JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

There was one man seated at his keyboard who did look directly into Dai-oo-ika's face on the screen. The man screamed, fell back from his chair, staggered to the door. But there he stopped. And when he turned slowly around again, he was smiling and his burned-shut eyes oozed mercury tears.

There would be more time later for such exploration, experimentation. Maybe he would even be able to extend his consciousness along multiple- countless-strands of the web simultaneously, instead of only one at a time. Like a god who can hear the prayers of millions at once.

For now, he had his current flock of new followers to finish converting. Before he converted them in another way, in his own unholy communion.

The five of them had their guns in their hands. Satin checked the six plasma capsules in the cylinder of his cannon-like Decimator .220. Even Mira held Brat's gun, which Javier had given her. Javier had succeeded in awakening her, but knelt down low beside her with an arm around her waist, as if to comfort a child roused from troubling dreams.

"You okay there, baby?" he whispered.

"Aside from a killer headache. I think I need a foot rub."

"Ha. Next time we're alone," he told her. "And nice guy that I am, I'll rub everything else, too."

"I bet you didn't do that to your mom."

Javier returned his eyes to the floor indicator, his demeanor becoming serious once more as the elevator descended for a final time toward the basement. "Be ready to move," he told the others. "Ready, now."

The cabin touched down. This time, they did not jab the keypad again to send it back toward the upper levels. This time, they waited for the door to automatically slide open.

They had already noted that there were no hands slapping or pounding against the outer security door, but when it slid open they were too sur-prised-and too wary-to feel real relief that there were no Blank People outside the door waiting for them.

Javier emerged first, whipping his gun this way and that, followed by Satin. Up and down the hallway, there were none of the bio-engineered entities to be seen. Patryk moved quickly to the door to the basement proper, but Mira put a hand on his arm before he could hit the button to open it. She looked to Javier and whispered, "It knows we're out here."

"But what is it, Mira? The Blanks?"

"No. Something else."

"The brainframe?"

"I… yes. But something more. I don't know." She shook her head. "I don't know."

"You called it 'Outsider' before, when you were in your trance."

She scrunched up her face. "I don't remember."

"We have to go," Barbie cut in, looking around wildly with her multiple sets of eyes. "Before they come back."

Javier held Mira's nervous gaze, but he nodded to Patryk. "Do it."

There was a beep, the red status button on the control strip turned green, and the metal door slid open in its grooves, but this time no gray arms shot out at them to drag them inside. There was only silence beyond, and an odd, unpleasant smell, almost rotten but almost like burning plastic.

Again, Javier led the way, followed by Mira and Barbie, with Satin and Patryk bringing up the rear. Patryk closed and locked the door after them.

"Where did they all go?" Satin hissed to Patryk.

They crept through a room with metal workbenches along the walls, maintenance tools hanging from racks above them. Machinery hummed softly, and the brightness of overhead emergency lights only made the shadowy areas seem darker by contrast. Across the room gaped a doorway like the entrance to a cavern. Was there a kind of deep, liquid burbling coming from in there? Maybe the tank that supplied the raw material to the apartments' food fabricators, because that foul rotting smell was becoming stronger.

Mira took Javier by the arm to stop him. "We should go back. Go out the front door."

"But aren't all the Blanks still up there?"

She seemed to stare off into the ether itself. "Yes. yes. I can sense them clearly, because they're all in one place. But they aren't moving."

"Because they're waiting up there to ambush us," Satin said. "Come on, come on, we can't risk it!"

"We're close now," Patryk told them. "The maintenance chute is in the room just beyond this one. We get through that, and we hit the town sewer system."

"Mira," Barbie said, "that big brain in there is messing up your thoughts. It's glitched. Just try to shut it out!"

Mira glanced at the black maw of the doorway, and back to Javier. She tried on a tremulous smile. "Okay. Okay. Let's just do this."

Javier touched her hair, then turned toward the doorway.

There was only a single emergency light that had not extinguished in the largish room beyond, but even that one was flickering. The only steady light came from banks of monitors, these showing a tempest of static through which a city skyline struggled to appear. The pale, bluish glow of these screens shone weakly on a glistening dark hulk that appeared to dominate the center of the room. The stench emanated from it, and Barbie cupped a hand over one of her faces' nose and mouth but the others had to suffer. "What is that, there?" her dual voices whispered in different tones.

Another rumbling gurgle. Then the slithering rustle of movement, as if an immense anaconda had just shifted its coils across each other. Javier thrust out an arm to bar the others.

"It's something alive," he hissed.

Patryk had been wearing the goggles his father had once used in his work, pushed up on his head, and as soon as they'd entered the grotto of a room he had slipped them down over his eyes and adjusted them for night vision. As he brought up the rear, only he could clearly see the mountain of flesh that sat at the center of the room.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

Only he saw the faceless head turn slightly at the sound of his voice. The sprawling, swollen creature withdrew part of its consciousness from the teaching of its acolytes. From its plucking at the strands of the net. It focused on these tiny intruders. Without eyes, with its mass of silver and black tentacles swarming, it looked directly at Patryk specifically. He screamed.

Javier swung his gun up and fired blindly, into the heart of the silhouette. "Run! Run! Run!" he shouted. "Go around it! Behind it! Go, go, go!"

Satin caught Patryk under one prosthetic arm and dragged him along, extending the other arm to launch a plasma capsule from his revolver. He missed what he took to be the thing's head, the corrosive green plasma spreading over some equipment behind the creature. Sparks sputtered into the air and a row of monitors went out. Abruptly, the vague cityscape vanished from every screen, replaced by static alone. What the green incandescence of the plasma might have illuminated somewhat, the black smoke from melting gear only further obscured. Satin kept moving, afraid to fire again lest he hit Javier or Mira in the darkness and the pandemonium. The leader of the Folger Street Snarlers was holding off in front of the vague creature and blasting shot after shot to cover their escape.

Javier pushed Mira to run after Barbie and Satin. "Hurry, baby! Go!"

His gun clicked empty at last.

At the rear wall, behind the mountain of flesh, Barbie found the maintenance chute already unblocked for them. Enough light from the utilities tunnel beyond shone through to make the way clear. Just before she scampered through on hands and knees, wheezing from exertion and fear, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the back of the behemoth in the pallid radiance from the open hatchway. She saw two projections that might have been ribbed fins like the dorsal fin of a sail-fish. Or wings. If the latter, they were far too small and fragile to ever lift such a dinosaur in flight. But they frightened her. They made her think that what she was seeing was a demon.