Deadstock (punktown) Read online

The cabin touched down. This time, they did not jab the keypad again to send it back toward the upper levels. This time, they waited for the door to automatically slide open.

  They had already noted that there were no hands slapping or pounding against the outer security door, but when it slid open they were too sur-prised-and too wary-to feel real relief that there were no Blank People outside the door waiting for them.

  Javier emerged first, whipping his gun this way and that, followed by Satin. Up and down the hallway, there were none of the bio-engineered entities to be seen. Patryk moved quickly to the door to the basement proper, but Mira put a hand on his arm before he could hit the button to open it. She looked to Javier and whispered, "It knows we're out here."

  "But what is it, Mira? The Blanks?"

  "No. Something else."

  "The brainframe?"

  "I… yes. But something more. I don't know." She shook her head. "I don't know."

  "You called it 'Outsider' before, when you were in your trance."

  She scrunched up her face. "I don't remember."

  "We have to go," Barbie cut in, looking around wildly with her multiple sets of eyes. "Before they come back."

  Javier held Mira's nervous gaze, but he nodded to Patryk. "Do it."

  There was a beep, the red status button on the control strip turned green, and the metal door slid open in its grooves, but this time no gray arms shot out at them to drag them inside. There was only silence beyond, and an odd, unpleasant smell, almost rotten but almost like burning plastic.

  Again, Javier led the way, followed by Mira and Barbie, with Satin and Patryk bringing up the rear. Patryk closed and locked the door after them.

  "Where did they all go?" Satin hissed to Patryk.

  They crept through a room with metal workbenches along the walls, maintenance tools hanging from racks above them. Machinery hummed softly, and the brightness of overhead emergency lights only made the shadowy areas seem darker by contrast. Across the room gaped a doorway like the entrance to a cavern. Was there a kind of deep, liquid burbling coming from in there? Maybe the tank that supplied the raw material to the apartments' food fabricators, because that foul rotting smell was becoming stronger.

  Mira took Javier by the arm to stop him. "We should go back. Go out the front door."

  "But aren't all the Blanks still up there?"

  She seemed to stare off into the ether itself. "Yes. yes. I can sense them clearly, because they're all in one place. But they aren't moving."

  "Because they're waiting up there to ambush us," Satin said. "Come on, come on, we can't risk it!"

  "We're close now," Patryk told them. "The maintenance chute is in the room just beyond this one. We get through that, and we hit the town sewer system."

  "Mira," Barbie said, "that big brain in there is messing up your thoughts. It's glitched. Just try to shut it out!"

  Mira glanced at the black maw of the doorway, and back to Javier. She tried on a tremulous smile. "Okay. Okay. Let's just do this."

  Javier touched her hair, then turned toward the doorway.

  There was only a single emergency light that had not extinguished in the largish room beyond, but even that one was flickering. The only steady light came from banks of monitors, these showing a tempest of static through which a city skyline struggled to appear. The pale, bluish glow of these screens shone weakly on a glistening dark hulk that appeared to dominate the center of the room. The stench emanated from it, and Barbie cupped a hand over one of her faces' nose and mouth but the others had to suffer. "What is that, there?" her dual voices whispered in different tones.

  Another rumbling gurgle. Then the slithering rustle of movement, as if an immense anaconda had just shifted its coils across each other. Javier thrust out an arm to bar the others.

  "It's something alive," he hissed.

  Patryk had been wearing the goggles his father had once used in his work, pushed up on his head, and as soon as they'd entered the grotto of a room he had slipped them down over his eyes and adjusted them for night vision. As he brought up the rear, only he could clearly see the mountain of flesh that sat at the center of the room.

  "Jesus Christ," he said.

  Only he saw the faceless head turn slightly at the sound of his voice. The sprawling, swollen creature withdrew part of its consciousness from the teaching of its acolytes. From its plucking at the strands of the net. It focused on these tiny intruders. Without eyes, with its mass of silver and black tentacles swarming, it looked directly at Patryk specifically. He screamed.

  Javier swung his gun up and fired blindly, into the heart of the silhouette. "Run! Run! Run!" he shouted. "Go around it! Behind it! Go, go, go!"

  Satin caught Patryk under one prosthetic arm and dragged him along, extending the other arm to launch a plasma capsule from his revolver. He missed what he took to be the thing's head, the corrosive green plasma spreading over some equipment behind the creature. Sparks sputtered into the air and a row of monitors went out. Abruptly, the vague cityscape vanished from every screen, replaced by static alone. What the green incandescence of the plasma might have illuminated somewhat, the black smoke from melting gear only further obscured. Satin kept moving, afraid to fire again lest he hit Javier or Mira in the darkness and the pandemonium. The leader of the Folger Street Snarlers was holding off in front of the vague creature and blasting shot after shot to cover their escape.

  Javier pushed Mira to run after Barbie and Satin. "Hurry, baby! Go!"

  His gun clicked empty at last.

  At the rear wall, behind the mountain of flesh, Barbie found the maintenance chute already unblocked for them. Enough light from the utilities tunnel beyond shone through to make the way clear. Just before she scampered through on hands and knees, wheezing from exertion and fear, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the back of the behemoth in the pallid radiance from the open hatchway. She saw two projections that might have been ribbed fins like the dorsal fin of a sail-fish. Or wings. If the latter, they were far too small and fragile to ever lift such a dinosaur in flight. But they frightened her. They made her think that what she was seeing was a demon.

  Mira started to scurry around the perimeter of the dark thing, Javier moving behind her. The snaking appendages observed them both, but it was the small being's mind that commanded the demon's attention. As if with numerous serpents' tongues, it could almost lick the thoughts that crackled from her mind into the air.

  Satin pushed Patryk into the access chute. He was babbling, sobbing, clawing at his goggles to get them off his head as if he feared their rubber frames would melt into his skin. Poised on the rungs set into the wall of the utilities tunnel, Barbie took hold of the boy and helped pull him through. Satin couldn't see past the shoulder of his pony when he tried to turn his head, but he shouted out for Mira and Javier blindly.

  Two of the striped tendrils lashed out, extended like thrown spears. They wrapped themselves around Mira's head.

  "No!" Javier almost fell over her, caught hold of one of the muscular shafts and tried to tear it off her. He had dropped his empty gun.

  The tendrils started to contract, then, jerking Mira off her feet, raising her into the air. Her legs kicked and she clawed at the coils across her face as they tightened.

  She had let go of Brat's pistol. It struck the side of Javier's foot, and he hunched down, felt for it frantically. "No, no, no!" he bellowed, as he looked up and saw Mira being drawn close to the mound of flesh. He scooped the gun into his hand, and pointed it up at the indistinct hump that was the thing's head.

  But he might hit Mira.

  But that might be for the best.

  "Come on!" Satin roared, unable to see what was happening on the other side. He was tempted to put a plasma bullet into the creature's back now that he could see its gray flesh more clearly in the light from the utilities tunnel, but the plasma was dangerous as wildfire, and his friends should be coming around its flank, coming any moment. He started folding his cybernetic bod
y into the access chute. The limbs could make it but his torso, broader and inflexible, became wedged.

  Javier hesitated, torn, and in that moment the creature brought Mira against its chest. She was engulfed into the heart of shadow. At first, that was what Javier believed. But then he knew it was more than that. Terribly more than that.

  He rose, thrust the pistol, and cried, "You fucker!"

  The arms came for him next. One slapped over his wrist, looped around it, squeezed. He let go of the pistol's grip but the trigger guard hooked his index finger. Another limb looped around his throat. He was lifted. He hovered in mid-air. Floated closer to the engorged mass.

  He was brought almost level to the face, and an instinct made him close his eyes so that he could not make it out. Snakes… Medusa… he would turn to stone. As soon as he shut his eyes, he heard a voice in his head. It was distant, watery, like a voice over a Ouija phone.

  "Javier," the voice said.

  He opened his eyes.

  Only inches away from the creature's chest. But now the arms began to lower him. To loosen from his neck and wrist. He was dropped and fell onto his hands and knees, gasping for breath.

  "Javier," the voice said again, growing fainter. "I can't hold it."

  "Mira," he croaked.

  "Run!" she blurted, surprisingly loud.

  Javier was up and running, then, skidding around the side of the creature. Behind it he saw the lighted access passage, and pushed off to one side was Satin's abandoned pony like the shed husk of a gigantic spider. Barbie had reached in to help unbuckle him and pull his odd little larva of a body through. She cradled him in her arms now.

  Javier dived into the chute, shot through it, almost fell to the floor of the utilities tunnel beyond. He looked up to see Patryk seated against the wall. His eyes were red as if a caustic chemical had been sprayed into them, but when they turned his way Javier knew that his friend could still see.

  "Where's Mira?" Satin said.

  "Dead," Javier told him. He still had Brat's gun in his fist, and he squeezed it as if he might crush it. Crush it like black coal into a glittering diamond, a crystal from which red laser beams burned, shooting out between his clenched fingers.

  "Fuck! Fucking hell!" Satin groaned. He looked up at the access chute. "What are we going to do now?"

  "We're going to go." Javier took Patryk by the arm and helped him to his feet. "We're going to go home." But his eyes returned to the blackness at the end of the access chute he had just plunged through. And his hand still squeezed his gun's grip. Crushing it. Crushing.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  deadstock

  "This is a prime example of Black Angus cattle," John Fukuda said, pointing to the specimen in question. "A thick neck and straight back, a wide brisket and round rump, a thick rib eye, and perfect intramuscular fat."

  "And no troublesome head or legs," Stake added.

  "Unnecessary parts. But if you like to dine on heads and legs, maybe I'll grow a special breed just for you," Fukuda joked. "Do you want me to throw in tails, too?"

  Stake took a step closer to examine the animal, if it could still be thought of in that way. It occupied one of many narrow pens lining both walls of a long central hall, each creature in this section identical. Several hoses were inserted into the blunt stump of the thing's neck, and one hose emerged from its back end. It rested upon its belly and the flipper-like vestigial limbs that were all it had for legs. It did not stir or shift its body in any way, and its sides did not even rise and fall in the act of breathing. Stake wondered if he would even hear a heartbeat if he were to put his ear against it.

  "We use better, more up-to-date processes than what Alvine Products was using," Fukuda boasted, as they continued on down the high-ceilinged hallway. "And we're always experimenting with new ones."

  Stake stopped short when he heard a loud burbling sound from one of the headless cattle. He turned to see a young woman in a white uniform making adjustments to a support system on a small rolling cart. On its bottom shelf was the pump that circulated the animal's fluids. The worker looked up and smiled apologetically at Stake for distracting him. To him, it had sounded like the creature had just been decapitated and blood had been gurgling out of its neck. However, the great living carcass appeared undisturbed in its blissful, dreamless state of oblivion. Stake commented to Fukuda, "You should breed office workers like this. Corporations would love you."

  "What do you think I have working in my administrative department?" Fukuda took Stake by the elbow. "Kidding." They continued on. "By the way, last month I had an entrepreneur of sorts approach me with the request that I design a headless, limbless breed of human female for a brothel he was hoping to establish at an asteroid mining outpost. His staff, as such, would need a minimum of care. And no pay, of course. 'The perfect woman,' he joked to me. 'No head to complain with, no legs to run away.'"

  "What a fuckbag," Stake murmured. "Huh? The clones, or him?" Stake gave Fukuda a look. "Him. So what did you tell him?" "I declined."

  "Out of a sense of outrage, or because you thought it might make you look bad?"

  "Outrage?" They had come to the end of the hallway, and a transverse corridor offered them a choice of directions. Fukuda gestured to the right. "Would you like to see our pork pigs? They come from a fine heritage, a very old breed-extinct in its natural state, actually-called Gloucestershire Old Spots. Very moist meat, with a fine texture. Or are you in the mood for chicken?"

  "If I see much more, I might become a vegetarian."

  "I didn't take you for being squeamish. And you seemed to enjoy that steak I treated you to in the Bioforms cafeteria."

  "I'm just anxious to talk to your man, Fujiwara."

  "Of course. I'll cut the tour short, then." He indicated they should go to the left. "This way."

  As they walked down this narrower connective hallway, Stake asked, "So Fujiwara works here, instead of at your main building?"

  "He keeps a lab here and another at Bioforms, as he has projects going at both facilities. He's one of my best researchers and designers. He has imagination. That was why the owners of Alvine were so keen on hiring him."

  "He was never charged for what their cult was trying to do?"

  "What they were trying to do is open to speculation, since it never happened. One could say the creatures they were secretly breeding were an army of monsters for some apocalypse they saw coming. Or one could argue they were an experimental brand of meat product. Anyway, the owners are all dead now. Pablo was just one of their team, doing as he was instructed. He was questioned, but not prosecuted in any way."

  "But did he reveal all of his research to the authorities?"

  Fukuda smiled over at Stake. "Of course not. People have to pay for such knowledge. And pay others not to ask too much about it."

  They arrived at the Research and Development department; specifically, lab suite RD-3. A recognition scanner appraised Fukuda and buzzed him in. Trailing him into the brightly lit series of large, interconnected rooms, Stake wondered idly if the scanner were good enough to have seen through his mimicry had he presently been imitating his employer.

  The two men passed work counters covered in computer systems, arcane equipment, printed documents, petri dishes, and the scattered remnants of take-out food and coffee. A holographic model of living cells had them hovering and crawling in the air above one counter, each individual cell as big as a tea saucer.

  They found Pablo Fujiwara alone in the farthest room. Stake didn't know where to look first-at the man or his specimens. Both were equally eye-grabbing. Fujiwara was a slight man with close-cropped hair but a great, curling and waxed Salvador Dali mustache. He was wearing a Buddy Balloon T-shirt, featuring that VT show's star, the 150-pound sphere that was Buddy Vrolik. Beneath his image were the words: SOMEBODY KILL ME. It was Buddy's catchphrase, and he said it at times of duress (as when his family members were having one of their frequent arguments) and at times of overwhelming pleasure (as wh
en a visiting comely female dropped something in front of him and bent over to pick it up). Fujiwara's pants were of a peach-colored leather. Stake realized they were like Janice's bed sheets: living human skin cells. He saw a small support pack clipped to the waistband, to keep the cells alive. A matching leather jacket was draped over the back of a chair.

  When they'd come in, Fujiwara was sprinkling something that looked like fish food into a tank filled with a greenish solution, in which writhed a mass of large, fat and lazy eels. They had gill slits but no fins nor even eyes, nothing more than a soft little beak-like mouth, which opened blindly to catch the raining feed. Fujiwara smiled at the approaching men. "My new pets," he explained. "Do you like boneless chicken?"

  "Those are chickens?" Stake said.

  Fujiwara was as enthusiastic as an artist at a gallery showing. "A step backwards in deadstock evolution, maybe, but it's all about building the better mousetrap. Or better mouse. I know there are those markets that wouldn't purchase this breed or even its meat, because they have brains and the animal lovers will be barking, but these cuties would actually be easier to set up and harvest than the plugged-in battery chickens. So we'll still find our buyers."

  Stake tapped on the glass as he watched them, then motioned toward a much larger eel-like creature that rested in a long tank dominating a counter against one wall. The tank was so narrow that the thing had no room to move, lying at the bottom like a pinkish log. Stake was reminded of a jumbo-sized shawarma in a Middle Eastern restaurant, ready to be shaved for a sandwich. The living cylinder had a mouth and gill slits but again, no other features. "And what's that? The king of the boneless chickens?"

  "Boneless pork," Fujiwara said proudly. "I call it my five-foot-long hotdog."

  "Yummy," Stake commented.

  "Pablo, this is the investigator I told you about," Fukuda cut in. "Jeremy Stake."

  Fujiwara shook his hand, and his expression became a bit more serious, maybe even a little wary. "Hi. You want to know about Dai-oo-ika."

  "Him, and Alvine Products. What were you doing for them?"