Death Got No Mercy

by Al Ewing

  Should've taken a day off, dog. Got a couple nights sleep and shit. I know you hated that motherfucker but that didn't mean you couldn't eat his food and sleep on his fuckin' piss-stained mattresses until you got your strength back. Shit, you didn't even change that fuckin' shirt.

  Cade spat. Goddamn Fuel-Air.

  Fuck you too, bitch.

  Cade was gaining slowly, but the boy didn't seem to tire. At this point Cade was wishing he had the truck - remembering how he'd dealt with the last crazy kid he'd found.

  Youth of today, man. What the fuck you gonna do, dog? Kill 'em? Oh yeah, that's you all over. Fuckin' baby killer. Come on, catch that motherfucker, bitch.

  Cade cursed under his breath. It was hard enough keeping up without Fuel-Air criticising his damned moral choices.

  Shit, fuck you then, baby killer...

  The boy gained another couple of feet on him. By now they were heading past Larkin Street, and Cade could see Market Street coming up. The boy was angling to the left. Where the hell was he running to...

  Cade cursed again, and spat. He wasn't a film going man, but he'd seen enough of them in his time to know a cliché when he saw it. The little bastard was heading up Market Street, towards the Civic Centre. Towards the BART.

  Cade put on a spurt as they rounded the corner, trying to catch him, but it was like trying to catch the hare at a greyhound race. He was in shape, but he wasn't a runner, and this kid obviously did a lot of running.

  The hare at a greyhound race. Something about that made Cade uneasy. He slowed as the boy darted around the building, letting the dirt-coated kid get some distance and skitter down the steps into the darkness of the BART station. Cade slowed to a walk, catching his breath, walking carefully forward...

  The hare at a greyhound race. That was a hell of a comparison. Because this kid did a lot of running. Like that was his job.

  Cade could hear Fuel-Air laughing at him.

  Because... the job of a mechanical hare at a greyhound race wasn't just to move fast.

  It was to get the dogs running after it.

  It was bait.

  The air filled with screaming.

  "Hell." said Cade. There wasn't time to say much of anything else.

  Out of the mouth of the Civic Centre BART Station came about two dozen men and women, all screaming their lungs out, covered in dirt and filth, teeth rotting, naked but for ragged jeans and cutoffs or torn business suit trousers and skirts, a couple of them not even having that. They had madness in their eyes, and they were fast as the boy - hell, they were faster.

  And they were headed right for him.

  Cade cursed out loud this time. Then he drew his knife out of his belt and swept it around in a wide arc, cutting into the first wave as they came for him. The lucky ones got their arms up in time, coming away with defence wounds as the blade glanced off the bones in their forearms. The unlucky ones reached up too late, grabbing hold of throats that were flapping open and gushing blood.

  Cade only had time for the one swing before they were on him. These people made the Pastor's mob seem gentle - they slammed forward, not seeming to give a damn if they trampled over their own, pushing their dead to one side, a couple of the pack splitting off to drag the convulsing bodies away and tear into them with their rotten teeth. The mass of bodies hit Cade, one of them impaling themselves belly-first on his knife as their rotten breath washed over him. Cade couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman.

  Their broken fingernails clawed at him, tearing at his ruined top and the wounds on his chest, the stench of their bodies hitting his nostrils hard enough to make the bile rise in the back of his throat. He flashed back to the corpses nailed to the crosses on the basketball court. It was like they'd come to life now, rotting flesh and all, to swarm over him and drag him down into the dark.

  He hit out at best he could, feeling his fists slamming into jaws, breaking bones, sending rotting teeth tumbling onto the precinct as they fell from suppurating gums, feeling ribs snap and legs break, and none of it doing a damn bit of good. He could beat on them until sundown and they'd still keep coming. It was in their eyes - crazed, rolling orbs, swinging about in their sockets. It was in the sounds they made, not quite human any longer.

  He could still beat them. If he could get free of the crowd, he could make a run for it, maybe get into one of the buildings -

  Something slammed into the back of his head, blurring his vision and making him see stars. He hit out with an elbow, smashing in someone's nose, then turned his head, trying to see what'd hit him. He caught a glimpse of someone holding a human thighbone.

  It had teeth marks on it.

  Another bone slammed into his ribs. They were armed. Cade tried to fight his way free, swinging his fists and snarling like an animal whenever they made contact and he felt the pain slam up his arms, but the best he could do was block the bone clubs as they swung at him. He wasn't going to be able to break free of them. The knife was out of his reach - they were already eating the one who had the blade in his belly. Cade didn't rightly know why they weren't eating him.

  But he knew they would soon enough.

  He'd screwed this from beginning to end, since he first set foot in the city. He'd acted like he knew what the hell we was doing and he'd screwed up time and again, and now he'd screwed up for the last time. Now he was going to die for it. Cade wasn't someone who felt fear, exactly, but he felt something like it now. A cold certainty that sat like a frozen stone in the middle of his chest. He was going to die down there, in the dark. Maybe they figured they'd cook him first. Maybe they just wanted him out of the sun before they tore him to pieces and used his bones for tools.

  He kept fighting even while they dragged him to that dark tunnel, the sheer weight of numbers forcing him down the steps, into the darkness, the pitch black, and there were even more of them there, a sea of monsters, human beings made less than human, running their ragged nails over him, scratching and clawing him, trying to tear his eyes out of his head.

  Cade figured his eyes were probably a delicacy. That and the testicles.

  The only light was coming from the street above, and that was mostly blocked by the crush of bodies, but Cade could make out piles of bones and skulls, sigils drawn in blood on the walls. They'd been eating the dead, those dead from the plague and anyone else they'd managed to catch since - eating their own when they had to. San Francisco was a big city. Cade wondered how many there were down there...

  Fingers found their way into his mouth, nails scratching at his tongue, trying to yank it out. He bit down and his mouth filled with blood. They were going to tear him into pieces.

  Cade felt a kind of calm wash over him. That was it. He figured they'd do him in quick. Too bad about the Duchess, but maybe Woody'd head north and get something from one of the small towns up that way. Hell, maybe they'd both move north and get out from under the jackpot that'd hit Sausalito.

  Wasn't his problem anymore.

  Cade relaxed, closed his eyes and waited for them to get it the hell over with.

  "Let him go. I want to talk to this one."

  The voice was deep and rich, in every sense of the word. It was a television voice, a radio voice, a money voice. A voice used to getting what it wanted.

  The cannibals let Cade go. He nearly fell backwards before he steadied himself on his feet.

  When he opened his eyes, he was damned near blinded - someone was shining a light right at him. The cannibals were creeping back, shielding their own eyes. Some of them slinked up to the surface, looking to join the ones who'd stayed up top to eat the fallen. Some crept towards the barriers, vaulting the turnstiles and disappearing deeper into the system. A handful stuck around to watch.

  Cade spat out the severed fingers in his mouth, swallowing the blood. "You in charge?"

  The voice chuckled. "Straight to the facts, light on tact. That's good. No place for small talk in a negotiation situation - shows weakness. In this frankly chronic economic climate cris
is... you need to be strong. Trust me... I'm Strong." Cade narrowed his eyes. It sounded like the start of a TV show. He was pretty sure it was one.

  The voice lowered his lamp, putting it on the ground. Cade blinked a couple of times and then took a look.

  The man in front of him was about Cade's height, black, handsome, well-groomed - or as well-groomed as you could get living in a subway station. He had on a white suit that was pretty much untouched by the dirt, shiny black shoes and a gold watch. His gaze was steady - none of the eye rolling the others had. His teeth were clean and white, apart from one gold one, slightly off from the centre. It had a diamond embedded in it that glinted when he smiled. He was smiling now.

  Put him in the middle of a Hollywood premiere, he might have looked a little shabby. Put him in the Pastor's supermarket, he would've looked like a prince. Down here, surrounded by human wreckage twitching and grunting and smearing their own waste on the walls, he looked like a God.

  But his breath had the same stink of raw meat on it.

  "Washington Strong. Your money-saving, flesh-craving host with the most - of any currency you name, I can put you to shame. Of course, stocks and shares don't have the same exponential potential that they once did." He grinned, and his tooth flashed. "These days... you could say I'm an investor in people."

  Cade was trying to place the name. He'd seen the man on the TV in Muldoon's, with the sound down - taking up three minutes on the evening news some nights, an hour-long show at the weekends, pointing to graphs of plummeting shares, playing with props, taking phone calls from worried old folks who'd lost everything they had. It was coming back a little now.

  Washington Strong, CNN's money maestro. Blue or white collar, he'd protect your dollar. News flash, here's where to put your cash. You could trust the man with the million-dollar smile.

  Only it turned out you couldn't. Cade had a hard time remembering the news from before the bad times hit - financial meltdowns had a way of paling into insignificance when everybody you knew was dropping dead in the street - but he remembered the old woman in Tennessee who killed herself after putting her last thousand dollars into Washington Strong's Investment Success Superscheme[tm]. He remembered the endless pre-trial hearings as Strong put off going to prison on a dozen counts of investment fraud, embezzlement and tax evasion. It would've been a hell of a trial, but the trial never came. The bad times turned up first, and suddenly nobody gave a damn about the man with the million-dollar smile.

  Cade nodded. He figured he should say something. He'd never met a celebrity before.

  "Nice smile."

  "An affectation that befits my station." Strong grinned. "Can't have a king with no bling, a ruler without a jeweller. You want loyalty - be royalty. Down here, a man's leadership skills can be a matter of life and dinner."

  Cade shrugged. He'd take the man's word for it.

  Strong stepped towards Cade, looking down at the severed cannibal fingers and stepping neatly over them. "You fought back pretty hard, pard. A display that made my day. Moves with something to prove. Got a name, my hard-fighting, finger-biting brother?" He still talked like he was on his TV show. Combined with the wash of rotten meat coming off his breath and that never-ending diamond smile, it made the whole situation seem unreal.

  "Cade," said Cade.

  Strong put a hand on Cade's shoulder.

  "You've made the grade, Cade, my bone-breaking, life-taking, widow-making buddy. You've got the greed you need to succeed. You're what you might call... hungry for success." He grinned, gesturing upwards at an imagined sky, his shadow making hideous clawing gestures on the wall. "I saw a lot of guys like you up in the towers, looking down on the ordinary joes, the pathetic shmoes... now we're under the ground looking up, but it's the same game, different name. We're sharks. We survive by taking lives. Once upon a time that meant taking every dime, but that was small time. If you've got real cohones, you take the meat from their bones..."

  Cade was about ready to punch that diamond out of his face, but he figured this wasn't the best time for poetry criticism. He looked around him, at the crowds of half-human things down in the BART station. A hell of a lot of them were wearing the rotted remains of suits. One of them had a tie.

  And those jeans had designer labels on them. No wonder they'd lasted so well.

  Cade took another look at the walls, the symbols drawn in blood. Dollar signs. FTSE, scrawled on the wall like a magic word. DOW. Jagged lines, smeared in human fat, rising up, up, up.

  Cade figured he knew what these people had been before the bad times had hit.

  He never knew San Francisco had such a thriving banking community.

  He turned back to Strong. "So?"

  "So, my ultra-violent, practically silent friend, there are two types of people in this brave new world. The eaters and the eaten. I think you've got the power to devour, Cade. I think you've got a bone-crunching, human-munching predator inside you, just waiting to get out. I think... you need to decide which side of the food chain you're really on. Right now. Because the offer I proffer comes with a deadline, my time-costing, patience-exhausting brother. And this rolex I'm wearing is just a shade fast."

  Cade got the message. Either join the program or join the menu.

  "Sure." he said.

  "Wise move. But I'd like a practical demonstration of your dentation, Cade. I'd like to know if you're serious about being deleterious." He paused, then smiled wider. "Eat someone for me."

  Cade narrowed his eyes. "Told you I'd do it."

  "I'm from Missouri. Show me."

  "Who?"

  Strong grinned, and looked over to the corner of the room. Cade followed his eyes, and saw the boy who he'd chased to get here. The one who'd got him into this. He looked at Strong.

  "Him?"

  Strong grinned. The diamond flashed.

  "Him."

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Politician

  Cade looked back at the boy, sizing him up. The boy looked right back at him and snarled like a stray dog. He'd heard what Strong had said - didn't like it much. Cade figured this would probably be a test for the boy as much as for him. If Cade didn't kill the boy and get eating, the boy was going to try and kill him, and he'd probably have an even chance. He'd have killed already - if he was being used as bait to lure suckers or other cannibals in, he was most likely trained to kill fast if he had to. Cade had killed his first man at age eight. He knew how easy it was once you'd started, kid or no kid.

  Even if Cade managed to put the kid down without killing him, he'd fail the test and the cannibals would come back for him, and Cade knew he wasn't going to be able to beat them all. This wasn't a crowd of normal folks - they were crazy as rabid dogs. They weren't going to hold back or try to avoid getting injured. They were just going to bury him and then tear him to pieces.

  That's unless he killed the kid. Cade wasn't comfortable killing children.

  But Cade wasn't exactly in his comfort zone.

  He looked around the BART station at the men and women in their stained, dust-covered clothing, their rotten teeth. He was right out of options - he wasn't getting through that crowd unless he turned cannibal himself.

  He shot Strong a look.

  "Got a question."

  Strong grinned, and the diamond flashed. "You got a meal to eat, Mister Cade. Call it an hors d'ouvre that must be obeyed."

  Cade didn't move. "Got a question. How come you're in charge?"

  Strong looked at Cade for a moment, then at the boy. The boy hunched like an animal, readying himself to pounce, his teeth bared. Strong shook his head.

  The boy backed down, slowly.

  "That ain't the question you were suggestin', Mister Cade. What you want to ask ain't why am I in charge. It's why should I be in charge of you - if I'm a product that's safe to invest in." He smiled again. "Let me ease your mind. I'm in charge because I have what it takes, Mister Cade. When the plague hit, a whole lot of the survivors - the movers and shakers an
d money takers in my particular circle - they looked around and they panicked. They thought they weren't going to make it in this new economic scenario. No more TV, no more internet, no more phones, everything falling to pieces. The only way forward was to maximise your survival potential, and that's where I stepped in. Washington Strong, the man with the million-dollar smile. The man who can tell you just what to do."

  Cade kept his eye on that flashing diamond. He figured if he looked at the boy, the boy might see it as a challenge. Better to keep Strong talking.

  Cade figured Strong was going to.

  Strong chuckled. "If they ever bring TV back, you should try getting on it, Cade. You don't have to know much... you just talk like you do. You got authority, you set the priority. When you tell people to jump, they don't ask why, they ask how high. They were used to following me, even after all the scandal. They wanted to put their money where my mouth was." The chuckle became a laugh, the light dancing as the lamp in his hand shook.

  "So... people were panicking. A few people were looting, but a lot were just breaking what they could find, burning things, running wild... they needed someone to tell them what to do, and I happened to be there. I told them the truth. It's a dog eat dog world, Mister Cade, and there are luxuries you need to set aside to abide. All those things you don't need to feed... like a conscience. Morality. Laws. All the things that stop you just taking what you want. And it's easy to take what you want when you're up against weaklings who won't, Cade. People who don't go that extra mile to live in style. My people already knew that - hell, they'd been feeding off folks for years. They didn't take much convincing." He smirked, and that gold tooth of his sparkled. "All I'm doing now, my hesitating, procrastinating brother, is feeding off people literally instead of metaphorically. And if you're on my team, you can live the dream. Eat like a king, live like a predator, do all the things you always wanted to do but didn't want to get caught doing. There's nobody to catch you any more, Cade, nobody but you."