Levels: The Host (29 page)

“No, I’m dead. I’m killed,” Uncle Narcolo said to Watly, sounding like he was whispering underwater. His words seemed half obstructed
with liquid.

“You’ll be
okay
, dammit!” Watly moved from behind Narcolo’s body and turned to hold his uncle’s face in his hands. Narcolo’s head went totally limp and the body went slack below it. In the dim light, it seemed as though this surrogate child’s wrinkles were filling in, his features relaxing, his cheeks swelling with long-lost youth. He looked young. Peaceful.
Finally calm.

“Officer?” It was Fenlocki’s
voice again.

“Wait,” Watly said to his uncle, holding the old man’s face tighter, squeezing the jaw. “Please wait.” But Narcolo Caiper was quiet. Finally calm
and quiet.

“Are we done, officer?”

“We’re coming out! Hold it a second! Don’t shoot!”
Watly shouted.

Where had the cat gone?
Watly scrambled to the corner, throwing the endless piles of rags aside. At the lowermost edge of the sealed doorway there was a six- or seven-inch-tall gap where the placene seal did not reach the bottom. A hole. A
cat hole.

“Vaidid?” Fenlocki’s voice was near. “Take two others and go down there. Use the
nerve guns.”

“Hold it!” Watly shouted. “We’re coming out with our hands up!” He reached back and pulled his uncle’s lifeless body toward him.
My shield,
he thought.
My shield.
He propped Narcolo’s body up next to the hole and started pushing his way through. He let the body lean into him as he shoved. The cheap placene bent inward some, giving a little, widening just enough for his torso as he went in head first. There were footsteps coming down the
stairs now.

I hope there’s a back exit to this building
, Watly was thinking as he tried to get his rear end past the narrow opening. He tried not to notice how his dead uncle was slowly falling to cover the cat hole.
My shield.
He tried to concentrate on the pain caused by scraping his wounded body through the tight hole.
Think of the pain, Watly.
Nothing else.

Just as he pulled his feet in beyond the lip, there was a blinding flash of light behind him as his Uncle’s corpse lit up from the nerve
gun blast.

My shield,
Watly thought again.
My raping human shield.

CHAPTER 33

W
atly was making up a story in his head. It was the story of an old man, the story of a sweet old man. A man who had lived a pretty empty life. A life of day-to-day nothingness. But a life full of dreams. Dreams of good things. Dreams of comfort. Dreams of beauty. Dreams of Second Level. And someday, someone—maybe someone impressive—came along and told him he could have those dreams.
..
for a price. “Find us the man we want and we will let you have your dreams,” the someone said. And so the old man was torn. “Will this man I find be hurt? What do you seek him for?” “No harm will come of him by our hands,” the someone could have said. “It’s merely a little bit of shady business we need him for—don’t
you worry.”

The old man thought it over—perhaps for a few moments, perhaps overnight, perhaps a week—and finally said yes. Yes to his dream. Yes to the good life. Yes to what he’d always wanted, always watched with envy on the CV, always tried to win in the Level Lottery. Yes to a dream that, it now seemed, was a lie all along. Yes to an impossibility. And for that yes he was punished. Punished as far as one can be punished. Punished to the point where the
punishment ends.

Watly still had no tears for Narcolo. He crouched behind the floater, staring across the street to the front of the Vagina Oblongata Bar, and thought of his
own
death.
When they get me
, he thought,
and they will.
..
when they get me I want it quick. I want it so I don’t even know it happened. I want to be me right to the end—living and being—and then: snap. Nothing. That’s what I want. No pain. No realization. No sense that the end approaches. Someone should sneak up behind me and shoot me directly in
the brain.

Watly shivered. The fine hairs in the back of his neck tingled and he sensed that someone was indeed sneaking up behind him. He turned but there was nothing. No one. He looked back to the street. It was still crowded with people. Nobody noticed him. If there
were
cops around, they were well hidden.
There must be police somewhere
. They’d read the note. They had to be near the bar, in the bar, or watching the bar. Again Watly’s hair pricked up. Someone behind him. A very soft whisper—almost inaudible— reached his ears.

“W.C.”

“Huh?” Watly turned slowly. A shadowy form on all fours scuttled around the overturned lowtruck
behind Watly.

“W.C.?” the
voice asked.

“That’s me,” Watly said weakly, afraid to smile until he
was certain.

She was wearing a long, dark brown hooded cloak that left her face in shadows but her voice—lilting and singsong—gave her away. “Watly Caiper, you look
like shit!”

She was alive. Alive and beautiful as ever. She was not dead. Not riddled with slug holes. Not breathing last breaths through blood-filled lungs. And now.
..
now there were tears. Alysess was alive. They held each other tightly for a moment. There was a wonderful brief kiss that seemed like medicine to his wounds, and then Alysess’s long arms were around him and his were around her. Watly felt as if he were holding on to her for dear life.
Please please please
. Hugging and hugging and hugging. He thought that this was the end. This was the end of everything. This was all there would ever be. The holding would last forever—just like this. On and on. But no. The clinging ended after a time. They touched foreheads and leaned into one another. Now they were two. Now they were two separate people. Now Watly felt shame. Horrible shame for bringing Alysess into it all in the first place. He’d done everything wrong. From the beginning.
God, but I blew this
whole thing
.

“You really do look like shit, Watly,” she said as she
pulled away.

“We have to—we have to get out of here,” Watly said. “They know to look around here.” He glanced back at the
busy street.

“They’re inside the bar, Watly. Waiting for us. I saw them go in. Eight cops. I’ve been casing the area longer than
you have.”

Watly looked at her with respect. Then he tried to stand. “There’ll be others looking for us. They must have some patrolling, looking. We have
to go.”

“Can you walk?” She winced in sympathy at Watly’s pain. The light from the dead floater made her skin glow from under the shadows of
her hood.

“Not well but well enough,” he said with as much confidence as he could
scrape together.

Watly could see Alysess look down at the bloodstains that showed through the rags. Some of it was his, and some of it was Narcolo’s. Her medically trained eyes took in his injuries, judging, assessing. “How the hell did you get here in the first place?”
she asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. Lots of things have happened. “He thought for a second, steadying himself on the edge of the floater. “I think.
..
I think I may
have run.”

“Shit on cemeld,” she said quietly. She didn’t speak for a few seconds, scanning her surroundings. She was looking for something—maybe a specific object, maybe just an idea. Her eyes brightened after a while. “Help me turn the lowtruck over, Watly. We’ll put the floater in it and pretend to be shipping it. You can use the yoke as a crutch and just make like you’re pulling. Let me do all
the work.”

Watly smiled. And did as he was told. He liked not having to think, not having to
decide anything.

Soon they were pulling. Or, at least, Alysess was pulling. Watly let her bear the weight of the cart as well as most of his own weight. He leaned on the placene yoke and tried to look like he was helping. They went slowly down the middle of the street. Straight down the center. Hiding from no one: two pullers pulling a lowtruck. Loudly singing a pull song. Watly even tried to do
some harmonizing.

I’ve got
aaaa
rms for the pull.

I’ve got
aaaa
rms to do my work.

For the pull is a long one

and the way is dark.

I’ve got
llll
egs for the pull.

I’ve got
llll
egs to keep me firm.

For the pull is a killer

and my day has just begun.

Everyone ignored them: a couple of workers pulling a lowtruck, bellowing a pull song. One in rags, one in a cloak. Another lowtruck passed and friendly nods were exchanged. They were invisible. A cruiser neared and politely drove around them. Hosts prowling around Sexsentral, their cuffs shining obviously in the dim light, walked around Watly and Alysess without a glance. Cats scurried away. Those having various kinds of sex on the street itself tried to move aside without uncoupling. It was a warm evening—a big night in the middle of Sexsentral—and a lot of people were naked or almost naked. Some danced down the street as their different body parts bounced a beat or two behind. Watly and Alysess kept onward, singing their way west—to the
rougher districts.

The streets got darker in this area where daylites hadn’t seen repair in years. The dripping from above was light but constant. They had to duck to avoid low floaters—many with only the starwet sign on them, the universal symbol for orgasm. Others were normally explicit floaters, their images endlessly repeating the same movements over and over. It was hypnotic. Watly’s eyes drifted lazily from one to the other as he dragged his feet along. Everything ached so bad. He was tired.
Stay alert,
he admonished himself.
Stay awake. Look at the signs. Look at
the people.

In and out, up and down, push and pull. Wetness, smoothness, softness, hardness. The rocking, the thrusting, the sucking, the nibbling, the rubbing. Real, on the signs, and on the floaters. All around him. He felt sleepy. Tired and dizzy.
Sex, sex, and sex. All this sex—it’s not
very sexy.

“Sexsentral is not about sex,” P-pajer Caiper had said to a curious little Watly once. “It is a shrine to the phallus, to the vagina. That is not sex. There is no lust in Sexsentral. No passion. Lust is a good thing, Watly. When you grow older you will see. Lust is the most wholesome part of life. You were born of lust. You were born of a sweet animal rutting passion. I hope your life is full of that. Everyone, after all, is the product of a fuck. Never forget that, Watly. We are all products of fucks. It is nice to think that the better the fuck, the better the product. It is nice to think that babies born of wild uninhibited lust are happier people. Sex is life, Watly. Fucking is the most pure and wonderful thing a human being can do. But there is fucking and there is fucking, Little-Watt. Sexsentral is a fine but sad place. People do not get what they seek there. There is no savage lechery, no wildness. No passion. It is a place inhibited
by genitals.”

Watly was drifting off. He forgot to pretend to be pulling. He forgot to sing the pull song. His lids wanted to close badly. His legs wanted to slip out from under him.
It’s very festive here, though, Mom,
he thought.
Very festive. And the folks seem happy and
having fun.

His eyelids were closing all on their own now, and he felt himself starting to slip into sleep, or into a faint, or into shock or something. He would have gone down, he would have dropped right there on the street, if he hadn’t heard—with his last vestige of consciousness—the sound of a bolt from a haver nerve
gun firing.

The electric crackle of the bolt was followed by the ting of metal as it struck just behind them. Watly forced his eyes open and turned to face the floater in the lowtruck. Its edge glowed yellow as the bolt looked for a nerve before dying out.
More shooting. More chasing. I haven’t the energy. I’m tired of running. Okay, okay. So kill me.
Big deal.

“Get in the truck, Watly.” Alysess was shoving Watly, her
eyes wide.

Watly froze. His vision blurred. “What the subs good.
..
”
More fleeing,
more chasing.
..

“Just get in the raping truck, you bolehole!” she yelled, and nearly threw him in on top of the floater. Watly landed hard on his bad side and heard another bolt being fired even before he saw the flash as it zipped toward them. It hit the tail end of the truck and died out just as Alysess
started pulling.

She pulled with a vengeance. She ran. With the weight of a heavy lowtruck, the dead floater, and Watly himself—she ran. Pulling it all behind her down the center of the street, feet splashing in the puddles. To Watly it was like being in a powered vehicle, bouncing along the road, trying to stay inside. He held on to the edge of the truck and pulled his sore legs in. Alysess was screaming now at the top of
her lungs.

“Get out of the way! Get out of
the waaaaaaaay!”

Behind him, Watly could see the cop who had fired trying to catch up. He was running along toward them with his haver nerve gun held out in front, braced with both hands. Watly kicked out at the floater, pushing it, shoving it with his feet. Finally it fell off the end of the truck. It bounced straight down the road a bit, but the cop easily sidestepped it. He stumbled slightly afterward but it hardly
slowed him.

All Watly could think was:
Not the nerve gun. Why a nerve gun? Anything but a nerve gun, terradammit!

The crowds on the street tried desperately to get out of the way. They were more afraid of the nerve gun than of the speeding lowtruck. Another bolt streaked across to them. People nearby screamed. Naked bodies scattered in all directions. Everyone scrambled for safety as the bolt went dully into the road surface just to the side of the truck. All around was panic, although the cop seemed pretty careful about bystanders. He wasn’t firing wildly. He wanted to kill only a
specific two.

“Get out of the raping way!” Alysess was screaming. She abruptly shifted direction—turning the truck strongly—and it almost flipped over as they banked. Watly had to lean sideways to keep from falling out. They righted themselves and headed down a narrow alley, Alysess never faltering, never missing a step. Rape, she
was strong.

Thank, you, Alysess. Thank you for being the
strong one.

“Move, move, move!” she was screaming. Couples and groups stopped what they were doing and fled to the sides of the alley. Painted faces peered out from the shadows. A scrawny little man with nothing on but a hosting cuff—his chest was covered with blood—stared at them with excitement. He looked like a bloody ghost, grinning madly in the dark as they passed. The cop fired again. This time he aimed high. The bolt just missed the side of Alysess’s face and flew up the alley, illuminating what lay ahead for a split second before dying out. What lay ahead was a dead end. A wall. The alley did not exit back to
the street.

Alysess kept pulling “Move move move!” Behind them, the cop slowed down, probably realizing he had the two trapped. There was no way out. He used his speaker, apparently calling for backup. Alysess finally slowed. She brought them to a full stop just short of the dead end. Watly could hear her panting. He sat up stiffly and climbed out of the truck, rolling off the edge,
legs throbbing.

The dead end was piled high with garbage, mostly placene and lumps of powdery cemeld. A few coils of dented cable leaned into the dark walls.
No cat hole here
, Watly thought. There were no working daylites in the alley. What light there was crisscrossed in long beams from windows way up above, reflecting dimly in surrounding puddles. Watly saw Alysess pull back her hood. Her eyes shone in the darkness, rising and lowering with each breath. She was still at the front of the truck, holding on to the pole as if it would
protect them.