There was a shout from far away—a cry of pain that might have been mine. I saw a yellow light and then nothing.
Chapter 6
I was not accustomed to the inside of a jail cell. It was cold, sterile, and insultingly Spartan. There was an open metal toilet in one corner and a bare mattress in another. One wall featured a doorway, really more of a gap with a shining barrier of light. I had no idea what that light did, but I expected I didn’t want to touch them. So I did. My fingernail sent up a wisp of white smoke.
Some time had passed. I later found out it was something like an hour, but there was no indication when I woke up. It felt like days. My head hurt. My duster, sidearm, and hat were missing—not that they’d have done me much good in there. My white shirt was torn from when I’d skidded through my duster that morning. Blood spattered the otherwise pristine cotton. The wound still stung, but the throbbing of my bruised knee nicely overshadowed the pain.
I tried to piece together what had happened because I didn’t want to think about what the future might hold. Trish’s cruiser had arrived. Had she chosen not to swing down to pick me up or had she somehow still been captured? I decided it was unlikely that she had been killed or captured. There was no solid evidence to support my belief, but that’s what I believed anyway. Trish was a mystery, and mysteries tended to require faith.
Still, something didn’t fit. Why had Trish gone invisible and dumped me in the middle of trouble in the first place? Was it just a mean bit of city humor? Maybe she had some other motive. Maybe there was a reason she didn’t want to be seen. The more I tried to figure her out, the more mysterious she became.
“The Browns need justice,” I muttered to nobody in particular. “They need justice and ain’t nobody going to bring it but me.” I repeated it to myself, again and again, hoping to find some reserve of strength in it. No solution presented itself. My distorted reflection in the metal floor just stared back up at me like it was expecting me to do something. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of anything to do.
Eventually, a reprieve showed up in the form of the greasy accountant whom I’d recently bludgeoned. His pale face was already showing dark bruising along one side and his movements were awkward and uncomfortable. He looked just about exactly how I felt.
My anger was gone. When I looked at him I felt sorry for what I had done. I felt pity and remorse. Why had I done that to him?
Before I had a chance to really give it some thought, he spoke in a quiet voice. “They should never let you people past the wall, for your own sake.”
I stood to meet the man, determined not to show him how helpless I felt. Less than a meter separated us, but those shimmering lights still kept us apart. I took his confidence as another clue that I probably ought not to reach through the field to shake his hand.
“My apologies,” I said.
“If only I could accept an apology so easily.”
I stood quietly. If he had something to say, then I was just going to let him say it. No need to get too wordy. Jenkins and another man in an exoskeleton lingered in the back of the other room. Out there I could also see computer jacks and terminals, two shiny metal doors, and a big red button behind some glass. My guess was that I didn’t want that button to be pushed.
“It seems you had an accomplice.” The man shifted uncomfortably tenderly flexing his jaw. “Prettier and smarter than yourself.”
I nodded. There was no use denying it.
“The law is quite clear on the matter. You can either be sentenced to a life of labor or a simple, painless death. Accuser’s choice.”
“Life of labor?” I couldn’t keep silent anymore. The gravity of my situation was becoming clearer.
“Or a painless death. Due to recent events, I am leaning toward death.”
“For roughing you up a little?”
“No, of course not.” The man took a step back. “Tell me, what is your name?”
“Jasper Davis Crow,” I said. “Sheriff J.D. Crow, if you happen to like titles.”
He apparently did not. “Well, Mr. Crow, it seems your accomplice—”
“Who is also an officer of the law.”
“Your accomplice stole some very important information from us. Trade secrets are not to be trifled with in today’s economy.”
“I bet.”
“You will tell me who your accomplice is and who the two of you work for.”
“We don’t work for anyone,” I said. “We’re chasing down a smuggling operation from one of your former producers.”
“The information is lost. We understand that there is no way to contain it once it leaves our systems. We want that woman, though. We suspect she has stolen from us before and we suspect she will do it again. Give her to us and we might be able to deal.”
“Son, you’re going to need a better deal than what you’re offering if you want me to give you anything.”
A tail snaked out from the back of the man’s head, accessing some panel on the outside of the doorway that I couldn’t see. The field dropped and the man stepped forward. The top of his head came up to my shoulders, but his glare was something fierce.
He poked a finger into my chest. “You are not in a position to negotiate, wastelander, you decrepit waste of food and fuel. You are nothing to us. You should have stayed out of Austin like your waste of a life depended on it.”
“You listen to me,” I said in a low growl. “I am a sheriff—lawman of Dead Oak and purveyor of the justice you seem to have lost sight of. There’s no dealing in justice. The guilty pay and the innocent walk.”
He blinked at me.
I was angry again, not at the man before me, but at the whole damn city. Everything was wrong here. Everything had been twisted and broken long ago.
Something was making my left arm weak. I could still move it, but it wasn’t strong enough to assault a moth, let alone the weasel in front of me.
My right arm didn’t have that problem.
I grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt, lifted him, and pushed him forward.
The second goon sprung instantly to action, but Jenkins stood still. He just smiled.
I held the gibbering fool between the goon and me. In the corner of the room I saw my coat, hat, and gun. I made my way over to them and scooped them up with my left arm as best I could.
The goon ducked left, but I was too fast. He seemed too afraid to hurt my living shield.
He shifted right but so did I.
Jenkins moved almost casually to a console and pushed a few buttons.
“Put me down!” Now that he was in mortal danger for the second time in one day, the man’s voice had reached an insane pitch. All pity that I harbored for the man was long gone. I shoved him backward, letting him tangle up the goon for a second while I pulled out my gun.
The silver door slit away, revealing a tiny elevator.
Trish stood up, smiling like this was all extremely funny. It was not.
With casual abandon, Trish shot yellow pulses of energy at the goon and the man. She turned the weapon on Jenkins, but he raised his hands in a plea for peace.
“Really?” Trish said.
“I know what you’re doing.”
Trish shot him.
“It’ll be better for his career this way.” She waved me into the elevator. “His boss would never believe him if we’d left him alone.”
I nodded, shrugged on my coat, and stood quietly as she sent the elevator upward.
Trish demonstrated her inability to handle silence. “Things work differently where you’re from, don’t they?”
“Yup.”
“I mean, all you needed to do was walk in, talk the guy, then walk out. I would have gotten all the information if you hadn’t and then we could’ve moved on.”
I nodded.
“But you had to get physical with the owner’s son and knock fists with his bodyguards? What the hell, J.D.?”
“Owner’s son?”
“Yes, J.D. That was the
owner’s son’s head that you randomly pounded into unconsciousness. Chester Goodwin. He’s kind of a jerk, but I don’t know that he deserved to be treated like that. We are law enforcement, you know.”
“Are we, Trish? I know I am, but what exactly did you say your credentials were?”
“It’s not that simple out here.” She got a distant look. Just as she was fixing to say something, the elevator dinged and opened onto a roof that stretched out for about twenty meters. Wind tugged at us as we stepped out, but we didn’t have to go far to reach Trish’s car. Soon we were speeding away from Goodwin Dairy and down into the boiling smog of the turbulent city.
“So, where are we headed now, deputy? Out of the city, I hope.”
“One more stop,” said Trish. “Tarrytown.”
I didn’t like how that sounded. I was ready to be done with the city for the day, preferably for the rest of my life. One more stop. I could do just one more.
Chapter 7
Nobody’s story exists in a vacuum. Sometimes a tale has to get around to itself in a roundabout fashion. This is the story of a boy forever changed, and that’s where this is going. We met many times over the years, but it’s those first few that mattered most. To understand what happened to that boy, you need to understand the world he lived in, and you need to understand me.
I was tough but not the toughest. I was fast but not the fastest by a long shot. Any punk with a bit of money to burn at the mod shop was faster, stronger, and smarter than me.
It wasn’t just the city folk. It was all of them. My people, the natural people of the world, were a dying breed, and thanks to the Texan Armed Forces, I couldn’t even count myself pure. You might have called me human, and most people would have said my heart was in the right place, but things were different back then. Nobody lived without tech—not even those of us who despised it.
“You want a history lesson?” Trish asked as we visited yet another rundown hovel in the place she’d called Tarrytown.
In response, I blew a smoke ring, watching as it left the environmentally controlled bubble to be destroyed by the wind. She didn’t get the hint.
“Tarrytown was the only Austin neighborhood to correctly predict the weather changes that would lead to the superstorms. They built the very first windwall a decade before the first storm ripped through the city.” She smiled. “Since theirs was the only neighborhood saved from the storm, they were the only neighborhood that didn’t get rebuilt during the Rise from Ashes of the late twenty-first century.”
“Therefore, it’s a shithole.”
“Exactly.” Trish gave me a serious look. “Dirty, old, abandoned. This is the place the government forgets about. It’s where criminals come to live out their days and poke each other with sharp objects.”
“Wonderful.”
“Don’t fuck this up, boss.”
I glared.
“They don’t need your judgment. People don’t believe in justice here.”
“I won’t judge.”
“Yes, you will.”
“I’ll keep it to myself.”
She gave me a doubtful look.
“I’ll try.”
“I guess that’s all I can expect.”
“Why do I get the feeling you think you’re my boss?”
“Maybe I should be.”
I gave her the scowl, a good one. As much as I appreciated her rescuing me from the Goodwin jail, something still bothered me about her. Unfortunately, if I wanted any sort of justice for the dead rancher, I’d have to rely on her some more. We weren’t any closer to solving the murder.
“Look,” she said. “Around here, I’m the expert. I ran in these circles for years before relocating to your backwater village. I have contacts here and I understand the local customs. Just keep your head low and hope nobody notices you’re a fleshy weakling.”
“Listen, deputy—”
“No, sheriff, you listen. You have one lousy augment. That makes you mostly human, which makes you mostly weak. You are a target here and I’m going to have to protect you. Keep your coat on and keep your toys fully engaged. Keep an e-cuff available at all times in case we need a quick takedown.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir.”
“Yes, miss.”
“That’s better.”
We hovered over the place for ten minutes, trying to get a feel for it. Trish wanted to rush in but I had a feeling. It was the sort of feeling that a normal guy might call fear and a smart guy might call intuition. I called it a feeling in my gut. I made Trish order her car to float there for ten minutes so we could see what was coming and going.
The building was old. Most of the buildings here were old, but this thing was ancient. It was big and had dozens of doors. It might have been some sort of retail back in its heyday, but it had been converted into a processing center. It was an L-shaped building that was covered almost to the point of complete concealment by a vine I recognized as iron kudzu.
Iron kudzu is a lot like the regular sort. It grows fast—dangerously fast. It can cover a hill in a day and swallow a building and trees in a week. Some years ago, some idiot scientist decided to engineer a variety of kudzu that would hinder troops during the civil war. It worked.
Fortunately, that scientist didn’t make the kudzu eat people. Unfortunately, it ate metal. Augmented soldiers fell to the stuff, getting trapped and sometimes strangled. Those of us who were unaugmented just passed right through. It was one more advantage for us naturals, but in the end even we couldn’t handle it. The stuff got into the wild and still grows all over Texas.
Twice during our ten-minute wait, we saw freighters—massive air trains with ceramic plating and photoelectric arrays mounted in long Mohawks down their middles—land on the back side of the building. The rumbling bellows from the first freighter indicated that it was packed with cattle ready for slaughter. The second one was a tanker, and I would have bet my six-shooter and a week’s salary it was full of milk. It landed in the short leg of the L-shaped building.
My sunglasses fed me a constant flow of information, most of which I ignored. It was useless stuff. It told me the history of the area, names and faces of people who lived here a hundred years ago, and road maps for the roads that had been swallowed by kudzu years ago. Like I said, useless.
“We go in down there.” I pointed at the short leg of the building. “Where you can see that dead spot in the kudzu.”
Trish bit her lip. “No way.”
“We just need to get inside,” I said. “And that’s the best way.”
“I’m not going anywhere near that stuff.” There was a hint of actual fear in her eyes. I figured she had to be afraid of something, but I never would’ve guessed she’d let it show.
“My glasses tell me there are doors all along the side of the building. It used to be a shopping center, you know.” Not so useless after all. I reached down and pulled out the bin that Trish had been organizing earlier. I rifled through the junk until I found what I needed: a four-inch, jet-black ceramic blade. I tested its sharpness with my thumb.
“You’ll never get past those plants.”
“We’ll see about that. They’ll never let us talk to the man in charge if we go in the front door.”
She rolled her eyes, but I could tell she was going to cave. For a moment, just a brief moment, I didn’t entirely dislike her.
“Tell you what, you wait out here and I’ll give it a shot. If I’m not out in thirty minutes, you come right in the front door and get me.”
“Pick up your corpse, you mean?” Trish concentrated for a second and the cruiser drifted over the patch of kudzu I had spotted earlier. “I’ll glitch their surveillance as you drop down, I’m already giving them a blind spot for us, so it shouldn’t be hard to hide your descent.”
I smiled to myself. The thought of surveillance hadn’t even occurred to me.
I leaned over the back of the cruiser and grabbed a tow cable with my left hand. The
cable was black metal, just like my arm. It was incredibly thin and coiled in such a way that I could easily drop myself from the car fifty meters into the patch of dead kudzu. I stuck the ceramic blade between my teeth, gave Trish a salute, and dropped.
It was a perfect descent—fast, smooth, and right on target. I hit the center of the dead kudzu patch with just enough force to send my headache into fits and knives of pain through my knee.
The kudzu wasn’t nearly as dead as I’d thought.
Like a coiled spring, the first vine I touched wrapped itself around my metal arm and pulled. I braced myself against it, but it had me unbalanced. My feet went out from under me and I fell forward.
It was all around me, choking out the hot sun and plunging me into darkness. Half a dozen long dead oaks scaffolded the kudzu, and I had landed only halfway down. I gasped at the depth of the patch. Farther down, the vine became woody—almost metallic. I grabbed the knife from my teeth and slashed at the vine that was holding my left arm.
I cut the vine just in time for another to spring into action. Iron kudzu wasn’t any smarter than your average plant life. It only reacted to the movement of metal.
Below the top layer, vines were slower but stronger. I sprang out of the way of the next coil. My feet were unsteady on the springy vines below. My boots hadn’t found soil, so I kicked off and dropped another few meters.
I almost made it.
A tendril shot down from above. Instinctively, I blocked with my right arm, but it didn’t slow down. Sharp fire ran up my arm as the vine cut deeply into the back of my wrist. The jet-black blade fell to my feet as the wicked tendril wrapped around my shoulder.
The stiffened vines around me shuddered. They were getting closer. They’d squeeze the juice right out of me if I let them. I cursed modern science for about the millionth time and tried to pull free of the tendril.
It wasn’t a lack of strength that stopped me. The tendril wasn’t impossible to shake because it was strong. It was impossible because it was springy. No matter what direction I pulled in, the tendril just stretched and moved with me yet the resistance was enough that I couldn’t escape.
Justice in an Age of Metal and Men Page 6