by Leo Champion
With a vroom and a blinding blaze of light from floodlights on its roof, an armoured car roared out of the Times Square gates. Following it were at least twenty men in step, Midtown soldiers…
I thought killings on their premises were only the Hux’s problem, she thought with a slash of ironic self-pity. Why the fuck does the Midtown Association care?
They must have been paid to, or Johnny Caustus’ boss was calling in a favour. Could be any reason, didn’t matter now. She broke into an all-out sprint as the engine came from behind her, still in darkness so far…
She aimed herself at a subway entrance, half buried in rubble at the intersection she was coming up on. They wouldn’t chase her down there…
The light, for a terrifying moment, was on her. She felt its hot blaze at her back and everything in front of her thrown into sharp relief by her shadow against it. And then she’d reached the subway entrance. She vaulted over the edge and landed in a crouch on tiled squares, flicking her implant to thermal again as she raced down into what had been the station’s ticketing area. Long-dead escalators led down to the platforms and tracks.
Sewergangers scavenged edibles from trash, but they were not welcome above ground. And many of them, Diana Angela had come to learn in the twelve years she’d spent stalking them and learning their ways perhaps better than anyone else alive, were superstitious about damaging the ancient machinery they lived around. So the station, other than being dark and filthy, was as its last legitimate user would have left it sometime in the 2060s.
Sewergangers waited by entrances, too. She threw herself into a roll and flattened herself against the wall – but no, none lying in wait up here. Except that there were four of them on the platform, where a train had made its final stop on one side’s tracks…
None of them had noticed her entering the station, but their attention was going to be drawn up this way shortly. She could hear people gathering up at the subway entrance, probably daring each other to come down here…
Carefully she slipped between open turnstiles and headed in, acutely aware that she was unarmed… but that could be corrected, she thought with a slight lick of her lips. She flexed her fingers as she crouched in the shadows, hearing feet approach.
A moment later the sewerganger came into sight, walking briskly and inquisitively up the long-dead escalators with a spear in one hand and a shrouded flashlight in the other. Another one was coming up into sight along the platform below, but the first one was near the top of the escalators and about to stumble onto her…
As the first vermin passed the shadow where she’d been crouching, she stepped out and hooked her elbow around its neck, squeezing roughly as she kicked his feet out from under him. With her free hand she pulled the nearest available blade from the vermin’s belt, which held several. It was only a short paring knife but she didn’t hesitate to jam it into his throat, cutting deep as bright arterial blood splashed across her. The vermin died with a gargle and she reached for the spear he’d dropped, transferring the short knife to her left hand and picking it up.
So much for being unarmed.
The second vermin had paused at the top of the escalators, thirty feet away.
“Borzog?” he asked, and shone his flashlight toward where Diana Angela crouched above the body. She raised the spear and hurled it at the second vermin’s bare-chested body, aiming for centre of mass and seeing the weapon impale him through the gut. He toppled thrashing backwards, down the escalators.
There was shouting from below, redoubled shouting. It sounded like there was a lair… in this subway station.
She had to move, and fast. She ran for the escalator, tile changing to smooth lines of metal under her feet as she vaulted down them four steps at a time.
When she reached the platform she crouched, scanning, aware that there were a whole bunch of heat signatures practically all around her, god damn it, but the one with the fewest was south, along the platform toward the tunnels. Only one sewerganger was in that way, sitting groggily up from where they’d been lying on an ancient aluminium bench. The other ones were starting to get their shit together, becoming aware of the dangerous intruder…
Diana Angela shifted the short little blade to her right hand, which was dominant, as she ran crouched along the platform. The waking-up vermin – it had tits, so it was female vermin – had a moment to realize that something was in front of her when Diana Angela’s blade went hilt-deep into her throat.
They were right about having a dangerous intruder, she thought with a grin that crept across her face. She was an intruder and she was fucking dangerous to these vermin!
But she wasn’t going to be dangerous, or alive, if several of them came at her at once. Her best weapon down here was invisibility; she could see them clearly with her implant, but their vision was limited to the range of their lights. So not only could you see them clearly all the time, but the direction they were pointing their lights showed you which way they were looking…
The vermin she’d killed had been lying on rags on the bench, but she found her weapons belt looped across one end, under where the sleeping vermin’s head had been. She didn’t have time to be picky; she pulled out what looked to be the biggest blade she’d had, a heavy cutlass. No, that would be too heavy – she dropped it, aware that she’d have to get moving soon – and went for the next. That was a machete and she nodded to herself, transferring the short knife back to her off hand.
“There!”
She fled down the platform and leapt onto the tracks, landing with a crouch on the rotten sleepers and broken ballast. A knife in each hand, she scanned for sentries in the tunnel – that there were none her heat vision could see did not mean there actually were none.
She’d be happy to kill more vermin, but the slippery heat between her legs was making its presence known again. She’d thrown off the pursuit – she hoped none of the tenement soldiers would be stupid enough to venture down the subway entrance, that never ended well for them – and she could take some time for herself.
Satisfied that none of the raiders in the station lair were following her – they seemed to be reacting with a focus upwards toward the street – she headed down the tunnel, careful not to step on any of the jagged ballast rocks that littered the tracks. She ran a bloody left hand through her hair, slicking it back, and allowed herself a broad, satisfied grin. She’d killed another paedophile and three more sewer vermin.
She was tingling as she made the decision to circle back to Times Square and the Last Stand. She’d done nicely, and now it was time to satisfy the hungry, tasty fire between her legs that the action had sparked…
Chapter Six
“You get him?” Cleopatra asked as Diana Angela pulled her boots on, having changed out of the ripped, bloodstained remains of the dress and gotten the worst of the blood off herself.
“And three of the sewer scum in the station. And four more who came after me,” Diana Angela purred, strapping knives to herself. She adjusted the black silk skirt but left the upper part scrunched up in the pouch; she wanted to show her assets off, not conceal them right now.
“There was a bit of a stir,” said Cleopatra. “You sure you want to be around Times Square?”
“Yeah,” said Diana Angela. Because it was the best place for her to get laid, and she also wanted to follow up on what she’d heard.
“You hear anything about political developments in the No-Go Zone?” she asked. The NGZ was a demilitarized area, by agreement between City Hall and Midtown fifteen years ago. Everything between Fourteenth Street and Canal was Association-neutral territory; neither Kalashov nor the Mayor could send uniformed enforcers past those lines, or demand vig from tenements in the area.
The precinct, she’d gathered, was right on Bowery… but she’d check out that rumour later. She was curious, but right now that temptation was running a strong second to getting male company.
“No, why?” the madam asked. “What I heard is that the 133rd Street Bloo
ds are now paying vig to Midtown.”
“Really?” Kalashov had endlessly promised he’d respect the 130th Street line.
“Some of the OGs got together and decided they liked him better than the Harlem overbosses,” Cleopatra scoffed. “So much for Afro solidarity, hey?”
Race mattered to an extent at the streets’ highest levels, but—Diana Angela shrugged. Realpolitik meant more and always had, when you got down to life and death matters. The proxy war the Midtown Association had been having in the north with City Hall-affiliated Harlem, pretending not to arm factions so as to officially preserve the fragile peace agreement that had ended the destructive wars of the early 2170s… looked to be drawing to a close, with the Mayor its loser.
“What got you interested in the No-Go? I can ask around,” she said as Diana Angela finished strapping weapons to herself and got up.
“Yeah, let me know. Precinct called the Garsons, I heard. It was overthrown by some airborne who claims his raff are now free.”
“Ah,” said Cleopatra. Realizing. “Another Commune… yeah, I see why you might be interested in that.”
Memories came flooding back, against her will: The great conspiracy coming to fruition on May First, 2181 as the people rose up against the bosses through Greenwich Village and across the city, with uprisings and strikes reported as far as Philadelphia and eastern Long Island. Red banners had waved from Canal Street up through Chelsea to the south side of the Hudson Yards on 34th Street, from Sixth Avenue to the Hudson River, and the early days had been so promising.
She remembered Spartacus, boyishly handsome, whose real name had been Alex Thomson. Like the other conspirators, and she in misplaced idealism had conspired with them, he had chosen a revolutionary pseudonym. Boundlessly enthusiastic about his vision for a better world of equal outcomes for everyone, she had fallen hard for him and they had become lovers – oh yes, she remembered that. Everything had seemed so wonderful at first, after the initial necessary bloodshed.
And then it had gone bad, if it had not been bad from the start. Illiterate raff could not run production facilities on their own, too many desperately-needed members of the middle class were fleeing, and the Commune had of course been engulfed in war from its birth. Vicious wars of defensive expansion and retaliation while committees argued, production fell, distribution failed, and people starved. Spartacus had, out of necessity, declared himself First Citizen. Motivated to create a better world at any price, idealism had led him to whip his people harder than any of the greed-driven neo-feudalists they’d overthrown.
“If the Commune fails,” he had once said, “it will be because the people were not good enough to deserve it. Only we, as the vanguard and the leadership, can make them better.”
And he had believed in that cause.
She remembered him explaining one night, in a cellar bedroom while airborne-dropped nitroglycerin pounded the streets above, how necessary it all was. His purges of the disloyal and sub-competent had been essential for the good of the people. Killing his old friends, he had told her sadly, was necessary because he was the people’s best friend. That was the night she had truly lost faith, the night she had realized the Commune’s fanatical determination to create heaven on earth at any price had not just failed but done the opposite.
But Spartacus had had the best of intentions; he had been a truly selfless man, if perhaps a little too aware of his own greatness. It would, she had come to realize, have been far less disastrous if he had been driven instead by lower motives. Instead he had been so selfless that, for the cause, he had sacrificed his own conscience. The Commune had been an attempt to create heaven that had ended in the worst kind of hell, but for what little it was worth, Spartacus had meant well. She hoped he’d at least found a place in purgatory after the bomb had gone off.
Its failure had driven her into a black despair over the state of her world, off the streets for months. If it could not be improved systemically from above or by design from below, it could not be improved at all…
She’d moved past that phase somewhat over the last almost-four years now, coming to realize that she could still do little bits of good, a kill at a time. You remembered the lessons you’d learned in the past, though, and if the price of that lesson had been her idealism then she was going to make sure she got her money’s worth by learning the lesson well. Good intentions just led to greater misery.
“Another Commune,” she murmured. “Another Spartacus… God, I hope not.”
* * *
She tried to get the Commune off her mind as she headed to the Last Stand and soon picked a shaven-headed, brown-skinned mercenary who turned out to be from Capitol City, DC.
“Wash Arn Town they used to call it,” the man informed her as Jenny arrived with the drinks he’d ordered them, “until they took his name off ‘cause he’d owned slaves.”
That had been the big renaming push of her girlhood in the 2150s, wherein even United States Presidents deemed problematic and sinful were to be referred to by their number and not their names, and then as minimally as possible.
She inched, on her stool at the bar, a little closer to where he sat on his. He wore a plain, neat brown uniform, no insignia on its shoulderboards, with a pair of holstered revolvers and a sheathed rapier under a wire peace-bond. Under his shirt there was a trace of tasty muscle, and just the way he sat on his stool implied a lynx-like poise and readiness she found very attractive. She’d have bet he was good with that rapier… and with his other one, too!
“That blood?” he gestured at a trace on her shoulder that her cursory sponge-bath had missed, probably not-so-accidentally touching her shoulder with the gesturing finger. “You need me to take care of someone for you, babe?”
She was getting hotter by the second, and she smiled at the man. In fact, she was going to brag to this gallant Southron about her night!
“Yeah, you can take a dump on his carcass,” she murmured. “He had the best fuckin’ security in Times Square outside the Library itself, but I got through it and killed the fucker anyway!”
“Uh-huh,” said the mercenary with a grin. He’d given some name but she hadn’t bothered to retain it. He was tonight’s entertainment, not much more. “Then what?”
“Then I smashed a window, outran his guards and Kalashov’s men, and escaped into the subways.”
The mercenary grinned again, looking as much at her tits at her face. She puffed them out a little for his benefit – I hope you like biting them! – and sidled her body that much closer to him, into his personal space.
“Into the subways, huh?” the merc asked. “Where the bogies just per-litely left you alone?”
She shook her head. “Implant, baby. Full-spec.”
Implants were available on the streets, but they were tremendously expensive and the software and sensor enhancements, even more so.
“So you avoided the bogies with your magic heat vision and came up when the coast’s clear?” the merc asked. He wasn’t going to call her out as a liar because he wanted what she wanted just as much, but he clearly wasn’t believing a word of it. That wasn’t her problem – just telling the story, reliving the night, was fun.
“No fuckin’ way did I avoid ‘em, baby,” she giggled, sidling a bit closer to him and then turning, lowering herself onto his lap. A strong arm found its way around her waist, holding her in, and she was pleased to feel that the man was not just decently-endowed but already hard and eager…
“So what’d you do, if you didn’t avoid ‘em?” the merc laughed. She ran a hand from her thigh onto his, feeling toned quads through his cotton trousers and savouring the anticipation.
“I killed the fuckers,” she purred. She had! “One, two, three, gaark! Then these four came down the tunnel after me and you wanna know what I did?”
She could easily have escaped that group – she’d had more than a hundred yards head start along the tunnel, vanishing into one of the interconnecting pipes and hiding in total darkness, wh
ile the vermin had to use flashlights and braziers to see, and give away their locations – or just getting up to the surface. But her blood had been pounding and her heart racing, and the fewer cannibal vermin alive the better, so…
She’d scaled a dividing wall inside the subway tunnel and come down into their midst from above as they passed, shouting threats and cautions at the intruder they’d thought was further down or gone entirely. There had been slashing blades and kicking feet and surging adrenaline as she’d killed one and then the next, every superbly fit muscle in her body working at its peak as she rolled to dodge an almost-good-enough crossbow bolt, bounced back to her feet and struck again, killing the third with a kick that crushed its throat and then the last one with a backhanded stab through the neck, jabbing the blade in and ripping it out in a spray of messy blood and tissue as her soul sang with a warrior’s joy.
There was a primal thrill in killing like that, an endorphin rush nothing else could match; it was almost better than sex, in its own way. It was the joy of absolute competence, of totally confirmed proof that you were better than the other fucker because you’d killed not just one or two or three but four at once. It was an exultant, primal feeling that she lived for… as well as, of course, satisfying the hot thirst surviving that kind of intensity raised…
“Killed ‘em all, I bet,” the merc smiled indulgently. “Hey, finish your drink.” He gestured at her glass, untouched on the bar. It was a blue cocktail that she suspected would be like a poisonous frog in its alcohol load.
She’d never been the biggest drinker; a little went a long way with her and she hadn’t thought to take an anti-alc capsule. But what the hell, the chick who’d just taken down a well-guarded paedophile and then seven – count ‘em DA, seven! – sewer vermin… could maybe afford to get a little fucked up tonight. Only a little, of course.