“You make this too easy.” He recognized the voice—it hadn’t been that long ago—but had no chance to reply. Another sound, that of something hard and narrow whipping through the air; he doubled over in pain when the object hit him in the gut. Another poke knocked him off his feet.
The lights came on. He found himself, as he gasped for breath, looking up at Dave Holden, standing above him, the leg from the kitchen table in his hands. “Goddamn it . . .”
Deckard managed to squeeze the words out. “What the hell . . . was that for . . .”
“That was for jerking me around for so long.” Holden put the end of the table leg against Deckard’s shoulder, pinning him back down to the wall beneath. “Not just the last time I was out here talking to you, but all the times before as well.” He jabbed the table leg harder. “You must’ve been laughing your ass off, when I walked out of here before.”
Getting onto his knees, Deckard knocked the table leg away with the back of his hand. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Oh? You will.” Taking a step backward, Holden called out over his shoulder. “Hey, come on out here. I’ve had my fun.” He brought his smug gaze around to Deckard. “This is going to trip you out, buddy. A real blast from your past.”
As he stood up, Deckard could hear someone else emerging from the farther sections of the safe-house apartment. That could be a problem, dealing with two people; he would’ve been able to take Holden, with or without the table leg between them. His ex-partner looked as frail as he’d had during their last confrontation, with the bio-mechanical heart in his chest audibly clicking and laboring to perform its functions. Whoever it was that’d come out here with Holden, the person had given him a shot of confidence; smiling, Holden threw away his crude but minimally effective weapon.
“Say hello.” Holden tilted his head toward the doorway at the other side of the room. “I think you know each other. In a way, at least.”
Deckard glanced away from him, in the direction indicated. . . .
And felt the world drop out from beneath himself.
“Jesus Christ—” A shock wave of adrenaline pulsed through him, drawing his spine rigid.
Deckard’s startled brain spun gearless for a moment.
Ducking underneath the side of the door, a dead thing stepped through, finishing the zipping up of his fly. “Visitors always come around, you know, when you’re indisposed.” Roy Batty straightened up and flashed his manic smile, eyes bright. “Hey, it’s good to see you, too.”
“No . . .” He took an involuntary step away from the smiling, hands reaching behind himself for balance. “You’re dead . . . I know it. I saw it happen . . .” An entire memory reel fast-forwarded through his head, a jumble of water sluicing blood over rusted metal, then a scruffy white pigeon, a winged city rat, climbing into the sky from hands that had fallen open and would never close upon anything again. “You’re dead, Batty . . .”
“Well, yes and no.” Batty’s image—Deckard wasn’t sure yet whether it was real or an hallucination—gave a judicious shrug. “A copy of me is dead—hell, lots of copies are—but I’m not. The original has proven to be somewhat more durable.”
“That’s the truth, Deckard,” With his hands free of the table leg, Holden had dug into his jacket pocket and come up with the same gun he’d had before. “Or at least I think it is. For the time being. This guy’s the templant for all the Roy Batty replicants. Including the one you met up with before.”
The explanation made sense, of a sort. Looking closer at the figure standing before him, Deckard could see that the man appeared older than the one that existed in his own memory banks. Both bio- and chronologically older, hands bonier, a little loose flesh around the tendons of his neck, lines that came with the passage of time set into his face. A Batty replicant would never have reached this stage; the built-in limitation of a four-year life span precluded it.
Unless-he supposed it was a possibility-something had been done to prolong its existence past that hard cutoff point.
Whether the Roy Batty in the tilted room was human or not-that wasn’t something he was worried about now. The shark of again seeing that smiling face had passed. What concerned him was the gun in Holden’s hand, and the cooperative air between the two men.
“What’s the deal?” He looked from one to the other. “I have a feeling you didn’t come out here just to say hello.”
“That’s the truth as well.” Holden kept the gun pointed at him. “We’re taking you in, Deckard. We’re going to hand you over at the police station downtown.”
“On what? Administrative charges?” If these two didn’t know about Pris having been human, and his being tagged for her murder, he wasn’t going to tell them. He couldn’t believe that these two loose cannons were in on the LAPD loop; maybe they could be bluffed. “So I made unauthorized use of a department spinner when I split town-that’s not a hanging offense. They can reimburse themselves out of the money I left in the pension plan.”
“Can the bullshit.” Holden shook his head in evident disgust. “Replicants don’t have 401-k’s.”
“What’re you talking about?”
The two men shared glances and a smile between them, then looked back at Deckard.
“You’re a replicant. You know it, and now we know it. Retirement for you is a whole different sort of thing.”
“Actually, Roy, I’m not entirely sure how we should proceed here.” With his free hand, Holden scratched his chin. “Why are we bothering to talk with this schmuck? He’s a replicant-we’ve already established that-so why don’t we just ice him now? We can drag his dead carcass into the station just as easily. Easier, as a matter of fact.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Batty looked annoyed. “It’s not just that he’s an escaped replicant here on Earth. He’s the only lead we’ve got on the conspiracy against the blade runner unit. If we snuff him before we can shake him down for what he knows, how’re we going to find out who was behind setting you up, and killing Bryant, and all the rest of that stuff?”
“Oh, yeah. Right . . .” Holden appeared confused, his gaze wandering to some abstract point near the apartment’s uppermost wall. His face and throat had drained white, as though whatever repair work the doctors might have done on him was now beginning to come apart.
“Wait a minute.”
“We can’t even take him in to the station until we find out more shit.” Even more insistent, Batty’s voice prodded the other. “We have to find out who in the police is tied up in this. Otherwise, we could be walking into there and handing him right over to the people he’s been working with. Then they’d ice our asses.”
“I said, wait . . .” With his trembling, upraised hand, Holden tried to ward off the other’s arguments.
Deckard looked from one to the other. Geriatrics, he realized. Like having been captured by a mobile wing of the nearest old folks’ home. “You people are completely screwed up.” He took a quick couple of steps and picked up the wooden table leg that Holden had tossed aside. Before the other man could react, he turned around and knocked the gun from his hand.
The partial impact was enough to send the enfeebled Holden sprawling.
The other one was faster. He sensed Batty launching himself from across the room; a split second later .a forearm was against his throat and the man’s weight on his back. Locked together, they toppled and crashed into the wall beside the door.
A hand brought up by his chin was enough to peel Batty’s choke-hold away. The lined visage snarled at Deckard as he got his palms against the other’s shoulders and pushed him away. Deckard shook his head. “You’re too old for this nonsense.” He raised his knee against Batty’s abdomen, prying away the clawing grasp of the withered hands and throwing him on top of Holden’s dazed, prostrate form.