They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy

by R. D. Harless

  "Fuck," I said under my breath.

  The arm on the floor had a tattoo of Daffy Duck tying off to shoot up. The elbow floppily bent the wrong way. It looked like the wrist had been crushed. This was Duck, this was the fucking guy. And it sure as hell looked like somebody had torn his arm off and beat him to death with it.

  I told him "Have fun in hell" before I killed the lights, shut the door and got the fuck out.

  In the hallway, I loudly whispered, "Trace!" No answer came. There were two offices left. "I swear, you better be in one of these," I said. She had to be in one of them. Or I was just plain fucked.

  I tried the next door, ready for any-fucking-thing it could throw at me. It was dark, so I threw up some more lights and nearly set the place on fire; it was packed with paper boxes and stacks of old newspapers to the ceiling. But in the middle of all of it, duct-taped to a chair, was Tracey.

  Layers of tape were wound around her head to cover her eyes and ears. More of it went around her and the arms of the chair to keep her sitting in it. She didn't look like she was awake, and there was an IV taped into her left arm that hooked her to a bag of clear fluids dripping on a hospital stand. A pair of men's boxers that were too big for her had been duct-taped to her waist so they would stay on. A white rag had been shoved underneath her to sit on. It was stained with blood.

  I pushed her chin up so I could check her throat. She was breathing.

  I shook her head. "Come on, wake up, Trace."

  Nothing.

  I plucked her cheek with my finger. "Tracey. Wake up."

  That didn't work, so I disconnected the IV in her arm. Who knew what the fuck they were pumping into her. The hole bled badly when the needle came out, so I heated the wound to cauterize it. This was just my fucking luck. The cops would be raiding any minute now, and this was what I nearly got killed trying to get to.

  I found a knife on a rolling hospital table next to the chair and made a cut on my thumb. If I understood right, the nanites in me were programmed to spread out through the bloodstream. I squeezed the cut to get a good dollop of blood and smeared it on Tracey's face and squeezed another one into her mouth. They would find their way into her system, maybe start repairing some of the damage done to her.

  A yell out on the work floor was cut short.

  Fuck.

  I shook Tracey's shoulder. "Come on, wake the fuck up. You have to get us out of here. You need to 'port us out, Trace."

  Still nothing. My way out of this place was fucked.

  I shook the hell out of her and pressed my mouth to the duct tape on her ears. "Wake. Up."

  But it wasn't working. They had doped her up hard. And that meant Silvy was in the driver's seat in Pyramiden. In all the shit in that room, there wasn't a single picture, cell phone, laptop or anything else Tracey needed to visualize all the teleports that had been happening in town, not to mention she wasn't even conscious to do them. I should have fucking known they didn't trust her enough to do it.

  I bent down and asked in the taped ear, "Silvy, you in there? I know you are. Silvy. If you can hear me, use Tracey to 'port me out. I'm right in front of her."

  No hiss.

  "I'll do whatever you want Silvy. I'll, fuck, just name it."

  Nothing.

  Something slammed into the other side of the office wall and knocked boxes over. Scared the shit out of me.

  I kicked a chest of drawers stacked with old newspapers. "Goddammit, Trace, you're useless, swear to God." All the shit I had done to get to her and she couldn't do a damn thing for me. I had no way out. Fuck me, man.

  I knelt down face-to-face with her. "Trace, if you're fucking with me, stop it. Please get us out of here. I don't care about you getting Will in on the bunker job, okay? I don't care anymore. Fuck my old life, too, I don't care, all right? You and me are square. Just get me the fuck out of here."

  She still didn't move.

  "Silvy, get me out."

  I leaned against the chest of drawers. Nothing happened. I was fucked.

  My eyes drifted down to that blood-stained rag. And the worst parts of that video flashed in my head.

  God, I needed a cigarette.

  "Hey, Trace," I said to her. She didn't move. "You know I compared every woman I dated to you after Europe? You were the standard, man, if you can believe that shit now. You were this cool, crazy chick who could hold her own. And fucking sexy, too. I don't know what--"

  Something else hit a wall out on the work floor. And another yell went quiet.

  I rubbed my eyes. Fuck. "So what the fuck do you want to do, then, Don?" I asked myself.

  My candle lights had involuntarily gotten hotter than the fires of hell without me noticing. They roared wild and out of control.

  What did I want to do? I knew three fucking assholes that needed to be taken down a shitload of pegs.

  I checked Tracey's pulse one last time and thought about our time in France.

  "I'll come back for you, Trace," I told her and shut the door.

  The door at the end of the hall was unlocked just like everything else. The three assholes might have been unprepared for everything, but fuck if I was. I fished Rosemary's badge out of my pocket to cause a little confusion and buy me a few extra seconds if I needed them. I thought fire, I thought ice. Power shit was a game of mind, not muscle, not body. Had to keep sharp. My heart was fucking jumping and pumping.

  The huge cavern of a workspace was cluttered with machines and computers the way the other rooms were cluttered with garbage. There was so much homemade electronics and computer crap they must have owned stock in Radio Shack. The portable generators lined up along one wall cranked out power to bundles of cables strung everywhere on rubber-coated hooks. A giant cylinder labeled 'Cooling' fed liquid into flexible plastic tubes that draped over servers and machinery. Even with all the coolant, the whole place was hotter than the desert outside. Just walking in made me light-headed.

  Chalk lines on the floor crisscrossed nearly every inch. White chalk circled the location on the floor of each server stack, sparking coil, numbered switches and every other piece of technical shit in the place. Colored chalk lines were drawn between the circles, linking them in a web that the wiring followed.

  At the center of the room, surrounded by all this crazy stuff, stood Ibn Meghar, head of the goddamn Shining Beacon Coalition. Sprawled out at his feet were two dead guys, one with a watermelon-sized hole in his chest and the other a pinch-faced weasely motherfucker whose head was several feet to the right of his body.

  Blood ran down Meghar's indigo tribal robes. It dotted his thick black beard. A red notebook hung in the air in front of him without him having to touch it. He turned its pages with the power of a brain that had busted tsunamis and toppled dictators.

  Then he cleared his throat. "I can hear you breathing," he announced loudly in perfect English.

  Well, fuck.

  I raised Rosemary's badge as a shield against the most powerful Post-Human on the planet, trying to sound like a fucking cop. "I was working with DeltaBlue to take these guys down," I said, lowering the pitch of my voice and pushing the words out so I didn't sound nervous. "But it looks like you got it covered." I fucking hoped the fucking psy-blockers were keeping him out of my fucking head.

  A smile crossed his face with a glimmer in his eye. "God damn, Moses, you made it in here? How you like my new proxy?"

  It felt like all the blood drained out of me when I realized just how amazingly fucked I was.

  Chapter 23

  Unfucking This Dog

  "I'll be damned," Bob said from Meghar's mouth, "I did not have you figured for the 'never quit' type. Are you still looking for Tracey? Because she's in the room out there; you can have her now." He snorted something powdery from a metal cylinder that he put back in his robes because why the fuck not get absolutely blasted while controlling a guy who could probably annihilate eighty square miles with his mind?

  He telekinetically jerked Rosemary's billfold o
ut of my hand to glance it over. "Here we go. The infamous badge. Who is this girl?"

  "She's nobody. I stole it," I replied. "How the hell did you grab Meghar?"

  "Silvy's been probing at him for weeks waiting for his defenses to crack. Thirty-six straight hours of him clearing ships off the Mauritania Coast later, here we are." He flung the badge right back into my hand. "This thing has a memory aura of lies and empathy all over it. Lee didn't even check the damn name on it before he threw away everything we gave him, did he?"

  I pocketed the badge. "What've you got going on in here, Bob?"

  "You know you nearly got him killed with your lies," Bob said. "We had to inflict some consequences. I've got a video around here somewhere if you want to see it. I hope those daughters of his don't mind a daddy who doesn't have a functioning speech center anymore."

  He was trying to distract me, trying to make me feel guilty. Fuck all that, though. Not this time. "What about Tracey?" I asked him. "What did you have her on? Is she going to make it?"

  On a table crowded with papers, notebooks, dirty paper plates and plastic eating utensils, a glass with a bulge at the bottom slid over to a bronze and glass absinthe dispenser.

  "So the Red Ghost is dead," Bob informed me, ignoring me again to run the conversation.

  The dispenser's handle squeaked by itself and filled the glass with the cloudy white drink.

  "He was the first one they got in the raid. Surface to air missiles I think is what they used. That's what they sounded like. They're invoking Smythe's Law, so they can just kill anybody that resists because of the casualties you people might inflict. You and that gypsy rabble outside."

  A plain table of aged, gray wood dug itself out of a mound of scrap and trash, floated over the equipment in the room and came to rest between me and Bob. Two bench seats toppled over a tower of boxes and crap with a crash and settled on either side of it. Bob sat down on one bench, the absinthe dispenser shut off, and the bulging glass shot straight to his hand without spilling a drop.

  "Have a seat," he invited. "I'm twenty-six jumps to forty. You'll have to catch up. You ever had tantric sex?"

  The double homicide on the floor was starting to look less disturbing compared to this conversation. Fuck, I was getting a headache.

  I ran my fingers through my short hair. "Nah, I just use a rubber."

  I had to keep him talking so he didn't trigger whatever crazy shit he had set up to go. He was trying to distract me, I knew that, but if he was as high as his glassy eyes looked, I could distract the shit out of him the same way we used to kill an hour of science class in high school by asking the teacher to explain how a helicopter worked.

  I pointed to the glass. "That's not the, uh, what do you call it, the Bohemian method for absinthe, right?"

  His eyes lit up. "So you know something about it. No, it's the French ritual. Fire from that Bohemian nonsense kills the flavor. Anybody that tells you otherwise is a fucking idiot. I had it once like that, and it tasted like swill and duck shit." He chuckled. "Never again."

  I sat on the bench seat across the table from him. "Where'd you get this table? Looks old." I just threw whatever shitty small-talk I could come up with at him. With quick hand movements to keep his attention.

  "I made it," he said, sipping the absinthe. "The wood was repurposed from an old barn, so, fittingly enough, I used it for a farmhouse style table. It's held up pretty well over the years. You're still wanting to kill Tracey, right? That's what you came here for?"

  I just told him, "I don't know. That's really the last thing on my mind right now. So tell me how all this stuff works."

  Bob downed the rest of the absinthe like it was nothing and looked the place over from floor-to-ceiling, one end of the room to the other. "Well, there was a good chance we'd corrupt the universal structure just by trying this. We haven't so far, but just don't breathe too hard on anything in here." He laughed way too fucking much at that. "But the jewels are still hanging dutifully in the net reflecting our white ascension infinite-fold. You ready for it?"

  I moved my hands around some more to get his eyes following. "I don't know, I'm still not sure about--"

  "Watch this," he cut in. He gestured to the two bodies on the floor. "That's Earle and Two-Stroke. That's them," he said excitedly. The guy was bombed, man. He raised them both up with Meghar's power and started one of them humping the other from behind like a jackrabbit. "That's Two-Stroke in the rear. Earle's catching." His intense eyes stared right at me, shifting from my left eye to my right eye and back, searching them. "You don't think that's funny?"

  Jesus.

  "It'd probably be funnier if I knew them better," was all I came up with.

  Bob shattered the absinthe glass to pieces on the table.

  "Fuck, man!"

  "Shhh," he said. The shards hung in the air, unmoving. "Watch this." Each piece broke and divided, then divided again, then divided again and kept dividing until what was left was too small to see. "This is the thing right here," Bob told me, intensity and just balls-out conviction in his voice. "This is it. I take it all down, I put all these infinitesimal pieces back together and I can make the glass again. Or I can make something better." He did another hit of powder. "That's what this all is. And you helped, yes, you did. Despite your efforts to come into our operation after we brought you here and take a crap on the rug, you helped. Those specs you and Tracey and Lee got for me in North Dakota saved a helluva lot of time."

  "That's what that stuff was?" I tried to say matter-of-factly. I knew we had helped the fucker. I knew it. Fuck, Tracey. "What were they specs for? Did you know I worked in a factory?" I just had to keep him fucking talking.

  "My EM field generator," he answered. "Like the one in the bunker that fired the radio pulse." He stomped his foot on the floor. "Got one under our feet right now. Whereas that one you all set off was a single pulse, this is a constant pulsing, wave after wave output. Waves again, you see?"

  Shit, shit, shit. He was going to kill everybody with this bullshit, just like it had killed Will and Red. Fucking crazy bastard.

  "Do you have anything to drink that's not absinthe?" I asked him. Earle and Two-Stroke kept humping in the corner of my eye. "And can you make them stop doing that? That shit's making my headache worse."

  They fell to the floor in a disgusting heap, and Bob unsuccessfully tried to hide a smile with his hand. "I don't have anything else to drink, no. Don't feel sorry for those two. Don't waste the precious mental energy. They were necessary evils made unnecessary by time and divinity. Although, truthfully, I'm glad somebody is here for this, and especially a skeptic, and especially a condescending prick one like you."

  I almost gave him a middle finger on pure reflex.

  He went on, "The thought of doing this alone was a little nerve-wracking, but now I've got a real Post-Human doing it too, so we've got a whole new scientific experiment angle on it. We'll see if it goes both ways like Earle did."

  "Uh huh," I nodded. "So Psycho Silvy, is she around here?" Where the fuck was a cop when you needed one? Jesus, man, raid this building already.

  "Off-site," he said simply. "What did Ja-Rilla smell like when you burned him? Did it smell like a human?"

  What he had said and what he was doing finally sank into my thick skull.

  "Wait, what the fuck do you mean you've got a Post-Human 'doing it' now? Are you talking about me?"

  "Where'd you get the psy-blockers?" he asked me. "I can't get in there and Silvy says she can't either. Why take them?" The fucker had a smile on his face. He was playing with me.

  I threw heat at him. "What the fuck is happening right now, man?"

  "You should see your face right now."

  "The fuck's going on, Bob? I will burn you to shit right now."

  He clicked his tongue at me. "I'm sure, I'm sure. In this body, I'll just bet you can. Right now, you're getting washed over by the quanta-godwaves, boy. I'm surprised you can't feel it. I can see all the colors sifting thro
ugh the gulfs between your particles and the quantum foam ebbing at your feet."

  I forced a laugh. "The fuck are you on, Bob? Jesus." But the sensation of something huge perched right behind me or above me watching everything I did was enough to make me keep looking over my shoulder, and my headache had been getting worse. "You're fucking with me. You didn't turn anything on."

  "There's no trigger," he said. "This whole set-up is the interface with the source. It's been running a constant tributary of exchange between us and reality this whole time."

  Mother fuck. He had been stalling me as much as I had been stalling him. He wanted to be sitting around in there because the shit was already going. Fuck.

  He lifted the droplets of blood off his robes with Meghar's mind. "The raid out there, that was a piece, I told them it was. All those Post-Humans are accessing their uninhibited connections with the informational code as we speak, and I'm in the one that can access the most. That's the punch-through we needed to the sub-basement, remember? That fucking kyke over there thought otherwise, but here we are. The EM field my generator's producing is being sculpted to a shape described by Mr. Earle's equations."

  "I don't feel anything," I straight up lied, fighting vertigo. Fucking shit.

  He pulled the metal cylinder from his robes and did another hit. "You need to take some of this. You're sober right now, but if you were on what I'm on and done the meditations, you would see it. The solidity of the world is melting like a Pollack painting. I can see the waves crashing all around you. It's your photonic baptism in the sea of all things."

  I got one last look at the room and tried to map it all out in my head for what I was about to do. Bob read my face like a book and slammed me hard to the floor with telekinetics.

  But he couldn't stop it.

  I hit every piece of tech in there with a blanket of high heat. Bearings and pistons swelled and seized up the generators, computer casings melted and blackened and the hardware inside burst into flames. The cooling system couldn't counter it all, and insulating rubber dripped off the hanging cables, causing sparks where the currents crossed. More sparks popped where the coolant hoses melted and liquid leaked into the electronics. Power surges killed whatever the heat missed.