Working Stiff tr-1

by Rachel Caine

  So who was this Bryn? No, not who. What was this Bryn?

  She wasn’t a person anymore. She felt like one and she looked like one, but what he’d just shown her had stripped that away.

  She was an animated, breathing mimicry of life.

  “Bryn,” he said, and drew her attention again. She hadn’t even realized it had wandered. “Bryn, please listen to me. You’re in the danger zone right now. It’s not just that your body has to survive; you need to survive along with it. If you withdraw, if you go catatonic, I can’t help you. Stay with me.”

  Bryn pulled in a deep breath. “Do I have a choice?”

  “Always. But I’d rather you didn’t pick the other option,” McCallister said.

  “Decomposing?”

  He ignored that, didn’t blink, kept his focus straight on her. “I have a proposition for you.”

  She laughed again. Still not a nice laugh. “They lock you up in this state for necrophilia.”

  “Bryn. Listen to me, because what I have to say is vital to your continued existence. Pharmadene wanted answers out of you, and I wasn’t able to get them. But together, we can offer the company something else. Something better, possibly.”

  She didn’t answer, because there didn’t seem to be much point. He was talking, but she didn’t understand what he was getting at. Not at all.

  They were never going to let her out of this room. Her water clock was going to fill up and spill over and she was going to sit here and rot. Literally. She imagined that it was going to hurt.

  “Bryn.”

  “I’m listening,” she said. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t seem to block out his voice. Her own sounded remote and odd, disconnected from the rest of her, but it seemed to reassure him.

  “I’m going to put you back in Fairview Mortuary.”

  That called for another laugh, but she couldn’t dredge one up. “As a corpse in the prep room?”

  “No,” he said. “As the new owner. Inheriting it from Mr. Fairview. You’re his niece.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are now, on paper; he didn’t have any other living relatives. You’ll go back to work, oversee the necessary repairs, start up the business again. Make it known you’re carrying on your uncle’s work in every way.” McCallister glanced over at Fideli. “You’ll hire Joe as a funeral director. He’ll help you out if you have any trouble, and make sure you get your shots on time. Your job is to go through Fairview’s records, and try to make contact with Fairview’s underground supplier of Returné and bring him—or her—out into the open so we can shut down the leak who’s selling the drugs, quickly and quietly.”

  “And then what?” Bryn asked him. “I go back to being dead?”

  “Bryn—let’s just take this a step at a time, all right? I’m doing what I can for you. This gets you back into the world and gives you a kind of normal life. Do well on this, and I’ll fight to keep your drug regimen in place. Deal?”

  She didn’t answer. She stared at him mutely, feeling as if parts of her were just … shutting down. Falling away. Important parts of her, already gone.

  Hope, for one. A sense of who she was.

  All gone now.

  “All right,” she said softly. “Deal. On one condition.”

  McCallister hesitated, frowning just a little. Maybe he felt the increase in her pulse through her fingers. “What condition?”

  “I get to have the gun. Not Fideli.”

  “Joe’s trained—”

  “So am I,” she interrupted him. “Four years surviving in Baghdad. And I get the gun, McCallister. Or you can sit here and watch me rot.”

  He pulled back, baffled, frowning in earnest now. “Why do you want it?”

  Fideli answered for her, face gone still and hard. “Because she wants to be able to end it,” he said. “Put a bullet through her brain. Do damage the nanites can’t repair. Right, Bryn?”

  She didn’t answer, but it sounded pretty good to her.

  There was a moment of silence, and then McCallister sighed. “Not a bad plan, but it won’t work. The only things that will truly end you are fire, dissolution, or dismemberment, and I can’t see you sawing off your own head. You’re tough, but nobody’s that tough.” McCallister tried for a smile, and almost made it. “If you put a bullet through your head, you’ll just be wasting bullets and screaming a lot.”

  She felt her teeth bare in something that didn’t feel like a smile. “How about if I use one on you? Would that work?”

  “Are you asking if I’m like you? Revived?”

  “Revived,” she echoed, testing it out. It sounded innocent, like she’d just had a long rest. “Yes. Are you revived?”

  “No. I’ve never died.”

  “Him?” She glanced at Joe Fideli.

  “No. The drug’s still highly classified, and highly experimental, not to mention expensive. Finding a way to keep you stable and on the drug constitutes extraordinary measures.” His dark eyes locked on hers, demanding a straight answer. “If I give you a gun, are you going to hurt yourself? Or others?”

  She imagined doing it. First holding the gun to her own head … but if what they were saying was true, it’d just be painfully inconvenient. And temporary. And messy.

  So could she shoot Joe Fideli? He’d brought her back to this. He probably deserved it. Or McCallister. Shoot him right in the heart, if he even had one, which she doubted. She could imagine it, but it didn’t hold any emotional warmth for her.

  She’d just be spreading around misery.

  “No,” she said, and for the first time, her voice sounded like her own. “No, I wouldn’t do that. I just want to be able to protect myself. It’d make me feel … safer.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Fideli said drily. “I’m all flattered and shit.”

  “Joe,” McCallister said. Just that, and Fideli went back to being a statue. “All right, you get a gun. And you get paid, Bryn. You run Fairview, and you spread the word that you’re continuing all of your uncle’s business ventures, including the one running out of the basement. I’ll supply you with a stock of Returné, both for yourself and for whatever unfortunates still need the shots, but you have to find his supplier quickly. I can’t guarantee an unlimited supply.”

  “I’ll need more,” Bryn said.

  “More. More what?”

  “Money. If I’m taking over Fairview, I need clothes. Better shoes. A real operational budget.”

  “You’ve got it. We’ll be depositing money in an account in your name. Joe will bring you the details. It’ll come through a network of shell companies, out of an annuity. You were left the money from your great-aunt Tabitha.”

  “Tabitha? Seriously?”

  “Tabitha Quick. She was a real person in Fairview’s family tree, just like you.” McCallister stood up, looked at her for a moment, then went to the door. It buzzed open for him, and he was outside for only a few seconds before coming back and shutting it again.

  He had a small pneumatic injection gun in his hand, loaded with a clear vial of … something. “Your arm, please,” he said. When she angled her shoulder toward him, he cleared his throat. “Doesn’t work through cloth.”

  Oh. In retrospect, dressing might not have been the best choice, because now it meant she had to slip off the button-up shirt; the sleeves were tight, and wouldn’t roll up that far. She unbuttoned it down the front and said, “I guess you’ve both already seen it anyway.”

  Fideli promptly looked down at his feet. McCallister kept his gaze carefully on her face as she pulled the blouse aside and bared the flesh of her upper arm.

  “What we saw was a body. It wasn’t you. You, of all people, should understand the difference,” McCallister said, very quietly, as he put the pneumatic gun to her arm. He pulled the trigger, and there was a star-sharp pain in her skin, then a heavy kind of warmth. “Done.”

  She pulled her blouse back together, holding it in place until he’d turned away, then did up the buttons with fast, sh
aking fingers. “How many others have you done this to?” she asked. “Like that man in the video?”

  “He was number four in the trials.”

  “So four.”

  “No,” McCallister said. “He was the first to make it. There have been six since then. Not including you, and whoever Fairview brought back. I told you, it’s top-secret and highly experimental.”

  She met his eyes and said flatly, “Why me, then? Why did you bother?”

  McCallister exchanged a look with Fideli, who shrugged guiltily. “I thought there was an outside chance—”

  “You knew I didn’t know anything. You knew I’d just started.”

  This was evidently news to McCallister, who straightened his already straight posture to give Fideli a long, measuring look. Fideli shrugged again. “No excuse, sir. She was a good kid, and I thought there was an outside chance she could be useful. My fault she ended up dead in the first place. I should have gotten there quicker.”

  “We’re not in the business of cleaning up your conscience,” McCallister said, and then shook his head. “Done is done, but we’re having a conversation later.”

  “Well, that’ll be fun.”

  While he was distracted, Bryn slipped in the question she really wanted to ask. “So you wouldn’t have brought me back if I hadn’t been of some potential use to you? Even though you got me killed?”

  For the first time, she got an unguarded reaction from Patrick McCallister. It was written all over his face, just for a second, and then the corporate drone was back, smooth and seamless. “Of course we would have tried,” he said.

  Liar. But what was interesting to Bryn was that what she’d seen flash over his face hadn’t been the logical match to the lie—not impatience, or disgust, or superiority. What she’d seen had been pure, weary guilt.

  Patrick McCallister, she thought, didn’t really like his job very much. Well, how many corporate drones actually did? Brilliant deduction, Bryn, she told herself. You could get federal funding for a research project on that.

  Still, it made him just a touch more human to her.

  “When can I get out of here?” she asked. She rubbed her arm where he’d given her the shot; it felt warm now, and a little tender.

  “Soon,” he told her. He went back to the door and opened it again; this time he was gone longer, and Bryn took a deep, convulsive breath of fresh air that drifted in. Well, not fresh, but new. She felt stifled in here. What she could see of the hallway outside looked like more of the same, though—white tile, clean-room sterility. She couldn’t see any natural daylight, just fluorescents. It felt like they were underground, but they might just as easily have been fifty stories in the air, sealed off from the outside.

  McCallister came back with something that looked like a tablet PC, something he made a few taps on and then handed to Joe Fideli, who examined it and nodded.

  “What is that?” Bryn asked.

  “A lot of things, including an audio/video recorder, infrared detector, secured Internet connection, and tracking device.”

  “And it’s got blackjack on it,” Fideli said, straight-faced. He tapped the screen, then turned it around to show her a map, with a blinking light superimposed on it. “That’s you. I can track you anywhere with this. There’s an app for everything, apparently.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”

  “The nanites in your bloodstream represent a significant financial investment,” McCallister said. “We’d prefer it if we knew where you were at all times. And, obviously, we need to be able to find you to get you the shot.”

  She hated the first part of that, but the second wasn’t unreasonable. “Where’s the tracking device?”

  “Inside you,” Fideli said. “It’s a smart device; it went in with the nanites and is attaching to your bone right now. Won’t come off easily. Long battery life, too.”

  “It’s not something we would use on a living person,” McCallister said. “The battery sheds toxins, and can lead to metabolic bone problems, but the nanites can easily deal with it.”

  “You people are crazy!”

  “We’re not you people,” McCallister said, and handed her a clipboard full of paperwork. “You’re one of us now. Officially.”

  She looked at what he’d handed her. Employment forms, including—of all the crazy things—a full application and 1–9 form. He shrugged.

  “I’ll need to see some ID, too. Welcome to the corporate world,” he said. “I never said it would make sense.”

  Fideli drove her home about six hours later, in a big, black SUV with dark-tinted windows that just screamed covert operations to her. She felt a little queasy, and rolled down the window enough to get a cool breeze on her face. It was night again. She’d been dead most of one day, at least.

  The first day of the rest of your so-called life. That almost made her smile. Almost.

  “Hungry?” Fideli asked her. “ ’Cause I could murder a burger right about now.”

  She wasn‘t, but she wasn’t sure whether that was biology or just depression. “Do I eat?”

  “Sure. Same as you ever did.”

  “Oh. Okay. Burger sounds fine. Whatever.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. The SUV smelled like leather and cologne. A guy car, definitely. As she shifted to make herself more comfortable, something dug painfully into her hip, and she reached behind her to find it.

  She pulled out a brightly colored plastic toy gun. Day-Glo orange and yellow.

  Fideli glanced over at it, rolled his eyes, and grabbed it away. He tossed it in the backseat.

  “So … what is it, some kind of well-disguised stealth weapon, or—”

  “My kids,” he said. “Can’t ever get them to clean up after themselves. Sorry about that.”

  Kids. She looked around the SUV with fresh eyes, not assuming anything this time. It was clean, but there were definitely signs she’d missed the first time … the most obvious being the infant car seat strapped in behind her.

  She couldn’t help it: she laughed, and kept laughing. It felt like a summer storm of pure, frantic mirth, and when it finally passed she felt relaxed and breathless. Fideli, making a right-hand turn into the parking lot of a burger joint, sent her an amused look. “What?” he asked. “It sounded good, whatever it was.”

  “I had you pegged for some corporate James Bond,” she said, and shook her head. “Licensed to kill. Driving some kind of high-tech armored spy vehicle with rocket launchers. Jesus, you have a car seat.”

  “Wouldn’t let my kid ride without it,” he said. “I’ve got three. Oldest is Jeff; he’s seven. Then Harry; she’s five. Juliet’s the baby.”

  “I guess you’ve got a wife to go with that.”

  “Kylie,” he said. “Best wife in the world. Best mom, too.” He sounded quietly proud. “Here. Pictures.” He opened the glove box, and there was an honest-to-God brag book in there, of charming kids and a pretty wife. Fideli looked like a different person in those pictures, relaxed and happy, a little goofy. It was … adorable.

  And it reminded Bryn, with a cold shock, that her life was never going that way. Not now. She stared down at the picture of Juliet, a happy, giggling little baby in her mother’s arms, and her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t have kids now, can I?” she asked.

  Fideli said nothing. When she looked over at him, his mouth was set in a pained, grim line, and his knuckles were tight where he gripped the steering wheel. She closed the picture album and put it in the glove compartment. The silence held until they were pulled up in front of the glowing marquee with all of the not-healthy choices.

  “I’ll have a Monster Burger with fries and a Coke,” he said to the speaker, and then glanced at Bryn. “How about you?”

  “Same thing,” she said, and tried for a smile as she wiped her eyes. “Guess cholesterol’s not an issue, right?”

  “Bright side,” he agreed, and conveyed the order. “Might as well get extra cheese with that.”

&nbs
p; The smell of the food filled the cab as they pulled away from the payment window, and Bryn realized that she was actually hungry. Funny, she hadn’t expected to feel that at all, for some reason. Sensation, yes, but needs? It just seemed strange.

  French fries still tasted as salty-delicious as ever. She munched on them as Fideli drove the last two miles to her apartment. It wasn’t much, a lower-middle-class kind of neighborhood with hardworking people. The apartments were generic and cheaply made, but affordable. Fideli didn’t ask what building she lived in, which indicated a little more knowledge about her than she felt strictly comfortable with; he parked the big SUV and said, “You mind if I take off? I like to eat with the family when I can.”

  “Sure,” she said. She felt strange, suddenly, as if she were looking at a building she didn’t know, facing an evening with a total stranger: herself. She took her Coke and bagged food, but made no move to get out of the truck. It idled gently, waiting. Fideli watched her in silence.

  “Hey,” he finally said. “Better idea. How about you come with me?”

  She jerked a little in surprise, because she really hadn’t expected that. She’d been waiting for him to impatiently order her out. “What?”

  “Home,” he said. “You look like you don’t need to sit alone and watch your burger get cold, Bryn. It’s been a pretty full couple of days for you, I’d say.” What he wasn’t saying was that he saw the fear in her. Fear of facing life alone, the way she was now. Whatever she was.

  “Joe …” She didn’t mean to use his first name; it was just instinct. She bit her lip. “Mr. Fideli … there’s no chance I could be … contagious, is there? I mean, I don’t want to put your family in any danger.”

  He shook his head. “Can’t share the nanites, even through an open wound. They’re keyed to your DNA, cease to function outside your body. I wouldn’t let you around the kids if there were any risk, believe me.”

  “And you’re sure that I’m not going to get a craving for brains or anything.”

  He laughed this time. “You let me know if that happens. But no. It ain’t your zombie apocalypse scenario, not this time. You’re just … you. On permanent, portable life support.” That was a sobering thought, and even he stopped laughing. He put the truck in reverse. “No arguments—you’re eating with us. We’ve got a guest room, too. Kylie’s got some stuff that’ll fit you.”