EdgeOfHuman

by Unknown

  "Maybe." Isidore shrugged, nervous. "Some kind of . . . kuh-cop tuh-talk."

  "The Wambaugh Curve." Strange to be talking about it out loud. It'd always been something that everyone in the LAPD knew about, could feel sitting under the breastbone like a ball of lead, but never spoke of. Another ticket to the department shrinks; where if they found you were too badly screwed up, they'd take away your gun and the answer to all your problems. "The index of self-loathing. Blade runners get it worse, and faster, than other cops. Comes with the territory."

  Isidore's eyes looked wet and sympathetic behind the glasses. "Then what happens?"

  "Depends." Once the dissection had begun, it was easy to sink the scalpel in deeper. "Upon where you are on the Curve." He'd used to think about these matters late at night in his flat, sunk deep in the overstuffed leather couch, one of the pleasantly expensive things that his bounty money had brought him. In the lonely splendor that'd followed his divorce, with a bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt from the Orkney Islands close at hand, that sweetly tasted of smoke and dirt and money as well. Nobody ever said that blade-running sucked on the paycheck scale. Sometimes he'd sat there, brooding or anesthetized, with replicant blood still spattered across his chest. One time, he'd lifted his glass and had seen the drops of red written across the back of his hand. And had sipped and closed his eyes, and not felt a thing. "Eventually . . . the Curve gets steep enough, you fall off. I did."

  "And then you weren't a blade runner anymore."

  Seconds passed before he could say anything. "No . . . He shook his head. "I guess I wasn't."

  "Too buh-bad." Steel under Isidore's voice, a thin needle of it. "A little late, for all the ones you killed."

  Deckard gave him a hard stare. "Listen, pal--" A weapon in the eyes. "I was just doing my job."

  "I knew you'd say that." No flinch, no stammer. "It's what they all say. All the murderers."

  The cop on guard duty actually lifted his rifle across his chest. The next move would bring it down into firing position, full auto rock 'n' roll. "You got security clearance for this floor?" A mean look underneath the SWAT team cap.

  "Hey, hey . . . don't sweat it, man." The figure in the hospital's green scrubs raised his empty hands. An easy smile, but cold eyes. "I hit the wrong button, got off on the wrong floor.That's all." He slowly lowered his hands. "No need to uncork the artillery, pal."

  "Wrong button, huh?" The guard kept his finger on the trigger. At this range, he didn't need the sharpshooter tags under the LAPD shoulder insignia. He could've set the muzzle's hollow eye right on the breastbone beneath the hospital staff outfit. "Well, why don't you turn around, get back into the elevator, and push the right button this time. That way, you won't get into trouble."

  "What's the deal, anyway?" The smiling man raised up on his toes, scanning over the guard's head to the open unit where the floor's sole patient lay surrounded by gurgling machines, a half-dozen doctors and nurses who seemed to be more like technicians and electronics geeks. Softly bleeping dots drew spiked trails on a bank of video monitors. "This guy some kind of VIP?" Beyond the bed and the body, windows reached to the ceiling, overlooking the city. "Been here a long time, hasn't he?" The magmalike L.A. sun battered the towers, the glare washing out the viewscreen of the U.N. blimp as it cruised by, making its constant pitch for off-world emigration.

  "You ask a lot of questions." Cool enough to show nothing more than his index finger tightening on the crook of metal; small shiny things clicked ready inside the rifle. "Not a good idea."

  "Peace, brother." Hands went up again, palms exposed, the smile floating between them. "You keep on doing your job, and I'll go do mine." Inside the man's skull, behind the cold eyes, a single unvoiced word: Jerk. A couple meters beyond the guard stood the open frame of a metal detector; he could see that it'd been switched off, probably to keep it from being triggered by the equipment carts that rolled in and out of the unit. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he'd had to step through the thing, still smiling, to find out what he needed to know; the small, efficient gun hidden at the small of his back was sheathed in enough microprocessor-controlled evasion polymers to slip past a goddamn radar station. It was the lazy unprofessionalism that irked him. These putzes were amateurs, all black-leather and chrome-eyed swagger, and sloppy on the details. Typical.

  He reached behind himself and hit the elevator call button. Already there; the doors slid open and he stepped back, hands still up for a joke, the smile still on his face. He gave a little wave through the narrowing slit. "'Bye now."

  Leaning back as the elevator descended, he let the smile creep up into his eyes. Behind them were no words, just a map, the exact layout of the unit, the guards, the machines and doctors, and the man on the hospital bed, who had a hole where his heart and lungs used to be.

  He got off on the next floor down. No guards on this floor; he collected his gear, bigger and more rawly industrial-looking than the hospital's usual chrome equipment carts, from an unused storage closet and wheeled it into the maternity ward. He began unfolding the heavy bracing struts, the pronged steel feet digging into the scuffed rubberoid flooring.

  "What the hell are you doing?" Some kind of nursing supervisor came bustling toward him, waving a clipboard. "You can't put that thing in here! Whatever it is."

  The smiling man turned toward the woman. "Oh, I think I can." Farther along the ward, on all sides, an audience of pregnant women watched the altercation. They all looked huge and imminent, lying on closely spaced beds and gurneys, raising their heads just enough to look over their rounded abdomens to see what the noise was; their passive faces, medicated or endorphined, radiated a Buddhistic calm. "Besides--" His smile grew larger, though less reassuring. "I won't be here long."

  "I'm calling security." The nursing supervisor turned and strode toward the central station.

  "That's not a good idea." He interrupted his setup procedure, reaching behind himself and taking the gun out from beneath the scrub shirt. A click of metal was enough to stop the woman in her tracks, her eyes widening as she looked over her shoulder and saw the small black hole pointed at a spot just below the front edge of her white starched cap. "Why should we bother them?" He backed her up against the counter of the central station, the gun's muzzle then just an inch away from her forehead. With his other hand, he reached past the younger, even more terrified nurse sitting behind the counter, picked the phone up, and yanked its cord free from the wall below. "Since there's really no problem here, anyway. Unless you make one." His smile broadened as he took the gun away from the supervisor's face and used it to point toward the station's other chair. "Have a seat."

  He walked back toward the bulky device squatting in the middle of the maternity ward's floor. The eyes of all the pregnant women had latched on to him; a couple of the less tranquilized had started to weep softly, pulling up the thin sheets of the gurneys and trying to hide behind them. "Ladies . . . you're beautiful just the way you are." He held the gun by his own head, pointing it toward the speckled acoustic ceiling. "Just stay like this. Real quiet." He turned, sweeping the beam of his smile across them. "And then we'll always have this moment together. Won't we?"

  The mothers-to-be stayed frozen in place, just as he wanted them. He glanced over his shoulder at the women back at the nursing station. "I'm keeping an eye on you, too." With one hand he pulled out the last of the device's struts and jacked it into place. "So just relax. This'll only take a moment."

  In the breast pocket of his green scrub shirt was a remote with two red, unmarked buttons on one side. Taking a pace back, he fished the metal box out. This was serious enough business to erase the smile for a moment. He hit the top button with his thumb.

  A two-second delay gave him enough time to turn his face away, ears shielded with his upraised hands, remote in one and gun in the other. The shock wave from the blast rolled over his back like a heated ocean wave, with enough force to send him stumbling a few steps before he caught his balanc
e.

  The silence that followed was broken by the muffled sobs of the pregnant women sirening into full-out wails. That and the patter of atomized structural material, falling in a rain of white dust and charred metal across his shoulders.

  Already in motion, he ran back to the device he'd wheeled into the ward. The thrust of the shaped explosive charges had dug the bracing struts another inch into the floor. He gazed up at the raw-edged hole that had been ripped through the ceiling above. Its center was filled by the hydraulic ram that had sprung like a jack-in-the-box from the device, the oil-glistening metal shoving aside the scorched, twisted girders.

  Strapped to one side of the device was an attaché case of chrome and molded black neoprene. flicking the remote back into his scrub shirt pocket, he pulled the case free and started climbing, the wrist of his gun hand catching the holds riveted to the side of the ram.

  On the floor above, the hospital staff and security guards were still stunned by the blunt prow shape that had erupted in their midst. Jagged metal scraped along his spine as he emerged partway into the smoke and settling dust. A quick look around, with the case pulled through and flopped down onto the hole's buckled perimeter; he saw the heart-and-lung patient right where he'd planned on, the railed bed surrounded by the whispering machines. The monitor screens had flipped, the explosion having sent the beeping lines into sharp-pointed spasms and trilling alarms. Letting go of the case's handle but not the gun, he pushed himself up and onto the edge of the hole

  The doctors and nurses, the ones left standing, had been shoved by the explosion against the walls. At least one had been hit by a bit of flying shrapnel; blood formed a bright net across his face and surgical gown before he collapsed onto his knees. The patient on the bed, at the edge of anesthetized consciousness, stirred feebly inside the web of hoses and tubes.

  "Hey, buddy--" The smile returned to the man's face, his eyes brightening, as he called to the guard dragging himself toward the rifle that had landed a few feet away. The words were enough to stop the guard, his fingertips a fraction of an inch from the butt of the rifle. The hesitation was more than enough; the guard raised his head and the smiling man fired. One shoulder hit the rifle as the bullet's impact tugged the guard by his shattered skull along the floor.

  He could hear the alarms shrieking somewhere else inside the hospital. Time dwindling now -- he pulled the remote out of his shirt pocket and hit the second button.

  In the vibrating sunlight outside the ward's high bank of windows, a brighter spark moved, metal struck by fire. As though it were a piece of the sun, fallen into an orbit low among the city's towers. It grew larger, closer, summoned by the tight beam from the remote in the man's hand.

  Which he was done with -- he tossed the small metal box aside. He scooped up the attaché case by its black molded handle and strode quickly toward the bed.

  "What . . ." Not even a whisper, not a sigh, but a few molecules of exhaled breath. The heart-and-lung patient's eyelids fluttered open. "What . . . are you doing . . ." A red bubble trembled in the cloudy plastic tube inserted in his trachea.

  "Take it easy, pal." The man's hands were flying as he leaned over the bed. Yanking and pulling, tubes and ridged hoses flipped up from the heart-and-lung patient's blood spattered abdomen. "Just lie back and let me do the work." He'd laid the gun down on the nearest equipment cart, scooping up the sharp-edged tools and sterile white tape he'd known he'd find there. "Funny, that's what she said last night. Don't laugh, you'll bust a stitch."

  Pure oxygen hissed as he jerked the largest hose from a Teflon socket at the breastbone's center; a wobbling bag of Ringer's solution burst on the floor like a prankster's water balloon as his elbow knocked over the IV-drip stand. He worked faster, the attaché case open on the bed beside the patient. Security alarms shrieked in dissonant chorus outside the ward; he could sense through the floor the tremor of distant running. The quick, faint noise of ammo clips being shoved into place touched his ear; he didn't look up. He'd already measured the exact amount of time he needed. A spear of reflected sunlight hit his face. Glancing up, he saw the spinner, a modified light-cargo model, approaching the window bank. No one in the pilot seat; the program triggered by the push of the remote's button guided the spinner closer, the steel-reinforced nose gleaming a meter away from the glass, then less.

  With a sweep of his forearm, he pushed the disconnected machines away. Another chrome rack toppled, sprawling the loose tubes, spastic octopus. With the roll of surgical tape he spliced the smaller lines from inside the attaché case, snugging them tight to the implant connections that studded the patient's torso.

  "Let's go--" He flipped the switch beneath a glass square set in the case's lid; a fiat green line coursed across the monitor. "Son of a bitch. Come on!" Smile into angry scowl; a fist struck the densely packed machinery; a miniature bellows sucked and gasped through a mesh filter, but the green line remained a perfect horizon. Both fists doubled, he struck the man on the bed, hitting the narrow target between the throat and the red-edged tubes hard enough to partway jackknife the man's knees toward his chest.

  "Jesus . . ." An agonized whisper. One of the heart-and-lung patient's hands came free, from where it had been bound by the wrist to the bed's chrome rail; he feebly tried to fend off his attacker. "Jesus Christ . . . get away from me . . ."

  The man above leaned down, sealing his mouth over the other's, a suction tube already prodded into the kiss. A hard exhale, and the patient's chest raised in response. From the attaché case came a birdlike chirp, as the monitor's green line jittered, then caught in a two-stroke beat. The artificial pulse slowed, steadied as the man, smiling again, wiped his mouth and adjusted the knob for the adrenaline flow.

  "I hope you're ready to travel--"

  Words barely spoken, when the high bank of windows shattered, sparkling points of glass arcing across the ward. The segmented metal frame bent and twisted, bolts screeching out of the floor and walls as the nose of the freight spinner shoved its way inside the hospital building. The smiling man brushed glitter of broken glass from the heart-and-lung patient's raw, exposed chest; he reached a hand behind and raised the patient up, his other hand looping the surgical tape around, strapping the attaché case and its nest of hoses tight against the body.

  "Hold on!" Glass crunched underfoot as he shoved the wheeled bed toward the spinner, now motionless in the gaping architectural wound.

  Rifle fire behind him -- he glanced over his shoulder and saw the bright muzzle flashes, the crouching figures of an LAPD security team, more of them darting from the bank of elevators as the doors slid open, the dark-uniformed men running head down and with guns in hand, taking up positions around the ward's narrow entrance. A bullet clanged and ricocheted from one of the bed's curved metal bars; others slammed into the surrounding walls. The ruptured floor, with the entry device's battering ram still rearing up into the space, and the knocked-aside medical equipment formed a partial barricade between the man and the new arrivals on the scene, momentarily shielding him from a direct line of attack.

  He reached to the small of his back for his own gun, found nothing, remembered that he had left it sitting on top of the main respiratory-assist machine, at the edge of the nest of tubes and hoses from which he'd yanked the bed. He could see the gun now, a small black shape on top of shiny chrome. Too far away to reach, especially with a sharp horizontal rain of hollow points lacing the room -- he swung back toward the shattered windows, watching across the prostrate form of the heart-and-lung patient as the freight spinner outside rotated, bringing its open cargo-bay door toward the jagged teeth of glass. The glaring sunlight hit his face like a furnace's hot flood.

  One of the spinner's flanged air intakes caught on a bent, broken section of the windows' steel frame. The thrust engines whined higher in pitch, as the autopilot program shoved the vehicle against the obstruction. The cargo-bay opening stayed where it was, nearly two meters away from the ripped edge of the hospital building.

>   Through the echoing clamor of the rifle fire, he could hear the security team shifting position, moving closer into the ward. He took a few steps backward, drawing the hospital bed with him, then bracing his hands against the lowest rail on one side.

  "No . . ." The heart-and-lung patient had seen what the other man was getting ready to do. "You can't . . . im . . . possible . . ."

  "Shut up." He pushed the bed full force, digging in and picking up speed, head lowered bull-like and muscles straining beneath the green scrubs. A second later the rolling bed had hit the rim of the floor-level window frame; momentum tilted the bed over and sent it flying toward the spinner outside, the cargo bay as the exact center of the target. His own momentum and a final diving launch carried him after.

  He landed on the patient, who moaned and tried to push him away with weak, narcotized arms. One of the hospital bed's wheels had caught against the sill of the bay door; the chrome frame and mattress fell outside the spinner, scraping against the hospital exterior as it spiraled down toward the city streets below.

  Bullets hit and bounced inside the bare-ribbed cargo space. Inside the hospital, the security team had come out to the open, sprinting across the ward's broken field, firing as they ran.

  He scrambled off the heart-and-lung patient; still on his knees, he lunged past the cockpit's empty seats and hit the autopilot's override button on the control panel. A slap of his hand against the thrust levers -- the spinner surged forward, a forearm slung around the pilot seat's headrest keeping him from being flung back into the cargo space.

  Through the cockpit's glass curve, he spotted the steel hook of the broken window frame digging farther into the engine's air scoop. Enough to tilt the spinner at a forty-five-degree angle as it fought against the crude grapple. A metal hail hammered small dents into the side panels.