No Dogs in Philly (11)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 11: Closure

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They cut her hair and shaved her head, locking her skull in a vice after she smashed up the first would-be barber’s chin with a headbutt. They stripped her down and sprayed her with a hose and tossed floury burning delousing powder at her. She got in a few good kicks and punches before they got the straight jacket on her.

It took three zaps of a taser to drag her to a cell and she got a solid crack in the ribs when she managed to squirt blood in the sergeant’s eye. She screamed and swore and tried to bite and kick, but none of the pigs would really touch her, really let loose and break something, give her a hard, satisfying pain that she could clutch and nurture and giggle with. Her cell had even been washed—no spit or blood anywhere—and then a medic had calmly shot her full of darts (a proud, high dose that turned her into a fish) while he bandaged her hands.

Then there was nothing to do but sit, so she screamed and then they gagged her, and then there really was nothing to do but lie on the cold cement and think. She didn’t want to do that, didn’t like that the drugs were wearing off, the tranqs and the booze, and the damping field shut down all her nonvital implants so she was alone in her own mind with no news or chat or porn or comedy or foreign tragedy to distract her from her own. She tried to hum but the humming became a whimper and then tried screaming through the gag again but no one could hear her and no one reacted.

She was alone, alone, alone, alone, and her thoughts were her own.

McCully was there, telling her to go back, but she was busy. Terry was there too, in less detail, except for the voice, which came through in agonizing clarity, the terror, the panic—how had she missed it before? It had gone right through her, right past her. But now she was stuck with it. Am I safe? What if he comes back? He won’t come back. I’m a detective. I know what I’m doing. You see, Terry, you fall into a gap, a wide gap, the gap that most people fall into—you aren’t important. You are powerless, and if someone wants to hurt you, they can and no one will stop them. Not the cops, because they don’t care. Not me, because I don’t care. Not McCully, he cares, he cared, enough to go back.

What did he say? What did he even do? Terry’s gun, the little six-shooter, hadn’t even been fired. They hadn’t had a chance. Did they die together, multiple perps torturing them as a team? Or was it the one, the same mysterious figure she’d dismissed? Had Terry heard McCully screaming from the living room? Had they been able to scream? She could never know.

She wasn’t there.

And Friar, now you’re back, eh? Lecturing me again. What would you make of this? Would you have stayed? Of course, because you were good at this job. You had a method, a purpose, a skill other than cracking skulls and an easy association with filth. You bastard, why didn’t you take the case? Why did you leave it to amateur night?

The cell door swung open and two pigs grabbed her by the feet and dragged her down the hall wheeeeee! They hefted her to her feet and made her hop through a door into a small interrogation room—cement floor, metal walls with a two-way mirror, hard metal chairs and a metal table.

Ah, shit.

There he was, ElilE sitting calmly, so straight in the chair across from her. The cops undid the straitjacket, carefully, tasers at the ready, but she was out of fight. There was no point anymore. They left her in the paper hospital gown and slunk away, closing the door behind them. She smirked and leaned back in her chair, casual, calm, fooling not even herself.

ElilE said nothing. They stayed that way for a long time and then she broke.

“Well?” she said angrily. “Are you here to interrogate me?”

“Those deaths were not your fault.”

“Just shut up right now.”

He did. They sat in silence again. She felt very tired. She wanted to go back to the cell, to curl up and sleep, maybe get them to beat her again.

“Well, I guess you can take this as my resignation because—”

“Don’t be flippant,” he said, sharply, breaking his calm. She felt the words like a whip, felt herself rising, reaching for the prod that wasn’t there, bearing the steel nails they’d ripped out, hissing like some monster and then she was empty. She collapsed back into her chair and she felt a shiver like all her anger turning to poison, and she hated herself like she had never hated anything before. Then that too was gone and she was empty again, nothing.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and maybe she really was. “People…people are dead…it’s my fault.”

He said nothing.

“Anyway, I quit,” she said. “Find someone else.”

“You can’t quit.”

“Watch me.”

“Do you know the name Fanny Duvak?”

“Never heard it.”

His face was still as stone. Could he tell it was a lie? Could she tell any of his lies? It was all lies anyway. Any time two humans spoke, nothing but lies on lies to themselves and each other.

His arm darted forward and his fingertip pressed against her skull. The light dimmed, she heard the voice, the singing multitudes:

“You will respect and obey the Gaespora. You will resume your mission. This mission supersedes everything. You will perform it to the best of your abilities, using every resource at your disposal. You will perform no actions other than eating and sleeping until the mission is completed successfully. You will contrive and deploy all necessary deceit in order to allay suspicion and explain your behavior. You may only perform tasks necessary to maintain your cover…”

But this time the voice felt far away. Quiet. She heard other voices. The rustling of the white bell flower in her ear. And something else. A music that was almost a color. A wavering blue. A growl. She grabbed ElilE’s wrist and pulled his hand away.

“Trying to brainwash me again? Sorry, don’t think that’s going to work.”

ElilE took this development in stride. He withdrew his arm and used it to straighten his suit.

“Telepathy, huh?” Saru snorted. “Is that what that is?”

“If that’s how you understand it, then you may consider it telepathy.”

“Oh, I may, may I? Guess what? You may kiss my ass.”

“We’ve been going over your evidence.”

“You mean you’ve been going through my brain, scanning my implants—hey, what do you think of my new flower? Like it? You can see it, can’t you? No one else can but I bet you can. Is that telepathy too?”

He blinked that extra half blink. “We know you found our list.”

“Yeah. So, you already know who the women are. Why don’t you go find them, go protect them, so they don’t all get goddamn murdered!” She hadn’t meant to shout but that’s how she found herself, and standing too, slamming a fist into the table.

“We cannot.”

“Bullshit!”

She fell back into her chair and glowered at him. He just sat there like a plant. It was amazing how much she disliked him.

“Oh…oh, I get it now.” She laughed. “I know why you can’t do this. You’re scared. Scared of the Hungry God.” She took his silence as an admission. “Scared they’ll knife you too. I get it. With what I’ve seen, no one is safe. Not even you.”

ElilE smiled, the ugliest thing she’d ever seen, a smile with no warmth, no pleasure, nothing that deserved a human smile—the smile of a cruel joke. And then he laughed, a laugh to match his smile, bitter, horrid laughter.

It made her skin crawl.

“I admit to some enjoyment when your thinking is so comically brutish. It does interrupt the tedium of interacting with you.” He laughed again, hysterical, and stood and threw up his hands. “How nice, the luxury of being concerned with one’s personal safety. Truly, if the sacrifice of my life could lead to a useful outcome I would offer it. But you see, that is not my decision to make.”

His arm slashed down in a blur and the table crumpled into a V against the force. He grabbed his chair and slammed it against the wall and it flattened, smashed, pieces flying across the room. Saru scrambled back into a corner; it seemed like he grew and the light bent around him so he was a giant towering over her, surrounded in shadows.

“I am but a tool. A vessel. A receiver. Even my name is not a choice. You may have noticed it is not a human name. Not an Earth name. Not even a name in the way we understand names. It is a palindrome. A symbol of eternity. A mark of the gods. It found me in nightmares before I could form words. It snapped like a collar around my neck when the Gaespora took me. And it constricts my every thought and desire and instinct.”

He slammed a fist into the wall. His arm disappeared to the elbow and the reinforced cement cracked like it had been hit by a wrecking ball. “Do you know what I hear in the quiet? I hear the death throes of the universe. Alien life, a buzz and gurgle and croak of riotous carnage. Do you know what I see when I close my eyes? An empty Earth; a dead rock stripped to the core. A black hole where our sun once burned. A sea of human bodies that live an endless death, a silo of heartbeats and carbon. I see pillars of flame and boiling craters. Pale spheres that turn mass into light and light into mass. I see a battlefield of gods and my home as debris.”

His face twisted like some creature, a gargoyle on a cathedral, his skin warped and wrinkled, jutting out in hard lines, reptilian, demonic. Saru felt the hatred, the rage, more than emotion; it was energy, heat washing through her, hurting her, burning her insides. Her mouth was wet and her tracing finger came away with blood.

“Find the women!” he cried. “Save them! Sweep out across the city. Protect them. Do something; you must do something! Ha! We will not. We cannot. Because we are afraid. Afraid that the UausuaU will interpret our action as a threat. That it will cease viewing this planet as merely a carcass to digest. And if you dislike how the Hungry God treats its food, you cannot comprehend the doom that awaits its enemies. Then you would know why they call my gods the Sad Gods.”

ElilE hissed out a breath like steam and then inhaled. And then again, and again, and the rage sucked back, and the hate was drawn out of her, making her lighter, freer. She realized she’d been holding her breath and her heart was vibrating in her chest. The shadows fell away, back to the harsh white LED brightness. ElilE shrank down to his normal height, regaining his impeccable, mannequin calm. He held out a hand to help her to her feet, but she scrambled away and stood on her own.

“I get it,” Saru spat. “You don’t know the right move so you’re gonna sit on the sidelines. Pretty chicken shit if you ask me.”

“Courage is a luxury of the strong,” ElilE said.

Something clicked in the back of Saru’s mind, an old key twisting in a rusted lock.

Fanny Duvak. At last she remembered the name. It was her, one of the aliases she had used to navigate the security bureaucracy—a burner ID, something you swiped once and then tossed. But it had her picture, had a scrap of data winding back to her and someone with a deep knowledge of the Net had followed the path.

She was on the list.

There was no quitting. No escaping. She had to solve the case, she was part of it already, from the very beginning. Blue eyes, about as dull and gray as you could get, a cheap imitation, dollar-store blue, but enough to tie her in with these other lucky candidates. Hell, it even made sense. She was more beast than human, a wolf in pants and a peacoat.

She grinned—ah, she couldn’t help it. It was just so damn funny. She laughed, a little at first, and then a whole lot—butt-clenching, belly-aching laughter that bounced around the room and only made her laugh more. Oh my god she was gonna piss herself. She laughed so hard she started to cry and had to lean against the wall for support. Then she sorted herself out, giggled and tried again. She looked ElilE in the eyes, her grin spilling out, biting down on it.

“You must have known I was a target before you hired me,” Saru reasoned. “Probably when I got all famous. My face splashed over the feeds. You realized I was on your list under an alias and I was very exposed. You hired Friar to babysit me—he was smart enough to smell something fishy and decline. So you did the very least you could do, really the absolute least, and hired me so I would be on alert. All this time I’ve been searching for myself.”

ElilE’s silence was as good as a confession.

“Ten million dollars,” she said. “I can’t believe you low-balled me like that. Make it a hundred. Make it a billion. Make it infinity. Make me the queen of goddamn Earth. If I’m a target then I’m a host. And if I’m a host then I’m a god.”

ElilE didn’t refute it. Didn’t react at all. Maybe he was scared.

“So, you need me alive? Is that why you brought me in? I’m touched.”

Though that wasn’t quite it. Something was off. It didn’t make sense. If they just needed a warm body and a heartbeat they could have whisked her away to a fortress prison at the start. Yes, they wanted her alive, but…something else too. Not that she was going to wait around and find out.

“Have these pigs release me.” Saru stood and cracked her knuckles as she made a fist. “Scrub this interaction from my record. In fact, delete my record. Take me off the list. Take me off every list in the world. I don’t exist.”

ElilE turned his head towards what she guessed was one of the hidden cameras in the ceiling and nodded. The door behind her buzzed and swung open. Half expecting him to stop her, Saru walked to the doorway and paused.

“Transfer the money into my account,” she said. Giving orders—she could get used to this. “Ten million square. I found me, after all. Contract fulfilled. Case closed.”