JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

"But how do Tin Town mutants find their way to Beaumonde Street?"

"There was a war," Mira confessed. "The other mutie gang was bigger. The only way out for us was to escape Tin Town. Some of our enemies kept chasing us, so we had to go further and further, until they stopped chasing. We finally got on a train, and got off the train here. Before the war there were thirty-one of us. Sixteen of us made it to the train." She swept her arm at her friends. "Now we're five. The Blank People got the others, before we were able to lock them all outside." "God," Tabeth moaned.

"What are you doing here?" Nick mumbled, his wet words barely decipherable.

"Our friend you say was put into the trash zap-per," Javier answered. "He came out to Beaumonde looking for his girlfriend, and he didn't come back. We tracked him here."

"Why would the trash zapper do that to him?" Nhu asked dubiously.

"The same reason the Blank People killed all the pig-hens they caught on the roof," Mira said. "The same reason they killed that homeless man. And why they're trying to kill us. I think it's because they see us all as pests. Pests to be exterminated."

"And the trash zapper thinks the same way?"

"The zapper and the Blank People must've been programmed to recognize and take action against us undesirable types," Satin growled.

"Undesirable is right," Nhu whispered to Tabeth. More loudly she said, "It still doesn't make sense, with a trash zapper."

"So what the blast are these Blank People, anyway?" Javier asked. He wandered closer to the window, now trusting that the Tin Town Terata would not shoot him in the back as he did so. He had to fight his own reluctance to near the window, however, reminding himself again and again that the things could not see them through the one-way tinting. But was that true? Who knew what senses they relied on? A kind of sonar, like the blind Waiai race, that could penetrate the bulletproof pane?

"Androids," Big Meat stated.

"No," said Mira. "They're not mechanical, anyway. They just have a chip in their heads. The rest is all organic. We know-we put the bodies of the ones we killed in apartment 6-B."

"And we've been putting the bodies of our dead friends in apartment 5-B," Satin added. "That's where we'll put Chang. I suggest you start using apartment 4-B." He nodded down at Hollis.

Mott squeezed his gun's handle tighter. "What do you mean, 'start?'"

Mira glanced up at Satin. "We've got to all work together here, Satin. Right?"

"This is easy enough," Tabeth said, pacing nervously, and digging a hand phone out of her jacket's pocket. "We just call the forcers down here to get us out past those gray things."

"Yeah! Of course!" Nhu lifted her arm, on which she wore a new-stolen-wrist comp like a bracelet.

Javier blinked at them a few moments before he said, slowly as if speaking to far younger children, "Think for a minute, if that's possible. We call the forcers to this building in rich old Beaumonde Square, where our two gangs are inside with guns in our hands and a room full of dead mutants? And a couple of people with bullet holes in them?" He motioned toward Hollis. "And I bet more than one of us has go some illegal substances on 'em, am I right? Dung, girls, we'd be going from this prison to another prison."

"Javier's right," Tiny Meat said. "We're the Folger Street Snarlers. Since when do we need to go crying to the forcers for help? We'll fight our way out of this-right, Big?" He slapped the shoulder of his larger twin, who presently carried him in the crook of one arm.

"We can try," Satin said. "But I hope you got enough ammo, little fella. There's twelve apartments to a floor, and three floors, and two wings. And there's one of those Blank People for every single apartment."

"So how many does that make?" Tiny Meat said.

"That makes seventy-two of them," Patryk replied softly. For a few moments, nobody said anything.

The body of the mutant named Chang was carried to apartment 5, here on the ground floor of B-Wing, by Patryk and Nick, escorted by Tabeth and Barbie with guns in their hands. Patryk held his breath when the door slid into the wall and the stench of the makeshift morgue rolled over him. Tabeth hung back in the hallway and stifled a retch. Patryk saw indistinct forms crudely wrapped in clear plastic tarps the mutants had scrounged from somewhere in the building. Some of the forms were on the small side-either creatures like Mira, or else the Blank People had made themthat small.

Next, this same crew carried Hollis into apartment 4-B, as Satin had facetiously suggested. They laid him on the floor, all out of tarps to wrap him in. They'd already taken his pistol and ammo, and a candy bar they'd found in a jacket pocket to add to the food Javier was pooling together, but now Barbie pointed at the corpse, and two of the supernumerary faces on the side of her skull rasped in unison, "We should take his jacket. It's cold in here."

"I wouldn't do that if I was you," Patryk advised her. "That's a Snarler jacket. Mott or Tiny Meat see one of you Teratas in that and Javier might not be able to stop 'em in time."

Barbie nodded, seeing his point. They left Hollis in the room, looking very alone on the barren floor, devoid of all furniture, but the door slid shut to close off the image.

The others had abandoned apartment 12-B where Hollis and Chang had died, as much to escape the blood on the floor as those two Blank People still lingering at the window. Looking back at them as he left the room, Javier said, "I don't think they're trying to get in, now. I think they're just reminding us that they're out there."

They all moved to the room in which the Terata had set up their own little camp: apartment 1-B, just off the front lobby that bridged the two wings of Steward Gardens. In 1-B there were some chairs and couches that the Terata had stolen from that lobby, on which they had since been sleeping. Glancing around at the other items the squatters had salvaged from here and there, Mott whispered to Tiny Meat, "I don't think these last five are the toughest, and that's why they're still alive. Dung! Look at them. The only reason they're still alive is the Blank People probably killed off the best fighters first. The only one of these sad fucks that I'd be worried about is that Satan bastard."

"Satin," Big Meat corrected. "You two remember what Javier said. Our gangs aren't at war; we've got to team up against these Blank People."

"Shut up," Tiny Meat told his brother. "Were we talking to you?"

"Listen," Mott said to Big Meat, "I hate to say this, but Javier's getting soft in his old age. How does he know these freaks didn't kill Brat themselves, like they did Hollis, even if it was just by accident? More believable if they'd said those Blank Fucks got him, instead of that trash zapper story."

Javier swept together the small store of edibles he had gathered from his crew. He saw the mutants all glancing at it as if it were a steaming, aromatic buffet. "What have you folks been eating?"

"We had some food with us when we started out, because we knew we'd be out of Tin Town for a while," said Mira. "But it's almost gone now. We found a pig-hen in one of the rooms; it must've flown in before we sealed everything off. So we ate that, yesterday." In a lower voice, she admitted, "We were talking about, you know, maybe having to eat our friends. I know that sounds crazy, but…"

"I understand."

"Anyway, first I suggested we try eating one of the Blank People. They are organic. Though in a way, that sounds even more terrible."

"I don't think we'll have to resort to that," Javier reassured her. "How long have you folks been trapped inside here, anyway?"

"Eleven days."

"Dung," he said, wagging his head.

"So," Nhu pointed at the humble pile of food, some of it purchased at Quidd's Market only hours earlier, "we divide up our food, and the Teratas ration their own stuff, right?"