He slid down the tree, tearing off leaves with his claws.
I stayed where I was, held by a terrible fascination, watching the choppers approach.
The Buonaville manhunter reached us first, and descended to hover over the disaster area, I realized that Parsec’s freedom wasn’t going to last more than another few minutes. He was wrong about the supposed obsolescence of the manhunter. Well, the chopper itself was just an old military twin-rotor, but as it hovered over the roadblock, a couple dozen drones spilled out of its side ports. They were the same model I once owned (I inherited mine from Artie, who picked it up on a Techworld): military surveillance drones with LiDAR and spectrographic imaging functionality. Those mothers can see through trees.
They split into two flocks and ranged out over the jungle on both sides of the road.
I stared up through the leaves, petrified with horror. They were going to see me.
I took the only evasive action I could: right there, in the top of the weatherstopper tree, I Shifted.
Shifting in treetops is not recommended. I wrapped my elbow around a branch, fell down a few branches as my arm fizzed out into a raw quantum-probabilistic zone of nothingness, and dug jaguar claws into bark just in time to save myself from a worse fall.
I chose my jaguar because it was in the front of my mind, and because it kinda sorta resembled a native Ponce de Leon flamecat, the top predator around here. Not enough legs, but apart from that. Flamecats can climb trees. It was fifty-fifty whether the drone’s pattern-matching algos would classify me as a flamecat or a Shifter in animal form.
I clawed the remnants of my t-shirt off my neck. My jeans, phone, gun, and boots tumbled down through the branches.
A drone buzzed over the top of my tree without slowing down and zoomed away, skimming the canopy.
Safe. But the bears weren’t. There is nothing on Ponce de Leon that looks like a bear, apart from Shifters.
Sudden movement on the road drew my gaze. Two men burst out of the jungle, right underneath the hovering manhunter. One was Nunak. The other was Larry K.
Nunak still had his holobook. He was gesturing in frustration.
Larry K still had his machine-gun.
Nunak typed, held up one finger—wait a minute!—typed some more.
The manhunter edged down further so its door gunner could target him.
Larry K sprinted out among the crashed vehicles, shooting up at the manhunter. Return fire from the door gunner followed him. Crushed fish jumped up like they were alive.
Larry K was smart. He didn’t aim at the manhunter’s rotors, or the cockpit. He aimed at the fuel tank.
The chopper erupted almost gracefully, burning as it sank to earth.
Beneath it, Larry K sank, too, bowing his head like a child that suddenly feels tired.
I skidded down the weatherstopper tree. I was halfway back to the road when the second Trident Overland rig exploded.
The fireball reddened the afternoon sunlight seeping through the strimmed wall of the jungle.
The ground shivered under my feet.
A drone fell through the trees and landed on the forest floor in front of me like a dead goose.
Nunak stumbled towards me, without his holobook, his face red, mooing in pain. He must have been standing too near the rig when it went up. He fumbled at his belt with burned hands. I helped him along by snapping at his pants legs. He yowled in pain again when his front paws hit the ground, but Shifting “resets” the nervous system to some extent, so he was able to walk on them.
Jaguar and polar bear slunk through the Tunjle, following the fairly obvious trail the other bears had left.
“How’d you do that?” I said over my shoulder.
“Blow up the trucks?” He had a high, squeaky voice, and his bear form was a bit off—it looked more like a husky than a real polar bear. I could see why folks underestimated him. “Wireless detonator.”
“No, the rest of it. Aircraft and drones falling out of the sky. Explosions don’t do that.”
“They do if you use the explosion to power a high-strength microwave energy burst.”
“Oh.”
“Microwaves are a type of EMP. It fries the electronics. Rotors stall out, and down she goes. Poor man’s HERF weapon.”
He talked like he was hot shit, but I had seen him crying in pain, and I could hear the fear behind his brittle bravado. I turned on the trail and showed him my jaguar’s teeth. “Nice trick. Where’d you learn that? In the forces?”
“No, I … who are you?”
He didn’t know my jaguar. He had thought I must be an associate of Parsec’s, just because I was a Shifter. “The name’s Starrunner.”
“Oh God.”
“Where’s my 500 KGCs?”
“I don’t have it,” Nunak said, caving in just like that. “I gave it all to Cecilia!”
I was about to smack him around a bit to get more information out of him, but then I remembered Larry K shooting down the helicopter and sinking slowly to his knees, and I lost my appetite for hurting anyone or anything. We walked on a bit, still heading away from the road, and found the other bears waiting for us in a thicket. They had all Shifted into their bear forms. Some of them had their packs strapped on their backs.
“Finally,” Parsec growled. “Where’s Larry?”
“I don’t think he’s coming.” I told them what I had seen.
“Aw fuck,” Gary K blurted. “Aw fuck fuck fuck.”
It is a terrible thing when a bear cries. I lost all my hatred for him in that moment. Larry had been his twin brother. Suzie nosed her boyfriend’s shoulder, licked the all-too-human tears off his furry face.
“Is Starrunner telling the truth?” Parsec roared at Nunak. “Speak up, you piss-colored mutt!”
“Y-yes, sir,” Nunak muttered.
“All because you fucked up. That pissant detonator couldn’t work from a hundred meters away? Goddammit. Larry was worth ten of you. I should leave you here. Break your legs and leave you here for the wood ants. You couldn’t keep up, anyway.”
Nunak started to plead incoherently. His desperation not to be left behind helped me to understand the dynamic between him and Parsec. He had always been shunned by the Bad-News Bears: too brainy, too uncool, too out-of-shape. But when Parsec fell on hard times, he had turned to Nunak for help, and Nunak had gladly given it, hoping to finally earn acceptance.
I shared the general view that Larry K had been worth ten of him, but I said, “He hadn’t knocked those drones out, y’all would have been caught already, Buzz.”
“True,” Parsec said. “And there’ll be more coming. We need to cover as much ground as possible before they can deploy another manhunter.” He snarled at Nunak. “If you can’t keep up, we ain’t slowing down for you, hear?”
I moved in front of Parsec as the bears tightened the straps of each other’s packs with their teeth. “Where’re you going?”
“Going?” His bleary little eyes met mine. “Nowhere.”
“Huh?”
“We,” he enunciated, “are going nowhere. This is our planet.” His gaze moved past me, into the rustling, vividly green maze of the jungle. His nose quivered, inhaling the rich scentscape. “We’re staying.”
My jaw dropped as I finally understood what he had in mind. They were planning to hide out in the jungle. To stay in the jungle …
… as bears.
“What about Cecilia?” I said.
Cecilia Parsec had supported her husband steadfastly throughout his ordeal. She had organized his legal defense, and Nunak had told me that she was involved with the blackmail scheme, as well. She and Parsec had a stronger marriage than many an upstanding couple. I couldn’t see him ditching her like this.
“She was gonna come,” Parsec said, “but then she changed her mind.”
“Guess it’s no use persuading you to change your mind.”
“Nope. We belong in the woods,” Parsec said. “I spent my whole life trying to pretend it
ain’t so, but at the end of the day, we’re Shifters. You know it, Starrunner. In your heart, you know it, too.”
I said nothing. Oh, I understood the pull of the wilderness. I had felt it at Alec’s place. I had seen the big woods wrap around my daughter and comfort her like a mother’s arms. There’s something inside of every Shifter that yearns for an animal’s natural habitat.
But let’s get real. Even the stewarded, selectively hunted woods on Alec’s property were dangerous. And this was the Tunjle. It was no one’s natural habitat. It was a green kill zone. Parsec had just spent a month in prison, and he was none too young. Of the other bears, some of them were fit, some weren’t, but I would bet they had never hunted and killed their supper in their life.
“You’ll leave your bones here,” I said quietly.
“That’s what you think.”
“Buzz, I wouldn’t try it, and I’m from San Damiano.”
“That’s my point. You’re from San Damiaaaano. You don’t belong here. We do.”
Parsec turned his head and checked over the line of bears. They had formed up in single file. Bears have a travelling gait that can eat up the ground, though they would be slowed down by the thick undergrowth.
“Ready to roll, ladies and gents?”
The bears growled an affirmative.
“So what’d you do with my money?” I said.
“Spent it,” Parsec said.
“Spent it on what?”
“You got any idea how expensive it is to be criminally prosecuted? I spent it on lawyers’ fees, the settlement in the civil lawsuits brought by the city, new suits and shoes for my court appearances, telephone calls from jail … the usual. It’s gone, Starrunner. You ain’t getting it back.”
I clawed a nearby tree in sheer frustration. Too well I remembered explaining my own spending habits to d’Alencon. I had pissed away millions over the years, a little at a time, and I didn’t even have a criminal defense team to pay for. “You hired all those pricey lawyers, and you didn’t even wait to see if they could get you off?”
Parsec laughed. “It wasn’t gonna happen. The normies hate us. I didn’t really know that before, but I do now.”
“Cecilia is a normie.”
The grizzly’s laugh cut off like my words were a knife. He swiped at me, so fast I had to jump back. “Fuck off and quit wasting my time.”
The bears trotted away into the jungle. A few seconds after the last pair of furry hindquarters vanished, it was like they’d never been here, apart from the lingering rank smell.
It is easy to get lost in the woods, even for an animal. But I had no trouble orienting myself back to the road. For one thing, I had the bears’ trail to guide me, and for another, the breeze was blowing from the coast, and even the smells of the jungle could not disguise the odors of burning jet fuel and roasted human flesh.
38
When I got back to the weatherstopper tree, I sniffed around on the forest floor until I found my phone and gun. My jeans had also fallen to the ground, although my other clothes must have gotten stuck in the branches. I tapped my phone with a claw. It was a brick. Nunak’s EMP had killed it. So that was another 5 KGCs they owed me. The cops might be able to trace it to me anyway, so I scratched a hole in the ground and buried it. I buried my gun with it. I could only carry one thing in my mouth, and I needed my jeans.
From the road came shouts, the hissing of foam-hoses, and the grinding of heavy machinery.
I padded up the hill I had walked down less than an hour ago, staying under cover. The noise faded behind me. I stuck my nose out of the green and saw my truck still sitting on the shoulder where I had left it. It was no longer the only vehicle parked on the hill. Quite a tailback had built up, waiting for the disaster area to be cleared.
When I drew level with the truck, I Shifted back. My nausea instantly returned full force. My gut knotted, but the fishburger refused to come back up. Groaning, I put on my jeans, crawled through the weeds on the shoulder, and climbed casually into my truck like I’d just gotten out to take a piss.
I stifled a yell of surprise.
In the passenger seat sat Cecilia Parsec.
“Hello, Mike.”
She loosed a haggard smile. She looked ten years older than when I had seen her last. She wore hiking clothes, a far cry from her usual high-fashion look. Her normally styled auburn hair fell in a tangled mass.
“Sweet Jesus,” I said. “Where’d you spring from?”
“I was going to go with Buzz. I changed my mind.” She shrugged. “I was done with the Tunjle after fifteen minutes. A narcosloth came this close to falling on my head.”
“They’re sneaky little bastards.”
“And my hair’s ruined.” She lifted strands, mocking herself. “This was a 300-GC blowout.”
“Jungle’s no place for the fashion-conscious,” I agreed.
“Buzz said I could ride on his back. Wasn’t it sweet of him? But I’d only have slowed them down.”
I ran my hands down my thighs, clasped them together, said, “Well.” Then I remembered I was shoeless and shirtless. Cecilia was the kind of woman who could make that feel like a crime. My tactical backpack was squashed under Cecilia’s much larger, brand-new one in the footwell. I put on my spare t-shirt and sneakers. “Is there any particular reason you’re sitting in my truck? Like maybe a 500 KGC reason?”
“The money’s gone, Mike. I apologize; I really do. We needed fast cash to pay our creditors.”
“If Buzz was planning to escape into the jungle, anyway, why even bother paying your creditors?”
“I think we both knew, in our hearts, that I wouldn’t be going.” She gestured downhill. “It’s moving.”
Breakdown trucks had dragged the hulks of the Trident Overland rigs to the side of the road. Cops, paramedics, and technicians milled around the obscene wrecks of the riot birds. Flying ambulances landed and lifted off as we watched. But one inbound lane was clear, and cops had begun to direct traffic around the disaster area.
“You’d better get down on the floor.” I pulled the grubby plaid seat cover off and tossed it over Cecilia like a blanket.
The cops were checking IDs. They made drivers extend their arms out their side windows so that the credit dots on their forearms could be scanned. I didn’t have a credit dot, because I was a Shifter. “Pull over, sir,” the traffic cop said. “I need to run your ID.”
I pulled over, into the disaster area, and gave them the holomarked ID card that all unchipped folks have to carry. Fire-retardant foam slopped across the road, covering the scorch marks where jet fuel had flowed and burned. Axe-wielding paramedics were breaking the windshield of a half-burned family car. I spotted Larry K’s body on a stretcher. Far from bothering to cover him up, some asshole had set a trauma kit down on top of him as if he were a table.
The cop frowned at a handheld, pulling up God knows what information about me, certainly including the data that my phone and car had spent the last hour right here on the side of the road. Cold sweat broke out on the backs of my knees. Why had I thought I could get away with this? Cecilia twitched under her stinky plaid cover. I touched her with my foot, willing her to stay quiet. If the cops found her, it was game over. Neither of us would ever see the light of day again.
Another cop ambled up to the truck. “What were you doing in Buonaville today, Mr. Starrunner?”
“Just a little road trip,” I said.
“Yeah? What you got there?” He pointed at the plaid hump in the footwell. His head was on a level with the window. I had a fantasy of punching him in the nose and stepping on the accelerator.
The other cop came back, making a face like he smelled something bad. “He’s green. All right, Mr. Starrunner, move on. You’re holding up traffic.”
I couldn’t believe my luck. I accelerated away from the scene as fast as decently possible. He’s green. What on earth had that meant? That I was free to go, obviously. But why? Could it be … could it be that Jose-Maria d’
Alencon was protecting me?
I slumped back in my seat and lit a cigarette. “You can come out now.”
Cecilia sat up on the seat. “Would it be at all possible for you to give me a ride home?”
I looked at her and realized she was in shock. Sometimes when people take a bad jolt to the heart, they just carry on, letting force of habit guide them like an autopilot.
“You and your husband robbed me blind,” I said. “My apartment is about to be repossessed.” I couldn’t go on, because my stomach was informing me that the situation had gone critical. I pulled over, stumbled into the knee-high weeds, and threw up.
It was the fishburger.
It was the disaster scene.
But as I retched, eyes streaming, I remembered something else.
Early symptoms may include sudden attacks of nausea …
It was IVK.
My asymptomatic grace period was over.
The enemy in my brain had come into the open.
I wiped my mouth on the back of my arm. Staggered back to the truck. Cecilia reached down to help me up. “Made the mistake of eating lunch in Gillietown,” I said.
“I have every kind of stomach med, if you want. I thought I’d need them in the jungle.”
“I wouldn’t say no.” I still wanted to believe the fishburger was the culprit. I accepted a couple of Cecilia’s pills and a bottle of designer sparkling water. The water and the pills stayed down. When I felt a little better, I started the truck again. “You were really going to do it, weren’t you? You were planning to go with him.”
“Yes. But then I just … couldn’t.” She stared straight ahead. The slanting sun picked out the lines around her mouth and eyes.
“You were scared.”
“Yes.”
“Of the jungle.”
“Yes! Of course!”
“It’s not that bad.” Half an hour ago, I’d been saying the opposite to Parsec. “The worst it can do is kill you.”
Cecilia let out a short, bitter laugh.
“Do you still love him?”
There was silence for a good two klicks. I glanced over at her again and saw tears tracking through her make-up. “How can you ask me that?” she said. “Look what I just did for him.”
Dirty Job Page 23
