iBoy

by Кевин Брукс

  "I don't know ..."

  I could hear O'Neil crashing around in my room now, emptying drawers, throwing stuff around ...

  I said to Ellman, "He's not going to find anything."

  "No? What about the Taser?"

  I sighed. "There's no Taser."

  "And the phone stuff, the computer stuff ... whatever it is you've been using to track and hack and all that shit?"

  I tapped my head. "It's all in here."

  He shook his head. "I don't get it."

  I looked at him. "If I tell you everything, absolutely everything, will you let me check on my gran? I just want to make sure that she's OK, you know? Make her comfort­able."

  Ellman thought about it for a moment, then nodded. "OK."

  So I started telling him everything. How the iPhone that Davey Carr had thrown from Lucy's window had cracked open my skull and left bits of itself inside my brain, and how those bits had somehow become part of me, giving me all the powers of an iPhone and more ... but as I told Ellman all this, I wasn't looking at him or thinking of him ... I was just staring at the floor, thinking of Lucy. I was telling my story for her. I still couldn't physically look at her, but I was looking at her in my heart.

  When I'd finished explaining everything, I finally looked up at Ellman. His icy-blue eyes were fixed on mine, his face emotionless.

  "That's it?" he said.

  "Yeah. I mean, I know you probably don't believe it, but —"

  "Show me."

  "What?"

  "Show me what you can do."

  "What about my gran? Can I go and check on her now?"

  "No."

  "But you said —"

  "I was lying." He smiled. "Now, show me what you can do, or I'll go and get your gran and rip her fucking head off."

  I stared at him for a moment, hating him, despising him, wanting to hurt him more than anything else in the world, but I knew he wasn't bluffing. I knew he had it in him to kill Gram without even thinking about it. So I just nodded at him, and I watched as he felt his phone vibrate.

  "Answer it," I said.

  He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket and opened the text I'd just sent him.

  It read: your dead.

  He looked at me, grinning, "I'm impressed."

  "I sent you some pictures too," I said.

  He opened up the photographs. One of them showed him hitting Gram with the phone, another one was of Hashim and Lucy ... others showed O'Neil and the guy called Tweet.

  Ellman studied them all for a while, then looked at me. "And this is all in your head, yeah?"

  I nodded.

  He said, "You got WiFi?"

  "I've got everything."

  "So you could be calling anyone right now?"

  "I could be, but I'm not."

  "Good. Because you know what'll happen if I hear a siren, or if anyone comes anywhere near this flat, don't you?"

  I nodded, "I'm not going to call anyone."

  He leaned towards me. "It won't only be your bitch who gets it —"

  "She's not my bitch," I said coldly.

  "She'll just be the first," he continued, ignoring me. "Any trouble from you, anything at all, and I'm going to do the bitch first, then her family, then your old woman, and I'm going to make you watch me doing it ... and then I'll fucking do you." He smiled. "All right?"

  "Yeah."

  "OK, good." He lit a cigarette. "Now what about all this electric stuff I've heard about? Yoyo says you zapped him or something. Is that right?"

  "Yeah."

  "Show me how you do it."

  I looked at him. "Who do you want me to zap? I can do it to you, if you want."

  He grinned at me. "Come here, Tweet."

  Tweet came over and stood in front of me. He was huge — big, strong, solid — and as he stood there staring down impassively at me, there was no trace of fear in his eyes. He wasn't frightened of pain.

  Ellman said to me, "Can you do it without putting him in hospital?"

  I nodded, looking up at Tweet. "I can hurt him as much or as little as you want."

  Ellman smiled. "Do it."

  I hesitated for a moment, considering my options. I knew that I could take out Ellman and Tweet with a big burst of power, but that still left Hashim and O'Neil. O'Neil was still searching my room — I could hear him crashing around — so it was possible I could get to him before he realized that anything was wrong.

  But Hashim ...?

  I glanced over and saw him watching me. His hand was so tightly taped to the gun, and the gun so tightly taped to Lucy's head, that even if I could have zapped him from here — and he was right over the other side of the room, so I was pretty sure that I couldn't — it only needed the slightest twitch of his finger for the pistol to go off. And I guessed that being electrocuted would more than likely make his finger twitch.

  I glanced at Lucy.

  Unbelievably, she winked at me.

  God, it made me feel so good.

  "What are you fucking waiting for?" Ellman said.

  I looked at him, looked up at Tweet, then reached out and touched Tweet's knee. Like I said, he was a really huge guy. So, just to make sure that he felt it, I gave him a zap that was somewhere between not-too- bad and pretty-bad. And he felt it, all right. He yelped — in a surprisingly high-pitched, almost girly, kind of way — and as his knee flashed blue and his leg jerked out from under him, he toppled over and crashed to the floor.

  "Shit, man!" he hissed, clutching at his knee. "Jesus!"

  "Y'all right?" Ellman said to him.

  "Yeah ..." he sighed, rubbing his whole leg. "Fuck, that hurts."

  O'Neil came bursting into the front room then, alerted by the sound of Tweet falling over. "What's going on?" he said, looking at Tweet. "What's happening?"

  "Nothing," Ellman said. "Everything's cool." He looked over at O'Neil. "You didn't find anything, did you?"

  Still staring at Tweet, O'Neil shook his head. "Not yet ... but I haven't checked the other rooms yet."

  "Don't bother," Ellman told him. "It's all sorted."

  "What do you mean?"

  Ellman ignored him, turning back to me. "Do you have to actually touch people to do that? I mean, can you do it from a distance?"

  I hesitated for a moment, instinctively holding back.

  Ellman said, "Don't fucking think about it, just answer me."

  I sighed, realizing that there was no point in lying. If I told Ellman that I could zap from a distance, he'd want me to prove it. And I wouldn't be able to. And if I told him that I wasn't going to prove it, he'd hurt Lucy. So I had no choice but to tell him the truth.

  "I can zap stuff from about a metre away," I said. "No more."

  He nodded, watching as Tweet got to his feet.

  "OK?" he asked him.

  Tweet glared at me. "Yeah ... yeah, I'm all right."

  Ellman grinned at him. "You don't look all right."

  "I'm fine," Tweet growled.

  Ellman turned to me. "Yo said he tried to stab you, but you did something to his knife."

  I nodded, "It's the electricity ... it gives me some kind of force field."

  "Yeah? So if Tweet wanted to smack you in the head for what you've just done to him, what'd happen?"

  "He'd get hurt even more."

  Ellman smiled. "You bulletproof too?"

  "I don't know," I shrugged. "No one's tried to shoot me yet."

  Ellman looked at me for a moment or two, his eyes seeming to gaze right through me, and then O'Neil called out, "She's waking up," and we both looked over at him. He was leaning round the doorway, peering down the hallway.

  "The old woman," he said, turning back to Ellman. "She's coming round."

  "Tie her up," Ellman said. "Get her out the way."

  As O'Neil nodded and headed off down the hallway, I had to force myself not to say anything, not to do anything ... not to give in to the murder in my heart.

  I looked at Ellman. He was just sitting there now,
smoking a cigarette, staring at nothing, his face a mask of concentration ...

  I glanced over at Lucy. Blood from the cut on her face had dripped onto her nightgown, and her face was pale and frightened, but as she looked back at me in the silence, I could see a hidden strength in her eyes, some kind of faith ... a belief that, despite everything that had happened — and everything that was happening and could possibly happen — we'd both get out of this in the end.

  She truly believed it.

  I smiled at her, trying to show her that I shared her belief.

  Even though I didn't.

  "It's a shame," Ellman said.

  I looked at him. "What?"

  He sighed. "You and me ... we could really have been something together. With your powers and my experience ... I mean, fuck Crow Town, we could have had anywhere we wanted. We could have made fucking millions ..." He looked disdainfully at me. "But you could never do it, could you? You're too fucking weak. Too fucking righteous." He shook his head. "No, I couldn't work with that. It'd drive me mad." He sighed. "Like I said, it's a shame ... but business is business." He smiled at me. "That's all it is, you know ... all this ... the old woman, the bitch over there ... you ... it's all just business."

  I didn't even bother looking at him.

  He sniffed. "Yeah, well ... we'd best get on with it." He stood up and called out, "Yo? You finished in there?"

  O'Neil called back from Gram's room, "Yeah, just a minute ..."

  "What you doing?"

  "Nothing, just looking around ..."

  "Leave it. We're going."

  "There's some nice stuff in here. Laptops, jewellery —"

  "I said fucking leave it!" Ellman barked. Then he turned to Tweet. "Call Gunner, make sure we're clear, then check the corridor."

  Tweet pulled a phone from his pocket, hit a button, and went out into the hallway. I listened in to the call and tracked it to another mobile in the square down below, somewhere near the entrance to the tower. Yeah?

  We're coming out. Everything all right?

  Yeah, it's quiet.

  "Get up," Ellman said to me.

  I got up.

  Tweet came back in. "It's all clear."

  Ellman nodded. "You go first. Hash, you follow him." He turned to O'Neil, who was standing in the doorway. "You follow Hash, OK?"

  O'Neil nodded.

  Ellman said to me, "You follow Yo. Understand?"

  "Yeah."

  "I'll be right behind you. Hash?"

  "Yeah?" Hashim said.

  "How's it going with that gun?"

  "My fucking hand hurts."

  Ellman said to me, "You hear that? His hand hurts. It's been taped to the gun for about an hour now, so his finger's probably getting a bit numb. It won't take much for him to pull the trigger. And it'll be your fault if he does. You got that?"

  "Yeah, I've got it."

  "All right, let's go."

  10110

  Here are comedy and tragedy... Here is melodrama ... Here are unvarnished emotions. Here also is a primitive democracy that cuts through all the conventional social and racial discriminations. The gang, in short, is life ...

  Frederic Thrasher The Gang (1927)

  It was 03:15:52 when we left the flat and walked down the corridor to the lift. There was no one around. The tower felt cold and empty. An early-morning silence pervaded the air, adding to the sense of emptiness, and the sound of our footsteps echoed dully in the stillness. As we approached the lift — which had been jammed open with an iron bar — I wondered if this was going to be my final journey ...

  My final time in this corridor.

  My final time in the lift.

  My final time in the concrete splendour of good old Compton House.

  I smiled to myself, thinking — well, it could have been a lot worse, couldn't it? Of course, it could have been a whole lot better too ...

  As we got into the lift and the doors closed, I glanced at Lucy. The picnic we'd had just a few hours earlier seemed to belong to a different world now, a world that existed a thousand years ago. And while, at the time, it had felt like the beginning of something between me and Lucy, it was now starting to feel like it was all there was ever going to be: the beginning, the middle, the end. But even so, if this was to be my final journey — our final journey — that brief time we'd shared on the roof together would still be the best time of my life.

  Yeah, I thought, smiling at Lucy, it could have been a whole lot worse.

  "What are you smiling about?" Hashim sneered at me.

  I looked at him. "Not much. Just thinking how lucky I am, that's all."

  "Lucky?" he said, shaking his head. "You fucking freak."

  As the lift reached the ground floor, I said to Ellman, "What have you done with Lucy's mum and her brother?"

  He didn't say anything, he didn't even bother looking at me. He just waited, his eyes taking in everything, as Tweet checked out the ground floor, making sure there was no one around. Then, after a signal from Tweet, Ellman gave Hashim the nod, and Hashim moved out of the lift with Lucy. O'Neil followed them. Ellman looked at me, jerking his head, and I followed O'Neil, with Ellman close behind me.

  Outside the tower, two black Range Rovers with tinted windows were waiting by the doors.

  Now that I was sure we were leaving the tower, I sent the text that I'd already written in my head to the local police and ambulance services. The text read:

  URGENT!!! PLEASE HELP!!! MS CONNIE HARVEY, AGED 54, HAS BEEN ATTACKED AND HAS SUFFERED A SERIOUS HEAD INJURY. SHE NEEDS IMME­DIATE MEDICAL ATTENTION. SHE HAS BEEN TIED UP AND LEFT IN HER ROOM BY UN­KNOWN ASSAILANTS AT FLAT 4, 23RD FLOOR, COMPTON HOUSE, CROW LANE ESTATE, CROW LANE, LONDON SE15 6CG. MRS MICHELLE WALKER AND HER SON BEN MAY ALSO NEED ASSISTANCE AT FLAT 6 ON 3oTH FLOOR. THIS IS NOT A HOAX. PLEASE HURRY.

  The two Range Rovers both had their engines running. While Tweet and Hashim and Lucy headed for the one in front, Ellman told me to follow O'Neil to the other one. I watched over my shoulder as Hashim and Lucy got awkwardly into the back of the first one, with Tweet getting into the front passenger's seat, then Ellman opened the back door of our Range Rover and told me to get in.

  I got in.

  He got in beside me.

  O'Neil sat in the front passenger seat.

  The guy in the driver's seat had his hood up, and all I could see of his face in the rear-view mirror was a pair of dark glasses and a raggedy twist of beard on his chin. From his phone records, I knew that he was Gunner.

  "All right?" he grunted at Ellman.

  Ellman ignored him, watching the car in front pull away. Then he just said, "Go."

  We turned right out of Compton and headed south along Crow Lane, both cars cruising along at a steady 4omph — not fast enough to get stopped, not too slow to attract attention. Ellman lit a cigarette and leaned back in his seat, looking totally relaxed and at ease. I gazed out through the window for a while, watching the estate pass by — the kids' playground, the low-rises, the towers ... Fitzroy House, Gladstone, Heath. There were a few people around — some gang kids hanging around the towers, one or two passing cars — but they might as well have been on another planet for all the good they were to me. I didn't need telling again that Hashim would shoot Lucy if I tried anything. So I gave up thinking about it.

  "Where are we going?" I asked Ellman as we passed Heath House and carried on heading south.

  "You'll find out when we get there," Ellman said.

  I looked at him. "How did you know it was me?"

  "Eh?"

  "iBoy ... how did you know it was me?"

  He shrugged. "Does it matter?"

  "Not really ..." I grinned at him. "But if this was a James Bond movie, this would be the perfect moment for the mad super-villain to show Bond how clever he is by unnecessarily explaining everything to him."

  Ellman smiled. "Yeah, just before he tries to kill the fucker."

  "And Bond escapes."

  He looked at me. "Real li
fe ain't the movies."

  "True."

  He smiled. "I mean, you think I'm going to hang you from a rope over a pool of fucking sharks or something?"

  "Probably not."

  He laughed. "And you're not exactly James fucking Bond, are you?"

  "I suppose not... what about you?"

  "What about me?"

  I smiled at him. "Are you the mad super-villain?"

  "Yeah, fucking right. I'm Hell-Man ... I'm the Devil —"

  "And I'm iBoy."

  He looked at me, genuinely amused.

  I said, "So, how did you find out?"

  He laughed. "It was the kid, the bitch's brother ... what's his name?"

  "Ben?"

  "Yeah. He told Troy and Jermaine that when you were trying to throw Yo out the window, and his sister was watching, he heard her whispering something to herself."

  Ellman shook his head. "The little shit thought she said eBay, but then Yo here remembered one of his crew call­ing you iBoy a couple of weeks ago ... you know, like he was just fucking around with you at the time. So then we started thinking about it, looking into it, you know ... and here we are." He looked at me. "Satisfied?"

  "Yeah."

  "You ready to be strung up over the sharks now?"

  "No problem."

  He grinned at me for a moment, then he turned away and spent some time looking out of the car window, check­ing all around, making sure that everything was OK.

  "You see anything?" he said to Gunner.

  "No, it's cool," Gunner said.

  "OK, take the right by the bridge and head back north. Yo, call Marek and let him know."

  As O'Neil called the car in front and passed on the directions to the driver (who I guessed was Marek), Ellman leaned back in his seat again and carried on smoking his cigarette.

  I gazed out of the window for a while, trying to work out where we were going, but all I could tell was that we seemed to be going round in circles. I tuned in to the GPS signal inside my head, logged on to Google Map, and let my iBrain do its stuff.

  "So, anyway," Ellman said casually, turning back to me. "You're Georgie Harvey's boy, yeah?"

  I didn't say anything, I just stared at him, wondering how the hell he knew my mum's name.