by Jeff Somers
I counted. There were fifteen men and six women crammed onto that row of bunks.
Word was spreading, too, leaking downward to the bunk beneath them. It was strange to watch it happening, people being shoved awake, something whispered directly into their ear, two sets of eyes on me. Then again, with the next person, sometimes with a handheld like Mara’s held up for confirmation. I looked back at Mara; we were all armed now, and I had no doubt any one of the three of us could handle a half-dozen shitkickers—assuming, of course, that Mara and Adrian would be bothered to step between me and a mob. But there were sixty, seventy people crammed into the car, and sixty or seventy more in the next.
The exclamation point in the corner of my vision beat in time with my heart.
I shut my eyes and took a deep breath. These were just civilians. Before the System started unspooling around them, they’d had jobs, families, dinner dates, and the idea of sharing a train car with someone like me had been ludicrous. I didn’t want to do any more damage here than I had to.
I opened my eyes and was fully awake, humming with a slight adrenaline edge. I put my hand inside my coat and closed it over the butt of my Roon auto, not new but well-loved, its grip glossy from use and sweat. I looked across the aisle at the first group of people and stared at them until one of them, a kid with a scum of gingery beard on his face, stared back.
“You don’t want this, junior,” I said loudly. “Stay alive.” It was too fucking late; I saw that immediately. He had too many people at his back, pushing, and I’d fucked him by singling him out. Or he’d fucked himself by meeting my gaze—it didn’t matter. I felt an icy black ball of nausea in my belly, realizing that this chump had no fucking chance here and I’d invited him up onto the chopping block. I looked around the car, quickly, trying to see how we could get past this without killing half the fucking world. I couldn’t see a way; if I backed down, it would just encourage them, make them think this reward was the easiest thing they’d ever done.
“Can’t do that,” the man said, shaking his head. “We’ve already contacted the police.”
My HUD told me otherwise—I could see pretty plainly from the tiny icon in the upper right corner that there was no connection with the grid. A few years ago you could have gone to the fucking south pole and gotten a signal, but things got sketchy away from the cities these days. I didn’t know how far out we were, but if someone had sent the cops a note, it wouldn’t get there anytime soon, and if it did, I wondered if Janet Hense or someone like her might not do some unofficial voodoo on it, since the System Pigs were playing against themselves on this one.
I shook my head. “No, you didn’t.” I wanted to give him—all of them—every chance.
They looked around at each other, flicking their eyes up and around. Counting. Crunching the odds. I was doing the same thing, trying to figure how many would take a chance, how many would crowd to the sides of the car, heads down, eyes shut. How many would follow five seconds in if enough of the others made a move. How many I could take on. Nineteen rounds in the Roon, and the possibility that Mara and the Poet would have my back. It was tiring, doing the math.
Shoot him in the mouth, Dick Marin whispered in my head, the ghost of a...brain still clicking and whirring somewhere, a multitude of somewheres, a ghost outdated and gamy from seclusion. They’ll all calm down, then.
I gritted my teeth. It had been so long since the ghosts—introduced when I’d been halfway bricked in Chengara, my brain sucked into a mainframe—had bothered me, I’d lost my touch at ignoring them. Silence had settled into the tiny spaces between us; I kept my hand on my gun inside my coat and slid the safety off, looking slowly around. No one moved, but most of the car was staring at me. If these had been my sort, from my neighborhood or its like, we’d already be trading body blows—I was valuable. As I looked around, I could almost see the backbone draining out of them. It was one thing to plot over a reward while the subject napped a few feet away. It was something else to read the list of things I was wanted for—murder, kidnapping, conspiracy, treason—and be the first to come at me. The System Pigs had made me sound dangerous.
“All right,” I said, and suddenly a man who’d been standing in the press of people on the floor pulled himself up onto the side of the bunks, hooking one arm into the supports and hanging there. He was wearing an expensive coat, but his clothes underneath were grubby and torn, and his silvery beard was mangled and knotted. His eyes were shock white in the midst of his dirty face, wide and fierce.
“This man,” he shouted, pointing at me, “is a murderer! And a thief! A piece of human shit! And every person who puts a hand on him right here, right now, gets a goddamn share of the reward!”
The train rumbled on, the steady rhythm and sway so fast and constant as to be silent and still.
He stared around with wide, frantic eyes. He drew in a deep breath and pointed at me again. “This man—”
Next to me, Mara’s hand flew up. In the tight space of the car the sound of her gun was intensely loud, louder than anything most of these people had ever heard. The whole train seemed to duck as the shouter’s face exploded into a spray of blood, revealing a grisly lump of bone and flesh that had been hiding within, and for a moment the Poet and the Monk were the only things standing upright.
Someone grabbed my arms from behind, and I was jerked backward. I let them pull me, and I got my feet up onto the edge of the bunk, giving myself a powerful push and slamming back into them, their hands snapping loose. I yanked my Roon from its holster and jabbed it up at the ceiling, firing two more booming shots. It should have been enough. It should have scared the shit out of them all.
They swarmed us.
A small figure in a big coat leaped from the bunks to my right, landing on top of me in a triumphant moment of bad dumb luck, and before I could remind myself that these were just people, just civilians, I’d shot her twice through the chest, sending her sailing backward into the suddenly surging crowd. I had no headroom and squirmed up on the bunk trying to position myself on my knees; I wanted the high ground. Whirling around, I found the rest of our bunk cowering behind us, arms up over their heads, people just hoping that if they stayed very still and didn’t get involved, it would all pass them by.
How’s that working out for you? I asked them silently. I wondered when trains had gone fucking sentient, and when they’d decided they hated me.
Forcing myself back around, I lashed my gun hand out at a tan, oblong head as it rose up over the edge of the bunk, crunching a nose into pulp with a shout, the jolt disappearing up my arm, absorbed by augmented nerve-suppression and circulation monitoring. I felt light and fast. I was a machine, and being a machine was turning out to be kind of fucking cool.
Everyone was shouting. Mara and I were still side by side, kicking and firing and pushing them back. I was amazed—we’d shot three with some prejudice. Desperate , I thought. With something akin to panic, I realized we weren’t going to intimidate them. We were going to have to kill most of them.
Another head popped up over the edge of the bunk, a sweaty mass of dark hair; as I tried to snap my arm back someone grabbed it, and then another pair of hands joined them, slamming my arm painfully backward. I kicked at the head I’d seen and made some contact, and then someone crawled on top of me, putting a foot on my neck so precisely right I almost thought there might have been a pro or two in the crowd. Choking, I reached back in desperation, hoping for a lock of hair or an ear to grab onto, but instead my free arm was seized, and two more people pulled themselves up onto me. I heard Mara’s gun go off twice, three times as my HUD swelled into a red sea of flashing icons and data streams. Then there was a volley of shots, suddenly cut off.
I was being smothered. In the corner of my vision, the flashing exclamation point seemed to grow with every steady, augment-regulated heartbeat. Then I was sliding, being pulled down from the bunk by my shoes, suffocating. I mashed my finger down on the trigger, the Roon barking out fifteen shots
in rapid succession, and I stabbed at the exclamation point in my HUD just like the Monk had explained it to me.
XVII
SHE AIN’T THE FIRST
They were like paper in my hands.
Everything got slow, but crisp. So fucking crisp, like everything was being run through a filter before it got passed on to my brain. I pulled the gun up toward my face and my arm tore free from the three people holding it down. It was effortless, my arm popping up in front of me, bruised and scratched, the coat torn. One of the figures that had been sitting on my arm, trying to wrestle the gun free, was sent rolling off the bunk, smashing into the crowd below us in slow motion.
Frowning, I decided to experiment, and I tore my other arm free with the same easy effort. Two people leaped onto my back, but it was easy to time their spastic, wavelike efforts and flick them off of me with my gun-heavy hand, tearing the thin skin of their faces, a tooth flying like a bloody comet through the thick air.
It was easy.
Mara was pinned on the bunk next to me, wriggling and kicking but trapped. On the floor, the Monk had thrown back its hood and revealed its waxy fake head, and a discernible circle of empty space had opened up around it as people recoiled from the first monk they’d seen in years. Next to it, the Poet was struggling with three women, his fist slowly connecting with the chin of one, her face screwed up in a comical grimace.
I didn’t feel anything.
I was empty, clinical. My HUD was bright and fully operational, showing my heart rate at the top of the red zone, my blood pressure off the scale, brain activity jagged and spiky—I felt none of it. I was steady and serene, and even when four more hands latched onto me, pulling at me, fingers digging into my skin, I felt nothing—no pain, no irritation. Just a stream of data to analyze, a reaction to calculate. Lazily, I rolled my shoulders and twisted out of their grasp, and decided the time had come to get this over with.
Taking my time, I pushed up and got my knees under me. I dropped the empty clip from the Roon and fished a fresh one from my pocket, slamming it into place and racking a shell into the chamber with my bloodied hand. I turned, swinging the gun out in front of me, and every face that got between the gun and the floor, I put a bullet in. It was beautiful, in a way, the perfection of it, the precision of my own movements. It was like I thought of something and it happened without me having to make any of the intervening calculations or movements.
A young woman in a nice, ridiculous fur coat pulled herself up, face locked in a snarl, rising slowly from the floor as she leaped for my throat. I slashed the gun down onto her head, bones crunching in both my hand and her head, her graceful backward slump gorgeous, ballet.
Rolling to my side, I freed my legs, twisting my back beyond its limits, and popped up into a crouch on the top of the bunk. I scanned the roiling crowd, eyes stopping on a young girl almost directly across from me, her red hair limp and greasy looking. Her coat was nice enough, and her skin was healthy and pale; she looked like a rich kid who’d gone to seed, like the occasional narcs who stumbled downtown in Old New York and never made it out again, sucking their credit dry and slowly absorbed by the neighborhood. She was probably not yet twenty, middle aged and didn’t know it, her eyes wide in terror as she stared around. I found I had the time to just crouch there and stare at her for a while, studying her. Gleason, I thought, would have been about her age. The thought seemed to come from outside of me, beamed in, as if the cosmos suddenly wanted me to remember her for some reason, to remember that she’d still be alive if she hadn’t hooked up with me and my fucking crazy ideas about making the System hurt, about staying off the Rail, about training her up to be just like me.
That was before the Plague, before I’d been cut down to size. Taught my lesson.
I’d paused long enough for the good citizens of what was left of the System to get their second wind; they’d come this far and if a few of them were dead and a few more sputtering blood onto the floor, all the more fucking reason to tear me apart. I felt hot, and realized with a start that I was perspiring heavily, sweat running off of me in slow, syrupy rivulets. My HUD was a dark, angry red, every status bar slammed into the top of its scale.
There was a determined group of six men and one woman, all soft looking, well dressed and white skinned. One of the men already had a broken nose and swollen eyes, but he came with the rest of them, rushing me all at once, advancing on me with mouths open, screaming something too slowly to make out. I leaned forward slowly, shifting my weight to absorb the shock of their impact, but movement behind me, a wavelike bounce shuddering through the bunk, made me spin, one hand easing out and taking hold of an offered calf, a half-inch of brightly tattooed skin showing between the heavy hem of the pants and the cracked leather of the sturdy boot. I rolled myself forward, timing it out with ease, letting momentum and gravity pull me down toward the floor as I yanked on the leg, pulling a dense, heavy figure up and over my head as I landed, slamming him into the approaching group and knocking them all on their asses. My projectile tucked and rolled into a passable landing, and when he popped up on the balls of his feet I realized it was Adrian, glaring at me, a fresh scrape along his forehead oozing blood into his eyes. He had a jagged knife in one hand but had lost his piece of shit Hamada.
He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him and just smiled as I absentmindedly stiff-armed a broken-nose asshole who’d spun and rushed at me as best as you could rush in the crowded car.
It was so easy. I didn’t even fire the fucking gun, I just punched and slapped and pushed. I felt like I could have kicked their collective ass all day long—every face that got close enough, I smashed a fist into it, every flicker of movement behind me, I spun easily and hit low. When I got tired of it, when it had gone on for long enough—though I didn’t know how long it had been—I took hold of a convenient body and lifted it up, tearing fingernails and sending a fresh sheet of sweat streaming down my face, and threw it into the remaining crowd of screaming, huddling people. I spun, and had a split-second image of Mara scowling at me before she smashed the butt of her gun down on top of my head.
Full of fucking surprises.
Something smelled terrible, and I regretted everything I’d done in my life, ever, the endless subtle trail that had led to me smelling this. I tried to flinch my face away from it, but the moment I tried to move, my head pain bloomed ... everywhere. My right hand throbbed, my left arm was seared deep with something hot and sharp, my ribs ached and my neck was frozen stiff. I felt weak and dehydrated, and immediately I began shivering, which hurt even more.
I opened my eyes, and the dim red light of the train’s interior burned my eyes and set fire to something in my head, which joined in the general throbbing. Mara’s face pushed into my vision, filling it as she frowned down at me.
“You don’t look good, you fucking psychopath,” she said.
I tried to say something. My mouth opened and a thin wail dribbled out of me.
“That was not too smart,” I heard the Poet say. Suddenly, my head was pounding. All of my HUD bars were yellow and well below normal. The fucking exclamation point was blinking in the corner again, but I flinched away from it. I never wanted to fucking do that again. “You almost killed me, you fuck. It was . . . disturbing.”
“Disturbin’?” Mara spat, moving away from me. “We got sixteen fucking corpses here he killed with his bare fucking hands.”
I turned my head, sharp stabbing pains shooting down my back. The car had been transformed into a slaughterhouse. Most of its former population was gone, but the vibration under me told me the train was still in motion, speeding along. Bodies rolled on the floor around me, limp and bloodied, and the whole space smelled like blood.
“Where...” I whispered, hoarsely, my throat seizing up in pain. “Where—”
“Herded ’em into the next car,” Mara snapped as the Monk suddenly knelt next to me, lifting my limp arm in its cold, plastic hands, its face still frozen in that unfortunate grin I�
�d started to assume was a malfunction. “They didn’t need too much encouragement.”
The Monk began an efficient examination, retrieving a small handheld from its coat and running it lightly along the perimeter of my body with one hand as it prodded and poked me with the other, getting some weak moans and grunts from me in response. Satisfied, it pushed the handheld back inside its coat and produced the LED screen again.
AS EXPECTED: YOU ARE IN SHOCK, AS IF YOU HAD SURVIVED WEEKS OF DEPRIVATION AND ABUSE. YOU WILL RECOVER WITH FLUIDS AND REST, BUT BE WEAKENED. YOUR AUGMENTS WILL NOT FUNCTION AT FULL CAPACITY WITHOUT SERVICE; YOU WILL EXPERIENCE DEGRADED FUNCTION. I WOULD GUESS THAT ONE MORE INVOCATION OF THE EHA ENHANCEMENT MODE WILL EASILY KILL YOU.
I nodded slowly, feeling like my brain was softly bouncing up and down inside my skull. “You think so, huh? You’re fucking brilliant.”
I slowly forced my way up onto my elbows, sweat popping out on my brow again. The Poet ambled over and held out a single N-tab and a small canteen to me. I took the tab in a shaking hand and swallowed it, then took the canteen, intending to just take a sip. When I handed it back to him, gasping, I’d drained it, water running down my chin, my whole body shaking. My stomach instantly seized up and tried to send everything right back up again, so I clamped my mouth shut and took some deep breaths, swallowing rapidly until it subsided.
Michaleen Garda had done this to me. I wouldn’t be on this fucking train, wouldn’t be crammed full of augments, wouldn’t be sitting here feeling my internal organs turn into cheese if not for that stump of a man. I ran my dry, swollen tongue along my lips and smiled, sitting up and trying to balance myself so I wouldn’t slump over.