by T. K. Malone
Teah sat and watched him. It was an odd town, that was for sure. Grid folk were so easy to fathom. They had their gripes and their moans, their celebrations—be it promotion, a raise in credits, or their birthday. Between the two, though, there wasn’t much more—unless you got into the gutter, into the darker side of the cities, and then folk started getting interesting. Out here, though, they were more complex than that. So many more layers underneath, so many flaws waiting to be discovered, and lately, with Saggers and now Trip, so much strength too. Lester had had layers despite his origins, she knew that, but she’d only managed to peel away a few before he’d given up the fight. She wished, not for the first time, that she’d learned more about him, about the stiff that had been allowed to leave.
“Say, Trip,” she shouted.
“What’s up?” and now he was sweeping over the grave and tamping it down. He kicked a few stones and bottles around. “That should do it. Could do with some rain, mind.” He hopped back over the parapet and went behind the bar. “Come on, sit over here, just like he never bloody came in. I was enjoying our chat before that dick interrupted us.”
She joined him, picking up the stools and sitting on one, her feet on the other. She stuck the cattleman on her head and lit a celebratory smoke. “So, you gonna answer?”
“Answer what?”
“Why’d you kill him? Why not just let me?”
“That? Thought I told you. He was a bastard to me, growing up. A right bastard. ‘Sides, way I look at it, if I’d have let you kill him, I’d have had a bit of a problem.”
She tilted her hat back and raised her eyebrows as she muttered, “Do tell.”
He leaned on the counter, picked up his cloth and draped it over his shoulder. “If you’d have finished him off, two things could have happened. Either I’d snitch on you to the folk here, to the folk in Morton, and have you run out of town—and that would have been your best option. The other one, well, I could have hung it over your head like a commuted sentence and used you, and then one of two things could have happened.”
“Two again?”
He nodded. “Always two up here. Two outcomes, Teah; another two. The first is that I’d have had to kill you eventually, and I’d have had to do that to stop the second event.”
“And that would have been?” She knew the answer, but wanted to hear him say it.
He poured another couple of whiskeys. “That you would get sick of me knowing, get sick of me almost using the information, only to pull back at the last minute. And sooner or later, you’d have tried to kill me.” He stopped talking and held her stare. She said nothing, sensing he hadn’t quite finished. “That about right? I’m guessing that’s about right.”
Teah nodded, slowly, and pulled her hat down. Leaning on the bar, she pushed her glass around some. “And now?”
“Don’t say much, do you?”
She moved her finger around the top of her glass, fast at first but then slowing. “Words can get in the way of you learning things about folk. Right now, you’re telling me who you are. Known you near seven years, Trip, and now I’m getting to know you. Why would I want to interrupt?”
He scratched his chin. “Fair enough. Well, I pulped Ray’s head for one reason, and one reason alone: now we’re in it together. You nigh on killed him—brought him down, disabled him, if you will, and I put him out of his misery. You dug the hole and I filled it in. All in all, we’re both responsible, we’re both culpable, and I guess we’re both in it together now.” He lit a smoke. “I watched you walk toward him with that rock and thought—”
“You thought all that while I walked toward him?”
He took a draw of his smoke. “No. At the time, I just wanted to crush his head, to stamp it to a pulp, and I didn’t want you to have all the fun. Thought of that load of horseshit while you were digging the hole, but here’s the thing—I wish that’s what I’d meant to do.”
“Be in it together?”
“Yeah.”
“Then that’s what it is,” she said, and tipped her cattleman back up, her mind made up on Trip.
“So, are we going to get our story straight?” he asked.
“Story? Best story is no story. Trust me, I should know. I operated in the grayer areas of the Black City. Imagine if Ray had never come here, if we’d just sat and chatted, what story would you need to tell?”
Trip smiled, clearly cottoning on fast.
“Just so long as no one sees the grave and the blood ‘n mush on the wall,” at which Trip pointed.
“You wanna scrub it down?”
“Hell no.”
Teah took a slug of her drink. “Me neither. Again, no story. Anyone says anything, you just notice that shit for the first time.”
“Suits me. Say, what’s it like in the city?”
Teah thought about it. The city was just the city to her. Some folk played by the rules and worked like proles, some claimed to play by the rules and didn’t. Some were out and out saints, and others, sinners. For every regulation The Free World threw at them, be it abolishing money, introducing personal trackers, VPAs, or whatever, there were those who got around it, those who bent the rules. Funny thing was, the stiffs came down hard on the poor buggers who tried to comply but had fallen afoul of some regulation or other. And all the while, a little way away from the city center, not a hundred yards sometimes, someone got butchered and no one cared.
“Unfair,” she said. “That’s what it’s like; unfair.”
Trip looked bemused. “And it ain’t unfair out here? Ain’t unfair that Hannah gets a beating? Ain’t unfair that Saggers was messed up by his father? Or ain’t it unfair that I didn’t even have one? But you grew up in the city, you had folk around you all the time. Folk you grew up with, same age an’ that. Friends.”
“Yep,” and Teah pushed her glass forward and raised it, to signal more. Yes, she had friends, she thought, as close to a family as you got, but the job, life, circumstance had all pushed them to the margins. Nonessential to daily life and so discarded. The city did that to people—made them surplus to requirements. The rush to live just stopped you living. She’d understood that the minute she’d come among the redwoods. “I had friends, but I never let them get to know me,” and that was the truth of it, and now she’d lost them, all of them, for good. She looked at Trip, but he was staring at the sky.
“What the heck are they?”
Teah followed his gaze. At first she couldn’t see what he was looking at, the dark blue of the cloudless night sky exactly as she’d expected. The hills and the trees that shrouded them all looked peaceful, but then she saw them. Like shooting stars, but streaking up into the sky, their elongated glows shrunk to spots of light as they rose yet farther still. And more emerged, one after another. Teah picked up her glass, her hands shaking, her mind comprehending but not believing. She emptied the glass in one go and stared back at the sky, Lester’s heavy air of trepidation all about her as beads of sweat popped onto her brow.
Still the lights rose, higher and higher as they streaked off into the distance, and Teah watched, mouth agape.
“What d’ya reckon they are, then?” Trip asked.
“Them? They’re the end.”
Something snapped in Teah, some motherly instinct that made her think of Clay. She jumped off the stool and made to run, but hesitated. Trip was still staring up. “Quick,” she shouted, “come on. Come with me.”
But he seemed rooted to the spot, until he muttered, “They nukes?”
11
Connor’s story
Strike time: minus 60 minutes
Location: Black City
The sky was black with drones funneling into the streets like a swarm of locusts. Connor looked up at them as they flew over, some stopping and hovering, black windows sliding open, hands reaching out. It only took the mere mention of an imminent apocalypse to get folk panic buying, he thought, but he couldn’t work out why they bothered. If it did all kick off, then there wasn’t goin
g to be a tomorrow—so why stock up for one?
Some, he guessed, just wanted to max out their credit line and fry owing a tidy sum to those who’d made it happen. Fair play, though he wasn’t convinced they wouldn’t just wake up broke. Connor, however, was feeling fairly pleased with himself. He’d lined up a nice little meal with the gorgeous Polly, a resident of the block across the street from him, and nothing, threat of apocalypse or no, would ruin his night. That was nothing other than his brother.
He ducked off Sixty-Seventh Street and into a narrow side road, turned down his collar and took a moment to compose himself. The Free World monitored the grid with a microscopic attention to detail. Ten square miles of identical black tower blocks, each evenly spaced from the next, each numbered by its position, and home to almost nine million people. But they weren’t so careful just off it.
He took a breath. The contrast of the uniform towers with what he now looked at always did this to him, the black immediately vanishing in favor of gray. Old gray concrete buildings that had had their time but were still needed. Every little utopia, he thought, demanded a slave to keep it fed, and the few mile radius outside the grid was certainly that. There were four sectors: docks, manufacturing, micro farms, and maintenance. This one was maintenance, and this one was the worst—the most run down, the forgotten one, the one that perfectly suited his brother.
There was something about the threat of imminent death that always got Connor thinking about family, and as Zac was all he had left, so Zac was going to get the call. He knew his brother hated him visiting, knew he despised him or his choice of work, or something. Their relationship hadn’t been the same, not since the incident in the tunnels, not since Teah had gone.
He’d always thought that sequence of events had been strange. Teah: the stiff who’d rescued him from the tunnels. Teah, the stiff who’d fallen into an unlikely relationship with his brother, a brother who ran an illegal bar not more than a few hundred yards from the grid. Connor only really remembered the outcome. How it had happened was just a fog. Even Sable, his VPA: Virtual Personnel Assistant, and his only friend, hadn’t accessed that part of his mind.
For just a fleeting moment, Connor smiled. It felt good to be away from the grid, it always did, but that feeling was only ever brief. He moved in different circles now. Deep down, though, he knew he didn’t fit in there, either. Deep down, he understood there was something false about his life. It was like an itch within him, one he couldn’t scratch, neither here nor in the grid.
He walked down the empty road now under an empty sky, no drones and no cars murmuring past. Maintenance, who needed that now? Zac’s bar was no more than a few hundred yards farther on, and Connor soon arrived.
Zac was behind the counter, a long steel affair with a tread plate for a front. A checkered cloth hung over his shoulder, his own little protest against air dryers. “Full of bugs” he’d say. Zac was odd, very odd. He looked up but didn’t smile, didn’t even say “hello”. His bloated face spoke of a lifetime on the drink. Early thirties going on late fifties, he probably wouldn’t give a toss if the world was blown sky high in the next few hours. Probably wouldn’t even notice.
“Ya’ll right there, Connor,” he eventually said, and immediately dumped a tumbler in front of himself. “You still off the booze?” he asked, pouring out a hearty whiskey.
Connor immediately regretted his visit, as he always did. Nodding, he pulled up a stool. There were two more sitting at the bar. One he knew—Billy Flynn, but the other he didn’t recognize. Big brothers always made you feel small, but Billy Flynn made everyone feel that way; he was a giant.
“You know I can’t drink while I work for them,” Connor muttered. Zac laughed and pushed a pack of cigarettes over to him. Connor didn’t take one out, just pocketed them for later. They were low yield; he knew that. Zac got them smuggled in especially, so gridders could smoke and still register as clean.
Zac leaned on the bar, his ruddy nose not an inch from Connor’s. “And how are they going to know if yea have a little drink?”
Rolling up his sleeve, Connor showed him his monitor. It lit up his arm with LED green, blinking under the skin. “Green means clean; one beer will change the color for a day,” Connor said, dissatisfaction in his voice—it was just some little dance they had to go through every time he visited.
“I had one of them once,” said the other bloke at the bar, a hunched-up drunk with nowhere else to go. “Ripped it out.”
“Knock it off, Pat,” said Zac, “you’ve done squat in your life that would hurt you, apart from the cigs and the sauce.”
“So, I heard you on the radio today, Connor,” said Billy Flynn. “The voice of The Free World, that’s your brother, Zac. The voice of The Free World.”
“Free fucking World,” Zac muttered.
“Is Crime gonna do it this time, eh? Is he man enough to press the big button?” Billy asked Connor.
Connor rolled his eyes at Billy’s use of Oster Prime’s pathetic moniker. Oster Prime: their fearless leader. Leader of The Free World of the Americas and Australasia, his nickname only ever whispered within the illegal bars the length and breadth of The Free World, and never within the grid.
“Would you like to see it?” Connor asked Billy. “Would you like to see him wipe out them Cossacks?”
“I’d sure like to think our guy had the nuts,” Billy said.
“He ain’t got the nuts,” muttered Zac. “Nor’s the Rusky. They’re just playin’ with your shit.” He tapped his temple. “Keeps you scared, brother of mine; scared. And when you’re scared, what do you do?”
“Comply,” Connor said, his voice sounding as bored as he was. Why? Why did I come down here? Why did I have the itch? he silently asked himself.
“Right,” said Billy Flynn, then smiled that devious smile of his. “Stops you joining the opposition—you weren’t thinking of joining them were you?”
“He could be their spokesman,” added the hunched drunk, with a grin. “The voice of… what are they called? The opposition, what are they called?” but no one took any notice of him.
“Aye,” said Zac, “’cept Charm pounded them to hell ‘n back. My brother— all alone; the last dissident.”
“Crazy times,” said the hunched drunk, and Zac topped up his own ever-empty tumbler. Connor ached for that drink, wished he could drown out the conversation. In fact, block out the last ten minutes or so in their entirety.
“It’s all shit news designed to keep you shitting yourself,” said Zac, and he drained his tumbler again. “Which one’s got the nads to punch the button? I think Prime would do it.”
Connor sighed; he’d heard the conversation before—more than once. It was what they thought, down here, away from the real world, in this shadowy one they lived in. It was a simple philosophy. While they didn’t go along with the politics, they knew the score. As long as their guy was bigger, meaner and braver than the other, they were safe; they were on the winning side.
He thought they were closer to the truth with the “scared theory”. Oster Prime wasn’t the usual sort of leader. He’d been swept to power when Europe had been laid waste. “Good riddance to the place” a lot had said. “Nothing but a festering bed of extremism” a lot of them had said. But some, some had seen the line the Soviets had crossed. They weren’t scared to press the button, so The Free World had elected someone who wouldn’t be, either. Now, Connor thought, everyone just waited, waited for the inevitable.
“So what are you up to on this final night of your life, my little brother? Or should I say ‘Who are you up?’,” and he laughed, as did Billy, and as did the hunched drunk.
Connor sat still, his arms on the bar, his feet on the stool, but his heart was homeless, stuck somewhere between this place and the synthetic paradise in which he lived. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing—the end—he thought. Either way, he was done here. He’d muttered his penance and thumbed its metaphorical beads, and so he jumped off his stool.
“Going so soon, Connor?” said Zac.
“Was just here to say goodbye—just in case.”
“Do you know something we don’t?” asked Billy Flynn.
“I just play them tunes and say what I’m told to say,” he said, and turned.
“All a load of crap,” said the hunched drunk.
“Goodbye, brother of mine,” shouted Zac. “And don’t worry about it all. He ain’t got them stones.”
Connor cursed as the door slammed shut behind him. Not ten minutes—fifteen tops—and he’d now need a month of therapy to get over it. Not that it mattered, he scoffed inwardly. His therapist was a constant companion, and he called her Sable. She was his shrink, his assistant, his diary, and his doctor. She was also his navigator, communicator, reader, strategist, and his banker and motivator, not to mention his monitor. She was in his head one hundred percent of the time. She knew his fears, his aspirations and dreams, and his shortfalls. Subliminally, she’d already be healing his ego.
Maybe it was just a ritual, he wondered. Something he had to go through every now and then to appreciate how far he’d come? Sable would say stuff like that to him. Then again, sometimes even she didn’t bother, knew his mood better than he did. Connor pulled his collar back up. More than likely it was just the black market smokes, more than likely that was why he visited.
Connor turned onto the grid again and rejoined The Free World, slotting into the machine. Smiling, he decided to focus on his up-and-coming date, and not for the first time, wondered if Sable ever got jealous. That got him to pondering if it would count as a threesome, which amused him as he walked to The Free World Bar And Grill, the one on Fifty-Sixth Avenue. Not that it mattered which one he chose; they were all identical.
