EdgeOfHuman (14 page)

Farther above, at the top of the highest city tower, a geisha face winked and smiled, as though in approval of the blimp's death. As though the taste on the magnified woman's tongue was a piece of the upward-gouting fire itself, the blimp heeling onto one side to display its wound, the orange ball of flame sweetly acrid as an umeboshi plum.

The whole street lit orange, the dawning of a new, harsher, and more beautiful day.

Fireball hitting first, decompressed hydrogen in oxygen's explosive embrace. A wave of flame in the shape of a churning sphere, the collapsing U.N. blimp barely visible behind the eye-burning glare. The flames' enormous hand flattened the street, rush of heat and expanding pressure knocking screaming human forms hard to the pavement, tumbling them with hair alight or silken veils incinerated against gasping breaths, eyelashes scorched away.

Deckard felt the soft, hot pulse. Enough meters away that he was only knocked back against the wall of the building beside him, impact with brick and metal jarring him dizzy for a moment. Neon serpents,
kanji
store signs, hissed a rain of sparks, glass tubing shock-broken, upon him and the others who'd been knocked off their feet. Bracing himself against the wall, Deckard pushed himself upright, the figures around him still on their hands and knees, trying to crawl away across the bright shrapnel of the shattered windows, or gaping at the inferno crash, now at ground zero.

The blimp's rudimentary skeleton, meridians of an ovoid globe, showed through the engulfing flames. Another mortar had been fired, but with no incendiary charge. Instead, a grappling hook, prongs snapping into a sharp-pointed iron flower, ran a cord from the blimp's wreckage, back to an anchor point in the alley on the other side of the street. Hunched against the blaze's thermal force, Deckard shielded his eyes with his hand, squinting at the action on the other end of the taut line.

More of the blimp's frame twisted and burst rivets free as the hulk collapsed with terminal grandeur into the street, the blunt nose fire-wrapped and gouging a ragged furrow into the concrete; the tail end's stubby fins clawed out a row of tenth-story windows before tearing loose and sailing aloft on the fire's updraft.

Another pair of iron hooks, looped overhead and hand-thrown by the figures in the alley, snagged the black frame, drawing it down tighter, as though the burning craft were an animal that might tear loose in its agony and vault into the smoke-clouded sky. Deckard could see the men, a half dozen or so gritting their teeth, clad in white fireproof Nomex suits, tugging at the lines, leaning back with their feet braced against the ash-strewn pavement.

The lower edge of the blimp's billboard-sized viewscreen hit the ground with a sharp jolt, evoking a last flicker of life from it. The visual programming went into skittering fast-forward mode.

The voice of the images screamed. No longer seductive, cajoling: "
A new life!
" Pitch whipping higher, as though in sudden fear: "
New life! Chance! New!
" Into the idiot ultrasonic, trembling the shards of glass left in the buildings' window frames: "
Start anew!
"

One of the attackers ran out from the alley, line and grappling hook circling over his head and uplifted hand. The dead and still living who'd been caught in the explosion sprawled at his feet as he let go, the hook singing toward the center of the tilted viewscreen. The pronged metal hit square the rapid play of colored photons. They flew apart, the rigid membrane that had trapped them now dissolving into razor bits, the circuitry beneath arcing into overload and meltdown. Deckard spun away, shielding his face with his arm, the fragments of glass and hot-tipped wires falling across his shoulders like hail.

"It's all lies!"

Another voice, amplified but not the one that had boomed, then screamed from the crashing blimp. He turned back to the street, the infinitesimal bell-like percussion of glass fragments chiming across the now-vacated street. One of the mortar crew-maybe the one who'd run out with the last grappling hook; he couldn't tell-had leapt onto one of the bent metal struts, the dying flames silhouetting his insulated form. The man had black carbon streaks across his wild-eyed face, a bullhorn in his thick-gloved hand.

"They're telling you lies!" Shouting through the flared horn, voice snapping its echo against the surrounding towers. "It's always been lies!"

Deckard stepped away from the wall behind him, to the curb and then down to the debris-filled street. Scraps of the blimp's fabric, still burning and exuding oily black smoke, spotted the asphalt. Distant sirens, approaching at ground level and in the sky, cut through the cries and shouts of the crowd that had packed the space only a few minutes before.

"You have to listen!" The voice coming out of the bullhorn had a fanatic's, a believer's, trembling edge. "Not to me . . . but to
them
!" Even from where Deckard stood, a mad illumination shone visible in the man's gaze. "They've come back . . . to tell us!" The man turned, holding on to an upright strut of the blimp's frame for balance, aiming the bullhorn's trajectory across all the angles of the street. "
They
know the truth! They've been shown the light! The light of the stars!"

From the corner of his eye, Deckard saw other motion. The
koban
booth had been toppled over in the explosion, pinning the uniformed cop. Face bloodied, the cop had now managed to get out from underneath and was struggling to get to his feet. He'd already drawn the heavy black gun from his belt.

"Humans! Jesus Christ doesn't love you anymore!" An aching whine of feedback tagged along with the words shrieking out of the bullhorn. "The eye of compassion has moved on! It sees only suffering! The eye of compassion no longer sees
you
--"

Deckard turned from the sight of the ranting figure, the blimp's smoldering ruins a pulpit, and saw the uniformed cop aiming the gun, arms outstretched, one hand folded over the other.

A red bloom appeared on the front of the ranting man's white Nomex jumpsuit. Silent now, he looked down. Then he crumpled, gloved hand letting go of the frame strut beside him, body folding around the splintered breastbone and falling to the flame-specked pavement.

"Hey!" With one hand braced against the metal weight on his leg, Deckard ran toward the cop. He ignored the black hole of the gun's snout swinging around in his direction. "They're over there! The ones who did it-" When the cop's shot had silenced the bullhorn, the rest of the crew in the alley had fled, abandoning the mortar behind them. Deckard pointed to another, closer space between the street's buildings. "I saw them go!"

He knew he had to work fast before the approaching LAPD spinners landed on the scene. The beams of their searchlights were already stabbing down from above, sweeping across the wreckage.

The cop, a net of blood over his face, still looked stunned. He let Deckard grab his arm and pull him toward the unlit space away from the street.

"Right back here-" In the buildings' shadow, he pushed the uniformed cop a step ahead of himself.

"Huh?" The cop raised his wobbling gun, aiming at nothing. "I don't see any-"

His words were cut off as Deckard brought the steel rod across his throat. Hands on either end, a knee braced hard against the small of the cop's back. A sharper tug and less than a minute of pressure on the windpipe, the cop dangling and struggling red-faced, then only dangling-he let go and the cop fell, palms and open mouth against the alley's heat-cracked cement.

He glanced over his shoulder as he bent above the unconscious cop. The police spinners had landed, their red and blue strobe flashers painting a luminous carnival across the building fronts and the downed U.N. blimp. Paramedic units hovered above, waiting for the SWAT teams to finish securing the area. The hands of the injured clutched at the black-uniformed knees, then were kicked aside as the officers established a perimeter with assault rifles leveled in all directions.

Hands as hooks under the cop's arms, Deckard dragged him farther into the darkness. It took only a few minutes to strip the LAPD uniform off the lolling body, put it on with all buckles and other pieces of leather and chrome snapped tight. He wadded up the white jacket and his own dirt-stained clothing and tossed them away.

The cop, vulnerable-looking in bare skin and boring underwear, started to move, eyes fluttering open. Deckard fished the cuffs from the uniform's belt and fastened the cop's wrists behind a convenient drainpipe. Before the cop could make a sound, Deckard had the miranda gag slapped over the other man's face, the oxygen-permeable membrane stifling even the whisper of his breathing.

Deckard finishing pulling on the gloves of thin black leather, the last bit of the jackbooted ensemble. He ignored the shucked cop's squirmings and malevolent glare, searching through the belt's other pouches until he found what he was looking for. A rectangle of grey plastic, credcard-sized, with a row of pressure-sensitive dots along one edge.

He knew better than to try his own activation code. The pass cards were all linked on a high-freq'd trans net; his old numbers would undoubtedly set off every alarm in the central station's tracking unit.

The cop's gun had landed a couple of feet away. He picked it up, then leaned down anti set its muzzle against the previous owner's forehead. "Let's be real quiet." With his other hand Deckard peeled back a corner of the gag. "Just whisper, okay?" The cop rolled his gaze toward the gun at his brow, then back to Deckard's face. "Just tell me your pass code."

"Get fucked."

"Wrong answer." He was familiar with the department's standard-issue small arms, from his own long-ago bullwalking days. Whereas this guy was young enough to be a rookie -- why else would he have been stuffed into a cop-in-a-box
koban
? -- and therefore breakable. Deckard pulled his crooked finger back just far enough to produce a nerve-racking click from inside the gun's machinery. "Try again."

No bravado this time. The cop rattled off a string of numbers, probably his own birth date; his face shone with a sudden tide of sweat. Deckard thumbed the code into the card.

Chameleon-like, it changed from dead grey to an iridescent, slowly fading red. It would work.

"Thanks." He made sure the gag was sealed tight around the cop's mouth. He held the gun against the wet forehead a moment longer. "You know. I really
should
do this . . ." The debate inside his own head went the other way. One, he didn't want to confirm that asshole Isidore's estimation of him as a murderer of actual humans-which hadn't been proven to his satisfaction, anyway. And two, as far as the LAPD was concerned, it was one thing to be a murderer, another to be a cop-killer. Whatever dragnet was under way for him now, it'd be nothing compared to what'd ensue if he gave himself a jacket like that. Even if he managed to get away, out of the city, they'd come after him just to ice his ass. A matter of group loyalty. He took the gun away from the cop's forehead, reholstered it. "You just stay nice and quiet, right here."

That might be awhile, at least long enough for him to accomplish what he needed to do, the next step in his nowcoalescing plan. Deckard scanned toward the mouth of the alley and the street beyond. The other cops who'd come swooping in looked to be busy, their investigation heading in the opposite direction, where the group who'd downed the U.N. blimp had disappeared; it'd likely be hours before they checked out this little pocket. He had no idea what all the commotion had been about-mortar rounds and bullhorns, for Christ's sake-but it'd all worked out to his benefit. Now he had about twice the chance he'd had before . . .

Which was still just about a notch above zero.

Keeping close to the brick wall, to avoid being spotted, he slid farther down an alley.

To a door, easily kicked in. He found himself standing at the top of a low run of stairs.The small, clicking echoes of mah-jongg tiles died away as a mixed group of Asian and Anglo faces swung his way.

"This strictly social club." An officious woman in a highcollared brocade dress fluttered before him. "All money on tables for decorative purposes
only
."

"Yeah, right." Around the edges of the basement room, it looked to be
pai gow
at vicious stakes. The whole world could've been coming to an end outside, and the gamblers wouldn't have looked up. Deckard strode through the lowceilinged space, scooping up a handful of cash from the center of one table, the usual policeman's tax, and pocketing it. That could come in handy as well. "Keep it that way."

Another flight of stairs took him up to the street on the other side of the building. The crowd was thinner here, a lot of it having headed over one block to gape across the yellow POLICE INVESTIGATION tapes at the fallen blimp and general disaster scene.

Head down, Deckard strode rapidly, the people on the street parting to either side, making way for him. At this clip, it wouldn't be long before he reached the central police station.

Holden opened his eyes.

"Wait a minute." Not lying down, but sitting up. No black attaché case, either gurgling or silent, strapped to his chest. Holden looked down at his own right hand prodding his sternum. A strip of navy-blue cloth dangled from his throat. "What the . . ." His voice louder now as well, almost deafening as it reverberated inside his skull. "What happened . . .

"I had to break into that storage locker downtown, that one where all your stuff got shoved when they cleaned out your old apartment." A now-familiar voice sounded from somewhere nearby. "Sorry about that. There might be somebody you could bill for the padlock I busted."

Holden looked over and saw Roy Batty sprawling with hands clasped behind his head, folding metal chair tilted back onto its rear legs. Watching him. He glanced down at himself again and saw that the strip of cloth was a necktie, one of his own good silk ones. The white shirt and grey suit, and everything else, were his as well. Stuff from another life, the one he'd lived before he'd gotten blown away at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Another life, another world.