Deadstock

'Yeah. I don't know if they sleep, exactly.'

They left the function room and shut its door. Together, they started back toward their camp in 1-B. Walking slowly out of deference to Mira, Javier asked, 'You got a gun?'

'No.'

'Take this one. I got one of my own.' He handed her a pistol, explained, 'That was my friend Brat's. I gave it to him for his birthday one time.'

Mira examined the mean little pistol as they walked, and smiled as if he had given her a flower plucked from a field they wandered through. 'Thanks.' She tucked it in the waistband of her white shorts.

With her hands free again, she reached up to rub her temples in circles with her fingertips. Seeing this, Javier frowned. 'What? Headache?'

'Yeah. I get bad ones a lot.'

'Related to your gift?'

'I guess so.'

'My mom used to get bad headaches, so she had me rub her feet.' 'Her feet?'

'I guess she thought it was like acupuncture, where one part of your body is connected to another.'

'I think that's just a story you tell girls so they'll let you rub their feet. It's so innocent. 'I did this for my mom, baby, really.''

He chuckled. 'Yeah, maybe you got me on that.'

Mira glanced up at him, embarrassed. 'I mean, not to say that anyone would want to rub my feet.'

'What? Why wouldn't they?'

'Well, they're so small.'

'Come on. So who likes girls with big feet?'

By now they had returned to 1-B-and in the middle of a heated argument. At first Javier expected it to be between the Snarlers and the Terata, until he saw the fury twisting the faces of Nhu and Mott. Nhu was holding her forearm as if she'd been injured. The Choom whirled toward his leader and said, 'She was trying to use her wrist comp to call the forcers down here, man!'

Javier glared at the Vietnamese girl. 'I thought I told you-'

'How long should we stay in here, Javier? The muties have been here eleven days! Maybe they got no place better to go, but I have a family waiting for me! This is crazy-all we have to do is make a call! We're right in the middle of Beaumonde, here! Cars are driving right past us! We aren't stuck on some other planet.'

'We can't get the forcers involved in this. We'll be thrown in prison.'

'I'd rather be there than here.'

'Oh, really? I don't think so. We can get out of here, and we will. Where's your comp?'

Mott held it up. 'I got it.'

'You almost broke my arm, you dung-dong!' Nhu screeched at him.

'Blast you.'

'All right, everyone give Patryk your hand phones, comps, whatever.'

'Why Patryk again?' Nhu sulked.

'Because he's one of the only people I can trust anymore, looks like. Besides, he's got a backpack.'

'Nobody better steal that boy's backpack,' the mutant named Satin quipped. 'They'll have all the food and all the phones.'

'Nobody should be panicking,' Javier snarled at Nhu, but then he ran his hot eyes over all the other faces, whole and mutated, as well. Barbie with her five. 'We lose our nerve, and our cooperation, and we die. You wankers think I've lived to be twenty-five by acting all panicky every time I was in danger?'

'Yeah,' Tiny Meat told Nhu. 'You get out of Folger Street and suddenly you forget what you are?'

'Shut it, scrotum-face.'

'Bitch.'

'All of you!' Javier roared. Silence prevailed at last.

Tall, quiet Patryk collected a few devices and stowed them in his backpack. Nhu had begun to sob. She backed into one wall, slid down to its bottom, and wrapped her arms around her legs. 'I'm sorry, okay?' she whimpered. 'I'm sorry.'

Near her, the spidery Choom mutant named Haanz cooed, 'You'll be all right. It will all be okay.' He started to reach out with his extra-long fingers to stroke the silky black hair that hung down to obscure her face, now that she had freed it of her lime-green swimming cap, but Nhu lifted her head abruptly.

'Don't touch me!'

The mutant withdrew his hand and averted his eyes shamefully.

'Patryk,' Javier said, taking him aside, 'get on Nhu's comp and look up Steward Gardens on the net. Maybe you can find us something useful, blueprints or whatever. Maybe something we can use to fight or shut down those zombies out there.'

Patryk nodded, and moved into the next room.

Javier sighed, then lifted one arm and sniffed at himself. 'So the showers work?' he asked Mira.

'Yeah. Come on, I'll show you how to use them.' She preceded the leader of the Snarlers to the bathroom.

'I'm sure he isn't quite that dumb that he can't figure out how to use a shower,' grumbled Satin, strapped in his cybernetic pony.

Flattened-faced Nick gave a snort of amusement. 'Jealous, man?'

Satin turned his bald head and gave his friend a withering look.

In the bathroom, Javier watched Mira lean into the shower stall to point out the various controls to him. When she was done explaining, she turned around to see that he already had his shirt off. She seemed stunned by the bared sight of his lean upper body, with its scattered scars and tattoos. The stylized dog head baring its fangs, the insignia of the Folger Street Snarlers, adorning his left pectoral.

When he saw her embarrassment, or whatever else was there on her face, Javier smiled and said, 'Sorry.'

Her eyes moved to a long raised scar above his collarbone. She reached up to touch it lightly with one finger. 'What was this?'

'We got into it last year with a Tikkihotto gang. They had those axes of theirs-what do you call 'em-e-ikkos. This kid whacked me with his e-ikko.

I could've had this smoothed away, but that's money, and…' He shrugged. Obviously he was fond of his battle scars.

She still rubbed the scar with her finger, her face as absorbed as a doctor's. When she finally started to lower her hand, Javier closed his own over it. He guided it down his chest, her finger like a pencil. Tracing across his nipple, lingeringly. Down the steps of his ribs. Into the hair of his belly.

His eyes held hers. Neither of them smiled now. It would be too vulnerable, just then, to do so. Or it might make things seem joking. This was not a time for joking. Their situation was very serious, here: in matters of war, and in matters of attraction.

CHAPTER NINE bed cames

Stake despised the situation comedy called Buddy Balloon, starring a mutant discovered by the producers in Tin Town, by the name of Buddy Vrolik. Buddy was a 150-pound sphere, without limbs, without facial features, without anything but artificial ports into which nutrients were fed and from which wastes were pumped, these substances contained in tanks stored under the motorized cart he rested in. He could move this cart about via a chip implanted in his brain, which resided inside that globe like a yolk in an egg. Similarly, he could have his thoughts expressed through a speaker in his cart, in the form of a synthetic voice.

In Tin Town, prior to his discovery, his sister had let Buddy sit all day in a child's plastic swimming pool in her living room, soaking up a nutrient solution usually fed to malnourished infants from a baby bottle.