"What're you crying about, cockroach?"
He shook his head. "I've never lost a case before. Never. And to lose this one; it's a sin."
I pushed myself to my feet. "Your still corners." I held out my hand and helped him to his feet.
"Corners?"
"You know, all corners, perfect score. Everybody's job here today was justice. Everybody got what they deserved, so everybody won."
He held a hand out toward the grave. "This dead child? That's justice?"
No, man, I thought. That's a corpse. "Yeah. That's justice."
"If this is what you call justice, Nicos, I don't think I can bear it."
I nodded as I slung my rifle and turned to follow the column into the dark of another icy night. "It ain't for the timid."
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As Good As It Gets
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That night was the coldest I ever saw on the desert. It made the air snap. Sounds carried so far I could hear myself being cursed from both ends of the column. I swear I could hear the grains of sand grating against each other. The hoods on my sheet and parka were up and the filthy rag I had wrapped around my face was caked with my frozen breath. A light came into the eastern sky, low and slow. It was a moon. That'd make Dom happy, anyway. By the time that moon's bluish gray dot was high in the sky, we had dragged more than a hundred exhausted or dead sharks out of the column's path. A few we crutched along. I saw one carried by a couple of yard monsters and I gave up my lughox to let two more ride. Here and there you could see an old crowbar buddy helping an exhausted mate crip it along. The rest were meatsicles left for the sand bats. The Mihvihtians had been issued stretch gloves as part of their equipment, but by the time I got to one of the stiffs, everything was gone but the god issue. I kept my hands in my armpits and cursed at the moon.
Priorities. If we hadn't kept moving all of us would've died. The sharks understood that, most of them. Every now and then reality has a way of busting through the bullshit. What the sharks couldn't understand was the death of Tani Aduelo. That stiff little bit back there beneath the grit didn't fit any of the usual crowbar scenarios. Everybody hated the snitch, Misi Pihn. Everybody loved the little pretty, Tani Aduelo. Two plus two equals twenty-two. Everybody knows that. So how come that chili pepper RC blew a hole through Tani? Is he a proto? This his first day in the crowbars? It was all jaw music.
Working a mouth is one way to forget the cold. There were others. A small pack of Jesus jammers were crutching each other along singing hymns. Oh, Lord, I'm such a worthless asshole, so give me a break because I think you're a chump, and other selections from the Thank the Lord God is a Sucker Songbook. I thought about burning Big Dave Cole's copy of Southey's Life of Nelson for a little warmth, but I couldn't. That book was my only connection to Earth, to Big Dave, and my past, what there was of it. Besides, during his life old Horatio Nelson had faced a few problems. He'd outlasted all of them except for that French sniper's musket ball at the end. His legend, the things he had done, and the effects of the changes he had made outlasted even that. I didn't figure I was any Admiral Nelson, but the book was something to lean on in a place that had no trees. Just feeling its weight in my kitbag gave me the illusion of not being all alone.
There was a rag head mullah who kept pointing around at the sharks on the desert, calling humans Allah's chosen of the universe. His evidence was that humans were the only known intelligent form of life. That we were the humans he was pointing at kind of made you wonder about his definition of intelligence. He was talking to himself, which was pretty common in the cold when someone was working with a bent strut. Either the cold, the situation, or something else had stroked the guy's gyros. But what he said gave my lobes the noids.
Is the human race as good as it gets? Is that sewer back on Earth the top-of-the line? It kind of made you smoke your wig some about where the Great Spirit had done his training. Did anybody ever wonder if God was qualified to do what he was doing? He, She, or It might be an on-the-job trainee filling in for someone who got fed up with the working conditions and quit. The universe might be just another blown project on the scrap heap behind the celestial vocational school.
I backed up my head and loaned a lobe to what I'd heard once from my mother about her father. She'd said, "He was doing the best he could with what he had." That was her way of letting the old bastard who'd raped her at the age of eight off the hook. She called it forgiveness, and she said it wasn't something she was doing for her father. It was something she was doing for herself. It didn't make any sense to me, but maybe that was what God did with the human race: the best he could with what he had. That was an even scarier thought. You kind of hoped that God had a little bit more juice than that.
I jammed it and concentrated on the pain in my fingers. I didn't have to answer any big questions. My only job was to survive the night and keep the column aimed toward the Razai and those signal flares Stays would send up every so often.
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Hours later, with the Eyes of the Spider directly overhead, that little blue moon far down in the west, I was in the middle of the walking column. I hadn't been able to track down either Nkuma or Alna. I felt lonely without Stays, Cap, Marietta, and the rest of the RCs. I needed to have someone there who was in the cops, someone who knew what it was like, someone who knew why we did what we did. I was just telling myself that it would only be a few more days and we'd be back, when a terrible scream ripped up from the direction of the left flank guard. It was immediately followed by a chorus of more screams from the same direction.
The walking column sharks froze. About the last place I wanted to be was the left guard, Tani's old buddies and all, but I took off running toward the north, wondering how many perps I'd have to chill this time.
By the time I reached the left flank guard, most of it was moving again. A few sharks were weeping on each other and getting their asses patted. "What the hell was all the noise about?" I demanded.
No one talked. One rough hand grabbed my right arm and pointed straight ahead. I went in that direction and could see the light from a fire cube burning. Surrounding it on the sand seemed to be a forest of strange little stumps, trunks, and branches dancing in the orange light. A little closer and I could see that the strange little trees were the outstretched arms and legs of long dead sharks. Hundreds, thousands of them. They had been covered by the sand, dried out, and were now newly emerged to give the Mihvihtians their special welcome to Tartaros. My skin crawled as my legs cramped from the desire to run. Grinning skulls covered with tatters of dried skin were everywhere. There were no clothes or belongings. The bodies had been stripped. "What happened to them?" asked a shadow. The voice sounded like it belonged to Ratt Katz, the people's conscience.
"I just got here."
I touched my greenstick to the fire cube and held it above my head. The corpses covered the sand as far as I could see. Here and there a dark furry thing sleeping inside a rib cage was startled by the light and scurried off. It looked like the work of a scavenger gang. Bending over I held out the light and checked out skeletons one at a time, turning over bones with my toe, until I found the evidence I was looking for. It was a neck vertebra that had been shattered by a slug that was still stuck in it.
"See that? A rifle."
"So?"
"So the lock watchers don't arm sharks on the way out the hatch, do they? This crowd was done by one of the old, established firms."
"Who? That Kegel you told us about?"
There was a lughox carcass nearby. I picked my way through the defunct and departed and examined the remains of the lughox's raggedy hide for markings. The bleached painted remains of a colored palm print was on the mummified critter's ass end. I pointed at it. "The Hand. Carlo T's boys did 'em."
"Is that the gang in the east the Razai is going to fight?"
I turned and the light fell on Ratt's face. The kid's features w
ere hard, the eyes gray and noided out. The kid wouldn't admit it if you stuck a howitzer in his ear, but he was scared. "That's the one."
"Nicos?"
I knocked the fire cube off the end of my greenstick and turned to the shadow. "What?"
"I know you and your two mau friends've been talking up the law and about how tough things are on the sand."
"Yeah?"
"Don't jerk me off, pigshit. How bad can it get?"
Ratt had a way that just made you want to do things for him. When I realized I was biting through the skin on my inner lip, I turned back and used the toe of my boot to push the fire cube next to a laughing skull that had a black hole drilled into the center of its forehead. "Ask old Crowbar Charlie there. He won't lie."
I headed back toward the walking column, thinking that it might just be a great idea to march the whole column through the corpse forest. Reality time. Here it is, you yard sharks. This is the real world. Grab a piece so you'll remember this is as good as it gets without the law.
I scrapped it though. We didn't have enough fire cubes to light the show for that long, and we couldn't afford to sit around until daylight. Instead, I kept them heading for the Razai. I looked up, and the light from Blue Moon faded behind the western edge of the desert. Then what I feared the most finally reached my ears. A shadow named Samara spoke and her words dripped with tears and hate. "Tani Aduelo was my friend."
I wrapped my fingers around the handle of my ice pick and located the source of the words as electrons skittled up and down my spine. It was black dark, but my sheet was different than theirs. I felt like I was walking around with a big "Bando Nicos, Pigshit Cop" sign on. There was a pause and Samara spoke again, her voice quiet.
"No, she wasn't my friend. No one was ever her friend. She never would allow anyone to get that close to her. But I liked her. Loved her. I can't bear the memory of that bastard gunning her down. One second she was full of life, the next she was nothing but a sack of dead guts. I hate him, and my hate is eating me alive."
Samara didn't know that the shadow walking next to her was Bando Nicos, the bastard baby-killer. I stuck my ice pick back in my belt. Inside I was dying.
Another voice. "You make it sound like it's the Razai Cop's fault that Tani killed Misi."
"Aren't you angry?"
The other shadow's answer came slowly. Maybe he was choosing his words. Maybe he was just cold. "I'm angry about it, but I'm not angry at the cop. I'm like you, Samara. My addiction is rage. If I was angry at Nicos, though, my addiction would be doing the aiming. It'd just be a way to kill the feelings and keep the flames roaring. Tani killed Misi, and she had to take the consequences for what she did. I'm angry at Tani, not the cop."
My god, I was right in the middle of a walking CSA meeting.
Another shadow spoke. "I'm an addict, my name's Brenie."
The meeting gave her the welcome. As a joke I prayed to the Spider for a change of subject. As they say in CSA, be careful what you pray for.
"I'm a crowbar shark," she began. "There's nothin' in this world I hate more'n cops, 'less it's cockroaches." There were a few chuckles.
"I saw that Bando Nicos only four times since I stepped out on the sand. The first three times was when he read us the law. The fourth time was when he smoked Tani Aduelo. He told us if you kill, you die. Tani killed, and she died. I respect that. What I respect more was that Nicos was just one little chili pepper cop in front of five or eight thousand sharks who didn't want Tani to die. All by himself he dropped the dark on Tani right in front of us. I'm not just talkin' brave, brothers and sisters. Bando Nicos is either a saint or is running with a stripped gear."
Samara had an angry response to Brenie's comment, but I didn't get to hear it. My feet were rooted to the dunes and I was sick to my stomach. Alna didn't want to be near me. I didn't want to be near me. My heart was about to explode. I turned away, ran south through the sand, and kept going until I was all alone. As one of Stays's signal flares streaked up into the cold night toward the belly of the Spider, I knelt on the sand, covered my face with my hands, and cried.
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Head Smoke
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The night cold deepened. I climbed a dune to get a fix on Stays' next signal flare. As I checked the Eyes of the Spider for our direction, I noticed that the few stars toward the south were gone from the sky. It seemed a little warmer. A half hour later the Eyes were gone too. The wind picked up and it began to snow. The tiny hard flakes stung wherever they hit bare skin. Just about as soon as it started, though, it stopped. It wasn't enough snow to add any time to our water rations. It was only enough to make us wet and miserable. Once that was accomplished, the snow stopped and the deep chill returned.
Muchas gracias, Great Power of the Universe. Many thanks, Great Spider. On some of the dunes I could see the blades of that retractable grass fully extended in great clumps to absorb the moisture.
After I saw the signal light streak up in the east, I walked toward the head of the column. All along the way there were the shadows of Tani's fellow exiles to contend with, not to mention their muttered curses. As the wet soaked in and the cold grew colder, the muttering ceased.
Somewhere during the night, I felt an arm wrap around my waist. It was Alna. For some reason, it wasn't much comfort right then. "How do you feel, Bando?"
I walked along through the sand for a bit, then I shrugged. "I don't know. Who ever knows how they feel?"
"Lots of people."
It wasn't something I wanted to talk about. The lump of lead sitting on my heart told me it was probably something I needed to talk about, though. My eyes began burning and I turned it off with anger. "How does Bando Nicos feel? I feel like I want to die, like I want to kill, like I want to take you and leave the Razai forever." My eyes began burning again and I was grateful for the dark.
"Alna, you remember that time when we talked about going off together and finding someplace with trees?"
She wrapped her hands around my right arm. "Yes. A little valley where we'd build a cabin for just the two of us."
"I been thinking about that a lot. Once we get out of the sand and hit the grass, there's mountains down that way. Maybe we should head off on our own. Maybe we can find that little valley. Build that shack and fill it with a bunch of little brown kids."
I looked at her, and her dark face was almost invisible inside her hood. For a startled second it seemed like she wasn't there. That I was talking to a ghost. I stopped us and turned her face toward the moon. If our kids looked like Alna with just a dash of chili pepper, they'd be beautiful. But the universe loves to play jokes. Our kids could look like me, but with nappy hair. They'd be something only a mother could love, and I was sure Alna would love them.
"Bando, what are you thinking?"
"Me? I'm thinking that you are my nightingale. You are my heart, my anchor in the universe, the only thing that keeps me from throwing a mental shit fit."
"There's more, Bando." Her voice was dead serious.
I hate it when people try and draw me out. I was quiet for a moment, the taste of killing Tani Aduelo still in my mouth. "I'm thinking I don't like my job much."
"Maybe you can boss the Razai someday and change things."
"No, lady, no." I shook my head. "No way, sister crowbar. That's the one job I want less than the one I got."
She laughed and I shook off the chills her joke had brought on. Leading the Mihvihtian cons for a few days showed me that I didn't want Nance Damas's job. What the hell, I was bringing in sixteen thousand new voters to a gang that numbered less than three thousand. Chances were a new election would find us all out of work. That would be corners with me, I thought. After my few days as a Razai Cop, I could haul a rifle in Bloody Sarah's army through Hell as a buck-ass private with a song in my heart.
"There's something I don't understand, Bando."
"There's all ki
nds of stuff I don't understand." I shook my head, trying to dislodge the naked image of the new ghost. "I don't know much, Alna. If answers are what you want, I'll probably let you down."
She reached up and touched my cheek. "You know, Bando, you're not half as bad as you think you are."
"Tell it to the black rag who dropped the clock in my lap. What'd you want to ask?"
"The girl? Tani?"
I could feel invisible fingers wrapping themselves around my throat. The breathing came hard. "What about her?
"Why did she take off her clothes?"
I nodded. "That one I can answer." I took a ragged breath as guilt filled in the words her image supplied: look at me, I'm so young, how could I have done such a thing? Look at me, I am so lovely, even if I had done something naughty, I surely didn't mean it. Look at me, certain of you men and you particular women, and you know who you are. Look at me. Feast your eyes on this. Doesn't my youthful form, my smooth skin, my tender age, excite you? Don't you feel horribly guilty about—
"It was the best argument she had."
Alna snorted, "Didn't look like much of an argument to me."
"No. It wasn't much of an argument," I answered. It was tearing the guts out of me, though.
Alna's head turned and she pointed. "Look! Another flare!"
The white streak climbed into the sky. We were close. In another day or two, we would be back with the Razai. I looked up and saw that the two stars that were between us and the belly of the Spider Nebula had set, Blue Moon long gone. The stars to the south were out and sparkling.
"The sky's cleared."
In minutes the stars began to fade as the sky began to lighten. Another engine streak burned its way down through the sky northwest of us, into the dark of the desert. There had been more than a dozen of them since we picked up the cons from Mihviht. Another shipload of convict-exiles were about to be dumped. Seventeen thousand more sharks on infinity hold.
INFINITY HOLD3 Page 31
