“Sure, Stephie . . .”
The Antaeus pulled off the bridge and on to Detroit Avenue. In the space of one city block the glass monoliths gave over to old brick warehouses with dead windows. Even the few places that were in use were aged black. They passed the first Ohio City marker and they were in Manny’s neighborhood.
Nohar pointed to the side of the road, next to a whitewashed building that held an unnamed bar that was just opening. “Pull over.”
“What?”
“We pull over and wait for our shadows to catch up with us.”
“Kit, I told you they pulled—”
“Angel, the Zips aren’t the only ones in on this.”
Stephie pulled over. “Now what?”
“We hunch down, out of sight.”
“If you say so.” Stephie crouched in the foot well with Angel. Nohar eased back into a prone position.
Nohar looked back the way they had come. At the height of lunch hour, in this part of town, traffic was dead.
It only took half a minute for their shadow to show up. An unmarked industrial-green Dodge Electroline, programmed or remote-driven, was moving down Detroit. It paused, hazards on, directly across from them and stayed there for nearly a minute. Then it accelerated and took the next right. Nohar figured it was about to perform some sort of search pattern.
Angel shook her head. “What now? And where did that come from?”
“Now, we walk and avoid the pattern that remote is running.”
Stephie was pulling herself out of the foot well. “What about your leg?”
“I’ll manage—”
Nohar felt a little more warmth ooze down his leg. He pressed the bandage and tried to get adequate pressure on the wound. “Van’s from Midwest Lapidary Imports, I think. The company involved in this mess.”
He pulled the shirt tight and winced. “Ditch the shotgun, let’s go.”
He hobbled out and his leg nearly buckled. In the daylight, his leg was soaked from the hip down, and his denim pants were beginning to adhere to his fur. He could put weight on it, but the bloodstains could be seen from a block away. Nohar was getting the feeling any halfway decent search would turn them up. They were too damn conspicuous.
He just hoped nobody called the cops on them.
He led the way through a vacant lot across the street from the bar, down an alley between two warehouses, through someone’s cracked-mud backyard, across a narrow brick dead-end street, through a gaping hole in a rusted chain link fence, over the rotting ties that were the only remains of the abandoned train tracks, and finally into an alley that led behind some residential garages.
When he stopped, he had to look down to make sure his leg didn’t end in a ragged stump. Angel spoke.
“Lady above, Kit. You know this place better than my runners knew Moreytown. And this place is solid pink—”
Nohar paused a second to catch his breath. “Angel, the divisions aren’t clear as they seem to be when you’re in Moreytown. I used to live up here.”
Stephie asked, “Open housing policy?”
Nohar snorted and rubbed his leg. “Call it no housing policy and a relative absence of lethal anti-morey violence. By the way, we’re here.”
Nohar hooked a thumb at the rear wall of the garage they had stopped behind. Carved in the wall, amid a host of childish doodles and vertical claw marks, was some blocky lettering. “Nohar and Bobby, 2033,” The threes were carved in backward.
Stephie was tracing the old carving. “Who was Bobby?”
“First and only pink friend—Let’s get inside.”
Nohar limped off around the garage. Manny’s van was gone. Manny probably wouldn’t be back until late afternoon or evening. When Nohar thought about it, he had probably contributed a lot to Manny’s current caseload.
The side door was locked—in this neighborhood, predictable. Nohar rang the call button. He was right. Manny wasn’t home. Angel and Stephie were rounding the side of the house. He called out to them. “This place has an old key lock, if you check the loose clapboard under the vehicle feed in the garage, you’ll find a spare.”
Nohar didn’t add the “I hope” he felt. It had been nearly fifteen years since he’d had occasion to use the spare key. Luck was with them. Stephie came back with the key in hand.
Nohar let them in.
• • •
It was close to seven-thirty and they were all waiting for Manny in his living room.Nohar sat on his windbreaker to avoid leaking blood on the furniture, while Stephie and Angel watched the news off the comm. News wasn’t great. The attack on the coffeehouse resulted in three dead—all rodents—and the local news called it a morey gang war. Great.
Even better were the reports of similar, and more deadly, incidents on the fringes of morey communities in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. All had the car bomb tie-in. All Honduran rats.
Reports were still coming in, they said, about unconfirmed attacks in San Francisco, Denver, and Miami. Everyone made connections back to the “Dark August” of 2042. Eleven year anniversary of the first riots in Moreytown, also on a Monday, August 4. Nohar didn’t need the reminder.
What really freaked the pinks was the obvious coordination between all the incidents. Same gang name. Same M.O. The Zips could have done no damage whatsoever, and the pinks would still freak.
The mall in New York was the worst. All four Zips there had automatic weapons, and the car bomb was a bit nastier than most. The vids had panned with loving attention to every body-bag.
Angel had overheard Terin complaining about her best people being dragged to the four corners of the country. While all the attacks were violent and bloody, the news never mentioned more than four rats involved in any one attack. Thirty rats, max. All heavily armed, supplied with explosives, and timed to the minute.
Terrorism staged to be a media event.
The whole situation made Nohar sick to his stomach. “A decade out of the hole, and a bunch of psychopaths push us back in.”
Angel stared at the screen. For once, her wiseass attitude was gone. “Kit, hell the Zips trying to do? Why?”
“Wish I knew.”
“Binder’s moreau control bill is going to make it through the House.”
Angel turned toward Stephie. “Huh?”
“The bill shuts down moreau immigration and starts mandatory sterilization.”
Nohar shut off the bodies on the comm. “We’re on the wrong side of another anti-morey wave. The riots all over again.”
Angel let out a nervous laugh. “Come on, Kit. You were there, this ain’t nothing like the riots.”
Stephie responded for him. “All you need is some media terror and Congress will jump on the bandwagon. It seems almost engineered to push Binder’s legislation.”
The front door interrupted their conversation. A very tired-looking mongoose entered the living room. Manny glanced at Stephie, then Angel, and finally Nohar. He seemed beyond the ability to register surprise. He was still wearing his lab coat, and a ghostly odor of blood, death, and hospital disinfectant was following him.
“You stupid bastard, why aren’t you in a hospital?”
Nohar was still wearing the Vind, but from Manny’s attitude, more concerned than angry, Nohar knew Manny hadn’t connected him with the rodent attack yet. Guiltily, he didn’t explain.
Manny released a whistling sigh from his front teeth. “I wonder what would happen to you if I wasn’t a medic. Can you walk?”
“I got here, didn’t I?”
“That’s not what I asked. How long have you been sitting there?”
Manny had a point.
Nohar tried to get up, but a shivering wave of agony rippled up the entire right side of his body. He collapsed on the floor, pulling the bloody windbreaker after him. Both women underwent a brief panic, but Manny sho
oed them away as he pulled out a sheet and laid it on the floor. It took all three of them to help roll Nohar on it.
“I hope you’ve already written off the clothes . . .”
Manny walked out of the living room and into the kitchen where he kept his medical equipment. Manny came back with a loaded air-hypo and a medical bag. He set the hypo down, next to the sheet.
“Introduce me to your friends.” Manny started shredding Nohar’s jeans with a pair of scissors.
Nohar tried to ignore the pain of the clotted blood tearing out his fur. “Angel, Stephanie Weir, the doctor doing violence to my pants is Manny, Mandvi Gujerat.”
Manny nodded. “Pleased, I’m sure.”
Angel twitched her facial scar. “You were really a combat medic?”
Manny had laid open Nohar’s pants leg and was examining the remains of Maria’s shirt that still bound the gunshot wound. “Five years in the Afghan frontier before New Delhi got nuked—You, Stephanie? Hand me those forceps.” Stephie removed them from the bag. Manny took the forceps from her and used them to start peeling away the outer layer of the makeshift bandage. “Nohar, if it wasn’t for that engineered metabolism of yours—”
Manny shook his head at the mess of Nohar’s hip. “No, forget it, I’m not going to get through to you anyway.”
Manny stood up. “I’m going to wash up. I’ve got to do some cutting and stitching on this obstinate lump of stupidity.” He looked at Angel. “You know, when this bastard was six, he broke his arm and forced me to set it myself? A compound fracture yet . . .”
Manny left the living room and soon there was the sound of running water from the kitchen. Stephie looked at Nohar. “What is this with you and hospitals?”
Nohar looked down at the gory mess on his right hip and suppressed a shudder. “I don’t trust them—”
Manny came back, pulling on a pair of gloves. “Yes, he’d rather trust himself to my floor. Who needs a sterile environment?”
Manny turned to Angel. “Pick up that hypo I brought in here?”
Angel did as she was asked. Manny turned to Stephie. “It’s probably a futile gesture, but would you tie on my mask?”
Stephie tied the conical face mask around Manny’s muzzle, muffling his voice. “Angel, can you handle that thing?”
Angel nodded and there was a mumble behind Manny’s mask that sounded like, “Doesn’t surprise me.”
In a louder voice trained to be heard from behind a jaw immobilized behind the restrictive mask, Manny told Angel to empty the cartridge into Nohar’s arm. Angel rolled up Nohar’s right sleeve, there was a slight sting, and the world floated away.
Chapter 14
Nohar had an intense fear he would wake up in a hospital. However, no disinfectant assaulted him when he awoke. He could smell alcohol, a much sharper and cleaner scent. There was also the faint coppery rust smell of his own blood. There was the dry dusty smell of old cloth and paper.
And nearby was the smell of roses and wood smoke.
Nohar opened his eyes.
He was in the attic. His old room still had no air-conditioning, and should have been hotter than Hades—but the omnipresent rumble and the breeze through his whiskers told Nohar the old ventilation fan still worked, pulling a crosswind through this two–room insulated oven. His eyes quickly shifted into nocturnal monochrome.
Her scent had betrayed her presence. Stephie Weir was asleep in a claw-scarred recliner across from Nohar’s bed.
He gave the room a brief scan and was thankful Manny wasn’t overly sentimental. The chair and the bed were the only remains of his old furniture. The attic was now a haven for boxes, old luggage, and older clothes.
Nohar’s gaze lit on the small end table that jutted out the side of the antique headboard. After a decade and a half, the table was still familiar. Nohar remembered the scratches that marked its surface. His name and idle crosshatches had clawed through five layers of paint to reveal the black finish underneath. The desk lamp was still clamped to it, still with three or four knots of electrical tape holding the cord together.
Orai’s picture was still in its cheap gold-plated frame, cocked at an obsessively perfect forty-five degree angle toward the bed. Its lower edge rested in a groove worn in the last two layers of paint. The gold was flaking and rust spots dotted the gray metal beneath. The glass was hazy with dust and, in the dark, Nohar could barely make out the picture.
Nohar sat up on the edge of the bed—his hip objected, but only slightly—and turned on the desk lamp which, to his surprise, still worked. Now he could see the picture. In it, Orai was in her combat harness, but unarmed. She was center frame and holding up one end of an American flag. The other end was being held by some friend from her unit. In the background he could see the Statue of Liberty and part of the Manhattan skyline. Orai and her friend, both tigers, were smiling, totally oblivious to the show of teeth. Orai was already beginning to show her pregnancy. The writing on the old picture was faded a bit, though the picture itself was still in good shape. It read, “Rajasthan Airlift—March 2027.”
Nohar sighed.
He realized Stephie was awake now. She was leaning forward in the recliner, probably trying to get a glimpse of the picture. Nohar didn’t know what to feel about that. It was a personal part of his life. But Stephie was just sitting there. She seemed to know it was his decision to tell her. She didn’t ask.
Nohar realized he liked this pink woman.
He handed her his childhood icon. “She’s the one on the left.”
Stephie took the picture. “Who is she?”
“My mother. She was already pregnant when the company defected. Her name was Orai.”
Stephie’s eyes raised from the picture. “You used the past tense.”
Nohar was about to evade the question, but why shouldn’t she know? He cleared his throat. “Died when I was five, just old enough to remember. She’d gotten inseminated, wanted to give me a little brother or sister. She’d saved for the procedure since getting to the States. Things went fine. Then, three months in, she went for a prenatal checkup—” Nohar sucked in a breath. “Those damn idiots at the Clinic—do you know what Pakistani gene-techs had done with feline leukemia?”
Stephie shook her head. The color drained from her face.
Nohar went on. “Those doctors didn’t know either. They misdiagnosed a Jaguar, put him in with the other felines, including Orai.” Nohar’s voice cracked a bit. He brought it under control. “They could’ve quarantined the Jaguar. But they don’t give moreys private rooms. Every feline in the ward started dying. Then they knew. She was near to term. She died miscarrying two cubs—”
Nohar fell silent. There wasn’t much left to say. He closed his eyes and tried to remember when he had told anyone that story in full. No one came to mind. Not even Manny, though Manny knew the story well enough.
The smell of smoky rose was suddenly very close, and Nohar felt a tiny naked hand on his cheek, brushing his whiskers. He opened his eyes and saw Stephie’s face, close to his own. Her breath was warm on the skin of his nose. Her eyes were liquid green nothing like the eyes of a cat—visible whites, tiny round pupils.
Nohar had never realized how alien human eyes were.
Her lips parted in a whisper. “Lord, how you must hate humans.”
Nohar shook his head. “No, no hate. Not for people.”
The hand left and Stephie replaced the picture, in its groove and at its forty-five degree angle. She did it in one fluid motion, stretching across Nohar to replace the picture. Again Nohar found himself admiring her muscle tone and her economy of movement.
She sat down next to him on the bed. The springs barely noticed her weight. Her nervousness was back. Just like at the table at the Arabica. She shook her head and looked up at him. Nohar wished once again that he was better at reading human expression.
“Nohar,
would you tell me, who’s Angel?”
Back to business. “I told you, she’s a lead. She saw the sniper—”
Stephie was shaking her head again. “Not what I meant. I want to know who she is to you.”
Huh? Maybe not. “What? Only met her yesterday— We sure as hell aren’t lovers. If that’s what you mean.”
Stephie turned a bright red. She clenched a fist that made her knuckles whiten. “I’m sorry, forgive me. I didn’t mean to offend—”
Nohar got a sensation he often got when talking with humans. There were two different conversations here. Stephie was, he felt, about to bolt off somewhere and cry. He didn’t want to be responsible for that, even if he didn’t understand what was going on. He placed his hands on her shoulder. Nohar didn’t know how to do this gracefully, so he just told her the truth. “I wasn’t offended. But the idea of having relations with that little twitch is ludicrous.”
Nohar could tell Stephie almost laughed. She was still flushed.
“Why ask?”
Nohar could sense a slight tensing of her muscles under his hand. “Angel was bragging all the time while you were unconscious. I just wondered, you’re such different . . .”
Ah. “Different species? I’d admit, me and her, it would be unusual, but not unheard of.”
“Isn’t that bestiality? Would it be possible?”
“Some human taboos, like nudity, can’t wash with moreys for practical reasons.”
Stephie was still looking up at him, and Nohar realized he’d only answered half the question. “And, uh, some morey characteristics came out the other end of the labs remarkably similar. I think it might be linked to bipedal . . .” He trailed off.
Great, no he was getting embarrassed.
Stephie had a questioning look in her eyes. The flush was fading. “Who do you have, Nohar?”
Nohar thought of Maria. “No one, anymore.”
“You’re lonely, aren’t you?”
He would have objected, but he had trouble lying to people he felt something for. He nodded. “You?”