Count Zero

by William Gibson

  “Lights down there,” Angie said, straining forward in her harness to peer through the rain.

  Turner made out a watery yellow glow and twin dark uprights. He laughed. “Gas station,” he said. “Left over from the old system, before they put the big road through. Somebody must live there. Too bad we don’t run on gasoline . . .” He eased the hover down the gravel slope; as he drew nearer, he saw that the yellow glow came from a pair of rectangular windows. He thought he saw a figure move in one of them. “Country,” he said. “These boys may not be too happy to see us.” He reached into the parka and slid the Smith & Wesson from its nylon holster, put it on the seat between his thighs. When they were five meters from the rusting gas pumps, he sat the hover down in a broad puddle and killed the turbines. The rain was still pissing down in windblown sheets, and he saw a figure in a flapping khaki poncho duck out of the front door of the station. He slid the side window open ten centimeters and raised his voice above the rain: “Sorry t’ bother you. We had to get off the road. Our wipers are trashed. Didn’t know you were down here.” The man’s hands, in the glow from the windows, were hidden beneath the plastic poncho, but it was obvious that he held something.

  “Private property,” the man said, his lean face streaked with rain.

  “Couldn’t stay on the road,” Turner called. “Sorry to bother you . . .”

  The man opened his mouth, began to gesture with the thing he held beneath the poncho, and his head exploded. It almost seemed to Turner that it happened before the red line of light scythed down and touched him, pencil-thick beam swinging casually, as though someone were playing with a flashlight. A blossom of red, beaten down by the rain, as the figure went to its knees and tumbled forward, a wire-stocked Savage 410 sliding from beneath the poncho.

  Turner hadn’t been aware of moving, but he found that he’d stoked the turbines, swung the controls over to Angie, and clawed his way out of his harness. “I say go, run it through the station . . .” Then he was up, yanking at the lever that opened the roof hatch, the heavy revolver in his hand. The roar of the black Honda reached him as soon as the hatch slid back, a lowering shadow overhead, just visible through the driving rain. “Now!” He pulled the trigger before she could kick them forward and through the wall of the old station, the recoil jarring his elbow numb against the roof of the hover. The bullet exploded somewhere overhead with a gratifying crack; Angie floored the hover and they plunged through the woodframe structure, with barely enough time for Turner to get his head and shoulders back down through the hatch. Something in the house exploded, probably a propane canister, and the hover skewed to the left.

  Angie swung them back around as they crashed out through the far wall. “Where?” she yelled, above the turbine.

  As if in answer, the black Honda came corkscrewing down, twenty meters in front of them, and threw up a silver sheet of rain. Turner grabbed the controls and they slid forward, the hover blasting up ten-meter fantails of ground water; they took the little combat copter square in its polycarbon canopy, its alloy fuselage crumpling like paper under the impact. Turner backed off and went in again, faster. This time the broken copter slammed into the trunks of two wet gray pines, lay there like some kind of long-winged fly.

  “What happened?” Angie said, her hands to her face. “What happened?”

  Turner tore registration papers and dusty sunglasses from a compartment in the door beside him, found a flashlight, checked its batteries.

  “What happened?” Angie said again, like a recording, “What happened?”

  He scrambled back up through the hatch, the gun in one hand, the light in the other. The rain had slackened. He jumped down onto the hover’s hood, and then over the bumpers and into ankle-deep puddles, splashing toward the bent black rotors of the Honda.

  There was a reek of escaping jet fuel. The polycarbon canopy had cracked like an egg. He aimed the Smith & Wesson and thumbed the xenon flash twice, two silent pops of merciless light showing him blood and twisted limbs through the shattered plastic. He waited, then used the flashlight. Two of them. He came closer, holding the flashlight well away from his body, an old habit. Nothing moved. The smell of escaping fuel grew even stronger. Then he was tugging at the bent hatch. It opened. They both wore image-amp goggles. The round blank eye of the laser stared straight up into the night, and he reached down to touch the matted sheepskin collar of the dead man’s bomber jacket. The blood that covered the man’s beard looked very dark, almost black in the flashlight’s beam. It was Oakey. He swung the beam left and saw that the other man, the pilot, was Japanese. He swung the beam back and found a flat black flask beside Oakey’s foot. He picked it up, stuffed it into one of the parka’s pockets, and dashed back to the hover. In spite of the rain, orange flames were starting to lick up through the wreckage of the gas station. He scrambled up the hover’s bumper, across the hood, up again, and down through the hatch.

  “What happened?” Angie said, as though he hadn’t left. “What happened?”

  He fell into his seat, not bothering with the harness, and revved the turbine. “That’s a Hosaka helicopter,” he said, swinging them around. “They must have been following us. They had a laser. They waited until we were off the highway. Didn’t want to leave us out there for the cops to find. When we pulled in here, they decided to go for us, but they must have figured that that poor fucker was with us. Or maybe they were just taking out a witness . . .”

  “His head,” she said, her voice shaking, “his head . . .”

  “That was the laser,” Turner said, steering back up the service road. The rain was thinning, nearly gone. “Steam. The brain vaporizes and the skull blows . . .”

  Angie doubled over and threw up. Turner steered with one hand, Oakey’s flask in the other. He pried the snap-fit lid open with his teeth and gulped back a mouthful of Oakey’s Wild Turkey.

  As they reached the shoulder of the highway, the Honda’s fuel found the flames of the ruined station, and the twisted fireball showed Turner the mall again, the light of the parachute flares, the sky whiting out as the jet streaked for the Sonora border.

  Angie straightened up, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and began to shake.

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” he said, driving east again. She said nothing, and he glanced sideways to see her rigid and upright in her seat, her eyes showing white in the faint glow of the instruments, her face blank. He’d seen her that way in Rudy’s bedroom, when Sally had called them in, and now that same flood of language, a soft fast rattle of something that might have been patois French. He had no recorder, no time, he had to drive . . .

  “Hang on,” he said, as they accelerated, “you’ll be okay . . .” Sure she couldn’t hear him at all. Her teeth were chattering; he could hear it above the turbine. Stop, he thought, long enough to get something between her teeth, his wallet or a fold of cloth. Her hands were plucking spastically at the straps of the harness.

  “There is a sick child in my house.” The hover nearly left the pavement, when he heard the voice come from her mouth, deep and slow and weirdly glutinous. “I hear the dice being tossed, for her bloody dress. Many are the hands who dig her grave tonight, and yours as well. Enemies pray for your death, hired man. They pray until they sweat. Their prayers are a river of fever.” And then a sort of croaking that might have been laughter.

  Turner risked a glance, saw a silver thread of drool descend from her rigid lips. The deep muscles of her face had contorted into a mask he didn’t know. “Who are you?”

  “I am the Lord of Roads.”

  “What do you want?”

  “This child for my horse, that she may move among the towns of men. It is well that you drive east. Carry her to your city. I shall ride her again. And Samedi rides with you, gunman. He is the wind you hold in your hands, but he is fickle, the Lord of Graveyards, no matter that you have served him well . . .” He turned in time to see her slump sideways in the harness, her head lolling, mouth slack.
r />   25

  KASUAL/GOTHICK

  “THIS IS THE Finn’s phone program,” said the speaker below the screen, “and the Finn, he’s not here. You wanna download, you know the access code already. You wanna leave a message, leave it already.” Bobby stared at the image on the screen and slowly shook his head. Most phone programs were equipped with cosmetic video subprograms written to bring the video image of the owner into greater accordance with the more widespread paradigms of personal beauty, erasing blemishes and subtly molding facial outlines to meet idealized statistical norms. The effect of a cosmetic program on the Finn’s grotesque features was definitely the weirdest thing Bobby had ever seen, as though somebody had gone after the face of a dead gopher with a full range of mortician’s crayons and paraffin injections.

  “That’s not natural,” said Jammer, sipping Scotch.

  Bobby nodded.

  “Finn,” Jammer said, “is agoraphobic. Gives him the hives to leave that impacted shitpile of a shop. And he’s a phone junkie, can’t not answer a call if he’s there. I’m starting to think the bitch is right. Lucas is dead and some heavy shit is going down . . .”

  “The bitch,” Jackie said, from behind the bar, “knows already.”

  “She knows,” Jammer said, putting the plastic glass down and fingering his bolo tie, “she knows. Talked to a hoodoo in the matrix, so she knows . . .”

  “Well, Lucas isn’t answering, and Beauvoir isn’t answering, so maybe she’s right.” Bobby reached out and shut off the phone as the record tone began to squeal.

  Jammer was gotten up in a pleated shirt, white dinner jacket, and black trousers with satin stripes down the leg, and Bobby took this to be his working outfit for the club. “Nobody’s here,” he said now, looking from Bobby to Jackie. “Where’s Bogue and Sharkey? Where’s the waitresses?”

  “Who’s Bogue and Sharkey?” Bobby asked.

  “The bartenders. I don’t like this.” He got up from his chair, walked to the door, and gently edged one of the curtains aside. “What the fuck are those dipshits doing out there? Hey, Count, this looks like your speed. Get over here . . .”

  Bobby got up, full of misgivings—he hadn’t felt like telling Jackie or Jammer about letting Leon see him, because he didn’t want to look like a wilson—and walked over to where the club owner stood.

  “Go on. Take a peek. Don’t let ’em see you. They’re pretending so hard not to watch us, you can almost smell it.”

  Bobby moved the curtain, careful to keep the crack no more than a centimeter wide, and looked out. The shopping crowd seemed to have been replaced almost entirely by black-crested Gothick boys in leather and studs, and—amazingly—by an equal proportion of blond Kasuals, the latter decked out in the week’s current Shinjuku cottons and gold-buckled white loafers. “I dunno,” Bobby said, looking up at Jammer, “but they shouldn’t be together, Kasuals and Gothicks, you know? They’re like natural enemies, it’s in the DNA or something. . . .” He took another look. “Goddamn, there’s about a hundred of ’em.”

  Jammer stuck his hands deep in his pleated trousers. “You know any of those guys personally?”

  “Gothicks, I know some of ’em to talk to. Except it’s hard to tell ’em apart. Kasuals, they’ll stomp anything that isn’t Kasual. That’s mainly what they’re about. But I just been cut up by Lobes anyway, and Lobes are supposed to be under treaty with the Gothicks, so who knows?”

  Jammer sighed. “So, I guess you don’t feel like strolling out there and asking one what they think they’re up to?”

  “No,” Bobby said earnestly, “I don’t.”

  “Hmmm.” Jammer looked at Bobby in a calculating way, a way that Bobby definitely didn’t like.

  Something small and hard dropped from the high black ceiling and clicked loudly on one of the round black tables. The thing bounced and hit the carpet, rolling, and landed between the toes of Bobby’s new boots. Automatically, he bent and picked it up. An old-fashioned, slot-headed machine screw, its threads brown with rust and its head clotted with dull black latex paint. He looked up as a second one struck the table, and caught a glimpse of an unnervingly agile Jammer vaulting the bar, beside the universal credit unit. Jammer vanished, there was a faint ripping sound—Velcro— and Bobby knew that Jammer had the squat little automatic weapon he’d seen there earlier in the day. He looked around, but Jackie was nowhere in sight.

  A third screw ticked explosively on the formica of the tabletop.

  Bobby hesitated, confused, but then followed Jackie’s example and got out of sight, moving as quietly as he could. He crouched behind one of the club’s wooden screens and watched as the fourth screw came down, followed by a slender cascade of fine dark dust. There was a scraping sound, and then a square steel ceiling grate vanished abruptly, withdrawn into some kind of duct. He glanced quickly to the bar, in time to see the fat recoil compensator on the barrel of Jammer’s gun as it swung up . . .

  A pair of thin brown legs dangled from the opening now, and a gray sharkskin hem smudged with dust.

  “Hold it,” Bobby said, “it’s Beauvoir!”

  “You bet it’s Beauvoir,” came the voice from above, big and hollow with the echo of the duct. “Get that damn table out of the way.”

  Bobby scrambled out from behind the screen and hauled the table and chairs to the side.

  “Catch this,” Beauvoir said, and dangled a bulging olive-drab pack from one of its shoulder straps, then let it go. The weight of the thing nearly took Bobby to the floor. “Now get out of my way . . .” Beauvoir swung down out of the duct, hung from the opening’s edge with both hands, then dropped.

  “What happened to the screamer I had up there?” Jammer asked, standing up behind the bar, the little machine gun in his hands.

  “Right here,” Beauvoir said, tossing a dull gray bar of phenolic resin to the carpet. It was wrapped with a length of fine black wire. “No other way I could get in here without a regular army of shitballs knowing about it, as it happens. Somebody’s obviously given them the blueprints to the place, but they’ve missed that one.”

  “How’d you get up to the roof?” Jackie asked, stepping from behind a screen.

  “I didn’t,” Beauvoir said, pushing his big plastic frames back up his nose. “I shot a line of monomol across from the stack next door, then slid over on a ceramic spindle . . .” His short nappy hair was full of furnace dust. He looked at her gravely. “You know,” he said.

  “Yes. Legba and Papa Ougou, in the matrix. I jacked with Bobby, on Jammer’s deck . . .”

  “They blew Ahmed away on the Jersey freeway. Probably used the same launcher they did Bobby’s old lady with . . .”

  “Who?”

  “Still not sure,” Beauvoir said, kneeling beside the pack and clicking open the quick-release plastic fasteners, “but it’s starting to shape up . . . What I was working on, up until I heard Lucas had been hit, was running down the Lobes who mugged Bobby for his deck. That was probably an accident, just business as usual, but somewhere there’s a couple of Lobes with our icebreaker . . . That had potential, for sure, because the Lobes are hotdoggers, some of them, and they do a little business with Two-a-Day. So Two-a-Day and I were making the rounds, looking to learn what we could. Which was dick, as it turned out, except that while we were with this dust case called Alix, who’s second assistant warlord or something, he gets a call from his opposite number, who Two-a-Day pins as a Barrytown Gothick name of Raymond.” He was unloading the pack as he spoke, laying out weapons, tools, ammunition, coils of wire. “Raymond wants to talk real bad, but Alix is too cool to do it in front of us. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, but this is official warlord biz,’ this dumbshit says, so natch, we excuse our humble selves, shuffle and bow and all, and nip around the corner. Use Two-a-Day’s modular phone to ring up our cowboys back in the Sprawl and put them on to Alix’s phone, but fast. Those cowboys went into Alix’s conversation with Raymond like a wire into cheese.” He pulled a deformed twelve-gauge shotgun, barely longer
than his forearm, from the pack, selected a fat drum magazine from the display he’d made on the carpet, and clicked the two together. “You ever see one of these motherfuckers? South African, prewar . . .” Something in his voice and the set of his jaw made Bobby suddenly aware of his contained fury. “Seems Raymond has been approached by this guy, and this guy has lots of money, and he wants to hire the Gothicks outright, the whole apparat, to go into the Sprawl and do a number, a real crowd scene. This guy wants it so big, he’s gonna hire the Kasuals too. Well, the shit hit the fan then, because Alix, he’s kind of conservative. Only good Kasual’s a dead one, and then only after x number of hours of torture, etc. ‘Fuck that,’ Raymond says, ever the diplomat. ‘We’re talking big money here, we’re talking corporate.’ ” He opened a box of fat red plastic shells and began to load the gun, cranking one after another into the magazine. “Now I could be way off, but I keep seeing these Maas Biolabs PR types on video lately. Something very weird’s happened, out on some property of theirs in Arizona. Some people say it was a nuke, some people say it was something else. And now they’re claiming their top biosoft man’s dead, in what they call an unrelated accident. That’s Mitchell, the guy who more or less invented the stuff. So far, nobody else is even pretending to be able to make a biochip, so Lucas and I assumed from the beginning that Maas had made that icebreaker.” If it was an icebreaker . . . But we had no idea who the Finn got it from, or where they got it. But if you put all that together, it looks like Maas Biolabs might be out to cook us all. And this is where they plan to do it, because they got us here but good.”

  “I dunno,” Jammer said, “we got a lot of friends in this building . . .”

  “Had.” Beauvoir put the shotgun down and started loading a Nambu automatic. “Most of the people on this level and the next one down got bought out this afternoon. Cash. Duffels full of it. There’s a few holdouts, but not enough.”