She’s done in under thirty minutes and feels the chill in stiff knees as she rises, only realizing then that Kurtis has been standing quietly all along. “You get what you were looking for?” he asks.
“I think I did. Thanks Kurtis.”
“No problem. Them I guess you’ll be off now?”
“I guess so too.”
“See you around?”
“I doubt that, Kurtis.”
He smiles, sort of. “Well maybe. Maybe not.”
He shoves gloved hands into his overalls and walks off. Kurtis had never been big on conversation, apart from that one time when he’d smiled sleepily and told her all about death like he was whispering sweet nothings to her. The one time he’d felt chatty and it had been the end of their relationship.
Death, human death that is, was being streamlined, he’d told her. Death takes up time and money but most of all, resources. To burn a corpse needs fuel, to bury one takes land. Right now, the Hubs are all out of both.
He’d been stoked because as a meat field worker, he’d been let in on the plan early. Funerals, he’d said, were phasing out over ten years. No more putting one hundred and eighty pounds of valuable resources into the ground for zero gain. Soon, every stiff in every Hub would end up like the John or Jane Does. They’d be recycled. Their death would be of use to the living.
She hadn’t been able to shake it for weeks afterwards, long after she’d broken up with Kurtis. Uncle Ted ending up as fertilizer and light grade oil. Grandpa as high protein foodfuel and soap, reprocessed in the same facilities that turned around expired livedrives. Kurtis had thought it dumb that they were delaying. He’d said that the government wanted to start right away but they’d realized public opinion wasn’t ready… not yet. He’d said people would accept change only when things got tougher and Kirsty had remembered the phrase when, three months later, Washington had announced a further round of water and energy cuts.
She looks down at these three bags of negative patient output and accepts that however creepy he’d been in telling her, Kurtis knew what he was talking about. As she turns away from these oddly shaped lumps in bags she can’t help recalling Arnold Jarrow’s threat, the old man explaining how Meat4 Power would mulch her into corn field fertilizer.
And she feels empathy, not for the hunks of chilled meat at her feet, but with the people they’d once been. She thinks whatever the lives they’d left behind and whatever dreams that died with them, they were already experiencing a small part of the future of the Hubs.
Wednesday 05 March
04:55 am
DAY NINETEEN OF his sixteen day mercwar, Jude Hemblen woke up sitting on a toilet. He blinked in the bright light of the washroom and rubbed his face, rough with three days of stubble, wet with drool that stained the collar of a black t-shirt smelling of sweat and gun smoke. Jaime Calderon, standing by the door of the toilet stall, kicked his foot again with an armored boot. “Time to get going, Hem,” said Calderon, already suited up, already with his M-81 strapped tight across the wide charcoal gray slab of his chest armor. “Different day, same old shit.”
Day nineteen of his sixteen day mercwar and still no end in sight. At the start, Hemblen told Crash The Pad they should fight hard, get rich quick and not get killed. But Crash The Pad had started dying straight away and after nineteen days, Hemblen couldn’t care less about getting rich. All he knew was that their phony war to cover some stupid product launch had turned real and sour and that the only way to stop it was to complete the whole pointless mission and cut Bostov out of Denver.
So here was his Chalk, packed into a small Shop ‘N’ Sip store that backed onto a Bostov electronics assembly plant and shared a storage yard with it. They’d paid the owner a thousand dollars to let them in when he’d closed up for the night and the dozen of them plus Perry the Union rep had slept in the washroom or behind the counter or anywhere else that they couldn’t be seen from the street.
Hemblen figured it was a small price to pay to go in the back way. He’d ruled out a frontal assault the day before when they’d seen patches of fresh asphalt all over the sidewalk. Without a doubt, Bostov had rigged the street with command detonated packages. Similar charges had blown Brenton Eichner’s feet off when he’d led Chalk Four into a pharm on day three. They’d killed three of Travis Richards’ Chalk Three the day after. All told, Crash The Pad had lost seventeen dead or wounded to concealed explosives.
Hemblen gave a quick briefing in a low murmur but by day nineteen, everyone knew the drill. His Chalk helped each other into their bulky armor, calf and thigh sections over boots, chest and back sections next, shoulder and arm plates after that. The armor, like the owners, was looking tired now, pitted and marked by small arms hits from Bostov employees fighting alongside Aurora Bor. Most times, gunfire left small, dusty pits that could be repaired overnight with two-part liquid epoxy. But Dave Walton had been killed outright by an unlucky shot through his face shield’s eye slit and Chip Denny lost his left hand when a steel-cored shotgun round punched out the Scuffgel sleeve connecting his glove to the forearm section of his armor. Far from staying down or going down, Bostov were resisting them any way they could. Kate Eales had died on day seven when a pharm wetworker stabbed her, plunging the blade between the back of her helmet and her high Kevlar-3 collar. Kate had smashed him to the ground with the butt of her M-81 and shot his heart out with a 12mm SLAP round but she’d still bled out in under a minute.
Chalk One lined up by the rear exit of the Shop ‘N’ Sip in assault order, Hemblen and Jaime Calderon at the front, Perry the Union representative at the back. When Perry gave him the thumbs up, Hemblen fastened his face shield, picked up his Benelli pump-action shotgun and slowly opened the door.
The yard was dark but tidy, concrete floor swept and scrubbed, piles of flattened cardboard cartons stacked shoulder high against the chain-link fence on either side. Hemblen crossed it in ten slow steps, crouched low, his shotgun pointing at the door, Calderon’s M-81 resting on his shoulder. He stepped off to one side and put two shots into the door lock, each one sounding like a hand clap behind the cover of his helmet and molded earplugs. As Perry announced mercwar over an open channel, Hemblen put three more rounds into the hinge side then kicked the door inwards and stepped aside.
Calderon went in firing, the M-81 blasts sounding real and dangerous compared to the Benelli’s pops. As Hemblen propped the shotgun against the wall, O’Toole and Pepper and Giroux streamed past him, all firing blindly into the doorway. As he unstrapped his M-81, Cooper and Pope and Leclerc rushed in and a cluster of FlashBangs started popping off. Then Hemblen joined the line behind Culley and cut left when Culley cut right and both of them started firing straight away because by day nineteen, Crash The Pad had worked out it was safer to shoot all the time than look for targets.
The room was a standard rent space for light industrial – open plan, painted cinder block walls and suspended ceiling tiles that were blowing into confetti under the juddering muzzle blasts. Hemblen blinked in the sudden bright light and found himself walking between two rows of assembly stations where, moments before, perhaps a hundred Bostov employees in white paper coveralls had been hunched over assembling and checking motherboards. Now most were cowering under the tables while some were scurrying to the far corner where Pepper, Cooper and Leclerc were capping off round after round. One came stumbling Hemblen’s way so he fired two simmunition rounds at his chest, the rushing propellant blackening his suit and scorching his skin, the concussion dropping him like a baseball to the brain. Hemblen stepped over and kept squeezing the trigger.
The smoky air juddered and leaped, paperwork and dust and little yellow memo stickers dancing in the gunfire. Hemblen pushed aside a worker shrieking as he cupped his bleeding ears. He caught the flash of the Aurora Bor logo and saw a startled opponent emerge from a side office, armored up and clutching an M-81 but without his helmet or face shield.
Hemblen and Cooper and Leclerc swung onto him and fired, ea
ting up his free hits in a couple of seconds. Hemblen saw him reaching for the pin on his rifle to ring out but still kept on firing. A SLAP, maybe his, maybe Leclerc’s, smashed into the side of his rifle and tore it out of his hands. Another caught him in the chest and spun him then two blew his back plate into swirling white clouds and sent him sprawling.
That’s how it was now. For the first week, Crash The Pad had stuck to mercwar’s unwritten rules – one shooter for each target, cease fire when they make a move to ring out. But then Aurora Bor had repeatedly livefired on Elisa Santiago even though a SLAP had shattered her elbow so she couldn’t pull the ring out of her rifle. Santiago had died and after that, Crash The Pad had decided to shoot Aurora Bor until they crumpled.
Hemblen tracked his aim off the falling mercwarrior and saw the Barrett rifle before he saw the shooter, the gun’s broad, flat muzzle brake and overlong barrel unmistakable and pointing his way. A Bostov worker in a paper suit was cradling it while another swept motherboards off a table to clear space for it. “Barrett! Front and center!” Hemblen shouted the warning over comms as his rifle clicked empty. He pressed the magazine release, tipped the M-81 so the heavy cassette slid off its mount rails and was reaching for a full mag when he staggered under a weight suddenly on his shoulders.
He dropped the rifle and reached over his shoulder, feeling an arm as he felt blows tock-tock-tocking against the side of his helmet. Hemblen tilted his head back to cover his neck then pulled on the sleeve as he dropped to one knee and the Bostov worker with bleeding ears landed heavily on his back in front of him. Still kneeling, Hemblen reloaded the M-81 and pushed the muzzle hard into the stunned worker’s cheek. The boy turned his face away and shut his eyes as if that would save him and dropped the weapon he’d been hammering into Hemblen’s helmet.
A soldering iron, the tip bent from the impacts. Hemblen hesitated for a second in disbelief, a kid with a blunt tool going up against a mercwar crew packing concrete-penetrating firepower. Then he put his knee on the kid’s chest and raised his rifle against the Barrett rifle but already Crash The Pad had thumbed their livefire toggles and splashed the area with SLAP rounds. The Barrett lay on the table, twisted. The shooters spattered the walls and slid to the floor in fabric-wrapped chunks.
And that was it. Less than two minutes and Perry called the action over. All mercwar rifles locked and in the sudden silence punctuated by coughs and sobs and groans, Crash The Pad felt nervous and exposed because the building still housed a hundred and fifty Bostov workers who clearly didn’t care about the Mercwar Union rules.
Hemblen lifted his weight off the kid with the bleeding ears who gasped for air. He stood and faced panting, ringed out Aurora Bor fighters, their armor strobing in the smoky air. He glanced at the four Aurora Bor on the floor, two moaning and writhing, two still. For an awkward minute, Crash The Pad pointed their deactivated weapon at workers who stared back with red-rimmed eyes and Hemblen wished Union rules had let him carry the Benelli into the room as back up. Then utivans started arriving in the street outside and the doors opened as Union after-action crews and MedAssist arrived to clean up. Crash The Pad gratefully backed out the fire exit to the Shop ‘N’ Sip.
“Transport will be here in a couple of minutes, Jude,” Perry told him.
“Great,” said Hemblen flatly.
“So nobody died this time,” said Perry.
“People died,” said Hemblen, snapping off his face shield and wiping his wet face. “The difference is nobody on our side died. Would have been a different story if we’d rolled up to the front door. You know that Aurora Bor are setting those mines, don’t you?”
Perry looked pained. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “There’s what you suspect and what we can prove and right now, Aurora Bor are obeying the letter of Union law, if not the spirit of it.”
Hemblen swished bottled water round his mouth. “People are dying because the other side are ignoring the rules. Did you see who was crewing that Barrett fifty cal? Bostov workers.”
“I saw that guy jump on your back, too,” said Perry. “These Bostov kids are some kind of crazy, huh?”
“I came this close to pulling the trigger.”
“Well, you did the right thing,” nodded Perry. “He was no kind of threat to you.”
“Wasn’t he? Could have taken a chisel to my neck. Could have got me the same way they killed Kate.”
“All the same, I’m glad you didn’t shoot.”
Hemblen took another sip of water. “I will next time,” he said. A couple of his crew packed into the Shop ‘N’ Sip’s aisles looked round in surprise.
“You don’t mean that,” said Perry.
“Stay down or go down – the rules of engagement are very clear. If I’d blown his face off, I’d have still been obeying the letter of Union law, if not the spirit of it.”
“Killing that kid wouldn’t have brought Kate Eales back, Jude.”
“But it might make the next one think twice about shanking me.”
Three unmarked utivans drew up outside and Crash The Pad picked up their bags and got ready to move out.
“It’s sad to hear you talking this way, Jude,” said Perry.
“I’m sorry, Perry but there it is,” shrugged Hemblen. “Thirty one casualties in nineteen days and I’m done with cutting anyone any slack.”
“You’re getting mean, son,” he said, as a burst of fire shattered the Shop ‘N’ Sip’s front window and drummed across the side of the first utivan and sent the driver tumbling out of the side door and scurrying for the shop door.
Hemblen gave a short, humorless laugh. “And now they’re shooting at us while we leave. Whole world’s getting mean, Perry. The whole damn world.”
Thursday 13 March
02:15 pm
KIRSTY WANTS TO keep going, to take the corpse samples to a Fedlab and have the results back before nightfall. Kareem says no. He tells her they’ve got to get back to the Bowlerama for a meet with the Reverend and Kirsty’s not about to argue with her teenage bodyguard. So they catch a cross-District Tramtrax, Kirsty using the downtime to call home on Slate. But Tim’s either tending to the rooftop fish tanks or waving his shotgun at the front door because even though she calls three times, he doesn’t pick up.
It’s a busy afternoon at the Bowlerama, every lane in use, queues at the shoe desk, pins clattering every other second. There isn’t a table free so Kareem makes one for them, leaning over a table packed with kids and having a quiet word that sends them scurrying. Kirsty and Judy Alexis sit and order fried food while Kareem talks at the bar with Pooky and the Reverend.
Kirsty feels good, better than she has for days. Sitting in this familiar place after doing her job fast and sure, it’s almost like she’s on top of her problems. The only strange part is Judy Alexis, her hair cut to match Kirsty’s, her clothing identical to confuse anyone taking a shot. She watches Judy Alexis watching the senior Grifters at the bar and realizes she knows nothing about these kids other than they always order milkshakes.
“Do you like him?” she says, nodding towards the bar.
“The Reverend?” says Judy Alexis, “who wouldn’t? He looks good, dresses good, even smells good. But I’m dreaming to think he even notices me.”
“I was talking about Kareem,” says Kirsty.
“Kareem? Oh, I just work with Kareem.” Kirsty smiles as the girl’s cheeks flush. “But what do you think of him?”
“Kareem?”
“No, the Reverend.”
“I like what he’s doing to our neighborhood. Past that, I don’t think anything about him.”
“You should,” says Judy Alexis. “He likes you.”
It’s Kirsty’s turn to blush. “Get outta here.”
“Straight up. Think about it. Why would he comp you all that kickboxing?”
“He already explained that. He was impressed the way I took down Dee Money when he pawed my ass.”
“You think?” Judy Alexis’ eyes sparkle
mischievously. “Then what about the gun hire? What about us bodyguarding you?”
“That’s a mutually beneficial deal. He’s getting fresh, filtered water for every dollar I owe him.”
“You think he hands out handguns to everyone who asks? You think he hires us out every day of the week?”
Kirsty thinks about it for a moment. “Maybe you’ve got a point there.”
Judy Alexis chews her fries triumphantly. “My point is that the Reverend likes you. You’re his favorite civilian.”
“You girls talking about me?” They look up and the Rev’s right there, flanked on either side by Pooky and Kareem. Judy Alexis looks mortified and stares at the table top. Kirsty stares up at him and changes the subject.
“Why d’you pull me in? I’m making big inroads into the case.”
“Yeah, Kareem was telling me. He thinks you might close it before sundown.” Kirsty thinks that, despite his smiles, the Rev seems distracted.
“Before I had to detour here, I thought I might have. But now? I’ve still got to work the nightclub evidence into a workable case, analyze the corpse forensics and link those into a workable prosecution. That’s a couple of hours work, minimum.”
“Yeah…” nods the Reverend, not really hearing. “The thing is though Kirsty… The thing is, I think that might have to wait. We’ve got fresh problems. Georgy’s outside.”
“He is?” She feels upbeat as she shoves fries in her mouth. “You told him to scram yet?”
The Reverend slowly runs his fingers through short, neat hair. “He’s got people with him.”
“What kind of people?”
“Gang kind of people,” says the Reverend. “Flame Warriors, Georgy’s old gang. Looks like he finally persuaded them to back him up.”
Her fries feel like oily mush in her mouth. Suddenly, Kirsty’s no longer hungry. “So we leave, right?” she says. “We hustle out the back.”
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