Strangers Among Us

Carnivores-3

Finch blinked. Hanging from the hook in front of him, with the last shreds of membrane dangling off it like tentacles, was a plastic-wrapped human body.

Blake fell silent for a second, then put both hands on his head. “f**k me,” he muttered. “So she’s doing mob work. s**t, Unit, this is bad s**t. Maybe we should gut check. Maybe we don’t want to blackmail someone who does disposal for a family.”

Finch barely heard him. There was something unnervingly familiar about the slope of the shoulders, the shape of the skull. He only had to peel a corner, letting a tuft of red hair escape, to know. But he kept peeling until the face came clear. A wider nose, a thinner brow, maybe. More or less, it was what he’d seen in a mirror at fourteen, back in the biolabs where he’d played host to all the viral and pharmaceutical trials that would have been illegal to perform on a full human. The clones who died and were sent for dissection looked an awful lot like this on the gurney.

Finch thought back to the black-shrouded alcove. The restaurant business was all about novelty, Carrow had said. She loved her little ironies, Vick had said.

“The cameras.” Finch swallowed. “Is there any footage from the private dining?”

Blake blinked stupidly, still staring at the hanging Neanderthal. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah, it’s that encrypted s**t. I’m just putting it . . . together.” He squeezed his eyes shut, working his neural plug. His mouth wrenched downward. “Unit, I don’t think you want to see this.”

“Show me.” Finch’s voice came in a rasp he barely recognized as his own.

Blake wordlessly spread the fingers of his smart-glove and set a flickering projection against the blood-stained floor. Finch found himself looking down at a half-dozen diners wearing designer fashions and party masks, most of them drinking too quickly from their flutes, laughing nervously. The smartglass table, unwatched, was playing out a snowy scene with small black figures.

All the masked heads turned as two white-clad servers wheeled in the naked upright corpse of a neo, limbs spread like the Vitruvian Man, muscles waxed and airbrushed. They’d used a nerve clamp on his face, giving him wide eyes and a feral grin. The recording was soundless, but Finch could imagine what the server was saying as she highlighted a pectoral, a thick thigh, a denuded c**k. All excellent cuts. Finch realized he already knew what it would taste like when cooked.

He managed to yank the balaclava off before bile spilled up his throat and sinuses and out, searing hot. Blake hopped backward to avoid the splatter. When it was over, Finch breathed in. Deep. Blew a clotted chunk out of his stinging nostril.

“Unit, you alright?” Blake’s voice was wavery as he switched off the projection. “That’s so f****d. So pure f****d. You eat something with cheese today? That’s probably why you hurled so hard. Fuck.”

Finch clutched at his abdomen like he might be able to claw it out entirely. He spat again and again, but supper’s aftertaste kept coming back.

“I mean, all the old labs got shut down, right, but that genome’s still floating around, right? That company in Sao Paulo, must be a front for some scuzzy black market operation, some warehouse thing.” Blake had pulled off his own mask, was running an anxious finger around his plugs. “Sticks them into the system as medical cadavers, ships them up here. Neo a la carte, right? Brazil hasn’t done up Referendum 88 yet. It might even be legal there.”

Finch gathered himself, looking from the steaming puddle to the hanging body to Blake, who was shifting foot to foot, clutching himself against the cold. For a moment, the air seemed to shiver and warp.

“I’ve got the snaps.” Blake tapped his temple. “Recorded you being sick, too, just because, you know, it makes it seem more real. This is so f****d, Unit. So, so fucked.”

Finch slowly nodded. His head was coming clear, the heat in his stomach replaced by a ball of black ice. He was going to murder Vick. He was going to murder Carrow, too.

Blake’s next words jarred him out of the revenge fantasy. “Unit, think how much Carrow will pay to keep this quiet.”

“What do you mean, keep this quiet?” Finch croaked. “This isn’t some money laundering thing. She’s butchering them. Us. For meat.”

Blake put his ungloved hand on Finch’s midsection, knowing better than to try for the out-of-reach shoulder. “Finch. Unit. I didn’t see this coming. I swear.” His voice turned wheedling. “But we have to remember the plan, Unit. This is ideal blackmail material. This could be a kingmaker.”

Finch jerked him toward the open freezer, harder than he’d meant to. “Look at him, would you?”

“It looks like you,” Blake conceded, wresting his gooseflesh arm away. “But it’s not you. Hundreds of people look like you, Finch. They’re not you. For all we know, this one had its brains blunted as soon as it came out of the exo-womb. It could be a frozen f*****g vegetable.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Finch said. “Doesn’t matter. Carrow’s getting f****d for this.”

Blake moaned. Stamped his foot against the concrete. “Unit, you don’t care about politics. You care about your gravity gym, and your beard, and getting laid, and getting paid. Right? That’s what we’re getting out of this. Paid. She’ll cough up a fortune to make this go away. A fortune.”

Before Finch could form his slip-sliding thoughts into a reply, a voice came from the door.

“Bullets are actually pretty f*****g cheap.” Vick had managed to stuff his Mohawk into the camosuit, but it flopped limply across his scalp as he pulled off the hood. His head floated over a vaguely man-sized shimmer in the air. A handgun hung suspended in front of it. “Supper didn’t agree with you, Finch? Can’t believe you actually ate it.”

Finch was halfway to his throat before Blake wrapped around his arm from behind, clinging like a bird.

Vick grinned. His lips were tinged purple. “This your little fucktoy? No wonder Ms. Carrow couldn’t get a rise out of you. Maybe that’s the real reason Neanderthals went extinct, huh?” He drifted the gun from Finch to Blake and back. “Personally, I think we just hunted you all down like animals.”

Finch swallowed. “Your boss loves neos so much she could just eat one up, is that it?”

“She’s a f****d-up woman,” Vick admitted. “And too trusting when it comes to knuckle-draggers. I knew you were shifty from day one. Hands on the wall, both of you.”

Finch’s swirling head was finally beginning to crystallize. Things seemed clear and bitingly sharp as he crossed to the wall and pushed his palms up against it. The cold stung his hands red. Beside him, Blake followed suit. He was shaking.

“I’d put that gun down if I was you,” Blake barked. “Everything in here is uploaded to my cloud. Soon as you pull that trigger, it’s everywhere.”

Finch didn’t have time to warn him before Vick smashed his face into the wall. When Blake brought his head back upright, his eyes were cloudy and blood bloomed from his nose.

“Faraday mesh,” Vick said. “You can’t send s**t from in here. Now, in Ms. Carrow’s absence, I’m going to make an executive decision and pulp the two of you.”

“You really just camped out here in camo on the off-chance I was planning a robbery?” Finch asked. He saw Vick’s handgun wobble slightly in his peripherals.

“I told her you were shifty.” The handgun steadied, but Vick’s teeth were half-chattering when he spoke. “Told her you were from some radical f*****g Neo Rights paramilitary. Told her someone must have tipped you off about Carnivor.”

Blake’s forehead was pushed hard against the cold concrete and he was licking blood and snot from under his nose, tears tracking slowly down his cheeks, but Finch forced himself to laugh. “That’s what you think? Paramilitary? I’m a criminal, shithead. We thought your boss was muling meth, and we were going to blackmail her.”

The handgun trembled again when Vick shivered. “Then you’re a f*****g i***t for not figuring it out sooner. Caveman to the core.”

“How about you and me go bare knuckle?” Finch suggested. “You always wanted a try, remember? Anyone can put a slug in a skull. Not anyone can say they fist-fought a neo. Come on, Vicky.”

Finch was ready for it when a forearm slammed the back of his neck. “I’m going to eat you, caveman,” Vick hissed in his ear, burrowing the gun under Finch’s shoulder blade. “I’m going to eat your corpse. Think about that. Maybe a bit stringy. I’ll still eat it.”

“Vicky,” Finch repeated. “She call you that when she throws you around in bed? Does she make you dye your hair red and get your skin bleached?”

The gun slid up to knock against the back of Finch’s skull. He tried not to shudder. Blake’s beetle black eyes were wide and he was mouthing what looked like shut up, Unit, shut the f**k up.

“You’ll never be a real caveman, though,” Finch said. “Poor circulation. Good luck in the Ice Age.”

He slammed his hand backward into Vick’s wobbling wrist, flinging himself away from the wall. The gun went off; he felt the sonic clap like a bludgeon to the skull and for a wild moment he thought he’d been shot. The lights flicked out—Finch remembered they were on a timer, remembered Blake had dialled it back—then his hands found Vick’s neck and he forgot about everything but crushing his trachea.

A leg hooked him down and they fell to the floor; his sole slipped off the frozen vomit, and his kneecap cracked against the concrete. Metal bounced against his elbow and skittered away—the gun was gone. Vick scrabbled at his hands, clawing with manicured nails, but Finch held tight and tighter until the kicks became sluggish and Vick made a ragged vibration deep in his chest and the cartilage finally gave way. The puff of dead man’s air caught Finch in the face. He retched.

“Unit, you going to throw up again?” came Blake’s brittle voice, swimming through the fading keen in Finch’s ears. “He dead? I been sitting on his legs. Unless that’s you. You dead?”

“No. You?”

Blake’s fingers found Finch’s face in the dark; Finch found Blake’s numb lips and kissed them softly.

“Unit,” he mumbled. “Vomit breath.”

They left Vick crumpled on the freezer floor and stumbled their way to the fire exit, Finch limping, Blake stubbornly trying to support some of his weight. The street outside became a silent movie as Finch’s hearing slipped away again. He could mostly hear his breathing, and blood swirling in his inner ear as they staggered down the block. Blake’s voice was tinny and indistinct. It took him a while to realize what he was saying.

“It’s uploaded, Unit. The clone in Carnivor’s freezer. Those cams from private dining. Everything Vicky said. All in my cloud now.” Blake raised his gloved hand and pressed a fingertip to Finch’s plug. “Look.”

Finch shut his eyes and saw the events of the past half hour race past in digital. Peeling back the membrane. Watching the smart-glove projection. Vick’s disembodied head. The gun. He found his good leg trembling.

“All you have to do is disperse it,” Blake said. “If that’s what you want. I figure blackmailing someone as psychotic as Carrow is a s**t plan anyway.”

Finch hesitated for only a second before he selected dispersal and watched the web traffic begin to swell. The snaps and captions and visual/audio recordings began to expand outward, link by link, blooming like argon across forums and news recyclers. By morning, it would be everywhere.

“Of course, we need to get the f**k out of Dodge, now,” Blake admitted. “Unless you think you can stand up to, you know, legal scrutiny and s**t. We can swing down to the coast. San Diego again. You go back to bouncing, I leave off net scamming and try to find something legit. No more B&E, no more blackmail, no more getting mixed up with units who kill units.” He paused. “You know. Boring shit.”

“West Coast might not be far enough,” Finch said, opening his eyes. “We’ll be famous after this.”

“Unit, I know.” He blinked. “Autocab’s on its way. It’ll meet us up on the corner.”

They staggered on in silence. It had rained while they were inside; the sidewalk was slick. The lampposts flickered on in sequence as they passed underneath.

“Brazil is pretty far,” Finch said slowly, watching their shadow hobble along on long dark stilts. “Sao Paulo.”

Blake stared at him, incredulous. “You mean go find that illegal clone factory, right? You trying to be a hero or something? Going paramilitary on me?”

Finch exhaled a long plume of breath into the cold air as the autocab pulled up to the curb. “That list you made. The things I care about. You should have been on it.”

Blake fixed him with a piercing look. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Up near the top. Beard-level, maybe.” Blake laughed; Finch tried to grin. “And under that, I think it’s time to make room for some other shit.”

“Hero s**t, you mean,” Blake said, leaning back on the autocab.

“I’d view it more as self-improvement.”

“I’ll think about it, Unit. No promises.”

Finch opened the door, Blake bypassed the payment screen, and the cab slid off into the night, flashing nearby attractions and restaurant suggestions on the upholstery. They watched in real time, without speaking, as Carnivor dropped off the list.