Bobbi gave Scalli a dubious look, but shrugged as well. “Well if we did, then hooray,” she said. “Fuck ‘em. The more of their shit we can destroy, the happier I’ll be.”
“I hear that.” Maya started talking about something else, and he turned toward Bobbi in his chair. “So what are we going to do here, then?”
Bobbi pursed her lips. “Well,” she said, “We’ve got to go and hunt her down, of course. We’ll have to hit Tenleytown first, figure out what the Oldies have heard. And we’ll have to work something out after that.”
“Tenleytown.” Scalli wrinkled his nose. “I don’t see how that place is still standing.”
“Yeah, well, Oldies are a lot tougher than anyone gives them credit.” Bobbi got to her feet, heaving a deep sigh as she looked at the holographic screen on the wall. There was an advertisement on for the new model Ford-Dezarre Lancer; there was a woman draped across the hood of the car, which was out in the desert somewhere with a perfect, blue, computer-generated sky. The car’s cab was in the back end and its hood extended gracefully forward, so that it looked something like a duck’s head with an enormous bill. The second coming of the Corvette Stingray, the commercial announced. The model lying across the hood was pretty and blonde, lean and dark-skinned. A wide swath of liquid latex had been splashed across over her body, the same color as the car, but it did nothing to hide the details of her naked body. ‘New for eighty-one,’ purred a woman in voiceover as the camera panned across the car. ‘The Ford-Dezarre Lancer. Buy one, and take the ultimate ride.’ The camera swooped down the hood, the woman, and over the back of the car before flying off into the horizon toward the F-D logo; they weren’t at all subtle about it, the camera zooming through her spread legs and over the mons so you could see her clit if you were really looking.
“That’s…a hell of a commercial,” said Scalli, whose brows had climbed up over his eyes. “Haven’t seen that one.”
“The next time I see one of those cars,” said Bobbi, “I’m going to burn it.”
Scalli snorted.
They had done their best to get ready for their little trip into the Old City, which for Bobbi really just meant dressing real down and prepping her bag as always. Normally, she didn’t need much else, but this time around she made some other arrangements. She wore her coveralls, of course, but she tucked a few thumb-thick stacks of cash bills into pockets sewn into the inside of the coveralls, accessible through snaps inside the outside ones.
She also carried a weapon. It was a combat knife, a ceramic combat dagger she’d kept in her dresser for years, one that she used to carry as a girl; on its blade had been etched a simple number 2 on top of a Christian cross, the unit badge of the 2nd Lord’s Crusader Infantry. It had been her father’s service knife. He’d killed with it, people who he had thought the enemy of humanity but had only really just been people who prayed to a different god than he had.
At least this time, she thought, the enemy wasn’t a matter of political opinion; if the Yathi race were bent on the end of humanity, then perhaps she could bring herself to spill blood if that was what was required. All the same, she had not carried that knife on her person since she had left the Old City, and now that she was going back to Tenleytown, she had thought that she might have gotten better.
There was an irony in that, she was certain, but if someone voiced it to her just then she’d have probably told them to fuck off.
Bobbi put the knife in her bag, though she knew she’d probably do better to put it somewhere more accessible. She’d do that when she had to, but she didn’t want to become too comfortable with wearing it. Once she’d double-checked her gear – the terminal, the Grail, programs and such – she went down into the bar room where Scalli was waiting for her like a small tank waiting to be boarded. He’d gotten rid of the long coat, thank God, and he’d instead tooled himself up in faded urban BDU pants and a tan jacket, the size of which screamed of only the most custom of big-and-tall stores. “Better button up when we get there,” she said, nodding toward that when she came through the door to the storeroom. “Someone’ll want to pick a fight with you over those plates of yours.”
“Why the hell would someone pick a fight with me?” He looked down at himself, then back at her, all incredulity.
“You’re big and scary, yeah, but you’re also good salvage with all that gear. Best to make them imagine what you might have, rather than know for sure.” Bobbi shrugged. “The element of the unknown works well for somebody in Old City, you know? If you seem too scary you get left alone. People out there fix on details, pick out weaknesses.”
“All right, fair enough,” he said, bobbing his head in understanding. He zipped up the jacket and shouldered the bag that sat on a table nearby, a big Army duffel that hung heavily from his body like a bad habit. Who the hell knows what he had in there, she thought, but she imagined most of it was horribly lethal. That was good, considering where they were going.
Scalli adjusted his bag so it was comfortable, then looked at Bobbi. “So,” he said, with the air of a man who was about to march into Hell’s own gaping maw. “You ready?”
“Yeah,” she said with a nod. “I’m ready.”
“Well.” Scalli turned toward the door and trundled out, holding it open for her to exit. Bobbi walked up to the entranceway, pausing at the threshold. The Old City. Her past. And beyond Tenleytown, madness and death. It wouldn’t be like how it was when she and Tom had gone, skirting the border. It would be into the bad places of the world, in some of which people had forgotten to be human. Bobbi hoped that bag was full of guns and fire, because they were going to need it.
“All right, then,” she said, more to herself than to Scalli, and took a deep breath.
She stepped across the threshold, into the parking lot, and closed the doors behind her. She thought of Tom’s coat hanging on the wall, and wondered if she’d ever see it again.
Well. Only one way to find out.
They piled into the van, with its oversized cab and its oversized everything else, and they began their trek across the city. They took the Pacific Highway down toward Sea-Tac and beyond, where the New City extended like a finger through the Verge and disrupted the generally concentric layout of the city zones. On the other side of the airport, between Kent and Des Moines, was the end of Civil Protection’s containment cordon and the southernmost gate to the Old City. Tenleytown lay just beyond that, well in sight of the drone guns and Pacification Officers that kept that end of the city safe from ferals, and it was there that they intended to go.
They had elected to go during the day, when things were liable to be the most peaceful. They were quiet for the most part as they went, listening to the music channels or letting the news play on the console’s display screen. Every now and again that fucking Lancer commercial would come on and they’d both groan, turn the channel to something else, and most likely groan again. Since discovering situation of the Yathi, all these things that had made such entertaining television now just reminded them of their place in world events. Might as well put up signs that screamed ‘FEED’ and ‘CONSUME’ and ‘OBEY’. Finally they just turned the damned thing off and let the humming of the engine serve as background noise for their journey.
As they passed the airport and Des Moines began to crumble all around them, they found the tension inside themselves growing more and more. This was it, after all. The last time Bobbi had gone into the Old City, it had been with Tom, and they had almost been killed. Happily they’d be down near Kent instead of Renton, which was far safer. Scalli didn’t look at all dismayed as they drove up to the walls of concrete barricade that now served as the border to the city. After all, he was used to combat, and they’d just been through an experience a bit worse than urban primitives. For one, they’d definitely be afraid of the guns that Scalli had brought with him, and they wouldn’t have to be shot into pieces before they would stop coming.
The looming structures were spaced with towers atop which drone gu
ns waited to greet trespassers. They drove along the inside of the wall, stained concrete walls soaked with the shadows of the evening, to where the gates stood waiting. They were massive things, powered slabs a foot thick that swung inward on graven tracks. A while back she’d heard that some ferals had gotten through some scavenged fire engines through the old gates before getting shot to pieces. Of course Civil Protection set up something made of solid overkill in the wake of that.
CivPro street officers, Pacification Officers in riot armor clustered around the gates, armed with assault rifles not too much different from what Scalli had used at Data Nexus 216. Bobbi had spent some of the last few days getting palettes of food and such from local supermarkets and loading them in the back of the van, as well as hacking together a profile of a local nonprofit helping the disaffected in Tenleytown. It happened, just not all that often. She had ID cards bashed together as well, and as far as she could tell they were good enough to be scanned through without a problem when Civil Protection went over the car. She was worried about Scalli’s guns, though he had said there was no reason to. The duffel, packed in with one of the pallets of food, was made of sensor-scattering material. Stealth luggage, she thought. The sec-for-hire business was full of surprises.
They spent a good half an hour there by the gate, with the CivPro officers going all over the van with a sniffer and looking tough in Scalli’s direction. The IDs panned out, though the head of the patrol, a dude named Forrest with a perennial smirk best attributed to the well-armed and extremely bored, kept trying to chat Bobbi’s pants off. Literally, as in she felt he’d take her straight into the bunker and drill her if she’d so much as hinted if she wanted it – but Bobbi was having none of it, and she when she rebuffed him it was firm but playful so that he wouldn’t get pissed and hold them back after the scan was done. Much to Bobbi’s surprise, they didn’t even do a physical check of the van; they swept it pretty well with the scanner but having not come up with anything glaringly wrong (thank you, sensorproof duffel bag) they were soon on their way through the gate with a ticket to allow them back in afterward. The ticket would be only for that gate, however; they’d have to use it on return if they wanted to get back in legally.
The great gray slabs of the gates swung inward, and beyond the wall the crumbling corpse of suburbia lay. Scalli and Bobbi looked at one another, feeling the weight of the moment, and then she looked back out toward the distant run of highway beyond which Tenleytown waited.
“Well, fuck it,” Bobbi said through pursed lips. “Let’s go save the world or whatever.”
If a visitor from the previous century had seen Tenleytown, the first thing that they might have thought of was Kowloon Walled City – and they’d be absolutely forgiven for doing so since that was basically what Tenleytown was. Four city blocks worth of office buildings, stores, and a long-decommissioned mall had been fused together under a crazy spiderwork of pipes, girders, scavenged plates and various impromptu structures to form a kind of castle in the middle of the crumbling suburban landscape. It looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic comic book, but then again most things out here tended to do so. Tenleytown loomed above what had once been the park-strewn land between Interstate 5 and State Route 167, whose fortified Old City stretches made CivPro’s containment operation look modest and was its own kind of defense against the crazies of the area. Sandwiched between the drone guns and mines that the government had laid to defend these two major traffic arteries, Tenleytown was the perfect place for those who didn’t want to live like savages to gather. It wasn’t pretty, but it was peaceful. Well, for the most part anyway.
They drove along 228th Street toward the squatter city, marveling what sprawled around them. Kent had been pretty torn up by fire just before Bobbi had lived in Tenleytown, but time had done much to rebuild the landscape to its own tastes. Left to burn out of control, many of the buildings were still burnt-out husks, the bones of houses and shop fronts exposed to the seasons and the ever-encroaching mist that settled out this way. The streets were crumbling veins of blacktop, and beyond that the parks, which still possessed the old and blackened hulks of their former trees, were again fields of mostly green grass. All around Tenleytown, the land had been left to nature. All around Tenleytown, life had moved on.
And to think – even if the Yathi were defeated, someday the Verge would push out here as the city was ‘reclaimed’ by human agencies, and it would all be ruined again. At least this way, as destroyed as it was, there was a kind of peace to it. Building it up again would just allow it to collapse, and probably worse. But then there was nothing to stop progress, was there?
When they had drawn close enough for the fortress to tower over them, Bobbi turned to Scalli and told him to stop. “You don’t want to get too close,” she counseled him. “They’ll open up on us and that’ll be it.”
Scalli snorted as the van rolled to a halt a few hundred feet from the structure. Beyond them Tenleytown was a stained tower of piebald concrete stained with the rain and filth of decades. A fence had been set up around the structure, an impressive thing made of chain link, concertina wire and Jersey walls; the only gate lay ahead of them, and though she did could not see any guards she knew that they were there. Hiding in the sheet-steel bunkers just beyond the fence line, or lying camouflaged in the sparse yellowed grass. They used to have their best snipers up on the walls or the roof to take down people, also. “All right,” he said, nodding at the view beyond the windscreen. “What are we supposed to do to get their attention?”
“Sentries will have already seen us.” For Bobbi, instincts she had not entertained in almost fifteen years were coming to life again, and she reached for the window control. “Gotta let them know that we’re okay.” She reached into her bag, which sat on the floorboard between her legs, and took out a flare gun and a single tiny rocket as she rolled down the window.
Scalli watched in interested silence as she slid out the window and perched on the ledge of the door. Bobbi socketed the flare on the end of the gun; she hoped that the locals hadn’t changed the signals since she’d been there last, else their journey might experience an abrupt end. “Here goes nothing,” Bobbi muttered to herself, and pulled the trigger. With a gush of air, the flare gun’s pneumatic piston launched the flare high into the air, high enough so that when it erupted into bright blue light it glowed like a cobalt star. After that, there was silence; the wind blew softly across the landscape, carrying with it dust and the smell of ancient petroleum.
“All right,” said Scalli from inside the van, “now what?”
“Hush.” Bobbi looked past the fence at the walls beyond. Minutes ticked by, but just as Bobbi was starting to worry she was rewarded by the sight of another flare scaling the stained gray sky – red, bright and glittering, a bloody ruby in answer to her challenge.
Scalli made a grim sound. “Red’s never good,” he said. “We in trouble?”
“I don’t know.” Bobbi squinted at the flare as it climbed across the sky, trying to work out what the unexpected color meant. Usually they answered blue with white, and then the guards came out and checked up on things. She considered for a moment before a possibility came to her. “Hey Scalli,” she said, “reach in my bag and give me another blue one.”
“That part of your code?” She felt a mighty bicep brush her leg as he reached down to fish out the intended flare. “Or are we fucked?”
“Shut up,” she hissed, and when he put it in her lap took the flare and slotted it on the launcher nozzle. Bobbi held the gun up overhead once more, and fired another spark of blue upward into the sky. She was answered with silence, and now she really began to worry.
“I’m going to start backing up now,” Scalli said. “This isn’t working.” He reached for the shifter paddle but Bobbi kicked him none too gently in the upper arm.
“Stop it, Scalli,” she barked, then said more evenly, “if you move now we’re definitely fucked. They’re just trying to figure us out I think.”<
br />
Scalli snorted, but at least he kept still.
Time stretched on. Finally, to Bobbi’s great relief, a single white flare rose up in answer. “Fantastic,” she said, “they’re gonna let us in.” She slid into the cab of the van again, rolling up the window as up ahead the area around the gate began to stir. Men and women in street clothes and web vests emerged from the bunkers by the gate, weapons slung; someone rose out of the shell of a burnt-out house, his gray and black urban camo mixing perfectly with the blackened concrete. The scout trained an assault rifle on the van as he stepped out, his sharp, pinched face smudged with black as he slowly paced around the front of the van.
Bobbi watched him carefully as the scout came around to look at them, noted the bright blue eyes as they swept between the two of them, eyes that narrowed as they swept over Scalli’s massive frame. He said something quietly to the open air – Bobbi assumed he had a radio rig in his ear, or something – and finally stepped out of the road, gesturing them forward as he began to walk alongside the of van. Bobbi saw, as best she could tell, that he still kept the muzzle of his rifle pointing toward the driver’s side door even in its now-relaxed position. Nobody’s taking chances, she thought. Security’s definitely gotten tighter around here.
The gates swung open, and as Scalli drove the van up Bobbi could tell that he was taking notes. What sort of hardware they were carrying, placement, that kind of thing. The security man in him awake and working away. The Oldies here were sharp, carrying guns openly; while there had always been guns aplenty in the Old City, Bobbi was surprised that they appeared so…military. Like a proper security force, even. “These people have their shit together,” Scalli murmured her way as his dark eyes tracked the landscape. “Looks like someone’s been giving them a lot of training.”
“Yeah,” said Bobbi with a faint frown. “I don’t know who that might be, though. I remember the militia being far less…militia-y.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 18
