KOP Killer (27 page)

We made our crouched approach, slithering through and around the poppies, our goal a wide stack of black tar bricks. Three guards, none looking this way. They were boys, young teens. General Z’s army was a children’s brigade. I doubted many survived long enough to be men.

We slipped behind the stack of bricks and peeked over them and around the side. I grabbed Maggie’s wrist, put my half-arm on Deluski’s shoulder. “You sure you want to do this?”

They both nodded. We had to know what was going on in there, had to know what game Mota, Panama, and the doctor were playing.

We had no choice but to break in and see with our own eyes. The local authorities wouldn’t help. Panama ran YOP.

The planetary authorities wouldn’t help either. This was General Z’s territory, a lawless expanse of jungle villages and O fields. The Lagartan army would never tame this region. Truth was, the pols didn’t want them to. Crush the narco-state and they’d have to stop milking the Unified Worlds for drug enforcement money, which they siphoned into their own pockets.

The three guards stood in a group, close enough that we could hear them chatting. We snuck from one stack of tar bricks to the next, approaching closer and closer, the first shed a few meters away. I looked at the main building. The windows, most of which were dark, were now in plain view. I checked the lighted ones, searching for moving shadows and prying eyes. All I found was eerie stillness.

Deluski led us toward the next cover, a low-to-the-ground enclosure of tarps and hand-hewn wood poles. We crawled over hoses to the enclosure’s edge. The clinic was a short distance ahead.

I moved around the enclosure, my shoulder getting wet as it brushed against the dewy tarp. What the hell was in there? “Wait,” I whispered to Deluski. I pulled my lase-blade, held it close to the ground, and flicked it on. I stayed hunched above the blade to block the light, fiery heat baking my chest and chin. I sliced into the tarp, a good-sized gash, and I spread the opening wide, using the light of my blade to peer through.

Dirt. Rocks. Sprawling squash vines. A garden?

I saw something move. Barely. I strained to see in the red light, spotted it again. A burrowing shell. I could see more of them now, lots of them, coin-sized shells dragging sluggishly across the dirt, along the squash vines and leaves.

Deluski tapped my shoulder. “See anything?”

I turned off the blade. “Snails.”

“Like the ones we saw at the gay bar?”

“I think so.”

Maggie elbowed me. “What were you guys doing at a gay bar?”

Deluski peeked around the side. “Let’s go. The guards are heading for one of the sheds.” We dashed behind the clinic, pressed ourselves into the wall. We hustled down its length, stopping at the first doorway, a shutter on hinges.

Maggie pushed open the shutter and we were inside, stealing down an empty hall, weapons-first. Humming lights fluctuated to the sound of an unseen generator. As we went forward, our legs were tickled by ivy and ferns that grew through cracks in the wood plank floors. An unoccupied desk came into view, and we stepped up to it. Maggie put her free hand on the seat. “Warm.”

We waited, listening. My heartbeat sounded in my ears. A toilet flushed. We followed the sound to a curtained doorway and stopped to surround it. A hand swept the curtain aside and a guard came through. Maggie and Deluski plugged his ears with lase-pistols.

“Drop to the floor,” I ordered. “Kiss the wood.”

The kid spread his hands and slow-moed down.

I pushed my heel between his shoulder blades, my toes pressing his head into the floorboards like it was a gas pedal. “Kiss it.”

I could feel the punk’s lungs rising under my heel, quick puffs up and down. His head went all the way down, lips on wood. I lifted my shoe so Deluski could relieve him of his weapon and frisk the little shit.

I put my foot back where it was. “How many guards?”

“Four,” he said, his voice cracking midword. I couldn’t tell if it was distress or puberty that frogged it. “Three outside and me.”

“Who else?”

“A nurse.”

“What about the doc?”

“He left, took a flyer to Koba.”

“Just one nurse?”

He nodded, his face mashing into the floorboards.

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

I put some extra weight on my foot.

“Upstairs somewhere,” he wheezed. “He makes rounds.”

“Does he come this way?”

“Sometimes.”

“Armed?”

“No.”

I let up. “Call him.”

“Manny.”

“Louder.”

“Manny! Get down here.”

Maggie and Deluski waited by the stairs. The ceiling creaked overhead. I looked up and followed the trail of whining planks to the staircase, shoes clomping down. He reached the bottom, stunned eyes sizing up me and my piece. He was built like a gym rat, his head shaved bald as a bent knee. Dark-skinned biceps squeezed out of a tight-fitting tee tucked into belted designer pants. He wore rubber gloves on his hands.

Maggie and Deluski closed in on either side of him. He froze except for a quivering lip.

Maggie waved her weapon at him. “What’s going on here?”

He hesitated, eyes clicking through his options. Deluski accelerated the decision making with a quick crack to the skull.

“A clinic,” he blurted. “It’s a clinic.” He rubbed his head with his gloved hand, checked his palm for blood. “What did you do that for?”

“What kind of clinic?”

“Listen, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. This shit’s not exactly a secret around here, but you best go see for yourselves.” He hiked a thumb at the stairs and rubbed his head again.

Maggie, Deluski, and I traded glances. Nods all around. Maggie told him to give us the tour.

We filed upstairs, all five of us. I kept my piece buried in the kid’s kidney. Deluski stayed with Nurse Manny, a fistful of the nurse’s tee bunched in one hand, weapon in the other, gun barrel stabbed into Manny’s spine.

We stepped down a short hallway, passing a room with a single bed on the left. “That’s the doc’s room,” said Manny. “My room is way over on the other side.”

Iguanas scuffled overhead, the rafters dotted with nests made from stolen fronds in the thatch roofing. We entered a long room, beds lined up barracks-style. We walked down the wide center aisle, my brain struggling to comprehend.

Maggie wandered, slack-jawed, her weapon hanging by her hip. She made to talk but her mouth just opened and closed like that of a dazed fish dying on a boat’s floor. Pigment had drained from Deluski’s face, his sand-colored skin turning a sickly olive.

My head spun, drunk on this fucked-up horror show. I felt ready to tip over. I drilled my piece deeper into my charge’s side, made him wince and bite his lip. I kicked his legs from behind. “Get down.”

Deluski ordered Nurse Manny down and looked for a place to sit, wobbly legs carrying him to the foot of an unoccupied bed.

I closed my eyes, just long enough to wish it all away. I opened them back up knowing it wouldn’t be gone. They were still here. The man lying naked on his back, a quadruple amputee, six black insect legs coming from his torso and scrabbling at the air like an upended beetle’s. The woman with air tanks for legs, hoses running from her metal thighs directly into her chest. The man encased in a bug shell, his face mostly hidden behind a chitinous mandible. The I-didn’t-know-what lying in a bath, skin looking like gray rubber, a triangle of thick gray flesh hanging over the rim.

A fucking fin.

One of them moved. Three weapons took aim. She slipped out of bed with a thump. Her legs had been shortened, no knees or feet, the skin of her thighs covered with dense, thick fur. She started into an ungainly, stump-legged crawl.

“Don’t mind her,” said the facedown nurse, his bald head raised off the floor. “She’s just going to the bathroom.”

She humped and bumped to the aisle’s end and turned for a toilet against the wall, used a step to get herself up. She looked young. Evie’s age or thereabouts. Her face was flat. Dominated by big eyes. Down’s.

What the fuck was this place?

Maggie put her shaky voice to the question.

“The doc does experiments here,” said the nurse.

“What kind of experiments?”

“He’s a genius, you know. Crazy, but a genius.”

The toilet flushed and the girl slowly began the return trip.

Maggie stepped over to the nurse, looked down at him like a lizard had taken a shit on the floor. She stared at the back of his smooth head, her weapon hanging tensely by her side. Hair fell in front of her face, sweaty straggles dangling over dark eyes. “Explain.”

“He’s trying to make more effective workers.”

“More effective?” She leaned down at him. “She can’t walk!” I kept a close eye on her lase-pistol. Didn’t want her doing something stupid.

“She can walk in space,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m talking about zero g. Hands are all that matter when there’s no gravity. You float from handhold to handhold. Legs just get in the way.”

“The fur?”

“Say you need to turn a wrench or something. Doesn’t work too good when your feet come off the floor. You have to anchor yourself, but do that with one of your hands and you’ve only got one left to work with.”

“The fur?” Maggie repeated, her tone maxed out on impatience.

“Works like Velcro.”

Velcro? Fuck me.
I felt numb, my whole body ready to melt into the floorboards. Somehow, against all odds, I held shape as I watched the girl drag herself up a short ramp back to her bed.

Maggie was stunned into silence.

Velcro. Fucking fuck.

Nurse Manny pointed at the man with the bug legs. “That’s another model the doc developed.”

Model? The poor sap’s eyes were lost in another world, legs clicking in a feeble attempt to turn himself over.

“The legs are way too weak to carry his torso down here, but get him in zero g and he’ll be scooting up walls, across the ceiling. He’ll be perfect for going EVA, won’t need to fuck around with a jetpack or a tether.”

“He has no hands.”

“True. The doc still has to add those. That, or he might go with a prehensile tail. He’s gotten good at those.”

Deluski spoke up for the first time. “Why all this talk about zero g? The Orbital has artificial gravity.”

“They’re mining asteroids up there. Most are too small to worry about setting up any kind of permanent base. The space stations and space liners have gravity, but most of the mining facilities operate in zero g or whatever little gravity they get from the asteroids themselves.”

“Have you shipped out any of these workers?”

“Not yet. He hasn’t even tried any of his designs on real people yet.”

Maggie raised her brows. “These aren’t real people?”

“Shit no,” he said. “This here is a vegetable garden. Nothing but cripples and retards. That one there was in General Z’s army, but he got lobotomized by a shot in the head, burned a hole straight through. There’s a couple more woundeds over there, the rest were dumped by their families. People around here are crazy superstitious. They think their kids are possessed when they don’t come out right, so they sell their defectives to the doc. He doesn’t buy them all. He’s picky about his specimens.”

Specimens.
Cold-ass bastard. Maggie lifted her piece just a smidge, enough to make me call her name as a caution. Nurse Manny wrenched his neck around to see what was going on. Maggie’s piece dropped back to her hip. “Continue.”

“Before he starts doing real people, he wants to test his designs by chartering a shuttle to take the whole bunch out of the atmosphere. He doesn’t quite have the funds yet, though. Soon as he does, he wants to close his plastic surgery biz in Koba. He funds this work here with the money he makes down there.”

“Where does he plan on getting the
real
people?”

“People will volunteer.”

“You must be joking.”

“Listen, lady, where the fuck do you think you are? This is Yepala. We’ve got an army of kids terrorizing people. Girls around here get gang-raped every day. People will do anything to land an offworld job. And the offworlders will pay for labor. You know how successful the mining operations are. Those people can’t wait to get a bunch of immigrants in to do all the shit work.”

I didn’t know what to say. None of us did. The horror of it all was beyond us.

Silence reigned for the next minute. Until a nervous Nurse Manny asked, “What are you going to do with me?”

The young guard glared at him. Manny said
me.
Not
us.

Nobody responded.

He decided to keep talking, like he figured he was safe as long as he had something to offer. “The one in the tub can breathe underwater. Pivon has a moon that’s all ocean. The waters aren’t as developed as ours when it comes to sea life, but they do have these little shrimplike creatures that are evidently mighty tasty. Doc figures a swimmer would be useful untangling nets and shit.

“And Quentin, the guy fused into the bug shell, is designed for EVA work. You attach a faceplate, and he’s airtight. You know how much time workers waste suiting up to go into vacuum? The doc figures that making people EVA-ready could boost productivity by ten percent. Maybe more. Plus it’ll be safer.”

I stopped listening. I didn’t want to know about the woman with air-tank legs or the young boy with sockets on the end of his wrists, myriads of attachments surely available for the right price. “Does General Z run this place?”

“Not the clinic. But he does run the opium operations. The guards are all his. This one’s job,” he pointed at the young guard, “is protecting the big storeroom downstairs. If the general knows there’s a clinic out here, he’s never shown any interest in it.”

“So you work for the doctor and the doctor alone?”

“Him and the sheriff. This is the sheriff’s land. He bought it real cheap a couple years back and had it cleared of jungle so he could lease it to General Z.”

“Lease it?” asked Deluski. “Can’t the general take whatever land he wants?”

“The money buys more than the land,” I said. “It buys YOP too. Let’s go. We got what we came for.”