Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)
Page 28
Scalli made a sound of discontent. “Down where?” He didn’t seem to like the sound of going down anywhere. Bobbi could definitely sympathize.
“Down underground,” said Violet. “There’s an incinerator down there, along with the maintenance levels. That’s where we’re going. Don’t worry, the fumes get sucked up through the ducts, so unless you’re going to go stick your head in one of them, you’ll be okay.”
Behind them, Mason and Scalli shared looks. It was a complete tactical nightmare, they both knew. “Well,” said Scalli, “I didn’t want to live forever anyway.”
Bobbi snorted. “It’s just as well,” she said. “It’d be boring as fuck to see the fashions repeated over and over. Can’t re-invent the computer over and over again, either.”
“Amen to that.” Scalli squared his mighty shoulders and stepped up next to Bobbi; Mason came up after a doubtful moment.
Violet looked them over, pursing her lips in consideration of them all, and then she nodded to herself. “All right, then,” she said, brushing a stringy lock of hair from her eyes. “Let’s go see the boss.”
The elevator still had power, through some agency that Bobbi had missed on the way down. There must have been industrial batteries, she thought, maybe some big industrial hydrogen cell amongst the abandoned machinery in the work shed. It was a tight fit, going down into the glowing depths, Scalli and Mason taking up most of the space in the big elevator. She was glad that she was small, and that Violet was so goddamned thin. Otherwise they would’ve had to take two trips and who knows what that might have meant for them. Down the shaft they went, the elevator grumbling, and Bobbi feeling her heart thundering beneath the sound of the old gears grinding away. They were all nervous, even Violet, though she still wore a smile. Going to see her kind of Jesus, her red-eyed Madonna. Fuck’s sake.
They traveled slowly, and descended through cramped underlevels sheathed in concrete and filled with shadows. As they cleared a third such stratum, the maintenance levels gave way to a smooth concrete shaft. As they drew closer to the bottom, a strange blue-white radiance flickered up from below; it was a light that Bobbi felt was familiar to her, yet she couldn’t quite pin it down. The smell began to thin as the glow from beneath grew brighter.
“That’s…disconcerting,” Scalli rumbled as the light licked up the walls of the shaft.
“Hush,” Violet hissed. “We’re here.”
The elevator cleared the shaft and descended through a wire cage into what was apparently an industrial incinerator room. The vaulted concrete barn was the size of a small warehouse, the near end of which the elevator shaft descended. Beyond them, the cylindrical monolith of the incinerator stretched toward the ceiling. Ductwork rose from the upper surface of the great machine and reached upward like the branches of a great steel tree, ostensibly connecting it to the stacks visible far above.
The floor was strewn with great piles of trash and debris, arranged in a wide ring around the incinerator proper— metal glinted in the light of dim fires that burned in makeshift cauldrons set up amid them, and the light of the fires supported the fluorescent lamps bolted to the outside of the incinerator, banishing the shadows in a wide circle around the central core. Here, Bobbi saw, the floor was filled with wild figures, figures Bobbi knew to be ferals. In the dim light she saw many of them, standing amongst the piles, perched atop them or along their sides, clustering around the cauldrons. Still others stood near the far side of the incinerator; as the elevator ground to a halt at the bottom and the door rumbled open, Bobbi caught glimpses of them shuffling about what looked like a large skip.
“Just stick close to me,” Violet was saying as she stepped out, drawing in a deep breath. “Jesus Christ, you boys are huge.”
“And the tiny will inherit the Earth,” snorted Scalli.
Bobbi tried to smile. “Don’t you mean the meek?”
“There ain’t nothing meek about you two,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.” Despite Scalli’s attempt to sound calm, even jovial, Bobbi heard the thin note of uncertainty there. She’d known him far too long for that to slip by. Not that she blamed him. Her own insides were twisting now, not sure what to expect or if she should try and expect anything but the worst.
Violet led them through the crowd, which to Bobbi was like an uncomfortable replay of the scene that she had just left. Perhaps she had thought differently about Redeye’s people, but they were all ferals of the most stereotypical appearance: shambling madmen covered in scars and open sores, glass-eyed statues standing stock still as if waiting for some unknowable signal to trigger their inner beasts. Nobody looked at them. They passed a woman who was scratching thin lines into her cheeks, working red, bloody furrows into her face as she waited for the time to pass. Even for the mad, something was very, very spooky. The moment hung in the air, invisible and waiting, and everyone was waiting for it to unwind.
“This doesn’t look like a good night to me,” Mason said. “We’ve walked in on something.”
Scalli agreed. “These people seem like they’re waiting for a big fucking shoe to drop,” he said. “Vi?”
“Don’t ask me,” Violet said quietly. “I just look after the heads.” But even as she said that, Bobbi could see in her face that something was wrong. She’d expected a celebration. This was…almost like a funeral. Shit, were they coming in only to find that Redeye had been killed? Had the Queen of the Crazy Boogeymen eaten a bullet before she could discharge whatever duty Cagliostro had ready for her? What the fuck were they going to do then?
Bobbi was about to say something to this effect, but Violet pointed forward. “I see her,” she hissed, pointing in the direction of the skip. “Come on.”
They crossed the cold field of the mad toward the incinerator. There, standing in the cold glare of the fluorescent lamps above them, a group of ferals were shoveling something out of the skip into the loading receptacle of the incinerator. Bobbi squinted in the dim light; lines resolved themselves as they drew near, white limbs picked out in the twin glare of the lamps and the flickering fires. She frowned. It was nothing she had not seen before, but the pale Yathi corpses they were loading into the furnace gave her pause.
“I see that they’ve been busy,” Bobbi said in dim tones. Her skin was cold despite the heat that radiated from the incinerator and the flames around them. Somewhere in the back of her head, a treacherous little voice told her to get out of there before they put her in there, too. She could see it, and closed her eyes a moment to flush the image out of her head. It only worked to a point.
“Very,” said Violet, but she only glanced at the skip as they proceeded by it. Bobbi saw that the thing was half full of naked, white, blonde corpses, all of them suffering grievous wounds. Most of them that she could see were shrunken ghouls. Some of them were not. “She’s right over here.”
They looked where Violet pointed. Perhaps they had expected to see some terrible figure of the wastelands, dressed as a goddess of entropy. What they got was what Bobbi had glimpsed so very briefly on the news: the thin girl in her early twenties, swallowed in dirty military fatigues and a men’s bomber jacket twice her size. Her dark hair hung in her eyes, but through the veil and from the shadowed upper half of her plain, pointed face, Redeye’s namesake burned like an ember. There she was, this waif of a girl, and yet looking at her now Bobbi felt the same sensation that she’d experienced upon seeing her for the first time on the news feed. It was a sensation that lurked in the dark corners of her guts, encoded in her body’s wiring. An apex predator. She radiated an air of command and menace, which even without the skip full of bodies beside her would have made her monstrous.
For all her slim stature and her youth, this slip of a girl was an avatar of death.
“Christ,” Bobbi heard Mason whisper.
“Not gonna help us here,” Scalli muttered in reply.
Redeye looked toward them as they approached, not moving save to turn her head to face them, her neat, spare body fixed as if made
of ivory. Though her hair was dark, her skin was as milky pale as the corpses that her minions shoveled into the waiting furnace. Moments passed in which Bobbi, Scalli and Mason said nothing, electing to stand as fixed as she did. Only Violet reacted, bowing slightly at the waist and clearing her throat so that a slight puff of air whistled from the hole in her face.
“I greet the Eye,” the thin girl said in a low and reverent tone, and genuflected before her idol. The look of peace that had settled over Violet’s face was striking.
“On your feet, Violet.” Redeye’s voice was deep and husky, like a lounge singer from the Twentieth; it was a big voice, much bigger than her small body should hold. To Bobbi’s surprise, she almost looked pained at Violet’s display. “You know you don’t have to do that.”
“Of course. Sure.” Violet stood, though she did not look up. “I’ve brought you some visitors. People from the city.”
Redeye looked past Violet to the three of them. That eye burned from behind the veil of lank hair; she brushed it aside as she stepped forward, turning it upon each of them in turn. Bobbi had the distinct feeling of a mouse being eyed by a cat. “So I see. And do they have names?”
“Bobbi January,” Bobbi said instantly. “This is Marcus Scalli, and this is Harry Mason.” Gesturing to each of the men in turn.
A soft “ahh” of comprehension escaped Redeye’s lips. She took a few more steps forward, and now Bobbi could see a hint of the scars ringing her glowing eye. “I know who you are. You’re the one who destroyed Tissue Processor Twenty-Two. That was a neat job, actually, blowing up the incinerators. They were dealing with the damage for months.” She shook her head. “Shame you didn’t do anything else, or at least nothing I’ve heard of.”
Bobbi cleared her throat. She wasn’t expecting the Queen of the Crazy People to recognize her name, much less what she and Tom had done at Orleans— or, at least, what she had done. Nor did she think that the Queen would dress her down for not doing more. “I…tried to do other things,” Bobbi said, feeling strangely hurt. “But we didn’t know what they were, then. In fact, it’s only been the past few weeks that I knew the truth about them.”
“You mean that they’re alien creatures who possess human minds and use their bodies as meat puppets, for lack of a better term? That they’re colonizing this planet, and aim to replace us all as the ruling species on the planet before their own gets burnt up?”
Bobbi looked back at Mason and Scalli, not sure what the hell to think. “Yeah,” she said as he looked back at the woman. “That’s basically it.”
Redeye stared at Bobbi for a moment. Then, much to Bobbi’s surprise, the frown that lined the woman’s lips turns upward, split into a smile; she had small white teeth, very clean, strange for someone living rough. She stepped up to Bobbi and offered her a small white hand. “Well, then,” she said with a wink of that terrible red eye. “You’re welcome here.”
With the possibility of immediate conflict put aside, Bobbi reached for the hand offered her— but slowly, as she was still quite stunned by the development. “Uh, thank you,” she said, staring at the thin hand that held hers. She’d expected it to be like ice, her imagination playing tricks on her—but instead it was burning hot to the touch, like the girl had a full-body fever.
Redeye looked at her for a long moment, keeping her hand on Bobbi’s. “You are afraid of me,” she said. “Do not be.”
“Says the lady standing next to a skip full of bodies.” Mason stepped up next to Bobbi, giving Redeye a look. “I’ve seen you in action before,” he said. “I was a vet in Europe, and even I’m afraid of you. You play very nasty, miss.”
“Mmm.” Redeye looked at Mason and let her hand drop from Bobbi’s, so that she could fold her arms over her chest. Bobbi saw scars across her forearms where the sleeves of her fatigues had been rolled up to the elbow, though they looked more like bumps on glazed porcelain than keloid. Strange. Redeye fixed her gaze on Mason’s face. “You are from Tenleytown?”
Mason nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We had a lot of problems with Genefex and its monsters until you showed up. I ran the scouts for the town militia. We’ve seen what you and your people can do. It’s very…”
“Savage,” Redeye said with a grin. How were her teeth so white? “It must be. They do not appreciate anything but savagery. They are like anyone else— you must scare them sufficiently to keep their hand at bay.”
“Like burning their bodies,” Bobbi ventured.
“More like cutting out their eyes,” Mason said. “Before that.”
Now Scalli decided to talk. “That’s baiting the bear a bit hard, don’t you think? I know your people are supposed to be hard, but they’re well-funded and well-organized. I don’t see how pissing in the Empress’s cornflakes on a routine basis is much of a strategic move.”
“It is if you want her to come out herself.” Redeye gave them a little shrug, some attitude coming through that was closer to her age than the warrior-princess thing she’d had going on until then. “If we keep destroying their property, they will emerge. That is how it goes.”
Though she didn’t say it herself, Bobbi knew there was something more going on there. She read it in the girl’s face. Having a prosthetic eye didn’t keep you from betraying emotion, after all. “You’ve given up,” she said suddenly, unsure of where the words came from. “You’re trying to bait them into some kind of a final battle.”
Silence. Everyone around them stopped and looked at Bobbi— the wailers, the ferals with their shovels, Redeye herself. The burning red prosthetic seemed to want to burn her with its gaze, like an invisible ray cooking her from the inside. “You are a good judge of people, I see,” the feral queen said, tilting her head a little as if reconsidering her previous opinion of the three. “Yes. We hit a facility tonight that was supposed to have something I was looking for. We won, but a great many of us died when the failsafes kicked in, locked down the complex and burnt everything inside. There are not enough of us left to continue the fight. They will come for us tonight, and if I have made the Mother of Systems angry enough, they will use worse than xsiarhotl.” There was that word again, the word that Cagliostro had used. The corpse-machines.
Bobbi looked at her. It was so strange, because what she wanted to do in that moment was to give her a hug, this stone-cold killer of men and worse, and tell her it was okay. Like she was her slightly younger sister. “Look,” she said instead. “Don’t worry about that. I want you to talk to a friend of mine. He’s got a message for you, should make you feel a lot better very soon.”
“Oh?” Redeye gave her a wary look.
“Yeah. I hope you know how to use the network.”
Redeye smiled thinly at her. “That will not be a problem. Come with me.”
They set up Bobbi’s terminal in the back of the incinerator room, behind the elevator shaft and away from the fires and the corpses. It turned out that they’d had a few people who were datanauts at some point, and had run a hard line down from the satellite dish of one of the old factories down the shaft and into the chamber. Bobbi prepped the terminal, checking to see that its battery was still good, and put on the firewall collar that she’d worn last when she had first heard from Freida. She offered Redeye a bridge cable, but she had only smiled and waved Bobbi off.
Bobbi had already known that Redeye was not in any way a normal girl, but when she sat down next to Bobbi and settled into a position of meditation she was not quite prepared for what came next.
“Don’t you need a cable?” Bobbi had asked her.
“Not at all,” Redeye had said. “I have a wireless network communication module in my brain. A gift from Genefex.”
Bobbi’s skin prickled at that, but it was more out of amazement than anything else. They hadn’t developed a means of facilitating mind-machine wireless communication yet, or at least not that she was aware of. The fact that Redeye was not only capable of it, but had already connected with her terminal and was prepared to ride along w
ithout any software integration of Bobbi’s own, threw her off even more. She had plenty of questions , but business had to be attended to first.
Sitting with her back to the tableau of madness inside the room, Bobbi plugged herself into the terminal, turned it on, and counted backwards until she found herself slipping into the blessed depths of Awakening. It had felt like a thousand years had passed since she’d done it last, save for the quick pass through Freida’s slow-box, and the intellectual detachment that came from it was soothing after all the raw, visceral experiences the Old City had offered her. Untethered, her mind raced across the digital complexes of the network, followed by the guarded presence of Redeye herself, until they pierced the wall of the slow-box and arrived in the land of molasses once more.
Redeye wasn’t splitting hairs with the proverbial bear.