JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Haanz's expression had been one of desperate concern, but now the desperation took on another quality. A desperation not to be left behind by pretty Nhu. One of his long-fingered hands grabbed Tabeth by the ankle, and he caused her to fall forward onto her elbows. Then he was leaping past her, loping after the small Vietnamese woman.

Scrambling back to her feet, Tabeth began to draw her handgun. "Stop it!" she yelled. "You'll get us all killed!"

Nhu almost collided with the doors, stopped herself with her palms against them. There was a control strip alongside the frame, and she immediately jabbed at the big green button with the word OPEN stenciled on it in white. The security glass had been tinted an opaque black on the outside, but from inside she could see the fountain in front of the building. And beyond that, at the end of the wide walkway, distant hovercars gliding along the street. A short run. She could flag a vehicle down. She was attractive, someone would stop, and then she'd pull Haanz along after her.

At the touch of her finger, the double doors had begun to part open with a whisper, sliding along their tracks. Nhu was greeted with the smell of outside city air and the chill bite of autumn. And then, like a diver into a pool, she plunged through. She was aware of Haanz galloping through the opening doors in her wake.

Tabeth charged after them, pistol in her hand. But now she was less concerned with calling them back, and more intent on hitting the big red button labeled CLOSE.

Haanz heard Tabeth running behind him, running surprisingly fast, almost catching up. His head turned on its long, serpentine neck to see the gray figure sprinting after him. And launching itself into the air.

Nhu heard Haanz's cry, looked back, stumbled on a few more steps until she was at the scummed fountain. Haanz was howling now. The gray creature had him pinned to the walkway, one arm locked around his neck. Behind her, Nhu heard a hovercar beep its horn at another on the street.

"Dung," she hissed, ripping her pistol out of its holster. Even as she did so, she saw the Blank People popping out of their niches in both wings. On all three floors. One here, two there, three more on this side. Leaping down to the overgrown lawn.

She met Haanz's eyes, wide in his skull-like face, his Choom mouth opening huge to cry, "Nhu… run!"

"Fuck that," she said, and shot the being who had pinned Haanz through its faceless face. Its head jerked back, and its arms slipped from around the mutant. His head fell forward, his neck drooping limp. Broken. Haanz's eyes and his mouth did not close as his face thudded into the walk.

"Blast, blast, blast," Nhu sobbed, whirling to run toward the street again.

From inside, Tabeth saw her friend go down in the middle of a dozen gray bodies. Nhu got off a few shots. Two of the Blank People rolled away, dead. The rest hunched around her obscured form like vultures over a lion's kill.

Tabeth had not touched the button to shut the doors. Instead, she had entered a marksman's stance, extending her gun in both hands. She began picking off the Blank People around her fallen comrade. She didn't realize she was weeping and shouting obscenities at the same time. But when she saw the heads of the hunkered Blank People begin to turn her way, and more and more of them drop down from the balconies, icy terror overrode her concern for her fellow Snarler and she reached out to the red CLOSE button.

The man-like creature that stepped around the edge of the doorway to stand face-to-no-face with Tabeth was exactly like its many brothers, except for the number engraved into its forehead: 12-B. And the giant red penis spray-painted onto its front.

It seized her by the throat, and began walking her backwards. Tabeth fired her gun into its mid-section, the muzzle pressed right up against its gray flesh. The creature flinched with the detonations but kept walking her, and kept squeezing. Finally, though, it loosened its hold and slumped dead upon Tabeth as she herself fell onto her back, half unconscious from lack of oxygen.

The dead being with its mock phallus lying atop her like an incubus, Tabeth lifted her head to see the flood come crashing through the open front doors. A flood wave of gray, living flesh.

Then, before she could raise her gun again, the living wave descended upon her.

Above-outside-the Snarlers and the Terata on the basement level heard the distant crackle of Nhu's and then Tabeth's gunfire. At once, Javier and Satin had their own guns out and were moving toward the stairs.

"Don't!" Mira screamed, jolting back from the metal basement door as if an electric shock had gone through her. Eyes bulging, she panted, "I was connected to the brain; I heard it. They've come through. The front doors are open. The Blank People are coming through."

"What about Nhu and Tabeth?" Javier asked.

"Dead. I felt their screams. Haanz, too. And now the Blank People are coming."

"All of them," Satin said, eyes hard and ready for a fight.

"All of them," she confirmed.

Even as she said it, they could hear the thunder of their footfalls upstairs. They heard the stairwell door fly open with a boom. The metal steps start to clang.

"Get into the elevator!" Patryk yelled, rushing to the nearest one and stabbing its OPEN button. The door slid aside without hesitation. He shoved Barbie inside, then Mira, and ducked in after them. Javier followed, and Satin last, whipping around to fire a few shots from his Decimator revolver as the first of the Blank People reached the basement level and flung open the stairwell's door. Splashed with hungry green plasma, several of them went down and impeded the others long enough for the elevator door to slide shut.

They heard hands without fingernails, hands without fingerprints, claw and bang at the closed security door as the elevator itself moved upward.

"Hey, it's the Man of a Thousand Faces," Lark slurred from the bar as Jeremy Stake entered the Legion of Veterans Post 69. "And all of them ugly."

But that was pretty much the extent of the Blue War vet's taunting, and when the Choom bartender Watt pulled a Zub draft for Stake, he explained, "He doesn't know that you helped him hit his head on the bar that time."

Stake smirked and took his drink to one of the tables. And it was as he sat down that his wrist comp alerted him to an incoming call. Stake checked its origin: Captain Richard Henderson. He took the call immediately, bending over the little device to let his mind become the computer's screen. There, he saw his old friend's face smiling at him, but with a somewhat leery look in his eyes.

"I found her, Jeremy."

Stake stared back at his friend a long few moments, but shook himself when he felt the sly crawl of his nebulous flesh. "That was fast."

"Things have opened up more on their world. And she's on the net now, where I guess she wasn't before. I contacted her myself, Jer. Her English has improved. I told her you'd be calling."

Stake nodded. "Thanks, Rick. I owe you."

"Well, she spared my life that day. I can't forget that. But are you sure you really want to do this? I mean, it's not my business, but just out of concern. You sure you want to go back like this?"

"There are some things I have to know."

"I understand. I think." Henderson craned his neck as if to peer over Stake's shoulder. "Looks like you're in a veterans' post. They all look the same. I should know-I got one as my hang-out, too."

"When you've been in a war," Stake said, "you live in the past as much as the present."

"I don't think it's just us vets," Henderson said. "I think all people do."

Stake had taken his hoverbike today, and he rode it back toward Forma Street, not wanting to call Thi Gonh from LOV 69. He was in his casual attire, not undercover, not on the job. A black sports coat over a white T-shirt, baggy khakis, beaten sneakers, and on his head a black porkpie hat. The silly little porkpie hat was, at least to his own eyes, an object of individuality. Something almost defiantly him, as if to compensate for the anonymity of his tenuous features. Something to paperweight his elusive self so it wouldn't blow away in the wind. He wore it even inside his apartment, sometimes. As he rode, he found himself reaching up to hold it down if the breeze gusted too much. Afraid to lose it.