Nerves of Steel

by Lee Hayton

  Gwen smiled at my request and ducked away behind the bar to fetch the paltry supplies. Before she returned, the sounds of approaching soldiers rang out through the air.

  In the time since I’d been living here, there’d never once been a soldier anywhere nearby. The empire didn’t waste money on lost causes. Best to just round up all the degenerates and have them live in one sordid place.

  The clip of the jackboots off the stone tiles of the street outside sent a shudder of despair through my titanium bones.

  If they were coming for me, they’d soon have their task completed and be on their way home. As soon as I walked out that door, they’d whisk me back to my prison and lock me away.

  Years had passed since the last time the jackboots had smacked off the concrete roads in my part of town. It didn’t mean I’d forgotten the sound. Each step took another bite out of my confidence, my courage, until I froze in place, unable to run or hide. They were coming for me.

  Chapter Eight

  As Gwen returned, she said, “Get downstairs.” I turned, primed to obey directives no matter whom they came from, and staggered toward the stairs. They led into a cellar where the dry goods and bottles of wines and spirits were kept.

  The kegs that changed a dozen times over for every wine bottle that needed replenishing were kept in a storeroom on the same level. The stairs were recessed and inside a closet. Unless you knew they existed and had the smarts to look for them, they were invisible.

  I crept down a few steps, sticking to the runner in case someone was already listening. My heart beat so hard that the thumping of blood through my ears drowned out every other sound. With the door closed, only a sliver of light came through the gap at its base. I squatted down so I could feel the stairs below me with my hands. Otherwise, my sense of balance might disappear along with my vision.

  “Routine inspection,” a soldier barked, the instruction clearly reaching my ears. “Everybody get their ID cards ready.”

  I reached for my back pocket, then swore under my breath and dropped my hands onto the steps. My ID wouldn’t pass an inspection, not from the soldier bots. Back in the good old days of human staffing, it would still have been fifty/fifty. At the time I had them made, I couldn’t afford much. In the time since, the threat hadn’t been significant enough to stick on my radar.

  That piece of hindsight was too painful to examine for long.

  A floorboard at head height creaked—somebody stepping close to the closet door. My throat clutched so hard that my swallow got caught halfway and my mouth filled with sour spit.

  The view down the stairs came into focus, my eyes doing a lot more with the sliver of light than I would have expected. Terrified that if I didn’t move soon, I would never be able to, I began the slow tread downstairs, testing each stair for creaks before applying my whole weight.

  Above me, the footsteps moved further away. When I closed my eyes, I could picture the positioning of the soldiers, some in the main bar, two behind the counter, another wandering into the smaller nooks and crannies. Mike’s voice was a reassuring murmur, acquiescing to the demands that were reasonable, sternly protesting those that were not.

  The protest wouldn’t matter. Soldiers did what they liked, especially when they were bots.

  If I wanted to get drunk—and a large part of me did—I had a lottery winner’s bounty to choose from. Some of the bottles were dusty because their contents would be undrinkable. Most were gathering up more flavor while they waited for their seals to be cracked.

  On a shelf at waist height, around a corner to the left-hand side, I found a stash of bar aprons. Forgotten, judging from the thick layer of dust on them. I shook one out and pulled it on.

  Farther inside the rows of shelving, I opened a cardboard box to reveal a stock of baseball caps, rather than the wine I’d been expecting. They were bright red—a color that existed in printing but not in nature. “Buds Brewery,” they said along the brim. I couldn’t work out if that had been an earlier name for The Waterside, or if it was a distributor’s logo. Either way, the company was long gone.

  I fitted it onto my head and tucked all my loose strands of hair up into it. With the visor casting half my face into shade, it would no longer be obvious on first glance that my face wasn’t entirely constructed of skin. Well, it would hide it from a human. Unless the bots handed me their programming guide, I had no idea what the soldiers would scan for.

  After looking at the shelves, I selected two bottles of the cheapest wine I could find and held one in each hand. If the soldiers came downstairs, it would look like I had a legitimate excuse for being down there. If they didn’t accept it, then two smashes with a bottle to the face might buy me a couple of yards lead in a chase.

  The door opened, and my blood pressure flew up the scale, sending a galaxy of stars spiraling around inside my head. When I saw Gwen hesitate before stepping onto the stairway, I relaxed and lowered the bottles in my hand.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered.

  Gwen looked over her shoulder, then turned back to me and shook her head. I nodded, no talking. After reaching the bottom of the stairwell in safety, she pointed for me to go upstairs.

  The door was open above me. I had to accept that if I opened my mouth again, the waiting soldiers would hear every word. With shaking legs, I mounted each step slowly. It might have been a show of care for Gwen’s benefit but the base emotion stopping my progress was fear.

  Even at my slow pace, the short staircase couldn’t last forever. I stood on the small landing inside the closet and tried to draw a deep breath. My lungs wouldn’t fill. The muscles of my chest squeezed them into such a constricted space that there was no room for luxuries like air.

  If you walk out of there looking like a frightened rabbit, the soldier bots will instantly know something’s wrong. Get a hold of yourself, woman!

  I tipped my head from side to side, getting out the cricks in my stiff neck. Plastering a customer-centric smile on my face, I walked out into the corridor then along to the bar.

  “I’ve got those bottles you wanted,” I announced cheerfully to Mike, then pretended to notice the soldiers for the first time. “Sorry.” I took a step back. “I’ll just go clear up the tables.”

  I flipped up the hinged section of the bar bench to step through into the main room. Although I desperately wanted to check behind me and see the reaction, I kept my eyes forward focused, heading for the farthest table.

  “Hey, love,” one of the men gathered there said, stepping aside to make room, “this one’s a right mess. It’ll take a bit of cleaning.”

  I heard Gwen come up from the basement to stand with Mike. Still fighting my desire to turn and look at what was happening, I tilted my head to hear better instead.

  “There’s nothing more I can tell you. I haven’t seen the woman you’re looking for.”

  The robotic voice that responded was too high for me to catch. From my position across the room, the individual words morphed into one long, discordant tone.

  “Hey, Bill. Fancy a game of darts?”

  I looked up, startled by the man’s suggestion. The dartboard on the wall was a feature, not an instrument used in playing the game. To my surprise, the two men picked up darts from a drop-box inset in the wall.

  How many years had I been coming here? And I’d never noticed the thing.

  As the men started to throw, I understood what they were doing. With the two of them standing, either in wait for their turn, or taking their go, they formed a barrier between me and the soldier bots. As the other regulars caught up with what was going on, they also sauntered over, one by one. Soon the audience watching blocked the bots entirely from my view.

  And me from theirs.

  By the time the jackboots clicked together, a signal they were leaving, my fear had melted away, revealing a puddle of gratitude in its wake. When the door closed on the last bot, I thanked the men in the only way they’d recognize. I shouted a round and told them to order
anything they wanted.

  Even there, they were magnanimous, ordering only beer.

  “Thank you,” I whispered to Gwen as I came back to the bar after delivering the last of the drinks.

  “I think it’s me you owe the thanks to,” Mike interjected. “After all, unless you have the money to settle that bar tab”—he nodded toward the drinking men—“then I’m the one who’s paying.

  In a fit of joy, I flung my arm around his shoulders and planted a kiss on his cheek. Too late, I remembered that Gwen probably already thought we were sleeping together. When I unhooked my arm, and looked back at her, the stern pout of her lower lip told me I was right.

  “You better get a move on,” Mike said. “The less you’re seen in here, the better. Did you hear the conversation?”

  I shook my head. Hard to hear above the rush of blood pounding through my inner ears. “Not all of it.”

  “There’s a bounty on your head.”

  I laughed, feeling relieved that it was something that simple. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  “No.” Mike shook his head, his face twisting into such an expression of concern that my breath caught in my throat. “They’ve put a real bounty on your head, not the piddling reward they had before. Twenty thousand credits for information. Two hundred thousand for a capture or kill.”

  My mouth dropped open. Empire credits converted into coin at a rate of fifty to one. Up until now, the price was set at two thousand for information. A nice chunk of change, but nothing too life-changing and there hadn’t been a kill fee at all.

  Shit!

  Suddenly, every pair of eyes in the room seemed laser-focused on me. I could feel the minds doing the calculations and paying it out in beer. If what Mike said was right, and I couldn’t find a reason to disbelieve him, then nowhere would be safe. My best chance was to scurry back to hide in my apartment and hope no one remembered where I lived.

  With my stomach churning, I waved goodbye, keeping the hat but placing the apron back on the bar. Gwen held a small, tight smile of satisfaction on her face as I closed the door. Good luck to her. As though I’d ever want to sleep with Mike.

  The journey home stretched out to marathon length, every camera in the world beaming straight at me. If I’d been a bug in a microscope, I would have felt less exposed.

  Two hundred thousand in credits wasn’t just life-changing for someone, that sum might prop up their family for another ten generations, as well. Norman would soon get a hefty dose of my close company. I could only hope that I would weather the same captivity as well as he did.

  I crept up the back staircase of our apartment, feeling like a burglar. Given the array of used condoms littering the way, apparently, I was a thief with very low standards.

  The back stairwell may have kept me hidden from the street, but I couldn’t do anything about the corridor. As I walked along, head down, hoping that the visor of my cap impeded other people’s view of me as much as it cut off my view of anything else, I could feel curious eyes looking at me. Nonsense, of course. The feeling existed solely in my head. Nobody in this neighborhood would ever look up unless they had a pressing reason to, but the sensation persisted.

  Every door I passed in the hallway could have a person spying on me through the peephole. Each noise I heard could be a neighbor phoning in a tip that would see them set for life.

  I resisted the urge to sprint with the part of my brain that still insisted on remaining analytical. To run along this wretched corridor really might make people look.

  Only when the front door was shut behind me, did I breathe a sigh of relief. As soon as it was out of me, I hurried to the window. From behind the comforting shade of the curtains, I surveyed the street. No one studied me back.

  Thank goodness.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  I jumped at the voice. Norman usually slept all the daylight hours. The trap of this apartment closed tighter when the sun was on display. Who wanted to get third degree burns heading into the kitchen for a glass of water?

  The reason for his wakefulness purred and ran out from between Norman’s legs. As the cat threw its lithe body in a figure of eight around my feet, I raised my eyebrows.

  “Is she sick of you already?”

  “Piss off,” Norman said, scowling at the cat and me as he walked over to draw the curtains closed. “Perhaps she’s wondering why the hell you’re pulling the spy act, just the same as me.”

  “I’m not pulling any act.”

  Norman snorted. “Because you always come in via the back stairs. The condom and needle artwork is so refined it really brightens up the whole day.”

  I snuck closer to the window again, peering through a slit in the middle of the blinds.

  “Jesus, woman! Just tell us what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t know that anything is wrong,” I said. “I’m just trying to work out if anybody followed me home.”

  Norman leaped onto the sofa, earning a creak that sounded like its death throws. “Why would anybody follow you home? Not exactly a prime target for a mugging, are you?”

  He stopped scowling long enough to tip his head to one side and look at me quizzically. “Unless you got paid enough today to make it worth their while.”

  “I got paid nothing,” I said. “Looks like no one’s going to hire me again for a while, either. We need to think about moving.”

  “Moving where? This is pretty much the worst place we could live, and they still charge rent. Where else can we go now that “down” is pretty much tapped out?”

  “Well, Earnest’ll be around soon enough, and I don’t have any way of paying him. You got any bright ideas beyond ‘something will turn up?’”

  “Go down to the strip clubs. They’re always looking.”

  I scowled at the suggestion and was glad to have a reply. “Mike says they’ve raised the bounty on my head. I’m not leaving the apartment for nobody.”

  Norman pulled the cat into his lap and started fussing with it. The playful batting it gave back to him soon escalated into a game of tooth and claws. “What’s the bounty up to now?”

  “Two hundred thousand.”

  He stopped playing with the cat in favor of staring at me open-mouthed. “How much? What? Why?”

  I ignored his later questions to answer the first since that was straight-forward. “Two hundred thousand. They’re paying twenty just for a straight tip-off.”

  “Holy crap.” Norman tossed a large smile at me. “If they keep putting it up like that, a vampire could be tempted.”

  Much as I knew he was joking, it was the wrong time and the wrong day. “You try to turn me in, you’ll find yourself in lock-up, I can promise you that.”

  The threat slid straight off Norman’s slick back. “What did you do to become public enemy number one?”

  I shrugged. “Asking questions that I’m not meant to be asking.” I turned a baleful glare on him since he was ultimately the one responsible. “If you hadn’t kept forcing me to follow up on the free vampire, none of this would have happened. I could have got my payout from the Pennyworth’s and walked away, scot-free.”

  “Whatever.” Norman pushed the cat out of his lap and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “If they’re targeting you just for asking questions, that means you’re onto something.”

  “Yay for me.” I flicked the curtain so that the narrow strip closed and walked into the kitchen for a glass of water. The up and down of adrenaline had made me thirsty. “If you find any use for the information I got out of it, let me know.”

  “Maybe that’s where we should run to,” Norman said.

  I turned to look at him, expecting sarcasm and seeing a look of open longing plastered across his features instead.

  “We’re in trouble, and you want us to run into the arms of a free vampire.” I shook my head and refilled my glass from the tap. “No, thanks. I’d rather take my chances here.”

  “You said the vampire had some polit
ical sway.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I walked through into the lounge and sat beside Norman. “I said that he was hanging around behind a politician. It’s not the same thing.”

  “What if he does have a power base?” Norman said, a pensive expression on his face. “Maybe that’s the reason that he’s come up with this silly plan. If he’s got hold of some politician’s strings, then it could open up the possibilities.”

  The day had already taken my energy from me. Listening to Norman, it seemed determined to take my good humor, as well.

  “No politician has ever done anything so atrocious that it would allow a vampire to control him.” I rubbed my eyes, picking a lump of sleep out of one corner. Lord knows when that had formed there—I’d spent precious little time asleep.

  “You need to go out and find out more,” Norman insisted. His eyes had lit up as he considered the possibilities. I had no problem bursting that particular bubble.

  “I’m not going out there to risk my life dredging up some useless information. What the hell are we going to do with it, even if we find out the whole plan? Sell it back to them?”

  “We could join them,” Norman said. He crossed over to the window, careful to stay out of the path of the stray pinpricks of light shining through the old fabric. After peering along the street for a minute, he turned around, beaming. “There’s strength in numbers, isn’t there? Get enough slaves together, and you can stage a revolt over any master.”

  “I’m not a slave,” I said. The words started off as valid in my brain, but by the time I voiced them, they sounded false. The walls of the apartment had already started to close in on me. Norman’s amused snort didn’t help.

  The cat jumped up into my lap, and I nudged her away—something that she didn’t accept as an answer. Her head nuzzled into the curve of my back, and she sat down, acting like a lumbar pillow.

  “Besides,” I said, getting my thoughts back in order. “There’s no way that this is connected to the bizarre vampire recruitment plan. The empire sent soldiers to The Waterside this afternoon. When the hell was the last time that happened?”