Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5)

by Dean C. Moore

  Purnell helped him to his feet. “You were ready for a game change. At least on a football field you can only do so much damage. So where’s the ball?”

  “Between my legs. I think the other one got pushed back in under the pressure.”

  “I’m done trying to talk sense to you. It’s time God found a better way than using me as his voice of reason.”

  Perdue smiled as Pernell sauntered off.

  After his men dragged off the unwilling flock, Perdue had a chance to explore the room in private. Fingering the religious knickknacks, he wondered what exactly compelled certain individuals to dive off the deep end.

  At the sound of a creaky floorboard, he turned to find a woman checking out the place, as if trying to divine its secrets much as he was. She didn’t look entirely solid. She was a great hologram, if that’s what she was. Maybe these religious primitives using God and morals over technology as a cure-all weren’t as primitive as they led on.

  “If you’re wondering why I’m here, well, let’s just say I’m no hologram. More of a thought projection.”

  “Oh yeah? I guess we’re all out to save the world in our own way, though most of us make a bigger mess of things.” Perdue set down the candle he was busy sniffing in order to see just what scents were conducive to altered states exactly. He wondered if he sniffed her, if it’d have an even more pronounced mind-altering effect. “That why you here? You the morality police?”

  “No, not exactly. My name is Robin Wakefield.”

  “Why do I get the sense you’re not from around these parts?”

  “There’s probably a version of me in this timeline, but I’m from another one entirely. Back in my world, your destiny remains unclear. I thought I’d visit a few neighboring timelines to see where all this is headed.”

  “All this?”

  “All this kill first, ask questions later. Don’t get me wrong, Perdue. I like your style. I imagine that’s what you have to teach me, the importance of decisiveness over eternal deliberation.”

  “What do I need to learn from you, exactly?”

  “Not sure yet. But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say it had to do with hiding from your internal demons by an endless absorption in your external ones. They’re far less threatening, aren’t they?”

  Perdue stiffened. But she was gone by then; faded into oblivion. Perdue doubted she caught the sea change. Maybe she didn’t need to. Maybe she’d framed her point as a rhetorical question.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Do you believe this?” As they strolled the avenue, Piper lost count of the cameras mounted next to the traffic lights, roosting in trees, and that didn’t include the ones sitting on the dashboards of cop cars and civilian cars, to boot, the ones surveying private properties, from all angles. And the ones the pedestrians were carrying in their hands in their cell phones. That was London for you! “And you had to go make us public enemy number one.”

  “We’re not number one yet,” Cliff said, smiling. Possibly he was thinking of their recent encounter with the Italian police, owing to their killing Conflict Diamonds Avenger in broad daylight in a Palazzo full of people. “You have to work damn hard for that title. Don’t worry, we’ll get there.”

  “How? I don’t see how we can survive jay walking,” Piper said.

  “You notice they aren’t all over us this second.” Cliff pointed to the idle police cars. “And it’s not because their facial recognition algorithms aren’t working. But the super-computer time doesn’t come cheap, and there’s a lot of demand for it, so it’s a matter of priority. That’s why it’s so important we get to be public enemy number one as soon as possible.”

  Piper snorted and said, “You’re crazy,” and left it at that.

  Cliff continued his lecture on the finer points of dodging the police, as he ate his fish and chips. Both sides of the thin cardboard tray were laminated with entreaties to visit the city aquarium. Piper thought the choice of a miniature billboard for the life aquatic was a bit ill-considered, but he digressed. “Let’s say the computers do find us, and alert some desk sergeant about us,” Cliff said. “He’s got to radio his guys. Maybe he’s in a meeting when the report comes in. Maybe when he sends the message to the beat cops in our area, they’re on break and decide to finish their coffee and donuts first. Maybe their cell signal is jammed by an inauspicious tree or poorly tuned cell tower. Maybe another crime is going down right in front of them that they just can’t walk away from. Or they haven’t had a chance to drop their kid off to school yet, running late for their shift. These cracks in the porcelain add up, leaving enough room for bacteria like us to thrive in the grooves, and provide the necessary color and art value to the ceramic piece.”

  “I’d feel more placated if I knew we could get away with murder right under their noses when everything is working in their favor, not ours. I don’t like depending on long shot odds when my future is at stake.”

  “Neither do I,” Cliff said, dumping what was left of his fish and chips into a trash can that was hugging a light post. He surveyed the area for strategic opportunity.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “How’s your acting coming along?”

  “Great since those police interrogations.”

  “Well, for my game plan to work, it’s going to get better, a lot better, fast.”

  Piper smiled. “Why?”

  Cliff ignored him. “You packed everything I told you to?”

  “Yes.”

  Cliff checked his backpack anyway, rummaged through the contents. “Looks like we’re a go.”

  “Doesn’t mean I know how to use any of that stuff.” Piper grabbed the pack back from him, threw it over his shoulder.

  “I’ll help you. By next time, you’ll be a pro.” He pointed at the two hoodlums walking their way. En route to Cliff and Piper, they ripped a little old lady’s handbag away from her, pushed her to the ground, riffled through for anything valuable. After finding nothing, they threw the purse to the ground. One of the punk rocker dye-job hoodlums—both looked like animated snow cones—kept only her red lipstick, which he applied to his lips. Compared to the various colors in his hair, his face and body tattoos, also colored, Piper supposed it was just the right garish touch, helping to push the discordant juxtapositions into migraine triggering territory for anyone foolish enough to stare at him too long.

  Cliff dropped his backpack on the sidewalk beside him, cued Piper to do the same, as if they were making sacrificial offerings to the two bullies coming their way.

  Cliff used the fact the two toughs didn’t feel the least intimidated by them to his advantage.

  He karate chopped Lipstick Dude in the throat, and left him on the ground gasping.

  “Now watch how I do this,” Cliff instructed.

  He jabbed his foot into the standing punk’s knee, perpendicular to the forward-backward orientation for which it was designed, breaking the leg instantly.

  As the youth reached for his knife, groaning and spitting all the while, Cliff kicked it out of his hand, picked up the knife and gouged out an eye with it.

  “Now, make sure you’re playing to the cameras.”

  He held the boy’s face up, and let the eye dangle for the nearest tree-camera.

  When the punk went for his gun, he twisted the arm around his back, and ripped the gun away from him. “Hold up the hand. Hold up the hand, I said, or the next bullet goes in your mouth.”

  The kid, held his hand up. Cliff shot off a finger.

  The kid screamed and ripped his hand away. “Hold your hand up,” Cliff said. “This is really just a tutorial on how to handle bullies. You don’t need to die for a simple lesson in schoolyard dynamics.”

  Crying, the boy held up the hand again. Cliff shot off another finger. Again the kid screamed and ripped his hand away. Cliff grabbed the hand, held it in place. “Hold out the fingers, don’t make me ask you again.” Still playing to the cameras, he shot off the last remaining fingers. “I guess y
ou’ll have to learn to jack off with your left hand. You’ll get the hang of it. You’ll thank me later for teaching you this important lesson of ‘adapt or die.’”

  After Cliff released the one he was working on, he shook on the ground, disabled by fear and his asthma acting up.

  Cliff glanced up at Piper. “Now you try it with the other one. He’s starting to catch his breath. Let him get to his feet first.”

  “You mind cueing me as to the real purpose of this exercise?” Piper asked.

  “We need to give the police ample motivation to get here, meaning this attack has to be brutish in the extreme and prolonged. Give the pedestrians a chance to phone it in until their numbers hit critical mass and someone decides to get off their ass. There’s no reason why you can’t learn to do a decent beat down in the meantime.”

  Piper noticed the police car hadn’t moved. Maybe it was parked in front of the policeman’s house, and he was asleep in bed, not scheduled to report to duty for another few hours.

  He drove a fist into the midsection of the punk as he rose, expected him to double over in pain. But there was no reaction. Instead he cuffed Piper in the face, and sent him thudding to the ground.

  Cliff winced. “You need to perfect unarmed combat in case your disguise proves inadequate, and you have to get out of a clinch.”

  “Yeah, I get that.” Piper tried to figure out how to snake out of the jujitsu clinch the hooligan had him in, with his back pinned to the ground, the thug straddling his chest. It was all he could do to stop his face from being used as a punching bag.

  “Use the reach of your longer arms to gouge out an eye, or rip out his windpipe,” Cliff coached.

  Piper went for the eyes with both thumbs, heard the scream, felt the pressure on his chest let up as the kid forgot everything but the pain.

  Piper rolled over, reversed the position, keeping the pressure on both eyes until they were both dangling out his sockets.

  He ripped out both eyes and swallowed them whole for the cameras.

  “Nice touch,” Cliff said. “Great improvisational skills.”

  The kid was taking wild swings at him, swearing, but Piper now had more freedom to go to work on his midsection without fear of too many of those blows connecting with his face.

  He pounded the kid’s ribs, both sides, hammered his mid-section.

  Cliff counseled, “You’re going to wear yourself out at this rate. He’s too tough in his mid-body. And you have to save something for act two of this little drama.”

  Piper backed off, let the kid get to his feet, then danced around to his back. Again, hamming it up for the cameras, he went to work on the kid’s kidneys, hammer punch, hammer punch. “Better,” Cliff said. “Now try breaking something. Hitting his hard muscles really plays to his strengths, not yours. Probably feels like a damn massage to him.”

  Piper tried one of those kicks Cliff did. Took him three tries to break the knee the same way.

  The kid stayed vertical, favoring the damaged leg.

  He and Cliff both observed the cell phones aimed at them, the entire beat down going viral, probably already on You Tube receiving God only knew how many hits. Though maybe public beat downs had become sufficiently passé that no one but the cops could be bothered, and then only because a sizable percentage of the population who voted did not take a gander to public executions.

  Piper danced in a circle around his victim to make sure each of the cameras caught a good angle on the action, including the stationary ones meant to survey pedestrian-traffic for the police.

  “I’m hearing sirens,” Cliff said. “Time to finish him off. Try a sleeper hold.” Piper jumped on the kid, rode piggyback, as he put the punk in a choke hold using both his arms. “Make sure to hold it until he’s good and dead,” Cliff coached.

  He lit a cigarette, and kept an eye on the closing police cars. “Hurry up, the audience is getting restless. Damn media generation. Everything is one big rush. You can’t take your time to enjoy anything, anymore.”

  Finally, the large punk crumpled under Piper’s weight and the force of the chokehold. He had held both of them up on his one leg all this time. As the life bled out of his face, Piper said, “I think he shit himself. What’s with that?”

  “Natural bodily response in the face of death,” Cliff explained. Piper still hung on, refusing to let go of the hold.

  “Release him. Shake your hands out. If they lock up with lactic acid, you’re not going to be any good to me.”

  Piper stood and shook out his hands.

  “All right, they’re almost on top of us. Head for the subway.”

  Piper sprinted for the subway. Cliff waited to finish his cigarette, needing the extra boost of adrenaline of the cops rolling that much closer to him. Finally, he darted after Piper, and down the stairs.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Alexis relaxed once she saw the crime scene had been secured and taped off, and the two victims of the savage beating were being attended by the EMTs to prepare them for the ambulance. They needed to be stabilized first; they were in bad shape. The one choked and left for dead likely suffered from brain damage.

  Her officers were interrogating the pedestrians, still using their cell phones to take video of the big scene for their fifteen minutes of Facebook fame, or maybe it was Twitter, or YouTube. She couldn’t keep up with what the kids were into these days. In another few years, when her own kids were a little older, she’d have to pay more attention.

  She headed straight for the clown holding the balloons. She had no idea why he and no one else had caught her eye, save maybe the old man struggling with his cane and forward mobility in general. Doubtful either of them had anything helpful to say. But anyone who looked like a possible lead was already being canvassed by cops crawling over the scene like cockroaches. So, why not? She liked clowns and old people. What’s more, they both looked good for some comic relief.

  As Alexis sauntered towards them, she realized why she was drawn to them. She was in her thirties, in good health, making a decent salary, with a husband, three kids, a dog; living the normal life in the normal way—at least it was normal a few decades back. Now she supposed suburban bliss was more illusory than real, and she was in fact part of a dwindling statistic. In short, there was nothing exotic about her: she wasn’t battling infirmity; nor was she battling the demons this clown was, trying to make a living on society’s fringe. Her normalcy was just as threatened as these two, just as likely to go extinct, but she didn’t feel that way. She felt almost guilty for having taken the safe way out, for being so well-adjusted. So much so that an old man hobbling endearingly and a clown holding balloons whose sad painted face didn’t seem sad enough, even with all its lined-in exaggerations to capture the true state of his despair, struck her as haute couture. She was as fascinated by them as her young children would be.

  She bought one of the clown’s balloons from him, figuring the money might help loosen his tongue. “You saw what transpired here?” He picked up the hint just fine, smiled, and handed her another balloon, which she paid for—overpaid for, in fact. “What did you see?”

  He pointed in the direction of the subway. She in turn pointed to a couple officers, sending them down the steps and into the dark tunnel to investigate.

  “Anything stand out about them?” Alexis surveyed the clown’s face to read what was really going on beneath all the face paint.

  He switched hands holding the balloons, to open a clearer view of her face. “They moved with economy and precision, like dancers. Speaking as a fellow professional, I mean.”

  “You’ve had professional training yourself?” she said. She lit a cigarette to help slow her down.

  “Yes, ma’am. Three years of clown school. I can tell you, the timing is always the hardest part. For fighting and brawling, particularly.”

  “You think these two are actually dancers?”

  “No, ma’am, I think one was a professional killer. He looked like he was training the other
one.”

  She thought about that, holding the smoke trapped in her lungs longer than necessary. “I watched the cell phone footage on the ride over here. That would be my take on it, too.” She took another drag, let her eyes roam over the big picture. She wanted to allow whatever else needed to enter her brain a way in, and to avoid tunnel vision on these killers. “Anything else stand out to you?”

  “They were rehearsing their parts. Maybe not just so the one could stay in trim, and teach the other one to be a better killer, but so they could both learn to slip into character better.”

  “They both played to the cameras big time. If they’re conscious of being watched twenty-four-seven, getting into character quickly to escape detection would be even more important than knowing how to give a good beat down.”

  “Just as important, certainly.”

  She handed him some more money.

  “You don’t have profilers to do this for you, to go over the impressive amount of footage on these two?” The clown kept his palm out.

  She put out her cigarette beneath the toe of her shoe. “Sure. Sometimes they generate so much detail you miss the trees for the woods. And sometimes all the experts in the world can’t replace ordinary people with their very unexceptional aptitudes and untrained eyes. Sometimes not knowing what to look for is better than knowing what to look for. Sometimes the criminals read the books on profiling, get inside our heads better than we can get inside theirs, but they can’t get inside your head, can they?”

  The clown smiled, handed her another balloon gratis. She let the cluster she was holding escape into the sky; freed, they seemed even better eye candy. “They drift and drift and eventually sea turtles swallow a piece of them and die,” the clown said.

  “I’ll remember that for next time.” She studied him, wondering if this could be one of her killers. It wasn’t uncommon for perps to hang around after the crime so they could continue to get their rocks off. But he was a good eighteen inches too short, a dwarf. More torso than legs, had the variety of dwarfism, apparently, which did not preserve proper body proportions.