Market Forces

by Richard Morgan

  Felt his heart stumble as the Saab palpably gathered enough sideways momentum to skid. He dared not brake, there wasn’t time. He needed the straight at speed. He unhinged the angle of the turn a miserly couple of degrees, slewed back across the double lane, fishtailing, muttering imprecations to the car. The Saab came back to him. He picked up the long rise-and-fall of the straight and ran for the next curve.

  Almost to the end of the gut-tickling swoop, almost on the curve, he choked off his speed and threw the Saab into a shrieking, gibbering handbrake turn.

  For one very long moment, he thought he’d fucked up. Thought he’d lose a tyre and then the car and plunge with it through the crash barrier into the zones below. The car slithered, tripped drunkenly across a badly mended pothole, screamed protest and tyre smoke he could suddenly smell—

  And stopped.

  Not the hundred and eighty. Just a ninety-degree sprawl across both lanes, blocking the Gullet like a bone in the throat.

  Back along the straight, the BMW came over the rise.

  He grabbed the shotgun from the passenger side footwell, threw open the driver side door and tumbled out of the car. Found his feet, found the BMW and cranked the action of the tactical pump.

  Curiously, now that the situation was drawn, everything seemed very quiet. The Saab had stalled out in the turn, and the BMW’s engine noise seemed almost inaudible past the distant ocean roar of his own pulse in his ears. The wind came and tugged at his hair, but gently. The sprawl of cordoned zone housing below seemed to be holding its breath.

  He let Bryant come on for another second, then put the first shot into the driver-side half of the windscreen.

  The familiar boom - he’d done a solid hour down in the armoury firing ranges, a final tuning of his earlier unexpected love affair with the long gun.

  The BMW’s windscreen cratered and crazed. He saw the splinter lines.

  No discharge of projectile weaponry from a moving vehicle. The parchment-dry conclusion of the legal board of inquiry after the Nakamura playoff. No substantial destruction to be inflicted with a projectile weapon. Provided these directives are adhered to—

  Bryant’s windscreen was armoured glass. Even with the state-of-the-art vehicle shredder load the armourer had shown him, care of Heckler and Koch - the roadblock ammunition of choice for all your urban enforcement needs - even with that, at this range there’d be no substantial destruction.

  He pumped the action, fired again. The spider-webbed screen resplintered, almost to opaque.

  It was pushing the envelope, pushing it the way Jones and Nakamura had done, pushing it the way Notley liked.

  The BMW came on. Behind the ruined screen, Bryant had to be almost blind. Chris pumped in another round, ran sideways to get the angle. Went after the leading tyre.

  The shotgun kicked. The tyre blew into shreds.

  No substantial—

  The BMW slewed violently across the road, brakes shrieking protest, scorching rubber into the road and the wind.

  Precedent, Chris. That’s what counts.

  In the elite, you don’t get punished for breaking the rules. Not if it works.

  The BMW careered past him, ploughed through the crash barrier and plunged over. It took less than a pair of seconds. Chris had time for one glimpse through the side window, Mike still fighting the wheel for control, then the big car was gone, and there was only the ragged gap in the barrier to mark its passing.

  Breath held.

  A flat, oddly undramatic metallic crump from below. Then nothing.

  Done. Won. Finished.

  Emptied out.

  Nothing.

  It coursed through him like current, that nothing. Emptiness, building to ecstasy. He threw back his head and screamed at the sky. It wasn’t enough. He couldn’t get it all out. He screamed until his throat felt ripped and his lungs locked up on empty. Until he gagged, finally, to a halt.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Echoes rippled out across the cityscape below, chasing each other off towards the cluster of glass and steel towers on the skyline.

  Overhead, even the clouds seemed to hurry away from the sound.

  Behind them, the sky was a flawless, vacant blue. Against all the odds, it was going to be a beautiful day.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  You bring back their plastic.

  Stranded atop the marching pillars of the Gullet, listening to his own pulse and the echo of his screams, Chris heard Hewitt’s words with hallucinatory clarity. It was as if the woman was standing next to him in the wind.

  You go in and you finish the job. If you can, you bring back their plastic.

  He peered down on the zone sprawl below. As far as he could tell, the BMW seemed to have fallen through the roof of a decaying commercial unit. He scanned the surroundings in both directions and spotted his access point. Fifty metres further along the Gullet, a caged staircase wound down around one of the concrete support pillars and came out at the end of a shabby residential street. It looked as if there might be a foot passage through from the street to the commercial units. With luck he could be in and out in ten minutes.

  He jogged slowly along the road to the top of the staircase. There was an ancient padlock on the rusting iron cagework. He levelled the shotgun, remembered the jagged vehicle-shredder load and thought better of it. He reached for the Nemex and found an empty holster.

  Fuck.

  He remembered the way the gun had refused to clip in while he talked to Vasvik. Remembered tumbling out of the Saab with the shotgun. He looked back along the road to where the car was slewed. No sign of anything on the asphalt, but it could have skittered away under the belly of the vehicle. Or fallen while he was still inside.

  Well, that’s it. You can’t get down. Have to leave it for the clean-up squad. Not like they’ll take long to get here.

  The relief gusted through him. Duel etiquette forbade outside approach for a regulation fifteen minutes, except in medical emergencies. But they’d reel the situation in on satellite blow-up, see the way it had played out and be here pretty soon. All he had to do was sit at the edge of the road and wait.

  But he knew what Hewitt would say. Knew how the whisper would run among the junior analysts on the floor below. Yeah, sure, Faulkner’s some natty driver. But the way I heard it, no stones when it comes to the consequences. Too soft to pick a corpse’s pocket.

  Fuck it.

  He locked on the Remington’s safety, reversed the weapon and pounded at the rusted lock until it gave. Dull clank of metal on metal. Orange flakes of rust scattered around his feet. The lock snapped and hung, severed. He levered the cage door open and picked his way down the steps.

  At the bottom, it was the same story. Another grilled iron door, another rusted lock, this time on the inside, as if a retreating army had fought a rearguard action out of the zones and up onto the highway. Weeds had grown up to shoulder height on the other side of the grille, effectively hiding the bottom of the staircase from outside view. From the inside, you could barely see the twinned row of black brick-terraced housing beyond. Chris craned his neck and stared through the nodding heads of the weeds, listening, trying to get some sense of whether there was anybody nearby.

  Nothing stirred.

  He started hammering at the lock. Slipped a couple of times, scraped his hand on the rusting iron. It was hard to manoeuvre the shotgun in the confines of the cage, hard to get a working angle. When he finally stepped out through the weeds, he was sweating and sticky inside his suit.

  The street beyond was empty.

  He scanned the frontages - the only motion was the flap of plastic sheeting over a broken upper window. A wrecked and rusted Landrover, one of the late models modified to burn alcohol, was beached on its axles about twenty metres down the street. It was skeletal, stripped of everything that would come off, the frame scorched molotov-cocktail black where rust had not yet crept in. He spotted the passageway a couple of houses beyond on the left and moved cautious
ly out into the street. Unrepaired potholes gaped in the cracked asphalt, some of them wide enough to take the whole front end of the Saab.

  He moved a couple of steps at a time, painfully aware of the windows looking down on either side, pausing to listen every two metres. Belatedly, he remembered the Remington’s safety and thumbed it off. Pumped out the last spent shell. The harsh metal noise it made shattered the quiet.

  Suit and shotgun, he reasoned nervously. It ought to keep the flies off long enough.

  He swung wide around the burnt-out Landrover, feeling slightly ridiculous as he covered the angles. He cleared the corner of the passageway. Moved down past high brick walls topped with broken glass. Detritus crunched under his feet. The passage came to an end amidst shallow mounds of weed-grown rubble and a clutch of leaf-canopied trees. He climbed the first mound with difficulty, burying his Argentine leather shoes to the ankle in little avalanches of sliding soil. From the top he saw the corrugated metal side of the commercial unit and a loading bay door, rusted open on empty square metreage beyond. In the gloom he could make out half of the BMW lying on its back. A qualified relief at his own navigational skills seeped—

  Motion.

  He whipped around, finger tightening on the Remington’s trigger.

  And snatched it away again, as if the metal was hot. On the down slope of the next mound, two children around four or five years old were playing a game with the slaughtered limbs and torsos of plastic dolls. They froze when they saw him, then scrambled to their feet and started shouting.

  ‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit! Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-shit!’

  He shook his head, lowered the shotgun and wiped a hand across his mouth. This close, the vehicle-shredder load would have—

  ‘Zek-tiv-shit, zek-tiv-SHIT!’ Elfin faces distorted with the force of the chant.

  A woman’s voice came from one of the houses, raised and harsh with anxiety. The children vectored in on it, looked at each other for a moment that was almost comical, and then darted away like spooked animals. They scrambled across the mounds of rubble and through a hole in a wall he hadn’t seen. He was left looking at the plastic carnage of dismembered dolls.

  Fuck. Fuck this. Fuck Louise Hewitt and her fucking plastic.

  But he went on, over the rubble mounds, up to the loading bay door and through.

  Inside, it was cold. Water dripped ceaselessly from the girder-laced roof and puddled along the lines of unevenly-laid concrete flooring. The BMW lay under the hole it had made, nose to the floor with the weight of engine and armour, back end in the air. There was a faint hissing from the front, and steam curled out through a gap where the hood had crushed out of true. Otherwise, it looked remarkably undamaged. The armouring had stood up.

  Chris moved crab-wise to the driver-side door, hesitated a moment and then hooked it open. Bryant tumbled out like a bundle of unwashed clothes. Suit bloodied, eyes closed and mouth open. One arm trailed across the floor at an impossible angle to the rest of the body.

  Nausea. The rising tide of delayed reaction from the duel. Chris pressed his tongue hard against the roof of his mouth and knelt beside the body. He stowed the shotgun under his arm and flapped back one side of Bryant’s jacket. The wallet gleamed gold-cornered from the inside pocket. He took it between thumb and forefinger and tugged it free. Flipped it open. The photo of Suki and Ariana smiled up at him opposite Mike’s racked plastic.

  A hand closed around his leg.

  Chris almost vomited with the shock. The shotgun clattered across the floor. He stumbled away from the car, broke the grip and saw. Bryant was still alive, eyes wide and staring up out of his inverted face. His good arm made feeble motions. His mouth opened and closed silently, like a landed fish. It was impossible to tell if he recognised Chris or not.

  You go in and you finish the job. You don’t take them to the hospital afterwards.

  He remembered Bryant’s gesture as the two cars ground against each other - the cocked thumb ripping across the throat. The grin. His mouth tightened and he picked up the Remington again.

  You don’t take them to the hospital, Chris.

  You finish the job.

  He stepped back and raised the weapon. Bryant saw it and flailed desperately about on the concrete. A broken moaning came out of his mouth. It looked as if he was trying to bring his working arm up to his shoulder holster and the Nemex, but he didn’t have the strength. Chris clamped his mouth tighter, took another step back and levelled the shotgun. Jagged motion, quick, before he could give it thought. He’d stopped breathing.

  Finish the fucking job, Chris.

  He squeezed the trigger.

  Nothing.

  No click, no detonation, no kick. No spray of blood and tissue. The trigger gave soggily through half the pull and stuck. Chris pulled harder. Still nothing. He worked the action and jacked a perfectly good unfired shell out into the air. It hit the concrete and rolled away, cheerful cherry red.

  Mike’s face, pleading up at him.

  Squeezed again. Nothing.

  ‘Fuck.’ It gritted out of him, as if he was afraid to be overheard in the empty warehouse. It still seemed to echo off the walls. ‘Fuck, fuck!’

  The padlocks - hammering at the padlocks until they snapped and came loose. He remembered the savagery he’d brought to the action, the haphazard angles he’d been forced to use in the cage at the bottom of the stairs.

  He’d jammed the mechanism, jolted something, maybe broken something inside, irretrievably.

  He stood looking at Mike Bryant. Wiped his mouth and swallowed.

  Finish it. Fucking finish it.

  He stalked closer, staring fascinated into the other man’s eyes. Bryant gaped up at him, twitching. He made noises that sounded like the name Chris, the word please.

  For some reason, it was enough.

  ‘Fuck you, Mike,’ he said quickly. ‘You had your chance.’

  He turned the injured man’s head with one foot, reversed the Remington and jammed the butt of the weapon into Bryant’s exposed throat. Leaned his full weight on the gun.

  ‘Fuck you, Mike!’ Now he was spitting it, bent over and glaring into Bryant’s face. ‘Fuck you! Fuck you, all of you suited fuckers!’

  It seemed to take forever.

  At first Bryant only made choking sounds. Then, from somewhere, he found strength to get his undamaged arm up and grab the Remington around the trigger guard.

  Chris kicked the hand away and stood on it. He was panting.

  Mike’s choking sounds grew frantic. He twisted his head against the concrete. He curled his trapped fingers around the edges of Chris’s shoe, nails clawing at the Argentine leather.

  Chris leaned harder. Tears sprang out in his eyes and streamed down his face. He lifted his foot and stamped down hard on Mike’s hand. He heard the dry snap as one of the fingers broke. He leaned harder. His whole weight lifting on the braced shotgun, taking his body almost off the floor.

  Something crunched. Mike stopped moving.

  Afterwards, Chris could barely get himself upright. It was as if the shotgun had suddenly become indispensable, as if he’d been afflicted with a sudden muscular disease. He limped back from the corpse, trembling so violently his teeth chattered. He made less than a dozen steps. He bent suddenly double and, finally, threw up. A thin helping of vomit and bile - he’d barely eaten that morning, but what he had came up. He dropped to his knees in a puddle, retching.

  The sound of boots through the wet.

  He looked up, only vaguely interested, and saw the men. Big, blocky forms in the filtering light from outside, like knights in armour from some mediaeval fantasy.

  He blinked to clear his eyes.

  There were nine of them, dressed in the cordoned zone gangwit ensemble. Cheap, grimed clothes, loose canvas trousers, bulky padded jackets, shaven heads and workboots. Hands held crowbars, wrenches, sawn-off pool cues and a variety of other items too jagged to identify. Faces were scarred with streetfight souvenirs. Eyes watchf
ul on the scene they’d just interrupted.

  He got unsteadily to his feet. One of the men stepped forward. He was near two metres tall, heavily muscled under a sleeveless T-shirt scrawled red with the legend I am the Minister for the Redistribution of Health. The lettering was splattered to make it look bloody. His face was scarred from the corner of the left eye and down the cheek. It gave him an oddly mournful look.

  ‘Finished, have you? Is he dead?’

  Chris blinked and coughed.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked harshly.

  ‘Who are we?’ Laughter rasped out, first from one throat, then building to a rattling echo off the metal roof. It died out as abruptly. The gangwit spokesman was swinging a short black-enamelled prybar softly and repeatedly into his left palm. His gaze seemed welded to Chris, playing up and down the clothes, the hair, the shotgun. He smiled and the scar tissue tugged at his face. ‘Who are we? We’re the fucking dispossessed, mate. That’s who we are.’

  There was no laughter to follow this time. The men had tautened, waiting for the leash to slip. Chris suppressed another cough and lifted the Remington as convincingly as he could manage.

  ‘That’s close enough. The police are on their way, and there’s nothing to see here.’

  ‘Yeah?’ The spokesman for the group gestured at the BMW and Mike Bryant’s corpse. ‘From what we’ve seen so far, I beg to differ. This is prime time. Mr Faulkner.’

  Chris pumped the action on the Remington.

  ‘Alright, I said that’s close enough.’

  Mistake.

  The unspent shell leapt in the air, hit the concrete and rolled towards the other man. For a moment, they both looked down at it. Then the gangwit looked back up at Chris and shook his head.

  ‘See, that’s a perfectly good round, mate. And to judge by your manner of execution back there a moment ago, I’d say—‘