Amortals

by Matt Forbeck

  Struggling again to free my hands so I could help Five, I looked up to see Ruby gaping in shock as if Christ Himself had entered the room to save my life. I peered past her to see a telltale blur somewhere near the one of the gated entrances to the chapel. It had to be a federal agent – probably Secret Service but just as likely seconded from the FBI. No one else on American soil had access to the kind of stealth technology that rendered suits of powered armor both invisible and silent.

  My Friend or Foe layer kicked in then. Every one of the One Resurrectionists started to glow green, while the outline of the agent in the stealth armor turned red. Even if the revolutionaries hadn't been such Luddites, their nanoservers wouldn't have been able to pick up the encrypted "friend" signal the agent was broadcasting, but because he and I were on the same side I could see his outline as clear as a lit match in a pitch-black room.

  Not knowing how trigger-happy my savior might be, I did the only sensible thing. I tipped my chair over and threw myself to the floor, pulling Five over with my legs as I went. As I bounced off the polished marble, the agent let loose a barrage of bullets.

  By now, the others in the room knew that something was wrong, and they'd started to dive for cover. Some of them pulled plastic pistols of their own and tried to return fire, shooting blindly in the direction of the door. Even if their desperate attacks actually managed to hit the intruding agent, I knew the slugs would only ricochet off his armor. The force of a lucky shot in the right spot as the agent was moving in the wrong direction might be enough to knock him off his feet, but it had no chance of actually hurting him.

  Two of the terrorists raced for the room's other exit, a pair of doors in the wall opposite the one through which the agent had stormed. I knew that if they reached it they'd have a good chance of escaping while the stealth-suited agent dealt with the other One Resurrectionists they left behind.

  As they flung themselves up the steps that led to their freedom, though, I spotted another blur in the left doorway, and I knew they were doomed. The triple crack of a carefully controlled burst of bullets from that direction confirmed my prediction.

  Next to me, lying on the floor and bleeding out fast, Five opened his eyes, saw me looking at him, and gave me a weak smile. He struggled to say something, and despite the painfully loud reports from the gunfire, I cranked up my auditory levels so I could hear his words and activated my Lip Reading layer to help make out what he said.

  No sound escaped from him. The blood pooling in his lungs made sure of that. But he mouthed two words to me, and they meant everything: "I'm sorry."

  At that moment, I would have done anything to trade places with him, amortal or not. I'd lived nearly two hundred years, and Five had only made it to about a quarter of that. It wasn't fair. The inherent injustice of it appalled me. How many descendants had I outlived? I'd given up counting years ago. How many more might fade away while I continued on? How long might it be until I watched Six die too?

  I didn't care how far apart from Five I'd fallen. I didn't care how much he might have hated me. I'd have put that damned plastic gun to my own head and pulled the trigger if it would have brought him back.

  "Stop!" I shouted. "Stop it, Goddamn it!"

  I sent out a cease-fire order over the Friend or Foe layer. I shouted at the shooters over and over to end their attack. It did no good. By the time I opened my mouth, it was already too late.

  The gunfight seemed like it took forever, but it was over in a matter of seconds. It ended when the last echoes of the gunshots faded into nothing and were replaced with cries of anguish. There weren't nearly as many such sounds as I would have hoped. Five, at least, would never make any noises again at all, and several of his associates had fared just as poorly.

  "Agent Dooley?" a male voice said, apparently springing from nothing.

  "Yes?" I had strained my voice raw with shouting.

  "Sir, are you hurt? Can you get up?"

  I closed my eyes and pushed back the grief welling in me over Five's death. I still had a job to do here, and I could not break down in front of these agents.

  "I'm fine, but my wrists are shackled."

  "All clear," another disembodied voice said. This one was feminine. The echoes in the rock-lined room made it impossible even to tell from which direction it came. "All hostiles are either down or secure."

  "Deactivating stealth mode," the man beside me said. The blur before me flickered like a torch in a tornado, then fell into focus.

  The man kneeling next to me was young, maybe twentyfive. He wore a full body-formed suit of composite armor of an indeterminable color that proved hard to look at for long. I could see his face through the now unpolarized shield that still covered it, forming a transparent layer of protection. The man's eyes were hard and serious. That comforted me some. He and his partner had just brought down or killed a number of people, after all, and if he'd been grinning like a fool I'd have been worried for myself as well.

  "I'm Agent Williams. That's Agent Rice." He nodded at the woman who now stood visible in the aisle between the chapel's simple wooden pews, holding her assault rifle over the few figures that still squirmed with life.

  "We're with Homeland Security, Special Forces," Williams said as he helped me off the chair and to my feet.

  "Which unit?" I asked.

  Williams answered without a hint of irony. "That's above your clearance, sir."

  I nodded at that, then flexed my arms against my shackles. They still held as firm as ever.

  "I called for a locksmith as part of the clean-up crew," Rice said. "They should be here any minute."

  "Can't you handle that yourselves?" I asked.

  Rice hefted her assault rifle in front of her. "This is the only tool I have that might work, sir. I don't think you'd care for the results."

  I scanned the room, assessing the situation. The men and women who'd been in the room with me had scattered at the sound of the first shots, and they'd knocked over or aside many of the wooden pews and tables placed around the room.

  Gaping holes from stray bullets pocked the mural showing the burial of Christ after the Crucifixion. A young woman had run this way and realized she'd trapped herself in a dead end. Her back against the wall, she'd tried to return fire at the stealth-suited agents. Now she lay here, her blood smeared against the mural, her eyes open and glassy.

  Opposite her, four people had gone in the other wrong direction, back through the pews until they reached the wrought iron gate in front of the columbarium, inside which rested the ashes of many famous locals. That included the noted teacher Anne Sullivan and her most famous student, Helen Keller. The irony that these people had been killed there by someone to whom they were deaf and blind would have been, I'm sure, lost on them.

  Of all the One Resurrectionists that had been plotting something here mere minutes ago, I saw only one of them still breathing: Ruby. The woman who'd forced Five to point a gun at me lay on the floor in a pool of blood. I couldn't tell if any of it was hers, but she was clearly not having a good day. One of her legs was bent at what had to be a painful angle. She'd mercifully fallen unconscious. I felt like grabbing her ankle and twisting it until she woke up.

  "She was the only one not armed," Williams said, standing next to me. "She should survive. The medics will be here to help her soon."

  I counted up the One Resurrectionists in the room. One near the mural, four near the columbarium, two shot down as they tried to escape through an open doorway, Ruby, and Five.

  That made nine. There had been ten.

  Father G was missing.

  I grabbed Williams by the shoulder. "One's gone. A priest. Did you see one leaving as you came in?"

  "It's a church," he said with a grimace. "There were lots of people upstairs. We swept past them in stealth mode."

  "I saw a few clergymen," Rice said. "What did your man look like?"

  I shot them an image of Father G from my nanoserver. I pulled it from the glimpse I got of him j
ust before he tased me.

  "His name's Father Luke Gustavo. He goes by Father G. He probably should have been locked up a long time ago."

  Rice groaned and nodded. "He was walking out the south doors when I came in," she said. "I had to wait for him to pass through before I could enter the cathedral."

  I hung my head. I would have buried it in my hands if they hadn't still been bound behind me.

  "Would one of your captors have a key to your shackles?" asked Williams.

  "Yes," I said. "But I'm sure it's in the pocket of Father G."

  "I'm sure the rest of our team can find him, sir," said Rice.

  "Can you communicate with them down here?"

  Rice flushed, then turned on her heel and sprinted up the stairs and out of the chapel. As she left, a medical team entered through the other doorway. They wanted to focus on me, of course, but I jerked my head toward Five.

  "See if there's anything you can do for him instead."

  "But, sir," a brave medic said.

  "That wasn't a request," I said. "I'll be fine."

  A Hispanic woman in blue coveralls entered with a case of tools slung over her shoulder. She raised her eyebrows when she saw me, then set to work without a word. Within seconds, she had me free.

  "Don't see too many of these anymore," the locksmith said. She hefted the shackles in her hand as I rubbed my freed wrists. The links of the chain clanked against each other.

  I nodded, but I wasn't really listening to her. I was watching the medics work on Five's body, giving it their best effort to somehow pump life back into him, humoring me although they knew it would be pointless.

  I couldn't think about the shackles or Father G or the One Resurrectionists any more. I couldn't even think about my murderer, somewhere out there, roaming free. I couldn't think about any of it.

  The only thing that kept popping into my head was Six and how I was going to have to break this to him and his mother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  "What the hell happened down there?" Patrón said. He sat behind his desk, his hands flat on its flawless, blank surface. He glared at me as if he might be able to see straight through me if he could only concentrate hard enough.

  "It's all in my report," I said. I'd thrown together the bare minimum on my way over from the National Cathedral and zapped it out ahead of me via the net. "Read it."

  I hadn't sat down when I came in. I didn't want to feel that comfortable yet. Maybe ever.

  At Patrón's request, Williams and Rice had escorted me to Secret Service Headquarters in their transport. They'd dropped me off outside one of the parking slips, placing me in the hands of a pair of agents that I knew I had met before. I couldn't be bothered to call up my ID layer so I could be polite enough to call them by name. I didn't care who they might be. They worked for the Service with me, and they were taking me to Patrón's office. That's all I needed to know.

  Patrón had never been the warm and reassuring type. If he thought one of his people needed someone to talk to, he'd send them to chat with a shrink. He didn't have time for such things. Compassion made him squirm.

  "If I wanted information from something that thin and useless, I'd chat with the President." Patrón scowled at me. "Give me the real skinny, not that nugget of indigestible pap you scribbled out in the opening throes of your incipient post-traumatic stress disorder."

  I shrugged. "Chasing the Kalis wasn't getting me anywhere. I thought the One Resurrectionists might have had something to do with my murder, so I went to check up on them."

  Patrón rubbed his eyes. When he stopped, he stared right at me. He looked older than I'd ever seen him – at least since he'd lost his first life.

  "And what was your direct descendant doing there?"

  I shrugged again, perfectly aware of how useless that made me appear. "Seems he fell in with the wrong crowd. You know how kids are."

  "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

  "Nothing at all."

  "It better not." Patrón fidgeted in his chair. "Not all of us have been disowned by our descendants."

  I glared at him with murderous eyes. "You want my report, or you want me to go down that path with you?"

  He turned red and looked down at his hands. They were perfectly and recently manicured. I would have put money down that he'd had his toes done at the same time. He'd come a long way since his days in the field.

  When he raised his head again, he'd lost some of his fire. "All right, Ronan," he said. "Let's start over. What happened down there?"

  I sized him up. This was not the Patrón I'd protected Presidents with. Back in the day, we'd spent countless hours whiling away the long, dull stretches that come with any sort of protection work. The danger in that kind of work was that you'd let the boredom lull you into a false sense of security. Boredom was what you wanted. You had to come to love it, to treasure it. Once you'd experienced the alternative, it wasn't hard to do.

  Patrón and I had helped stave off the worst effects of boredom on each other by talking for hours, playing games, becoming friends. We'd kept each other sharp, although we'd long ago stopped playing poker together after I'd established myself as the superior player. He had a subtle tell that I'd spotted and relentlessly exploited. When he was bluffing, he'd become dead serious, and his right eye would twitch twice. It never happened when he simply didn't tell the truth. I'd seen him lie better than any sociopath in the name of national security. His tell only came out when he was trying to intimidate someone with something he didn't really have, like a pair of pocket aces.

  But that had been many years ago. Too many for me to want to count. Neither one of us was the same.

  "I spotted Father G leading the protest outside of the White House when I left it the other day," I said. "That got me to thinking about him and the One Resurrectionists and the way they've always had me at the top of their hit list."

  "But this is an organization that's never displayed any violent tendencies before." He raised a hand to cut off my objection. "That double assassination plot was hatched by a splinter group. We never were able to link them back to the Ones."

  "True, but they've often advocated violence, or at least suggested it. They usually go right up to the edge of calling for open, armed rebellion and pull up short, but it never seemed like it would take too much to push them over the edge."

  "Could you have been investigating them before your murder?"

  "Anything's possible," I said. "That one's more than a bit likely. Even if I hadn't been, they know me and might have been willing to claim credit for my murder if they thought it would help their position."

  Patrón frowned. "They did have a great deal of illegal ordnance for a supposedly peaceful group. They were clearly planning something."

  "I suspect that once forensics gets through examining the crime scene, we'll have plenty of leads on that. You should also raid every one of their workplaces and homes."

  "Already on that," said Patrón. "Teams are moving in on each of them as we speak. Except for Ronan the Fifth's place. I figured you'd want to take care of that one yourself."

  Silence fell between us, and I let it fester and grow.

  The quiet became too much for Patrón, and he broke.

  "Ronan," he said. "I'm sorry about your great-great-greatgrandson, but I have to ask. Is it a coincidence he was there?"

  I smirked at him. "You think I sent him in there as some sort of mole. Just so I could have him and Father G tase and shackle me – and so some of your trigger-happy yahoos could shoot him dead."

  Patrón raised his right hand from the table so he could stab his index finger down at it. "That was a legitimate removal," he said. "Agent Williams' recordings show you in clear and present danger of losing your life."

  I gritted my teeth. "You just don't get it, do you?" I said. "I'm amortal. You know what that means?"

  "I'm amortal too, Ronan. I know what it means. I read the Amortals Project's brochures too. You're a valuable ass
et, and Williams acted to protect that, just as I had ordered him to."

  "No, you really don't get it at all. When you're an amortal, it doesn't mean your life is more precious. It's less. I get as many shots at a decent life as I want. Most people only get one. That makes their lives vital. It makes ours disposable."

  Patrón dismissed my words with a wave of his wrist. "So, the greatest minds in the world – the most important people in the world – they're something you can just wad up and throw away."

  "They're a renewable resource," I said. "It's simple economics. Our lives are less rare than those of regular folks. Therefore, they're worth less."