Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman

by Duncan Eagleson

  “They were long last moments.

  “Y’know, we talk about somebody taking someone apart in a fight, but I don’t use that expression anymore, ’cause I’ve seen it done literally. The Monk must have broken every damn bone in Amira’s body, one by one, taking his time, letting the guy suffer. And Amira, he never makes a sound other than a grunt now and then, like he won’t give the Monk the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

  “Finally, when Amira’s nothing but a pile of ground meat, lying there in that hallway, the Monk walks over to me and picks up his belt. He buckles in, takes out his gun, and shouts, ‘City guard! Don’t try to run, or we’ll shoot!’

  “And then he shoots the guy.

  “To be honest, I don’t know if Amira was still alive or not. The Monk walks over, picks him up, and throws him out the fifth story window, right through the glass. He looks down there for a minute, and then turns to me, and says, ‘He shouldn’t have tried to run. Bad luck he was making for the window. Drop like that, he probably broke every bone in his body.’

  “Then he grins, and walks past me down the stairs.”

  “Holy fuck,” said Pauls. “That’s some cold shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you stayed partners with this guy for how long after?”

  “Couple of months. Never saw him do anything like that again. Oh, he was pretty brutal in the Riots when they actually started, but no more than some of the other guys, at least not that I saw. Then come the fighting down by the power plant. Some of the union boys had guns, and I took a shot in the thigh. Laid me up for over a month. When I come out, the Monk had been assigned a new partner, and they put me with you.”

  “Right,” said Pauls. “By that time, they were calling Caine ‘Bone Grinder’ instead of ‘Monk.’”

  “Yeah. I dunno how he came by that tag, but I can guess.”

  The two walked another block in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts.

  “When Grinder disappeared after the Riots,” Pauls said at last, “I never did get the whole story on that. You figure some of the unionists got him, or maybe some of Amira’s friends or family?”

  Lantz shook his head. “Nah. Take more than an angry crowd of unios to take that bastard down. My guess, he figured even Jaworski had limits, and he couldn’t get away with shit like that forever. I think he blew town, maybe out to the zones, where there ain’t any law to speak of. Long as the Railwalkers didn’t catch up with him, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted out there.”

  They stopped walking and stood in silence for a moment. Finally, Pauls asked, “Are you drunk?” They had been drinking long and hard that night, neither of them walking an even keel when they left the bar, but both stood steady and straight now.

  “No,” said Lantz.

  “Me neither,” said Pauls. “What do you say we do something about that?”

  Lantz nodded, and the two guardsmen began to walk toward a smear of neon that could be seen down the street.

  12. WOLF

  One of Morgan’s talents is she’s what they call a “comber.” She hooks up to the net and searches. She’s got several programs she sets up with different search parameters. Sets them searching, and sits there watching the screen. There are four windows open on screen, with text and pictures flashing by faster than you or I could take them in. But Morgan’s in this sort of fugue state, where she’ll pick up on relevant items out of the thousands flashing by on the screen. While the programs refine their results, Morgan’s refining them, too, and the combination of their results is winnowed through again. She finds some amazing stuff this way.

  This morning Morgan would be doing her combing thing on the victims. With so many, it could take a while. Rok and I decided to head out. We were pretty useless while Morgan was doing her thing, and we wanted to look into what had happened with Andrew Foreman. We were going on the theory that the Beast had snuck into the CA Tower disguised as the janitor, and the hit-and-run accident that had put the real janitor in the emergency room seemed a little too convenient.

  We stopped at the main desk. Pappas, the older sergeant who’d painted the watercolor we saw in the wardroom, was on duty. He was a small, thin guy with a large head and a lined face, who smiled easily and pleasantly. I asked him about the vehicle in the hit-and-run.

  “Have to query Traffic for that,” he said, and held up a palm. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it for you.” He tapped at the keyboard of his desk unit, peered at the screen. “They nailed the vehicle. Fifteen year-old Quantum Roller. Registered to a Jemison Farris, 348 C Street. Owner claims the vehicle was stolen, but he didn’t bother to report it. He does have an alibi: he was at work. His boss and the time clock both vouch for him.”

  “Thanks, Pappas.”

  “Hey... you guys going down there? To see Farris?” I nodded. “That’s Alphabet City—Mutant Central. Watch your backs down there.”

  We said we would.

  We set out on foot. It was a longish hike from One City Plaza out to Alphabet City, but we both wanted to get more of a feel for the city than we were getting while holed up in the tower, or being ferried to incident sites in guard vehicles. Around the Bay City area it generally stays pretty warm for a month or so after Summersend, but today it seemed like Old Man Autumn wanted to give us a little preview. As we walked up Third Avenue, the sunlight was pale, if bright. The slanting light turned the buildings on one side nearly white, while the buildings on the opposite side cast bluish shadows halfway across the street. I noticed people were tending to walk on the sunny side. It wasn’t actually cold, but the shadows held a cool nip that folks weren’t acclimated to yet.

  Before too long the buildings were getting shorter, and there were fewer granite, concrete, and plasteel structures, and more brick and adobe. At 35th Street we crossed a wide, open plaza with a farmer’s market, filled mostly with Oriental and Latino faces, where women in black carrying string bags weighed and judged tomatoes, corn, rice and beans, while kids ran or skateboarded between the stalls.

  Within a few more blocks we were entering the ghetto.

  Every city has its ghettos. Historians tell us that before the Crash the country attracted millions of immigrants, and it was usually the most recent immigrants who occupied the ghettos, while the previous inhabitants of the bottom rung moved up one social station, from abject poverty to merely poor. Irish were replaced by Eastern Europeans, who were replaced by Italians, and then Orientals. Africans, of course, were being brought over as slaves during a lot of that time, but really only entered the social structure as though they were immigrants after the Freedom War. And so the cycle went, from the Founding Times until the Crash. There aren’t nearly as many immigrants anymore, so ghettos since the Crash have been made up of a haphazard cross-section of groups, depending on the location. In San Angelo it’s mostly whites. Santa Brita’s ghettos are Chinese and Russian. In Gatesville, where the ruling classes are mainly Indian and Chinese, it’s mostly Latinos and black, with a scattering of whites. Places like Bay City, which allowed mutants in, usually had a mutant ghetto.

  As we drew further into Alphabetland runabout traffic slowed, then ceased. There were fewer wreaths, corn dollies, and other seasonal decorations, too. Less of a sense of celebration. Foot traffic thinned out until, as we approached Avenue C, there was only a group of five walking a block behind us. We unbuttoned our tunics for easy access to our guns. Rok muttered, “Next corner,” and I nodded.

  Before we got to the next corner, though, a woman in a motorized wheelchair came around it and stopped, facing us. We slowed as we got within ten feet or so of her. She was bald, marble-white skin gleaming in the weakening late summer sunlight. One of her huge, pale eyes was made to look even larger by a lens, like a giant jeweler’s loupe, held in place by leather straps. Her upper body, wrapped in several layers, looked powerful, but her lower body vanished beneath a blanket, showing no feet below. The way the blanket occasionally shifted, I was guessing there was something that was
not quite legs under there. I was also guessing she was old. It’s hard to judge sometimes with mutants; in this case, she seemed to have no eyebrows, so her baldness probably had nothing to do with her age, but the wrinkles and age spots were pretty indicative.

  She leaned to one side, looking around us to the figures behind, and called out, “Put your toys away, boys, and leave them in your pockets. These are Railwalkers. They could kill you twice before you got off your first shot, pledge and promise on it.” She looked at us. “Ain’t that so, gentlemen?”

  “Might be,” said Rok. “If they’re good.” He looked over his shoulder, then back at the chairbound mutant. Gave a little sideways nod. “Or might be we could kill ’em three times.”

  The old woman chuckled. “So how’s that saying go? You come from the East?”

  “Wolf am I, walker of the rails between worlds, and he is Rok. Twenty-three blessings, grandmother. Say your need.”

  She laughed again. “Say my need? You don’t got that long to listen, Normie. Tell you what I’d like, though. Like to know what you want here, Railwalkers. You didn’t come down sniffing for no mutant pussy.”

  “Looking for a man named Jemison Farris. Had his runabout stolen a couple of weeks back.”

  “Farris?” she laughed. “If that piece of shit Stroller of his got pinched, he’s better off without it. Why you care, anyway?”

  I answered her question with another. “What’s it to you?”

  “Jemison had enough trouble with the guard already. Don’t need no more official crap coming his way.”

  “No crap involved, just some questions.”

  The old mutant eyed us suspiciously. Then she nodded. “Ephram,” she said to one of the mutants behind us. “Go get Farris, tell him I said come on over to Deke’s.” Then she called over her shoulder, “Waldron! Go tell Deke to put on the coffee.” She turned back to us. “Won’t be but five percent, but it’s the thought that counts, ain’t it?”

  “That it is,” I said.

  She spun her wheelchair and led the way. The fellows behind us came up closer as we began to move. We kept a weather eye open, but it seemed that the woman’s tentative approval of us was accepted, and their formation was protective—apparently we were now guests rather than potential enemies. Closer up I could see that these were indeed mutants, though more sound of body than many I’d met. Three of them appeared relatively normal if you didn’t count the lack of a nose on one, and a tail on another. The fourth was a lumbering behemoth, not above six foot, but weighing over three hundred pounds. He had rough, scaly-looking skin, and his fingers were wed, forming something like lobster claws. Except for the big one, they all carried weapons, though they followed the old mutant’s instruction and kept them in their pockets.

  The boarded-up storefront she led us to had “Deke’s Place” written in spray paint on the window’s plywood. It had been some sort of convenience store or groceria at one time. You could still see the marks on the stained linoleum where display shelves had once stood, the empty space now taken up with a half-dozen mismatched sets of tables and chairs. The refrigerator cases along the back wall were dark and empty, no colder than the rest of the place. The room was vacant except for a thin mutant behind the counter, whose eyes were on the sides of his head like a horse. The old woman wheeled across the floor to take a place at the sturdiest-looking table. She gestured for us to sit.

  “Take a load off, Railwalkers. Fair to say you, Terrapin Jones am I. These folks call me Oculus.” She gestured at the others in turn and introduced them. The one with the tail was Jed, the noseless one Marlus, the huge one was called Lob, and the fourth man, who showed no malformation except for a wall eye, was known as Pinko. The four didn’t join us at the table, but took up positions around the room, Pinko at the window near a gap in the boards, Lob beside the front door, Marlus and Jeb at the back. The horse man, who Oculus introduced as Deke, brought a tray with heavy white chipped mugs, a pot of coffee, and a bowl of loose tobacco to the table. Oculus took the pot from him.

  “I’ll Mama that Java,” she said, and poured for the three of us. Deke took cups to each of the other four as well, but most set them down untouched. Oculus brought out a stone pipe and began to fill it from the bowl.

  “Seems like you’re ready for a war,” I said to the woman. “Trouble with the guard?”

  “Not the guard so much.” She shook her head. Fired up the pipe, handed it to me. I took a token puff, handed the pipe to Rok. “Bay City used to be a decent place for mutants,” she continued. “Got to register, you know, but the laws give us our rights, assuming we got the wherewithal to use ’em. Oh, like anyplace else, there’s plenty of normies don’t like us much, but mostly they let us be, until recent.”

  “Since the Beast appeared?” I asked. She nodded. Rok stood and offered the pipe to Pinko, who puffed quickly and passed it on.

  “Ain’t been a single mutie killed by the Beast so far. Lots of normies assume the Beast is a mutie his own self. Mebbe some think we might be helping him, or sympathetic, anyway. Things been a little tense, as you might say.”

  “I can imagine,” I said, and I could. When people become frightened they look for scapegoats, and become suspicious of anything that smacks of otherness. Next to the malformations of most mutants, differences of skin color and cultural heritage among the normals would become insignificant.

  “What about you, Walker of Rails?” she asked. “You think the beast is a mute?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “But Roth called you here about the Beast, no? Why you down here lookin’ for Jemmy?”

  “Farris’s runabout was involved in a hit and run.”

  “The night Chief Adams died,” she nodded. “Guards sweated Jemmy good about that night. He was workin’. What’s that run down got to do with the Beast?”

  At the door Pinko stirred and said, “Jemmy.” The front door opened and another mutant entered, dressed in a laborer’s denims. He had a Neanderthal look about him: an overhung brow ridge and lots of hair. His hairline reached halfway down his forehead, and his five o’clock shadow nearly reached his eyes. He didn’t have the appropriate physique, though—he was thin and weak, and with an incongruous-looking pair of glasses perched on his nose, he gave the absurd impression of a techno-nerd caveman. He nodded at the woman. “Oculus.”

  “Jemmy,” she said. “Pull up a chair. These are Railwalkers Wolf and Rok. They was about to tell me why the guard thought you and your runabout had something to do with the Beast.”

  Farris nodded but said nothing else as he pulled a chair up to the table. I looked from Jemison to Oculus, considering how much I should tell them.

  “The man the runabout hit,” I said, “was a janitor at the guard station at City Center.” Oculus smiled slightly, but Farris’ eyes widened. The guard apparently hadn’t mentioned that while questioning him. “We think the Beast stole your runabout to put that janitor in hospital, and snuck into the station disguised as him.”

  Oculus laughed out loud at this. “So that Beast, he’s a skinwalker,” she said, using the Namerican term for shapeshifters. “Oh, don’t look at me like that, Railwalker man. You didn’t have to say it, Oculus was born at night, but not last night. Roth call you folks in, gotta be he thinks there some hoodoo in this Beast. Ain’t no guardo janitor got claws like the Beast supposed to have, ain’t no disguisin’ that kinda thing, unless you’re a shapeshifter.”

  I turned to Farris. “I know the guards grilled you for hours about this. I don’t want to add to your troubles, just want to know if there’s anything about that night you can tell us, anything at all that seemed strange or off, maybe something you didn’t tell the guard, or didn’t think of at the time.”

  Jemison looked from me to Rok to Oculus, and back again. He looked at the table.

  “Only one thing,” he said. “Didn’t know it until after. Tommy Chang.” He glanced at Oculus. “You know, Annie’s kid? He says he seen a big bald guy hanging around Chalme
rs Street, where the Roller was parked. Said he looked like a mutie, but Tommy didn’t know him.”

  “Tommy gets around,” Oculus explained. “Knows just about every mutie in Alphabet City.”

  “Only thing I can tell you I didn’t tell the guard,” Farris added with a shrug.

  A big bald guy sounded like it could have been the Beast Auden saw, but it was iffy, a slim connection. This didn’t add very much to our knowledge, but talking to Farris had been a long shot anyway.

  “Thanks Jemmy,” Oculus said. “You go on back to work now.”

  Jemison Farris got up, avoiding eye contact, nodded to us, and to Oculus, and made his way to the door.

  Oculus looked at us. “Tell you what, Railwalker man,” she said. “I can see Jemmy didn’t tell you nothing you didn’t already guess. But I’ll give you a new toy to play with. That weren’t the first time someone seen a bald mutie nobody knows. He’s a ninjaman, walks the night like a shadow. But there’s eyes in Alphabet City see through the dark, and we watch out for our own. That bald ghost, he be seen one too many times ’round a squat over at Chalmers and A Street. Most of the squatters there, they found other places to habit, you get my meaning? Might be you want to check that place out.”

  “Might be,” I agreed.

  We were rising to leave when Ephram burst in, out of breath.

  “Jemmy...” he gasped. “Guards... C and Montrose.”

  We followed out the door and down the block to where a small crowd was developing. The dozen or so people—mutants all—backed up suddenly, and the air became tense. I could see at the center a burly guardsman holding Jemison Farris up against a wall.

  The crowd had backed up because the guard’s partner had drawn his gun. Other guns and knives were appearing, most still held down, away from the guards’ line of sight, but exposed to us as we approached from behind.