by Rob McCarthy
"Oh, Bailey…" Madison raised a tentative hand, reaching for her daughter’s hair, as if to remove it from the vomit. But her hand hesitated. For an instant it weaved in the air, in a way that made me think of a cobra about to strike. Then she lunged. She grabbed the gun and knocked Bailey backward. I dove after her, but Bailey’s shoulders slammed against the breakfast bar. There was a dull crunch, and a sharp metallic odor. Bailey gasped, her mouth gaping in agony. Her scream was the last thing I heard before the gun went off, its sound like a bomb in the tiny house.
The blast threw Madison against me, blood emptying from an exit wound between her shoulder blades like wine from a jug. Her eyes were wide like her daughter's now, her face every bit as pale. Her mouth opened and closed breathlessly. The expanding bullet had entered low in her abdomen and exited high out the back, boring a channel through her. To judge by the tremendous amount of blood, it had carved a tunnel straight through her heart.
Bailey was shaking uncontrollably, her body hammering against the blood-spattered laminate of the breakfast bar. Her eyes were rolled back into her head, and her throat gurgled noisily, sending a milk-white froth bubbling over her lips. I didn't need to see her implant to know the worst of it, but she slumped forward, and there it was. The ruptured port. A black fluid spread beneath the skin, at first blistering and then liquefying the tissues. Autothysis. Suicidal altruism? Maybe to a shareholder.
Then a noise came from outside.
Footsteps.
Running up the sidewalk from the street.
I grabbed the gun and ducked into the bathroom behind me. There was a quick rap at the door. But they didn't wait for an answer. The door creaked open.
From around the corner of the bathroom, I watched a skinny, blond-haired man enter the front room behind the barrel of a gun.
His mouth fell open at the scene around the breakfast bar.
"Son of a bitch!" he shouted. "Hurry up!"
Behind him a large black woman wearing latex gloves paused in the doorway and looked up and down the street. She wore an overstuffed backpack on one shoulder, its weight straining at the narrow strap.
"I told you something fucked up was going on." The man looked to be in his mid twenties, whippet thin, with a twangy voice that seemed sharpened by his pronounced underbite.
The woman was older, probably a hundred pounds heavier. She wore her short black hair tied into knots that looked like rivets holding her scalp on. She stepped past Madison Burke’s body and gently raised Bailey's head and shoulders. She pushed back an eyelid.
In the bathroom, I clipped my badge to a lanyard around my neck.
The woman was close enough that I could smell her soapy, hospital-like odor. At some point she'd probably done some kind of training, maybe biomechanics, maybe nursing, but no hospital had sent her here tonight.
The man fidgeted just inside the door, looking out at the street. "She dead?"
"Ain't dead," the woman said, lifting the long chestnut hair from the back of Bailey's neck. "Yet." She shook her head with disappointment and sighed. "Just good for nothing."
That, however, was an overstatement.
With a single step, I entered the living room and sighted on the skinny man peering behind the drapes.
"Drop the gun," I said.
Both their heads swung toward me. The woman stared mutely. The gun wasn't on her, but it was six feet away. And she looked smart enough to know what that meant. She should have. Madison Burke’s corpse was two feet from her knees. Resignation entered the woman’s eyes, and her head dipped, as if someone had just hung that heavy backpack around her neck.
The skinny man was a different story. And it was written all over his face. Behind his bony skull, his gearbox brain was scrambling to find reverse, desperate to back up and try this again. But there was no reverse. And when he could stand the grinding of those gears no longer, the skinny man made his choice. His body spun, and his arm rose. And for the second time that night the boom of my gun filled the little house. He hit the door so hard that it slammed shut. The gun fell from his hand, and he slid down the wall like a piece of undercooked spaghetti flung at a dirty refrigerator.
On the floor beneath the breakfast bar, the signs of life were leaving the body of Bailey Burke. She was someone who never should have received a mod in the first place. Looking at her now, I wondered why Marichal had chosen her. Why they hadn't chosen the nearsighted redhead Mackenzie Dougal, a girl groomed for the job since the day the Mod Girls Club took her away from her train wreck of a family. Although, looking at the Burkes, I wondered if Mackenzie’s family could have held a candle to a pileup like this.
As it turned out, the skinny man was the lucky one that night. He'd brought a medic with him. Or at least someone who was something close to a medic. After I made my call to Marichal and to Fidelis Insurance, I searched the woman’s backpack of medical instruments. Then I let her go to work on him. He was lucky. He got to leave with an IV in his arm. Madison Burke exited in a body bag. And Bailey Burke in a lead-lined case that was wheeled out by Marichal’s chemhazard containment team.
A few weeks later, I heard from Mackenzie Dougal, the nearsighted redhead of the Faith Junction Mod Girls Club. She sent me a message of thanks. True to Mrs. Price's word, the club was suing Marichal, claiming that the company had failed to do due diligence and that the Bailey Burke fiasco had damaged the club's good name. Marichal settled quickly. By then, the company had its hands full with a full-scale industrial-espionage investigation, kicked off by the two mod-jacker collars I'd turned in that night at Madison Burke’s. As part of its settlement Marichal was offering Mackenzie Dougal a mod contract. Soon, her message told me, she would move from the chapter house in Faith Junction to a residence hall on Marichal's Greenwood Hills campus.
When I first read the message, I didn't give it much thought. That night I was working a stakeout for Fidelis Insurance, parked outside a cold-storage facility that they'd ID'd as a chop shop operations base. But that was a long night, and sometime around my tenth or eleventh cup of coffee, I remembered the message. I pictured Mackenzie Dougal’s squinty face in a portrait on the Faith Junction Mod Girls Wall of Fame. And then I did something I didn't usually do. I hit “reply," and I offered the girl my unsolicited advice. Not much, just three short words: Don't do it.
END
Copyright © 2014 by Rob McCarthy. All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
