Across the Dark Water

by Richard Kadrey

  The guide looked up. His face had turned hard.

  “You know how the old man said you’d die begging? I hope I’m there to see it. We lost the crowbar to the dogs, so help me open this manhole.”

  It took them several minutes to remove the heavy cover with their numb fingers. When they finally managed it, the guide stepped into the hole and climbed down a steel ladder set into the wall. The thief followed him and when he reached the bottom he looked up.

  “Shouldn’t we close the cover?”

  The guide looked around.

  “They’ll do it later.”

  “Who will?”

  Pointing down one of the tunnels, the guide turned on a flashlight and said, “This way.” The thief was used to streets, and roofs, and the dark contours of other people’s rooms. He didn’t know what to make of this new world, so he followed the guide because the only other thing he could do was climb out of the hole and give up.

  He quickly lost track of time in the sewers. The tunnels didn’t smell as awful as he thought they would. Maybe it was the cold. Maybe it was because there was no one left to flush anything into them. Whatever the reason, he was grateful. Still, there were standing puddles here and there and he cursed when the frigid, slimy water splashed his legs. Sometimes, rats walked along the walls, pacing them. But they seemed more curious than anything. At one turn, the thief saw a half-frozen waterfall of old sewage. He found it strangely beautiful in the bluish glow of the flashlight LEDs. The tunnel they stepped into after going through a cracked wall was much wider and cleaner and their passage, while not pleasant, wasn’t as difficult as it had been earlier.

  There were moments when the thief wondered if the guide wasn’t leading him to a place where it would be easy to kill him and take the last of his belongings. But that made no sense. The guide could have killed him as far back as the Ferris wheel and a hundred times since. No. Whatever the reason for the sewer detour, it wasn’t an ambush.

  Soon, though, the guide stopped. A tall woman stood in the tunnel ahead. Her black hair was tied back and she wore an expensive fur coat that stretched all the way down to her combat boots. Two other women stood behind her with rifles trained on the men.

  “Hello, Maggie,” said the guide.

  “Hello yourself.” She looked at the thief and said to the guide, “The blind man said you might be heading here. This your cargo?”

  “He is indeed.”

  “You’re really taking him to see the Turk?”

  “It’s what he paid for.”

  “Be careful. There’s something going on at the bunker.”

  “What’s going on?” said the thief.

  Maggie grinned at him.

  “Look. It can talk.”

  The women behind her laughed.

  “I don’t know what’s going on exactly,” said Maggie. “Things are just different. The Turk has more patrols out. He’s cleared the countryside and shoots down anything in the sky that gets near him. It’s like he’s expecting something.”

  The guide looked at the thief.

  “You still want to go?”

  “I don’t have a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice, shithead,” said Maggie.

  The thief looked at her and the other women.

  “Do you live down here in the sewers all the time?”

  Maggie looked at the guide.

  “Where did you get this idiot?” She turned to the thief. “You haven’t been in the sewers for miles. What, were you expecting to pop out of the Turk’s toilet?”

  “Then where are we?” said the thief.

  “The metro tunnel under the river. Army pulled up the rails when they blew the bridge, but it’ll take you right to the bunker.”

  “Then you’re the toll takers.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, pay the lady.”

  “How much?”

  She named a sum.

  “Gold or cash?”

  “Cash is fine.”

  When he’d paid, Maggie and the other women stepped aside so that the guide and the thief could pass. As they went, Maggie called to the guide, “Be careful out there. I don’t want to have to drag you in pieces backto the blind man. If you end up in a wheelchair, he won’t be able to help you wipe your ass.”

  The guide gave her the finger without turning and the thief heard the women laugh again. The sound was high and clear and reminded him of Mina. More than ever, he wanted to get to the Turk and out of the mad city.

  The guide stopped a few yards on and pushed a button set into the grimy wall. Gears ground and something heavy moved in the wall next to them. A moment later, doors opened and the two men stepped into an unlit elevator. The guide pushed the top button and the car clattered upward. A moment later, the doors opened and the thief found himself standing in morning light in an enclosed glass atrium for the transit system. He pushed through the doors and back out into the cold. No more than a half mile off sat the Turk’s bunker, black and immense, outlined in white snow.

  The thief felt happier than he had in months.

  “You said this would be the hardest part of the trip. That wasn’t so bad.”

  The guide took out a piece of the loaf and ate it without offering any to the thief. “We’re not at the hard part yet.”

  * * *

  They went north for an hour without getting any closer to the bunker. Then turned west, and the building finally grew larger in the thief’s vision.

  “After what Maggie said, we’re going to circle the place before you even dream about going in,” said the guide.

  By now the thief was impatient, but understood that the wisdom of the guide’s plan.

  They walked uphill into a thin stand of trees above the bunker. Hunkering down behind a sickly pine, the guide pulled a handful of spiked red marbles from his bag and threw them in a sweeping motion down the hill before them. Rolling under their own power, the marbles bounced far out in all directions. A few stopped in place and pulsed red before going out.

  “Mines,” the guide said. “Can’t go that way. We’ll have to try farther up.”

  He had just reached into his pack for more marbles when the thief caught sight of figures around them. He touched the guide’s shoulder.

  “There’s someone here.”

  The guide didn’t make a sound. His gun and fired twice at the figures advancing on them. The bullets’ hiss surprised the thief and he pressed himself down into the snow. These weren’t hobbling shells. They were Raufoss. Armor-piercing.

  One of the figures fell at an angle that allowed the thief to see it clearly. Though it possessed arms and legs, its face was a parody of anything human. Crooked, uneven teeth in what looked like a broken jaw. Lumpy clots of skin on its skull, as if someone had taken a blowtorch to it. The eyes were clear, but the forehead was cracked. A Romper Stomper, he guessed. The guide continued firing and more fell. Each face was different, but no less horrific. The thief grew less shocked by it all. It was a joke. The ridiculous faces were war paint meant to scare fools. Like us, he thought.

  More of them came and the guide didn’t stop firing until his pistol was empty. Yet the Stompers, mounted with rifles and grenade launchers, didn’t return fire. The thief remained still. The guide dropped his pistol to the ground and cursed frantically as the mechs surrounded them. Two reached down and pulled the thief and guide to their feet, marching them around the minefield and down the hill to the bunker.

  They bought them in through the front gates. More Stompers filled sides of the concrete deck outside an enormous armor-plated doorway that slid up as they approached. There were gun emplacements along the roof and drones overhead, spinning and diving in complicated circles in the sky above them.

  As they approached the armored doorway, the guide dug in his heels and shook his head. He said, “I’m not going in. Shoot me here, but I’m not going in.”

  The Stomper escort stopped, but did nothing. The thief got the impression that they were c
ommunicating with whoever was controlling them from inside the bunker. A minute or so later, two Stompers pushed the guide away and escorted the thief inside.

  The guide shouted after him, “If you make it out, I’ll take you to the border with your damn papers. I always finish a deal.”

  * * *

  Through the armored doorway was a large transport bay full of trucks and jeeps. They went through that area and continued deep inside the bunker complex. Down dozens of gray corridors, some leading off to side offices with dusty glass. The thief could tell they hadn’t been inhabited in years. He wondered if it was the military or the wealthy and politically connected who were bringing him so deep into the Turk’s lair, and for what purpose.

  The Stomper led him into an elevator and they went down for a long time. There were no numbers on the panel. Just simple up and down buttons. The thief counted the seconds and when the doors opened, he figured that they’d been descending into the Earth for close to a minute.

  There’s no escaping here, he thought. Even if I knew the way out. He took a breath and steadied himself for whatever awaited him.

  To his surprise, when the elevator doors opened and he stepped out of the car, the Stomper didn’t follow him. The doors slid shut again and he was alone. The thief stood in what could have been some kind of laboratory or, he thought, the basement of an electric power plant. Large monitors ringed the room, showing views of the hillside and rooms within the bunker. The thief saw himself on video from different angles. What looked like motors hung overhead. Around them, smaller devices ran on little wheels along lubricated poles.

  The thief looked around and said, “Hello?”

  A PA system crackled and a voice said, “Hello,” and his name.

  The thief turned just as something large swung down from the ceiling in his direction. He recognized it as some sort of particularly sophisticated mech. The central body was twenty feet tall and a dozen insectile arms with delicate titanium fingers hung in a ring from the thing’s body. It spoke again: “Hello” and his name. The sound frightened and then disgusted him.

  “Stop that,” he said.

  “Stop what?” said the mech.

  “Stop using Mina’s voice.”

  “You can’t imagine Mina in a place like this?”

  “No.”

  “Does that mean she should go away?”

  That stopped the thief.

  “Is she here? Show me. Let me see her.”

  The mech slid closer and turned around. Mina’s face swung into view.

  “Hello, baby. I’ve missed you.”

  He wanted to run. He wanted to vomit. But instead, he went closer to the mech. Its insect limbs clicked and clacked.

  It was Mina’s face he saw. In fact, her whole body. It looked as if the skin had been flensed from her body, stretched and intricately melded to the mech. The thief could see the profiles of other faces and skins beyond hers, wrapping around the bot’s entire torso.

  The thief said, “How are you here?”

  “They brought me here. The people who ran this place. I was almost dead. They experimented on me. When most of them were dead and there was no one to run the site, they gave me a second chance at life.”

  “You’re the Turk,” said the thief.

  Mina’s face grinned. It didn’t look quite right, but it wasn’t as bad as it might have been.

  “If you mean the AI who runs the complex, no. There never was an AI. There was always a human behind the scenes. When the most intelligent parts of the system began to fail, it reasoned that it could survive with more human components.”

  “Which means you are the Turk, except the Turk never existed.”

  “No, silly,” said Mina. “The real Turk was an eighteenth-century automaton that could play chess and beat masters. Only there was no automaton. There was a man inside the box who made all the moves. The whole concept of the Turk is a joke.”

  Suddenly exhausted, the thief looked for a chair and when he didn’t find one he sat on the floor.

  “How is this possible? I’ve wanted to come here to see the Turk for months. What are the odds that the guide I hired would bring me to you?”

  The Mina machine moved closer to him. It extended a metal hand and the thief touched it.

  “There were no odds in this. Just me. I knew you were looking. I cleared a path for you to find me. Sent patrols to force you onto safer streets. Cleared buildings for you to bed in.”

  “And the dogs?”

  “Them too.”

  “Why? They almost killed us.”

  “Did they attack you?”

  “They chased me.”

  “But did they attack? I wanted to weaken your friend outside. Deprive him of some of his tools and throw him off balance so it would be harder for him to kill you.”

  The thief made a face.

  “He could have killed me a hundred times.”

  “Yes, but he wants what you want.”

  “Travel papers.”

  “Yes. He’s been lying to you all along.”

  The thief thought it over. It made a kind of sense.

  “Why don’t you kill him?”

  “Because I want you to do it for me.”

  Like everything else since he’d arrived, that caught the thief off guard. He lay down on his back on the floor.

  “You haven’t asked how I died,” said Mina.

  “I was afraid.”

  “It was medicine my mother gave me. His medicine.”

  The thief sat up.

  “Oh god. That’s why you led me to him.”

  “I miss you. Do you miss me?”

  “Every day.”

  “We can be together. I’m not exactly who I once was, but I’m enough to still love you.”

  “I love you too. I want to stay. But I want to make that fucker outside pay for what he did.”

  Mina’s metal hand lay gently over the thief’s heart.

  “To be with me, you’re going to have to give up your body. You’ll have to die.”

  The old man’s words about his death came back to the thief: yours will linger and you’ll beg for it.

  “Yes,” he said. “Please kill me.”

  Mina’s arm retracted and another swung down. There was a sleek silver injector on the end.

  “What’s that?” said the thief.

  “The virus. A new strain. It works quickly and no one has immunity to it. I’ve been saving it for just this moment”

  “That’s how I’ll kill the guide?”

  “Yes. But it’s only transmissible through blood.”

  The thief looked at her and finally understood. He pushed up his sleeve.

  “Give it to me.”

  The needle stung and the injection burned through his veins for a moment, but when it was over he felt as good and strong as ever.

  After Mina gave him the travel papers, the Stomper took him through the building and out onto the bunker’s concrete deck, where the guide was waiting. The man opened his arms wide when he saw him.

  “You did it, princess. The Turk let you go. With the papers?”

  The thief pulled the papers from inside his black bodysuit and showed them to the guide.

  “We should get going,” said the thief. “I’d like to make it to the border before dark.”

  “Absolutely,” the guide said. He looked at the Stompers, but the mechs did nothing to stop them as he led the thief away. They headed back toward the transit tunnel. The guide talked amiably as they went.

  “I don’t believe you fucking did it. I have to admit, this trip, I thought you were a complete asshole the whole way. But now? Now you’re my fucking hero.”

  They were halfway to the atrium for the tunnel elevator when the guide said, “Tell me. What does the Turk look like?”

  The thief stopped.

  “I thought you said he gave you a fortune.”

  The guide stopped too and looked around, uncomfortable.

  “Shit. I did say
that. No, I never saw the Turk, and he never gave me anything.”

  Before the thief could speak, the guide had the knife in his hand and plunged it hilt deep into the thief’s gut. The man let out something that was half a groan and half simply a long exhalation of air. The thief fell forward against the guide’s chest.

  “Don’t fight it,” said the guide. “Just relax and wait for Jesus.”

  The thief looked at the guide, but his vision was collapsing to a long tunnel. He knew he would pass out in a moment, but before he did, he pulled off a glove with his teeth and raked his nails down, scratching the guide’s cheek. The man screamed and stepped back, pulling out the knife. The thief reflexively pressed his hands over the wound in his belly. It took just a few seconds for the guide to regain his senses and stab him again. This time, the thief brought up a hand and smeared his blood onto the guide’s wounded cheek. The guide shoved the thief to the ground and rifled through his bodysuit. When he found the travel papers he stood up.

  The cold revived the thief enough that he could see the guide looking over the papers. He appeared elated as he tucked them into his own suit. Then he grimaced and put a hand to his cheek. “Fuck. It burns.” The guide pulled his hand away and the fingers came back black. “What the fuck did you do to me?”

  The guide ran in the direction of the atrium. The thief watched him sprinting madly away, trying to put to put as much distance as he could between himself and the thief. In red-slimed snow, the thief was able to push himself up on one elbow. He watched the guide run a hundred or so steps, stumble once, and fall face-first to the ground. He didn’t get up.

  Soon, a group of Stompers came from the bunker and the thief felt himself loaded onto a stretcher. He passed out and when he awakened, the wounds in his abdomen were healed with a cellular glue that left only vague scars. He had the impression that a long time had passed. Perhaps days.

  When he finally sat up in bed, Mina’s face flashed on one of the monitors.

  “How do you feel?” she said.

  “All right. Good, in fact.”

  “We’ve been feeding you supplements for days. You were quite malnourished.”

  “I didn’t have any reason to eat.”

  “Come to me,” Mina said. He went outside and a Stomper took him to the lab where Mina was waiting. “It’s so good to see you,” she said.