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The girl in the image was life size, and revealed to just above her navel. Maybe for the sake of identification they wanted to show the neon-glowing tattoo of a pink teddy bear with one cyclops eye she wore on her upper arm, or perhaps it was thought that a bit of nudity would make people stop and take note.
Her arms were bent a bit stiffly at the elbows, her hands contracted into claws, and a similar effect gripped her tendoned neck and the unsettling grin she wore, her partially blackened lips gone papery and dry and peeled back from a huge leer of gritted teeth. Her eyes fairly bulged, and had a dull grayish sheen as if a membrane lay over them. She was young, maybe mid twenties, and had a short stylish hair cut gone disheveled; with her tattoo and candy-pink nails, such a carefully designed presentation for the world, and yet here she was displayed like this. It was like clipping a poodle only to drown it in a bottle of formaldehyde.
With the back of his overcoat rippling as another tube whooshed past the dock behind him, Toskins took two steps closer to read the type that scrolled from left to right in a dozen languages under the stationary main caption:
“Unknown human female, approximate age twenty-four, discovered 4.25.57 on Platform D of Folger Street Terminal. No purse, wallet, personal identification. Body was found bisected below the hips. Lower portion of body not recovered. If you can identify this woman, or wish to claim her remains, contact Police Precinct 17 at 55.9090.5599.”
Bisected below the hips? Toskins looked sharply up at the woman again, as if for traces of blood spattered on her belly, crusted inside her navel, but saw none. A good thing they had at least not revealed just a few more inches of her (all that remained of her), in the interest of good taste.
Toskins forced himself not to look at her breasts, under the circumstances, ashamed that he wanted to, the more ashamed when he read the enthusiastic graffiti again: “SEXY!” In disgust of this place, as if Punktown itself had murdered the woman, he turned away to find the escalator to the city that awaited him with sadistic glee above.
Murderer. Yes, she must have been murdered, though the posting hadn’t mentioned cause of death. Could it have been a tube accident? Was the bisection the cause of her demise, or something that had come after?
Platform D, eh? This was Platform D.
He must put her out of his mind. As much as it was preferable to dwell on a cadaver than to contemplate his tedious job and the numbing round of meetings he faced, he had best get on with it, and he wanted to keep his mind clear and alert when he hit the streets. After all, this was Punktown.
««—»»
The collar of his overcoat turned up against the sting of winter at his nape, Toskins mounted a pedestrian overpass to cross the roaring metal rapids of Folger Street. The bridge-like overpass was enclosed within a plastic tube to keep out the elements, though it was still frigid inside, and a low-flying helicar seemed almost to scrape its belly across the transparent roof, causing Toskins to duck his head and mutter a curse. Two youths loitering in the clear tunnel snickered at him. Toskins was irritated but didn’t dare make eye contact with them.
If this were Miniosis, he thought bitterly, there would be a security camera, and heat and soft music would be piped into the overpass as well.
His destination, the Hotel Valhalla, was diagonally across the street from the entrance to the Folger Street subway terminal. The company that was hosting his stay had already arranged his accommodations for him, and they would send a driver for him first thing in the morning. He had by necessity got a late start today, having had to finish up a project at his own office, and so there was little more to do this afternoon but settle in and wait for the morrow.
He could see the hotel through the walls of the tunnel, the floor of which vibrated with the vertiginous rush of traffic below his feet. It was a fairly smallish establishment, a bit gray and worn around the edges, but this was after all a pretty rough part of town. He was surprised the place hadn’t uprooted and settled elsewhere. (The offices of his hosts were a few critical blocks over, at the periphery of Industrial Square.) Toward the end of the tunnel he paused to gaze down at the street. A gang of perhaps a dozen Choom boys sauntered along the sidewalk like one many-legged feral beast, hungry for prey. In the opposite direction stalked a filthy and wild-haired asian man with blood streaming down his face from a scalp wound, gesticulating furiously and bellowing something about devils in the subway. Three prosties bundled in faux fur and sporting thigh-high shiny boots sat on a bench outside the hotel’s front entrance, lazily contemplating their prospects.
Toskins stared at the prosties outside the hotel, which must be even seedier than it looked. It gave him a bit of insight into his hosts, made him wary about their frugality. His thoughts fluctuated between the work ahead of him over the next few days, and that very pretty prosty in the middle, who looked to be a nicely stirred blend of white and black, her hair dyed crimson to match her plastic boots. Did he dare to make this trip a little more adventurous than he’d scheduled?
The noisy youths behind him were making him nervous again, so he pressed onward, descending the opposite staircase and exiting the overpass almost directly in front of the Hotel Valhalla.
As he neared it, the center prosty looked up at him with heavy-lidded eyes that were meant to look sensual rather than bored and perhaps high. Overly-full crimson lips drew back slowly to bare bright white teeth that glistened subtly with saliva. What organisms might be swimming in that saliva? Like slithering fanged eels…
Toskins flickered a smile back at the pretty girl, but averted his gaze shyly and found himself hurrying past the bench, and on into the hotel itself.
««—»»
While Toskins waited in line to check in at the counter, he noticed a young woman queuing up to a second clerk, a few paces to his left. She was tall, wore an elegantly cut long winter coat, her honey-colored hair set off by the coat’s black faux fur collar. As if sensing his stealthy gaze, she turned to look in his direction. Instead of sneering or looking quickly away, as he expected in that awkward moment, her pretty pink lips shifted into a subtle but definite smile. Her eyes were green, he judged. She held his gaze for what seemed to him a fantastically long moment, but then his line moved forward by one person and he was obliged to pull up ahead of their previously parallel arrangement.
The couple ahead of Toskins took an inordinately long time at the desk—they had a number of demands, a number of problems, and were very testy—so the blond woman’s line ended up moving at a faster rate, and by the time Toskins had wrapped up his business, he looked to see the woman turning into the entrance of the hotel’s lounge, apparently unaccompanied. Just before she passed through the threshold, she looked back briefly over her shoulder. Was it at the lobby in general, or him in particular?
Don’t be ridiculous, he told himself. A lovely girl like that, a bland little fellow like himself. She had only been polite by smiling before, hadn’t she?
He turned away from alluring mirages to seek out the elevators, and his room on the fourth floor. He shared his lift with two young men in ridiculous T-shirts and fedoras, who seemed to be discussing a science fiction convention here in the hotel, and a middle-aged man who appeared to be at least half-drunk, with one arm snugged around the waist of a stony-faced prosty with a platinum wig that fell in a cape to her knees. She caught Toskins staring at a black sore or lesion on her forehead that her fake spun-gold bangs partially masked.
Unlike the natural blond downstairs, she did not smile when she caught him watching her.
««—»»
The room was small, but it would do. Its tiny bathroom was dominated by a nice big shower stall that he was looking forward to trying out later. It was large enough for two, he thought. For honeymooners and prosties with johns alike.
There was a window looking down on the bridge he had crossed only a half hour earlier. Already the sky was growing dusky with evening, and the city was glowing bejeweled through the deepening violet mist, a deceptively pretty sight, the way a bioluminescent bauble dazzles at the mouth of a deep sea fish.
Toskins had tossed his suitcase across his bed and asked for the robot bellhop to bring him up some coffee and a ham sandwich for dinner. It had lingered in confusion, fighting to digest his request, its programming glitched. He had sighed and shut the door in what passed for its face. Maybe he’d go down to the hotel’s restaurant later. They might even have some food in the lounge.
Why not go there right now? part of him urged eagerly.
A more realistic part of him ignored the adolescent voice. He moved to the vidtank, switched it on for company as he unpacked.
Outside the window, he heard a few distant crackles of gunfire, and foolishly felt like ducking around the edge of the frame, out of sight of some sniper. Instead he gazed down at the street again. Traffic had thinned by about half already, now that it was the tail end of rush hour. Peripherally, he listened to a succession of news stories from the VT, each seemingly more horrific than the last. Punktown’s daily summary of atrocities.
…A top executive of a biotechnology lab had shotgunned his own head apart in the company meeting room, being sure to call all his chief underlings in first to witness the deed. No cause was given for his actions, but before he pulled the trigger the executive sobbed for his people to please forgive him for some unspecified sins…
…City officials were concerned about the growing number of mutations, both sentient and animal, many of them potentially dangerous, seen aboveground following Punktown’s recent catastrophic earthquake, flushed out from the caved-in sewers and subway tunnels they had formerly hidden away in…
…A Kalian religious fanatic had entered the Chrislamic Cathedral here in town during a mass and stabbed four people, one of whom had died of his wounds, all the while screaming about the impending apocalyptic arrival of the Kalian demon-god Ugghiutu…
…A number of unclassified life forms had beam skipped—stowed away in teleported cargo—from a remote research colony to this long-established colony of Punktown on the planet Oasis. It was not yet known whether they were animals or sentient beings, but they had killed one man already at the research base…
…The body of a murdered woman had been discovered in the ladies room of the bus station off Industrial Square. The woman, a thirty-one year old waitress, had been severed at the waist—Toskins spun around to look at the screen sharply—though her lower portion had not been recovered. He caught only a glimpse of a smiling photo of the woman in life, followed by footage of red-uniformed men carrying a bagged, truncated form through the bus terminal’s front doors…
Had to be a serial killer, he thought.
Having had enough, Toskins growled at the VT to put on a wallpaper design, and a background of jazz at low volume. It complied. Swirling greens and blues from the VT screen softly glowed across his hotel room’s walls soothingly, and the music was like something he’d be playing at home right now. That was much better. He finished his packing, set up his palmcomp atop a little desk, logged on to read his mail. This ended up taking a bit over two hours, as there was some business to address amidst all the junk mail to dispose of. Finally he got up to stretch, decided he had best go downstairs and get something to eat after all—though in the restaurant, not the lounge. Not that he expected the attractive blond to still be there. If she’d been looking for dinner, she’d had it. If she’d been looking for companionship, she’d have found that, too.
Should he have followed her into the lounge after all? Why wasn’t it possible she had been looking over her shoulder at him? Why must he always sell himself short, limit his own possibilities? If it weren’t for his insecurities, might he not be higher in his company by now? Perhaps tonight yet another of many squandered opportunities had trickled between his frail fingers. And thus, here he was alone in a bad hotel on a diplomatic visit to a cheap business associate.
He wandered to his window while he slipped back into his suit jacket, for one more look at the city in its full night glory before he tinted the window a nice opaque black.
He half hoped to see more long-legged prosties on parade; they were more abundant and less discreet than in Miniosis. But by the same token, he always felt guilty when looking at them, the way images he’d seen on VT of cows being slaughtered and processed for meat made him guilty for not being a vegetarian. Well, was it his fault that his girlfriend had broken off with him fourteen months ago? (Actually, according to her it was.) Was it his fault he was not only leery of entering a new relationship, but finding it difficult to even meet a woman to be leery of?
He saw no prosties, in any case, as his gaze slowly swept the street below. Traffic had thinned to a dribble, a drying up riverbed, at least in comparison to when he’d arrived. He saw only a few skulking pedestrians, and was about to turn away when his eyes returned to the illuminated mouth of the subway kiosk, the steps he had ascended himself hours before.
Something dark, some fast silhouette, had come dancing nimbly up those stairs and darted off into the shadows of the street, all in a blink and a half. He had seen many an alien life form in Punktown and in Miniosis, but it hadn’t looked like any he’d encountered before. Not that a person might ever encounter all of them. The thing had appeared very pointed, very elongated, and apparently without arms. Along with his impression, in the nanosecond in which it was lit by the sickly lights of the kiosk, that its skin was a dark reddish color, it had suggested to him a giant carrot scuttling along on three or four crooked legs.
Maybe he’d seen something else, misinterpreted it; it had only been a flash, after all. And yet, for some reason the sight of the thing had disturbed him greatly, caused a shivering wave to flow up the back of his arms, neck and skull, as if the thing had transmitted a current of electricity that he had received in his very nervous system. In fact, he still sensed a whispery current crawling inside him, as if the thing lurked in some alley, surreptitiously gazing up at his window at his face pressed to the glass, the way he himself had been spying for prosties.
He tinted the glass fully black. Stepped backwards and shuddered. Then left his room to see about that food.
««—»»
Dinner was adequate: nodyee, a blind but predatory, shark-like Tikkihotto fish which projected sonar waves from an aperture in its phallic, armor-plated head. He’d always been curious about it, but found it a bit too fishy and salty for his taste. He sat eating alone, watching others at their tables around him while he chewed self-consciously. Trying not to look for the blond but doing so anyway. Along with the fish he had a salad and a couple of beers to help him sleep in a strange place.
At the next table, a man in a jacket that could not aspire to close over his immense gut worked on a slab of steak so pink it looked uncooked. His open jacket revealed a gun holstered against this taut globe. He saw Toskins looking at it, and quickly reassured him by twisting around in his seat so that Toskins might see a badge ID pinned to his jacket, which he tapped with his knife. It read: SECURITY. The fat man winked and masticated. Toskins smiled, embarrassed to have been caught staring, and resumed his own meal. He was also embarrassed by what he took to be a bit of lasciviousness in the man’s wink, and in the passing of his tongue over his greased upper lip.
By the time Toskins wandered out of the Hotel Valhalla’s restaurant, he was ready to try out that shower, climb into bed and watch a little VT before dozing off. It would be an early day tomorrow.
He was walking down a dimly-lit side hallway that throbbed deeply with loud dance music from the lounge on the other side of the wall—his destination a row of elevators—when he saw a dark, furtive figure step out from behind a trough of exotic plants.
Despite the subdued lighting he instantly recognized the honey blond, in her long winter coat. Though his entire nervous system surged with a delirious little thrill to see her again, her sudden lurching appearance startled him, and he faltered to a halt.
The woman was grinning at him. Nothing subtle about her smile this time. A huge grin, wild even, her eyes glittering large and glassy. Drunk, he thought. And that would explain her jerky movements as well, when she waved her arm at him twice, awkwardly, in an unmistakable gesture for him to come to her.
Too nervous to smile back but too excited to resist her bold invitation, Toskins started forward again.
But he had taken only a few steps further along the hallway when he saw the woman turn abruptly to the nearest elevator, bat the keypad clumsily twice until the door slid open, then stumble inside.
Toskins quickened his pace, glancing over his shoulder at a giggling couple coming up behind him. He wanted to get in the lift with the blond before the other two piled in with them.
But before he reached the threshold, its door slid closed again, and the indicators above started lighting in sequence. Floor two…
Was it a game, then? A tease?
Anger filled him. He stood there seething, watching the numbers, while the couple took the elevator to his right and left him alone once more. Third floor. Fourth, where he had his room…
But what if it wasn’t a tease? What if she only meant to be discreet? That they should arrive at their destination independently?
Her elevator stopped at the sixth, and top, floor.
There was only one way to find out if she were merely taunting him or not. He would not let his insecurities hold him back yet again. Toskins stabbed a finger into the keypad. When the same elevator descended, he slipped into it and tapped the key for the sixth floor.
