The Killing Game Read Online Free PDF

and item of furniture.
    Ema clapped her hands. “You hired a decorator!”
    “He’s coming this week,” Gregory said. “I can’t wait to get started.”
    Cursing his fate, he contacted a decorator minutes after Ema padded away. The man arrived the next day, a leather-trousered robot that walked as if it were dancing. Gregory’s instructions had been simple: “Make it look like someone lives here.”
    “Don’t
you
live here?” the decorator replied, puzzled.
    Gregory felt his intestines begin to constrict as his mind raced to find the solution. Then the deco-robot clapped its hands and laughed as if in appreciation of a joke. “Oh, wait … I get it. You want a lived-in quality. Something comfy. No problem. I just need your preferences in style, colors…”
    Gregory retreated to his Faces room, digging through magazines and expelling gases from his painful tubes. Five minutes later he handed the man a page from a magazine. “This is it.”
    The deco-robot studied the page, puzzled again. “Danish
ultra-
Modern. Not what I picture as old-shoe comfy.”
    “That’s what I want,” Gregory said, tapping the photo. “It looks easy to care for.”
    “I’ll contact sources, show you photos. I’ll call soon with choices in—”
    “No,” Gregory said. “You do it. Colors, furniture. Everything.”
    The man showed confusion again, but Gregory spoke four words he’d found helpful in dealing with the robots.
    He said, “Price is no object.”
    The decorator said, “Whatever you want, sir.”
    The empty spaces had been filled with couches, chairs, sleek floor lamps, accessories such as the red glass vase on the mantel. Above the mantel hung a huge, multicolored mish-mash the decorator had called “an abstraction redolent of Kandinsky”.
    Interested in the odd phenomenon of hanging someone else’s scribbling on one’s walls, Gregory had borrowed books on modern art from the library. He now knew what Kandinskys were, but couldn’t understand why. The only works he understood were by Andy Warhol. Products, packages, people, faces, all reduced to flat simplicity and repeated endlessly in different shades…
    Warhol knew.
    Gregory continued to his kitchen and blended organic power bars with almond milk, honey, protein powders and vitamins, drinking the foaming concoction. He felt a rumble in his bowels as the food filled his stomach, a sharp pain in his tubes, the new food pressing vapors from his body. His knees loosened and his face went slack. His hands began to shake and long-gone voices filled his mind.
    “
You have splendid vodka tonight. And such food!
”
    “
Carnati, piftie, mamaliga. Tuica made from plums as sweet as your mouth. Call Petrov and Cojocaru. And, of course, sweet Dragna. Tell them time grows short and we must enjoy our remaining nights to the fullest. Hurry, then we’ll go select tonight’s robots.
”
    Gregory leaned against the counter and caught his breath.
    What happened?
    It was the remnant of a dream, he knew. He had built a wall between him and his dreams, but on rare occasions images pushed through. He must have dreamt last night, a piece of dream finding a crack in the wall. He looked around the room, needing to focus on something beyond unbidden voices and pictures.
    Bong bong bong
…
    Gregory heard the alarm ring on his computer upstairs: time to go out and check his trap. The dream disappeared within a quickening pulse and he swiftly changed into outside clothes. He had another cat, skinny and white with brown spots. It mewed plaintively and pressed against the furthest corner of the wire mesh, shaking with terror.
    “Don’t worry,” Gregory grinned, the bad dream eclipsed by his new acquisition. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

7
    “What was that, Detective Ryder … did you say lack of effect? What kind of effect?”
    I was starting to think Wilbert Pendel would never graduate from the academy. The kid wasn’t stupid, he just seemed unable to listen or