He unlocked the door and she piled in, grinning. She jammed the bags in between her knees as she sat down and he could see that they were filled with the oblongs of boxes and electronics pouches. "For later," she said to him, winking. "And this is for you." Bobbi reached into one of the black bags and came up with a shoulder rig into which the fat black shape of a pistol rested.
Walken took the rig in one hand and unsheathed the pistol with the other. He looked at it. It was a Colt-Jennings M27, an American Special Forces sidearm from before the European War, big and heavy with a twelve-millimeter bore. It had a tactical unit slung under its chunky barrel combining a laser spot-sight and a blinder strobe. It wasn't like the Nambu with its graceful, corporate-inspired lines. There was the fire-select switch and the bulge of a heavy recoil canceler behind the tactical unit, but there was no dual magazine, no tranquilizers, no electronics. Compared to his now-impounded sidearm it was a spear with a monomolecular edge, primitive in design yet devastating in effect.
"Yeah, I know," Bobbi said as she saw his expression, "It's a clunker. But it ain't got a transponder, so it can't be tracked and with the tactical kit you can probably run off the psychos just by waving it around. Got you some ammo, too — here." She pulled out a blank cardboard box and handed it across, which he took after strapping on the C-J and shoving it home; its weight made him feel a great deal more secure.
Opening the box made Walken whistle. Oblong cassettes of translucent orange plastic containing rows of caseless bullets were packed neatly inside, their gleaming tips jutting out from blocks of gray propellant. Most were banded with olive paint, military-issue uranium stoppers, but two were full of cylindrical slugs banded with an angry orange. "Comet rounds," he pointed out. "They don't make these anymore." Because they were outlawed, he knew, after the European War. Comets were incendiary penetrators, made to use against personnel and light armor; they were like miniature tank rounds, liquifeying in transit, turning into plasma upon impact. They'd fuck up a car or a truck like it was hit with a thermite needle or a heavy-caliber rifle round, nevermind what they'd do to a person. "These couldn't be cheap."
"No," she said with a shrug, "But I don't do the shooty thing. I figure you'd be better off with a real alley-blaster, not those pissy Japanese things they give you Agency boys. That's a real man's shooter." She grinned at him again, showing white teeth. "Besides, baby. Gotta spend money to make money sometimes, yeah?"
"Yeah," he replied. He took out the C-J and slid a magazine of the depleted uranium slugs into its grip. "What else did you get?"
Bobbi rattled off a list: a motion tracker and a pair of earbead radios with jaw mikes, more security paraphernalia for her home setup. She'd bought some more things for her medic bag, too, though she didn't go into details. "Trade secrets, baby," she chimed as they started eastward. "Never you mind."
They drove for a while in silence. Walken prepared himself for what most likely loomed ahead; crumbling concrete, bad streets, wild-eyed gypsies aiming to take whatever they had. He had an image of himself lying dead on a ruined street, Bobbi getting dragged off screaming to serve as the main course of a rape buffet. The latter part of that image made him close his eyes.
"Hey," Bobbi said, blinking up at him, "Eyes on the road, baby. You all right?"
He frowned, eyes snapping open again. "Yeah," he said. "Sure. Just thinking about what we're doing, that's all."
She canted her head a bit, pink cockatiel crest licking the Honda's roof. "Hey," she said gently, her green eyes seeking his face. "This ain't your best day, I know. Just don't go unraveling on me already."
"It's not that." He shrugged, frowning a bit more. "I'm okay. It's the whole thing, that's all. I'm trying to figure out what the Hell he's doing, sending us back there. Why's he putting me on this trip?"
"Why does anybody do anything?" Bobbi shrugged; beyond them the Verge grew shabbier and shabbier, crumbling away with every passing block. There weren't even streetlights now, just dead bulbs in rusting fixtures hanging overhead as they drove by. "Stadil was always a weird fuck, even when he was being gracious. Made me do a lot of song-and-dance just to get the first job, you know? Hell, maybe he's still alive somewhere, just fucking with you."
"No chance of that," he rumbled. "Peeled his face off a shorted-out deck."
"Jesus."
Walken nodded. "Nasty scene. Say, that reminds me." The Honda was alone on the street now, the last of the battered trucks and vehicles giving way to spatterings of foot traffic. Here, sixty years of urban decay was being bared as if it were a vast time-lapse projection of an orange rotting in a bowl. "You know anything about something that'd vaporize the brain? An implant?"
"What, like a bomb? Skull-mine, something like that?"
He nodded, nimbly guiding the Honda around an enormous pothole. "Something like that. Stadil and his boys... their brains were burnt out when we got to them. Like, entirely. There was hardly anything left in their skulls."
"Jesus," she said again. Her nose wrinkled. "That's nasty shit. Uh... I dunno, baby, every implant I know of either scrambles or goes boom, even Wonderland shit. I guess maybe you could use a thermite charge but that'd take the whole head off. That doesn't sound like the kind of damage that you're talking about."
"Well," Walken said with a grunt, "Their skulls had popped from the pressure, just there was nothing left behind inside of them. Strange thing, though. They were all wired in at the time."
"All of 'em?" Her brows arched a bit. "Hmm."
He glanced at her. "You hear of something like that?"
"Maybe." She frowned a bit, thoughtful. "Lemme think on it. Now you know where we're going, right?"
"Yeah. I've been there before — a few days ago, even."
"That Doll thing?"
He nodded. "That's where we found some Koreans, hired hack-artists. Gangsters, you know. All dead, taken apart by hand. We thought they might've taken the Dolls for Stadil, away from someone else. Thought maybe whoever it was originally ordered the Dolls sent someone to pick them up. Like a team of mechs or something."
"That's some nasty shit there," she said. "What do you think?"
"I think the Dolls did it." He rolled his shoulders. "That was what my 'instincts' said, that and the fact the one I killed attacked me first. How did Stadil know that?"
"I don't know," Bobbi said while going back to her packages. She was busy adding software data cylinders from a box into the forest of colors already slotted into the back of her portable terminal. Walken thought of Park and his expensive hack-progs. "He knew a lot about you, though. He liked you, like I said — had a great admiration of your instincts. 'Bobbi', he told me when he was going on about getting killed, 'You'll like this one. He knows things about the world, just as you know about technology. He knows a lot about the truth, even though he might not realize it himself.'"
"That's ominous," Walken muttered.
Bobbi nodded. "Yeah," she agreed absently, sliding the cover closed on the software compartment. "I didn't know what he meant by that. I guess you're just some hot shit detective, huh?"
He shrugged. "I'd like to think so," he said, "But the truth is I just let things talk to me. I used to be closer to regs, you know, but now..." Another shrug. "Honestly, half the time I just let the moment lead me on. You know?"
There was silence; he looked over, suddenly uncomfortable, but found Bobbi looking at him with a wide, pearly grin. "Oh, I know exactly what you mean, baby," she said. "I think we're gonna get along just fine."
When the marginal civilization of the Verge had gone entirely and the rickety towers of the Old City began to swim into view, Walken did not speak. He was the driver, the nerves, the muscle. He dug into his basket of old experiences, dug out old cop instincts with mental fingers. The Honda would be a target for any wrecker gangs or bandits that wanted to pick it down and he had to be absolutely careful.
Bobbi was plugged into the Honda's console. She had already demonstrated her ability to split awareness
when she hacked the cameras back at Sea-Tac, so he wasn't going to tell her no when she decided to ride the car's computer. She was serving as two sets of eyes, scanning with the car's sensor along with her own pretty greens. "Got bingo on the scope," she would chime every now and again, arms crossed, her face again a mask as she divided her sensorium. "It's raining, though. People don't come out when it's raining."
"Don't see why not," he muttered. "Seems the perfect time for an ambush."
"Even Oldies get sick," she pointed out. "Ain't exactly any clinics around here ain't run by the Koreans or the Yak, you know? Hard to get yourself into a hospital for pneumonia when they got guns at the door. And that's only on the fringes. Past that, it's all Crazytown."
Walken nodded. "Yeah," he murmured, "Just didn't think about it, I guess."
"They ain't animals out here, Tom," Bobbi grumbled. "'Cept for the crazies. They just live like it, sometimes."
She was right, of course. Out here it was like another world, and the disconnect between the city zones could be incredible. The crazy ones, especially; poor corporate management and the broken free health system often resulted in the insane leaving institutions without suitable treatment. They always seemed to circulate back out into the Old City, where they formed gangs of psychopathic hunters. Ferals, they were called, and even though they might not be uncivilized as individuals their composite madness made them into a very dangerous whole.
"I'm sorry," he said, blinking out of danger mode for a moment. "I didn't mean it like that."
She didn't move, but he heard the shrug in her voice. "S’alright,” she said. "Folks just think what they wanna in the city, that's all. Whole different world out here."
Voice of experience, Walken thought. Must've come from out here herself.
"I get what you mean," he said and felt immediately guilty. "I know how it is. I came out here from the Eastern Corridor, you know?" Images of the megalopolis he had called home spread into his mind, the cordon of urban creep that had once been comprised of separate great cities now solidified into a monolithic whole. "Baltimore."
She made a soft 'ahhh' of understanding. "Charm City, sure," she said with a nod. "Nasty place. You a cop there, yeah?"
Memory pooled cold and damp in his stomach. "Yeah. Street, then Narco. Then the Bureau got me after I was part of this Wonderland case. Weirdest fucking thing, you know. They were selling this drug called..." He fumbled to think of the chemical name, blanked, discarded the attempt. "Well, they just called it 'The Rocket' on the street."
"What, the White Rocket? Send you to orbit on board the Astral Plane?"
"Yeah," he said with a nod. "That's another name for it."
Despite her divided state, Bobbi shivered. "I heard that was powerful shit," she said. "But crazy nasty. Heard it made people psychotic."
He nodded. "Yeah," he said, "That's what it did. Worse than PCP ever was in the last century, that's for sure."
She wrinkled her nose. "Friend of mine told me, once, they made that from people. Chemicals in the body, you know, rendered down." Another shiver touched her shoulders and she looked out the window again.
"That's what we thought, too," Walken said, nodding. "They made it from human endorphins, somehow. Synthetic analogues wouldn't work so we figured they had donors."
"Milked, huh?" She shook her head.
"Yeah." Walken took a deep breath. "That's what we thought. I was part of the Narc team investigating it. Broke the ring, but we never found where they made it, if they even made it locally." He shrugged. "Bureau got me after that. Said I had good insights, would do well on staff."
Bobbi grunted. "That famous instinct of yours," she said. "Got you in all kinds of trouble, baby. I..." And then she paused a moment, a frown etching itself on her pretty face.
Over the hum of the hydrogen motor Walken could hear the servos of the sensor node as it whipped around on its base near the firewall. "Everything all right?"
"No," she said. "Something up ahead... big thermal signature. Weird. I don't know what it is. Baby, why don't you — "
Then they both saw it. Like the black coach of Death, an ancient streetcar came barreling down the cross street, charred and swallowed by a great halo of pale fire. Nighttime shadows were boiled away as hulked cars and crumbling facades became bright and terrible with the glow of its blazing shroud — a light that only blossomed further as the streetcar hammered into an ancient streetlight on the corner not twenty feet before the Honda's nose. The streetlight crumpled like rotten balsa, ancient fluorescent bulbs scattering glass across the tarmac. Bobbi gasped.
Walken jammed on the brakes even as the streetcar came screaming into view. Cut off, adrenaline roared through him; he knew that they were trapped. This was a barricade and they had no real way to turn around quickly in the gutted streets. Beside him, Bobbi let out a bright scream she fell back against the padded seat of the Honda. Her eyes rolled back in her head.
"Fucking shit," he spat as he grabbed for the C-J, eyes darting between the rearview mirrors. Like roaches stealing from beneath a filthy mattress, figures now began to emerge from the alleys behind them. Their silhouettes flickered among the blinding halo of the flames, unfolding themselves from the receded shadows and wielding weapons scavenged or built wholesale from the ruins of the street. Long narrow blades, makeshift axes, hammers and such cast tall shadows across the sides of buildings like the arms of giants. He could not see their faces, but it was not necessary. He knew these shapes unwound themselves to kill them. Walken jammed the Honda in reverse, smashed the accelerator and suddenly the car was a slate-colored bullet hurtling toward the feral mass, daring any of them to stand in their way.
He'd seen junkies stand in the way of a magrail train before in Baltimore, thinking themselves immune to the tyranny of inertia, but this was something different. When he shot back no less than three of the ferals stood there in his way, catching the Honda's rear bumper with all the force it could muster. The first just broke apart against the rounded square of its back half, covering the plastic windscreen there with blood and gory foam. Blind, he hit the next and felt the Honda buck as the tires found, bit and then crushed the body beneath them.
All that blood and flesh made the tricar spin out, lose traction. The sound of crumpling metal and the thunderous jostle of impact told him that he'd hit something behind them. Walken looked over his shoulder and saw pale concrete through the back window. He had smashed the back of the Honda slam into a building behind them. The tricar's engine sputtered and died among the electric tang of ozone.
Moments hung like jewels of silence, ticking off the slow advance of the predators around them.
That's when the sound came.
The ferals had only taken a few steps toward the Honda when it had hit the wall. They stood there as its engine died, weapons raised over their heads, looking upward as if they had seen something shifting in the late-night sky. Then, all at once, their mouths moved. What came out of the savage throng was like a keening, starting low and then building, their faces framed in the raging glow of the burning cars, into a howling wail. He had never heard its like before, but he knew something close; the sound that the Doll had made was somewhere in there, vast and animal. It was the keening of those who prepared to hunt. To kill. To feast.
Walken's blood froze in his veins. It was an old fear that came then, not the cerebral blasphemy of Wonderland but something deeper, baser. The fear that took him had been pressed into his genes over millions of years of evolution. Lizard instincts came to life and suddenly his mental switchboard was on fire, the old primordial programming coming online. Blind terror made him stab at the Honda's console and he held the gun out into the darkness like a flaming brand.
The tricar made a whining noise as he tried the ignition once, twice, three times to no avail. The keening rose, faded and then silence hung as his fourth attempt sputtered uselessly. The ferals looked down, shadowed terrors holding their brutal weapons and dove off their perches to swa
rm toward them.
The C-J was a far heavier pistol than he was used to using — its recoil compensator kept his wrist from breaking as he sprayed the ultradense rounds through the windscreen and into the surging mass, but accuracy was a thing only to be prayed for. The plastic shattered, sprayed forward and his world was filled with the deafening thunder and blazing light of the C-J's firing. Where the rounds missed, concrete shattered and plumes of dirt were thrown upward, displaced by their mass. Where they struck feral flesh, however, howls of rage and agony found the air as limbs and bones exploded into clouds of spalling meat and fluid.
In seconds he had deafened himself and emptied the pistol's magazine, but the resulting carnage was enough to drive the heathens back. In that instant he dared to punch the ignition again; the engine sputtered, turned over as the backup fuel cell kicked in and slamming his foot down onto the accelerator Walken brought the Honda screaming to life.
The tricar lurched, careening wildly at top speed and met the pack of ferals with its bulk once again. Its tapered nose was like a plow, turning aside the howling ghouls as if they had been so much snow. He caught glimpses of scarred faces, painted skin, wild eyes jaundiced yellow with madness and malnutrition. They were clawing at the Honda's hull as he plowed on; he felt hot, stinking blood splash across his face as he smashed the barrel of the C-J into the face of one who tried to hang on to the windscreen's frame. Moments of chaos and forward motion ticked by as the tricar plowed forward, then over, then through... and suddenly they were free, the tires screeching, spinning on spilled blood and worse but finding traction enough to hurl them down the street. Behind them the remaining ferals were howling in mingled pain and rage, garish silhouettes against the fires of their barricade. The sound and the fear carried him faster than simple mechanism ever could.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 15