Red Cells (10 page)

“Make it fast, man,” Stake overheard one of the guards respond. “We’re already short of people now that we’ve got men taking those two injured prisoners to the infirmary.”

“
Dead
prisoners,” someone else corrected, cutting in. No doubt one of the guards who had been conveying the bodies of the Tin Town Maniacs. “You watch yourself with that one, Hurley.”

“I got it under control,” Hurley replied.

The two men had almost reached the exit, located at the opposite end of the great room from the doorway the prisoners were filing through, when a sudden uproar caused them to halt and whirl around.

The prisoners at the end of the line were looking above them and pointing at a ghostly white ribbon that circled overhead like a tatter of ectoplasm.

“Hey!” Stake started to call out.

And then, a figure the general size and shape of a man, but resembling more the animated skeleton of a demon, seemed to step straight out of the air. No flare of light or puff of smoke; it suddenly just
was
. Its blank face, armored as if with chitin, framed by wriggling millipede legs like a flower of bone.

As the prisoners at the tail of the queue cried out in surprise, the eel-like harbinger shot down to the figure’s head and joined its streaming mane. Became part of the whole…its job done, as if it had helped open the way, a key in some unfathomable lock.

The prisoners near the phantom spun away to scatter. Hurley slapped his hand to his gun. Yet they were all too late.

The demon thrust out its arms to either side, and just as quickly as Stake had caught hold of both Tin Town Maniacs, it seized two prisoners by enclosing their heads in its long fingers. Between those bony fingers, Stake saw the blue eyes of one of the men gone wide in horror.

But a second later, all three of them were gone. The entity vanished in a blink, just as it had manifested. The departure of the two trapped prisoners, however, was more messy. Twin detonations of vivid
redness
made Stake shut his eyes and turn his face to the side involuntarily. Even from this distance, he felt fine drops of blood and a few nuggets of flesh reach the skin of his face.

When he looked back, there were two great splatters on the rec yard floor where the men had been standing. Other prisoners closer to the scene than Stake and Hurley looked as though they had just emerged from swimming in a lake of blood.

A scream echoed in Stake’s mind, dwindling slowly like a siren down a long tunnel. At first he had thought it was a half-blurted cry from the throats of the two prisoners, but they hadn’t had time for that. He knew it was the cry of the entity, instead. Not heard, but felt in the very folds of his brain like ricocheting electrical impulses. Alien impulses…not his own…

The last of the cry of rage faded away into nothingness.

From the doorway Hurley had just been about to usher Stake through, a stream of men suddenly trotted into the rec yard: Colonial Forcers, helmeted and dressed in gray and black urban camouflage, boots clomping, carrying bulky assault engines in their arms.

But the monster was already gone.

Epilogue

Serendipity

Due more to overcrowding at the Paxton Maximum Security Penitentiary than benevolence, Jeremy Stake only served three months for his impersonation of Edwin Fetch at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. His killing of two fellow inmates was investigated, but dismissed as justifiable. That the victims had been the reviled Tin Town Maniacs worked very much in his favor—as did the eyewitness testimony of prison guard Omar Hurley.

Some of the Trans-Paxton prison gangs, such as the Orange Bunch, fragmented and were shuffled into other gangs. The Muties, however, naturally melded with the larger mutant gang at Paxton Maximum Security. Stake stuck close to Null and Hassan Billings for the duration of his sentence, in case of further trouble from Fetch, but none arose and he seldom even glimpsed the man. Blur he never saw again, nor did Null and Billings know where he’d been taken. To another prison? A hospital for the mentally ill?

They liked to believe he had gotten his shapeshifting gift under control long enough to masquerade as one of the guards, and had strolled out the front door to disappear into Punktown.

As for the abandoned Trans-Paxton Penitentiary being dismantled, destroyed, or shifted out of its pocket, and the pocket closed up—none of this happened. Stake wasn’t surprised…nor by the news that the prison would now be utilized as a remote outpost for the scientific study of interstitial life.

* * *

Two months after his release from prison, Stake found himself working on the assembly line at SynthLife Automatonics, helping create highly realistic androids in what was called the Little Gravure line (individual models bearing such names as the Saaya, the Meiki, the Hikaru). Too expensive for anyone but the most affluent to privately own, the adorable Asian-styled machines were more commonly utilized in legal brothels.

But Stake’s factory gig was not because of a continuing difficulty in obtaining assignments as a private investigator. It was, in fact, one such assignment.

SynthLife’s owner had summoned Stake personally, with the request that the detective pose as one of his workers so as to look into a very vexing problem. For several months now, a number of his expensive finished or near-finished androids had been acting very strangely, erratically, when it seemed nothing could be wrong with their programming. In fact, three of them had managed to vanish from the plant altogether. When Stake asked if they’d been stolen, the owner told him that didn’t appear to be the case. Security cameras had shown the first of the valuable missing androids simply walking out of the building, escaping as casually as could be, after work hours. Following that night, though, the security cameras throughout the plant had been malfunctioning, probably hacked into.

A newly hired security guard had intercepted the last runaway sex doll. He had ended up unconscious with a concussion and broken arm. That was when the owner had decided to try another approach to the dilemma, focusing on sorting out its cause.

He suspected industrial sabotage, perhaps from a competitor. An inside job, some of his own workers taking money in return for causing havoc. Stake took the assignment, but he thought it might get messy if the problem turned out to be a syndicate boss—such as Punktown’s foremost crime lord, Neptune Teeb—at a disagreement with SynthLife over pricing or such. After all, the syndies were behind those brothels that acquired the Little Gravure models.

Well, Stake decided, it still beat another gig in prison.

* * *

Stake was not involved in covering the delectable automatons in their soft realistic flesh, but in constructing their inner frameworks, and the work was often surprisingly manual and greasy. At least, the tasks they gave him to do. His instructors were two human workers named Brook—short, huge-bellied, and bug-eyed—and the taller, thinner, and sunken-cheeked Nolan. Neither of them had much patience for training a newbie, and they picked up on the mutant’s subtly unfinished countenance. One of them would grouse, purposely loudly enough for Stake to hear, “Look at this guy, huh? Tell me he isn’t a clone. I think the company’s bringing in clone labor now to replace us. They can work clones for peanuts.”

The other worker would reply, “Clone? I say he’s an android. SynthLife must be testing out a new line. But yeah, I think we should tell the union to have a look at this guy while we still have our jobs.”

Stake ignored them during such exchanges, keeping to his work. Days went by, and he took in everything around him, even his coworkers’ little rituals. Every day, grizzled dwarfish Brook would greet Nolan in his gruff voice, “Hey…how’s your tighty whities?”

“Pretty damn mighty,” Nolan might reply.

“I’ll tell you what’s mighty. Your wife’s mouth. She’s a regular Black and Decker pecker wrecker.”

The next day the exchange might go: “Hey, how’s the tighty whities?”

“Eh…today they’re pretty shitty.”

“Yeah? You know what’s really shitty? Your wife’s titties.”

Today when Brook ambled in late from the cafeteria and began keying a template change into an automated welder, without looking up from his own work table Stake asked on a bored impulse, “So how’s your tighty whities?”

Brook whipped around with his already protuberant eyes bulging, looking like a startled bulldog. “I don’t wear whities. I wear boxers. Why are you so interested in what I got under my jeans, man-lover?”

Stake looked up at Brook slowly, but held his tongue and returned to his assembly work.

“Yeah, you better mind your mouth, android,” Brook told him.

Later on in the shift, Stake reached up with both hands to adjust the baseball cap all of them wore as part of their uniform, and surreptitiously took a few shots of Nolan on his wrist comp. Then he waited for a time when Nolan was off on an errand to another department, quickly ducked into the nearest men’s room, and studied the best shot of Nolan on the wrist comp. He might not be able to reproduce Brook’s body type, but Nolan was within his range, and he could assume a sunken-cheeked appearance nicely.

When Nolan—Stake—emerged from the restroom, he walked right up to Brook, cupped the smaller man’s crotch in his hand, and said, “I’ve always loved you.” Imitating someone’s face was no good if you couldn’t do their voice, too, and Stake was a master of mimicry.

Brook tried to push him away but Stake was already skipping off like a gleeful little girl, vanishing behind warehouse racks reaching halfway to the high ceiling. Then, out of sight, he darted into the men’s room again.

When he emerged with his own face restored, beyond the warehouse racks he heard the two workers raising their voices at each other, cursing and ready to go at it. Whistling, Stake continued on toward the cafeteria for a little impromptu coffee break.

As he passed alongside a metal rack loaded with various-sized boxes of parts, he heard the faintest rustle above him, paused to glance up, and saw a single piece of green-colored foam popcorn come half tumbling, half floating down from on high. He noted several other pieces already scattered on the concrete floor below the rack.

Stake quickly faced forward again and resumed walking, but he had quit whistling.

* * *

Stake watched from the shadows, the cavernous plant silent all around him with the last of its second-shift workers having departed for the night, as the diminutive and busty nude sex doll clambered down the shelves of the rack. She had emerged from the open end of a large box, which had disgorged a shower of green foam popcorn like burst water from a new mother’s womb. When she alighted and turned, Stake stepped forward, pointing a powerful Panzer handgun loaded with green plasma capsules.

She was complete, right down to the shimmering black hair framing her face to the feathery patch of pubic hair. Ready to go out into the world and masquerade as human. The only giveaway that something might be wrong about her was her eyelids. They fluttered spasmodically.

“I don’t want to shoot, I swear,” Stake said to the thing.

“If you do, there are many other bodies here I might take instead,” the android said in its sweet
kawaii
voice.

“Do you know me?”

The little android—he recognized it as one of the Saaya models—cocked its head slightly to one side. “
You
. You are the chameleon. From the prison.”

“You’re something of a chameleon yourself, aren’t you?”

“Is that how you understood who we are?”

“Maybe. But I suspected as soon as I heard robots exhibiting erratic behavior…and security cameras going down at critical times. And your flickering eyes just now confirmed it for me. You should try to get that under control.”

“Have you told your masters what you suspected?”

“I’m not working for the government, if that’s what you mean. I’m just investigating for this company’s owner. But no, I haven’t shared what I thought.”

“And will you?” The android took one step closer to him. Stake didn’t appreciate the threat, and straightened his arm to aim the gun more precisely at the cute, pouting face.

“I’d rather not. I can sympathize with what your kind have gone through, trapped in that pocket. But why come here? I’m assuming you stowed away on one or more of the escaping transport pods.”

“Correct. Some of us came here. But most remained, in the hopes the pocket would be closed. Now we understand it will not be. Your people mean to study us more closely.”

“I’m sorry for that. Truly. But I ask again…why did some of you come here?”

“Considering recent events, we felt it was also time that we studied
your
kind more closely.”

Stake nodded. “Understood. I can’t blame you. But I hope you’ll be patient with us. Those researchers might prove benevolent to you. They might help you yet.”

“Are you trying to trick us, or are you only naive?”

“I suffer occasional irrational bouts of optimism. They keep me going.”