JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

Mira started to scurry around the perimeter of the dark thing, Javier moving behind her. The snaking appendages observed them both, but it was the small being's mind that commanded the demon's attention. As if with numerous serpents' tongues, it could almost lick the thoughts that crackled from her mind into the air.

Satin pushed Patryk into the access chute. He was babbling, sobbing, clawing at his goggles to get them off his head as if he feared their rubber frames would melt into his skin. Poised on the rungs set into the wall of the utilities tunnel, Barbie took hold of the boy and helped pull him through. Satin couldn't see past the shoulder of his pony when he tried to turn his head, but he shouted out for Mira and Javier blindly.

Two of the striped tendrils lashed out, extended like thrown spears. They wrapped themselves around Mira's head.

"No!" Javier almost fell over her, caught hold of one of the muscular shafts and tried to tear it off her. He had dropped his empty gun.

The tendrils started to contract, then, jerking Mira off her feet, raising her into the air. Her legs kicked and she clawed at the coils across her face as they tightened.

She had let go of Brat's pistol. It struck the side of Javier's foot, and he hunched down, felt for it frantically. "No, no, no!" he bellowed, as he looked up and saw Mira being drawn close to the mound of flesh. He scooped the gun into his hand, and pointed it up at the indistinct hump that was the thing's head.

But he might hit Mira.

But that might be for the best.

"Come on!" Satin roared, unable to see what was happening on the other side. He was tempted to put a plasma bullet into the creature's back now that he could see its gray flesh more clearly in the light from the utilities tunnel, but the plasma was dangerous as wildfire, and his friends should be coming around its flank, coming any moment. He started folding his cybernetic body into the access chute. The limbs could make it but his torso, broader and inflexible, became wedged.

Javier hesitated, torn, and in that moment the creature brought Mira against its chest. She was engulfed into the heart of shadow. At first, that was what Javier believed. But then he knew it was more than that. Terribly more than that.

He rose, thrust the pistol, and cried, "You fucker!"

The arms came for him next. One slapped over his wrist, looped around it, squeezed. He let go of the pistol's grip but the trigger guard hooked his index finger. Another limb looped around his throat. He was lifted. He hovered in mid-air. Floated closer to the engorged mass.

He was brought almost level to the face, and an instinct made him close his eyes so that he could not make it out. Snakes… Medusa… he would turn to stone. As soon as he shut his eyes, he heard a voice in his head. It was distant, watery, like a voice over a Ouija phone.

"Javier," the voice said.

He opened his eyes.

Only inches away from the creature's chest. But now the arms began to lower him. To loosen from his neck and wrist. He was dropped and fell onto his hands and knees, gasping for breath.

" Javier," the voice said again, growing fainter. " I can't hold it."

"Mira," he croaked.

" Run!" she blurted, surprisingly loud.

Javier was up and running, then, skidding around the side of the creature. Behind it he saw the lighted access passage, and pushed off to one side was Satin's abandoned pony like the shed husk of a gigantic spider. Barbie had reached in to help unbuckle him and pull his odd little larva of a body through. She cradled him in her arms now.

Javier dived into the chute, shot through it, almost fell to the floor of the utilities tunnel beyond. He looked up to see Patryk seated against the wall. His eyes were red as if a caustic chemical had been sprayed into them, but when they turned his way Javier knew that his friend could still see.

"Where's Mira?" Satin said.

"Dead," Javier told him. He still had Brat's gun in his fist, and he squeezed it as if he might crush it. Crush it like black coal into a glittering diamond, a crystal from which red laser beams burned, shooting out between his clenched fingers.

"Fuck! Fucking hell!" Satin groaned. He looked up at the access chute. "What are we going to do now?"

"We're going to go." Javier took Patryk by the arm and helped him to his feet. "We're going to go home." But his eyes returned to the blackness at the end of the access chute he had just plunged through. And his hand still squeezed his gun's grip. Crushing it. Crushing.

"This is a prime example of Black Angus cattle," John Fukuda said, pointing to the specimen in question. "A thick neck and straight back, a wide brisket and round rump, a thick rib eye, and perfect intramuscular fat."

"And no troublesome head or legs," Stake added.

"Unnecessary parts. But if you like to dine on heads and legs, maybe I'll grow a special breed just for you," Fukuda joked. "Do you want me to throw in tails, too?"

Stake took a step closer to examine the animal, if it could still be thought of in that way. It occupied one of many narrow pens lining both walls of a long central hall, each creature in this section identical. Several hoses were inserted into the blunt stump of the thing's neck, and one hose emerged from its back end. It rested upon its belly and the flipper-like vestigial limbs that were all it had for legs. It did not stir or shift its body in any way, and its sides did not even rise and fall in the act of breathing. Stake wondered if he would even hear a heartbeat if he were to put his ear against it.

"We use better, more up-to-date processes than what Alvine Products was using," Fukuda boasted, as they continued on down the high-ceilinged hallway. "And we're always experimenting with new ones."

Stake stopped short when he heard a loud burbling sound from one of the headless cattle. He turned to see a young woman in a white uniform making adjustments to a support system on a small rolling cart. On its bottom shelf was the pump that circulated the animal's fluids. The worker looked up and smiled apologetically at Stake for distracting him. To him, it had sounded like the creature had just been decapitated and blood had been gurgling out of its neck. However, the great living carcass appeared undisturbed in its blissful, dreamless state of oblivion. Stake commented to Fukuda, "You should breed office workers like this. Corporations would love you."

"What do you think I have working in my administrative department?" Fukuda took Stake by the elbow. "Kidding." They continued on. "By the way, last month I had an entrepreneur of sorts approach me with the request that I design a headless, limbless breed of human female for a brothel he was hoping to establish at an asteroid mining outpost. His staff, as such, would need a minimum of care. And no pay, of course. 'The perfect woman,' he joked to me. 'No head to complain with, no legs to run away.'"

"What a fuckbag," Stake murmured. "Huh? The clones, or him?" Stake gave Fukuda a look. "Him. So what did you tell him?" "I declined."

"Out of a sense of outrage, or because you thought it might make you look bad?"

"Outrage?" They had come to the end of the hallway, and a transverse corridor offered them a choice of directions. Fukuda gestured to the right. "Would you like to see our pork pigs? They come from a fine heritage, a very old breed-extinct in its natural state, actually-called Gloucestershire Old Spots. Very moist meat, with a fine texture. Or are you in the mood for chicken?"

"If I see much more, I might become a vegetarian."

"I didn't take you for being squeamish. And you seemed to enjoy that steak I treated you to in the Bioforms cafeteria."