"Don't!" Mira screamed, jolting back from the metal basement door as if an electric shock had gone through her. Eyes bulging, she panted, "I was connected to the brain; I heard it. They've come through. The front doors are open. The Blank People are coming through."
"What about Nhu and Tabeth?" Javier asked.
"Dead. I felt their screams. Haanz, too. And now the Blank People are coming."
"All of them," Satin said, eyes hard and ready for a fight.
"All of them," she confirmed.
Even as she said it, they could hear the thunder of their footfalls upstairs. They heard the stairwell door fly open with a boom. The metal steps start to clang.
"Get into the elevator!" Patryk yelled, rushing to the nearest one and stabbing its OPEN button. The door slid aside without hesitation. He shoved Barbie inside, then Mira, and ducked in after them. Javier followed, and Satin last, whipping around to fire a few shots from his Decimator revolver as the first of the Blank People reached the basement level and flung open the stairwell's door. Splashed with hungry green plasma, several of them went down and impeded the others long enough for the elevator door to slide shut.
They heard hands without fingernails, hands without fingerprints, claw and bang at the closed security door as the elevator itself moved upward.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
the veterans
"Hey, it's the Man of a Thousand Faces," Lark slurred from the bar as Jeremy Stake entered the Legion of Veterans Post 69. "And all of them ugly."
But that was pretty much the extent of the Blue War vet's taunting, and when the Choom bartender Watt pulled a Zub draft for Stake, he explained, "He doesn't know that you helped him hit his head on the bar that time."
Stake smirked and took his drink to one of the tables. And it was as he sat down that his wrist comp alerted him to an incoming call. Stake checked its origin: Captain Richard Henderson. He took the call immediately, bending over the little device to let his mind become the computer's screen. There, he saw his old friend's face smiling at him, but with a somewhat leery look in his eyes.
"I found her, Jeremy."
Stake stared back at his friend a long few moments, but shook himself when he felt the sly crawl of his nebulous flesh. "That was fast."
"Things have opened up more on their world. And she's on the net now, where I guess she wasn't before. I contacted her myself, Jer. Her English has improved. I told her you'd be calling."
Stake nodded. "Thanks, Rick. I owe you."
"Well, she spared my life that day. I can't forget that. But are you sure you really want to do this? I mean, it's not my business, but just out of concern. You sure you want to go back like this?"
"There are some things I have to know."
"I understand. I think." Henderson craned his neck as if to peer over Stake's shoulder. "Looks like you're in a veterans' post. They all look the same. I should know-I got one as my hang-out, too."
"When you've been in a war," Stake said, "you live in the past as much as the present."
"I don't think it's just us vets," Henderson said. "I think all people do."
Stake had taken his hoverbike today, and he rode it back toward Forma Street, not wanting to call Thi Gonh from LOV 69. He was in his casual attire, not undercover, not on the job. A black sports coat over a white T-shirt, baggy khakis, beaten sneakers, and on his head a black porkpie hat. The silly little porkpie hat was, at least to his own eyes, an object of individuality. Something almost defiantly him, as if to compensate for the anonymity of his tenuous features. Something to paperweight his elusive self so it wouldn't blow away in the wind. He wore it even inside his apartment, sometimes. As he rode, he found himself reaching up to hold it down if the breeze gusted too much. Afraid to lose it.
However casually he was dressed, though, under his coat he still wore his favorite pistol in a shoulder holster. It was a Darwin .55, "the height of firearms evolution" as the ads proclaimed. On the job or not, this was still Punktown.
Coasting astride the bike, he again remembered being stationed in the city of Di Noon, with its streets flooded in bikes. And he remembered gaping up at Thi, riding astride him but leaning back with her smooth blue belly pumping fast, her own face composed with strength and control as she looked down at a more helpless likeness of herself, watching his transmuted face sadistically for the pleasure she was inflicting, and asking him, "Ga Noh like? Ga Noh like?"
Lizard atop lizard. It was the most primal of all impulses. The need of cells to lie alongside other cells. And he ached for her, even now. As if some vital part of him had been severed. Or never attached in the first place.
He arrived at his little tenement house at the end of the infamous street, jutting at its very corner like the prow of a ship pushing on through a glittering sea of vehicles. Rather than leave his hoverbike on the sidewalk, he got off to glide it into the lobby and store it under the stairs. He took the elevator to his top floor flat.
As he let himself into his apartment, Stake instantly took in how its air was heavy with a high-priced cologne, such as someone might overindulge in just to show that they could afford to do so on their salary.
A hand appeared from around the door to seize him by the lapel, almost dragging him off his feet. This person's other hand jammed the barrel of a snub-nosed Decimator revolver under Stake's jaw painfully. A second man closed and locked the door. Out of the corner of his eye, Stake saw that this man had a pump-action shotgun in his hands. He recognized it as his own, in fact. The man had found it in the corner between his computer desk and the wall.
Both men wore pricey and priggish black suits, bowler hats on their heads. And the flesh of their faces and hands was leopard-spotted in a camouflage of blue-on-blue.
The first man let go of Stake's jacket, instead slipped his hand inside it to relieve him of the Darwin .55. "Nice," he said, smiling and tucking it into his own waistband.
As Stake stood there between the two clones, a third one stepped into view from the bedroom. He was of course identical to the other two, but somehow Stake could tell that this one was Mr. Jones. The clone nodded courteously. "Mr. Stake."
"How did you get in here?" he demanded.
"That would be me," said the man with his shotgun. Was this one Mr. Doe, the clone who had driven him back to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children after his meeting with Adrian Tableau? "Skeleton card," he explained.
"So what do you want?"
"You're a Blue War vet," observed Jones, strolling about the room now, and pointing to a case containing several medals that Stake had mounted on one of its walls. They were largely barren otherwise, and he particularly refrained from hanging photos or paintings of people, lest he begin to look like them. In his private lair, he wanted only to be himself. Whoever that was. To that end, there was only that one photograph of himself, should he need to stare at it upon his arrival home.
"Why do you ask?" Stake joked drily. As if, from the clones' appearance, it wasn't apparent.
"Very funny," said the one with the shotgun.
Stake smiled, feeling a bit smug. These men didn't remember him from his visit to Tableau's company; he was sure of it. But then, that returned him to his question. "I asked you what you're doing breaking into my apartment?"
"We work for Adrian Tableau, Mr. Stake," Jones explained. "He's the owner of Tableau Meats."
"I see. And?"
"And, you apparently work for John Fukuda. Owner of Fukuda Bioforms. A business competitor of Mr. Tableau's."