Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

by Justice in an Age of Metal

  I needed that knife.

  Above, vines were wrapping around the black metal of Trish’s tow cable. I let go of the cable, but it didn’t ascend. I wondered if Trish would be able to pull free when she needed to get away.

  The knife was at my feet. The tip had landed straight down and lodged in a thick vine. Once, twice, three times I kicked at it, trying to dislodge the knife. No luck. The tendril tightened. I could see marks in the metal where acidic sap was beginning to tarnish the polish.

  The hardened vines were edging closer. I pulled hard at the tendril and edged a little to the left, where there was still some space. The open clearing was only a meter farther down, but it might as well have been a kilometer.

  An offshoot of the tendril brushed the front of my coat.

  “Whoa, miss. Not so frisky,” I said. I batted it away.

  It came back relentlessly. It was thin like a pen, but as it coiled it looked to me like it was trying to gently pick my pocket.

  I smiled.

  It was trying to pick my pocket, or coil around it in any case.

  “Here, miss,” I said. “I’ll save you the effort.”

  Pulling against the vine that held my wrist, I dug deep into my pocket with my right hand and pulled out a fistful of little metal marbles. My e-cuffs, all of them, were attracting these vines and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them.

  I tossed the cuffs up—as high as I could and as far. They mostly bounced off of the younger vines, but when they hit the older vines they stuck.

  There was enough metal in the old vines that the things activated.

  A black light surged into the back of my eyeballs. Next I knew, I was on the ground, face first in the red dirt. Not three meters from me was a crude stone door, complete with a carved wooden doorknob.

  Above me, the vines were twitching and convulsing from the pulse of the e-cuffs. Vines lashed and spun for as far as I could see. I spotted the knife I’d lost in one, but it would be too dangerous to reach for it.

  I crawled to the door. Every muscle in my body was sore, but I fought against it and reached up to the wooden knob. The door was unlocked. I slipped inside and pulled it closed behind me, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness.

  They didn’t, but the sunglasses shifted quickly enough. A colorless image appeared before my eyes and I could see well enough. I was in.

  Chapter 8

  “You all right?” Her voice shot loud through my head, and I just about jumped out of my skin. It was Trish.

  “The hell, woman?”

  “The plants went all crazy down there. I thought maybe they’d killed you.”

  After a little silence, I replied, “If they’d killed me, they wouldn’t be moving.”

  “Oh.” I maybe detected some amusement in her voice. “They weren’t moving for a while.”

  “They were killing me for a while.” I forced myself to stand up and stretch the stiffness out of my legs. The pulse from the e-cuffs had not helped the various aches and pains that had followed me all day. “You might want to see if you can get that towline free, deputy.”

  “Will do, sheriff.”

  There was a doorway without a door on the far side of the room, an open maw that belched the mechanical noises and the acrid smoke of some unknown monstrosity. The room was a mess—a clutter of desks and debris. One wall looked to be a shrine to dead technology. A dozen generations of computers were piled in a haphazard array across the floor. Shelves held valuable-looking equipment. My guess was that this was all left over from the previous owners, and whether the latest owners were squatters or legitimate owners, they’d never bothered to sort through any of it.

  As far as I could tell, there was only one thing of any real value in the entire room. A circle of chairs surrounded the center of the room. In the center of the circle was a small wooden table like the kind people used to own back when wood was an inexpensive building material. On that desk was something I hadn’t seen in ages.

  It was a bible, printed on paper and bound in leather. Long after digital took over the written word industry, the bible had survived. I had heard it said that the bible was the first book mass-produced by the printing press, and also the last. Those days were long gone, though. Nobody’d made them for years, which was why they were so valuable. I was looking at a collector’s item.

  I picked up the bible and leafed through its dangerously thin pages. I remembered those books from the days before the war. My mother had kept one at the bottom of an old trunk. It had been passed down through her family for generations. Conrad had found it once, and he wouldn’t stop asking her what it was. Eventually, she gave in and said it was a dead relic from a dead religion, left to collect dust and not cause anybody any more harm. I wondered what had happened to that book. My best bet was that my father had long since sold or destroyed it. He never did go for such things.

  The book in my hands had not been left to collect dust. That book was something someone used. From the gold foil on each page and etched leather binding, you could tell this was something someone really adored. It even smelled good, like leather and roses.

  The sound of voices sent me ducking down behind the cover of the chairs. I was built for stealth about as good as one of Brown’s longhorns, but I wasn’t fixing to be found just yet.

  “You get that latest shipment yet?” The voice was male—the sort of voice that always sounded like a whisper but carried the force of authority.

  “Yes, señor.” The second voice was strange. It was hard to place what was wrong with it, but having run into a good variety of weirdoes on the job, I was able to place it. “It arrived twenty minutes ago. We are processing it now, and distribution should go out later tonight.”

  “Is it the same as the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. We cannot afford another break in production.”

  The voices passed, so I hailed Trish. “Deputy, we have wikis down here.”

  “Shit.” She was sounding less and less professional. “So much for cornering one of them.”

  Wikis were about as wrong as a person could get, as far as I was concerned. Take a perfectly decent human brain, then network it with a dozen other perfectly decent brains. Connect all of that through some neural uplinks to a central computer. That’s a wiki. They are the absolute extreme of shared information, but I had never heard of them sharing emotional data, which gave them some very small, lingering sense of individual identity.

  It was a wiki who took my arm in the war. Slowly, painfully, and surgically, it had removed my arm and carefully cauterized the wound. I never did know why it hadn’t just killed me. It might have been some sort of new psychological warfare, designed in that twisted hive mind. If that was the case, it worked.

  A cold sweat trickled down the back of my neck.

  Bottom line: if one of them spotted me, they’d all know I was there. Trish was right. I couldn’t corner one. Also, wikis tended to replace as much of their human bodies as possible. They could easily overpower me. If it came down to any sort of fight, I was not likely to get out of there alive.

  Not that my odds were all that good to begin with.

  “So, I suppose I’ll be sneaking, then.” I said.

  “Good luck with that, boss.” I sensed a little too much amusement in Trish’s voice. “You want me to lay down a distraction?”

  “Not yet.”

  I tossed the bible back onto the table and moved over to the doorway. The hallway was dark, lit only by dim red lights flickering high above. Just outside the door, a conveyor belt moved steel one-liter bottles from left to right. They were empty at that stage, but a machine was filling them a short distance down the line.

  The wikis were a lost cause. I had to avoid them if I wanted to get out alive, but one of the many things I’d learned about wikis during the war was that they don’t like to talk. Not only do they avoid vocalization, but they also don’t even bother to properly form words among themselves. />
  That wiki in the hall had been talking. I needed to corner the guy he was talking to.

  They had gone to the right, so that’s the way I went too. My sunglasses had an echolocation feature, but the machinery in there was confusing it.

  It wasn’t hard at first. There was a wiki adjusting something on the bottling machine. I spotted his long, metallic neck and gangly arms quick enough that I was able to duck down behind a bottling machine before he turned my way. The yellow glow of its eyes pierced the dimly lit hallway, casting flickering shadows on the far wall.

  Crouched, I started to move my way past. Did I say I was as sneaky as a longhorn? Make that a whole herd of them. Wearing cowboy boots was pretty much the same as wearing tap-dancing shoes and a cowbell.

  Luckily, sneaking isn’t always about being quiet. Good sneaking is about blending in. It’s about being as much like the background as possible, in terms of sound, sight, and smell.

  I sensed the wiki’s movement on the other side of the console.

  I froze.

  My fingers touched the cold cement floor, and I strained my ears to sense any more movement.

  The machinery continued its tumult of activity. The rhythmic thrum of the bottler almost drowned out the pounding of my heart.

  I breathed slowly, matching the rhythm of the machine, not wanting to alert the ultra-sensitive ears of the wiki.

  I took a step forward, then another. I matched the rhythm of my steps with the rapid metronome of the bottler.

  Once I was past him, I stole a glance backward. The wiki’s head was tilted, as if he knew something was wrong. He wasn’t looking my way.

  Ahead, I could see another open doorway into another junk-filled storeroom. Beyond that I could see a smaller doorway with an actual door. That was where I needed to be.

  Matching my rhythm again with the machine, I made my way forward. The loudest sounds of the room faded behind me as I got closer to the door.

  There were more noises coming from the room. Voices, muffled too much for my ears, rang out angrily. They were two voices—human, as far as I could tell. One of them might have been the smooth voice from before, but the other was definitely not a wiki. It had the defiant tone of youth.

  The shades proved themselves useful once again. Yellow text started flying in front of my eyes, presumably translating the words that were being spoken behind the door. I moved back into a corner, where visibility to me would be reduced in case the wiki looked my way.

  “God’s work, Sammer.” I thought that this must be Mr. Smooth. “People need this. We’re saving people.”

  “I know it’s God’s work. We did everything just like normal.”

  “Yet, the police are involved?”

  “Yeah. This morning…”

  There was a gap in the conversation. It was still going on behind the door, but they must have shifted because the glasses could no longer pick up the words.

  Back down the hall, machines continued to roar their rhythmic cacophony.

  I edged forward to better catch the conversation.

  “In God’s work, there sometimes needs to be sacrifices.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hundreds are being saved every day. If one falls so that hundreds may thrive, doesn’t that make sense?”

  “I suppose. But, I don’t even know…” The yellow text stopped again, even though the talking continued behind the door. I grumbled in frustration and crouch-walked right up to the door. I would be completely visible to anybody in the hall, but the text started up again.

  “Must be done, my friend. If someone was there, as you say, then they will describe what happened. This will lead the law directly to us, and even though our souls are clean we will suffer great setbacks. You must do as you must.”

  “But Ben wasn’t—”

  “Then who else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then you must do as you must.” There was a pause. “Go now with God’s blessing.”

  Straining my hearing, I could sense a door opening and closing in the room. Whoever that kid was, he was leaving out a back door.

  “You get all that, deputy?” I asked.

  “Enough of it.”

  “He’s leaving now. Get eyes on him. Take him down if you can.”

  Just then, emptiness filled the air. Silence.

  Everything had stopped. Fighting my fear, I looked down the hall to see the shiny-headed long neck of the wiki I’d snuck past. His hand was on a big red button, and he was staring at me with glowing yellow eyes.

  “You will stop.” His voice had that wrongness about it still. The thing started walking toward me on stilt-like legs that clanged against the concrete with every step. Farther down the hall, I saw more movement.

  I stood and tipped my hat to the metal monster.

  “Could use that distraction now, Trish.”

  The door was locked. At least, it would have been considered locked for legal reasons regarding breaking and entering. It was not, however, locked in any meaningful way. I popped the doorknob out of the door with an easy black metal backhand and ducked through the door.

  My visit was not expected. Mr. Smooth was leaning too far back in his chair to start with. Upon seeing me he overbalanced backward, but I believe it was the sudden screeching siren that made him fall. I only caught a glimpse of the man before he toppled back. Black hair, crusted over with style. Baby-blue suit with a slim Texas tie. This guy looked about as smooth as he’d sounded.

  I wanted to arrest the bastard. I really did.

  Unfortunately, I had more pressing concerns. The door burst open behind me, just as I reached the exit on the opposite side.

  The metal man crouched through the door, lumbering and lurching like he was drunk. His eyes found me for just a second. As I passed through the door, I felt a wave of heat from behind.

  Then I was free. The scorching sun beat down on me, but my shades compensated. A short path carved through the heart of the kudzu, giving me a straight shot to a small side-landing zone.

  I ran hard. My ribs hurt. My head hurt. My knee hurt. Everything screamed out against what I was doing, but I ran anyway.

  “Could,” I gasped for breath, “use… a… pickup.”

  I raised my left arm. A second later, I was flying through the air. Trish was reeling me in like a tarpon from the gulf.

  “Glad to be of service.” She smirked as she reached over the edge and hauled me into the cruiser.

  I nodded, a sign of deep appreciation that I’m not sure she got. “You get eyes on the kid?”

  “He’s fast but I’m tracking him. Speed he’s going, we should be able to pick him up just past the wind wall.”

  “Good. I’m tired of this damn city.”

  She smiled at that. “You and me both, J.D.”

  Chapter 9

  I wasn’t one to sleep on the job—normally, that is.

  It took a lot longer than expected to catch up to the punk biker. The kid’s skidder was fast. With incredible maneuverability and some truly amazing acceleration, the kid managed to get out of the city a lot faster than I thought possible. Trish assured me that outside of the city we would have the advantage. I hoped it was true. She sent the cruiser up high and opened the throttle.

  My head hurt. My back hurt. I felt old. I pushed tenderly at my ribs to see if anything was broken, but everything seemed like it was in place. The gash in my hand from the kudzu started oozing blood again, so I wrapped a bandage around it, wincing at the sting. My knee was swollen and I actually had to think for a minute before I remembered that the injury was from my fight with Jenkins.

  The energy had left me. All that adrenaline just suddenly wore off. I put my feet up on the soft cushions of the cruiser and lay back while Trish stared out of the front of her vehicle like a cat ready to pounce on a spider. The top of the convertible was down, but an environmentally controlled bubble kept the wind from our faces.

  I must have fallen asleep within seconds.


  I’m a kid again. I have both of my arms. I’m waiting in the back of Pa’s shiny new flying car, peering over the edge to a rusted-out old warehouse below.

  I’m amazed at the way the car just floats there. It doesn’t drift like our old bucket. The frame’s forged out of some fancy new dark metal. I remember hearing someone say it was made out of black metal—the stuff they forge from dark matter and iron. Ma would hate it, like she hates all of the best toys. I turn to tell my little brother all about it.

  He’s not there.

  Then I remember Conrad isn’t ever going to be there. He’s dead.

  Gunshots ring out below. Each shot echoes a metallic pang against the old tin building. Each shot startles me just as much as the previous one.

  My heart pounds and I gasp for breath. I duck down from the side of the car and curl up in the middle.

  Then Pa’s back in the car.

  “What happened, Pa?” I ask.

  “Justice, son” he grumbles. “Just some justice.”

  When I look up, Denise Brown is in the car. It’s not the same car, though. It’s Trish’s cruiser and Denise is too close.

  She leans even closer. Her soft body brushes against mine.

  “You’ll find them, won’t you?” She whispers this into my ear like she’s nibbling the words into place.

  I nod.

  “You gotta help me, sheriff,” she whispers. Her breasts are heaving as she breathes, rubbing against me. “Help me get what I need.”

  I nod again, my body’s responding to her advances, but something feels wrong.

  She grabs my shirt and pulls me on top of her. She plants kisses on my neck and all over my collarbone.

  Then I woke up.

  Trish was looking at me. One corner of her mouth was turned up in that infuriating smile.

  I blinked the sleep out of my eyes. “Ugh,” I said. “That was messed up.”

  “Sounded like a perfectly normal dream for a young boy like yourself.”

  I shot her a look, realizing too late that she couldn’t really see my eyes through my sunglasses. “Strange dream is all. Dreamed about Denise Brown.”