Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  Gangs rule the streets. Drugs have been entirely legalized, but they're as addictive and costly as ever. Without any of the treatment programs of the wealthy, many of the poor fall into the endless cycle of stealing from each other to get their daily fixes.

  Meanwhile, far overhead, in skyscraper mansions connected by soaring walkways, the rich look down on the poor and feel only fear that they should ever fall so low.

  Life with the rich is a song. Sex is open and free. Foods and fashions are exotic. The arts flourish.

  On the underside, though, it's just the opposite. Fear of getting hurt or ill and not being able to pay for a doctor (health insurance exists, but is exorbitant) makes most people a lot more cautious than they might normally be. People with gunshot wounds, whether sustained in a fight or as a bystander, are routinely put out of their misery. The streets are dotted with crippled victims who were not so fortunate.

  The rich never see the streets, though, and neither do many of the poor, at least those of the poor well-off enough to consider themselves "middle-class". With modern technology, most workers rarely have to leave the safety of their tiny apartments. They telecommute to work, and most of their needs are met by delivery services staffed by well-armed drivers. These "webheads", as they're known, often side with the rich in questions about what to do with the truly poor. Although the webheads may not have much, they're head and shoulders above the souls that roam the streets.

  The time for rebellion is ripe, but the people have few footholds in the world above them. Lately, though, things have gotten so bad that some of the wealthy (or potentially so) have sided with the Underground out of simple principle. Miranda is one of these people. With her help, Dooley will become one of them, too.

  And then the tide may finally be turning.

  And finally, here's the first draft of the first chapter of Amortals, written back in 1994. Forgive my prose, please. It's come a long way in the last 16 years.

  THE ORIGINAL FIRST CHAPTER

  Dooley came to and suddenly realized that was the last thing he wanted to do. His skull felt like a jackhammer had woken up inside of it, found itself trapped, and was trying its best to bang its way out. He felt like death warmed over – no, worse.

  He tried to open his eyes, but they were crusted over with the blood that had streamed down over them from the many cuts on his head. A gloved hand slapped him across the face, knocking the crusts loose and starting the blood flowing again. With a herculean effort, Dooley managed to wrest his eyes open.

  He immediately closed them again. The man was still there, the man who had done this to him. He mumbled a prayer to some forsaken god under his breath. The fisted glove slammed into his face again.

  Dooley tried to say something again, but the teeth got in his way. He spat out the loose pieces of bone and began to whimper. He was lost and confused. He didn't know who the man was or why he was hurting him. He only knew that he wanted it to stop.

  He struggled for a moment before he realized he was tied to the wooden café chair he was sitting in. His legs were fastened to the chair's, and his hands were bound behind his back. The cord had already cut deep into the skin on his wrists, and it was starting to gnaw against his bones. He pulled against it desperately but only succeeded in flaying his skin further.

  The tears rolling down his cheeks finally dissolved the crusts on his eyelashes altogether. He opened his eyes to see that he had vomited on himself. He felt the urge to do so again, and although there was nothing left in his stomach, that didn't stop him from retching foul air.

  He wanted to tell his torturer to stop, to leave him alone. He'd do anything, say anything, tell anything. He just wanted the pain to end.

  But he found he didn't have the words.

  He coughed and hacked and spit up blood. He was bleeding internally. Some of his organs had been ruptured. He felt like he might drown in his own fluids before the man could hurt him again. He hoped that he would.

  Unfortunately, while Dooley had been consumed by his pain, the man had circled around behind him. He kicked the top of the chair hard, toppling it forward onto the floor with Dooley along with it. Dooley's knees smashed into the concrete, followed quickly by his forehead and his already broken nose.

  He wanted to pass out, to find some sort of escape, but unconsciousness would not come. Just when he thought he might finally return to its solace, the man grabbed the back of the chair and hauled Dooley upright again, jolting him awake.

  Dooley opened his eyes all the way this time, blinking away the blood and sweat that stung his eyes. He was in a large room. The walls were far enough away that he couldn't see them in the darkness. A single, bare incandescent bulb shining overhead lit the area in which he was sitting, casting what little he could see in sharp shadows. Blood and vomit pooled on the concrete around him. Something cylindrical and silver sat on the floor in front of him and to his left. It lay just inside the edge of the light. All else was darkness.

  He could hear footsteps circling him in the void outside the cone of illumination that was his universe. Boot heels trod purposefully out past the edge of the light as if the man was trying to find a way in. Dooley wished with all his might that the light would keep the man away, that he was trapped in the darkness, leaving Dooley safe under the bulb's care.

  The footsteps came around in front of Dooley and stopped. A voice came out of the void. It was muffled, electronically masked. Still, it sounded strangely familiar, but try as he might, he could not place it.

  "Are you ready, Dooley?" it asked him.

  Dooley's head was spinning out of control. He tried to answer, but found he couldn't. His tongue lolled in his mouth like a useless, old rag. It was dry as a carpet in a desert cave. He licked his cracked and split lips and tried again, but all he could manage was another whimper.

  "Come on, Dooley. This isn't like you." The voice laughed sadistically. "Where's that rapier wit of yours now, old man?"

  Suddenly, Dooley was consumed with anger. This man was toying with him, teasing him, torturing him. Dooley started to scream unintelligibly, venting his frustration at the man as if he could wither him away with the sheer ferocity of his emotion.

  The man just cackled lowly, the mask making the sound into something inhuman.

  Just as quickly as it began, Dooley's fit ended. He slumped forward exhausted, his rage entirely spent.

  The blood trickling down his wrists had made the cord slick. He indulged himself in an instant of hope, but it was dashed as he found that the bonds had bitten too far into his flesh for him to ever have any chance of freeing himself. He had gored his wrists, but it had done him no good. He was as trapped as ever.

  "Do you know why you're here, Dooley?" the voice said. "Do you know what you've done that would justify such pain?"

  Dooley looked up, straining to see the man's face in the

  darkness. There was nothing. He could see nothing. He shook his head back and forth in his misery and moaned and moaned.

  The voice came again, deep, black, and clingy, shattering Dooley's hopes that he would ever be able to get away from it. It stuck to his brain and burned like napalm. The flames were inextinguishable. Not blood nor tears would ever put them out.

  "You messed with the wrong people. You put your nose in where it didn't belong." The voice paused dramatically.

  "You did your job, Dooley. And for that, you're going to receive the ultimate reward."

  The tip of a gun broke out of the darkness and into the light. It was long and thin and black and cold. It seemed to absorb the light as it hit it, sucking it slowly from the cone as it inched forward.

  It was perfect, flawless. The only thing that Dooley saw that was darker than the barrel was the hole that ran right down its middle. That hole seemed to suck at the light, to pull Dooley in closer and closer to its black promise.

  "You," said the voice. Dooley had almost forgotten the man was there. "You are going to die."

  Dooley's eyes flew wide at
the tone of sheer menace in the man's words. This was it. It was all over.

  Then his executioner stepped into the light, right behind his automatic rifle. He was dressed all in dull, flat black, from his high-laced boots to his full helmet. The only part of it that reflected any light at all was the helmet's faceplate, and this was like a mirror.

  Dooley stared into the shiny visor, hoping to be able to somehow penetrate it, to be able to see through it and let his eyes fall on the face of the man who was going to kill him. But all he could see was his own battered face staring back at himself hopelessly.

  For a moment despair took him, and he cried like a child, wailing for the rest of his life that would not be. His murderer stood there stolidly, implacably. He was entirely unmoved.

  When he had cried himself so hoarse he couldn't make any more sound, Dooley looked up at the man and started crying again, soundlessly this time. He knew the man was waiting for him to finish, so he decided he would never stop. Eventually, entirely exhausted, he stopped.

  Slowly, he looked up at the man again, his stomach tight with fear, but his heart filled with resignation. The darkness was invading the light, eating it, stealing it away. Dooley looked at himself in the faceplate.

  At one time, he had been handsome. Bloodshot brown eyes stared back at him from a drawn, pale face almost completely covered by fresh, red blood. His nose was broken, and his left cheekbone had been smashed. His curly brown hair was matted down with thick, black fluid.

  He laughed once at the sight of himself, a short, humorless sound. A smile followed it. Many of his teeth were missing. He winced at the pain, but let the smile turn into a grin.

  He laughed again, louder this time. Then once more and again. Soon he was cackling wildly, tears streaming down his cheeks, washing thin trails of white down his red, red face. The man in black never even moved.

  When he finally stopped, he looked directly into the center of the gun. He watched it intensely, trying to see deeper and deeper into it as if he was trying to reveal the deadly secret that lay nestled at the end of the chamber. Then he let out a deep sigh, forcing the air out of his lungs and leaving it out in the light.

  In the silence, the sound of the gun being cocked was clear and crisp, like the crack of a foot on a dry twig on a dark night.

  "Goodbye, Dooley," the killer said. "I'll be seeing you around."

  Dooley didn't react at all.

  As he was staring into the gun's muzzle, transfixed by the purity of its darkness, it suddenly flashed with the brightest light he had ever seen. It was followed quickly by an impact that hit him right between the eyes. Once through the front of the skull, the bullet, barely slowed at all, exploded, blasting out through the back of his head, letting the light from th e bulb spill down inside his brain.

  The darkness took him entirely then.

  He never even heard the gun's report.

  An exclusive first look at Matt Forbeck's superb urban fantasy, Vegas Knights.

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Luck is for losers."

  I hated it when Bill said that. I hated the tone, the words, the way it made me feel like just that: a loser.

  "Shut up," I said. "I can't think with you jabbering at me like that."

  I ran a hand through my shaggy hair and stared down at the cards before me. I ignored the five laid out face-up in the middle of the table. I couldn't do anything about them. The two hole cards face-down in front of me worried me though, and I hadn't even looked at them.

  Bill slapped a hand on the polished wood. The cards jumped off the table a fraction of an inch and settled right back down where they'd been. Nothing about them changed a bit.

  "You think it's hard to concentrate here, in a hotel room?" Bill sneered at me. "Just imagine how much worse it's going to be on the floor in a real game with real money on the table."

  "We won't be playing for chips?"

  "Chips are money, Jackson," he said. "That's one of the tricks the casinos play on you to keep you coming back. Losing a stack of black chips doesn't seem like that big a deal. But that stack's worth all your textbooks for the year."

  I glared at Bill now. He stared back at me with his blue eyes under his dark, close-cut hair. Everything about him was razor-sharp, from the edges of his sideburns to the creases in his khakis. He was only nineteen, a few months older than me, but he always seemed far more sophisticated.

  "You're not helping, brother," I said. I turned and reached for my laptop.

  Bill leaned over the table. "What are you doing? That can't help you."

  I launched my video chat program. "I'm going to call Ultman."

  Bill slammed the laptop shut, almost pinching my fingers. "No. What's the professor going to say?" He put on his best Indian accent. "'I told you not to do anything foolish, Mr Wisdom'? 'Bring him back to Ann Arbor, Mr Chancey'?" He gagged. "Are you going to listen to that?"

  I rubbed my eyes and sighed. "This is crazy," I said. "I can't believe I let you talk me into this."

  Bill pulled the laptop away and tossed it on one of the beds. I glanced out past it to the view out of the room's wide, tinted window, which was curved to fit inside the casino's outer wall. The sun had fallen behind the mountains to the west, turning the sky into bands of bright orange at the horizon, fading to star-speckled blue-black high above.

  I'd never seen mountains before the plane trip from Detroit Metro to McCarran today. The guidebook on my smartphone called the range hunkered off to the west of Las Vegas the Spring Mountains. They looked close enough to walk to, although intellectually I knew it would take me at least a good day's hike just to reach their feet.

  "It's a good plan," said Bill. "It's going to work. How can it not work?"

  I smirked at him. "You want a list? I've seen enough movies. We're going to screw this up, and a couple gorillas in dark suits and glasses will take us into a back room and beat us half to death then offer us a free ride to the airport."

  Bill groaned. "You're always so negative. You have to think positive. We're not going to screw this up."

  "I'm positive we will."

  Bill made a fist. "Thinking like that will get us killed."

  I put up my hands and walked to the window. When we'd checked in three hours ago, the hotel tower had faced the strip. I wondered how long it would take for it to make a complete spin.

  "Forget it then," I said. "It's not worth it. It's just money."

  "Just money," he said. "So you're rich? Your grandma doesn't have to work to send you to school? That out-of-state tuition isn't taking a bit out of her retirement fund?"

  I winced. Bill knew how poor I was, especially compared to him. I felt guilty every day about taking my grandma's money, but she wouldn't let me not. "A man's nothing without an education," she'd told me. "Just see how your daddy and granddaddy turned out. We ain't gonna have that from you."

  Bill just wouldn't let up though. "How's that scholarship working out for you?"

  I turned and scowled at him. He knew. "I'd be doing fine."

  "If what?" he said. He stuck out his chest, daring me to say it.

  "Forget it. I ain't going for it."

  He pumped his fist at me in frustration. "Magic isn't the problem, Jackson. It's the solution."

  "It's stealing. It ain't right."

  "So now you got morals." He rubbed his forehead. "You didn't seem to mind taking money from those frat boys last week."

  I knew he was going to bring that up. "They had it coming. Besides, it was just beer money. They could afford it."

  Bill tossed up his arms. "And these casinos can't? Have you looked at this place? It's a garden in a desert!"

  He walked over to the wardrobe, opened it up, and started rummaging through it. "Look at this hotel," he said. "Revolutions is fifty stories tall, and the whole building spins on an axis.

  "Check out the Luxor. That light that spears out of the top of the pyramid, you can see that from space. The Stratosphere is over a thousand feet tall, and it ha
s rides on top of it. The Mirage has a working volcano sitting out in front of it.

  "Do you have any idea about the kind of engineering that goes into building something like that? Do you know what it costs to keep it all going?"

  "Do you?"

  "A hell of a lot more than we could ever take out of here in a single night. The profits on a place like this are astronomical. And half of them go to the mob."

  "You believe that, you've been watching too much TV."