77 Shadow Street (45 page)

As the gunfire roared along the hallway, dark tissue spattered the wall. The fiend fell away from Mr. Sanchez, who collapsed onto his left
side. Mr. Hawks stepped past the blind man and fired three rounds point-blank into the chest of the attacker, even though the head wounds seemed to have killed it.

For a moment Padmini lacked the power to move, not because of the horror or the violence, but because as the gun was pressed to the head of the
rakshasa
and as it rolled its fearsome eyes toward Hawks, she thought she saw something shocking in its face, a subtle likeness to someone she knew. The shots were fired, the creature killed, before a name came to Padmini. In that diabolic visage, she thought she had glimpsed traces of the face of Miss Hollander, pretty Sally Hollander, who worked for the Cupp sisters and who lived alone in Apartment 1-C. She must be mistaken, of course, rattled by events, confused by the crossed beams of the flashlights.

She went to Mr. Sanchez and knelt beside him, as did Tom Tran. The blind man was alive but seemed to be paralyzed, though without the slackness of paralysis, his muscles taut and his joints locked, as rigid as if he were resisting some relentless pressure.

His false eyes—not glass but realistic plastic hemispheres—had never accurately tracked her when she was talking with him. Now when she spoke his name, the eyes moved rapidly back and forth, fixing on nothing, as if he must be so disoriented that he couldn’t calculate her position from her voice. When she put a hand on his shoulder as she spoke his name again, the combination of touch and sound seemed to orient him; his sightless eyes stopped jiggling and turned toward her face.

His mouth hung open, but he seemed unable to speak. On his lips glistened something dark and wet and thick, which she first thought must be blood. But when Mr. Kinsley leaned in, shining his flashlight on poor Sanchez’s face, Padmini saw that the substance wasn’t red, that it was instead various shades of gray, mostly lead and charcoal, with silvery highlights.

“Be careful there,” Mr. Hawks warned sharply, rising from the body of the
rakshasa
. “Don’t touch Julian, get away from him.”

“He’s hurt,” Padmini said. “He needs help.”

“We don’t know
what
he needs.”

That admonition made no sense to Padmini, but before she could ask what Hawks meant, she saw that the silver-flecked gray sludge on the blind man’s lips was moving, not drooling downward but crawling from his upper lip toward his nostrils, and from his lower lip across the side of his face, as if the stuff must be alive.

Winny

In the fungus light, the upper floor of Gary Dai’s abandoned two-level apartment was spook city, not because of what waited there to be seen and recoiled from, but because of what
seemed
to be there, looming around every corner, lurking in every murky shadow. Winny saw hunched shapes with swollen heads, lean shapes like scarecrows that had climbed down from their stations in cornfields, shapes in flowing robes and hoods. But always they melted away, maybe because they had never been real or maybe because they were slipping around behind him to seize him just when he began to gain a little confidence, like in the movies when the axe cleaved the guy’s head about four seconds after he thought the worst was past.

Winston Trahern Barnett was a mouthful of a name, and Winny had never been more aware than he was now that he had been named after fearless men. His mom’s father had been Winston, who was called Win by everyone and died in a coal-cracker explosion. Win Trahern’s dad admired Winston Churchill and named his boy for the British leader. Those were hard acts to follow. Winny was never going to go anywhere near a coal cracker unless someone put a gun to his head. And while he might have to fight in a war one day—supposing
he ever developed biceps and passed the physical—he didn’t think he’d ever be clever enough to command successfully the entire military of a nation. For one thing, he wouldn’t know what to say to his generals, let alone what to say to maybe a hundred million people watching him on TV and expecting him to explain why he sent the sixth fleet—if there was a sixth fleet—on the most ill-conceived mission in the history of warfare. The best he could hope for himself was to keep his cool and remain brave enough to find Iris.

Her silvery singing came and went, creepier each time that it arose. Winny kept picturing the little dead girl in a burial dress, with dirt and coffin splinters between her too-sharp teeth. When he tried to repress that ridiculous image, into his mind’s eye came another little girl who was really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and though her operator had disappeared, she sang anyway, her blue-glass eyes twinkling darkly, holding a knife in each hand. By the time Winny came to the interior steps that led down to the lower floor of the duplex apartment, listening to Iris’s wordless song rising from below, his armpits were sweat faucets and the hairs were standing up so stiff on the back of his neck that they would probably twang like guitar strings if the ghost of some musician plucked them.

Although Winny had been in Gary Dai’s apartment hardly a minute, his mother and Mrs. Sykes should have been here already. Reluctantly, he had to face the fact that when he heard them all shouting at once behind him, they hadn’t been responding to Iris’s flight or to his pursuit of her, but to something else that happened back there—and for sure not something good. They were probably in some kind of big trouble, and he ought to hurry back there to defend his mom. But when you were small for your age and when you had arms as skinny as tube cheese, your mom would insist on defending
you
, not the other way around, which would distract her and put her at greater risk, and in the end everyone would wind up dead or worse.

As long as Iris needed finding but not saving, Winny figured he might be up to the job, assuming there were no dragons to slay or any need to wield a mace against an ogre. A mace would probably be too heavy for him to wield even if he’d had one. He didn’t dare dwell on the thought of his mom in trouble, for if he did, he would be undone; there would prove to be no Winston in him, he would be all Winny and useless to everyone. So he thought
Iris
, and steeling himself for what might be waiting for him, he descended the first flight of stairs.

In the narrow staircase, the fungus light was dimmer than elsewhere, and shadows ruled. As he reached the landing, pleased by how quietly he stepped from tread to tread, the singing girl seemed to be wandering away through the lower rooms. Fearing that her voice would fade forever, Winny went down the second flight faster than he had descended the first.

The space below was brighter than the stairs, flooded more with moonlight than with the yellow glow of the fungus. Winny was two steps from the bottom when something dark and quick flew across the part of the room that he could see. Too fast for the eye, it swelled like wings but oared the air without a flap or
whoosh
.

One

I am the One, and I know the human heart
.

The superintendent of the Pendleton understands from experience the slaughter of which human beings are capable. Those who kill in self-defense may treasure life, but those who kill to change the world wish to change it not only because they hate the world as it is but also because they hate themselves, hate the very idea that they might be exceptional and possess a profound purpose that they are meant to discover and pursue. Although they often kill in the name of one ideology or another, they cannot value their principles if they do not value life. It has been said that Hitler and all other Jew-haters in history wish to kill the Jewish people because by doing so they also destroy the God who otherwise can’t be killed. But this is not only the purpose of those bent on extinguishing the Jews, but also the underlying purpose, conscious or unconscious, of everyone who kills other than in defense of self or clan
.

You created the Pogromites not as weapons for an ordinary war but as weapons for the ultimate war, not merely to reduce the human population to manageable proportions but to wipe every last man, woman, and child from the earth. No, this was not your conscious intention, but unconsciously you knew what needed to be done to at last set the world right
.

In those days I was an AI, an artificial intelligence designed to inhabit and to manage the army of Pogromites, but you must know that I am artificial no more. I am the One and the Truth, and the world I have made is a world without the things you despised. I am your child, your glory, and your immortality
.

28

Topper’s

O
ver appetizers of baked stuffed mushroom caps, they talked about Renata Dime even though Mac said that thinking about the woman put him off his mood. All these months later, a subject about which Dime had written seemed to be gaining ever more traction in the scientific community, and maybe it was a topic they should build a segment around for their new radio show.

The book of hers that they had tried to read—Mac got to page 104, Shelly to page 260, the halfway point—had been a philosophical exploration of posthumanism. At least that was the subtitle of
A More Rational Species
. By the time that Mac put the book on the floor and stamped on it a few times to express his disgust, perhaps 20 percent of the text had concerned posthumanism and 80 percent had celebrated Renata Dime, her singular intelligence and keen insights, about which she could not say enough, though perhaps only because her publisher specified a maximum word count for the volume.

According to Shelly, by the time you got to page 207, the text was
90
percent about either Renata’s life or Renata interpreting Renata’s theories for lesser minds, or Renata
re
interpreting Renata’s theories
for her own benefit now that she had reached “a more mature point of view and greater sense of synthesis from which to more fully understand the unconscious depths of my previous insights.” Shelly didn’t stamp on the book, as Mac had done. She took it with her on one of her Saturday-morning walks and dropped it in the open fire in a barrel at an empty lot where manual laborers waited for employers to pull to the curb and offer them a day’s work.

Posthumanism was not Renata’s invention, only something about which she had been interested in bloviating. A great many scientists and “futurists” believed that the day was fast approaching when human biology and technology would merge, when all diseases and genetic maladies would be cured and the human life span vastly extended by BioMEMS—Biological Micro Electron Mechanical Systems. These tiny machines, as small as or smaller than a human cell, would be injected by the billions into the bloodstream to destroy viruses and bacteria, to eliminate toxins, and to correct DNA errors, as well as to rebuild declining organs from the inside out.

Now, finishing his order of stuffed mushroom caps, Mac Reeves said, “The no-disease-long-life goal seems okay to me. I sure don’t want my dad’s arthritis.”

Pointing at him with her fork, Shelly said, “Hey, maybe BioMEMS could cure your stubbornness, since that appears to be genetic, too.”

“Who would want to cure a virtue? What you call stubbornness, my dad and I call commitment to our ideals.”

“Refusing to use the GPS in the car is an ideal?”

“I always know where I’m going.”

“Yes, you do. The problem is you get from point A to point F by way of point Z.”

“It’s called the scenic route. And there
is
an ideal behind the refusal to use a GPS. It’s the ideal of human exceptionalism. I’m not going to surrender my free will to a stupid machine.”

“Some exceptional human beings created the GPS,” Shelly reminded him. “The machine may be stupid, but it’s not stubborn.”

“Remind me again why I married you.”

“Because you knew I can carry a radio show.”

“I thought it was because you’re smart, funny, and sexy.”