Red Cells Read online

  First Edition

  Red Cells © 2014 by Jeffrey Thomas

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For fellow author, David Conyers.

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  Prologue

  Transitions

  “Miss her already, friend?” asked the mutant seated next to Jeremy Stake in the transdimensional pod.

  Stake had rolled up the sleeve of his candy red prison uniform to stare at the bared flesh of his arm. He had traced a finger on the underside of his forearm to summon a holograph, its image imprinted like a tattoo into his skin. A man and woman, cheek against cheek, grinning into the camera. The woman was striking: a blue-eyed albino black woman with her hair in dreadlocks. The man was himself. Or so it would seem. He shared the same features as the man in the holograph, at any rate. A thin face with a weak chin compensated for with a groomed goatee, his gelled dark hair buzzed close on the sides, and squinty eyes that sparkled with a kind of dark mischief.

  He didn’t respond to the mutant shackled to the bench beside him, but the man went on nonetheless. “You better get used to missing that sweet thing if you’re off to the Wormhole. Can’t be no light sentence if you’re going there. What you get for time?”

  Stake decided to play nice. “Six months. Possession with intent to sell. Purple vortex.” He didn’t need to ask what about you?

  “Only six months for vortex? Lucky. Me, twenty-five years…armed robbery. Can you believe that? Didn’t even shoot nobody. Man, if I wasn’t a mutie, I swear it would’ve been different.” The man’s shapeless, leathery, sprouting head put Stake in mind of a potato left too long in a cupboard.

  What would his fellow prisoner think if he knew Stake was a mutant, too? Born and raised, no doubt like himself, in the Punktown slum called Tin Town? But Stake’s particular condition—which had a name, Caro turbida—was not immediately apparent, providing every so often he gazed long and hard at the holograph of that weasly face imprinted into his forearm. He couldn’t tell the mutant it was this face, not the beautiful albino, he had been staring at.

  “Hassan Billings,” the mutant said, offering his hand. “What’s yours, brother?”

  Hassan? Didn’t that mean handsome? Stake winced inwardly but shook hands with the man and said, “Ed. Edwin Fetch.”

  * * *

  The final preparations were near completion; the ramp had been closed, and the pod was minutes away from disembarking from Punktown’s Theta Transport Station. Stake, Billings, and the men seated beside them on their bench faced another row of prisoners shackled to a bench directly opposite. This prison transport pod was nearly identical to the military shuttles that had once conveyed troops to the extradimensional world of Sinan, where Stake—now thirty-eight—had participated in the conflict called the Blue War, which had ended fifteen years ago. The anxiety he felt now was much the same as he had experienced then, facing his deployment to Sinan…though his stint as a soldier in the Colonial Forces had been a longer sentence: four years.

  It was not into a naturally occurring other dimension that the pod would be sent, however, but into an artificially created pocket universe, which existed not so much in an alternate plane coterminous with Punktown as a kind of nowhere space between planes of existence. A hollow burrowed into nothingness, into which an entire prison had been sent, just like this pod, after its construction had been completed just two years earlier. The Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. Prisoners had nicknamed the facility, and the pocket it resided in like a model ship in a bottle, the Wormhole.

  Crime in the megalopolis of Paxton, on the Earth-colonized world of Oasis, was of legendary proportions, and this had been the Earth Colonies’ response to the dilemma of overcrowded prisons there. Paxton—universally dubbed Punktown—was so built up that it couldn’t accommodate yet another prison within its borders. The last one had been built below the city, but that project had met with much protest from the residents of the city’s Subtown sector. And thus, the opening of the pocket universe. Within that excavated bubble, its prisoners were actually no farther away from Punktown’s citizens than the man passing you in the street. And yet, at the same time, more distant than the farthest known star.

  Two young men were seated facing Stake and Billings, and when they noticed Stake appraising them, they both smiled. Stake looked away immediately. Not because he was afraid of the gangly youths, but because it was unwise for him to look too long at another person’s face…lest, against his will, he change.

  Billings leaned against Stake’s shoulder and whispered, “Those are the Tin Town Maniacs…the wicked fucks. You hear about them, Ed?”

  Stake couldn’t help but glance up at the youths again. He had in fact heard of them, and he’d had the misfortune of experiencing one of the VR vids they’d made and posted in the ultranet. The so-called Maniacs had killed a number of drug-addled homeless mutants in the Tin Town ghetto, making vids of their exploits, apparently simply for sport. Their parents were affluent, residing in the upscale neighborhood of Beaumonde Square, but their efforts to disprove their sons’ guilt had been in vain. Though the youths had refused truth scans and memory downloads, as was their legal right, both of them appeared clearly in their recordings. Watching that single vid, Stake had been filled with impotent rage as one of the young men (yes, that one, with jug ears and his blond hair cut in bangs) smashed in the face of a drunken mutant with a hammer. Until the face became no more than red pulp, it wore a look of bewildered fear and pain. Stake had been frustrated at how passive the victim was. He liked to believe that he would have been spitting his broken teeth in his killer’s eyes.

  The boy with blond hair blew a kiss at Stake and batted his eyelids. Billings gave the youth a rude gesture, and hissed in Stake’s ear, “I’d love to snuff these two rich bastards myself, but I want to keep my nose clean. I’m hoping for an appeal.” He snorted. “Yeah, I know, a mutant getting an appeal. But dreaming is free. That’s the only thing about us that’s free, from here on out, huh?”

  And then a vibration ran through the floor under their feet, the seats they sat upon, the walls against their backs. It was subtle enough but unmistakable, and the vibration carried into their very bodies. Stake felt like a humming tuning fork, and it was a nauseating sensation, though he knew the queasiness was more psychological than anything.

  Two guards, uniformed entirely in black like “forcers”—law enforcers—right down to their antlike full-head helmets, sat up front in the pod. Over his helmet mic, one of the guards remarked, “This is it, boys…we’re on our way. Kiss your reality good-bye.”

  One

  Flesh and Blood

  “You ever do time before?” Stake asked Billings as they pushed their plastic food trays along the runners in the cafeteria line. Despite Stake’s initial reluctance to make friends here, the two had remained close for moral support since their arrival and brief indoctrination, though they didn’t share a cell. Stake was in the prison’s Red Block, while Billings had been assigned the Gre
en Block and accordingly wore crayon green shirt and pants.

  “Not here,” the mutant replied, placing a carton of juice on his tray, “but yeah—three years in Paxton MSP.” That stood for Maximum Security Penitentiary. “Receiving stolen goods. You?”

  “First time anywhere.”

  “Well don’t show you’re scared. They’ll sniff that out right away. If it was me, I’d try to get in a fight right away, to let folks know you aren’t to be messed with. Not to kill anyone—we don’t want to be here forever—but you know what I mean. But you, with only six months to get through…I’d even avoid fighting. So just watch your back, is all.”

  They filled the recesses in their trays with various foodstuffs generated by the kitchen’s fabricators, most of these comestibles derived from fermented bacteria. This approach, like the prison’s recycled water and air, kept to a minimum the supply deliveries that had to be made to the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. When they reached the end of the line, the two newcomers crossed to a nearby table that offered a mix of prisoners, as opposed to those tables plainly staked out by prison gangs or nonhuman races of sentient beings. Aside from the absence of females, the prison was every bit the melting pot Punktown was.

  “Me, I can probably get close to those guys,” Billings said around a mouthful of faux mashed potatoes. He nodded subtly toward another table and Stake twisted around a little to look.

  The table Billings had indicated was completely filled by mutants. More precisely, a gang of mutants. Some bore only minor signs of affliction, while others were much more wildly deformed than Billings. Some were even nonhuman mutants. But one of their number in particular caught Stake’s attention.

  “Caro turbida,” he murmured to himself. But Billings heard him.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s a type of mutation. It means ‘confused flesh.’”

  The man Stake referred to, seated at the end of the long table, jolted with small tics and the occasional more violent spasm, but his head was constantly thrashing and shaking, so that Stake wondered how he could ever get food into his mouth. The front of his blue uniform was already stained with today’s attempts. His face was a blur, but not only because of its rapid movements. He was changing. His was not one face, but a seemingly endless succession of faces, morphing from one to the next so quickly that Stake couldn’t be sure if any of them were repeating. Or was their variety unending? Was he reproducing every face he had ever glimpsed in his life? Uncontrollably…involuntarily. For who would want to subject themselves to this state? Maybe some were the likenesses of fellow prisoners—Stake couldn’t tell—though he believed he witnessed flashes of female faces…old faces…those of various races. But like Stake with his less extreme form of Caro turbida, the mutant didn’t seem able to alter himself into the semblance of a nonhuman entity.

  “Wow,” Billings said. “I think the other muties just feel sorry for that one.” Even from here, over the loud chatter that reverberated off the cafeteria’s ceiling, they could hear the shapeshifter’s stream of incoherent babbling punctuated with barking outbursts. It was as though he were possessed by a whole legion of ghosts.

  “I don’t know what he could have done,” Stake said, “but I’ll bet he should be in a mental hospital, not a jail.”

  They had been studying the mutant so blatantly they neglected to recognize that another of the men at the table had noticed them, until he called over, “Hey—virgins! You want to fuck my friend Blur? You want him to turn into a woman for you? He can’t lock it in, you know.”

  “Sorry, friend,” Billings called back, twisting his lipless mouth into a nervous smile and lifting an open hand of peace.

  “I’m not your friend, freak,” the man snapped, though he himself was afflicted. The mutant was hairless, his skin a metallic bluish black, shiny and crinkly like crumpled foil. Tall and powerfully muscled, besides.

  Billings lowered his head and whispered, “Dung! I may need these boys…I don’t want to alienate them!”

  “Sorry,” Stake said, turning away from the mutant gang, too. “He must be the leader. Chip on his shoulder, huh?”

  “Lot of us mutants do,” Billings said.

  “Mm,” Stake grunted in agreement.

  “Is there a problem?” a flat voice asked behind them. Both men turned in their seats again to find that one of the robot guards had approached them, having witnessed the exchange. The automaton had flexible segmented lengths for its four limbs, neck and waist, while its head, torso and pelvis were of black metal. Perhaps to give the flat face a more fearsome aspect, its eyes glowed red, matching the red identifying number on its chest.

  “Everything’s okay here,” Billings told the machine.

  “Be advised not to agitate the seasoned inmates, newcomer,” the guard chastised.

  In their orientation upon arriving at Trans-Paxton Penitentiary, they had been told that half of the guards here were robots. The reasons for the balance between organic and inorganic guards were numerous. For one, fewer living guards meant fewer potential victims of violence from inmates. Robots could not be bribed, corrupted, or show favoritism. Their implacable nature was intimidating, but neither could they be sadistic. Robots didn’t require on-site housing, rest periods, off-weeks in which to go home to family. Prisoners feared their physical strength and relative invulnerability, and yet it was still useful for the inmates to fear the harsher minds of living men. Plus, robots might almost be considered innocent in a sense, whereas a crafty human (or other such sentient being) could be more difficult to fool. At the end of the day, just as in manufacturing facilities, labor laws prohibited prisons from utilizing automatonic guards exclusively, lest too many living beings find themselves without employment.

  The robot wandered away, sweeping its glowing eyes toward other tables. When it had left, another prisoner—a Choom, the native race of Oasis, remarkably human in appearance apart from their vast Jack-o’-lantern mouths—said to Stake, “Careful, boys; things have been on edge here lately, and I bet they didn’t tell you that in orientation. I’m not so sure it’s even made the news back home.”

  “What’s that?” Stake asked.

  “A few prisoners have been killed in their cells. Seems like it’s three, though some say four. Could be a gang doing it, but people are pointing fingers everywhere, not just at one group. Makes for paranoia.”

  “The victims aren’t all from one gang? Or enemies of a certain group?”

  “If there’s a pattern, I don’t know it.”

  “So how are they being killed?” Stake asked. It wasn’t hard to pique his interest. It was his nature, and his vocation.

  “Dung!” the Choom chuckled, wagging his head. “I heard the dead guys were absolutely demolished.”

  “Demolished? What do you mean, demolished?”

  “I haven’t seen the aftermath myself, but I mean like…exploded. Like there’s nothing left of them but blood. Blood everywhere.”

  Two

  Recreations

  Over the next few days, Hassan Billings had gingerly nudged closer to the mutant gang—called the Muties—until it looked like they were going to accept him into the fold, which meant that Stake now sat alone at one of the picnic-style tables scattered across the floor of the sizable recreation yard. He’d never learned to play chess, though he could have played against the computer, so instead he traced his finger across the table’s vidscreen surface playing solitaire. Technically he wasn’t alone at the table, but the man on the other bench lay on his back with his shirt off and draped across his eyes, as if to tan himself in the mock sunlight beaming down from the room’s ceiling—which was in truth one immense vidscreen displaying a crystal blue sky. Similarly, the rec yard’s vidscreen walls portrayed a high white barrier, over the top of which more blue sky showed, and against that a bristling cityscape of uncountable towers, many of which soared so high their tops were lost in blue mist. It was a vid of Punktown, taken from the recreation yard of a different p
rison: Paxton MSP. Stake figured it was meant to be a less depressing view than this prison’s own enclosed ceiling and walls, but he wondered why in that case they didn’t show a vid of a surrounding forest or sandy beach instead. He supposed they didn’t want the prisoners to forget their status.

  Atop another table not far away, a ladyboy danced. She was Asian, petite, and very convincing, having knotted up the front of her red top to bare her smooth midriff. The men who had gathered thickly around the table cheered her on in her wild gyrations. Though Stake was sure some of the prison’s transgendered inmates were at the bottom of the food chain, he’d learned that several of the prison’s gangs actually boasted leaders who were either transgendered or else mutant hermaphrodites. Being very attractive and very much in demand, they had used that to their advantage, bestowing favors until those who hungered after them went from mere protectors to full-on underlings. Stake found this interesting, and joked with himself that he should drop his current guise, morph into a beautiful female and do the same. It was the bestowing favors part that brought him back to reality.

  Slowly, and without any real anger, one of the human guards with the name HURLEY printed in white on his left breast strolled toward the table, and via his helmet mic called, “Hey, Lee, get off that table.”

  “I’m exercising, baby,” the ladyboy called back. “This is the exercise yard, right?”

  “Go lift some weights, then,” Hurley persisted. “Come on, get down…and fix your damn shirt.”

  Lee’s audience booed but parted to let her step down from the table. As she did so, she noticed Stake watching and wiggled her fingers at him. He dropped his eyes to the solitaire game. Better not to gaze at her too long, anyway, lest he start morphing into her likeness whether he wanted to or not. His grip on his gift was not always a firm one. In fact, he thought it best to roll up his sleeve, conjure the waiting image of Edwin Fetch and his girlfriend, and stare at Fetch’s face to ensure that his mask didn’t slip. Naturally, whenever he did this, he always avoided looking at Fetch’s albino girlfriend.