Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  I regained my balance and kept up with Arthur, racing toward the nearest line of cars behind a hedge.

  “What’s your plan?” Simon called after us desperately. “Stop! Cassandra! You don’t need to sacrifice yourself!”

  I did, because of him. And I didn’t have a plan. LA could take out its anger on the brain entrainment and on me, and maybe that would release the pressure valve for the rest of the city.

  I jacked into the first sedan we reached, and Arthur slid in alongside me.

  “Duck,” I said, flooring the car into reverse, and he hunched down immediately. The clap of more gunfire peppered the parking lot, and one of the back passenger windows went.

  I peeled away, jumped the curb and a bed of landscaped flowers, and plopped myself down directly into rush hour. Horns sounded as I cut across an intersection on the tail end of a red light, and I veered in front of a bus and through a gas station.

  A siren wailed behind me, and then away. Called away from a reckless driver to a shootout at McCabe’s radio station, doubtless.

  “You ain’t going to sacrifice yourself, are you?” Arthur said.

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m going to make them fight me.”

  “Russell!”

  I wasn’t sure if he didn’t believe my bravado or he just thought it was a bad plan. “They need a bad guy to blame,” I said. “That bad guy should be me. Is me.”

  A Park & Ride sign caught my eye, and I spun the wheel and swung in. Every time I’d been in one of these lots they’d had a section up front for motorcycle parking…yes! I slammed on the brake next to the bikes, and our velocity skidded to zero.

  An old Hispanic woman yelled an obscenity and flipped the bird at my driving as she crossed in front of us.

  I jumped out. Arthur started to follow me.

  “No,” I said.

  “Russell, you ain’t—”

  “In this kind of fight, you’ll just be a liability. I can’t be protecting you,” I said, as harshly as I knew how. It wasn’t true, but if I did only one good thing today, not getting Arthur killed would be it. “If this goes south…tell Checker it’s up to him.”

  “What now?”

  “He’ll have to find a way of propagating a…I don’t know, a virus, or a patch, that will neuter what we did.” Without being able to locate and disable our original signal hacks, it would be maddening work, especially considering he wouldn’t have my math for the new deployment. He’d just have to figure it out…however long it took.

  Arthur tried to shout after me, but the open-choked roar of the bike I’d just jacked drowned him out.

  Two cops tried to pull me over on my helmetless, speed-demon journey, but I cut between lanes of stopped cars and lost them both.

  The address I’d given on the radio was a deserted factory complex, one rundown and abandoned enough that I’d accidentally blown up part of a building there the year before without attracting any local cops. I wasn’t sure if the LAPD would get McCabe’s show sorted enough to go to the location I’d specified, but it was outside the city jurisdiction, so I was betting the bad guys would get there first.

  For better or for worse.

  I hit the right neighborhood—it was more decrepit than the last time I’d been here—and took the bike into a slide in front of the main gate of the factory. I dropped it completely as I punched the engine cutoff, jumping to clear it. I’d scale the gate and find a vantage point as quickly as possible.

  I only had the one firearm. I did a quick count in my head—eighteen rounds left. First priority here would be re-arming myself from the first wave…

  “Cas,” Rio called.

  Holy fuck.

  Already inside the complex, he strode toward the gate from a banged-up SUV, enough firearms slung around himself over his duster to qualify as a small arsenal.

  He’d been listening to McCabe’s show.

  A rush of gratitude and relief flooded me. My boots gobbled the chain link of the gate, and I rocketed over to hit the ground in front of him.

  By the time I landed, he was holding out weapons. “I have more in the vehicle.”

  Wow. I might live through this after all.

  Chapter 35

  Rio and I stood back to back on a catwalk above a vast factory floor, one filled by stacks of old cut sheet metal with edges that would slice any careless flesh. We had the cover of several large pillars and chunks of defunct machinery and enough armaments to give us a fighting chance, depending on how many people showed up to kill me. We’d also both geared up with body armor, thanks to Rio’s ridiculous mobile supply cache. It was only soft armor that wouldn’t stop rifle rounds—other than maybe ricochets—but at least we’d have protection from handgun fire.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  “I am glad you altered your actions,” Rio said, “however brash this plan is. The Lord be with you, Cas.”

  God help me, he thought I had engaged in confession with all of McCabe’s audience.

  I glanced through our supply of weapons, taking note of them one more time, organizing them in my head like an ordinal number system. I had a rifle ready to go in each hand, and Rio’s presence was firm and solid at my back.

  Even if we died today, if we took out most of the people angry about this, mopped up those most likely to jump to violence, Arthur and Checker and Pilar could reverse the brain entrainment without much more consequence than going back to where we started. The status quo didn’t feel like something to be triumphant about, but at this point, I would take it.

  The morning sun gleamed through the factory’s high windows. The first shouts echoed from outside. They had found us.

  “I miss this,” I said to Rio. “Fighting on the same side.”

  “It is my preference as well, Cas,” he answered.

  And then there was no more time for conversation, because the doors on the south side of the building blasted in.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Rio was good. I was even better.

  The loyal members of Los Angeles’s criminal underground along with members of three self-appointed militias burst in on us in waves, with shouts and war cries and overwhelming bursts of automatic fire. But we had the high ground, a lot of ammo, and damn near perfect accuracy.

  Through the endless hammering of the gunfire, the smoke, the fire and shouts, I recognized people from almost every faction Yamamoto had gathered. Not the leaders, but their most loyal henchmen and henchwomen, the people who did all the dirty work for their bosses and had been too wedded to the life for my brain entrainment to remove their unwavering allegiance.

  Or maybe, in a twist of irony, they were the only people with any kind of integrity. And we killed them for it.

  In a gunfight, ten minutes are an eternity, but ten minutes passed, and then another ten. My hands dropped and reloaded, raised and fired, over and over, the world narrowing to metal and thunder and each target only until I’d squeezed a trigger, because by then I was moving to the next one. The mathematical lines of sight and windows of danger spiderwebbed out, saturating the space, each barrel clicking into place in a predetermined probabilistic window.

  The roar of the fight was deafening, and the air clogged with the smell of gunpowder. My hands ached and my muscles protested. We kept going.

  Then I raised one of the rifles to snap the sights into collinear alignment with the next attacker, and I recognized Torvald.

  Mama Lorenzo and her private security had arrived. Delayed—perhaps by traffic, perhaps by the police, but they were here to kill me for betraying their boss, for the attack on the estate, for Malcolm. More of the Lorenzos had to be on their way, too—their whole family. And I was about to wipe them out for the crime of wanting justice.

  My finger hesitated on the trigger, and Torvald fired, a three-round burst that flashed against my retinas in slow motion even as I fell out of his aim vector. I grabbed at Rio’s duster behind me as I went down, but I wasn’t fast enough.

  The
second and third bullet tore through the air right by my ear and slammed into Rio’s back.

  He staggered. We fell together.

  “Rio! Oh, Jesus—” I knew I yelled the words, but I couldn’t hear myself. I tumbled up into a crouch over him and fired blindly behind me. “Rio, talk to me—” My left hand groped, searching for how to help—I didn’t see blood yet, but the layers of fiber and unfurling kinetic energy in the body armor flashed through my brain. The armor wouldn’t have protected him. It was mathematically impossible.

  Oh, God.

  Rio grunted. His hand twitched to close around his weapon again.

  I’d dropped my left-hand rifle as we went down. Still trying to cover us with my right, I pulled out a knife with my free hand and ripped the blade down the length of Rio’s coat. The slugs had mangled his armor just below the shoulder blade. Red bubbled up, as if it had only been waiting for me to be witness.

  I smashed a folded layer of his duster against the wounds and got my knee on top of it to apply pressure. I split my attention between the proper vector diagram for keeping Rio’s blood inside his body and grabbing for another magazine to reload.

  Rio tried to move again, disrupting the equal and opposite forces. “Stay still!” I screamed at him, but through the deafening battle I wasn’t sure he heard.

  I sensed more than saw the wave of humanity below surge forward as I failed to hold them off. Angry silhouettes scaled one of the catwalks to the side, gaining height on me. I shot one of them, but then I had to return my attention to the floor. With half my focus on Rio, I was no longer fending them off—even with the high ground, even with good cover, even with my skills and an accurate rifle.

  Inequality of numbers was one of the most basic mathematical concepts.

  I still kept going, breathing in gun smoke and decimals, letting mathematical interpolation fill in the data for every blind spot and taking out one enemy per shot.

  Rio had stopped moving. Dampness soaked through the folds of his duster.

  I heard the ricochet too late to do anything.

  The bullet pinged off one of the metal pillars and kicked me in the left side of my ribs. The armor stopped it, but the kinetic energy spun me off Rio, sprawling me on the catwalk.

  I struggled to get back up, to protect Rio, to fight—the vast net of data became all I could sense, and I gave myself in to it, squeezing the trigger over and over, but I was only one, and the probability mounted against me, massive and toppling.

  Theory argued that when you knew the outcome of a problem, it was immaterial how you got to the end. This fight was over, but I wasn’t admitting it. Not until they killed me.

  Apparently I was a crappy theoretician.

  I crouched over Rio, making my body as small a target as possible—

  “Stop!”

  The shout was a clarion call above the fray, somehow perfectly audible through the thunder of the gunfire.

  “Stop!”

  And everyone did.

  We stopped.

  Below and around me, across the entire factory floor, gun barrels wavered and then dropped to point at the ground. The last shell casings fell in the earsplitting silence, clinking against cement and sheet metal.

  I lurched, and had to put a hand down to keep from falling. I tried to raise my rifle to target and fire, but…

  That was really a bad idea, wasn’t it? With the bad guys deescalating, I should deescalate too, shouldn’t I?

  Rio’s arm hitched, and somehow a pistol appeared in his hand, its grip resting on the catwalk. Its sights wobbled in a drunken line. “Let them go,” he slurred into the utter stillness. “This is a sin in the eyes of the Lord.”

  “And slaughtering each other isn’t?” came the same voice. It echoed from just down the catwalk, over the heads of those who had come to kill us. “This conflict is pointless. Go home to your families; see to your wounded. Save your lives for a fight with meaning. You can trust that the technology affecting you will be deactivated. Justice has been served here.”

  Everywhere in sight, weapons slid into holsters or were slung over shoulders. There weren’t many wounded—Rio and I didn’t shoot to wound. But the crowd shuffled to retrieve the bodies of their dead and help each other out of the building.

  I thought about shooting some of them. But that wouldn’t be very sporting, would it? Shooting people in the back as they walked away, after the fight was over?

  A tall, lean silhouette slipped in through a side door as the last of the stragglers wandered out. Mama Lorenzo. She’d been outside. She’d probably heard.

  She didn’t have a gun. Her hands opened and closed by her sides, and she gazed around at the blood-soaked floor with glassy eyes.

  “It’s over,” called Simon, from where he stood, alone and unarmed, on an open catwalk above the empty factory. “No good can come of any more violence. You’re done here.”

  Her head jerked in a nod, and she stumbled against the doorway as she made her way back outside.

  The door banged shut behind her.

  Simon alone remained, a single living silhouette in a mosaic of smoke and shell casings and blood. So much blood, so much the sharp metallic scent of it overwhelmed everything else…

  Simon’s head bowed forward. He gripped the railing of the catwalk in front of him, and his shoulders began to shake.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “Cas,” Rio murmured. “Are you back?”

  He had to know it was a stupid question considering he couldn’t trust my response, but I answered by scrambling for my weapon anyway.

  Though there was no point in going after them now, was there? Even if I could chase any of them down? And Rio needed help—

  “Just let them go, Cassandra. Please,” Simon said. Brokenly.

  “Let me make the goddamn decision myself,” I shouted back, throwing down the rifle and heaving myself back toward Rio. Moving had opened his wounds further. I pressed back down on them again, ruthlessly, and he let me. I couldn’t tell how bad it was.

  Simon picked his way toward us. “Would you rather I not have come, then?” he asked, so bitterly I felt it wash through me in a wave.

  “Yes,” Rio said. “This was not well-done.”

  “Good, we agree,” Simon shot back. “I should have left you to die. Or let you murder them all—that would have been so much better.” He reached us and stared down at Rio with no sympathy. “Are you going to kill me, if you live?”

  “You merit it,” Rio answered. “For your sins.”

  “I’m still the only person who can help Cas. Although why I should, after this—”

  Rio exhaled slightly in acknowledgement, and let the pistol drop from his fingers.

  “Wait just a damn second,” I said. “Fuck that.”

  Simon shifted to face me. “We had a deal.”

  “In exchange for you resolving this situation, which you skipped out on doing,” I pointed out.

  “It’s done now.”

  Fuck. He might’ve been late, but he’d crossed every moral line of his to come fix this, in the end. As I’d asked him to. As I’d bargained with him.

  I wondered if he was influencing me to think all that. He probably didn’t need to.

  “If Rio lives,” I said, “then you’ve held up your end.”

  I knew that wasn’t fair—or rather, I could feel Simon thinking it wasn’t fair, along with a wave of hatred and anger, for me or the situation or Rio. I wasn’t sure. But he crouched and helped me.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He didn’t answer, and I wondered if he regretted saving my life.

  Then I wondered if that was my thought or his.

  Chapter 36

  The fallout was messy and sprawling, but fortunately for us, fell mostly elsewhere.

  The police had the recording of McCabe’s radio show and the obvious scene of a massacre at the factory, but when they pressed McCabe for a description of me, he apparently couldn’t give them anything beyon
d “short” and “black,” which wasn’t even accurate. And he’d never asked my name. The detectives did interview Arthur, who managed to spin them a story—again—about being a PI investigating something peripheral who just happened to end up as a witness. He was remarkably good at that.

  Mama Lorenzo had a sizeable chunk of the LAPD on her payroll already and turned out to be disinclined to give them any information. Or to come after me. I wasn’t even sure she fully remembered all the events after her brother’s death—I asked around in some corners, and the word came down that Malcolm’s killer had already been declared dealt with.

  That should have relieved me. Instead, I was swamped with guilt and fury, impotent rage with no target other than myself.

  Simon and I had gotten Rio to a hospital before he bled out. Between his surgery and when the detectives came to talk to him, he’d disappeared. I didn’t much worry about him—Rio could take care of himself. He’d call me if he needed to.

  Banking on my mental health stretching just a little longer, I’d told Simon I needed a week before I submitted to my side of our bargain. I spent most of it canvassing the city and reprogramming our boxes to strip the brain entrainment app from any phone that had it. I limped through the process; getting shot had cracked two of my ribs, and my left side felt like one solid bruise. Other bits of intel trickled in from my inquiries—even as the brain entrainment ebbed away, nobody seemed to be taking up arms against each other, and beyond the Lorenzos, no one else was talking about being angry with me, either. Or talking about me at all.

  It was as if I’d never been involved.

  Even though he’d almost certainly saved my life, the thoroughness of Simon’s magic made me resent him all the more. He’d so completely erased a piece of my history right in front of my eyes, a series of events and mistakes that now no one could remember, no one save me and a few friends.

  What else of me would he erase, in the name of saving me?

  I spent a lot of time wondering if Checker had been right, and we’d chosen the greater of two evils.

  I spent a lot of time wondering if Dawna had been right, and had only been doing what we had been, on a greater scale.