by Leo Champion
He was never going to walk again. Oh shit.
“Calm, soldier.” The woman offered a bottle. He took it and drank the water down, not having realized how thirsty he was until now. In seconds he’d skolled the bottle. He handed it back, hoping she’d have another one. “We saved your knee. Be glad of that.”
“Don’t – recognize – you from the hospital staff,” said Cameron through the pain. My leg!
“Lonsdales,” said the woman. “Your boss is throwing around cash like it’s candy on Coney Island, getting every medic in the city here. Now, you’re going to need a peg but you should be stabilized. We’ll be back in an hour with more morphine – not giving that to you now because I know you want it right now.”
Well damn.
“Hey, Cam? Cam! Cameron?” came a familiar voice from down the street. A very familiar voice.
Then the owner of that voice, his fiancé Myra, appeared, her long brown curly hair falling down past her face as she leaned down toward him.
“Cam, darling?”
And everything was good even without the morphine.
* * *
“I swear loyalty,” the man in front of Corporal Benny Frick said to the tripod-mounted video camera and the stern-faced West Bowery officers, “to President Jeff Hammer and the Precinct of West Bowery. I promise to obey all commands and do my duty, or upon my own head be it. So help me Lord.”
“Welcome to the West Bowery guard,” the senior officer, a short-haired blonde woman with powder-burned captain’s tracks on her shoulders, said. “You’ll be paid as one of our own going forwards, and President Hammer asked me to say – whether you’re old families or not doesn’t matter any more. Promotions are on merit going forwards. And nothing else.”
“This feels like Communard stuff to me,” said Billy McKee, ahead of Frick in the queue to swear. “Feels like treason.”
Frick wanted to smack the kid, but – he’s only 15, he never saw the Commune. Just heard stories.
Frick, a decade older, had been a Downtown levy in the joint task forces fighting their way up through the commissars’ militias in Greenwich Village four years ago. He’d been there – and he never wanted to go there again. Even the old hands, those who’d fought then-Midtown Association Chair Bellini during the Association Wars ending fifteen years ago, had said the Commune fighting was bad. It had left scars on Frick, at least.
“Shut your face, kid,” he snapped. “Commune didn’t take prisoners and they sure as fuck didn’t recruit anyone. Now, your family was in the Cathedral, right?”
“Yeah?”
From what Benny Frick had heard, President Hammer of the West Bowery rebels was even leaving those people with a bit of their money. Not to mention their lives!
He touched his right pectoral, which had been bandaged under his shirt by a medic who’d muttered that he’d come from Downtown. President Hammer had sent people all over the city offering money for medical assistance, and it said something about the rebel fucker that he was paying true bling to have his former adversaries, people who two hours ago – Frick had to admit – had been trying to kill his ass… treated. The Communards had executed prisoners out of hand.
“So they’re all but broke now. You want to earn them a living? Sign. Or you wanna be raff?”
“Next,” said the West Bowery captain.
Frick pushed Billy McKee forwards.
“My name is Billy McKee, Captain Karstein,” he said, raising his hand to his chest in front of the camera, “and I pledge my arms to President Hammer and West Bowery…”
* * *
John Brasci turned to Vinnie DiCarlo in front of the machine with its reels of paper and arcane processes. He was just a scavenger turned guard who didn’t want to fight any more. Vinnie was the engineer, and he’d been poking at the thing for the last ten minutes. Wheels turning in the man’s brain, Brasci knew that meant.
“You think you can figure it out?” Brasci asked cautiously. He didn’t want to distract his friend.
“Think I already have. What we need is stuff to print. You sure you own this now?”
“Sergeant Mangoletti said Boss Hammer says we took it, it’s ours. Since the streeters who got here first couldn’t carry it. This did all their announcements and declarations, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. For the Garsons, too, back when the Rev still held,” said Vinnie.
“Sarge says we’ve got a contract already, all the stuff Boss Hammer needs printed,” said Brasci.
The problem with Hammer’s reorganization was that some of the independent organizations being called companies, just couldn’t compete. They’d been propped up artificially under the Reverend’s central management, but now with their suppliers and customers free to work things out elsewhere, they weren’t making enough cash to pay their people.
Especially since President Hammer had bought all the scrip back. The precinct stores, which had depended upon a scrip economy, couldn’t handle that. Mr. Lock had said that that was their problem; their people and assets would be hoovered up by the enterprises that could hack it.
Nellie’s boss, retired sergeant Mr. Stevenson, had run a precinct store, the same one that had employed Cam Krasner’s fiancé Myra. Nobody was buying from there now, because the place’s prices had been artificially subsidized to exist on the scrip economy. Now people had bucks, they were taking them elsewhere. Mr. Stevenson had been told to find some other use for the store’s property or sell it to someone who would.
Yesterday a guy had come in from the Lonsdales with his family to make it into a café and library. Mr. Stevenson had been hired as assistant manager; Nellie and Myra would be serving coffee and renting books and getting a percentage of the company profits.
“I think I know what we can print,” said John Brasci. “Hid away his stories when they banned ‘em, but we can bring them out now I think…”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Kiska books and the news! Get your daily news here! Want Lady Raff, we have her stories a buck apiece!” the one-legged hustler with his cart was shouting outside the café where Diana Angela sat smiling at an outside table.
It had been three weeks since the revolution; it was mid-March now and the start of spring was in the air, the days getting longer and the mercury rising. Plants on rooftops were starting to bud into flowers. Soon the heat would get brutal – midsummer it regularly got past a hundred and ten, Fahrenheit – but right now it was pleasant.
“Get your Lady Raff, your war histories, your daily news and your Karl Marx!” the hustler was shouting. A passer-by stopped to exchange cash for something, printed on cheap yellow paper, and from her table she smiled.
When she’d first seen Cam Krasner, a couple of weeks ago, she’d asked him – with a weapon half drawn, ready to take care of any guards who appeared while he ran for it – what the fuck kind of death wish do you think you have, openly selling John Kiska’s work right on the street like that.
“Boss Hammer was one of my first customers,” the curly-blond-haired veteran had said, shifting his weight to the peg below his right knee and half-flinching from the pain. “Said to me, ‘people can read what they damn well like in my precinct’, ma’am. Told me he’s not gonna ban his people from reading ink on paper.”
DA was starting to wonder how she might arrange a meeting with President Hammer. Would he open his door to a paid girl? She wanted to get a better measure of this crazy airborne – but for now she was content to enjoy the ambience going on in West Bowery, a constructive optimism that she’d only seen during the very start of the Commune. It had ended – it had ended when the loot had run out. Here… they were building, not just redistributing.
The ABC Café was called such because it had writing on the walls, in the form of advertising bulletin cards you paid a dollar to emplace. Patrons and passers-by read them. As she watched, another one went up – advertising a job at a new enterprise. Others asked for scavengers or sorters, paying cash with bonuses. More of them adver
tised rooms or beds for rent; those ones didn’t last, people snatching them up and applying right away. More people wanted to move into West Bowery than the place had space for. There were people who’d quit their jobs to become full-time landlords.
“Your Kiska books,” Cameron Krasner at the cart shouted to passers-by, then paused to do business. “Get your news, your stories, all the good stuff!”
A pair of tenement guards in green shirts and black jeans, covered by black body armor, passed by on patrol. One of them might have given Krasner a dirty look, but no more.
Eddie Haskins had told her about Krasner, who’d lost his leg – and gotten a pension for it from Boss Hammer, apparently – in the war. Good soldier in his squad, crippled in the fighting. Even victory had a cost.
Eddie had mixed feelings. His big brother had been promoted to captain after the war, given full official command of Fifth Company – with a bunch of the Changs he’d been facing to integrate. Boss Hammer had told him the former Changs were to be treated as equals now, and apparently pulled the sergeant’s pins off one man who wouldn’t accept that. We’re not conquerors, we’re integrators, West Bowery’s leader had said. Spartacus-style. But… it was working.
Now, she sipped coffee and watched the people pass by. It was refreshing, relaxing, almost exuberant.
Eddie had also mentioned that they were on alert against kidnappings, that the border guards were on orders to check those going out as much as those going in, looking in particular for signs of duress. Lock’s executives had been poaching the best people left and right across the city, apparently, and some of the old tenement bosses had thought they owned their better managers and technicians. Boss Hammer had apparently told those bosses to go to hell.
She knew from van Zanden that the bounties on Jeff Hammer were into the six figures, and the ones on Lock himself were past fifty thousand. She’d seen herself – free evaluation if you’d needed my advice, but Bitch Kimmy Karstein really does seem to know her shit – that Lock had good security these days, though. Another man she’d like to meet, if she could figure out a way to… which she would, and soon. She was coming to like West Bowery and the little bits of good steadily compounding on each other here.
People with purpose weren’t unusual around here; everyone in West Bowery now had purpose. They had their own hustles to execute, their own money to make, and no time to fuck around. Even the military moved faster here – President Hammer had opened the officer ranks to the best people regardless of birth, which unsettled the old-school sergeants, lieutenants and captains but gave everyone else a motivation.
But the five big men coming up Mulberry Street now caught her attention. They were walking together, for one, and they wore brown and tan suits that didn’t fit. They were muscle and two of them carried paint cans as they approached Cam Krasner with his cart.
“Get your Kiska books, all the stories you couldn’t read until now but they’re now yours for a mere buck apiece!” Cam Krasner called to the crowds, then paused to handle the transaction as he made another sale.
“Shut it,” one of the five men barked, and punched Krasner in the face. The shocked man went down, and the same big man kept him there with a kick to the groin. Emptied one of the paint cans onto Krasner, while his friend with the other paint can sprinkled its contents – gasoline, Diana Angela could tell from the smell ten feet away – across the cart.
Two others from the team had drawn machine-pistols, were covering the street facing north and south. The fifth man drew a cigarette lighter and glared at the fetal Krasner and his gasoline-soaked news cart.
“Fucker who wrote these seditious incitements”, the fifth man snarled, “got torched by Midtown. Our turn now. Join him in hell, fucker,” he said as he raised the lighter.
Diana Angela was already moving. She sprang from her chair, kicking that man in the jaw with the toe of her boot and knocking the lighter skittering out of his hand as her own hands went for knives. She didn’t care who these thugs were – she’d dreamed of saving John Kiska from the Midtown Association.
Only there were five of them and one of her. Shit. Should have thought ahead better, she thought as she backhanded her Bowie into the neck of one of the machine-pistol wielders. He fell face-down but the others were moving fast; the guy she’d kicked in the jaw was drawing a weapon and she had to keep them from firing because even a muzzle-flash might set off the gasoline on the cart and its vendor, all around them.
She turned on the left-side gunman, trying to keep someone in between her and that man as she brought her left-hand knife into the eye socket of another thug. They were moving competently and rapidly, good fighters, but there were two of five down now as, the collapsing body yanking the blade from her left hand, the second one went down.
“Hands up! All of you!” came a firm shout from behind.
Men with double-barreled shotguns appeared around them, the shotguns raised to their shoulders and pointed at her and the three remaining thugs.
At the head of the shotgun team was a woman with short blond hair and captain’s tracks on her shoulders. Eddie Haskins’ company commander, she recognized the face. Kim Karstein.
Slowly Diana Angela dropped the knife and raised her hands. You couldn’t argue with multiple shotguns pointed at your head.
“Hold on, hold on, Captain,” said the leader of the group, the one who’d had the cigarette lighter. “We’re NYPD detectives. I am going to reach into my left-hand pocket and show you a badge…”
“Orlov, McKinsey,” Captain Karstein barked, “if that man moves his hands from above his head, assume he’s going for a gun and blow his head off.”
“Let me show you my goddamn badge!” the detective leader snarled.
“No NYPD north of Canal Street,” said Karstein. “Cops aren’t allowed in the NGZ, ergo you’re not cops.” She turned her cold face to Diana Angela. “And who the hell are you?”
“A friend of his.” DA looked down at the moaning Krasner. “Saving his ass.”
“Krasner, you know this chick?”
“Just a regular customer,” the injured man moaned. “Didn’t know she could do that.”
“Cuff them all,” Karstein ordered the squad, “and take them into the Eyrie.”
With two shotguns pointed at her face, Diana Angela had no choice but to accept the cuffs around her wrists.
* * *
“Our little Kiskatrap worked,” Kim Karstein smiled to Hammer in his office, in the building that had been known as the Chapel but was now the Eyrie. “Some of Chief Kagan’s boys finally showed up – with buckets of gasoline. Who knew City Hall liked irony?”
Hammer cocked his head. He hadn’t liked the idea of using a veteran, a man who’d lost his leg fighting to secure and expand the precinct, as bait.
But when the Karsteins had lost the argument over seditious literature – “no,” he’d ordered, “I am not going to bust people over words – people in my precinct can say, write and read whatever they damn well want to” – Kim had made the point that if Hammer didn’t object, Boss Kalashov or the Mayor would. May as well be ready for that.
So there’d been a squad on ready notice across the street, waiting for something to happen.
“Five NYPD, of whom three remain alive. Two of the others – and she kicked the shit out of a third – were killed by this other chick,” Karstein went on. “We think she’s working for the Midtown Association. Speaks like upper-Intendancy arkie, but that’s probably an affectation.”
“Huh. She killed two NYPD?” asked Hammer. “How do you know she’s Midtown?”
“Who else would have? We’ve confirmed, Boss, that she’s an outsider to the tenement. Has the looks of a high-paid call girl, but… she killed two NYPD and disabled a third in thirty seconds.”
“She say anything?” Hammer asked.
“Only that she wants to speak to you, personally.”
* * *
She has an implant, Hammer realized as a digital flash
crossed the woman’s eyes in the cell. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and chained to a wall mount; she was a sharply beautiful blonde woman who met his gaze evenly despite being pinned to the wall of a cell underneath the Eyrie.
“I’m Jeff Hammer,” he said to her. Behind him, three shotguns were aimed at her. Cuffed and chained or not, Karstein’s people weren’t taking chances with this woman. “You wanted to see me. You killed two thugs that tried to torch one of my veterans alive. Thank you for that.”
“They weren’t going to murder Kiska a second time,” the woman snarled. “Not on my watch.”
He recognized that accent. Upper-class arkie.
He remembered a room in the sewers many months ago, a blinding light, an incongruous accent as the door swung open…
“You saved four prisoners,” Hammer said slowly, “below the Washington Building last August.”
The woman shrugged.
“I save vermin’s captives whenever I can. They do horrible things to them,” she said in that accent.
“Karstein,” Hammer said without turning. “Get this lady her crossbow back.”
The glint of recognition in her eyes told him all he needed to know. He hadn’t been certain until now.
“So you were the one pointing it at me during the Assembly,” he said softly. “May I ask why you didn’t fire?”
“May we please speak in private?” she asked him.
* * *
It was a relief as the cuffs came off, but Kimberli Karstein didn’t give her back her crossbow or her knives.
“Not while you’re in private with the boss,” the security chief hissed as she unlocked Diana Angela’s cuffs. “You won’t need to be armed then.”
Like I need to be armed to kill him, she thought but did not say. Or you.
“When we’re done talking, I want my weapons back,” she said mildly, not really caring either way. She could replace the blades easily enough in Times Square.