Anarchy

by Peter Meredith

  No normal bounty would ever cover the cost of the gun. So far, Cole’s highest bounty had been fifty dollars for bringing in a serial rapist. The Dead-eyes were another story altogether, one that he couldn’t ever mention.

  The fact that they were in the city at all was deemed classified. If he mentioned them even in a drunken ramble, he would be liquidated. His body would be dissolved in a vat of acid and his name expunged from every record in the city. Each new recruit was given the same speech, the same warning, and had to watch the same video of some idiot who had talked. He had been lowered into the vat slowly, toes first. The grainy video ran for twenty-nine excruciating minutes.

  “Some bounties pay better than others,” Cole said, holding his hand out for the gun. “I doubt I’ll get rich, but it’s honest work, unlike what I used to do.” The officer had been about to hand over the pistol, but stopped at the jab.

  Hamilton laughed and slapped Cole on the back with stinging force. “As always, Cole, you’re a damn hoot. That mouth of yours is going to get you killed some day, and hell, that day might just be today.” He nodded to the other officers to give him back his belongings. As Cole holstered the Crown, Hamilton pointed up at the tenement. “Is your bounty up there? If so, have at it. You know I’d love to help you out but whoa, look at the time. Me and the boys are on our mandated break.”

  The gang of Red Dogs backed up a few steps suddenly looking uncomfortable and confused, not knowing whether they were about to be attacked or they were expected to attack a man with an entire squad of policemen watching.

  Cole solved the problem for them. “Boys,” he said with a nod to them, and then took off at a loping run. Behind him, Hamilton and his men shouted a few insults. Cole didn’t care what they said. They were criminals themselves. It’s what happened when no one policed the police.

  Snagging Dead-eyes was far more important and far more honest—just as long as he didn’t kill a human in the process.

  After two blocks, the rain began to come down harder than before. It was a cold rain and tasted like dirty pennies. That was usually a bad sign. It meant it was coming in from the west. Cole slid his hood from the back of his coat and pulled it down in what was almost a useless gesture. A hood wasn’t going to do jack if he was showering in radioactive water. “The sirens aren’t going off,” he told himself, and kept going, slowing down at every side street and alley he came to. If Santino took any one of them, he could disappear forever.

  It was only after another couple of blocks that Cole realized where Santino was going. He was going home. For the last week, Santino had been hiding out in a flophouse in the village, but like so many criminals before him, he was drawn to the scene of his crime.

  Santino’s apartment was seven blocks away and Cole figured he could be there in minutes, only just then the klaxons started to sound.

  “Shit!” he hissed. The klaxons were far worse than the sirens. It meant a Cat-2 radioactive cloud was coming in. “Or it’s already here.” The sensors set up on the Jersey side of the Hudson were always breaking down; the smart thing to do was to get inside as fast as he could. “But when am I ever smart,” he muttered, pulling out a small emergency mask. He slapped it on and kept running straight down the street, which had gone from annoyingly crowded to deserted in seconds. Even the few taxi cabs that sometimes still prowled the streets were nowhere in sight.

  It was like he was the last person left in the city. It was unnerving, but at least the empty streets made sprinting easier, and he ran like his life depended on it. By the time he made it to the building he was reeling from the run and from trying to suck air in through the mask.

  Yanking it off, he laid it over the rail of the stairs, and then stood half-bent, gasping and staring around. The interior of the building was cleaner than most and as dim as all of them. Only the vamps could afford to properly light a stairwell or to run an elevator.

  Santino lived on the seventh floor; a long climb after the run. Cole sucked in a deep breath and started up. His eyes had yet to get used to the dark and he kicked something after only the fourth step; and at eye level was another small lump. Although his mind immediately thought: trash, he hesitated. Trash was usually kicked to the side and these two objects were in the center of the staircase.

  The first was a single high-heeled shoe, a spray of white plastic beads gleamed dully up at him from the toe. The other item was a purse. It hadn’t been discarded, it had been dropped. He was just fishing the wallet from it, when he heard a thud, a scraping noise and a muffled shout. All of this came from below him.

  Like practically every building, its foundation extended deep into the earth. There would be basements and subbasements. Sometimes there were proper tunnels that led to the subways. Other times there were hand-dug warrens and dens where squatting slags lived and died like roaches. They were dangerous places and frequently slumlords chose to brick off a shaft rather than trying to evict the poor creatures. It was efficient, but the smell of their rotting bodies would linger for months.

  Cole did not relish the idea of going down to look and tried to tell himself that the thud and the dropped purse weren’t necessarily connected. Only he knew better. Dead-eyes were vermin. They liked the dark, and they especially liked to feed in the dark.

  Santino had probably surprised the woman who owned the purse. Caught alone, she would have been easy prey and maybe the temptation had been too much for him.

  “Son of a bitch,” Cole whispered, easing the Crown from its holster, and slipping down the stairwell, hurrying as fast as he dared. Syn-ope wasn’t the only thing Santino might have picked up at the Mandarin Joint. Mandarins would sell a person anything as long as the price was right. Santino might be armed to the teeth.

  The level below the street was made up of more apartments. Sub-gardens they were called, and Cole couldn’t stand them. It was like living in a prison. The air in them never moved.

  The next level down was where the darkness took on a physical quality. It sucked in around him. Cole carried a slide-light for the Crown and clicked it in place beneath the barrel. It gave off a timid light which the darkness greedily ate up after only a few yards. Still, it was enough to show him that the level had been designed for storage and at one time it had been filled with metal cages. The metal had been sold for scrap decades before and all that remained were rectangular rust outlines on the dusty floor.

  Within the dust was a confusion of tracks. The shoeless prints stood out to Cole. They seemed so small, as if a child had been taken and not a woman.

  Because the darkness was so thick, the subbasement had an endless quality to it and Cole suddenly felt the need to run to catch up with Santino and his victim. He raced along in their tracks and came up on them in a back corner, where they grappled together on a low mound just in front of a hand-dug tunnel that sloped away into an even deeper darkness.

  “Let her go!” Cole bellowed.

  Santino was a big man, almost as big as Cole, which made it a wonder that the woman hadn’t already been dragged down into the hole. It was hard to describe her since all Cole saw of her was a wild mane of blonde hair whipping about as she fought like mad, clinging desperately to a gun they were both holding.

  “I said drop it! I’ll shoot if…”

  Suddenly, Santino was flying at Cole with outstretched arms, his hands going for Cole’s throat. With no idea where the woman was, Cole couldn’t risk shooting. Instead, he threw himself backward, twisting his torso at the same time, so Santino passed over him, his nails scraping over Cole’s poly-leather coat. They both fell and then got to their knees at the same time.

  “Wait!” Santino hissed, holding out a hand that was dripping with black blood.

  Seeing the blood was all the proof Cole needed. He fired twice from a distance of three feet, sending Santino’s head back with such force that his neck broke. One shot struck just off the center line of his forehead and the next took out one of his dark eyes.

  Cole wasn’t taki
ng any chances. In his line of work, he could never afford to take chances. He got to his feet and came to stand over the man and pumped two more into his head.

  “That’ll be ten-thousand dollars, please,” he said, grinning. With a happy sigh, he spun his flashlight around at the darkened subbasement. “Ma’am? Are you okay? Hello?” She wasn’t just gone. She was infected and gone. “Sad,” Cole muttered.

  He wasn’t really sad. It was hard to be sad when he had just bagged a Dead-eye and had another on the hook. He’d let her stew in her juices for a day or two and then swing by and break the bad news. No, that ain’t the flu you got, girly. Sorry, but I got to pop you.

  Chapter 3

  The free coffee wasn’t worth the wait. The coffee beans were synthetic, meaning they weren’t really beans at all, and the brew only tasted vaguely like coffee. Overall, there was more of a tinny, bleach flavor and Cole made a face every time he took a sip.

  The brown fluid kept him awake and that’s all that mattered. He needed to babysit his bounties because things had a way of happening when the government was involved. Bodies got misplaced, paperwork was lost, and checks could come back missing a zero or two. He had spent his entire adult life working for the city government and there was always a mistake and never one in his favor.

  For the tenth time that night, he glanced over his report, making sure the wording was correct. It was important that the woman had: “…entered the building because of the alarm warning.”

  Hunters were supposed to keep to their own territories, however the big bosses cared little for nuance as long as the job got done. If word got out that the woman in his report lived in the building, Cole would have his hands full keeping the others away. That’s why he added: “Dropped purse appeared fancy, with steel or silver clasp.”

  In the dark, he hadn’t noticed any clasp and guessed that it had been a button job. This area had been a middle-class neighborhood and the women couldn’t afford metal clasps or even faux leather. He paused, trying to remember the feel of the purse when he’d picked it up. It had been heavier than expected and maybe a bit larger than average. But was it faux leather?

  “Don’t matter,” he muttered, as he wrote in: “Dropped faux-leather purse appeared fancy…”

  He was just thinking about embellishing the shoes when his boss came in looking more haggard than usual. This was saying something since he always looked haggard. Cole wondered, and not for the first time, if he had slipped out of his mom’s puss tired and scraggy with little baby jowls and a pinched angry look. Right away, Cole noticed that he wasn’t carrying one of the green envelopes that always held his check.

  “What gives?”

  “You fucked up, Cole. Get in here.”

  Lieutenant Joshua Lloyd’s office was in a constant state of dishevelment. His desk creaked under a mound of reports, while along the wall, the drawers of his four filing cabinets were so stuffed with files that none of them could close. Even the lone couch across from his desk was upholstered in paper a foot deep. When Lloyd slipped behind his desk, he seemed to meld into the mess.

  The only chair in the room, besides the one under Lloyd’s wide rump, held another stack of papers, that were topped by an ancient Air-o-lux box fan that was older than Cole and Lloyd put together. It was held together by tape and wire.

  Cole didn’t want to sit. “I didn’t fuck nothin’ up. It’s not my fault the skirt took off. And I don’t blame her either. And yes, I went after her, but she went out in a Cat-2 for fuck’s sake. You don’t pay me enough to run out in the middle of a Cat-2.”

  “The girl isn’t the problem. It’s Santino.” Out of habit, he glanced toward his door to make sure it was shut. “He wasn’t a Dead-eye.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Of course, he was. I saw the black blood, Lloyd.”

  “It was dark. You said so yourself. Blood looks black in the dark.”

  “It wasn’t dark when the recovery team got there.” Though it had been a two-hour wait and congealed blood did darken over time… “No, it was black. I saw it. Damn it, Lloyd! What kind of shit is this? I want to talk to the recovery team. I want to see their damned notes.”

  Lloyd sat back shaking his head, making his limp hair move more than the Air-o-lux ever did. “You know what their job is. They’re there to destroy evidence, not to preserve it. Do you really want to bring them in on this? It’s their man who ran the tests. All he’s going to say is that Santino was a human and that you plugged him four times, twice execution style. Son, you’re just lucky this happened out of sight.”

  Cole heard the threat and had to grind his teeth on an entire string of curses. “There was a girl. He took her down into that…”

  “Yes, the recovery team saw the bare print. It’s why you’re not being charged. Santino was a murderer, we all know it. But God, Cole! If he’d been just a regular guy…” He shook his head again, letting Cole know he would have been strung up for killing him.

  “If he was a murderer, wouldn’t there be some sort of bounty?”

  Lloyd muttered, “Unconvicted murderer. Look, I’m not trying to dick you on this one. Santino’s in the morgue. You can see for yourself. What’s left of his brain is as pink as my balls.”

  “I will look, thank you,” Cole said stiffly, doing his best to rein in his anger. Ten-thousand had just gone out the fucking window. Twenty-thousand, if he counted the girl. Furious he started to storm from the office and was halfway out the door when Lloyd called him back. “By the way, your paint’s running. You should fix that.”

  Crap! One more expense he couldn’t afford. His tats weren’t real; they were squid-ink henna and usually lasted a few months if he was careful. The recovery team had been less than careful. Everything in the basement and the stairs leading down to it had been bleached and scrubbed, and that included Cole. Nine hours later and his clothes were still damp.

  Without his tattoos, he looked exactly like a cop pretending he wasn’t one. “This day just keeps getting better and better,” he groused as he stomped down the stairs to the third subbasement. As always, the morgue was like a hothouse, and as always, the smell was enough to turn a hard man like Cole green beneath his smeared tattoos.

  The morgue worked like a production line. The bodies were even placed on a conveyor belt. At the first station, they were stripped and any “valuables” placed in a single small bag. Those items not deemed valuable—a highly subjective term—were divvied up among the crew at the end of their shift. At the next stop, the body was printed. At the next, it was photographed from every possible angle. The actual autopsy came next. A difficult case might take all of five minutes. Santino probably took less than one. At the next stop, whatever notes that had been written were typed in triplicate.

  After that, the body was sent to be mulched.

  Cole caught up with Santino as he was rumbling down the line to the mulcher. He possessed no authority in the morgue except his voice, his steel fists and the fact that he would obviously use them if he had to. Three reasons that were good enough for the techs who got paid hourly and didn’t mind the break, short as it was. There wasn’t much reason to look any further than the holes in Santino’s head. The brain was clean, as were his eyes.

  “Fucking human,” he whispered.

  Mumbling more curses, Cole stormed from the morgue and then up out of the station, stopping on the crumbling steps outside. He thought about going back to his apartment, but it was a thirty-minute walk. He’d been planning to take a cab, but without the bounty he couldn’t even afford to spring for the train, and that was seventy cents.

  What was at home, anyway? Nothing. His apartment was cold and virtually empty. Other than a few old suits, a mattress and some bags of boil and eat ramen, he possessed next to nothing. Except pawn tickets that is. Over the last year he had collected enough of them to cover his walls. His phone was dead because he hadn’t been able to pay the bill, and the electric would go any day.

  His luck had been on
a downward spiral and he hadn’t picked up a decent bounty in months. And now he’d lost two in one night.

  “I need a drink,” he muttered, glancing around. There wasn’t much to see. The sun was coming up in all its glory and somewhere people were enjoying it, they just weren’t enjoying it in New York. The night mists were turning to a grey drizzle and the ghostly skyscrapers were beginning to solidify…more or less. Many of them weren’t exactly solid. They were dying, crumbling monuments to an old world.

  Cole was still staring up when someone pushed him.

  “Get your ass off the steps, slag.” It was a police officer, bringing in a stick-thin money-honey, in a see-through red dress that matched her contact lenses. She was twitchy, coming down from riding the Rican Mule. All in all, she looked as though she had been pulled from a gutter.

  Normally, Cole would have knocked the beat cop’s teeth in and strolled away before he had the chance to come to, only just then, Cole was the one who felt beat down.

  The cop and the honey swept by and he stared after them. If she hadn’t already, she was going to lose the cash she had made that night from renting out her body. Cole didn’t want to know what her daddy was going to do to her. New age pimps were rarely kind.

  “But that’s not my problem,” Cole said, repeating the New York mantra. His problem was that damned slick. Cole couldn’t get him out of his head, and he knew that even if he went home, he wouldn’t be able to sleep. There were too many loose ends, too many questions without answers. If Santino wasn’t a Dead-eye, why on earth had he chopped up his wife and stuck her in a freezer?

  “He could have buried her in the basement. It’s what I would have done if I was just an everyday murderer. But why would an average killer take out her heart?” It was the wife’s missing heart that had brought Cole in on the case. “I need to see the report on her,” he decided, turning on his heel and following the cop.

  Since computers had gone the way of the dinosaur a hundred years before Cole was born, every report generated in the police station was eventually sent to the “Hall of Records.” If there had ever been an actual hall it had been buried under paper ages ago. Now the “hall” consisted of the top ten floors of the immense building.