Code Noir (14 page)

Putting him in a mental box felt a whole lot better. I could deal with
competitor
where
lover
,
saint
and
hero of the people
burned holes in my psyche.

We were competing for the right to fashion our own vision of the future in The Tert. Right now that meant who found out what was going down in crazy town.

It occurred to me that he might have seen me in trouble back there among the canrats. Perhaps he’d even left me for dead. I thought I could read Loyl some of the time, but predict him, never.

‘You know where you’re going?’ he asked.

‘Do you?’ I countered.

‘Mind if I follow you?’

I shrugged. ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’

We walked on in tenuous accord, shoulder to shoulder, like rival cops into a riot.

‘Leesa Tulu’s mine, Loyl,’ I whispered.

He grabbed my sore shoulder. ‘No.’

Despite the pain, my body hair warped at his touch. I suddenly wanted him. Desire rose in the back of my throat like vomit. How could he do this to me? How could anyone do it to me? In a place full of nutters, my head loopy with visions, and some serious shit to deal with, how could I want him so bad?

I shook his hand off. ‘You’re a zealot, Loyl. Zealots don’t help people, they use them.’

He smiled. ‘You see, Parrish, you and I have so much in common.’

Not much was said after that - apart from agreeing to stop and share a watch so we could both get some sleep.

I tried to fathom the scene around me. Bars, food stalls, smoking and shooting dens - regular things that weren’t regular. For starters, each stall dished out the same food. Pies and something I took for coffee.

One lit doorway we passed advertised a garish pink ‘kleen beds and air con’ neon and a bunch of warty growths hung under the eaves.

It had to be better than a night out on the pavement.

Didn’t it?

We stepped into the entrance hall: a guest lounge on one side, a small desk unit on the other. Unlit stairs promised bedrooms.

Underfoot the floor crunched. An albino girl/thing perched on a stool behind the desk, her bare legs adhered, literally, to the plas of her seat.

‘Howsitgoin’?’ Her voice was sweet like sugar-switch, but her accent was broad - archaic almost. ‘We gotta beeee-uutiful room for youse.’

Australians had lost their twang sixty-odd years ago, along with their nationality, when refugees from southern Europe, forced away from their own contaminated territories, flooded their borders. The refugees tried Afreeka first, but the Freekans had their perimeter tied up tight with some advanced defence. Their conscience didn’t blink at a horde of white Euros in trouble.

Couldn’t say I blamed them.

Down here, we’d always thought the man-flood would come from the islands to the north, Indo and Malayland and the rest. But they’d got smart and cleaned up their countries.

Although I’d never known the Australia of before, the albino’s accent flooded me with curious nostalgia. Like genetic coding.

Loyl-me-Daac, on the other hand, seemed excited by it. I hunted his face for traces of fanaticism. No way was I sharing watch with this guy when he flipsided into his I’m-on-a-mission-for-myself persona.

‘What happened to your skin?’ he asked her.

I elbowed him hard, figuring personal questions were not the way to a stay unnoticed around here.

The albino girl/thing rolled her eyes.

They were black like Daac’s. Not true albino.

‘Skin-stripped,’ she said. ‘How d’ya think I’d afford this place?’

I stared closer. Speckles of blood seasoned her arms like finely ground red pepper. Raw bleeding meat covered in a translucent synthetic skin. I didn’t understand what she meant. Didn’t want to.

‘You seen a woman go through here? Scarf, boots, face paint?’ I asked instead.

The nearly albino girl/thing chewed on a fingertip. Some plas skin came away in her mouth and she spat it on to the floor. I suddenly knew what made it so crunchy.

Beats nail biting, I guess.

‘Nope.’ She watched the blood well on her fingertip, licking it like an ice cream until another skin grew.

‘Putcha print ’ere. Same on the door lock. What’ve you got to pay for it?’

Loyl and I exchanged looks. We held out our cred spikes at the same time.

She stared blankly at them. ‘Fingerprints buy youse a shower. No bed. What else you got to barter? Skin, hair, sperm, hormones - ’though me sampler’s on the blink. I’ll have ta use me big glass. It’s all good in Mo-Vay.’

Mo-Vay? ‘What do you do with the samples?’

She frowned at the question. Bemused. ‘Sell them to Ike,’ she finally answered. ‘What else?’

‘Who?’

‘That’d be God to you,’ she said.

I couldn’t think of what to say next, so I stood and waited to see if Daac would lop off a finger or spit into a jar for her. I sure wasn’t going to.

Maybe he was thinking the same thing about me.

The albino girl/thing began to tap her fingers on the desk. One of them left wet, pink smudges.

Eventually I scrabbled in my pack for something of value and came up with a fistful of Loser’s fur.

I plonked a pile of it in front of her. ‘Body hair,’ I lied.

She stretched backwards and pulled a magnifier over her head. It didn’t do much for her look. Blood-specked white girl/thing in brightly lit plastic bubble.

She studied the hair expertly. So much for the broken DNA sampler. This little girl didn’t need one.

Daac sent me a what-the-fok-did-you-give-her frown.

She answered him before I could. ‘This is canrat. Not worth batshit, usually. But this one’s got dingo innit. None left around here no more.’

She flicked off the light and jerked the bubble back, beaming a grin.

‘How long youse wanna stay?’

 

I followed Daac past the guest lounge toward the stairs. Did I say guest lounge? Try locked ward. I knew lots of punters in The Tert suffered from the effects of the heavy metals, but I’d never seen the worst of it.

Until now.

Some of the occupants
lounged
connected to pumps, their uncontrollable shaking, warts and rashes testament to their particular poison. Others were vocal and hallucinatory. One - a woman, I think - smiled soft, bleeding gums at us. Her toxin-darkened skin reminded me of Stellar, Jamon’s ex-squeeze.

I turned away, sick to my stomach.

We climbed three flights of rotten stairs and risked the corridor. Daac reached into his pack and produced a skin glove. He slipped it on and touched his fingers to the keypad.

Nothing happened.

After a moment he kicked the door and it sprang ajar. Peeling off his glove, he dropped it. In a minute it had shrivelled into something like the albino girl/thing’s fingertips. ‘No need to give anything away for free,’ he said.

The room sported a half-window view of the pavement below and the stink of urine in the san. Richly coloured mould stains formed a dizzy pattern across the ceiling - a tripper’s paradise. One bed, a low chest with single drawer and a hard-backed chair. The air con wheezed in asthmatic spurts: freezing blasts - then nothing.

‘You sleep first,’ he said. He dragged the chest across in front of the door and the chair to the window. Then he pulled a Sprag semi-auto from his pack.

I’d never seen Daac with a weapon like that before.

He felt my curiosity. ‘Just a feeling,’ he muttered.

The pillow looked risky, so I set my pack under my head and stretched out on top of the cover. My hands rested on the Lugers for comfort.

‘Don’t shoot yourself,’ he said.

‘Never.’ I yawned, wanting and not wanting to sleep. ‘Plenty of practice.’

He slung down on to the chair so he could recce the window and the door. With half-light and half-closed eyes I gorged on the sight of his face. My thighs itched, so I rolled away.

Could I trust him? For half an hour, surely
, I decided, and crashed.

I didn’t have dreams any more, only dark shadowy spaces of dim consciousness. The Eskaalim’s gluttony filled me like a bloated carcass.

 

 

I sweated myself back to proper consciousness, fist clenched between my thighs as I shuddered to the end of my orgasm. Thankfully my back was still turned to Daac. Had I moaned aloud?
Please, no!

I lay still, waiting for the moment - and the embarrassment - to pass.

But the heat wouldn’t leave me.

Hadn’t left me for a while. Since The Slag, my tee had been wet under my arms and around my neckline. I sweated all the time, like I had menopause or some other shitty female affliction. My neck ached from leaning on my pack.

At least Loser isn’t in there, I thought. How would I have explained him to Daac?

 

Daac!
I sat bolt upright.
Where was he?

Chair empty. San empty. Bed empty. Chest back in its place. Door ajar.

Relief came first. He hadn’t witnessed my lust.

Then fury.

Bastard left me unprotected!
If the Cabal wanted him marinated, garnished and BBQed, I’d be more than happy to do it.

I slipped my pack on and stumbled to the window.

He was out there on the pavement, under neon, in deep discourse with a stranger. He handed a pock-marked guy something then slipped back toward Chez Nutter.

Forgetting my relief that he hadn’t seen my night-jinks, I sat on the chair, pistols drawn, waiting for him.

He came quietly into the room, replacing the chest.

‘Friends?’ I asked.

He jumped and then located me in the dark.

‘Parrish?’

‘Unless you left someone else here asleep and defenceless. ’

The smallest of grins. ‘You? Defenceless?’ Then he ran his hand across tired eyes. ‘I shook you. You wouldn’t wake. It was important.’

‘What was?’

‘Biz.’

‘Out here in Mo-Vay?’ I drawled.

‘We could spend for ever looking for Leesa Tulu. We need information or we’re wasting our time. My last sighting was back on my place - a vendor who said she’d seen Tulu and Mei. Since then I’ve been following you.’

‘What vendor?’ I demanded. ‘Don’t tell me . . . grey hair, eyebrow studs, food like rat vomit.’

He gave me a stare. ‘How did you know that?’

‘Never mind. How much did it cost you?’

The stare became quizzical. ‘Cost? Why would it cost me anything? She just told me.’

I suddenly got a bad case of gnashing teeth. Life sucked. ‘Why are you here, Loyl? This isn’t just about Mei and Sto, is it?’

He sat down on the bed. ‘You first.’

‘I’ve been hired to find Tulu,’ I said truthfully. ‘I told you that. Attempted hijacking and voodoo dolls made it a bit more personal.’

‘And your employer would be?’

‘Client privilege.’

I watched him carefully now, the neons outside strobing pink and sickly yellow stripes across his face. Maybe it was fatigue - the Wombat knows he’d been travelling hard and fast as well - or maybe he’d held on to the sane, gorgeous act for too long, but fanaticism had begun to transform his face into something much less attractive.

‘She’s an experienced medium. I might be able to reach the Eskaalim through you, Parrish. With her help.’

‘Why me? What about the others that have been infected?’

‘We’ve tried. They didn’t survive,’ he said flatly.

‘So its about attrition, is it? You happened to kill the others and I’m next on the list?’

He frowned, missing my sarcasm, missing everything that didn’t fit with his skew on the world.

‘You’re stronger than the rest, Parrish. You’ve already survived two attempts at contact. If somehow I can harness this creature through you . . . it could be useful.’

I exploded. ‘Harness it! For what? What are you thinking? An army of shape-shifters to fight your wars?’

He didn’t answer me directly. He didn’t have to. I saw the truth of it in the glittering calculation of his eyes. ‘We
will
have our place back, Parrish. Our land. This will all change. I’ll rid it of the scraps.’

Scraps!
The Tert punters? Sure, I guess. But right there was where Daac and I had a
fundamental.
When I said The Tert is full of human scraps, I meant it fondly.

He meant,
torch ’em!

You see I’m pretty big on live and let. Unless you try to stick a gun at my head or a knife at my throat, in which case I’ll turn you into dog food. To my mind the world had a history of carnage that could be summed up by arguments over who thought they had the right.

Most people still didn’t get it.
We all had the right. And none of us had the right.
How simple could it be? How we fucked it from there on in was an individual problem. The thing I hated more than anything else - more than stone-cold crazies, fakers and pretty dresses - was manipulative zealots.

And yet my hormones squealed every time this particular one came near me.

Well hormones or no, I wouldn’t let him use the Eskaalim to make foot soldiers for his cause. But I wasn’t going to tell him that just yet.

I calmed myself with that plan. ‘So where is Tulu? ‘

‘Won’t know until morning. When they come back to get paid.’ He yawned and slumped down on the bed. ‘Wake me at light.’

I watched him sleep, and stewed - several hours of a bitching internal war that alternated between wanting to leave him and wanting to lie next to him. Moral disgust versus fleshly temptation, while his jaw fell slack and he snored softly.