Fantasmagoria (15 page)

Dobie ripped the tape off Vernal’s mouth. “You think you’re pretty fuckin’ clever, don’t you? With that trick back there.”

Vernal coughed. “Well, yes.”

Yunique smirked. “Where’d you get the leper?”

“There are plenty down by the wharf, where the sewers drain. Fuckin’ wasps and scythe beetles everywhere.”

“Gross.”

Vernal looked around for an escape. “I gave him some money and told him I was a servant of the Keeper, that I wanted to help him.”

“You said you’d take him to the doctor?”

“I didn’t say doctor. I said men who would cut the wasps out.”

“Smart.”

Yunique had an accent Vernal didn’t recognize. Her words came from the back of her throat and tripped over the tip of her tongue.

“It took awhile to find someone who was that close to bursting. I thought he was gonna pop the entire ride over.”

Dobie slapped Vernal in the face. “The fuckin’ lemon juice was a nice trick, asshole.”

Vernal shut his eyes. “Wasps don’t like it.”

“You don’t fuckin’ trust anyone, do you?”

“Is anyone trustworthy?”

Dobie shook his head. “Naw. Not really.”

“You’re mad about Cecil.”

“You’re god-damned right I’m mad about Cecil! He goes out with you and never comes back.”

“He killed those little girls, Dobe. Beat them.”

“Bullshit. Cecil was a stand-up guy. And a damned good fighter. All he could talk about was how he and Velma and the girls were gonna settle down now that he couldn’t fight no more.”

“Exactly. He was used up. Fought too lon--”

“Shut up. You don’t know.”

Vernal didn’t argue. There was no point. The same thing was happening to Dobie. Both men had been knocked stupid, used up by the syndicates that rigged their fights. Vernal knew boxing was stage play. At least, he thought, the lovebirds had bandaged his severed finger, albeit also with electrical tape. “What are you gonna do?”

“I’ve got the key.” Dobie flashed it in his face. “You should’ve hidden it somewhere less obvious than your ass.”

“So, you got it. So what?”

“So . . .” Dobie frowned. “What’s it for?”

Vernal rolled his eyes. “How stupid are you, Dobe?”

Dobie punched straight down and knocked Vernal hard in the stomach. Vernal curled into a ball as best he could with his hands and feet tied. He tried to catch his breath.

“Talk like that again and we’ll cut that tiny pecker off. By Goyen, look. He’s fucking hard.”

“Why”—Vernal’s stomach spasmed as he gasped for air—“is everyone. Trying to cut. My dick off?”

“’Cuz it’s disgusting,” Yunique snarled as she reached down and diddled the tiny erect member. “It looks like a dead worm.”

“I’m sure,” Vernal took a deep breath. “To someone. In your line of work. It doesn’t seem like much.”

Dobie grabbed Vernal’s tuft of hair. “What’s the key for?”

Vernal looked him straight in the eye. “It opens the Imperial Treasury. Anyone who has that key,” he glanced at it, “gets free access.”

Yunique gasped.

“No way . . .” Dobie grabbed tighter. He was suspicious. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I’m serious. Why do you think Pimpernel wants it so bad?”

Dobie let go and Vernal’s head bounced off the floor of the trunk.

“Ow.”

Dobie smiled at Yunique, who threw her arms around him. They kissed. “I told you I’d make us rich, baby.”

The siren yelped again from the street, much closer now, and the couple turned.

Yunique looked at Vernal, then to Dobie, who simply stood and stared. “Go see what it is,” she urged.

“Right.” Dobie nodded and walked away.

“He’s not so bright, is he?”

Yunique stared down. Other than her drooping eyelid, her face was symmetrical. Her make-up was built-in. Her expression went blank. There was no longer any emotion in her eyes. She was smart, Vernal thought. She kept the big guy on a short leash, gave him what he wanted: sex and lots of praise. But then mechanoids were almost always smart. And they had control of their emotions. Vernal envied the advantage. But they were also second-class citizens, barely tolerated in the Empire and not at all anywhere else, so despite their intelligence, most were uneducated, ignorant enough to believe that the Emperor kept his money in a giant piggy bank.

“It’s good for you. Means he won’t figure out you’re gonna ditch him until it’s too late.”

Yunique grabbed Vernal’s throat and he choked. She was strong, almost as strong as the fighter, but there was no hate in her eyes, no sneer, no twitch of jealousy or frustration. Her personas—the hyper-sexual damsel, the harmless airhead, the filthy whore—were practiced, flawless, but she had no use for them with Vernal. Her eyes were a void. Staring up into them with her hand crushing his neck, Vernal knew she wouldn’t hesitate to kill him as soon as she was able. And the same for Dobie.

Vernal looked at her droopy eyelid. If it had been caused by simple mechanical damage, a tinker would have fixed it up quick, which meant it was something deeper, in her electronic brain perhaps. Vernal wondered what had happened.

The police cruiser passed on the nearby street and Yunique looked up as she held Vernal’s throat. The car rolled slowly and repeated the announcement over loudspeakers. The police were asking everyone to clear the streets for their own safety. That was unusual. Something big was happening.

“What’s going on?” Yunique put her mask back on.

Dobie appeared over the trunk. “Was he giving you lip?” He nodded to Vernal, whose face was red.

Yunique let go and Vernal sputtered and gasped. “I don’t like that awful voice of his. Why are the police here?”

Vernal coughed.

Dobie shook his head. “I don’t know, but from the corner it looks like they’re clearing everything south of Lex.”

Yunique rested a hand on the fighter’s arm. “Baby, we should go.”

Dobie nodded at the scoundrel. “What are we gonna do with him? Should we take him to Pimpernel’s?”

“Jeez, Dobe,” Vernal cleared his throat. “You’re such a moron.”

“Aww baby,” Yunique comforted the big man. “We can’t do that. He’ll just rat us out about the key.”

“Right.” Dobie looked confused.

Yunique waited for him to make the obvious suggestion.

Vernal couldn’t take it anymore. “You’re gonna have to kill me, stupid.”

“I know that, asshole!” Dobie punched Vernal in the head.

“Ow.” Vernal shook his head. He kept his eyes closed. They were watering from the sting. “You can’t do it here, though.” As if on cue, the police siren yelped again. “But I know a good place.”

“He’s trying to trick us,” Yunique warned.

“No,” Vernal sighed. “I’m not. I know a place outside South Carton. It’s abandoned, out near Hoosegow.”

“I have a better idea.” Yunique smiled and slammed the trunk shut.

Vernal heard doors open and close. The car rumbled to life and drove away. He wanted to yell for the police, but there was no way they’d hear through the trunk and over the sound of their own speakers. He looked around. It was dark. He could see little but the metal ribs of the car’s sidewalls. He smelled the gas and heard it jostle back and forth in its tank. He squirmed against his bonds. The tape cut into his flesh and constricted his blood supply. The nub of his severed finger burned. It was infected. His eyes kept watering and the tears dribbled down his face.

All he could see was Yunique’s dead eyes staring down at him. He’d be dead within the hour if he didn’t do something right now.

“Shit.” Vernal cocked his wrist and felt the larval stinger nick the electrical tape again. He wiggled his hands behind his back and repeated the motion, and in a few moments, his arms snapped free. He reached down to cut his feet loose.

The car skidded to a halt and Vernal hit his head against the bars of the back seat. “Shit.” He grabbed his head. Now it hurt on all sides.

There was a distant explosion. Vernal stopped. He held his breath. There was screaming. Lots of screaming. It was muffled, perhaps far away, but inside the thick-walled trunk it was impossible to tell.

The car shook as if on a trampoline. Vernal felt himself move into the air and fall again. Then silence.

He listened.

The car shook again. And again. And again. He could hear yelling from inside the cab. His captors were arguing. He felt the car speed up and slam to a halt, as if it had crashed into a wall. He hit his head. Then the entire car lifted into the air and started rolling end over end. Vernal flailed in vain for support, reaching for anything to steady himself as he spun like a load of laundry.

The battered vehicle slammed on its side and the trunk’s latch gave way. Vernal flew onto the road, naked. His open, screaming mouth slammed onto pavement. He chipped another tooth.

He was on his back as the megalosaurus standing over him crushed the front of a nearby bus and let out a primal bellow. Vernal felt a spray of shattered windshield. People were running and screaming. The panic in the air was tangible.

Vernal’s bloody mouth dropped open. It burned. “Fuck.” His hand hurt. His head hurt. He was dizzy. He started to feel sick.

The monster bellowed again and tore through the side of a building with the spikes encircling its head. Vernal covered his head as glass and sheet metal bounced off the sidewalk. Then the beast stepped on the trunk of the car and launched it into the air with its next stride.

Vernal hunched and vomited uncontrollably. He didn’t see the creature’s other foot dropping on top of him until it blotted out the sun.

(SEVENTEEN) The Perils of Domesticated Minotaurs

Gilbert’s mom was a circus contortionist and secret double agent who had introduced his dad to the Black Hand. She was an excellent cook who spoke seventeen languages. She was a weapons expert who had invented a new kind of undetectable poison that auto-lobotomized anyone who ingested it. She could sing opera but would do so only for Gilbert. She was beautiful and had modeled briefly before settling down to raise a family with Carl Tubers.

At least that’s what Gilbert had told himself as a child. Certainly he had no evidence that any of that was not true. But whether she was a contortionist or not, he was certain of one thing: His mother was not a soldier in the fascist Second Army of the Master Race. She couldn’t be, not least because of the strange biology required, but also because Amazons would never tolerate a half-breed.

“Tell me, Gilbert, what do you know of my people?”

Colonel Sryn walked behind Gilbert as he stood on a high metal catwalk overlooking a line of female mechanoids on the floor below. They were queued in front of a large vat, and one by one, the woman at the front would remove her undergarments and empty her tank into it. Several of Pugs’s burly minotaurs, complete with electronic shock collars, kept watch over the scene. An industrial furnace rumbled in the corner.

“What?” Gilbert hadn’t been listening. The pain in his arm was a constant distraction, as was the surreal scene before him. The vat looked to be full of semen, milky and congealed.

“Amazons. What do you know of us?”

Gilbert wanted to mention fascism, genocide, The Great War, all the things he learned in school, but none of that seemed like good topics to broach with rifles pointed at his back. He looked at Lette, who stood surveying the scene and smoking a cigarette, eyes shrouded by sunglasses, skin white as ivory, lips black as death. For a moment, Gilbert thought he saw her hands shake. “I know if any of you are . . . touched by a man, you turn into that.”

“Typical,” the colonel snorted.

“What?”

“Nothing about our contributions to literature, to science, to music. But I suppose I can’t blame you. You were never taught any different.”

“What are you going to do with me?”

“What do they tell you about The Great War?”

Gilbert glanced at Lette again. “That a lot of people were killed.”

“And that was our fault?”

Gilbert shifted his weight without thinking and pain stabbed through his broken arm. “I don’t know.” He grimaced.

The colonel stood at the railing and surveyed the line of mechanoids. “It’s not ‘touching’ that causes the metamorphosis. Calling it that makes it seem so genteel. Have the balls to call it what it is, for Kraxus’s sake. Those women were raped.”

Gilbert didn’t respond.

“Did you know that during the war, soldiers were encouraged to rape any Amazon they encountered, soldier or not?”

Gilbert shook his head.

“Posters were circulated—I’ve seen some of them, antiques—they showed voluptuous women in traditional dress, which for us is no more than animal skins, a display of our hunting prowess. It’s warm in the jungle, so there’s no need for us to cover our breasts, or to wear underwear, facts the Therian propagandists exploited artfully.”

“I didn’t know that.” Gilbert just wanted the conversation to end. He wanted to look for an escape but dared not turn his head.