No Dogs in Philly (19 page)

She tried a leg sweep, a half-assed affair that
didn’t budge his foot, didn’t even make him look down. Then she
tried to kick him in the testicles, but he swatted her boot away
like it was a humping terrier. He reached out a hand, presumably to
help her up, and she tried to stab it with her boot knife. He
evaded easily, grabbing her wrist and pulling her to her feet,
where she swayed, tottered, and then slammed the flip dagger in her
heel into his foot. Of course he didn’t react. She was beginning to
realize that pain was not a useful negotiating tool in this
scenario. The Jojran impersonator didn’t seem to care—didn’t seem
to feel it.

“
Is there nothing you want?” he
asked, grabbing her by the shoulders. “Do you really want to be
like this? Angry, sad, afraid, fighting without knowing why? You
could be so much more.”

“
I…want…” she had the hiccups for
some reason, perhaps a result of the meandering rib bone. “I want
to kick your ass.”

“
Yes…” he said. “You do…you really
do.” He let her go and spread his arms wide, vulnerable. “Do what
you must, Saru. It doesn’t make any difference, really. Today,
tomorrow. Seven years or a million. You will know our love
and—”

She shot him, a real bullet this time, right in
the chest from a foot away.

“…
you will be happy…”

Again.

“…
you will know peace…”

Again.

“…
and joy…”

And again and again, she emptied the whole
automatic clip, closing her eyes and screaming. When she opened
them it was quiet. Jojran, his body, the alien impostor, or
whatever it had been, was lying on the ground in front of her in a
puddle of blood, riddled with holes. He looked peaceful, happy
even, somehow, and that annoyed her. The blood was pooling around
her boots, soaking into Jojran’s white fuzzy carpet, splattered on
his nice white couches. Her head was killing her, she couldn’t
focus, her feeds and her implants were scrambled from the touch or
the trip to the island, or the blow to the back of her head. Her
hair was wet and she could feel the wet trickling down the back of
her neck, sliding down the channel of her spine. She swayed to her
knees and pried the vial of blood from Jojran’s fingers. Then she
limped and rummaged and gasped her way around the kitchen until she
found a plastic baggy. She dragged it through the blood pool until
it was full and put it in her pocket along with the
vial.

The music in the elevator was a tropical
melody, blue skies and white sands. The doors slid open at the
lobby and she sucked in a breath and tried to look normal as she
walked to the doors, ignoring the security guards. She’d washed as
much of the blood off as she could but there were still splatters
on her coat and jeans, and she couldn’t really walk out naked. She
pushed hard against the doors, leaning in to support her body
weight. They wouldn’t open.

“
It’s only a matter of time,” the
security guard called. There was a click and the doors swung open.
She stumbled into the night.

Chapter 16

The blood was a lie—more than a red herring, a
joke. Four different vultures and one shady lab tech at the
MercyCorp Hospital, and they all came back with a different
analysis. It was McCully’s blood. Terry’s blood. Jojran’s blood.
Her blood. Had she mixed up the samples? No, of course not. The
needle ring on her middle finger did all the work, one quick,
painless prick on McCully and Terry to get their samples,
impossible to mistake for the nigh-quart of blood she’d wrung from
Jojran/his impersonator or the vial she’d snatched from McCully.
Didn’t she know that doppleganger blood was a trickster, that it
could corrode and corrupt and play havoc with your data? Of course
she did, that’s why she kept the vial and the blood bag separate
from her prick ring. And anyway, this wasn’t a case of dopple
contamination—that would mess with the results, ruin them, not
change them every time. But everyone who looked at the bag of blood
came back with a different idea of who it belonged to. The skeevy
lab tech had even found Friar’s blood in the mix.

Friar. He knew all about this magical bullshit,
understood it even to the point that it was a science for him. And
now his ghost was banging around her skull, inviting her to
tropical getaways in the midst of some extremely tense situations.
Was he really helping her? Or was he just another symptom of this
enemy, a stray scrap of misery, a bodiless victim that had gotten
stuck in the drunken, angry maze of her brain.

Feasters. The man, the thing, whatever it was
wearing Jojran’s skin was a feaster for sure, or one of their
servants. What was she expecting? Not that, for sure. Crazy, yes,
strong, probably, and clever, a psychopath with an education and a
dollop of religious zeal. But that was something else—there was a
power there, and she needed to admit it, internalize this as fact,
because the sooner she really let herself believe there was alien
magic at work, the sooner she could stop underestimating her
enemies. Now, in the light of day, walking down Broad Street,
surrounded by men in caji suits and women in posh dresses, it
seemed silly, like a bad dream that she’d confused with grown-up
life. But she could still remember the voices calling to her, that
urge she’d felt within her—physical, emotional, spiritual,
sexual—to give herself up and join into something greater. She
remembered the skin-crawl terror of the security guard calling to
her in Jojran’s voice as she slunk away, remembered the way every
man and woman on the trek to her hotel—no way she could go home
now—had seemed to stop and watch her pass, to whisper nice things
in strange voices and offer themselves. She remembered the elzi she
passed scattering before her, which frightened her perhaps more
than anything, because of course they couldn’t see or hear or know
that she was there, and yet they ran from her like she was
doom.

Instinct brought her to a bar but she didn’t go
in. Somehow, perhaps for the first time in her life, drinking did
not seem likely to provide a solution to her problems. She kept
sipping from her flask to keep her mind a little zagged, just in
case the Friar ghost in her head hypothesis was whack and she was
being hacked, but it seemed unlikely. And now what? No trail of
blood to lead her to her prey, and she herself was a mark. Flee?
Where? The Gaespora would freeze her accounts and she wouldn’t be
able to buy an exit visa. And they’d find her anyway. She wasn’t
going to let herself be hunted—she was the hunter, she was the
aggressive one who kicked down doors and shot first and asked
questions maybe later if she needed to find a liquor store. But
there were no more doors to kick, no one to beat up and cough up
answers.

She spent the afternoon in Rittenhouse Park on
a bench, scanning the Net. It was a nice, light-hazy day where you
could see pretty far in front of you and breathe without a
cheese-grater feeling in your lungs, so there were a lot of people
out. It felt comforting to be around other people, people she
thought were unlikely to be servants of an alien death God. Passing
through the censor walls was a breeze and she quickly found herself
in the Wekba, the dark part of the Net where everything fun
happened. It was important to have a high-quality spam filter and
AI countermeasures or your brain would be overloaded with ads and
you’d find yourself sprinting to the nearest alley to buy sky from
a tricked soda machine, or you’d be hacked by a prowling viking
like Jojran and wake up with your accounts empty and all your sex
memories hung like panties on a flagpole for the world to
see.

Most of what she could find on the feasters was
trashy horror stories. Feasters were vampires that sucked your
blood and could kill with a thought. They injected you with their
blood and turned you into their slaves. If you looked them in the
eyes they could hypnotize you. They were demons who struck bargains
in exchange for your soul. They were beings of astonishing romance
and had lots and lots of sex with young women and misunderstood
young men. Why was she doing this? What did she hope to learn?
There were accounts of people who had met with feasters, made deals
with them—a businessman who had traded his beating heart for
wealth, a lonely mother who had jammed ice picks in her ears to
hear the voices of her dead children, a man who had given his cock
and balls in exchange for true love. And what would she trade? Was
it her body they wanted, or her mind—she couldn’t imagine it being
the latter. What made a person? What was their appeal to others or
to aliens? And what had that Jojran impostor said? That there
really was no price and that we humans were just too dumb of an
organism to accept a gift. She could buy that. She’d seen enough
sad, desperate people do crazy things for less than the promise of
eternal love.

What she really needed to know was how many of
them there were—how many people she was going to have to kill to
save her own life (and maybe some other people’s lives too, as a
bonus). She’d killed one, hadn’t she? She’d checked on the police
scanner and saw a murder had been committed at Jojran’s address, a
single body—no suspects of course. That was the kind of murder the
police liked, a single man with no ties and a good deal of seizable
cash. And even if they traced it back to her and decided to wobble
their lard asses into action, ElilE would make it all disappear. So
the body hadn’t gotten up and walked away, thank God. But what
about the mind, the presence, that intellect making him tap dance
around. Had that died too? Or was it like an AI virus living in the
Net, lurking in your coffee maker and your car and your player?
Would she have to destroy the goddamn Net to be free? No, this
wasn’t some twisted AI; it was too smart and too dumb at the same
time—too organic.

Friar. Of course. Friar had known—and she had
known he’d known in the back of her mind, but still couldn’t bring
herself to go back. But now she was out of options. She drew
herself out of another so-called experience with the feasters,
which had turned yet again into porn, and got to her feet. The
answer wasn’t in the Net—it was here, in real life, and her
problems could only be solved with fist and gun. She shut down all
her feeds—all the comedies, coupons, fun facts, and erotic sensory
waves, shutting down every distraction and setting herself in
business mode. Nothing to interrupt her thoughts but the body
scanners, police feeds, and tip offs—the tools of the
trade.

She walked to Friar’s house and rested a hand
on the fortress door. It swung open easily. Something clicked in
her brain—the Friar presence that had been haunting her. A clever
man would take his security seriously and the cleverest—and
richest—would train his equipment to recognize his psychosomatic
profile. She’d thought his presence in her brain could be a fluke,
a mistake of his mad-scientist experiments. But perhaps not.
Perhaps he had done it on purpose (poorly), trying to help her, so
she could continue on when he was gone. And perhaps he’d even known
that she would need to come back here. She walked down the hallway,
past the study, the living room that looked to be never used, the
kitchen with a half-full teacup still on the counter. She found the
second fortress door leading to the basement, which also swung open
at her touch. Her footsteps echoed, boots clanging on the metal
stairs. The lights were off and her waving arms couldn’t find a
switch. She tried to activate them with a mental command, and with
the effort of the concentration she missed the last step and
tumbled face first onto the metal platform.

“
God damn it to fuck!” she yelled,
words too echoing with the clang of her body against the metal—how
big was this place? She picked herself up and rubbed her knee. It
was the kind of injury just lame enough to hurt and not activate
any combat or healing procedures. She stood still and let her eyes
adjust to the near-dark, light supplied by the glowing of
instruments. Guided by this she found some promising switches, and
after trying several the lights came on. Finally. Now to find a
clue and—all the hairs on the back of her neck stood straight. The
operating table was empty. No stinky, decayed Friar—she was ready
for that. No chance the pigs could have been here, no enterprising
vulture or worried relative. She’d told no one, and how could they
even get in? Who would take a body and leave all the expensive
crap? Friar was dead; she knew that, he was dead for sure…wasn’t
he? She’d felt him go still, stuck around to check. But had he
faked it? What reason would he have? With a sinking feeling she
walked to the edge of the platform. Her eyes followed the lights
down, down, down into the pit, to where the massive steel door now
lay open.

Chapter 17

Twenty-seven standard bullets, four ball
busters, two incendiaries, ten rubbers, three micro-grenades, the
prod at 64 percent power, the boot knife, the thigh shivs, a
garroting lasso, the poison-injector ring…it seemed like a shit
arsenal against the darkness of that black pit. She searched the
lab three times over, but it didn’t seem that Friar had any
weapons—how could he be private justice without at least a taser or
a tranquilizer gun? Manners only took you so far in a gunfight. Did
he stab people with his scalpel? She’d have to go in with what she
had. Or she could run away. She could go to the gun store and buy a
bazooka, a machine gun, a flamethrower, a laser, or a
sixty-thousand-dollar plasma launcher. But even then would she be
ready? Could she make it down those steps again knowing that door
was open? The surprise was a gift and she needed to take it. Friar
was down there, alive or dead, and if he was fucking with her he
would have to pay.