by D L Young
“I don’t see a way out,” Jack said, giving voice to the desperate thought Maddox had at the same moment.
“There isn’t one,” Maddox panted. “It’s a dead end.”
Maddox ground his teeth together. He wasn’t in his element. If he were in the City, he’d have given the cops the slip easily, the same way he had countless times. Scrambling up a fire escape like a monkey, leaping across the gap of neighboring rooftops, ducking into a hidden subway maintenance corridor. He’d evaded the cops so many times in so many ways since childhood, it had become a kind of game to him. It felt like anything but a game at the moment.
Maddox heard the cops lumbering up the footpath. “Hide,” he blurted.
They scrambled about, furiously searching the merchant stalls for a place to hole up. Jack dove inside a small space between stacks of old car tires, balling himself up as small as he could manage, then pulling a couple tires over the gap to hide from view. Maddox squeezed his way inside the empty cabinet of a food kiosk, wedging himself into a tight nook beside a rusted-out gas canister, clutching his gear satchel to his chest. His feet slipped on warm grease that had dripped down from the still-hot cooking surface a couple centimeters above his head. The heat felt like a hot towel lying across his scalp. He reached out, closed the cabinet door, and blinked in the sudden darkness.
A moment later he heard the cops enter the clearing. “Fan out,” one of them said. Perfect, Maddox thought morbidly. He’d hoped they wouldn’t pause here, that they’d run straight through, assuming he and Jack had run into the trees beyond the clearing. No such luck.
There were holes oxidized into one wall of his hiding place. They were too small for anyone to see him from outside but large enough for him to have a limited view of what was going on. He saw two cops stalking the edge of the clearing, their visored faces moving back and forth in slow, searching sweeps, rifles held at the ready. Then a pair of armored legs blocked the view, passing less than a meter from his face. Clenching his jaw muscles tight, he didn’t move, didn’t breathe.
He waited, every muscle in his body tense, expecting the cabinet door to fly open at any moment. He heard crashing noises, things being tumbled over. The cops were going through the stalls, tearing them apart. Nothing here, go check that one, he heard one of them say. Sweat ran into Maddox’s eyes. He blinked hard, not daring to wipe it away with his hands and maybe bang his elbow against the metal door, revealing himself. Through the holes he saw the edge of the tire stack where Jack was hiding. A cop walked up next to the stack, stopped. Maddox held his breath as the cop kicked the stack, then started to remove a tire.
Maddox flinched at the sudden scream of a motor. A hover engine, winding up to what sounded like red line revolutions. Loud and close.
“Take it down!” one of the cops cried. In the next moment, a barrage of automatic gunfire buried the sound of the hover engine.
Daylight assaulted him as the door to his hiding place flew open. A silhouetted figure loomed over him. Maddox held his hands up reflexively and gasped, anticipating gunshots. None came. Instead, the figure pulled him out by the arm. Jack.
“Quiet now,” he said, his mouth close to Maddox’s ear. “Come on.”
Squinting against the bright light, Maddox couldn’t tell what was happening. The gunfire continued as Jack hustled him across the dirt. A moment later, his eyes adjusted enough to glimpse the rhino cops at the opposite side of the clearing, their rifles trained on a smoking hover falling from the sky like a brick.
As they dashed back onto the footpath from which they’d come, the firing stopped, followed by a crunching thud of metal slamming heavily against the ground.
They ran, listening for sounds of pursuit. There was no gunfire, no shouts for them to stop. The distant amplified voices of the cops grew fainter, then disappeared completely. The cops must have continued after them in the same direction, unaware Maddox and Jack had doubled back. The pair slowed to a jog, more from exhaustion than mutual consent. As he caught his breath, Maddox’s thoughts turned to Tommy. Had the kid gotten away?
When they emerged a minute later into the clearing where they’d first seen the kid, Maddox had his answer. Tommy was there, kneeling next to his stand, hurriedly packing wares into a large canvas bag. Except for Maddox and Jack, the kid was alone in the large abandoned clearing.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jack said.
The kid jerked his head up at them. “Are the rhinos on you?” he snapped, heaving the bag over his shoulder.
“No,” Maddox said, breathing heavily. “What happened? That hover…” He was still too gassed to get out more than a couple words at a time.
Tommy peered beyond them, his brow furrowed. “They’ll be back before long.” He tilted his head, gesturing for them to follow. “Come on. I know a way out where they won’t see us.”
***
The tunnels beneath the old Bronx Zoo had to be at least a couple centuries old, judging by the brickwork. Maddox recognized the same kind of masonry, small, tightly packed bricks dull blond in color, on some of the City’s oldest buildings. The ones marked with special plaques, designating them as historical landmarks. Where someone of significance had died. Where some important treaty was signed. The tight, darkened passageways would have been impossible for Maddox to navigate without his specs amplifying the almost nonexistent ambient light.
The air was cool and humid. The walls glistened with moisture. Maddox and Jack followed Tommy, still catching their breath.
“Why didn’t you come down here in the first place?” Maddox asked.
The kid answered without turning around. “I couldn’t. The cops were blocking the only entrance. I had to circle back around.”
“Who was in that hover?” Jack asked.
“No idea,” the kid said. “But those rhinos weren’t messing around.”
No, they hadn’t been, Maddox agreed inwardly. They hadn’t even bothered to warn the hover’s driver, which their rhino gear could do by overriding the vehicle’s audio system. Instead, they’d opened fire without hesitating. Not exactly standard procedure.
Maddox swallowed. Those cops hadn’t been looking to arrest someone. They were a hit squad.
For the next few minutes, no one spoke. Condensation dripped from the ancient arched ceiling. Their footfalls echoed softly off the walls. Maddox finally felt his heart return to something close to a normal rhythm.
Slowly, the darkness dissipated. The dank, heavy atmosphere gave way to a cool current of air. They were nearing an exit.
“So where does this come out?” Jack asked.
“About a block from a metro station,” Tommy said.
A minute later, they climbed a narrow stairway and emerged into the sunlight. Tommy pressed his hand against his forehead to block the sudden brightness. The Bronx spread out quietly around them. Empty lots overgrown with weeds, decaying buildings, cracked and crumbling roadways that looked as if they’d been beaten by an angry god wielding an enormous hammer. Roughly fifty meters in front of them stood an elevated metro platform. A small knot of people milled about at the top of the stairs, waiting for the next train.
Standing there, it occurred to Maddox he hadn’t given any thought to his next move. Beyond getting back to the City, that was. If he had any chance of staying one step ahead of the cops, it was in the crowded sprawl of the City’s valley floor, where he knew dozens of ways to stay off their radar. Yes, the cops had caught him off guard when they’d raided his office, and yes, he still didn’t know how they’d managed to locate his place of business. But even so, he felt the odds had evened up a bit. Certainly not in his favor, but at least now he knew they were after him. Now they couldn’t surprise him. What he needed was a place to hole up, catch his breath, and see if he could figure out what the hell was going on.
“So what’s our next stop?” Jack asked.
“Our next stop?” Maddox said. “This is where you get off the roller coaster, Jack. I’m toxic, in case you haven�
�t noticed.”
Jack waved a hand dismissively. “A little heat. Big deal.”
“This is more than a little heat,” Maddox said.
Jack nodded, as if that was just what he wanted to hear. “All the better. I could use a new story to add to my legend,” he said shamelessly, then glanced at Tommy and gave the kid a playful wink. “And besides, everybody knows Jack Kadrey doesn’t cut and run.”
The kid’s eyes widened. “Wait, you’re Jack Kadrey? Natural Jack Kadrey, the fighter? Holeeey shit!” His anger at Maddox instantly forgotten, the kid gawked upward, his mouth hanging open. The fighter smiled, basking in the kid’s awed stare.
“At your service, little brother,” he said with a gracious nod.
Maddox resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Okay, big shot, listen to me. I didn’t see any bee drones back there, so you’re probably not burned. But if you stick around this party much longer, you will be. So right about now, cutting and running would be the smartest thing you could do.” After a moment he added: “In fact, doing anything besides cutting and running would be monumentally stupid.”
Jack smiled at the kid. “It’s like he’s daring me to stick around, isn’t he, young brother?”
The kid was still gawking. “You are such a badass,” he mooned.
This time Maddox didn’t resist the urge and rolled his eyes. He smoked, taking a long drag and blowing out. The fighter stared at him, grinning in a way that told Maddox he had no chance of talking Jack out of it. The man’s turf loyalty ran deep.
There was a low rumble in the distance, growing louder. A metro train approaching. “Your call,” he told the fighter, shrugging. So Jack wanted to play the superhero. Fine. Maddox was too tired to argue the point.
The trio headed to the metro station, climbed the stairs. As they stepped up onto the platform, Maddox scanned the area for security cams. There was a single rusted-out housing high on the wall, a pair of bare wires snaking out from it that had once been attached to a camera. They moved to an empty space, away from the half dozen people waiting for the train.
“I know a safe place off the grid,” Jack suggested, keeping his voice low, “where we can lay low for a spell.”
“Sounds good,” Tommy said.
It sounded anything but good to Maddox. Splitting up was their best option. Together, they were conspicuous as hell. A huge black guy, an average white guy, and a Korean kid. Even if the cops hadn’t managed to get a clear pic of them back in Fabbertown, by now they’d surely put together a description. And it would take all of ten seconds to send out a search algorithm to every street cam and bumblebee drone in the City, tweaked to find just such a trio.
Still, he needed to find out what Tommy knew about this whole mess, if indeed he knew anything. The cops had interrupted him before he could ask the kid much of anything. A couple hours of downtime with some space to breathe might get a few of his questions answered. Then after that, they’d have to split up.
The train roared its arrival to the station. The clackety-clack of the tracks slowed and brakes shrieked as the train reduced speed and the graffiti-covered cars shuddered to a stop.
“All right,” Maddox told Jack as the doors slid open. “So where are we going?”
“I know the perfect place,” Jack said, his tone a bit more enthusiastic than the occasion called for.
“And you’re sure it’s off the grid?” Maddox asked.
“Utterly and totally. Trust me.”
7 - Electric Kitty
Jack brought them to a brothel, of course. It was a very Jack way of going underground.
“Who said going off the grid can’t be fun?” Jack said, elbowing Maddox playfully as they stepped into the run-down tenement in Queens. They were greeted warmly by the hostess, a fiftyish woman named Celeste with intricate face tattoos and forearms full of jangling silver bracelets. She hugged Jack around the neck and fussed over him and his companions like an overbearing mother. Sex workers in various states of undress brought them generous portions of stir-fried noodles and glasses of cold beer. Tommy hardly spoke as he slurped his noodles, his wide eyes wandering from woman to woman. More than once Maddox noticed the distracted kid miss his mouth with his chopsticks, poking a load of greasy noodles against his cheek.
Electric Kitty—a place Maddox had heard of once or twice but had never visited before today—catered to body mod fetishists, employing sex workers with an impressive variety of surgical and nano-enabled modifications. Pigtailed anime girls in plaid skirts with flawless pink skin and enlarged irises and pupils. Living, breathing porn cartoons, giggling and sucking on lollipops. A topless woman with bright blue skin, devil horns, and yellow cat’s eyes. A toffee-skinned geisha with full lips and dreadlocked hair who looked to Maddox as if (s)he occupied the exact midpoint of the gender spectrum. A man with rippling muscles and a deep tan, his right arm below the elbow missing, replaced with a sex machine prosthetic. Dildo fingers of varying shapes and sizes. By the time Maddox finally noticed the woman with two rows of tits, he’d already lost the ability to be surprised.
Maddox was less than comfortable with Jack’s selected refuge, but he had to admit the fighter had been right about the place. Electric Kitty was indeed off the grid. The scramble shields embedded in the walls and ceilings that housed the four-story operation were top of the line, blocking all incoming and outgoing digital traffic. As soon as they’d arrived, Maddox kicked off an app in his specs, checking for vulnerabilities and security gaps. The app had run through its routines and, to Maddox’s great relief, found nothing. The place was watertight. A tiny island of digital darkness in a cybernetic sea. Even the ad feed went silent in Maddox’s lenses, which almost never happened. A large portion of the operation’s clientele, apparently, wanted their secret desires to stay that way, so Electric Kitty, ever attentive to its customers’ wishes, invested heavily in privacy tech, making it an ideal place for the trio to hide.
After the meal, Celeste showed them to a spacious ground-floor room near the rear of the building. The fighter sat on an overstuffed burgundy sofa, a woman on either side of him, a third sitting on his lap. Tommy sat awkwardly in a chair that matched the sofa. Maddox wondered if the kid’s uncomfortable expression was worry for his friends, or if it was simply the sex-anxiety of a first brothel visit. A bit of both, maybe.
Maddox looked at Jack, shook his head.
“What?” Jack asked, his voice rising with exaggerated innocence, his large hands full of ass. “You wanted to go off the grid, so I got you off the grid.”
Getting off the grid. Getting off, period. Why not do both at the same time? Yes, Maddox thought again, this was a very Jack way of going underground.
***
Convincing Jack to downshift his revving sex engine wasn’t easy, but Maddox persisted. Finally the fighter gave in, at least for the moment, and politely asked the women to give them some privacy. Alone and nakedfaced, the three huddled around a small table with Maddox’s gear satchel lying on top of it.
“All right, kid,” Maddox began, “give it up. What’s going on with your turfies?”
“I told you already,” the kid insisted. “I don’t know anything. I tried to call them and I didn’t get through to anybody.” Tommy stared hard at Maddox. “But what if they did blow up some office? Why would you give two shits, salaryman?”
Salaryman. Before today, Maddox hadn’t been called that in a while. Not since he and Tommy and a mercenary woman named Beatrice had gotten mixed up with a very nasty AI. Beatrice had called him salaryman, her voice inflected with either sarcasm or contempt—he’d never been sure which it was. Here with Tommy, it was a hundred percent, unmistakable contempt. The kid was still carrying a grudge.
After their run-in with the AI, Maddox had taken Tommy under his wing, not unlike his late mentor Rooney had done with him once upon a time. The kid had the innate skill needed for datajacking, and in the early days of rebuilding his business, Maddox had needed the help. Tommy had been a quick
study, taking only weeks to learn the ins and outs of core-level virtual space. For most newbies it took months.
But the kid had proved to be too undisciplined, too inclined to ignore Maddox’s guidance. The overeager kid would jump headlong into something right after he’d been instructed to move cautiously. Tommy was ambitious and impatient to the point of recklessness, and Maddox couldn’t afford to employ a bull in his china shop. After a couple frustrating months, he’d cut the kid loose.
In the year since, Maddox had slowly, painstakingly rebuilt his business. And in the last few months, the work had finally found a decent rhythm. Jobs were coming in steadily, cash flow was growing. Then this mess had hit him, knocking him down just when he’d gotten back on his feet, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. Maddox had never been a starry-eyed optimist. When things were going well, the larger part of him never expected it to last. The good times were the exception to the rule, the smallest sections on the timeline of your life. But even a cynic to the marrow might have expected a run of good luck to last more than a few short months. And it was this that angered him most about his sudden and mysterious reversal of fortune. He’d worked himself to the bone, scratched and clawed his way to the threshold of success, peered into its room, only to have the door slammed shut in his face.
Some of the anger in Tommy’s face faded, then a light flipped on behind his eyes, like he’d finally figured out some nagging problem. “I just got it,” the kid said.
“Got what?” Maddox asked.
“The cops think you have something to do with that bombing, too, don’t they?”
Maddox didn’t answer. The kid might be reckless, but he wasn’t stupid. He hadn’t planned on looping the kid in, but so much for that.
“Should have known,” the kid said, shaking his head. “You don’t care they’re in jail. You only care because it touches you.”
“I’m sorry for wanting to stay out of jail.”
“And what about my turfies?” the kid said.
