Noir by K. W. Jeter Read Free Book Online Page A

Lupino anymore. The curls against her pale cheeks had vanished, along with the general air of brave vulnerability and period early-forties outfit from Raoul Walsh’s
High Sierra
that’d been laid over her in McNihil’s world. The worn-and-mended woolen skirt, the thin unbuttoned sweater with a zigzag decorative pattern around the bottom and at the cuffs showing her tiny wrists, the plain high-collared blouse … all that McNihil had already seen her in had been replaced, at least in the percolator’s distorted mirror. Replaced by what was sadly real.
    More skin; that was what was mainly noticeable. Still in a skirt, of some kind of black plasticky stuff with the slick sheen of fetish enthusiasms. But hiked nearly pudenda-high, with correspondingly bare arms and cleavage. The neoprene highlights shimmered with the slow fever gleam of neon on a rain-wet nocturnal street. Over on the other side, where the colors were, a girl could freeze to death in an outfit like that, not so much from air temperature as the coldly assessing gazes of men.
    Just like a cube bunny
, thought McNihil. He hadn’t expected anything else. It was no wonder she’d been able to get into his apartment. That was about the only kind of survival skill her species possessed. Beyond, at least, the value of skin and flesh and face.
    The little vision, the peek into the girl’s hard-side existence, faded as the coffeepot heated up, evaporating the wetness on its curved chrome flank. Which was all right by McNihil. He preferred things—especially human things—in black and white. Hands against the edge of the counter, he closed his eyes and leaned his weight forward, easing out the kinks in his stiff spine as he waited for the pot to sigh in steam.
    Overhead, bare lightbulbs dimmed for a second as the coffeepot gurgled wetly. A cranking mechanical noise came from the rear of the apartment,where all the black cables ran. McNihil’s generator was the envy of the surrounding apartments. A sleek, grease-fed hummer that he kept swaddled in rags to cut down the residual noise, its intestinelike exhaust sphincter duct-taped to a hole he’d punched in the building’s exterior. There were other people in the building who weren’t so fortunate; they got by on batteries or candles, or gave up the desire, the need, for light entirely.
Like connecting cave fish
, brooded McNihil; it sometimes gave him the creeps to even think about it.
Creep
being the operative word—he could see them in his brain’s interior optic, moving around in the pitch-black with their big lemur eyes or the holes where their vestigial eyes had been, their fingers radiating out in front of them like cockroach antennae. Like roaches in more ways than that: whenever he came back to the building, if he pushed the ground-level door open fast enough, he could hear them fleeing back into the even-darker recesses where they were blindly comfortable. Some of those people—if that word still applied—were so devolved, the charity agencies didn’t even make personal deliveries anymore, but just sort of pushed food packets at the end of a long stick into the gloom, and let whatever was in there grab them and be gone.
    Waiting for the coffee, McNihil reached down and massaged his aching leg. Climbing five flights to get here, through stairwells and landings palely lit by sputtering fluorescent halos, or with nothing but shadows and ammoniacal piss odors seeping into the ankle-deep fast-food trash and discarded subcutaneous-membrane packs—he’d gotten used to it. If he held himself very still, breath stopped and heartbeat slowed, he could hear inside the thin layers of walls and through the buckling floors. Little creatures and the slightly bigger ones that fed on them were scurrying about on their own errands, guided in darkness by the ripe smells of rain-saturated decay. The human inhabitants of the building, and all the similar buildings clustered around it, scuttled through their various