DEADSTOCK

All Javier knew was that he had to come here tonight… tonight. Oh, he had pla

In the dream, he had been walking through the streets of a city. But the city could not be Punktown. Couldn t be. Because a city with the feral spirit of Punktown, the pulsing life, the humming vitality- however polluted and diseased-surely could not be reduced to this carbonized ruin. This snuffed-out, three-dimensional shadow.

What buildings remained standing to either side of him (the rest crumpled to mountains of twisted rubble) were mere skeletons of girders. Hollow shells. Blackened husks. Vehicles still clotted the streets, but depending on their material were fused together or melted into barely recognizable shapes like puddles of candle wax. The sky was black with clouds of soot, and scattered fires still burned across the city s jagged horizon, making the bellies of the clouds glow red.

If this was, in fact, Punktown, where were its people? The millions upon millions of Earth colonists, most of them by now having been born here, and where were the native Chooms? And the many other races that had settled here, in lesser numbers? The gray-ski

Gusts of wind swept the dust up into his face occasionally, but he wore protective goggles over his eyes. Patryk s, maybe. But it wasn t the dust that caused him to wear them. It was something else. Something he was afraid to look upon with his naked eyes. As much as he dreaded this something, however, it was what he had come here to find.

Finally, signs of life. Voices carrying on the wind, like the ash. Muted, at first, muffled. But as he got closer and closer, they didn t really become that much clearer, only louder. He could not make out what the owners of those many garbled voices were saying. Whatever it was, they were saying it all at once, their droning voices lifted in a monotonous chant.

Javier turned the corner of a street, and found himself looking down a particularly wide boulevard. It was filled with people from one charred shore to the other, thousands of people perhaps, yet all of them had their backs to him. It was just as well. From the looks of their ragged clothing and their burnt scalps, it was better that he could not see their faces. They looked like an army of the dead. Not only were their voices raised to the sky, but their arms as well. They seemed to have invited this a

He didn t study them too long, however. He merely noted them peripherally, because there was something else that commanded his attention, froze him in his tracks as if he had been turned to stone by the sight of it. It was the something he had come here to find.

It loomed at the far end of the street, filling the end of it and then some. It was as tall as some of the intact buildings that flanked the broad avenue. Impossibly vast, impossibly alive.

This creature, this entity, would have soared even taller had it not been crouched on its hind legs, its arms resting on its knees as if it sat upon a throne. Its color was primarily gray, though its swollen belly lightened to a translucent milky white. Its hands and feet looked like the fleshless digits of a skeleton, but were webbed as if it might be an aquatic being, and this impression was furthered by its two great wings, which-large as they were-could not possibly support its bulk in flight. These appendages were tightly ribbed, resembling the dorsal fin of a sailfish, and thus might have been more fin than wing. In addition, the thing s head evoked incalculable ocean depths, devoid of all light. Without eyes, without ears or any other features except a cluster of squirming tentacles where a face should have been, each tentacle ringed with silver and black stripes, each tentacle thick as a tree trunk. The "ocean" this creature was meant for, however, might have been the ether of another dimension. Or a black gulf that yawned between dimensions.

There was also something about the entity that suggested the mechanical, blended with the organic. Portions of the thing s skeleton seemed to be external, like the cage of ribs above the swell of its belly, and the complex bones of its limbs, but these structures appeared machined rather than grown.

There was a network of pipes snaking between the bones, wires like veins ru

Was this the entity's intended form? Its true appearance? For some reason, rather, it bespoke to Javier a kind of confusion of the flesh. A barely checked chaos. As though, in laboring to achieve its ultimate manifestation, the creature had consciously or unconsciously emulated features of its environment. The building it had gestated inside. And the city that surrounded that building.

Too mesmerized to feel terror or anything much but awe, Javier watched as several smaller forms came scuttling out of vents or gaps in the titan s body, scurried across its surface, then burrowed back inside. From this distance he couldn t tell if they were gray, human-like figures crawling on all fours, or huge insects like microscopic nanomites mutated into a much larger state. Or some combination of both.

Yet now his attention was diverted from the creature, back to the crowd of chanters gathered to pay it homage. He realized they had lowered their arms, and that they had all begun to turn in unison. Every one of them, turning to face him.

They had no eyes; those had been fused shut. But they gri

"Kill me," they all said at once. "Kill me." Each time, louder. "KILL ME." Until the sound became so thunderous, it didn t seem to come from their mouths anymore. It seemed like a booming thought transmitted from the very brain of the colossus, instead.

"Javier? Hey."

With a supreme effort, he tore his eyes away from the creature, turned his head to see Patryk standing there-no, sitting there-beside him. Sitting beside him in the front seat of the lime-green hovercar. Javier didn t even remember bringing it to a stop in the parking lot, and lowering it to the pavement. The rain flowed down the windshield in sheets. Because it was dark, Patryk could bear to go without his shades, and his eyes peered at Javier with concern.

"Are you okay?"

Javier nodded slowly. After a few moments in which to calm the racing of his heart, he grunted, "Let's go."

The two of them, with Theo also lending a hand, unloaded Satin s mechanical pony. Once on the ground, Satin was able to unfold its limbs and raise himself to a walking position. The pony s yellow paint shone dully in the murk, but the other four had dressed entirely in black, Javier and Patryk even wearing black ski hats pulled down to their eyebrows.