Noir

by K. W. Jeter

  She weighed her options. Even though she already knew what she was going to do; she moved away from the front of the hotel, the lobby behind the shattered windows mainly ashes now, interspersed with charred corpses. The fire was still traveling upward through the building’s floors; even if McNihil managed to hang on to the fire escape outside, he’d either be fatally burnt or in the skin-graft ward of a hospital for so long that his usefulness to her would be zero. He was her door-though he didn’t know it yet-into the whole business with Harrisch and the dead Travelt, so he had to be preserved awhile longer. Once she had walked through that door and gotten to the other side, then it would be just as well if he was off the scene, crisped or in a box, it didn’t matter which. But until then…

  Stepping over the writhing bodies, a vision came to November unbidden, of the strictures of form and identity dissolving, the prisoning matter of the city’s heart reverting to some premammalian coitus. The way, she thought, that fish and things that swim around in the ocean do it. Enough cheap black leather, rags and ancient thrift-store finery, jointed crutches and small sharp-pointed weapons, had been shed that skin could be sluiced to some infantile purity by the liquefying foam. The distinction between one body and another was erased, the membrane between the body’s interior and the soft outside world forgotten; she almost envied them. Or it. November supposed it was the oncoming tide of the future, humans finally having gotten tired of bones and jobs to do. She just hadn’t reached that stage yet.

  Thinking diminished her attention for a moment, just long enough for a hand to snare her ankle. She fell, hands quickly bracing and catching herself against the white-smeared curb. November rolled onto her back, seeing some wide-eyed, happily grinning face. Which received the heel of her boot at the bridge of his nose; the bare-chested figure toppled backward unconscious and was subsumed into the general mass.

  For a moment longer, she couldn’t get up; the foamed street was too slick for her scrabbling hands to get a purchase on. Other hands, without specific intent, clutched at her, limbs and shining torsos pressing at all sides. A breath-stopping panic rose in her, flooding out all thoughts but of escape. A generalized terror, the sense of her own boundaries melting away, the result a horrifying connectedness; this was what she had run from all her life. Even her brief moments of coition aboard the circle’s trains, with the glittery-eyed businessmen in the private spaces between cars-no linkage in those encounters, but instead a sharper sense of the alien, the penetration of the other. The pharmaceuticals she slid beneath the resealable patch of her skin; those packets were always laced with enough amphetamine to render the division between herself and the world as sharp as a razor, even while her higher brain functions were opiated down to lust.

  Twisting onto her side, November reached past the wet forms around her and managed to grab the sidewalk’s curb; black ashes slid beneath her fingertips as she clawed her nails into the cracked cement. The foam clutched at her like some reluctantly yielding amniotic fluid; she slowly managed to push herself, shoulders-first, against the base of one of the building’s walls. Her legs curled beneath her in a belated fetal posture, the ankles of her boots just out of reach of the conjoined organism in the streets.

  Bracing herself against the smoke-stained bricks, November got to her feet. Her breath returned to her lungs. Time had come to a halt, the line between one second and the next as meaningless as any other division; she had no idea how long she’d been out there. She tilted her head back, wiping a white residue from her eyes, wondering if the distant McNihil was still alive. The figure on the tilting fire escape was there, holding on to both the trophy container and the creaking iron structure. As she watched, another pair of the heavy fastening bolts worked their way free, dropping to the sidewalk a couple of meters away from her. The fire escape, continuing its slow disintegration, peeled its higher sections farther from the building.

  The flames and smoke billowing from the shattered windows, close enough to singe McNihil’s trouser legs, indicated that there would still be no path up through the hotel. One building over, an empty storefront had been touched less by the fire; past the boards and torn-aside plywood barriers, the street-level interior held a few smoldering display counters and shelving units. November kicked one obstructing board loose, then ducked her head beneath the next one up and pushed her way inside.

  A long sprint up the building’s dark stairwell had brought November to the rooftop. An easy leap landed her on hands and knees, on top of the hotel. The peeling sheets of roofing material felt hot against her palms.

  At the rooftop’s edge, she could look out across the foam-drenched street, the extinguished wreckage of the downed airliner rising from the white sea like the empty-eyed ghost of some forgotten technology.

  “McNihil!” Clutching the edge of the roof’s low parapet, she leaned out above the swaying fire escape. “Look up here!” she called again.

  His hold on the fire escape was several stories below; it took a moment for McNihil to realize where the voice was coming from. Without loosening his grip, he tilted his head back and gazed upward. “Who the hell are you?” His face was set hard with suspicion.

  “Right now, I’m your best friend.” Distrustful bastard, thought November. Her eyes stung with the smoke rolling up the side of the building. “Hang on, and I’ll get you out of there.”

  “The connect you will.” Below, McNihil looked around, as though there might be some alternate route off the fire escape. A gout of flame, larger than any before, burst through the shattered window nearest him.

  “For Christ’s sake,” said November disgustedly. “Don’t be an idiot.” She turned away from the parapet-he wasn’t going anywhere, she knew-and scanned the rooftop for something she could use. A thick black cable, an outmoded video or power feed, dangled from a wooden crossbeam at the roof’s center. November reached up and pulled it loose, wrapping a coil several meters long between her hand and bent elbow.

  The cable was long enough to lower a doubled length, knotted into a loop at its end, down to McNihil. “Here’s the deal,” shouted November over the roof’s edge. “Grab it and I’ll brace. You can walk yourself up here.”

  Wind from the fire-department ’copters blew into November’s face and rippled the steaming puddle of water that had collected around her bootsoles, the runoff from her foam-wet clothes. If the FD crews were aware of her and McNihil on the burning hotel, they made no sign of it. The ’copters banked and swooped away, toward a couple of flaring hotspots at the open space’s perimeter.

  She could see McNihil looking over his shoulder, down to the street, as though he was gauging the impact his body would have on the ones below, mired in their dissolving white blanket. Not enough there to safely break his fall; November wondered if the people in the street would even notice when he hit, or whether his hard death would trigger some massive, longed-for climax through the interlinked organism they had created.

  McNihil looked at the black cable dangling near him, then back up at her. “Why’re you doing this?”

  “I’m a public-spirited citizen.” November shook her head in disbelief. “What the connect does it matter?”

  “Yeah, right.” McNihil made no attempt to grab the cable. “And you just happen to know my name.”

  It’d been the first time she’d spoken his name aloud, when she had called to him from over the parapet. Though she had thought McNihil’s name enough times inside her head. November had realized it’d been a mistake, as soon as the three syllables had escaped her lips; she couldn’t bring them back, but she’d been hoping that, given his current circumstances, the significance would’ve zipped right by him. That she knew who he was, when he was supposed to be going about his asp-head business all incognito.

  “All right,” said November. So it hadn’t gotten past him. “I want to talk to you. Is that okay? There’s some things we need to discuss, you and I.”

  “People who want to talk to me, they can make an appointment.” Mc
Nihil seemed unperturbed by the grinding metal joints and swaying of the fire escape. “You know my name, you should have my phone number, too.”

  “I do. But this is personal.” She was lying her ass off, but the situation called for improv. “Face-to-face.” The last thing she’d wanted was to talk to the guy, at least right now. “Without anybody listening in.”

  McNihil, arm hooked around the fire escape strut, managed a disdainful laugh. “People who want to go private with me, I’ve found that they rarely have my best interests at heart.”

  That exasperated her even further. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” November’s hands shoved against the edges of the parapet. “If I wanted something bad to happen to you, I’d just leave you where you are. In a couple of minutes, you’re going to be fried anyway-and you’re arguing with me? Jeez.” And asp-heads were supposed to be so connecting smart. “Grab the wire, goddamn it.”

  November figured that it wasn’t her that convinced him, as much as a sudden rush of flame from the window, large and close enough to singe McNihil’s sleeve. The force of it rocked him back against the angled corner of the ladder, the entire vertical length of the fire escape going through a lurching wave. A couple more bolts popped out from the bricks and fell through the smoke to the street below. McNihil let go of the strut on which he’d had a one-handed grip, and seized the dangling black cable beside him.

  “You want to talk?” McNihil shouted up to her. “Then pull, already.”

  The fire escape collapsed, shearing away from the burning hotel, before November had completely braced herself. McNihil’s weight, suddenly unsupported, slammed her hard against the parapet, the doubled cable cutting deep into her palms. She dropped to her knees, to keep from being yanked over the edge of the rooftop. The raised section was just low enough for her to see over, with one shoulder dug into it. The fire escape, shedding pieces of metal as it went, angled above the streets, the loosened joints shifting and breaking apart. In an agony of high-pitched rust, what was left of the structure, its base still fastened to the bottom level of the End Zone Hotel, fell across the copulating bodies in the street. With a shudder that moved outward in concentric rings, the composite organism reacted as November had seen other pale flesh react, stung by the lash. If the extinguishing foam was now flecked with blood, shining black in the night’s partial spectrum, then a small, painful price had been paid for the orgasmic groan that welled up simultaneously from a thousand throats and a single one.

  She paid no attention to that sound; she’d heard it before, if not on quite so large a scale. November, leaning back from the cable tourniqueting both her hands, had managed to get to her feet. The different angle allowed her to see the figure at the other end of the tether, McNihil swinging in a wide arc outward from the building.

  “Grab it with both hands, you jerk!” November shouted to him. “You’re going to fall!”

  McNihil clung stubbornly to the trophy container, its tapered shape pivoting with momentum in his grasp. He reached the apogee of his horizontal arc and came back into the wall, turning so that he landed with both feet in classic rappel position. As November watched, he struggled to pull the trophy container across his bowed chest, until its smaller end had snagged inside the front of his jacket. He shoved the object downward, releasing his grip on it only when the point protruded from his shirt’s bottom hem. The tube was held diagonally across his torso, the larger, bulbous end hard against one side of his face.

  “All right!” McNihil’s shout went past November and into the empty sky. “Hold on!”

  He worked himself up the hotel’s wall, hand over hand on the taut cable. As he approached, November let herself slowly sit back on the rooftop’s tarry surface, her legs locked against the parapet. In the gun-sight V of her crotch, McNihil appeared, convulsively snagging first one arm, then the other, onto the low rise at the building’s edge. The trophy container impeded his being able to kick a leg up onto the parapet; he had to take one hand from the cable and pull the tube out from his shirt, then throw it with a heavy clatter on the roof. With one more heave, he landed sprawling on top of November. The weight knocked the cable loose from her hands, setting it free and slithering over the roof’s edge. She heard, but didn’t see, its impact on the mingled crowd below, the lighter stroke producing the sigh that a lover’s kiss might evoke.

  “Pardon me.” McNihil rolled off her and got to his feet. He strode over and picked up the trophy container, giving it a quick once-over to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged. He seemed satisfied by the inspection. His gaze moved back to her. “Thanks.”

  “Any time.” November pushed herself onto her elbows, then closed and drew up her legs. It had been one of the more strenuous encounters she’d had, in which she’d wound up in more or less this same position. She stood upright, taking a look at her hands. They ached, fingers curling, from the grip she’d had on the cable. She forced her palm open wide, and could see the red numbers there, the ticking away of her accounts. The amount of hours she’d already wasted on this guy irritated her. There wasn’t that much time left now.

  “So you want to talk to me, huh?” A few feet away, McNihil wasn’t even looking at her. He was examining the trophy container again, knocking a few smudges of soot from the object, checking that the seal between the head and the elongated body hadn’t been violated. He smiled when he looked back around at her. “I bet you do.”

  The blow from the back of his hand took November by surprise; she was cursing herself in fury even before she landed sprawling on her back. Before she could pick herself up, one of her outflung wrists was pinned against the rooftop by the sole of McNihil’s shoe. Her vision cleared, and she found herself looking into a black hole inches away from her face. Behind the hole was the familiar shape of a high-caliber weapon, and behind that, McNihil’s outstretched arm pointing down at her. Behind that was his face, no longer smiling.

  Never underestimate these old bastards, vowed November. Now she’d have to find some way to maneuver around him. “What’d you do that for?” she asked. “Fine way to treat somebody who just saved your ass.”

  “It’s how I treat people who follow me around.” The gun looked like some unmoving geological outcropping in McNihil’s fist. “And who don’t do a very good job of it.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Sweetheart, I have blown away people just for coming on all dumb with me.” McNihil could have leaned forward and tapped the gun’s muzzle against her brow. “Figure it out. We’re standing on top of a burning hotel, someplace nobody gives a rat’s ass what happens to it. I can walk off here easily enough. But if the scavengers tomorrow go rooting around through the ashes and they find your bones with a hole drilled through the skull, do you really think anyone will care?”

  She said nothing. Her pinned arm was beginning to ache from the pressure of McNihil’s shoe.

  “What’s your name?”

  No need for lying. “November.”

  “Good enough. There’s so little poetry in our lives nowadays.” McNihil shook his head. “Most of the time, it’s just scrabbling around and pointless subterfuge. Like your tailing me. Like your hanging around whenever I was having my little meetings with Harrisch and his pack of execs.”

  Shit, thought November. She’d been operating under the impression that she’d pulled that one off, that he hadn’t a clue about her keeping tabs, at least up until that engineered train crash. She wondered how much else he knew. The dismaying prospect came to her that he could be completely ahead of her. That he might’ve known that she would be here waiting for him.

  At that moment, an invisible fingertip, with ice under the nail, touched her heart. November looked up at him, with a new understanding and even a degree of admiration. There was a good reason to be afraid of people like him.

  “Okay,” she said. The rooftop was uncomfortably warm beneath her, the tarry surface liquefying and seeping into her jacket. “But I already told you-we
need to talk. And if I hadn’t been following you…” She nodded toward the parapet. “You’d be all over the street by now.”

  In his other hand, McNihil held the trophy container like a staff of office. Smoke billowed behind him, from holes torn in the hotel’s structure. “Talk about what?”

  She didn’t see any need to lie about this, either. “Harrisch, of course. All that stuff he’s leaning on you about. It’s not what you think it is.”

  McNihil laughed. “As if I care. Since he can lean on me all he wants, and I’m still not having anything to do with it.”

  There were also good reasons for feeling sorry for him. He still doesn’t know, thought November. The trap had just about closed tight around him, and he still didn’t feel its teeth.

  Which was just as well for her, she figured. One way or another, she was going to move in on his action. The more connected he wound up, the easier it would be.

  “You know,” said McNihil, peering at her, “I can see the gears turning around inside your head. You’ve got a nice cold attitude, young lady. Most people, their brains stop when they’re staring into something like this.” McNihil tilted the gun a fraction of an inch, letting it catch bright points of light from the flames licking past the roof’s edge. “You could’ve been an asp-head. But there haven’t been a lot of openings posted by the agency lately. That’s kind of a shame.”

  It’s because you’re ancient history. She kept her reply silent. You and all the others. The reasons for the asp-heads’ existence-if there had ever been any-were long gone. Somebody like McNihil could blow away a scamming punk, put his spine and cut-down brain in a long metal jar; big deal. Who needed that anymore? It was what pissed her off about all her own scheming and plotting against McNihil. They should’ve just come to me first, November brooded. Harrisch and his little pack. If they’d done that, instead of thinking they could get some line on their dead colleague by using some old, burnt-out asp-head, they would’ve been off and rolling by now. She could’ve finished the job, found out what they wanted to know-Hell, she thought, I’m already more up-to-speed on what happened to Travelt than this guy could ever be-and pumped the numbers in her palm back up to where they should be. But no, it was never that simple. The standard complaint of freelancers such as herself: you not only had to do the job, you had to get the job first.