Dead Mann Running (9781101596494)

by Petrucha, Stefan

  Her low center of gravity kept her from falling, but she staggered sideways. Jonesey, or his body, or whatever, acting as if it were in a Romero movie, bit into her neck, enough to make a little tear. He used the fingers of his remaining hand to widen the hole, then tore out a chunk of her throat, which he proceeded to stuff into his mouth and chew.

  As her screams turned to gurgles, a chopper light veered to cover the sudden uproar. The funny thing is, even with all those cops and guardsmen standing around, no one moved a muscle to stop Jonesey until long after everyone was sure she was dead.

  33

  Not wanting to see what they did to Jonesey’s body before it hurt anyone else, I was almost grateful I had one last bit to play. There’d be time to mourn him later, maybe an eternity. I was still woozy as I ran back up the stairs, wondering how long I’d stay standing.

  “You heard it,” I called. “Your mother’s dead. It doesn’t matter any—”

  The searchlights were still pointed at the fracas below, but there was enough light for me to see a small hand extended over the water, pouring blue liquid from an open vial.

  She’d done it.

  “Why? I did what you asked.”

  The hand let go of the empty vial and slipped back into shadow.

  “I imagine my father asked that often when my mother punished him. She called him weak, but I don’t think she ever understood him. She couldn’t. It’s like that black wall you run into when you try to remember something. But if you think about it, he never invented anything that wasn’t used. He invented this thinking she would use it.”

  The choppers rose and twisted back into position, making wild abstract shapes in the tower, all white or all black, no grays. They didn’t even realize there was no point anymore.

  “But you hate her,” I said. “Now she’s a power of example?”

  “Not her, my father. He believed in surrender, submission. That no matter how much willpower you think you have, things move on their own. He must have thought my mother a fool, spiritually at least. It finally dawned on me that trying to bring her to justice made me a fool, too. So, this is how I surrender.”

  I think I wanted to understand, but so far, it wasn’t happening. The best I could come up with was that the child of Travis and Rebecca was now playing her parents game all on her own. Afraid she might run, I took a step forward.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “I really don’t want them to fire before I apologize.”

  I was stunned. “You release a plague on humanity and you’re sorry?”

  “Oh, not for that, but for what I did to your father.”

  I don’t know how I managed to look surprised anymore, but I guess I did.

  “He was in the lab as a volunteer. You gave him the case.”

  She nodded. “I’d been inside often. It was easy to sneak in and out. It was the first place I headed when I learned my father was dead. I found the briefcase he’d left wrapped with a pretty bow for mother’s big day. I wanted to prove she’d killed him. Having her present would give me leverage. But I was afraid it had some kind of tracking device, that they’d catch me. So I gave it to your father, along with the fake ID. He didn’t know the name Kyua, so I explained it was the Cure. He wanted very badly to give it to you, so I showed him where to run.”

  “You used him.”

  “I wasn’t the first, but I think I was the last. Once I thought it was safe, I met him there. I gave him every chance to give it back, I even told him what it really was, but he thought I was lying, that he had a way to save you. My mistake. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone could care for their child that much. Can’t blame me for that, can you?”

  The folds of her hood dipped in and out of the light, black squiggles on a snowy field. Over the reservoir, metal clicks mixed with whirring blades.

  “By then I was in a hurry. Mother knew her gift was missing, Colby Green found out about it, too, from one of his moles. We fought. I actually had to take your father apart, and thanks to whatever my father had done to him, he still got away, part of him, anyway. That’s what I’m sorry for. But at least you knew your father for a while.”

  A sliver of color appeared in the ebony wall. Blue. She was holding the other vial.

  “I didn’t know mine, not really. In all my life he only wrote me one letter. My mother tore it up, but let him send me the pieces. She told me it was an apology for creating me, but there was only one line I could make out. Do you want to know what it was?”

  She stepped into the searchlight beam, holding the remaining vial in both hands, as if it were a chalice. I heard the hiss of a launcher firing.

  “We are the stuff of stars. Remember?”

  The grenade hit. I had no choice but to submit. I flew backward down the stairs, seeing all those stars Travis Maruta had written his daughter about.

  34

  Humanity’s fondest dream, immortality, was about to come true. Frantic warnings were issued, pipelines clamped shut, but even without the riots, there was only so much they could do. Even if people didn’t have a tendency to drink water, Project Birthday worked just as well airborne. Evaporation would send tons of the stuff into the air.

  That didn’t stop people from trying. Every LB in the area, Misty, Booth, Green, the guard, the police, the army, the hospital patients and staff, all of us were placed under quarantine. The CDC and a horde of penitent ChemBet boffins worked us over around the clock.

  When they told me Misty survived her throat wounds, I wanted to see her, but they wouldn’t let me. I was kept in a separate room, submerged in a vat of some shit called Plasmocin. I heard Nell got the same. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The vat had a window with a TV on the other side, so there was something to watch, and they let us out every few hours so we wouldn’t lose it.

  Speaking of losers, judging from the cable news, after the ferals were rounded up, the rebelling chakz, with no further orders from their glorious leader, became more interested in watching all the excitement rather than causing it.

  Once I was pronounced clean, they let me visit Misty. Sort of. She was behind a thick glass wall and I was carrying a bucket to catch the Plasmocin still dripping from the various cracks in my body.

  She’d been off the drugs a few days. Her eyes were clearer, but that only made the sadness in them clearer, too.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  “For a chak, that’s an improvement. You working your program?”

  She made a face. “It’s a psychiatric hospital. Half the staff are addicts. We have meetings every six hours.”

  “How’s it working for you?”

  She bobbed her head and swallowed. “I miss Chester. But I’m glad he’s not coming back. I don’t want to either. I’d hate to be like you, Hess, no offense.”

  She held her hand against the barrier. I pressed mine to the same spot. The glass probably felt better than my skin.

  “None taken. At least it gives you a good reason to stay healthy, huh?”

  She nodded. “If they let us out, and there’s ever a case you don’t want to take, I won’t argue. We can both watch television all day.”

  “Deal.”

  To get on my good side, or keep me from joining the long line of people suing them, ChemBet sent me the volunteer application my father filled out, the one that gave them permission to do whatever they wanted and keep him as long as they liked. In the little space where it asks why he’s signing up, he says, “My son’s a chak. I want to do right by him.”

  Had a hard time wrapping my head around that one. I couldn’t blame him for being duped by Penny, but I still didn’t forgive him for kicking the dog.

  Nell was declared clean about the same time I was. In her case, she was immediately placed under arrest for the murder of Travis Maruta. Booth, cursing his head off in quarantine, took the time to arrange a meeting for me before they transferred her out.

  We sat in a small windowless room for half an hour, holding cold hands and no
t saying much until it was almost time for her to go.

  On the way out, she asked, “Canada?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We both knew it wasn’t going to happen. Not that I thought she’d get jail time. With the truth out, or as much reality as mankind could bear, her broadcast made her more popular than ever. It’d be to the state’s advantage to drop the charges and have her take the stand against ChemBet, or Green, or both. Even if the case went to trial, I doubted any jury would convict her. People were getting more sympathetic to chakz now that they knew they’d be one someday.

  The reason Canada was out was because we couldn’t get there from here anymore. Fort Hammer and the surrounding county had been sealed off. More troops manned the borders every day. And you had to figure that if they didn’t find a vaccine quick, someone up the chain was already planning to nuke the place.

  How long before that? Like the poet said, April is the cruellest month. That’s when the CDC figures the mycoplasma will be too entrenched in the general populace to stop the spread.

  Judgment Day? More like Misjudgment Day. Not that graves would burst open and the dead rise, but when any infected LB died, in an hour or two they’d be on their feet. Then again, since the body wouldn’t have much time to decay, most of the newcomers would be smart, at least for a while.

  After Nell was shipped out, I was told I’d be free to wander Fort Hammer again, provided I agreed to keep mum about certain facts I’d learned regarding the inspiration for the invention of the RIP, the revelation of which would likely cause more chakz, and some livebloods, to lose it. I agreed. With the evil geniuses behind it all dead, what was the point?

  After a few days back in the office, the first snow started to fall, some of it into the hallway. As I was busy trying to sort the trash into different piles, I got two more surprises. The first was that a liveblood FedEx man was actually delivering in the Bones. The second was the contents of the package.

  Inside a small white box there was a plastic bag containing, according to the label, the ashes of my father’s arm. An enclosed letter said the CDC had all the samples they needed to reverse engineer whatever Maruta had done to him. Meanwhile, ChemBet was suing to get the remains back, insisting my father’s cells were their intellectual property. Rather than let that happen, they’d cremated what they had. Satisfied that 1900 degrees Fahrenheit would take care of anything communicable, as “surviving” heir, they decided the ashes rightfully belonged to me.

  I took the little bag to the roof and looked at the Bones and the city. I still wasn’t sure he got the meaning right, but I had to say something as I tossed the ashes into the wind, so I muttered the last few words of that poem Dad liked:

  And you, my father, there on the sad height,

  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

  Funny thing, as I watched the snow fall on the living and the dead, I was struck by a rare optimistic thought. If everyone gets the virus, maybe someone with half a brain and a healthy attitude really will try to find a cure. And then, who knows?

  A cynical view of humanity? Maybe. Or maybe you just have to be dead to think that way.

  Life is wasted on the living.

  Praise Kyua.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Born in the Bronx, Stefan Petrucha spent his formative years moving between the big city and the suburbs, both of which made him prefer escapism. A fan of comic books, science fiction, and horror since learning to read, in high school and college he added a love for all sorts of literary work, eventually learning that the very best fiction always brings you back to reality; so, really, there’s no way out.

  An obsessive compulsion to create his own stories began at age ten and has since taken many forms, including novels, comics, and video productions. At times, the need to pay the bills has made him a tech writer, an educational writer, a public relations writer, and an editor for trade journals, but fiction, in all its forms, has always been his passion. Every year he’s made a living at that he counts as a lucky one. Fortunately, there’ve been many. Ripper, which is sort of like the Harry Potter books but with no magic and with a serial killer, is available now.