Gun Machine

by Warren Ellis

  That, Bat gave a little snorting laugh at, looking out of the window. “Hey,” he said. “Where are we?”

  “Taking a little detour. I wanted to look at something.”

  Bat peered around as if trying to track the random trajectories of a fly. “Is that Collect Pond Park over there? I thought it actually had a pond.”

  “It’s been under construction for years,” Tallow said. “There was a little pond added recently, and then they drained it and now they’re re-excavating it or something.”

  Collect Pond Park was a dismal flagstoned square, so gray that the stacked yellow-painted fencing from some construction phase or other actually brightened it.

  “That,” said Tallow, “is Werpoes. A spring ran from Spring Street, through the stream that was dug out for the canal that Canal Street’s named for, into a pond that was eventually called the Collect Pond. By 1800 or so, the pond was just a poison pit, so they dug out the canal to drain it out. Then they filled it in, and then they stuck Canal Street on top of the canal. And all of that used to be Werpoes, the main Native American village in Lower Manhattan, on the shores of the pond. What’s left is, well, that. The pond basin, the remains of the dome houses of Werpoes, and any other sign that anyone was here before us are all well underground. Under that piece of park, and over there.”

  Tallow pointed in the other direction, and Bat followed his finger.

  “The Tombs,” Bat said.

  “Yeah. The Manhattan Detention Complex is built over Werpoes and the Collect Pond. So’s the criminal court. The original Tombs complex was actually rotted out by the remains of the pond—the draining job was so bad that even when they in-filled the basin, the whole patch turned to marsh, and the damp crept up into the Tombs. So here’s what I’m wondering—”

  “Why your brain started receiving an NPR program on massively uninteresting history?”

  “I’m wondering why Jason Westover’s wife warned me not to go near Werpoes. Also, Bat, I’m going to remember that the next time you tell me my history-fu is much weak, because I did all the reading on this for that reason. The strong intimation was that our guy haunted Werpoes. But look around. The Tombs, the court, a park that a fat Chihuahua couldn’t hide in, office buildings…where’s a guy who stored his most prized possessions in a crumbling walk-up on Pearl Street going to live around here?”

  “Lots of police too,” Bat commented.

  “Including us,” said Tallow, pushing the car forward.

  Scarly was in the office-cave she shared with Bat, lit by her computer monitor. “I made him,” she said, without looking up. Her expression was oddly blank, in a way that made Tallow’s stomach turn in some weird involuntary presage to fear.

  Bat tumbled into the room, all flapping arms and nodding head. “You made him? You made who? Who’s been made?”

  “Our guy,” she said flatly.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Bat.

  “Our guy became a customer of the NYPD right at the top of the introduction of DNA collection. His sheet’s in the database. I got a match. I made him.”

  Bat looked over her shoulder at the screen and said something like “Shiiiiiiiiit.”

  “John,” said Scarly, “you want to look at this.” It was spoken like a threat.

  Tallow didn’t want to.

  Tallow wanted to blow it off, tell them to get on with it, drive back into the 1st, get a coffee, and let the world go by. Not even watch the world go by. He remembered the days when the world was just a moving backdrop behind a stage occupied solely by himself, whatever comfortable chair he had found, and whatever thought or tune or paragraph it amused him to rotate in his head for the length of his shift. It seemed twenty years ago. He knew it was just last week, but he was unable to summon last week with any clarity. It seemed like an image of childhood summer—or, perhaps more apt, a photo of last week blurred and filtered and glazed by a digital application that stamped the patina of faded memory over it.

  Tallow walked over and looked at the screen.

  There was the man he met outside the apartment building on Pearl Street.

  Twenty years younger, at least. Not quite so calm. Lean, but not quite as hard. Blood on his face. Not his blood.

  There was a name on the screen. The name didn’t seem to matter.

  Tallow realized he could hear his pulse. As he swallowed and closed his eyes, Scarly’s voice rose over the booming in his ears.

  “…ex-soldier. The doctor who looked him over has a note on the sheet saying he was probably schizophrenic. There’s also a handwritten annotation on the scan of the paper. CTS?”

  Tallow actually smiled. “You haven’t spent too much time in emergency rooms.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It’s ER medical slang. CTS means Crazier Than Shit.”

  “Great.”

  Tallow leaned in. His man had gotten pulled in on an assault charge, but the victim seemed to have somehow dematerialized. So all they had was a lunatic veteran wearing someone else’s blood and cluttering up a holding cell. Given the general state of overcrowding and the general sense that there were more important things in the world to give a shit about, a supplementary note was written indicating that the arresting officers were wrong and that it was very probably his own blood that CTS was wearing, and since there was no visible crime or victim, the individual in question should be processed and tossed onto the street.

  “The notes just say former soldier,” Scarly said. “No idea if he was a vet or discharged before he was posted or what. Sloppy job. I’ll bet it was just one person who decided to process him out properly, because he had repeat client written all over him. Probably the same CSU who would’ve been made to scrape the blood off him. I’d really like to pull up his service records.”

  “Can we do that from here?” Tallow asked.

  “Probably,” said Scarly. “But not right now. We’ve got enough to think about, and getting that information would take hours, and we have places to be.” She shook herself all over, as if trying to awaken from a chill dream or trying to get cold rain off her skin. “Come on. Move.”

  “Move where?” said Bat.

  “To the car, Bat. John can follow in his. We’re going back to my place, where my wife is going to feed us.”

  Tallow felt immediate revulsion at the idea. “I don’t want to impose.”

  “John. This is a direct instruction. You are coming to our apartment and eating with us.”

  “I can grab something—”

  “John,” said Scarly, “I have been instructed. If I arrive without you, I will be punished. You don’t want me to be punished, do you?”

  Tallow was about to respond when he saw Bat, standing behind Scarly, shaking his head in short fast motions, very much communicating the sense of No, John, no, don’t mention that thing I told you at the bar that is making you want to say But you like being punished, Scarly, don’t do it there will be consequences terrible consequences.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Tallow said, backing up to the door.

  “John. We’ve been working late, and we still have a lot to talk about. So Talia offered to make dinner. It’s not like we’re trying to induct you into a cult.”

  “And,” Bat said, “we also have stuff to do tonight. Right, John?”

  Scarly looked at Bat like he was a criminal. “Stuff? We have stuff to do yet?”

  “John has a scheme,” said Bat, smug in the warm glow of knowing something Scarly didn’t.

  Scarly stepped to John and screwed a surprisingly hard finger into Tallow’s chest. “So it’s settled. Bat rides with me. You follow us. Talia feeds you. And you tell me what you’re hiding from me.”

  “I’m not hiding anything.”

  “It is not acceptable that Bat has knowledge of something that I did not already know first. Or at least that I could convincingly claim to have once known and then forgotten because I am so much more important than him.” She was coming back
to herself now. “Also I’m fairly sure he stole my Twine unit, and there’s a jar of—never mind. You explain later. We go now.”

  “But—”

  “There is no but. There is only go.”

  Tallow wanted to crawl somewhere and make himself die. The idea of this dinner was entirely antithetical to his life as he’d constructed it. The idea crept out like a spider and set off an autonomic repulsion. He just didn’t want to be part of…

  Tallow caught the thought in his head and made it pause before finishing. The thought went: I just don’t want to be part of people’s lives.

  He had to turn that sentence around in his head, to view it from all angles and look for the traces that might suggest to him when it had formed into such concrete.

  You’re just utterly fucking nuts, said Bat in Tallow’s memory. Tallow knew he wasn’t. He could study that statement dispassionately and know that he was not crazy and it was right and good to stay the hell out of people’s lives. He didn’t need to see what they had, and they didn’t need him hanging around. It occurred to him that he was never going to make anyone else understand this. He played people’s arguments and shot them all down with logical efficiency.

  It took one long second more before it occurred to him that that was actually probably what a crazy person would do.

  “All right,” said Tallow, “I’d like to meet your wife. Where are we headed?”

  Tallow congratulated himself, very quietly, on having left all his options open. Perhaps he could just say hello and then leave. He told himself he wasn’t committed to dipping himself into their lives.

  The worst of the traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge was over, and, in convoy, they had a relatively straight shot off the island.

  So preoccupied was Tallow with the looming threat of meeting other people and the worrying insight that perhaps he was indeed utterly fucking nuts that it took at least five minutes for it to leak into his perception that he’d snapped the radio on by reflex.

  Multiple assaults in the Bronx after the head of a local Catholic school, fired after being found with a one-terabyte external drive stuffed with child pornography, escaped jail time.

  A clerk beaten to death in a sex store on Sunset Park; crosses daubed on the counter and windows in the dead man’s blood, approximately four hundred dollars’ worth of apparently fairly brutal German pornography stolen. Murder weapon presumed to be a fifteen-pound rubber dildo.

  In Williamsburg, a seventeen-year-old boy found naked on the street and bleeding out from more than three hundred cuts.

  Queens: Landlord hacked an elderly tenant to death with a machete and then attempted to cleanly kill himself. He was still conscious when the emergency services arrived, despite his having turned himself into what one wit called “a human Pez dispenser.”

  Five gang members, all under eighteen years old, found stacked on a Watkins Street corner in Brownsville, in broad daylight, all dead, all castrated. Nobody saw anything.

  Also in Brownsville, a sixteen-year-old girl slashed the throat of a thirteen-year-old girl, killing her within minutes. The sixteen-year-old had to be restrained from killing herself, since she claimed her intent had been only to scar the decedent in such a way that their mutual pimp would no longer be able to use her for high-end (twenty-dollars-plus) employment.

  Man in Prospect Park found masturbating into the barrel of a nine-millimeter handgun. Upon being disturbed, he shot an Urban Park Ranger, a passing jogger, a dog walker, and a nanny before shooting himself through his open mouth up into his brain.

  Some laughter over the crackling air: The Hell’s Kitchen building used by a small-time gun dealer who went by the name of Kutkha but was better known as one Antonin Anosov was currently on fire. Many detectives across the Five Boroughs had met Anosov over the years, and there was generally a fond contempt for him. He was one of the few genuine eccentrics the local crime scene had produced in recent times, and while no one would be caught saying he actually liked him, he was certainly appreciated by most of those who dealt with him. Therefore, there was a little flurry of jokes tossed around as to how his place of business had caught fire.

  A few minutes later, there were reports of bodies at the site. A lot of bodies. The jokes turned to ash and blew down the radio waves and away. Smoke signals.

  Twenty-Eight

  THE HUNTER had time to kill.

  He was experiencing a thing that he’d come to think of as the exhaustion of revulsion. The overwhelming, existential disgust that the modern world caused to roil and pustulate and burst inside him simply wearied him over extended periods. Being constantly, on some level, physically repelled and sickened by the alien world he had to interact with just drained him. He felt septic, and tired, and somehow old.

  The exhaustion frightened him. It made him weak, mentally. He slipped deep into Mannahatta as he walked, so deep that he began to lose the ability to perceive modern light sources. Night gathered quickly, and traffic became the running of amber-eyed wolves. The hunter moved between the trees as best he could, holding his palms in his armpits to occlude the scent of fear in his sweat. No man was at one with the wolves. Wolves ate even mighty hunters, for there was no honor or code among predators, and everyone’s guts steam the same way when torn open on a cold night.

  A car ripped out from the forest and almost gored the hunter on its chrome.

  The hunter spun and clung to a red maple as the car sped past him and dissociated into a pack of silvered wolves racing away into the dark trees.

  The hunter squeezed his eyes shut, and then slowly opened them in an experimental manner. He was rewarded with a blurry view that was perhaps 80 percent modern Manhattan, and with a pulsing headache. He could live with that: the pain would sharpen him for a time, before its persistence began to dull him further. Maybe it’d fade before then.

  Food would help. He didn’t dare risk Manhattan food. He had once, in a desperate circumstance, scavenged a half-eaten burger left in a brown bag atop a trash can. The meat was loaded with enough salt that he could feel his kidneys spasm as he chewed, and it had the signature flavor of having been cut from an animal whose own droppings had been a considerable part of its diet. The bun that wrapped it was, he supposed, some alien cousin to corn bread, except he could taste ammonia and chalk in it. Half an hour later, he threw up everything that had been in his stomach, painfully and protractedly. He threw up in colors he’d never seen himself produce before, and he was fairly sure, twenty minutes into the vomiting, that he saw the blackened stub of a baby tooth he’d swallowed when he was six. He’d lived off the fruits of this island of many hills for too long and just couldn’t metabolize the machine-processed muck the new people survived on.

  Now the hunter rummaged through his pockets and his bag and came up with half a handful of cracked black walnuts and six hackberries wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, all foraged from Central Park. He began walking again, eating as he went, chewing each bite thoroughly and methodically before letting himself swallow it down, alternating the rich, smokily vinous walnut pieces with the candied bursts of the hackberries. The morsels would give him the strength to get to Central Park and gather more food to get through the rest of this night.

  He was abstractedly aware that he was crying as he walked but chose not to consciously acknowledge it. It was a thing off in the distance of his mind, in his peripheral vision, that he could decide not to focus on. Present, but not immediate: the sound of his own voice screaming in heartbreak that he was insane, hopelessly insane, and should find help, or jump in front of a car, because he was living like a demented animal and how did this happen to him and why is everything wrong and why are the streetlights smoking and why are the telephone poles breathing and please and please and please—

  At a street crossing, the hunter noticed the modern people looking at him strangely. He ignored them. From the rattled expressions on their faces, anyone would think he’d been walking around crying and shouting. And that, he said to himself,
is not what a hunter does.

  He glided across the street to the fenced perimeter of Central Park and slipped between its bones like a knife.

  Twenty-Nine

  IT TURNED out that Scarly and Talia lived in the indeterminate urban foam around Park Slope: close enough to the district to reduce the cultural stress of two women living together, far enough from its declared boundary to make an apartment affordable. There was, to Tallow’s amazement, both a public parking lot opposite their building and empty parking spaces in front of the building. As a Manhattanite used to at least a five-minute walk from parked car to apartment building, Tallow felt a little cheated, as if Heaven had been just across the bridge the whole time and no one had told him.

  He parked behind Scarly and Bat in front of the apartment building, a wide red-brick home a scant four floors high.

  Scarly and Talia made their home on the fourth floor, and Talia was waiting at the open apartment door for them. She was as tall as Tallow, and in infinitely better condition. She had an almost surreal copper-wire mane tied with rubber bands that made the back of her head look like a telephone cable trunk. She wore a gray wife-beater that showed off heavy, finely worked musculature, and black tactical pants that completed a picture of an off-duty SWAT officer. Her bare feet, as she stood on the rug by the front door, were callused to the extent that Tallow would guess her main training was in kickboxing. She wore no makeup; her skin was pale to the point of translucence; and she greeted Scarly’s hug and kiss with guarded affection, one eye on Tallow the whole time.

  “Thanks for this,” Scarly said.

  “No problem. Welcome home.”

  Bat came up, and Talia endured a peck on the cheek and a “Hey, Tallie.” She smacked the back of his head, not completely fondly, sending him scuttling indoors.

  Tallow stuck his hand out, making direct eye contact.

  Talia pursed her lips, tested his gaze, and then shook his hand with brisk force. He matched it, and said, “I’m John.”