Anno Dracula 1999 Page 5

  Richard couldn’t help himself. He whistled.

  What a whopper! What a blooming walloping whopper!

  HAROLD TAKAHAMA

  ‘What are the weaknesses of chiropterids?’ Hal asked.

  His hand pondered for unreasonable seconds.

  ‘Exposure to sunlight causes degradation of cells,’ it said. ‘They petrify and crumble, with an appealing, ice-cracking tinkle.’

  ‘No use here. And thanks for the poetic frill. Next?’

  ‘A stake through the—’

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Silver bullets or edged weapons.’

  ‘Ne… uh, is there any silver about?’

  ‘Not in appreciable quantities.’

  ‘Next?’

  ‘Lightning strikes have been known to—’

  He was getting impatient with the machine. ‘Lightning! Wait, that’s electrical discharge. Is high-voltage current effective against chiropterids?’

  Whirring.

  He was almost impatient with the shapeshifter too.

  What was it – Self-Designation Karl – waiting for? It had dealt with Taguchi – and, presumably, Ishikawa – with merciless swiftness. Was it stuffed to the gills after two big feeds? Did the mulch of victims’ minds slosh around its oval rat-skull, threatening to squirt through cilia-frilled nostrils? Or was it simply confident, taking the time to enjoy torturing a lower-priority target?

  It still didn’t seem right that Jun Zero was Number Three.

  He was the one with the computer hand.

  ‘Electric current has proved fatal to some bloodlines of vampire. In 1951, in the Arctic Circle, an arc of—’

  ‘Discontinue,’ he snapped. ‘No need for a history lesson, Lefty.’

  ‘This unit is to be designated “Lefty”? Confirm, if so.’

  ‘Confirm.’

  Whirring and processing. ‘Designation set and filed. Renaming is possible within thirty-six hours. Then designation is permanent. Does user Jun Zero wish to rename?’

  ‘No, Lefty. User Jun Zero wishes to know if high-voltage cable is immediately accessible.’

  The chiropterid looked at him askance.

  Could it understand English?

  Lefty talked to Jun Zero in English. Both were also fluent in Japanese.

  That was a revelation. A shortcut around the blanks.

  It was as if he’d checked a filing system. Two languages were there. He only had to think of Japanese and he could think in Japanese. The partial reformat hadn’t affected that function. His memories of the last eight years were gone – and those of the years before hazy – but skills learned in that time were available to him.

  At home in 1992, his parents spoke only English. He had enough Japanese to hold a two- or three-minute conversation with Gramma – who was still pissed at FDR for clapping her in a camp during the Second World War – but not enough to follow unsubbed Overfiend bootleg videos. Since then, Jun Zero had become fluent in the tongue of his ancestors.

  He had a stab of panic grief – was Gramma still alive? She’d been ancient.

  What did his parents think of his career choices? Dad was a notary public and Lodge Master of the Ojai Sons of the Desert. He took pride in contributing to the community and voted for law and order candidates.

  ‘You’re nothing to me,’ Joji Takahama would say to a criminal son. ‘A Zero!’

  Was that where the username came from?

  The chiropterid had stripped Hal of years, kicked him back in time. It was still fixated on him.

  Self-Designation Karl might know more about Jun Zero than he did.

  Was that why it was cautious? Not attacking yet.

  Was it afraid?

  Did Jun Zero know more than computer fu?

  He made a fist and thumped his chest. Then felt his stomach and sides. Unfamiliar cords of muscle under his shirt. No flab handles above his belt.

  Hal Takahama’s little wobbly gut was gone.

  Jun Zero had racked up serious gym time. Maybe with steroids and surgery. He obviously wasn’t against scientific augmentation.

  So he might be up to a fight – if not with an eight-foot-tall bat monster.

  Hal had a sudden little thrill in his water. He might not be a virgin!

  He tried to check the filing system for sex skills – highly inappropriate at this moment – but they weren’t hardwired like knowing Japanese or designing robots. An outlaw hacker like Jun Zero was a probable babe magnet, though.

  Hal Takahama got flustered when a check-out girl at Vons smiled at him.

  Jun Zero slept with tattooed Asian women who had switchblade fingernails.

  Fuck Hal Takahama, then! He was Jun Zero now.

  Was Winona Ryder still hot? She’d dig the Zero.

  Had she become a vampire? Was she friends with Ally Sheedy?

  This was not the time to think about celebrity threesomes.

  ‘The cable ahead of you carries sufficient voltage,’ said Lefty.

  He looked down.

  He had nearly tripped over the python-thick rope. Now he knelt and reached for it.

  Part of his disguise was rubber-soled shoes.

  Good planning or happenstance?

  He took hold of the cable with both hands.

  Lefty’s fingers bent. As they curved, steel points slid out from the tips. Lefty had claws – and a USB plug in its thumb.

  Hal had more questions for his hand. They could keep.

  The chiropterid cautiously advanced.

  Hal banked on Self-Designation Karl being cunning, not clever. Thirsty brute, not calculating creature. An Alien alien, not a Predator alien. It wouldn’t start talking to him with Taguchi’s voice. It would stick its mouth into his forehead and bore into his brain.

  As the shapeshifter pounced, Hal’s perceptions adjusted.

  His thoughts sped up, goosed by his electric hand. His reactions kicked in.

  In that serious gym time, he had worked on his reflexes. Hal could control a virtual robot. Jun Zero could trash monster ass.

  He yanked up the cable and rammed it against the chiropterid’s spear-tipped proboscis.

  Tiny teeth ground through rubber and bit into live current.

  Hal was thrown backwards by the shock.

  He slammed against a folding wooden chair that came apart.

  The spasming, fallen chiropterid couldn’t detach its mouth from the cable. It had relatively puny human arms. A branching network of string-thick veins inflated around its neck. Its ears caught fire. Its eyes burst like squeezed grapes.

  An electrical arc played around its head. It fell forward.

  To be sure, Hal took a snapped-off chair leg and used Lefty to hammer it through Self-Designation Karl’s ribcage. Lefty did not appreciate the abuse.

  ‘It is not advisable to mistreat this unit. Warranty may be invalidated.’

  ‘How expensive are you?’

  ‘Unit cost four million dollars. Surgical attachment procedure and neural implants two million dollars. Research and development—’

  ‘Discontinue,’ he said. ‘Who paid for this?’

  ‘You did.’

  Jun Zero was fucking loaded. He knew it!

  Hal had told his parents there was a fortune in fighting robots.

  Though he reckoned Jun Zero had come by his money by diversifying. The road from G-bot designer to outlaw hacker must have serious kinks.

  The chiropterid’s death-mask flaked off its elongated skull. Fissures spread across its chest, with – as Lefty had promised – a sound like ice breaking. It wasn’t ‘pleasing’. Karl crystallised, then turned to white and red clinker.

  ‘A security sweep of Floor 44 is due in seven minutes,’ said Lefty. ‘It may be advanced ahead of schedule because of power interruption in the Processor Room. Evasive action is advised.’

  Frying Karl hadn’t blacked out the building. Fail safes and redundancies kept the system live and online.

  He found a vampire crouched by the frosted glass d
oor.

  Ishikawa.

  The third member of Team Taguchi was dressed as a security guard and had a slime-rimmed hole in his forehead. He had centre-parted grey hair.

  A key card was discarded nearby.

  ‘Aggressive action is recommended,’ said Lefty.

  Ishikawa snarled through fangs. As a mind-wiped, new-made being, he only had urges and appetites.

  Hal should have brought another chair-leg stake.

  Ishikawa scented blood and looked around, snorting.

  His eyes were big and red.

  Had Jun Zero worked for this viper? That didn’t feel right.

  Jun Zero was his own man. He must have had a wary alliance with Ishikawa. Mutual respect for unique skills. Precautions taken against betrayal – though not, unfortunately, against the client who was definitely on Jun Zero’s shit-list. What Bat Bod Karl had got was a taste of what Unknown Douchecanoe had coming.

  Someone would pay for this – for Ishikawa and Taguchi.

  And the partial rewrite of Jun Zero.

  To get out of the room, he had to shift the vampire from the doorway. He also had to keep it off his neck.

  Vampires were mostly civilised these days. Their urges and appetites were different from those of warm people, but kept on a leash. The undead wanted to continue to enjoy the benefits of living in a complex society where abducting a virgin every night and biting her neck had immediate legal consequences. Strip all that code and what did you get?

  Ishikawa.

  A bloodthirsty blank slate. Learning fast.

  He’d need serious training to adjust. If no one staked him before he grew back a personality, a conscience, and a sense of self-preservation.

  He held up Lefty, mentally kicking himself again for not fitting a repulsor ray.

  Wet hair flopped over Ishikawa’s fractal screensaver eyes.

  Then, the vampire caught another scent and his head snapped up.

  Lurching down a row between server cabinets, hands out like a sleepwalker, was Taguchi. Another blank slate, but warm.

  Taguchi shouldered Hal aside. Moving on instinct, towards the light.

  Ishikawa leaped like a cat and sank fangs into Taguchi’s shoulder, well away from the jugular. He had vampire instincts, but no skills. Taguchi screeched and flapped his hands at Ishikawa’s head.

  Hal had a moment of concern.

  This had been his gang. His friends?

  The men he might have known were gone. These meat-sacks were what were left on the plate after the chiropterid feast.

  They were lost. He only had Lefty.

  Jun Zero would avenge his comrades.

  Locked in their clumsy clinch, vampire and victim slammed into a cabinet.

  An alarm sounded.

  Hal didn’t need Lefty’s advice.

  He picked up the key card and let himself out of the Processor Room.

  NEZUMI

  A mime troupe dressed as robots performed in the square, slowing the procession towards the Daikaiju Building. Their display was sponsored by Sprünt. To Nezumi, both flavours tasted like something that could eat through a spaceship hull.

  A fat American senator dressed in a silver toga and a laurel of Christmas lights held things up to make drunken haii-yii gestures she supposed he thought typical Asian greeting. Just the politician to send to a diplomatic bunfest. She hoped the Japanese Diet sent a farting sumo in a cowboy hat to Washington D.C. in return.

  Teenage-appearing kyuketsuki cops broke up the guerrilla marketing show. They accepted free cartons of Red Label but moved the spray-painted mimes on.

  Bund police officers wore stiff blue wigs and form-fitting body armour. They used yo-yos instead of truncheons. Some piloted brightly coloured one-person tanks. The gear looked like toys.

  ‘Hey,’ said the Senator, ‘my Dad bombed this block!’

  The cops took his tactlessness lightly and frog-marched him back onto the red carpet. They’d be glad when the night was over.

  This city was barely recognisable from 1945.

  This Japan was by no means the land she had wandered for a thousand years. She had outlived tyrant lords and their retainers.

  There were new tyrants. Billionaires, CEOs, Presidents.

  Some wore the same faces as their predecessors.

  London had changed too. ‘Cool Britannia’ was the thing.

  Even Drearcliff Grange was changing.

  Cells were now called dorms because parents stopped wanting daughters packed off to prisons or convents. Exams were called assessments. Whips were prefects and no longer used whips. They were up on social sciences and expected to understand the problems of juniors and have long cosy chats with them when they got into scrapes. Punishments were called anything but that.

  Girls stopped calling them scrapes for a while, but did again. They picked it up from Nezumi. She was slow to change, of course – and influential, if generally quiet. Every year, she was a novelty.

  The only vampire in the Third Form.

  A few Sixths turned, picking eighteen as an age they wanted to stay. They often asked for her advice. Desperate to be told they hadn’t made a huge mistake. Confused by appetites their bodies interpreted as a mutant form of eating disorder. Hoping for tips on biting people who didn’t want to be bitten and getting away with it.

  Those chats weren’t long or cosy.

  She had little to share with new-borns.

  So far as she knew, she hadn’t turned. She’d stuck.

  Only yesterday, by her lights, her cell-mate and best chum ‘Inchworm’ Inchfawn was mooning over a film magazine, trying to decide the swooniest – Rudolf Valentino or Antonio Moreno. Now, ‘Strawberry’ Fields pestered her to pick a favourite Spice Girl.

  Sporty, of course.

  ‘Not Scary?’

  Nezumi had made herself smile at that.

  Fields gulped and changed the subject.

  If Nezumi wore mask, tights and cloak to become a superheroine – given her kendoline skills, she’d be a good one – she’d pick ‘Cool Britannia’ as her name.

  Cool. She understood that. Cool, not cold.

  It was how she felt.

  It was what girls said she was.

  It was a word she used often.

  Mr Jeperson said it too. It was from his teenage years.

  Cool, like a jazz musician. Straight from the fridge.

  Mr Jeperson wasn’t thrown by running into his old flame, Mrs Van Epp. From what the Lovelies said, he had enough old flames to burn a forest.

  He remembered their names and what they did and how they were doing. He sent small, thoughtful presents on birthdays.

  Like Nezumi, Mr Jeperson couldn’t remember his early life.

  The first Mr Jeperson – Captain Geoffrey Jeperson – had found him as a child in a camp and brought him to England to be his son.

  He’d been given a birthday to go with his name, and shared it with her.

  Every year since they first worked together – tracking down the Great Brain Robbers in 1963 – he sent her a thoughtful present for June 25. And a card.

  Nezumi once asked him if he had frost picture memories of his family.

  He shook his head, then rolled up his green puffy sleeve to show her a tattoo.

  GEIST 97

  ‘Nazis did that,’ he said.

  He had a gift. He felt when anyone else was sad. Or happy.

  He could spot bad pennies too.

  She made a point of sending him a thoughtful present on his birthday. Surprisingly few others did. Mrs Van Epp, who could afford to buy Harrods and hire someone thoughtful to pick presents even if she was busy herself, never bothered. Nezumi thought less of her for that. She wasn’t a bad penny, exactly – but she was no sound shilling either. A crooked sixpence, perhaps. Mrs In-Between.

  The Persian vampire was wearing the silliest headgear.

  Even that lady who wore hats shaped like Blenheim Palace or the Starship Protector to Ascot wouldn’t be seen dead in Syrie
Van Epp’s veiny spongebag.

  In the crowd, Nezumi saw a man in an over-the-head hood that made his head look like a naked swollen brain with one big cyclops eye. Then she spotted another shifty bloke with the same look.

  In an ideal world, the duo would be Japanese superheroes. They wore long black dusters, as if they didn’t know the Trenchcoat Twosome copyrighted the name.

  Nezumi had always known this was not an ideal world.

  They were Aum Draht too. Not just for dress-up-and-play.

  As if alerted by buzzing in their brainhats, the two adepts strode towards each other – and Nezumi realised she’d be caught between them.

  Suddenly swift, one grasped her from behind. The other rushed at her.

  She heard clockwork turning inside their coats.

  They had suicide waistcoats on.

  RICHARD JEPERSON

  A man in a long black coat held Nezumi, gripping her upper arms. His head was the size and shape of a football. His face was covered by an Aum Draht Orb.

  Was this anything to do with Syrie?

  Richard saw her, huddled on the pavement with other panicky guests, crouching wonkily in high heels, handbag held over her eye-turbanned head. Not the attitude of an involved party.

  So, a rogue Aum Draht faction. Mr Mystery Eye was dangerous.

  Of course, so was everyone else in the street – including the schoolgirl the adept thought was his hostage. If this kicked off, it would make a bloody mess.

  Richard had seen too many of those.

  The vampire detective assumed a shooting stance. His gun aimed at the big eyeball.

  If Aum Draht wanted to graduate from cyber-nuisance to streetfighting, they might reconsider wearing targets on their heads.

  Mr Eye was the second of a two-man team.

  The other eyehead was shorter, but with a coat the same length. Handily for identification purposes, Mr One wore a metallic numeral on his lapel.

  As Mr One walked towards Nezumi and Mr Eye, he kept his right arm up as if his wristwatch were a raygun. He unbelted and unbuttoned his coat with his left hand. Under his off-brand black mac, Mr One wore a less fashionable drab canvas waistcoat. Not this season at all. Glass phials, wires and wind-up mechanisms were sewn into the lumpy thing. Works whirred. Vile liquids boiled.