by S. C. Jensen
“What’s happening?” Hammett said.
“Run.” I shoved the back of Dickie’s jacket. He yelped and stumbled, scrambling on his hands and knees on the slippery concrete floor. I grabbed him by the jacket and hoisted him to his feet and pushed him again, keeping my eyes trained on the water. “Go.”
A roiling mass of glistening black hide burst through the surface of the river. I fired two rounds into the water. The crack of the pistol bounced off the walls of the tunnel and seemed to burrow directly into my brain. Two jets of water shot up where the bullets hit, but it was too dark to see if there was any blood in the water. The creature stayed down. I couldn’t tell if I’d hit it or if it was biding its time for the next attack.
There was a crash up ahead, and Dickie cursed loudly. He said, “Bubbles, I can’t see!”
“Coming, Dickie,” I said.
“I smashed my shin on something in the dark,” he said. “And now I can’t find it.”
“Something alive?” I asked.
The sound of his shoes sliding on the concrete made my heart leap into my mouth. He said, “I’m slipping!”
I jogged backward, keeping my eyes and the gun focused on the river.
Nothing moved.
Satisfied that whatever was in the water wasn’t going for an immediate attack, I spun around and ran after Dickie with my finger light pointed ahead.
I found Dickie crumpled at the bottom of a twisting spiral staircase, rubbing his leg. The ground angled steeply upward as I approached the staircase and my feet slid on the slimy surface of the tunnel floor. I grinned up at Dickie. “You found it.”
“Did you shoot a gator?” His eyes roved wildly along the river. It rushed along below us. We crouched on a kind of makeshift ledge that led up to the staircase.
Yellow eyes flashed behind the twisting metal stairs, illuminated by the pale glow of my finger light.
I kept the light trained on it and raised the pistol with my other hand. Dickie’s eyes widened and he froze. I said, “Don’t move.”
Taking a deep breath, I aimed between the stairs above Dickie’s head. The big, yellow eyes blinked. The thing’s mouth opened slightly, white teeth glinting in the light from my finger. A low, belching growl oozed out of its throat like it was letting off gas. Making room for its next meal. My hand jumped with every pulse of my heart. I wished I could transfer the gun to my upgrade, but I didn’t want to risk losing the light.
If I missed the shot, the bullet might ricochet off the staircase and hit one of us.
If I didn’t shoot, Dickie was gator bait.
Suddenly, an ear-splitting siren exploded through the tunnel. It bounced off the walls and tore through my eardrums, so high-pitched I almost couldn’t tell if it was a sound or if something was physically stabbing me in the ear. The gator gnashed its teeth and twisted its thick, armoured hide in a tight barrel roll, and splashed into the river. It sank below the surface, leaving only oily bubbles in its wake.
The squealing noise stopped but my ears kept ringing. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the sensation of angry insects buzzing around in my brain.
Then I felt a buzz in my pocket. Hammett’s voice chirped up at me. “Did I get it?”
Relief flooded through my body. Laughing, I stumbled forward and collapsed onto the staircase. I pulled Dickie up behind me and clambered up the stairs with leaden legs. A round man-hole cover blocked our exit from the staircase, but I shoved it up with a pneumatic kick from my prosthetic and slid it aside.
A refreshing drizzle of rain sprinkled down on our heads as we climbed up into an alleyway between two tall office buildings in what was probably the Biz District.
“You got it, Ham,” I said, giving Dickie a hoist out of the hole. I patted the sphere in my pocket and holstered the pistol again. “And I will never call you pork chop again, I promise.”
Oki was nowhere to be seen.
“Where are we?” I peeked out of the alley and tried to get my bearings. “Should we have gone the other way in the tunnel?”
The sky that peeked out between buildings was pitch black. The buildings were pitch black. No lights, no HoloPops. The street had no hack cab pick-up points. Was it even on the grid? Rain drizzled around us and into puddles that collected at the base of the buildings. Webbed cracks splintered up from the foundations on either side of the alley, and a thin current of puddle water flowed into them as if the basements were thirsty. Probably where some of the water in the tunnels had come from.
“According to my coordinates, we are at the northerly edge of the warehouse district,” Hammett said. “The nearest grid pick-up is about ten blocks southeast.”
“Did we walk that far?” Dickie said. “I kind of lost track down there.”
I had Hammett project a holomap through my tattler, and Dickie tucked in close around it to block the light in case anyone was around to spy on us. In the Grit, there were almost always people around to spy.
“There’s Sal’s place.” I pointed. “And there’s Cosmo’s.”
“We went in exactly the opposite direction,” Dickie said.
The little triangle that indicated our position blinked out and then reappeared a couple of blocks away. “What happened there, Ham? Why’d we move?”
“I don’t know,” Hammett said. “I’m getting interference from one of these buildings.”
“So this map might not even be right?” I said.
The clawing feeling in my chest was back. I felt like I was stuck in one of those nightmares where there’s something you need to do or somewhere you need to be or something you have to run from, and you’re just frozen in place. No matter how hard you try to move, your body is paralyzed.
And the need to do something keeps building and building until you think you’re going to suffocate.
Usually, after a dream like that, I wake up in a cold sweat, panting as if I’ve been running in my sleep. I’d give just about anything to wake up right now. I try to quash the panic with deep, controlled breaths. Dickie grips my sleeve. His eyes dart from the buildings to the alley to the map.
“If you move toward the grid,” Hammett said, “I should be able to get a lock on our position. Try moving southeast and try again in a few blocks.”
“Okay,” I said. “Ready to go, Dickie?”
Dickie nodded dumbly, but he didn’t let go of my sleeve. I had to prise his fingers off my arm. He shook his hand and said, “Sorry.”
“Bubbles,” Hammett said, its little electronic voice sounding slightly worried. “You might want to switch me into power save mode. That sound-wave burst I did back in the tunnel expended a lot of energy.”
I cursed. Did I even have Hammett’s charging station with me?
I looked both ways out of the mouth of the alley, then I checked the map again.
“Okay, Dickie,” I said. “One last look and we’re losing the map. Memorize as much as you can.”
Dickie took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded. His homburg sat a little sideways on his head, but his lips were set in a determined line. He said, “Southeast. Got it.”
I committed as much of the map to memory as I could, silently cursing myself for the years I’d abused my brain and body, and hoped against hope that Hammett would have enough battery left for us to do at least one more check. Then I killed the holomap and turned left out of the alley, staying tucked into the shadows along the edge of the building. Dickie jogged close behind me, so close I could hear him panting. His breath tickled the back of my neck in staccato gasps.
“We’re going to be okay, Dickie.” Looking up at the sky again, I said, “How long was I out for? It was still morning when I got to Sal’s.”
“About thirty-six hours,” Dickie said, his voice trembling.
I stopped short, my heart lurching into the back of my throat. “What?”
Di
ckie blinked at me with wide eyes. He said, “Give or take.”
Time was running out. How many days had it been now? I felt a sudden urge to turn Hammett back on to check the date stamp on the video and give me an exact number. I tried to focus, but the last couple weeks strung together in a hazy blur of images and emotion with no sense of time.
The longer Libra had Tom, the worse my chances were of getting him back, or at least getting all of him back. With Gore’s theory that Nathanial Price might have hundreds or thousands of prisoners to squeeze, I had a lot less faith that he’d hold to his original bargain. But I was the one closest to Rae. I was his best chance. He couldn’t risk losing his leverage over me by hurting Tom. He couldn’t.
I had no idea if that was true or not, but I repeated it to myself like a mantra, willing it to be so. When we got to Cosmo’s, I’d get Hammett charged up and zero in on the timeframe. But there was nothing I could possibly do to accelerate the process. There was no sense in worrying about it.
No sense at all.
My heart beat at the inside of my chest to tell me exactly what it thought of “sense.” But I forced myself to keep running.
This area of the city was completely unfamiliar to me. I thought I knew the Grit District like the back of my flesh hand, but my experience was admittedly limited to populated areas. This place was a ghost town. A forest of eyeless black buildings. Nothing moved in the shadows except for Dickie and me. Not even a rat or an alley cat to keep us company.
But then, animals relied on people—the waste, the scraps, the refuse of human life—to support themselves in the city. And there were no people here. There hadn’t been people here in a very long time.
I risked turning on my flashlight, scanning alleys and side streets as we passed them, looking for any sign at all that we were still in HoloCity and hadn’t been transported to some abandoned Old Earth settlement, million of miles across the stars from home.
Dickie sucked in a breath with a sharp hiss. He whispered, “What was that?”
I stopped and listened, blood pumping through my ears. “Did you hear something?”
“No,” Dickie said, and grabbed my prosthetic arm. He pointed my finger light down the last street we’d passed. “There.”
A low, squat building hunkered between the black towers like a storybook troll under a bridge. Its surface was a light grey marred with what appeared to be streaks of soot from fires burning at the base of the buildings, but there were no barrel burners there now. Dickie said, “Let’s go closer.”
“Why?” I said. Blackened windows clustered on the front of the building in groups of six or eight, giving in the unsettling appearance of a mutated spider. “Do you know this place?”
Dickie jogged across the street toward the building and motioned for me to follow him. I fell into pace behind him, keeping the light low to the ground in front of us. As we got closer, the forest of black towers thinned, and more troll-like buildings emerged from the pitch. They stretched as far as the eye could see in the murky light. Pale, ghostly shadows hunkered between the towers. Waiting.
Dickie stopped and said, “Turn off the light.”
I turned off the light and let my eyes adjust. “What are we doing here?”
“I know this place.” Dickie’s breathing had become ragged from running, and he cleared his throat into the crook of his elbow. The sound fell flat in the eerily still air. The smell of burned garbage lingered here, though no one seemed to be around to burn it. He said, “This is Creep Stacks.”
“Creep Stacks?” I almost laughed, but the way Dickie’s breath hitched when he said it stopped me.
“That’s just what I call it,” Dickie said. “It’s this weird apartment complex on the edge of the warehouse district. We used to do some shooting in abandoned buildings near this place. You know, real niche kink stuff. I always hated doing studio tours out here.”
“I don’t know it,” I said.
“You might,” Dickie said. “From the other side.”
Something jogged in my memory. “You mean that area with all the ‘No Vacancy’ signs?”
“Yeah,” Dickie said. “Most exclusive housing in the Grit. Pretty sure you have to be dead to get in. Nobody ever comes out.”
“I thought that was just where the king pins kept their runners and pro skirts holed up,” I said. “The HCPD has a long-standing white flag on the place. Someone’s paid up to keep the law out. But nothing ever seems to happen in there, so I never really worried about it.”
“It gives me the creeps,” Dickie said. “Ever since I was a kid and my parents first started taking me around to the more colourful ‘on location’ sets. I used to fake a stomach ache when they checked out the warehouse shoots. Creep Stacks.”
I had to admit the name fit. The buildings had an indefinable nightmarish quality, the way you try to explain a bad dream to someone else and when you say it out loud it sounds ridiculous, but the slinking sense of dread is still there, living in your head.
“Great,” I said. “At least we know where we are.”
“Not great,” Dickie said. “We’re on the wrong side.”
“What do you mean?” I said, but the slinking sense of dread scurried around in the back of my skull, and I knew exactly what he meant.
“We’re not in the warehouse district,” Dickie said. “This is that burned-out section of the old city that’s been blocked off with new buildings in every direction. I’m pretty sure being in here is a punishable offence according to at least seventeen different Trade Zone laws.”
My skin prickled with the feet of a thousand insects parading up my legs and over my scalp. I said, “We’re in the Burn?”
“I think so.” Dickie shivered and rubbed his hands up and down his arms as if to ward off a chill. “Just at the edge, I think. But this is it.”
The Burn was a section of the old city, before HoloCity had risen around it, where some kind of industrial accident had rendered the area inhospitable. I said, “Is it still radioactive?”
“Hopefully not here.” Dickie pushed his hat back on his head and wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of a dirty hand. A black streak, like the marks on the buildings around us, marred his forehead. He said, “But if we’d gone the other way, we might have been in trouble.”
The low, grey buildings of the Creep Stacks seemed to close in on each other, as if they were huddled together, laughing at us. I said, “We might still be in trouble if the only way out of here is through those buildings.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Dickie said. “The Burn is sealed off everywhere else. I assumed there would be a wall on this side of these buildings, too. Maybe Creep Stacks is enough of a deterrent.”
“Well,” I said and took a deep breath. “I’ve never actually heard of anything happening here.”
Dickie tried to grin, but the apples of his cheeks had withered into sunken blobs. “That’s because no one who goes in ever comes out to talk about it.”
I punched him on the arm.
“We could go back into the tunnel,” I said. “Try the other direction.”
“No way.” Dickie’s eyes widened and he shook his head vigorously. “If those gator things are swimming around under the Burn, I’m not taking my chances. They’ll be mutants for sure.”
“Okay,” I said. “That settles it. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, right?”
“That’s not an encouraging image,” Dickie said.
I ran my fingers through my hair and bounced on my toes. I patted the gun beneath my jacket and the pocket with Hammett and shifted my bag on my shoulders. I was ready to run if I had to.
“Here,” Dickie said. He passed me a silver-foil-wrapped stick. “I forgot I grabbed this for you.”
“Bubble gum?” I laughed, and my voice became a ghost bouncing off the walls of the buildings in front of us
, daring me to follow it. I unwrapped the gum and folded the sweet pink stick against my tongue. I closed my eyes, feeling the tension melt out of my muscles. I wrapped Dickie in a huge hug, picked him up, and spun him around. “You’re the best.”
“It’s just gum.” He laughed, too, and a hint of the old apple-cheeks came back. “I’ve got a whole pack.”
I stretched the gum between my teeth, pushed it out with my tongue, and blew a bubble the size of my head. It popped with a crack. I grinned and sucked it back into my mouth, relishing the sense of normality that flooded through my body with the old habit. It was a silly coping mechanism, childish and comforting.
And exactly what I needed when my world had been turned upside down. I squeezed Dickie against my side with my flesh arm and pressed my cheek against his, tears inexplicably stinging behind my eyes. I said, “Thank you.”
“I’m not much of a hero, Bubs,” Dickie said. “But I’ve got your back.”
“And I’ve got yours,” I said, and squared up to face the grey, scowling-troll buildings before us with a fresh sense of purpose. “Let’s get this over with.”
I jogged into the Creep Stacks with Dickie at my side.
For all the hype surrounding the apartment compound, the trip through the middle of the forbidden area ended up being anti-climactic. The buildings squatted around us sulkily, as if they were annoyed that we’d called their bluff. In the middle of the stacks, it was impossible to see anything beyond the charred grey concrete and the blacked-out eyes. At least here there were rats and the lingering stench of rotting garbage that said we weren’t the only human beings to pass through these parts in the last hundred years.
Occasionally I stopped Dickie and tucked in next to a windowless building to listen for footsteps, sure that we were being followed. But nothing appeared. We crept back out into the street and hurried between the buildings and, though I wasn’t able to shake the burning sensation of invisible eyes on my back, we never encountered another soul.