Preservation (A DRMR Short Story)

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  A passing squadron of three rangers earlier in the day had been talking animatedly. Apparently there were reports of more dead poachers turning up. Three in the last two days. Nearly twenty in the last three weeks. She had smiled to herself, hidden away in her tree perch.

  She zoomed in on the Olifants, watching two rhinos fording the river. A male and a female, both teenagers. Perhaps they were on a date. Some distance away, she found another female grazing, and a much smaller rhino running around and beneath her. The animal was young, little more than a baby, and full of energy. If his mother could survive, the baby could have a long life ahead of it. If Akagi could do her job well enough, and make her mission succeed.

  She lost herself in the tranquility of the moment, riding high on a small measure of bliss. She knew that her days, too, were numbered. There were still plenty of poachers out there, and eventually they would lead her to another link in the long line of syndicates that she would contend with.

  First, she had to heal. A bone-deep ache wrapped her skull, the skin still puffy and bruised. The swelling around her eyes had lessened considerably, but her cheeks had a painful, cottony feel, her nose tender and mushy beneath the surface. The nasal implants were an irreparable loss unless she opted to leave the country. But having them fixed or replaced would raise too many questions that she wasn't prepared to lie in response to; not yet, anyway. Not while there was still work to be done.

  She popped a hydrating candy, allowing herself to linger and enjoy the fruity tang. Her eyes returned to the mother and her baby, rolling in the dirt and sending up a cloud of dust. For the first time in a long while, she allowed herself a glimmer of a smile. And then, she prepared herself for the hunt.

  A NOTE TO READERS

  Thank you for choosing to read my work – it is greatly appreciated, and I hope you enjoyed the journey!

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  FIRST OFF, I must thank Samuel Peralta, who invited me to take part in his anthology, The Cyborg Chronicles, where this story first appeared. I am fan, first and foremost, of his line of Future Chronicles anthologies, which have included the likes of Hugh Howey, Ken Liu, Annie Bellet, Peter Cawdron, Ann Christy, Lucas Bale, Susan Kaye Quinn, Jennifer Foehner Wells, E.E. Giorgi, Matthew Mather, and many, many more. I am deeply honored and awfully humbled to join their ranks, and grateful to Sam for including me.

  Thanks also to my editor, Crystal Watanabe. Her suggestions throughout the development and editing process proved invaluable. Her assistance and guidance made this work all the stronger.

  I owe a debt of gratitude to Christian Bentulan, who did a fantastic job with the cover art fronting this story.

  My Patreon supporters help make my work possible with their monthly contributions. Special thanks are owed to KC Santo and Kate Martyniouk for their generosity.

  Finally, many thanks, too, to my beautiful wife. I am eternally indebted to her for her love, compassion, and support.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of the science fiction novels Convergence, an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist, and its sequel, Emergence, as well as several horror titles.

  His work has appeared in several anthologies, and he has written for the websites Graphic Novel Reporter and Audiobook Reviewer, in addition to work as a freelance journalist.

  In between compulsively buying books and adding titles that he does not have time for to his Netflix queue, he is hard at work on his next story.

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  ABOUT CONVERGENCE

  (DRMR Series, Book 1)

  Memories are the most dangerous drug.

  Jonah Everitt is a killer, an addict, and a memory thief.

  After being hired to kill a ranking officer of the Pacific Rim Coalition and download his memories, Everitt finds himself caught in the crosshairs of a terror cell, a rogue military squadron, and a Chinese gangster named Alice Xie. Xie is a profiteer of street drugs, primarily DRMR, a powerful narcotic made from the memories of the dead. With his daughter, Mesa, missing in post-war Los Angeles, Everitt is forced into an uneasy alliance with Alice to find her.

  Mesa's abduction is wrapped up in the secrets of a brutal murder during the war's early days, a murder that Alice Xie wants revenged. In order to find her, Jonah will have to sift through the memories of dead men that could destroy what little he has left.

  In a city where peace is tenuous and loyalties are ever shifting, the past and the present are about to converge.

  Read on for an excerpt...

  CHAPTER ONE

  MURDER is easy when you wrap a cause around it, like a flag or a god--or money.

  I was sitting in a car that wasn't mine. It had been given to me for the job, and when I left the motel lot, I would drop it off at a pre-arranged location, where somebody else would pick it up. I wore thin leather gloves to prevent leaving fingerprints and to save time on cleanup.

  A light rain spotted the windshield. A young black woman in a too-short red skirt walked past, then up the stairs to the second-floor landing. She passed a row of dull-green doors with black numbers, then stopped and knocked on one about three-quarters of the way down. An Asian man dressed in boxer shorts and an undershirt answered. They exchanged a few words, but his mouth barely moved when he talked, and he didn't smile. She followed him into the room, closing the door behind her.

  I gave them a few minutes to get down to business. I pulled a pistol from the center console, checked the magazine, and chambered a round. I screwed on the silencer and tested the heft. Like the car, the gun had been supplied by my employers.

  The hit was fairly standard. Only thing odd was that the job had come to me via two employers, each with their own reasons for wanting the man dead: Alice Xie, whom I worked for often, and Jaime, a guy I occasionally did jobs for in exchange for favors. Both had taken an interest in the Asian man, and each wanted something different. One wanted his life, and the other wanted his memories.

  Alice had her fingers in a lot of criminal activities, including prostitution, and she had provided the girl in the red skirt as a distraction. However, other factors ran beneath the surface of this small favor. For one thing, the street value of this particular combination of illicit sex and murder would be high. Black-market memories never came cheap, especially for snuffs; add on a taboo tax, and you were looking at some serious profit.

  I pulled a balaclava over my head and face before I got out of the car. I went up the stairs to the motel room. The prostitute had been told to leave it unlocked, and when I turned the handle, the door swung open.

  Both occupants of the room were naked, and she was kneeling on all fours on the bed while he took her from behind
, his back to me. He grabbed her face and roughly twisted her head back toward him, causing her to cry out in pain. Then he pulled her hair until she screamed again. He swore at her in Chinese as he punched her in the back of the neck. He shoved her face down into the mattress, trying to suffocate her while he screwed her.

  When I shut the door with a click, he turned quickly, pulling free from her, and gasped in surprise. She pushed herself away, wheezing. His eyes went wide at the sight of my gun. His words came at me in a rapid clip. I didn't know what he was saying, but I knew he was pleading for his life.

  Then his hands shot out, and he grabbed the gun, pushing my arm away as he stepped toward me, trying to force me back. I popped him with a quick palm strike to the chin, rattling his teeth. He must have bitten his tongue because blood spurted through his lips. I tugged my arm away and drove my knee into his crotch. When he doubled over, I hammered the butt of the gun into the crook of his neck.

  "Please don't," he said, over and over. Thin ropes of blood and drool dripped from his bottom lip, and he cradled his genitals in both hands.

  The girl was scrunched up against the wall, bedsheets pulled tight against her with one hand, the other hand busy massaging her bruised throat. Half-moon shapes marked where fingernails had been pressed deeply into her breasts. Her mouth and cheeks were swollen. She was young, maybe sixteen, not much older than that. Given the hard nature of her working life, she could have been younger.

  I pulled a small black rectangular box and a coil of wire from my pocket. "Turn your head," I told the man.

  He did. I spotted the data port behind his ear and ordered him to plug in, while I fed the male connector into the box.

  "Please don't." His mouth quivered. Tears ran freely down his face.

  I glanced at the girl again. "Go in the bathroom."

  She shook her head. "No way. I wanna watch."

  "Go in the bathroom," I said again, my tone leaving no room for argument.

  She sulked off. I could feel her eyes on my back, and I knew she was watching anyway.

  Wanting the fresh memory, I hit record. I didn't care about whatever else he had in back-up. I was getting the good stuff--the fear and adrenaline. His heart and thoughts had to be racing. Synapses fired and fired and fired, creating huge chemical dumps, his pineal gland working overtime.

  He kept begging. Finally, he shut his eyes as I raised the gun. I pulled the trigger. He knelt for a moment, a small bloody hole in his forehead. A spasm shot his eyes open. His bowel muscles relaxed, and he evacuated onto the carpet. Then he collapsed to the floor.

  I ignored the smell and rolled him over onto his stomach. I unplugged him, and tossed the DRMR and its cord onto the bed. I pressed my fingers deep into the skin on the back of his neck, near the data port, trying to get a feel for where the wires ran, which wasn't easy through leather gloves. Latex gloves would have made this part of the job easier, but I didn't trust the thin rubber not to tear.

  "What are you doing?" the girl asked. She was standing in the bathroom doorway with the sheet tied around her body.

  "Go back in there." I dug my fingers into his shoulder blades and down the length of his spine. I felt around his scalp and hit pay dirt with a small protuberance near his hairline. That was why I'd used a .22--no exit wound. The bullet had gone in the front of his skull, shredding his brain, before being lodged somewhere inside there. No damage to the electronics.

  I looked over my shoulder, into the bathroom. She sat on the edge of the bathtub, tears streaming down her face, snot running from her nose and around her open mouth. Bruises around her mouth and cheekbones darkened her mocha complexion from where the Asian man had laid hands on her. Finger marks ringed her throat. Suddenly, she seemed a lot older than sixteen.

  A cracked mirror over a filthy-looking sink caught my reflection. My late forties bordered on late fifties, and a nose that had been broken a few times too many in recent years without ever being reset graced a face lined more with crags than wrinkles. More gray peppered my short hair than I remembered.

  I pulled out a knife, grabbed a good handful of his hair, pulled as far as it would stretch, then stabbed the knife in and scalped him. A glint of steel grafted to his skull caught my eye. I unscrewed the cap with the blade of my knife and popped loose the memory chip. A lifetime of the man's memories. I stuck the knife into the chip socket and twisted, pulling it in all sorts of directions until the hole was large and disfigured. Then I did the same to the data port behind his ear, damn near tearing it completely out of his head.

  I fired two more rounds into the back of his skull, just to be safe. I wanted to bring any chances of data recovery down to zero.

  "Come here," I called to her. "There's a bag in my pocket. Take it out and open it."

  She moved tentatively. I dropped the chip into the antistatic bag and told her to seal it. Her hands shook while her thin fingers pressed the silver material of the bag shut, then she carefully put it back in my pocket.

  Once she finished, I said, "Get dressed. Get a towel from the bathroom and wipe down anything you touched."

  She moved quickly, and the task didn't take her long. She'd touched hardly more than the doorknob and the bed. She wiped the bathroom counter.

  "You leave first," I said. "You walk casual, but keep your face down."

  She nodded, then left. We were finished with each other. The interaction was nothing more than a passing blip in one another's lives, hardly worth the mem space.

  I'd been in the motel room for maybe five minutes. It felt longer, thanks to the adrenaline comedown.

  The dead man's clothes were neatly folded on a small chair between the bed and the windows. I had noticed from outside that the blinds had been drawn and shuttered closed. They let very little light into the room, but I instantly recognized the pine-green Type 07 uniform and the patch on the shoulder. A red background with a prominent golden star set inside a circle. Pacific Rim Coalition. Epaulets decorated with two gold stars marked him a zhong chiang, or lieutenant general, in the PRC Army. The rank was a political appointment, if his pleadings for mercy were anything to go by. Somebody had granted him a lot of undeserved favor and attention to be promoted to such a high rank at such a young age.

  I shoved the DRMR back in my pocket and did a quick assessment. If any of the girl's fingerprints were left, it would be hard to trace them to her. Motels as disreputable as this one enjoyed heavy transient traffic. All kinds of people, touching all kinds of things, over and over. It'd be damn near impossible to get a good impression. The chiang's memory core was in my pocket, and with his brain Swiss-cheesed and the core and data ports ruined, any chances for recovery were hopeless. I was sure no one would be able to identify me under the balaclava. The girl and I would be able to walk away and disappear into the ether.

  I peeked out the window. Nobody was standing around in the lot. No new cars. I pulled the balaclava up and made a cap out of it. Less suspicious that way. I wiped the doorknob with the towel, used it to open and then pull the door closed behind me, and walked back to the car, casually, with my head down, like any other patron who frequented shady motels. Passing through the sickly yellow glow of the pulsing holosign advertising the motel's cheap hourly room rates, I quickly checked over my shoulder. I didn't see anyone peeking out from the doors or windows as I went. The lot and the street beyond were quiet, and I had no reason to suspect anybody was watching me or could tie me to the chiang's murder.

  I dropped the towel on the floor well behind the driver's seat, then got in front and turned the keys. The car was an antique that still ran on gas. Miraculously, there were people that could still afford the gas and oil needed to drive these old heaps.

  I drove to a parking garage, where I left the car. The gloves and balaclava went into a dumpster a few buildings over. I disassembled the gun, discretely tossing the pieces into garbage cans and down manhole covers and sewer drains as I went. I checked behind me for tails, committing the faces to memory and cataloguing
them for reference, then crossed the street and walked in the opposite direction, to a bus stop, where I waited for the 704 to Echo Park.

  Traffic was slow. The bus was crowded well beyond its capacity, and bodies were pressed tightly against one another. I started to feel claustrophobic. What little was left of LA's mass transit systems after the war was overburdened. The city didn't have enough shuttles in service to accommodate the population, and with much of downtown decimated and many of the major thoroughfares closed, travel was slow. Before the war, the Metro Rapid shuttle had run stop to stop in about twenty minutes. Anymore, with all the detours and random PacRim checks, the commute was likely to take at least forty.

  A brief stop eased the constriction of the crowd as people unloaded. Mercifully, few got on. We shuffled a bit to make more room, and I briefly caught a glimpse out the front window. Ahead of us was a military convoy of Type 103 tanks protected by reactive armor and jeeps that were painted green, brown, and black over a gray background of urban camouflage.

  The bus stopped a short time later for a PRC road check. I sighed, aggravated. Soldiers flanked the bus and inspected the wheel wells and underbody. They flitted through the crowd, barking rapid questions at random people. They took the driver away and, through a sliver of window between clusters of bodies, I watched as he was questioned. He gave short answers, shaking or nodding his head in response to the PRC inquiries. A guard came up the steps and looked inside, at the congestion of bus riders. He held a gun, but casually. No threats there. He looked under the driver's seat and gave the wheel well a quick once-over. His uniform was similar to the chiangs', but he was of much lower rank, wearing green pants and a buttoned coat, a lighter green button-down shirt, a soft cap, and black leather boots. He looked around briefly, shouted something out the door in Chinese, then walked out after the bus driver pulled himself back up. Then we were off again.