Free Replicant Night by K. W. Jeter Page B

was how wrapped up in craziness the two of them had gotten. Then they'd had their big falling-out, from which only one of them had survived . . . or so it'd seemed at the time ...
    Something had hooked the two of them back together, Holden and Batty, or whatever was left of him inside the briefcase. Something that probably wasn't good news.
    It was too much for Deckard to try to figure out now, at this point of his exhaustion. As long as the briefcase was quietly sulking to itself, he might as well try to find sleep.
    Deckard found himself half wondering, half dreaming, of what reception was in store for him on Mars, how Sarah would welcome him home from his long, futile venturing.

4
    A knock at the door.
    "Oh, boy!" The alarm clock danced on top of the bedside table. "Daddy's home!"
    "Christ-" Sarah laid the back of her hand across her eyes, trying to block out what was left of the day's illumination and any other sensory data coming into her nervous system. As much as she had been expecting, even-in a perverse fashion-looking forward, to this moment, it had still crept up on her without warning. Until now.
    "I bet that's him! I bet that's him, all right!"
    She wished again that she had spent the money for the third bullet. "Just shut the hell up." Her brain felt both sandfilled and fuzzy from the cumulative toxins of troubled sleep. Sarah pulled herself into a sitting position on the edge of the grey mattress, then watched as the apparent separate entity of her hand fumbled inside the table's single drawer.
    "Mrs. Niemand ... excuse me." From the opposite wall of the bedroom, the calendar had caught sight of the bright metal cylinders tumbling in Sarah's palm. "But what exactly are you doing?"
    Brass glinted at her fingertips, though the bullets' tapered points were dull leaden in color. "None of your business." She slipped the bullets into the gun from the table, then closed up the chamber. "Don't worry about it."
    "Humanity is my business, Mrs. Niemand. Though that was said in other contexts, it applies in this situation as well."
    "I don't need the literary allusions." Sarah shifted the gun to her left hand and used her right to smooth her dark, disordered hair back from her brow. Some previous tenants of the hovel, who had either killed themselves or managed to get shipped off the planet while the starbound emigration vessels were still running, had shelled out for the appliances to be hooked up to the library trunk feed. The penurious Niemands had canceled the service, but the calendar had the rudiments of a university education soaked up in its off-line banks. And didn't mind showing it off, all of which had added to the general hell of Sarah's existence. Maybe four , she thought. I should've bought four bullets .
    The knock at the door sounded again, blows hard enough to shake the hovel's thin plastic walls. A rain of soft, sneeze-provoking dust drifted down upon the bed.
    "Come on!" The alarm clock shrilled even more excitedly. "Let's go see!"
    Sarah placed the muzzle of the gun against the clock's face, at the exact center from which the two black hands radiated. "Let's be real quiet." She pushed the clock back across the table. "So Daddy and Mommy can have a little quality time together. All right?"
    "Okay," squeaked the clock. It cowered back against the wall.
    "Mrs. Niemand!" The calendar fluttered its pages at her as she walked past. "I implore you-don't do anything you'll regret later."
    "There's not going to be a later." The gun's weight dangled at the end of her arm. "So regret's not a problem."
    "Sarah!" Using her real name, the calendar cried after her. "Please ... don't ..."
    In the front part of the hovel, a space barely wider than what her outstretched arms could have reached across, the percussion on the door was even louder. Enough to start peeling some of the web of silvery duct tape and glue-tacky patches away from the torn seams and other leak points. The hovel shivered and hissed as though