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times had made him a loner by choice, and only now --
"Jesus," she muttered. "What am I thinking?"
He paused, glanced up from the final connections he was making with his new
rig. "What?"
His face was angelic. No trace remained of the hideous patch of dripping
purple flesh which had marked him before. She had to stop, force herself to
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remember what he'd looked like then.
"My time sense is all screwed up," she said. "Now, then, future, present, it's
all blurred together. I keep thinking about used to be and will happen, but it
doesn't fit. The future is in the past, the past hasn't happened here yet, and
I just can't seem to get a handle on it."
He grinned. It made him look like a fifteen-year-old boy opening presents
under the tree. "Don't worry about it," he said. "Use yourself as a reference
point. You are now. Everything else is either gonna happen or not, or already
has, but you can't count on it.
Take it as a new reality."
She grunted. and lit another cigarette. "Have you tried to manipulate this
'reality'?"
"How so?"
"You know, like you used to change Berg and Levin's construct. Those fucking
sheep."
He shook his head. "No."
"How come?"
"I don't think it'll work here," he replied slowly.
"And why is that?"
"I dunno. This one feels ... different."
She narrowed her eyes and blew smoke, but let it pass. Ozzie's feelings were,
at best, tenuous and hard to pin down. And she was beginning to get her own
ideas, grounded on something harder than mere feelings.
She'd had half a lifetime of dealing with Jack Berg, and something about this
weird game he'd dreamed up wasn't right. That knowledge had niggled at her
almost since the beginning of it, but she hadn't been able to form any
conclusion. Now, as Ozzie finished with the final links that joined his box to
the largest of the mainframes, it came to her.
"Berg doesn't play games," she said.
Ozzie said, "There. All ready."
"Did you hear me?"
"Uh huh. You said he doesn't play games."
"That's right. He never did. Lousy at poker, hated chess, wouldn't even watch
football. So why all of sudden, at what he claims is the most important
contest of all, does he risk everything on this stupid fairy tale contest?"
Ozzie twined his long fingers together, bent them out, and cracked each big
knuckle in a cascade of sharp, liquid pops. "You're the Berg expert, babe," he
said.
She nodded. "He said it wasn't a game," she mumbled. Her voice rasped softly
in the silent, cavernous room. "And it's not."
"So, then?"
She nodded decisively. "Let's get to it, bub. Hook me up to that devil
machine."
"Calley, what the fuck are you talking about?"
She smiled at him. "It's not a game," she said. "But he's cheating anyway."
--------
*Chapter Sixteen*
Danny Boy MacEwen licked at his right hand, where the hair and flesh beneath
had been split open. He shivered, his breath coming in ragged gasps, as the
coppery taste of his own blood filled his mouth.
Only two more blocks. He chanted the number silently, a mantra of safety. For
the moment, the chase had fallen away. He heard a muffled shout from the next
block over, as some nameless Rager discovered the two bodies he'd left,
disemboweled and steaming in the glacial night. He felt a sudden thrill of
triumph. Perhaps they'd underestimated him after all. He'd doubled back, when
he'd realized the strange, chirping cries filled the darkness in an extended
wall between him and the refuge of the Labyrinth. They thought they had him
trapped, but he'd cut two from the chaser pack, lured them into a blank-walled
alley. He remembered the way their eyes had bulged in the dim light as his own
hairy shadow had fallen across their path.
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They'd fought -- knives against claws -- but it hadn't been enough. They'd
used their weapons, but he _was_ a weapon. Only the one gash, deep but
relatively harmless, splitting the padded fingers of his left hand.
He savored the warmth that had suffused him as he'd spilled their guts, long,
ropey shining sausages that glittered wetly in the barren light of the street
lamps, onto the frozen concrete. He'd dragged them back to the street and left
them at the end of a trail of blood.
But they were only homeboys, stupid homies that used knives to frighten those
even more stupid than they, and they'd never
faced an enraged wolf. He hunched himself lower behind a rusted dumpster
overflowing with gelid chunks of garbage and continued to lick his wound. He'd
been lucky, in a way. The night was full of the eerie cries of hunters far
more dangerous than those two. And the more he thought about that, the less
sense it made.
The tall ones. Two of them at least, maybe more. Stilts, they were called, for
reasons nobody knew any more. Stilts -- the incredibly tall, thin killers who
worked only for the highest Rager chiefs. Why would Stilts be hunting him?
He gnawed at the question but couldn't come with any answer that made sense.
Not that it made any difference. There _were_
Stilts out there tracking him, their long, deadly frames moving through the
darkness like whips, their lips pursed around their weird cries.
He didn't know if he could kill Stilts. He didn't want to find out, either. He
cocked his ears. His muzzle came up, testing the welter of scents on the
bitter wind. It seemed that some of the sound was converging on the site of
his kill, Perhaps they were careless.
Maybe there was an opening now, where none had been before.
He had to chance it. He licked his wound a final time and grunted as he heaved
himself up. Only two more blocks.
He loped forward into the shadows, panting.
The final block loomed before him. He hugged the corner of a deserted
warehouse and peered down the deserted street. It was a buffer zone. At the
end of the street he made out the tumbledown roof of a decayed kiosk which
shielded the abandoned entrance to the underground. Once this had been a
bustling street just north of Chicago's old Loop. Now it was a slum but, for
reasons of their own, kept by the city fathers a well-lighted slum. Tall
streetlights illumined the empty pavement, so that it seemed almost like a
stage.
Danny Boy had heard it talked about once -- the city was owned by Ragers, and
the topside gang preferred a well-lit no-man's-land between their turf and
that of the underpeople. It was easier to keep the denizens of the Lab in
their place, especially since the subterranean gangs weren't fond of any kind
of bright light.
The street was a killing field. He shuffled slowly forward, stepping into the
light. As he did so, his head jerked up. A stumbling, lurching, leaping pack
of rabble spilled around the corner behind him, saw him, began to bay with
glee. He saw the flash of bright metal and then, suddenly, flinched at the
harsh crack of an ancient handgun. Something whanged off the edge of the
bricks above his head and splattered him with stinging grains of rock.
No choice, he knew. He loped into the middle of the street and scrabbled
forward. He'd made almost half the block before the inevitable happened.
They came from either side of the street, slipping like elongated wraiths from
doorways, the gaping mouth of an alley. Three of them, tall, willowy, deadly.
They blocked him neatly and stood, waiting. The one in the middle smiled. The
other two made low, warbling noises deep in their throats.
"Come, wolf," the middle one said softly. "Come to me, my little dogface." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]