Striper Assassin (24 page)

Mickey chuckles, but it’s not his usual chuckle. It sounds nervous. “Don’t frag with my brain, Hammer.”

“Look at those tracks.”

“You’re saying an animal did this?”

“Maybe a talis cat.”

“Oh,
crap
! Come on!”

“You got any better ideas?”

It would fit, and fit real good in Hammer’s view. The data they got on Striper says she uses magic, that she does vicious damage. Maybe she’s really a mage, a mage with a vicious pet. A mage could probably teleport her pet talis cat wherever she wants, behind someone’s back, make it kill and then run. A talis cat could do that, tear open Dog Bite’s back, then dash up the corridor and out of sight. What noise it made would have been covered by the blaring trid.

If Hammer’s memory serves correctly, talis cats stand just under a meter at the shoulder, making them about as big as the average tiger. Big and powerful enough to tear a man wide open.

“This is crazy.” A nervous laugh bubbles out of Mickey’s mouth. “Fraggin’ slot. Now what?”

“We do what we came to do.”

Mage or not, it’s killing time. They owe it to Dog Bite and to themselves, if they’re gonna earn the rest of their pay. Striper obviously knows they’re here. They’ll just have to be careful. Hammer motions Mickey toward the hall, and follows, a step at a time, up the hall to the stairs. The infrared trace is gone, faded into the air, but the reddish blotches on the floor show that the cat, or whatever it was, went through the door marked Warehouse, which now stands wide open. Mickey crosses to the far side of the doorway. Hammer sets himself to provide covering fire, then motions Mickey inside.

The third floor of the warehouse is like each of the floors below, two stories tall and piled high with crates and shipping containers, arranged into aisles. The bloody paw prints, growing faint now, lead off to the right. Hammer decides to ignore them, to play the game by the book. He and Mickey will do a methodical sweep, take no more chances. Run the witch and her cat to earth.

They’re halfway through the grid of aisles when they hear a bang somewhere off to one end of the warehouse. A deep-pitched humming arises. Hammer recognizes the sound.

“Freight elevator.”

Mickey curses. “Frag! She must be heading down! The slot’s getting away!”

Not this time. “Head for ground.”

They double back to the door and hustle onto the stairs. They’ve gotta move fast if they’re gonna reach the ground floor in time to make their target. The third floor is six stories up and that means six flights of stairs to get down.

They’re down three flights when a loud bang echoes through the stairwell. Hammer catches himself abruptly before the top of the next flight down. The bang came from above and sounded suspiciously like the bang of a door slamming shut. Mickey stops and looks up at him from the landing below.

The slitch is playing games with them.

Hammer clenches his teeth.

The freight elevator must have been a ruse, sent down just to confuse them, run them around. Maybe Striper sent her animal to the ground floor, but it’s irrelevant. The key point is that animals don’t operate freight elevators and they don’t slam doors shut, not like this, not in a way that’s sure to attract attention. Striper must be above them, regardless of where her animal went. Hammer’s going to enjoy killing the slot. If only because she’s dragging things out so much. Really getting him bent.

He motions at Mickey.

Up one flight, they flank the door to the second floor. Hammer's sure that the bang came from higher up, but he's going to be methodical and check things out. Mickey sets himself and nods. Hammer yanks the door open. Mickey darts inside and Hammer follows. There's no sign that anyone's been there, so they head on up the stairs to flank the door to the third floor. Mickey sets himself and nods. Hammer reaches across for the door handle and suddenly the door is swinging open, ramming into him like a freight train and slamming him back off his feet, clutching at his bloody hand. Her claws raked his flesh even as the weight of her paw drove the gun from his grip. Now she advances, bounding up again and again, slamming at him with her forepaws, slashing with her claws. Hammer pulls another gun. She slaps it away. He pulls a knife. She smashes it from his hand and claws his arm from shoulder to wrist. He screams and falls over backward, tumbles over the floor, scrambles up and starts running, but she’s already there, slapping him down, down and down and down, till he rolls screaming onto his back.

“LEMME GO! LEMME GO!”

She straddles his body, bares her fangs, and then roars. The air fills with the rank stink of his terror. That is the proof she demands, the surest measure of her power. Any hunters who come this way will smell the terror she has inspired and take warning.

She flicks an ear with satisfaction, then rips out his throat. That is the price to be paid for turning on the hunter.

The price Nature demands.

It makes things right.

* * *

07-14-54/04:46:51

Roll cam.

The datajacked Sony CB-5000 in the steady-mount atop his helmet comes on-line with a shower of electronic snow and a quick burst of static. Skeeter keys the Bionone tridlink controller on his right forearm to overlay the view through his Seretech Evening Shade cybereyes with a complete technical readout. No point in risking his fraggin’ skin if the blinking dingo equipment isn’t going to record every gore-drenched bit of action.

“Skeeter!” J.B. says impatiently. “Am I—?”

Skeeter thrusts a finger at the dink-fragging biff.
You’re on already!
Start babbling, dithead! J.B. lifts her mike. “This is Joi Bang for WHAM! Independent News and I’m here on the Philadelphia waterfront where only moments ago a broadcast on police comm frequencies reported that a small war has begun complete with automatic weapons fire.”

Skeeter lifts his right arm out to his right, then across his chest to his left to get some extra images of the street with the AZT Micro25 strapped to his wrist. The skank blasted street is deserted, of course. Nobody but a ditbrained newshead like the so-very-trid-o-genic Asian-faced J.B. would come into this part of town any time before dawn.

Abruptly, an engine roars and tires scream. Skeeter jerks around to train his helmet-mounted cam on the street. A black van peels out of an alley across the street and goes racing up the block, smoke pouring from its tires. On the van’s roof is something that looks like a half-inflated black balloon.

“Police have apparently not yet arrived on the scene,” J.B. remarks, so very muck-headed astutely, and then she’s off, running up the sidewalk and right into the alley at the side of the warehouse. “Skeeter!
Skeeter, come on!”

Un-be-fragging incredible.

* * *

07-14-54/04:49:12

“Skeeter! Skeeter, look!”

The damn fraggin’ biff is up on a loading dock at the rear of the warehouse. Skeeter marches up the steps and onto the dock. J.B. pulls on an open door and turns to face him, lifting her mike.

“Am I—?”

You’re on, dag-fram it!

“As you can see, the door is open,” J.B. says into her mike. “Any possible perpetrators may still be inside.”

Right.

“This could be very dangerous.”

No frinkin’ kiddin’ ding-brain.

“We’ll take a look.”

Damn ditheaded biff.

* * *

07-14-54/04:56:30

Main lens, close focus. Three floors and six flights of stairs up, they find a freakin’ ripped-up mutilated mess of a corpse sprawled on the stairway landing. Skeeter’s thermographically enhanced view through his Seretech cybereyes show that the corpse is still hot, not quite at normal human body temperature, but close. J.B. immediately starts babbling. The effin’ scrod-headed newscoop is naturally just
delighted
over the find.

“Here we have further evidence of the string of cannibalistic mutilation killings that have been terrorizing northeast Philadelphia!” J.B. gushes in an undertone. “What other monstrous mutilations have been committed here? Only—”

The bimble-brained biff abruptly hesitates. From beyond the open doorway where the corpse lies comes a low, rumbling growl. The only thing Skeeter’s heard to compare with it is the animal growl of a troll, one who is very unhappy.

Mouth open, yet damn-fragging miraculously silent, J.B. turns from the lens of Skeeter’s helmet-mounted Sony to face the doorway. That’s when something steps into the doorway. Something big. Very big. Its eyes glint blood-red with a phantom ray of light. Its face is a ferocious alien mask of bloody red and stripes of black. It bares enormous gleaming fangs. Its mouth, stretching open wide, seems easily big enough to swallow the very trid-o-genic head of J.B. in one gulp.

“Oh my god oh my god oh my god!”
J.B. babbles.

Skeeter presses the PANICBUTTON button on his Toshiba portable wristfone. The monster in the doorway roars, and the roar is thunderous, reverberating through the stairwell. J.B. screams, turns and runs, ramming right into Skeeter.

“OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD!”
the muddle-headed dithead screams, racing down the stairs.

Skeeter scrambles back onto his feet and charges down the stairs right on the damn fraggin’ dithead’s heels. The monster roars again. J.B. screams. Skeeter concentrates on running like he’s never run before, down six flights of stairs, through the ground-floor warehouse, off the loading dock in the rear and up the alley to the street. Even then, his dimble-headed muck-brain news snoop is still gasping.
“Oh my god! Oh my god!”

Yet another damn-skanking night on the town!

Obviously, J.B.’s theories about cannibalistic orks is down the toilet. Obviously, some paranatural animal like a tiger got out of the zoo, the Philly zoo or some other zoo, and has been prowling the city, killing anything that moves. The one good thing about it all is that he got some fantastic footage of J.B. running away like her shorts were on fire and her behind was catching.

That much is worth a chuckle.

A short one.

Part Two

Were

31

The waterfront slums begin just north of the port. The streets are lined by three-and four-story tenements that go on for kilometers, on and on, flanking the Delaware halfway to Trenton. Tikki stops just short of the House of Corrections in northeast Philly. The district around the prison tends to be quiet except for a lot of police vehicles coming and going. Many are indistinguishable from the area’s regular sector cars and so, to some, the district seems heavily patrolled.

The building where Tikki stops is just a little taller than the others on the block, five stories of grime-blackened brick and dark, smog-smeared windows. She turns off the sidewalk, pushes through a recessed door, and steps into the face of a Konoco Combat Master shotgun, pointed right at her.

The slag holding the gun is dressed like a ganger and has bright orange hair and teeth filed to points. He sits on the stairs. He sits there because that’s his job, to keep everyone but tenants out of the building.

He immediately lowers the gun and nods.

“You know me?” Tikki says.

The guy shakes his head. “Never seen you before. In fact, I ain’t even seeing you
now.”

Good boy.

Tikki takes the stairs to the fifth floor, which has three small apartments. All three belong to her. Tonight, she decides to use the one on the left. She opens the door lock with a simple four-digit combination. There’s no other mundane way through the door except by brute force or major mechanic surgery, either of which would leave observable traces.

The apartment is two rooms, main room and bathroom. The main room has a counter at one end that conceals a micro-kitchenette with a small refrigerator and a sink. There’s a low Japanese table and pillows and a mattress for sitting and sleeping and a portable trid for entertainment. The bathroom is micro-sized, too. Shower, toilet, sink. Both rooms have lighting fixtures on the ceilings, but Tikki never uses them. The windows provide adequate lighting, day or night, and if for some reason she needs more she’s got the trid.

Standard lighting makes a target of people. So do windows. That’s why the first thing she does upon entering her doss is to draw the Kang and look out the windows of the main room across to the roof of the building adjacent. Tonight no one is about. Admittedly, windows like these pose something of a security risk; but they also provide a means of escape if someone should come smashing in through her front door. Given the choice, she’ll accept the added risk in exchange for the avenue of escape.

The night is almost over, but what remains of it is not for wearing clothes. She strips naked, dumps everything, clothes and weapons included, onto the mattress, then turns on the trid. News Now 38 has a story about some suit called Neiman who got hosed in a parking garage. Nothing new about that. Like they say in the adverts for adventure trids, the modern metroplex is a dark and dangerous place. Somebody’s always getting sliced or diced or chopped to ribbons. What surprises her, though only briefly, is the absence of any mention of all the yakuza she’s been scragging for Adama. The cops or the corps must have the gag on. It wouldn’t be the first time.