“You won’t be in there long, okay?” Hurley said impatiently. “Just until we can get this crazy damn Orange Bunch boarded on their boats.” He switched from speaking to Stake to addressing several of his fellow guards over his helmet mic. “Anderson, Grau, Pulver – I’m taking Stake to solitary for now until we can ship him out with the rest of Red Block. I’ll be right back. You got things covered okay?”
“Make it fast, man,” Stake overheard one of the guards respond. “We’re already short of people now that we’ve got men taking those two injured prisoners to the infirmary.”
“Dead prisoners,” someone else corrected, cutting in. No doubt one of the guards who had been conveying the bodies of the Tin Town Maniacs. “You watch yourself with that one, Hurley.”
“I got it under control,” Hurley replied.
The two men had almost reached the exit, located at the opposite end of the great room from the doorway the prisoners were filing through, when a sudden uproar caused them to halt and whirl around.
The prisoners at the end of the line were looking above them and pointing at a ghostly white ribbon that circled overhead like a tatter of ectoplasm.
“Hey!” Stake started to call out.
And then, a figure the general size and shape of a man, but resembling more the animated skeleton of a demon, seemed to step straight out of the air. No flare of light or puff of smoke; it suddenly just was. Its blank face, armored as if with chitin, framed by wriggling millipede legs like a flower of bone.
As the prisoners at the tail of the queue cried out in surprise, the eel-like harbinger shot down to the figure’s head and joined its streaming mane. Became part of the whole… its job done, as if it had helped open the way, a key in some unfathomable lock.
The prisoners near the phantom spun away to scatter. Hurley slapped his hand to his gun. Yet they were all too late.
The demon thrust out its arms to either side, and just as quickly as Stake had caught hold of both Tin Town Maniacs, it seized two prisoners by enclosing their heads in its long fingers. Between those bony fingers, Stake saw the blue eyes of one of the men gone wide in horror.
But a second later, all three of them were gone. The entity vanished in a blink, just as it had manifested. The departure of the two trapped prisoners, however, was more messy. Twin detonations of vivid redness made Stake shut his eyes and turn his face to the side involuntarily. Even from this distance, he felt fine drops of blood and a few nuggets of flesh reach the skin of his face.
When he looked back, there were two great splatters on the rec yard floor where the men had been standing. Other prisoners closer to the scene than Stake and Hurley looked as though they had just emerged from swimming in a lake of blood.
A scream echoed in Stake’s mind, dwindling slowly like a siren down a long tunnel. At first he had thought it was a half-blurted cry from the throats of the two prisoners, but they hadn’t had time for that. He knew it was the cry of the entity, instead. Not heard, but felt in the very folds of his brain like ricocheting electrical impulses. Alien impulses… not his own…
The last of the cry of rage faded away into nothingness.
From the doorway Hurley had just been about to usher Stake through, a stream of men suddenly trotted into the rec yard: Colonial Forcers, helmeted and dressed in gray-and-black urban camouflage, boots clomping, carrying bulky assault engines in their arms.
But the monster was already gone.
EPILOGUE: SERENDIPITY
Due more to overcrowding at the Paxton Maximum Security Penitentiary than benevolence, Jeremy Stake only served three months for his impersonation of Edwin Fetch at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. His killing of two fellow inmates was investigated, but dismissed as justifiable. That the victims had been the reviled Tin Town Maniacs worked very much in his favor – as did the eyewitness testimony of prison guard Omar Hurley.
Some of the Trans-Paxton prison gangs, such as the Orange Bunch, fragmented and were shuffled into other gangs. The Muties, however, naturally melded with the larger mutant gang at Paxton Maximum Security. Stake stuck close to Null and Hassan Billings for the duration of his sentence, in case of further trouble from Fetch, but none arose and he seldom even glimpsed the man. Blur he never saw again, nor did Null and Billings know where he’d been taken. To another prison? A hospital for the mentally ill?
They liked to believe he had gotten his shapeshifting gift under control long enough to masquerade as one of the guards, and had strolled out the front door to disappear into Punktown.
As for the abandoned Trans-Paxton Penitentiary being dismantled, destroyed, or shifted out of its pocket, and the pocket closed up – none of this happened. Stake wasn’t surprised… nor by the news that the prison would now be utilized as a remote outpost for the scientific study of interstitial life.
Two months after his release from prison, Stake found himself working on the assembly line at SynthLife Automatonics, helping create highly realistic androids in what was called the Little Gravure line (individual models bearing such names as the Saaya, the Meiki, the Hikaru). Too expensive for anyone but the most affluent to privately own, the adorable Asian-styled machines were more commonly utilized in legal brothels.
But Stake’s factory gig was not because of a continuing difficulty in obtaining assignments as a private investigator. It was, in fact, one such assignment.
SynthLife’s owner had summoned Stake personally, with the request that the detective pose as one of his workers so as to look into a very vexing problem. For several months now, a number of his expensive finished or near-finished androids had been acting very strangely, erratically, when it seemed nothing could be wrong with their programming. In fact, three of them had managed to vanish from the plant altogether. When Stake asked if they’d been stolen, the owner told him that didn’t appear to be the case. Security cameras had shown the first of the valuable missing androids simply walking out of the building, escaping as casually as could be, after work hours. Following that night, though, the security cameras throughout the plant had been malfunctioning, probably hacked into.
A newly hired security guard had intercepted the last runaway sex doll. He had ended up unconscious with a concussion and broken arm. That was when the owner had decided to try another approach to the dilemma, focusing on sorting out its cause.
He suspected industrial sabotage, perhaps from a competitor. An inside job, some of his own workers taking money in return for causing havoc. Stake took the assignment, but he thought it might get messy if the problem turned out to be a syndicate boss – such as Punktown’s foremost crime lord, Neptune Teeb – at a disagreement with SynthLife over pricing or such. After all, the syndies were behind those brothels that acquired the Little Gravure models.
Well, Stake decided, it still beat another gig in prison.
Stake was not involved in covering the delectable automatons in their soft realistic flesh, but in constructing their inner frameworks, and the work was often surprisingly manual and greasy. At least, the tasks they gave him to do. His instructors were two human workers named Brook – short, huge-bellied, and bug-eyed – and the taller, thinner, and sunken-cheeked Nolan. Neither of them had much patience for training a newbie, and they picked up on the mutant’s subtly unfinished countenance. One of them would grouse, purposely loudly enough for Stake to hear, “Look at this guy, huh? Tell me he isn’t a clone. I think the company’s bringing in clone labor now to replace us. They can work clones for peanuts.”