No Dogs in Philly Read Free Page B

only sound was the hum of his computer and the squeak of the
chair or a fart from his fleshy prison.
    They were feasters, they had to be; it was the
only explanation. They weren’t thugs or robbers; he’d been in
enough of them to understand their way. They weren’t twitchy or
angry or greedy or even cruel. In ten toes he hadn’t seen them move
or eat. Only the leader spoke. They carried no weapons but knives,
and he didn’t know a lot about knives but he knew these were sharp.
The leader’s knife had gone through his toe like it was nothing,
not even butter, just a quick flick and the toe slid off. There was
no pain—they had injected him with drugs, mind-focusers,
analgesics, and their own blood. This last fact convinced him of
their nature. The feasters were blood worshippers; they believed if
you ate a man you gained his strength. And he suspected that would
be the fate of this girl. They believed she had some power and they
meant to eat her.
    The leader’s eyes flickered open. He stood and
withdrew a syringe from his jacket. He calmly slid the needlepoint
into his neck and sucked out about a juice-box full of blood. The
leader walked over and jammed the needle into his neck. He felt
nothing with the needle but oddly the blood entering his body
burned. He could feel it spreading out through him, warm like piss
in a pool but not diluting, just filling his body with heat. He
wondered what diseases were coming along for the ride—a fancy new
hepatitis perhaps?
    He realized then, that there was no randomness
involved here. What he had taken for brutal motivation was a
ritual. Every twenty-four hours, on the exact second, a toe was
removed. Every twelve hours blood was injected. Every six hours a
new cocktail of drugs to keep him awake. He was being
transformed—like a club with a notch for every skull it had broken.
These were creatures of ritual, moved by ritual, obsessed with
ritual. They were clocks, machines, vampires, slaves to a higher
order. He felt a comfort—was it the blood?—in this ritual. He had
thought his search methods to be perfect and orderly, but now he
recognized how crazy, how random they were. He began again, from
the beginning, from birth records, genetics. He knew, somehow, that
the eyes were natural blue and not a bought alteration. He knew
much more now, the knowing a great staff he could lean upon. It was
wonderful to know .
    There it was, all the girls in Philadelphia
born with blue eyes in the last forty years. Now their medical
records. It was a phenomenal amount of data, more than he could
ever know or process, but it seemed to glide by. He felt his
consciousness divide like a cell, and then again and again and
again until he was a thousand cells, a million, all working in
tandem to solve this problem. In the background, time was passing,
seconds, days? Millennia? He felt light and free, a mind without a
body, a creature of pure data. And girls, surrounded by girls, so
many in just one area, beautiful, ugly, horrid, filthy sacks of
copulation making more and more girls—did they never stop? Why was
he here? This girl, Charlene M. Farrow, grew up in Kensington,
black with blue eyes, was this the girl? No, she was dead, beaten
by her husband into a coma. And this girl, Ramona Ko, she was the
one! No, she was married, three kids, Glish teacher in the
suburbs.
    And what was this? A cell-mind trembling in the
foreground, bursting with excitement, rushing, exploding,
destroying all the other tiny minds around him. It was the girl!
The one they wanted—they, who were they? It didn’t matter, they
knew, they knew already he had found her; he had done it. She had
made a call, called her mother and he had heard the voice, all the
bits of data going through the line, and he knew the voice belonged
to those eyes because all data was one, any form of information
expressed as any other; a stream is a star is a tree is a limb is
an arm or a drop of blood or a snowflake, a scrap of cloth, my