“Who are they?” Parker said as they pulled up along the winch.
“My friends,” Blake said. “The people I was with. They have to keep them alive.”
“Why?”
Blake got out of the truck and went to the winch. “Because whoever you kill just comes back.” She pushed a button on the winch, and with a grinding of gears, the cable wire began to unroll as the cages slowly lowered to the ground. “So your true enemies, you never kill.”
“Why don’t they kill themselves?”
“With what?” Blake said. “And if one of them does manage to die, his friends will be tortured even more for it.”
Parker watched from the truck as the four cages, all of them containing men, reached street level. Blake pulled open each door with a shriek of metal. The men inside look like starved dogs, bones protruding, ribcages standing out like ventilation covers beneath tattered shirts. Their faces were covered in bruises and cuts. One of them stumbled forward and collapsed to the ground. Blake helped the man up, then pointed to the cinema. Parker couldn’t hear her words, but he was sure she was telling them about Mohawk still chained up inside. The men’s eyes went hard and narrow as railroad spikes. They shuffled off painfully, like zombies, lurching across the avenue toward the desolate movie theater.
Blake got back in the truck, and she and Parker headed north.
“What’s going to happen?” he asked.
“Same thing that always happens when the group getting tortured captures their torturer.”
They drove up First Avenue, the bridge receding behind them in the side view mirror. The street was empty, but Parker glimpsed occasional movement inside some of the buildings. He had the sense that people were everywhere.
Every building was a wreck. Some had plywood put up over windows with various cryptic messages scrawled graffiti style over the front.
No Food Here.
Beware the Passage of Days.
Revenants Inside.
The sidewalks were littered with broken glass and trash, surrounded by an unearthly quiet. Beyond the low rumble of their own truck engine, Parker could hear nothing. Manhattan, the loudest, busiest city on Earth, had gone completely quiet. And it wasn’t a peaceful quiet. It was the quiet brought about by fire. The quiet of someone hiding beneath the bed from a burglar. Whoever lived here was afraid.
“Why did you cut the heads off those men?” Parker asked.
“To keep them from coming back.”
“Coming back?”
“When you kill someone, their . . .” She paused, trying to find the right word. “Spirit. Comes back. In a new body. They are the same person, more or less. But the body they left behind, their dead body, comes back to life too. But there’s no consciousness in it. No soul. No thought. It just wanders. We call them revenants.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“They’re the most dangerous things out here. Violent. Unpredictable. They’re all trying to find a consciousness. So any humans they see, they attack.”
“And chopping the head off keeps them from coming back?”
“Yup.”
“Lovely.”
Blake pulled the truck over on the corner of First Avenue and Eighty-Second Street. She dropped the gearshift into Park, then shut off the ignition. The rumble died out. The silence of the street was overpowering. What she said about the revenants made sense. The bodies must be AI, but since nobody was running the system, they operated without guidance.
“We got a read on Clayton.” Selberg’s voice sparked suddenly in Parker’s ear. “He’s coming into the system on a Metro-North Railroad train arriving at Grand Central in twenty minutes.”
Parker didn’t reply. He and Blake sat in front of a grocery store. Through the empty glass panes of the front windows, Parker could see overturned racks. Under one of the racks, a pair of legs. Someone dead beneath, like a dog, crawling beneath a porch to die.
“What are we doing here?” Parker said.
“We?” Blake said. “You’re getting out and walking. There is no we.”
“Walking where?”
“I don’t really care. But I don’t have time to spend babysitting you anymore for free. I need a guarantee.”
“What guarantee?”
She turned and looked at him for the first time. Her face was hard lines and sharp edges, her nose busted from the earlier fall. She was a woman who had seen bad times and knew they were only getting worse. But her eyes were a soft green. Like a field just after dawn. “That you get me out of here,” Blake said.
“How do you even know I can? Or what’s even out there?”
She looked away from him, her big, green eyes growing distant as she stared up the length of the avenue. On the horizon, the wrecks of cars had been piled up in front of the lobby of an apartment building. The vehicles formed a makeshift pillbox. On the opposite side, a fixed machine gun was mounted into the ground. A man smoked a cigarette, his hand casually resting on the barrel. Above him, the apartment building rose about twenty stories. Parker could see the first real signs of human habitation. Clothes hung out to dry along the railing of a balcony. Cook smoke wafted from one of the windows. A shirtless man sat on a plastic beach chair on another balcony reading a book, a sniper rifle slung over his shoulder.
“They call these places Peace Colonies,” Blake said. “After the guards left and things began to fall apart, the good people barricaded themselves in these towers. They created their own defense systems. Working together, they formed a little ecosystem of protection against the rovers.”
“Who are the rovers?”
“The rovers are the gangs that run the streets. Thousands of them out there. Like our friend with the Mohawk back at the theater. They take what they want. Rape. Torture. Doesn’t matter to them. They have no law. Only the law of the gun.”
“Why did you leave the Peace Colonies?”
“Rovers grabbed some of my friends,” Blake said. “I’ve been searching for them.”
Parker reached over and turned the ignition back on. The engine rumbled to life. “Keep driving. Let’s talk.”
Blake put the vehicle into gear and they continued west down Eighty-Second Street, the small quiet brownstones all gutted and blackened by smoke.
“You remember when the guards left?” Parker said.
Blake nodded, navigating around a torn-up section of the road. “This place wasn’t so bad before. There were peacekeepers here.”
“When did they leave?”
“About two years ago,” Blake said. “It was like, we all woke up one day and ten percent of the people were just . . . gone. Not too long after that, the chaos started. But I remember, every once in a while, someone would show up. From the outside. They would come for one of us. And just vanish.”
“What do you think the outside is?”
“Someplace that’s not here,” Blake said. “I know there’s something going on here. Something that doesn’t make sense. Like, how can you kill a person, then they keep coming back. How is that possible? And why has nobody ever left Manhattan? I mean, when the peacekeepers were here, we all believed that this island was all there was in the world. But why have bridges? You know, if you walk out on a bridge here, you come to the fog. You’ve seen it, that fog that surrounds the whole island.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“You walk into the fog, you just come right back to the beginning of the bridge again. I mean logically, why have a bridge that doesn’t go anywhere?” Blake said. “So there’s got to be somewhere else, other than here.”
They were quickly approaching Central Park. Blake accelerated, then braked hard, their truck lurching up over the curb at the wall of the park. Only the park wasn’t there anymore. Instead, Parker saw a vast open space of dirt that yawned out toward the reservoir. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had been burned to rubble. And along the open space, uneven rows of wooden grave markers stretched forth into the thousands. Central Park had been turned into a cemetery
.
“This is what the last two years have been like. One big graveyard. Everyone who has been killed, they keep coming back, but the bodies pile up. Sever their heads and bury them so they don’t turn to revenant,” Blake said. “I find your man for you, you get me out of here.”
Selberg’s voice crackled again in Parker’s ear. “Got a lot of movement at Grand Central. Clayton is headed for a hornet’s nest.”
An old man with a salt-and-pepper beard walked along the edge of the cemetery. A massive pit bull on a length of chain wrapped around the man’s hand walked with him. The dog must have been a leftover from when the system had been live, like the horses in the 1890 system.
“You do what I say,” Parker said to Blake, “I’ll get you out.”
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter. But I will. I promise.”
Crossing over from Eighty-Second Street, another man dressed in rags pushed a shopping cart filled with lengths of metal pipe. He walked slowly toward them. One of the wheels of the cart spun mindlessly. Blake looked uncertain. Her fingers drummed against the edge of the steering wheel.
“Blake,” Parker said, “we don’t have a lot of time here. So you need to make a decision right now, or I need to get out and find another way. I have to get to Grand Central.”
“What’s your name?”
“My name is Parker.”
Blake’s hand tightened on the wheel. She put the truck into gear. “Well, Parker, hang on. You see that guy with the pit bull? And the other guy with the shopping cart?”
“Yes.”
Keeping one hand on the wheel, Blake slowly raised the Sten. “See how they’re coming up on both sides of the truck?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a sign that it’s time for us to go.”
Shopping-cart man stopped walking in the middle of the street about thirty yards ahead of them. He moved slowly toward the front of the cart and began rummaging among the pipes. Parker gripped his own machine gun, bringing the barrel up to just below the level of the window. The man with the cart spun around fast. In his hand he held a bolt-action rifle. He fired once from waist level, the bullet shattering the windshield. Parker felt the impact just inches to the left of his head, the frame of the truck vibrating as the bullet tore into the cab.
Blake put the truck into reverse and pumped the pedal to the floor. The truck lurched backward. Along the cemetery, the other man bent down and released a clip on the pit bull’s collar and shouted something in the dog’s ear. The muscular beast tore away from its owner, streaking across the front of the truck, closing the distance on the vehicle. Blake braked hard and spun the wheel. The truck skidded and swung in a half circle, Central Park sliding wildly past the windshield until they faced south. She put the truck into Drive and slammed down the accelerator again. The vehicle shuddered, then tires caught on concrete with a squeal of rubber and the duo jolted forward. On Parker’s side, the pit bull caught up with them, legs pumping, mouth hanging open. The animal launched itself up through Parker’s open window, its compact body slamming into his shoulder.
The pit bull was in the small cab with them, eighty pounds of muscle and teeth snapping and twisting. Its jaws snapped shut on Parker’s forearm, incredible pressure and pain charging through the length of his arm. The dog’s head twisted and snapped back and forth, the teeth digging through leather and flesh. With his free hand, Parker reached for his weapon. An instant later, the cabin exploded with the ear shattering crack of Blake’s machine gun. She fired with one hand, the bullets striking the dog’s body. There was a yelp of pain and Parker felt the pressure subside, like the easing off of a steam valve.
“Oh man,” Blake said. “I hate shooting dogs.”
The dog’s dead weight was heavy in Parker’s lap. The truck was traveling fast down Fifth Avenue. Parker pushed the animal out the window of the truck and it disappeared from view. He tore off his jacket and inspected his arm. The skin was dark red, already bruising from the crushing force of the jaws, but the leather had kept the dog’s teeth from tearing skin. Parker felt a wave of nausea rise from his stomach to his mouth.
“You okay?” Blake asked.
“Ask me in five minutes.”
“Welcome to my world,” she said. “Sucks here.”
Parker put his jacket on and rubbed the length of his arm. They sped past St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Graffiti scrawled across the front read “There is no God here.”
That was the truth.
“What’s at Grand Central?” Blake asked.
“My partner is coming in.”
“Grand Central is filled with rovers,” Blake said. “So I hope your friend is worth it.”
Blake turned off the avenue and headed east down Forty-Second Street. Parker had never worked with anyone on the inside before. And definitely not a prisoner. But this place was different. He had never seen a system this violent.
“We’re going to have to go in fast,” Blake said. “Snatch up your man before the rovers even know we’re there. But that’s not the worst of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“This guy you’re looking for,” Blake said. “He’s holed up in the Waldorf Astoria hotel.”
“Sounds classy.”
“Not exactly,” Blake said. “That place is like ground zero for revenants. The entire building is crawling with them. Your guy is basically trapped there.”
“Do you know where?”
“I heard he’s got a top floor penthouse. Not sure though. Either way, we’re going to have to fight a lot of revenants to get to him. And they don’t go down easy. So I hope your friend we’re meeting is good in a fight.”
“Sam? Oh yeah, he’s the best.”
Grand Central approached rapidly, the large granite structure blackened by smoke and ominously quiet. They screeched to a stop beneath the Park Avenue viaduct and Blake was out of the truck in an instant, moving rapidly toward the main glass doors. Parker followed and they entered the central walkway, which led toward the main concourse.
Even in this awful place, Grand Central was still the most glorious station Parker had ever seen. It was the one constant in nearly all the systems he had broken into. The timeless anchor in a city of change. Someone must have hooked up the station to generators, because overhead, the chandeliers cast a pinkish hue off the Tennessee marble that layered every surface. Abandoned shops were spaced at intervals along the Vanderbilt Hall before the space expanded into the giant main concourse.
Above them, the domed ceiling soared, covered in the pattern of constellations on aqua-colored plaster. Light streamed in through three arched windows the size of small buildings that lined the far wall, while the iconic four-faced clock stood in watch over the main information booth; each clock frozen at 9:15. The familiarity of the concourse comforted Parker, but its emptiness made him uneasy. There was little cover here, the perfect place to be trapped.
“Track 19,” Selberg said. “Coming in now.”
Parker turned and scanned the arches for the correct track. Over the ticket windows, the arrival board suddenly came to life, the black and white tiles fluttering like shuffled playing cards.
“This way,” Parker called out. “Track 19.”
The platform was empty. The rails were already beginning to hum, and in the distance, farther up the line, they saw the slowly increasing brightness of train headlights approaching. Blake took up a position behind a support column, her Sten trained out toward the main concourse.
“Get your friend and let’s go,” Blake said. “By now the rovers know we’re here and they’ll be coming for us. And don’t let yourself get taken alive.”
“What do you mean?”
“Unless you want to spend the next five lifetimes in a cage, if things don’t go your way, make sure the last bullet in that machine gun is for you.”
“What happens if I get killed?”
“We call it getting recycled. You’ll wake up somewhere else in the city. Could b
e anywhere.”
The train chuffed its way along the platform. A silver locomotive, blue stripe along the side, with Metro-North printed in white painted letters. Behind it, eight passenger cars.
The cars rolled to a stop and the doors opened automatically. No sign of Clayton. Parker entered the first train and found rows of empty seats. He moved quickly through a handful of cars before finding his partner. Clayton had kept his original form. Sometimes it was difficult getting into these systems and they had to jump into other bodies. But security here was easier to break so both Parker and Clayton could be hacked in as themselves.
Clayton wore a business suit, seated in the back of an empty car, his head slumped over onto his chest. His eyes were half closed, thin strips of white visible beneath his lashes. His body was limp, the only movement coming from his thumb and forefinger as they tapped a random pattern against each other.
“I’m showing a lot of activity headed your way,” Selberg said.
Parker bent down over Clayton, took his shoulders, and shook him hard. He was lifeless. “What’s going on with him?”
“I’m working on getting him synced. He’s a first-timer. It’s taking longer.”
Out on the platform, Blake’s voice called out. “Hurry up in there. We’re about to have company.”
Parker checked Clayton’s pulse, feeling nothing. He shook him again, then stepped back to the open doorway and looked out along the platform. Blake hid behind the support column, machine gun at her side. Beyond her, a dozen armed men moved quietly along the length of the main concourse. They wore a rough assortment of civilian clothes. Some in jeans, some in cargo pants. Most were in filthy T-shirts. Each carried at least one rifle.
They looked like trained civilian militia, serious and cruel, but they didn’t know where Parker and Blake were. They walked in a line across the concourse, headed for the ticket windows. Eventually they would begin to check each platform. And Parker and Blake would be trapped.
The Memory Agent Page 23