JEFFREY THOMAS - DEADSTOCK

"It might be Brat!" Javier reminded him. He climbed through next. Mott was a close third, and the others all followed, Patryk bringing up the rear. As soon as he was through, he unholstered his own gun as the others had-all except Tiny Meat, who didn't use a gun, though they could smell the sharp chemical bite of his rising bile.

Satisfied that the last of his friends was now inside, Hollis moved to the open doorway across the room, pistol held ready.

"Moron," Javier barely uttered under his breath. He motioned for Patryk to hasten and cover Hollis. Patryk nodded, flicking a switch on the goggles he still wore to avail himself of their basic night vision function. Only he would be able to see clearly into the murk beyond this room, but that hadn't stopped Hollis from approaching the threshold and peeking around its edge.

Hollis's black market firearm was a Scimitar .55, an expensive semiautomatic, silvery glitter sparkling across its dark purple enameled body. It had an internal silencing feature. The gun that killed Hollis did not. A crude revolver, its thunder in these dead rooms like a detonation inside the head of every one of the Snarlers. But it was only Hollis who was actually struck by its lead projectile. The bullet smashed a sizable chunk out of the right side of his tattooed face, taking one peeking eye with it. His body slumped back almost gently, folded to the floor, and Patryk jumped over it as he took Hollis's place.

"Blast!" screamed dreadlocked Mott, surging forward with his own gun ready. "Blasting fuckers!"

"Mott, keep back!" Javier roared.

But Mott had learned a little from his friend's death, and plastered himself to the wall behind Patryk, ready to follow him into the next room should Javier give the word.

"Oh God… oh my God," whimpered Clara, backing toward the open window they had clambered through only moments earlier. Despite having a gun of her own in hand, she wanted to flee right now-even if it meant abandoning her friends in the face of great danger-but she was more afraid of incurring Javier's anger than that of whoever was lurking in the gloom beyond that doorway.

"Who is out there?" called a muffled voice from within the next room.

"We're here to kill you, you motherblasting fuck!" Mott bellowed, with eyes bulging.

"Mott, shut it!" Javier snapped. He edged closer to Patryk, and called over his shoulder, "Who are you?"

"Don't shoot, okay?" the voice replied. It sounded strangely distorted. "I'm sorry."

"You're sorry? You're fucking sorry? You killed our friend!" Mott yelled.

"I said shut it," Javier told him. He again addressed the voice in the darkness. "I asked you who you are!"

"We're squatters here. We came in to squat. Please, please don't shoot! I didn't mean to kill your friend. I thought he was one of those things."

"What things?" Javier demanded.

"The Blank People."

"What fucking Blank People?"

They all heard Clara scream. They all turned. They all saw her being pulled backwards out the open window they had climbed through, by two pairs of gray arms.

And then she was gone, and then her screams really began.

Jeremy Stake preferred riding a hoverbike, a leftover trait from his days in the Blue War, but sometimes his job called for him to use a hovercar instead, and he owned one of those, too. Similarly, when he was off the job, or on a job that required him to look casual, his clothing style was quite different from the nondescript black business suit he wore now-a generic look useful for any number of environments. He adapted to the occasion. But the regulars at the Legion of Veterans Post 69 recognized him in either casual or business-like incarnation, and they had tired of teasing him about whether he was off to the stock market or- when he needed to use the toilet-if he were headed for the "boardroom."

The veterans' former taunts aside, his suit wasn't quite that spiffy, and the hovercar he parked in front of LOV 69 was dimpled and dented here and there. He climbed out of it, and entered into the little building's cavernous shadows. Bass-heavy music thudded from a jukebox, a sports program played on one giant VT screen and a muted soap opera (watched avidly by several drunken gray-haired men) on another. Neons glowed fuzzily through cigarette smoke, and a genie-like holographic woman belly-danced inside a large plastic bottle advertising Knickerson beer. He seated himself on one of the stools at the bar.

Without having to be asked, the bartender pulled a tap to fill a glass with Zub beer and placed it in front of him. This man, Watt, was a Choom veteran of the Red War, older than Stake, his crew-cut hair silvered and one arm replaced from the elbow down with a nimble-fingered, plastic prosthesis black as an insect's limb. Despite his grunt of greeting and perpetual glower, he was one of the few men in the Post whom Stake spoke with at any length. Stake returned the greeting by asking, "Any wars broke out since last time I was in?"

"Not this week, unless I'm forgetting something."

Stake picked up and sipped the foam off his beer, swiveling on the stool a little to scan the other occupants of the barroom. Sitting at a table in front of glass cases containing framed portraits of past Post commanders, various plaques and medals of valor, and trophies won by school sports teams the Post had sponsored, were some more Red War veterans and some similarly boozy-looking women. The Red War vets seemed to predominate at this Post. That was okay by Stake. He didn't really want to reminisce all that much with other Blue War vets. But then, he asked himself sometimes, why did he even come to this place when he felt in the need of a brew? Maybe it was a distant camaraderie, safely filtered. Maybe it was something like a programmed behavior. He was used to that, from those bloody years.

Watt had told him what some of the older vets had claimed: that two decades ago, a crew of veterans from the Klu-Koza Conflict had come in here from time to time. Could that be true, when some said there had been no survivors of that conflict, and others held to the belief that the engagement had never happened at all? Well, those mythical men were gone now, if they had ever been here. Ghosts hung in the air like the cigarette smoke. Ghosts of veterans now dead, and the conjoined ghosts of all the people they had killed. The live souls who hunched over the tables and bar, wearing baseball caps and windbreakers thick with military pins and patches, were embalming themselves with alcohol; ghosts in the making.

Is that what I am? Stake wondered. Is that why I come here?

"Want a shot with that?" Watt asked, scooping up the one munit tip Stake had dropped beside his coaster.

"No thanks," Stake replied without looking around at him. "I'm on a job this afternoon. Just killing time."

"Time's all we got left to kill these days, huh?" slurred a hulk down at the end of the bar. It was a man named Lark. Stake had been trying to ignore the fellow Blue War vet's presence. In the past they had occasionally compared notes, but Stake had found nothing like comfort or pleasure in the exercise. Lark hadn't seemed to like being dismissed, and so it wasn't unusual for him to take a poke or two at Stake before subsiding into conversation with whatever dumpy barroom floozy he could coax beside him with a bottle of Zub.

"Depends on what you do for a living," Stake mumbled.

"Oh, that's right, you're a private detective. You still get in a little gunplay, do ya, huh? I thought you mostly looked through a camera's sights these days, Jer. Following cheating wives and all that."

"Yeah. And when you want me to follow your wife, you just call me, okay? I'll give you a discount."

The woman beside Lark, not his wife, chortled. Lark growled, "Blast you, Stake! At least I have a wife, you stinking mutant. Who the hell would want you?"