by Gregg Taylor
On the other hand, a hand canon was about as subtle as a brick through your windshield, so how good did he really have to be? Especially since I seemed to be incapable of firing back. First things first. Time to find Soul Patch.
“Do you really think you can cross Cyrus Carter and live, Monarch? After all that I have done for you, all that I have given you?”
I moved to the end of the aisle and up the far wall, in as much darkness as I could find. Carter was that way, with his little friend somewhere in the darkness waiting for me. Which meant if I wanted to take Soul Patch out, I had to stick my head into the trap and come up shooting first. The GAT hung by my side, my gun arm straight down to the floor, the side of the pistol pressed against my leg to conceal the whir of the plasma generators, or at least muffle it in the folds of my coat.
Carter seemed to be getting more involved in the sound of his own voice, and less concerned with the little two-handed melodrama Soul Patch and I were about to enact all around him. It must be wonderful to be absolutely certain that you are the reason for all of creation and everything in it.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he boomed, almost amused. As if he understood the dog now. “The money wasn’t enough, was it? You wanted your life back.” He seemed genuinely tickled at the thought.
My cheeks flushed in rage that I did not have time for. I didn’t remember my life as Monarch, much less the one that I’d given up to become him, but something deep within me hated Carter for his scorn. Somewhere in the darkness he must have known this because he continued with new gusto.
“Or better yet, someone else’s life, someone quite fictional, with all the credits you can use. It can be yours, Monarch.” His voice was smoother now, softer in a way. He was prepared to forgive the dog its muddy paws and even to reward it, if only it would come when it was called. “Everything this world has to offer can be yours at the push of a button. You can live again, Monarch. Bring me the girl and it can all be yours.”
His song was full of promise, full of hope. He sang it like a poem and I almost believed him, but only because I wanted to so badly. I turned to the right and moved in a fast crouch-walk through a narrow space left when one of the tall shelves had rotted away and fallen against the next. It was near pitch-black in there, and the best piece of cover I’d seen. Five to ten Soul Patch was already in here, waiting.
I moved slowly, silently, searching the darkness for any sound, any sign of movement. If Soul Patch was expecting me to hunt Carter, this would be the perfect tall grass for him to lay in and wait. Carter’s voice was coming from the centre aisle, maybe thirty feet from the end of this passage. If he was expecting me to hunt Carter, I’d come up behind him as he watched and waited.
But if he knew that I would hunt him first, he’d be facing the direction I was sure to come from to take him out. I’d walk right up to him and if I was very lucky, he’d pause just long enough to let me see him smile.
There didn’t seem to be much I could do about it either way. This one wasn’t on me, it was on Soul Patch. If he were good, he was mine. If he was very, very good, I was dead.
Something long and nameless brushed past me in the darkness. I didn’t so much as flinch. I didn’t dare. Carter had fallen silent, but I thought I could hear him breathing heavily. He was a powerful man, but not at all built for physical displays like this, much less the oratory that had followed. He sounded exasperated to me. Furious at my failure to come slinking from the shadows with my tail between my legs and my GAT at Claire Marsland’s temple.
Or whatever the hell her name was. I wondered if I’d ever know. I wondered if she’d made a break for it. It wouldn’t have been a bad play – if the roles were reversed I might have tried it myself. Except they had been and I hadn’t. But even that wasn’t fair. I’d love to congratulate myself on what a good person I turned out to be after all, but the truth of the matter is I’d had nowhere else to go when I came riding to her rescue, and she had the ultimate prize in a bubble envelope under her arm.
Of course, she’d have to make it up the aisle past the Locust and find her way back the way we came, so I thought it more than likely she was still behind the stinking lean-to on the shelf. I hoped so, and hated myself for hoping it.
Suddenly, the darkness before me shifted and I could see traces of light beyond. I realized that I was nearly at the end of the aisle, and that the blackness before me was nothing less than my friend with the Soul Patch. I froze. I couldn’t tell at first, but then...
He was facing the other way.
I crept closer, as slowly as I could. A nice, commanding view of the middle of the room, good cover. It had everything you could want. Except it also had a back door, and I had found it.
I paused a moment. From here I would have a decent chance at pulling the trigger on Carter, except I still wasn’t sure that I’d be able to take the shot, and I still wasn’t sure how to deal with that. So it would be best if Mister Carter did not hear the roar of a GAT just now. I slid the double-Z into its holster and readied myself.
“Monarch!” Carter suddenly cried in rage. Before the echo had died I had thrust my right fist forward in a hard jab to the base of Soul Patch’s skull, grabbed him by the head and forced him to the ground. I put as much weight behind the next two punches as I could, desperately trying to punch clean through his cranium. It wasn’t possible, of course, but the satisfying crunch of bone against concrete told me that he wouldn’t be getting up any time soon.
I’d have made sure of him, but I didn’t have a blade. Besides, if I was ever going to be more than this, I should try and cut down on how many people I killed. A little.
Soul Patch’s gun was an M Series. It had some decent heft, dual projector arrays and a hand grip that felt customized. I slipped it into my pocket, just in case, and peered out to see if I could spy my master.
The bad dog was ready to come home.
TWENTY-FIVE
He stood stock still in the middle of the great aisle that cut through the room. Thin traces of light blazed through tiny cracks in the roof above and splayed around him in every direction, their narrow beams dancing with the decade’s worth of dust we had thrown into the air. It surrounded him like an aura. Even in stillness and in silence he was a force of nature – an element onto himself. And he was not pleased.
I slid through the darkness, unsure of what to do. From which angle was it best to attack an angry God?
“Why would you do this? Why would you betray me?” His voice was raw, but quieter now, as if he were thinking aloud, not even addressing me. “You killed that fool detective, just as I ordered, and when you took his place I applauded. You would deliver her right to us, along with the Protocol... such brilliant improvisation.”
He fell silent. I stopped in my tracks, hardly daring to breathe.
“Or was it?”
The question hung in the air a moment before he turned. Turned and looked right at me. The fat bastard had known right where I was, probably from the moment I took out the prick with the soul-patch. There was a hand-cannon still clutched in his grasp, but his arms hung loosely by his side. He had no fear of me.
I raised my gun arm and tried to pull the trigger. My arm began to shake with the effort, it was like holding a hundred pounds at the full extension of my arm. My forehead began to bead with sweat. I tried to curse him through clenched teeth, but it was useless. I brought my left arm up to support the right, gripping my wrist and trying to counterbalance the growing weight, but it was a losing battle. Even as I gained control over my arms, my legs began to give out at the knees. At last my arms collapsed before me with the strain. I knelt before him, helpless. He was not the sort to miss the significance of such a moment, nor to fail to savor it.
He stepped closer to me, the echoes of his footsteps ringing through the great open space with an expression on his face that was gentle, almost kindly.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself, my boy,” he said. “The brain is a delicate instrument.
The neural block seemed like such a simple thing, but there is no true simplicity when it comes to altering the human mind. And yours has seen its share of abuse. You uploaded an info pack on Bountiful just last week. You know every corner of this cesspool of a city, a place where you had never been.” He rested his great ham of a hand on the back of my head, like he was blessing me. “You’ve had your mind wiped so many times to get you past security scans... somehow...” He looked at me, quaking at his feet, still struggling with the gun. “...is it possible?”
And then he began to laugh. It started at the back of his throat like a private chortle and grew exponentially until it filled every corner, every space of the stinking warehouse we were in and shook every fiber of my being. My face grew hot with hate.
“You actually thought that you were Drake Finn, didn’t you?” he roared. “The puppet is a real boy again at last!”
I let my arms drop. It couldn’t end like this – there had to be a way.
“That’s why Felco couldn’t bribe you... why you wouldn’t stop trying to protect the girl... you’ve been acting like a hero from one of those dime novels you’re always reading. They were written before you were born, Monarch. Written and forgotten.”
Twenty feet behind Carter was a large crate sitting on the floor. Its lid was smashed open; it had probably been looted years ago. I focused on the crate with everything I had. Focused on it to the point that I almost didn’t see the very large man that was directly between it and me. Directly in the line of fire.
Cyrus the Locust raised his gun. It was a nice little Mark III. He practically spat his farewell to me through clenched teeth.
“There are no more heroes, Monarch. No more!”
I raised the GAT and fired at the crate. It was my true intention to frag that empty wooden box behind Carter. Or at least it was true enough to get past the inhibitors of the neural block, because I didn’t feel a thing as the plasma bolt tore through Carter’s left leg on its way to the crate. He fell, cursing, and I pulled the trigger again. That one was harder, but the bolt still flew free and punched through part of his arm as he fell. I tried to give it a third in the hope of pulling something center mass, but the neural block was all through being fooled. I stood up and walked over to him, picking up the Mark III from the floor where it lay and slipping it into another pocket. I was building quite a little arsenal. I doubted that would help me with the whole “killing fewer people” thing, but there was time for that later.
He was panting where he lay. He looked far less imposing sprawled out on the floor like that, gasping like a fish on a dock. He looked up at me with his eyes full of rage.
“It’s over,” I said simply.
“Over?” he sputtered. “Over? You really think the world is that simple? One pathetic little Shade with a concussion and a bad case of puppy love can bring the mighty Cyrus Carter to his knees? You really need to lay off the paperbacks.”
I circled him, forced him to shift to keep his eyes on me. He couldn’t know the trick I’d used to get past the inhibitors – to him I was a threat again. If I raised the gun against him one more time and couldn’t follow through, he’d know the truth. I had no idea what to do about that.
He sneered at me through his pain. “I was born rich, Monarch. I was born powerful. You were born when you were un-made. When someone pressed delete on your behalf. There is no right side, no wrong side. Only the winning side. We leave nothing standing in our wake. But I am merciful. Join me and you will sit at my right hand.”
“Is that the one with the smoking crater in it?” I smiled.
“Insolent fool!” he barked. “Don’t you know who I am? Bring me the girl! Don’t share her fate.” Unbelievably, he was hauling himself back up to stand. There just wasn’t any quit in this guy. “As long as I shall live there is nowhere she can run, nowhere she can hide.”
“You know what Cyrus?” I said. “I believe you’re right.”
I raised the gun, thinking as hard as I could about showing him the barrel, not doing him any harm. It seemed to work, I didn’t get the shakes – but Carter did.
“Oh, you’re really going to shoot a man you’ve disarmed? Hero?” He spat the word at me.
If there was going to be another conclusion to this little saga, this would be a real good time to think one up.
Carter screamed like he was on fire. It took me half a second to realize that I hadn’t shot him. He lit up like a Christmas tree as a second electric charge punched into him. Then a third. He staggered and turned. Even with his mass, he had to be dead already. Had to be.
Claire didn’t seem to share this opinion. She squeezed the trigger of Felco’s little ACS Monitor again and took him center mass, nice and clean. Cyrus “the Locust” Carter, master of the world and would-be demigod, fell to the floor like a bag of wet hammers and did not move.
“Hi,” I said to her. She didn’t speak. She knelt next to Carter’s ample frame where it lay, still smoldering on the cracked wooden floor. She seemed reluctant to touch him, but needed to know that he was dead. I said nothing. At last she seemed certain.
“Why did you come back for me?” she asked without looking at me.
“Because you’re my client,” I said.
“No,” she said, “I’m not.”
“Would you like to be?” I asked. “I work cheap.”
She laughed in spite of herself and looked up at me. I felt a little awkward standing there, the gun still in my hand. She smiled at me but something wasn’t there. Now that I think about it, I suppose it was the lines. When she smiled, or laughed, there were always those little lines around her eyes, but they were nowhere to be seen. I only knew that something felt wrong. She looked down at the ground.
“You aren’t Drake Finn,” she said.
“That’s what I hear.”
“Did you... did you know all along?”
“I found out when you did.” It didn’t sound clever, but it was true.
She nodded. “You’re a killer,” she said.
“So are you.”
She looked at me and there was a flash of anger in her eyes. “You do it for money.”
“What are you planning on doing with the Golem Protocol?” I asked. “Donate it to the Widows and Orphans fund?”
She looked away. So it was like that.
“You want me to go, I’ll go,” I said.
“Where?” Her voice was soft.
I shook my head. “Couldn’t say.”
Neither of us said anything for what felt like a very long time.
“All right,” I said, and turned towards the door we had come through.
Claire lifted her head and her eyes grew wide.
“Oh, God,” she said frantically, stabbing the Monitor out into the air in front of her and firing wildly at something behind me. It had to be Soul Patch. I turned and with two long strides was between her and her target, the GAT outstretched to finish the job I’d left undone.
But Soul Patch was nowhere to be seen.
Damn.
I didn’t hear her move. She was soft and sudden as anything you could imagine. I didn’t know she had it in her, but Claire Marsland had done nothing but surprise me from the moment that she stepped onto the shuttle pad. Every time I was sure that I could read the thoughts behind those eyes, I’d been dead wrong.
Now I was just plain dead.
I felt the snub nose of the ACS Monitor buried in the base of my skull, just above the hairline. I didn’t say a thing. Neither did she.
“You do like to play hero, don’t you?” she asked at last.
“It’s getting old pretty fast,” I admitted.
“Not fast enough. I heard what the Locust said to you.”
I said nothing.
“And he was right,” she said, pressing the muzzle into my flesh a little harder. “You play the hero every time.” She growled like she was cursing me. “I even fell for it at first. Can you blame me?”
I didn’t exactly blame her,
so I didn’t speak.
“But in the end it made you predictable. And that made you weak.” She seemed to be finished, but still she didn’t do anything. I could feel the end of the pistol begin to quake a little.
“Damn you, why don’t you say something?” she shouted.
“Sure thing,” I said. “The Monitor is a funny piece of hardware. Self-charging, if you like that kind of thing. Some do. I don’t.”
“What are you talking about?” she almost whispered.
I ignored her. “Thing is, variable ambient static fields make it unpredictable at best.”
“Shut up,” she said quietly, her voice wavering. What had she expected from a killer, love poetry? She had the drop on me right enough. And now she was going to get the facts and plenty of them.
“Comes down to this, angel. Sometimes you get five shots. Sometimes you get six. Takes about a day to charge again.”
“What?” she whispered, clearly counting in her head.
“Which means you’ve either got a deadly weapon up against the back of my head, or a cheap piece of molded plastic. And you’ve made a serious mistake letting the weapon touch me. No – don’t try and pull it away, or I’ll have to hit you now.”
The gun pressed harder into my skull. I could hear her breath coming faster and I knew her heart was pounding.
“That’s my girl,” I said. “If you tried to take away my one advantage, I’d have had to move right away. And one way or another we wouldn’t have had a chance to make nice.”
“Nice?” She was almost weeping in frustration now. “Why would I want to make nice with you?”
“I saved your life. And you saved mine. And we each risked each other’s a few times. And there was the small matter of a night at the Ironwood that probably didn’t mean much to you, but I thought was pretty damned spectacular.” May as well be honest.
She snorted. “So what if it was? Are you looking for the happily ever after ending? I have in my hand the key to a life that you can’t possibly imagine. No one can. Power and privilege beyond the dreams of avarice.”