Grimmer Than Hell

by David Drake

Lacey licked his lips. "Well," he said, "You got the stylus Mooch took off me?"

  Allen nodded, his forehead wrinkling. He slid open a drawer in the console and pulled the ivory-colored instrument from the varied truck within.

  "It's not just a stylus," the hunter said truthfully. "They learned a trick from Tesla—its a laser that'll cut forever if you just hold the base against a good ground. The wall behind you'd do. You press the button on the side and it shoots forever."

  Allen stared eye to eye at the smaller man. "You're lying," he said. With the beginning of a smile, the leader touched the back of the stylus against the wall and pressed the button. The tip was centered on Lacey's breast.

  The ground conduction signal shivered into the rock. Nothing visible occurred in the room.

  Lacey relaxed. He smiled like a shark feeding. Bill Allen blinked in surprise, not at the failure of the "weapon," but at the hunter's reaction to his attempted murder. "This far away, there's maybe a ten-second delay," Lacey said. He dropped flat on the floor beside the safe.

  "What—" Allen began. He groped for the powergun in his belt. The shock wave from the explosion in Black May's quarters reached him before he could draw. The wave front drove the mahogany bar at an angle before it, pulping all of Allen's body between his neck and his diaphragm.

  Lacey did not really expect to live through the blast. It drove down the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels like a multi-crowned piston, shattering whatever stood in its way. The Boxcars and everything in it were gone, driven meters or kilometers down the tunnel in a tangle of plastic and splinters and blood; everything but Lacey and the safe that shielded him.

  There was no sound, but Lacey found he could see after the ground stopped quivering like a harpooned manta. A hundred meters of tunnel roof had been lifted by the blast. It collapsed when it fell back, close enough to Lacey that his feet touched the concrete morraine when he tried to straighten from the ball into which instinct had curled him.

  The air was choking, but with dust and not K2—yet. The rebounding shock waves of the blast would suck the stockpiled gas into every cranny of the tunnel system soon, but at least the lethal cargo had not ridden the initial wave front. Even with the safe to turn it, the blast had pounded Lacey like a rain of fine lead shot. He rose slowly, sucking air through the hard fabric of his sleeve. Once the ground beside him came into focus, he saw a dropped powergun. Lacey picked it up and began to stagger toward an unblocked staircase.

  Those who knew Jed Lacey best thought he was merciless. They were wrong. He used his weapon repeatedly before he climbed to the street. That was the only mercy desired or available to the hideously mangled forms who mewled at him in agony.

  * * *

  The guards at the anteroom of Level 20 were nervous and confused, like everyone else in the City. The lower levels of some buildings had burst upward, killing thousands. Long sections of traffic-laden streets had collapsed, adding their loads to the death tolls. K2 was denser than air, but the swirling currents raised by the explosion had blown tendrils of the gas to the surface in many places. Where the odorless hemotoxin touched, skin blackened and flesh swelled until it sloughed. Red Teams wearing atmosphere suits were patrolling streets that were otherwise deserted by the living.

  Lacey pushed through the shouting clot of newshawks. He was gaunt and cold. His suit had been shredded into the garb of a jester mocking the Plague. No one who looked at Lacey stayed in his way.

  The door from the Commission Room slid open to pass a uniformed captain in full riot harness. "Max!" Lacey croaked. His fingers brushed the heavy man's wrist to keep him from leveling the slung needle gun.

  "Where the hell did you come from, Lacey?" Nootbaar grunted. The guards stood tense and featureless behind their faceplates.

  Lacey grinned horribly. "That's right, Max," he said. "Now I need to see the brass—" he thumbed toward the closed door—"bad. I know what happened."

  Nootbaar bit a knuckle. "Okay," he said, and he held the door open for Lacey.

  Commission staff and uniformed police made the room itself seem alive with their motion. Lacey slipped among them, headed for the three desks in the middle. A projection sphere was relaying the horror of a dwelling unit where three levels had sunk into a pool of K2.

  Characteristically, it was Lemba who first noticed Lacey's approach. He spoke silently to his implant. A klaxon hooted and the projection sphere pulsed red for attention. The Chief Commissioner's voice boomed from ceiling speakers, "Clear the room! Clear the room!"

  "What the—" Commissioner Kuhn began, but she too saw the ragged figure and understood. "Did he—"

  "Silence!" Lemba growled. "Until the room's cleared." The woman glared but accepted the logic of secrecy. Her gown was a frothy ball of red. It was much the same shade that Lacey's suit had once been.

  The door closed behind the last pair of armed guards.

  "I've done what you wanted," Lacey lied. But he had done what the world needed instead, protected one seed of civilization against the day when it could sprout . . . "Now give me a pardon for what I did for you. Then you'll never have to see me again."

  "Nothing was said about a pardon," Arcadio muttered over tented fingers.

  "I did what you wanted!" Lacey repeated. He did not raise his voice, but his eyes were balefires licking the bones of each Commissioner. "Give me a pardon and no one will ever know about it. Even you won't have to learn."

  "The explosion, the gas . . . ," Commissioner Kuhn whispered. "All these people dead in the streets—"

  "They died!" Lacey snarled. "It was cheap at the price, do you see? You've got your city back now, because the scum below blew themselves apart. The ones down there were tougher than you and smarter than you worms'll ever be—but they're dead. Don't clear the K2, just seal all the openings. You're safe forever now—from Underground. You're safe from the dead."

  "We aren't going to turn that loose, are we?" Kuhn asked slowly. There was nothing rhetorical in her question.

  "The alternative is to try to keep it caged," Lemba noted. He shrugged toward Arcadio. "I doubt that would be a profitable undertaking. And we have a great deal else to concern ourselves with at the moment."

  "All those dead," Kuhn said. "And we directed . . ."

  The Chief Commissioner coughed. Neither of the others spoke. "Citizen Lacey," Lemba said, "by virtue of the powers civil and criminal vested in me by the Charter of this City, and with the concurrence of my co-commissioners—" he looked at each of them. Arcadio nodded minusculy; Kuhn did not, her cheeks as bright as her garments, but she did not gainsay Lemba—"I do hereby pardon you for all crimes, actual or alleged, which you may have committed within this subregion to the present date."

  Lacey nodded. "That pardon's the only thing I'll take with me from this City, then," he said, "besides my mind." He slipped the powergun from beneath his tunic and laid it on the smooth floor. His toes sent it spinning toward the frozen Commissioners. At the door, Lacey called over his shoulder, "Careful of that. There's still one up the spout and two more behind it."

  The door closed behind him.

  * * *

  The six-year-old was blind with tears as she ran into his legs. Lacey lifted her one-handed. "Can I help?" he asked.

  "The street fell!" she blubbered. "I can't go home because the street fell!"

  "Umm. What building?" By now the gas would have seeped back into Underground, but a windrow of blackening bodies kept the thoroughfare empty. The dead did not touch Lacey any more. Only the living mattered.

  "Three-oh-three-oh forty-ninth street level ten," the child parroted, her arms locking about Lacey's neck.

  "Sure, Level 10, no problem," the Southerner said. He glanced around to get his bearings. "Your parents'll be looking for you, so we better get you home, hey?"

  Humming to himself and the girl, Lacey skirted a wrecked truck still lapped with burning alcohol. Lacey was alive, maybe for the first time in fifteen years. It was going to take work, but he thought he l
iked being a human being again.

  THE END

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