Deadstock

and closer, they didn t really become that much clearer, only louder. He could not make out what the owners of those many garbled voices were saying. Whatever it was, they were saying it all at once, their droning voices lifted in a monotonous chant.

Javier turned the corner of a street, and found himself looking down a particularly wide boulevard. It was filled with people from one charred shore to the other, thousands of people perhaps, yet all of them had their backs to him. It was just as well. From the looks of their ragged clothing and their burnt scalps, it was better that he could not see their faces. They looked like an army of the dead. Not only were their voices raised to the sky, but their arms as well. They seemed to have invited this annihilation, and praised it still.

He didn t study them too long, however. He merely noted them peripherally, because there was something else that commanded his attention, froze him in his tracks as if he had been turned to stone by the sight of it. It was the something he had come here to find.

It loomed at the far end of the street, filling the end of it and then some. It was as tall as some of the intact buildings that flanked the broad avenue. Impossibly vast, impossibly alive.

This creature, this entity, would have soared even taller had it not been crouched on its hind legs, its arms resting on its knees as if it sat upon a throne. Its color was primarily gray, though its swollen belly lightened to a translucent milky white. Its hands and feet looked like the fleshless digits of a skeleton, but were webbed as if it might be an aquatic being, and this impression was furthered by its two great wings, which-large as they were- could not possibly support its bulk in flight. These appendages were tightly ribbed, resembling the dorsal fin of a sailfish, and thus might have been more fin than wing. In addition, the thing s head evoked incalculable ocean depths, devoid of all light. Without eyes, without ears or any other features except a cluster of squirming tentacles where a face should have been, each tentacle ringed with silver and black stripes, each tentacle thick as a tree trunk. The 'ocean' this creature was meant for, however, might have been the ether of another dimension. Or a black gulf that yawned between dimensions.

There was also something about the entity that suggested the mechanical, blended with the organic. Portions of the thing s skeleton seemed to be external, like the cage of ribs above the swell of its belly, and the complex bones of its limbs, but these structures appeared machined rather than grown.

There was a network of pipes snaking between the bones, wires like veins running in and out of the glossy skin, the neck thick with bundles of cables that communicated between head and body. Steam issued from crater- like ports in the elbow and knee joints. Heat that made the air about the entity ripple was vented from grilles-or were those gills?-in its mountainous form. And beneath the skin of the being s domed head bulged the knotted convolutions of a brain (encephalon, Javier thought numbly) with no skull to contain or limit its growth, its emanations.

Was this the entity's intended form? Its true appearance? For some reason, rather, it bespoke to Javier a kind of confusion of the flesh. A barely checked chaos. As though, in laboring to achieve its ultimate manifestation, the creature had consciously or unconsciously emulated features of its environment. The building it had gestated inside. And the city that surrounded that building.

Too mesmerized to feel terror or anything much but awe, Javier watched as several smaller forms came scuttling out of vents or gaps in the titan s body, scurried across its surface, then burrowed back inside. From this distance he couldn t tell if they were gray, human-like figures crawling on all fours, or huge insects like microscopic nanomites mutated into a much larger state. Or some combination of both.

Yet now his attention was diverted from the creature, back to the crowd of chanters gathered to pay it homage. He realized they had lowered their arms, and that they had all begun to turn in unison. Every one of them, turning to face him.

They had no eyes; those had been fused shut. But they grinned. And as if in a single rumbling voice, the congregation chanted one phrase much clearer than what they had uttered before.

'Kill me,' they all said at once. 'Kill me.' Each time, louder. 'KILL ME.' Until the sound became so thunderous, it didn t seem to come from their mouths anymore. It seemed like a booming thought transmitted from the very brain of the colossus, instead.

'Javier? Hey.'

With a supreme effort, he tore his eyes away from the creature, turned his head to see Patryk standing there-no, sitting there-beside him. Sitting beside him in the front seat of the lime-green hovercar. Javier didn t even remember bringing it to a stop in the parking lot, and lowering it to the pavement. The rain flowed down the windshield in sheets. Because it was dark, Patryk could bear to go without his shades, and his eyes peered at Javier with concern.

'Are you okay?'

Javier nodded slowly. After a few moments in which to calm the racing of his heart, he grunted, 'Let's go.'

The two of them, with Theo also lending a hand, unloaded Satin s mechanical pony. Once on the ground, Satin was able to unfold its limbs and raise himself to a walking position. The pony s yellow paint shone dully in the murk, but the other four had dressed entirely in black, Javier and Patryk even wearing black ski hats pulled down to their eyebrows.

Javier opened the trunk. In it lay the two suitcases. Rather than lift them out, he merely unlocked and raised their lids to give access to their contents.

Before coming here they had already broken the green clay into pieces, rolling them into soft worms. They had molded other chunks into spheres between their palms, like snowballs. Like grenades.

The explosive compound was a 'smart material.' The primitive mind incorporated into its very substance was receptive to signals transmitted from a little device Javier carried in his pants pocket. The material could be programmed in any number of ways. Different chunks could be detonated individually, like grenades if thrown. Or, all of the material could be made to detonate at once.

Satin was too clumsy for stealthy work, and so he would remain with the hovercar to notify the others by hand phone should a forcer patrol car come nosing around. Also, he and his submachine gun were ready to cover the retreat of the others, should they come running with Blank People-or that whatever-it-was they had encountered in the basement-in pursuit.

The other four wore pouches with shoulder straps, and into these they loaded the balls and worms of green clay. Then, they exchanged grim looks, and scattered into the wet darkness.

Barbie and Theo approached the right side, or B-Wing, of the structure together, each of the opinion they were watching over the other. They squeezed between two hedges, then Theo helped Barbie pull her awkward bulk over the low wall of the ground floor walkway, which corresponded with the two balconies above it. On the other side, they immediately hunkered down and reached into their pouches for the first worms of clay. Wheezing, Barbie pressed hers against the base of one of the black metal doors to the apartments. The dark windows spaced across the building made her nervous. Might a number of Blank People leap out at her at any moment? As she rose to move on a little bit, and plant another piece of explosive putty-Theo doing the same in the opposite direction-she eyed the nearest window more closely. The brows of several of her faces knotted in confusion. Had the window been barricaded? There was something pressed flush against the open frame. She took a step closer, and even started to reach out to touch the barricade but quickly withdrew her hand.

It was a slate-gray material, glossy as plastic, that blocked the window s opening. A wall of living flesh.

Patryk had stolen around to the far side of the building: A-Wing. He, too, began flattening worms of clay against the base of Steward Gardens. He, too, looked up and realized that every open window was blocked by gray flesh. He shuddered, but kept up with his task. This was the thing that had nearly blinded him. The thing they had come here to kill.

Javier had moved to the front of Steward Gardens. He had just positioned a worm of clay against the foundation of the building when his hand phone beeped. He brought it close to his face. 'Yeah?' he hissed.

It was Barbie, whispering in blended voices. 'Guys, the thing s gotten huge. It s pushed up against all the windows. It s ready to bust out of this place.'

Javier studied the windows across the front of the building, noted the way the city s distant lights glistened on the wet dark skin that filled them. 'I see it. Looks like we can forget about going inside to plant the rest of the stuff. Just keep moving around the perimeter. Boys, you got that? Do not attempt to go inside.'

A pause, and then Patryk joined in the conversation. 'Got it.'