Gun Machine

by Warren Ellis

  Thirty-Six

  THE HUNTER didn’t know what was happening. He knew only that he had to hide.

  He ran down the middle of the street, zigzagging when he approached traffic lights since he knew of old that they often meant security cameras were close by. He could tell traffic lights by their three eyes, vertically arranged, and their long black bodies poised to strike, like cobras. One step was on blacktop, the next on dirt. Everything was wrong.

  He knew where he was going.

  There were still people on the street, and they were staring at him. The paint was everywhere, all over him, penetrating his clothes, gumming his eyelids together. He perceived a tiny flash, a red light, at the edge of his peripheral vision, and put his gun on it. There was no one there: the space between two trees resolved in his eyes into a storefront. He approached it. The red light flashed again. A box with black glass in it—a computer, he told himself—and an eye atop it. As he moved in front of it, the red light went off again, under the eye.

  The hunter ran. Three stores down, he saw another light blink on and off.

  There were eyes in every window.

  He was trapped in the future, and everyone was watching him.

  The hunter made the crosswalk. A bison, giant and dark and its fur slick with pond water, rushed him across the trail. On the run, he shot it between the eyes. It swerved unnaturally and struck a broad black maple on the corner, wrapping around its trunk and smoking as it came to rest. The hunter was already gone.

  Tallow punched Ambient Security into Forward mode. The system started gathering motion-triggered webcam shots from the streets ahead. There was an arresting shot of a man demented by terror and covered in orange paint staring into the camera and realizing he was caught. It was three blocks in front of him. You’re a fast bastard, aren’t you, Tallow thought, and was glad he had taken the car. There was no way he could have kept up on foot, and frankly, he wasn’t doing so well in the car. He matched the picture’s location to the map, judged the traffic system, and made a turn, hoping to hell that he was guessing right.

  He saw a car embedded in a lamppost, its windshield shot out.

  A lynx tore past the hunter, making a noise like a riverfront storm. It had a human rider with a flat glass face.

  The hunter was frantically trying to match landmarks to memory, but everything was shifting. He got a street sign to resolve through the twisting chaos of his vision, found his orientation, and sprinted down a conduit alley.

  Tallow saw a blurred snap on his phone, flicked his eyes to the map, and knew where the hunter was going. He knew that alley, he knew where it came out, and he was now certain of the hunter’s intended destination. Tallow figured that his man, in fact, was entirely too close to it.

  The hunter emerged from the alley to see a pack of dogs come around the street corner to his left with a horrific squeal. The hunter shook his head, gripping his gun harder. The pack coalesced into a motor vehicle, one he knew.

  The car mounted the sidewalk. The hunter could not stand and fight. He snapped off a shot at the car, turned, and ran for his life.

  It was a good shot, and a good reminder for Tallow that the paint-spattered lunatic on the street was the most prolific and efficient killer he’d ever heard of. The windshield crazed, and the right corner of his seat exploded in shredded cheap vinyl and yellow foam. He was blind and had no choice but to stamp on the brake. His right shoulder burned, just at the top. He glanced at it swiftly and saw a neat notch seared at the shoulder of his suit jacket. Not important. Tallow elbowed out a hole in the windshield glass and tried to convince the car to move forward again. The car wasn’t interested and made a sound like a sick dog gnawing on a branch.

  The hunter had gone twenty or thirty steps before he realized he couldn’t hear the car running. It was stopped, half on the sidewalk.

  The hunter knew he should keep going. Half a minute of sprinting would put him entirely out of Tallow’s sight. But the car wasn’t moving. Perhaps he’d wounded Tallow. Perhaps he’d done some paralyzing violence to the vehicle’s workings. He should run. But Tallow was there to be killed. He wanted to kill Tallow so much. A hunter didn’t just leave prey sitting there. It would have been tasteless to walk away.

  The hunter started walking back to the car, quickly.

  The damned engine wouldn’t turn over. Tallow didn’t know why. Tallow wasn’t good with cars.

  Jim Rosato had always said Tallow wasn’t good with cars. That’s why he drove. Jim Rosato had always said Tallow wasn’t a street cop like him, and that’s why he went first in a street situation.

  “Jim Rosato’s dead,” said Tallow as he wrenched the ignition and stamped on the pedals. The car leaped forward like an animal, spitting out a hubcap as it gained the street.

  The hunter took a shot. He didn’t trust his vision enough for a headshot, so he went for the biggest mass he could focus on.

  The bullet slammed into Tallow’s vest, right over his heart. It was like having the wind knocked out of his lungs by a baseball bat. His heart skipped six beats and the world went black and red around the edges. The car weaved, bumped up the opposite sidewalk, and took out a newspaper vending box before Tallow got it and himself back under control.

  Another shot screamed across the hood. Flecks of hot tin torn up by the bullet’s passage flew into the car and across Tallow’s face. A sound like a roar came out of him as he aimed the car down the street with murder.

  The hunter had no choice but to turn and run.

  Tallow tried to keep the nose of the car on the hunter, but the bastard was threading between streetlights and mailboxes and any other damn thing he could put between himself and the car while running like a gazelle. Tallow swung the car out wide, making a guess. He was getting bright little spikes of pain across his chest whenever he tried to breathe.

  The hunter angled left at the next intersection, firing another bullet without looking. The shell plowed into the front of the car, caromed around elements of the engine, and came out low by the driver’s seat. Tallow yelled as a chunk of his right calf tore away. He swore and kicked his leg out to try to shake the pain. His face was wet. He wiped the sweat off it as quickly as he could, before it ran into his eyes, and saw blood on his fingers as they closed around the steering wheel again. He swore twice. The blood was making the wheel slick and hard to grip. His leg was full of burning grit, and smoke was leaking out of the car’s hood.

  Tallow had to drive across traffic to stay in pursuit. He missed a sideswipe by inches and had to mount the sidewalk again, clipping some signage as he barreled the wrong way down the next street, praying that no one would be driving toward him.

  Ambient Security updates petered out. The storefronts were thinning out. The hunter was out of sight. Tallow had to trust to his knowledge of the city, everything he’d learned over the past few days, and his instinct. There was nothing else left.

  The hunter had made it. He knew he was only seconds ahead of Tallow. He fumbled in his bag for the key, held in a loop stitched into the vessel’s bottom. There was no one around: this face of the building, the rear, was always quiet at this time of night, and he had means of entry should he be challenged. But he needed the key. He only ever carried two. One for Pearl Street and one for this place. Both given to him. Both kept close and with care. He freed the key.

  Tallow brought the wallowing car around on the rear side of the Manhattan Detention Complex. There were three entranceways, each just big enough to take a wagon from Correction, all covered in green shutters. On the far left of them, a single doorway in a recessed alcove. No police around. There was no traffic back here at night, as a general rule, and a patient man would wait out what little motion there was before going to that door.

  The hunter was there, getting a key into the lock. If Tallow pulled up now, he had a clear shot. But a clear shot at distance, when his eyesight and his grip were both compromised. He’d have to aim for the chest if he wanted to guarantee a hit.
>
  Tallow wanted to kill him.

  For one second, he was at the top of the stairs in the Pearl Street tenement looking at the man who had killed his partner and becoming a mindless thing with a gun that just killed people.

  The alcove was narrow.

  Tallow gunned the car into it anyway.

  The hunter turned and saw a burning black stampede with glowing eyes and smoke twisting off it and something covered in blood riding it toward him and he screamed to heaven.

  The car rammed into the alcove at its best speed, crushing both its headlights, collapsing the ends of the grille, tearing off great swathes of the front fenders, and slamming the prow into the hunter, smashing him through the door.

  The air bag enveloped Tallow in plastic clouds.

  Tallow wanted to lie in it forever. He couldn’t. The hunter had a gun. All he could think was that the hunter had a gun. He beat back the air bag and got the driver-side door open. It took some force, and he had to put his shoulder to it, which hurt. He stepped out of the car and fell right over. His calf wasn’t doing some piece of work essential to standing up. Tallow grabbed hold of the door, pulled himself upright, and braced himself before pulling the Glock.

  The hunter was lying on his back in the debris of the door, motionless.

  “No,” said Tallow.

  Tallow clambered over the remains of the front of the car, cutting his thigh on a jutting length of bodywork and barely even noticing it. He wasn’t worried about the hunter’s gun anymore. All he could think was Don’t you dare die.

  The hunter wasn’t moving. And then there was a painful, juddering intake of breath. And then another.

  Tallow could hear sirens now. Moments later, there were voices within earshot, and the clicking of guns. Tallow held up his badge, told them who he was, and told them he needed medics here five minutes ago.

  “This man does not get to die. He doesn’t get to escape.”

  Tallow stepped away. The hunter’s gun was in sight, which pleased him. So was the hunter’s bag. Tallow picked it up and looked inside it.

  Folded in the bottom of the bag was a small black wallet containing a New York Police Department detective’s badge.

  Thirty-Seven

  IT STILL wasn’t much of a case, but they built it anyway.

  Bat insisted he had gotten more bandaging than Tallow because he was hurt worse. When informed, not with kindness, that Tallow had also had a calf wound packed and wrapped up, that his hands were bruised for God knew what reason, that half his shoulder was black with bruising and burns, and that he looked a bit as if someone had emptied a nail gun into his face, Bat started bitching about how someone had stolen Fuck You Robot from Tallow’s apartment. With additional poison, Bat further noted that Fuck You Robot must have been the only item of value in Tallow’s apartment, as nothing else had been stolen.

  “What are you, autistic?” said Tallow. Scarly laughed and Bat told him never to darken their door with his bullshit again.

  Assistant Chief Turkel was, these five days after Tallow had driven his car into the back of the Tombs, on administrative leave. This was, officially, due to the loss of one of his oldest and dearest friends, Jason Westover, and also Jason’s beloved wife, Emily. It had occurred under such tragic circumstances—a murder/suicide pact, among such people, in such a place as Aer Keep!—that Turkel had declared that he was unable to serve while suffering such grief.

  Unofficially, Turkel had stood firm for two deeply unnerving days. Turkel had not been aware that Tallow had ridden with the hunter to Beth Israel and had put off his own treatment until he’d found a doctor he could convince to start pumping antipsychotics into the bastard. Two days later, the hunter started making a degree of sense and explained to attending officers that the key and the badge had come from his good friend Al Turkel.

  Tallow got himself attached to the team directed to search the less used basement regions of the detention complex. It had turned out that there was an informal system at work in which tired cops between heavy shifts were allowed to grab sack time in disused cells out of sight of the main workings of the complex. Tallow felt faintly aggrieved that no one had ever told him about it.

  Three hours of poking around (which was hell on Tallow’s leg) turned up a cell down in the guts of the place that showed signs of more regular use. Someone had been finger-painting on one wall. Swirls. Scarly matched the paint to that recovered from Pearl Street, and they were off to the races.

  At this point, Turkel started talking for his life, explaining that he’d been forced at gunpoint to take the shield of a dead detective with no family and give it and the key to the hunter so that he could use a cell at the bottom of the Tombs as a hideout. Tallow thought it must have been very pleasant for the hunter, being able to hide so close to the buried surface of Werpoes. He could probably have pretended he was sitting in a teepee or whatever in the village at night.

  Machen, who’d accidentally started the whole thing, was long gone. He’d gotten on a plane to Mexico a little over an hour after his meeting in Central Park, and his whereabouts were currently unknown. The whereabouts of a considerable quantity of Vivicy currency were also being questioned. Tallow doubted very much that he’d ever see Andrew Machen again.

  Turkel’s stories crumbled as the hunter kept talking. He talked like a man who hadn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time and was determined to make the quantity up in as short a period as possible. Tallow, Scarly, and Bat could provide evidence in support of enough of it that the administrative-leave story was cooked up, and Turkel was essentially placed under house arrest.

  Today, the case had ascended out of Tallow’s hands and into those rarefied Olympian heights at One PP where the police gods decided how to correctly handle the affairs of foolish mortals and limping detectives.

  Tallow was due to attend his lieutenant’s office at Ericsson Place to officially sign off on seven days’ leave. A leave that he was assured he would be able to return from. But he was on Baxter Street, parking a new car—new to him, anyway, though it drove like something out of The Flintstones—and then walking across to the Tombs.

  “Asshole,” muttered a sergeant as Tallow signed in.

  “Where is he?” Tallow said. “Same place?”

  “Don’t know who you mean, buddy,” the sergeant said.

  Tallow sighed and read the sergeant’s name tag. “Okay. I’ll be sure to give your name to the first deputy commissioner when she asks me later how the Tombs are running today.”

  “Fuck you,” said the sergeant. “He’s in the same place. Just got back from court. Asshole.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” said Tallow brightly, and limped off.

  The hunter lay alone in a holding cell, reading a book. He didn’t have much choice about the lying. His crutches were propped by his bunk, his legs were mostly plaster, and he was in a back brace and a neck brace. The trauma team told Tallow that the hunter had gotten off lightly, considering, and most of the damage had been done by his being put through the door rather than his being hit by the car, due to the walls absorbing most of the kinetic energy when the car struck them. Someone had dressed the hunter in parts of a cheap suit. His shoes were off.

  “Hello, Detective,” the hunter said. “Excuse me not standing up. It takes two other people for me to do it, at the moment.”

  “Hello.” Tallow still couldn’t bring himself to use the man’s name. It lessened the man, somehow, and Tallow didn’t want him lessened.

  “I just returned from the courthouse,” he said, not looking up from his book. “It turns out I’m going to live a long and productive life.”

  “I heard,” said Tallow. The fix was already in. In return for cooperation, and to save haggling around the vexing question of whether an unmedicated schizophrenic can be held responsible for his actions across twenty years, the hunter would get life imprisonment without possibility of parole in a maximum-security facility, probably Sing Sing.

  “So,” said the
hunter, eyes still on his book. “Are we doing more questions today?”

  “Just one,” said Tallow. “What were the guns on the wall for? Was it wampum?”

  The hunter’s eyes flew to Tallow with delight. “Wampum! You knew it!”

  “A wampum belt wrapped around an entire apartment?”

  “Very close, Detective, very close. It was wampum. And wampum is information. Just as art is information, and song is information, and music, and dance. You can imagine it—and, hell, now I can imagine it, with the amount of medication swimming inside me—as a giant machine. A great big apartment-size machine, like the early computers that filled a room, running its own code.”

  “But it wasn’t finished, was it?” said Tallow. “When I walked around inside it, I could see blank spots. Missing elements.”

  “That’s right. I wasn’t done yet. Every piece had to be just right. Every piece had to have its own little bit of machine magic, its own piece of code.”

  “What was it for?”

  “What do you know about the Ghost Dance, Detective?”

  Tallow frowned. “That’s older history than I’m usually good for. I know it was a Native American thing. Something magical about killing all the white people.”

  “In one interpretation. The history is more complex than I really have the strength for. But the gist of it is that the Ghost Dance was a complicated ritual dance, rich in information, which, if completed correctly, would lead to several things. The removal of whites and all their evil from North America. The restoration of the native dead. And the renewal and replenishment of the land, free of all the structures imposed by the white man. Do you see where I’m going, Detective?”