Apocalypse Alley

by Don Allmon

  Duke’s booth was a corner booth with a semicircle bench. New Guy slid in opposite Duke, next to Comet. Not too close.

  He was wearing a red baseball cap with a stitched-on label: three inverted triangles and the letters MF. Comet didn’t know what that meant and had to look it up. “You a farmer?” He kind of hoped he was, because Comet had never fucked a farmer before (never even met one), and everyone knew farmers were filthy as hell.

  “No. I just like the hat. You a cowboy?”

  Comet was dressed as trashy as could be. He wore a Christian Texas-sized turquoise belt buckle because it was gaudy and made people stare at his crotch, a threadbare tank top that showed his shoulders off, and a faux-straw cowboy hat that had been crushed beneath fucking bodies so often it glowed under black light and Luminol.

  Comet broke out his dirtiest, sly grin. “I’m a kind of cowboy.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “The break-him-before-I-ride-him kind.” This banter here, it was all make believe and didn’t mean nothing. Comet could do it without going red. Duke’s teasing was different somehow. No matter how close they’d grown in only four wars, he was always afraid Duke’s teasing was for real.

  “That so?” New Guy said. “What if he’s already broken?”

  “There’s always something left to break. Just gotta know where to look. Sometimes looking’s the fun part.”

  They tried to hold each other’s eyes with a serious stare. This was supposed to be hot, not funny. They both raised their beers to hide breaking grins. They both waited a moment before drinking so they didn’t choke on a laugh and blow beer out their noses.

  Duke laughed. Everyone in the bar turned to see. Duke’s laughs were like thunder. “Ain’t that adorable! The two of you embarrassed.”

  “I ain’t—” both New Guy and Comet said at the same time. They stopped at the same time.

  Duke thought that was even funnier. His laughter boomed and rumbled all over. “I’m gonna love watching the two of you fuck.”

  Good sign: New Guy didn’t run when Duke said that. Plenty of sensible guys did. Duke and Comet weren’t lovers and never had been. But Duke liked to watch and Comet liked to show off.

  “What’s your name?” Comet said.

  “Jason Taylor.”

  “Comet.”

  “On account of the hair?” Comet’s hair was nano-dyed flame colors. It was temperature sensitive and heat made it flicker.

  “On account of I’m me. Welcome to Greentown, Jason Taylor. I’ll be your top tonight.”

  Buzz Howdy made a scene, hoping someone would save him. He shouted, “You can’t do this! You’re not the police! I ain’t done nothing wrong!” Which wasn’t quite true. He was a hacker, a forger, and a thief, and had done plenty wrong—just not today.

  He fought the crazy gene-job fucker who had him by the scruff of his shirt and was pushing him around, and tried to make sure everyone in the dark bar could see he’d been handcuffed.

  But this wasn’t Pacifica. This was an anarchist town in Freestate Arizona, and there weren’t no police.

  All those orcs looked at him, then looked at the guy holding him, then turned back to their small knots of friends gathered around tables, talking low or talking loud, making deals or promises or just shooting the shit like there wasn’t a little red-headed human in the middle of their bar about to get the hell beaten out of him. Probably the crazy fucker could have whacked him right here in front of everyone, and no one would have said a goddamn word except to complain about the splatter.

  “Got anything else you want to tell everyone?” the fucker growled in his ear.

  Buzz knew plenty of guys like him. He could have gotten eyes that looked natural, but instead had replaced them with one of the solid glow models to ramp up the cool factor (and so he’d picked Jedi blue instead of Sith red, what difference did that matter?), a genetically engineered porn-star body, and a violent streak looking for every opportunity to show it off. He bet the guy had a three-decimeter dick and thought it was something special, like anyone couldn’t have one for twenty grand. Buzz would have spit at him if he’d ever learned how to spit, but he hadn’t, so he said, “Fuck off,” instead.

  He wrenched Buzz over to a corner table. The table had a two-meter DMZ around it where no one else stood. Seated there was the biggest orc Buzz had ever seen. Buzz knew Duke Mason by sight.

  And apparently Duke knew him. “Buzz Howdy. You know who you’ve found, Comet? This here is Buzz Howdy, dumbest hacker on the planet. Have a seat, Buzz.”

  Comet—yeah, he’d have to be named something like Comet, wouldn’t he?—shoved him into the booth and then slid in after him so Buzz couldn’t get out.

  —He’s right. This is dumb. You shouldn’t be here. A teenage boy flipped the cap of an ancient lighter and lit an ancient cigarette. Orcs passed through him like he wasn’t there because he wasn’t. He was an illusion, the consequence of stimuli injected into Buzz’s head, which meant no one could see him or hear him but Buzz. His name was BangBang. He looked like a fourteen-year-old James Dean. Buzz had never heard of James Dean and had refused to look it up, so BangBang’d had to tell him, and now he held a friendly grudge about it.

  On BangBang’s shoulder sat a mouse named Critter. Critter wasn’t really a mouse. The two of them belonged to the 3djinn “data liberation” consortium, like Buzz. Unlike Buzz, they were two of the 3.

  BangBang spun an illusionary chair around, sat, and crossed his arms over the chair’s back. Illusionary lips synced perfectly: —Do you know who that is? That’s Duke Mason. He’s dangerous. He’s like a whole fucking rogue nation all stuffed into one orc. He’s caused more wars than we have.

  —I know who Duke Mason is.

  Duke was the sole owner and CEO of Irontooth Enterprises, not the largest private military company in the world—Duke could only field around 7,000 security contractors—but one of the most high-profile. Their logo could be seen in the background of nearly every high-level politico on the planet, sewn onto the sleeves of their security detail. He had direct lines to senators, generals, and cabinet members worldwide. And he’d set up shop in Greentown, not for any egalitarian dream, but because Arizona was a freestate and not a signatory to the UN resolutions that governed PMCs. So no, he wasn’t a criminal, but only by virtue of living in a place where the laws were decided by those with the biggest guns.

  Comet dropped his pistol on the table with a heavy clunk. He turned it so it was pointed Buzz’s way like they were playing spin the bottle and it was Buzz’s turn.

  The gun was still lifeless. Buzz sneered at him. “Ain’t all that dumb, am I?”

  Comet drew his hand back for a good slap.

  Buzz flinched and glared. He said to Duke, “Your merc here—”

  “I’m a PMC, not a merc.”

  “—ignored a zero-day patch on his gun. You’d think a competent P-M-C would keep his gun up-to-date.”

  Duke’s eyes narrowed, and Comet looked down at the table. “I’ve been fourteen hours on a plane. My weapon was stowed.”

  —You were supposed to be going into hiding, coming to High Castle to be with us, BangBang sent.

  —I’m not here by choice. Can you not feel the handcuffs? BangBang was a rider. He had full access to Buzz’s sensoria when he wanted. It was how he was able to manifest the illusion of himself so perfectly. And the handcuffs pinched and held Buzz’s arms at a bad angle so they’d gone sore and a bit numb and tingly. There was no way BangBang could have not known if he was paying any attention.

  “Fix your goddamn pistol,” Duke said to Comet. He pointed at Buzz. “You. Shut the fuck up.”

  The whole table fell silent. Duke’s and Comet’s eyes went mid-distance stare: the sign that their attention was now focused on a cyberspace Buzz couldn’t see.

  —Can you access their space? Buzz asked BangBang.

  The teenage James Dean shook his head. —Irontooth. Not even gonna try. Maybe BangBang had tried hacking Mason’s com
pany once upon a time and it hadn’t gone so well.

  No one spoke. Buzz sat and fidgeted.

  Comet’s hands moved over his pistol, resetting it by sheer muscle memory.

  Comet’s hands were all tendon and bone. The tone of his skin made his thick roadmap veins appear green. And they weren’t scarred up at all, not like Buzz thought a fighter’s hands should be scarred. No calluses, nothing. Those hands were deadly strong, Buzz already knew, but the way they brushed over his gun didn’t seem deadly at all. Buzz could almost forget it was a gun he was touching that way.

  The gun’s lights came on. Buzz could have hacked it again before the patch was complete, but what was the point? (Except to watch those hands reset it again?)

  Minutes passed. Duke’s and Comet’s eyes shifted focus from time to time. Buzz felt ignored. And after a few more minutes of being ignored, he felt a bit forgotten.

  BangBang sent, —I’ve hacked the BarNet. I’ll wipe all the customer accounts and that will give you time to slip away.

  —No! I ain’t slipping away.

  —After you double-crossed the Electric Dragon Triad, it was a lot of work getting you to safety—

  —It was a lot of work for JT and Austin, not you.

  —And what you’re doing right now undoes all of it.

  —Right now, JT is in trouble. Someone attacked him. I want to know who and why, and then I’m going to do something about it. He’s my friend.

  —I’m your friend.

  —You’re not in danger.

  “I could help,” Buzz said aloud.

  —You’re wrong, Buzz. I am in danger. And you know who’s putting me in danger? You.

  “Oh really? You could help?” Duke said. “Go ahead, then. Help me.”

  Their eyes didn’t focus on him. They expected him to lie, so he didn’t. Except this one: These people would only know JT by the fake identity Buzz had created for him. They called him Jason Taylor. Buzz had to remember to call him that too.

  “I followed an AI fragment to Jason’s place. It’s called the Blue Unicorn. That holo recording you saw when you found me, that was it. A recording of it, at least. By the time I got there, the place was shot up. Jason and Austin—Austin’s an old friend of Jason’s, a way-back kind of friend, they were together the last time I saw them—they were both missing. Dante too, I guess.”

  The whole thing had been terrifying. He’d searched everywhere for the three of them and each room and building he’d entered, he’d been certain he’d find his friends dead. He squirmed in the seat, the handcuffs biting. “I was searching the place’s security records when your asshole showed up. I didn’t find anything. There’d been a cyberattack and the whole network was a wreck.”

  “Why would an AI fragment ask for Dante?” Comet said.

  Buzz shrugged and shook his head. He didn’t know.

  “Why did it go to Jason’s place?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who shot up the place? The AI didn’t do that.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Jason?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he okay? Is he hurt? Is he captured? Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “So you’re useless. Or a liar. Or both. Thanks for the fucking help.”

  “I’m not lying!”

  Comet didn’t let up with the questions. “Did you take the hard drive out of that Atari?”

  “You frisked me. Did you find it?”

  “Answer the question,” Duke said.

  “It was already gone when I got there. I told you, someone cleaned the place up data-wise. There was nothing left.”

  Duke set a holo puck in the center of the table. Comet protested. “You’re trusting him?”

  The puck activated and projected an image of the wrecked yard of JT’s compound. It was 3-D, probably created from video recorded by Comet’s cybernetic eyes. The image shrank until it showed the whole yard in shimmering green. Some places had been highlighted and glowed a brighter green. Duke moved from one highlighted space to the next: long gouges in the pavement, punctures through corrugated siding that didn’t look like bullet holes, pieces of twisted metal.

  Duke said, “Comet’s run an analysis of the battlefield—”

  Buzz blinked at the word battlefield, and he saw Comet’s jaw clench. Comet didn’t like JT’s place being called a battlefield any more than he did. Maybe they had something in common after all.

  “—and from the damage, tracks, and debris, he’s confident there were three Atari Koroshiya 036s. Though I can’t imagine how Jason might have done it, he managed to disable one of the three.”

  He gave Buzz the opportunity to explain how a mild-mannered engineer like JT could have held his own against three high-end urban combat drones long enough to take one out.

  The answer was that JT wasn’t a mild-mannered engineer. But Buzz said nothing.

  The image focused on the dead Atari drone. Duke blew the image up until its chest filled the puck’s projection area. Centered there was the word DOC painted in childlike sloppy tempera.

  “Mean anything to you?” Duke asked.

  Buzz studied it. He’d noticed the word at the time, of course, but hadn’t thought much of it. All his attention had been on data recovery; the idea that there might be something else worth investigating hadn’t occurred to him. But now that he saw it, there was something familiar.

  He accessed a 3djinn database of images and video stolen from top-secret files worldwide. He felt BangBang and Critter looking over his shoulder. Critter began to chatter, and BangBang cussed. He found images of wreckage just like that Atari, with names painted on them in comic tempera. All those images were connected to one person.

  “Valentine,” he said.

  Duke sighed, sat back, and crossed his arms. Probably he didn’t trust a direct sending link with Buzz, because he requested a secure anonymous drop, and then shared an encrypted folder with both Comet and Buzz (and though Duke didn’t know it, by extension BangBang and Critter). Buzz opened it. The folder contained PBI and Interpol reports on a cybernetically enhanced drone pilot and assassin code-named Valentine. She’d been credited with a dozen high-profile murders, including the British Prime Minister Beau Geddings (Bright-Green Party) and the orc mystic Odoro Hazzell. She had warrants for her arrest in almost every country and extradition agreements between all the North American unions, the Commonwealth, the EU, the Caliphate, Egypt, and even China, who never agreed to extradition with anyone.

  “So a world-class assassin and a 3djinn hacker followed an AI fragment to Jason’s house, where they found it asking for help from a teenage orc.”

  Buzz shook his head slowly. Because when put that way, it did seem unbelievable. Had he and JT and Austin fucked up so badly by getting involved with the Blue Unicorn that someone had sent Valentine after them?

  He should run. He should go into hiding and never come out. And like he was reading Buzz’s mind, BangBang sent, —Hide, Buzz. Take the Marid and come to High Castle with us like you said you were going to, and hide.

  It was the sensible thing to do. Take 3djinn’s stolen spaceship and get as far away from Greentown as he could. Because if that assassin had come for JT and Austin, she’d come for him too, wouldn’t she?

  Maybe Duke was right and he was the dumbest hacker on the planet, because he didn’t tell BangBang yes. What he said was: “You said there were three? Two other Ataris? They’ll have recorded the fight and everything that happened before I got there, right? Probably other data too? We grab one of her drones and we get our answers.”

  “And how am I supposed to find her?” Comet said.

  —You’ve lost your goddamn mind, BangBang sent.

  “We set a trap. She came after the Blue Unicorn. So we blast that we’ve found the Blue Unicorn over the net, all nodes, and Valentine will come to us. You distract her. I hack a drone. We find Jason.”

  —You don’t stand a chance, Bu
zz!

  —Then help me!

  —I’m not going to threaten our network to help your idiot friends. It’s not just you you’re putting at risk. It’s the whole 3djinn network. You know passwords—

  —So change them!

  —and encryption algorithms and you know the identities of contacts and clients.

  “I’ll do it,” Comet said and slid out of the seat.

  “Great.” Buzz turned so Comet could remove the cuffs.

  “You ain’t going nowhere.” Comet said.

  —and if Valentine gets into your head—

  “You’re taking him with you,” Duke said.

  —It’s all of 3djinn at risk!

  —Either help me or get the fuck out of my head!

  “I don’t want him with me.”

  “You need a hacker.”

  “I need a hacker I trust. I’ll call Prancer.”

  “Prancer’s four hours out in Mexico City. Take him with you, and find JT and Dante and this friend of his, Austin, and bring them back safe. That’s your mission, Comet.”

  BangBang and Critter went quiet and icy and then vanished.

  Comet didn’t like Duke’s orders one bit, Buzz could tell. Comet rolled his shoulders. A coiling-snake-strike crouching-panther-like sort of movement, patiently vicious. His whole body rippled with the strength of it. It was arrogant (and Buzz disliked the guy just that much more), intimidating, and entirely, unhealthily, confusingly thrilling.

  Comet hauled Buzz out of the booth and turned him around. As he undid the cuffs, he leaned in close and whispered in Buzz’s ear, “You’re still my prisoner.”

  Comet pocketed the cuffs and went for the door. Buzz went to follow, but Duke’s immense hand closed around his arm. “One more thing, 3djinn.”

  Buzz tried to pull away, but Duke’s grip was iron. He scowled at Comet near the door and refused to look back at Duke.

  “Before I dumped forty million into Jason’s start-up car shop, I did my research. Jason Taylor was a kid from nowhere Montana who just barely got himself accepted to Hyundai-Daisho Davis. Bs in his coursework. Second-string on the Halo team. Capstone paper on the shear-strength of nano-engineered plasti-ceramics—boring as shit if you ask me. Doubly so considering the same paper was written by another student two years previous at Cornell. Jason’s indenture to HD was ten years. He gave them four and skipped out on the last six. No record how he paid off the other quarter million he owed them for his education.”