No Dogs in Philly (12 page)

She unfurled the list and read it again.
Melissa Caton, Emily Brown, Geraldine Fibreria, Fanny Duvak—why did
that name seem familiar? She searched her memory, feeling as if she
should know that name. Had she seen it somewhere? It was right on
the edge of her memory…coming into focus and…lost it. Damn. Too
many knocks on the head.

“
Anything yet?” she asked
Jojran.

“
What are you expecting here? It
took me a week to find this lead, you want me to do it again in
three hours?”

She grumbled something and went back to pacing.
The daylight outside was fading, the sunray over the Vericast tower
growing faint. The city lights were coming on, thousands of points
and squares of visibility in the gray-black evening. She could see
right across to an office building where a worker was pissing into
a plant by his desk. Was he drunk and desperate? Or was this a
grudge? Or just routine, working hard, too lazy to go to the
bathroom? She scanned the other windows, hoping to see a couple
having sex. The feeds made it seem common, but nothing
tonight.

A thought occurred. Five of the six women had
been tortured before they died, but this most recent woman had been
killed before they opened her up. Was that significant?

“
Jojran.”

“
Uh.”

“
The woman killed last night that
I told you about, Penny Wilshire. Let’s focus on her.”

“
Why?”

“
A hunch.”

His eyes unglazed and the windows showed images
of Penny. Saru didn’t want to go back into his vik. It was
draining, and besides, her vision was flickering again, her brain
glitching out. Who knew what would happen—and that damn flower was
back in her hair again. Penny had been pretty before they’d scooped
out her eyes, and before she’d lost her cashier job at Selly’s. She
had a son but no husband or boyfriend, and an opiate dependency,
which made her about as white-bread plain as you could get. She’d
sold herself a few times to feed the kid or buy the heroin she
needed—more often than not the latter. It wasn’t a complete record,
towards the end her sightings became sparse and were mostly police
reports, getting picked up for possession and
prostitution—ironically the easiest way to get out of jail. It
seemed like the kid had fallen by the wayside.

“
What about the kid, anything on
him?”

His photo came up, only one. He was registered,
a real person with a birthright chip, but he never got to
school.

“
Not much. He’d be about twelve
now.”

“
Can you find him?”

“
Doubtful.” He went quiet and the
quiet stayed. She got bored and started pacing again. Fanny Duvak,
she knew that name, who was she? She tried to break the case down
again and look at all the little pieces. The feasters wanted a
girl, and they were guided by an alien evil, maybe. They thought
this girl was a host for another alien. So they were killing all
the girls that could possibly be the host and luckily they hadn’t
found the right one yet. So what made someone a good host? The
Gaespora, ElilE, had been vague on that. There was something he was
hiding for sure, but not something that would help her find the
girl. It had to be genetics, some common trait they shared. A dead
end. She didn’t have genetic data, other than they all had blue
eyes, and didn’t know where to get it or have the skills to make
any use of it. But then there was that other thing…what had Hemu
said—if he was even a reliable source—that the other God, no, the
other alien liked dogs?

“
Did any of the women have a dog?”
she asked.

“
What?”

“
Did any of the women own dogs. Or
come in contact with dogs?”

“
I’ll…check. Doubt it.”

She doubted it too. Owning a dog was a luxury
of the rich—they had to be kept safe, after all, so the elzi didn’t
eat them—and most of these women were in that all-too-common,
barely-scraping-by category.

“
No…sorry.”

“
Yeah, I figured. Did any of them
have any…dog-like traits?”

Jojran’s eyes unglazed; he pulled out of the
Net and craned his neck to look at her, incredulous.

“
What does that even
mean?”

“
I don’t know,” she said angrily.
“Did they ever bite anyone? Or have a good sense of smell, or get
fucked on their knees?”

“
I think you’re drunk.”

That was irrelevant. But he was right; it was a
stupid question.

“
Never mind,” she said. “Forget
it. Find the kid. And see if you can get genetics on any of the
women.”

“
Oh I found the kid,” he said.
“You’re going to love this. He’s an elzi. He’s in the registry,
tagged and everything. You want to question him?”

“
Shut up.”

Damn, if only Friar was alive she could have.
Why did he have to go and die like that? He couldn’t have waited a
week to help her out a bit more? And as she thought it her vision
flickered like mad and the room began to spin faster and faster so
it all swirled around like water going down a drain and taking her
with it.

There he was, Friar, in the flesh. But where
was there? They stood on a circular stone pillar about the diameter
of a hot tub. Beyond the pillar was black, nothing but infinite
black. She looked over the edge, far too close for her comfort, and
saw more black. Up black, down black, left black, right black. If
this was a vik it was about the most unimaginative she’d ever
encountered, and easily the most realistic. The stone felt hard and
real, she was honest-to-God freezing her tits off, and try as she
might she couldn’t bring her focus back to the real world. She was
stuck here. Great.

Friar looked like he had looked alive: short,
portly, balding, aged and wise with his professor getup. He seemed
to be trying to talk but almost like he’d forgotten how. A lip-like
indentation had formed in his forehead and was gabbing up and down.
It migrated to his left cheek and then slithered down into his
mouth. His real lips started moving and a sound came out like he
was singing and moaning at the same time. The sound didn’t
dissipate; it just built and echoed and piled onto the previous
notes echoing and bouncing through the black, louder and louder and
louder. She clamped her hands over her ears but the sound was
inside her, forcing her to her knees. Then there was a
pop.

It was quiet and she was wet. She was kneeling
in a puddle of orange…water? It felt strange on her, tingly. She
stood and looked around and decided that if she was ever going to
panic then now would be an excellent time. She wasn’t on Earth,
that was for sure, or any place she could conceive of as being
Earth-like. It was a swamp of tiny orange pools amidst a veiny,
purple and green ground that was spongy and slick with what seemed
like phlegm. There were trees, if you could call them that—sharp,
geometric arrangements, black, zigzagging, right-angle branches
sprouting from furry testicles, climbing up and joining together to
form a geodesic canopy. There were things moving through the
canopy, things slithering through the muck, the whole place crawled
and twitched with life. Her Betty flew to her hand; she was going
to start blasting but the gun turned into a flower. Friar appeared
in front of her and took it.

“
I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry,”
he said. It was his real voice.

“
Tell me,” she said, fighting the
panic. “Tell me right now if this is real.” As if she could trust
him. He was as much a conjuring as anything else here—more so.
Something fluttered overhead. Faint strings like strands of spider
web slithered down from the canopy and caught a flitting—was it a
bird? It had no wings, just a black, spiky/furry body with a large
red hole that could have been its mouth or its ass or an eyeball.
The spider strands constricted and she heard a shrill chitter as
the creature was squeezed until its skin popped and its juices
drizzled down to the sponge below, which gurgled and slurped at the
drops of blood in apparent glee. She wanted go, right
now.

“
I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so
sorry.”

“
Friar what’s going
on?”

“
I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry.
I’m sorry, Saru. I’m so sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So sorry. So
sorry. So sorry. So sorry.”

His voice rose in pitch so he sounded like a
chipmunk: “Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry,” and then
fell and fell to become low, impossibly low, and the sound echoed
as it had before, not dying but growing and building and bouncing
around the swamp, and deep within the song of his repeated sorries
she heard another song, a different song, one that it seemed to her
had been sung for a very long time by a great number of people and
living things that were not people, and even things that didn’t
live, stars and planets and empty space, humming in perfect atomic
unison:
uausuausuausuausuausuau
… It was too much to bear;
she screamed, adding her own voice to the sound so it became part
of the song, and then she shot upright like a catapult arm and
smacked her forehead into Jojran’s nose.

“
Ow, fuck!” he yelled. He put his
hand up and yelped. Blood was pouring from his nostrils. Saru
looked around frantically and saw she was in a bedroom, a nice,
large bedroom with clean white sheets and neat white furniture and
windows across one whole wall, and through the windows was the city
of Philadelphia, thank God. Also she was wearing ill-fitting silk
pajamas, which meant that at some point Jojran had taken the
initiative to undress her.

“
What happened?” she
asked.

“
You broke my nose!”

“
Before that!”

“
Ow, it hurts!”

She rolled out of bed and landed cat-like.
Every danger sense, natural and enhanced, had leapt into activity
and she felt herself operating in the lucid purity of combat
instinct. In the corner she spied her clothes and she ran to her
belt and clipped it on, Betty flying to her hand. Room by room she
went through the apartment and scanned it for any threat. Nothing.
Then she went back and got a Quick-e-Set strip and slapped it on
Jojran’s nose. It shot him full of painkillers and then wriggled
into the work of massaging his cartilage back into place. She even
helped him clean up, scrubbing his face with a vigor he insisted
was killing him. Her heart was pounding and she was soaked in a
cold, clammy sweat. It took a half hour for her body to calm
itself. She dressed and paced and then finally sat. Jojran sat on
the other couch in the living room, eyeing her warily.

“
Are you okay?” he asked. “I’m
fine, in case you care.”

“
What the fuck
happened?”

“
Well, I was chasing down leads on
the Net and then you went quiet all of a sudden, which I greatly
appreciated. Then when I got off I found you passed out on the
floor and assumed you drank too much, because really, I hope you
have other friends to tell you this, Saru, but you’re an alcoholic.
Anyway, I lovingly carried you to the bedroom and then when you
didn’t wake up for a while I got worried. You were sweating like
crazy, turned my sheets into a swamp.” He omitted the issue of
undressing her. She didn’t press.

“
How long was I out?”

“
Almost a day.”

“
A day! And you just left me
there?”

“
What was I going to do? Call a
doctor? If I did that you’d be berating me right now for telling.
You looked like shit; I thought you needed rest. So what happened,
are you really okay? How do you feel now?”

“
I’m fine,” she said. “You were
right, I’m tired. I needed to rest.”

She couldn’t tell him about the blackout. She
couldn’t tell anyone anything. While he’d been gabbing she’d been
going through her implants and there was nothing, no recording, no
poison indication, not even a red flag or suspicion she’d been
hacked—nothing was missing, no thoughts were awry. She’d passed out
for almost a day and all her systems showed was high levels of
stress—just like she’d been in a nightmare. She was vulnerable,
incredibly vulnerable like this. If this was a hack job it was the
most sophisticated prank in all the universe. And if it was
something that a bottle of rum and a security overhaul couldn’t
fix… She could still hear that sound, that echoing sound as Friar
tried to speak, and that long, hidden, swirling black note behind,
below, above, and beyond everything, running in the background. It
was faint now, something she could only notice with her full
attention in a quiet place. It called to her, beckoned, and it was
growing louder.

Chapter 10

The dog was getting bigger, it was impossible
to ignore, and closer too. It used to hang around the sides of her
vision, watching her from a distance, but now it was close, a few
feet away, and huge, the size of a wolf, of a motorcycle. Fine,
dog, do whatever you need to do. She still felt tingly, days, weeks
after it had entered her and what? Made her invisible? Now, in the
light of day, it was hard to remember the creature, that thing with
the metal centipede body and the head of human torsos. Had it been
real? How lit was she at the time? Had someone cut her a bad dose
of sky? Had she just been lying passed out on the subway platform
having another nightmare? No, it had been real, just like the dog
was real.