The Sons of Heaven by Kage Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

going bald early and attempting to hide it with a comb-over. There were a lot of medications he might have taken to regrow hair, but he distrusted them. Bugleg distrusted most things. He had big dark worried-looking eyes and weak features, and was a genius in his particularfield, which happened to be chemistry. He knew very little about anything else, however.
    Certainly he didn’t know enough to look before he got into the agcar that pulled up at the garage mounting block. It was his habit never to look at the driver, because the drivers were cyborgs, and Bugleg was frightened of cyborgs, even though he had helped to create them. He didn’t notice, therefore, that there was no head visible above the driver’s seat. He just edged well away from the door once it closed for him and sat there watching his own white fingers as they knotted themselves together in his lap.
    But he did notice, eventually, when the agcar failed to pull into the parking garage in his hotel. He looked up in alarm and finally realized that there was wild countryside out the windows. This was because his agcar had long since left York behind and was now merrily speeding along the A59.
    Bugleg made a little terrified sound.
    “Took you long enough to catch a clue, didn’t it?” said a voice from where the driver ought to have been. To his horror, a face came leering around the side of the driver’s seat. Bugleg screamed at it.
    “Oh, come on,” said the owner of the face. “Not so bad, am I? I’d have thought you’d cry hello, and isn’t it Old Home Week? Perhaps you’d like a closer look, so you can see there’s nothing to fear you in little me.”
    Bugleg shrank away as the creature scrambled nimbly into the backseat beside him, and settled itself in comfort. The agcar sped on.
    “Don’t mind the floatymobile,” said the creature, waving its hand. “I’ve tinkered with the console. It’s programmed to drive itself now. No nasty big cyborg slaves to hear us, you see? Just kin here. You and me.” It poked him, grinning.
    It was something like a wizened child—or perhaps a little man. It wore a man’s clothing, a fine-cut business suit of Harris tweed. It was shod in similar elegance, wore expensive sun goggles and a shapeless hat. Somehow, though, there was something inexpressibly
dirty
about it. A sense of leaves and twigs in its thin gray hair, mud on those polished shoes, a faint hint of a moldy smell. Bugleg gasped and burst into tears.
    “What’re you wetting your knickers for?” scolded the creature. “Haven’t the eyes to see, have you? But they’re our eyes, I can tell. Stop that weepiness now!” It reached out and slapped him, quite hard. Bugleg gulped and cowered, but he stopped crying.
    “You haven’t caught a clue yet, alas.” It sighed, pulling off its sun goggles and hat, and leaned forward to stare very hard at Bugleg. “Look, you dim booby. Don’t you see it?”
    Anyone else looking on would have already realized—as Bugleg was only now beginning to realize—that there was a certain similarity between the two of them. Big head on a spindly neck, dead-pale skin, sparse hair, same weak features and pursed mouth. Only, the creature had a meager gray beard and mustaches like bits of gray string hanging down, and its big green eyes were sharp, malevolently intelligent.
    “You—you—how come you look like me?” said Bugleg at last.
    “Like I said,” the creature told him, “we’re kin.”
    “I don’t have any family,” said Bugleg.
    “Don’t you, though? Adopted by somebody, I’m sure. Raised among them, like all the others. You’ve had brothers and brothers your Dr. Zeus Incorporated has bred and raised, generation on generation down, cousins by the dozens, too. Mixing their big blood with ours to get themselves brainy little hybrids, since their tribe’s too stupid to come up with their grand inventions by their own selves.”The creature bared its teeth, tiny teeth like a baby’s. Bugleg