by Andy Remic
A warehouse.
It was huge, much larger than the exterior had led them to believe. The roof was constructed from corrugated plasti-shields which allowed a dull grey light to filter down like nuclear snowfall. The warehouse was filled with massive H-section struts leading up to the eaves and crisscrossed with large shelves stacked with truk-containers. It was more like a shipping complex than a jewellery wholesalers. But then, as Jones had pointed out, there was probably more tax evasion going down in this backstreet London shit-hole than in any Banker’s Convention for Top Level Banking Management. Or maybe not.
Dex, back against the wall, surveyed the towering iron shelves filled with truk containers. Again, the stench of fuel was strong; like acid in his nostrils.
Somebody, a woman, screamed.
Jones and Dex charged into action, boots stomping down an alloyconcrete walkway. They rounded the corner to be confronted by a scene which hammered nails of confusion into their skulls. They both stopped dead, D4 shotguns wavering uncertainly. This was not the scene they had expected...
Three people, a man and two women, hung upside down from a beam. They were naked, hands and feet tied tight together, and one woman bled from her mouth, streaks running past her eyes and soaking into her long, blonde, dangling hair, and dripping into a puddle. Their frightened eyes shifted subtly from the two PUF officers who had invaded their torture, and back to the shadows...
Dex reacted first, D4 shifting to the darkness where something, an outline, stood perfectly still, camouflaged, only a gentle gleam of eyes watching them without movement.
“What...” said Dex, as Jones stepped past him, levelled his shotgun, and without a sound opened both barrels. Booms echoed through the warehouse and Dex blinked, but the figure had flipped out of the way, and from the darkness came three fast phuts.
“Down!” screamed Jones, the flat of his hand slamming Dex, and they both hit the ground hard as a line of automatic gunfire cut across the clearing, howling, fire erupting to the backing track of tinkling shell cases. Both men opened their shotguns and more booms smashed through the acid in return fire. Wood splintered. Steel screeched. Concrete crumbled.
For what seemed like hours, there followed a violent exchange of gunfire. Finally, through the smoke and the sound of Dex reloading his D4, Jones grabbed him roughly. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“But the prisoners...”
“The prisoners are dead.”
Dex glanced up. The three phuts had been silenced shots. Straight through their skulls.
“We move. Now!” yelled Jones.
Dex said nothing. Trusted his partner’s experience and his own screaming instincts. They ran through smoke and gloom as a sudden crackling came to Dex’s ears, and behind him the flood of Shuttle fuel ignited. There were cracks and sparks, then a whoosh that made every hair on Dex’s body stand on end and scream a song of desolation right through to his soul. They sprinted like madmen down a corridor, ignoring the way they’d entered the warehouse. Because...
Dex gave a crooked smile as he felt a wash of heat behind him.
Because hell, that was the trap...
They ran hard, boots pounding. Fire roared through the warehouse. Petals uncurled with heat and energy and agony. The warehouse groaned and screamed, and Dex and Jones burst from a second doorway choking on smoke, like unwanted foetal ejections from the glowing vulva of an alien whore.
Dex stood, hands on knees, wheezing.
Jones tracked with his shotgun, face covered by a haze of grey ash, eyes alert.
“What you doing?”
“It’s out here.”
“What is?” Dex scowled, glancing up.
“The android,” hissed Jones.
That made Dex stand up tall and finish reloading his shotgun. “Back there? That was a hit?”
“More than that, I reckon,” said Jones, voice sour. “Much, much more.”
~ * ~
It was only when they were surrounded by an assortment of PUF cars and truks, and five hydroengines tackled the blaze, that Jones finally allowed himself to relax. But even as they sat on the pavement, backs to yet another crumbling brick wall, watching the hydromen fighting the raging blaze and sharing cigarettes, still Jones refused to lower his shotgun. It was as if he were waiting for a follow-up; for payback.
“Go on. What happened?”
“It was when I was in the army,” said Jones, voice low. He took a drag on the dregtube. The tip glowed. Jones coughed out blue smoke.
“During Helix?”
“Yeah. Helix. I saw this. Exactly this. Three people, strung up by their feet. The ground doused in high-octane fuel. If she gets interrupted, then whoosh. The whole place goes up.”
“She?”
“She was an android. An Anarchy Android.”
“They’re illegal. Especially on Earth.”
Jones looked sideways at Dex. “Yeah. Right. How fucking naive do you want to be, compadre?”
“Why a she? This could have been a male.”
Jones shrugged. “No. They make male androids, sure. But females take KillChips with a higher success rate. It’s very, very rare a male becomes an Anarchy Model. Must be in the genetics, or something. The female of the species, more deadly than the male? Damn. Fucking. Right.”
Jones smoked some more. Dex considered his words as the hydromen finally killed the fire. The street was a quagmire of foam and black-streaked water. The stench of burnt detritus filled Dex’s nostrils like toxic snuff.
It started to rain.
“You think she - it - will come back for us?”
Jones shrugged. “No... I don’t think so. We’re police. They don’t want to raise their profiles. Killing police gets a lot of attention, yeah? Too much attention. However, if we’d been burned alive, maybe... well. Fair game, right?” He grinned, then, and slapped Dex on the back. Both men climbed to their feet and stood beneath the ashy rain. It stained them. Dirtied their purity.
“Shit,” said Dex. “Just what I need on my last bloody day of work. A triple homicide.”
“At least you’re going on holiday! I’ve got more of this to come.” Jones’s eyes gleamed. “Lots more.”
“So they’re bad, these...” Dex savoured the words, “Anarchy Androids?”
“As bad as they get,” said Jones. “Experts. At torture. Murder. They have no emotions. They have no fear. And they’re tougher than a hard-boiled motherfucker. This one we found, out in the jungle on Tashkan during Helix. Well, it took ten of us to drop her. Ten of us, Dexter. And she took out a fucking perimeter tank with her bare hands. “
Dex holstered his D4 and walked back towards their BMW PUF Battlecar.
He thought about his children. He thought about his family. He thought about losing his family. He thought about how the stakes seemed to get worse and worse, every single day.
Was it worth it?
Was it all really worth it?
And he thought, as he occasionally had, about resignation.
What would Kat do if some mad-crazed Anarchy Android bitch took his head clean off in the line of duty?
Shit. Shit.
Thank God I’m going on holiday, he thought. It would give him space, and time to think. Time to talk. Time to make a decision.
~ * ~
Dex entered the low-slung dung-bar and the door slammed shut behind him with the sound of a loading shotgun. The bar was military themed, and called The Full Metal Jacket. Dex grinned. He fucking loved that film. Especially the bit where the Cong Aliens attacked during the Tet5 Offensive, and the retro-panning during the squeezy-boat journey up the Perfume Bottle River in LOS Los Angeles.
Pegg was at the bar, and gave him a vague hand gesture. Dex’s grin fell as if he’d been knifed. Pegg was well on his way to the dark side of non-sobriety. Shit. Next thing he’d be telling Dex he was his father...
Dex moved to the bar, where a small, bald barman with a skin ponytail was pulling Japachinese beer into glittering diam
ond tankards.
“Can I help you, son?” he drawled.
“I’ll have a pint of Dublin. Anything for you, Pegg?”
“A half of PissWhiskey.”
Dex hopped onto a high stool, which gave the click of a landmine priming. Oh the comedy! thought Dex. “You out to get drunk, mate?”
Pegg looked up then, and Dex read the pain - the anguish - in his face. Here was a man not just betrayed, but destroyed. Dex’s heart fell like a stone down a well, and straight out of his arsehole. Shit. This was going to be a long night.
“Yes.”
Dex accepted his black beer and sipped the thick stuff. It went down well. Too well. Like treacle through a toilet pipe. “Kat said you caught Meesha.” His voice was gentle. “Want to talk about it?”
“Talk about it? I’ll slit the bitch’s throat.”
“What happened?”
Pegg stared at Dex through bloodshot eyes. “I know you thought I was crazy. Paranoid. Fuck it, even I felt paranoid. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, right?”
“Hmm.”
“It started off with her working longer and longer hours. Said it was the traffic. But the timings didn’t add up. I mean, she was taking three hours to get home and I knew, fucking knew it was an hour and a half, max. Then she was leaving for work earlier and earlier, but I was drinking too much anyway by that point, so it took me a few months to notice. Turns out she was leaving for work early so she could leave work even earlier; and that’s when she was meeting him.”
“Who?”
“Smark.”
“Your best friend?”
“Yeah. That back-stabbing wife-grabbing cunt.”
“Pretty low, that. To do that to your best friend.”
“Wait ‘til you find out exactly what she did do with the hairy bastard! I thought she’d got suddenly more adept at sucking dick. And taking it from behind like a begging dog in heat. What a bitch.”
Dex remained silent. There wasn’t much he could say to a remark like that. He knew he was in for a long night of bitterness and hate. And all night he’d have to be careful, have to pick his words with care - because, well, because if they, Peggs and Meesha, ever made it up again (which was always a possibility, right? nothing more insane than love or war) then Dex’s words would be regurgitated, examined, spun around and re-contextualised. If Dex wasn’t careful, at some point further down the line, at a distant spot of illumination towards which he was always travelling like a runaway train in an eternity tunnel... well, one day Dex would become the Bad Man in all this. He’d seen it happen before. Shit, he’d been blamed for worse. And sometimes - sometimes it was just better to keep your big flapping mouth well and truly shut.
“She went to the gym for six hours at a time.”
“Six hours? Christ. You’d think she’d look like fucking Arnie Neggarschwartz!”
“Well that was one of the giveaways, yeah mate.”
Dex scratched his chin. “So things got worse? I assume they did, or we wouldn’t be sat here nursing a beer and, er, sharing the fact that your cheating wife is a bitch.”
Pegg stared into his whiskey-substitute for a while, lost in thought. When he spoke, he blurted it out like a waterfall of disgorged words, as if eager to excise a cancer from his dark, tortured soul. “I was suspicious. Suspicious for too long, and I kept telling myself I was imagining things, but I let it go and let it go and let it go, her rolling in at four in the morning after being at her cousin’s - and that’s the worst bit, right? Smark and her, getting it on behind my back, behind her cousin’s back. I mean, shit, they’re family, right? So I planted a BUG in her handbag, started monitoring her progress. The wily clever cunning bitch was constantly looking out for being followed, she was taking evasive manoeuvres, really weird driving patterns, down back alleys and stuff. I didn’t get it at first, until I realised she was parking up down back streets for five minutes, getting out of the car, scouting around to see if somebody was following her. Once, I saw a text she sent. She said she was far too clever to ever get caught. The arse. Not clever enough to delete that message, was she? And not clever enough to figure out the BUG. And that was her downfall - thinking everybody else, and me in particular, were completely dumb.”
Dexter took a long, soothing draught of Dublin. “You caught her, then?”
“Yeah. Last night. Using the BUG. I saw her leave work early and then stop for an hour at a time, maybe two, in Knightsbridge. Obviously meeting somebody. The I had a few night shifts came in, and her nocturnal mobility went crazy. I mean, off the map. Well, off the civilised map. All manner of dark and dingy back woods, plastic parks, places without lights and with low population densities.” He stared gloomily into his drink, hands clenched around the diamond tankard, knuckles white. It was then Dex saw... no. It couldn’t be.
Blood? On his knuckles?
Dex groaned inwardly. Oh, God. No. Not Pegg. Not Katrina’s brother...
“I had a night shift last night. But I couldn’t take anymore. I followed them on the BUG, down to Green Canary Wharf, you know, the section built on the Thames Sludge. It was quiet. Three AM. When I arrived, I saw her groundcar, all steamed up. I parked, crept over, and there she was on the back seat with Smark. Her dirty whore legs open wide as he pumped away at her. Her face was open in ecstasy - an ecstasy she never bloody showed me, that’s for sure.”
Dex suppressed the glib joke threatening to slip from his tongue: You mustn’t have been doing it right, mate!
“What happened next?” Unconsciously, Dex had pushed his drink to one side. His hand slipped to his hip. To his holster. To his Techrim 11mm. Suddenly, his throat was dry. This was beginning to look bad; friend or no friend, brother-in-law or no brother-in-law.
“I took an axe,” said Pegg, his voice strangled. “A long-handled axe.” He looked up then, a sudden spasmodic jerk. His eyes were red-rimmed, tears glistening like trapped sapphires. “I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t want to do it!”
“What did you do?”
“She got me in so much fucking debt as well, Dexter! I started getting these bills, cred cards, dollar cubes, even bloody clothes catalogues - all in my name. Not only was she humping my best friend, she was going to leave me financially screwed. I know it! Here!” He clenched a fist to his breast. “And even worse. Even worse. She was engineering the whole situation; my whole life! Setting me up. Cleaning me out like some scumshit shitbag down in the dregs.”
“What did you do?”
The Techrim was out. Cool in his hand. Held close against his thigh. A promise. A promise of... justice.
“I deserved more than that!” he said, tears coursing down his cheeks now. “I deserved more than being used like that, deserved more than being stabbed in the back. Cheated on for months and months and months. How could she do that to me, Dex? If she wanted somebody else, fine, fuck off and find him... but to keep it going for so long, they were laughing at me Dex, laughing at me even when I banged on the door of the steamed-up landcar...”
Dex’s voice was low. “Did you hurt them?”
“She stumbled out into the mud, her stained knickers round her ankles. I lifted the axe up above my head and I swear to you, Dex, I swear I didn’t want to do it - but something took hold of my heart, drove splinters of ice through me, pushed me over the precipice of reason and into a deep dark pit of hate...”
Dex pointed the 11mm Techrim at Pegg. His brother-in-law. His wife’s brother. His friend, dammit, his fucking friend. “You know I’m going to take you in, Pegg. I’m sorry. I represent the law. You can’t be allowed to do those things.”
“Wait a minute!”
Dex was standing, plasticuffs out, and within a heartbeat Pegg’s face was on the bar swimming in his own spilt beer and sorrow. Dex cuffed him. Noticed more blood on the cuffs of his shirt. Shit.
“Wait, Dex, wait! I didn’t kill them, oh my god, you really think I killed them?”
Sirens wailed ab
ove London. Through the dark. Through the rain. Backup were coming, triggered by the act of Dex using his plasticuffs.
“It’s up to the Boys in Blue now, my friend,” said Dex, glancing up. Glass smashed distantly. He could hear boots crashing across boards, even through the booming hearty military march playing from the jukebox in the corner, and the slurping sounds of snogging jujunga suckers.
“Wait, no Dex, I dropped the axe, I let them run off laughing through the mud, I didn’t do anything!”