by Jeff Somers
I let that hang in the air while the bartender, a skinny girl of about ten with dull, wild black hair frizzing out around her head, poured red liquor into the big guy’s cup. I studied her as she worked; it had been a long time, I realized, since I’d seen a child. She looked incredibly small and new, suddenly. When she came over I handed her five hundred yen. All the bills were new and crisp.
“I need transportation, long distance,” I said, holding on to the bill when she grabbed it. “You point the right person at me and there’s another five hundred.”
She bit her lip and nodded, eyes wide and locked on the money. Paper was still strange to me, and fucking inefficient, but it felt good to be able to bribe people again. Five hundred yen would buy her something to eat. A thousand yen might keep her alive for a week, if she lived careful. It was a good enough tip to get her enthusiasm up. I let go of the bill and she made it disappear impressively. I eyed her for a moment as she ran, barefoot on the cracked, frozen cement floor, to the rear of the bar. She probably worked the streets as a Pick when she wasn’t slopping drinks in here, and she probably did well doing it.
I sat down across from Remy, who was finishing off his second cup of solvent, looking yellow and bloated, his eyes squinty. Remy was the worst drunk I’d ever known. He drank fast, like he was punishing himself, and got surly, picking fights and being nasty. He’d killed four or five poor assholes in stupid bar fights, and I’d learned that that was the whole point. That’s what he wanted to do—have a reason to shoot someone. I’d had to knock him cold a couple of times just to stop a fucked-up situation from crossing over into batshit insane, but he never complained. He woke up, vomited once or twice, and seemed good to go. I looked down at my own cup, untouched. In the cup, the booze looked black, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I missed gin, but no one made gin anywhere. I missed N-tabs, too. Every time someone set a joint of memy, who wdown in front of me, I wanted to puke right onto my plate.
“Try not to piss everyone off,” I said. “We’ve got a window before Morales gathers his troops. We don’t need the rest of the town against us, too.”
Remy saluted me and waved his cup in the air without turning around. I sighed.
The bar was mostly empty, just a half dozen people aside from us, four cripples who sat nursing cups on the darkened edges of the room, Remy’s new friend, and a cardsharp who sat alone, shuffling an ancient deck of holographic cards that still shone bright and cheery in the dim light. There was no sound in the place aside from the wind howling through the thin walls, and not much light from the smoky oil lamps. I wondered, briefly, how come no one tried to lift anything from behind the bar with the girl gone, and then wondered why they didn’t try with the girl there, since she looked about as dangerous as a cloud. Then I got bored and put my attention into trying to drink the stuff in my cup. I opted to breathe through my mouth and just swallow it fast. It was thick and oily on the tongue, and when I’d choked it down the burn wasn’t the pleasant one alcohol usually gave me, but something acidic and sinister.
I thought about Mexico. We’d passed through it on our way to Potosí, months ago, coming south down from Alaska and the ruin of California, which was still just a field of rubble that glowed at night. Mexico was better off; it had been largely controlled by criminal gangs before the civil war, and since the war had been under the thumb of two dozen old army units and their commanding officers, a hundred well-armed and desperate men and women who still had augments in their heads that could be controlled by their CO and his blackjack. Mexico wasn’t civilized, but you could get things done in Mexico, and the gangs and old military units were big enough that yen was useful to them. It wouldn’t be hard to run an operation in Mexico, if I could dig up the resources.
Tiny steps told me the bartender had returned, and bigger steps in tow told me my yen had bought someone’s attention. I didn’t turn around; Remy was still sober enough to glance over my shoulder and then shrug, letting me know it wasn’t a threat.
The girl who sat down across from me was beautiful: tan, smooth skin, long, glossy black hair, an oval face with a long nose and a full mouth with nice teeth. Her eyes were a dark green and looked back at me steadily. She was wearing canvas overalls that had been patched a hundred times over a thick, gray shirt that looked warm and scratchy. Her hands were nicked by a million tiny cuts and heavily calloused, but they were folded in front of her calmly. If she was afraid of drunk men with guns, she didn’t show it.
“Adela tells me you need to go somewhere,” she said flatly. “Where?”
I stared at her for a few heartbeats, smiling, giving her the old attitude. It was like clicking into a groove, well-worn and familiar: Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, is not amused. “Mexico City,” I said finally. City was a grand term for what was left up there, but names stuck.
She pursed her lips, nodding, calculating distances and risk. She glanced at Remy, who had acquired his third cup and seemed content to stare into it, then back me. “Two of you?”
I nodded. “Probably.” I couldn’t think of any reason we’d acquire anyone else, but you never knew.
She nodded again, and leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms behind her and pushing her tits at me. That was probably a good negotiating trick, usually, and my smile became more natural. The girl had some brains. “My cousin has a vehicle. Four-wheel. The deal is: You provide a type V6 battery with working solar collector, plus ten thousand yen, and he will drive you there. We all provide our own food along the way.”
“We?” I asked. I wondered if that was a grift, if we were supposed to stare at her tits and get all hot and bothered at the thought of her sleeping three feet away from us out in the wilderness and forget to haggle on the price. Or if she was fishing to see if we’d make her an offer to keep us company along the way. That thought made me sad, suddenly, and I made a face, waving my hand. “A working battery and a collector is gonna cost me fifty thousand yen, easy, from one of those assholes out there. That’s sixty to get up there. That’s fucking robbery.”
She sat forward again, so suddenly I was startled into widening my smile. “Do you have a vehicle?” She waved a finger in front of her. “No, you do not. You do not like the price, you can go find someone to maybe carry you north.”
Remy suddenly lashed out an arm and took hold of her hair, yanking her head back as he set his cup on the table carefully. She squeaked in shock, but then whipped her hands up and clawed at his face, kicking the table as she twisted in the chair. If her nails hadn’t been bitten down to the tips, she might have made the kid regret such a sloppy move. As it was, he had her neck bent down over the back of the chair and she had no leverage with which to extricate herself.
“Be polite,” he advised.
I looked at Remy and shook my head. “No fucking need for that, dammit,” I said evenly, controlling myself. He glanced at me and shrugged, releasing her and scooping up his drink casually.
She sprang from the chair, her face dark, and stood coughing. No one else in the place had so much as shifted their weight. I waited to see what she’d do: curse us out, walk away, make threats. Instead, she swallowed, pushed her hair from her face, and then slowly resumed her seat, settling herself carefully. When she looked back at me she was composed.
“Your friend should be careful with people he may be sleeping near later,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “People get stabbed in their sleep.”
Remy raised his eyebrows and I thought it was the closest to a smile I’d ever seen on him. “I don’t sleep,” he said.
I leaned forward, clenching my teeth. Fucking Remy. It was like hauling a retarded bear around with you—sometimes he got a burr up his ass and you just had to let him dance. But I didn’t like it, and I saw this as a teaching moment. “I apologize for fuckhead over there,” I said pointedly, clasping my hands in front of me to keep them from doing damage. Fucking Remy. “We have a deal.” I held out my hand slowly, unclenching it with effort. I wanted to ki
ck Remy’s chair out from under him and give him a few to the ribs, but would be a better time and place for that.
She stared at my hand for a moment, then nodded and reached forward to shake. “I am Adora. I will take you to Cristo and you can see the vehicle and discuss a deposit.”
She tried to take her hand back but I held it tight. “He’s a fuckhead,” I said, jerking my head at Remy. “But he’s my fuckhead. I just apologized for him, but that’s all you get. If he gets stabbed, I will kill you.”
She went pale for a second, swallowed again, and then firmed up, getting her face back under control. “I accept the apology,” she said slowly. “Shall we go?”
She stood up, but waited for us to follow suit before walking for the exit. I smiled. I liked anyone who could look into Remy’s eyes and still threaten him.
Then I looked at Remy and gave him a hard smack to the back of his head. He accepted it silently, wincing and scuttling out of reach, but saying nothing.
“This way.”
We followed her through some heroic mud, the kind of dark brown stuff that made walking so much trouble you just wanted to lie down in it and be sucked into the earth. Adora was pretending to be unconcerned as she turned her back on us, but she had a blade tucked up her right sleeve. I figured some of the men she’d done business with weren’t as polite as me, so I gave her a few feet of space and glanced back at Remy, who was lagging, sweat streaming down his face as he carried the battery and collector.
“Don’t fucking drop it,” I said cheerfully. “I just hocked everything we fucking own for that thing.”
He grunted, long hair hanging in his face. Remy had wanted to just take it by force—what the hell, we were leaving Potosí anyway—and we could have; the old man running the cart had two fat guys sitting on barrels drinking moonshine for security. Remy and I would have been halfway to Mexico before those two managed to get on their feet. But the old man was just skin and bones, dried up and hanging on, and he’d wanted a fair price. Fair was fair.
We were heading toward a bleached wooden shed, a sagging collection of slats that looked ready to collapse if we made too much noise on the approach. Adora worked a rusty metal chain and padlock and threw open the warped doors, revealing a shadowy garage in which was parked a military four-wheel vehicle. I’d ridden in something like it a few times; if you didn’t mind your kidneys in your throat and a few lumps on your head, it would get you where you wanted to go.
I stared at it, listening to Remy grunt and swear his way toward us. Then I looked at Adora.
“There’s no cousin, is there?”
She shrugged. “Having a cousin keeps some of the creeps away.” She jerked her chin at Remy. “You bought the battery; I figure you are serious.”
I nodded. “We are. But serious men can’t be trusted either. I’ve known some really serious men, and most of them were bastards.”
She shrugged again. I liked the roll of her shoulders. The overalls didn’t give you much clue, and no one was eating well these days, but I had an impression of curves. “If I worried about every potential rapist I came across,” she said, emphasizing potential just enough, “I would never leave the house. You have brought yen as well?”
I studied her. “Yen you get in Mexico City,” I said. “Just in case you got a side business slitting throats at night.”
She made a face but shrugged. “Very well. Help me push it out into the field.”
I followed her into the dank interior of the shack and put a shoulder behind it.
“Why are you going to Mexico City?” she asked, breathless, after we’d pushed the heavy thing a few feet, the axle squealing.
I wasn’t breathing hard; my augments still managed my oxygen supply pretty well. “We’ve got an old friend to kill.”
IV
SORRY ABOUT THE BLOOD
“Where are we?”
Adora didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. We passed Panama. Somewhere north of there.”
Outside the cab the world was darkness, lightning, and rain. The windshield of the car glowed a soft blue, giving Adora a vector outline of the terrain and a constant readout on the battery, our elevation, direction, and speed. The geopositional satellites were all still up there, humming along, and the last week had been like going back in time, back into the System—we were connected.
She was tired, her round face tight and her eyes puffy with strain. She sat hunched forward, her heavy overalls and thick gray shirt making her body a mystery. It had been a long time since I’d been this close to an attractive woman. I wondered how she’d managed to go this long without being molested, and then wondered if maybe she hadn’t. Her hair was pulled back into a complex knot at the back of her head, revealing small, perfect ears I found strangely compelling. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead and my thoughts off the smooth skin of her neck; even if she was interested in a roll with someone like me—which was pretty unlikely—I didn’t have the time or energy for it. And I wasn’t going to risk our ride. I had no way of knowing if Morales’s information was accurate, but if it was, I didn’t figure Wallace Belling would be in that hospital for long.
I twisted around in the safety netting and looked at Remy, who had been asleep for four days and showed no signs of waking up, ever. The interior of the four-wheeler was pretty sparse—the seats were bare metal, and the whole thing vibrated like a fluid earthquake when she put it in gear, grunting and sweating. My back ached, my legs were numb, and my eyes felt like they were glued shut. Another week in the front seat of her rolling coffin and I’d be ready to kill myself.
“He still back there?” she asked.
I looked back out the windshield. Trees, tall and slender with bushy tops, flashed by. We’d stumbled on a stretch of usable road, old and cracked but in one piece. The road came and went. Sometimes we were slurring up mud in the middle of fucking wilderness; sometimes we were bouncing through cratered battlefields with walls of fire burning eternally around us, and sometimes the skies parted, the sun shone down, and a fucking highway from pre-Unification days erupted out of nowhere, a vein of tar, and we’d bounce up onto it and suddenly everything would be smooth and easy, like the world had been built for us to drive on it.
Lightning flashed, distant. I sighed, trying to stretch. “You’re not going back to Potosí, are you?”
She didn’t respond. We’d been silent for so long, I thought maybe I’d surprised her. After thirty seconds or so, I shut my eyes.
“You brought only food and cash. Judging the wad, it’s a lot of cash—for you. Probably every cent you’ve managed to scrape together. You don’t bring your life savings with you on a trip.”
She bit her lip. “There’s nothing much going on in Potosí.”
I laughed. “Sister, Potosí’s a fucking sewer, but it’s better than most of the world right now. At least the buildings are still standing. At least it’s not irradiated—fucking Las Vegas, you can’t go within a hundred fucking miles of it without being cooked from the inside out. Potosí’s got something like a society—you’ve got trade, a social order. Fucking hell, kid. You could do worse than Potosí.”
“That’s fucking depressing,” she said. “If Potosí is so wonderful, why were you so eager to leave?”
I opened my eyes. “People were trying to kill me.”
She smiled. “And you have a man to kill in Mexico.”
I smiled. “You think that’s bullshit.”
She shrugged. “You’ve got a man’s gun, that’s for sure. Junior back there has a gun with a fucking capital G, yes? But working for Morales doesn’t mean shit. The world is filled with men who want to be hard.”
I shut my eyes and tried to work the dull ache out of the small of my back. It was impossible. “Is that what I’m trying to be? A hard man?”
“You talk like one. Everything is a threat. Everything is funny and nothing is true.” She shrugged again. “In Potosí a lot of people talk like that. Most are dead, now. The army occupied us, you
know. For six months we had a major in charge of the town, five thousand soldiers, armor units, silver hovers in the air. They set up military courts—jokes, bad jokes, but anyone caught stealing—shot dead. Caught breaking curfew—shot dead. Don’t want to sell them your… your last fucking cow… shot dead.” She paused, her hands tight on the stick. “The hard ones, they usually didn’t have anything hard to say when facing the firing line.”
I nodded. “We tend to lose our sense of humor when we get executed, I’ll grant you that. But I’m pushing forty, sister. Life expectancy keeps dropping, from what I can tell, and t widans every year I’m that much more amazing.”
She laughed, a sudden outburst of snorting and choking that was mildly disturbing. I popped open one eye and turned my head to look at her. She was shaking with sudden laughter, her whole body jerking with the force of it.
I let it drift, and she didn’t say anything more. We rode along in silence for a few minutes, the rain lashing the rusted chassis, the silent lightning giving us a glimpse every now and then as the four-wheeler sailed down the road. I liked that she wasn’t afraid. I was tired of people being afraid when they saw the gun, when they found out who you were. I liked being laughed at. It reminded me of New York, years ago, Kev Gatz and I crawling through the sewers and starving to death. No one had been impressed by me back then, either, and it was before the Squalor job, before London and Rose Harper and everything that came after, ruining me and then coming back to ruin what was left.
Poor Avery, a voice whispered in my head, making me jump a little.
Salgado? I thought, and waited. She didn’t say anything else. When I’d been in Chengara Penitentiary, they’d stuck needles into my brain and tried to upload me to the prison mainframe for storage, but the army had crashed the party and I’d been disconnected before they’d completed the work. Somehow a bunch of other people’s stored minds had backwashed into me, and three of them had lasted long enough for me to get used to them talking to me. My old pal Grisha had told me those three had survived probably because I’d known them, somewhat, in real life. Dolores Salgado, former Undersecretary of the System of Federated Nations, had been in prison with me. The old bat had been important, and then she’d been in prison, and then she’d been dead, and I somehow had a copy of her in my brain.