They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy

by R. D. Harless

  I stuffed the badge back in my pocket. "Oh, I'm not one of them? Why do you think I didn't kill Agent Red in Dakota? We were working together to get Will out; Tracey just fucked that part up. Why do you think the first thing I did after the bunker job was get busted? Come on. That's pretty convenient, isn't it? I just gave myself up to them? Do I seem that retarded?" That fucking hurt to say. "How'd I take down a fucking speeder like Run ALC if I wasn't trained for it?"

  Lee shook his head. "No way."

  "That was how they brought me in," I pressed him. "They arrested me so they could debrief me. I gave them what was what and sat in a cell waiting because we knew you guys would get worried about what I'd say and make a play for me."

  So much bullshit I could almost smell it.

  The Rasta pointed at me, nodding, "Yeah, I seen dat shit on The Wire."

  "Let me see that badge again," Lee said. "They don't give informants badges."

  I put the badge back in my pocket. "I don't want your nanites all over it. They gave me a badge just like they gave Rosemary. She was undercover like me. Tracey screwed up and let two UCs onto your crew. With Agent Red on standby. The SCEIA is serious about bringing this whole operation down.

  "So here's what comes next, guys: I don't want to see you get fucked over here just for going with the flow. There's gonna be a raid soon, but if they can't get it organized by tomorrow, I'm burning this place out myself. Anybody you know that wants a good word from me, and I mean legitimate guys here not fuckers with a death toll, you hook me up with their names and tell 'em not to resist arrest. That includes you, Rasta Man, you can get in on this."

  God damn was it a power trip acting like a cop.

  "But this is the thing, man: everyone that wants to get in on this deal will have to surrender peacefully to the cops. All the details will be worked out after processing. I'm telling you I'll fight for you, I'll fight for your boys, too. Or they can fight DeltaBlue and the US Government on their own."

  I couldn't let up, I couldn't waver; that was the key to pulling off a lie this big. I had to invent details and I had to make it so big that they wouldn't believe somebody would just make that shit up. But I couldn't make it too good to be true. If I promised Lee walking away scot free, he would never buy it. I had to make him feel like he was making a real choice and taking a chance helping me.

  "If you want a real shot at immunity, though, you gotta hide me, you gotta keep me off their radar. You're just a guy they forced into this. You don't owe them shit. And your girls will go into protective custody. Now, like I said, I can make you all these promises, but it really all has to be approved by Washington. They get final say. I'll fight for you, but they make the call based on how much you cooperate. And that means I need the nanites, and I need Tracey. But both of you will come away with shorter sentences, minimum, maybe time served if this goes very fucking smoothly."

  I kept at it for two full cigarettes of bullshit until Lee and the Rasta didn't know up from down.

  After all of it, I got a, "Look, let me think about it and get you--"

  I cut Lee off. "You don't sign up now, I'll just find somebody else to roll for the information. Nine times out of ten when guys go sleep on it, they get a case of the chickenshits. I'm coming to you because you're a good guy, and I know you don't wanna go to Stone Pass."

  "Me neider," The Rasta said in my ear.

  Lee waved my smoke out of the air in front of him. "I've been in the system in DC, and there's not a damn thing in there about you being a badge, Don. And I know you can talk like a motherfucker. You're tellin' me that you and Rosemary were both Feds in that set-up? That little bit about her came through the grapevine, but ain't shit come through 'bout you."

  I smiled. "Y'know, before the internet there was this stuff called paper that people wrote shit down on. Or they just remembered it. And when you got guys that can read computers from a thousand miles away, sometimes it's smart not to put everything on one. Come on, my balls ain't big enough to make something like this up, man. I'm completely putting my life in your hands. You can have me killed, can't you? You're a swingin' dick around here. The ball's in your court. These individuals, Bob, Earle, Two-Stroke, are all high-value targets."

  Lee tested me with, "What's the Skee-Ay's think is going on down here?"

  "That Bob and his friends are trying to figure out how we're linked to the unicorn fairy kingdom," I shot back. "I don't know what they think, that's above my pay grade. I'll tell you what I see. I see people are getting so pissed off around here the whole place is gonna get wiped off the map in a Poster war before the cops can even get here. No plumbing, turf fighting already, food shortages, man, everybody's ready to go off. My office is more concerned with rounding all these assholes--"

  "And the only way you can make this work is for me to hide you and all this info from Silvy."

  I shrugged. "I thought I could count on you for that. They've taught me a few tricks to deal with psychics, but I need some insurance."

  "Seems like you been hidin' all this pretty good up to now," Lee said.

  "I just thought what I had to get a meeting with you. And it worked. If you don't want this deal, I'll find another way. I just hope Silvy doesn't read some bad thoughts I plant for her or any memories of this meeting that accidentally slip through. But she's too busy for that like you said, right?"

  The way I figured it, Lee wouldn't have even been alive for this meeting if not for me, so I had every right to put the ass I had saved in danger. Still felt shitty as hell doing it, though.

  Lee shoved his hands in his pockets. He had gotten injected with Spencer's nanites, yeah, but he was still that guy that told me he felt like he was in over his head around people with serious abilities. I hoped he still was, anyway.

  He locked eyes with me. Emotionless tears came from the circuitry in his eyes. "So now I have to choose between keepin' this a secret and helpin' you so she doesn't find out I kept it from Bob and them or tellin' them we talked and signin' your death sentence to save my own ass."

  "I made that same kinda choice for you in Missouri," I said.

  Damn, I was an asshole.

  He looked at the ceiling and rubbed his eyes. He didn't know what the hell to do.

  "Lee--" I started.

  "Don't talk, man," he said. "Don't say no more."

  He took a deep breath and narrowed his eyes at me. "You put me in a fuckin' spot, man." He nodded his head and said quietly, "But I might be able to assign you a new IP so you just show up in the new user log, all right? I'll set your 'bots to default settings so they block Silvy. The bosses probably won't cross check the logs right now, they got all kinds of other stuff goin' on. If I can do it, your 'bots are gettin' turned on for a day. We already heard the cops were comin' in hard tomorrow. I don't know how you knew that, but maybe you are a cop like you say. You better deliver 'cause I only half believe this shit you talkin'. And you're an asshole for doin' this to me."

  "Half belief still gets you full benefits," I said. I tried to sound like a cop but that just sounded fucking stupid.

  He pointed to the bundle in my hand. "You gonna give that ass back to Tracey when you see her?"

  I looked down at the red-brown newspaper. "Man, I don't know. I don't know why I've even got this damn thing. This place is fucking with me or something. What about you, man, do you believe this shit they're talking about changing people? They told some guy I talked to they'll give him powers like us for helping out. He's not even a Poster. Can they do that?"

  Lee glanced at the Rasta and shifted uncomfortably, "What they're doing, man, we seen some shit. They keep sayin' the laws of physics are like the laws of a country. You can break 'em if you got the guts. The rest of what they keep sayin' is way over my head, but it's one of those things where it's better to go along with it because if they're right, you don't want to be on the wrong side of it." He told the Rasta, "Let's go," and left me with, "I'm helping you nail the rest of Tracey's ass, not Bob's. Don't tell a
nybody different and fuck me out of another reward, man."

  "I won't," I said. "Let me know when you get it done."

  "Yeah, I know. Give us a few minutes before you leave. Don't follow us."

  Lee and the Rasta headed out. The side door slammed shut.

  They weren't gone thirty seconds when the Yin Yang twins appeared again and started barking at me and pointing at the door for me to go. I told them to shut the fuck up and blew some heat their way before I lit another cigarette and walked out. They came out the side door and stood guard at it to make sure I kept moving off their turf. Little pricks.

  My mind started racing about getting to Tracey, but I had to get all this shit out of my head. Silvy wasn't blocked yet. But the fact that I knew I couldn't think about what I was gonna do made my mind try to think about it more. I went back to humming 'Ice, Ice, Baby,' but there was only one really good way to really fuck up her reading me.

  Across the way, a building said: 'There are no facts, only interpretations' - Friedrich Nietzsche. I took a deep, smoky breath. A burger was on the ground at my feet. It had been stepped on but it was still in the wrapper. Fuck it, after what I had just done to Lee, I had no pride left. I picked it up and bit into it. I picked dirt out of my mouth and gave the spray-painted tag the finger. "Fact: you suck dick, Need-chuh, whatever the fuck your name is."

  I headed over to the cantina that had been set up in a school cafeteria. 3-D hologram posters were plastered all over the walls labeled with shit like 'FAKE,' 'THE GREAT LIE' and 'DON'T BE FOOLED.' The beer at the self-serve bar tasted like rice, so I traded up for bottle of some kind of alcohol I couldn't pronounce that tasted like airplane engine degreaser. It would have no damn problem killing a train of thought. I sat down at one of the few tables without loud gambling or people passed out in vomit, lined up a few plastic shot cups and drank for Will.

  The next halfway sober thought I had didn't come until sun up. And it was to get the hell out of bed before the Indian girl I ended up with woke up.

  I untangled myself from her as slowly as I could and put Agent Red's clothes back on, taking care not to let the belt buckle clink, and eased her door shut behind me. I didn't even rustle my cigarettes out until I was a block away because I thought I remembered her saying something about having an enhanced hearing thing.

  Walking through Pyramiden that early felt like being the last person on earth. There were no sounds at all. I walked with my eyes shut for the sake of my pounding head, only opening them to the bright orange sun enough that I didn't run into shit. I had no idea where the fuck I was in town or where to go to lay low that preferably didn't involve skinheads. I was still alive, though, so at least Lee probably hadn't sold my ass out. I'd give him until lunchtime before I worried about trying to figure out how to get in touch with him.

  I stopped walking, and my hand went to my belt and my pockets when I realized I didn't have the newspaper bundle with me. I must have lost it while I was drinking.

  "Well, fuck," I muttered. There went my fucking peace offering.

  Between two apartment blocks, I could see part of the metal building in the tent city. I wondered what the hell could be going in there. And how much shit I would be in if I set the whole thing on fire.

  Shit. "Silvy?" I asked, 'you punk bitch slut' my thoughts added. "Goddammit, stop that shit," I cursed at myself. Nothing came back from her.

  I kept walking through town trying to get my bearings until I heard something in the distance beating at the quiet air. I looked around; there were black dots all around the rising sun. Below the dots, sand kicked up behind flashes of light. Like sun light off glass. Or windshields.

  Ten-foot tall letters and numbers took shape above buildings all over town. The apartment block nearest me had a giant glowing 'C-9' appear over it. The one next to it was 'C-10.' The labels went to every building order like that. And all of them were glowing in Delta-fucking-Blue's signature color.

  My cigarette fell out of my mouth.

  There went my smooth fucking plan.

  Chapter 21

  Shit Rolls Downhill

  "How the fuck is this gonna be the first thing I've been right about?" I bitched as I ran for the door at C-9 because hell if I knew what else to do other than get off the street.

  The sun dimmed from bright morning to dusk like a flashlight with batteries going bad. Somebody had turned the light away from town or sucked its intensity or something.

  "Lee, are you there?" I asked out loud. If my nanites were turned back on, I thought I might be able to talk to him like on a cell phone, but I didn't get an answer.

  The door to the C-9 building wouldn't open, so I melted the lock until it did. From three floors up, glass rained down on me. A flier in his underwear had gone through a window and bolted over rooftops and out of town. Those fuckers were always the first to bail the second anything went even a little wrong, and once Underwear Johnny was out first and drawing attention, more fliers went out windows all over town. Most of them had enough sense enough to open the damn things first.

  I made it one step over the threshold of C-9 when a fist that felt galvanized drilled me in the chest like a fucking prizefighter. It took the wind out of me and put me on my ass on the sidewalk; bits of glass still stuck to my shirt cut into my back. The fist's owner yelled at me in French while I clutched my damn sternum and tried to get my breath back. I had gotten decked by a fucking Frenchman. It probably spun my granddad in his grave.

  I got the guy's attention and pointed out of town. "De police," I told him, coughing for air and rusty French. "S'il vous plait, uh, intrei, fucking, uh, hep-hepberg? Hepberger?"

  The French fuck slammed the door on me, then yelled at me some more because I had destroyed his lock.

  A bunch of the fliers were stuck in mid-air, unable to move, grabbed and frozen in place by telekinetics. The ones that could still move had to dodge heavy-caliber machine gun fire that sent tracer bullets streaking up through the gray sky. Cops that could flew down the fliers that got outside of the perimeter of gunfire while the Kevlar circus pulled into town.

  "Shit. Lee, man, are you there?" I asked again as I picked myself up. God, my chest hurt. Fucking Frenchman. I hoped the nanites would repair it like they had my ribs.

  An apartment building down the street came apart piece-by-piece like the parts diagram in a lawn mower manual with a wrenching, splintering noise as the brick, wood and metal twisted and came undone. Everybody inside was held in place by telekinetics so they couldn't run or put up a fight. The cops weren't fucking around.

  A fucking speeder jetted by me, threw my ass to the ground in his wake and kept running. He had a cop speeder in black body armor on his ass, a cop who stopped running long enough to sit me up and put a pair of fucking plastic zip-strips on my wrists. He told me with a heavy accent to stay on the ground, and he was out of sight in an eye blink. As soon as he was, I softened the plastic cuffs enough to break them and got running toward the edge of town, toward the tent city. I had to get to Tracey, and Lee said she was there. I just had to stay out of custody long enough to get to her.

  Fliers were still shooting across the sky in every direction, and mean-ass Apache helicopters loaded with rockets and guns hovered everywhere while other buildings got the take-apart treatment. Bull horns blared in every language to cooperate. I saw a troop carrier full of Mexican soldiers in it pass on the next street over. Agents branded with initials from law enforcement agencies all over the world swarmed Pyramiden, covering as much ground as they could as fast as they could before everybody woke up and got their shit in gear.

  A crowd of Posters ran by me, and a young guy who was a lambchop sideburn enthusiast slapped my shoulder and told me to go with them. "We go to tents. When raid come. They tell us."

  Shit. The three assholes had specifically told everybody what to do when a raid happened. They the cops would hit the place and had prepared everyone for it. And the whole fucking herd was going the same fucking direction I was.
Fuck.

  I followed after the crowd, hanging back behind them. A Hummer full of soldiers jumped a ditch and landed hard to cut off their route, and Lambchop graphically killed a cop with some kind of acid shit dripping from his pores. Him and his people stripped the cop's body and went after the other three guys in the Hummer, taking their body armor and guns for themselves. I decided to take my own route.

  I snuck over to the next street, ducking every time I heard gunfire, and ran toward the edge of town. Up on a rooftop, some half-naked guy with 'F-BOMB' tattooed in three rows of giant print that filled his whole torso cupped his hands around his mouth. It was like a train car full of plastic explosives had detonated when he shouted, 'Fuuuuuuuuucccccckkkk yyyyyyyooooooouuuuuuu piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggss!'

  Up in the air, the side of an Apache caved in from the shockwave. It went into a smoking spin and clipped a building on its way to the street. Windows shattered everywhere. I barely had time to get my hands over my ears when F-Bomb started firing on ground personnel and trucks with a machine gun "fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck" that cracked Kevlar, broke bones and hammered vehicles mercilessly.

  But F-Bomb didn't have brain enough to move his ass instead of standing out in the open, so he got telekinetically yanked down in a four-storey beeline that bounced his ass off the street to a waiting group of black SUVs, armor-plated eighteen wheelers and military transports. He talked a few guys off their feet and bloodied noses, but agents closed ranks around him. I got back to running and didn't stay to watch him get his ass beat.

  I made it five steps and got yanked off my feet again and put back on my ass with a new set of zip-strips.

  "I told you to stay down," the cop said before he was gone again.

  I melted through the fucking cuffs and stood back up. "Leave me the fuck alone, man!" I shouted after him. Goddamn speeder.

  Then everything in town went from mostly apeshit to completely apeshit.