by Jeff Somers
Mara’s eyes opened again, and we looked at each other for a long moment.
“I hear nothing,” Mara said.
The silence was perfect. My HUD snapped into bright clarity and I was on my feet. The Poet was smiling, nodding at me.
“Yes,” he said.
IX
THE DOOR CAME, AND THE DOOR WASN’T HAPPY
For a second, the silence vibrated inside me, coming up from the floor and burring into my legs. Five hundred desperate bastards squeezed in like cargo, two dozen pissed-off soldiers doing fucking humiliating train duty, and none of them making a noise. I looked at Mara and heard Michaleen’s voice in my head: everyone.
“Someone crashing the party? ” I whispered.
She shrugged her whole body and her eyebrows and then nodded her head a little. She looked like she would close her eyes and take a nap. Movement behind me made me spin, but it was just the Poet, jacket off, flexing his huge arms, twisting his torso this way and that.
“Anyone outside? ” I asked, staring in wonder at the Poet, muscles rippling under taut, oily-looking flesh. It was fascinating, like snakes living inside him, maggots squirming to get out—like the cells were eager to start throttling people. I imagined myself in a fistfight with the Poet, and augments or not, it wasn’t pretty for me.
“Clear,” Mara said. “Why—”
I spun back and stepped to the window, throwing it open as far as it would go, which wasn’t too far. I studied it for a second, cocking my head, and then turned halfway, bent my arm, and smashed the window out with my elbow. I felt wonderful. My augments were smoothly managing my adrenaline, endorphins, blood oxygen—everything. It felt good to be able to do the work again I’d always done.
“Give me some room to work,” I said to Mara as I levered myself backward out through the opening. I leaned out and held onto the rough corrugated exterior of the train. The wind tore at me as I looked around; the grassy embankment was empty. To my right was a rusty metal ladder attached to the car. Taking hold of a rung, I pulled myself up and out easily, bracing for the ancient metal to give way and send me sprawling to the ground.
All the bars in my HUD were bright green, pulsing with my heartbeat, which remained slow and steady, unconcerned.
I took a deep breath and pulled myself up, crawling on top of the car while my blood oxygen levels scrolled past in an unobtrusive gray font. I hoped someone got an award for that font; it was a work of fucking genius. Thinking about the millions of little details that went into shit like my hand-me-down augments, I flopped over onto my back and stared up at the sky, blue and white and gray, and then rolled onto my knees and pushed myself up onto my feet, facing back toward the rear of the car where the soldiers had been headed. Whatever had shut the train down had come from that direction, and the best tactic I could come up with was to get behind it.
I stepped carefully, taking it slow—which was hard. I wanted to run. I wanted to sprint through everything and just kick everything’s ass. When I reached the back end of the car, I got down on my belly and slipped my head over the edge and quickly scanned the link between us and the last car of the train. No one in sight, and no sound except the wind, the whole world just dead and empty. I paused; you had to know your space, where people would come at you, where your exits were. I pushed back up onto my feet and leaped over the gap between the cars, a sudden feeling of exhilaration shooting through me and making my status bars flash.
I landed softly on the next car and trotted down to the butt end of the train, dropping back onto my belly for a quick peek over the edge. I waited a few heartbeats and then swung myself over the edge, letting myself down slowly until I was a few inches from the small platform just outside the door of the car. Dropping the last few inches, I crouched down and peered in, my eyes adjusting instantly to the light difference.
The car was crowded with people. Most of them were in narrow, cramped bunks nailed up against the walls of the car, but some were seated in the aisle, on top of each other, bundles and boxes piled up between them, on top of themselves, everywhere.
They were all perfectly still, staring. I counted to ten, watching, and when no one had so much as blinked, I twisted the latch on the door slowly, grimacing, and eased it open, the metal-on-metal grinding sounding loud and disastrous to my ears as it eased into its pocket. I kept low, duckwalking into the car, but no one even glanced at me, their eyes fixed on some distant invisible object, their lips slack. Pusher, I thought to myself. Fucking Psionic freaks, making you dance from across the room just by thinking hard at you. I’d known way too many of them, and a knot of sour anxiety bloomed in my belly.
As I slowly crabbed my way forward, I cast my eyes around, looking for anything that could be a weapon. Spotting a decent-sized walking cane clutched in the slack hand of one of the passengers, I pulled it from his grasp and weighed it briefly in my hands. The balance sucked, but it had decent weight to it and felt like good, solid, synthetic wood. It would cave in a skull as well as anything.
At the forward door, I crouched down and peered through the cloudy glass, ducking down in sudden shock; the five soldiers, including Little Mother, were all standing just outside the next car. I counted three and eased up again, getting a better look: They were frozen as well, locked in postures that looked surprised and awkward, their weight on their back feet. I eased the door open just enough to slip past, easing it back into place while staying as low as possible, my legs starting to burn a little with the effort. The soldiers remained perfectly still. I turned my head and found Little Mother’s sidearm an inch from my nose, snug in its white holster. Instead of the standard-issue military sidearms that were linked to the soldier’s augments, refusing to fire for anyone else, this was a skinny-looking monster I’d never encountered before, superficially resembling the Roon 87 but obviously cheaper, with a longer barrel. I reached up and lifted it carefully from the holster, brought it down into my own gravity, and checked the chamber. I dropped the clip into my hand and glanced at it: full and plump, thirty-two shots.
“You’re a naughty one,” I whispered as I pushed the clip back in until it clicked home. “Swapping for a non-regulation piece, you little minx.” I ran my eyes over Little Mother one last time, wondering where she might hide extra clips. I didn’t see anything obvious and I didn’t have time to do a proper search. I pushed through the soldiers and inched myself up onto the balls of my feet, squinting into our car.
There were no cots in this one, purely semiprivate berths with the corridor running between the tiny rooms, the crowd packed tightly against the wall across from the berths. Three women were grouped outside our door, each wearing a long black coat, their uniformly dark hair tied up in tight buns sitting on their heads like crabs. Cocking the hammer with my palm, slowly, I reached up and unlatched the door. Sliding it open just far enough, I carefully shouldered my way through it. Once inside the car, I raised the gun and paused, taking a deep breath, steadying myself. I needed surprise; the moment the Pusher became aware of me, it was over.
I started the duckwalk again.
They were listening at the door, whispering. The whispers were formless, wordless, just a hissing noise drifting back toward me, a buzzing in the air. I moved the gun as I walked, ticking it from one to the other, getting a feel for the distances and the speed. Halfway to them, I stopped, steadied myself, and took a bead on them. They were standing in a close group—one with her ear almost comically pressed against our broken door, one off slightly to her side, and one behind them, leaning in toward them. I settled on the one in the rear; when she dropped, she’d fall into the other two, slowing them down.
The door exploded outward, knocking all three to the floor in a sudden outburst of noise. The Poet, shirt-less and barefoot, leaped into the hallway, the fake, sentient muscles of his arms and chest writhing as he took a moment to preen, flexing the tree trunks he called biceps and howling.
“You gonna creep out here all fucking—”
�
�Shut up,” I whispered to myself, for my own amusement. “You’re about to go for a ride.”
When he shot up into the air, I just smiled. When he somehow snaked an arm out and sank his fingers into the hair of one of them, taking her with him to the ceiling of the corridor, I blinked in surprise. For a moment, they were a blur of limbs up above, screeching and kicking. Putting the gun on them, I closed one eye and thought about letting both Mara and this idiot go, just letting the Spooks crush their skulls with invisible fists and walking away.
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t do it. Even ignoring the remote and the fact that I’d drop dead if I got too far away from Mara, even a turd like the Poet was a brother in arms. Even Mara—we were all making our way and if I was on Michaleen’s hook, they were too, probably. I didn’t think Mickey inspired a lot of affection and loyalty.
I opened my eye and took in the scene again, trying to judge which one was the Pusher. The Telekinetics were tough, throwing you around like a puppet and making heavy things slam into you, but they could be dealt with. A fucking Pusher could have you doing dance moves with a fucking glance.
It wasn’t the one currently getting to know the Poet better than she—or anyone—would have wanted up at the ceiling; she would have had him barking on the floor in a flash. I gave a second to the other two. One stared up at the ceiling intently. The other stared into the cabin, a still-life. Ticking the gun over, I took a bead on that one and squeezed the trigger. The cheap auto bucked in my hand like I’d kicked a dog, and the Spook’s head jerked forward and left, splattering the wall red, with flecks of yellow.
The second triplet whipped her head down, big round black eyes on me like magnets, and then I rocketed backward, my feet lifting off the floor, my arms dangling in front of me, everything shrinking.
I thought, Shit, here comes the door.
The door came, and the door wasn’t happy. I managed to close my eyes just before impact, which was good, seeing as I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life searching for them on my hands and knees.
I snapped awake with a jolt—one second, darkness; the next, my HUD flaring to life, my chest heaving with sudden anxiety, conscious. My status bars flared emerald—except for one in the middle of the pack that had yellowed a little—and then dimmed. A faint sense that something was wrong, something out of place, licked at the edges of my thoughts without forming into anything solid. I turned my head and a sharp pain stabbed up my neck, making me wince. I blinked, looking down the corridor. The Poet was struggling with one of the triplets, his huge hands clamped murderously around her neck, his own eyes bulging from a face far too dark with blood—even though the woman hung in his grasp like a rag doll, her eyes were locked on him, choking him right back. They were pasted up against the wall like they’d been glued there. I squinted, trying to see if there was anyone else, another Spook doing the heavy lifting, but there was no one. Something was flashing in my HUD, a tiny dot, and as I concentrated, it swelled up, firming into a gyroscope that was slanted dramatically off-kilter. The wall had become the floor; I was sitting on the pocket door between cars. I could hear, dimly, screaming below me, and I pictured all those frozen people, suddenly awake again, smashed in together with gravity plucking at them.
Wincing again, I turned my head until I could squint out the cloudy plastic window. My stomach lurched as the world reset itself, the ground rolling some ten or fifteen feet beneath us, the train car at a crazy angle, still connected to the rest of the train, the other cars hanging on like tin sausages. I was suddenly aware of a groaning metallic sound, continuous and irritating.
On the ground, near the tracks, a man stared up at me. He was old, with thick gray hair hanging down to his shoulders, but his face had the same familiar roundness to it—a Spook. And since he was staring up at me while the whole fucking train was floating into the air, I had the sudden brilliant intuition that he was a Telekinetic, and the most powerful fucking Tele-K I’d ever imagined. The whole fucking train.
I was sweating. The screams below just went on and on, like animals howling.
I rubbed my hands on my coat and looked down at myself; my stolen gun was in my lap, held in place by gravity. I grabbed it and twisted my head around again to look out at the freak below. I had no shot. Even if I could angle my arm, the glass was thick enough to queer me, and if the Spook was good enough to get the whole train in the air, chances were one shot was all I was going to get.
I turned my head again and looked at the door’s latch. Tightening my grip on the gun, I took a deep breath, reached up behind me, and yanked.
The door rolled into its pocket with a mean-spirited suddenness, and I dropped down onto the next car, catching my leg on the coupling as I fell, doing a half spin and landing awkwardly. I spent a second making sure I wasn’t sliding, and then I rolled to the edge, hooking one foot into the coupling and swinging my arm around. I put the gun on him, reminded myself of the way the piece of shit barked, and braced for impact.
Just as I squeezed the trigger, the motherfucker looked right at me and the train lurched under me. I lifted up for a second and slammed down, rattling my teeth and knocking the gun from my hand. Before I could contemplate the ways in which this train hated me, I felt something like gravity grabbing onto me with invisible wet fingers and trying to pull me off the train. My foot was lodged pretty firmly in the coupling; I felt my leg being stretched as I snagged. Blood rushing to my face, I craned my head up to look down at the Spook, who stared up at me without expression. The screams and the metal grinding had blended together into one formless blast of noise, and a rushing howl in my own ears joined it as the little status bars in my eyes started to wither into yellow.
Behind him, creeping down the embankment, was Mara.
She looked tiny—tall but thin, her limbs too insubstantial to be any threat. She looked rough—red hair a mess, a deep scratch across her forehead, her nifty leather pants torn across one thigh—and she had a long, black stick in one hand, one of those collapsible beat-downs that telescoped from something you could hide in one palm. How she’d gotten off the train and circled around was a mystery, but I tabled that thought, shifting my eyes to the cold, rocky ground below me. I had a sudden vision of my future. It involved the ground, gravity, and sixty tons of fucking train right behind me.
I looked back up in time to see her plant herself behind the old Spook and rear back. My heart pounded into overdrive and the little bar that represented my adrenaline levels skyrocketed, and then everything suddenly ... slowed down.
I watched Mara raise her baton as if she were enveloped in syrup, her face contorted in a mask of red violence that ruined the delicate lines of her unpretty face, the baton rising so slowly I had time to look at the old man’s face in detail: unlined, red skin, with hideous eyes that were dark pools of shadow surrounded by yellow-black bags, swollen and unhealthy looking. His mouth hung open slightly, revealing teeth that looked likely to be even worse than his eyes. I stopped looking at him, preferring Mara’s rictus of rage to the Spook’s grooming. She’d only managed to get the baton cocked behind her by then.
My HUD had turned a shade of pink, like a haze had been smeared over everything.
Before I could think too hard about all of it, the gentle pulling sensation disappeared, leaving me limp against the warm metal of the train. The old Spook spun with surprising agility to face Mara, his hands flying up between them, but she took the opportunity to angle the baton and catch him on the chin with an upstroke, sending him spinning backward, feet off the ground, in a slow-motion ballet.
Beneath me, the train jerked and for the longest moment I’d ever experienced, it seemed to float in the air, my stomach flipping over. When we started to fall, it was beautiful: slow and graceful, a sudden wind around me, my body lifting off the train slightly, the ground drifting up like a dream. A stream of numbers flashed across my vision, tiny and fast, obviously not meant for me, really; a dump for the field technician who would retrieve my corpse,
I supposed, a record of how I went down to make sure it hadn’t been any kind of technological malfunction.
Gripping the edge of the coupling with my hands, I pulled my feet under myself, crouching on the side of the train as it rolled slowly toward the ground, my own heartbeat a distant, mournful drum, and when the ground was still a few feet away I launched myself horizontally, my HUD suddenly streaming calculations concerning wind speed, inertia, mass, and velocity I ignored. It was easy, like I had all the time in the world. I planned on a dramatic tuck and roll, to come up like an acrobat smoking a cigarette and impressing the only lady in view. Instead, I hit the ground like a bag of shit, scraping some of myself off on the rough ground, and time snapped back to normal speed as I dissolved into a rough, unbalanced roll, bars and numbers flashing across my vision in jagged little spurts until an obliging rotten log on the embankment stopped me.
I stared up at the clouds above, feeling and hearing the impact of the train as it smashed back into the earth. Half the little bars in my HUD had gone an alarming shade of pus yellow, and a mean-spirited adrenaline dump was keeping me conscious despite my intense unhappiness about it. And then Mara’s face, back to its serene, flat-nosed expressionlessness, floated above me, looking down at me like I was a bug tied to a pin, crawling around endlessly.
“You still alive, then? ” she said.
I blinked and moved my dried-up tongue around. “If you call this living,” I croaked, and with a flash in my eyes I passed out.
X
A LITTLE LOVE AFFAIR MADE UP OF LONGING GAZES AND UNREQUITED VIOLENCE
I studied Mara’s face. Lit by the fire, she was almost beautiful—almost. I tried to imagine her smiling, as an experiment to see if that would push her over the edge, but I couldn’t manage it.
