K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

Batty was dead; they'd told him that, Bryant and a couple of his other old pals from the blade runner unit. They'd come to the side of Holden's chrome-railed bed with their hats in their hands, wedging themselves into the small space between one gurgling machine and the next; the doctors had turned down the fentanyl drip enough to bring him into semiconsciousness, in which he'd been able to hear Bryant telling him that the group of escaped replicants, the batch he'd been assigned to, had all been successfully retired. As if he cared.

For its own reasons, the department gave him partial credit for the track-down, even though all he'd managed to do was inhale a hollow point through his breastbone, from that lump Kowalski. Bad for the morale of the rest of the squad, to let one of their number get his lungs blown out and not put a little something extra in his paycheck. The hospital visit had been when Bryant, the whiskey breath seeping through his brown teeth even stronger than usual, had shown him the morgue shots of the dead replicants. Including Roy Batty, who'd been the leader of their violent little band — even through a narcotic haze, the image of that unmistakable face, with its shock of white hair and gaze still coming in loony from the other side of the marble slab, had made a deep impression on him. Unforgettable.

"Hey — how about turning on some lights?" That was Batty, speaking into the spinner's comm mike. Holden had watched in silence as, Batty had tuned in a narrow-beam radio link with some identified ground station; the frequency numbers on the control panel looked way off any band with which he was familiar. "If I have to bring this thing in blind, I'm going to feel like kicking someone's ass afterward."

Holden looked out the side of the cockpit. At darkness, far beyond the reach of L.A.'s lit-up sprawl. How far had they gone? Up ahead, through the transparent curve, he could discern a jagged silhouette along the horizon, mountains outlined by stars and the moon's soft glaze.

Some other blue light, not the moon, spilled across the bleak landscape, blinking on and off. Holden brought his gaze around — it took some effort; he could feel himself tiring — and saw a landing rectangle outlined by the bright flashes. "There you go-" A voice crackled from the speaker on the control panel. "Make it quick, willya? We're getting sand in our boots, hanging around waiting on you."

"Where…" His own voice came out a feeble whisper. The effort of speaking, on top of just staying conscious and lifting his head from the seat's padded rest to look around, had come close to exhausting him again. The dials on the black attache case, visible beneath the web of surgical tape that bound it to him, jittered as the device kicked more oxygen into his body. "Where… is this…" Getting out the last couple of words had brought black spots dancing in front of his eyes.

Batty's disquieting smile swung in his direction. He reached over and made a small adjustment on one of the attache case's valves. "As I told you before. Someplace special." The smile widened, deepening the lines on the weathered face. "It's someplace you were always going to wind up."

No lock-on from the ground station, as far as he could see; Batty was taking the spinner down manually, centering the vehicle motionless above the blue lights, then hitting a straight vertical descent. The spinner's undercarriage hit the ground hard enough to bounce Holden in his seat, the attache case against the hollowed spaces of his chest.

"Sorry about that." Batty started flicking off the engine controls. "These freight jobbies are a bitch to maneuver."

"That's… that's okay," whispered Holden painfully. Maybe it wasn't too late to try ingratiating himself with the folks who ran the afterlife. "I'm sure… you're doing your best…"

Batty glanced over at him. And smiled. "You haven't seen my best yet,"

That worried him. He could hear the cargo space's door unsealing and, beyond, the sound of rolling wheels and running feet.

"Take it easy with this guy." Batty supervised Holden's unloading and being strapped onto a gurney. "I didn't bust him out and bring him all the way here, just so you could drop him on the ground like a carton of eggs."

"Whatever." A bored-looking younger man, whitecoated, scribbled something on a clipboard, then looked up. "You need a receipt on this?" He lifted one corner of a pink duplicating form.

"'A receipt…'" Batty rolled his eyes. "Fuck me."

"It's the regulations," said the younger man.

"Maybe instead, I should just pull your underbrained head off and stuff it down your trousers."

"Hey. Don't want the receipt, just gotta say so." He used the clipboard to gesture toward another couple of men standing around. "You guys wanna help get this case into surgery?" He leaned down and patted Holden on one straprestrained arm. "Good luck, pal." A stage whisper.

"Take a hike." Batty let the other men push the gurney as he walked alongside.

Hell, or whatever part of the afterlife he'd landed in. looked fairly ramshackle to Holden. A sprawling compound of rusting Quonset huts, windblown sand dunes mounting up the curved sides; other shabby prefab cubes made of tilt-up foam-core walls, the structural glue leaking out from the seams, as though melting in the night's dry heat; everything dusted with the same fine grit that eventually wound up in the streets of L.A. Turning his head to the side on the gurney's thin pillow, Holden watched the unimpressive and barely functional architecture roll by, lit by the sickly radiance of sodium-vapor globes strung along the tops of tarred wooden poles.

At the edge of the artificial light, struck more by the stars and moon, a razor-wire fence penned a flock of abandoned police vehicles, spinners and heavier cruisers with scorched flame-out marks along their engine exhausts, cockpits shattered or drilled with a line of spiderwebbed holes from high-caliber automatic weapons fire.

"This the one?"

Holden looked above himself and saw an unshaven face. A hand with black fingernails took a half-smoked cigarette away from the face's mouth; grey ash drifted down and was sucked into one of the black attache case's air intakes.

Either another doctor or some kind of butcher — the unshaven man had on a long white coat spattered with dried bloodstains. Holden wasn't sure which possibility filled him with greater foreboding.

Batty reached over and plucked away the cigarette. "Show the poor bastard some consideration." A red arc, then a burst of sparks as the stub hit the ground.

"They're all poor bastards." No show of annoyance; the unshaven man appeared beyond the expenditure of energy that would take. "All right, let's get him in and do it. No sense standing around out here." His nicotine-stained fingers began flicking off the controls on the black attache case.

"Hey…" Panic set in as Holden heard the attache's machinery wheezing toward silence, the small clicking and gulping noises slowing, then stopping. "Wait… a minute…" A grey veil began thickening before his vision; despite the heat of the desert air, his face and hands suddenly felt cold. Numbing fingers groped for the switches and buttons above his chest, but the gurney's straps kept him from reaching them. The tiny ball dropped in the valve, the hoses and tubes drooping limp and uninflated.

"Quit worrying." The unshaven doctor or butcher fumbled a cigarette pack out of the pocket of his white coat, lit up another. "You got at least three minutes or so before any real brain damage starts setting in." Dragged deep, coughed, then gestured to what appeared to be a couple of assistants standing around. "Yo, guys, get over and give me a hand with this one. Come on, let's get to work."

"Hang in there, pal." Batty's deranged smile floated in the mist above. "See you on the other side,"