No Dogs in Philly, page 14
Instinct brought her to a bar but she didn’t go in. Somehow, perhaps for the first time in her life, drinking did not seem likely to provide a solution to her problems. She kept sipping from her flask to keep her mind a little zagged, just in case the Friar ghost in her head hypothesis was whack and she was being hacked, but it seemed unlikely. And now what? No trail of blood to lead her to her prey, and she herself was a mark. Flee? Where? The Gaespora would freeze her accounts and she wouldn’t be able to buy an exit visa. And they’d find her anyway. She wasn’t going to let herself be hunted—she was the hunter, she was the aggressive one who kicked down doors and shot first and asked questions maybe later if she needed to find a liquor store. But there were no more doors to kick, no one to beat up and cough up answers.
She spent the afternoon in Rittenhouse Park on a bench, scanning the Net. It was a nice, light-hazy day where you could see pretty far in front of you and breathe without a cheese-grater feeling in your lungs, so there were a lot of people out. It felt comforting to be around other people, people she thought were unlikely to be servants of an alien death God. Passing through the censor walls was a breeze and she quickly found herself in the Wekba, the dark part of the Net where everything fun happened. It was important to have a high-quality spam filter and AI countermeasures or your brain would be overloaded with ads and you’d find yourself sprinting to the nearest alley to buy sky from a tricked soda machine, or you’d be hacked by a prowling viking like Jojran and wake up with your accounts empty and all your sex memories hung like panties on a flagpole for the world to see.
Most of what she could find on the feasters was trashy horror stories. Feasters were vampires that sucked your blood and could kill with a thought. They injected you with their blood and turned you into their slaves. If you looked them in the eyes they could hypnotize you. They were demons who struck bargains in exchange for your soul. They were beings of astonishing romance and had lots and lots of sex with young women and misunderstood young men. Why was she doing this? What did she hope to learn? There were accounts of people who had met with feasters, made deals with them—a businessman who had traded his beating heart for wealth, a lonely mother who had jammed ice picks in her ears to hear the voices of her dead children, a man who had given his cock and balls in exchange for true love. And what would she trade? Was it her body they wanted, or her mind—she couldn’t imagine it being the latter. What made a person? What was their appeal to others or to aliens? And what had that Jojran impostor said? That there really was no price and that we humans were just too dumb of an organism to accept a gift. She could buy that. She’d seen enough sad, desperate people do crazy things for less than the promise of eternal love.
What she really needed to know was how many of them there were—how many people she was going to have to kill to save her own life (and maybe some other people’s lives too, as a bonus). She’d killed one, hadn’t she? She’d checked on the police scanner and saw a murder had been committed at Jojran’s address, a single body—no suspects of course. That was the kind of murder the police liked, a single man with no ties and a good deal of seizable cash. And even if they traced it back to her and decided to wobble their lard asses into action, ElilE would make it all disappear. So the body hadn’t gotten up and walked away, thank God. But what about the mind, the presence, that intellect making him tap dance around. Had that died too? Or was it like an AI virus living in the Net, lurking in your coffee maker and your car and your player? Would she have to destroy the goddamn Net to be free? No, this wasn’t some twisted AI; it was too smart and too dumb at the same time—too organic.
Friar. Of course. Friar had known—and she had known he’d known in the back of her mind, but still couldn’t bring herself to go back. But now she was out of options. She drew herself out of another so-called experience with the feasters, which had turned yet again into porn, and got to her feet. The answer wasn’t in the Net—it was here, in real life, and her problems could only be solved with fist and gun. She shut down all her feeds—all the comedies, coupons, fun facts, and erotic sensory waves, shutting down every distraction and setting herself in business mode. Nothing to interrupt her thoughts but the body scanners, police feeds, and tip offs—the tools of the trade.
She walked to Friar’s house and rested a hand on the fortress door. It swung open easily. Something clicked in her brain—the Friar presence that had been haunting her. A clever man would take his security seriously and the cleverest—and richest—would train his equipment to recognize his psychosomatic profile. She’d thought his presence in her brain could be a fluke, a mistake of his mad-scientist experiments. But perhaps not. Perhaps he had done it on purpose (poorly), trying to help her, so she could continue on when he was gone. And perhaps he’d even known that she would need to come back here. She walked down the hallway, past the study, the living room that looked to be never used, the kitchen with a half-full teacup still on the counter. She found the second fortress door leading to the basement, which also swung open at her touch. Her footsteps echoed, boots clanging on the metal stairs. The lights were off and her waving arms couldn’t find a switch. She tried to activate them with a mental command, and with the effort of the concentration she missed the last step and tumbled face first onto the metal platform.
“God damn it to fuck!” she yelled, words too echoing with the clang of her body against the metal—how big was this place? She picked herself up and rubbed her knee. It was the kind of injury just lame enough to hurt and not activate any combat or healing procedures. She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the near-dark, light supplied by the glowing of instruments. Guided by this she found some promising switches, and after trying several the lights came on. Finally. Now to find a clue and—all the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. The operating table was empty. No stinky, decayed Friar—she was ready for that. No chance the pigs could have been here, no enterprising vulture or worried relative. She’d told no one, and how could they even get in? Who would take a body and leave all the expensive crap? Friar was dead; she knew that, he was dead for sure…wasn’t he? She’d felt him go still, stuck around to check. But had he faked it? What reason would he have? With a sinking feeling she walked to the edge of the platform. Her eyes followed the lights down, down, down into the pit, to where the massive steel door now lay open.
Chapter 17
Twenty-seven standard bullets, four ball busters, two incendiaries, ten rubbers, three micro-grenades, the prod at 64 percent power, the boot knife, the thigh shivs, a garroting lasso, the poison-injector ring…it seemed like a shit arsenal against the darkness of that black pit. She searched the lab three times over, but it didn’t seem that Friar had any weapons—how could he be private justice without at least a taser or a tranquilizer gun? Manners only took you so far in a gunfight. Did he stab people with his scalpel? She’d have to go in with what she had. Or she could run away. She could go to the gun store and buy a bazooka, a machine gun, a flamethrower, a laser, or a sixty-thousand-dollar plasma launcher. But even then would she be ready? Could she make it down those steps again knowing that door was open? The surprise was a gift and she needed to take it. Friar was down there, alive or dead, and if he was fucking with her he would have to pay.
There was an elevator, she saw, a large steel platform the size of an industrial dumpster that slid down two metal rails to drop her just in front of the door. It moved damn slow, giving her more time to think than she needed. The bare light bulbs down passed one by slow-ass one, the platform above getting smaller and smaller, and she reflected on her own stupidity. Mercenaries—she could have hired a dozen crack heads with shotguns to run ahead and eat bullets for her. Another light. Hemu, he might have had some mystical answer for Friar’s disappearance. Another light. ElilE. Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard. Another light. And why did she care anyway? If Friar wanted to fake his own death and live in a sewer, how was that any of her concern? Maybe he had an ex-wife giving him grief or he was in debt or forgot to pay his taxes. What did he have to do with her case—with her survival? Everything, of course.
The elevator came to a jolting stop right in front of the door. Truly massive, larger than she’d thought, you could drive a whole subway car through it. Why did Friar need such a large door anyway? She realized she had to pee and shuffled into a corner behind one of the door’s hinges to relieve herself. Better. There was a control panel with seemingly obvious open and close buttons, but also a keypad that she assumed was to lock the damn thing. Which meant he was trying to keep something from getting out, right? Or maybe he kept his gold in there in great heaps and piles—wouldn’t that be a happy ending? A ring of the same bare bulbs that traced the elevator illuminated the area around the door but didn’t do much to punch away the darkness beyond. She could see about eight feet through the door—it appeared to be dirt floor and naked rock and there was the faint outline of a concrete frame amidst the rock. Oh well, here goes nothing.
She stepped into the darkness and then took another step. Nothing happened. She took another step and then a skip. “Hello!” she yelled down the tunnel. Her voice echoed back, except it seemed to be saying, “Idiot.” What had she expected? The door to slam shut and the lights to go off? The door weighed fifty tons. She could roast a chicken and limbo to safety in the time it took to close. As for lights…she took enough steps that the entrance was a small bright circle and then switched on her night vision. Perfect. She certainly was in a tunnel, about the same width and height as the door, and dank and wet and clammy. There were footprints in the dirt—a clue!—and her scanners told her they belonged to size-nine male loafers. That sounded like something Friar would wear. Obviously, this was his mysterious tunnel.
She kept walking. It seemed like she walked for a very long time, but maybe it was just the lack of entertainment feeds and her creeping sobriety. Crap. She hadn’t taken stock of her barsenal before heading out. There were just a few swills—now her flask was empty and the backup flask was low. She had some diluted sky in her pocket ring, but would that be enough? Walking and walking and walking and—a door. It had snuck up on her, another door, similar to the first, closing off the tunnel. Well now what? There was a symbol on this door, something crazy that a retarded child might draw. It was a bunch of straight and squiggly lines, crossing and connecting and blending and flowing together, and now as she looked she saw they were changing and moving and seemed to have color beyond the green tinge of the night vision. She wanted to touch the symbol and so she did, and then gasped as the lines came up from the door and slid into her veins. She felt them pumping and sucking and draining her blood, a delicious joy and near-sexual pleasure rushing up and distracting her brain with ecstasy as they killed her. She jerked her hand away and screamed as her skin tore and blood splashed out, more of her precious blood spilled, lost. The strings had fused to her veins, melding into them so it was impossible to see where they ended and her body began. She grabbed her boot knife and slashed upwards in a long arc, severing the strings. Instantly the ecstasy was gone, replaced by an agony that overwhelmed her pain filters for a full five seconds. Her veins dangled from a ragged gash along her wrist and her whole arm shook. She fell to her knees and then back on her ass and choked back vomit and the urge to sob.
It took about eight minutes for her machinery to get the situation under control. She slapped on three knit patches, cotton-candy threads soaking up her blood and melding into her flesh to create a nice temporary skin. Her platelet injectors were on overdrive and they informed her she’d lost about a liter of blood, which might explain the wooziness, the headache, the exhaustion and possibly the self-disgust. Or maybe that was because she’d managed to spring the very first trap she’d come across and nearly die. But what kind of trap was it? Her night vision was good, top notch—she’d spared no expense—but obviously it had missed a few details. She switched it off and supercharged the contact plates in her left hand to form a lackluster flashlight. It’d drain calories like a motherfucker and with less than a full tank o’ blood that might be an issue, but damn it she needed to see. The scribble design was still there, no longer moving, no longer mesmerizing. It seemed to her the black lines had assumed a reddish tinge from drinking her blood. What kind of trap was that? She’d never seen anything like it. Wires that cut you, yeah, drugs that made you feel good, yeah, needles that drained your blood, all the time—but never in a neat little package like this.
Her head started to hurt and she switched off the makeshift flashlight and went back into night vision. The expedition was a failure, just like everything else she’d done. There was no control panel here, nothing she could find anyway with eyes or scanners—and she wasn’t about to run her fingers across any more surfaces. The door was closed, she didn’t know how it opened; it was time to go home and get drunk, and maybe go to a hospital. And she would have, too, if a crack of light hadn’t appeared almost with that thought and the door hadn’t swung silently open with a deal more speed than she had anticipated. And the view beyond—once her vision adjusted—took her breath away. Great, my blood, my breath, my sanity—what more do you want? My tits in a basket?
In front of her was a cavern the size of a football field. She knew it had to be at least that large because there was a cathedral inside, right in front of her. A stone bridge extended from the mouth of the door across a four-lane-highway chasm to an equally impressive door in the side of the cathedral. To her left and right were more doors, closed, with their own stone bridges leading to their own cathedral doors. Assuming they went all the way around, she guessed there were fourteen doors in all. She switched off her night vision and found she could still see. The cavern narrowed at the top, disappearing in a luminescent golden cloud. She stepped onto the stone bridge—it seemed so old, but how could it be?—and her footsteps sounded loud but didn’t echo. There was a noise, she realized, in the background, faint and present like an engine hum or rushing water. She hadn’t noticed it at first, couldn’t notice it unless she was really paying attention. What was it? It sounded like voices, hundreds, thousands of voices, singing softly, men, women, children, tenors, basses, whatevers, high and low all singing together. With that same crawling, slithering-vinyl sensation up her spine, with a sickness in her heart and groin and belly, she recognized the song pouring up from the pit below and echoing from the walls, the song in the screams of newborns and the gasps of the newly dead, in car honks and sex ballads, the song of an eye grating against its socket and a worm digging its way through human flesh: uausuausuausuausuausuausuausuau…
She followed the song, walked to the edge of the bridge and looked down. There they were, the bodies, thousands of them, hundreds of thousands maybe, dead—or alive? They moved, or seemed to, writhing like maggots around one another in a great fleshy soup that filled the cavern. From another hole—a lower hole, a hole with no bridge, one of hundreds—came the creature. It looked like a pile of human torsos fused together and jammed onto the body of a train-sized centipede. It slithered out of the hole and down the side of the cavern, coming, coming, coming, seemingly no end to its body. The first fifty feet of it detached from the wall and swung gracefully out over the pit of bodies below. It reared and Saru saw on its belly a long line of human bodies—oh God, children too!—held by smaller arms. The flesh pool seemed to rise up, the arms of bodies within it reaching out to embrace the bodies trapped in the centipede. They were cradled and carried down with care and love to disappear into the flesh pool. Then the centipede slithered back up the wall and back into its hole and was gone.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
She screamed and whirled, the Betty leapt to her hand and she barely adjusted her aim enough to keep the bullet from going right through Friar’s skull. It nicked the top of his ear, taking about three centimeters of skin with it. He didn’t flinch.
“Friar!” she yelled. The Betty wobbled in her hand. Her arm was still shaking and from more than just the blood loss. She forced herself to take a deep breath and then managed to speak in a semi-normal voice. “Give me a reason not to hit you this time, because I am freaked the fuck out.”
He waved his hand like he was brushing away a piece of dust and the Betty jerked out of her hand and flew over the side of the bridge. Well, fuck. She tried to laugh but all she felt was defeated. “You’re one of them then, eh?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am.”
She sat on the stone railing of the bridge and put her chin in her hands. Then she looked over the side, down at the writhing pool of flesh. One of those fuckers had her gun. Could she get it back? How far was the Betty’s jump distance? Not three hundred feet. She turned back to Friar. How had he snuck up on her like that? He was the same as he’d been before except now instead of the professor getup he was wearing a black caji suit. He still had that potbelly, still had that balding head with the gray-hair sides, still had those tired eyes that still looked sad. Not an athlete, not a warrior. But he was one of them. He was part of this. And so it seemed the rules did not apply. She’d have to kill him, kill him for real this time. Get some real satisfaction.
