Gridlock: A Cybershock Story

by Nathalie Gray

  The abrupt deceleration propelled Steel forward, where she stumbled, doing a face-plant that stole the air from her. By her side, the backpack spilled some of its precious content on the floor. Multicolored pills clicked inside narrow plastic tubes. While the last thug battled it out with the stranger, she gathered her run’s content, stuffed it all back into the pack and zipped it tight. When the man began to howl in pain, Steel didn’t need to turn around to know what was going on. She crawled on her hands and knees until two rows of seats separated her from the closest door.

  When the man suddenly stopped howling, silence deafened her. The metro’s comms system calmly announced security was on its way to respond to the emergency brake system. Nobody would come. No one had in decades.

  Steel floundered forward a few more paces before she saw a shadow stretch out in front of her. She rolled to a sitting position, an arm raised to fend off the attack that would surely come. He’d just killed or maimed half a dozen armed men. What could she do to stop him?

  Chapter Two

  She couldn’t speak. Fear closed a fist over her throat. She could only look.

  The man they’d called the Cardinal stood over her like a giant red ghost. The cape parted when he leaned over, gripped Steel by the front of her bomber jacket and hoisted her to her feet as though she weighed nothing more than a pair of boots. Out of pure instinct, she grabbed the hand he had around her lapel. Intense heat seeped into her palm. He was incredibly hot, despite the gloves.

  For a moment, they stood face-to-face, barely a foot from each other. At five-nine, she was pretty much the same height as him and got a really good look. Features surfaced from the depths of his hood. Bright blue eyes set wide apart, a high forehead, a long and narrow nose, and a thin mouth that curved at one corner. Not handsome, but striking just the same. Steel realized her mistake when his lips thinned and his eyes narrowed. She’d seen the Cardinal’s face. A man who’d just killed almost half a dozen others, and she could ID him. Too late. His fist remained bunched around her collar even after he’d lifted her, and following a long silent moment, he set her down and stepped back.

  “You were not supposed to see so much,” he whispered. That voice, she couldn’t get over it. “My persona relies on anonymity. The Cardinal cannot be seen showing mercy as it would damage my reputation. You do understand.”

  “I-I…” Steel clamped her mouth shut.

  “I now find myself in quite the quandary. Allow me to share my dilemma.” He opened one gloved hand, showing his empty palm. “On the one hand, I have no qualms about ending your young and obviously painful life.” He presented his other palm. “On the other hand, my quarrel rests not on your slender shoulders but on those of the tyrant keeping us all under its cybernetic thumb like the cowering, pale shades of our former selves we have become.”

  “I-I can keep my mouth shut.” Steel shoved her hands in her pockets.

  The gun.

  She’d forgotten she’d retrieved it during the fight. What if…? He’d kill her before she had time to press the trigger. Hadn’t he taken a bullet right in the chest, at close range, and yet here he still stood. But she couldn’t do nothing.

  “How can I trust one such as you? How can you prove to me you would not betray my identity to the authorities?”

  Steel looked at her feet.

  “Precisely.” His shoulders hunched a little. “I fear you gave me no choice.”

  “No.” She backed up a step.

  “Forgive me. Please know that I find no sense of justice in this terrible conclusion.”

  Steel didn’t think, didn’t debate, didn’t argue with herself nor wait for the perfect opportunity. She stabbed forward with the gun and squeezed the trigger. A blue spark of electricity danced on the Cardinal’s chest before he arched back and staggered sideways.

  In a heartbeat, Steel was across the wagon and into the next, backpack in hand, and throwing herself at the door leading to the outside. Night air and rain—it always rained—greeted her as she squeezed out of the embrasure, grabbed the metal handrail and smoothly jumped over the turnstile. The city, or quadrant as they were known nowadays, drowned the swoosh of blood in her ears. She ran across the platform, mashed the panel to the lift. Good luck smiled onto her because the doors opened at once. Steel didn’t want to see danger coming and never checked back. Maybe he was close. Maybe he wasn’t. She charged into the steel cabin and frantically telegraphed on the lobby button so the doors would shut.

  “Please,” she snarled over and over. Please. Please. Please.

  Interminable seconds passed. Jumping up and down like a boxer didn’t help alleviate the panic as she waited for the doors to close. They finally did. Impossibly, excruciatingly slow. For fuck’s sake! But they did. No hand came to stop them at the last possible second.

  She let out a breath she’d held for the entire time. Half sigh, half sob. Her lip burned, her eye was swollen almost completely shut, her hands ached from holding the damn backpack so hard, but she felt almost buoyant to have evaded the dangerous killer, the Cardinal or whoever he was. At least for now. She had no doubt he’d quickly recuperate and come after her. She’d seen too much. Not only his murders, but his face as well. He was probably already on his way down the stairs. With the killer moves she’d seen him pull, she wouldn’t be surprised that he could bound down the stairs quicker than the lift could shoot back to ground level. Only two stops on this ride. Up top and down below. She wondered where Six had gone.

  Gun in hand, Steel prepared for the worst as the lift reached ground level. She knew this particular station like the pocket of her favorite sweater. As soon as the doors opened, she’d sprint out along the right wall, chance a peek then round the corner, follow the old wheelchair access ramp and jump over the handrail so she could dive between the station’s back wall and the next building. She’d be home in ten minutes.

  Adrenaline pumped her muscles. She checked and rechecked the gun. Everything worked fine. She had a bit of charge left. She pulled the hood back from her face. She needed to see as close to one-eighty as she could so nothing—and no one—could sneak up on her.

  Ping. The doors opened.

  Steel rushed out of the steel cabin. Rain made the old, cracked pavement slick and treacherous. No one jumped her. Everywhere around her broken billboards exhorted purchases and commitment for products and ventures long dead. Above the roofs, floating relay stations for the richer folks’ shuttle system spewed toxic gases that floated down to ground level. A city slowly crawling on top of another city, with some areas looking like a sandwich, with levels and connecting tubes. Yet they had nothing in common, except for the people. And even then, most rich folks had so many enhancements they hardly resembled those of lesser means and their more rustic looks. As much as the older part of the city was dark and dirty and dangerous, the larger portion was glossy and rich and safe. But she could never make it there. She didn’t have the implant. Nor did she want it.

  She made it to the handrail, leaping over it with both feet together. She’d lost a bit of peripheral vision to her right because of her swollen eye, but she could see enough to gauge her jump well. Below the ramp, she landed amidst detritus that smelled of rotten things and years-old urine. Back when she’d moved into her new home—staying at the same place after breaking up with Six hadn’t seemed wise—the place had reeked of it. She’d done what she could with what little she had. But it would all change. If she managed to deliver her run. For now, she needed to take care of herself, sleep some, charge her electroshock gun, find another route. Adapt. She’d done that for as long as she could remember.

  When she emerged from the alley and onto a wider street, Steel hunched her shoulders and slipped into the thick crowd, where smells assaulted her. Natural fibers wet with rain, spices, other unknown scents. She still gripped the gun in her jacket pocket but didn’t need it.

  She made it home, the top apartment on a dilapidated former bank. Brand-new locks and chains barred entry.
She pressed the pad of her thumb to the first lock, counted four seconds then yanked on the chain. Too soon or too late and the thing would trigger the alarm. The other locks followed, one needing a key that she pulled from the undone lining of her boot’s tongue. She squeezed through the thinnest opening possible, closed the door behind her and bolted it right away. A grungy brick wall that looked ready to collapse separated her apartment from the street below. On bad storms, it rained inside. But she didn’t care. As a corner unit, she could see anyone coming from two angles and had more than one escape route if—when—shit hit the fan. Only after she’d checked the bars on the windows, the space behind the closet and the crack underneath the door did she put the gun on its cradle.

  Nerves finally got the better of her, and she dropped to her knees in the middle of the decrepit room. She raked shaking hands through her hair. Her scalp ached from Skinny’s handling. She’d escaped a sadistic former boyfriend and his gang, only to have a murderous vigilante come after her. If he had. Yet tears didn’t come. Maybe she didn’t have any left.

  “Get a grip.”

  To keep her mind busy, she lit one of her last cigarettes. It wouldn’t relax her as it usually did. Nicotine flowed into her bloodstream, her sinuses cleared a bit and the throbbing of her eye wasn’t so bad anymore. Her hands still shook, though. She put on water to boil, fixed some instant soup mix that she slurped back while it was still too hot, too hungry to care. She saved the last few drags of her cigarette for later and emptied the rest of the stockpot into the tiled recess, which must at some point have been the bottom part of a shower stall. It was now her tub. Better than washing up with a basin, as she’d done before.

  She stripped, folded her clothes neatly on the wobbly stool and entered the warm bath. She sighed as she sat cross-legged and began to gingerly rub her sore limbs with a tiny amount of dish soap she’d scrounged from the back of a restaurant’s garbage in the better part of town. Blood, fresh and caked, dropped in the water and made an uneven pink halo around her. A hiss escaped her when she dabbed the corner of her shirt to her swollen eye. Damn.

  Washed and warmed, she leaned on the tiled wall and closed her good eye. She had forty-eight hours to make it to Leech’s contact before he sent his goons after her. She’d memorized the time and place, a small cookshop by the foot of an old bridge that used to span both banks of the river. It now served as a sort of border station to the good side. She was to sit there and wait until someone came by and offered her a drink. Leech must have known no one in their right mind would approach a pierced and tattooed girl who looked like she was permanently pissed off and offer her a drink. Even better than some stupid password.

  Forty-eight hours. She still had time to get a bit of rest. She’d go in the morning.

  If her senses hadn’t been on hyperdrive from her ordeal in the sky metro, she might have missed the tiny sound that just caught her ears. Something clicked against the front door. Metal on metal. She froze, awareness—barely a notch down from full-blown panic—extended to its limit. She crawled over the edge of the recess, cold tiles pebbling her skin, and retrieved her T-shirt, which she wrestled on backward and inside out. No time to correct that. Panties followed. The gun was in the other room, being charged. It’d beep if she took it off the cradle. Fucking stupid thing that…

  Again, a click against her front door. Faint but there. She wasn’t being hyperaware.

  A change in air pressure caressed her face. The door had just opened.

  Steel retrieved one of her improvised weapons—there was one in each of the apartment’s three rooms—and grabbed the chipped baseball bat in two hands. It’d have to do. Suddenly, the lights went off. She suppressed the yelp of surprise. The gun’s cradle beeped. Had the intruder cut the main power, thus resetting everything, or had he just seized the weapon to use it against her? She’d go with Option B, just in case. And her dripping wet. One charge would deck her out cold.

  A thought came to her. Maybe it wasn’t the guy in red. Maybe it was Six who’d followed her. Her heart jack-hammered and her throat constricted. She needed to cough. Was afraid to even think too loudly. As much as the strange man who called himself a Cardinal had scared her—he’d killed those men without even touching them—she didn’t want to have to deal with a pissed-off Six. Not with her at half capacity. Not with what he’d been about to do.

  Shaking, her feet making small, sucking noises, she crept across the bathroom, followed the wall to the doorway—the door had long ago been burned for warmth—and chanced a quick, left-right-up-down peek into the main room. The row of windows provided a perfect backdrop to spot any upright form moving through her place. There was none. A beam of red light from a hovercraft across the street traversed the room the way a Cyclops with heat vision would scan the place. She gripped the bat tighter. She’d probably leave nail marks on the thing.

  Maybe he was still closer to the entrance? Keeping her shoulder to the peeling plaster wall, she rounded the doorjamb and had taken two paces when a silhouette very close to her stopped her cold in her tracks. How the hell had he managed that? There was no one a second ago.

  Too wide at the shoulders to be Six. Plus, her fashion-conscious ex wouldn’t wear a hooded cloak.

  She attacked.

  The bat made a disgusting, muffled sound when it landed on the guy’s shoulder. She’d expected a cry of pain, a grunt. Something. The man ducked under the next swing and the next after that. She aimed lower so he’d have to jump. She could probably swing her bat for a longer time than he could leap around the room. Steel hit the wall. The shock resonated up her arms. Plaster crackled off and scattered in crunchy debris. Stepping on it, she came at the man again, this time swinging for the dark silhouette’s center. He wouldn’t be able to jump over that. Faster than she could abort her swing, he leaped into her reach, trapped the bat with one hand. Steel could do half a dozen chin-ups, more if she’d had anything decent to eat. Yet the guy ripped the bat out of her grip as if she’d been a child. It clattered to the floor too far for her to reach.

  She was screwed.

  The man made a fist on the front of her T-shirt and pulled her close. Steel jerked her knee up hard and met his inner thigh, which was hard as fucking concrete. A grunt squeezed past her gritted teeth. Left hook to the face. He deflected that. Elbow not far behind. He blocked it with his own. But he didn’t attack. Why didn’t he attack?

  Steel grabbed the front of his garment in both hands, yanking hard so she could use him as a lever when she let him go and rolled backward. Overbalanced, he flipped over and crashed on top of her. They went tumbling back, hit the wall and rolled into the middle of the room where a blade of light hit his shoulder and throat, then his face. She’d known he’d come for her. She shouldn’t have come home, should’ve kept going, found shelter in the crowds, but instead she’d been a stupid crybaby to come here, isolating herself this way, just because she bled a little.

  Displaying incredible strength, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and slid her to him as a cat would a mouse. She thrashed, punched, kicked, tried to bite. Their fight was strangely silent except for the occasional grunt or humph. He settled on top of her, straddling her waist. At least he wasn’t here to… Not yet anyway.

  Damn, he was heavier than he looked.

  Steel managed to hook her foot around his shoulder and forced him back. Not far enough. He pressed a hand against her sternum and leaned over very close to her face. The blade of light hit dazzling blue eyes. Like gems. It really was him, the Cardinal. Shit.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered.

  “Wh—?”

  A sound she knew well froze her blood. A hiss, followed a split second later by a violent shudder that made her feel as though her limbs had grown by a foot, all at once. As her consciousness filtered out of her like heat through a cracked wall, it occurred to her that he’d taken the gun and not cut the main power after all.

  Shit.

  The young woman had looked worn and ti
red, malnourished and dull in her faded black garments that hung on her slender frame. Yet there had been an energy like a fever that emanated from her wiry body. As if instead of indolence or hopelessness, privations had caused the opposite—a stubborn determination to walk tall and forge ahead. This was a young woman who had suffered, who had lost her fair share of battles, but who would never bend under the weight of life or allow something or someone to break her. A remarkable person. Dante doubted anyone else had noticed. Or bothered to try.

  He had followed her with the full intention of permanently silencing a potential witness, but as he waded through the coarse but efficient security system she had set in place, the thought of killing the young woman had begun to weigh increasingly heavier. Would that not make him like those he despised? Would he not be the monster they had wished to create? Surely. Yet how could he let her leave when she knew his face? His plan hinged on anonymity. The Cardinal could not afford to have his face revealed and relayed to every screen and facial-recognition system on the planet. No one knew he existed, he had no official ID, no parents, no one. Even his name, Dante, he had chosen himself from an old, old book he had read. A tale of betrayal and revenge. Much like his own. Fitting.

  Dante set her on his bed—she should have weighed more than she did, given her height—pulled the blanket on top of her then retreated to the chair he had set in a corner. He sat, hands on knees, and waited, patience probably his one and only virtue. Her hair was still wet. He must have interrupted her ablutions. He had been intent on interrupting the young woman’s life.

  So young-looking yet so frayed. Bleached hair ill-cut and uneven. Tattoos like black tongues snaked along one side of her, up the arm and shoulder, her cheek, while one band of ink in a barbwire pattern encircled her neck in a black chokehold. Simulated tears dotted each outer corner of her eyes. She wore more piercings than he did scars, the metal rings and studs glittering on her skin like drops of molten silver. Not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination. But intriguing. Very much so.