Necrom

Chapter Eight

A PIERCING ELECTRONIC howl was filling the room as Gibson struggled desperately to recover his wits. He had been in such a deep sleep that, at first, he didn't even know where he was. Luxor? That's right. The apartment? He could remember that, but what was happening to the television? The glass of the screen seemed to have been transmuted into soft stretching plastic, and something was trying to push its way through it from inside. The raw energy blazing from the set was blinding, and it strobed back from the walls of the room like a short-circuiting psychedelic light show. Gibson raised an arm to shield his eyes, convinced that the picture tube itself was going to explode at any moment in a shower of glass. At that point he was still thinking in relatively normal terms like explosion or TV meltdown. He had yet to question why he was seeing flashes of dazzling color on a black-and-white set. It was only when something like an arm or a tentacle that seemed to be composed of swirling, multicolored interference extended out of the screen and into the room that he realized that he was still in the hostile world of the extraordinary. The thing was reaching around as though looking for a handhold, and it had formed indistinct fingers that blazed with red fire. It was like watching an electric lizard struggling out of its egg, except that as more of it emerged into the room it started to assume an increasingly humanoid form. Gibson watched transfixed as, with a final frenzied effort, it dragged its legs clear of the bulging screen and stepped to the floor, spilling cascades of sparks onto the dirty carpet, now only linked to the set by a glowing umbilical. It stood about six inches taller than Gibson, and he knew without being told that it meant him no good. When a black hole of a mouth opened the thing's approximation of a face, the electronic howl modulated as though it was trying to form words; then, without further preamble, it lunged for Gibson.

Gibson hurled himself out of the chair and rolled sideways. He was certain that if the thing touched him he'd be instantly fried. The thing didn't move particularly fast, and it seemed to have little sense of direction, but there was a flash of discharge and the stench of burning leather and horsehair as it hit the chair where he'd been sitting moments before. The whole room seemed to be filled with static, and Gibson could feel his hair standing on end and small shocks running up and down his spine.

The thing from the TV was turning and coming after him again. With no chance to get to his feet, Gibson scrambled backward across the floor like a terrified crab. It reached for him again, but he ducked under its arm. The gun! He had to get the gun. He didn't know whether it would do any good but it was all that he had. He could only go on ducking and weaving for so long. The gun was on the floor beside the chair where he'd been sleeping and, while the thing was turning again, he dived for it. Clint Eastwood would have been proud of the way that he came up off the floor with the automatic clutched in his fist. Doing his utmost to keep his hand steady, he squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked and the sound of the shot momentarily drowned out the electronic howl, but, to his dismay, the bullet went straight through the monster, and the only damage it did was blow a crater in the wall. A violet streak marked where the bullet had passed through the thing, but otherwise the only effect was to slow it up for a moment. The monster made what looked like a surprised gesture, as though it hadn't expected the bullet, but then it kept on coming.

A voice barked an order inside his head. "Shoot the TV!" It was as though an emergency area of his brain had assumed control. Gibson didn't think about it. The creature was almost on him and he could smell ozone. He fired twice. The TV exploded in a blue flash, and the thing vanished in the same instant. It was as though the TV set had not only been its means of entry to the room but also its source of energy, perhaps the source of its very being. He slowly lowered the gun. After the noise and confusion, the silence in the room was like a hollow void. The TV stood in the corner with a curl of blue smoke rising from the shattered screen. After thirty seconds of total, shocked paralysis, he stuffed the still warm gun into the waistband of his pants and ran for the Johnnie Walker in the kitchen. He didn't even bother to pour it into a glass; he went straight for the bottle.

Gibson knew he had to get out of there. It was a primal urge, not a logical decision. He didn't want to be in any place where things came at you out of the TV. Even though he'd killed the television, he had no reason to think that he was safe. For all he knew, there could be any number of other monsters waiting in the apartment to get him: in the fridge, the cooker, the electric toaster, even in the faucets in the bathroom. He wasn't waiting around for another attack; he'd rather take his chances on the streets of Luxor.

The one thing he wasn't going to do, however, was to go out wearing the suit that had been bleached out by the transition. He wanted to be as anonymous as possible out there, and an albino in a white suit was about as anonymous as Frosty the Snowman on the Fourth of July. He made a quick inventory of his double's wardrobe and picked out a baggy black suit, a dark-blue work shirt, and finally a white tie for just the slightest touch of flash. He dressed quickly, stowed the gun and wallet in the pockets of the borrowed suit, and, after a few moments' speculation whether the hostility to freaks that he'd seen on television extended to albinos, he completed the ensemble with a dark overcoat, a black fedora, and a pair of sunglasses he'd found in a drawer while he'd been going through the look-alike's stuff. After a final swift, hard belt of Scotch, he took a last look at the broken TV and let himself out of the apartment. As he was locking the door behind him, the blue face of a small balding man poked out of one of the apartments down the hall.

"What's going on? What's all the noise about."

"There's no noise."

"I heard shots."

Gibson pocketed his keys and started walking away. "I shot the TV because I didn't like the show. You never heard of that before?"

A fine drizzle was falling on the nighttime streets of Luxor as Gibson turned right out of the front door, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and started up the street at a brisk pace. He wanted to be as far away from the apartment building as fast as he could. There was always the chance that one of the neighbors had called the police. It didn't look to be the kind of building where gunshots were so commonplace that everyone ignored them. There was also the chance that if the streamheat had been monitoring the attack of the TV beast, they, too, might be on their way, if not to rescue him, at least to scrape his charred remains from the catpet. At the end of the block, he paused to listen, but he couldn't hear any sirens.

He was heading in the general direction of the big intersection with the golden statue that he'd seen on the ride in with Klein, Once there, though, which was about the limit of what he knew of the local geography, Gibson had little real idea of where he was going or what he was going to do. His flight from the apartment and its possible dangers had been so precipitate and so urgent that he hadn't bothered to stop and think through a plan. The best that he could come up with was to find a bar and use the breathing space to see what else he could learn about the ways of Luxor. After that, maybe a cheap hotel and a little time to think. He was screwed and he knew it, but the longer that he could put off accepting that unpleasant fact the better.

He turned the corner and kept on going. He could see the floodlit statue up ahead in the distance, and he continued in that direction. The traffic was fairly light in this largely residential area, and when he heard shouting and the gunning of car engines behind him, he reacted with the instincts of a paranoid and whirled round, his hand going toward the pistol in his pocket. He relaxed when he saw it was just a gang of teenagers in two convertibles, tops down despite the drizzle, drinking and hollering and generally carrying on. Then a beer can sailed past his head, bounced off the sidewalk, and was immediately followed by a torrent of abuse.

"Fuck you, albino bastard! You gonna die!"

"You gonna die, motherfucker freak!"

In unison the kids in both cars broke into a fast chant that drifted back to him as they accelerated on down the street.

"Die freak!"

"Die freak!"

"Die freak!"

It was only as they were speeding away that Gibson noticed the banner hanging out of the second car, a stylized purple eagle on a red background. So what were these juvenile idiots, junior normal nazis out for an evening of freak baiting? The problem appeared to be worse than he had imagined from just watching TV. Not only was he in another dimension and subject to electric-monster attack but he also seemed to have joined the ranks of the local "niggers." Gibson had been in Luxor for less than a day, and he was becoming rapidly convinced that it sucked.

After some more walking, he finally reached the intersection, and, as he stood wondering which way to go next, a police Batmobile came slowly round the statue, obviously making a routine inspection of anyone who was on the sidewalk. Gibson wanted to be the hell off the streets. The sooner he was in a warm, comfortable tavern with a drink in front of him the better. He'd seen a number of cabs cruising for fares but he'd hesitated over taking one. He still tended to believe Klein's statement that the streamheat operated one of the local cab lines, and the way his luck was running, he was quite likely to pick one of those and be right back in the frying pan again. On the other hand, though, he could wander around lost in the rain all night. It was time to take a chance and hail one and ask to be taken to the local equivalent of Times Square or whatever.

The first empty cab that he attempted to wave down went right past without stopping. At the last minute, he spotted a small purple-eagle sticker on the windshield, just like the teenagers' banner. Clearly this particular driver didn't stop for albinos. It was some minutes before another one came along, and Gibson spent the time becoming increasingly nervous. Fortunately this driver didn't share the prejudice against freaks. The cab pulled up beside Gibson and he climbed in.

"Where to?"

"I'm a stranger in town and I'm looking for a place to get drunk."

The driver didn't treat it as an at all unusual request. "You want it quiet or rowdy?"

Gibson grinned. "Oh, rowdy any time."

It wasn't just a matter of natural inclination. Gibson had decided rowdy would give him a good deal more natural cover. The driver set the cab in motion. "I'll drop you at the corner of Pomus and Schulman. That's pretty much the heart of the Strip."

Gibson nodded. "The Strip sounds good to me."

"Watch your money, though. The place is lousy with thieves."

"Isn't everywhere, these days?"

The driver nodded. "You said it, pal."

They passed yet another of the billboards with a giant picture of Jaim Lancer on it. Gibson wondered where the president stood on the matter of freak hatred. He suspected that the president was the kind that rode the fence, deploring it in public but tipping the wink to the local nazis in private. He had that kind of look about him.

Very soon they were passing through an area of gaudy neon and busy sidewalks. Gibson felt a little more encouraged. This was more like it. The pulsing, rippling lights and their mirror images on the wet street were beacons of vibrant trashy humanity against a darkness that, from where Gibson was sitting, seemed increasingly cold, threatening, and polluted. Ever since he'd been a kid, Gibson had been drawn to the bright lights of big cities. They'd been both his strength and quite possibly a part of his downfall. Certainly they'd always been there, offering their comfort, winking and blinking and constantly renewing their tawdry promises, so no matter how many times he'd been stung or cheated or washed up and left for dead in the cold daylight, he always went back.

The driver turned in his seat. "You see anything you fancy in this sink of iniquity?"

Gibson stared out of the window at the passing show. "Yeah, a whole bunch of things."

What Gibson mainly saw were the crowds, and in their numbers he knew he had his best chance of safety. They moved along the sidewalks like the crowds in every red-light district he'd ever been in, strictly divided into two groups, the prey and the predators, the suckers and the players. The suckers always moved with a slow aimlessness, always looking for the forbidden thrills, always hoping and too stupid or too desperate to give up and go home, even when they must have realized that those thrills were just myth or imagined shadows. The predators only moved when they had to. With some, movement was a matter of open display, as with the prostitutes who swung their hips and lazily chewed their gum, or the corner cardsharps who flashed their cuffs and recited the soft come on. Others merely waited in the shadows, like the smooth, watchful, well-fed pimps in their sharkskin and gold checking on their stables, or the nervous takeoff artists laying for the careless or the drunk and ready to melt away at the first approach of a cop. Streets like this were a beckoning refuge for anyone on the run or with a need to disappear. There were already so many criminals, marginals, and illegals living on them that an organic system of boltholes, hiding places, warnings, and alarms was firmly in place. Streets like the Luxor Strip might take no prisoners, but they also asked very few questions.

The driver pulled over to the curb. "I'll let you off here if that's okay."

Gibson squinted at the meter. If he was reading the numbers right, the fare was 3.75. Gibson had yet to learn the name of the smaller unit of UKR currency that was one-hundredth of a kudo. His reckoning must have been correct, because the driver seemed quite satisfied with his kudo-and-a-half tip.

As Gibson climbed out of the cab, the driver raised a hand. "You watch your ass now, you hear?"

Gibson grinned. "I will, don't worry." The driver didn't know just how carefully he would be watching his ass.

The first thing that Gibson heard was the sound of bebop: a tune that sounded uncannily like Charlie Parker's "C-Jam Blues" came bouncing from a nearby blue-lit doorway, Gibson's spirits immediately lifted. Luxor might be a fucked-up place, but if it had bebop, it couldn't all be bad. The temptation was to duck straight through the blue door and submerge himself in the music, but Gibson had a natural aversion to simply going into the first place he saw. He'd walk on down the block and check out more of what the Strip had to offer before he settled on somewhere; besides, a live band might well indicate that it was a nightclub behind the blue door, and Gibson had some serious thinking to do before he could let himself go. A friendly shot-and-beer joint would be more his speed, if indeed Luxor had such a thing. He suspected that they did, although he knew that he had to be prepared for friendliness to be just an illusion.

He couldn't read the neon signs, but the majority of their messages were loud and clear. Sex seemed once again to be the major selling point, and half the places that he passed featured some variation of striptease or girly show. On the other side of the street a blue neon woman with an hourglass figure and vibrant yellow hair towered three stories above the sidewalk, swinging her electric-light hips while her red bikini flashed on and off. When the bikini was in the off phase, pink nipples glowed in the center of her massive breasts. On the same sidewalk a gang of teenage boys shouldered their way through the slower-moving crowds with the nervous urgency of a gang on the prowl, obviously out of their own neighborhood but determined to play it tough in front of the more serious lowlifes who really operated on the Strip and called it home. In their black leather jackets, Hawaiian shirts, and black dungarees, they resembled the chorus from a revival of West Side Story. Gibson smiled to himself. What would they be getting next in this town, James Dean movies?

As he approached the next corner he spotted another group of people who seemed to be going against the general flow. A half-dozen hard-faced men in riding boots and field-green military-style uniforms were aggressively handing out leaflets, thrusting them into the hands of unwary passersby with intimidating looks that challenged the recipient to either refuse the flyer or try and hand it back if he dared. Gibson immediately recognized the emblem on their red arm bands. He was seeing altogether too much of the sinister purple eagle, and he quickly altered direction to give them the widest possible berth, A hooker in a red skirt slit to her thigh saw what he was doing and flashed him a fleeting smile of sympathy. Gibson had stopped believing in whores with hearts of gold a long time ago, but the smile gave him a moment of pause. Then he noticed that she, too, was wearing sunglasses after dark. Perhaps, under the thick pancake makeup, she was just a fellow albino expressing solidarity.

From the moment that he'd left the cab, Gibson had started noticing just how many genetic aberrations there were walking the streets of Luxor. Even allowing that there would be a higher proportion of freaks and misfits around a place like the Strip than maybe in other parts of the city, the numbers were startling. Gibson had spotted at least a dozen individuals with facial deformities in the space of two blocks, plus two more albinos and a beanpole of a man who had to be well over seven feet tall. The dwarfs were so numerous that they almost formed a second stratum on the sidewalk. The genetic damage in this dimension was completely out of control, and Gibson wished that the advocates of limited nuclear war back home could see what a bunch of dirty little bombs could do.

He came to a kiosk that sold newspapers, magazines, and tobacco, and he decided that it would be a good idea to stock up on cigarettes. The outside of the kiosk was protected from the weather by a layer of enameled tin signs, the kind that Gibson had seen in stores as a kid, and that they now sold in trendy antique boutiques to the kind of people who lived in apartments with exposed brick walls and Victorian furniture. It was the standard Luxor style of tits-and-ass advertising, and he probably wouldn't have given any of it a second glance, except that one of the well-developed and scantily clad blue babes was holding up a pack of Camels. Of course, the name was in the Luxor alphabet, but it was definitely a pack of Camels. The same tan, yellow, and brown pack, the same camel, and the same pair of pyramids and clump of palm trees in the background of the drawing. Gibson slowly shook his head: a different system of writing but an identical brand of smokes.

"I guess there's no telling with parallel worlds."

A fat man was taking his time over buying cigars, and Gibson had to wait. He glanced at the covers of the local tabloids. Luxor still had a lot of newspapers-as far as he could see, five in all. The headlines screamed unintelligibly, but Gibson could see from the pictures that, of the five papers on the rack, four had given their front pages over to a gruesome multiple murder. Huge color blowups of the bloody crime scene were positioned alongside smaller shots of a frightened pinhead being manhandled by police. A freak slaying appeared to be hot copy, and Gibson wondered why he hadn't seen the same story on TV. Was the press in Luxor so fast with its editions that the murder story had broken after he'd watched the news?

The fat man was through and it was Gibson's turn. "Three packs of Camel filters, please."

The man in the kiosk gave him a strange look. "Where you from, mister? Camel don't make a filter."

"So give me anything with a filter on it. I don't care."

The man treated him to a look like he was just one more crazy in a long day and tossed three packs of totally unfamiliar cigarettes onto the counter.

"Three kudos."

So a pack of cigarettes cost a kudo. That made life tidy.

Farther down the block, Gibson thought that he'd spotted his bar. The neon sign was elaborate, a foaming stein with suds running down the side, but as he turned into the entrance he ran straight into a burly bouncer in a black shirt and Tyrolean hat who made no attempt to get out of the way.

"You can't come in here."

Gibson still wasn't accustomed to being on the receiving end of a color bar.

"I just wanted a drink."

"So go down the street to the Radium Room. They serve your kind in there."

The Radium Room wasn't the most luxurious saloon that Gibson had ever been in, but for the moment it would suit his purpose. Nobody in the place seemed the kind to get inquisitive about a stranger who minded his own business. If he hadn't been told in front, he would have known immediately that the management had no reservations about serving mutations and also hiring them. The place was busy but not jammed, and at least a third of the clientele showed evidence of some kind of glitch in their genes. The bartender who asked him what he wanted had six fingers on each of her hands, and webs between the fingers.

It was then that Gibson made his second cultural error of the evening. "Scotch?"

"Huh?"

Clearly the term wasn't used in Luxor. He tried again. "Whiskey?"

"Why didn't you say so."

"I'm sorry. I'm from out of town. Could I get a beer back with that?"

"No problem."

Gibson pulled out the look-alike's wallet to pay for the drinks, and before he put it away, he took anodier look at the picture on the ID. A thought struck him. Could it be that the double was actually a parallel him? He didn't like the thought one bit and swallowed the shot of whiskey in one gulp.

"Jesus Christ!"

The bartender, who was still counting out his change, looked up sharply. "What's the trouble?"

"Nothing." He gestured to his now empty shot glass. "Why don't you do me again while you're still here?"

"You can put it away."

"It's been a rough day."

Gibson was wondering what, if indeed the double was his parallel in this dimension, would happen if the two of them met? Would they merely exchange pleasantries or would there be some hideous interface in which one or both of them were destroyed like matter and antimatter? Of course, the double wasn't an albino; maybe that would make a difference. A kind of sidebar idea jumped into his mind. If the streamheat's plan was really to swing some kind of substitution, the fact that he had come out of the transition as an albino may have seriously screwed things up. He sipped his second shot, hardly tasting it, and set the glass down on the bar. He took the whole parcel of thoughts that had been triggered by the picture in the wallet and, handling them with the mental equivalent of long tongs, consigned them to one of the deepest recesses of his mind. He should be concentrating on practical survival and concealing himself as far as he could in this red-light subworld of Luxor.

He took a deep breath to calm himself and clear his mind and then looked around the bar. He would probably be spending a lot of time in places like this over the next few days. The Radium Room appeared to be something of a pickup parlor. Gibson didn't know enough about the mores of Luxor to be able to tell if it was a swinging singles joint or a hooker bar, but he suspected the latter. He noticed that a woman a little way down the bar was looking in his direction. Taking the dim smoky light of the barroom into account, she actually didn't look too bad. Her close-cropped helmet of yellow-blond hair contrasted prettily with the blue of her skin, and her mouth, a slash of purple lipstick, pouted seductively. Gibson no longer had any doubts about how he'd handle getting close to a blue woman. To paraphrase Stephen Stills, love the color you're with.

The woman was coming through the crowd toward him. In her pencil skirt and low-cut blouse, she looked like a B-girl from some fifties gangster movies, and when she slid into the space at the bar beside him, he discovered that she had the matching, husky Lizbeth Scott voice.

"You wanna buy me a drink?"

Gibson smiled and signaled to the bartender. "Sure, anytime."

The woman's pout increased in provocation. "Are you alone?"

Gibson laughed. "You wouldn't believe how alone I am."

"My name's Zazsu."

Zazsu appeared to be a regular at the Radium Room. The bartender didn't bother to ask her what she was drinking, she simply set a green concoction in a conical glass in front of her and picked up some of Gibson's money. Zazsu sipped the green stuff through a clear plastic straw in a manner that seemed to be an open invitation to all manner of shadowy delights.

"Are you gonna tell me yours?"

"It's Joe."

Zazsu frowned. "Joe? That's a weird name. Are you from out of town?"

Gibson nodded. "Oh, yeah, I'm from out of town."

Zazsu came straight to the point.

"So I guess you don't know any girls in Luxor."

"Not a one."

"You looking for a good time?"

"I might be."

"I've got a place right near here. I could show you a real good time for a fifty."

"Is that a fact?"

Zazsu raised an eyebrow that seemed to indicate that time was money and he should make up his mind. "So, you wanna?"

Gibson hesitated. The offer was tempting, and even a little commercial creature comfort was preferable to the absolute isolation that he'd been feeling ever since Klein had left him alone in the apartment. As far as revealing his alien status, he was fairly confident he was on safe ground; the natives of Luxor seemed to believe that out-of-towners were capable of any gaucheness or stupidity. He was about to agree to Zazsu's offer when he happened to glance up. The smile froze on his face and the words stuck in his throat. Nephredana had just walked into the Radium Room and was heading directly for where he was standing. It was a somewhat different Nephredana from the first time he had seen her, with Yancey Slide outside Windemere's house in Ladbroke Grove, but there was no mistaking it was her. If nothing else, on high spike heels she was a head taller than most of the drinkers in the place. Back in London, she had been pure metal, the wet dream of any Megadeth fan; now she looked like a gun moll from some lost Robert Mitchum movie. As before, she was all in black, a sequined jacket like the skin of a vampire reptile over a sheath dress so tight that it gave no quarter, a wide-brimmed hat with a veil tilted at a piratical angle, and a pocket book over her shoulder big enough to hold a small arsenal of weapons. A hush fell and heads turned as she made her way determinedly through the crowd, and one dwarf actually dropped his drink.

She made short work of Zazsu. With a jerk of her thumb, and a rasp of that deep graveyard voice, she ordered the woman away. "Beat it, honey. This one's mine."

"Wait a minute…"

"I said beat it, bitch."

"I…"