by Jeff Somers
I’d decided to be patient. Years spent dealing with Remy had taught me patience, and I was surprised at the payoff it sometimes produced. I felt pretty good, thanks to my stint in the army and the augments they’d inserted, but I was an old fucking man, and I’d learned that when the cosmos let you off the Rail for a while and let you take a seat, you enjoyed it. You never knew when the next opportunity was going to come.
“Yeah, I know, Wallace. Michaleen’s the fucking puppet master, right?” I smiled. “I just want to know where he is. The rest won’t be your problem anymore.”
His smile faded, like it was being erased by an unseen hand. “I know you’ve come here to kill me, Avery. And you deserve your chance, after what I’ve done to you—and here I am trussed up for you, a sure shot, commensurate with your abilities. And you haven’t asked me why I’m here.”
I nodded. “Wallace, I’m starting to get irritated, because I keep asking you a simple question and you keep giving me bullshit.” I gave him my helpless face, all eyebrows up and lips mashed together. “I want to make this clean and quick, out of respect for the truly fucking monumental level of asshole you achieved in life. But you’re making it hard.”
“You are the stupidest fucking man I have ever met,” he said quietly, his voice small and dry as tinder. “He’s in Split. Croatia. Don’t ask me where the fuck Croatia is. Look it up.”
A thrill shivered through me and left a dull, listless calm in its wake. Split, Croatia. I’d never heard of it, but it was a destination. A noise out in the hall made me turn my head in time to see Remy wave me off and step lightly out into the shadows outside the room. I turned to look back at Belling. I hated him, had spent years imagining the day I’d get to kill him, but here I was and I didn’t want to. He was just an old man, alone in a fucking hospital in Mexico City.
Of all places.
I frowned and stood up, clicking back the hammer on the Roon. Kicking the chair out of the way, I reached out and tugged the limp, greasy pillow from under Belling’s head. He turned and looked at the wall, swallowing.
“Go on, then,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t fucking stop you.”
I stood there for a moment. He’s been fucking with you for so long, and you know only the half of it. “All right, Wa,” I said slowly, struggling with a sudden bad feeling, a formless sense of wrong. “I’m dumb and you and Michaleen and Marin were running everything.”
“Marin,” he sniffed. “A fucking errand boy. Got his in the end. The world’s better without him.”
Sure enough, Marin whispered.
“So why are you here, since you want me to ask so badly?”
There was no sound, just a sudden, learned sensation of air molecules being pushed around, a sense that the empty space behind you had taken on mass and form—it was familiar, an old story, and I knew the ending well—despite my augments leaping into clarity, my bars going redline, and my whole body twitching, tearing muscles in its attempt to spin around, something heavy and solid caught me on the side of my head and spun me around, and as I struggled against a sudden, thick blanket of fuzzy darkness descending on my thoughts, I heard Belling’s wheezing, cracked voice.
“You moron: I’m bait.”
VII
I THOUGHT YOU WANTED ME TO
I snapped back into consciousness, a gift from my military augments, my HUD suddenly bright and clear. The heads-up display wired from my implants to my optic nerve had gotten jarred loose or been frayed by something, and for years it had faded in and out, sometimes bright and clear, sometimes a ghost hovering in the background. Now it was crisp, and my status bars showed green across the board, though I wasn’t sure how much stock I could put into their summary of me.
I sat up. I was still in Belling’s room, and based on the light I’d been out only a short while, ten minutes or so. My hands were wet and cold; I was sitting in a thin pool of blood. I made my mind blank and just looked around: Belling’s bed was a spreading red stain with Belling a lump of twisted sheets on top. Remy sat in the red plastic chair, staring at the far wall. Behind me and to my left a tall, tan man in a bad white suit lay stretched out, a cheap-looking small-caliber auto in one hand, a river of blood slowly leaching from him to my puddle. I’d never seen him before in my life. It was as if a hole had appeared in the ceiling and deposited him there, the perfect murder.
I looked back at Belling’s body. All I could see were soiled sheets and the top of his head, the thin, perfectly white hair.
“You killed him,” I said.
Remy didn’t respond right away. After a moment, he said, “I thought you wanted me to.”
For a second, I felt nauseous. I could feel the lukewarm blood soaking into my pants. They were thick corded pants, good for the cold and heavy as hell and forever to dry when they got wet. I felt a strange reluctance to move, though, and just sat there, breathing. I frowned. Remy should have known better. I’d talked his ear off about Belling for years, told him all my revenge fantasies in bloody detail. I wanted to reach out and slap Remy, but found I lacked the motivation.
“You know I wanted Belling for myself,” I said slowly. My head felt thick, my thoughts difficult to form—I’d cracked it on the floor, I guessed. Concussion. I’d had every sort of injury possible and knew them all well, old friends. “How could you fucking just—”
“I didn’t kill him,” Remy snapped, gesturing at Belling. “I killed him. He killed the old bastard. Said something about waiting his whole life for this, and then took the gun off me and put it on the old man, and before I could do anything, fuck, the old man was dead.” He shrugged. “Figgered you wouldn’t want this piece of shit alive to hit you on the head again.”
I followed his hand and stared at the man in the bad white suit. He was older than me and looked recently laundered, like he’d cleaned up a bit before strolling into the room and hitting me over the head. Like maybe this was the biggest day of his life, the day he got the drop on old Wa Belling, a king of the bastards who must have had an old man in a white suit waiting decades for revenge in every city in the old System. I looked back at Remy; it wasn’t the first time he’d saved my ass.
Outside the room there was some low-level commotion. Nothing that alarmed me, nothing that bothered me. Familiar noises of panic, shouts, feet on the stone floors, the squeal and bark of doors being opened and shut. There was no power, so there were no klaxons or sizzling force fields or distant hover displacement. Just people running around the old-fashioned way, going batshit.
After another minute or so I pushed myself up to my feet, smearing the bed with blood as I used it as a crutch on my way up. I stood there and looked down at Belling. He seemed incredibly small, a lump of dirty sheets and blood, a bare foot poking out from underneath the bedding. My throat tightened up and I looked over at the grimy plaster wall. I hated Wa Belling, and I was not going to feel fucking pity for him. Not when I’d finally gotten my revenge.
It didn’t feel like it was supposed to. It was all wrong. I kept picturing that foot: pale, curled inward, toes splayed.
“Let’s go,” I said, my voice coming out a hoarse whisper. I turned and knelt to retrieve my gun, sticky with blood, and tugged at the sheets until I had a clean corner to wipe the Roon off.
Remyot ring down at his hands. “Where?”
“Fucking Croatia,” I growled, stepping over the puddle of blood and the stretched-out body. I slipped the Roon into my pocket. “Wherever that is. Come on!”
I walked out of the room and kept walking, without waiting to see if the kid was going to follow me. Out in the hall people had appeared as if they’d been hidden in little niches, set free by blood. I walked briskly toward the stairs and they got out of my way, thin people with wide eyes and threadbare scrubs on. Who was paying them? Why did they bother to come here? It didn’t make any sense. Wa Belling spending his last fortune on a dirty bed in some shithole—that didn’t make sense either. My hands curled into fists. At the bottom of the stairs I collided wit
h a kid running with a pile of folded towels. He skittered away from me, hissing apologies, his eyes down. I took three quick steps and cuffed him hard on the head, sending him sprawling, a stream of high-pitched Spanish following him down to the floor. I forced myself to keep walking. I wanted violence. I didn’t even know why—I just wanted to hurt someone, to kill someone.
I pictured Belling again, shrunken and pathetic. I’d wanted him dead, but not like that. A Gunner of Belling’s caliber shouldn’t have gone out that way. I suddenly remembered Michaleen in Amsterdam, the last time I’d seen him in the flesh, talking about another Gunner: Died with a fuckin’ ice pick in his throat, hands tied behind his back. Bled out over four fucking hours. No way for a killer to go.
Adora was standing in the entryway to the building, arms crossed under her chest. My hands twitched, and I pushed them into the pockets of my coat as she stepped toward me.
“I may have found transport for us,” she said quickly. “But first—”
“I know: I owe you ten thousand yen,” I snapped, pushing past her roughly. “But that’s all. I don’t give a shit about your vehicle. You drove it into the pole.”
She swore behind me and grabbed my arm. I clenched my hands in my pockets and fought down another urge to wheel around and hit her.
“We’ve got trouble, you fucking moron.”
I stopped and finally looked up, blinking. The huge square had emptied a little, but a lot of the surly civilian population had been replaced by a few dozen men and women with shredding rifles, the tattered remnants of white uniforms still clinging here and there. And standing in front of them was a familiar ramrod-straight figure with glistening white hair and a seemingly permanent tan. A stub of ersatz cigar, rolled from some horrible plant that superficially resembled tobacco, rolled wetly around his mouth as he grinned at me.
“Well, shit,” Malkem Anners said. “Mistah Cates, you and me must be linked by fate. You wanna tell me what made you think you could come inna my city and transact your business without tellin’ me?”
All the fight had been shocked out of me, and I walked with Anners in a sort of numb cloud. There were twenty of his soldiers around me anyway, so all the fucked-up rage in the world wasn’t going to do much but get me killed, anyway. <0emight="0em">
I turned and looked back at Remy and Adora, walking a few feet behind us. Remy was squinting down at the ground like he was hunting for bugs, and Adora still had her arms crossed under her tits, staring at me.
“How’d you end up here, Colonel?” I asked, turning back to stare at my former commanding officer, who’d sold me to Belling all those years ago. “I left you in Hong Kong, strutting around like a fucking peacock.”
He laughed. “After we got shoved outta Hong Kong, Mister Cates—no thanks to you and my little deserter back there—I got reassigned to Command West. Took a drubbing for a while, but they didn’t have officers to waste, so I got a command again pretty quick. I was tryin’ a push south from Mexico City when we lost contact with HQ. Thought at first it was just a glitch, but… Well, fuck, that was three years ago, and I ain’t heard from the Joint Council since.” He laughed. “I liked it here, so I decided to stay and make it my home.”
I nodded. “So you’re running things here, huh?” The world was filled with assholes like Anners, ex-army or System Police or just mercenaries in the right place at the right time who discovered that having fifty men with guns and some semblance of chain-of-command discipline made you lord and master of a chunk of the world. I’d worked for some of them and had come to the conclusion that there wasn’t a single person in the whole world, what was left of it, who knew what the fuck they were doing.
“I take a fifty split on everything that happens in the city,” he said by way of an answer. “And I form up an execution detail when shit gets out of control. If that’s running things, then I’m running things.”
“What you calling yourself? Mayor? Duke?” I said, trying to cut him down a little. “I’ve met a few dukes.”
He laughed. “You kidding? I’m the only thing people remember to respect: I’m fucking Director of Internal Affairs for Mexico City, Cates. Straight ahead.”
We were heading toward a decent-looking small building, two stories and painted bright white, a little bit of a space around it in the big city. Four of his men lounged against the wall, shredders on display. The guns were all in good condition, but based on the state of the rest of their equipment and uniforms, I figured Anners’s men were low on everything—ammunition, body armor, batteries. The shredders were for show; if Anners’s whole crew lit up at the same time I had no doubt they wouldn’t have a bullet between them after twenty seconds. I was a little impressed that Anners had chosen such a modest house for his headquarters, but then I thought it was probably easier to secure against potential throat-slitters—probably the entire population. Without power for motion sensors and trip wires, keeping people out was problematic, and smaller was better. I decided it was a safe bet that Colonel Anners was not popular.
“You two stay out here,” he said, waving at Adora and Remy. “No one’s gonna bother you ’less I say so. Mister Cates, after you.”
I clenched my fists again. I didn’t have much against Malkem Anners—he was a ripe prick who’d treated me pretty fucking rotten, but after what I’d been through, that actually put him at the high end for manners. I starteto get angry again, a formless unhappy rage that got under my muscles and started tugging at my tendons, making me itch. Every time I started walking, some asshole reached out to grab my ankle, and I was getting sick of it.
Inside, I was surprised to find myself alone with him in a small foyer, just an empty room with bare lathing on the walls and rough plywood for a floor. I followed him through a doorway that felt just slightly too small, crowding me as I shouldered my way in. We were in an old kitchen, the wooden floor bleached and rubbed smooth, the old porcelain sink the single largest of its kind I’d ever seen. Everything else had been torn out, leaving behind outlines on the wall and floor. It was so clean I didn’t want to touch anything.
“I still got a supply of blackjacks,” Anners said, crossing to the other side of the kitchen and holding up three of the small black remote controls for the military implants Remy and I still had in our heads. He turned and leaned against the wall, making a dumb show of examining the remotes. They weren’t specific to any one soldier; any officer with any functioning remote could use it on any of us who’d been augmented by the army—Remy’d spent the last few years obsessed with this exact scenario. My own implants had gone sour back in Hong Kong. Remy’s were still sitting in his head like a spider. “I wonder what happens if I toggle his killswitch.”
My HUD snapped into clarity, my heart lurching into a jerking rhythm as all the anger rose right back up and spilled over. Anners didn’t know it, but he wasn’t going to fuck with Remy. When Remy had walked away from Anners’s unit in Hong Kong, he’d risked summary execution via his implants just to get away from the crazy fucker, and for years I’d watched the kid stewing in terror and nightmares from his stint in the army, getting skull-fucked every ten minutes by this asshole.
No shots, I thought, my head clear, my vision sharpened by the remnants of army tech in my head. Shots will bring every one of Anners’s people. It had been years since I’d had to do any quiet work, but there were some lessons you never forgot.
I took a step forward, keeping my hands obviously at my sides, and stalled.
“Probably nothing,” I said. “I got a set of military augments, too, and I can tell you they didn’t exactly use the best components.”
Anners shrugged, affable. “Maybe, sure. Or maybe I press the button and he falls down dead, blood drippin’ from his ears.”
I wandered slightly away from him, running my eyes over the outline of long-gone cabinets and appliances on the wall opposite Anners. He hadn’t brought any of his people in here with us, which told me that whatever he was about to blackmail me for was something h
e didn’t trust his own people with.
“Go ahead,” I said, keeping my voice steady and casual. “I don’t fucking like the kid. He just bitches and moans all the time. Follows me around.”
This bought me some seconds. Anners didn’t say anything, grinding the gears. I turned slowly, keeping my eyes on the walls as if I were examining the details, drifting closer to him, and then lunged suddenly, feinting for the remotes in his hand. Surprised, he snatched his hand up into the aid sd them out of my reach, but I’d already changed direction, chopping my hand into his windpipe. Arrogance got you killed. Malkem Anners had been running things for too long.
The remotes scattered to the floor and he staggered backward, crashing into the wall, both hands going up to his throat while his eyes bulged out of his head. Reminding myself that Anners had augments in his head, too—probably better ones, since he’d been an officer—I stepped in close and kneed him hard in the groin, determined to keep him off balance and unable to gather himself. He tried to double over slightly, then caught himself and straightened up, still unable to breathe but trying to protect himself. Anners had gotten sloppy, and I imagined that having years of unquestioned obedience from people had given him some unfortunate ideas about his own invincibility. I always told Remy: Never forget you’re just a shithead yourself. The only thing that separates you from the other shitheads is knowing you are a shithead.
I lunged in for his head, intending to slam his skull against the wall until he went out, but he managed to get his arms up between us and knock me aside with surprising force. He was a big guy, and his augments were fully functioning and giving him an added boost of adrenaline and pain suppression, letting him tear muscles and tendons with his own force and not feel a thing. I staggered for a second and recovered, coming right back at him, feinting low and then surging up inside his reach as if I was coming in for an embrace. His face had gone purple, and while his implants were compensating for his lack of oxygen he was going down fast if he couldn’t get his lungs unlocked.