Apocalypse Alley

by Don Allmon

  Shutting him down, like he was nothing more than a faulty machine. The words almost didn’t register.

  Neural implants suffered mechanical failure same as any other system. They could overheat; there were chemical breakdowns; there were viruses. At some level of safety tolerance, a damaged implant would trigger a fail-safe that dropped the wearer into a barbiturate coma to protect the brain from collateral damage. Recovery rates from catastrophic failure without this protection averaged around 6%. With it, 19%.

  Buzz’s implants were not failing. BangBang was going to send a false-positive and trigger the coma. He was going to drop Buzz into a coma just to save his fucking data.

  He threw everything he had at BangBang. He bent BangBang’s fucking world into knots even as he realized it was all over now. He couldn’t fight Valentine and BangBang both. The cyborg found part of Buzz’s porn collection, and it should have been funny she’d waste time burning that, but it wasn’t funny. It was a fucking kick in the nuts.

  And several levels of consciousness away, his sensation of the external world so dim, fighting a war on two fronts, he almost missed the crack of shots. He felt the equivalent of BangBang and the cyborg both startle: a stuttering in their signals. Gunshots and the physical world filtered in like a dream.

  Comet. Thank God. My fucking hero.

  Comet’s body did all the things it was programmed to do, released all the chems Duke had specced, and his mind went awash with a dreamlike lucidity. He crossed rooftops in two or three bounds. He crossed alleys and streets in single leaps, chasing the sound of gunshots and a ragged trail of gouges in asphalt and scars on concrete.

  And then he found them.

  One Atari held Shaggy in a death grip. The second stood guard. And bent over Shaggy, one hand wrapped through his hair, was someone with way too much sense of dramatic evil to be real.

  Comet fired on the fucker.

  A shot hit the cyborg in the temple with a good solid whang and the cyborg’s head snapped back. Her hat went spinning, and she dropped to the pavement. Analysis said she wasn’t dead. He fired on the drone holding Shaggy, and Shaggy shouted, hoarse and barely audible but for Comet’s hearing, “Not that one.”

  “Not that one”? That’s the one that’s going to tear him apart! But he switched targets anyway, and the rest of his shots hammered into BANDIT’s nano-ceramic plating.

  Magazine empty, no spares, he holstered his pistol and raced down the alley. BANDIT, seriously dented but still operational, stepped out and spun up its gun. Comet slid to one side and the bullets flew past. Hand-to-hand now, he pushed the drone’s gun away while he tore into the thing with a precision jab. He’d fought these before; he knew their weak spots where critical wiring or hydraulics were located. Its pilot wounded, BANDIT should have been running on native VI, and native VI didn’t stand a chance against anyone well trained and Comet was a fuck-ton of well trained. He’d disable it good and fast before the cyborg recovered.

  Except the drone twisted and dodged away from Comet’s jab and none of his blows connected or slid past its defenses. Knife-bladed insectile limbs deflected him. It rose up on two legs and now it had four limbs to fight with. It flashed knives around. It spun and lashed out. Comet caught its blows on the armored sleeve of his motorcycle jacket. Puffs of pulverized plating and fabric filled the air. Their arms blurred in strike, feint, and counterstrike, beats like a jazz drum solo played too fast.

  This shouldn’t have happened. He should have taken the drone easily.

  Comet leapt away. He crouched low and balanced, hands up and ready, fingers gently curled. The alley went quiet.

  The cyborg was already standing. Synthetic skin had been blasted from her forehead, exposing divot-ed metal underneath. A patch cable ran from her head to Shaggy’s. Her red eye flickered beneath L’Oréal hair, then steadied.

  Comet rolled his shoulders. “You’re a Master.”

  The cyborg drew a pistol and fired. Comet shifted to put BANDIT between them, and the shot caught nothing but air. BANDIT attacked, still raised on hind legs, four arms snaking and darting. Comet caught one and twisted just so. The arm dropped useless. COWBOY uncurled one leg from Shaggy (and Shaggy inhaled, rasping and desperate for air), extended a gun and fired a blaze of shots. One struck Comet in the shoulder, and his arm went numb and spun him off-balance. He retreated, a step again, then another, while turning blow after blow with his one good arm and keeping BANDIT between him and the cyborg. The cyborg saw what he was doing: using her own drones to block line of fire. BANDIT suddenly shot up the wall, driving its piton-claws into cinder blocks. Comet’s cover gone, the cyborg and COWBOY unloaded an entire magazine at where he stood.

  Had stood. The flare of lights from the guns were blinding, and when the gunfire stopped, Comet wasn’t there. He’d gone up the opposite wall. He threw himself at the cyborg, but BANDIT intercepted midair, and the two crashed together. Comet, inside the drone’s reach, tore, kicked, and pulled at its soft guts. Red hydraulic fluid sprayed everywhere. They fell eight meters.

  The drone had more legs and swept Comet’s out from under him so instead of landing gracefully, Comet slammed into concrete. Damaged, the drone landed no better, but its bladed claws dug into Comet’s chest armor and lifted and drove him into the wall.

  Comet’s head whacked against cinder block and his vision went pixilated and lined. Whack, again and again. Pain exploded through his head. Whack, again, and his hearing went into a high tin-whistle whine.

  BANDIT’s claws held him in place while COWBOY drew a laser-sighted bead on him that couldn’t be missed.

  Buzz felt BangBang flee his mind. The cyborg’s attacks faltered.

  Buzz took the advantage and went straight for what he’d wanted all along. He played man-in-the-middle and tricked COWBOY into thinking that its pilot had requested a video file. Military-quality drones kept a recording of everything they saw for debriefings. It would tell him what happened to JT, Austin, and Dante. He downloaded.

  Dimly, outside where the world moved in slow motion, Duke’s supersoldier fought BANDIT and Valentine.

  She was still distracted away from Buzz. Something about Comet had earned her undivided attention. BANDIT hammered Comet against a wall and held him there. COWBOY cycled a fresh magazine and aimed a killing shot.

  Buzz grabbed control of the drone’s gun arm, threw its aim to the left, and fired. Pieces of BANDIT went flying, armor useless—it was just that many bullets. Huge divots blew out of the cinder block walls, tracing a path of devastation right toward the cyborg.

  —You care more about your friends than 3djinn, Valentine sent. —What a fool.

  —He ain’t my friend.

  She cut their link entirely. The gunfire stopped a moment too soon, and Buzz was alone in his own head, the world gray and peaceful.

  The bad guys fled, and Comet slid down the wall to the pavement amid pieces of bot, nothing graceful about it at all.

  Valentine and her two drones scattered three different directions. Comet didn’t pursue, not even BANDIT, broken and wobbly and missing some legs. He crawled over to where Shaggy lay.

  Shaggy looked like hell. He’d looked a bit battered before—bruised eyes like he’d had no sleep for days, cuts and scratches everywhere scabbed over but still red, recent—but now he was positively wrecked. His face was puffy and red from the drone’s choke hold. He was flat on his back. He was shaking, and Comet was afraid he was caught in a seizure from whatever Valentine had done to him while they’d been linked.

  It wasn’t a seizure. Shaggy was trying to laugh. “I got you. I got you, you cocky son of a taint.”

  Shaggy struggled to stand, but he couldn’t even push himself up. Comet offered him a hand. Shaggy batted it away at first, then took it anyway. Standing, he clung to Comet, one arm over Comet’s shoulder. The other held his waist like drunken slow dancing. Shaggy’s breathing sounded bad the way it did when you’ve been half strangled.

  Comet went a bit hard: Shaggy
hanging on him, depending on him the way he was, fucking cute as he was, the way he’d fought her like he had. This was how bad things got worse, this feeling here. This was Duke’s fault, the fucker—the dumb-ass orc wiring Duke had given him, and all he could hope was Shaggy didn’t notice.

  Comet walked him a bit until the guy got his feet under him and Comet didn’t feel quite so close to a hard-on.

  “You okay? Link me a diagnostic.” Because everyone always said they were okay even when they weren’t.

  Shaggy snapped to his senses and jerked free. He stumbled, fell against the alley wall, and glared at Comet.

  “You’re welcome,” Comet said.

  “For what?”

  “For saving your damn life.”

  “You didn’t save my life. I saved your life!”

  Comet wasn’t going to argue. He’d have been a smear of lumpy red paste on that wall if Shaggy hadn’t gone crazy with COWBOY’s gun when he had. “You did. Thank you for saving my life.”

  Shaggy blinked a couple of times. His glare faded soft and apologetic. “Oh. Well. You’re welcome. Don’t think that means I’m going to blow you or anything.”

  And Comet’s cheeks went hot thinking Shaggy knew about the hard-on. Or maybe he was just talking shit. Comet changed the subject. “Did you get what we needed?”

  Shaggy grinned. “I need a place to sit down and analyze it.”

  Long before Buzz had ever met JT, Bruegel had gone deep under. He’d never even said goodbye. It had been the worst fucking breakup in the history of ever.

  Bruegel had been Buzz’s first: a high-school crush he’d had on an older guy that had soured almost immediately but Buzz had been too stupid to leave.

  Buzz had been seventeen, Bruegel nineteen, when he found Bruegel half-naked, skin an unnatural gray shade, sprawled on the bed they shared, plastic tubing spread everywhere, all filled with happy colors that would keep him in a lucid coma and keep him fed. Bruegel would never come back from the digital paradise he’d found.

  Buzz hadn’t called 911.

  That was when he’d become a real hacker, not just a kid messing around. He hacked banks, hospitals, hospices, ambulances, and medical supply companies. He stole more money, equipment, and identities than he’d ever imagined he could. He built Bruegel a multimillion-dollar empire because he had to keep the guy alive and give Bruegel what he’d wanted more than he’d wanted Buzz.

  In the end (even today, this very morning at seven o’clock EST on the dot) interns wheeled Bruegel’s bed onto the porch of a hospice in the Everglades Islands as if Bruegel could appreciate that there were alligators frolicking beneath him. His bed was more comfortable than the broken-down thing he’d fucked Buzz in, and he was fed all the unpronounceable fluids he needed to stay alive, and there were trust funds that would pay his hospice bills until he was a thousand goddamn years old while his mind wandered the networks and built mathematical castles there.

  Months after Bruegel had been safely moved to the hospice, there’d been a knock at Buzz’s door. He’d opened it up because he was too fucking tired to care that he hadn’t buzzed anyone up. And there she’d stood, holograms of extinct butterflies flickering around her. “I hear you need a new roommate.”

  He hadn’t advertised, so he should have slammed the door on her. He should have been that suspicious. Instead, he’d let her in.

  Two weeks later over breakfast, she said, “I know what you did for Bruegel. He was an asshole and didn’t deserve it. But he was also a genius, and what you did means a lot to a whole bunch of people you don’t know.”

  Buzz poured almond milk over his puffed rice and didn’t tell her what it had meant to him.

  Four weeks later, Roan said, “I want to introduce you to some people. They’re called 3djinn.”

  Six years later was now.

  Comet’s apartment was nothing special. It was a studio on the top floor. It was always too hot and smelled like baked wood. There was a run-down iron-framed bed he’d bought on auction, a bamboo-wood dresser, and a closet filled with so many weapons, explosives, and ammo, his neighbors would have freaked if they’d known. On the dresser were two holo-photos. In one, his parents, anachronistically stoic; in the other, Grandmaster Natalia Jen, faintly smiling in the TRADOC dress blues. Otherwise, the place was practically barren, even the walls. He never stayed here when he was in town. He stayed at Duke’s place, where there was a pool and AC that didn’t frost over.

  Comet glanced out the window, half-expecting to see Valentine waiting on the street looking noir.

  Shaggy nosed around the place. He reached for the holo of Grandmaster Jen.

  “Leave that alone.”

  Shaggy did. “Greentown freenet blocks the protocols I use. I’ll need access to your network.”

  “No, you don’t.” There was no sign of Valentine. Probably she’d gone to lick her wounds and reassess. He pulled the shade.

  “Fine. Tell your neighbor, Susan, she should change her password.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Using her network. Her last name’s on the resident’s list by the front door. Cross referenced some shit, crawled a few social networking sites, ran her vital stats—birthdays, dog’s name, boyfriends, et cetera—through a password generator and boom. It only took about five thousand tries.”

  “You’re a fucking menace. Leave her alone.”

  “And you’re nothing but a wannabe paladin. You don’t want me to mess with your neighbors’ networks, give me the password to yours.”

  Comet gave the thief his password and made a note to change it later.

  Shaggy said, “Your head’s bleeding. You might have a concussion.”

  “I don’t have a concussion.”

  “She smacked you into that wall pretty hard.”

  “I was built to be smacked pretty hard.”

  “Got that right,” Shaggy mumbled. He sat on the bed. “Well, you still got blood all over the back of your head.” His eyes went half-lidded, and Comet figured he was looking over the data he’d stolen from COWBOY.

  Comet touched the back of his head. His hair was all gummed up and sticky.

  He went through his closet, pulled out an armored motorcycle jacket he hadn’t worn in forever. It might fit the guy. And he dug to the bottom of one drawer and pulled out a pair of jeans from before the accident, when he’d been a couple of sizes thicker through the waist. He tossed the jacket and jeans to Shaggy. It startled him out of his trance.

  “You need better protection, riding. Put those on while I clean up.” And then he grabbed Shaggy by the wrist, snapped one end of the handcuffs around him and the other end around the bed frame.

  “What the fuck!”

  “I still don’t trust you. And I ain’t turning my back on you while you’re free.”

  Comet kept the bathroom door open. He turned the medicine cabinet mirror so he could keep an eye on Shaggy while he cleaned himself up. He shucked his jacket and T-shirt. He ran warm water over a washcloth and dabbed it at the back of his head, and it came away bloody. Head wounds always bled worse than they were. And, yeah, he had a bit of a headache and the washcloth stung and he was achy everywhere like you’d expect from fist-fighting a robot. He didn’t check his own medical diagnostic. He was fine. Comet was always fine.

  In the mirror, he watched Shaggy glare at the jeans. Shaggy stood and tried to undo his cargo shorts, but the cuffs held his left hand too close to the bed frame and hampered him. He’d have to dress one-handed. He shifted his glare to Comet reflected in the mirror and mouthed, Asshole.

  Comet gave him an evil grin.

  Shaggy turned his back to him like Comet was gonna watch, kicked off his shoes, and dropped his shorts. Comet watched.

  Shaggy wore boxers. They were a little threadbare, and the band had lost some of its elasticity, so when the shorts dropped, they tugged the boxers down a bit too, enough to show the top curves of Shaggy’s bubble ass and the V of his crack. It was the lily-pinkest ass Co
met had ever seen. There was an ass that had never once seen the sun.

  Shaggy fought with getting the jeans over his feet one-handed. Fought some more to get them up his legs, hiking up one side and then the other, and finally pulled them over his ass.

  Back in 501, Comet had kept a close eye on Shaggy, expecting him to make a break for it while he and Duke reviewed the recording of Jason’s place. Maybe he’d kept too close an eye, because bits and pieces of Shaggy stuck in Comet’s imagination like the afterburn of headlights on his digital retinas: The puckish slope of Shaggy’s nose and the light freckles there. Brown eyes, dilated huge in the orclight. Shaggy’s fingernails ragged from chewing. The copper-orange hair on his arms. Freckles on the back of his wrists so sun-thickened they ran together.

  Shaggy filled out Comet’s old jeans just fine. Really fine.

  Water ran in the sink. Water dripped from the forgotten washrag down Comet’s back. Comet didn’t notice.

  Shaggy suddenly turned, and Comet looked away, blinking, eyes gone sticky.

  He dabbed at his head a couple of more times and rinsed the rag. The scrapes had stopped bleeding. In a few hours, you wouldn’t even be able to find where the wounds had been.

  In the mirror: Jeans up and buttoned, Shaggy threw down the jacket he couldn’t put on while handcuffed. He dug through the pockets of his cargo shorts and pulled out all kinds of shit: cables, bare chips in blue and green plastic, and a St. Christopher medal sans chain. They said astronauts came back a little messed up, believing things were out there. Net runners were like that too. Prancer carried a hamsa. The ones who spent a lot of time in the net always carried something.

  Comet had frisked Shaggy more than once, so none of it was new. It was the usual junk.

  Shaggy took one of the chips no bigger than a thumbnail and laid it against the electronic lock on the cuffs. A moment later the cuffs popped.

  Comet went still. His body flooded with chems and his senses went sharp. His closet was open, all those weapons right there.

  But Shaggy just tossed the cuffs to the side and put on his sneakers. He didn’t even glance at the closet. His shoes had laces, which no one saw anymore, and he double-knotted them. Then he took Comet’s jacket and filled all the little pockets it had with cables and chips and his medal. Then he scooted back on the bed, sat cross-legged, laid his hands in his lap, and dropped instantly deep into a net fugue, which was as vulnerable as he could possibly make himself, like he trusted Comet not to kill him while he checked out.