Black Man / Thirteen

by Richard K. Morgan

  Tanindo and the mesh won out. Bambarén had an antique street-honed savagery to call on, but it was blurred with age and years of rank. Carl broke his holds, took the punches through the padding of the weblar jacket, teeth gritted tight as pain flared across his cracked ribs and through the codeine veil. He vented a snarl, smothered a knee jab to his groin, and then smashed an elbow into the tayta’s face. The other man reeled off him. Carl stabbed stiffened fingers in under the chin. Bambarén gagged and—

  Behind him, the recently familiar chatter of a Steyr assault rifle erupted across the living room space. Short, controlled burst.

  He flailed loose of Bambarén, rolled for the cover of the table and the chairs around it. The tayta yelled something, and then another brief storm of automatic fire swept over them both and the shout choked off. The tabletop was ripped into splinters, the assault rifle slugs punching through as if it were cardboard. He heard impacts off the rock behind him. Something slammed into his back, ricochet he knew fleetingly. The Glock, the fucking Glock—

  —was gone. From his position on the floor, he saw Onbekend’s legs moving forward, cautious, bent-kneed stance, edging around for a clear shot. He did the only thing left, stormed to his feet, mesh-fed speed and raging strength, hurled the chewed-up table off two legs and forward like a shield. Onbekend snapped off more fire, the table toppled like a tossed playing card, impossibly slow, he dodged sideways. The Steyr chattered, impacts caught him, the impact jacket squeezed and warmed as it worked, the shots twisted and slammed him backward into the alcove wall…

  And the firing stopped.

  It was almost comical. Onbekend stood with the suddenly silent weapon in his hands. Faint ping of the load alert, into the quiet like a dripping tap. His gaze dropped from Carl’s face to the Steyr, saw the blinking red light. He’d had no time to check the magazine, must have grabbed the first decent weapon he saw off the pile on the breakfast bar, and he’d come away with one almost fully discharged.

  Carl came off the wall with a yell.

  Onbekend threw the emptied Steyr at him. He batted it aside. The other thirteen tried to grapple, he punched and stamped the attempt apart, drove Onbekend back across the space in a flurry of tanindo technique. The thirteen blocked and covered, launched jabbing counters, but all the time Carl read out the damage Sevgi’s slugs had done in the way the other man moved. He felt a snarl peel his lips, savage satisfaction, the heart-deep anticipation of damage. He closed, broke up a defense, lanced a high blow through, and caught Onbekend across the jaw. The other thirteen staggered, his back almost to the shattered picture window now. Blood and translucent light behind—Carl caught it out of the corner of his eye, dull red smears on the jagged lower line of the remaining glass, glint of the sun’s rays on the sawtoothed edges. He closed with Onbekend again—

  And there was a crouched figure beyond the glass.

  Carl had time to register the shocked, frightened face, the raised shotgun. His attack momentum was already committed, all he could do was let it carry him stumbling across the living room, trying to get out of the way. The shotgun went off, fresh glass smashed off the ruined window, and Onbekend bellowed. Carl fetched up against the breakfast bar, clawed down a clatter of weapons, and hit the floor. He grabbed at random, found himself with another of the assault rifles, dragged it around—safety off—and triggered it just as the door blew inward.

  There were a pair of Bambarén’s men gathered there. They’d shot out the lock and burst in, one high, one low. Carl was sitting on the floor, back to the breakfast bar, nowhere near where they’d expected. He held down the trigger on the Steyr and sprayed. The hammering fire kicked both men backward, limbs waving as if they were trying to fend the bullets off. One of them flew back through the entryway and landed in a puffed cloud of dust outside; the other caught an ankle on the doorjamb and went down tangled where he was. Carl skidded back upright, got cover at the edge of the picture window, and then hooked around and hosed the shotgunner off his feet.

  Sporadic fire from farther off. No more bodies. In the sudden quiet, the Steyr pinged insistently for more ammunition. The weapon’s previous owner had doubled magazines, taped two back-to-back and inverted. Carl unlocked the gun, swapped the ends, and snicked the fresh magazine into place.

  Somewhere on the floor, Onbekend groaned.

  Carl peered out and saw crouched figures backing hastily off, slithering back to their cover by the path. He chased them with a quick burst from the Steyr, drew a deep breath, went back to the doorway, shoved the body on the threshold out of the way with his boot so he could get the door closed. Halfway through, he realized the man was still alive, breathing shallowly and rapidly, eyes closed. Carl shot him in the head with the Steyr, kicked him the rest of the way out, and shut the door. Then he dragged an armchair across the floor and pushed it hard up against the handle. Vague realization of pain as he worked—he stopped and looked down at the impact jacket, saw the shiny bulges where the gene-tweaked weblar had stopped the slugs and melted closed around them. But blood trickled down past the lower hem of the garment. He pulled it up and saw an ugly gouge in the flesh above his hip. Angled fire from someone as he jumped or twisted or fell sometime in the last minute and a half. Could have been Onbekend or the guys in the door, maybe even a stray long shot from outside.

  With the sight, the pain rolled in. He sagged onto the arm of the wedging chair.

  “That’s fucking ironic,” Onbekend coughed wetly from the floor. “I come that close to taking you down and one of Manco’s fucking goons takes me out instead.”

  Carl shot him a tired look. “You were nowhere near.”

  “Yeah? Well, fuck you.” Onbekend propped himself up. “Manco?”

  No reply.

  “Manco?”

  Carl watched the other thirteen’s face curiously from across the room. Onbekend’s features contorted with effort as he tried to get himself into a sitting position. His chest was drenched with blood from the shotgun blast. He growled through gritted teeth, pushed with both hands, couldn’t do it. He fell back.

  “I’ll go look,” Carl told him.

  Manco Bambarén was flat on his back in a pool of his own blood, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. It looked to have been instant—Onbekend’s shots must have nailed him across the chest as he was trying to get up. Carl looked down at the familia chief for a moment, then headed back.

  “He’s dead,” Onbekend said. Blood in his throat turned his voice deep and muddy. “Right?”

  “Yeah, he’s dead. Nice shooting.”

  A bubbling laugh. “I was trying for you.”

  “Yeah? Try harder next time.” Carl felt spreading wet warmth, glanced down at his leg, saw blood soaking through the material of his trousers at the belt and thigh. Even through the painkillers, his chest ached as if he’d been crushed in a vise. He wondered if the weblar had failed, let something through somewhere else as well—it could happen with multiple impacts in the same region of the jacket, he’d seen it before. Or maybe someone out there, some fucking gun fetishist, had an armor-piercing load he liked to show off. Power enough to bring down a coked-up black man, just like in Rovayo’s history books; power enough to bring down the thirteen. Power to stop the beast in its tracks.

  “Ah. Not a complete waste, then.”

  Onbekend had seen the blood as well.

  Carl sank onto the floor, put his back against the armchair he had blocking the door, and pulled his feet in so his knees went up. He propped the Steyr on his legs and checked the load. Filtering sunlight slanted in past him, missed his shoulder by half a meter, made him shiver unreasonably in the contrasting shade.

  “How many are there out there really?” he asked Onbekend.

  The other thirteen turned his head and grinned across the short expanse of stone-tiled floor that separated them. His teeth were bloody.

  “More than you’re in any state to deal with, I’d say.” He swallowed liquidly. “Tell me something, Marsalis. Tell me the tru
th. You didn’t hurt Greta, did you?”

  Carl looked at him for a while. “No,” he said finally. “She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.”

  “That’s good.” A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. “Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.”

  “I’m not your fucking brother.”

  Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.

  Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.

  So.

  He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men Are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Hall stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.

  “Fifteen.”

  He looked across at Onbekend. “What?”

  “Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.”

  “Fifteen, huh?”

  “Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?”

  “Three.” Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. “Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?”

  Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. “Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips? No contest.”

  Carl grimaced. “Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?”

  “Nah, stay awhile. Gives us time to talk.”

  Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. “We’ve got something to talk about?”

  “Sure we do.” Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. “You still don’t get it, do you. Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.”

  “See what?”

  “What we are.” The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. “Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.”

  The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the gray matte surface of the weapon in his hands.

  “But not us, right?”

  “Fucking right, not us.” Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. “Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?”

  Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

  But let Onbekend talk his way out.

  “Tell you how you get that,” the dying thirteen rasped. “How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis—we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.” More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. “Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cutoffs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?”

  “Yeah, so did we,” Carl said somberly. “Remember.”

  “They tried to contain us.” Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desperately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like forever. “But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.”

  “If you say so.” Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving toward Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

  “Yeah, I do fucking say so.” The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the sun-touched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead; the arm was limp behind it. “We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.”

  “You aren’t,” Carl pointed out.

  Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. “No, but you can.”

  “I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.”

  “Hey, you’re the lottery guy.” Onbekend was gasping now. “Telling me you don’t feel lucky?”

  “I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.”

  Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. “There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.”

  He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

  “You’ll show them,” he bubbled.

  The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

  Outside, Carl could hear Bambarén’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

  I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

  It was almost as if she were there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

  He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

  I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

  We all will.

  Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

  He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock, and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines, and then slung it around his neck, adjusting the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.

  A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.

  You’ll show them.


  “Yeah, right,” he muttered.

  Drag the armchair aside, crack the door, and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.

  I’ll see you in the garden.

  The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.

  Deep breath.

  Then he went out into the sun.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Richard K Morgan is the acclaimed author of Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels, and Altered Carbon, a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award. Morgan sold the movie rights for Altered Carbon to Joel Silver and Warner Bros. His third book, Market Forces, has also been sold to Warner Bros. and was winner of the John W. Campbell Award. He lives in Scotland.

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