Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [57]
“What floor did you press?” I asked Nearly, to break the silence.
“Sixty-six,” she said, “it’s where I live. I’m done for the night I’m going home.”
“Where are we going to go?” Suej asked, her eyes firmly on me now. I looked at the floor indicator and saw we were coming up to 40.
I looked at Nearly. “Can Suej come with you?”
“Sure. There’s only a couch, but…”
“No!” shouted Suej. “I’m not going. I’m coming with you. I want to find David and the others. I’m sick of being left places. You never used to be like this. You were there all the time and now you’re never here.”
64.65.
“What’s the address?”
“Sixty-six/two thousand and three—corner of Tyson and Stones.”
“See you later,” I said, jabbing a floor button as the doors opened behind her. “Stay indoors.”
Nearly stepped out and I gently shoved Suej after her. She stumbled backward out of the elevator as the doors closed, her face like thunder.
Then I stood, facing the doors, as the elevator shot up toward 135. I was trying not to think about the forest, and not succeeding. I’d never had a flashback to The Gap before, and in that two-second glimpse had been everything I’d been trying to forget. I was also trying not to think about Nanune, and the fact there’d been something wrong with her head over and above the fact that it was no longer attached to her body.
About the fact that there’d been “unspecified facial damage.”
In my current state I couldn’t work out how this changed things, though obviously it changed everything. I didn’t know where to look for the blue-headed man who’d come asking for me with Nanune’s head in a box, and sensed I wouldn’t have to. In the meantime, there was someone else looking for me. I’d shoved Suej out because I’d decided to save him the trouble and go looking for him instead.
Club Bastard was an explosion of thrashing groovesters, contained within a barnlike building in the middle of a party floor. You couldn’t have gotten anyone else into the club without first compressing them to the size of a pea, and I suspect that when I pushed my way into the club someone must have been popped out of a window the other side. Music crunched out of massive speakers along every wall, competing with the cacophony of five hundred people all shouting at once. The music was Predictive Trance, the notes and words all fresh-minted in real time by a bank of computers on the far wall. The algorithms used for generating the lyrics are keyed to the effect of various recreational drugs, and thus the more out of it you get, the better you become at predicting what the words will be.
I shouldered my way through to the bar, buffeted on every side by bright young things. The line at the counter wasn’t very deep, probably because everyone in the place was bombed on happy drugs. Dying tendrils of the Rapt I’d taken were sparkling periodically in parts of my brain, and being surrounded by glittering eyes and expensive highs was not what I needed. I was grimly conscious of the fact that what I did need was more Rapt, and that I shouldn’t allow myself to have it. I was also still shouldering thoughts of the spares away as hard as I could. I knew I had to find them soon. Nothing had changed—including the fact that I didn’t know where to start looking. I wasn’t in a great state, to be honest, and had no high hopes of ever feeling better.
The gorilla behind the bar stared at me impassively when I got there, waiting for me to speak.
“Is Johnny in?” I asked, trying to look tough.
“Who wants to know?” the man said. He was trying even harder than me and succeeded only in looking like two types of shit in a one-shit waistcoat.
“I do, obviously, you stupid fuck,” I said, not impressed. “Or I wouldn’t have asked. Is he in or not?”
Huge hands closed around my arms. A Vinaldi goon stood on either side of me, two jabs in my back making it clear they were