Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The heaving of a man whose brain had just been turned to jelly obstructed the aperture long enough for Mindy to find cover in a corner. Satisfied, Lucia returned her attention to Chico, whereupon she found him gone and herself without the time to pursue him. She scrambled to cover behind an overturned table and began to take what shots she could at the motley squad of cyborgs as they stormed into the bar.

  Roland engaged them immediately in his customary fashion, and as usual he ended up drawing most of the fire. She put another cyborg down, this one with four prosthetic limbs and some manner of bionic monocle, as it attempted to flank Roland with a machete-style weapon. She did not know if it could cut him, but she did not know that it could not cut him either. Shooting him through the back of his neck rendered such questions moot.

  She was somewhat taken aback by the exchanges between Roland and Bob. She did not expect the tall man to put up the kind of fight he appeared capable of, and the smallest twinge of apprehension tugged at her subconscious when the man in the suit knocked Roland through the outer wall. The number of people capable of man-handling Roland was small, and most of that cohort wore medium or heavy armatures. Lucia was certain that despite his height and build, there was no hidden armature to be found under Bob’s tailored black suit.

  Beads shattering against her table top and filling the air in front of her face with shrapnel reminded her that this question was best left for another day. Roland could handle himself and she needed to look to her own survival. A fresh magazine slammed home in her pistol and she resumed her workmanlike decimation of the opposition. Two more went down, flechettes finding the softer and fleshier parts of armored torsos. She noticed that all the new players resembled Chico in some way. The style and configuration of their bionics bore superficial resemblance to his, and several had the same black eye-sockets that he did. Lucia filed that away for later reflection and moved to support Mindy who was currently pinned down by several enemies.

  Streaking across the back side of the main floor, Lucia laid covering fire down to take the pressure off. Her shots scattered three enemies and allowed Mindy to slip into a dark alcove at the rear of the house. Lucia slid in behind the same alcove Mindy was using and flipped the black dagger back over to the little blond.

  “Thanks, Boss,” she quipped. “I missed this.”

  “Where’s Manny?” It took a lot of effort for Lucia to keep her words slow enough to be understood.

  “He went down behind the DJ booth. I saw him crawl back toward Rodney’s office.”

  “Good. He’ll be safe there. I’m going to see if he’s on comms. Buy me ten seconds.”

  “Roger that.” Mindy leaned out from their corner and tore through a magazine of eight-millimeter beads. Cyborgs scattered like crows under the barrage and Lucia hit her comm.

  “Manny? You with us?”

  “Define ‘with,’” he replied. “I’m down to one arm and holed up with The Dwarf. What do you need?”

  “Can you still control that thing when it’s not attached?”

  “Yeah. But unless you think a crawling limb will scare them enough to run away, I’m not sure what we can do with that.”

  At that moment, Roland and Bob exploded back into the bar with a horrific crash. Roland seemed to have the upper hand, battering the smaller man into the floor like an otter smashing clams against a rock. She squinted, and this grew into a tight-lipped frown. Bob seemed to be taking it all rather well. His cyborgs forgot about Lucia and Mindy and began to pepper the fighters with gunfire. Both men ignored it.

  “What the hell is that guy?” Lucia wondered aloud.

  “What?” Manny asked.

  Roland was stomping on Bob’s head now. It looked nasty. “Never mind. Sorry, Manny. Talking to myself.” She returned to the matter at hand. “When I say, I want you to trigger the EMP in your hand.”

  “I can’t aim it, Boss.”

  “So don’t aim. Just send it out everywhere.”

  “It’s not a strong emitter, Boss. If I can’t focus it, the pulse will be weak.”

  “It’ll do.”

  “Okay then. On your mark I’ll pop it.”

  Bob’s goons had doubled their fire at Roland, and Lucia could see the tall man retreating.

  “I think Mr. Bob has had enough of old Ironsides,” Mindy opined between gunshots. “He’s gonna let his boys take over. Too bad for them.”

  Lucia looked over to see Roland use one foe to try and block the vibroblade of another. Her perceptions were elevated enough to catch the thin line of silver the sweeping weapon traced across Roland’s abdomen. With an internal wince, she wondered if Mindy’s confidence might be a touch premature. Just as Roland’s left fist converted the man’s head to a pink spray of brains and blood, she called to Manny. “Hit it.”

  From somewhere under the DJ booth, Manny’s severed white fist closed and a bank of capacitors discharged an omni-directional electromagnetic pulse. It was a modest discharge, not sufficient to destroy any critical systems or permanently incapacitate any machinery. For the eight cyborgs still in fighting fettle, however, it really ruined their day.

  Those with sensitive optics found themselves blind while their eyes rebooted. One man screamed and grabbed his head while sinking to his knees. Another dropped a strange-looking pistol when it began to throw dazzling electrical arcs and spew acrid white smoke.

  Lucia observed all of this with a small smile and looked to Mindy. “There playing our song, Mindy.”

  “Then let’s dance,” said the little blond killer.

  The two women swept from their alcove with guns blazing. Lucia’s CZ was smaller and less powerful than Mindy’s big pistol. However, the hypersonic needles penetrated far better than the larger beads. Where Lucia saw head shots, she took them. Otherwise, she had to be content with punching holes in areas she hoped would slow the men down. She soon found that anything other than head shots had only limited success against the heavily augmented men. She held out for those as much as feasible.

  Mindy’s beads smashed into the fleshy parts of cyborgs with gory explosions and blasted armor with dazzling coronas of shattering ceramic. Even when they did not penetrate armor, the sheer kinetic energy of each hit damaged and disoriented the enemies further. Using a PressPoint implant to light up her targets left her aim slower than Lucia’s preternatural skill and hyperkinesis. She was no less accurate, though. Armored cyborgs fell under their withering fire like trees before the woodcutter. Their first salvo thinned the number of enemies by half, and Roland was among the remainder like a tornado of smashing fists and black muscles. It was hard to say which group got it worse.

  The fight did not go for very long. Roland tore limbs from bodies, pulped organs, crushed skulls. When a head emerged from the fray, Mindy or Lucia shot it. In under a minute there was nothing left of the terrifying cyborg hit squad but a pile of spare parts and bloody corpses beneath the feet of a giant skull-faced war machine. Parts of the wet mess still twitched and moaned, but the old soldier showed no concern for their pain. After checking Lucia for obvious injuries and finding nothing dire he asked, “Where’s Chico? Where’s Bob?”

  Mindy blanched. “Where’s Kitty?”

  “Shit,” they all said at once.

  “Roland, go find Bob,” Lucia ordered. “Mindy and I will get Kitty. Chico will have her.”

  “I’m betting they’re all in the same place,” said Roland. Then he added, “Or at least they will be soon.”

  Lucia concurred. “Let’s find them first, then!”

  Part of Lucia was uneasy about how casually she dispatched Roland to his task. The giant looked a proper mess. Shirtless and bent, his trapezius still wept silver fluid from a narrow hole. She knew the others would not notice, but she could tell he favored his right arm. The gash to his gut did not look bad, but it too oozed silver fluid in streaks down to his belt. Every ounce of nanite transport media he lost reduced his ability to self-repair, and he looked to be losing plenty. The nagging reality
that if his lung started bleeding again, he could actually die remained a constant companion to her burgeoning anxiety as well. She had observed and realized all of this, yet the order for him to chase down Bob had come without hesitation. Bob just gave Roland as hard a fight as anything she had ever seen. Tom Miner, in a one-ton mining armature, had given Roland less trouble than whatever that thing calling itself ‘Bob’ had.

  She called over to the big man, “Just, be careful, Roland. Okay?”

  She wished he had brought Durendal. The big machine pistol would give him the chance to engage Bob at a distance, but they had decided that it was too dangerous to use in the enclosed quarters of Hideaway. There would be no time to fetch it now.

  There was no expression on his face to read, just the silver skull of his helmet and the cold mechanical sound of his filtered voice. “Of course. Aren’t I always?”

  Lucia knew it was a joke, yet another of Roland’s sad attempts at humor. She wanted to laugh but could not find a laugh anywhere inside herself. In vain, she searched for the emotional intensity that seeing Roland injured usually caused. Then she struggled to find the part of her that cared. Her new firmware had those anxieties so muffled and subdued she could only acknowledge their existence, and no more than that. It would wear off in a few minutes, and she decided this was good thing. She may not feel much at the moment, but the part of her that remembered what feeling was recognized the danger of her current state. She had little fear for Chico, or Bob, or of fighting and dying. Yet she had less fear for the lives of her friends, as well. The nanobots killed fear where they found it.

  Not all fear is bad, she reminded herself.

  The last time she let the machines control her fear, Manny lost his arm. A glance over at the young man as he emerged from the back office, once again short a limb, caused her to shudder. It could not end soon enough.

  In the alley, Mindy picked up Kitty’s trail by both smell and ultraviolet. “Chico is leaking something,” she pointed to a small stain on a brick that no one else would have noticed. “Lights up real bright on UV.” She looked up at Roland. “Bob went up.” She pointed to regular chips and divots in the concrete of the adjoining building. “Probably to search from a higher vantage point.”

  “I don’t do ‘up.’ I’ll call Sam,” Roland decided. “We’ll use police drones to track Bob. You guys get after Chico and Kitty.”

  “Good plan,” Lucia said. She dropped a fresh magazine and power cell into her pistol and stepped gingerly with her injured leg. “Let’s move out.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Chico had seen Bob at the same time Roland did, and when Roland hurled himself at the man, the maimed killer burst to life before anyone could react.

  A leap took him across the room to clear the bar and he landed lightly in the shadowed space beyond it. There he found Kitty curled in a ball and shivering with fear where she had hidden when the fight started. A quick scan pulse told him that the whole place was about to light up like a third-rate warzone.

  “Come on, baby!” he said and grabbed her roughly by the arm with his one good hand. “We’re getting out of here before the shit really hits the—” A raucous cacophony of gunfire buried his words under tidal wave of sonic booms. Bottles of liquor exploded above their heads as ricochets and wild fire shattered the glass receptacles and rained all manner of alcohol over Chico and his captive. Lights shattered, furniture exploded, and Kitty screamed.

  Dragging the poor girl behind him, Chico kept his head low and used the bar for cover as he angled for the door.

  “No!” He heard Kitty shriek over the noise. “Get away from me!”

  “Goddammit, bitch!” he snarled back. “How many times do I gotta tell you? You do what I fucking say!” He gave the woman a punitive swat across the chin with the stump of his right arm, staggering her and ending her protests with a yelp of pain. Another rip of automatic gunfire swept the top of the bar, throwing a rain of polymer and ceramic chunks over their heads and sending them both back to the floor. “Shit!” Chico spat. With a savage yank on Kitty’s arm he lurched forward again, nearly ripping her shoulder out of the socket as he flew toward the door and safety. There was about twenty feet of space between the end of the fragile protection of the bar and the door. Chico realized the only way to cover that distance without taking hits would be to move at or near his top speed. There was a strong urge to abandon the girl, a consensus from his phantoms that his obsession with her was creating unnecessary risks. But he could not bring himself to release her hand. She was his, and he was keeping her. He had nothing if he did not have her. A man had to take care of what was his; that was all there was to it.

  Without warning and far too roughly, Chico pulled Kitty onto his shoulder. The force of his mechanical parts hitting her diaphragm blasted the air from her lungs in a pained gasp. With the wind knocked out of her, Kitty could only wheeze while he activated the Gunslinger macro and ran as hard as he could for the street and relative safety. Through the lens of hyper-acceleration, the reactions from the warring men in the bar were torpid and drowsy. Gun barrels that were shooting at Tank swiveled in languid arcs to come to bear on Chico. Muzzle flashes blossomed in lazy yellow spheres, and Bob’s head turned to track the flight with a blank expression. Even at top speed, hypersonic beads traveled too fast to follow. They appeared as bright yellow streaks, laser-like beams that chased the fleeing cyborg across the bare patch of floor as he ran. His feet gripped the deck hard for the necessary traction and sent pieces of whatever fake-wood substance it was made of up behind him in a dirty brown rooster tail. He made the door without taking any hits and slipped past his foes like a stream of mercury. He turned into the alley without slowing, then ran for The Drag without looking back.

  When he had put a couple of blocks between himself and Hideaway, Chico found that he had to slow down. Something was very wrong, he could feel it. He staggered into a deserted alley and scattered the few drunks using it for a quiet place to sleep off a bender. Lowering Kitty to the ground as gently as he could, Chico canceled the gunslinger and nearly vomited when sensations rushed back to a more normal cadence. He was not bleeding, but some sort of fluid was weeping from his severed hand. He hoped it was not important.

  He had run too hard and used too many macros, he knew. The Bat had saved his life by switching his perceptions from electromagnetic to pure sonics, but the parts of his brain it used were not compatible with the Gunslinger. He had been warned many times about relying on his macros too much, and even a man as obtuse as Chico could be convinced if the consequences were dire enough. He wondered if he had damaged his brain by pushing this hard. There was something like a tension, not really painful but decidedly uncomfortable, in his head. He felt flushed and disconnected, as if he had a high fever or a migraine headache. Chico considered running the Medic macro, but that would severely curtail his combat output. It was while pondering his options that he noticed his voices were silent. The buzzing in his head was either drowning them out or turning them off entirely. He missed them now, and wondered if he had damaged his implants.

  “Nonna?” he asked quietly.

  “Ready.”

  “Status?”

  “Internal diagnostics offline. System synchronization below minimums. Please run medical protocol.”

  “Shit,” was all he could think to say.

  With nothing else to be done with his overworked bionics, Chico looked down at the trembling woman. Kitty was curled in a ball, crying softly and hugging her knees to her chest. She mumbled incoherently, her pale lips working words too jumbled to comprehend. He lowered himself to one knee and looked more closely. “It’s okay, baby. I got us out. You don’t got to worry about any of those guys anymore.”

  Her eyes, heavy and drooping, moved to meet the black facets of his optical sensors. Her face twisted into several configurations. At first Chico thought she was going to scream, then it looked more like she might just cry some more. Chico could never figure out why chic
ks cried so much, but he tried to ignore it when they did. Girls just weren’t as tough as men, he figured.

  But Kitty did not cry. Her head began to sweep back and forth, side to side with a look of incredulity.

  Then she started to laugh.

  It was not a happy sound. It did not bubble up from her chest and burst from her mouth like it might have if something was truly funny. It was a sad laugh. Sad and mean, Chico realized when he really listened to it. Before long it grew into something truly ugly. It was derisive, angry, and more than a little unhinged. It became a cackle, grew into the braying guffaw of a madman who found humor in the morbid and deranged.

  Chico did not like it. It almost sounded like she might be laughing at him. That was disrespectful. “Hey!” he barked. “What’s wrong with you?” Kitty’s eyes were wide now, her mouth open showing her pretty white teeth. Tears had streaked her eye makeup down her cheeks and her face beamed like one of those scary masks they had outside of theaters in Uptown. “Seriously, babe,” he cautioned. “Cut that shit out right now! What the fuck is so goddamn funny, anyway?”

  The laughter faded until Kitty was simply breathing in great heaves. “What’s so funny? I’ll tell you what’s so funny, Chico.” She paused again to get her breathing back to normal. “Ever since you came back, I’ve been trying to figure out how to not be afraid of you. How to not be scared.”

  The killer’s face twisted into a scowl. “You don’t gotta be afraid of me, babe. I love you!”