“Stop there.” Mason shook his head. “God damned stupid girl. Yeah, I know all about it. You don’t have anything to worry about where I’m concerned, in any case. Your boy took care of that.”
Violet looked between the three of them again before drawing a wet, whistling breath. “I don’t mean to be a problem,” she said, “and I’m very grateful that you’ve saved us, but those boys have friends, and all that gunfire is going to be bringing them here sooner than later. If we’re going to go see the Eye, we should do it before night falls.”
“Right.” It was Scalli who spoke now as he approached, holding the rifle by its grip as it dangled from one arm. He had his visor on, which made it hard to see his expression – he just looked like a badass one-eyed combat machine, some previous generation’s idea of a hi-tech cyclops, and he radiated a cold precision that made Bobbi’s skin crawl. She looked down…and gasped.
Scalli was wounded, or at least he appeared to be. His chest and stomach looked as if it had been shredded by gunfire, rents torn in his shirt and the dark flesh beneath, though there was no blood. Instead a milky blue substance had dried there, and where there should have been raw red meat there was something ribbed and black like hydraulic cable.
Bobbi gasped. “Jesus fuck,” she breathed, “Scalli, what the hell…?”
“I’m all right,” Scalli said, and he frowned. “It’s a long story. Ask Mason later, he’ll tell you all about it.” He looked to Violet. “Where’s our truck?”
“Smashed,” Violet said with a shake of her head. “Your girl plowed it into a wall trying to get to you two. I think she thought you were in the shrine.”
Mason made a soft, unhappy sound. “Shrine?”
Bobbi cut in. “I’ll tell you when we’re on our way,” she said. She didn’t think they needed to see the gallery of heads in the grocery basement else they may never get out of there.
“I’ve got another truck waiting,” Violet said. She looked at Scalli and made a face. “You’re gonna have to sit in the back. You’re way too big to sit up front.”
“I’ll do just fine in the back,” said Scalli, who had turned his cyclops-eye toward Bobbi. “I’ll look out for her.”
Considering what she’d just seen him do, Bobbi wasn’t certain how comfortable she might be with that.
They took the machine gun off the Highwayman, along with the medical supplies. Mason was a pretty damned good medical tech – Bobbi supposed you had to be if you were recon – and he worked over her leg with stims and stabilizers and whatever battlefield alchemy there was that let her walk without fucking things up too much in the long term. “You’ll need to see a doctor,” he told her. “Eventually. Got some nerve damage in there, nothing that shouldn’t be repairable, but considering the situation you’re lucky the damned thing works at all.” She had a nasty cut on her head that he healed up with medicated quick-seal gel as well, and she spent a while picking gravel out of her cheek while Mason tended to her leg.
Bobbi stared at him as he applied the patches and injections, all done under Scalli’s distant but watchful eye. Diana had been so certain that he would kill her. He could do it now, reach up and make it look like complications from an accident. But he didn’t, not even when Violet had her back turned or was otherwise engaged – and when Violet left to get her truck she finally spoke up.
“Diana tried to kill me,” Bobbi said.
“I said I know,” Mason said as he wrapped a securing bandage around a small forest of dermal patches adhered to her thigh. He didn’t look up.
“She said that you were going to kill Scalli, too.”
Mason paused in mid-wrap. He didn’t say anything for a moment. “I was going to,” he said then, and went back to work. “She asked me to do it. She was always asking me to do things for her— she never asked me to kill anybody before, though. She saw the same thing that I did in Marcus, here.”
Bobbi looked up at Scalli, who stood a bit away from them like an angry, well-armed djinn. He was guarding the breach. He carried the machine gun now, rigging up a shoulder strap out of one of the electric truck’s seatbelts. He hadn’t taken off the visor since he had returned with Mason. He knew that though he wasn’t near them, he was watching through its eye. “What about him?”
“That he’s corporate, or at least used to be. She told me he was a Genefex infiltrator, that she’d found his ID when they were screwing around last night.” Bobbi heard an unmistakable spur of anger in his voice, and she felt bad for him. Diana really had gotten her hooks in him good, and she had turned out to be the very beast that she had convinced him Scalli was. “So I waited until we went into the grocery, and then I shot him. Twice.”
Bobbi looked up at Scalli again; he hadn’t attempted to hide the blast in his gut, nor had he explained anything yet. After all, he’d told her to ask Mason. “Well he’s not dead,” she said. “And you’re not a bad shot.”
“Best shot,” said Mason, “next to your friend there.” He finished wrapping up her leg and got to his feet. “So you can imagine how surprised I was when he dodged the first hit— that’s what took out his suppressor— and then turned around and tried to put the butt of his rifle through my skull.”
Bobbi let out a whistle. “I can imagine,” she said. “But…what is he? That’s no muscle job.”
Mason nodded. “You’re right. Close, though.”
“Huh?” She put her leg into her jumpsuit and zipped it up, standing now. Her leg felt detached again, but it felt solid. She was already missing the blissful warmth that the endorphin patch had spread through her.
“It’s armor,” he said, nodding toward Scalli’s towering form. “It’s a muscle suit. He’s a big boy, Marcus, but that’s not muscular augmentation. It’s a suit of covert full-coverage body armor, electropolymer myomer bundles in armored sheathing. Modeled after his own skin and everything. Augments his strength, can take incredible punishment. That’s expensive tech, to say the least.”
Bobbi stared at Scalli. She could definitely see it now, especially with Diana talking about how his dick came out through a sheath. Not that she really wanted to think about that. “I didn’t know,” she said softly. She wasn’t really sure what to think of now, but she knew what she was going to say the next time she got him alone. “What happened after?”
“After what?” He was putting away the leftover medical supplies in its red field case, his tone casual.
She made a face. “After you tried to kill him and he tried to cave your face in.” Jesus, why were the military types so fucking slow to give her anything? Scalli, now Mason. Tom wasn’t like that. This was why she didn’t like to deal with people often. They wanted to be quiet. Not puzzles, not like she liked, just a pain in her ass.
“Oh.” He paused a moment. “Well, he took me up on the roof, set me straight. About a lot of things.”
“A lot of things,” she repeated. “Like what?”
“Like why you’re here? Why really.” Mason wrinkled his nose and looked as if he might have swallowed something nasty just then. “He told me everything, all about those people. The Yathi.” He shook his head. “Fucking aliens, man, that’s just not funny. I didn’t know what to think.”
Bobbi frowned a little. She didn’t like Scalli spreading the word without talking to her, not one goddamned bit. But on the other hand, she had to be fair; she wasn’t exactly sitting around waiting for Freida to prove herself when she got told the whole litany. Allies were in short supply, and they didn’t deserve getting dragged along on this thing if it was going to get ugly. She probably should’ve already told them before. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Well. What do you think now that you’ve had some time to chew on it?”
“I think it explains a lot of things I saw in the Eurowar,” he said. “People acting certain ways, that kind of thing. Nothing obviously alien or anything, but let’s say it wasn’t the first time that I saw those ghouls before, coming to this city. Saw them in Bonn, saw them in Vienna. Tho
ught they were cyborgs, you know, company elites. They had armor on then.” Mason shook his head. “It’d take too long to explain right now. Let’s just say that I’ve seen shit in the field makes this all fit right into place. Makes me want to help you.”
Bobbi watched his face for anything she could take as a sign of impending bullshit, but she found nothing. She wasn’t sure if that made her more secure or just made her feel badly for Mason. His eyes were haunted when he talked to her, dim and flat. Must have been terrible, whatever it was he’d seen. Well, there was plenty of room for terrible on the January Express. “All right,” she said, “I trust Scalli, and you’ve been honest with me. Maybe you can tell me in the future what went down, but right now I’m gonna take you at your word. You’re gonna help us, good. We need the help.”
“I know,” he said with a nod. “And I’m not mad at you about Diana. She dug that hole herself, I know. Wish she hadn’t gotten eaten by those fuckers, but that’s not your fault. We’re on even ground here.”
She watched his face a moment longer and then nodded. “All right,” she said, then a thought struck her. “Wait. If you were up on the roof, why didn’t you see me coming? Why didn’t you hear the wreck and come down to see what the hell was going on?”
“Because we weren’t listening,” he said.
Bobbi screwed up her nose a little at that. “Seems like you’d have to be pretty busy to miss that,” she said. “Loud enough to knock me out.”
Mason shrugged. “We were talking over chip,” he said. “Deep link.”
She looked at him. Deep link, like they had implants. “You mean like, you were plugged into each other directly?”
He nodded and turned his head a bit; there was the plug, a good one, hidden under a flap of false skin. “He’s got one too,” he said, “It’s how I knew he was military, or something close to it. We got the same model. He was showing me everything via recorded feed, what you showed him. He’s got a photographic memory because of it, see? Same as me. Used to store mission data with it, it’s the same thing.”
Bobbi wasn’t sure what to think about that, much less respond. She did her best, though. “That’s not what I was expecting to hear,” she said. “So he was busy transmitting, you were getting it, and you didn’t have any external senses.”
“Kind of hard to focus on the outside world with that shit that he was sending me. It was pretty terrible. That scene at the hospital, and then at the data place…” He shook his head. “Reminds me of the Eurowar. You got some stones, honey, dealing with that kind of thing, and then Diana trying to off you, and still dealing okay.”
She shrugged. “You gotta, I guess,” she said. “Else you let it eat you. Guess we know what happens when you let it eat you enough; you stop believing in something.”
“Yeah.” Mason nodded, his expression haunted like before. “What do you believe in, Bobbi?”
Bobbi looked up into his face, grave like Scalli’s, and she shrugged again. “I believe there’s got to be a better day,” she said, “or at least one we can choose ourselves. If we’re gonna burn the world down, that’s something we need to choose for ourselves. Not with these things riding around in our heads. I gotta try and make that happen.”
“Yeah,” Mason repeated. He laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed a little. “Me too. We’ll make it happen. Even if it kills us.”
Violet returned a little while after with her ‘truck’, which was much removed from the modern day as the Old City itself. It was a positively ancient thing, a gasoline-burning job from the dawn of time, or maybe the 1990s, that had been converted in the ‘Twenties to run on ethanol. It positively amazed Bobbi that something so ancient could still run— she’d never even seen a vehicle from the Twentieth, at least not up close. She couldn’t imagine how the hell Violet had gotten the damned thing to run. At one point it had been a small delivery truck, but now it had been covered under layers of black spray paint and covered with more stylized red eyes. These, Bobbi was relieved to see, were courtesy of Krylon and not some sacrificial victim. “It’s to let them all see who I’m representing,” Violet told them as they found it sitting in a half-collapsed garage not far from the grocery. “So there isn’t any mistake.”
Bobbi and Scalli sat in the back, with Mason sitting up front with Violet, who was driving. They could talk through a sliding hatch that was cut in the wall of the cab. Bobbi was first, telling them what had happened with Diana, and then all the rest with Violet and her shrine. The baton then got handed over to Violet, who because of her connection to Redeye was obviously the star attraction.
“So we’re going to see the Eye,” called Bobbi through the hatch as the truck trundled along, trying to be heard over its engine. “What can you tell us about her? I mean, short of what we’ve been able to piece together, anyway.”
Violet smiled as she drove the truck through the crumbling streets; mostly silent since they had left the grocery shrine, it was in warm, if ghoulish, tones that she replied. “The Eye is our salvation,” she began, “every one of us, whether we deserve it or not. She’s, ah, well we worship her, but we don’t look at her as a god – I mean she’s not one in the blood-and-thunder sort of way.”
“Not everyone shares your opinion of that,” said Mason, “if what Bobbi said about your little Shrine is any indication.”
Violet had the grace to look a little guilty. “We’re not exactly all there in the head out here,” she said, and shrugged. “I mean, you see how we live out here, for one. And then, there’s…the Others.”
They were all quiet for a moment as that hung in the air. No matter how often it got brought up, or how much they saw, the reality of what the Yathi were still stirred up dark currents inside the heart. Mason broke the silence by saying, “That’s what I don’t understand. What has she got against them, outside of being…well, human? I mean from what’s out there, everyone associated with this woman is crazy.”
“You don’t need to be sane to know what is right.” Violet shook her head as she drove on, looking grim. “But the truth of the matter is that we’re all failed transfers, so to speak. The Others tried to take us, but it just didn’t work. That leaves a certain desire for revenge in one’s heart, and the Eye provides us with the opportunity to sate it.”
Bobbi sat up and blinked at these words. “You mean to tell me,” she said, “that you were all…well, possessed at one point or another?”
“You’ll find that a major cause of madness in this world anymore is sharing a skull with an alien mind,” said Violet with a nod. “The mind of the Other fades away, or gets subsumed…but the human mind that returns never returns entirely intact.”
Bobbi frowned faintly. “But what if the mind of the…Other…comes back? Is that possible?”
Violet shook her head. “They say that a lack of belief in anything greater than yourself is what lets the Other in – I can’t tell you if that’s the truth. What I can tell you, however, is that once you manage to shake the Other out, the only belief you have after that is that you’ll never let it in again, even if you have to cook your own brain to make it happen. Drugs, self-torture, that sort of thing. It’s not always necessary, though.” She gestured to the hole in her face with one hand and laughed wetly. “Sometimes we cut the nose off to spite the face, so to speak.”
Mason made a face. “Jesus.”
“Not everybody goes off the deep end entirely, of course. Some of us are…” Violet trailed off, searching for the right word. “Reasonably well-adjusted? At least we aren’t all complete psychotics.”
“Just occasional cannibalism and idol worship,” Bobbi said with a faint smirk.
“Well.” Violet smirked; her sharp teeth gave her a predatory cast – this close Bobbi felt even more uncomfortable than before. “Maybe not well-adjusted. At least my crazy only comes out in certain ways, though. Not like Heron and his people, but then again they strayed from the path a long time ago. They used to be like us.”
“You m
ean they started eating human flesh, instead of keeping their cannibalistic tendencies toward the Others.” Bobbi shook her head. “What do you get out of eating them, anyway?”
“Well we don’t usually do it,” said Violet. “But for me, as the tender of the Shrine…let’s just call it revenge on my part. It’s not like they’re human anymore, after all. It’s more like eating slaughtered cattle.” She licked her lips with a ragged tongue. “Besides, I like the taste. Better than beef, that’s for certain.”
Mason shook his head. “Christ,” he muttered to himself. “How would you know what beef tastes like, anyway?”
“My folks are wealthy,” Violet said. “We used to eat real meat pretty regular. Not that I’d bother them now, of course. They think I’m dead. Wouldn’t recognize me anyway.”
Bobbi wrinkled her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said. “All right, well, maybe you can answer something for me. You used to have this thing inside of you, right? The guy sending me, he said he’d gone through the same thing, just took a different way of kicking it out. Do you have memories about this sort of thing, something like that?”
“Kind of,” Violet said. She stared ahead, got quiet.
Bobbi wondered if she’d crossed a line somehow. “Hey,” she said, “you all right?”
“Yeah.” Violet frowned a little, which made her look even more like a ghoul than before. “Look, it’s hard, talking about this to…normal people. Even if you’re bringing something this important to the Eye. I can’t answer everything, either. I don’t know everything about this situation; honestly, I don’t really remember much about that time. Nobody really does that I know of, except on an instinctual level. It’s…a feeling.”
“Probably a defense mechanism.” This came from Scalli, whose deep voice filled up the whole truck. “Nobody wants to remember trauma. The things that these people do, nobody wants to remember that.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 26
