Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

phone.
    “I’ll try to come home,” he says. “Soon. There’s got to be a way to work something out.”
    For the first time Aiah looks up at the plasm batteries waiting in her tote bag.
    “Soon,” she says. “I need you soon.”
    I need you to save me from this , she thinks.
    *
    Aiah locks the pneuma station grill behind her, then walks down the old stair to where the water spill begins. She holds to the rusted iron guardrail as she carefully treads down the little series of waterfalls. She realizes her steps are slower than they really have to be.
    She comes to the bottom of the stair and her shirting helmet light catches a glimpse of writhing liquid silver — a flash of belly scales, of needle teeth — of something moving in the shallow lake, and her heart gives a terrified leap.
    The serpentine thing writhes away at the touch of her light. Aiah waits, one insulated glove clamped on the rail, torchlight beams stabbing at the water while her pulse drums in her skull.
    Whatever the thing was, it’s gone. A kind of resonance effect generated by untapped plasm sometimes gives birth to creatures unhealthy, unnatural; or maybe someone actually built the thing, and then set it free or allowed it to escape.
    She hesitates for a long time before she dares to put a foot in the water. Whatever the creature was, it doesn’t reappear.
    The platform seems larger than the day before, the shadows darker, angles stranger. Aiah’s thundering heart sounds louder in her ears than the sound of her echoing boots. She remembers the dead woman’s hollow eye-sockets, remembers she’s been dead for three days now and this isn’t going to be pleasant at all. Aiah hesitates outside the door to the old toilet, sweeping her hand torch over the platform, trying to make sure nothing’s there.
    She’s just delaying things, she knows. Either she’s doing this or she isn’t. She takes a breath, turns, enters the room.
    The dead woman lies on a mound of broken concrete next to the canted brace. Aiah sees a dark spill of auburn hair, heavy boots, one hand dangling, the other still fiercely clamped on the brace. The mouth is open, a perfect oval of an endless scream. Her hollow eyes grow larger as Aiah moves closer. Aiah’s steps slow, then halt. She doesn’t want to get any closer.
    Aiah’s nostrils twitch obsessively, but she detects no odor of decay. The woman seems curiously shrunken inside her olive-green overalls.
    Aiah’s heart thunders in her chest. She takes a step closer, then another. The woman’s skin seems stiff, parchment-like, the lips shrunken, long teeth visible in shrunken gums. There are no eyes in the hollow sockets, nothing there at all.
    Aiah kneels by the body, reaches out a hand that freezes in mid-air. Air spills from Aiah’s lungs in a soft hiss.
    The woman is mummified, she realizes. Moisture drawn out, nerves burned away, soft organs like the eyes just gone. All consumed by the Bursary Street holocaust as surely as the lives of its other victims.
    Aiah’s already wearing insulated gloves. Carefully she reaches for the woman’s arm, takes it gently, pulls the clawed hand away from the hot brace. There’s no resistance, no rigor; the arm seems to weigh nothing at all. Aiah opens her hand and lets the arm fall.
    Sister , she apologizes, I’m sorry.
    She takes the blanket out of her tote, lays it next to the plasm diver, and then rolls the body onto it. She picks the body up — it weighs no more than a heap of dry rags — then moves it around the fallen brace to the back of the room, where it won’t be seen in the first flash of someone’s torch.
    The auburn hair is disordered. Aiah tries to arrange it about the hollow-eyed face, happy she’s wearing gloves when a fingertip scrapes across a withered cheek. Then she covers the body with the blanket.
    Aiah stands, open-mouthed stare still in her mind, and feels the weight of the surface world about her, all the foundations and beams and brick and concrete,