No Dogs in Philly (4 page)

“
Shit,” the man with the flask
said. “Shit, shit, shit…”

“
What about the tunnel?” the
androgynous one said. “We could run down that way. Follow the
elzi.”

This seemed like the only answer, but as she
thought it the dog turned and looked at her and she knew it was
wrong.

“
No, we can’t.”

“
Fuck this.”

The androgynous one ran to the platform edge
and hopped down. After a second’s hesitation the man with the flask
followed far less gracefully, and then the other man. Ria stayed
where she was and the young girl’s head jerked between her and the
others now running down the tunnel. The androgynous one disappeared
into the black beyond the firelight and then the young girl sprang
after them screaming:

“
Wait, wait for me, don’t leave
me!”

They disappeared.

Ria sat there, staring at the black mouth of
the tunnel where they had gone. Her heart pounded a thousand beats
a minute. She felt the sweat wetting her clothes again. The
scrabbling of the elzi began to fade. It was quiet, so quiet she
could hear the drip drop of water falling from the ceiling. She was
alone, except for the dog. It walked toward her slowly, coming as
close as it ever had, touching her, and then not stopping, entering
her body. It was a strange feeling, like heat and cold at the same
time and a thousand needle pricks on every inch of skin. She looked
at her hand and saw that it both was and wasn’t, understood that
only her eyes could see the hand before her, that the light no
longer obeyed the rules of a dumb universe, but a new set of rules,
rules of a magical ghost dog that said, “Back, away, this person is
not yours to touch. She is hidden.”

There was a sound, a slithering nail on a vinyl
record, a sound that crawled inside her ears and wriggled down her
spine and made her want to jam knitting needles in her tits and
scream. In the flickering light of the trash fire the creature
looked like a train-sized centipede, countless legs jutting out at
strange angles, scratching along any surface they could grasp to
push the body forward. At the front was a mass of flesh—bodies, at
least a dozen torsos, crammed together, and they were alive. They
moved together, swaying like seaweed, eyes all closed, and as they
passed she saw their mouths all twitching together as they
whimpered—a dozen men, women, and children all whimpering together
in tenors and basses and sopranos.

The creature stopped and then reared its head,
its mass of human bodies, twenty spindly metal legs clawing into
the floor and walls and ceiling to force the head up to the fire to
bring the dozens of bodies within five feet of her, and in unison
their eyes opened and they stared at her, right at her, and she
sat, frozen in terror and horror. The whimpering stopped. They
reached, arms grasping as far as they could out from the fused lump
of flesh they shared, licking their lips. And then they spoke:
“Come…come…come…come…” a whisper, all of them over and over in her
ears and in her brain: “Come…come…come…come…”

The words trickled through her nerves, nudging
her, moving her, she felt herself stand. The arms were welcoming;
it was her family, they wanted her, they loved her. She felt it,
the warm beam of love from her family drawing her in. She would
reach out, touch them, join them.

A jagged pain cut through her, a dagger of ice
cutting through the warmth. It was that damn dog! It had taken
everything else from her and now it was taking this too! She took
another step, and another dagger of ice and then another and two
more in her eyes and she saw herself suddenly inches from the
grasping hands, the fingertips worn to yellow bone from scratching,
the eyes white and dead, the lips cracked and torn and bloody, and
she screamed. The hands drew back and the eyes rolled wildly and
the mouths shot open and screamed back at her. Then the creature
reared up and crashed back onto the tracks, shaking the ground and
showering dust and bricks and tile from the ceiling. The legs
twitched frantically and it tore down the tunnel, segment after
segment of twisted metal, and was gone.

Chapter 4

The Gaespora were a group of scientists who had
pushed human experimentation to the point of becoming a new
(superior) species. They were invaders from another dimension. They
were people born naturally with psychic powers. They were a hoax
perpetrated by the American oligarchs. They could have sprung from
radioactive dog shit for all Saru cared—the fact that mattered was
they had her clit in a vice and were predisposed to
squeeze.

The office was nice, she had to admit, top
floor of the Vericast building, open air, with an ungodly expensive
cloud shear to cut through the smog and bring real, honest-to-God
daylight down around her. She had seen the light from the ground of
course—the bright, golden beam that swiveled around the big, funky
skyscraper in the city center—but she hadn’t realized it was the
sun. It felt good, the light; it was warm, and gazing up she saw
blue. There were birds up here, and not just pigeons and
crows—little blue birds and red birds and birds with big funny
tufts and brightly colored feathers. They sang and flew from tree
to tree, more trees than she had ever seen. She couldn’t even
believe there were that many kinds of trees in the world—short and
fat and tall and with wrinkly bark and smooth bark and apples and
long limbs that drooped down; there must have been hundreds. There
was a pond too, and the water was clear and reflected the blue of
the sky. It was so perfect and beautiful it made her angry. She
felt like crying and she didn’t know why.

“
We had planned to shear the whole
city,” ElilE said, making his third attempt at pleasantries. “But
the city council would not partner with us. Imagine: sun and sky
for all of Philadelphia.”

“
Then why didn’t you just go ahead
and do it yourselves?” she said, taking the bait, even angrier now
that she’d spoken. “Who would stop you?”

“
We are guests in this world. We
act only in partnership with humans.”

“
Bullshit,” she laughed (but why
did she still want to cry?) The man, ElilE, was definitely human,
even if he had a fairy-ass name. Human face: check. Human body:
check. He was barefoot like all the other Gaesporans—they had
winced as she stomped through the grass in her steel-toed boots—ten
human toes: check. He even wore a high-fashion black and silver
pinstripe caji suit like any other dickhole bizman…and yet there
were things that were odd about him. His eyes, green, normal, but
so steady—yes, steady, that was the word. She wasn’t a psychologist
by any stretch, but she’d talked to a fair spectrum of humanity and
could identify some cause-and-effect emotions: I whack your knee
with a bludgeon; you scream. I accuse you of fucking your sister;
you look shocked—or at least feign it. I drop hints and clues and
suppositions—subtle and not—and your eyes twitch or your tongue
licks your lips, or you blush or redden or sweat or
gasp.

There was none of that with ElilE. He sat
cross-legged on a smooth, moss-covered bolder—they’d brought her a
chair, hard wood that made her sit too straight—hands on his knees,
staring and sometimes giving words. He was still, perfectly still.
His breathing never varied, his eyes blinked but it was strangely
regular. She decided to risk a scan, a quick visual—camera
based—that wouldn’t trigger any alarms. He might notice the
dilation of her pupils and the processing power might cause her to
slur a word or skip a beat, but for all he knew she was drunk and
high.

Amazing. Eight breaths a minute in even
intervals. Six blinks per minute, again in even intervals. Pulse:
forty. He was controlled for sure, but that didn’t signify anything
inhuman. Good dopple training could get you the same result, or
psycho yoga, and of course there were drugs you could take to make
your body do anything you wanted—drugs manufactured by the
Gaespora.

“
Okay, what do you want? Why did
you bring me here?”

It was time to get this over with. The chair
was starting to hurt her back and the sun was in her eyes—damn it
was bright, and it felt like it was burning her skin. She wanted to
get back into the cool shade of the city below, away from this wind
and bright and the goddamn loud-ass birds chirping everywhere.
Also, she was fairly certain that something had crawled up her
pants and was biting its way to the money spot.

“
You are a private investigator,”
ElilE said.

“
Obviously you know that
already.”

“
We want you to find a
girl.”

“
Kidnapping?”

“
We don’t know. She is in danger.
There are others looking for her. If they find her they will kill
her.”

“
What kind of ‘others’ are we
talking about? I don’t do riv jobs. I play nice with my fellow
PIs.”

“
We believe she is hunted by
feasters.”

She stopped scratching her thigh. Well that was
interesting.

“
Sorry, I’m not the one you want.
You need to talk to Morgan Friar—he deals with that mumbo
jumbo.”

“
We have already contacted Dr.
Friar. He has refused. You are our second choice.”

If this was a ploy to grab her attention it had
worked. Friar refusing a case?
Doctor
Friar? He’d never
mentioned he was a doctor. Did he think it was a goose chase? Or
was it real, too real, too dangerous? She thought again of the
pudgy little man hunting down feasters—creatures, if rumor was to
be believed, that made vampires look like fairies.

“
Why didn’t he take the
case?”

“
He would not say.”

“
Why do you think he turned it
down?”

“
We do not speculate.”

“
Honey, this whole case is
speculation so far. You
believe
she’s in danger? You
believe
there are feasters involved? The only fact you’ve
managed to produce is that the best man for the job doesn’t want
it.”

Seven blinks—an extra half-blink at the end.
Did that signal annoyance? Frustration? Persuasion? She took it as
a victory she’d managed to stick a pinhole in his poker face. He
said nothing. He closed his eyes. The vast, glassy, sail-like wind
shear suddenly stopped—she hadn’t even noticed the sheen of energy
across it until it stopped. The wind picked up, the birds chirped
more frantically, the black clouds of smog spiraled
overhead.

In a fraction of a second, ElilE darted
forward, so quickly her eyelids had just reached their peak in
surprise as his finger touched her forehead. She blinked; it was
night, quiet, the birds chirping softly, the sound of insects in
the bushes, a black sky overhead crowded with a billion stars, so
bright it lit the world around her—and color, she had never known
there was so much
color
in the universe. ElilE sat across
from her still, as though he had never even moved. He stared and
his eyes reflected the sky—black, so black, with a billion points
of light.

“
You are a skeptic,” he said, and
his voice was different now, not the tenor of a man, but a rustling
many-voice of wind in trees and rippling ponds and clicking insects
and even a few human sounds laughing on the sidelines.

“
You do not believe in us. You
think us human—and we are, but only so. Your world and our world
are alike but not perfectly. We built this world ages ago, back
when we were different from what we are now. We accept your
presence here though it was unplanned. We recognize your existence
and we are grateful for the shelter you provide, flawed as your
doings are.”

He pointed up to the sky and her gaze followed,
transfixed.

“
Know that as many stars as are in
this universe, there are universes within a higher plane of
existence, which itself is as common as the universes within it.
These universes are not static beings—they live and move and touch
and consume one another. Your universe and our universe touch for
we have made it so, and we can exist in your universe in the margin
of similarity. We live as we can as thoughts within your kind and
through thought we drive action and with action we bring your world
closer to our own.

“
There is another force that has
touched your universe, a force which you would understand as evil
but we understand as the impetus of hunger. It is a universe vaster
than our own collective and far vaster than your own, and it seeks
no such union, no shared knowledge, no balance, no compromise, no
existence other than its own. It has consumed many other universes
and grown in power with each consumption, eventually to stand alone
and form the basis of a new universal plane, to ascend in existence
and birth smaller existences based upon its own. We do not
understand its ultimate motive—if it can be understood—but we know
in its motion it will destroy and consume all other
universes.

“
You have seen this force and
named it even; it is the dark place in your shared consciousness,
the place you call the UausuaU. It besets your universe as it
besets ours, and no action we have seen will stay its course. It
grows in power as it turns the margin of similarity towards its
own. We grow here, slowly, and as our powers increase we have seen
other universes appear, sensing the kill, carving off what they can
to strengthen themselves. Far beyond this planet are other
organisms, other wars, other visitors to your universe.