by Kaleb Schad
“This boy is SLS property, like you,” Glasses said. “It’s important that you not get involved.”
“LCP police or military do Cullings.”
“They do. Did. How long have you been out here?”
Tyler didn’t answer.
“We’re developing new ways of handling Cullings that are less invasive.”
“Less invasive.”
“Less overt, let’s say.”
“But still Culling,” Tyler said. “Still killing people.”
“Technically, the courts ruled they aren’t.”
“People.”
“Technically.”
Something was stoked within Tyler, an ember he’d forgotten, thought had burned out two years ago in Liberty Heights under that residence tower, but now threatened to conflate into something uncontrollable. For two years he had hidden out here, desperate to feel nothing, to remember nothing, but these men and child had brought something to him better than buried feelings. They had brought him back his rage.
“You fuckers haven’t changed at all,” he said.
No more a child than that laser is a flashlight, they said. A tool. And what was a tool in the hands of a man, but a way to destroy something? Tyler was good at destroying things. If there was anything he was good at, it was that.
“I never liked the 226,” Tyler said to the soldier holding the laser.
“No?” The soldier’s eyes settled as he said it, as if he knew a decision had been made, as if he knew the outcome of that decision and regretted it. Maybe one had. Maybe he should.
“Too heavy. I like being able to move.”
“You seem more of an antique guy. Old fashioned, maybe,” Laser Dick said.
“Two years, four months, twenty-three days, sixteen hours and,” Tyler looked at his watch, “four seconds. Give or take.”
“Okay?” Glasses said.
“You asked how long I’ve been out here. I haven’t dealt with a single other person in all that time. It was nice.” Tyler looked at the boy and Eddie, then back to Glasses. “And I’m nobody’s property.”
He threw his .30-06 at Laser Dick’s face. It’s called the startle pattern and every mammal does it. It’s a genetic reflex to danger. With Tyler’s enhanced perception, time slowed and he watched as Laser Dick swiveled his head in slow motion to the gun arcing through the air, his arms pulling in towards his body, legs bending. Meanwhile, Tyler was moving off-center and forward.
There are three rules to successful close-quarters combat: surprise, speed and violence-of-action. Tyler was built for all three. He reached Laser Dick at the same time the Springfield did, knocked down the L226 with his left hand, flattened out his right one and drove it through the man’s throat nearly taking off his head. The Springfield crashed into Laser Dick’s dead face. Tyler snatched it out of the air by the barrel.
He paused, letting Glasses catch up, to recognize what was happening. When Tyler saw clarity come across the man’s face, he said, “I like the glasses.” He used the rifle as a baseball bat, driving the glasses and the man’s face into the back of his own skull, popping his head like a balloon filled with crimson mud.
Eddie was on his feet and running toward the table, reaching for the MK-9. The window in the kitchen melted, then splintered as the soldier outside fired his laser. It sliced through Eddie’s side, releasing a pungent smell of burning cotton and flesh.
“Eddie,” the boy screamed. He tried to buck his hips to get the soldier off of him, but was out of his weight class by sixty kilos.
If the soldier on Ben was any good, Tyler knew, he’d shoot at Tyler and ignore Eddie. Focus on the primary threat. Tyler dropped his rifle, leapt towards the last soldier. The soldier pivoted on his knee and sprayed his assault rifle at Tyler in a desperate, stuttering arc. Tyler planted a foot on the wall next to him and swan dived over the spray of bullets. His perception was enhanced enough to see the bounce of the muzzle after each flash, to time the next shot and calculate what its deviation from the target would be in plus or minus degrees above and below sight line. He knew he was above that range.
The bullets sizzled as they passed under Tyler, the sound of the shot milliseconds behind it. Then Tyler was on the soldier and grabbing his head in both hands and twisting. Dry twigs in late summer would have given more resistance.
The kitchen window lit up again, but the shot went wide of Tyler, searing through the far wall. He scooped up his .30-06, raced out the door, banked right, tossed the Springfield to his left hand, swung it around the edge of the cabin and pulled the trigger. That fast. One motion. There was a sacrilegious flash and roar of the gun in the forest night. He heard the man on the porch grunt. Tyler rounded the corner, dragged the man off of the porch by the pack’s straps, then used the soldier’s own laser to slice off his head.
Tyler looked at the decapitated man. Steam from the blood twirled in the moon’s callous light.
What had he done? These weren’t vet tech rent-a-cops. Malcolm Staern and SLS didn’t let people like this disappear. Tyler should know.
“Fuck me,” he whispered.
Six days and change. He could have let them take whoever these twats in his cabin were and hoped it took seven days for SLS to send more folks out to check on the Twitcher in the woods. By then, it wouldn’t have mattered. But, no, he had to go kill everyone and ruin it all. If there was one thing Tyler was good at, it was destroying things.
Eddie was going to die, that much was clear. The laser had burned through his lung and into the upper colon at the least, probably through the descending colon and some of the small intestine as well. There wasn’t a lot of blood, the laser cauterizing much of it, but the damage was fatal.
The boy was kneeling next to Eddie, holding his hand, crying.
“Take him,” Eddie said when he saw Tyler standing over him. “Out of the LCP.”
“What do they mean he’s a Cull?”
“They won’t stop.”
“How is the boy a Cull? What does that mean?”
“Please, mister,” the boy said. “Help him.”
“They took him. It wasn’t his fault.”
“How does he work?” Tyler nudged Eddie with his boot. Shock was sucking the man’s consciousness away.
“You’re a doctor. Why won’t you help him?”
“I don’t know,” Eddie said. “Quietly. It wasn’t his fault.”
“You have doctor books!”
“It wasn’t his fault.” Eddie slurped a breath.
“Staern Life Sciences made him?”
“Just a boy.”
“Malcolm Staern?”
“Eddie,” the boy cried. He shook Eddie’s shoulder.
Staern had stuck this kit in Tyler’s body. Not Staern himself, of course, but his company. His defense division that partnered with the Liberty Conglomerate Province military. Live fast. Die fast. Tyler couldn’t say they weren’t honest with him, but what choice did he have? What choice was left to him? They knew that, too. What choice had they left him?
And wasn’t that the story of his fucking life? Never given a choice, always things done to him until Tyler thought the doing couldn’t get any worse and then it did. Every time. Hey kid, give me your Seven Ten, his mom would say, making it near impossible for Tyler to go back under the synmap. When he ran away from home and met the Red Lithiums and thought he had found a real family, of people awake and living with each other, he thought this was it, this was the place he would die happy. Well, they tried for the first half of that, not much caring about the second half. Of course LCP wasn’t interested in a boy running for his life, no cubit to live in, not even on the dole anymore. Deceased, they said. It says so right here. Deceased. Five years ago, age eight. Fucking government. Street life it was, then. By the time Staern’s ‘cruiters found him, he hadn’t eaten in weeks and had allowed…Tyler wouldn’t let himself remember any more. But he sure as shit remembered how it started. Who started it all.
He looked at his watch.
-06:03:19:33.
“How did you get through Cerebus Gate North? How did you get out of the city?”
Six days. If they drove, they could retrace Eddie’s path and reach the northern gate to Elia in a day and a half. Through Elia to the center of the city in another day and a half, maybe two. Be at Staern Life Sciences tower in three, maybe four days total. What was he considering?
The boy ran to the kitchen where a towel lay crumpled next to the sink. He shook out the broken glass, small bells in the steel basin.
“How did you get through the gate?”
Eddie’s head lolled.
The boy knelt and pressed the towel to Eddie’s side, trying to staunch what little blood there was.
“The gate, Eddie. They don’t just let you through. How did you get through?” He shoved Eddie with his boot again, harder.
“Stop it,” the boy shouted.
They did this to him. Tyler didn’t give a shit about the man — had never met him before today—but it was the principle of it. They had a “Me first and to Hell with everyone else” attitude that had decimated Tyler’s and his mother’s lives. The things they had made him do… By God, six days might be enough time.
Eddie opened his mouth, but only blood instead of words.
“Help him,” the boy cried.
“Yeah,” Tyler said. He walked over to the table, picked up his Mark 9 and racked the slide.
“Stop. No!”
Tyler returned to the man, pointed the gun at Eddie’s temple and pulled the trigger.
That was the last thing Tyler would do for another person. From here on, Tyler was doing something for himself. This Cull-kid looked to be the perfect parting gift from this boot-shit world. An apology dropped in his lap. Tyler would take the apology and shove it down Staern’s throat. Make it go boom.
Laser Dick looked to be about the right size and his uniform hadn’t been shot through. The blood and little bit of bone on the collar could be rinsed out. Anyway the uniform was black. Maybe this could be their way through Cerebus North.
The kid had skidded back when Tyler shot Eddie, but blood had gotten on him anyway. Tyler could see he was rattling hard, volts of terror trembling through him.
“Take off your clothes,” Tyler said.
The boy didn’t move.
“Kid.” Tyler took a step towards him and the boy looked up. “Strip.”
“Why?”
Tyler leaned down and pulled at the kid’s collar, catapulting him to his feet.
The boy unzipped his SLS jumpsuit. Once he was naked, Tyler walked around the boy examining every pale centimeter of flesh, lifting his arms, combing his fingers through the boy’s hair, lifting his eyelids. No scars. No implants except the synports on his scalp and the fistula in his left arm that everyone got. Clean.
“Anything in you?”
“What?”
“Tracers, ‘netics. Bombs.”
The boy looked at Tyler.
“Get dressed,” Tyler said.
Tyler’s Mark 37 assault rifle from back when he was an official soldier of the LCP Corporate Assault Forces and eleven magazines of high-powered, self-guided rounds. His MK-9 pistol and six twenty-round magazines of splatter rounds. Two E15 incendiary grenades. The Springfield and his last four shells for it. His old combat vest that still smelled like Liberty Heights. A Melmoth combat shirt made from LV that combined flexible, laser dispersing and ballistic retarding fibers. Still heavy, but helpful when the shit hits the fan. Inside his rucksack: a change of socks, underwear and a t-shirt, his TX armor-piercing knife, a hard case kit that held his multi-tool, tape, rope, tourniquet and ferro cerium rod. A thermal blanket that reflected back his heat for warmth and masked his heat signature from thermal detection. An AnyAqua thermos with self-cleansing filtration liner. Makes piss taste like Canadian spring water. A cell-powered chainsaw and gloves. Eddie Fahrs’s credit chip with thirty-thousand chips on it. A stainless steel plunger of amphetamine boosters and blood dopers.
And the thetabiencort. Just in case.
These were the things he put in his Light Tactical Vehicle, silent and heavy. In life, often, there is a weight to waiting, a burdensome purposelessness that is undetectable. It wasn’t until Tyler had loaded his vehicle, the accoutrements of revenge—murder? Did it matter?—stowed, that he felt the lightness of decision. Of purpose.
These were the things he put in his jeep. These things and a weapon in the shape of a boy.
Tyler kept to the old roads from before the Great Divestment, but that meant some rough riding over crumbling asphalt and gravel trails. So far he’d only had to stop twice to use the chainsaw and clear trees. As dawn broke, Tyler could see buzzing across the horizon combines and fertilizers, harvesters and feed bots and sprinklers, a bee’s colony of automated agriculture wrapping up the fall harvest and fertilizing fields before winter. He knew he could drive a thousand miles and as long as he avoided the few agripharms between here and there, he wouldn’t see another human being until he reached Cerebus Gate North.
The blinking lights on wingtips and tail rotors reminded him of fireflies in June bobbing above the grass behind his cabin and he thought about how he would never see them again. He checked his watch: -05:17:58:12.
“Why does it count backwards,” the boy asked.
Tyler curled forward like a cat and stretched his back.
“Your watch. Why does it count backwards?”
“It’s counting my time left,” Tyler said. “Shut up.”
“Time left until what?”
Here and there, the sideways sunlight skipped across crumbled silos and farms. A flock of turkeys—was that right? Flock? Tyler thought he’d learned a different word—scurried off the road in front of them and into the brush.
“I’m hungry,” the boy said.
Of course. Tyler was an idiot. How could he have forgotten food for the kid? He had to eat so rarely, himself, it wasn’t part of his readiness routine.
“The human body can go more than three weeks without food. You’ll be fine.”
“Three weeks? That’s a long time. Are you a doctor? Is that why you had doctor books?”
Maybe if he didn’t answer the kid would shut up.
“You don’t look like a doctor. You’re too big. What are those thingies on your arm and neck?”
“Kid. Shut up.” Tyler needed to think. He needed a plan to get through Cerebus Gate North if the uniforms didn’t do it. Last time he’d snuck through there’d been so much chaos what with the tower collapsing and the military operating in and out of the gate, worried the tower had dropped from an attack from the Midlands.
Cerebus North.
Liberty Heights.
A residence tower filled with tens of thousands of people under synmaps, but not all of them. Some of them were awake on their scheduled relapse. Some of them were in the kitchens preparing solid foods instead of the nutrient sacs they’d lived on for the last ten days while they were under. Some of them were warned of what was coming before they’d felt it.
“I don’t want to go three weeks,” the boy said.
Tyler returned to the jeep.
“Without eating,” the boy said.
“You won’t have to. Three, four days, max.”
“Why? Where are you taking me?”
What difference did it make if the boy knew? Tyler knew when—to the second — he was going to die. Shouldn’t the boy?
“I’m taking you back. We’re going to figure out what makes you go boom and then we’re going to walk into Malcolm Staern’s tower and do just that.”
“That’s not what I do.”
“You’re a Cull, aren’t you?”
“I’m a Ben.”
“You’re a weapon.”
“Stop it.”
“See these?” Tyler pulled back his sleeve and shoved his forearm in front of the kid’s face, squeezing a fist, revealing corded muscles and deep purple JACKK veins. “It’s called the Joint Auto-pharmaceutical and Cyb
ernetic Kinesis Kit. Only the best in amphetamines, antipsychotics, steroids and nanocellotics that science can imagine. The same guy who made you put this shit in me.”
“Stop it.”
“And for the same reason.”
“Shut up!” The boy started crying.
“We’re not so different, you and I,” Tyler said. “Both killers.”
The sun crawled skyward and as they passed the northern corner of Lake Huron, Tyler could see the skeletons of ships crusted into the shorelines, masts standing like gravestones. From a time when people did such things as sailing and fishing. Now nobody sailed and anyone could sail, with the right syncast.
Eventually the boy had stopped crying and watched the countryside. “We could stay here. Or go back to your cabin.”
This again.
“You’re dying. That’s what your watch is counting, right? We could go back to your cabin and I could stay with you and we could play games or tell stories and when you weren’t feeling good I could make you something and I could try and help you.”
Tyler didn’t answer.
“Where are your friends?”
“They train you to talk so much?”
“I had lots of friends. They made me. When I came out for relapses. They’d ask me if I wanted to go and make friends.”
“You’re not a Skimmer, are you? Skimmers don’t have friends.”
“None? Who do they play with?”
“And anyway, the only friends I ever had tried to kill me. Hell, everyone ever has.”
The kid didn’t say anything for a long time and Tyler thought maybe he’d gotten bored and wasn’t paying attention anymore, but when he looked at the boy, when he saw the boy was staring at him, but not seeing him, Tyler knew he’d nicked something deep.
“Why’d you say that?” the boy whispered.
“What?”
“I didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Eric asked to see his mom and dad and I told Mrs. Kathy that he didn’t want to play anymore and she said she would take him home and that they would make him feel better before he left and, anyway, it wasn’t me. I was just there with him. He got sick by himself.” It was as if the words vomited up from somewhere the boy hadn’t known existed within himself and this sudden knowledge of guilt terrified the child as much as the secret itself. He breathed hard through his nose.