The Digital Plague

by Jeff Somers

  “Boss,” Happling said, sounding urgent.

  “Not now,” the colonel snapped.

  Happling’s jaw clenched. “Now is a good time to tell you,” he gritted out as if chewing rocks, “that I’m not killing any cops.”

  XVI

  Day Six:

  I’ve been Promoted

  For whatever obscure security reasons, the elevator indicator wasn’t labeled; it was just a long string of LEDs sinking from the ceiling to the floor. The bottom three lit up red, one by one, dripping down toward us. I pulled my stolen Roon from my pocket and held it ready, but I was willing to let the two cops take the brunt of whatever was coming out of the cab. Marko pushed himself as flat as possible against the wall, clutching his bag of tricks to his chest and looking ready to shit his pants and run, in that order, at a moment’s notice.

  The bottom light glowed warmly and the doors snapped open, and it was difficult to stay still—after being beaten half to death in the Blank Room, my brain chemistry was running wild, dumping adrenaline and sleep into my blood—but I managed it with some effort.

  The elevator was empty. We all stood still for a moment, thumbs up our asses. The adrenaline turned into vinegar inside me, curdling my stomach. I looked over at Marko, who had closed his eyes.

  “You’re one of those fucking geniuses I keep hearing about, aren’t you?”

  The kid opened his eyes one at a time and then visibly sagged, his whole body going jelly. He shut his eyes again and looked like he was going to throw up. I slipped my gun back into my pocket and stepped over to him, catching him under the armpits as his legs gave way.

  “Deep breath,” I said, trying to make my voice friendly. “You’ve had a rough hour or so.”

  He pushed at me weakly. “Fuck you,” he said hoarsely.

  I laughed and let him drop. “Ask the captain to tune you up a little,” I said, turning away. “It’s a wonderful fucking tonic.”

  “Shut up,” Hense said in a distracted voice. “Good work, Mr. Marko. But we have to get moving.”

  “That was too easy,” Marko said weakly, pulling himself up. “All I did was issue a standard reset and it just came. That shouldn’t have worked.”

  “Why do it, then?”

  He shrugged without looking at me. “It’s always step one. Just in case it works.”

  Fucking Techies. I stood next to Happling and stared into the empty cab, white and clean. None of us moved.

  “It’s your fucking building,” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hense turn to look at me, but I didn’t look at her.

  “Move,” she spat, and stepped into the car. Happling followed, grabbing me by the shoulder and shoving me ahead of him.

  “Mr. Marko!” Hense shouted.

  The kid appeared in front of us, scratching at his beard. “I don’t trust things I didn’t make happen. Shit does not just happen.”

  I was standing behind him, but I could feel Happling’s grin like a change in air pressure. “Kid, keep standing there like a piece of shit and I’ll show you something else that does not just happen.”

  I imagined Happling’s grin, feral, his teeth yellow. I could feel him next to me. He wanted to fuck the kid up. Marko sensed it, too, hustling into the elevator, looking around as if he expected it to sprout spikes from the ceiling and walls and start to contract on us.

  Hense gestured hesitantly, but the elevator responded immediately, the doors snapping shut. “We’re going out the back through the loading docks,” she said. “They won’t be abandoned, but they should be pretty sparse.”

  “Boss,” Happling said slowly, not liking the taste of his words. “What if we get stopped? I’m not here to shoot cops.”

  “I thought that was what I was here for,” I said, failing to match the big cop’s amazing grin.

  No one said anything to that. There was a momentary sick sense in my stomach, and then a light ding from the elevator.

  “Happ, you’re point. Marko and Cates after him.” Hense turned those pretty, static eyes on me, making me regret my smart comments. I didn’t want this woman to ever stare at me for any period of time. The feeling I’d seen her before swept through me like a flame, burning out as fast as it had come upon me. “Mr. Cates, try any bullshit and I will start investigating how badly you can be hurt without being killed.”

  She turned away before I could say anything back. “Happ,” she said, “I won’t order you to shoot cops. But if you obstruct my way out of here, I will shoot you. Understood?”

  As the doors swooshed open, the big cop’s jaws bunched, and then he was leading us out of the elevator. The kid was on his heels, looking terrified, and then me, a fake expression of bland disinterest in place. My game face. I was half blind, felt like something important had been broken inside me, and found myself in a building filled with people who would happily shoot me on sight—but I had to be Avery Cates. I was famous. I had to act like it.

  We turned a corner of bald cinder blocks and were on the docks, where the grimy garbage hovers backed in every day to cart away tons and tons of garbage for dumping over in Jersey. It smelled like a toilet and all the concrete gleamed with an unhealthy shine. Loader Droids idled in the bay, humming softly, waiting for the next delivery or pickup. Weak daylight shone from the dock entrance a few dozen feet away. I could hear the Vids echoing an announcement in the distance, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  Behind us, the second elevator bay dinged softly.

  The two cops whirled, Happling’s satchel hitting the ground and Hense’s coat swirling around her. I felt slow next to them, crouching and bringing my gun out, arm aching and head throbbing. Marko just stood there, a fucking target, blinking in confusion.

  The second elevator split open and disgorged two men. I recognized the first one; it had been only an hour or so since he’d expressed his disapproval of me outside the elevator, but I imagined I could already see signs of my little buggers eating away at him—circles under his eyes, a sheen of sweat like his body was trying to bake something out of itself. His dark hair was still plastered to his forehead as if he never thought to push it out of his eyes. He had put on his coat, and stepped forward with his hands in his pockets, shoulder holsters bulging under each arm. His tiny eyes were set close together, giving him a permanent squint.

  “We’re under lockdown orders, Colonel,” he said in his weedy voice. “I’m shocked and dismayed to think you might disobey that command in order to smuggle a prisoner out of the building.”

  “I’ve been promoted,” I said, smiling. “I’ve got this neat new coat and everything.”

  He pointed at me without looking at me. “Shut the fuck up, you fucking monkey. You think you got tuned up? You think you got hurt, your fucking rights violated? Asshole, we haven’t begun violating you. How many cops have you killed?”

  Thirty-three, I thought darkly. Including the Stormers outside Westminster Abbey. I kept my smile on my face, but my free hand formed a fist so hard my knuckles popped.

  He licked his lips and shrugged. “You’re not taking Cates out of the building, sir.”

  His buddy was behind him, arms folded, a thick-chested guy with spindly legs that looked like they belonged to someone else. Neither of them moved for their guns. Hense and Happling relaxed a little, putting their weapons up. They were going to stand there and piss on each other’s shoes all fucking day, but no one was going to shoot.

  I made a show of relaxing, too, letting my gun drop to my side, out of immediate sight. I kept my one good eye dancing from spot to spot.

  “Do you idiots know what’s happening here?” Hense said levelly. “How you passed your CIS tests I’ll never fucking know, since you’re dragging your goddamn knuckles around bothering me. Lieutenant, get back to your post or I’ll break you down so hard you won’t just be reassigned to Chengara, you’ll be serving slop at Chengara.”

  The lieutenant’s expression, which appeared to be one thin beat per minute away from
unconscious, didn’t change. I ran my eye over his friend, who was a square-shaped kid, bloodshot eyes staring balefully at Hense and Happling. No one was paying any attention to me. Typical System Pigs—I was irrelevant. I was just a shithead from the street they’d get around to shooting when it fucking suited them. I cleared my mind, imagining snow, thick yellowed drifts of it falling silently, that nothing could penetrate.

  “Colonel, I think I speak for all of us, every cop in this building, when I say go fuck yourself. You’ve broken a dozen SSF regs just by not posting Cates to the system. Now you’re taking him from the building without posting him. These are Class A violations, Colonel, as far as the Worms are concerned. You’re going to get burned for this as it is, and I think if anyone has to worry about—”

  Feeling peaceful, I took my moment. It didn’t require any theatrics or fancy moves: amateurs got caught up in diving, jumping, making it look like something you’d see on the Vids. Wasted effort—bad for your aim and your chances of staying alive. I raised my weapon calmly, sighted on the lieutenant, and squeezed the trigger, putting a surprisingly small hole in his forehead. Then I moved my arm and brought the cop behind him on my right into sight and squeezed the trigger again.

  Thirty-five, I thought without pride, with just a dusty feeling, my whole body aching.

  Then Happling was crashing into me, growling like an animal. The gun was stripped from my hand before I could bring it around, and my head did a little drumbeat against the concrete floor. His fist crashed into my mouth, breaking some teeth with a sharp, lancing pain and sending my head back into the concrete. The familiar taste of my own tired blood filled my mouth, and for a second I thought, Do it, do it, you goddamn animal.

  Then I could hear Hense’s voice, somehow cutting through Happling’s wordless howling.

  “Captain!”

  One word, but Happling froze, his fist raised over me, my blood dripping off his fingers. His face, bloated and red, quivered as he hovered there, crouched above me. I tried to suck air and got a thick mass of blood instead. I burst into a spasm of choking coughs, spewing blood and snot everywhere as I twitched, little red spots appearing in front of me each time.

  “You kill him, you kill all of us,” she said, her voice expressionless. “You want to kill yourself, crawl over there and shoot yourself in the head.”

  Happling and I stared at each other. His whole body was shaking. Finally he tore himself away from me, rolling away and springing to his feet. He stood with his back to me and cracked his neck loudly, rolling his head around. “He doesn’t keep the fucking gun,” he said, biting off the words one at a time. I imagined hell, my final resting place, and saw Captain Nathan Happling, beating me forever.

  “The fuck I don’t,” I gurgled, my words soft. “You still don’t know where you’re going, asshole.”

  He didn’t turn around. “Eventually,” he said, “I get to kill you.”

  I pulled myself into a sitting position, blood dripping from my chin onto Happling’s coat. Hense stepped between us; I could feel her anger, but she was locked down and perfectly calm, her eyes dead and cold. I didn’t like looking at her eyes. Every time I looked at her, I thought of cops I’d killed. I turned and looked at Marko, who was staring at me, eyes wide. I gave him my bloody grin and he looked away, finding the floor suddenly fascinating. My mouth ached in time with my pulse, pain fresher than everything else.

  “Let’s move,” she said.

  We moved. In silence we left the cooling bodies of the two cops behind and slipped out into the street. Which was nearly deserted, except for packs of Stormers hustling here and there, the occasional officer talking into the air and listening, badge exposed, to his earbud, and a civilian or two running for their lives. As we paused for a moment, dazzled by the gray light as fat hunks of yellow snow fell silently around us, a well-dressed woman ran full speed into Happling, bounced off him, and landed hard on her ass, staring up at us. She was pretty, of course, a blonde in a bright red, expensive-looking coat, her face sporting the overly smooth, expressionless look of the totally reconstructed, a rich girl who hadn’t liked the face the cosmos had given her.

  A moment later three Stormers skidded to a halt around her, gave us the once-over, and then took her by the arms and brought her to her feet. Hense and Happling had cop written all over them, and I guessed that was enough for the Stormers, who’d spent their entire adult lives getting their balls kicked by officers.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” one of them buzzed through his helmet speaker. “Emergency curfew.”

  They carted her off without another word, her blank face staring back at us until they’d turned the corner, where by the sound of it a hover idled, slowly filling with all the citizens who’d been too slow or too reluctant to get off the streets.

  Hense started off east, heading up the block as she clipped her shiny gold badge to the front of her coat. “Keep your head down,” she said to me in a tense whisper. “And resist . . . the . . . urge . . . to speak.”

  I was one solid ache, the rhythm of it mesmerizing. My heart would beat, and then my whole body would pulse with a muffled, diffuse pain, and as we walked I landed on my right foot with each pulse, imagining the whole side of my face inflating and deflating with each step. The empty streets were eerie. There was trash everywhere, just random things—paper, foam cups, a single black dress shoe. It looked as if there’d been quite a little dustup when the SSF had declared an emergency and ordered the streets clear. Hense set a killer pace, and I struggled to keep up; I hadn’t eaten in a long time, a time spent getting acquainted with the System Pigs’ newest interrogation techniques, which had turned out to be exactly like their old ones, only a little more enthusiastic.

  The ruined building just off the river loomed up over us, big swathes of it nothing but gaping holes, exposed guts, all that glass that once made it shine in the sun shattered and jagged. It was like a huge box, thin and square, ugly as hell. It had taken a beating in the Unification Riots and no one had ever bothered to do anything about it. I stared at it as we ignored a hastily constructed checkpoint—so far no one had wanted to mess with a colonel—and crossed the last street, its pavement broken and uneven, before the river. The hover field was a small, fenced-in affair guarded by a couple of Crushers who eyed Hense in terror as we approached.

  I looked over her at the field itself. It wasn’t well populated; just a few sad-looking hovers, rusty and dented, remained.

  “I’m sorry, uh, Colonel,” one of the Crushers, an elderly gent of at least forty, his face gaunt and his uniform almost comically big on him, said. “We’re under orders to keep these bricks on the ground.”

  To my surprise, Hense stopped and visibly collected herself. She glanced at me and then at Big Red Happling, and then looked back at the Crusher, who didn’t enjoy her attention at all.

  “By whose orders?”

  The Crusher managed to look embarrassed. “Director Marin’s, Colonel.”

  She nodded and took one step forward. “Director Marin is not here,” she said in a cool, level voice. “And cannot hurt you. I am here, and can. Call it in. But don’t try to stop us.”

  The Crusher looked at her, then at the rest of us, and then spun around looking for his partner, who had wisely retreated back into the little shack provided for them. “Shit,” he muttered. “You won’t even get out of the city, Colonel. I mean—”

  “Excuse me!”

  We all turned, startled. I saw Happling’s arms twitch for his gun and then stop as we all watched an elegantly dressed figure crossing the street. He was a tall, broad-chested young man, his face chiseled and his skin clear—serious, serious surgery, I thought, with some genetic workups to boot. Expensive shit. His outfit, which was pink and white, was cut expertly and moved easily as he trotted up to us. The two cops, I thought, were too shocked to do anything.

  “Please,” he said with a smile. “I am willing to pay—handsomely—for a ride out of the city.” He produced a credit dongl
e from his pocket. “Please—I have a family. There are rumors—disease, those animals downtown again. I am—”

  Happling stepped forward, crowding him and making him step back. “Did you just offer to bribe us, you piece of shit?”

  The man’s confident smile drained off his face. “No! No! Of course not,” he said quickly, putting up his hands. “I was just—”

  The big cop slapped him across the face, moving so fast there was no time to react. The gorgeous man’s head whipped back instantly, his lower lip split open, blood running in a weak trickle down his chin. His expression told me he’d never been hit before. In his entire life. He wasn’t even afraid, he was fucking amazed. And I thought, Who grows up without being hit? How rich did you have to be? I wanted a number. I wanted statistics.

  “You stupid fuck,” Happling said, turning away.

  He marched past us toward the field. The Crusher stepped aside as the bigger man approached, and without saying anything more we followed him onto the field to a decrepit hover that had once been silver but was now a charred sort of gray. It was a small, ancient model, but designed for long trips over water. Happling climbed in without a word, and we followed him, one by one.

  “Ah, hell,” Marko muttered as Happling and Hense disappeared into the cockpit. “It smells like shit in here.”

  I had to agree with the kid’s delicate nose, though my own—probably broken—wasn’t working too well. There were seats, however, a great luxury, and I sank into one with a snort of pain. Nothing seemed to be working right. It was as if I had a million tiny fractures, all waiting for the right moment to snap.

  My hosts didn’t waste any time. The hatch snapped shut, the cabin pressurized, and the roar of displacement, somewhat muffled, sprang up outside. With a lurch we were off the ground. I turned to look out the tiny window by my seat and saw the two Crushers standing there, paralyzed. I knew they were wondering who to be more afraid of, Dick Marin, who they imagined was a single man in an office far away, or these crazy cops who were right there, who’d been close enough to touch.