No Dogs in Philly (20 page)

There was an elevator, she saw, a large steel
platform the size of an industrial dumpster that slid down two
metal rails to drop her just in front of the door. It moved damn
slow, giving her more time to think than she needed. The bare light
bulbs down passed one by slow-ass one, the platform above getting
smaller and smaller, and she reflected on her own stupidity.
Mercenaries—she could have hired a dozen crack heads with shotguns
to run ahead and eat bullets for her. Another light. Hemu, he might
have had some mystical answer for Friar’s disappearance. Another
light. ElilE. Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard, bastard. Another
light. And why did she care anyway? If Friar wanted to fake his own
death and live in a sewer, how was that any of her concern? Maybe
he had an ex-wife giving him grief or he was in debt or forgot to
pay his taxes. What did he have to do with her case—with her
survival? Everything, of course.

The elevator came to a jolting stop right in
front of the door. Truly massive, larger than she’d thought, you
could drive a whole subway car through it. Why did Friar need such
a large door anyway? She realized she had to pee and shuffled into
a corner behind one of the door’s hinges to relieve herself.
Better. There was a control panel with seemingly obvious open and
close buttons, but also a keypad that she assumed was to lock the
damn thing. Which meant he was trying to keep something from
getting out, right? Or maybe he kept his gold in there in great
heaps and piles—wouldn’t that be a happy ending? A ring of the same
bare bulbs that traced the elevator illuminated the area around the
door but didn’t do much to punch away the darkness beyond. She
could see about eight feet through the door—it appeared to be dirt
floor and naked rock and there was the faint outline of a concrete
frame amidst the rock. Oh well, here goes nothing.

She stepped into the darkness and then took
another step. Nothing happened. She took another step and then a
skip. “Hello!” she yelled down the tunnel. Her voice echoed back,
except it seemed to be saying, “Idiot.” What had she expected? The
door to slam shut and the lights to go off? The door weighed fifty
tons. She could roast a chicken and limbo to safety in the time it
took to close. As for lights…she took enough steps that the
entrance was a small bright circle and then switched on her night
vision. Perfect. She certainly was in a tunnel, about the same
width and height as the door, and dank and wet and clammy. There
were footprints in the dirt—a clue!—and her scanners told her they
belonged to size-nine male loafers. That sounded like something
Friar would wear. Obviously, this was his mysterious
tunnel.

She kept walking. It seemed like she walked for
a very long time, but maybe it was just the lack of entertainment
feeds and her creeping sobriety. Crap. She hadn’t taken stock of
her barsenal before heading out. There were just a few swills—now
her flask was empty and the backup flask was low. She had some
diluted sky in her pocket ring, but would that be enough? Walking
and walking and walking and—a door. It had snuck up on her, another
door, similar to the first, closing off the tunnel. Well now what?
There was a symbol on this door, something crazy that a retarded
child might draw. It was a bunch of straight and squiggly lines,
crossing and connecting and blending and flowing together, and now
as she looked she saw they were changing and moving and seemed to
have color beyond the green tinge of the night vision. She wanted
to touch the symbol and so she did, and then gasped as the lines
came up from the door and slid into her veins. She felt them
pumping and sucking and draining her blood, a delicious joy and
near-sexual pleasure rushing up and distracting her brain with
ecstasy as they killed her. She jerked her hand away and screamed
as her skin tore and blood splashed out, more of her precious blood
spilled, lost. The strings had fused to her veins, melding into
them so it was impossible to see where they ended and her body
began. She grabbed her boot knife and slashed upwards in a long
arc, severing the strings. Instantly the ecstasy was gone, replaced
by an agony that overwhelmed her pain filters for a full five
seconds. Her veins dangled from a ragged gash along her wrist and
her whole arm shook. She fell to her knees and then back on her ass
and choked back vomit and the urge to sob.

It took about eight minutes for her machinery
to get the situation under control. She slapped on three knit
patches, cotton-candy threads soaking up her blood and melding into
her flesh to create a nice temporary skin. Her platelet injectors
were on overdrive and they informed her she’d lost about a liter of
blood, which might explain the wooziness, the headache, the
exhaustion and possibly the self-disgust. Or maybe that was because
she’d managed to spring the very first trap she’d come across and
nearly die. But what kind of trap was it? Her night vision was
good, top notch—she’d spared no expense—but obviously it had missed
a few details. She switched it off and supercharged the contact
plates in her left hand to form a lackluster flashlight. It’d drain
calories like a motherfucker and with less than a full tank o’
blood that might be an issue, but damn it she needed to see. The
scribble design was still there, no longer moving, no longer
mesmerizing. It seemed to her the black lines had assumed a reddish
tinge from drinking her blood. What kind of trap was that? She’d
never seen anything like it. Wires that cut you, yeah, drugs that
made you feel good, yeah, needles that drained your blood, all the
time—but never in a neat little package like this.

Her head started to hurt and she switched off
the makeshift flashlight and went back into night vision. The
expedition was a failure, just like everything else she’d done.
There was no control panel here, nothing she could find anyway with
eyes or scanners—and she wasn’t about to run her fingers across any
more surfaces. The door was closed, she didn’t know how it opened;
it was time to go home and get drunk, and maybe go to a hospital.
And she would have, too, if a crack of light hadn’t appeared almost
with that thought and the door hadn’t swung silently open with a
deal more speed than she had anticipated. And the view beyond—once
her vision adjusted—took her breath away. Great, my blood, my
breath, my sanity—what more do you want? My tits in a
basket?

In front of her was a cavern the size of a
football field. She knew it had to be at least that large because
there was a cathedral inside, right in front of her. A stone bridge
extended from the mouth of the door across a four-lane-highway
chasm to an equally impressive door in the side of the cathedral.
To her left and right were more doors, closed, with their own stone
bridges leading to their own cathedral doors. Assuming they went
all the way around, she guessed there were fourteen doors in all.
She switched off her night vision and found she could still see.
The cavern narrowed at the top, disappearing in a luminescent
golden cloud. She stepped onto the stone bridge—it seemed so old,
but how could it be?—and her footsteps sounded loud but didn’t
echo. There was a noise, she realized, in the background, faint and
present like an engine hum or rushing water. She hadn’t noticed it
at first, couldn’t notice it unless she was really paying
attention. What was it? It sounded like voices, hundreds, thousands
of voices, singing softly, men, women, children, tenors, basses,
whatevers, high and low all singing together. With that same
crawling, slithering-vinyl sensation up her spine, with a sickness
in her heart and groin and belly, she recognized the song pouring
up from the pit below and echoing from the walls, the song in the
screams of newborns and the gasps of the newly dead, in car honks
and sex ballads, the song of an eye grating against its socket and
a worm digging its way through human flesh:
uausuausuausuausuausuausuausuau
…

She followed the song, walked to the edge of
the bridge and looked down. There they were, the bodies, thousands
of them, hundreds of thousands maybe, dead—or alive? They moved, or
seemed to, writhing like maggots around one another in a great
fleshy soup that filled the cavern. From another hole—a lower hole,
a hole with no bridge, one of hundreds—came the creature. It looked
like a pile of human torsos fused together and jammed onto the body
of a train-sized centipede. It slithered out of the hole and down
the side of the cavern, coming, coming, coming, seemingly no end to
its body. The first fifty feet of it detached from the wall and
swung gracefully out over the pit of bodies below. It reared and
Saru saw on its belly a long line of human bodies—oh God, children
too!—held by smaller arms. The flesh pool seemed to rise up, the
arms of bodies within it reaching out to embrace the bodies trapped
in the centipede. They were cradled and carried down with care and
love to disappear into the flesh pool. Then the centipede slithered
back up the wall and back into its hole and was gone.

“
Beautiful, isn’t it?”

She screamed and whirled, the Betty leapt to
her hand and she barely adjusted her aim enough to keep the bullet
from going right through Friar’s skull. It nicked the top of his
ear, taking about three centimeters of skin with it. He didn’t
flinch.

“
Friar!” she yelled. The Betty
wobbled in her hand. Her arm was still shaking and from more than
just the blood loss. She forced herself to take a deep breath and
then managed to speak in a semi-normal voice. “Give me a reason not
to hit you this time, because I am freaked the fuck
out.”

He waved his hand like he was brushing away a
piece of dust and the Betty jerked out of her hand and flew over
the side of the bridge. Well, fuck. She tried to laugh but all she
felt was defeated. “You’re one of them then, eh?”

“
Yes,” he said. “I am.”

She sat on the stone railing of the bridge and
put her chin in her hands. Then she looked over the side, down at
the writhing pool of flesh. One of those fuckers had her gun. Could
she get it back? How far was the Betty’s jump distance? Not three
hundred feet. She turned back to Friar. How had he snuck up on her
like that? He was the same as he’d been before except now instead
of the professor getup he was wearing a black caji suit. He still
had that potbelly, still had that balding head with the gray-hair
sides, still had those tired eyes that still looked sad. Not an
athlete, not a warrior. But he was one of them. He was part of
this. And so it seemed the rules did not apply. She’d have to kill
him, kill him for real this time. Get some real
satisfaction.

“
So what?” she asked him. “Are you
gonna kill me now, like you killed those girls? Was it you who
killed them?”

“
We gave them life.”

“
Yeah, your friend said something
about that before I shot him. Are you going to give me life,
then?”

“
If you want it.”

“
I don’t. I’m going to go get
another gun, and I’ll be back to kill you then.”

She stood and walked to the door. It was
closed, of course. She didn’t want to touch it in case it sucked
away more of her blood. Kicking seemed safe but it still didn’t
open. She looked over the side. Could she climb down into one of
those holes? And accomplish what? Better to take her chances with
Friar than the centipede from Hell. Ah Friar, what’s your game? He
just watched her, standing there, making no moves. Patient man. She
sidled over casually and then charged him. Her shoulder slammed
into his side and yes! she knocked him back a foot. The prod landed
in his testicles and he didn’t even wince, just stood there as the
arcs of lightning jumped around his thighs. He raised an arm,
fingers limp, and swished them around. Strings exploded from his
hand and fingers like the strings of the door and shot into her
neck this time. She screamed and fell to the ground as the
sensation of ecstasy filled her yet again and the blood drained
from her body.

“
Stop,” she gasped, and he
stopped. The wires zipped out of her neck, leaving a dozen tiny
wormholes, and slurped back into friar’s hand, which he then
extended to help her up.

“
Bastard,” she breathed, and
tottered to her feet. It was hard to see. Her platelet injectors
were saying her blood levels were dangerously low. No fucking duh.
“Let me go,” she said. “Open up that door. I don’t want to be
here!” She really didn’t.

“
Would you like to see inside?” he
asked, gesturing towards the cathedral. “It is a work of
art.”

No, she didn’t want to see inside. She didn’t
want him to drain any more of her blood either. Think! Think damn
it! Stall. This is your life we’re talking about here, missy.
Granted, it ain’t much but it’s yours and he’s trying to take it so
think of a way to save yourself and then you can go home and drink
forties and watch porn and never think again.

“
Okay,” she said.

He started walking and she followed. What was
the range of those wires? What was the range of his little gravity
manipulator that had flicked away her Betty? Did he need a line of
sight? She didn’t have enough guns or blood to be scientific about
it.

At first the cathedral had looked kind of like
a drip castle that a child would make out of mud, but as she drew
closer she saw that it was all carved stone, more fluid and
life-like than she had ever seen. There were more human bodies, and
they were happy, embracing, kissing, and fucking in a huge orgy
spread out across the surface of the cathedral. In a way it was
beautiful, but if it was supposed to depict the pit below they were
way off the mark. And of course, how did it even get there? Stall.
She needed to stall. She needed time, time to think, time to be
rescued. Who knew she was here? Anyone? Everyone who would care was
already dead.