Deadstock

seeking youths be responsible for spiriting away so many of them?

The side path he had taken from the parking lot joined the main walkway to the front doors. When he came to the fountain he paused to glance back at the street, the traffic flowing past, cars containing people bent on their own destinations, troubled with their own problems. He did not know that when a gang girl named Nhu and a mutant named Haanz had recently died in this yard, none of the people speeding by who had happened to look over and glimpse their strange deaths had bothered to call the forcers, even with communication devices right before them on their consoles or around their wrists. This was Punktown, after all.

Still watching the distant movement of the street, Fukuda felt that this was the last time he would ever see the world outside this building again. All along he hadn't realized the true destiny for this place, but now he understood. He had built Steward Gardens like pharaohs had once built pyramids for themselves. As a tomb.

He smiled bitterly when he recalled his brother John's mockery, comparing James with his army of quasi-alive statues to the Chinese Emperor Qinshihuang, who had filled his tomb with an army of 8,000 terracotta warriors. No wonder the encephalon had never worked right, no wonder this place had been cursed, when John had agreed to help him but had done so without faith, without enthusiasm, without the support he should have shown for his twin brother.

James shook his head. Shook away the anger. Hadn't he left it in the past yet? Hadn't he accepted that the anger should only be at himself? Couldn't he learn that lesson at last, before he went inside to meet his punishment?

Before he could will himself to go inside, however, someone came outside to meet him. Perhaps the person had been watching him from within, and grown impatient.

Though he was dressed in a forcer's uniform, and though the Blue War clones with their blue-mottled faces all looked the same, Fukuda knew from past experience that this was Adrian Tableau's top security man, Mr. Jones. The one who had tortured him, and the one he had tortured in turn.

Jones had a gun in one hand, and beckoned Fukuda with the other. 'Mr. Fukuda,' he said calmly, 'would you please come this way? We've been expecting you.'

Once he hit Beaumonde Street, it hadn't been hard to find. There was a name on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved on a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.

Jeremy Stake noted that there was one vehicle parked in a lot to the right of the building, and a helicar on its roof. It didn't surprise him that Fukuda had reached this place before he could, but he swore under his breath anyway. His hoverbike had been delayed by the snags in traffic, but he prayed that Fukuda's larger vehicle had been delayed even worse, shortening the time between their arrivals.

Stake overshot the building and continued on to an office block next door. He left his bike in its lot, thinning out as evening set in, and jogged back toward the apartment complex on foot. He entered its unruly grounds as warily as if he were creeping through a jungle of blue vegetation, bent low and darting from cover to cover. He moved in on the left flank, not wanting to come straight at the front doors. Every window stood open. That was odd, but it would grant him a stealthier entrance.

As he got closer to the building, he glanced up at the darkening sky several times, expecting to see a helicab with the number 23 on its belly floating above him, but he had lost sight of it when he had entered Beaumonde Street. So, had he only imagined that it was following him? Paranoia, perhaps, but he couldn't blame himself for that.

The Darwin .55 was out of its holster and nosing ahead like an anxious bloodhound.

When he reached the building itself, Stake squatted below the window of one of the apartments, poked his head up gingerly to peek into the unlit room beyond. Judging the room to be empty, he hauled himself over the sill. He was inside.

The door leading out of the apartment and into the hallway was open. When Stake stepped into the murky corridor, he saw that every one of the inner doors for the apartments had come open, like the windows. Open like the eyelids of a corpse. He detected a distant shouting that the hollowed-out husk of the building caused to echo.

He ran lightly in that direction.

'Let me go to my daughter!' Fukuda exclaimed, as Jones held him back. Tears had filled his eyes at the sight of her, sitting in one of the front lobby's chairs, again unbound but with one of Mr. Smithee's hands resting heavily on her shoulder. 'If you've hurt her in any way…' he began.

Smithee grinned. 'You'll do what?'

'Daddy,' Yuki was sobbing, holding out one hand to him. 'Daddy.'

'Did you check him for weapons?' asked Adrian Tableau.

Jones nodded. 'Nothing. Not even the syringe he injected me with last time.' Jones showed an unsettling smile to the man whose arm he gripped.

'You injected me with it first, you fucking belf!' Fukuda snapped back at him. He saw a look come into Jones's eyes like that of a leopard before it springs onto its prey, but he shifted his anger to his business rival. 'I'll tell you what I told your toy soldiers the last time, Tableau. I had nothing to do with your daughter's disappearance! I hired a man to look for Yuki's kawaii-doll, as I'm sure these thugs have told you. And I admit my investigator did track your daughter down to an apartment in Subtown, on Folger Street. The apartment of her boyfriend, named Brat Gentile. He was the last person to see her, not me. They slept together, his brother told my man, and when he woke up your daughter had disappeared.'

Adrian Tableau came close to Fukuda, his lower jaw thrust forward. 'I've heard this boyfriend dung before. If my daughter had a boyfriend I'd have found him by now. And even if she did, who's to say you didn't snatch her as soon as she left this alleged Subtown apartment? Or are you suggesting this boyfriend did something to her?'

'You ask him about it! He's gone missing now, too, so he's the one you need to be looking into.'

'Oh, I'll look into it, all right. But right now I'm looking into you.'

'I'll talk to you all you want, but you have to let Yuki go. She's a child! She's innocent!'

'A child, like my Krimson?' Tableau suddenly bellowed, spittle flying in the other man s face. 'An innocent, like my daughter? Oh, we can t let anything bad happen to your daughter, can we?' Tableau looked past Fukuda toward Smithee, gave a barely perceptible nod. Fukuda turned his head to see Smithee drop down into a crouch beside the weeping teenager. He removed the shiny black shoe from her right foot, as gently as a shoe salesman. He then pinched the edge of her navy blue knee sock, and began rolling it down, exposing her hard youthful calf.

'Stop it! Stop it, you fuck!' Fukuda roared, trying to throw himself at the man, but Jones pulled him back and now took hold of his other arm as well, wrenching them both behind him.

'Don t,' Yuki cried, but she only watched helplessly as Mr. Smithee pulled the balled-up sock off her foot.

'Mm,' Smithee said, running one finger along her wrinkly sole as if to tickle her. 'Cute.' Next he wiggled each toe, starting with the biggest. 'This little piggy went to market. This little piggy went home.' When he came to the last and tiniest toe, he didn t let go, held it by its plump end. From his holster he drew his pistol, which he pointed at the base of the toe, the muzzle brushing cold against her skin.

'No, no, no, no!' Fukuda screamed.

'Oh, it won t bleed much,' Smithee assured him. 'The beam will cauterize the wound. But her foot won t be so pretty afterwards, I m afraid. Especially if the next little piggy goes to market. And the next. And the next.'

'Please,' Yuki begged, 'why don't you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don t you just ask her what happened?'

'Yes, yes, do that!' Fukuda blubbered. He wished he hadn t stomped Yuki s phone to pieces after all. Wished he had it in his jacket pocket right now.

'I m not here to play with blasting toys!'

'I know you don t want to try that approach, because then it means she s dead. But if she is dead then you ll want to know why, and you could hear that from her own lips!'

'Her own lips? Her own ectoplasm, you mean? Listen to you, Fukuda. And here I thought you were a man of