K. Jeter - Edge Of Human

He didn't care about that. All this arguing about who or what was human and who or what was not, and how you could tell or could never tell-his brain was starting to ache from the convoluted, seemingly endless labor of picking his way through the branching corridors. A maze, thought Holden. That's what it is. The basic mental pattern of the clever psychotic. Contagion the danger; Holden knew he had to be careful. In his weakened state, still getting over the effects of having an entire new heart-and-lung set shoved into his chest, it'd be easy to get sucked into Batty's ideational construct. If nothing else, it showed why the Roy Batty replicant had become the leader of the band of escaped replicants: the original was a natural scoutmaster, an organizer of fun and games. Play hard, die hard.

"Let's get out of here." Batty laid a hand on Holden's shoulder, steered him toward the morgue's door. "This can't be all that cheerful for you. I mean, finding out you're a replicant and all-that must be hell on your self-image. I know I'd take it hard. Plus seeing some corpse who's the exact same thing as you… sort of." He gave a little shudder. "The symbolism is really kind of morbid, you know?"

Shift change over, banks of grey steel lockers closed, the wooden benches between them polished to a smooth luster by generations of bare cop buttocks and the black serge of uniform trousers; in the close atmosphere hung the scent of sweat and fungicide. He knew that smell, could remember it from his own tours of duty before he'd promoted up and out. With each panting breath pulled into his lungs, Deckard ran further into his own past, one that he'd rather have forgotten. His shoulders barely cleared the narrow space, the black uniform's sleeves torn by collision with hinges and corners of metal.

"There! Take him down!"

He heard the shout and the clatter of jackboots hitting the bottom of the stairs behind him. Without a glance over his shoulder, he dived with arms reaching out straight, the weight of the gun gripped tight in his fist. He hit the bare, damp concrete as a line of automatic rifle fire stitched across the locker doors. Still sliding, he rolled onto his back, getting his other hand onto the gun and firing blind, the recoil from three rapid shots pushing him along another couple of feet.

At least one shot had struck flesh; he heard a gasp of shock as the auto fire went wild, raking the locker room's ceiling and bursting the light fixtures into sparks and glass splinters. In darkness, he scrambled to his feet, staying low and close to the metal doors to his left. His hunched shadow leapt in front of him, outlined by each red muzzle flash back at the stairs.

His own boots splashed into water a quarter-inch deep. That and the humid air in his nostrils told him he'd reached the showers. Deckard reached to one side and touched wet tile; he steadied himself, breath laboring, as his eyes adjusted to the dim illumination from the one bulb left unbroken. His mind raced, trying to dredge from memory a way out of the sub-basement levels below the police station.

"You're not going anywhere, dickhead-"

Before he could lift the gun, a forearm slammed into his throat, the impact lifting him from his feet and pinning him against the wall. The back of his skull cracked against a chrome shower nozzle. His dropped gun splashed in the thin water, as his hands clawed futilely at the bare, hard-muscled skin pressing under his chin.

Fragmented light glinted in the eyes and silhouetted the cop's naked torso, soap residue webbed across his chest and arms, hair plastered dark and shining on his broad neck. He must've already been in the showers when the pursuit had exploded into sight at the far end of the locker room, then stayed silent and waiting.

"You're the one they're looking for-" A black constellation spun across Deckard's vision as the cop grinned and jerked him higher against the slick wall. "Aren't you?"

He couldn't push away the throttling arm. His hands let go and scrabbled at the tiles behind him. A blunt-edged X filled one palm; elbow digging into his own ribs, he twisted the handle.

The cop howled as the scalding water shot from the nozzle and into his face. Deckard felt the heat drip across his ear and the side of his jaw, but only for a second-moist oxygen rushed into his lungs as he fell, back sliding against the tiles. In front of him, the naked cop knelt with both hands pressed against the raw, red pulp of his flesh. The water arced over his back, steam billowing as it sprayed onto the floor.

Deckard spotted the gun lying a few feet away; he launched himself forward, scooping up the weapon. A roar of pain and rage echoed off the walls as the cop grabbed him by the front of the uniform and pulled him upright. He brought the edge of his brow against the cop's chest; with one push, Deckard took him to the wall, hard enough to loosen the other's grip for a moment. Long enough to lean back and raise the gun, the black muzzle against the cop's breastbone. He squeezed the trigger.

The tiles cracked, the wall behind crumbling from the impact of the cop's spine and shoulders. Concrete rubble sluiced over Deckard's arms as the exposed pipes bent and snapped. The gun was knocked loose from his grip, as the cop's dead hands let go of him.

The corpse sprawled at his feet, the pooled water transformed into a dark red lake.

Through the clouds of steam, he could see the shadowed, indistinct figures of the other cops racing through the locker room's narrow aisles. A darker space had appeared behind the burst pipes and shattered tiles; he braced his shoulder against the concaved section of wall and pushed. He nearly fell as the cement gave way and he stumbled coughing through a burst of white dust. Hot pipes singed his hands as he groped his way through the maze of plumbing.

A quick glance over his shoulder-he spotted. the shapes of his pursuers clustered around the ragged opening, the first of them climbing through, brushing aside a tangle of plaster-clotted rebar and the splinters of ancient wooden beams.

Deckard tasted salt seeping into the corners of his mouth, his face sopping with blood and water the exact same temperature. He ducked his head beneath the belly of a sewage conduit and ran as best he could, empty hands clawing a blind passage before him.

Holden had retreated into his head, letting his entropy-laden body get steered outside by the other man.

"Looks like it's going to be another hot one." Outside the Reclamation Center's medical unit, standing in the ragged circle of cigarette butts the doctor had left strewn on the sandy ground, Batty pointed to the horizon. The first coloring of dawn, a purplish-red smear along the tops of the distant mountain range, had crept into the cloudless sky. "Man, everybody bitches about the monsoon season when it's here, but when it's gone, you'd do just about anything to get rained on for twenty-four hours at a clip."

Subterranean heat rose up through Holden's legs. The desert hadn't finished radiating the thermal load it'd absorbed from the day before, and now more would be pounded into it by the sun lifting overhead. Where he gazed past the razor-wired fence, an incipient Santa Ana wind sifted dry dust through the sparse clumps of withered brush.

Everybody says that, he thought. All the time. One hot one after another. Someday the cycle wouldn't be broken by the onset of the yearly rains. The heat would go on building up, cumulative, until the sands melted into glass, perfectly smooth and reflective, bouncing a fierce glare back into the sky. Same thing would happen in the city, the streets turning to a black tar lava flow, then hardening to obsidian mirrors. We could see ourselves that way, all the time-he could picture it. Everyone looking down and wondering whether the image looking back at them, in that world of permanent night, was human or something else…