The Final Evolution

by Jeff Somers

  Something smacked into the side of the four-wheeler, making a dull thud. A second later, two more impacts, and then a volley of smaller ones.

  “Rocks,” Remy said, yawning. “Guess we made some enemies by rolling over everyone.”

  I nodded as something big and heavy starred the rear windshield. “Up and out,” I said. “We let them crowd around and pin the doors and we’re fucking dead. Up and out!”

  Adora was struggling with the door on her side, which was undamaged. “We can’t just leave it here!” she shouted as she pushed the door open. “Do you know what this is worth?”

  I put my hands on her ass and gave her a shove to get her moving. “I do not give a shit how much this rolling box is worth,” I snapped, then looked at Remy, who appeared to be almost back to sleep. “Hang back half a minute,” I said, thinking again I almost missed the fucking cops. “If you see a reason to do something creative, take it.”

  He gestured vaguely at me, keeping his eyes closed. I stared at him for a second, wanting to take a moment to educate him a little, but there wasn’t time, and with a grunt I pushed myself out of the ruined car.

  I stood up in the weak sunlight and drew my Roon, glancing down as I checked the chamber and slid the safety off. A crowd had already formed in a loose ring around us, angry locals shouting and brandishing some sticks and other impromptu weapons. A rock sailed past my head as I took in the crowd, looking for talent. I didn’t see any, and forced myself to stand still and not flinch as another pair of fist-sized rocks came my way, missing me by inches. Nothing ruined the impression like a good flinch. It made the shitheads think they’d put the fear of them into you.

  I picked one of them at random, just a guy in the front with an old table leg in his hand, raised up over his head. It wasn’t far; I raised the Roon and before the crowd could even notice it and get upset, I squeezed the trigger and blew a hole in le Leg’s chest, knocking him wetly back into the crowd.

  Everyone stopped moving. I looked down at my feet and cursed; I’d tried for his shoulder. There was no such thing as a safe place to shoot someone—odds were I’d nick an artery—but when it was you versus a table leg you had to at least try.

  “Hey, Avery,” Remy shouted from inside the car, “you don’t have to kill everyone. You know that, right?”

  Clenching my teeth, I swallowed my urge to pinch the kid’s nose. I looked back up and scanned the scene. The crowd was hovering, terrified but aware on some elemental level that if they all stuck together there was nothing I could do but run.

  “Repeat what I say,” I said to Adora without looking at her, and then raised the gun up over my head, firing one more precious bullet into the air. Behind me, I heard Remy crawling from the wreckage, and based on the anxious ripple that went through the crowd, I assumed he had his ridiculously large gun in hand.

  “I’m looking for a hospital,” I shouted, and Adora shouted it in Spanish a moment later. “An old man is staying there. Rich.”

  A few seconds stole by, and then a handful of arms raised up and pointed to our left, where a huge two-story building stretched the incredible length of the square. The tense energy of the crowd faded away, and suddenly it was just a sagging group of people. I turned and looked the building over: red brick and tiny blown-out windows, squat peaked towers at each end and in the middle. The entrance was tiny, a single doorway in which a single figure stood, gaping at us.

  I nodded and scanned the crowd again. I considered offering them something in return for their ruined merchandise and injuries, but decided against it. It would just encourage them.

  “Come on,” I said to Remy. “Let’s go find my old friend Wallace.”

  He nodded and let me step in front of him, his sunglasses hiding his eyes as he watched the crowd. I had to admit, Remy looked fucking badass.

  “What the fuck?” Adora shouted, and in a flash she was in front of me, all wide eyes and hands. I kept moving, forcing her to stumble backward. I was all momentum. The moment I stopped, these assholes were going to do some math and come at my back. “My vehicle!”

  “We’re done,” I said, checking the Roon and letting the slide snap back into place. Adora kept tripping over herself as she squawked in front of me, but she didn’t give up. I liked that. “You’ll get your yen as soon as I finish here.” I didn’t have time. If this wasn’t a setup, if Belling was really in this ancient hunk of building, he would know already I was here and be making his own preparations, and Belling was a fucking master. Belling had made me look stupid too often to take chances. He would expect me to creep about, to make plans and scout out the area, find allies. He would expect me to be careful, so I’d decided to just crash in, gun blazing, see what happened. I was excited; I struggled to keep an appropriately grim expression on my face.

  Adora couldn’t form words; she just made outraged noises as she struggled to walk backward at my pace. Just as she hit the slight lip in front of the doors and fell on her ass, hard, Remy spoke up behind me.

  “We’re not going to observe, map the exterior, find someone who knows what it’s like in there?” he asked mildly from behind. “We’re going in blind? I think that violates at least three of Avery Cates’s Rules of Successful Murder, doesn’t it?”

  The kid was enjoying himself, but I was all momentum: I didn’t slow down. I pushed past Adora and leveled the gun on the mystery man who stood gaping at us in the shadowed doorway. He was tall and thin, not very old, but had the smooth look of someone who’d been sitting on top of the pyramid back in The Day, back when the System still existed and yen meant something.

  “Move,” I said, “or I’ll shoot you in the chest.”

  He put his hands up automatically, and then he started walking backward as I advanced. “Wait! No! Wait!” he spluttered in English, his vowels round and his consonants clipped. “I’m a doctor!”

  “The fuck do I care?” I snapped, clicking back the hammer. He blinked and threw himself against the wall of the narrow tunnel we’d entered, so I rounded on him and pressed the Roon into his belly.

  “You’re a doctor,” I said, “so you know how a gut wound works, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Old man,” I said. “Old. Like Father Fucking Time in the flesh. Guns, probably. Rich.”

  The doctor nodded eagerly. “Yes! Yes, of course. Second floor. Room five. Only private—”

  I spun away and stormed down the tunnel. Remy was behind me like a crow, pecking.

  “Avery, come on. This is ridiculous.”

  “If we take the time to be smart, do this right,” I said, my augments still functioning well enough to keep my breathing easy even as I rushed forward, “we’ll miss him. Believe me. Wallace Belling has lived a long fucking time because he’s good. He’s smart. He’s fast. He’s heartless, and greedy, but he’s good.” I shook my head. “If we play this smart we miss him.”

  The tunnel opened up into a large room with soaring ceilings. A big staircase was right in front of us, the stone steps smooth and warped from years of feet. The stairs split left and right after a flight and wound their way up; the walls behind them had once sported some colorful painting that had chipped and eroded, leaving behind a meaningless mosaic of color and water stains.

  I took the stairs two at a time, my rusty old augments pumping adrenaline and endorphins, gearing up for battle. My HUD shuddered and flickered in my vision. This was not the right way to do anything. This wasn’t professional, but I knew I had to just let momentum carry me, for once. If I gave Belling a moment, he would vanish—or drop on me. The stairs snaked around and led to an open balcony that stretched the interior of the building, the remnants of a rotting, dried-up garden complete with empty fountain laid out in front of me. I skidded to a halt and spun, eyes searching the walls for a clue, finally finding a crude wooden sign hung from a nail on the wall, indicating rooms one through three behind me, four through six in front.

  Now I crept. I hunched down and duckwalked my way down the gloo
my hallway, listening. The grit under my boots was loud, an endless scrape in my ears, my own breathing forming a rhythm section with it and propelling me forward. Behind me, I heard Remy arriving—the kid was pretty quiet but my gauges were in the red and I heard him behind me, instantly giving up his complaints and dropping into a covering position. Just outside the open doorway of room five, I paused to glance back at him, and he gave me a quick nod. The kid didn’t like it, but he would do the job at hand. I knew that.

  I let him catch up. When he was right behind me, he stood up, and I launched myself across the doorway, seeing if I could draw fire. Nothing happened, and I landed in a cloud of dust on the other side of the door with a grunt. For a second I listened again, and then looked at Remy. He shrugged at me and rolled his hand around in the air: Hurry up. Remy thought this was just old-school revenge bullshit, and he wanted to get it over with.

  I nodded, took a breath, and jumped, landing just inside the room. I threw myself flat and rolled to my left until I hit a wall, and then I raised the Roon and looked the room over, silence crowding around me.

  It was a pretty bare space, created from a much larger one some time ago with bad quality construction, the walls thin and sagging, nothing sealed, nothing permanent. There was one metal bed, rust eating at the legs and headboard, on which a thin gray mattress and a pile of dirty linens had been placed. A small wooden table was next to the bed, and a red plastic chair from a previous century against the far wall, and that was it for furniture. Two digital clipboards hung from the wall next to the bed. Sheets of paper had been pasted onto them, covered with tiny, insectoid writing. I hadn’t realized anyone really could write by hand anymore.

  I pushed myself up to my knees and looked around again. There was nothing else in the room. I lowered my gun.

  “Shit,” I muttered, hands suddenly shaking. The old bastard had fucking slipped me again.

  The pile of linen on the bed suddenly moved and resolved itself into a thin, skeletal human being with a full head of thick, white hair. I brought the gun back up and took a cautious step toward the bed. It was an old man, stick thin and papery, his face somehow… off, a youthening surgery that had gone to seed, his skin sliding away from the tendons.

  “Hands!” I hissed. “Show me your hands!”

  A scraping sort of sound emerged, and I realized he was laughing just as he pulled his arms from under the thin blanket he rested under and held the stumps up for me. His wrists were pink and stretched lumps of skin. I looked back at his face and froze.

  “Hello Avery,” Wallace Belling said in a faint echo of the booming, cultured voice I knew. “My hands—my hands, Avery.” He made a clucking noise in his throat as he raised the stumps in front of his face as if he’d never seen them before. Then his watery eyes found me again. “He took my hands, Avery. Mickey cut them off.”

  VI

  JUST PLAIN OLD MURDER

  “Fuck,” Remy muttered behind me, stretching out the word in disgust.

  I just stared at Belling. He’d been old when I’d first met him, millennia ago in London, working the Squalor hit against my will. He’d pretended to be Cainnic Orel, but Belling wasn’t far from Orel’s status—the best Gunner I’d ever seen live, in action. Even as an old man he’d kicked my ass plenty of times.

  The man in the bed wasn’t Belling. Couldn’t be Belling. He was a dried-up old man, skinny and loose skinned, his face skeletal. His hands had been chopped off, and the angry red stumps at the end of his useless arms had healed badly and looked painful.

  For a few seconds I just stared at him, blinking. I’d been prepared for a gunfight. I’d been prepared for a mind fuck; those were usually my only two choices when I met Wa Belling.

  He grimaced and laboriously turned himself away, giving me his back. He was wearing a thin white gown, and the outline of his spine was stark and clear. “Don’t fucking look at me,” he muttered into the wall. “You come here to fucking pity me? Just kill me. It’s what you came here for.”

  The anger in his voice fleshed it out and matched up with what I remembered. Belling telling me I was charming; Belling telling me how he’d seen better.

  “Michaleen did this?” I finally managed. My own voice suddenly sounded thin and distant.

  “Found me in Krakow,” he said more quietly, still staring at the wall, his stumps hidden from view. “I thought hiding in the middle of Cop Land was brilliant. I didn’t have the nerve to use the augment. I was afraid of getting scrambled.”

  The God Augment. Memories flashed in my head of Hong Kong and the two avatars I’d thought were real people, but were just Belling and his boss in disguise. Have a technical surgeon implant that into your brain and supposedly it gave you all the Psionic powers that people were sometimes born with—telekinesis, compulsion—and some that no one had documented in the wild. Supposedly. I never knew if it worked, or how it worked, because by the time my artificial friends and I got to Hong Kong, the flesh-and-blood Belling had already been there and stolen it out from under Michaleen.

  I remembered that Michaleen, in his female avatar body, had not been amused. At fucking all.

  “He took it?” I asked. I didn’t want Belling to roll over. I wanted him to stay with his back to me. He looked like death, and I didn’t like being in the same room with a ruined man like this.

  He snorted laughter. “My boy, he took it, with prejudice. I almost had him… I almost…” He stopped and suddenly turned back toward me, and for a second his eyes were burning and I really believed it, believed this was Belling in front of me. Then he deflated, sinking back into the skinny, frail body knotted up in thin sheets. “It doesn’t matter. He beat me when I was nineteen, and he beat me now. And it’s too late. No one will ever beat him, now.”

  There was a noise behind me, and I whirled to find a startled woman in a pair of often-repaired blue scrubs, carrying a plastic tray on which several brown bottles rested. She was standing in sudden, shocked stillness, Remy’s gun against the back of her head, one of his long arms langorously stretched out from where he was leaning against the wall to one side of the doorway.

  I jerked my chin at the hallway. “Out. Stay out,” I said, and turned back to Belling.

  “You never let me kill anybody,” Remy said and sighed.

  “You have my permission to kill yourself if you don’t shut up,” I said without turning. “Wallace,” I said, feeling calm. “What did you mean no one will ever beat him now?”

  My fading augments had leveled off my adrenaline, and I was in control and feeling patient. I’d been working toward making Belling regret playing me false for years, since before Hong Kong, but in my mind it had always been a fight, a challenge. Walking up to a hospital bed and putting a shell in Belling’s ear wasn’t revenge, it was just plain old murder.

  He smiled. His smile was terrible. It was the same smug smile I’d seen a hundred times before when Belling was making fun of me with just the tone of his voice, but now there was nothing behind it. I was talking to a ghost.

  You should be used to that, Dick Marin whispered in my head. I stopped myself from shaking my head to dislodge him.

  “Avery, he used it. The augment. He had it implanted.” Belling paused, licking his lips with a yellowish tongue. “And not just that: He salvaged a late-model Monk chassis and had some Techies work on it, ripping out some of the control circuitry, customizing it, and he had himself… converted.” He looked down at his stumps. “He’s not human anymore, Avery. He’s something else entirely.”

  I blinked, everything going slow and quiet in my head. A Monk chassis. The Monks were the predecessors to the avatar units, developed by Dennis Squalor as the basis of his church. Squalor had killed a lot of people and forcibly converted them into Monks before I got hired to snuff him.

  “Sweet hell,” I whispered, imagining that short bastard in a Monk body, hydraulic strength and computer reflexes. “Why?”

  The Monks had proven to be less than immortal; a few years after
the Plague most of them were rusting hulks. But with proper maintenance, I supposed one could be made usable again. And I’d had the pleasure of being beaten to a pulp by Monks. The idea of Orel, the greatest killer in history, in one of those things was fucking horrifying.

  “Why,” Belling said, his voice flat and cold. “The idiot asks why. Avery, you are a stupid brute of a man. A blunt instrument. Your continued survival is mysterious on so many levels…. He swallowed. “Why, Avery: Because Michaleen is getting old. Was getting old.” He smiled, his eyes dancing, distant. “Death comes to us all, Avery. Even you, you fucking roach, eventually. These last few years Michaleen could feel it creeping up on him, and it became a little project of his to stop it.” He sighed. “Now he has.”

  I stepped closer to the bed and pulled the plastic chair away from the wall, spun it around, and sat down with its cracked back against my chest, my arms hanging over, the gun pointed at the floor. “Wallace,” I said slowly, trying to sort through it all. None of my scenarios for murdering Belling had involved a fucking mercy killing. “Where is Michaleen?”

  Michaleen Garda, Cainnic Orel—the same man. I’d wondered, sometimes, which one of his names was really his, but it didn’t matter. Short little man, looked old and fat, but quick, like a dancer, and stronger than he looked. And he’d been three steps ahead of me ever since I’d decided to kill him.

  I looked up as a wheezing, sawing sound filled the air. Belling was laughing at me, his corpselike body hunched up and shivering with mirth.

  “Oh, goodness, Avery, I do apologize,” he said, sucking in breaths that looked painful. “You’re not planning to go after Mickey? Oh, my dear boy—you were no match for him years ago, when you were thirty years younger than him and he wasn’t a demigod in silicone and Kevlar.” He looked at me, his dried yellow eyes like smoldering coals, sick and hot. “You’re no match for him, Mr. Cates. He’s been fucking with you for so long, and you know only the half of it.”