by Devon Monk
“Go!” Abraham yelled.
I turned and starting running toward the library.
But Abraham was striding the other way, toward the Dumpster, toward the fallen, buried Domek.
Had he lost his mind?
Abraham bent and picked up a hundred-pound chunk of concrete one-handed and threw it like a skipping stone at the mess of debris over Domek.
He was cursing in that language I didn’t know, his body filled with a rage it couldn’t contain, every movement power and pain and violence.
I took a step toward him.
“Go!” he yelled again.
A flash of metal moving in that pile of debris caught my eye.
“Abraham!” I yelled. Too late.
A spattering of bullets fired out from the garbage. Abraham jerked back as they hit, riddling him.
I ran for him, not thinking that I was running into the fire, not caring that the bullets would tear through me next. I couldn’t die, we couldn’t die unless Domek blasted our brains out of our heads. And I wasn’t going to let that happen.
I didn’t know how Abraham was still standing, but he yelled in that language, bent, grabbed spine-breaking chunks of metal and rock and heaved them at the gunman.
Abraham was anger, violence, hatred. Unstoppable. Galvanized.
The bullets paused.
I grabbed his free arm, determined to get him the hell out of there before they started up again.
He pivoted on me, eyes burning red, scorched by pain and fury.
“Move!” I yelled.
He seemed to come to his senses. We ran, pounding toward the building, three steps, six.
Bullets hissed into the ground beside us, tracking our path. In less than a minute, we’d be nothing but holes and lead shot.
But we didn’t get that minute.
A cannon blasted out overhead, followed by gunfire that screamed with guided ammunition, target guaranteed. Shit. Tracers. If someone wanted us dead, this would do it.
Searing, spitting bullets rattled out like World War End. Far more than Neds or Quinten could lay down. Far more than Domek had on him.
Abraham and I ducked and rolled behind that low concrete wall not far from the library door. None of the others were here. I hoped they’d made it into the building.
“You will stand down,” a new voice bellowed over a bullhorn during a short interval in the holy-shit chorus. “Throw all weapons on the ground. Now.”
“Do you see him?” I asked.
Abraham scanned the sky and the roof of the abandoned library. “No.”
“Is this making sense to you?” I asked.
“No.”
The only thing I could come up with was either a House had just stepped in to stop our killer and capture us, or Ned’s contact we were supposed to meet here had a lot of illegal tracer firepower and a bullhorn.
Then I didn’t have time to ponder. The distinctive plink of metal canisters hitting the ground rattled across the plaza.
Not just canisters; tear gas. Dozens of them.
Damn it.
Domek went back to shooting, but the bullets weren’t coming our way. I didn’t care who was on whose side now. We just needed to get out of here.
Abraham was on his feet, pulling me up.
I ran through the cover of tear gas rising to fill the air, went blind by the time I’d taken ten steps, and had to feel my way along the side of the building.
Wandering blind in the line of fire was going to get me dead. Any minute now.
Then hands reached out pulled me into a space with no wind and a hell of a lot less smoke. I heard a door shut behind me.
“Here,” Quinten’s voice said, “put this over your face.”
We must be inside the library. “Abraham?” I croaked.
“He’s here,” Gloria said.
So we all must have made it inside the library. Hurray for our team.
Quinten dropped a damp cloth in my hands and I pressed it over my face, taking in several breaths of the sour-grape and chemical solution. Whatever he’d drenched the cloth with did an amazing job at stopping the burning in my eyes, nose, and throat.
The voice on the bullhorn outside was still yelling demands. Another volley of bullets rattled out. If Domek wasn’t dead, he would be soon. Tracers always hit their mark, and if not, some clever weapons designers had rigged them to act as impact explosives.
Right on cue I heard the pock-thoom of the mini explosives triggering.
“Is this everyone?” a man’s voice I didn’t recognize asked.
“This is us, Slip,” Right Ned said.
“One extra will cost you extra,” the man said.
“Of course,” Right Ned said.
I squeezed my eyes tight and rubbed the cloth carefully over both eyes, then my mouth and nose. My vision was a little foggy, but the basics of the situation were easy enough to see. We were in the burned and gutted library. Abraham had planted both shoulders against the wall and was scowling, silent, as he drew the cloth away from his eyes. Gloria handed him a new cloth, which he pressed against the wound on his stomach. He wasn’t just bleeding. He was bleeding badly.
“Pay before party, Harris,” Slip said.
Slip was medium height and build, strung together with the ropy muscles of someone who spent too much time in salt water. He stood with his back toward the interior of the building, facing Neds, who were ahead of me to my right.
Slip’s shoulder-length hair was dry and sun bleached, his weathered tan skin carved with wrinkles at his forehead and eyes. He wore a sleeveless hoodie and pants with plenty of pockets down the outside of the legs. He also had on a thigh holster, a full quiver and crossbow across his back, and a pinched expression of suspicion on his face.
Ned reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a bottle of pills. “Antibiotics, full strength.”
Gloria’s eyes went wide. I guess she hadn’t realized exactly what Ned had taken off her shelf. Antibiotics were rare and valuable. But, then, the pills were paying for her passage, so maybe she was paying for herself.
Neds tossed the medicine to Slip. He shook the bottle without looking at it.
Voice on the bullhorn outside laughed and cussed. There was only intermittent gunfire, then a lot of silence.
“This isn’t enough,” Slip said. “One of you stays behind.”
“We all travel together.” Left Ned pulled an even bigger bottle out of his other pocket. “Painkillers.” He held it up. “This bottle squares our debt.”
“How many pills?”
Left Ned shook the bottle. It sounded full.
The man curled two fingers in a “give it over” gesture.
“We’re square,” Right Ned repeated, still holding the bottle. “Full passage for her and for the rest of us. To Kansas.”
Slip opened the bottle in his hand, sniffed the antibiotics, then dumped one out and pressed it against his tongue. He nodded before dropping the pill back in the bottle.
“Along with that”—he nodded at the painkillers in Neds’ hand—“we’re square.”
Neds tossed him the painkillers, and Slip jammed both bottles away in a bag that hung at his belt.
“While I’d like to say I want to know all your names,” Slip said, raising his voice like he’d suddenly become our tour guide, “I don’t. You can call me Slip. If you want a ride on my boat, walk this way.”
He gave us each a quick up and down, as if setting the details of us to memory just in case we became worth turning in for a ransom.
When he looked at me, his eyebrows quirked down just a notch. I didn’t know what he saw in me. I saw in him a man who knew the profit he could make off anything that fell into his hands.
We weren’t people to him. We were cargo.
I didn’t like him. Nor did I trust him.
The door behind us swung open, and I spun toward it.
“Whoo, that’s good times!” A tall, lanky, dark-skinned man with an autotracer cannon slung over
his shoulder and a bullhorn in one hand strolled in. “I do love breaking out one of these babies.” He grinned at us, then tossed the bullhorn to Slip.
“This here’s Lucky,” Slip said by way of introduction.
“Is he dead?” I asked Lucky.
“The assassin? Not if he’s a fast runner and can find a doctor quick. Well, and a bomb technician.” Lucky sauntered across the floor, heading toward the far side of the library. “Might have annoyed him enough for him to call in backup, though.”
Slip followed the other man and gestured for us to do so. “I usually charge extra for taking out an agent of House Black,” Slip said, “but Domek out there is a personal annoyance—”
“Always up our asses,” Lucky said.
“So we are more than happy to kick his shit for free. But a few bullets and toxic gas won’t stop him. We move now.”
Slip pressed his hand into a wall that I didn’t think had a scanner in it. I was wrong.
The wall opened, swinging on silent tracks, and I briefly noted the inside was fitted with shelves that still had books on them.
A tiled staircase with inset lights took us under the library. Slip led the way, and Lucky brought up the back. After a second long flight of stairs, we stood in a tunnel that was about as different from our escape route out of Gloria’s place as I could imagine.
The entire underground station had the look of lost splendor. Ceilings were worked with glass and metal. Spirals of cast iron and stained glass created cathedral arcs that bloomed like petals of stunning flowers down the length of the place. A second-story railing and walkway ringed the station, doors and rooms dark behind that walkway.
The air smelled of salt, oil, and a meaty stagnancy. We appeared to be the only people here, which I supposed made sense if hardly anyone knew about the place.
A lowered rail ran down the length of the tunnel. On it was a train: a round-cornered rectangular, dull silver engine connected to a string of identical cars that gave it the appearance of a blind, subterranean caterpillar.
I thought this train, with boarded-up windows across the twelve boxcars, might have been originally designed to take people to and from work in the city. In about the mid-2100s it would have been part of the cross-country multicity work lines that connected the subrails. Not every line had been completed back then, but it had still been a strong secondary transportation system, though it was a people mover more than a freight mover.
Then the aboveground speed tubes had been tested and built. Since they were four times as fast as anything else over or under land, all the funding for the substations was funneled into the tubes. Freight moved quicker on tube, and so did people.
It was no surprise Gloria thought this system was defunct. Everyone thought it had been defunct for more than a hundred years.
The train that waited on that track appeared clean and well maintained. Bluish light poured out through the open doors.
“I hope you don’t mind tight quarters,” Slip said, walking toward the train. “Well,” he pivoted on his heel, half bent with his hands up, not quite in apology and not quite a bow, “you really don’t have a choice, do you?”
Lucky opened the door to one of the train cars.
Quinten strolled up to it like a rich man inspecting insufficient accommodations. He stepped onto the train, and Gloria followed.
That left Abraham, Neds, and me all standing outside.
Lucky braced his arm across the doorway. It wasn’t enough to stop any of us if we wanted to get on board. Bones were easy to break. But we waited.
Slip’s gaze took me in again, boot to head, stopping just briefly on the bullet wounds in my thigh that hurt like a bitch, and the matching bullet wounds in my arm that hurt like a bitch.
Then he gave Abraham the same inspection. Abraham was bleeding too. Worse than I was.
But Abraham didn’t show that he felt pain, if he did indeed feel it. His feet were spread wide in case he had to fight, arms crossed loosely over his chest as if Slip and Lucky wouldn’t be worth his time to fight. He radiated a “do not fuck with me” attitude, his eyes burning red.
“You didn’t tell me you’d have two stitches with you,” Slip said to Neds.
“What do you care?” Right Ned asked.
“They’re galvanized,” Slip said.
“And you’re the king of the black-market rats. Are you telling me there’s cargo too hot for you?”
“Both their eyes are red.” Slip said.
Our eyes were red? I supposed they might be. When I’d first met Abraham, his eyes had been red with the pain he could not feel from a gut wound. My eyes turned red when I was in pain too, and, like I said, those bullet holes hurt like a bitch.
“So?” Left Ned said.
“You know what they say: ‘Eyes of red, you’ll soon be dead,’” Slip said. “If that’s true, then the ride stops here.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Right Ned said. “I’ll give you a piece of free advice: your life will be a whole lot easier and much, much longer, if you don’t give these two any reason to find out if that old saying is true.”
“The woman’s bleeding,” he said.
Wow. It had been . . . never since I’d been so completely ignored and dismissed from a conversation.
Abraham had made a point of explaining to me that galvanized did not have human rights, that we were essentially not considered human. But I’d lived out on the farm all my life with my family. I’d never been treated like a thing that couldn’t talk for itself.
“We’ll take care of her,” Right Ned said.
Slip gave me one hungry look.
Lucky chuckled. “I’ll plug her holes for her.”
Abraham moved so fast, I could barely track him. He was beside me, then past me, on top of Lucky and pounding his head, then ribs, so hard, I heard bones crack.
Lucky crumpled like a wet tissue.
And Slip grabbed for his gun.
14
News is not good. Some think the ferals carry the disease. We have no cure.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
“I wouldn’t do it, pal,” Left Ned said, his Glock already in his hand. “All those stories about galvanized strength aren’t stories. She’d kill you a hundred times over before you’d ever even hurt her enough to stop her. And your friend there already pissed off the other one.”
Abraham slammed his fist into Lucky’s head one last time, then stood and turned toward Slip, flexing his bloody hands into fists.
“Do you really want both of them angry?” Left Ned continued. “They’ll crush your train like an empty can, pull off the tracks, and beat you to death with them before they’d break a sweat. You saw what they did with that Dumpster out there.”
Abraham, wisely, wasn’t moving in on Slip yet. Wisely, because I didn’t think Abraham needed more bullets in him, and I was pretty sure if we killed Slip we’d have to find new transportation across the country.
Slip snarled, and then his mouth curled into a false smile. “I’m sure we all want the same outcome here,” he said to Neds, though his gaze returned to Abraham again and again, as if expecting him to attack.
“You keep those stitches quiet, out of sight, and the hell away from me,” he said. “If I find either of them loose or rough-handling my employees, I will put a bullet in your head.” He smiled again at Neds. “Both of them.”
“We won’t be trouble if you don’t make us trouble,” Right Ned said.
Slip walked over to Lucky and kicked him. “Pick yourself up.”
To my surprise, Lucky moaned and dragged himself up on his feet.
Abraham must have been holding back.
Or too wounded to kill him quick.
“You get us to Kansas,” Right Ned said, “and we’ll be gone.” He gestured for Abraham and me to follow him into the train car. Abraham didn’t look at me, but he shifted as if to cover our retreat, glaring at Slip and Lucky. I followed Neds.
The inside of the train was
a lot smaller than I’d hoped. The back half was filled with unmarked crates stacked almost up to the ceiling. I had no idea what was in them. The front half of the car had a couple cots folded and leaning up against the wall, plus two folded chairs and a wooden bench.
It smelled like pears and cedar, which was a lot better than I’d been expecting it to smell.
Abraham finally stepped into the train behind us.
The doors sealed and locked with an electrical whine. Even if we wanted to get out, we couldn’t. Well, we could try crushing the train like an empty can, but I didn’t think either Abraham or I had that in us right at the moment, no matter what Neds had said.
“He’s an ass,” I observed to no one in particular. The bullets in my thigh, arm, and maybe one in my hip were really starting to hurt now.
Quinten and Gloria were setting up a cot in the back of the car.
“Anyone claiming this chair?” I picked up a chair made mostly of plastic and set it with the back against one wall. That left room for another cot on the side and the rest of the chairs to be set up in the remaining middle space.
I lowered myself into the chair and cussed. “This has been a crappy day.”
“We’re not dead,” Right Ned noted.
“Yet,” Left Ned added.
“Gold star for optimism,” I said.
“Matilda?” Quinten straightened and stepped over to me. “Let me look at your wounds.”
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“Let me make sure of that.”
Abraham moved to the back of the train car, the width of him taking all the spare room of the place as he passed by. He settled onto the cot with a grunt.
“Abraham is much worse—” I started.
“Gloria is tending him.” Quinten knelt in front of me and shrugged out of his duffel. “I’ll check on him after I tend you.” From the very steady, very calm tone of his voice, I could tell he was trying not to sound very worried.
“How much blood am I leaking?”
“Enough,” he said.
I glanced down at my leg.
Wow, that was a lot of blood.
