Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  She woke sometime later, just as the van was slipping beneath the skin of the earth. She was too frightened to move. Like a child, she hoped that if she just lay there, he would forget about her. Then his groping hand found her thigh.

  “Too skinny,” he muttered, giving it a pinch and a poke, like someone assessing a piece of poultry.

  Tears came then. Silent tears.

  The van chugged out a trail of black smoke as it entered the labyrinth of tunnels below the city. It took too many turns to count, still the girl was hopeful she would recognize one of the reflective signs that sometimes hung across the top of the roadway. Hope died a quick death as Mack-D swung into one of the unlit passages that branched from the main road.

  Down they went into unrelenting darkness. There were no signs down here, no traffic, no pedestrians hurrying home. The road narrowed until the van filled the shaft.

  “We’re almost there,” Mack-D told her. “Fourth left. There’s number three.” He slowed, looking for the turn. It always came up so suddenly when driving. When he saw it, he let out a long breath. He took the turn and stopped in front of a wall of solid iron that was splashed with graffiti. It was then that the girl began to realize she would never see the sun again.

  Although she had been calling herself Allegro Albarossa all night, her real name was Christina Grimmett, and she was most definitely not rich. The fancy clothes she had on were the cast-offs of her employer, Ashley Tinsley. She was a true vampire. She was so rich that she only wore an outfit once before having it burned. Were she to be seen in the same outfit twice she would likely hang herself, and donating her clothes was something she could not contemplate. What if, God forbid, some lesser creature was seen wearing her outfit?

  Christina had stolen the outfit piece by piece and now realized it was wrong and that this was her punishment. She began to blubber which made him grin.

  “You can scream if you want,” Mack-D told her, as he slipped out of the van. They both knew screaming was useless now. The earth would swallow it just as it had swallowed her.

  She struggled up, realizing that he had left the van running. Here was her chance—but to do what? He was working a heavy key into a slot, and the door or the gate or whatever it was, would be open in seconds. She would never be able to get the rope off her in time and even if she could, she didn’t think she could back out of there without crashing.

  Then a thought made its way through her rising panic: Maybe I don’t back out. Maybe I crash on purpose. Her captor was framed between the headlights. All she had to do was get in the front seat, somehow get the van in gear, and slam on the gas. With her hands tied behind her back, it seemed impossible. Still, she had to try.

  Squirming, she threw her torso into the passenger seat and then kicked her legs around to the driver’s side. The plan failed at that point. Somehow, she got her crooked arm caught up on the gear shift jutting from the center console—and she couldn’t get it off! To make matters worse, as she fought to free herself, her knee banged the horn and it let out a single tired honk, like a dying goose.

  Mack-D reacted slowly to the sound. He turned and stared through the filmed-over windshield at Christina, his dulled mind unable to comprehend what she was doing. This gave her an extra few seconds to try to jerk her body off the gear shifter, but all she managed to do was mush the shifter into reverse. With a wailing shriek, the van ground backward against the tunnel wall. Desperately, Christina tried again, bucking as hard as she could.

  The van jerked hard as it slipped into drive and then began to roll forward at an achingly slow pace. There should have been plenty of time for Mack-D to do something, but he only stared into the headlights as the van crawled up to him at a steady six-miles-an-hour. He seemed mesmerized by the lights, and to her amazement and grim satisfaction, the van crushed him into the iron wall. He let out a blast of air as his chest took the brunt of the blow and for a moment, he hung his head.

  “Ha!” Christina shrieked. “That’s what you get! That’s what you…” What she saw when he lifted his chin choked her words off. At first, she thought one of his eyes had popped out and was sitting on the stunted hood of the van. Then she saw that it was only a contact lens and what she took for a gaping hole in his face was actually his real eye. It was black and wet as oil.

  “No,” she whispered, finally understanding what he was. “Dead-eye.” It was one of them. One of the undead.

  Her mind reeled. There hadn’t been a zombie seen east of Jersey since before she was born, and yet here was one grinning at her, black blood dribbling from between its teeth.

  She had to escape and not just from the beast, she had to get out of the city altogether. If people found out that there were zombies in New York, there’d be a panic. She’d be in a race for the harbor against ten million people. With a head start, she might beat most of them there, but could she beat the bombers or the missiles?

  In Ottawa, it had taken only a pack of fourteen Dead-eyes for that city to be wiped off the map. That too was before Christina’s time, but they say the city still glowed at night from all the radiation.

  Desperation lent her strength. She heaved herself over the shifter but as she tried to roll over, she nudged it with her hip and shoved it once more into reverse. Back went the van, freeing Mack-D. A scream built inside her as she watched his black grin grow wide as he walked around to the driver’s window.

  “Yes. Scream for me,” he said, climbing in, his face dark with hideous pleasure.

  She did more than scream and he loved every second of it.

  Chapter 2

  It was only four and already the day was growing dark, not that it had been all that bright to begin with. A sunny day in New York was a rarity and Cole didn’t like them. They weren’t natural. A sunny day made him feel exposed. No, Cole preferred the anonymity of a dismal wet day.

  The ugly clouds had been pissing out rain since noon. Not in torrents as it sometimes did, but in spurts, and now the streets were slick with muck.

  New York had its own brand of mud. For the most part it was made up of human shit and ash that drifted in from the cratered remains of Newark. There was also a good deal of rat turd in the muck, and industrial waste sometimes made it fancy with prisms of obscene-smelling rainbows. Finally, corpses added their own special tang to the mix—the “daily” pickups had ceased being daily when Cole was a boy, and now a body might sit in the gutter for days before anyone came by to dispose of it.

  Cole hunched broad shoulders against the rain and watched his prey as he finally left the Mandarin joint off 6th. Cole had never been to one of these joints where lunch wasn’t a ten minute, eat-while-you-stand affair. If he lingered any longer than that he always had some tiny, wrinkled raisin give him the stink-eye and tell him, “Go way. You order more food or go way.”

  But the sick bastard Cole was after had been in the joint for three hours. Cole absolutely hated waiting like that. It made him antsy. Standing around doing nothing made his muscles stiff. He liked to be loose and ready for anything. In New York you had to be ready, or you could very well end up as just another bloated corpse, stripped bare-ass, maggots doing the funky jive in your hair, and rats tunneling into your bowels.

  In this case, the waiting was meaningful.

  There was no way a Mandarin was going to let some slick hang out in his shop all afternoon unless a deal was being made. Cole just hoped it was his kind of deal. He wouldn’t have blinked an eye if the slick was trying to move uptown ice, or mule that had been spun-up in a Rican’s toilet. People threw away their lives all the livelong day and that was on them.

  But if ‘ol Santino was buying up large amounts of syn-ope, well that would be quite telling. Dead-eyes needed to be on downers twenty-four-seven or they’d go monster. Near-lethal doses of opioids kept their rage in check and dulled the hunger for blood.

  As always, the question was whether Santino Grimmett was a Dead-eye at all. There was a depressingly good chance that he was just a run-of
-the-mill murdering psychopath. Cole hoped to God he wasn’t. There was no money in it. Putting down a Dead-eye would net him ten-large. Killing an un-convicted psycho could very well lead to a prison sentence. Cole’s predecessor was turning dusty in some black hole in the ground because he had offed a human.

  Cole had to run a fine line. If he was too quick on the trigger, he faced prison, if he wasn’t quick enough, he would end up like so many hunters: recycled out of a rat’s ass.

  The career of a hunter was generally short and violent. Still, the money was good. It kept the lights on and the booze flowing…barely. Things had been tight for Cole, and he was probably the only person in the world who wanted Santino to be a Dead-eye.

  As the slick moved into the crowd, Cole trailed after, watching him closely as he trudged north. In this light, Cole’s hazel eyes were as grey as the rain, though it was hard to tell as they were at squints as he looked for the smallest clues. Santino moved slowly, almost aimlessly, while all around him the faceless crowds hurried to get home and dry. Was the syn-ope kicking in? Were his neurons black with the virus and his brains drowned in a sick goo?

  Or was he depressed because he had stabbed his wife of twenty years, butchered her remains and stuffed her different parts in his freezer? Of course, it could have been that he was tripping balls. It was hard to tell. Judging a person from behind by the way he held his shoulders was far from an exact science. Still, something was wrong with him. Something made him stand out.

  Unlike the hundreds of people pushing along with him, he didn’t duck his head as he passed through a grey curtain of water falling from a second-level catwalk. And he didn’t seem to care when he angled off the sidewalk and his foot came down in the ghastly muck that everyone else avoided. He was also the only person who didn’t glance nervously around as he crossed the unmarked boundary into Red Dog territory.

  Even Cole let his eyes slip off his mark. A half dozen young morons with poorly concealed handguns lounged on an awning-covered stoop. They thought they were tough. Cole thought they looked like targets.

  The pedestrians went stiff as they passed, holding their heads straight, while canting their eyes far to the right. All except for Santino. He moved like a sleepwalker and passed by without a challenge.

  Cole was a different story. As much as he tried, sometimes he didn’t blend in. He not only had a certain air of danger about him, but he also stood a head taller than most of the people in the crowd. The poly-leather black coat that hung to mid-thigh might have been expensive; and maybe the narrow tie, a black stripe down his white shirt made him look like an office worker, and everyone knew they had money.

  At the same time, his black boots were worn and he had the partially inked face of a man who was slowly becoming a slag.

  Two of the braver toughs came off the stoop and strode into his way, wanting a closer look. “We got a sidewalk fee here,” the taller of the two said, giving a what-can-you-do shrug. The Red Dogs claimed they were pure breed Irish but in reality, they let in any pasty-faced wanker as long as he had a freckle or two. This one had a spray of them across a girly little nose. “I’m afraid we’re gon’ hafta charge you ten.”

  They also affected an annoying Irish brogue. They weren’t alone in this habit. The Rastas acted like they were from Jamaica instead of from Jamaica, Queens, the Ricans called everyone “Ese,” and Cole couldn’t go to an Italian restaurant with a slick without wanting to punch him in the face. Rigatoni became ri-gahTONEY. And the damned Mandarins acted like they were fresh off the boat but there wasn’t a one of them whose family hadn’t been here for six generations.

  Normally, Cole had little patience for this sort of thing. Just then he had even less. “Ten?”

  “Each. In cash, o’ course.” The bigger one cast a quick glance at his companion, who wasn’t going to be a Red Dog much longer. Cole was tall enough to see the slag building up in his thinning, greased hair and behind his ear. His eyes were already a bit dull.

  “I could do fifteen,” Cole said, pulling back his coat, showing off the 10mm Crown on his belt. The aluminum alloy winked silver in the low light. The gun was literally worth any three of the Red Dogs, and they stared as if they were looking at a diamond of the same size. They blinked back into the moment when Cole dropped his big hand down on the grip.

  The leader started to draw in a long breath, which would end with him going for his gun. Judging by the bulge beneath his brown corduroy jacket, Cole figured it was one of the ludicrous .44 caliber Eagle knock-offs that were all the rage. Because of its size, it wasn’t a weapon designed for a quick draw.

  “Maybe you should rethink this,” Cole advised. “I’d hate to waste a bullet killing you.”

  “There’s six of us,” the Dog answered, losing his accent in his attempt to sound tough.

  They were teens who probably hadn’t ever fired more than five rounds with their over-sized guns. The damned things were made of composite plastic and had a habit of cracking after a few shots. After thirty they could explode. To make matters worse, their eight-inch barrels were overly-light and with the rounds in the grip, the guns were completely unbalanced.

  Cole wondered if any of them could hit the broadside of a barn. “I’m not too worried,” he said. And he wasn’t. The kid’s right hand was frozen about a foot away from his body. When he tried to reach for his gun, it would be mechanically stiff and slow. His friend had been so cock-sure that he had walked up with his hands behind his back. He might as well be handcuffed.

  “You and your little puppy friend are the only ones I need to kill. Once you’re stretched out, the others’ll run inside crying for daddy.”

  “Maybe,” the Dog said, trying to sound tough. “Or maybe there are a whole mess of us and one of us will get you.”

  Cole glanced up at the building. Like so much of New York, its windows were bricked over in an attempt to keep out the acid fog, the fallout, and what the previous governor had called “heavy particulate airflows.” It was the PC way of saying industrial contamination that made the southern wind smell like metaled rot. When it came in thick, it turned the sky the color of an old bruise and had been known to asphyxiate infants in their cribs.

  “But you’ll still be dead,” Cole said, flicking his eyes back at the Dog. He was about to go on when they heard a sharp whistle from up the street. Two stoops up, a gaggle of money-honeys pulled their skirts lower as they scurried inside.

  “Taxmen,” one of the Red Dogs warned in a hissing whisper.

  The lead Dog pulled his coat tight around his meager chest, doing little to hide his gun as a patrol of four police officers came strolling up the block. Like all taxmen they were tall and strapping to begin with, but looked even bigger decked out in their body armor. Beneath the plates of grey metal, they wore urban camo, and in their hands, they carried the scaled-down Forino version of the old Colt M4. They looked more like soldiers than policemen.

  “We already paid our taxes, officer,” the lead Dog said, raising his hands. “We pay Manua every month, rain or shine.”

  “That’s Lieutenant Manua to you,” one of the officers shot back. “And those taxes only cover everyday activities. This doesn’t seem all that conventional. It looks to me like you boys were about to throw down right in the middle of the street. You know the governor frowns on a dozen people getting gunned down in broad daylight. And when he frowns on it, I frown…holy shit.”

  Cole grimaced at being recognized. He knew this officer all too well. “Bruce, it’s good to see you,” he lied.

  Sergeant Bruce Hamilton laughed. “Look fellas, it’s the White Knight himself, Cole Younger. How’s the back? Not bothering you too much, I hope.” Four years earlier, they had been on the same squad right up until Hamilton had “accidentally” shot him in the back.

  “Better than new. Look, I’d love to reminisce about old times…”

  Hamilton spoke over him, “You turning slag on me?” He pointed with his rifle at Cole’s tattoos. They were a che
ap blue-green. The four on the left were stylized hammers; on the right were six skulls suggesting he was part of the “Sledge” gang. “If so, I can put you out of your misery. That last bullet was just a warning. We both know I could’ve killed you.”

  Cole didn’t have time for Hamilton and his hooked nose and thin greasy blond hair. With every minute Santino was plodding further out of reach. And yet this was the first time Cole had seen Hamilton in those four years. “You act like shooting a friend in the back is some kind of accomplishment. If you had taken me on, face to face, I could understand that cocky smile of yours, taxman.”

  At the word, Hamilton sneered. “Keep telling yourself that, Cole. I warned you. I told you it was going to happen if you didn’t play ball. It’s something I never understood about you. All you needed to do was take a little here and a little there, and maybe turn a blind eye every once in a while. If you had, you probably would’ve made lieutenant by now. Instead, you’re one of the little people.”

  He laughed aloud, but then something caught his eye. Stepping closer, he used his rifle to push back Cole’s trench coat. “And what’s this? I thought you knew that packing heat out on the street is illegal. Got a license?”

  There was no need to answer. One of the other police officers snatched the Crown while a third took his wallet. “Says here he’s a bounty hunter. His license is up to date.” The officer sounded disappointed. Bounty hunters held an odd position within society: not quite cop, not quite one of the little people that made up the masses. They couldn’t be “taxed” while on the job.

  “Ain’t no bounty going to cover this,” the other officer said, sighting down the length of the Crown, carelessly pointing it at a young woman who was hurrying by holding her child’s hand in a crushing grip.