“That’s your girl’s name?”
He blushed blue, nodding and looking down.
“Well, like I said, maybe you can make it work. But you’ve got to be honest. Every relationship is based on a foundation of trust. If you can’t trust each other, then you can’t love each other.”
“What was your girlfriend like?”
I felt a stab in my gut that echoed emptily. Memories flashed through me without fanfare, a dozen happy and sad moments. Meeting her at Dante’s Inferno. Finding out we were going on the same run. The thrills that followed, on the run and off. Losing her in Louisiana. Finding out she’d been taken by Deus, remade into his slave. The final moment of her life when I granted her the only peace I could…
I shook my head. “Look, Slim, my relationship was…troubled, and certainly fell outside the realm of conventional dating.”
He grimaced. “And what would you call mine?”
“Touché. Even so, they aren’t comparable. Just…all you can do now is break it to her slowly, gently, and make sure she knows the score. If you really care about her, she deserves that.”
He slumped. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
I nodded and got up, put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll get through this one way or another.” He looked a little reassured as I got up to leave. “Oh! I almost forgot…”
He turned to look up.
“Did you ever get an ID on those bastards who stole our stuff and killed Edgar?”
He shook his head sadly. “No, no, she was in a hell of a shock the whole time, her eyes almost never stopped moving. And then she was shot. I tried clearing up the playback, but even if I pirated the software, I don’t have the hardware necessary to translate it and get the job done. I’d have someone else do it on their system, but—”
“You never know who’ll find out we’re after them.” I finished.
“Exactly. Especially in this town.”
“Well, we’ll be shopping for parts for electronics and stuff, soon. Probably enough to give you some real toys to play with. Let’s see what we’ve got to work with then, okay?”
He nodded and got back to work.
I closed the door and hadn’t gone one step before I was choke-slammed into the wall beside it. I struggled to ignore the instinct to turn to mist and locked eyes with Needles’s infuriated glare.
“What the frag—”
“Where do you get off, Red?! What the fuck are you trying to do around here?!”
“What are you talking about?”
“First you take things out of my hands with Barnes, and I lose almost all the ghouls fit to guard around here. Now you’re trying to convince my only tech specialist to leave?!”
“No, I—”
He let go, and I sagged against the wall, rubbing my neck. His dual nature subverted my regeneration. He really could hurt me. He started pacing in the deserted hallway.
“What the frag can you say, Red? I heard you talking. What does he want to do someday? You think he can make it on the outside? You think any of us can?”
“Plenty do.”
“Oh, don’t give me that drek! You and I both know that’s the exception, not the rule, and pretty rare at that.”
“Maybe that’s for lack of trying.”
He rounded on me, stepping right up in my face. “You think we can all just blend right in and become upstanding members of society, just with a little surgery and acting? Rick, most of these people were born ghouls. And you can’t get the surgery until you stop growing, if you can find a doc willing to operate on a ghoul in the first place! But you grow up a ghoul. You want to just try erasing that and plopping them into a new life overnight? It can’t happen. It can’t work!”
“There are people down here who could have a more normal life.”
“You think things are bad here? You remember Cabrini. It was a nightmare, no matter how good the intentions. No matter what Tamir’s sacrifice bought us. And what about the ones who get twisted, who can’t operate out there, can’t ever be normal, no matter how much plastic surgery they get? They just get left behind?”
“Some ghouls try to make it work. You know about the Seattle Necroplex. No one got left behind there.” The Seattle Necroplex was a sort of massive mausoleum where, unbeknownst to Seattle’s greater population, ghouls consumed the remains of those interred. The owner, Adam Shepard, was a cosmetically-altered ghoul who made sure the other ghouls got taken care of and stayed in their own space. Many of them had been put to work in city sanitation, safely away from people to work and live in peace. Almost no one knew their trash was collected by ghouls.
Needles rolled his eyes. “It’s not that simple, Rick, especially here!”
“Then leave, Needles! If it’s so goddamn rough out here, head for greener pastures! There’s territory aplenty for you and yours out there! Maybe you are attached to Chicago, but you’ve gotta think about the now and the future! Join another pack, head over to Long Pig Farm, make a connection with the Ghoul Liberation League. Do something bigger than locking yourselves down here to rot!”
He turned away, scowling. “You just don’t get it.”
“No,” I said with a sudden flash of insight. “No, I think I do. This isn’t just about what’s best for the warren or the pack. This is about what you’ve built here.”
“What?”
“You’ve invested years into this place. Hell, more than twenty years. Most of the ghouls here aren’t even that old. This isn’t just about the ghouls, or Chicago, or memories or anything. This is about Sara’s dreams. This is about making it work.”
“That’s bulldrek.”
“You’ve spent so much time here that you feel like it’s going to be a waste if you leave it behind. And you can’t even see the writing on the wall. The corps are coming. All too soon they’re gonna come back and reclaim the city, rebuild it from the foundations up. You think you’ll be entitled to squatter’s rights? It’d be cheaper just to tell some Zone gang you’re here and wait for somebody to collect the bounty.”
“Shut up.”
“This is your ghoulish little Camelot, and you’ll trap everyone inside and take them down with you before you let it crumble—”
“I said shut up!”
He swung around and decked me on the jaw, hard enough to send me reeling. I stumbled and caught myself, holding my mouth as I got back up and looked him in the eye.
“Needles, this is just a place. The real legacy you’re leaving behind is in your pack, not your warren. Sara wouldn’t have wanted them buried down here.”
He heaved for breath, rage and hate and bitter impotence written across his face. I turned and walked away.
The thin lining of my faux-leather jacket didn’t do anything against the cold, but I jammed my hands in the pockets just the same. Once more, the metahuman predators of the Zone knew better than to approach me, and I let the raw cold of the air keep me stalking toward the markets in the northern Corridor. Gravel and broken glass gave way to mere cracked and overgrown pavement, the footing steadier past the crumbled ruin of a great ferrocrete containment wall.
There was little enough to say to Needles’s anger. It was understandable why he would resist change when every previous one in his life had been for the worse. Sara’s death, his infection, the collapse of Executive Order 162 and return of bounties on Infected, the Bug Breakout and the Bomb, the walls, and even their fall all kept him off-kilter, constantly adapting to survive new situations and never profiting by it. His tactical training as a DocWagon HTR had set him up to be reactive instead of proactive, and it limited his guidance of the warren.
The bazaar avenue hung with strings of bioluminescent pods, charged with gathered light during the day and casting just enough residual glow for low-light to work perfectly. The smells of woodsmoke and ozone drifted in the cold breeze, The stalls lining the path jutted out unevenly, overhung with rustling plastic tarps or colorful, faded second-hand blankets. Plasboard countertops held all kinds of knickkna
cks, salvage, and other objects of limited value. The expensive things, the meaningful things, would be locked up somewhere behind the counter where magpie hands couldn’t snatch and run. Medical supplies, weapons, survival rations, purified water. But what I was looking for could be found in front of a dilapidated, repurposed garage with a bubbling hiss coming from within.
The proprietor of this small bit of industry, an ork wearing a cowboy hat and a faded tank top with a depiction of the Buddha under a threadbare and stained blue parka, woke from a light doze when I cleared my throat. He swung his boots off the stall table and nodded as I made my purchase. He bagged it up in brown polka-dot kitchen curtains, tied it with a zip cord, and happily accepted a payment of two grams of novacoke.
What was worse was the responsibility Needles laid upon his ghouls in return for what he took on in their name. They were his surrogate family, the second chance for what he saw as his failure. He had taken a group of people and used them to fill in the hole left behind where his love and humanity had been. He’d lost so much that losing any more would be inconceivable.
The only thing to do was to fight me, and whatever other powers tried to upset the world he had built. And right or wrong, he was my friend. And I owed him.
Hence the six-pack of home-brew tucked under my arm, packed in a homemade carton lovingly stamped with a crudely drawn ork woman wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and a tusky smile.
The trip didn’t take very long, and I was thinking of how to phrase my apology as I walked into one of the utility entrances—
—and bumped right into Needles.
My hands glowed with a manabolt even as he bared his teeth and nails before we recognized one another. As quickly as it started, my chant and his hiss halted, and he took in the sixer under my arm while I noted the cooler he had been sitting on.
He smirked at me. I returned it.
At the lake’s edge by Belmont Harbor, along a concrete outcropping that stands on the water, there’s a spot where grass still grows green and the trees, if a little sparse, hang with rustling leaves in the Michigan wind.
Amid this is a single park bench which has inexplicably survived all that this city has gone through, and Needles and I sat there in that slice of displaced serenity, sprawled comfortably looking at the midnight waters. The moon was bright. Chicago was one of the only cities left in the UCAS that wasn’t perpetually shrouded in smog, all her disasters ironically giving her enough of a break from industry to clear the skies, and if you listened for the distant subsprawl traffic and noticed the total lack of Matrix coverage, you could hear an echo of Chicago as I still remembered it.
Needles had cut a deal with a blood runner from the Black Crescent, and the cooler was filled with eight chrome cylinders of metahuman blood, still fresh and warm from their donors. The six pack of microbrew in its home-made plasboard carton sat at his ankle, and we were each three bottles in.
Popping the tops, we drank in silence. He was halfway through his drink when he spoke.
“If you could go anywhere, where would it be?”
“Hmm.”
“Not for settlin’ down, but to see.”
“I’ve been a lot of places.”
“Well, what’s still on your list?”
I thought a bit more before answering. “I’ve never been to Rhine-Ruhr. It’s not what it was since ’55, but I’ve always wondered what it would be like to see a functional anarchist society.”
Needles smirked. “You’ve been in the Corridor. You know exactly what it looks like. People come together, make a community without selling out.”
I shrugged. “Still. Must be a lot to be learned, even now. How it worked, why it didn’t. How about you? Any place in mind?”
He was silent again, watching the black waves, the bottle rocking back and forth in his fingers as he rested his elbows on his thighs.
“I’d have seen Massachusetts.”
“That’s where Sara was from, right?”
“…yeah. Where she grew up.”
He was quiet. I didn’t press him. After a moment, he began again.
“She always talked about what we’d do when we were finished with the Cabrini Clinic. She wasn’t the complaining type, she’d never say one word against it. She thought it would make her seem ungrateful for how good her life had been, and for the opportunity to give back. But she was a person like anyone else, and it doesn’t matter how much good you’re doing, sometimes you just have to let go. Think about what you’d like. And she would tell me about Lexington where she grew up, and Cambridge where she went to school. She’d go on and on about big family dinners and how her folks would make a big feast. Her dad would try to scare me by sitting the two of us in his study looking over a pond in their yard. I have this imaginary scenario in my mind of what it would look like. She told me so many times, I psyched myself up for it. Prepared for the bourbon and the hunting rifles over the window meant to scare me. Prepared to stand my ground and play it cool and confident without being arrogant or standoffish. I mean, I didn’t go to some Ivy League school, but I’m a physician, I made good money helping people. And how was a hunting rifle gonna scare me when I carried an SMG and pulled bleeding patients off the pavement in the middle of a firefight? Still scared me, though. I was so ready for the quiet fight with the would-be father-in-law. I could map out my exits, she’d talked about that house so much. All wood paneling and whitewash. Classical Colonial style. Big house. And we’d go in the Fall for the leaves and the season, and that... was when I was going to ask her to marry me.”
He took a long pull from the bottle, finishing it and throwing it out into the lake.
“It didn’t matter if her folks approved, but I think I could have won them over. And I think they’d have done anything for her. And if I could leave this damn city, if I had the luxury of something approaching a more normal life and I could take a vacation, I’d make a pilgrimage out there. I’d see that house, at least, and see if it looks like it did in my dreams.”
“What about her folks?”
He chuckled bitterly. “I was a man back then, Red. I was people. I had a future like anyone else’s. I don’t think her parents, if they’re still alive, have any interest in the man who failed to protect their daughter. And I seriously doubt they want to be reminded of what she became when they look at me.”
“How about your family?”
He sniffed. “What family?” He turned to look me in the eye. “Sara was my family. This warren is my family.” He turned back to the water, his thoughts his own once again. I tilted back my bottle, finishing it before it could coagulate.
“Sorry.”
He nodded. “Me, too.”
My eyes drifted back out. The full honey moon on a calm, black lake. I’ll see this night again as I die. Whenever that night comes.
“Glad you got back to me so soon, boyo. I might have given this little plum away to someone else.”
Ranes waved a folded piece of e-paper between his fingers as we sat in a new bar, seemingly cloned from the first. That didn’t say much: a lot of bars, cheap and pricey, were cut from the same cloth.
I kept my eyes on his, careful not to register too much interest for the plan he held or disgust for the beer before me. “Well, my crew’s eager for work.”
“And I’m eager to see my fifty percent share.”
My brows bounced in surprise. This was the part where we negotiated. It was a smooth transition.
“Fifty? That’s a pretty steep price. We’ve got a lot of mouths to feed, and it’s not as though we can afford to move too much.”
“You don’t have to move too much to get a big profit when it come to electronics, boyo. Haven’t you heard? Smaller is better these days.”
I smiled. My supposed letter had let him know I was interested in electronics. I was glad he’d come through. “Just what kinds of electronics?”
“Commlinks, hardware, drones, some cyberdeck components, even.”
“Pretty
diverse.”
“Shipment comes in fresh tonight. They put all their worry into transit. Security relaxes a bit after it first arrives, if you know how, when, and where to get in.” He waggled the hard copy invitingly.
“Still, fifty…pretty steep.”
He started to pull it back, his smile fading.
“Unless, of course, you can prove it’s worth my while…”
He smirked at the challenge. “How much carrying capacity can you manage?”
“No more than one trip, a midsize moving van. Of four operatives that are along, two would have to ride back in the van.”
He nodded, not asking why.
“I predict your take at well over seventy-five thousand UCAS after fencing.”
“And you know a fence?”
He smiled. “I am the fence.”
I smiled back. “Good. Then either you waive the usual fence’s take or the percentage comes down. What say we call it fifty percent of the initial take, and you fence what we don’t want to keep free of additional charge?”
He looked annoyed at the idea of giving up profit. I persisted. “It makes things a lot rounder in the end. You want half of what’s in that van? We’ll be the ones risking health and freedom to fill it up. Make it worth the while to do so.”
“All right, all right.” He threw his arms in the air and shook his head, tossing the paper my way. “All my life, never had anyone give me so much grief.”
I highly doubted that. “How will you know how much we took?” I asked, keeping him on-topic.
“My sources can let me know just how much is missing from inventory as of that week. I’ll know when a large score goes down, and take my cut accordingly.”
I unfolded the electronic paper to see a fully detailed map of a distribution center for Black Lotus Software, one of Mitsuhama’s moneymakers. That didn’t bode well as far as security went: Mitsuhama was famous for their “zero-zone” security measures; zero penetration, zero survival. MCT guards are trigger-happy, and automated security is among the best. I considered it. Infiltration would be tough, but if we could subvert the building rigger who would no doubt be in control of security, we could take control of the facility for long enough to grab what we needed and make off before they could get any records or bring any backup.
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