Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  Necropolis

  Michael Dempsey

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  SAN FRANCISCONecropolis © 2011 by Michael Dempsey

  This edition of Necropolis © 2011 by Night Shade Books

  Cover art by E. M. Gist

  Cover design by Rebecca Silvers

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-315-1

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-316-8

  Night Shade Books

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  Electronic version by Baen Books

  http://www.baen.com

  This book is dedicated to my parents, Ann Marie and Gene, who always thought it was more important to spend their hard-earned money in support of their kids’ artistic inclinations than to buy a new couch.

  (Prologue)

  DONNER

  Ten minutes before I died, I realized I was out of cigarettes.

  I stopped on the sidewalk and looked up Broadway. There was a bodega at the corner of 66th, its entrance steeped in darkness courtesy of repair scaffolding that had converted the city block into a wood and pipe tunnel.

  My wife collided gently with me. Pedestrians grumped around us, late for the rest of their lives.

  “C’mon, it’ll just take a second,” I said to her.

  Elise wrinkled her mouth in vague disapproval. She’d started doing it enough lately that tiny lines were finding permanent homes around her lips.

  “The overture’s going to start,” she said.

  I knew. We were running late.

  Lincoln Center, our objective, was half a block away. The fountain sparkled, shooting streams of blue-green water into the air. Gold-trimmed banners announced an upcoming jazz festival. As if to punctuate Elise’s point, a couple of them cracked like gunshots in the fall breeze. Other tardy opera-goers hurried across the plaza in their overcoats and furs, laughing, chasing their own exhalations.

  I smiled. The place still gave me a little shiver of excitement, even after all these years. Okay, so maybe it hadn’t aged so well, with its grid-wrapped travertine marble and drippy postmodern columns. But those dated buildings and their flaking stone still housed world-class opera, theater and ballet. How many guys got to splurge once a year and treat their wives to the planet’s largest performing arts center?

  “Listen, if I’m going to sit through three hours of this Don Corleone thing—”

  “Don Quixote, you fool,” she said, laughing.

  “Whatever. I’ll still need a smoke for intermission.”

  She gave me the look again. I knew she wasn’t really irritated. The truth was, we were both relieved to be back on solid ground after last night.

  It had been bad. Real bad.

  I shook my head to dispel the feeling. Let the accusations, the cutting remarks, the tears, the guilt, all slide into oblivion. What mattered was tonight. Tonight was going to be great.

  “Oh, fine.” She sighed with a patience born of great practice. “I’ll wait here.”

  “Like hell you will,” I said. “This city’s dangerous, in case you hadn’t noticed. Especially for someone as gorgeous as you.”

  “Yeah?” She ran a finger up my lapel. “How gorgeous am I?”

  I closed the space between us. “You are,” I said, touching her copper hair, “the most intoxicating creature I’ve ever laid eyes on. And you know it.”

  The cold had brought a blush to her cheeks. The dots of color against her skin’s natural creaminess brought to mind a porcelain doll, or maybe an antique, hand-colored photograph. Some of her features—the delicate nose that turned skyward at the tip, the bud of a mouth—might have looked child-like, were it not for her eyes. Christ, those eyes. Large, probing, they were the anchors of a graceful and commanding symmetry. They countenanced no fools; they demanded immediate respect. The combination was devastating.

  She looked almost uneasy at the appreciation in my face. “You’re still nuts about me, aren’t you?” she said.

  I rolled my eyes in mock exasperation.

  “Tell me,” she said. She pulled us further out of the flow of cranky foot traffic. The air had become cold-blooded in its assault now, but we barely noticed it.

  “My job, what I do every day,” I said slowly. “You’re always knee-deep in somebody’s pain. It grinds at you, tries to make you hollow. A lot of the guys go under. Succumb to the undertow. There’s this emptiness behind their eyes, you know? Like they’re dead already and just going through the motions of being alive. But me, well. All I gotta do is think of you. And then the world, this city, my life—it’s magic again.”

  Eventually, she remembered to exhale. “Good answer,” she whispered. Her breath trembled in front of her.

  “Worth a pack of smokes?” I asked.

  She slipped her arm through mine. “Okay. But we’ll go to that one. It’s cheaper.”

  She nodded at a Korean grocery across from the subway. Her small hand melded into my palm, a perfect fit, tugging playfully. “And pick up the pace, Detective! Don’t want to miss the first scene.”

  So we hurried into the grocery.

  And died.

  PART ONE:

  BACK FROM BLACK

  For certain is death for the born

  And certain is birth for the dead;

  Therefore over the inevitable

  Thou shouldst not grieve.

  —Bhagavad Gita

  1

  KOVACS

  The cemetery was bleak, forlorn, and totally fucking decrepit.

  Christ. Who’d want to be buried here?

  Kovacs stamped his feet against the chill.

  A rusted iron fence, complete with Gothic spikes, struggled to remain upright amid the weeds and broken glass. Rows of headstones sat skewed like dragon’s teeth. The stones were monstrosities, encrusted with putto and scripture, their once-polished veneers pockmarked and moss-covered. Roots gnarled the pathways like disgorged pieces of bone.

  Stupid assholes, he thought, peering at the stones. He knew how he was going out. Vacuum-sealed in a disinterium. So they knew where to find him.

  He sucked at his cigarette to dispel his sudden surliness, but the smoke in his lungs didn’t make him feel any better. It was pouring rain. Which meant he already had a grudge against this corpse for making him come out in such nasty shit.

  He motioned for Drone, who was currently shaped in an umbrella configuration, to descend closer. As he huddled under its protection, he realized suddenly what was really spooking him. He was Outside. Outside for the first time in ten years.

  He’d taken the Midtown Tunnel off FDR Drive into Queens. Made decent time along the LIE, until he’d come to the barriers and checkpoints. Once he’d received clearance to leave the Blister, he’d driven out onto the Grand Central Parkway, which of course had been empty, like the rest of the freeways. It still creeped him out, all those miles of deserted cement and steel.

  Kovacs tossed his cigarette away and pulled the fedora tighter down onto his head. In the distance, the Blister pulsed over the city, conjoined snow globes of energy. Electromagnetic discharges parried with the rain in a surrealistic light show of crimson and turquoise.

  His city. Look what they’d fucking done to it. It felt like he was looking at the cover of one of those pulp sci-fi magazines that had been popular in his father’s day—Weird Space Tales, or whatever. Oh, the city’s silhouette was basically the familiar conglomeration of skyscrapers—the Chrysler, the Empire State, they were still there. But they were now surrounded by pointed silver spires, tube-like shafts and swirling elevated cruiseways. Like someone had morphed Manhattan with Oz.
>
  Drone’s stabilizers whined in protest at a sudden gust, and Kovacs was dosed with a face full of rain. Sputtering, cursing, he turned. A medevac dragonfly was setting down about twenty meters away, its blades adding to the storm’s blast, its chitinous body plates lending it a prehistoric menace.

  About fucking time.

  Three figures spilled out. They plodded forward in their white environmental suits, appropriately ethereal.

  “You call it in, flatfoot?” one of them shouted over the roar of the turbines.

  The medic got treated to a scowl. Out here was no one’s beat and the guy fucking well knew it.

  “Surprised the graveside monitor was still working.”

  The man looked around. On the street beyond the outer fence was a row of crumbling brownstones. Probably still some skeletons inside. “A nice neighborhood, once.”

  “How long since you’ve done a retrieval outside the Blister?” said Kovacs, trying to sound casual.

  The man shrugged. “Six, seven years?”

  He pulled a Y-shaped device from his pack that looked like a divining rod. He swept it back and forth, consulting the holographic readout. Its beeping strengthened southwesterly.

  “Okay,” said the medic. “Let’s go.”

  The device led them deeper into the bone yard, past stunted trees and mausoleums right out of an old flatflick.

  God sure had an ironic sense of humor. No, strike that, his mind protested. Leave God out of this. Things were too screwed up. If God actually was behind what had happened… well, beneath that concept lay a hysteria Kovacs knew he’d never be able to wrestle to ground.

  “Don’t get your knickers in a bunch, love,” said Drone, noting his tense face. “You’re five by five.” Thinking that Kovacs was worried about the biofilter field Drone was projecting around his body. Its “body language interpretation” mode (highly touted by the manufacturer) wasn’t very good. Even after seven months as partners.

  When they’d almost reached the outermost fence, the divining rod announced that they’d arrived. Kovacs could only see a wild growth of hedges until the medics cleared the underbrush with a couple swipes of a scythe.

  There. A thin shaft was bracketed to the headstone. Its wafer-like sensors were encrusted with decay. A red light at its summit strobed the darkness in warning.

  “What’s it doing way back here?”

  They exchanged an uneasy glance.

  “Can’t see the inscription.”

  Drone grunted and directed a blast of compressed air against the stone’s marble face. Muck clouded into the air and floated away in search of another headstone on which to settle.

  PAUL DONNER

  b. 1979, d. 2012

  There was a matching headstone beside it.

  ELISE DONNER

  b. 1973, d. 2012

  Both had died the same year. A car wreck? Murder-suicide? You wish. Anything to keep the bores away. Probably something a lot more mundane. Food poisoning at the local sushi shack. The second grave—the wife’s—was dark, its monitor unlit. Sorry, pal. All alone on your second time around.

  The squad leader nodded. “Two-twelve. Don’t get many this fresh anymore. The current crop’s from the 1950s.”

  One of the rookie medics smirked. “Pretty soon we’ll be digging up Abe Lincoln.”

  The leader caught Kovacs’s bloodless reaction and laughed. He leaned over and touched a stud on the tube. A bright medical holo sprung into the air from the headstone. The rain and wind distorted its field, making it jitter and flap. The tube spoke. “Thirty-seven minutes to revival,” it stated. “Critical support structures damaged. Without surgical intervention, survival probability six percent.”

  The leader spoke into the comm tattoo on his forearm. A roar rose over the rain. They all turned.

  An autodozer growled forward out of the storm, crushing shrubs and bushes in its wake, its steel-toothed maw shuddering in what looked very much like hunger.

  ***

  The coffin dropped onto the mulchy ground. Rain battered away the dirt and decay, revealing its metal skin. “Okay,” said Kovacs to the men. “Knock yourselves out.”

  The men attacked its seal with crowbars. The catch released with a crack and the lid was thrown open.

  Kovacs’s breath caught in his throat. Contrary to urban legend, hair and nails didn’t grow post mortem. It was the shrinking back of the flesh, exposing more of the nail bed or hair follicle, that created the macabre impression. This guy was no exception. If he’d been handsome once, you couldn’t tell. His features were sunken and wax-like. The lips and eyes were half-open, the hands drifted down to his sides, the Krazy Glue having long ago dissolved.

  But that wasn’t what made Kovacs’s eyes widen in shock.

  The corpse wore dress blues.

  Somebody whistled. “A cop.”

  “A detective,” Kovacs corrected, noting the gold shield.

  His chest was festooned with ribbons, his legs draped in the American flag.

  “Look at them medals. Who was this guy?”

  The leader examined the badge. “78th Precinct.”

  Kovacs grunted. “Park Slope. Brooklyn.”

  “So what’s he doing buried out here in Kew Gardens?”

  No one had an answer.

  “So who’s gonna do it?” said the leader. “Manual confirmation’s required.”

  There were no volunteers.

  “Pussies,” muttered Kovacs.

  He knelt down and pressed two shaking fingers to the corpse’s neck. For a moment, there was no sound but the crackle of rain on vinyl ponchos. Finally, he nodded. “Still dead.”

  Despite their training, everyone there sagged with relief.

  ***

  “Please wait,” the room said. “Close your eyes.”

  The top three microns of every exposed surface in the room was flash-incinerated and vacuumed out. There was a popping noise. Red lights went green and the far doors of the decontamination foyer whooshed open.

  The crash team continued with the gurney into the operating arena. Kovacs and Drone started to follow them in, but a territorial resident in a mask stopped them. The man actually made the mistake of putting a gloved hand on Kovacs’s chest.

  “Whoops,” murmured Drone.

  Kovacs grinned. He peeled the resident’s fingers back, careful to inflict the maximum amount of pain without permanently crushing anything important.

  The resident’s eyes flashed shock. “Hey, shit! Let go!”

  Kovacs squeezed harder, lightening the man’s face a few more skin tones. “Know the penalty for touching a cop?”

  “I just—you’re—you’re not allowed in the OR!”

  “I document the outcome, pal.”

  The resident yanked his hand back. He cradled it under his elbow, glowering, debating another smartass remark. Finally he nodded toward an observation cubicle set off the foyer. “Do it from there.”

  Kovacs watched the man flee down the steps into the surgical arena, but the satisfaction he’d hoped for wasn’t there, only numb fatigue. He followed Drone into the cramped space. It stank of sweat and fear.

  Through the window, he watched the crash team sweep the body onto the surgery table. The medics dove in, cutting away clothing, applying sensors and IVs. Diagnostic AIs crawled across the body like Tinkertoy spiders.

  Kovacs wriggled in the plastic chair. His ass was already going numb.

  Drone settled beside him. “Want a soda?” it said.

  “Get fucked.”

  “Such language.”

  “Are you recording all this?” Kovacs snapped.

  “All spectrums.”

  “Then what am I doing here?” he said.

  “You’re my date?”

  Kovacs closed his eyes. He swore he could actually feel the damned thing smirking.

  Below, in the operating room, the Chief Surgeon probed two dime-sized wounds. One was in the heart area, the other down where the spleen would be. Kovacs ma
rveled at how tidy small-caliber handgun wounds were. You’d think something that could kill you so efficiently would look more… dramatic. Of course, for drama there was the Y-shaped coroner’s incision, sewn shut with loops of heavy black thread.

  The body had taken on a sheen, the skin covered in a thin film. A nurse watched data streaming into the air off a black obelisk. “Tissue saturation 45% and falling.”

  The doctor touched the skin, brought the moisture up to his nose. “Formaldehyde sweat. Still amazes me.”

  “Ready with the trocar,” said the nurse, unimpressed.

  Kovacs had seen enough of these procedures to comprehend the irony. Once upon a time, the pointed metal tube had been a mortician’s device used to remove fluids and gasses, puncture the organs and inject preservative into the chest cavity. Now it was employed in reverse, to remove the formaldehyde solution the corpse’s cells were excreting.

  “Cause of death?” asked the doctor.

  One of the black slabs replied: “Gunshot wound, left ventricle.”

  “Shot in the heart,” a nurse said softly.

  On the equipment behind them, the green flatlines glowed.

  ***

  Donner looked like a freshman biology experiment, the muscle of his stomach neatly pinned back, his abdominal cavity on display. The doctor poked around, prodding spleen, stomach, lungs.

  “His organs have grown back nicely.”

  A nurse surveyed his nether regions. “Mmm-hmm.”

  He ignored her. “Secondary wound completely healed. The liver, though. See? That’s degenerative.”

  “Cirrhosis? Our hero was a boozer?” asked the nurse.

  “Grow another one,” he instructed one of the spiders, which scurried over to something that looked like a microwave oven.

  “Question?” It was the resident. The doctor sighed but didn’t object. “Why doesn’t it regrow healthy?”