Edge Of Human

10

Shift change over, banks of grey steel lockers closed, the wooden benches between them polished to a smooth luster by generations of bare cop buttocks and the black serge of uniform trousers; in the close atmosphere hung the scent of sweat and fungicide. He knew that smell, could remember it from his own tours of duty before he'd promoted up and out. With each panting breath pulled into his lungs, Deckard ran further into his own past, one that he'd rather have forgotten. His shoulders barely cleared the narrow space, the black uniform's sleeves torn by collision with hinges and corners of metal.

"There! Take him down!"

He heard the shout and the clatter of jackboots hitting the bottom of the stairs behind him. Without a glance over his shoulder, he dived with arms reaching out straight, the weight of the gun gripped tight in his fist. He hit the bare, damp concrete as a line of automatic rifle fire stitched across the locker doors. Still sliding, he rolled onto his back, getting his other hand onto the gun and firing blind, the recoil from three rapid shots pushing him along another couple of feet.

At least one shot had struck flesh; he heard a gasp of shock as the auto fire went wild, raking the locker room's ceiling and bursting the light fixtures into sparks and glass splinters. In darkness, he scrambled to his feet, staying low and close to the metal doors to his left. His hunched shadow leapt in front of him, outlined by each red muzzle flash back at the stairs.

His own boots splashed into water a quarter-inch deep. That and the humid air in his nostrils told him he'd reached the showers. Deckard reached to one side and touched wet tile; he steadied himself, breath laboring, as his eyes adjusted to the dim illumination from the one bulb left unbroken. His mind raced, trying to dredge from memory a way out of the sub-basement levels below the police station.

"You're not going anywhere, dickhead-"

Before he could lift the gun, a forearm slammed into his throat, the impact lifting him from his feet and pinning him against the wall. The back of his skull cracked against a chrome shower nozzle. His dropped gun splashed in the thin water, as his hands clawed futilely at the bare, hard-muscled skin pressing under his chin.

Fragmented light glinted in the eyes and silhouetted the cop's naked torso, soap residue webbed across his chest and arms, hair plastered dark and shining on his broad neck. He must've already been in the showers when the pursuit had exploded into sight at the far end of the locker room, then stayed silent and waiting.

"You're the one they're looking for-" A black constellation spun across Deckard's vision as the cop grinned and jerked him higher against the slick wall. "Aren't you?"

He couldn't push away the throttling arm. His hands let go and scrabbled at the tiles behind him. A blunt-edged X filled one palm; elbow digging into his own ribs, he twisted the handle.

The cop howled as the scalding water shot from the nozzle and into his face. Deckard felt the heat drip across his ear and the side of his jaw, but only for a second-moist oxygen rushed into his lungs as he fell, back sliding against the tiles. In front of him, the naked cop knelt with both hands pressed against the raw, red pulp of his flesh. The water arced over his back, steam billowing as it sprayed onto the floor.

Deckard spotted the gun lying a few feet away; he launched himself forward, scooping up the weapon. A roar of pain and rage echoed off the walls as the cop grabbed him by the front of the uniform and pulled him upright. He brought the edge of his brow against the cop's chest; with one push, Deckard took him to the wall, hard enough to loosen the other's grip for a moment. Long enough to lean back and raise the gun, the black muzzle against the cop's breastbone. He squeezed the trigger.

The tiles cracked, the wall behind crumbling from the impact of the cop's spine and shoulders. Concrete rubble sluiced over Deckard's arms as the exposed pipes bent and snapped. The gun was knocked loose from his grip, as the cop's dead hands let go of him.

The corpse sprawled at his feet, the pooled water transformed into a dark red lake.

Through the clouds of steam, he could see the shadowed, indistinct figures of the other cops racing through the locker room's narrow aisles. A darker space had appeared behind the burst pipes and shattered tiles; he braced his shoulder against the concaved section of wall and pushed. He nearly fell as the cement gave way and he stumbled coughing through a burst of white dust. Hot pipes singed his hands as he groped his way through the maze of plumbing.

A quick glance over his shoulder-he spotted. the shapes of his pursuers clustered around the ragged opening, the first of them climbing through, brushing aside a tangle of plaster-clotted rebar and the splinters of ancient wooden beams.

Deckard tasted salt seeping into the corners of his mouth, his face sopping with blood and water the exact same temperature. He ducked his head beneath the belly of a sewage conduit and ran as best he could, empty hands clawing a blind passage before him.

Holden had retreated into his head, letting his entropy-laden body get steered outside by the other man.

"Looks like it's going to be another hot one." Outside the Reclamation Center's medical unit, standing in the ragged circle of cigarette butts the doctor had left strewn on the sandy ground, Batty pointed to the horizon. The first coloring of dawn, a purplish-red smear along the tops of the distant mountain range, had crept into the cloudless sky. "Man, everybody bitches about the monsoon season when it's here, but when it's gone, you'd do just about anything to get rained on for twenty-four hours at a clip."

Subterranean heat rose up through Holden's legs. The desert hadn't finished radiating the thermal load it'd absorbed from the day before, and now more would be pounded into it by the sun lifting overhead. Where he gazed past the razor-wired fence, an incipient Santa Ana wind sifted dry dust through the sparse clumps of withered brush.

Everybody says that, he thought. All the time. One hot one after another. Someday the cycle wouldn't be broken by the onset of the yearly rains. The heat would go on building up, cumulative, until the sands melted into glass, perfectly smooth and reflective, bouncing a fierce glare back into the sky. Same thing would happen in the city, the streets turning to a black tar lava flow, then hardening to obsidian mirrors. We could see ourselves that way, all the time-he could picture it. Everyone looking down and wondering whether the image looking back at them, in that world of permanent night, was human or something else…

I should sit down-he felt as old as Batty looked. Or lie down, take the load off his new heart. The doctor was right; if he wasn't careful, the whole setup could give way, like an overstressed motor. And he couldn't allow that to happen, not until he'd moved his own agenda along. He'd have to husband his strength, calculating all of his resources and endurance, to accomplish what he'd have to do.

He glanced from the corner of his eye at Batty. The other-human or replicant; he still wasn't sure-stood silent. The quiet gave Holden the opportunity to start putting together his list of the people who'd screwed him over.

Bryant was on the list, of course. He nodded slowly, gazing toward the red-shaded sunrise. If nothing else, Batty had convinced him of that part, that the head of the blade runner unit had set him up to get blown away by the replicant Kowalski. Why, he didn't know. All of Batty's big talk of high-level anti-blade runner conspiracies hadn't impressed him.

Cops had simpler ways of determining who to go after. Mainly the application of that ancient maxim, Cui bono? Who'd benefited from his taking a hit?

The answer came with minimal pondering. Deckard… my old pal. That sonuvabitch. Deckard had taken over the assignment, to track down the escaped replicants; that was a nice fat bunch of bonuses for retiring each one. Maybe that whole business of his quitting the department had been a ruse, something cooked up between Deckard and Bryant, to make Holden believe that he finally had a clear field, his old rival in the blade runner unit off the scene. Maybe a little kickback arrangement, Bryant and Deckard splitting the bonuses? That was possible as well. Who knew why people did evil shit? Maybe the tests should be redesigned, that determined who was human or not. None of that empathy nonsense. Instead… Would you have any problem sticking a knife in your friend's back? No? Congratulations — you have all the essential qualities of treachery, ingratitude, and two-facedness that marks a real human being. Collect your ID and ammo discount card at Window Five. That would work.

Holden glanced over again at Batty. He was necessary for the time being; Holden knew he couldn't take care of everything he needed to, not in his present post-op condition. I'll go along with him for now, thought Holden. For as long as I need to.

The other opened his eyes, bringing his sly gaze around. "You've had a busy night." Batty displayed his psychotic smile again. "Haven't you? All the things you've found out…"

Right. He said nothing aloud. He'd already added Batty to the list of things to be taken care of. Whether Batty was human or not-that remained to be seen-he might be the only one who could make that whole pitch about Holden being a replicant. Whether it was true or not, it wasn't a good thing for somebody to be going around talking about.

He'd decided. He smiled back at Batty. If he had to kill the guy to prove that he was human himself… or at least keep everyone thinking he was…

He didn't have a problem with that.

The space behind the police station's walls had narrowed, a gap through which Deckard had barely been able to squeeze himself, the rough concrete surfaces tearing open the front of the stolen uniform. He left a trail of watered blood on one of the massive pilings that had been sunk into the ground to support the weight of the multileveled structure rearing high above him. The dark gap chilled as it sloped farther underground; a draft smelling of stone and smoldering fires rose into his face and was drawn into his lungs with each straining breath.

Suddenly the constricting pressures against his shoulders flared apart, the span widening beyond the reach of his raw-scraped hands. The gravel of broken concrete slipped from under his boots, pitching him forward. The only thing that kept him from falling was an angle of pipe that his flailing grasp found a few inches from his head; his fingers tightened upon it as he heard, past the hammering of his pulse, a few dislodged pebbles clatter upon another level beneath. A low rumble moved through the earth itself.

He knew that his pursuers were still working their way down toward him; their muffled voices leaked through the gap, along with the noises of the equipment, hydraulic jacks and hissing acetylene torches, with which they cut a channel through the station's underpinnings. Only a matter of time until they caught up with him, the rat-like escape he'd made coming to an end in some corner of rock and buried steel girder.

A dim glow rose from the space that had opened below, as the rumbling sound grew louder, taking on an insistent mechanical rhythm. Deckard could see now that he had broken through the roof of an arched tunnel, with a parallel ribbon of iron tracks running its length. Some past seismic event had torqued the police station's foundations enough to pry open the cleft through which he'd squirmed; bricks and ragged chunks of concrete lay scattered across the bed of one of the old railway tunnels that ran beneath the massive structure. The glow, rapidly becoming brighter, came from the engine of the rep train approaching around the tunnel's curve. The hot diesel smell, oily and stinging, struck him full in the face, as though the source of all Santa Ana winds had erupted from the earth's core.

The sounds of his pursuers grew closer, perhaps only a few yards back along the gap through which he'd crawled. Those noises were drowned out by the rep train's noise and clatter, now directly beneath him. He squatted down, then got his legs out past the crumbling edge of the hole into the tunnel roof. He held on for a few seconds longer, until the dark shape of the engine was past; then he dropped, pushing himself away from the edge, diving with outstretched hands.

With a jarring impact, he landed on top of one of the freight cars. He clawed for a hold on the wooden slats; through the gaps between them, he could see faces looking up at him. None of the human-like figures, pressed tight against each other inside the car, raised a voice; their blank gazes regarded him without emotion.

He couldn't hold on. The rattling motion of the train peeled his fingertips, wet with his own blood, away from the slat to which he clung. A hard lurch jolted him loose; in the stink and din, his chest and stomach slipped across the freight car's roof. The rep train took another curve in the tunnel; the swaying motion was enough to throw him over the edge.

One crooked arm caught itself in the angle between a vertical slat and slanting cross-beam. His back and shoulder slammed against the freight car's side, knocking the last of his breath from his aching lungs. The tunnel wall, jagged stone outcroppings and rusting stanchions, screamed a few inches away from his head as he fought with animal desperation to latch his free hand on to any part of the car.

His own weight began dragging his arm from its hold upon the vertical slat. His agonized vision took in the freight car's occupants, their naked forms picked out by the engine light bouncing off the tunnel's arched ceiling. Male and female replicants, packed behind the freight car's sliding door, locked with a single steel bolt.

The other cars behind, stretching into the tunnel's darkness, were the same, filled with the rejects from the Tyrell Corporation's production lines-the replicants whose memory implants hadn't taken, the ones who hadn't passed the mental and physical tests that qualified them to be slaves in the off-world colonies. Their creators routed them through a clearing station administered by the police department, checking them off in numbered lots to make sure all were accounted for prior to disposal. Not retirement-an industrial process, quick asphyxiation and smokestacks belching out the odors of incinerated flesh.

He could no longer tell what things he saw before him, and what fear and exhaustion had pulled from his memory, overlaying the rep train's reality with his own past. A slope-jawed face turned away from him, the male replicant's massive shoulders hunched with a sullen, proverbial resentment; his bare arms glistened with sweat. Kowalski-he could remember the face, or one just like it, another unit of the same model. What had the other Kowalski said to him? A long time ago, in another world, up on the streets of the city far above. Wake up — it's time to die…

Another Nexus-6 looked at him for a moment, her gaze reaching past the other replicants' naked shoulders. Dark-haired, long-limbed… her name had been shaken from his skull, leaving only the vision of another one like this, crashing through one plate-glass window after another, blood between her shoulder blades, the bullet from his gun turning her into a wingless angel, a thing that flew amid bright razor crystals…

"Help…" Deckard couldn't tell if that was his own voice rasping from his throat or the memory of his voice. "Help me…" What he had asked of another one of the replicants. His arm dragged farther from its hold, only the crook of his wrist against the cross-beam keeping him from falling under the wheels clashing sparks from the tunnel's iron tracks.

Another woman huddled in the corner of the freight car. The Tyrell Corporation had given her enough knowledge so that she could be afraid; her face, pressed against the paleness of her arms, was wet with tears. The tangled curls of her brown hair fell across her knees.

"Rachael…" He didn't know if it was her, or if they would have given this one a name yet. He called to her again. "Please…"

The female replicant raised her head and looked at him. And did not know who he was.

He suddenly felt an arm at his back, clutching him and pulling him up against the freight car's side. One of the replicants-he couldn't see which one-had reached through the slats and grabbed him, kept him from falling. He looked down and saw the tracks cutting by, a few inches from his dangling feet.

Brighter light flooded across him, as the rep train burst from the tunnel's mouth and out into the open. The reddish glow of morning slanted across a barren landscape, darkened with years of soot and spattered oil droppings. Abandoned freight cars and rusted-out tankers formed parallel barricades along the rows of tracks to either side.

Deckard managed to get his free hand between his chest and the slats. He pushed himself back against the arm's grasp; the replicant, still unseen by him, sensed what he was trying to do and let go.

He landed on his shoulder, rolling clear of the rep train's wheels. He kept his face down against the stones and rubble, until the noise of the train had passed and faded into the distance. Cautiously he raised his head, enough to see the last of the cars disappearing with its silent cargo.

On his hands and knees, Deckard managed to focus his vision past the tops of the motionless freight cars to his right. The towers and spires of the L.A. skyline carved the advancing daylight into hard-edged segments. He knew that he was out of the city, somewhere in the industrial wastelands ringing its vast sprawl.

A desiccated, blood-temperature wind rolled across his back. He managed to stand up, the rags of the stolen police uniform gaping over his torn and abraded flesh. Slowly, his feet stumbling against the oil-covered rocks between the tracks, he began walking.

Not north, where his unreasoning heart wanted to start for. But someplace where he knew he could hide.

For at least a little while…