by John Helfers
They had to go.
Except for the chair, the rest of the apartment was empty. One light shone down from the ceiling fixture right in front of the hallway door. There were sockets in the ceiling in other parts of the big room and one in the ceiling of the kitchen that I could see, but rather than broken bulbs, it looked like the last tenant had taken them. Taken the plastic covers of all the electrical outlets, too. Some people.
“Let the kid go,” I said. “Let me take a look at him.”
The head elf looked at me for a moment, then nodded to the muscle. One of them touched the binders on the kid and they snapped open.
The kid immediately hopped out of the chair and started for the door.
Didn’t get far.
One of the bruisers caught him by the back of the shirt and lifted him off the floor, legs still kicking, tossing him back toward the chair.
Got to give this to the kid, he was persistent. Three times he got caught before he gave it up. Granted, he was a kid, but given how easy he got caught each time, I’d have given up sooner. But finally, the kid stood there in front of the chair, panting, trying to pull the gag free.
“The gag,” I said. I knew the kid could claw at that thing for years and never work it free.
The right touch and the gag popped free, too.
“He looks OK to me,” the elf said, sneering.
Looked OK to me, too, but no reason not to make sure.
“How are you, kid? They treat you OK?”
In the John Wayne movie, the kid is dressed like a sissy but he says to John Wayne, “Sir? Are you my grandfather?” Now, I didn’t really want the kid to mention that I might be related to him, but I doubted the kid had a clue—the only time I had ever seen the kid, he was barely a year old. But that “sir” part had always sounded good to me, maybe with a touch of defiance, refusing to knuckle under.
“Bite me, dickweed,” the kid said.
Well, another lost John Wayne moment. At least the voiceprint matched.
Turning to the elf, I said, “Can’t believe they want this back.”
The elf just shrugged. “Password?”
This is the dangerous part of any such transaction. Outnumbered like this, they didn’t have to let the kid go, or me either, once they had the password. In fact, if the extortion worked once, it might well work again. Who knows how many golden eggs the kid could lay for them?
I had to get things moving. Out there somewhere, some Humanis operatives were herding every asset they could get hold of in my direction.
They believed I had a bunch of dirt on them that they didn’t want made public.
I did but it was well hidden because as long as I had it, I had a chance to live.
It wasn’t going to go public until I was good and dead. It was that sort of information: wasn’t going to expire any time soon.
Me, I had decided years before that I wasn’t going to be taken alive. Not if I had a choice, anyway. One of my pants pocket contained an autoinjector full of ricin. Illegal as hell but arrest was the same as capture for me, to be avoided at all costs, so wtf.
The elf got a stricken look on his face. He looked at the bruisers and their eyes narrowed before they headed for the door. In seconds, all three of the big boys were gone.
It could have been anything but I was sure something was going on outside and I was afraid I knew what it was.
“The password,” the elf demanded.
“Hogwarts,” I said. I’d loved those books when I was a kid.
Where the elf pulled that pistol from, I couldn’t say. I would have sworn there hadn’t been any place in his clothes lumpy enough to hide it, but there it was. “I told you to come alone.”
“I did. What’s going on?”
“One of my people is not responding.”
Raising my hands to the level of my shoulders, I said, “No clue. I came for the kid. You got your file, I got the kid, I just want to go get my money.”
For a few moments, I stared down the muzzle of the pistol the elf held on me, wondering if this might be it, finally, after all these years. My knees shook.
Geez, I’d been targeted by robocannon and I can’t tell you the number of times I ran down a corridor dodging bullets. I was younger then.
For sure, I thought I wasn’t going to get any older, but the elf displayed that slack-faced expression I had come to recognize. The ruffie had started to kick in.
Time for my secret weapon.
If you practice long enough, you can learn to walk quite normally with something not too large—or with too many sharp points—clamped between your butt cheeks. People doing a pat-down don’t usually cram a hand in there.
I let the little metal tube slide down my leg as I turned off my eyes and ears for a moment.
The flash-bang exploded when it hit the floor.
Immediately, I turned the gain back up on my eyes and I reached out my hand and took the pistol from his hand.
“What is it? What’s out there?” I said, as I jammed the muzzle up under the elf’s chin.
“Ghouls. Maybe two dozen.”
Crap. I hadn’t thought anyone could get ghouls to do anything, but apparently the Humanis people were not only able to get over their aversion of meta-humans enough to use them as operatives but had found some way to convince ghouls to cooperate.
Maybe it was just a matter of making sure the ghouls had plenty of meta-human flesh to chew on. Ghouls liked that.
I thought about shooting the elf but why attract attention? At least, any more than the flash-bang already had.
So I kneed him in the groin and jabbed my fingers into a nerve nexus under his right arm. Dropped him like a rock. Nice thing about the martial arts is that they never go obsolete.
Dropping the pistol into one of the pockets of my pants, I snatched the secretary out of the elf’s other hand and stuffed it into another pocket. Another chunk of change to me for preserving Ares’ data.
I reached inside my waistband and pulled out two bundles of black plastic. Harnesses. Memory plastic.
Each bundle had a fist-sized disk of metal in the middle and I held one of those disks to my chest and pulled the slider on the side downwards.
The bundle undid itself and legs reached out like a startled spider, then wrapped themselves around me, making an effective harness as the plastic folded itself into the pre-programmed shape, the “legs” gripping each other in the middle of my back.
The kid had just stood there and watched as I had disarmed the elf and done the harness thing, but when I took the first step toward him, the kid turned on his heel and ran for it. Since I was between him and the hallway door, he had no choice but to head for the darkness and gloom of the kitchen.
I stepped up the gain on my eyes so I could see the doorway on the other side of the kitchen that either led into a bedroom or to a hallway that led to the bedroom. I had no idea if there was a back door to the place, but the kid didn’t even know whether the kitchen was a dead end or not. Not that he had much choice.
He also didn’t have much in the way of legs. Given a bigger start, he could have gotten away. No way my old legs would have been able to keep up with him but he was close enough that I only needed two steps to reach him.
I put the disk of the second harness in the middle of the kid’s back and slid the switch. In a fraction of a second, I had him by the harness.
My old fingers almost let go, though. I think if the kid hadn’t been startled by the flapping black legs whipping around him, he might have been gone and away. As it was, I held on by my fingertips and hoisted the kid off his feet.
I mentioned that I had seen the kid once before, when he was a year old. Needing a place to hide out I had hunted Donna up. Big surprise for her. Stayed with her for two days, until I could use my contacts to set up a new hidey-hole.
One of those days, she hoisted the kid out of his crib and handed him to me, telling me to hold him for a second while she changed the sheets.
&
nbsp; I am not a kid-person. Didn’t know what to do with my fellow kids when I was a kid and hadn’t had anything to do with them afterwards.
Didn’t know what to do with this kid, either. His face was screwed tight and he expressed his unhappiness with the general state of the universe by howling at the top of his lungs. If I had not been distracted trying to turn down the volume of my ears, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten nailed, but the bugger planted a bunny-suited foot right in my huevos.
I almost puked then.
Now, ten years down the road, the little bastard cow-kicked me again, square in the nuts.
I almost puked.
But I didn’t have time for that.
Ghouls. Elves. God knows what else.
Time for the escape plan.
I clicked the disk of the kid’s harness onto the disk of mine. They were made to mesh and once they clicked, the kid was not going anywhere without me until I reached between us and hit the release.
His feet hammered on my knees and thighs.
Old muscles and bones don’t like that. These days, I bruise just by thinking about it.
That’s one of the places where I had not planned well. I should have had something to put the kid out but I didn’t.
So it wasn’t a perfect plan. Sue me.
Rather than going out the front, I turned toward the rear stairwell. Paulie would have another car at the end of the alley between 4th and 3rd. All I had to do was get to it.
The stairwell was pitch dark. I generally approve of efficiency, but if the elves had taken out the lights in this stairwell, too, I thought maybe they were overdoing it a bit. Still, that’s what light amplifiers are for. I cranked up the gain on my eyes.
And the biggest, ugliest, droolingest ghoul I had ever even heard of was there, halfway up the flight of stairs. Apparently they can see in the dark, too. Or at least this one could.
That damned elf hit me from behind right then.
You know, when a man takes one in the nuts, he should lay on the floor for a while and pray for death.
Instead, that elf either had cast iron balls or some pretty good painkiller implants.
But again, the old reflexes saved me.
As the elf barreled into me, I bent my knees and sidestepped slightly, reaching up and grabbing his arm as he tried to get an arm-bar on my throat. One good twist of my body and his momentum sent him up and over my shoulder.
Wish I could have seen his face when he got his first look at the ghoul he was sailing right into.
Both of them went down, tumbling on the stairs in a ball of legs and teeth.
I didn’t hang around to see which one was going to win the wrestling match, though I think the elf probably had the most motivation. It was highly unlikely he was going to try to eat the ghoul if he won, which was not at all true of the ghoul if it won instead.
Unfortunately, I am not a twenty-something anymore and the kid’s weight put me off-center enough that I went down on one knee.
Hard.
The only good thing about pain is that the worse it is, the faster the body’s endorphins kick in. At least long enough for me to fumble an autoinjector out of my pocket and jab it into the fleshy part of my leg.
The pain went from flashy sparkles of color in my vision to mere agony in seconds.
I’d only bought myself maybe ten minutes, though, before that knee was going to swell and lock up on me.
At the top of the first flight, the extra twenty kilos of kid strapped to my chest combined with fifty years of muscle atrophy to make my tired old heart hammer in my chest. The painkillers probably helped with that.
I never wanted to be a courier. I wanted to be a fighter. I had the knack and I trained, when I was young, in the martial arts. When the Awakening happened, I was one of the first kids in my school tested for magic. I spent my college money learning the adept magic.
But I fell in with the wrong bunch, signed the wrong contract, and by the time I got myself out of that, my head was full of silicon.
There wasn’t much left of my magic.
I was on the third floor, I was sweating like a pig, and the damned kid was beating my poor knees to pulp.
Donna loved this kid. No way she could be a child of mine. A child of mine would have drowned this spawn the first chance she’d got.
Weak or not, I needed the old spells.
Never learned to do the spells without moving my lips, muttering the guiding instructions my old teacher gave me. Then again, I never had that much need for them, so I never really learned to do it the right way. Kept telling myself I would do the work, practice, and get better. I still do. Hope springs eternal.
I felt new strength running into my legs, into my chest. My heart rate slowed a bit but I was still puffing like a bellows as I made my way up the last four flights and onto the roof.
The way to make an op work is to have a plan. That plan should include a backup plan, in case things go to hell.
If there was any justice, there would appear to be three air conditioning units on the roof. The building plans would only show two but if my people had done their jobs, there would be three. I wanted the one closest to the alley.
I also wanted my heart to either to stop hammering so hard or to just give up, have the heart attack, and let me die. The spells had helped some. I had made it to the roof, even if I felt death breathing on the back of my neck.
Did I mention that the kid was howling at the top of his lungs the whole time?
Cargo pants are a good thing. I had scooped up the gag the elves had used as I scooted out of that apartment and had stuffed it into a pocket. Before I broke the handle off the roof door, I slapped the gag over the kid’s mouth.
Good gear is worth every dime. I still have that gag, by the way.
That’s the second error I made in my plan. Maybe I was still caught up in that John Wayne thing, but gag, hobbles, binders: those should have been in my kit. I’d been lucky that the elves were more experienced with kids than I was.
When I eased the door open, the roof was empty. One big flat expanse, covered with crushed limestone over a tar base.
And three AC units.
The only thing better than good gear is good contacts.
The kid was still drumming his heels on my poor knees and I knew that, if I lived through this, I’d be limping for weeks, as much from the kid as that jammed knee I took on the stairs. I just needed to limp another ten meters.
This last box looked just like an AC unit, felt like one. In the old days, we’d used these boxes to hide all sorts of stuff. Good place to stash extra gear, cache extra ammo, or hide stuff you’d stolen while you beat feet for freedom. No one looked twice at an AC box.
The kid kept bracing his feet against the edge of the unit and pushing off, which pissed me off until I turned around and backed into the unit, feeling around under the edge for the release.
I found the button and pushed it. As I stepped forward, to get out of the way, the kid threw himself to one side so hard I almost fell on my face.
Believe it or not, I actually panicked for a moment, afraid I was going to fall on the kid and hurt him.
Fortunately, I caught myself, though I twisted my ankle, and my foot folded underneath. I hopped a couple of times to catch my balance again, without putting any pressure on my foot, but it felt like I’d broken every bone in my foot and torn every tendon in my leg.
I hate getting old.
Behind me, the rustle of heavy fabric and a rush of air told me the balloon was inflating. Turning, I watched it pop free and rise above it, a dozen cables holding it to the box.
They make pretty fine plastics for all purposes these days, but cloth doesn’t reflect radar and, filled with helium rather than hot air, it wouldn’t show a heat signature either.
The kid jerked again and I caught myself on the already-damaged ankle.
“Goddamnit, kid,” I growled, my eyes tearing up from the pain. “You act like you never want to see your mo
ther again.”
He stopped struggling, just like that.
Who’da thought it’d be that easy? Kids.
Once all the lines were clear and the balloon loomed over the box, I stepped over the edge and settled down inside it. What with the helium tanks, there wasn’t much room for me and the kid. The frost on the tanks warned me not to touch them. Fire-burn, freezer-burn: burn is burn and it hurts. Avoid hurt.
In the middle of the floor of the box was a handle. One twist and the box came free of the roof and off we went, rising silently into the air.
I almost dared to breathe.
Until I heard the helicopters.
Maybe they were friendly, maybe not. Probably not.
Riding a balloon is deathly quiet. Since you move with the wind, there is no sound from that. You are far enough up that you don’t hear much of anything from the ground.
I sat up enough to peer over the edge of the box and saw the lights of the city creeping by below us. All I could hope for was that without radar or IR to find us, the helicopters would fly right by.
Still, I reached over and eased open the valve on the nearest cannister. Helium hissed and I could feel the minutest rise of the balloon. The choppers will be low, looking for us, so the higher we went, the less likely they would find us.
Not to mention that having a helicopter blade slash the gasbag would change the ending of the story.
I settled back for the ride. I felt the kid shiver against my chest, and I looked down to see he had wrapped his arms around himself.
The bottom-most pocket on my right leg contained my first aid kit. Kind of silly to carry it, since most times you either got away clean or were leaving body parts behind, but I had a mylar survival blanket in the kit.
My ancient fingers almost fumbled enough to lose it but I managed to get it wrapped around us enough to save some heat. The kid didn’t stop shivering, but the shakes weren’t as bad.
My knee and ankle were both killing me, my body felt like I’d been pulled backwards through a knothole, and what I wanted more than anything else was a big glass of single malt.
But I’d pulled it off. Got the kid, kept the data.
