Deadstock

'I thought Rabal told you we were trustworthy,' Javier said, referring to their regular dealer, a Kalian. But he obliged by slipping out and passing to the KeeZee the gun that had belonged to Brat.

'I don t even trust Rabal,' the KeeZee told him. 'That s how I stay out of prison. And how I stay alive.'

Next into the room came Patryk, wearing dark glasses to protect his still red and sensitive eyes. He handed over a pistol as well. Then Barbie, of the five faces, entered the rented room. She relinquished her own handgun, followed by a boot knife nicely balanced for throwing. Lastly, in stalked Satin in his new cybernetic pony, though it was actually far from new. It was bulkier and more awkward than his previous sleek black model, its yellow enamel paint chipped and blistered, but at least it moved his pupa-like body from here to there. Scowling suspiciously, he directed one of his mechanical limbs to turn over a stubby little pistollike submachine gun.

'Your iron could be better,' the KeeZee remarked, locking the weapons inside a suitcase resting atop a bed too short to accommodate his looming frame. 'Interested in upgrading?'

'Maybe next time,' Javier told him. 'Our finances are limited. Right now we want to concentrate on the stuff that Rabal said you could get for us.' 'As you wish.'

The KeeZee knelt down to drag two larger suitcases out from under the bed. The mattress creaked from their weight when he set them down. He flipped both lids open, and took a step back to let the others see around him.

'Huh,' said Satin.

'Whew,' two of Barbie's faces said. Her largest face just gurgled and dribbled some saliva.

'That should be enough for what Rabal talked about,' the KeeZee said.

'Anything we should know about this?' asked Javier.

'Yeah,' the KeeZee s fabricated voice grunted. 'Be careful.'

Money changed hands. Satin's powerful cybernetic arms hoisted both pieces of luggage, as if he were a bellboy employed by this seedy establishment. Confiscated weapons were returned. Seeing his guests out, the KeeZee asked Javier, 'So what are you folks, a street gang or something?' His tone, even translated, sounded a bit derisory-but people of his vocation made their living off street gangs. Javier suspected the derision had to do with the two mutants. Javier wasn t happy about that. Nor was he happy about the being's lack of discretion in asking him such a personal question, but he answered anyway.

'Yep,' he said. 'We're the Folger Street Terata.'

It was well into night, but better than that, it was raining hard besides. Even the most ambitious worker at the office block next door had gone home hours earlier. Except for Quidd's Market and some notable theaters and restaurants in Beaumonde Square proper, this was not an area that seethed with nightlife. During the working week, the moneyed took themselves straight to the safety of their upscale apartments-such as, had it ever opened, Steward Gardens would have provided.

Safe from the stabbing cold of a pounding, late autumn rain. Safe from the criminals, the addicts, the gang members that might venture as far afield as Beaumonde Square if boredom or curiosity or restlessness compelled them, hoping to score one extra-fat wallet to pay for a larger than usual measure of seaweed or purple vortex, buttons or beans, kaleidoscopes or red shockers.

Javier Dias had tried all those substances and more in his twenty-five years. But tonight, his blood was pure. His mind was clear. It was not the first time he had been focused on avenging fallen comrades; he'd been doing that for over ten years. Yet, tonight it felt different. He felt much, much older now. By decades. By centuries. It was both a bad and a good thing, in ways he was only beginning to understand.

Javier had bought the hovercar they rode in from his cousin, Santos, at a great discount. In addition, this week Santos had given Javier a job doing such odds and ends as polishing the outsides of the pre-owned vehicles, and sometimes cleaning the blood of their former owners (often gang members, drug dealers, pimps, and low-level gangsters) from the interiors. Santos promised to take his younger cousin under his wing, to have him selling the used and repossessed cars himself within the year.

As had been a popular style for a number of years, most of Santos s vehicles sported elaborate artwork on their hoods and sometimes on their flanks and bonnets as well. The reproduction of a mural by Diego Rivera or a painting by Frida Kahlo, or a whimsically disturbing engraving such as El fin del Mundo by Jose Posada. A lot of Day of the Dead motifs, rich with skulls and skeletons in sombreros, and a lot of blood-soaked crime scene photos from ancient tabloids such as Alarma! Years ago, when visiting Santos at his lot-his fat cousin s face ever hidden under a brightly colored wrestler s mask, different every year- Javier had fantasized about owning a vehicle with this latter type of embellishment: the glassy-eyed or shotgunned face of a murder victim filling the whole canvas of the car s hood. Now, strangely, he found these vehicles distasteful. Now, he only wanted something cheap but reliable.

So the five of them rode in a battered hovercar with vividly purple Day of the Dead figures cavorting all over its lime-green body. It was not exactly nondescript, particularly for the Beaumonde Square area, but again-it was night, and raining in torrents of near biblical proportions, as if the sky had been rent open to reveal a strange sea hiding behind it: the inverted sea of another dimension.

There was the sound of a gun s slide in the car, as a first round was fed into the chamber. Javier knew it was Brat Gentile s gun, which he had given to his brother, Theo. Theo had heard about the reappearance of the last of the Folger Street Snarlers. Theo had sought them out. And when Javier had told him his story (the real Javier this time), Theo had asked to come along tonight. With the gang again, just like old times.

'Steady there, man,' Javier advised him.

Theo grunted. The fear that had filled him lately had been eclipsed by his bloodlust. He stared out his window as Javier pulled into the lot to the right of Steward Gardens.

Earlier that evening, before the rain, there had been a vehicle parked here. They did not know that. They didn t know that a woman with blue skin had forced the vehicle s owner to help her carry another man, who was unconscious, to this vehicle, and then drive the three of them to a hospital. The vehicle s owner had resisted at first, because someone he loved had disappeared inside the building, but the blue woman had persisted, and the man had given in, knowing that there was nothing to be done. Javier and his friends were not aware of any of this. And because of the dark and the downpour, they had not spotted the helicar abandoned in the lot atop the building, either.

All Javier knew was that he had to come here tonight… tonight. Oh, he had planned on coming back. But there was something about tonight. Something that had alerted him, something that drew him. An intuition? An instinct? It was probably the dream he had had the night before. As he cruised the hovercar around to the rear of the building, where it would be best shielded from the street, fragments of the dream floated to his consciousness like the debris from a ship sunken in lightless depths. The fragments began to coalesce. The sunken ship of his dream arising, as if a film played in reverse.

In the dream, he had been walking through the streets of a city. But the city could not be Punktown. Couldn t be. Because a city with the feral spirit of Punktown, the pulsing life, the humming vitality- however polluted and diseased-surely could not be reduced to this carbonized ruin. This snuffed-out, three-dimensional shadow.

What buildings remained standing to either side of him (the rest crumpled to mountains of twisted rubble) were mere skeletons of girders. Hollow shells. Blackened husks. Vehicles still clotted the streets, but depending on their material were fused together or melted into barely recognizable shapes like puddles of candle wax. The sky was black with clouds of soot, and scattered fires still burned across the city s jagged horizon, making the bellies of the clouds glow red.

If this was, in fact, Punktown, where were its people? The millions upon millions of Earth colonists, most of them by now having been born here, and where were the native Chooms? And the many other races that had settled here, in lesser numbers? The gray-skinned Kalians, the tendril-eyed Tikkihottos, the beetle-like Coleopteroids, the sightless Waiai, the scaled Torgessi and so many, many others? He saw no mutants. No clones. Not even their skeletons. No trace of any of them, at all. Unless… unless this black, glittering ash that covered the cracked pavement. Unless this obsidian sand that crunched under his soles.

Gusts of wind swept the dust up into his face occasionally, but he wore protective goggles over his eyes. Patryk s, maybe. But it wasn t the dust that caused him to wear them. It was something else. Something he was afraid to look upon with his naked eyes. As much as he dreaded this something, however, it was what he had come here to find.

Finally, signs of life. Voices carrying on the wind, like the ash. Muted, at first, muffled. But as he got closer