Authors: K. W. Jeter
'Don't move. They'll hear you. Then they'll be able to tell exactly where we're at.'
'"They"?' Iris looked up at the ceiling; the noises had stopped for a moment, then started again, fainter but also detectably closer. 'Who is it?' Of the possibilities that raced through her thoughts, none was pleasant.
Maybe
, she thought,
Meyer did decide to retire me
. Not only out of the police department, but for good. 'How did they know we're here?'
'They always know,' said Vogel. 'They know before you do. Or at least he does.'
'"He"?' Iris frowned in puzzlement. 'What "he" are you talking about?'
Vogel didn't appear to have heard her. 'This isn't supposed to be happening,' he muttered. The expression on his sharp-angled face darkened as he tilted his head back, slitted eyes focusing on some point beyond the room's ceiling. 'It's not in the script.'
'There's a script?' Iris peered closer at him. 'What's that supposed to mean?'
'Right now' – Vogel's distracted attention returned to her – 'you don't need to know. And there isn't time for me to tell you about it. We've got to get out of here.'
'Glad you agree,' said Iris. 'That's where I've been heading for a while now.' She nodded toward the room's tall, brass-fitted doors. 'Which one did we come in by?'
'Forget that,' Vogel said. 'We can't go out the same way we came in. You should know that by now. Nobody can ever go back; there's only forward, even if you don't know where you're going.'
Great
, thought Iris disgustedly. Always with the deep commentary. 'Yeah, but if that's the quickest way out of here . .
'I said, forget it.' Vogel's brow creased with furious concentration. 'I've worked with the guy long enough to know how his mind operates. Especially, how he figures other people are going to react.' A long-simmering resentment tinged Vogel's words. 'He always underestimates everybody else. He's got this godlike
ü
ber
-perspective on human affairs.'
'Who?' To Iris, the other's description sounded as though it were something personal. 'Is this the person who lifted the owl from me, back in my apartment? So now I take it that he's got a whole crew with him?' The burrowing and scraping sounds from the rubble above had become noticeably louder, indicating a number of unwanted visitors.
Maybe
, thought Iris,
they're the ones, or what's left of them, from the movie theater
. Which was not good; they wouldn't be likely to be in a pleasant mood when they found her here. 'Who is this guy?'
'Wrong guess,' said Vogel. 'Different kind of trouble entirely. But definitely trouble; when he starts deviating from the script, it's because he thinks he has to. That means he's going to be worried about having lost control of the project.' Vogel bit the corner of his lower lip. 'What it also means is that he must have caught me going off-script. Shit.' He glanced around the corners of the room, near the beamed ceiling. 'I didn't figure he'd have this place wired as well; this whole sequence was supposed to be off-camera.' Vogel's expression turned even more bitter and brooding. 'Which was what was in the script. So if he was able to catch me deviating, that means he didn't trust me from the beginning.'
'Why the hell should anyone trust you?' Iris flung her hands up in exasperation. 'You said you went off some script you were supposed to be following. And he caught—wait a minute.' She pulled herself up short, having found herself in Vogel's spiraling mental loop. 'I don't even know who we're talking about.'
'Figure it out,' snapped Vogel. He grabbed Iris's forearm with his good hand, and pulled her with him toward the darker reaches of Tyrell's private quarters. 'It's the director!'
'Director?' Iris let herself be led past the reach of the candlelight, as much to discover what Vogel meant as to find a way out of the buildings' ruins. 'You mean . . . the director of the
movie
?' She pointed with her thumb back toward the theater. 'That
Blade Runner
thing I just watched?'
'That's the one.' Vogel let go of her arm so he could fish inside the pocket of his jumpsuit for his flashlight. With its beam flaring ahead, he kept walking at a fast enough clip that Iris had to hurry to keep up with him. 'Come on. They're going to be on us pretty soon, if we don't get a move on.'
'Where we heading?'
'Like I said – I know how his mind operates. Urbenton will figure that we're stupid enough to go running out the way we got in here, and he'll have part of his production crew – the thug part – waiting for us. So we go another way.'
'If there is one,' said Iris.
'Don't worry.' Vogel kept the flashlight aimed ahead of them. 'I know my way around this dump pretty well.'
Beginning to have my doubts
, thought Iris. The floor underneath her bootsoles had turned both broken, with the ends of bent steel girders poking through the once-polished planks, and sharply tilted to one side. Enough light bounced back from the flashlight beam hitting the walls to dimly reveal the condition of the ceiling overhead. The weight of the collapsed buildings' rubble had obviously hit this section of Eldon Tyrell's private quarters with enough force to warp the reinforced framework that had protected the other sections, twisting and flattening it like a lab rat's wire cage. Iris and Vogel had to duck beneath the bowed ceiling beams, shouldering aside dangling skeins of dead electrical wiring and data conduits; the stench of charred insulation sheaths was still strong enough to lodge choking in Iris's throat.
The private quarters came to an end at a sheer cliff-face of concrete rubble, bristling with lengths of corroded rebar. Crouching down, with the top of his head barely an inch away from the buckled ceiling, Vogel pointed up. 'We climb,' he said.
'Climb where?' Iris knelt beside him, in the scattered glow from the flashlight. The floor beneath her was now so tilted that she had to dig in her fingernails to keep from sliding into Vogel.
'You're skinny enough,' said Vogel. 'Shouldn't be any problem for you.' He swung the flashlight upward, revealing a narrow gap between the vertical rubble and where the ceiling had been sheared away. 'It's only tight for maybe twenty yards or so, then it opens up. It's easy; plenty of handholds.'
'Easy for me, maybe. But what about you?' Iris was close enough that she could poke the sling across his chest without even unbending her elbow. 'What are you going to do, stay down here and hold them off?'
'The hell with it.' Vogel pulled away the sling, now ragged and dirt-stained, wadded it in his hand and tossed it onto the loose rubble behind them. Flexing his fingers, he stretched out the arm that had been bound to the front of his jumpsuit. 'Thing was giving me a cramp, anyway.'
'Hey –' Iris frowned at the sight. 'You weren't hurt at all!'
'Not physically, no.' A quick smile flashed across Vogel's face. 'But your leaving me there, with those guys – that really cut me to the quick.'
Right
, she thought in disgust. When there was time, she'd have to re-think her assumptions about what had gone down at the movie theater where she had managed to lay hold of the owl. If Vogel had been faking any detail about what had happened to him, then the chances were good that a lot of other details were phonies as well.
Maybe even the whole set-up
– though she had to wonder what the point of that would have been, what Vogel or whoever was behind him would have been trying to accomplish with that kind of elaborate ruse. But for all she knew right now, the moment she had slipped out of the movie theater Vogel and the other men had broken off their mutual gunfire and had stood around, smoking and exchanging small talk.
'You lying sonuvabitch.' Iris spoke the words almost without anger, except for that which she directed toward herself for having fallen for anything Vogel had ever told her. 'You know, instead of scrambling up this chimney-hole, I've got a notion that maybe I should stay right here instead. And have a little talk with whoever it is that's dropping in on us.'
'You don't want to do that.' Vogel emphatically shook his head. 'That's a way bad idea.'
'Yeah? Why?'
'Look, I know you're going through a spasm of distrust at the moment.' Vogel spoke with elaborate patience as he crouched beneath the buckled ceiling, with its dangling loops of wire and cable screening off the rest of what had been the Tyrell private quarters. 'I can understand that. And I can even admit it's somewhat deserved; I haven't been totally upfront with you about everything that's been going on—'
'Or anything.'
'We don't really have time to argue right now.' Vogel held up a mollifying hand, palm outward. 'You can chew my ass raw when we get out of here, okay? What you have to realize is that you are in deep, deep trouble.'
'Been there,' said Iris. 'Done that.'
'Worse this time; I promise you. If Urbenton has gone off-script, there's no telling what could happen to you. You don't want to trust me about that, fine. But look at it this way.' He brought his face close to hers, so that in the dim radiance of the flashlight she could see her own reflection in the dark centers of his eyes. 'As near as you've gotten to what you've been trying to accomplish — getting hold of that owl — it's all been made possible by me. For better or worse.'
'Mostly worse.'
'Regardless,' said Vogel. 'You don't
have
anyone else to trust, other than yourself — and you can't say that's gone any better. So it's me or nobody.'
'Maybe not.' Iris glanced up at the cramped space's ceiling, then back to Vogel. 'There's always this director guy and his friends who are about ready to drop in on us.'
'Sure. You got that option. I don't have any way of forcing you to get out of here. But just consider.' His voice dropped in pitch and volume. 'What if you guess wrong? About who you want to trust and distrust. If I tell you that it wouldn't be exactly pleasant for you to meet up with Urbenton and his crew, and you don't believe me — it could get real ugly for you if you guess wrong on that one. Let's face it: people haven't been playing softball with you lately.'
That much was true, at least. 'All right,' said Iris. She sighed. 'So I go first? Up the chute, I mean?'
'Right.' Vogel's thin smile appeared again. 'That way I'll know where you are.'
'You're the boss.' She turned and inched forward, cautiously lifting her head into the open space where the broken ceiling ended. As Vogel had promised, the wall of rubble had plenty of jagged crevices that she could dig her fingertips into. The ceiling's edge scraped past her shoulder blades and spine as she kicked the toes of her boots into the crags below and started to climb into the narrow darkness.
Even without the occasional glint from Vogel's flashlight, a fraction of its beam sliding up past her face and hands, she could sense him below, climbing after her. Some of the handholds she found were fractured and crumbling, as though the concrete had been all but disintegrated by the force of the explosions that had collapsed the Tyrell Corporation headquarters. Bits of sharp-edged gravel slid under her palms and past her wrists; she took a certain wry satisfaction in imagining them raining down upon Vogel's upturned face.
The gap through which they crawled antlike opened up, after what seemed like a mile of scrabbling effort; Iris felt that the back of her leatherite jacket was no longer scraping along the cliff-face behind her. She could even breathe, taking in a complete lungful of the dust-laden, scorched-smelling air.
Iris suddenly felt something grab her ankle, and realized it was one of Vogel's hands, reaching up to snag her.
'Hold it.' Vogel had switched off the flashlight; his whisper filtered through the darkness to her. 'Don't say anything.'
She listened, and within a fraction of a second heard the same faint but distinct noises that Vogel must have detected. Whoever was burrowing down through the ruins, down to the Tyrell private quarters from which she and Vogel had just fled, the group was evidently within a few meters of their own position. Iris could hear the scraping sounds of smaller bits of rubble being shoved aside, clearing a parallel vertical shaft downward.
The space in which Iris clung to the rubble face was open enough that. Vogel was able to climb partway alongside her. She glanced down and could just discern the sharp angles of his face, close to her elbow.
'They must think we're still down there,' whispered Vogel. 'Urbenton probably didn't wire all of the private quarters; must've figured that there was no need to do the crushed end, where we got out.'
She realized then that the dim glow by which she made out Vogel's face wasn't from his flashlight, but from the other group's worklights seeping through the network of crevices and fissures between herself and them. Holding her breath, she waited until the bits of stray light were swallowed up by darkness again, and the scraping and scrabbling noises had faded a bit, coming now from a point some meters below.
'We don't have much time.' Iris kept her voice as low as Vogel's had been. 'When they get down there, it won't take 'em long to figure out that we split on them.' She glanced upward along the rubble face, trying to discern any indicator of its remaining height, then looked back down toward Vogel. 'How much farther until we're at the surface?'
'Still a ways to go.' Vogel was completely hidden in the gap's darkness. 'Get moving.'
Without any aid from Vogel's flashlight, Iris was forced to grope around for each new handhold. The sheer face of crumbling cement ended, giving way to a tangle of metal reinforcing rods, knotted and twisted together into a steel rat's nest. She reached up and grasped a curved section of rebar and pulled herself up, bending her knees to bring her bootsoles flat against the concrete rubble.
That was a mistake, she realized immediately, as the concrete broke apart, her boots pushing through a thin layer to a hollow space beyond. Her entire weight tugged forcefully on the rebar section onto which she was holding, arms extended straight above her head. With a shriek of metal grinding across metal, the section stretched loose from the rest of the tangled rebar, dropping Iris several feet down. She dangled for a moment, twisting against the sheer rubble face, as though clinging to an immense elastic band; the unsteady motion, compounded by the surrounding darkness, sickened her to her stomach.