by James Knapp
When I rolled her arm, I put my full weight on and it came out at the shoulder. I heard it. She showed me her ribs, so I fired a side kick and broke those too.
Her eyed bugged out and her jaw dropped. Her legs gave out, and when I let her go, she dropped like a stone.
“Ten points! Calliope Flax!” the judge screamed.
The ref came out into the ring and ran over to her, but she wasn’t getting back up. He looked up at the booth and made an X with his forearms.
“That . . . is . . . the . . . fight! Winner, Calliope Flax! She takes it again!”
The ref had a needle and stuck her with painkillers so she could breathe. Two other medics came on to take her out back so they could put her shoulder back in. She stood—I’ll give her that—but she didn’t stare at me anymore. She didn’t even look my way.
“In round one, Minnie Botma is out of the fight!”
The crowd screamed so loud it hurt my ears. They spit and threw trash, stomping on the sides of the cage. I felt something cold on my back and something brown and sticky splashed down my leg as a paper cup hit the fence. Chew spit, by the look of it. A bottle skipped across the top of the cage; then another one smashed on the corner.
“Okay, settle down, people!”
It was a mob scene. I tried to see if Luis was getting picked up, but I couldn’t see shit. Something was wrong; I knew when I saw the guy going for him. That guy didn’t look right.
“Flax! Flax is number one!”
“Flax, you bitch, rot in hell!”
I was getting dizzy. Christ, that bitch rattled my cage. . . .
There was blood all down the front of my tank top, and when I grabbed a towel and wiped my face, there was a lot of red. One of my front teeth was gone. I grabbed my water bottle and poured it over my face, letting it run down my neck and chest.
I had to get the hell out of there. Maybe Luis would try to meet up with me. He might try the locker room or the lobby. I climbed out of the ring and shoved past Eddie.
“Hey!” he yelled. “Where the hell do you think you’re—”
I pushed through the crowd, heading for the lockers. My hands were shaking as I got my padlock open and took my jeans and sweatshirt out, pulling them on over my fight clothes. I threw on my boots and jacket and made a run for the lobby. That’s when I heard the scream.
It was a guy, and it was loud, but it came from outside. I slammed through the doors and out to the sidewalk. No one was there. The fights were still on, and most everybody was still inside. I looked left and right; then I heard the scream again, real low, like it was from the gut. It gurgled and stopped.
I stood there, listening. My breath came out like smoke in the cold, and every time I sucked in air, it stabbed my broken tooth. A second later I heard another grunt.
The bathroom. There was a public can that filled up after the fights, but now there was no one hanging around them. I moved to the door and looked, but it opened so you couldn’t see in from outside.
“Hello?” I called. No one said anything.
I reached into my jacket and pulled out the brass knuckles, just in case. Blood still dribbled down my lip as I squeezed one set into each fist.
“I’m coming in!”
I gave it another second, then marched down and turned into the men’s room.
It took a second for it to sink in. A guy was in there, wearing a dark coat with the hood up. He stared at me when I walked through the door. On the floor in front of him was Luis, or what was left of him.
“It’s you,” the man said.
I didn’t see a knife, but Luis was cut up bad. One arm was hacked off at the elbow and was on the floor next to a toilet. His other hand was short a thumb, and the other fingers just dangled there. His guts were in a pile under him where he lay facedown, with his ass still in the air like he was trying to get up. The floor was wet with blood. It was fucking everywhere.
“That was quick,” the man said, stepping toward me. He had a weird look on his face, like he was zoning in front of the TV. An orange light was lit up in his eyes.
“What was?”
“Your fight.”
“Look, I don’t want any trouble,” I said. I took a step back, but he pulled out a gun and pointed it in my chest.
“Quickly,” he said. “I monitored the call you made to the FBI. I know he was with you, and I know the FBI is on their way to pick him up.”
“What the hell do you want?”
“The data spike,” he said. “I know you have it.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. “He told me about it, but that’s it—”
“He told me you have it.”
He was stepping in on me. I tried to fade back again, but he stuck the gun right in my chest. The look on his face never changed. The barrel was aimed dead center, right at my heart.
“This is your last chance,” he said. I smashed the wrist of his gun hand. The gun went off, but the bullet slammed into the tile next to me and I punched him in the side of the head. I gave him everything I had, and I had plenty. Something crunched under my fist. Even without the brass knuckles, it should have dropped him, but it didn’t.
When he came back around, still holding the gun, I bashed him with the other fist too. He fell back and I grabbed his gun arm, then rolled him, slamming him face-first into the wall.
I broke his wrist on the urinal, but he wouldn’t drop the piece, so I smashed the side of his face with my elbow a few times, then blasted a knee into his ribs. He went down, cracking his head on one of the sinks and rolling onto his back.
Black shit was coming out of his mouth. With the light on his face, I saw it was white as a sheet. The veins underneath looked black.
He was getting back up. I stomped down right on his face and he fell back. More of that black stuff was coming out of a cut on his forehead and his nose. One of his eyes had turned light gray or silver.
He hooked the butt of the gun on the urinal pipe to pull himself back up, so I stomped his elbow on the side and broke his arm in half. His coat fell open, and I saw the bricks underneath, each one with a thick wire coming out of it. Some kind of timer display was counting down on his chest. The guy had a bomb strapped to his chest.
I don’t know how his hand still worked, but he still had the gun, even though it just hung there. Something made a loud snap, and just like that there was a big knife in his other hand. It came out of nowhere.
He was still coming, and I would have hit him again, except for the bomb. The bomb changed everything.
The tip of the knife scraped the tiles behind me as I turned and ran like hell.
Nico Wachalowski—Arena Porco Rojo
Two blocks from the arena, the signal from Calliope’s cell started moving. Without the exact layout of the place, it was impossible to tell exactly where in the area she was, but from the basic blueprint, it looked like she was leaving the premises. She left the building, lingered near the outside, then went on the move again in the parking area.
Wachalowski, this is Sean. We just got wind of a disturbance down at the arena; we’ve got shots fired, one dead, and one missing.
Who was killed?
No name yet, but a young male. It could be our guy.
They beat us to him. They got to him and she got too close; that’s why her signal was moving. She was running.
Try to get the cops to hang back. I’m almost there.
By the time I got to the arena, blue and red lights flickered over the faces of patrons who had streamed out to see what the commotion was about, and the cops had their hands full keeping them back. Inside the lobby, faces were pressed against the glass, looking out. I pulled over near the blockade and got out of the car, holding up my badge. A handful of the arena-goers hooted when they saw me, but the officers looked less impressed.
“Who’s in charge?” I asked.
One of the men held up his hand, looking at me under the brim of his cap.
“You,” he said. “I got the call
to hang back until you got here.”
“I appreciate it. Can we get these lights off?”
He nodded to one of the officers, who ducked away, and a few seconds later the flashing lights went dark one set at a time. I switched to a thermal filter, but there was still too much interference; too many people had been through to pick out any one signature.
“There’s a woman down there somewhere,” I said. “Has anyone seen her?”
“Not since the attack. Word is she took off down toward the lower levels, and the guy went after her.”
“Who was the victim?”
“Name was Luis Valle.”
“Where’d it start?”
“Men’s room,” he said, pointing. “One of the fighters came out and heard something, then went to check it out and got into it with the shooter. There was an altercation that spilled out into the garage; then Sawed-off Sam over there comes out and starts shooting.”
He gestured to a stocky, balding man with a thick neck who was standing cuffed next to a pair of officers. Following the path he traced, I saw one of the cars nearby had sustained several shotgun blasts at medium range. Glass and spent shells littered the pavement.
Wachalowski, this is Noakes. Secure that body immediately.
If he had what they were after, he doesn’t have it now.
I’m not asking you.
“I need the crime scene locked down,” I told the officer. “No one in or out.”
“Already done,” he said evenly.
The attacker might still be here, and I’ve got a civilian in trouble. I’m going to try to bring him in.
Without the kid, the information he was holding is the first priority.
I get it.
“The fighter was female?”
“Yeah.”
On my map, I was still reading the signal from her phone. The blip was stationary, so the phone was still in one piece, even if she wasn’t.
“Start getting these people out of here,” I said.
He shook his head, but he got moving. I dropped the thermal filter to 20 percent transparency and bumped the light up a little as I headed down the ramp through the rows of cars. At the same time, I started scanning the JZI communications bands, pulling out the police chatter until it got quiet. If the attacker tried to communicate with anyone else, I wanted to pick it up.
Crouching next to one of the vehicles, I scanned the area, but again, there were too many signatures. I listened, but I didn’t hear anyone nearby. The blip was brighter, though. It was close.
Staying low, I adjusted my visual filters until I found recent thermal prints that probably belonged to Flax. With the concrete to my back, I scanned the area in front of me, but the garage was quiet.
“Calliope Flax,” I said, “this is Agent Wachalowski with the FBI. If you can hear me, don’t speak out. Stay where you are.”
Her signal was maybe five spaces away to my left, keeping perfectly still. I put one hand on the cold pavement and leaned down to look under the vehicle I was using as cover. Beneath the undercarriages of the other cars, I saw a tiny light move somewhere in the distance near the ground.
I zoomed in toward the movement. It was the LED on her phone. She had spotted me and was waving it to get my attention. Her chin rested on the pavement as she lay flat under the axle of a truck, her face flecked with blood and her eyes wide.
I wasn’t sure how well she could see me, but I held out one palm to indicate she should stay put. That was when my phone rang.
It was a rookie mistake, and it was almost a fatal one. The shooter had a pretty good bead on me already, and that cinched it; the garage erupted with gunfire, and bullets punched into the vehicle I was crouched behind. The windows sprayed out, and several shots sparked off the ground less than a foot away from me, one of them puncturing the rear tire.
Stupid . . .
I grabbed the phone as air hissed out of the hole, struts groaning as the vehicle leaned onto the rim. The display on the phone flashed the name ZOEOTTas I shut it off.
The shots stopped for a minute, and I could hear him reloading. Staying low, I changed positions, moving several cars down before scanning in the direction the shots had come from. No thermal signature that I could see was there, but when I flipped through the other filters, I finally got an outline. He was hiding under another LW suit about three cars away, but based on the body structure, it didn’t look like the same guy I’d shot at outside the FBI building.
I’ve got him.
I raised my weapon and turned up the intensity on the filter until his outline stood out sharply and I could target the shoulder joint of his gun arm.
A three-round burst caught him and he pitched back. His gun fell out from under the LW drape and clattered to the ground.
“Freeze!”
He moved like he was going to go for the gun, but his arm wouldn’t cooperate. He stood up.
“Kick it over!”
He did, and the weapon skittered to a stop in front of me. I picked it up and slipped it under my belt, keeping my gun trained on him. He kept the LW suit active, still appearing as nothing but a silhouette in front of me.
“Ma’am,” I said, “come on out. Stay on the other side of the car.”
I heard her come out from under the car, and moved to join her. She was kneeling on the ground, and I reached out to help her to her feet, but she batted my hand away. She stood up, glaring at me.
“Nice ringtone.”
“Go back to the barricade and stay with the cops,” I told her.
“Who the hell are you looking at? There’s no one over there.”
“Just do it.”
The shooter moved, his outline shimmering as he started closing the distance between us.
“Stop right there,” I yelled, even though I knew it wouldn’t work.
He kept coming and I fired three bursts, nine shots in all. On the third burst, the air in front of us rippled as the LW suit shorted out and the guy came into view.
“Holy shit!” Calliope yelled.
“Go back to the others!”
As the LW field flickered away, he opened the defunct suit to reveal a device strapped around his middle. He raised a detonator in his good hand.
I fired one last burst, tearing through his throat. I didn’t look to see what happened; I grabbed the girl and carried us both behind a concrete divider.
“What the he—”
The bomb went off, and for a second the inside of the garage lit up. I clamped my hands over her ears as the explosion pounded through the air. Everything went white as glass, metal and concrete sprayed across the divider, scattering tiles. It was over in a second, a cloud of flame huffing back up the ramp as the twisted remains of a vehicle rolled off another one, crunching onto the blacktop. I grabbed her hand, and this time she held on. I pulled her to her feet and half dragged her back up toward the barricade.
Through the muted ringing, I could already hear footsteps approaching as the cops came storming down. I stopped, holding her back by her wrist, and pushed her to the wall.
She was maybe five-eight, with short hair that was cropped on the sides and back. She was all muscle, solid and scrappy. One of her front teeth had been knocked out very recently, and her lips were painted with black lipstick. She glared up at me, a pixie-haired prizefighter.
“Did he give you anything?” I asked into her ear.
“What?”
“Luis! Did he give you anything? Anything to hold on to? Anything like that?”
“No!”
“Hold still!”
Taking a step back, I peered through the fabric of her clothes, starting at the top and working my way down. The pocket over her left breast was shielded with something and I couldn’t see in, but in her right-side pocket I could see a set of keys, a tampon, and what looked like a tube of lipstick. I focused on it, turning up the intensity of the scan, and she frowned.
“What are you looking at?”
There was someth
ing inside of the tube. Something besides the lipstick itself.
“Give me the lipstick,” I said.
“What?”
“Now! Just give it to me!”
She continued to glare at me as she reached in and pulled out the tube.
“I don’t think it’s your color,” she said, tossing it over.
I uncapped it and turned the stick out all the way, pulling it free. When I shook the tube, a data spike fell from the hollow base into my palm.
“What the hell is that?” she asked. I held it up so she could see.
“That,” I said, “is the thing five people have already died for today. You were almost number six.”
She looked at it, and her thin lips, lacquered with that same black lipstick, curled into a sneer.
“He put that in there.”
“I know.”
She didn’t look scared anymore; she looked angry. She never even looked back at the carnage behind her.
“You owe me a lipstick,” she said.
“Yes, I do.”
“And a reward.”
The police were heading down the ramp, and in the distance I could hear sirens approaching. Somehow I knew better than to touch the girl in front of me again, so instead I gestured toward the uniformed officers.
“You’ll get both,” I told her.
“Your goddamn phone almost got us killed,” she muttered.
“Quiet.”
I fished it back out and turned it on. Zoe had called twice; the first was a hang-up, and in the second she left a four-second message with a picture attachment.
When I opened it, the picture expanded to show a photograph of Faye kneeling in front of the burning prison transport, the revivor in her lap.
I listened to the message. Her voice was heavily slurred.
“She’s in trouble,” she said. “She’s going to die.”
Faye Dasalia—Shine Tower Apartments, Unit 901
By the time the blood sample had been dropped at the lab, it was dark, and I was grateful when Shanks offered to swing me by my place and deal with signing the car back in himself. As he cut the engine on the dark street in front of my apartment, wind buffeted the vehicle, peppering the windows with snow and grit.