Richard Kadrey - Metrophage

Zamora lead Jonny out a side exit and left him weak-kneed, standing in an oily puddle. The Colonel removed a Futukoro from his satchel and tossed it behind Jonny.

"Take that with you. Wouldn't want you getting mugged, now that you're back on duty. I'll be available to you for the next forty-eight hours, Gordon. After that, the deal's off. I'll be seeing you," said the Colonel.

The door swung in quietly, hissing as it sealed itself shut.

Jonny was alone in the alley. He drew himself up and taking a few drunken steps forward, kicked savagely at the door's heavy riveted face; he pounded it with his good hand.

"Like hell, you bastard!" he screamed. "You can't do this to me!"

For a vertiginous second he was insane, turning in frustrated circles, splashing more filth onto his ruined jeans.

Finally, panting and lightheaded, Jonny stepped away from the unyielding door, feeling angry for such a stupid waste of energy. He should be on his way out of town.

Jonny's gaze slid down the damp walls to the thin fog at the alley's mouth. He stooped awkwardly, protecting his throbbing shoulder, and scooped up the Futukoro. He walked to the infra-red scanner that monitored the alley, took aim and blew it off its mounting. Somewhere, an alarm went off. Jonny hurried away from the place.

"Shit," Jonny mumbled as he stepped on something soft and clinging in the doorway of the abandoned hotel. Then, "Shit" again as he recognized the accuracy of his curse. He was somewhere near Exposition Boulevard, out of breath, a few blocks from the old Lockheed rocket bunkers. Ancient booster engines and decaying nose cones displayed their brittle bones behind fences topped with razor wire.

Gingerly, Jonny scraped his soiled boot on a cracked stone step and peered from the alcove. Whoever Zamora had following him was being very cagey. Jonny still had not caught sight of the tail, but he knew the man was out there. Zamora would never let him just walk out like that.

He had exhausted himself, running for cover and for the sheer joy of running, for the momentary sense of freedom it gave him. Still, he had not been able to spot the tail and that bothered him. Even now, as he watched from the alcove, nothing on the street moved.

Except for the doorway-bums shifting restlessly with their chemical dreams.

The hot night had remained hot, was giving way to another hot day. Jonny's tunic clung to him like a second skin. He relaxed against the hotel and tried to regain his bearings. His shoulder had begun to throb within a few minutes of leaving the prison. He desperately wanted a drink, a snort, a smoke, anything that would transport him from the pain, the Colonel's obsessions and the old neighborhood in which he was hiding. Writers had been at work on the old buildings with their compressed-air canisters of sulfuric acid, burning their messages, like grim oracles, into the very bodies of the structures.

Over the years, the fronts of the abandoned hotels and shops had taken on the texture and feel of old candle wax. In the alcove, Jonny ran his fingers over crumbling letters. DUCK AND

COVER. And, ALPHA RATS ARE SCARED OF CATS.

On an impulse, Jonny pushed on the hotel door. It scraped across a warped wooden floor and stuck, revealing a bleak interior.

Jonny took a tentative step inside.

It looked to him as if a bomb had gone off in the lobby. The plaster meat and wooden bones of the place were visible where sections of the wall had caved in or been torn away. An old-fashioned wrought iron elevator lay scattered among blistered Lockheed tail fins and useless landing gear.

But, as depressing as the old hotel was to look at, it was the smell of the place that got to Jonny. The deadly stink (ammonia, old cheese, mildew) brought tears to his eyes. But he held his breath and pushed the lobby door closed. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then, tired and leadfooted, his shoulders bumping into walls that appeared from nowhere, he started up the stairs for the roof. From there everything would be visible, and he reasoned that by leaping from rooftop to rooftop, he could lose whoever was following him.

He had not counted on the smell, though. At the first landing, Jonny's eyes were watering; by the second, he was having trouble breathing. Then, on the third floor he abruptly ran out of stairs. There was a door, labeled ROOF, but it was immovable-crusted shut with age and grime. Jonny put his boot to it, but that only brought a pitiful rain of dust from the sagging ceiling.

Outside, he thought, and up the fire escape. Jonny entered one of the guest rooms that opened off the corridor and headed for a window.

Inside, the room was large and, empty of furnishings, faintly echoed his steps. A dim rectangle of street light outlined the smashed innards of an old telephone-comsat uplink. The place must have been nice once, he thought, if they could afford to put those in the rooms.

In the middle of the floor was an upturned hubcap someone had been using to cook in.

Jonny had taken, perhaps, a dozen steps into the room before the smell got to him. It was a physical presence, twisting in his lungs like a tormented animal. His nose ran; he coughed. Holding his arm across his face, he breathed through his mouth. If the Committee had this stuff, they could wipe out the whole city, he thought.

When Jonny reached the window, he found it swollen in place from the damp ocean air. Knowing that Zamora's tail would hear it if he broke the glass, he started back into the hotel to look for a pipe or board. Something that would help him pry the window open.

A rustle of fabric from the far corner of the room. The flicker of something small and metallic.

Jonny took a step forward- and was in the air, falling, his legs knocked out from under him. He curled up as best he could and came down flat, protecting his shoulder.

"Goddamit," he yelled as shapes closed in from the gray edges of the room.

"Get his clothes," came a voice dry and thin as wind.

"Get his shoes," came another voice.

"Get him."

A stooped figure in rags lumbered up to Jonny and began grabbing at his tunic. Jonny cried out at the sudden pressure on his bleeding shoulder, lashing out with his free arm. Pain exploded in his wrist as something sharp and wet dug into it.

Jonny kicked out blindly into the dark, noting with satisfaction a groan as his boot connected. Rolling into a crouch, he propelled himself up into the stomach of the tunic puller. The figure staggered back, wheezing horrid breath.

Jonny leaned forward, letting his weight propel him toward the window. But he was knocked back as someone else jumped him.

"He's going to get out…He'll rat…"

"Little monster…"

"Watch his boots…"

At the window, he was dragged back by a swarm of dry, reptilian fingers. He screamed. Things like vises and knives, pincers and broken glass cut into his back and arms.

Christ, they're biting me, he thought.

Jonny managed to loop his leg behind the leg of one of his attackers. Then, pushing forward with all his strength, he heard a window crack and shatter. Suddenly, he and one or two others were on the fire escape. The sudden release of hands and rush of air left him light-headed, but some animal part of his brain moved his arms and legs, pushing him up and away. No one followed.

Two flights up the fire escape, Jonny stopped to look at his attackers. They huddled below, cooing and mewing over their injured. Though it was cooler outside, the heat still broiled the streets, baking the old tenements; the whole neighborhood rippled behind waves of desert heat. Yet, the mob were clothed in layer upon layer of cast-off coats, moldering lab smocks and vacuum suits. A fat man in tattered test pilot gear crawled onto the landing and gazed down at the street. His clothes hung from his arms in strips, little more than patches all crudely sewn or wired together. The mass of rags on his thick frame gave him an awkward bear-like appearance, but his eyes burned with a savage clarity.