“I haven’t eaten yet,” I said. “I’ll join you for that drink, if you’ll join me in a meal.” He nodded. I added, “But so help me, the day you fail to back one of us up because you’re drunk, it will become my mission to make your life a living hell. Assuming I’m alive to do that.”
“Fair enough.”
Auden’s runabout held a spare set of clothes, jeans and a sweatshirt. The jeans were a little long for me, and the sweatshirt a little tight across the shoulders, but they’d do well enough for grabbing a bite to eat. My boots still squelched a bit, leaving damp footprints behind, but I could live with that for an hour or two. Auden knew of a place not far away, said it looked like a dive but served excellent burgers and moderately good whiskey. He was right on both counts. We demolished the burgers quickly, Auden’s appetite apparently having returned. When we sat back with our coffee and drinks Auden’s look was evaluating.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Byer leave, I get the impression you’ve dealt with Boss Roth before. But I haven’t seen a Railwalker in Bay City for many years, and then it wasn’t you. How and when did you meet Roth?”
I told him.
29. WOLF
I was about twelve when my Pa nearly lost me to Wendell Crichton in a card game.
Until that happened, I never quite knew what I really meant to my Pa. Sometimes he’d call me his “lucky charm” and swear the only times he won were when I was with him. Other times he went the other way, claiming I jinxed his luck, made him lose. I never knew if he was going to insist I sit by him through a whole night of gaming, and I’d be nodding off to the low murmur of men’s voices growling out bets and the smell of hooch and tobacco, or whether I’d be sent out to sit alone in a parking lot behind some anonymous bar or casino, waiting for him to come collect me when the games finally ran down. It was pretty confusing for a kid. It seemed like I was somehow responsible for whatever the Fates threw at my father, good or bad. That’s a heavy load for a kid to carry, especially when your Pa loses more often than he wins.
Pa had been on a bad losing streak that spring when we rolled into Bay City. Did I say “rolled”? I misspoke. We walked. Pop had lost the jeep back in some berg or other; I don’t remember the name. I do remember the place had only one small bar where the games went on, where Pa had been playing with hard men who smelled of animals and grain. We left there riding on a donkey who could barely carry the two of us. Pa lost that animal in the next town over, which I remember was called Sitio Ancho because it sure didn’t look much like a city to me. From there we ended up walking into Bay City, which did look like a city, in spades. I don’t know who Pa got to stake him to the first couple of games he played in Bay City, but he must have found someone, since his losing streak, if it didn’t turn to winning, at least eased up some. We had a room where the roaches would actually run and hide if you turned on the light, instead of hissing at you to back off and get out of their face.
I guess I’ve been presenting a kind of one-sided picture of my father here. I’ve been citing all the bad stuff, and none of the good. It wasn’t like he was an evil man. He never mistreated me, not really. Oh, he walloped me a few times. Sometimes I probably even deserved it. Now and then, when he was losing regular, and drunk, he might light into me for no other reason than that I was a convenient target. But if he was stupid and unconscious sometimes, and a slave to his addiction, he could also be wonderfully charming and loving and generous, too. He had what my profs at the Railwalker Academy called “the glamour.” I’ve seen him lose money he never had to men who would have killed you for looking at them wrong, and not only escape with his life, but charm them into lending him tram fare to get home. That’s how we ended up with that donkey.
Still, life with my Pa wasn’t all roaches and sticky carpets and dingy sheets. I’ve been talking mainly about his losses, but he sometimes won big, too. There were times we spent weeks in the most expensive hotels in the western cities, catered to by uniformed servants, and indulged in whatever fancies crossed our minds. When Pa was on a winning streak, nothing was too good for his kid. And because he did have his winning streaks, and he knew how to work them, my Pa had a reputation in the gambling community. Which meant that when the chips were down, he could sometimes get into high-stakes games on nothing more than his name, and his winning smile.
I can’t say I know it for a fact, but I can guess that that’s probably how he got into that game in Bay City that time. If you’d made a list of the players sitting at the table that night, except for my father, your average Bay City resident would have assumed it was some sort of high-level city conference. And for all I know, it may have been; there were many games my father attended where much more than just gambling went on. You’ve heard the cliché about how deals are made in smoke-filled rooms... Well, my father and I were there for many of those deals. We weren’t parties to the negotiations, just to the card games, games which served as the excuse for certain persons of power to gather together in an informal setting.
This particular night there were many powerful men present, and a couple of women, but I would remember only two of them. One was Wendell Crichton. The other was Micah Roth.
Pa was losing badly that night. I could tell by the way his leg was twitching. Not that I couldn’t have followed the play—by the age of nine, I knew the games and the odds almost as well as my Pa did. Poker, jackflash, crops, roundabout, you name it, I knew it. But I wasn’t really following the play, not in any conscious, intentional way. Tired and sleepy, sitting on the floor by my father’s chair where he could touch my head for luck now and then, the leg told me all I needed to know. Pa was not doing well.
I came alert again when I heard my father say my name. He wasn’t addressing me, he was talking to one of the other players. “He’s a good boy,” I heard him say. “Smart, industrious, worth a fuck of a lot more than twelve K.”
Alarm bells went off in my head as I realized suddenly what was happening. I now knew exactly what my father thought I was worth: twelve thousand bucks.
“No,” said another voice. “I’ll cover.”
“I didn’t hear the man ask for anyone to cover for him,” said another.
I dragged myself to my feet, looked around the table. It was clear immediately what was happening. The others had all dropped out. It was down to my father and the two men who had spoken. One was big, blond, and balding, with the face of a man used to getting what he wants; the other was smaller, but denser, with the build of a boxer, lank black hair, piercing eyes, and thick, stubby fingers, a man who looked used to physical labor. I would later learn that the blond man was Wendell Crichton, the boss of Bay City, and the darker man was Micah Roth, head of the Federation of Labor Unions. At that time, however, to me, they were simply the Dark Man and the Light Man. And intuitively, I knew that the Dark Man was on my side, while the Light Man was an enemy.
The atmosphere around the table crackled like static on a frigid day in February. Everyone was staring at my Pa. I looked at him too. He glanced at me, then back at the other players. At last he said, “Sure. Thanks, Micah. I appreciate it. I’ll accept your cover.”
The blond man looked disappointed, and the dark man didn’t exactly look pleased, either.
Later, as we were leaving the place, the dark man approached us. My Pop started to voice his thanks again, but the dark man, Micah Roth, put him up against the wall of the building, his forearm across my Pa’s throat.
“Spare me your thanks, arsehole,” he said. “And know this. I may not be able to track all your movements, all your games and all your bets, but I will have the word out to watch you. And if you ever wager away this child’s life again, and I hear of it, I will find you, and I will make you regret it. Do you understand me?”
Pa nodded, so far as he was able with Roth’s forearm pinning his neck to the wall. Roth released my father, glanced briefly at me, then walked away.
Seven years later, at the age of sixteen, I left my Pa and went to wo
rk with a construction company in Santa Brita. It took me another three years to save up that twelve thousand, but I finally did it. When I had the total amount I traveled down to Bay City and looked up Micah Roth. By that time the People’s Takeover had happened, and Roth was now the City Boss in place of Wendell Crichton.
As it turned out, it took some doing to reach Roth, even with the money I had to offer. When I finally made it past the secretaries and official filters and dropped the cash on Roth’s desk, it was clear that he remembered me and my Pa, and what this was all about.
“You didn’t have to do this,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “I did.”
He examined me with that laser gaze for long moment, and then said, “Yeah. I understand why you did. Thank you.”
“We square?” I asked.
“Yeah, we’re definitely square.’
“Good.” I walked out of his office.
Auden had listened quietly to my story. When I’d finished, he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, “that sounds like Micah Roth.”
“Funny,” I said. “I paid off my old man’s debt, but I still feel like I owe Roth something.”
“Yeah,” he said. Took a sip of his drink. “That kind of thing, it’s about more than money. Roth and Adams both stood behind me when I needed it. You can’t ask more than that from a boss.” I looked my question at him. He made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a snort. “What,” he said, “you don’t know? Well, it’s not like it’s some kind of secret. It was all over the newsfeeds at the time.”
30. AUDEN
My Da was a guardsman, back in the day. You probably know the guard were divided over the Takeover. Lots of ’em had had their fill of Wendell Crichton. Anton Robles, George Adams, and my Da among ’em. This bunch of buds fought alongside Roth and his people. When the fighting was over they formed the core of the new city guard. Da retired from the guard not long after that. Wasn’t a long retirement. His heart got him within a couple of years.
My younger brother, Clay, he was always a heartache to Da. All kids go through that rebellious shit, but Clay never grew out of it. Ran with a rough crowd—Bar of Gold, Danny’s Place, that sort of thing. In the days after the Takeover, the loyalists who stayed in the city gravitated to the rougher streets, so Clay ended up hanging with that sort, too. Said some harsh things about our Da, and the guards, and Roth now and then. ’Course, that was other people talking through him, I knew that. Clay wasn’t ever a thinker, a reader, the type to make speeches. He just memorized bits and pieces of his favorite loudmouth’s screed. He was like one of them guys chop up bits of other people’s music and make a song out of it. But then, some of them guys actually come out with some cool stuff. They apply some creativity, where with Clay, it was just regurgitated pap, y’know?
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. Kid had a good heart. But he lost it somewhere along the way. There was this loyalist cell, called themselves the Bay City Traditionalist Wing—most called ’em the City Trads—that Clay got involved with. Jeff Coltrin, they called him Fariff, the leader of the City Trads, he’d turned them from being a fringe political party into practically a religious cult. He used hypnotic indoctrination, drugs, sex, whatever worked best for the mark he was brainwashing. He got Clay hooked on crackers. I knew the kid was doing them; you can’t miss the shakes crackers give you. But what could I do? Give him a talking-to as his older brother? Like he was gonna listen to that, right? Don’t think I didn’t try.
Long story short, one afternoon, we got a tip-off. The Trads were planning to assassinate Mears. He was a famous Labor leader who was about to set off on a five city-state tour. I got the call; I went out with a squad, met with Mears’s people as they were about to set out. It was our responsibility to escort him to the intercity train station. After that he was somebody else’s problem, right?
The City Trads, they decided to take him at the station.
There was a Railwalker in town about that time... I think he did the Mayday Ceremony. Big strapping blond guy named Baze. Kinda full of himself. Either he had Chief Adams convinced he was hot shit, or Adams let him think he had. Either way, he was with us when our people arrived at the station.
When the hit came down, the City Trads had maybe a half dozen in the field. Real amateurs. They tried to look like regular travelers, but they were sending off signals like they might as well have carried neon signs. My guys took ’em down, no problem. Except one of ’em, he grabbed a hostage, this six-year-old girl. He was holding a gun to her head. And as I got a little closer, I could see it was Clay.
Now, I was thinking like Clay was still in there somewhere. If I could talk to him, I could get him to see how he shouldn’t be doing this, how this little girl is innocent. She has nothing to do with his fight; he’s gonna be betraying his own cause if he hurts her, right? I mean, can the cause really call itself righteous if they murder innocent kids? I still think I might have stood a chance to talk him down.
But before I could even move, Railwalker Baze stepped up, and he walked toward Clay and the kid, talking to him the whole time, putting a Force in his voice, working on Clay, trying to get him to stand down. What he didn’t realize is, that kind of voice trick, it wasn’t gonna work on this kid, ’cause he’d already been brainwashed. Fariff had got his mind in a steel trap, and nobody else was getting a finger between those jaws. Not with fancy esoteric mind tricks, anyway. All Baze did was piss him off.
I looked at my brother’s face, holding his gun on this girl, and our eyes met. And I saw my brother wasn’t there any more. I wasn’t looking into Clay’s eyes, I was looking into the eyes of a disease, an addiction, a sickness. And I knew that that sickness meant he was not getting out of there alive. And I knew, I absolutely knew, that he was going to take that little girl with him when he went.
He raised the gun and capped off a shot at the Railwalker, which knocked him down.
Before he could bring the weapon to bear on the kid again, I shot him through the forehead.
Clay wasn’t really a good shot, so he had only winged the Railwalker. The kid was fine. Mears came out of it with his hair barely ruffled. Newsfeeds had a field day with it, of course. Most called me a hero, and some—the more loyalist-oriented—made a lot out of the fact he was my brother.
Auden was silent for a while.
Finally, I said, “I’m sorry about your brother. And I’m sorry one of our order interfered.”
“Baze was a dickhead,” said Auden.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. “The order isn’t perfect. We can’t avoid that entirely.”
“Avoid what?”
“A few dickheads taking the tats now and then.”
Auden snorted. “I guess you can’t. The guard has our share of dickheads, too. As you discovered.”
“I won’t hold that against you, if you won’t hold it against me.”
“Fair enough.”
We were both silent for a while, wrapped in our own thoughts.
“Y’know,” said Auden finally, “I tell myself that my brother died long before that day. That what I killed was a disease, a monster. But even if he was really my brother at his core, the monster was gonna make him kill that kid. I couldn’t let him do that, could I?
“No, you couldn’t.”
“Don’t change the fact that I killed my own kin.”
There wasn’t anything I could say to that.
31. BAY CITY
Nita Robles stood in the door of the locker room, looking into the gym, watching the female Railwalker, Morgan, work out. She had been doing sword work. She didn’t work with the wooden bokkan or shinai that were racked on the wall, but Iado-style, with her own steel sword. Robles admired her moves. She was fast and slick, faster than most swordsmen or women Robles had seen. The city guard were drilled in sword work, and wore swords with their dress uniforms. It was one of the weapons they had to qualify with, but it wasn’t a preferred weapon. Most guards carried batons and guns, and trained most
heavily at baton and hand-to-hand. Robles was the odds-on favorite in the inter-city competitions coming up this fall.
After a while Morgan set her sword aside and began her empty-hand kata. Robles watched with interest. The woman had power, no doubt about that, a lithe strength. Her moves showed some influence of Baritsu, but were mostly derived from a hard style: Shotokan, Nita thought, or perhaps Kyoku. After watching for a while, as the Railwalker finished one set of kata, Robles walked into the gym and to the edge of the mat. The Railwalker nodded with an inviting gesture. The guardswoman stepped onto the mat and the two bowed again and squared off.
Robles let the woman come to her. Since the Railwalker’s kata had been hard style, Robles stayed soft, avoiding, circling, redirecting attacks. ’Kido and wado moves mostly, the adjustment of vectors, use of the opponent’s strength and energy against them. When she thought she’d taken the Railwalker’s measure, gotten a sense of her personal style, Nita shifted to offense and moved in on her. Kicking, punching, blocking, the two women pursued each other across the mat. Nita moved in for a one-two combination and Morgan stepped inside it. There was a flurry of knees and elbows, stunning blows, and Robles was slammed to the mat. Morgan knelt above her, poised for a killing stroke, as the guardswoman slapped out.
They stayed frozen for a moment, Nita Robles glaring up at Railwalker Morgan. Since she’d won her first black belt at eighteen, no one had ever taken Robles down that easily. The Railwalker’s eyes were steady and level, revealing no emotion.
Nita Robles began to laugh. “That,” she said, “was cool. Show me.”
Morgan smiled, stood, and handed the guardswoman up. “The close-in stuff comes mostly from the later pre-Crash street systems like Keysi and Bakbakan,” she said. “You want to really learn that style, you should talk to Rok. He’s amazing with it. But yeah, I can show you a few things.”
Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman Page 24