It was a clean sweep for October—the fourth Friday in a row that Angelica Lorenzo y Lopez wanted to tell her boss to grease his head and go pearl diving for hemorrhoids. Her shift was a half hour into nirvana and they could have flushed the whole place for all she would care. Ralph’s Diner was dead in the water. Half an hour waiting for Judy to show up to relieve her, and Angel hadn’t waited on one effing table.
Her greaseball boss, Sanchez, was sitting in his little yellowing manager’s office, peering through his little one-way mirror at his nickel-and-dime empire as if he was too lordly to cover for Judy. Angel thought of giving the finger to the mirror. She admired her self-control for not giving in to the temptation.
Judy was late every effing Friday and Sanchez gave no never mind every time Angel complained. Angel had decided that it must be one of two things—either Judy was going for joyrides in Santa’s lap back in the manager’s office, or it was because Angel was the only nonhuman who worked in the place.
Probably both.
A restaurant in the Mission District, of all places, and Angel was the only moreau serving tables. And Sanchez wondered why business sucked.
And boy, did business suck.
There were a total of three, count them, three whole people in the place. One was a regular, one of the street people who came in for coffee every afternoon. He was an old graying rodent with thinning fur and naked spotted-pink hands that shook as he drank his one, count it, one cup of coffee. In the back sat a small black-and-gray striped feline who was slowly shredding a bacon cheeseburger—a pink’s food, but the cat didn’t seem to mind. The cat’s ribs showed under his fur, and Angel tagged him as a recent immigrant who’d probably never seen real human food.
Those two, and her. A rat, a cat, and a rabbit. For once, at a hundred and twenty centimeters—not counting ears—Angel was the biggest one in the room. Ralph’s was so empty you could land a ballistic shuttle down the checkerboard linoleum aisle.
From the looks of things she didn’t even have a reasonable expectation of getting a tip.
During Angel’s third glance at the clock, Judy finally showed.
“About time, pinky,” Angel said as Judy ran through the front door, out of the fog.
“Don’t harass me today. I’ve had enough sh—”
Angel hopped down off the stool she’d been sitting on. She could hear Judy trying to quiet her labored breathing, and Angel’s nose told her that the moisture on Judy’s face was more sweat than condensing fog. Judy had rushed to get here more than forty-five minutes late.
Angel’s heart bled. “I might miss the whole first quarter—”
“I’m sorry about your football game.”
“Yeah, right.” Angel stretched to remove her denim jacket from the coatrack.
“You’d want me to risk my life on those roads—” Judy started.
“Don’t do me no favors, pinky.” Angel stormed out the door without bothering to clock out.
Angel had little sympathy. The pink wench had a car, while the poor ol’ morey rabbit had been doing without wheels since she’d sold her ancient prewar Toyota to cinch the money to move to this burg. Somehow, this poor old lepus pedestrian was always on time—
Except, of course, when some human woman goes and makes her late. Angel sighed as she pushed through the thickening fog on Howard Street. All those moreaus who weren’t eating at Ralph’s were probably at the game or at some bar that had a holo feed from the action. She, unfortunately, was due for the latter. Tickets for Earthquakes games were at a premium that she just couldn’t afford.
Her destination was a little bar nestled in the newest part of the coast south of Market Street, The Rabbit Hole. Unfortunately, Ralph’s wasn’t on the coast. Angel had thought she’d have the time for a nice leisurely walk—she should have assumed that Judy would be late again and scouted a game cast that was closer by.
It was a rare bar that didn’t charge a cover that rivaled the ticket prices. The NFL would have had a monopolistic conniption, but the Non-Human League didn’t have much legal clout, and was probably grateful for the exposure.
She didn’t have much of a choice if she was going to be in time for the game. She took a deep breath, soggy with fog, and started running.
Small Angel was, but she was a genetically engineered rabbit whose great-grandparents had been designed for combat as part of the Peruvian infantry. The musculature on her thighs was half again as broad as her hips, and her feet were as long and as broad as her forearms. A few humans thought lepine moreaus were funny-looking or cute—but with rare exceptions, they were the fastest infantry ever to come out of the gene-labs.
She bolted down Howard at full speed, with barely three meters of visibility, telling herself that it wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
Even as she thought it, a band of ratboys emerged in front of her. The fog sucked up sound and smell as well as light, so she had no time to stop when she realized they were there. She was leaping over their heads before they had time to realize she was bearing down on them. She retreated down a steep section of hillside, letting the fog soak up their curses.
She tried to pace herself so she hit the cross streets with the lights. She only had one close call with a remote driven van that freaked when she appeared in front of it. She left the Aeroline van with its horn blaring, hazards going, and its collision avoidance program absolutely convinced it had hit something.
She made the trip in less than ten minutes. It was five to six when Angel got to The Rabbit Hole, to find it almost as empty as Ralph’s. One table of moreaus, two feline, two canine, and a fox. That was it.
“Wha?”
The answer was on the holo behind the bar. Angel walked up, mesmerized. On the holo was the president of the United States. He was in the process of blaming the latest run of interspecies rioting on aliens from Alpha Centauri.
“Shit.”
Angel climbed on to a seat in front of the bar and watched President Merideth do his shtick. It was a lost cause.
“Shit.”
She’d been looking forward to the game all week. Frisco vs. Cleveland, and she wasn’t even going to see so much as one down. She twitched her nose and said, “Ain’t fair. Bet he’d wait till the end of the game if it was the N-effing-L.”
She waved the bartender over. He was a moreau rabbit, but his fur was white as opposed to her spotted tan. She ordered a Corona and lime and closed her eyes. Yeah, she’d just missed a crowd of moreys. The scents of a dozen species still hung in the bar’s air along with the perfume of a like number of beers that had christened the bar in the past hour. A rich, empty smell.
Angel chugged the Corona and ordered another.
Another boring weekend loomed on the horizon. Home with Lei, or more likely, alone. Lei always seemed to find things to do with her free time. Things that generally blew more capital than Angel could afford. Sure, Lei was willing to pay Angel’s tab for an evening out—
But Angel was never comfortable with that. She’d stay home and probably vegetate in front of the comm watching the latest news reports of the fighting in New York and LA.
Around the fourth Corona the bartender’s whiskers sat at a slightly condescending angle. “What can I do for you, Miss?”
“Refill me.”
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” It irritated Angel to notice that the bartender’s voice held no trace of the slight lisp normal for a lepus. Almost sounded human.
“Ain’t driving, and the game got zeroed.” She pushed her glass at him. “Nothing better to do.”
The bartender shrugged and bent over behind the bar.
Angel stepped up on the seat so she could lean over the bar and add, “Find a lime that doesn’t taste like a used rubber.”
The bartender shoved another Corona at her while, on the holo, Merideth began to invoke the names of the Joint Chiefs and several leading scientists.
Angel snorted and sipped her drink.
Preempted by aliens. Great. Angel was effing sick of aliens. She had hoped the media would have gotten over its alienitis over the course of the summer. Hell, everyone and their brother had been milking the story since January.
Still no end in sight.
So the CIA or the FBI or someone finds a bunch of white blubbery things nesting under the Nyogi tower in Manhattan. Even if the MannSatt news service had done a God-help-us live broadcast from an alien “lair” under the Nyogi tower two months before Bronx artillery zeroed the building. So what? Even if they come from another planet, it’s better than letting the Japs run things, right? Look what happened to them.
But it kept coming, aliens, aliens, aliens. It couldn’t be escaped even if you killed the comm, because that effing huge white-dome alien habitat they built over the ruins of Alcatraz was the most prominent thing on the Frisco skyline.
So what are we going to do? Go to war with a planet a few light-years away?
Talk about unreal.
Tabloid stuff, but it was tabloid stuff that was getting hard news coverage. After a half century of isolationism, it seemed that the U.S. had found a new evil empire. Leaks from the blessed U.S. government made the aliens look like some sort of interstellar covert action experts that were doing the kind of political destabilization games that the CIA used to excel at—or said it excelled at, anyway.
All supposed to keep anyone from getting off this rock.
“But why,” she mumbled. “It’s such a lovely planet.”
Personally, Angel thought Merideth was just grabbing at anything that gave him even a remote hope of reelection. Or, failing that, of leaving office without becoming the most despised president since H. Ros—
Angel felt the hackles rise on the back of her neck, under the collar of her denim jacket. She looked up the bar and saw that the bartender was gone.
She smelled a pink smell.
“One furball left. Seems upset about something . . .” A human voice, behind her.
No, Angel thought to herself, don’t turn around. The bartender was right, you’ve had too much to drink.
Did everyone else just up and leave?
“Wassa matter, something wrong with our President?” Another human spoke.
The Rabbit Hole was a morey hangout. Why’d pinks have to walk in and fuck with her? They didn’t hassle the other moreys. She would’ve heard that.
She tried to ignore them. Perhaps they’d leave.
“Think he’s bein’ disrespectful.” The first voice. How many were there? Angel should have been able to gain a rough estimate from their smell, but stale lime was flavoring everything.
And, damn it, they couldn’t even get her gender right. Just because she didn’t have globs of fat on her chest like a human woma—
“Talking to you!” said a third pink with the ugliest bass rumble excuse for a voice that Angel had ever heard. A hand grabbed her shoulder and spun her around on the bar stool. Her drink flew out of her hand, splashing on the legs of the nearest human.
Three young human males. Hispanic, black, and anglo. She was the only morey left in the bar.
The three closed in around her, a wall of jeans, leather, and hairless flesh. Even the heads. They were all shaved totally bald, down to the eyebrows.
The baldness meant one of two things. Either they were some rabid prohumanists who’d taken the morey slang term pink—meaning hairlessness—to heart and depilatoried their whole bodies. Or they were Hare Krishnas.
They weren’t chanting.
The anglo pink had his hand on her shoulder. He’d been the one she’d doused with Corona. The sleeves of his jacket were torn off, revealing one bicep tattooed with a flaming sword. The glass she’d been drinking from rested by one of his boots. He raised his foot and placed it on top of the glass. A second later there was the gunshot sound of the glass giving way.
He ground the pieces under his boot, smiled, and looked like he was about to enjoy a nice game of trash the rabbit. The black was shaking his shoulder. “Chuck the bunny, Earl. That’s not what we’re here—”
She told herself that these guys weren’t a hard-core gang, or they’d have trashed the bar by now. The adrenaline was pumping, and she could feel the edge on her nerves driving her to do something. She held herself back, but her muscles were vibrating with the effort. She couldn’t explode, not when she was drunk, and if she went along, she might get out of this with her hide intact.
Earl wasn’t listening to his friend. “Look’t he did to my jeans—”
The pronoun did it. “I’m a girl, you shitheads!”
Angel grabbed the seat of the bar stool, spun around, and planted a back-kick directly between Earl’s legs.
That ugly bass voice gasped and was choked off with a breathless squeak. He lost his grip on her shoulder and fell to the ground, clutching his groin. Angel’s kick was something of consequence.
Especially when she meant it.
The bar stool was still spinning, and time rubberbanded, slowing as it stretched.
“Earl, you fuckhead—” Angel heard the black say to the lump on the ground. She was slipping off the stool, into the gap she had made in the wall of humans, even as she heard the whistle of air toward her.
She ducked, but not in time, as something very hard slammed into the right side of her head.
She stumbled away from the bar stool, head thrumming, vision blurred. The fur on that side of her face was suddenly warm and tacky. She backpedaled, paralleling the bar, retreating toward the bathrooms.
The Hispanic was twirling a chain in his right hand.
To hell with the nonhuman gun control laws. She was going to dig her automatic out of the underwear drawer and start carrying it again.
The Hispanic swung the chain, but she managed to dodge it.
As she dove, blood got into her eye. Blinded, she ran—and slammed into a wall. The entire right side of her body went numb with the shock of the impact. She didn’t start aching until she was assdown on the floor.
The Hispanic laughed. Angel didn’t feel fear or pain, just a stomach-churning embarrassment. Even after five Coronas she should be able to handle herself better.
The Hispanic’s laughter stopped so abruptly that she forced her eyes open, despite the blood gumming them shut.
She was on the floor next to the “men’s” room. It gave her an oblique view of a black-furred arm sticking out the door. In the hand was an equally black Heckler and Koch 10-millimeter Valkyrie automatic.
Her gaze shifted to the three punks. Earl, the fuckhead anglo, was on the ground in a fetal position. The black was bent over him. The one with the chain was halfway to the door to the bathroom.
A calm voice with an almost liquid Brit accent echoed out of the bathroom. “Please drop the chain.”
“We know you. Fucking hairball don’t . . .”
“Scare you?” The owner of the arm stepped out of the bathroom. He had to be the handsomest vulpine Angel had ever seen.
“Chico,” said the black, “I think Earl’s dyin’.”
“Shut up with the names, man.” Chico, the one with the chain, was losing his bravado. He tried to face down the vulpine. “If cops catch you—”
The fox laughed. A soft sound, but deep. “They’d approve of you? Please, drop the chain and leave.”
“Damn it, Chico, I’m calling an ambulance.” The black ran out of the bar. In search of a public comm, Angel thought.
She looked at Earl.
Earl wasn’t moving.
She looked at Chico.
“You can’t fuck with this—” Chico wasn’t moving either.
The fox cocked the automatic. “Please.”
The sound of the gunshot was deafening. It was still echoing in Angel’s sensitive ears when she heard the sound of metal hitting the ground.
The truncated section of Chico’s chain was swinging about three centimeters short of his right hand. The rest of the chain lay on the floor.
“Fine, keep the chain,” said the fox. “Just leave.”
Chico bolted, nearly tripping over Earl. The fox kept his gun aimed at the doorway for a few seconds before he holstered it.
He wore a green suit that looked good on him—unlike most every other sort of pink-type clothing you could drape on a morey. The green brought out the luster of the red fur on his face and tail. She barely noticed that it was tailored to conceal a shoulder holster.
He held out a black-furred hand to Angel. She realized that she’d been on her ass all along. She grabbed his hand and frantically pulled herself to her feet.
“Please,” he objected. “Be careful. Head wounds—”
“Bleed a hell of a lot,” Angel snapped. She shook her head. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be short with you.”
“You can’t help the way you were designed.” His engineered vulpine mouth managed to form a rather nice smile. And Angel realized that her savior had just taken a cut back at her.
She rolled her eyes and walked over to Earl. The world was looking a lot less shaky. A combination of adrenaline and an engineered metabolism seemed to have cooked off most of the alcohol. She was somewhere between the tag end of a buzz and the start of a splitting migraine.
Earl was curled into a ball. It looked like she had not only done a number on his balls, but had had a pretty bad influence on his pelvis and a few ribs as well. Earl’d coughed up his share of blood. Fortunately, Angel could still hear him breathing. She shook her head. “I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”
Yeah, but look at him now—sailed two meters before he landed.
She felt the fox’s hand on her shoulder. “Are you going to wait for the ambulance to show up?”
From the way he said it, she knew he didn’t intend to stick around. She didn’t blame him. It was illegal for a morey to own a firearm, and considering what was happening in the rest of the country, it wouldn’t be pleasant to have the cops catch you with one.
“Think his friends really called an ambulance?” she asked.
He shrugged. “There’s a comm up on the corner. We can call one from there.”
Angel nodded.
Behind them, on the bar’s holo, President Merideth finished speaking with a plea to end interspecies violence. The broadcast rejoined the morey football game. Frisco—Cleveland, scoreless in the third quarter.
Angel ignored it.
• • •
They saw the ambulance land from across Mission Street. Its lights were barely visible descending through the fog—rotating flashers cutting slices out of the night air. For a few seconds, sirens and the foghorns off the bay fought a muffled battle for attention.
The ambulance led the cops by about twenty seconds. A crowd had gathered out in the front of The Rabbit Hole, and Angel and her companion were half a block up the street. The cops didn’t pay any mind to them or to any of the two or three dozen moreaus up and down Mission.
The two of them stood in the doorway of an old earthquake-relief building, a whitewashed cinderblock cube that was wrapped in a cloak of graffiti, across the street from another relic of the ’34 quake, an on-ramp for the old Embarcadero Freeway. The on-ramp rose into the fog, so the abrupt stop it made in midair wasn’t visible. The end hung somewhere over Howard Street and anyone who drove on it now would eventually crash into the luxury condos that held sway on the new coast south of Market.
The ambulance took off, sirens blaring. Angel shook her head and winced when she started feeling the cut on her cheek again. She’d managed to wipe most of the blood off with a towel she stole from the bar, but she needed to get home and clean up.
The fox noticed her distress, and he handed her a handkerchief.
She pressed it against the side of her face. “Shit like this ain’t supposed to go down here.”
“It happens everywhere.”
“This is San Francisco. We’re supposed to dance hand in hand over golden hills with flowers behind our ears.”
A soft laugh came from the fox. “Would you prefer LA? An incident like this down there and police would start a house-to-house—”
“And in New York the National Guard would call in an air strike. I’m still disappointed. I moved here to avoid this shit.”
“Where’s you come from?”
“Cleveland.”
“I’m sorry.”
They stood there in silence for a few minutes, watching the phoenix-emblazoned cop cars disappear into the mist, one by one.
“Damn,” Angel said. “I don’t even know your name.”
The fox turned his head toward her and smiled. “We’ve missed the formal introduction, haven’t we? My name’s Byron.”
Byron held out his hand, still smiling. Most moreaus Angel knew of didn’t have much of a repertoire as far as facial expressions went. Angel’s own smile amounted to a slight turning at the corners of the mouth, but Byron’s muzzle crinkled, his eyes tilted, his cheeks pulled up and his ears turned outward slightly. He smiled with his entire face, and somehow it looked natural, not like a fox aping a human.
Somewhere there was a British gene-tech who was very proud of himself.
The smile was infectious and Angel mirrored it, even though it hurt her cheek. She took his hand. “Angel.”
“Angel.” He said it slowly, his voice lending her name an exotic tone. The smile grew a touch wider, as if she’d just provided him with the answer to a complicated problem as opposed to just her name.
“Lovely name,” he said and Angel thought to herself that an English accent seemed to fit perfectly in a vulpine mouth.
And she’d always thought of her name as casting against type. “Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”
“Section 5, Ulster antiterrorist brigade. God save whatever’s left of the monarchy.” Byron shrugged. “U.S. citizen for fifteen years, but I can’t shake the accent.”
“What’s wrong with your accent?”
“A vulpine accent is a few steps below Cockney. I’d lose it in a minute if I could.”
Angel thought of the bartender who tried so hard to sound human. “Don’t. I like it.”
Byron shook his head.
“Trust these ears. You have a very sexy voice.”
Byron smiled again. They were still holding hands and he brought his other hand up to trace the undamaged side of her face. “I would never argue with an angel.”
He lowered his hand and looked down Mission. The cops had all left, and the sky was dark beyond the fuzzy light of the streetlamps. A late October chill rolled off of the water. Angel shivered slightly.
“Apparently,” Byron said, “the crisis is over.”
Angel nodded and let go of his hand.
“We really should do something about your face—”
“Fine, really.”
“I have a first aid kit in my car.”
Angel looked up at Byron’s face and the look in his eyes made her wonder exactly what he was thinking, and if it was anything close to what she was thinking.