by Gregg Taylor
There were more yells down the road ahead. They weren’t cries for help, they weren’t exclamations made from fear, they were something else again, something primal. I pulled deep into the doorway and tried to get my wind back. My legs felt like rubber. I spat and wiped the side of my face with my open left hand in a useless gesture against the rain.
There was no point in letting emotions into it. Those were bound to be a little screwed up. Everything else was. But logically, there were three options.
I could ride out the riots in Freeville and walk away from the whole stinking mess. This was certainly the path of least resistance. I would have the paper money in my pockets, the GAT, my copy of Murder, Sweet Murder and not another damn thing. Being a Shade seemed like a complicated thing, and I had no clue how it was done.
The yells were getting closer. There were at least five or six different voices rising up against the roar of the rain. Had to figure for every one that was shooting his mouth off there had to be at least two more. Big crowd.
The most obvious option would be to get back in with Carter. No mean feat, since I had killed at least... what was it now... four of his men. My men. He’d see me as a traitor at worst and at best as a broken piece of equipment. But if I could put this Golem Protocol in his hands...
...I would be delivering what he saw as the last piece he needed to become a God. Somehow I found it hard to see him as anything more than a cruel, Old Testament deity. And what would I be to him but a liability? Still, there was a chance.
I could see them now. There had to be twenty, twenty-five of them. All men, probably none very far out of their teens, but full-sized by any measurable standard. They were walking in something like a straight line across the entire width of the street and sidewalk. The message was clear. This is ours. There is no going around. There is no going back. I kept still.
I thought about Claire’s eyes again. I didn’t want to, because I knew there was no profit in it, but I did anyway. Was the girl that she had shown me much more real than I was? She’d lied to me almost from the moment she had stepped off the shuttle. Hell, she’d been lying to me longer than I could remember. She might be trying to do the right thing by her father, but she was also a ’Frame spook, and a rogue one at that. Who knew why she was doing anything. There was no goddamned reason to get myself killed for Claire Marsland, to die by some idiotic hero’s code.
I had my wind back now. There was a cry from the far end of the line of hooligans on the other side of the road. I had been spotted. They halted in their tracks and began to gather around the base of the stairs on which I stood.
I pulled my hat back on my head. It seemed pretty damned likely that I was going to die in the next five minutes, and if not, you couldn’t have found a bookie in Bountiful that would have given you odds on my seeing the sunset. Sunsets were overrated anyway. I could die an un-person. I could die a lap-dog. Or I could play detective for a while longer.
I walked down the stairs towards the assembling crowd of punks. I stopped two steps from the bottom. There were concrete railings on either side of me that were higher than my waist and solid to the base of the stairs. This was a bad spot.
I said nothing. They looked at each other. Finally one stepped up.
“What do we have here?” he said. He was scrawny but looked strong, and his flesh was riddled with bumps, like there was a growth under his skin every few inches. He’d never know what they were because he’d never find a doctor willing to look at him, and if he did, he wouldn’t think of anything but robbing him or stealing drugs. He was maybe all of twenty, but probably not so much. He had sharpened his teeth into points, which in Freeville passed for something to do.
I had nothing to say to this, so I didn’t.
“I’m talking to you, Pops,” he said, angrier. I looked in his eyes. He was like a dog. He was just barking, and there was no answer I could give him that would not result in more barking. So I gave him none. Simple enough and it had the desired effect. It pissed him off.
“What’s the matter with you, Pops? You got nothing to say?”
There was some excited laughter from the ranks. It was hard to say if the boy with the bumps was the de facto leader or not, but he was the one getting in the outsider’s face, and at the moment, that made him the Alpha. That meant taking him down would be like taking down any five of the others. A prospect too good to miss.
There was a delicate art to this kind of transaction. Whether they knew it or not, most people who didn’t do this kind of thing for a living followed the rhythms of conversation, even in a situation like this. Meaning any response from your opponent is going to come in the space you have allowed for them to speak. It was an unconscious thing. A wisecrack, a plea for mercy, a punch to the face, they were all expected to come in the same moment, unless you had done this enough times to spot the pattern. My guess was that Bump Boy hadn’t. I could buy him as a petty crook, a gang member, a rapist... but he didn’t seem familiar with this particular role. For one thing, he led with his face when he spoke. I could see the knife in his hand, but it wasn’t nearly as nice as the one the last dead bastard who pulled a knife on me had.
Bump Boy wasn’t much of a public speaker. If Pops was the best he could do, then thinking up his next bon mot must have taken some concentration. When they finally came, they weren’t long. The moment to do it was just as he began to open his mouth.
“L-” was about all he said before I brought my foot up and broke his nose with my heel. It was a less impressive move when you remembered that I was standing two stairs higher than him, but I was hoping no one would notice that.
The nose is in many ways the best possible thing to break, as long as you’re the one doing the breaking. It’s exposed, it’s fragile, it spurts blood in a dramatic fashion and every so often somebody takes a little nap right afterwards. There’s also very little chance of killing the person you’re hitting, though I was almost certainly going to do that in the next few seconds anyway.
Bump Boy confirmed this suspicion when he immediately hurled himself towards me, blood streaming down his misshapen face and something akin to murder in his eyes. He hadn’t taken two steps before I had the GAT out of its holster and shot him in the face.
I was a great advocate of the high-percentage shot. Center mass. Don’t take chances, don’t get fancy. But I was two steps higher than the kid, and in a hurry. The bolt took him high on the forehead, which turned out to be a pretty good thing, as the whole skull seemed to lose its structural integrity and the resulting spray covered the eight or ten punks closest to him.
The key to a situation like this is to take control, not just respond. There was a chance that the crowd would have broken and run, but it wasn’t much of a chance. They’d still have me surrounded and if anyone did have a piece it would be coming out now. I shot three more of them, more or less at random. I took one close to me in the kneecap, because the shrieks were always disheartening to anyone with fight left in them. I shot the second one in the groin as the worst thing any young punk can think of is going through life as a gelding. The third one I killed in no uncertain terms just in case anyone thought I was showing mercy or restraint.
They backed up, and an array of knives, blunt implements, chains and a couple of machetes that looked like they’d seen some use today were thrust towards me by trembling hands. But no one ran, which meant I was still penned in. What in the hell were they waiting for? A clever and cinematic speech? Were they just afraid that if they ran I would shoot them in the back? Or were they just scared out of their minds and waiting to hear what I wanted them to do? This seemed like a solid possibility. Personally, I considered my position pretty damned clear.
I shot another one of them because he looked like he was about to say something.
Four seconds later I shot another one without looking directly at him. For some reason this seemed to have more of an impact and a couple of the ones near the back turned and ran. That was six of them dead o
r crippled and two of them turned tail. There looked to be about fifteen left, maybe less. I wondered if they knew how many shots a GAT Double-Z got to a rod. I tried to recall how many I’d used since I’d woken up in Drake Finn’s office with three charges gone. It really all depended on how many bolts I’d thrown at breakfast, and I just wasn’t sure. I couldn’t have more than a few left, and if I pulled the trigger and came up dry they’d kill me twice in half the time it would take me to reload.
We all stood in silence for about ten seconds while they stared at me. Finally I looked at them like they were all idiots.
“Shog off,” I said, as much as possible like only an idiot would need to be told.
As a man, they turned and ran in the direction that I had come from. Their whoops and shouts were gone. They ran hard and ran fast.
I flipped the GAT over and looked at the meter. One shot left. I snorted and fired it in their general direction to make sure they kept running. The sound told me I had hit something, and as I turned to look I could see them jumping over another fallen form. I flipped the safety on, took the spend charge rod out and replaced it. I holstered the GAT and looked around me.
This is what I was. I knew what every moment meant. How long a pause to take. Who to shoot just exactly where and why. I was a stone cold killer. If I went back to the Locust I could never be anything else, even if he let me live.
Did I even have it in me to be anything more than that?
Maybe. Maybe not.
I ran the rest of the way out of Freeville without incident.
TWENTY-TWO
I was about sixteen steps into Grid 1 when I hit the wall of cops. They were starting to pack up by now, and no one seemed to be moving with the same kill ‘em all intensity that they had raced to the scene with. I was soaking wet, breathless and coming right out of Freeville, so I should have expected a hard time.
“Hold it, pal,” a grunt in heavy armor said, his hand raised. I pulled my coat close to me and tried to look wet and cold, which shouldn’t have been much of an illusion. I just didn’t want him to see the gun, and I hoped he didn’t notice that I reeked of ozone.
“Please,” I said, trying to sound desperate, “my wife is in there.”
“Just hang on. The whole Acre is locked down.”
Two heavy transports roared to life near us, loaded to the brim with armed assault teams.
“Please, you have to let me pass,” I said, knowing that the engines would drown me out, but also knowing that panicky husbands tended to forget things like that.
“Hang on, I can’t hear you.” The cop’s lips moved as the transports lifted into the air and roared back towards Freeville.
“Are they leaving?” I asked. “Where are they going?”
“What’s going on here?” It was a more senior officer. Probably the unit commander, but it was hard to tell under all that equipment.
“He’s trying to get in to see his wife,” the junior man replied.
“How’d he get this far?” the commander seemed annoyed. “Hov traffic is supposed to be rerouted.”
“He was on foot,” the first cop replied.
“On foot? Where are you coming from, sir?”
“Please... my wife called, she said there were police everywhere. Someone said something about a Synth attack-”
The commander cut me off. “There was no attack. We haven’t even been able to find any Syths except for a couple working without papers. How did you get here?”
“My taxi driver wouldn’t come through Freeville. He said there was some trouble.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” the officer said. “They’re burning it down. We’re on our way there now.” He looked at me and then at the road I must have come in on. “How did you get here?” he asked again.
“I ran.” That much was true anyway, so I didn’t bother to embellish.
“You ran? Through Freeville?”
I nodded.
“She must be a hell of a woman.” He smiled like he had one himself at home.
I said nothing. I tried to look cold and mildly traumatized.
“Where does your wife work?” he asked.
“23910... Grid 4... South Key Shipping.” I rattled off. The commander punched the numbers into his Omnilink and nodded. “Issue this man a pass and let’s get going.” He gave me a manly chuck on the shoulder and moved on.
“If there are still units conducting a search,” the junior man had taken over again, “just show them this.” And with that he took a yellow citation book from his belt and wrote Cleared. 145-11A882 in thick black printing as large as he could. “That’s my unit and badge number. If they ask where I went, tell them I’m bashing heads in Freeville.” He followed his commander’s suit with another chuck on the shoulder. The testosterone seemed to be flowing fast and freely.
I held the slip of paper above my head as I waded through the troops. It got a fair amount of scrutiny for the first couple of blocks, after that the logic seemed to be that if I didn’t belong there, I’d never have made it this far. Besides, they were pulling out en masse, and Freeville was about to be hit by more heavy equipment than would ever have bothered with one of their semi-annual riots. The NewsNets would say nothing about the Synthetic scare. There would be no calls for an investigation, no advocates arguing for equal treatment for Artificials. But there would be plenty of footage of “heroic young officers keeping the honest citizens of Freeville safe from a few malcontents”. I was in no position to decry the bloodbath that was likely about to occur, since at the end of the day I was almost certain to have been the largest single contributor to it.
By the time I hit Grid 4, I almost had the streets to myself, and that had my heart racing. At last I could see the crumbling red brick of the South Key Shipping Company approaching at a distance. The rain had slowed to a drizzle, but everything was sopping wet already. I looked around. No cops. I took the GAT from its holster and let it hang by my side, my thumb on the safety. The warehouses of the Access Acre were old, dirty and sat nearly one on top of the other. The fact that nearly everything that came into or out of Bountiful made its way through one of these buildings didn’t seem to make any of them worth cleaning up.
Two doors down was a crumbling and empty complex. The walls were coming down in places, and the weeds were forcing their way through cracks in the concrete out front. One of the big doors that had housed the loading dock was wide open, and as I approached I could see that it had been stripped, probably for scrap metal.
I stuck my head in the loading bay and nearly jumped out of my skin. The building was wreathed in darkness and decay, with piles of abandoned materials lying in corners where the light streamed in and fought a losing battle to illuminate a tiny patch. It seemed to go on forever, with nothing of value on display except a very big, very black Hov, pulled just out of view from the street. I threw myself back and waited. Nothing. I approached as quickly and quietly as I could manage. The Hov was deserted. Which meant the Locust didn’t have what he wanted yet.
I moved back towards the opening in the wall when I heard footsteps approaching. More than two sets. I slipped the safety off the GAT and stepped backwards into the darkness as silently as I could. If my foot had found a stray piece of rubble or any of the loose piping that seemed to be lying around, I was done.
Nothing. I was fairly sure that I couldn’t be seen, but I found a brick column and huddled beside it, just to be sure. The footsteps were getting closer. Four sets. I was sure of it now. Four sets, and one of them a woman. That meant they had Claire with them. It made sense, the district had been teeming with cops just a few minutes earlier, no sense taking chances doing anything too public. Not when he was this close to victory.
Suddenly, there they were. First a man with a ponytail in a long coat. He looked around as best he could and nodded his approval, moving towards the back of the Hov as the others entered behind him. Claire, walking smoothly but with her arms huddled into her core, then Carter, all t
hree hundred pounds of him moving with astonishing grace, and finally a prick with a little soul patch of a beard. Soul Patch kept watch at street level. He would be the last to move to the car. He was looking for two things: cops, who had already left the party, and yours truly, who was already nestled in behind him. That was Ponytail’s fault though, and I resolved to kill him first if it was at all possible.
Claire looked over her shoulder at the dim daylight she had just left for what she must have believed to be the last time. Carter placed a great ham of a hand on her shoulder and guided her deeper into the alcove.
“Please don’t do anything foolish, my dear.” Carter’s voice rolled like thunder through the echo chamber of the empty building. “It wouldn’t help you, and I promise you it would make things a great deal worse.”
Claire snorted. “How could it possibly be worse?” she asked.
Carter walked her towards the trunk where Ponytail was waiting. He had a large, padded manila envelope under his arm. It was labeled and bar-coded. There was no mistaking what it was. “There is no darkness so complete that I could not make it darker still, young lady.” He smiled. “Don’t you see? I now have all things in my power. I could give you your life back, if I chose. I won’t, but I could. Forgive me, there is no profit in it, and the chance of considerable inconvenience. I could even let you continue as you are, but I cannot take the chance.”
“Just do it and be on your way,” Claire said, resigned.
“Yes. The old ways are best, aren’t they? Shoot you in the head, bundle you into the trunk and dispose of you properly when convenient.” Claire shuddered and hung her head. Carter continued to speak his own gospel. “But I want you to understand what a blessing that is, my child. Why with this,” and here he raised the package as one would a powerful totem, “I can remove any trace of you, of anyone you ever were, and leave no iota behind. Even the worm virus used to create a Shade leaves traces if you know where to look for them. But this... this allows me to offer you a living death. If you choose it, I can plug into the Omnilink in the Hov and simply erase you from existence.”