Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “Lot has changed in fifteen years, I guess.” Up ahead, a woman in a ski jacket and jeans was waving them down to stop just beyond the fence. Beyond her, Tenleytown swooped skyward. Scalli brought the van to a stop, rolling the window down as the woman approached.

  “All right,” said the sentry. “What are you two doing out here, anyway?”

  “Supply drop,” Scalli said instantly. “Got a van loaded up with food for you folks.”

  That got him a look loaded with exasperation and suspicion. “Great, another charity crawl,” she said with a grunt. “And what charity are you two with?”

  “We aren’t with any charity,” Bobbi cut in. Her heart had picked up in her chest, thundering with recognition. Bobbi knew that woman, or at least a younger version of her. She knew the lean face with his sharp cheekbones and the laughing mouth, eyes as warm and brown as the shag cut that licked her chin. “Uh, you’re Diana Blake, aren’t you?”

  The sentry looked at Bobbi with eyes that hooded with suspicion that had exploded with those words. Scalli looked as well, though he of course was just surprised. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Oh, I’m Bobbi,” said Bobbi. “Bobbi January. You remember me?”

  Diana Blake narrowed her eyes as she looked Bobbi over. “You don’t look familiar,” she said.

  “I got a body job,” Bobbi said, and ducked her head in embarrassment. “I, ah, got tired of looking plain and scrawny, you know?”

  Diana screwed her mouth up a little. “If you’re Bobbi,” she said, “why’d you punch Tim Callow in the nuts when he caught us playing in the back of his store?”

  Bobbi didn’t hesitate. “Because he called me Roberta,” she drawled, and she set her green eyes on Diana with a look of sheer theatrical menace. “Nobody calls me Roberta, you know that.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then Diana let out a snort of laughter. “Jesus fuck,” she cried, “you’re her, all right. Where you been?”

  “All over,” said Bobbi with a toss of her head. “Except, never really leaving here for long.”

  “Well, I don’t blame you for getting out,” said Diana, “You never were frontier material. C’mon, I’ll lead you guys in.”

  With that Diana turned and marched up ahead of the van, toward a gap between two office structures that had been converted into another pair of gates. As Scalli started the van to rolling again, he looked at Bobbi from the corner of his eye. There’d be questions later, oh yes. Questions aplenty.

  After the van had been parked beyond the inner gate and was being offloaded by militia, Diana had taken Scalli and Bobbi to talk. Tenleytown was a temple to the urban pioneer. It was just as Bobbi had remembered. Three sides of the square swung high and away from the earth, blank-faced concrete monoliths that formed a wide courtyard over which they towered, crisscrossed overhead by a system of platforms and walkways. Every bit of space that could be used had been converted into one thing or another – living space, storage, even mercantile facilities. Tenleytown used to have a single canteen; now the entire strip mall was almost full with restaurants and outfitters. “Christ,” muttered Scalli as he looked at the faces that crowded the courtyard, looked out from windows and from the walkways above. “How many people live here?”

  “Oh, two hundred families or so.”

  It was said pleasantly enough, but there was an absence of pride in her voice that Bobbi couldn’t place. Nevertheless, it was impressive; Bobbi let out a whistle. “That’s what, five, six hundred people?”

  Diana nodded. “Lot of immigrant families come here,” she said, “escaping from Civil Protection and its enforcement of the immigration laws.”

  “Instant containment and deportation,” Scalli said with a grunt. “The land of the free.”

  “We trade with folks from outside the area, too. It’s not like it is over in Renton anymore, Bobbi; the ferals and crazies out here have either moved east or been blown away. There are settlements like this one all over the Old City now.” Diana smiled now, and now the pride was very clear. “It’s really gotten better in the last two years. And when the government starts reclaiming this place in earnest—”

  “Do you think that’s liable to happen?” Bobbi blinked at her in astonishment.

  “That’s the rumor.” Diana shrugged, and led them across the way toward the end of the strip mall, which made up the lion’s share of Tenleytown’s eastern side. “Now that the hostile population has been reduced, we’ve been hearing whispers that the city might start pushing urban reform in earnest.”

  All Bobbi could do was shake her head. “I guess I wasn’t expecting this,” she said. “Time was this place was almost empty.”

  “It’s a lot different than it was,” said Diana with a nod. Scalli was eyeing her rifle, which not only looked new but looked rather expensive. “We’re thriving out here. It’s not like it was, especially since the highway guns were updated with new AI. They don’t target everything that moves anymore, just the obvious hostiles.”

  “Targeting profiles can be changed,” Bobbi said grimly. “You should be careful of that.”

  Diana smirked at that. “We are,” she said. “C’mon, you two, in here.”

  She took them into a little place at the end of the strip mall, where it formed a corner with an ancient Corlini Pasta which had been converted into a small power plant. They could hear the hum of the hydrogen generators inside even from a distance. Passing through a colorful southwestern blanket that had been hung from the open doorway, they entered a deep and narrow room that had been converted into restaurant space. A bar ran down the right side, stocked – more or less – with bottles of liquor and snacks. A fat Asian man in a loud neon orange windbreaker, his balding pate made into a kind of fringed dome by the wide bandanna he wore around his brow, sat watching them impassively from behind it.

  Bobbi knew this place well; she had been there many times when she was a girl. The smell of cigarette smoke and the faint scent of sandalwood incense brought back memories that she swiftly stifled, memories of a little girl playing under one of the warped tables that ran along the wall opposite the bar while her mother tried to latch on to one of a cavalcade of new boyfriends.

  “This is Fortune House,” Bobbi said. Her voice was rather flat.

  “It is,” Diana said, and she threw Bobbi a faint smile that was laced with poison. Bobbi made a dark sound in the back of her throat.

  “…I am missing something,” Scalli said as he followed both women, in the time-honored way of men who can see ahead of them, very clearly, an impending catfight.

  Diana went and took a seat at the last table, where she perched smiling that false, placid smile at the two of them. Bobbi took a seat opposite her, which left Scalli to grab a chair and sit on it like a mountain between them and the bar. Given the way Diana was looking at Bobbi, perhaps it was best that he would block immediate access to all the bottles.

  “So,” said Diana, looking across the table at Bobbi with that cyanide-and-sugar smile. “Why are you back?”

  “Business.” Bobbi’s tone had taken a hard edge; she didn’t want to deal with this shit. She didn’t want to deal with any of it, really, but at least out in civilization she didn’t have childhood memories getting stirred up around her. “You know how it is.

  Diana dipped her head a bit, brows arched. “Business in the Old City,” she said musingly. “Or is it just here in Tenleytown? Because then it’s my business, you understand. The militia keeps things nice and legal.”

  “That’s an improvement indeed.” Bobbi said, and her blood flushed with heat. “I remember how when we were growing up people could get just about anything here, or steal it.”

  “We know that very well, don’t we?” Diana’s dark eyes flashed.

  Scalli put one very large hand down between them at that, his arm like a turnpike bar. “All right,” he said in a weary voice, “enough of that. We’re supposed to be professionals here. What’s this noise all about?”

&nbs
p; Bobbi looked between Diana and Scalli. “It’s my mom,” she said. “She, uh, used to bunk with Diana’s dad here.”

  Scalli looked at Diana. “And I take it you didn’t like that, huh.”

  “My mother certainly didn’t.” Diana wore a strained smile still, but her words were sharp hooks in their ears.

  “Ah.” Scalli took a deep breath. So bitter were Diana’s eyes that Bobbi was sure that she might jump up at any minute and spray her with bullets from that expensive rifle. Bobbi should have known that this was going to happen, but unlike so many people she was fairly fucking realistic about things. Bobbi liked Diana; she was one of her best friends growing up. She didn’t know that her mother was fucking Di’s dad until well after her mother had disappeared into the wilds. What she did know, right here and now, was that this was some high-school bullshit that she had no time or desire to delve into.

  Neither did Scalli. The mountain of a man lowered his arm between them and laid his palm upon the table, heaving a deep breath like an irritable father. “All right,” he said, “I’m going to say this once. I get that you girls have history, and that’s all important or whatever— but it’s ancient history and deserves to get left back there. You want to know what we’re up to? We’re going to find that crazy girl what keeps blowing up buildings in the Old City and do some business with her. That has fuck all to do with this place, or you. So if you girls want to scratch each others’ eyes out, you do it later on. We have other shit that needs doing.” That said, he looked between the two of them. “All right?”

  The two women stared at him for a moment. Bobbi spoke first. “Sure, Scalli,” she said, more than a little surprised. “All right.”

  Diana, however, seemed to have latched onto only a portion of those words. “Wait,” she said, looking at Bobbi with widened eyes. “You’re going to go hunt down Redeye?”

  “That’s the plan.” Bobbi was happy to move on to a new topic. “We’re going to find out what the hell she’s up to.”

  “Well I’ll tell you what she’s up to,” said Diana. Suddenly she sounded very frightened. “She’s out there gathering up every crazy motherfucker in town, and then going out and shooting those corporates who work out here. Those motherfuckers are welcome to it, I say.”

  Scalli’s brows arched. “And you say this because…?”

  “Look.” Diana glanced at Bobbi a moment before training her attention on Scalli. “Part of the reason we have the militia we do is because those assholes were running us out of here. Like, they’d showed up once, tried to buy us out of the area. We just ignored them, right? Suddenly they’ve got security in the area, people are going missing, and then…” She stopped there, and her skin had gotten pale.

  “Go on,” Scalli urged. Now he looked grim.

  Diana’s eyes widened a little more; she looked like a little girl. “We had some reports of people being seen in coveralls, you know, working with the corporates on the other side of the interstate. Our people. Only they weren’t our people anymore.”

  “What do you mean?” It was Bobbi’s turn to urge her now.

  “Well…” Diana looked between them, her hands knitting together. Bobbi saw that they were trembling slightly. “They…they were dead, we heard. I mean obviously, holes in them and everything. But they were all white, and they were helping move things…and then…”

  Bobbi wanted to stop her and call her out on what was obviously a bullshit spook story, but she and Scalli knew better. “And then what, Di?”

  Diana looked straight at Bobbi now, her eyes flickering with a combination of disbelief and terror. “We had some scavengers out that way, you know, that’s how they saw them. And they got into a firefight with corporate security…they set the dead bodies on our people. Tore them to pieces, with their bare hands! They didn’t lie down, not even when the scavvies shot them up with their rifles. You had to blow their heads wide open to get them to stop, or literally cut them up ‘til they couldn’t move anymore…” Diana had turned very white with the recollection, and Bobbi was just about to go and get her a drink when Scalli spoke.

  “How did you find this out,” he asked, his tone gentle. “Were there survivors?”

  “Yes,” Diana managed to say. “Barely. Just one, my Francois. He died not long after. Damned things had…they’d pulled his arm out the socket. We don’t know how got here without passing out, but by then…” And then she was silent for a moment, her eyes turned to the table and her face set and hard like sea-washed granite. When she finally spoke again it was with an entirely plastic calm. “Since then there have been other sightings, other…encounters. But not since Redeye’s started blowing things up.”

  Bobbi and Scalli shared significant looks. “I think I understand,” Bobbi said. “You think we’re going to go and kill the girl, and these corporates will get back to fucking things up all over again. That it?”

  “You mean you aren’t?” Diana looked up from the table, her face a mask of surprise. “But I mean, you brought this guy with you. I always knew you as a talker, Bobbi, but you never were much of a fighter at all— but this guy…I mean, I just thought you were going to straight up assassinate her.”

  “I got no interest in hurting that girl, Di,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head.

  “Good,” said Diana, “because I can’t let that happen. We’d lose the whole town if they turned those things on us!”

  “That explains the snipers.” Scalli looked thoughtful, propping his head up with one giant fist. “You folks are prepping for an invasion, aren’t you? Or you were, at least.

  Diana nodded. “It only made sense,” she said. “They were getting very close for a few years – setting up operations in the city, preying on Oldies like I said. So we prepared for it. And then afterward, we figured out that this girl was diverting their attention elsewhere while blowing up all their shit, so we just made use of the advantage while we had it, you know?” She rubbed at her eyes a moment, which had gotten very red and wet with her recollection of the ghouls and the death of her apparent lover, and then gave Bobbi a very suspicious look. “Wait. If you’re not going to kill her, what are you going to do?”

  “We’re here to point her toward a better target,” Bobbi said, and she grinned. “When we’re through, we’re going to make sure that Genefex is put in a seriously bad way.”

  Diana’s eyes narrowed a bit, but they glittered with interest. “How bad of a way?”

  Scalli fielded that one. “Put out of business,” he said, “or at the very least put down the path to certain ruin. That good enough for you?”

  “Quite good enough,” said Diana. In her dark eyes, an unmistakable light of wanting vengeance had bloomed. “How can I help?”

  By that night, they had an escort. They hadn’t expected that the militia would be quite so happy to help as they had been; Bobbi was hoping for information on what was going on down here, maybe a direction as to where Redeye had gone. But though Diana might have had an axe to grind thanks to her man being killed, she definitely wasn’t the only one who’d lost something. There were others on the militia staff that had lost family members and friends, and some civvies as well – but of course, as angry as they were at Genefex and its predations, they were also spooked as hell about those ghouls. In the end, there were two people who stepped up to come along. The first was Diana herself, which of course meant that further bitchery would probably come arise at some point as her business with Bobbi was clearly not over. The other was a fellow by the name of Harry Mason.

  Harry had lived in Tenleytown since a little before Bobbi had left, though she hadn’t met him back then. Years ago, Harry had served as an officer for SevinArms, a PMC on contract with the Atlantic Bloc during the European War. Bobbi didn’t like the sound of that. But Scalli had other opinions; here was a military man, he said, who had helped train a lot of the existing town militia. There was no reason why they couldn’t bring him along, especially since Harry had been a recon man back in the day. Th
e two of them stayed in the barracks that night, while they waited for the community council to approve the help that Diana and Harry had already pledged to them. At some point during the night, Bobbi was pulled from nameless dreams by Scalli, who got up and left for a while. He did not try to wake her, and she fell asleep before he returned.

  The next morning delivered their go-ahead from the council. Taking on Genefex might be a tall order, but the advantages for the Oldies were clear should they succeed. They loaded up into a converted SUV that served as a recon car for the militia, an old Nissan Highwayman on big tires with an electric engine and a solar kit they could use out in the field. Bobbi had forgotten how quiet electrics were, given the prevalence of hydrogen cars; it made nearly no sound as it rolled out of the militia garage, with its body plated and covered in flat gray paint spattered with stains so that it looked like aged concrete. Its wheel wells were tinged red at the edges with rust, and there was a cupola cut out of the roof where an ancient machine gun slumped, desolately awaiting use. They parked Scalli’s van in its spot, and as the hazy, red-orange halo of sunrise threw its lurid stain across the gray sky, Bobbi was reminded of blood in water.

  They drove east.

  Redeye’s last attack had been staged at the Nissan-Sterling plant, which had been the latest sequential assault on the list of Genefex facilities that Bobbi had access to. The next location on the list was called ‘Drone Processor 072’, which sounded all kinds of fucked up to her. Bobbi knew the physical address to be the site of an old sewage treatment plant on the extreme northeastern edge of the Old City, up toward Newcastle. Out there, the whole band of the Verge that ran the eastern side of Lake Washington was not a swath of fading slums but bristling with manufacturing areas, lots of corporate interests represented in the forms of plants and factories. The wall up there was heavier than the one south of Sea-Tac; after all, it was corporate interests that were at risk if the crazies boiled over, not civil, and nobody could countenance that.