by Ben Bequer
He nodded, looking at the laptop’s screen.
“We’ll finish the bow later,” I said, choosing one of the designs I had worked on for days, and set the machine to run. Based on how long a simple part had taken, we were in for a few days wait. I dropped a few bars of polymer into the reservoir and left the lab.
“Let’s go for a drive,” I said, heading outside. “I want to see the site again.”
As we stepped outside, six SUV’s raced towards the townhouse, tires chewing the road as they came to a halt. Each one held at least four guys, all in track suits with hard faces as they formed a loose perimeter around us. In the middle, lighting a cigarette for maximum effect was the general. He whispered with Dorin who stood close behind him, never looking away from us, not waiting for Dorin’s nod before walking towards the townhouse.
“Bubu, go inside,” I said. None of the men looked armed, which meant they were all armed. Then again, twenty to one seemed like good odds for dealing with a shit head American.
“Stay Bubu,” the general said, as if he were speaking to a dog, and a few of the guys behind him smiled.
“You’re not in charge here, Mihai,” I said, feeling a hot edge scraping at my patience. The printer was working, the castle would be up in a week, maybe less. I did not have time for this.
The general chuckled as he walked towards me, the smoke blowing into the wind like this was some crap eighties action movie. He looked over his shoulder, then back at me and grunted in dismissal. He turned to Bubu and shook his head grimly, his eyes were two chips of steel.
“You have something to say,” I said. “You say it to me. Bubu’s got nothing to do with it.”
The general shook his head, without losing eye contact with Bubu. “He brought you to me. If something is wrong, it’s his problem. He knows this when he brings you to me.”
Bubu started speaking to them in Romanian, his tone hard to pin, but halfway through the general started shaking his head. He waved Bubu to silence, the cigarette leaving a smoky trail as it danced in his hand. “Bubu knows the price,” the general said, his tone stony. “If he cannot pay, maybe his pretty wife has something we can use.”
I took a step into the general’s airspace, looming over him. “I thought we agreed that his family was off-limits.”
The general took a step back, the cigarette tumbling to the pavement. The gathered thugs closed in a step, some of them hesitating. They didn’t know how to react unless ordered. All I had to do was beat the general and he was half finished. I cowed him in front of his men, and he knew it. His confident mask cracked for a heartbeat, but he recovered before they could see.
Dorin was at the general’s shoulder a moment later, but was waved off with such ferocity, I thought the old man might turn and slug him. There was a subtler game going on here, one where Dorin had just won a little something at the general’s expense.
The general stood and barked an order and there were guns everywhere. Semi-automatic pistols, UZIs and AKs, one of the idiots even had an RPG, and they were all pointed in our direction. I stepped in front of Bubu who moved closer to the open door.
I heard a clack from behind me and though I saw neither man, rifle muzzles jutted inches out of the upstairs windows. I saw them pan the width of the window frame, while some of the general’s men took aim at them. Bubu said, “Bro, get inside,” and followed his own advice, running into house. Mihai screamed something and the gunfire started. The first shot hit me center mass, and I saw it flatten against my sternum, sticking to my skin through the hole in my shirt. A barrage followed, and while they succeeded in destroying my clothes, none of the rounds penetrated my thick skin. The guy with the RPG let it fly and I didn’t even move, letting my skin tank the awful explosion.
When the smoke cleared, I was mostly naked, but my skin was pristine.
“You know, I’ve really been trying,” I said strolling forward, as the men reloaded. “I just wanted to lay low and do my thing.” The gunfire started again, less aggressively as I had created crossfire with my casual walk into their kill box. “I even found a way to stomach you skeevy fuckers.” One of the thugs shooting at me fell over from a wound that transected his chest, blood gushing onto the dirty road as the man quivered then was still. “But a man has his limits,” I said, reaching Mihai, who had fallen back to the SUV’s, a Desert Eagle held in a solid, two-handed grip. He shot me twice in the face, both rounds caroming off my thick skull. I grabbed a double handful of his track suit, the supple fabric stretching between my fingers. “And I told you not to threaten his family again.” Twisting at the hips, I heaved, putting the energy I would need to move a tank into hurling the dumpy old man. There was no resistance, he was there and then he wasn’t. I followed his track as he flew in a soaring parabolic arc until I lost him, a pinprick against the dusky sky. Everything stopped; the echoes of gunfire swallowed by the early evening. Mihai’s men were looking skyward, as if waiting for him to fall back to earth. Chances were he got enough altitude that a crosswind hooked him. There was no way to tell where he would settle. That’s a lie, I could do the math, I just didn’t care.
I walked over to Dorin, who cringed at my approach, letting the pistol he had just emptied into me dangle from his fingers, clattering on the old road. I put a hand on his shoulder, my fingers pressing gently into this collar bone and said, “What about you, bro? Can you fly?" Dorin's gaze lingered skyward, turning slowly to meet my eyes as the words sunk in. He answered my question with an almost drunk shake of the head, and I pointed at the road leading to the townhouse. "Don't let me see you again."
It didn’t take much convincing for Dorin and the rest to leave empty handed. A thought at the back of my mind nagged at me, insisting that it would be smarter to kill all of them. I ignored the impulse and let them crawl into their SUV’s and drive away. I waited for them to double back and catch us unaware. They couldn’t kill me, but Bubu and the others were vulnerable, especially if they had revenge in mind.
I looked down at my tattered clothes, struck by the absurdity. I could create a castle from nothing, even a particle accelerator to open a wormhole to travel across space and time…but I could not, despite all my efforts, keep a good pair of jeans intact. I knelt and picked up an expended shell casing from the street, rolling the still steaming 7.62 cartridge along my fingers.
“Hey bro,” Bubu said, holding a towel for me. I didn’t know what to expect. He knew who I was, he knew my record, but he hadn’t seen me do anything like what I had just done.
“Look, Bubu, I get it,” I said, and I did. I was used to the insanity, but only after years of immersion and too many crazy things to count. It was unfair to thrust my life on everyone else and expect them to adjust. It was ridiculous.
Shaking his head, Bubu said, “No bro, I’m done in Romania. After this? If Dorin doesn’t kill me, he’ll make sure I never do business again.”
“Anica, Emil,” I said.
“I called them, they’re already gone. She has family in the U.K.”
“They have money, papers?”
“Yeah, I left them money when I visited yesterday, and her brother works for the government. She’ll get a visa, no problem.”
“Well, that’s good. You need anything, cash, whatever, you let me know.”
“He wanted to pimp her out,” Bubu said, his voice tight and angry. “Motherfucker wanted to pimp out my wife.”
I didn’t know what to say so I shrugged, and threw the towel on my bare shoulders.
I headed towards the house when Bubu said, “You still want to drive to the site?”
“Won’t be able to see much tonight,” I said. “Besides, I need to find some more clothes.”
Chapter Ten
We went inside, Bubu closing the door and locking it behind him. Stray rounds had punctured the cheap wood, and the night’s chill leaked into the warm house. Vertina and Lala emerged from the bathroom, scared, but uninjured. Onas got a couple of shallow cuts when the window he was p
erched at was shot out. Vandilo looked shaken. His bullet had killed Mihai’s thug, and I could tell it was his first murder. I put a hand on his shoulder and nodded. He seemed to accept my unspoken thanks, but spent the rest of the day nursing an unlabeled bottle of clear liquor.
I sat on the small porch for the rest of the evening, drinking beer, and reading a paper on polymer tensile strength written by some folks at Stanford. I didn’t think Dorin would be back, but stupider things have been done for less. The people in the house were my responsibility. If they were going to take my shit, wash my drawers, and cook my food, they were going to get my protection.
Seven worked her wonder with a soft, mechanical whirring, and according to the control program, I had another twelve hours until the second machine was done. Then I had to cable it and install the parts, including several pieces I hadn’t trusted to 3D print and made myself. Once that was done, I would plug it into the network and the work could start in earnest. I didn’t like the wait.
Night cloaked the streets leading to the townhouse. If they did come back, sitting on the porch asleep and drooling wasn’t going to deter them, so I went inside, my jaw cracking with a heavy yawn. Despite the late hour, the house was still bustling. Lala and Vertina were wedging hunks of wrapped deer meat into a fridge that was already full, Onas and Vandilo sat at the table, cleaning their rifles. Bubu came downstairs, talking on the phone, drawing me in with a gesture.
I followed him to his room, and he nodded at me as he finished the call. “So listen, bro,” he said. “I can get the rest of the stuff without going to Dorin, but it will cost more.”
“How much more,” I said, and he quoted a number that sent me into a whirl of mental gymnastics, trying to reconcile how much money I had left with what we still had to pay. Bubu’s mouth thinned out, and he shrugged, about to say something when I waved him off. “This isn’t your fault.”
“It is,” he said. “I knew going to Mihai was dangerous, but the things you wanted, there was no other way to get it. I never had a chance to do a job like that.”
“Guys like Mihai are always angling,” I said. “They’re like sharks looking for fresh blood in the water. That shit he pulled today was normal operating procedure. No amount of up-front money was going to change that.”
“You’re right,” Bubu said. “The good news is that our new supplier agreed to deliver, so the rest of the things should be here tomorrow afternoon.”
“That sounds almost legitimate. Are you getting all respectable on me, ordering shit off Amazon?”
Bubu laughed, “Do you have enough to cover it?”
“Yeah,” I said, but I knew we were stretching a bit thin.
“These people are friends. It costs more to get stuff, so it costs us more to buy, but they won’t come looking for trouble.”
“I pity anyone comes here looking for trouble.”
“No shit,” Bubu said. “The printer wasn’t damaged with all the shooting?”
“Lucky for them, no,” I said, shaking my head. “If it had, I would’ve killed every single one of them.”
Bubu shuddered at that, but said, “I don’t think Dorin will come back.”
“Mihai didn’t have any supers in his stable?”
“No, he hated them. Thought they were inpure, like them,” he said, gesturing towards the kitchen.
“They backed us up today. They could just as easily hidden out or run away.”
“This is true,” he said, though the effort almost killed him. “So what now?”
“I can’t sleep.”
“I can,” Bubu said. “You should too. First printer will be done before these guys get here.”
“Yeah, I’ll try. I need a snack, though.”
* * * *
I went and found Vertina had bread fresh from the oven, handing Onas and Vandilo each a thick roll. She offered the basket to me, and I took the whole thing, fishing in the fridge and coming away with two thick hunks of cheese and two beers. Waving farewell; I went up to my room and spent the night thinking about how long it would take to build the castle’s superstructure and bunker.
In many ways, the underworks were more important than what lay above ground. I did my research and decided to replicate the neo-classical Castle Peles, which still stood near Sinaia in central Romania. I’d been tempted to do something more medieval but once I had seen pictures of Peles, it was settled. Designing the 3D model was going to be a challenge considering I’d never used Autocad, Maya, Lightwave and the dozen other programs I needed to create the model and do the accurate textures, inside and out. Thankfully, Bubu put me on to a book in the Romanian library system that had hundreds of pictures of the place. I hacked in and downloaded a copy, which made the texturing process much easier. Another complication was labeling the different parts of the schematic by construction material. We were building a multistory structure, so it needed a proper support matrix, but we were using state of the art polymers, so we didn’t need the traditional method of construction.
Between the new materials I had designed for the main structure, and aerogel-like stuff I was using as filler and insulator, the walls would be able to hold the weight of a World War 2 battleship.
And take a broadside from one too.
Yeah, I was having fun.
I had been working all night, and stepped outside to take a small break. Night was dying and the sun was cresting over the Carpathian Mountains. The view from our little village was impressive, streaks shooting through the pass. I don’t know if Romania was a place I could settle down in, but it did fit my sensibilities, scumbag generals aside. It was something to think about.
The truth was that I allowed building the castle and planning for Haha to swallow my mind. It’s wasn’t just that it required the majority of my attention, but I didn’t want to think about what happened next. Part of that was an ironclad certainty that I wasn’t going to survive the culmination of my trap. It was one of the keystones of the plan. The point of building a castle was to give me the best chance of coming through the ordeal without requiring major invasive surgery, for once. That said, once the servers were lit and Haha infiltrated, it was going to scramble his code to the point that escape would be impossible. The other part, the scarier part was what would happen if I did survive.
Any thought of a future past Haha drew me inexorably towards Apogee – and she had let me down, again. Superdynamic, I understood. He didn’t give a shit about me. It was nothing for him to hand me over, despite his hand-wringing. He didn’t care that he was screwing me over; he just didn’t want to be the bad guy. It was a level of hypocrisy so deep and ingrained that you could never get him to see it, even with all of his intellect.
I flexed my right hand; the scars muted against the early morning’s light, and wondered what they meant to her. In the early days of my recovery, she had come to see me often, deactivating the solid light cast over my hand and taking it in hers. She had traced the scars gently, her calloused fingers, hard from years of fighting, were a balm that soothed my pain. We both knew where they came from, but never spoke of it.
I knew what they meant to me. They were a symbol of devotion, and proof that a man was a collection of the decisions he made. I wanted, more than anything, to save her that day. I made it happen. Nobody could say different.
I was afraid that they meant something different to her. In the coldest, darkest depths of my blotched soul, I was terrified that what drew her to me was not the potential of something better, but the ball and chain of duty. Not affection, but gratitude for saving her life. She didn’t know how to separate the two, and the result was an endless flirtation that went nowhere.
Now I was “dead,” and that was probably easier for her, cleaner, simpler. I would be that person who upended her life, but past a fleeting memory, gone forever. “It’s better this way,” I could imagine her saying with a shrug, washing her hands of me. In her mind, in all of their minds, I was no better than Zundergrub, unbalanced, powerful, dange
rous, in need of counseling and medication far from where the good people dwelled. All of those notions were buttressed by the ghost of a dead friend. She would never forgive me for Pulsewave.
It chilled me to think it, because I loved her.
She let me down time and again, but it always came back to that inalienable fact.
Dammit, I was a sucker.
* * * *
I was no good when I got angry, so I went upstairs, carrying a basket full of food and two bottles of wine - a quick snack before hitting the sack. Then again, it was like four in the morning, so maybe it counted as breakfast. As I reached the top stair, I heard a bustle from Bubu’s room – a creak from his door and a slow shuffle approaching. I paused, looking down and saw him come to the base of the stairs, looking up, bleary-eyed. “You waking or going to sleep,” he said.
“Want some of this,” I said, gesturing to the basket in my arm.
He rubbed one eye furiously, without answering, as he came up the stairs. My room was a mess, every surface covered with dirty clothes and schematics so I kicked clear an open spot on the floor and set up an impromptu picnic.
Bubu sat down, uncorking a bottle and handing it to me, and taking a long swig of the red wine. “This regional shit is not bad,” he said after long consideration.
“You know your wine?”
He shrugged, tearing into a loaf of bread, “I know what tastes like shit and what tastes good, you know.”
We dug in, eating grapes, cheese and bread, washing it all down with the “shit” wine. We were ravenous, consuming half the basket before either one of us spoke again.
“I can go get more,” he said, taking the last piece of bread.
I waved him off and drank more wine, giving the bottle a little shake, the last third of wine sloshing inside. The snack would send me off to sleep without much of a problem.