by Jeff Somers
The streets thinned out as we headed uptown, and the empty shells of buildings gave way to merely decrepit, sagging old stone structures that should have been blasted away and replaced with the shining new metal ones, except that everything ground to a halt twenty years ago and never quite got started again. Even those shining new buildings uptown were starting to look a little run-down.
The shop was called Tanner’s, and the windows on the street were big and clear and unbroken, filled with the most ludicrous bullshit I’d ever seen. Little figurines, wooden jewelry boxes, crap like that. I felt grimy and dirty, and self-conscious-we’d lost our camouflage and stood out against affluence, even the very edge of affluence. I looked at Gatz and he just shrugged raggedly. I squinted at him.
“When was the last time you ate, man?”
He shook his head. “Food just makes me sick.”
Tanner’s was warm and inviting, filled with all kinds of useless crap. Furniture, lamps, knick-knacks, art pieces lined the walls and tables. There was barely any place to walk. I felt huge, shouldering my way through all the dusty shit, my eyes scanning the ceiling for the obvious security measures. Just as I was wondering where in fuck Milton and Tanner were, I turned a corner and stopped short, finding a tiny, craggy old woman blocking my way, arms akimbo.
“I hope,” she snapped, “that you didn’t come in here thinking to be robbing us, kiddo. You’re on the system, and you wouldn’t get far.”
I smiled. “I look that desperate, eh? To rob this fucking place?”
It was insulting. I was a Gunner. I worked for a living. I didn’t have to steal.
She looked me over from foot to head. “You look like a punk.”
That was insulting. I turned the smile off. “I see the fucking cameras, Mother, and I see the field trips embedded in the walls. I didn’t come here to rob you. Pick suggested your name for a job.”
She shifted her weight slightly and suddenly seemed quizzical, less pissed off. She even smiled a little. “A job? What the hell do I want a job for? Do you have any idea how much money we make with this place?”
I looked around. “This crap sells?”
“It sure does, kid,” a voice came from behind. I turned, startled, and found the same woman standing behind me. She was even standing arms akimbo, and a brief moment of complete confusion shuddered through me. Fucking twins.
“All right,” I said, nodding. “Which one’s Milton and which one’s Tanner?”
The second woman shook her head. “Doesn’t matter.”
The first said, “Come on in the office, then, sonny, and we’ll talk business.”
The second added, “Bring your scabby little friend, too.”
The first, “I don’t trust him out here alone. Sticky-”
The second, “-fingers.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, gesturing at Gatz, who was, indeed, examining some of the shit closely, as if it might profitably disappear into his skeletal hands. “He’s coming. I insist.”
The two women cackled simultaneously, freaking me out. “He thinks-”
“-he’s got-”
“-some pull, like it ain’t us-”
“-that’s got the guns on him!”
I scanned the room again, gritting my teeth against the embarrassment of having to. I didn’t see anything. I looked back at the first one. “No fucking way.”
She sneered at me. “Gunners.”
The back office was plush, carpeted, and climate-controlled, dominated by a huge wall-mounted Vid and two oversized wooden desks, ornately carved, pushed together head-to-head. The twins each took a seat and left Gatz and me standing. I glanced around, shrugged, and shoved a pile of papers off one of the desks with a flourish, hefting myself up onto it, facing them both simultaneously. I was about as uncomfortable as possible, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.
They looked at the papers on the floor sourly. The second one said, “Your boy’s gonna clean that up before he leaves, yeah?”
I blinked. “Probably not. And I’d like to see you make him. I’m here with a job offer. You interested, or are you making so much skag with this bullshit you’re just enjoying breaking my balls?”
The second one shrugged. “Sonny, we like breaking balls.”
The first one nodded. “We earned it.”
“Wasn’t for Pick, we wouldn’t even talk to you,” the first one said. “He’s the only fucker we know of ’round here that’s older than us.”
“How do you know Pick?” I asked, to be polite. Polite did wonders for the oldsters. Anyone who’d been an adult before Unification, a few yessirs and noma’ams could go a long way.
“School,” they said simultaneously.
“We worked with him on some government projects, back when things were still sane,” the first one continued.
“Genetics,” the second one added. “It was amazing to have the chance to work with him.”
I tried to picture these two as scientists. It was an amusing image, these two leathery old broads rubbing their chins wisely, wearing white coats or some shit. It made sense, though; a lot of the best crooks after Unification had been real brains, scientists and economists and shit. Unification had done some weird things to people, people you’d never expect. It had killed my father, who’d seemed tough as steel to me when I was a kid, and it had turned these two freaky twins into thieves, and good ones. It was hard, after twenty years of living life on the streets of New York, to picture these two as fancy academics, but I’d seen stranger things.
“Fucking Joint Council tried to recruit us all,” the first one said with a grin full of shockingly good teeth, yellowed but strong and unbroken-sort of like the women themselves. “We were living in a commune upstate-remember?”
The second nodded, her eyes on me. “Sure, sure-Freedom Gardens. Naked fucking kids, every-fucking-where.”
“We were living up there with Pick, just watching everything happen, after the schools were all shut down and our funding cut off, and the JC sent a couple of shiny new undersecretaries up there to offer us all jobs. Some project they were all working on, right after the JC formed, something top secret, very hush hush.”
They both grinned. “We told ’em to stick it!”
They glanced at each other without moving their heads, just eyes sliding to the side. “Shit,” the first one said with a sigh. “They fucking raided the place a month later. Pick had a bolthole and we got out, but they tore the place down.”
“We’ve been making our way off the books ever since.”
“In other words, kid, Pick and us, we go way back. And that’s the only reason we’re talking to you, okay?”
“So get-”
“-interesting fast.”
I shook my head. “You’re talking to me because you’re intrigued. Look at you. Sitting here rotting away selling bullshit to people you used to rob.” I grinned. “Come on. You know me. You know I don’t waste time.”
They looked at each other. I could almost hear the static of communication between them. They looked back at me, creepy as hell.
“We heard the name, Mr. Cates,” the first one said. “You call me Milton.”
I winked at the second one. “Tanner. Let’s hear it.”
They may not have bought the act, but they bought the job. When I was done with my high-concept gloss on the whole mess-boiling what was likely months of work and endless complexity into two sentences-they looked at each other with that crazy light of excitement and greed I recognized very well. Every crook got that look when you really got him interested.
Milton-or Tanner, who the fuck knew? — leaned back and regarded me. “You’re either the most fucked-in-the-ass Gunner I’ve ever met, Mr. Cates, or onto something great.”
“He’s fucked,” Gatz said lazily. “Obviously fucked.”
“Either way,” the other one said, “we want to be there to watch.”
“What’s our cut?”
I gave them a number, and for the first
time since we’d walked in, they were silent, staring at each other, using that twin telepathy to hash it out with waggled eyebrows and dilated pupils, Morse code. Finally they looked back at me.
“We’re in, Mr. Cates,” they said simultaneously. “When do we get started?”
“Tomorrow night,” I said, sliding off the desk and making for the exit. “I’ve got a few arrangements to figure.”
From behind, I heard one of them call out, “Word is there’s a System Cop’s got your name tattooed on his ass. You still gonna be alive by tomorrow night?”
I didn’t look back. “Probably not.”
XI
JUST SOMEONE WE THOUGHT WAS DEAD
10000
Outside Tanner’s, Kev and I paused a moment. I watched the gray, sullen faces of people who marched to jobs working for people just slightly less poor than themselves. Or thieving and mugging and murdering their way through life. Few of us managed what Pick had managed, a little emperor of information in his back office.
I glanced at Gatz, who looked like he’d fallen asleep standing up. “Shit. I need a drink.”
He nodded. “What the hell. I don’t have any appointments or job interviews today.”
We started walking. I felt nervous, exposed. I’d imagined I’d stayed outside the sphere of the SSF’s attention because I was smart and careful, but here we’d located several famous people on the SSF’s most-wanted list in almost no time. It suddenly occurred to me that the System Pigs might know a lot more than they let on, and just let us all scamper about to see where we’d go, that maybe I wasn’t as hidden as I’d thought. After all, we had engaged Pick in fifteen minutes of conversation, paid him a few thousand yen, and had the location of several desperate criminals. I had an uneasy feeling Pick got his info direct from the SSF databanks, and that maybe I was in there, too.
It never took long to find a booze establishment in Old New York, the ancient core of the city. This one looked nicely squalid-a transient, illegal bar, not like Pick’s, which was mostly legal and had bribed its way to a truce with the Crushers. It was one of the hundreds of illegal, unlicensed places that sprang up for three weeks, raked in cash selling sewer liquor to anyone with yen, and then disappeared just before the System Pigs took an interest. It was an old bombed-out relic from the Riots that looked ready to fall over in a heap, its windows ragged empty spaces. Scavenged tables and chairs had been scattered amongst the debris, and an open fire crackled in a trashcan in the middle of the room. I paused to admire the hand-lettered sign leaning up against the outside wall: live music every night. sitters must drink fast.
I turned to Gatz to say something about this, but the freak had kept shuffling forward and was already inside. I quickly followed him in. The only other customer was an Asian-looking kid, apparently asleep at a table, legs up, mouth open, sunglasses obscuring his face, empty bottle between his ankles. I walked up to the makeshift bar while Gatz took a position near the door and removed his own glasses. Good lad, guarding my back.
The proprietor was a short, round, red-faced man who beamed at me with alarming jocularity.
“Welcome! Welcome to Rolf’s by the Sea.” He winked. “The Sea of Humanity, that is, flowing by our hallowed windows every day. We serve anything you want, as long as it is potato vodka. But we will call it whatever you wish.”
I asked the obvious question. “Where in hell do you get potatoes?”
He winked one bleary eye. “We call anything used to make our fine liquors potatoes, sir. It is a generic term.”
I nodded. “Okay. Give me a bottle.”
He nearly farted in excitement and scurried away, opening a well-locked, reinforced door and disappearing into the room beyond. Real restaurants had fancy delivery mechanisms and Droid waiters, but who could afford shit like that? I drifted to sleeping beauty, pulled out the empty chair, and sat down.
“You have to sit here?” he said without moving.
I blinked. “No.”
I grinned as the blobular Rolf arrived with amusing pomp and ceremony. The kid straightened and leaned forward, folding his legs underneath the chair with surprising grace, and said, “I wouldn’t mind a blast.”
I looked at him. He couldn’t be more than a teenager, maybe eighteen at the most, but he was already ruined. Broken teeth, sallow skin, red eyes-a fucking waste. You could tell someone’s status just by looking at him, because there were only two kinds of people in New York-maybe in the world-these days: Rich and Poor. If you were rich, you glowed with health, you benefited from organ replacements grown from your own DNA, noninvasive life-extension therapies, effective and current vaccinations-the whole deal. If you weren’t rich, assuming you made it out of childhood to begin with, you ended up looking like this kid. Like me. A walking corpse. You either had more money than I could even imagine, or you had nothing. That was it.
You sometimes got a slummer in the gin mills, a rich fuck prowling around in a costume, pretending to be poor. That’s all they ever did-pretend. When you’re that rich, there’s nothing else to do. Everything you did, by definition, was pretend, because you didn’t have to do anything. If you worked a job, it was for fun, because the jobs didn’t pay shit. Droids did everything better; humans were just expensive, unreliable, and, to be honest, prone to robbing you blind.
You were either rich, cop, or little people. It always pissed me off when I saw some rich fuck pretending to do a job. There were people shuffling along outside right then who would kill for a job, any job. The only jobs left were in the Vids and the SSF. You could get into the SSF as a Crusher, a beat cop, which was better than nothing, but all it did was make your daily struggle for survival legal. Everything else you had to be rich in order to get the damn job. It made my blood boil.
I shrugged and slid the cup over to him, uncorked the bottle, and poured him a blast. He took up his cup, nodded at me, and drank. I took a hit from the bottle and winced. The stuff tasted like piss. Warm piss. “How old are you?”
The kid scowled, squinting into the cup. “What is this, a date? I’m nineteen.”
I nodded. About right. Hadn’t known any world but post-Unification. Had spent his whole life running through the sewers, terrified of the light because it usually turned out to be an SSF hover. I stood up. The booze was eating me from the inside, and I wanted to just puke it all back up. “Keep the bottle,” I said, feeling tired.
He was already pouring himself another. “Fuck, man, I owe you one.”
I started for the door. Fuck it, he’d be dead before long anyway, just like everyone else. Behind me, I heard a fussy, chubby little commotion.
“Sir! There is the issue of the bill!”
I paused next to Gatz and glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “Kev, pay the man.”
Even though Pick had never been a physical kind of crook, the kind that waves a gun around and beats the tar out of people, he had everyone’s respect for the simple reason that he had survived the streets of New York long enough to grow old, and he knew everything. As a result, anyone in New York who planned to separate some citizens of the System from their yen came to Pick’s.
A lot of jobs had been planned at Pickering’s. Most if not all of the major schemes attempted in New York in the past decade had probably been started over rotgut gin at Pick’s, and I figured I could do worse for a portent. I slipped Melody a few yen and reserved the back room. Once we were seated back there, I ordered Gatz a bowl of whatever Melody had going in the kitchen and sat there while he ate. It was slow going at first, but some ancient instinct kicked in and by the end he would’ve eaten the bowl if that hadn’t cost extra.
I hadn’t even gotten around to my glass of booze when Ty Kieth appeared, lugging a huge black bag. It was amazing: I slept with everything I owned. No one owned anything, anymore; the best you did was work some rich fuck’s property and get some crumbs in return. But Techie freaks like Kieth could always scavenge tons of skag.
“Cheers,” Kieth said breathlessly,
dumping the bag on the floor and tearing it open. “Give Ty a moment while he scans and cleans the place. Ty doesn’t make a peep in public until he’s safe.”
I nodded, raising my glass and taking a sip-always a mistake; Pick’s gin was meant to be bolted, winced over, and held down by sheer force of will. “Knock yourself out.”
He began extracting a startling amount of equipment and laying it in a perimeter around the room, pausing each time to spin around with a handheld device in one hand. Gatz and I watched him silently. When he was done, he grinned and dropped heavily into a chair.
“Well, that’s done. We can speak safely now.” He winked at me. “You’re a hot name, you know that? Everyone knows
Avery Cates out of Old New York has something big brewing.”
I choked a little on my drink. “Great.”
Milton Tanner arrived without fanfare and leaned up against a wall, arms crossed, looking very unhappy. I muted the huge Vid installed in the wall behind me with a gesture.
“Okay, since you’re all here I assume we’re all on board, yes?”
Ty Kieth attempted a smile, nose quivering. “I think we’re all desperate enough to be in this.”
“You don’t speak for us,” Tanner growled. I saw Milton’s lips move, silently. “But yeah, we’re in.”
I didn’t give a shit why they were in. “Okay, let’s get started. I have three items to address here. Number one is, as of this moment, you are all in my employ. This job has begun, and if you have any problems with me or taking orders, walk away right now.”
I waited again. Stony silence.
“We’ll make introductions later. The second item is this: This is not a democracy. The money flows through me, so if you want your share, do what I say when I say it. Your expertise is needed and I’ll ask for it. But don’t argue with me. Questions?”
I waited again. After a moment, to my surprise, one of the twins raised her hand.
“Okay, we’re experts, Mr. Cates,” she said crisply. “I know who Kieth is by reputation. Who’s the zombie?”
