Deadstock (punktown) Read online

  Stake imagined that as a less than endearing sensation. He took another slurp of his soup, then observed, "So it's safe to say that our culprit is right here in this room."

  "It has to be one of them," Yuki said in an urgent whisper. "They've all seen me with him. They all envied me for him. It's been a week now, exactly, since he's been gone! And I've only had him for about a month. It's so unfair!" Her voice was near to crumbling. "I always take good care of him; I never ever put him down and turn my back on him. If I can't have him with me, like in phys ed, then I keep him in my locker. And that's what happened! I came back from my shower, and there was my locker-open. And Dai-oo-ika was gone!"

  "Does anyone else know the code to your locker, or was the lock forced?"

  "It wasn't forced, but it could have been hacked."

  "What about maintenance people?" "Um, I don't know, they might have access to the lockers."

  "I'll look into that. What about your friends; they wouldn't know the code? The ones I met the other day?"

  "Oh… Kaori, Suzu and Maria are my best friends! And they have their own kawaii-dolls."

  "But not as good as your doll, no matter how good theirs are."

  "No, no, they wouldn't. Besides, what good is a kawaii-doll if you can't show it off to people?" she said with plain honesty. "You wouldn't just hide away with it."

  "Unless someone was doing it specifically to hurt you."

  "Right. To hurt me." Those oversized eyes under their border of bangs had begun to film over wetly. "That has to be it. Someone so jealous, they wanted to get back at me. I just hope they haven't hurt him. I hope they ask for a ransom or something. I'd get Daddy to pay it, I don't care!"

  "So do you know any girls who dislike you? Who are especially jealous of you? How about teachers? Have you had problems with any of them?"

  While he conversed with the girl, he let his gaze alight on her face only briefly before it fled to another table, or a supporting column of the room, or the wall of bright windows. If it lingered too long on her face, he would begin to feel the familiar rustle of his cells (even if that sensation were largely imaginary) as his features began to remodel themselves. Again, his eyelids would take on the epicanthic fold, but in imitation of her eyes instead of her father's. The length of time it took for this process was not always the same. Sometimes it was fairly swift, and other times it was more gradual, but unless he was preoccupied he usually had a subconscious awareness of when it was going to transpire, despite the fact that he had no conscious control of his ability. He felt restless with Yuki's own eyes upon him. Had Fukuda told his daughter about his "gift?" Was she even waiting to see it happen for herself?

  "A teacher? Oh no, all the teachers like me! I don't have a problem with any of the phys ed teachers who would be in the locker room. But I have had a problem with some of the girls here, in the past few years. It's always like that. Cliques, you know?"

  "Sure. Right now-but don't make it obvious- do you see anyone taking extra interest in our conversation? Anyone who's been hostile toward you in the past?"

  He saw Yuki involuntarily turn her head just a fraction, but her glistening eyes rolled about in wide, morose arcs. "A lot of people are looking at us."

  "Mm," Stake agreed, peering over the rim of his coffee cup as he sipped from it, and taking in the many curious glances.

  "Oh," Yuki fretted, "maybe it wasn't a good idea to meet in public, after all! What if we scare the person into destroying Dai-oo-ika, to hide the evidence?"

  "I'm sure they wouldn't do that, not with his value. In fact, we might spook them into coming forward and saying it was all just a harmless prank."

  Yuki returned her gaze to him. "One of the nastier girls, one of the ones who've been really mean to me, disappeared last week, too. She's in my biology class."

  Stake looked directly at her now. "Disappeared how?"

  "Well, she had an older boyfriend, and the rumor is she ran away with him because her dad didn't approve. But one of her friends-her name is Krimson-one of Krimson's friends swears she heard Krimson trying to talk to her on her Ouija phone. And that would mean Krimson is dead." Yuki hugged her arms and visibly gave a shudder.

  "Huh," said Stake.

  Lost in thought for several beats, he frowned toward the floor. He tended to do this a lot. No faces to see down there. It was hard to escape faces in a city. In his apartment he didn't even have pictures of people, whether they be photos or paintings or holoportraits, displayed on the walls. Except for one: a picture of himself. If he came home looking like someone else, staring into this photo as if it were a mirror helped him speed up the process of looking like himself again. In the wrist comp he wore he could store pictures of faces, the countenances of people he might want to metamorphose into for this or that reason, by staring hard at their image. But he had also filed a picture of his own face in his wrist comp. He could gaze at it to hasten the restoration of his neutral appearance (his "factory" or "default settings," as he joked to himself), like a man with amnesia remembering who he truly was again.

  Lost in her own thoughts, Yuki said, "My mother died when I was just a baby, you know."

  This comment, seemingly out of the blue, caused Stake to meet her eyes again. "I'm sorry. I lost my mother when I was just a child, too." He regretted his own admission as soon as it left his lips. Why tell this young girl such a personal thing, regardless of what she had revealed to him? He didn't elaborate on his mother, and thankfully she didn't ask him to.

  Yuki continued, "My mom. I think… I think I've heard her, too."

  "Heard her? You mean, on your Ouija phone?"

  Yuki nodded, doing her best to keep a cap on her emotions. "I swear it's her voice. She's trying to tell me something. Something important. But I can't hear her well; just little bits and pieces, really far away, and full of static."

  "Huh," he said again.

  "Please don't tell my father I told you that, okay? He hates those Ouija phones. I don't want to upset him. He loved my mom a lot."

  Half a sob gushed out, and Stake found himself reaching across the table to take her hand. He was a bit embarrassed when he realized what he'd done, but here he was, so he gave it a comforting squeeze. Yuki looked down at their joined hands tearfully, then smiled up at his face.

  "People will really think we're boyfriend and girlfriend, now," she joked, trying to restore her composure.

  "Well, I'm honored if they'd think that." But he felt it was prudent to let go of her hand now.

  "You're cute, you know?" she confessed, and giggled behind her palm. "I'm sorry."

  He was more embarrassed than ever; her compliment caused him to feel flattered and self-conscious and bewildered all at once. No one had ever said that to him. "Cute, huh?"

  "Yes," Yuki told him. "You have a face like a doll."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  permutations

  "Close the window, close the window-don't let them in!" cried the distorted voice from the room beyond this one.

  "Clara!" Tabeth yelled, pulling a gun out from underneath her white leather jacket.

  "Oh God!" Nhu blurted, jumping back from the window through which the four gray arms had dragged their friend and fellow Folger Street Snarler.

  "Don't hit Clara!" their leader, Javier, barked as he saw Tabeth aim her pistol outside. He dashed forward to join her.

  From the other room, the owner of the frantic voice rushed forward impulsively, a whitish blur in the murk. This was what Mott, still poised around the edge of the doorframe behind Patryk, had been waiting for. He reached around Patryk with his own handgun, and squeezed its trigger at the ghostly shape responsible for the death of his close friend, Hollis, who lay near his feet with blood coming in a tide from a head broken open like that of a doll.

  Tabeth had begun firing outside only a microsecond before Mott opened up with his gun. Javier, caught between the two sounds, spun around toward the latter, thinking that the shots might be coming from the same person who had
-acciden-tally, they claimed-killed Hollis. But he saw Mott's extended arm, his handgun bucking.

  "Mott, hold your fuckin' fire!"

  "I got him," Mott said, his Choom face a caricature of an insane grin. He lowered his gun as ordered, but he gloated, "I got that piece of dung!"

  From the room beyond, terrible screams and confused shouts. Screams of pain from the one who'd been hit, or screams of despair from that person's comrades, whoever and however many they were.

  From where she stood, though a bit removed from it, Nhu could see out the window. She could see what was happening to Clara. She shrieked. Her shriek dipped and rose again when she saw Clara's body flinch as it was inadvertently struck by one of Tabeth's projectiles. But considering what those two gray figures were doing to her, Clara had to be dead already. If not, then getting struck by Tabeth's bullet was a blessing.

  "Oh. oh." Tabeth said, lowering her gun. Bile rose into her throat.

  Big Meat had his gun pointed toward the window now, as he surged toward it with Tiny Meat clinging to him, Tiny Meat letting loose a fusillade of high-pitched obscenities. Big Meat pushed past Tabeth, who had gone into stunned mode at having hit Clara. At having seen those things tear Clara.

  But Nhu was already darting back toward the window, into Big Meat's range of fire, and he barely checked his trigger finger. Tiny Meat barely checked the spray of acidic bile from the bone nozzle in his face. "Out of the way!" he screeched.

  They could see the two gray entities-now gray and red-drop the thing that had been Clara, turn their heads in unison, and break into a sprint toward the open window. The way they were running, it appeared that they would dive straight through it, side by side, like two trained dogs through a hoop.

  Nhu was good with anything technological, but her fingers froze a moment above the buttons on the sill, as if she had never encountered so simple a thing as the controls to raise or lower, tint or make opaque a window. A mad thought sprang into her head: what if the beam from Patryk's goggles had damaged the controls? Disabled them? What if the window wouldn't close?

  Javier saw the gray things coming. Like Big Meat, he was pointing his gun out there but afraid to hit Nhu, and instead of moving forward to push her out of the way or aim past her, he commanded, "Close the window!"

  The faceless beings had almost reached it. Though their smooth, abstracted bodies were devoid of muscular detail, Javier still saw in their body language that they were tensing themselves up to spring at any moment.

  Nhu's index finger jabbed a button on the control strip. The window began to lower with the barest whisper.

  One of the gray beings sprang. Then the other.

  A thud against the safety pane. Palms spread across it with a splat like suction cups, first one pair and then the other. Palms that squealed down the surface, smearing red. The pane was still lowering. There was a gap at the bottom. One of the suction cups came off the window, flashed down and slipped under the lowering edge. A gray hand like a giant spider clawed at the air.

  Big Meat lunged forward. Now he pushed Nhu out of the way. But it was Tiny Meat who jetted the groping hand with his bile, even as the edge of the window pinned the wrist against the sill. The gray flesh sizzled, bubbled. Dripped something clear instead of crimson. Fingers were reduced to nubs. There should have been bone inside those fingers, revealed by the acid. There wasn't.

  Holding his breath against the strong chemical smell of Tiny Meat's bile, Javier rushed forward also now that Nhu was out of the way. Not waiting for Tiny Meat's bile to finish dissolving the hand, he pointed his gun at it and fired. The foaming blob splattered into chunks. Was gone. And the window completed its serene downward passage, meeting the sill and sealing. Locked. Glancing back to make sure her fellow gang members were done spitting and shooting, Nhu moved in and touched the button that activated an alarm on the window, should the things manage to force the pane open somehow with those three remaining, spread palms. She imagined, though could not hear, the squeaking sounds they made against it. She tried not to see the faceless faces behind those palms. Or the streaks of her friend's life fluid.

  "It's still tinted one-way," she said numbly, straightening. "They can't see us."

  "How do you know?" raged Tiny Meat. "Blasting things don't have eyes, anyway, but they saw Clara!"

  Patryk and Mott hadn't left their post by the threshold to the next room. From the chaos of voices in there came a more articulate exclamation. It sounded female. "You killed our friend!"

  "Sounds familiar, huh?" Mott shouted. "So now we're even!"

  "Shut it," Javier growled. "Hey," he then called into the other room. "You said you're squatters. What the hell is going on here? Why are you fighting these 'Blank People?' I want answers, unless you wanna keep fighting us, too. And I don't think you want that!"

  "You're the ones that wouldn't be wanting that!" an arrogant male voice bellowed in return. But the female voice overruled him.

  "We'll come out and talk if you promise not to shoot. It was all an accident. We don't want any trouble with you-we just want to get out of this place!"

  "So do we."

  "Right. So we need to talk. Promise not to let your friends shoot."

  "Then throw out your guns first!" Mott yelled. But it was Javier's gun, suddenly, that pressed hard under the Choom's heavy jaw.

  The leader of the Snarlers did just that, through gritted teeth. "Are you trying to steal my job, wanker?"

  Mott looked back at his friend from the corner of his eyes. "No, man, I just…"

  "What do I got to do to get you to listen to me? Make that hole in your ear bigger? We're going to talk to these people. It sounds like those gray things have got them pinned down in here. And it looks like we're pinned down in here, too. We might just be on the same side."

  "They probably killed Brat!"

  "Don't be stupid. We found his gun outside- where those things are."

  "We didn't kill your friend!" the female voice called. Javier was surprised; he hadn't thought they'd been discussing it loudly enough for her to hear. "He was outside. I didn't sense it until he started screaming. The trash zapper out there picked him up, and fed him inside. I heard him screaming inside my skull."

  "What are you talking about?" Javier demanded.

  "I have a gift."

  "Mutants," Nhu whispered.

  Javier lowered the gun from Mott's jaw, where it left a red indentation. "Let's talk. Come out. We'll keep our guns down if you do."

  "Don't, Mira," that angry male voice rasped. But she wasn't listening to him. The female came out first, her arms raised above her head.

  Arms as short as those of a small child.

  "Mutants," Patryk echoed Nhu belatedly.

  The first person to emerge from the darkened room, into this room where the surviving

  Snarlers were clustered, was an adult woman in her mid-twenties compacted into a condensed form. A dwarf, with a normal-sized head and fairly normal-sized torso, but with chubby stunted limbs, her somewhat bowed legs giving her a waddle. Her hair was long and black, cinched in a messy ponytail, her dark eyes large and striking. Her clothing looked like it had been donated to a homeless shelter by a parent whose daughter had outgrown it: a pink T-shirt with a cute cartoon jellyfish on the front, outlined in flaking glitter, and white shorts. But the clothing was dirty and frayed, speckled with dark stains of old blood.

  Had he only seen her face, Javier would have found the young woman very attractive, with those heavy-lidded eyes and her strong nose and full lips. But besides her dwarfism, there were also dark purple veins on both temples, running up into her hair, like tattoos of forked lightning. A gift, she had said she possessed.

  "I'm Mira Cello," she told him, stopping in the center of the room. The Snarlers hadn't put their guns away but they didn't point them, either. For a moment, the only movement was the gray palms sliding down the windowpane, then moving back to the top again.

  "I'm Javier Dias. This is my gang. What's lef
t of it. The Folger Street Snarlers."

  Mira glanced down at the body of Hollis, then away with a wince. Slowly she let her arms drop, having established that she meant no harm. And then the rest of the squatters timidly began filing into the room after her. A couple of them carried guns of their own, but kept them lowered as the Snarlers did.

  Javier had the irrational thought that the next person into the room was the man Mott had shot, but that man was dead. The reason for this impression was that the mutant's head was an impossible ruin, looking as though it had been run over with the tread of a construction robot. It was crushed into a half-flattened mass, with only one eye showing through the rubbery folds that twisted the mouth into a drool-slicked hole. More like a crumpled Halloween mask than something with a skull, let alone a brain, inside it.

  "This is Nick," Mira said.

  The Choom man who followed Nick crawled into the room on all fours, like some giant white spider. He was naked but for a pair of filthy shorts, his bony body making him look as though he were in the terminal stage of starvation. His strangely bent stick limbs each had two extra joints, and it appeared that his too-long fingers were supernor-mally jointed, as well. A wispy-haired head wove like that of a cobra atop a slender neck twice as long as it should have been. The young man smiled shyly at pretty Nhu. In his hollow, wasted face, his already broad Choom mouth seemed a death's head grin. Nhu had seen a lot of mutants and non-human beings in her young years, but something about this man's eerie movements made her shiver. She quickly looked away.

  Mira introduced him. "This is Haanz."

  Another woman came shambling in, hefty and wheezing, a too-small dirty gray sweat suit straining to contain her bulk. Javier counted five faces of varying sizes crowded onto her single shaggy-haired skull. Oddly, the one normal-sized face appeared insensate, its mouth drooping and eyes rolled up white. Only two of the smaller, rudimentary faces appeared to be cognizant, with sharp, alert eyes. One of the three dead faces was positioned upside-down, with hair trailing from its scalp to partially obscure the half-formed suggestion of a sixth face. "Barbie," said Mira.