No Dogs in Philly, page 7
“They are like the Hunger though they are not. They seek to grow, to become Gods of Gods, but through kinder means. The Slow God neither gives nor takes from the Sad Gods. She pities them, for they have lost much, and chastens them, for they have not learned. Of all the Gods, their end is least certain.”
“Oh, okay. So, where’s this girl? The Blue God’s escort.”
She noticed that all the hips in the joint were now watching them, staring almost reverently at her. There were at least thirty of them, and she saw they were armed with guns, knives and—was that a sword? She slapped herself mentally for letting down her guard. Lame as they may be they could still dog pile her and chop off her head. And she hadn’t quite realized how nutty these guys were. They really believed this shit.
“We will help you, but you must help us.”
“Ah, a capitalist God. I like that.”
“We would not ask. We would help you freely, but we are desperate.”
Desperate. That was something she could understand, that could make a body do some twisted shit. And if she said no? Awfully tempting, seeing as they seemed to be relying on voodoo just like everyone else. Would they beat her senseless and crucify her if she flipped them the bird and bounced? Although…Hemu had been sincere enough, and really what she needed was thousands of slaves to keep an eye out for all the blue-eyed girls in the Fish. That was almost exactly what Hemu could give her, if he wasn’t bullshitting.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I will show you.”
It was a tricky climb to the top of the warehouse, but the view was breathtaking. The city was a wall of lights and crawling ads, spilling into Jersey across the Hathaway Bridge. She’d never seen Philly like this before, the panorama of light, almost as far as you could see in any direction. It was like a fantasy world, a magical kingdom—it almost looked like a place where you would want to be. Above it all, a massive steel erection jutting from the wall of light, the Vericast building, illuminated by a bluish beam of what she could only suppose was moonlight, a symbol of absolute might. She got the odd sense that they could see her up in the Gaespora forest, that ElilE was still there on his rock, that he hadn’t moved since their meeting, and that he was seeing through the miles of air and dark to warn her: time was running out.
But that wasn’t what Hemu had brought her up here to see. He was pointing at something below, and shouting something—they had to shout the wind was so loud. She didn’t like the wind. The heights she could handle, sort of, but all this blowing, whipping her hair in her eyes and chilling her through her coat; it seemed to be pushing her towards the edge, urging her to jump, calling her a pussy if she didn’t make a try at flying. What was Hemu pointing at? It was a building, maybe, large, almost a quarter of a city block, illuminated by slow-blinking lights. It almost looked like a refinery. Oh speak up you mild-mannered twat. She grabbed his head, and brought it closer to hers, almost so their foreheads touched. She was pleasantly surprised that his breath didn’t reek—was that peppermint?
“What. Are. You. Saying?”
“It’s a fab dozer,” he said, pointing at the building. “It’s coming this way.”
“So?”
“It will destroy the church, the Place of Communion.”
“So? Build another one.”
He shook his head.
“The Slow God cannot be in all places. This place is close to Her. This place is dear.”
She thought back to what ElilE had said about similarity—what had he said, similarity margins? Margarine?—well, similarity. And this God, or alien, or inspired con artist preferred this particular spot.
“What will happen if it’s destroyed?”
He shook his head again.
“It will be bad. She brings us peace.”
The thought hit her hard—peace. That was the word. The quiet, the calm around the area, the green things growing everywhere and the flowers. And she hadn’t seen an elzi in hours. She could believe that there was something here, a God, a gas leak, a fluke of topography that made it desirable real estate.
She activated her binoculars and night vision. She could see the fab dozer now, a box frame on bus-sized treads with wrecking balls, heat rays, grinders, chemical recyclers, auto-assemblers, and three-dimensional printers. She could see the line of apartments it had shit out behind it—nice, two-story buildings with brick facades, for the young techies and embyays. It was a billion-dollar automated development device—it had to be automated to keep Hathaway’s hands clean in case an elzi or a hip got caught in the blender—and Hemu was asking her to destroy it, because she would have to destroy it. It was doubtful she could get a sharp enough program to reroute the thing, and even if she did they would eventually catch the error and fix it. This would carry a terrorism charge at the least and you couldn’t buy your way out of that. The feds’d strap her to a metal cross and rip out her fingernails, peel off her nipples, rape her with cattle prods and snap her bones, one by one until she confessed. There was no way.
“I can’t do that,” she said. “I can’t. I mean, I don’t even know how, and even if I did—they’d catch me. That thing is a fortress. I’m sorry but no go.”
He stared at the fab dozer, face unchanged.
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I think I understand alright.”
“It is not you who can do this. It is the girl. When you find her, you must bring her here. She will destroy the machine.”
“I can’t do that. I have to bring her to the Gaes—the Sad Gods.”
“Do you know why they seek this girl?”
“They want to protect her. There are men trying to find her, trying to kill her.”
“Yes. Let us go below.”
They climbed down three stories of dilapidated stairs and rickety ladders. The building was occupied in the lower floors, ruined but clean, and with the green vines everywhere with the white flowers—maybe that was the only thing keeping the building up. They stopped on the thirtieth floor—fuck that had been a climb—where a heavy scent of cooking vegetables filled the air. The smell made her mouth water; all she’d had was that stick of Chew 20 and half a liter of bourbon. Her stomach growled. Hemu lead her to a line of scraggly-looking men and women and handed her a bowl carved of wood. They followed the line to a huge pot, repurposed from an industrial container of some sort, full of bubbling stew. They were served by baggy old women and then found a place alone in a corner by a window. It was dark and hard to see without night vision, but the hips didn’t seem to have a problem. There were fires, which seemed like a terrible idea, but they were careful to contain them in drums and piles of rocks, and the whole wide floor flickered between light and shadow. Peace. It was peaceful. There were no city sounds and the people hardly spoke. There was a moan, some couple having sex in the shadows somewhere. She sipped at the broth of the stew—not bad, needed salt. Her poison sniffer said it was fine.
“You must spend the night,” Hemu said. “You will be safe here.”
“Okay,” she said. Strangely she was in no hurry to leave. Sheltered from the wind it wasn’t too cold and she still had a fine view of the city. Her brain was acting funny, all sober now, and she felt she might actually get a full night of natural sleep.
“In the morning, we will help you,” Hemu said. How did he know? Was he the leader? He hadn’t talked to anyone but her this whole time. But she realized that didn’t matter. No one talked here, in the Communion Place, but they communed. The decisions were made in conference with the Slow God. They were all together here, protected. She could feel it, just a little, in the corner of her mind. It was a nice feeling, but it made her sad.
“When you find the girl, you must decide. You must bring her to us or bring her to the Sad Gods.”
“You were waiting for me,” she said. Of course. That’s why he was there.
“Not me. All of us. I found you.”
“And the girl, is she one of you?”
“She is what you would call hip to mean she has no home and she relies on others like her. But she does not follow the Slow God. We are not many.”
“But you control the hips?”
“We give as we can. The Slow God gives freely to man and we take all we can and give to others. But our understanding is small.”
She felt very strange. This peace shit was getting to her. It was…relaxing. She felt all the disconnected strands of her brain, plugged into all the feeds, all the processes of checking her back and scanning for threats and searching, always searching—they all wound together and for what seemed like the first time she was living as a whole, focused, present, part of a moment. And the moment was shared. She reached out and held Hemu’s hand, furious at both her need and her embarrassment. He took her hand and held it gently, and they stayed that way until she drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 8
The girl had been bound and gagged, trussed up like a turkey, no signs of a struggle—she’d probably thought it was part of the game. They’d slit her throat and then let the blood run into a trench about four inches deep, two feet wide, and four feet long. Now the trench was a rectangle of black, crusty, mud, like a giant chocolate bar. They’d scooped out the girl’s eyes, cleanly, and then laid her down, spread her legs and arms, and unraveled her veins to make a blood angel in the dirt. It was the sixth girl in two weeks, and all Saru could feel—aside from an urge to fill the trench with vomit—was relief. This wasn’t the girl; this wasn’t her girl. She knew because of the flower in her hair. This was just a poor, sad, desperate woman who happened to have unusually bright blue eyes—she assumed.
Hemu had given her the flower—and a promise that the hips, or the worshippers of the Slow God would comb the Fish in search of the girl—plucked it seemingly at random from the chapel wall and placed it in her hair. She’d tossed it, of course, and ground it into the pavement with her boot. The memory of the night made her angry, each step away from the place had made her angrier and angrier. What were they playing at? What was this? More smoke and mirrors, more scams, more drugs and ploys to drill inside her brain and manipulate her. At the time it had felt real, believable, nice even. But back on the streets, away from the flowers and silent vagabonds and the city sky all lit up like stars, it seemed like she had just been played again, given just enough information to make her look like a sap, hooked, landed, and flayed.
And the damn flower wouldn’t go away! A tiny white bell on a thin green stem and every morning it appeared in her hair again, exactly where Hemu had placed it, lovingly, reverently almost—had she really considered sleeping with a homeless man? The thought filled her with disgust and a self-loathing that was warm and comfortable like an old sweater. She’d crushed and burned the flower, flushed it down the toilet and tossed it off a rooftop—scene of a disemboweled schoolgirl—but always it came back. It was a glitch in her memory—her whole brain, her whole setup was glitched. There was no flower but for whatever reason her brain had fixated on it, forgotten to delete the memory when the flower itself was gone, and so she was haunted by it. That and other things. Her vision still flickered from time to time, she’d lose minutes and forget where she was, and sometimes she heard the laugh, the hyena laugh of Friar’s death. She needed to find a saw jockey she could trust, someone to go into her brain and reset everything to factory settings. But she couldn’t afford it now, couldn’t afford the downtime of having her mind rebooted, the drooling, the potty training, the learning to walk all over again.
“The odd thing is,” someone was talking. She’d zoned out, let her thoughts take her away. She brought herself back to the moment, back to the mutilated girl in front of her, the mounds of reeking garbage—a desperate woman turning tricks in a junkyard—the obnoxious cackling of crows, and the spindly man in a saggy gray uniform trying to make sense of it all. McCully, a vulture, private forensics and body auctioneer. Made a living as sell-serve to PIs and then selling the corpses back to the family, if they gave a shit.
“…is that this girl didn’t suffer. They cut her throat, and with something sharp, before they took her apart. The other girls, well, it took them a long time to die.”
“What are you thinking?” she said, mechanically. She didn’t really care; the girl was dead, it wasn’t her mark, time to move on. There were no clues here, hadn’t been any clues before, not so much as a hair or a drop of blood or even a sign of a struggle. The girls had no traces of identifying drugs, no bullet holes or darts, not even particularly high levels of stress chemicals considering how they’d died. She’d pulled all their histories and given them to Jojran to investigate, but she didn’t have any hope. The only thing that seemed to tie the murders together was they’d all had their eyes scooped out. One of the girls had a friend—yes, her eyes had been blue, but that was still hardly evidence. It was entirely possible these murders were just a lark for some psychopath—she’d even called Lou and told him to cancel the chase, just in case—but she didn’t believe it. Too much coincidence. And there was that damn flower.
Deep in her gut, the part of her really steering the ship, she could feel it, feel the flower. It was like a wind chime in a warm breeze. Now it was tinkling, metal pipes gently knocking against each other as she looked down at the eyeless corpse with her veins spread out like angel wings. It touched her just enough to tell her this was important, but it wasn’t the clanging she’d feel if this were her girl. A dumb game of Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!
“…I’d say she died late last night, early morning. Lucky that none of the elzi got at her, strange even, because this place is crawling with ‘em.” McCully gestured grandly at the panorama of garbage. “They love this place, there’re piles of ‘em here—are you listening to me?”
“Yeah,” she said.
He squinted at her. His face was wrinkly, like a walnut. “I don’t like this,” he said. “A few more of these and the cops’ll have to get involved.”
That would be the end of her case, ruined. They’d storm the slums, kick down doors, round people up, chase every lead—not that too many were presenting themselves as it was—into a rat hole and then find some poor foreign schlep to take the fall and execute him on the evening news.
“What do I owe you?” she asked, wearily. At the time a half a million dollars had seemed pretty close to infinite money, but now having to pay out half the fucking city for tips and leads, Net tracks, thugs, pimps, vultures, dudaws, and mercs, she was pissing cash.
“Two thousand.”
She counted it out. “You gonna take the body?”
“Family’s got nothing. I’ll leave it for the elzi.”
“Okay. You know, the second you get word I want you to call me.”
“You expecting more like this?”
“Yeah.”
He glanced around nervously at the piles of trash. A vulture didn’t spook easy, didn’t go well with poking at corpses and lugging them around, but McCully seemed downright nervous, like whoever did the girl was going to pop out and lop off his dick. Fat chance; he had about the grayest, blandest eyes you could imagine, grayer than his drab vulture onesie.
“Walk away,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever they’re paying you, walk away.”
“Can’t.”
“You’re in over your head.”
“Boy don’t I know it.”
He glanced around again, conspiratorially, and then leaned in close. “Saru, whoever killed these girls knew what they were doing. I’ve never seen a throat cut like that before. It’s like they used a machine, straight, measured, even. And the way they moved her…” He kept glancing around. Who did he think was listening? But he’d gotten her attention at least. “It, it’s hard to say just from what we have…but it looks like she moved herself.”
“What do you mean?” What did he mean?
“I mean, after they cut her throat and bled her out into the trench, it looks like she stood up and lay down on her own.”
“Is that possible?”
“For an elzi maybe, who knows what keeps them moving, but they’re clumsy…I don’t know who or what could do this, but it stinks of Wekba…this isn’t a normal crime.”
“Well I know that already,” she said crossly, and started walking away. “Keep this quiet,” she yelled over her shoulder. “And let me know when you get the next one.”
An elzi was lying on the hood of her Cadillac, basking in the midday haze like a lizard. She pulled a rusty pipe from a trash pile and used it to pry him off her hood. He fell to the ground and then crawled away on hands and knees, stopping to lick a gum wrapper he’d found. The Caddy was a piece of shit and she hated driving it—stuck in traffic, vulnerable—and paying $400 to fill it up, but cabs wouldn’t run out to the city skirts. Too many cabbies had been called out to nowhere land only to be tapped in the back of the head and have their cars chopped up.
She grumbled the car to life and careened down the dirt path to the exit and onto something resembling a street—more potholes than anything. Halfway to the city center she got a call from Jojran. She switched the Caddy to auto and put Jojran up on the windshield. He used an avatar, an electric blue tiger-man in some sort of Gyptian-looking space suit. His avatar sat in a chair like he was commanding a starship and there were stars flying by in the background. What a fucking joker, but he was good at what he did.
“I’ve found something,” he said. He used his own voice, squeaky, like a ball forgot to drop. It was ridiculous coming from the ultra-masculine tiger body he’d chosen for himself.
“What is it?”
“Come over and I’ll show you.” Always trying to get her to come over. Always trying to get in her pants. Maybe if he came out and said it she’d let him cop a feel but she couldn’t stand his simpering innuendo, his false-confidence suave.
“Just patch me in.”
