by Jeff Somers
She stared at me.
“Listen, if I wanted to rape you, I would have. You’re an inconvenience. We’d much rather cut you loose, and we will in a day or two. So don’t eat if you don’t want to. I don’t care. I’ll let you think on it for five seconds.”
I sat there holding the tablet and stared at her. I counted five in my head, and then pushed the tablet at her mouth. She opened up and I popped it in without ceremony. She swallowed it whole. Then I held up the cup of water.
“Wh-” she started to say, and I whipped my hand up again.
“No talking, right? Nod that you understand.”
She nodded. I took my hand away. I pushed the cup toward her.
“You can live for three days without water, Ms. Harper,” I said. “But I wouldn’t advise it. This is nasty shit, especially for someone who’s used to filtered. I’d drink it, though, because we’re all leaving in a bit, and you’re going to be on your own for a while. I doubt anyone else is going to help you.”
I held the cup up to her lips and tipped it. More ran down her chin than got into her mouth, but she greedily gulped what she could. When it was gone she lay there panting and licking the last dirty drops from her lips. I nodded.
“Okay. You’ll live a little longer, then.” I got up.
“Wait!” she croaked, her voice sounding rusty and deep. I turned back to her suddenly, bringing my arm back, and she leaned away from me in shocked panic, eyes widening.
“Please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
I stood there, poised, but didn’t bring my arm down. I stared down at her, and then knelt back down, leaning in close. I could smell her sweat, her fear.
“Don’t,” I said slowly, “speak.”
Eyes wide, she nodded dumbly.
I started to get back up, but paused. “Listen, Ms. Harper-I’m a civilized man, okay? I promise you’re going to be fine, if you just shut your mouth and relax. Okay?”
I didn’t know why I’d said that. I wanted her to believe it, though. I was a civilized man. If I’d been given a chance, if I’d been born ten years sooner, if I’d been rich, I would have… done something. Anything. I looked at her until she nodded again, faintly, afraid to move too much and set me off again. When a hand fell on my shoulder, I almost grabbed it and flipped the motherfucker over my shoulder, but let the urge pass through like a ripple of potential energy.
“C’mon, Cates,” Tanner said cheerfully. I wasn’t sure how I’d come to tell them apart, but it had become suddenly easy. “You ready to die?”
Turning away from Harper, I made a mental note to replace the tape on her mouth, not because anyone was going to hear her, but because if she started shouting I didn’t doubt that someone, maybe even Gatz, would shut her up.
“We’ve got to strap you down. When the toxin hits your nervous system, there’s probably going to be some convulsing.”
I stared at Kieth, who had somehow found the time and materials to shave his head smooth again. His scalp gleamed in the sickly light of the kitchen. I was sitting on the big crate, with Kieth, Milton, and Tanner standing around me, each of them holding a length of synthetic rope. Orel leaned against a wall, smoking a cigarette, disdaining to do any actual work. For a second, my balls crawled up into my gut and my tongue shriveled to a stump. I was going to entrust my entire existence to these people. If they weren’t incompetent, they wouldn’t shed tears if I never made it back-unless of course I was bearing buckets full of yen at the time.
The moment passed. It didn’t matter: I wasn’t going to live through the week, anyway. I’d killed System Cops, I’d taken on the job of assassinating the leader of the Electric Church, there were hits out on me. I could feel the struggle falling away, and calm took its place. I was just waiting for the impact, and the few seconds before were blissful, peaceful-empty.
I nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Kieth nodded. “I just want to make sure you understand what’s about to happen to you. Administered correctly, this solution will induce a deathlike state. This means that while you may-or may not-retain perception, you will certainly lose all conscious control. Your breathing and heartbeat will slow to almost undetectable levels. To most examinations, you will appear deceased. If you do retain perception, it will be… most uncomfortable.”
I let Milton take my arm and begin tying a rubber tube around my forearm. “If I retain perception?”
Kieth shrugged. “Not many people survive this. There just isn’t much information available.”
This struck me as funny, and I burst out laughing. Kieth and Milton shared a look, but didn’t say anything. I listened to the rest of Kieth’s speech with tearing eyes as I struggled to regain my composure, but the laughter kept dribbling out of me. This was classic. This was appropriate. This was how the Gweat and Tewwible Avery Cates was going go out, after all the fighting and scrabbling and suffering. He was going to just lie back and get executed.
Kieth plowed through my hysteria. “You’ll possibly feel pain. Don’t discount the psychological impact if you do have your wits about you, Mr. Cates-it’ll probably be very claustrophobic.”
Still giggling, I waved at him. “Come on, Mr. Kieth, hurry it up, now.”
Milton tapped the vein that had risen in my arm and nodded with professional satisfaction. Kieth picked up a slender syringe and looked apologetic.
“I tried to scrounge an auto-hypo, but they’re scarce, so we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way.” He held the syringe up so I could see it. The seriousness on his face almost started me laughing again. He still thought this all mattered. “The, uh, the Monk will have another syringe just like this one, containing a little cocktail of chemicals. If Mr. Gatz can really control it, it will be injecting it directly into your heart when the time comes-when you are inside and momentarily secure. Mr. Cates, Ty can’t stress this enough: The ‘waking up’ process is not going to be pleasant. You’re going to go from as near dead as you can be and still be alive to fully functional within seconds. It will be much like doing a hard reboot on a computer system. That, Ty knows with certainty, will be very painful.”
I nodded, feeling some control coming back to me. “Understood.”
Kieth looked unhappy. “Ty doesn’t think telling you this serves any purpose, but everyone else seems to feel you should know that you need to come out of stasis within four hours or so. Longer than that and you may not ever come out. You can only play dead for so long, eh?”
“Understood. Let’s get this show on the road. It’s time.”
Kieth held the syringe up and tapped it with one finger, squinting at it. Then he looked around at the others and back at me. A terrible excuse for a smile came over his face, unpleasant to look at. “See you on the other side, Mr. Cates.”
I lay back and they strapped me down tight. Milton held my arm in position, palm up, and I made a fist. I looked around at all of them as Tanner leaned over me with a piece of leather to slip between my teeth. I was still calm, still feeling the last tingle of the laughter rippling inside me, but a coppery taste of terror had oozed into my mouth. I swallowed it back and it stuck in my throat.
“Don’t fuck up,” I said, my voice tight and harsh, as if little bits of glass had gotten lodged in it.
“Fuck you,” Tanner snapped, jamming the leather between my teeth roughly. “We don’t ever fuck up.”
A bit of motion caught my eye and I turned my head to see Orel pushing off from the wall and crushing his discarded cigarette. Our eyes met, and he winked as he sauntered out of the room. I knew that look. That calm determination always preceded a calculated murder. He’d waited until I was tied down, and now he was going to put a bullet in Marilyn Harper’s brain. A hot blade of panic sliced through me: How had I not seen this coming? The answer was galling: For all his outward urbanity, our fake Orel was not a civilized man.
I kicked, I screamed, I struggled against the ropes. But Milton and Tanner held me down with surprising strength, and Kieth leaned in like
a doctor, grim and serious.
“Sorry, Mr. Cates,” he said, sounding almost sad. “But you’re worth a lot more money to us dead than alive right now.”
I felt hands on my arm, the cold bite of the needle, and
XXVIII
A BOTTOM-FEEDING FISH, BLACK AND SWOLLEN AND COVERED IN SPIKES
10100
An icepick in my chest, tearing apart blood vessels as it slid along my arteries, propelled by the sluggish, back-and-forth tide of my blood, bloating me with a sudden, razor-sharp heat that sank into every unprotected organ. It was a bottom-feeding fish, black and swollen and covered in spikes, puffing up as it neared the surface, ready to explode. I opened my mouth to scream but found myself biting down on the strip of leather instead. It kept coming. It was too large for my arteries, it tore through and began swimming in my guts, perforating and wriggling, headed unerringly toward my heart. It tore through my pelvis, it lacerated my lungs. Gasping, choking in the open air, it bloated up through my chest and slammed into my heart and exploded there, sending spikes shooting through my insides, landing with wet, shivering force in my spine, my bones, my cartilage.
I stiffened, my whole body going taut as a fuzzy numbness burned its way from my feet upward. I shook and shivered, biting through the leather strip in my mouth, staring pop-eyed at Ty Kieth, who silently took a step backward, eyes on the exits.
Then, suddenly, everything went dark as I passed out.
When I came to, my vision snapped on, as if God or someone had flicked a switch. One second, nothing, the next, I was staring up at Brother West’s hideously cheerful mask of a face. It loomed over me, waxy, pale, permanently smiling.
“Mr. Cates? I do not know if you can hear me, but I want to assure you I will keep my end of the bargain. Mr. Gatz assures me you will keep yours. It is time to go.”
His head floated away, and I was staring up at the ceiling. There was no noise. Then some sounds I couldn’t identify: a swishing sound, a sharp, metallic clang, a tearing sound. I struggled to bring my thoughts into line, but they squirmed and writhed out of my grasp. I wanted to shake my head to clear it, but couldn’t.
Then the pain started to come back.
At first it was just a buzzing in the background, a dim memory of something terrible, teasing at the ends of my thoughts. It gathered like distant thunder, growing in ominous volume until it broke over me like terror, like bamboo shoots under my nails going deeper, further, faster.
I wanted to scream, but couldn’t. I wanted to howl and writhe and attack anything around me, to pass along the infection, expend some of it, but couldn’t. I stared up at the ceiling, my vision turning red, my skin peeling off, my bones splintering. On top of the pain there was a thick layer of numbness, my arms, legs, every part of me dead and without feeling. Underneath, in the core of me and sinking deeper every second, were razor blades, broken glass, thumbtacks.
I tried to quiver, and couldn’t.
I was lifted, then, the ceiling drawing closer and then sliding away, and carried out of the kitchen area. Gatz’s head suddenly loomed into my vision, pale and waxy like the Monk, but with a film of sweat on his taut, gaunt face.
“I Pushed him hard, Ave,” he gasped. “If you can hear me, I Pushed him hard. I’ll stay close, keep it up as long as I can. I’ve got your back.”
His face disappeared, and there was just the sound of moderate physical effort, and the ceiling, and the pain.
“Set him down a minute,” I heard Milton say. The world tilted, and I was lowered to the floor. At the last second Gatz’s hand slipped, and I dropped the last foot pretty hard. My head flopped over to the side, and if I could have, I would have crawled backward, cursing, because Marilyn Harper was staring at me.
She was sprawled on the floor and looked startled, as if she’d somehow fallen that moment, and was just lying there in shock. Her hands were still tied, her arms were bent uncomfortably back. Her hair spilled wildly over her face, red and stiff. Her mouth was open slightly. Her eyes were wide open, her face a mask, the ragged hole torn in her forehead still dripping.
“That’s a fucking shame.” Tanner sighed, sounding out of breath. “That fucking old man is pretty harsh, huh, Wonderboy?”
Gatz didn’t say anything.
Her accusing eyes bored into mine, and I couldn’t look away. I’d lived too long, held on selfishly, and this was the result? I hadn’t had any affection for Marilyn Harper, but this wasn’t civilized. She hadn’t done anything to rate this, shot in the head by Cainnic Orel. That was how I deserved to die, and I couldn’t help but think that she’d caught my bullet.
With my bones being burned to ash inside me, I wanted nothing more than to turn my head away.
“All right, Wonderboy.” Tanner finally sighed. “Let’s go. The Tin Man is waiting out back. It makes sense to the Monks if Cates is nailed here. More realistic. So let’s go, and then I gotta get into costume.”
As I was carried out of the Assembly Room I had a good view of Gatz’s shoulder, sweat dripping down from it, and I could hear his breath, strained and phlegmy, rattling in and out of his open mouth. I realized that my life was in his hands. If Brother West came out of the Push too soon I’d either get carved up or just be left to drift away. It was all up to Kev Gatz. I wasn’t afraid. I was ready. I was ready for it to be over.
When the pain ate the edges of my vision and things went dark again, I went down eagerly.
I came back groggy. In the distance, hover displacement, shouts, something that might have been a gunshot. Nearer, just above me: humming.
The red pain receded like water evaporating, leaving me blind, inside something, moving. The steady thump of heavy boots on the cracked, damp stone street led the way, wrapped in the dim, quiet hum of hydraulics. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. I tried again, mentally flailing, screaming, pounding against the sides of whatever I was trapped inside. Nothing. Not even a wheeze of horror. I just lay, staring at blackness, listening to the heavy tread of Brother West as he conveyed me somehow to Westminster Abbey.
All I could see was Marilyn Harper’s eyes: wide, staring, just like twenty-six other sets of eyes I’d seen. An old man, startled up from breakfast in a cafй on Morton Street, nailed with a lucky shot that turned his nose into a pit of blood. Twin brothers collapsed back into their hover, staring blankly, blood running down their scalps. A woman, guns falling from both hands, hanging from an ancient fire escape, her foot caught between slats, staring down at me, blood dripping. All of them, bad people. All of them, dead. All of them, killed by me.
I hadn’t pulled the trigger, but I’d killed Harper just the same. Twenty-seven dead in twenty-seven years plus all the damn cops who’d stepped in front of my gun recently. And now my comeuppance was at hand.
I listened. I could hear-I knew it was probably pitch black inside the little hover I’d been loaded into as a new Church “recruit,” so maybe I could see, too. I couldn’t move, or breathe, or stop feeling the terrifying sharp-edged pain that lapped at every nerve with a razor tongue. My mind raced through the diagrams and flowcharts we’d worked on, scratched onto any available surface, Kieth’s neat script and my own huge scrawl. We must, I thought, be on one of the private transport hovers the Electric Church used to move its cargo-it wouldn’t do to have Monks cheerfully transporting recently murdered citizens through the streets, whistling. The Church had its own zoned air lanes for its hovers. All registered religions did, though most of them, I was pretty sure, weren’t using them to transport bodies.
I had no idea how much time had passed. A weird, electric hum of terror stabbed through me, and then again, and then it became a constant, searing presence. I wanted to scream and wave my arms about and beat myself senseless against the walls of my tiny prison, but I just lay there, my dead body mocking myself. If this was what death was like, if this was even just a second, a momentary horror right before you sailed off into infinity, I was all ready to sign up for my Monk suit.
There wa
s a series of loud clanging noises, and then the scream of displacement. I couldn’t feel anything, but I knew the sound, and realized we must be descending. I oriented my mental map of Westminster Abbey, which was a freestanding wall of ancient-looking stone like a broken bone rising out of the ground in a large courtyard, surrounded by a thick, reinforced wall. The hover pad was not far from the building’s remnant. Everything was underground, and I knew that once we touched down I’d be wheeled onto a wide conveyor belt and sucked down into the belly of the whole place. I imagined my path as a red line that terminated in one of the small, square rooms that acted as entry points for the corpses. From these small rooms the bodies were conveyed on belts through narrow passages into the huge processing center, where the dicing and slicing was performed, largely by Droids, according to West.
If all went well, I’d end in one of the smaller rooms and not proceed past it, except under my own power, by choice-cataclysmically bad choice, maybe, but at least by choice.
An eternity passed, a numb, unreal current running through me, teasing my dead nerves into a believable imitation of pain. Then I was in motion; I could tell from the way I banged around inside the mobile coffin I’d been stuffed into, first this way and that. I did some mild calculations and decided I was being loaded onto one of the belts. According to plan, Brother West was right beside me, standing stock still and grinning mildly at nothing. He’d said that nothing ever varied in this process, that it was machinery and I was to be a cog, so he must be there, standing ready with the hypo to bring me back to life.
The motion stopped. There was a humming sound, a vague, distant sound of voices. Then something heavy slammed into my container. There was a scrape, and then a smooth, rolling sensation. I just saw eyes. As I lay there, the pain swelled up again, the spiky fish bloating, piercing every bone in my body simultaneously until I wanted to claw my eyes out for relief.
