Free Bloodline by F. Paul Wilson Page B

me glad I rent, Abe. Go back to that Creighton Institute. What else can we find out about it?"
    "Let's see." After a few more clicks Abe leaned back and looked at him. "Oy. The full name is the Creighton Institute for the Criminally Insane."
    Jack shook his head. "Swell."

2

    Broadway seemed like a good place to find a map, so Jack ambled west.
    Broadway ran north-south up here. A few blocks downtown, at 79th Street, it broke from the grid and started angling east, crossing the city on a diagonal all the way down to the East Village where it headed due south again.
    He spotted a Barnes & Noble and saw a display of Kick in its front window. The cover was hard to miss with its bold black type and stick-figure drawing against a neon-yellow background.
    He stared at the Kicker Man, feeling that same odd sensation.
    Enough of this wondering. He needed to find out why that figure looked so… what? Familiar?
    A placard with a similar color scheme posted behind the display read:
    Join the kicker evolution!
    Evolution?
    He went inside, picked up a trade paperback, and flipped through it. Large type and a little Kicker Man in each of the breaks.
    "Save your money, man."
    Jack looked up and saw a long-haired guy in jeans and a tie-dyed shirt giving him a sidelong look.
    "Say what?"
    "That book." He spoke in a conspiratorial whisper from the corner of his mouth. "It's a load of crap, man."
    Nodding knowingly, he moved off.
    Well, well. A reader review. But not a helpful one. Jack expected a load of crap. He simply wanted to know how Hank Thompson had come up with that four-armed man.
    He found a New York State map and headed for the checkout counter. On the way he passed a "New Paperback Fiction" rack where a cover caught his eye: cobalt blue with a pair of glowing yellow eyes—definitely not human—staring out above a pile of pills. He stopped when saw the title: Berzerk !
    Those eyes were startlingly close to a rakosh's. And the pills… last spring he'd run up against a drug with a lot of street names, one of which was Berzerk—misspelled just as it was on the cover.
    And then his heart stuttered a beat when he read that it was "a Jake Fixx novel" and "sequel to Rakshasa! by P. Frank Winslow.
    He snatched it from its rack and grabbed a passing employee—a twenty-something guy with thin hair and thick sideburns.
    "What is this?"
    The guy looked at Jack, then the novel, then Jack. "We call that a book."
    A comedian. Yay.
    "I know that. But who's this guy Winslow? How many of these has he written?"
    The guy shrugged. "I dunno. You'll have to check with Information."
    "But you work here."
    "Yeah, but I just put them on the shelves. I don't read them. Sorry. Check with Information."
    Jack did, but the kiosk was empty. He found the fiction section and searched through the W authors where he found one copy of Rakshasa . He checked out the cover and found the same cobalt blue, same glowing eyes, but instead of pills, a freighter floated in the foreground.
    "Christ!"
    He didn't know what was inside, but from the look of the covers it seemed like someone was peeking into his life.
    The information kiosk was still empty so he headed for the checkout area. With no line he walked up to the only cashier, a guy with a shaved head and a black soul patch.
    Jack slapped the novels on the counter and pushed them forward.
    "What do you know about these?"
    He shook his head. "Nothing." He pointed to the copy of Kick . "But I know a lot about that."
    Jack noticed a tiny Kicker Man tattoo in the web between his thumb and forefinger.
    "Fine, but—"
    "You'll love it, I can tell. It'll be like a wire into your brain. I've read my copy so many times it's damn near worn out."
    Jack pointed to the tattoo. "Who'da thunk."
    The guy held up his hand. "That lets the world know I've dissimilated and evolved. I'm a Kicker and proud of it."
    He scanned and bagged, then said, "That comes to twenty-four-seventy-one."
    Jack reached for his wallet. "Comes to more than