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 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.