Dead Man Dreaming

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  The look of defeated terror on Pritchard’s face indicated that Lucia’s impressions were likely correct. Roland leaned over the downed man and stared as if lost in thought. Then, with a decision made, he looked back to his partner. “I really want to kill him, Lucia.”

  “I can’t stop you. But it’s probably a bad call, big guy. Mind if I try something?”

  “He just threatened the only good cop in Dockside. That kind of sets me off. If your idea doesn’t work, I’m probably going to kill him. Sorry.”

  “I understand,” she said calmly. Then to Pritchard she asked, “You know who we are?”

  Lonnie nodded, too afraid to talk.

  “Do you know who The Dwarf is? And Billy McGinty?”

  Another nod.

  “Good. Now listen carefully. I can have The Dwarf call in every marker he has with your department before the sun comes up. I can have Billy kill the supply of blaze that gets kicked back to you guys just as fast. If that isn’t enough, I can call Gateways and have them swamp the docks with security and private investigators any time I want to.” She knelt down to look the man in his bleary eyes. “Now, I could also let Roland tear you apart and send you back to your lieutenant in a very small box if that’s what tickles my fancy. This is how things used to work around here. I get it.”

  With one hand she hauled the dazed detective to his feet and stood him up. Then she began adjusting his disheveled coat and straightening his rumpled shirt. “But things are different now, detective. So I want you to go back to ‘they’ and tell them that Detective Parker is off limits. Dockside has some new rules, you see. If the PD wants to be part of the community they can play by them like everyone else does. Because, you stupid flatfooted asshole, I can break your department with three comm calls any time I want to. As far as Dockside PD is concerned, I run this town, now. We clear?”

  Lonnie was not sure if they were, but he nodded anyway.

  Lucia smiled. “Good. Now what is your job?”

  “I gotta tell everyone to leave Parker alone or you will fuck up the whole department.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  Pritchard felt the sting of panic. “I think so?”

  “You better,” Roland rumbled. “If you don’t like it her way, we can always try mine.”

  “I believe you! I believe you!” Pritchard sounded sincere this time.

  “Who runs Dockside?” Roland asked, finally sounding like he was enjoying himself.

  “She does,” Lonnie said, pointing at the terrifying woman.

  “And don’t you forget it,” added Lucia. “Now go.”

  The detective turned and ran. It was a sloppy, ataxic, and staggering flight. Devoid of grace and dignity, the broken cop fled into the shadows a far different person than he had been mere moments before.

  Lucia watched him go to make sure he was really gone, then turned to Roland. “See? My way works better.”

  His reply was a question. “You run this town?”

  “Don’t I?” she replied, all innocence.

  “I thought we agreed you would not become an underworld power broker.”

  “I thought we agreed you wouldn’t just kill people who pissed you off.” At this her expression changed. “What set you off just then, anyway? I know you hate dirty cops but that felt excessive, even by your standards.”

  “When I first came here, there were two guys who took a chance on me. I was pretty messed up then. Still too much bad stuff in my head, you know?” His head sank, burying his face in ugly blue and black shadows. “Well, these two didn’t write me off as just another thug, they treated me like a regular person with a soul and everything. One was a cop. The only good cop in Dockside at the time. A goddamn anachronism is what he was. Anyway, someone killed him because he kept trying to solve crimes instead of participating in them. He died right in front of my apartment, not fifty feet from where Granovich is laying right now.”

  Lucia nodded, understanding. “And the other one is under a sheet with half his head missing.” She wrapped her arm around his and pulled herself into him. “I guess old Lonnie really did not pick his moment very well, did he?”

  “He did not.”

  “You okay now?”

  The big man straightened and rolled his shoulders. “Yeah. I’m all right. Let’s hope your little show worked, because we have work to do and battling the cops won’t make it any easier.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The killer dreamed.

  He was not supposed to dream. He was not even sure if his current state could be considered sleeping, so he remained unsure that this experience was technically a dream at all. It felt like a dream, and he lacked the philosophical and intellectual sophistication necessary to allow him to explore other possibilities. So as far as he was concerned, this was a dream.

  In his dream, he was dead. Perhaps it was not really him, but the him he was in his dream was dead. Of this he felt certain. It was a weird thing to be dead. Again, his lack of imagination limited his chances of ever truly comprehending the situation. All the same, he knew he was dead and his spirit was floating away without a body and this felt strange. He could distinctly remember having a body, which was not surprising. Bodies were important, after all. However, if he focused on that memory, he found himself positive he could remember having several bodies. This was as messed up a thing as being dead was. No one could have more than one body, this he was certain of as well. But if he did in fact dream, anything could be true. Dreams were known to be weird like that.

  One body had been lean and handsome with dark hair and dark eyes. This was his first body, his favorite. It was the body he had grown up with, the only body he remembered having as a child. It was his familiar, comfortable body. He had liked it very much. Then there was the other one, the bigger and stronger body. He had liked that one too. Maybe not as much as the original, but it was powerful in a way the first one could never be. Alas, both bodies were gone now, because the killer was dead and floating away on a swirling blue-black sea of vapor. Where his ethereal form flowed to he could not say, and this annoyed him. Was he going to heaven? That seemed unlikely; he did not even believe in heaven. Or did he? He could not recall if he believed or not, and trying to figure it out confused him even more. Nonna had believed in heaven, but he was far too educated to fall for such nonsense. Where had he gone to school again? Why did he not remember school? He remembered drab lectures on math and economics, but he could not actually picture the school in his mind. This also conflicted with his very vivid recollection of leaving school at thirteen. How could he have dropped out at thirteen yet still have a college education?

  Confusion pressed against his disjointed consciousness, getting him lost in memories and impressions he could not reconcile. He was a contract killer, yet also an enforcer. He was both a criminal mastermind and a Galapagos mercenary at the same time. There were too many lives to remember in this dream. Whispers of a thousand experiences, contrasting memories both fantastical and impossible flashed across his dreaming eyes. Competing clips of personal insights the killer did not remember acquiring played for dominance in the theater of his imagination. Now fear began to poke at the edges of his dream, unraveling his unconscious mind and digging into his memory like a dog flinging sand at the beach. Deeper and deeper the fear penetrated, though the hole it made ultimately led nowhere. It was as if underneath all these different experiences lay nothing at all. Like his brain was a patchwork cloak of dim impressions draped over a wire frame mannequin. If you tore the cloak away, all you would find was the ugly and incomplete facsimile of a person.

  The dream was becoming a nightmare. The disembodied mind of the killer began to flail against the blackness in seizures of impotent terror. He could not bear to think he might be a dead man buried inside a construct made of other people’s lives. The killer was not ready to be nothing more than the mannequin upon which a cloak had been placed. A thought came to him then, in the moment before his mind succumbed to the mo
unting panic and horror. It was something that someone had told him. An important thing, and he clutched at it like a drowning man grabbing a rope.

  Dead men don’t dream.

  His brother had told him that. He trusted his brother. His brother was his closest friend, and his brother would always help him. He was dreaming, and that meant he could not be dead.

  He was not dead, he realized.

  Lost, to be sure. But he lived still and as long as he lived he could fight. Fighting he knew how do to. This thought pulled another memory to the front of his fractured thoughts. Though it hurt more than any other, this became the rope that saved a drowning man.

  Nico could not dream. His brother was dead. Killed by that fixer in The Dwarf’s stupid bar.

  Now the drowning man ascended, pulling himself hand over hand, dragging incomplete consciousness through the sea of false memories with one bloody fist after the other. The others were still there to try and shove him back down, wailing ghosts of other people struggling to assert themselves. His grip was too good to slip now, for he loved his brother more than anything else. Nonna had always told them to look after each other, that twins were special and blessed by God to be two bodies with the one soul.

  His clarity improved as he forced himself to relive the death. The memory of his horror sliced through the dream, tearing past the noise as only acute trauma could. Where every other memory simmered in a fuzzy and indistinct haze, this one was perceived in vivid color and excruciating detail. His weapon lay in his hand, black and heavy and cool to the touch. The grip was comfortable and familiar, and the motion of raising it practiced to the point of instinct. He pressed the gun forward to fire at the giant black monster, framing the barrel within the black mass of the fixer’s silhouette. He did not look through the sights; he never did at this range. He focused on the target and getting a good clean trigger pull like he had been taught. At this distance it was no different pointing your finger and all too easy a thing at that. At the exact moment he pressed the trigger, Nico’s flying body filled his field of vision. He had tried to halt the motion as it happened, tried to prevent the gun from going off. Even in his dream it was impossible. The familiar flash of light from the muzzle and the comforting shove of recoil driving the grip into his palm heralded the death of his brother.

  The deed was done and there was no stopping the bead once it had begun its journey. He had to watch the fiery orange projectile punch through his own brother’s chest and spray blood against the barroom as it exited his back in a crimson geyser. Then the still-bleeding corpse had struck him in the face and drove him to the floor with a bone-jarring crash.

  The killer was surprised to find the other voices in his dream now silent. Then he really listened and realized this was wrong. They were not silent. They were drowned out by the sheer volume of emotion the memory of his brother’s death brought forth. The fog-filled blackness of his dream vibrated with a roar like a crashing river, the ephemeral blood pounding in his disembodied ears. Even in death his brother took care of him, keeping the other voices at bay for just a moment. It gave enough respite for the killer to have a single epiphany, so he made it a good one.

  He was Chico Garibaldi, and he was getting the hell out of this nightmare.

  He had no eyelids to flutter open, so the technician monitoring his down-cycle had no immediate indication the killer was awake. If that man had been paying attention to the telemetry, he would have had plenty of time to watch Chico’s nightmare play out across the assorted diagnostics. Maybe it would have been interesting enough for him to call for the doctor, or maybe he would have shrugged and continued on with the hard work of watching pornographic holovids on his DataPad.

  The question would remain forever unanswered because he had not been paying attention. Entranced by the gyrations of the people on his screen during Chico’s internal struggle, he had missed all those potential warning signs. The killer lay under a thin plastic sheet to keep dust off his optics, and watching an inert cyborg sleep on a slab under plastic wrap was simply not enough excitement to hold the attention of an underpaid lab tech.

  The screeching of several electronic alarms quickly set the man’s attention back to his appointed task. His gaze went to the now moving thing on the slab and fear gripped his doughy frame with fingers of ice. The killer was rising from his resting place, and that was not supposed to happen.

  The plastic sheet slid from Chico Garibaldi’s naked body and slipped to the floor without making a sound. Gray and black cybernetic legs swung to the side of the slab and Chico slid to his feet with the “click-clack” of metal toes against the pale tile. There was a stumble, a shift in his hips as the legs that had made him so fast and agile just the night before suddenly felt foreign and heavy. His recovery was almost instantaneous, and he was against the viewing glass a second later. He pressed his palms to the panel and sneered at the terrified lab tech inside, watching with glee as the stammering man punched frantic codes into his terminal.

  Chico rested his forehead against the window, smiling a crooked smirk and letting the mirrored black facets of his eyes do the job of furthering the man’s panic. “Hello, little boy.” It was a taunt, cruel and malevolent. The lab tech mashed buttons harder and shouted into his comm, giving a clear indication that the effect was as intended. “Knock knock,” Chico sang as the elongated toes on his right foot curled and drove into the tiles beneath him. The ceramic squares cracked and buckled, allowing the digits to burrow deep and anchor his foot against the floor. Satisfied with his grip, Chico leaned back and drove his right fist into the polycarbonate observation screen.

  He lacked sufficient mass to break the panel under normal conditions. Even with the fantastic strength of his arms, he would only hurl himself backward if he struck something much heavier than himself. The physics of augmented combat could be a tricky thing for the uninitiated. But his right foot was as planted as any oak tree, and this served to add the mass of the building to his own. Chico did not know why or how he knew to do this first. He had no recollection of where this knowledge had come from, but now aware of it he found it a welcome thing.

  The clear panel yielded to Newton’s strictures with an explosion of white dust and pointed shrapnel. The lab tech tumbled from his stool and then to the floor as the naked black-eyed monster followed his punch with a leap that took him through the jagged opening. He landed astride the sobbing man, a metal foot to each side of his stammering face.

  Chico shook his head in a show of disappointment. “You were supposed to say, ‘who’s there?’”

  “Don’t kill me!” the technician blubbered, covering his head with his arms and keeping his eyes closed tightly. “Oh God! Don’t kill me!”

  “Kids these days.” Chico clamped a gray-black hand over the technician’s face, and pulled the gasping man upward. “No manners at all!” He shoved the head into the featureless white expanse of the wall hard enough to buckle the thin panel. A muffled scream bled out from beneath his palm, and he tried to silence it with another rough shove into the wall. The scream turned to a gurgle, and this irritated Chico more than the scream had. Like a jackhammer, he slammed the technician’s skull into the wall rapid-fire, a dozen hits in less than three seconds. He did not stop until no skull remained to hold and the lifeless, nearly-decapitated body slipped from his grip to slide down the blood-spattered wall. It collected in a wet heap at his feet and Chico found himself panting like an animal despite feeling no exertion.

  A voice boomed behind him in a clear, authoritative baritone. “Waterloo.”

  Chico jerked at the sound. He knew that word. It was a word they had used to shut down his cybernetics when they acted up. Some part of him suspected it would not work this time, and true enough it did not. He spun, facing the source of the command and finding a tall man in a dark suit standing in the doorway.

  “Sorry about the kid,” Chico smiled affably. “But he didn’t say ‘please.’”

  The suited man leapt at Chico, v
ery nearly surprising him. Chico caught him by the throat and lifted him from the floor. “You sure you wanna try that, pal?”

  The man in the suit said nothing, rather he drove a foot into Chico’s chest with far more force than the killer may have thought possible. The cyborg winced and threw the man away with enough strength to kill, but his enemy twisted in the air to land in a graceful crouch. Grimacing with pain, Chico charged. The man in the suit rose to meet him, and now the killer was beginning to nurse some suspicions of his own about this opponent.

  Chico had never been much of a physical fighter. He was a triggerman to his core, and never felt truly dangerous without a gun in his hand. As he met his foe in the middle of the room, however, his hands and feet seemed to move of their own accord. He punched, kicked, slipped and parried like he had been born in the ring. Whether it was the fundamentals of good footwork or the intricate timing of a counter left-hook, Chico felt the rhythm and technique of it all come as naturally as breathing. He saw what his body was doing, and he knew his body was doing things it should not know how to do. Worse, it did not feel like he was the one doing it. There was an uncomfortable familiarity with it all, packaged with a strange detachment. It was the sort of transformative experience a highly developed philosophical mind would want to explore in great depth.

  No such minds were present, and true to his nature Chico was content to let the stranger in his head beat the crap out of the jerk in the suit. He was not sure what he was fighting, but it was stronger than any man he knew and nearly as fast as he was. The man in the suit was relentless and skilled, that much anyone could see. Yet whoever was driving Chico’s body through this fight saw the flaws in his style very early on.

  The suited man attacked constantly, employing powerful linear techniques. The footwork and positioning were consistently strategic, but lacking in both style and imagination. Without knowing why, Chico slipped into a more circular pattern, attacking at angles to the man in the suit’s straightforward assaults. His foe did not adjust in time, and in short order Chico had delivered two crushing overhand rights to his head, sending his foe staggering into the wall with enough force to buckle a panel. Those punches should have been fatal, yet the man in the suit rose unfazed. This was no ordinary enemy, and another disembodied impression from the killer’s subconscious warned him that every second spent battling this thing eroded Chico’s chances of escaping the laboratory.