They tried to keep reasonably close to the coast, avoiding areas that they had known to be dangerous before the Seeders had awoken, like South Central, but the LAX corridor was little more than a trench from multiple plane crashes, and parts of Inglewood, Culver City and Gardena were infernos. Where they could they had taken smoke-shrouded routes. Their augments meant they could still breathe where others couldn’t. Amid the smoke they’d had to hide from military personnel with gas masks that had merged with their flesh.
They had crossed a channel and Beth had got a glimpse of Terminal Island, the artificial island split between the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. She knew there was a prison on the island. She wondered what it was like in there now. She supposed not that many of the prisoners would have had phones. Was the prison the last bastion of the sane? Had the prisoners escaped? Or had they just torn themselves apart anyway, without the direct influence of the Seeders?
They had turned off East Anaheim Street and onto an avenue that quickly became a dirt track, sandwiched between a used car lot and junkyards. The dirt road ended at train tracks, and beyond that she could see yellow mountains of sulphur. The whole area stank of rotten eggs. She scanned either side as they travelled down the dirt track. There was very little movement, though the ECV’s passage scattered a pack of dogs, mostly pit bulls.
Alexia drove the vehicle down to the tracks and turned it around so it was facing out of the alleyway.
‘You bring me to the nicest places,’ she said quietly. There was little humour in her voice. Beth sort of liked the woman but she was sure that Alexia had been quite a frivolous person before this. She was worried that du Bois’s sister was even less prepared for all this than she was. She felt a spike of anger when she considered for a moment that du Bois might actually be enjoying himself on some level. Then she remembered his response to La Calavera.
There was a line of old freight cars that had clearly been there for some time. At first she thought there were still homeless people living there. Sat round an unlit fire pit, or around trashcan braziers, but then she realised that they had been posed. Then she saw the head poles. Then she realised that the bodies had been decapitated … and the heads of goats sewn onto their necks.
‘Hobo camp,’ she heard du Bois say. ‘Most of them wouldn’t have had phones.’ That didn’t make it better.
Beth climbed down from the turret, grabbed her LMG and got out of the ECV. Her movement sent clouds of black flies into the air.
‘Let’s get on with this,’ she snapped and started heading towards the freight cars. Du Bois grabbed her by the shoulder and almost got hit for his trouble. She turned on him.
‘Look, I understand you hate me—’ he started.
That’s the problem, Beth thought. She knew she should, she just couldn’t quite bring herself to do so. Her father’s life, as far as she could tell, had been just one long streak of misery. He had given up a long time ago. He would not have survived any of this. He would have suffered. She knew that du Bois had done him a favour. Knowing this just made her feel worse.
‘But if you’re in this we still have to work together.’
‘What do you want to do, sir?’ she demanded, knowing that she was being petty. Du Bois just shook his head and turned towards the freight cars.
‘So I think it’s that one,’ Alexia said grimly, pointing at one of the freight cars further down the line away from the hobo camp. It was full of bullet holes.
The three of them walked towards it, looking all around them, weapons at the ready, checking the freight cars they passed. As they got closer to the bullet-ridden freight car, Beth could see a lot of bullet cases glinting in the morning sun. Du Bois picked one up, briefly examining it.
‘Five-point-fifty-six millimetre. Judging by the amount of them I’m guessing they were fired from fully automatic weapons. They just turned up and sprayed the place.’
Beth and Alexia covered him as he yanked the sliding door open and then climbed up into the dark interior.
‘Anything nice?’ Alexia asked.
‘A flaying,’ du Bois said.
‘Nobody just kills anyone any more, do they?’ Alexia said. ‘I’ll stay out here and mind the car.’
Beth glanced at her slightly irritably before climbing into the freight car. There were five bodies inside. The air was thick with flies. It looked like the victims, whoever they were, had been living there for a while. There were bedrolls on the ground, books, pornography, a camp stove, and a selection of unappetising looking ration packs. The bucket in the corner stank. All five of them had been carefully flayed. There wasn’t a scrap of skin on them. In some ways that they’d only been flayed was a relief. That was when Beth really started to worry about herself.
Du Bois was gripping the blade of his tanto, releasing his blood-screen, presumably programmed for forensic analysis. There were some shell casings on the ground. Beth picked one up.
‘Russian seven six two,’ she said. ‘Probably from an AK pattern weapon.’
Du Bois was looking inside one of the corpse’s mouths. ‘Eastern European dental work. I’m guessing these guys were ex-military.’ He pointed at wounds in the flesh of one of the bodies. ‘They were shot first. Someone turned up, maybe as many as ten shooters, emptied rounds into the car, then came in and did this.’ He pointed at some scrape marks on the planks of the freight car’s floor. ‘They took something.’ He concentrated. Beth was sure he was getting information back from his blood-screen. He pointed at one of the bodies. ‘He was flayed alive …’
‘Nice.’
‘The rest were done post mortem. Here’s the thing, though – this happened a week ago.’
‘This was done by sane people?’
‘Obviously not, but they weren’t subject to the Seeders’ influence when it happened. Probably a gangland ritual killing, to warn them off retaliation.’
‘The DAYP?’
Du Bois shook his head. ‘They could have had someone do it for them, I suppose, but I suspect this happened before they knew they needed whatever it was that was here. Whoever did this has gone to some effort as well. The guards had discipline. Though why they don’t just park these things in some garage in faceless suburbia I don’t know.’
‘Everyone is … was … looking for terrorists. Nobody cares about the people down here, and nobody would listen to them. Your blood-screen tell you what they were guarding? Nuclear? Biological?’
‘Well, if the DAYP are interested then I’d guess the Russian mob had stumbled over S- or L-tech, possibly a weapon, which could be really bad news for us.’
‘Could La Calavera have done this and then sent us on a wild goose chase?’ Beth asked.
‘Possibly, but why bother? Why not just tell us that he couldn’t help us?’
‘He didn’t strike me as incredibly sane, and he’d definitely be capable of something like this.’
‘Maybe he wanted to appear to be co-operative,’ du Bois mused. ‘Xipe Totec.’ Beth had heard La Calavera mention Tezcatlipoca, one of the Aztec gods, but du Bois had seemed to think that the gangster had been referring to Mr Brown. Xipe Totec was the Aztec god who had been known as the ‘Flayed One’. His sacrifices had involved ritual flaying.
‘You want to go back to see La Calavera?’ Beth asked.
‘Not if I can help it. We go back there, I suspect one of us will kill the other.’
Beth wasn’t in a hurry to go back there either.
‘So?’
‘I need a car battery.’
The current from the battery was just enough to kickstart the heart. The nanites from du Bois’s blood were enough to do the rest. The nanites clustered together to provide artificial stimulus for an atrophied heart and neural pathways. Du Bois had programmed the nanites to kill signals from the man’s nerve endings. He had picked the one who been flayed alive because he would have seen the most.
The flayed man opened his eyes. Beth had expected panic. His blue eyes were oddly calm,
perhaps because of the lack of pain. He looked up at them both and then down at himself.
‘How long?’ he asked in Russian, which of course she understood now.
‘A week,’ du Bois told him, ‘maybe a little more.’ The man nodded. ‘Can you tell us what you were guarding?’
‘Could I have a drink?’ he asked. A hip flask hit the boards of the freight car, thrown by Alexia. The flayed man picked it up and took a sip from it. ‘I taste nothing.’
‘You’ll have to take my word for it, it’s good stuff,’ Alexia shouted from outside. In the distance Beth could hear dogs growling, fighting over something.
‘What were you guarding?’ du Bois asked again. The flayed man was staring at the bloody boards of the freight car’s floor. Finally he looked up at Beth and du Bois.
‘How long do I have?’ he asked.
‘Not long,’ du Bois told him.
‘I need a phone.’
‘Things have—’ du Bois started to explain.
‘Once you have told us what we need to know,’ Beth said. Du Bois frowned, looking over at her. ‘What were you guarding?’
The flayed man was studying her. ‘Even if I wanted to I couldn’t tell you. It was a sealed crate. Not drugs. Not refrigerated. About four feet long by two across and two deep. No markings on the crate. Whatever it was it was important enough for them to get us to guard it all the way from Ukraine. I’m guessing a weapon of some kind.’
‘Hermetically sealed?’ du Bois asked. The flayed man shrugged. ‘What happened here?’
‘People turned up and shot us.’ He gave his answer a little more consideration. ‘A lot.’
‘Who?’ Beth asked.
He shrugged. ‘We heard the sound of cars, performance engines by the sound of them. We grabbed our weapons and then there were a lot of bullets coming into the carriage.’
‘Did you see any of them?’ Beth asked.
‘I got tagged pretty bad, in the shoulder, side, leg. I was in and out but I saw the man with the black glass blade who did this.’ He gestured at his body, then he looked down. ‘But he wore a mask, like for ice hockey.’
‘And you have no idea who they were?’ du Bois asked.
‘In my country yes, but here, I’m not so sure.’
Beth frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We were under surveillance. We were sure it was FBI counter terrorism. In Russia the SVR … if we had something they wanted …’ He gestured at the sunlight shining through all the bullet holes. ‘Here I don’t know …’
Beth looked at du Bois. ‘The FBI did not do this.’
‘The CIA would do this,’ the flayed man said. ‘I worked with them in Afghanistan, but they would not do it in America I think. A phone?’
‘You’re sure it was government surveilling you? Some of the Mexican cartels …’
‘It was government. A phone.’
Du Bois opened his mouth.
‘What’s your name?’ Beth asked. The flayed man turned his head to look up at her. She could see the sadness in his eyes. She was pretty sure he knew what was coming next.
‘Arkady.’
‘I’m sorry, Arkady.’ He was nodding when she shot him in the head with the Colt OHWS.
Du Bois was moving away from her, bringing the carbine up. Alexia had the ARX-170 pointed into the freight car.
‘What did you do?’ du Bois asked as she holstered the pistol.
‘I’d rather he thought we were complete bastards than realised what had happened to the world and anyone he cared about in it,’ she told him as she jumped down from the freight car and started walking back towards the ECV. She felt the eyes of both the du Bois siblings on her back.
It was the most ridiculous of long shots. Beth could see it in du Bois’s eyes, hear it in Alexia’s voice. They were just going through the motions now. Bothering the dead. They were in a city of insane millions looking for sociopaths who were going to fit right in.
As they left the Long Beach area they had heard what sounded like a small war going on behind them. Artillery, tanks, helicopters, jets pounding the city to the south of them. Du Bois had guessed that the Marines at Camp Pendleton had decided to take the city in force.
It had taken them the better part of the day to make their way back north towards the west Los Angeles district of Sawtelle. This time they had to fight. They had to run roadblocks. Small arms fire had bounced off the vehicle’s armour. Du Bois had taken a round in the leg. Beth had also caught a ricochet in the arm. It had gone through her combats but not her hardened skin. It had still hurt.
She had known what the minigun’s capabilities were but there was a difference between knowledge, using it for suppressing fire – as they had when they had been looking for La Calavera – and witnessing what it could do to a human body first-hand. She’d fired controlled bursts. Trying to limit it to between fifty to a hundred rounds each time she had depressed the trigger. The rotating six-barrelled weapon’s rate of fire was horrific. It had filled the air with arcs of light from the tracers, chewing away at cars and SUVs in a shower of sparks. The people hit by the rounds looked like they had been disintegrated, they became smears on the concrete. Alexia and du Bois had popped smokes around the ECV to obscure the vehicle, though they could see through it themselves. Alexia used the weight of the armoured patrol vehicle to punch through the roadblocks. Du Bois and Beth fired at anyone, or anything, that looked like it posed a significant threat. It had happened more than once. It was as if the city had woken up to them. They were a disease and all the armed psychos were LA’s antibodies. Their grace period was over.
‘This is a fucking waste of time now,’ Alexia muttered, sucking hard on the cigarette she was smoking. They were parked on a footpath among some trees on a lawn surrounding the Wilshire Federal Building, an ugly, white concrete, nineteen-storey tribute to bad sixties government architecture, close to the corner of Wilshire and Veteran. South of them, on the other side of the Federal Building’s car park, was a real park. North of them, across the skyscraper-lined Wilshire Boulevard, were the neat rows of thousands of veterans’ graves in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. To their west, though obscured by the Federal Building, was the VA West Los Angeles Medical Center. ‘You’re just playing soldier boy because you don’t know what else to do.’
Du Bois and Beth were standing on either side of the ECV, weapons ready, keeping watch. Beth was starting to realise that despite her new physiology, despite the ability to stay awake for prolonged periods of time, the constant need to remain alert, the constant tension, was starting to take its toll. She was only half listening to Alexia, who was leaning against the ECV’s bullet-scored bonnet. The Federal Building looked strange, somehow. She was wondering if she was starting to hallucinate.
‘We’re just going to be fighting now, all the time. Eventually they’ll get us, and if they can’t kill us, then we’re looking at suffering for a very long time.’ She shivered, despite the temperature. The sun was going down but the evening was staying warm, low cloud and smog holding the heat in. Beth wasn’t sure the other woman was wrong, though she was planning to put a nanite-tipped bullet in her own head before it came to that. ‘We’ll run out of ammunition eventually.’ This was true. Beth had three cases of rounds left for the minigun, but she’d already burned through one case today alone.
‘So will everyone else,’ du Bois said. They could hear nearly constant gunfire now. If they watched then they could make out the distant flickering of muzzle flashes. They could still hear police sirens as well. Further east on Wilshire they had seen a mass battle going on between two forces in skyscrapers on opposite sides of the road, a spontaneous waste of ammunition, a battle thrown like it was a barbecue. ‘This isn’t going to end like this, Alexia,’ he continued, gently. ‘It’s going to get worse.’
‘How?’ Beth was surprised to find that she’d asked the question. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than this. There was something very wrong with the Federal Building.
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‘Imagine the thing you saw in the Solent. The Seeder. Many more of them, but more malign and insane.’
‘So let’s go somewhere better, somewhere isolated, and live out the time left as best we can,’ Alexia said. There were tears in her eyes. ‘I can’t do this any more. There are exclusive resorts in the mountains, the desert, we could …’
‘Go there, clear them out?’ Beth asked. Everything was stained with blood now.
‘Oh God,’ Alexia said and looked down.
‘Maybe you should take the ECV, take Beth with you if she wants to go,’ du Bois suggested. ‘Let me know where you’ll be and I’ll come for …’
‘You bastard!’ Alexia thumped him on the shoulder, staggering him a little. ‘You know I won’t leave you! Not now! We should both go! All go!’ She turned to Beth. ‘Will you tell him?’
Beth looked at Alexia and then used the excuse of being on watch to turn away from her. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Alexia’s plan sounded attractive, no doubt, but she remembered the dead tourists in Portsmouth, the freaks who had taken her sister, the other Elizabeth in the warehouse in Cambridge. It might all be meaningless against the backdrop of all this insanity, but dealing with the DAYP was her part of the insanity, the small thing that she could put right.
‘We’re going to run out of places to look soon,’ she said, still not looking at Alexia. ‘We might as well check this out.’
‘Christ, you’re no better than he is!’ Alexia spat. Now Beth turned to look at the other woman.
‘Fuck off!’ Beth snapped.
‘Alexia,’ du Bois cautioned.
‘No! Because this isn’t the last place you’ll look, because if you don’t get what you want here, you’ll go back and fight that Calavera arsehole! And you might not know it yet, but you want to do it! You’ve got a taste for it. You don’t know how many soldiers’ eyes I’ve seen that look in.’
The Beauty of Destruction Page 39
