No Dogs in Philly (6 page)

“
This way please.” He guided her
down the hall; she caught a glimpse of the living room with a grand
piano and the dining room with a crystal chandelier. They passed
the kitchen (“Would you like anything?” “No thanks”) and he lead
her down to the basement. This was more like it. It was part
workshop, part lab, part hospital room and—oh my God there was a
man in a cage. No, not a man. An elzi, a once-man. That was a
little shocking.

“
Yes, you see my friend
Jonathan.”

“
You keep him locked up in
here?”

“
I do. It’s for his
benefit.”

She could believe that. It was common knowledge
the rehab centers were fancy crematoriums and she couldn’t see much
difference between him roaming the streets and being locked in a
cage in her colleague’s basement. At least he couldn’t take a chunk
out of anyone this way. The elzi dozed, serene, fingers clenching
and unclenching in typical stereotyped behavior. She approached the
cage and saw that it was suspended from the ceiling by chains. The
floor was actually a deck and the cage hung a few feet out from the
railing. She looked down and was surprised to see that there was no
ground below—it disappeared in darkness.

“
How deep does that go?” she
asked.

“
It’s quite deep. Let me show
you.”

Friar flicked a switch and harsh yellow lights
popped on at regular intervals, going down what must have been
eight stories. At the bottom they formed a circle around a hatch
the size of an aboveground pool.

“
Where does that lead?”

“
To the under city, of
course.”

“
The under city?”

“
Yes. The sewers, the abandoned
Broad Street Line and all its stations. It is quite large, and
grows larger. There are things down there, digging things, things
that tunnel and carve and build.”

He was almost reverent as he spoke. She
shivered.

“
Why do you have this? How did you
even build this?”

He smiled sadly.

“
What did they offer you? A
million? Five million? Ten million? Twenty?”

“
Uh, it was ten.”

He nodded. “Yes, what they offered me. That was
not the first job I have been offered, but it was the first I
refused. As a younger man I thought them fools the way they tossed
around their riches, that they did not understand human concepts of
value and money. Now, wiser, perhaps, I see they understand it far
better than we, that it is worthless compared to life—and
sanity.”

“
So that’s how you built this?
Working for the Gaespora?”

“
Indeed. A fascinating species,
but too niggardly with their secrets. My curiosity is better
rewarded by the UausuaU.”

“
So you believe their spiel about
being from another planet, or another universe, I guess? You don’t
think they’re human?”

“
Human? Yes, partly. And also
other. They have touched the knowledge of a different existence and
the idea of that existence has brought them closer to
it.”

“
Yeah…I think they mentioned
something like that. They also drugged me and messed with my head
or something.”

“
Ah yes, I remember my first time.
Nothing quite like it, is there? I guess the best word would be
telepathy, but it’s purely physical, of course.”

“
Okay.”

She did not like this. He was saying more and
more and she was understanding less and less. The opposite was
supposed to be happening. She’d come here to simplify things, not
complicate them with dumb philosophical chatter. She went over to
an operating table, which no longer seemed out of place. It was a
hard metal slab, smeared with blood.

“
And I’m guessing this is where
you chop up the elzi?”

“
Correct.”

He waddled over to a sink and donned two yellow
gloves. He sprayed a rag with some solution and attacked the
bloodstains.

“
Sorry for the mess,” he said. “I
was just conducting an experiment before you came.”

“
What kind of
experiment?”

“
I’m trying to see if I can remove
the elzi implants without killing the host.”

She laughed. He was insane, clearly. It wasn’t
too surprising—he’d spent his life studying the Wekba and working
around criminals and beasts. As far as madnesses went, Friar’s was
pretty mild. But thinking he could cure the elzi, that was the kind
of shit that would get him killed. Better to round them all up and
burn them. Smash up every computer, car, and sentient vibrator and
return to an agrarian utopia.

He smiled at her. “I know. It seems hopeless,
but I must try. Actually, I have learned one neat trick. Let me
show you.”

He went to a control panel, an old-fashioned
analogue dealy with buttons and levers. It swung the cage around
above the operating table and the bottom opened, dropping the elzi
like a turd onto the table. He groaned a little and then curled up
into a fetal position. Saru stepped back. She wasn’t afraid of the
elzi—she’d zapped her share of the angry ones—but she didn’t trust
this “trick” that Friar was about to perform. He fastened chains to
the elzi’s wrists and ankles and then she noticed that Friar had
pulled out the elzi’s teeth and chopped off his fingers. To declaw
him? To make him less dangerous? Or was that part of the
trick?

Friar went over to a machine that looked like a
giant radio with a computer console sticking out like a pouty
mouth. He tapped at it a bit and then went to a counter covered in
strange tools, soldering irons, and what looked like medical
instruments. He grabbed a syringe the size of a squirt gun, walked
over to the elzi’s neck and then jammed it in. She saw a scaly rash
of similar punctures and wondered how many elzi had sat on that
table, and where they were coming from, and what happened when they
were no longer useful. Did Friar just dump them down the hole? Why
not?

The elzi hardly reacted to the syringe—could
they feel pain? Its eyes opened and they were still human, not
rotted, wormy holes, or white with cataracts. They looked at Friar
accusatorially and then grew droopy and unfocused. The elzi’s jaw
went slack and he drooled. Friar beamed.

“
It’s different for everyone, but
about a pint of zoloctepine is enough to disable the hate response
of the typical elzi. Watch.”

He flicked the elzi’s implant. Saru’s hand shot
to her prod. The elzi twitched but did nothing. Saru sucked in a
breath.

“
That’s not funny.”

“
I assure you he’s quite harmless.
The effect will last about twelve minutes before the implants
discover a suitable counter. That’s what I couldn’t figure out
before—almost lost a few fingers—you need to mix in different drugs
every time or they counter it. And once one of them knows the
counter, they all do. Fascinating.”

He went to the workbench and picked up what
looked like a thumb-sized satellite, and then walked over to the
operating table. She flinched when Friar clipped it onto the elzi’s
neck, but the elzi didn’t react other than to twitch.

“
Now, watch this,” Friar said. He
leaned in close—closer than Saru would have liked—to the elzi’s,
cracked, rashy ear. “Jonathan. Where is the girl?” Nothing
happened. Saru realized suddenly that she was wasting her time here
and that precious minutes in the hunt for ten million dollars were
slipping away.

“
Well, this has been
fun…”

“
Jonathan, where is the
girl?”

“
Caaan’t tell…”

She nearly pissed herself. The elzi spoke—it
fucking spoke!—but not in any voice that a live person ever used.
It was like someone squeezing his guts to force the air out of his
throat.

“
Please, Jonathan, we must know
where the girl is.”

“
How would he…”

Friar gave a look to silence her.

“
Do you know where she is,
Jonathan?”

“
Yessss.”

“
You must tell me
Jonathan!”

“
No…no!”

He screamed and his body tensed and he thrashed
and tore against the chains. Friar jumped back, away from the
flailing arms.

“
Noooooo!” the elzi screamed.
Lines appeared in his skin, like fat worms crawling beneath the
surface. Bubbles formed and popped, splattering blood. There was
the cracking of bones, over and over like kids throwing poppers on
the ground, and they burst through the skin and ripped it apart.
The elzi dissolved before them, torn apart from the inside. And
then there was nothing left—a small pond of gore and viscera and
the implants glinting evilly. The tiny satellite had
melted.

“
Thank you, Jonathan,” Friar said.
He seemed shaken, but not as shaken as he should have been. Saru
felt like she was going to barf again.

“
You…sick fuck,” she said. “What
did you do to him?”

“
I? I did nothing, though I admit
that was a likely outcome.”

“
You knew that would
happen?”

“
Not that, exactly. It was very
likely Jonathan would die helping us, but the manner of his death I
did not know.”

“
What…what…did you do to
him?”

“
I offered him a conduit, a
moment’s escape from the Uau. Imagine a paper bag over your head
and a single pinprick of light—that’s about as much as I can do to
penetrate the spectrum. His mind belonged to the UausuaU; it was
his price, you see, for the ecstasy, the knowing. I tried to steal
that knowledge, appeal to his forgotten humanity.”

“
What are you saying?” She
couldn’t take her eyes off the bloodstain. “That some random elzi
you clubbed and dragged into your torture chamber knows where this
fucking girl is?”

“
He knows what Uau know—and he
knew where the girl was. That means the feasters know where she is,
or have a good idea.”

“
Well shit, that doesn’t help. I
don’t know where to look even!”

“
Yes, you do,” he said. He too was
staring at the blood now. She looked at him and then back at the
blood and then the skin on the back of her neck began to crawl.
There was a sensation in the room, a feeling like she had had with
ElilE when the day had gone suddenly to night.

“
I…may…have gone too far this
time,” Friar said. He hefted himself onto the operating table,
right onto the pile of gore. It soaked into his pants, red stains
climbing up the fabric. He unlocked the foot shackles, removing the
scraps of flesh and fastening them around his own
ankles.

“
What are you doing?”

“
I…have been…naughty.”

He tightened the shackles around his legs and
then started on his arms; his neck bulged strangely. She saw under
his earlobe where a player would be was another tiny satellite
device identical to the first, its legs jammed into his skin. A
spasm crossed his face and a sound like a hyena laugh squirted from
his mouth. He tightened the shackles on his arms, and before she
could even process what he was doing, he flicked the key down into
the hole.

“
No!” she screamed.

“
Yes,” he said, calmly, and then
there was another hyena laugh that set her skin crawling. “I’m
afraid it is quite ne-necessary now. Please…if you have kindness in
you, the syringe with the red label…please.”

She stood still. The spasms happened more
quickly now, more hyena laughs; he was shuddering and then he
looked at her and she felt again the feeling of the day going to
night and a fear radiating from him like a wave. It forced her back
and then she ran to the worktable and scrambled to find the
syringe. There it was, in a special holster of its own, packed and
ready. For a second she marveled at how neatly it had been placed,
how ready amidst the clutter, how he had prepared for this
inevitability while working through his experiments. She ran back
to the table.

“
The girl…” he said. The twisted
smile was lasting longer on his face; his arms and legs were
straining against the chains. She saw that if he was free he would
hurt her now, hurt many people. “Look for the girl…in the fish.”
His hand grabbed at her, stopped by the chains; she stabbed the
syringe into his chest and pounded down the plunger, and then
scrambled to the stairs. She stayed just long enough to make sure
he was still, and then she flew up the stairs and out of the
house.

Chapter 6

Morning. Shit—should have set an alarm. She
jerked herself out of bed and lay on the floor. Across the dirty
gray carpet and mounds of clothes and bottles she saw the
clock—11:34 a.m. Time to get up, maybe. She stood and then shimmied
to the toilet and barfed. She found her peacoat in a pile and
grabbed a handful of Claritol. The sick in her stomach calmed and
the jackhammer in her skull became a simple pat on the head. She
surveyed her apartment—her third apartment in as many months—and
was filled with disgust. No furniture but a mattress, no rooms but
the kitchen-bedroom and toilet separated by a screen. What was she
paying for this shit?