The Digital Plague

by Jeff Somers

  I listened and felt nothing. The water was strangely beautiful.

  “I’d love to push you in,” it repeated. “But you still have work to do. Things will take their course, of course. It’s unstoppable now, and my sources tell me New York is quarantined and about to fucking burn to the ground. I want things to move faster, so I need you out there, spreading yourself around. I know you, you cocksucker. I know you’d never dream of sacrificing yourself. So you’ll scuttle around like the roach you are and move things along, won’t you?”

  It spun me around and we started back toward the group, where the cops stood with Belling. The Monks emerged from the church silently.

  “Mr. Kieth has escaped,” the Monk said, its hand tightening painfully on my shoulder, “with the help of your pet SSF Techie, who is smarter than he looks. That is problematic. But I know him as well as I know you, Avery, and I know he’ll stay alive, which is all I really need from him. We will, of course, search the city and find him. It isn’t really a human city anymore, after all. It is our city, and I doubt Mr. Kieth will find it very hospitable. Very well. Officers,” he said, stopping and letting me shuffle forward to stand with them, “I’d gladly kill you as well, but He has told me I need you to keep Mr. Cates alive. I fear if your colleagues arrive and find you dead and Mr. Cates here alone, they will simply execute him on the spot. So I need you to remain alive to vouch for him.”

  We all stared at him. I realized I didn’t even mind the pain anymore. I felt good.

  The Monks began to file away, falling into line and marching for the river. The leader spread its hands. “This is a mess, right? Fuck it. It’s the System. It’s always a fucking mess. Everything falling apart in goddamn slow motion, every moment. Look at this—Paris—a huge goddamn city. Lost. Lost and no one even trying to get it back. Every year they lose a few more inches to the wilderness, to the weeds—to us.”

  The Monks behind him were marching straight into the river, just walking into the water and slowly disappearing. In the distance, I noted with vague interest, I could hear hover displacement.

  The Monk leaned in toward me. “Go home, Avery. Go home and scuttle about, spread yourself around. If they’ve managed to contain things, to set up a clean zone, that’s exactly where they’ll bring you, huh? And good-bye to that.” It reached out and put its cold plastic hand on my face. “I’m glad, though, that I got to see you like this. Hurt, desperate. All that fucking yen you got for killing all those people—not even counting the people you left behind along the way—and here you are. It’s good.” It turned to follow the last of the Monks. “He told me it would be good. He whispered to me when I was reborn and promised me revenge. I didn’t even know what the word meant until he spoke it to me.”

  I watched him go. “I know you,” I said to the air, and then Belling was in front of me.

  “Avery,” he said, and then stopped, holstering his guns and shooting his cuffs. His face looked odd to me with his scum of beard and deep lines. “I am sorry our paths crossed like this. Even the best of us fear death. You, I know, understand.”

  Fuck you, I thought lazily, not really feeling it.

  I watched, vaguely curious, as Belling was carried across the river by four of the Monks. He held the edges of his coat up out of the water and stared at the sky. I followed his gaze and saw the hover, a fat bug of light floating slowly through the sky, like a star crashing to Earth from a light-year away. At the sight of it, a hard kernel of anxiety bloomed in my chest, still smothered by a relaxed unconcern. I watched it slide across the sky, dropping lower and lower, displacement screaming around us, making us stagger backward. As it passed over the church it dropped to a few dozen feet above us and landed behind the building, shaking the whole island.

  For a second the night was quiet and peaceful.

  The kernel of alarm grew, like a pearl forming around a piece of grit, swelling and shunting aside the lethargic calm that had enveloped me. Hovers were never a good thing, I thought. I should be worried. I should be moving.

  Shouts behind us, and then the familiar sound of boots in sync. We stood there admiring the night as Stormers formed up around us, moving stealthily and invisibly, detectable only by the blur of their motion as their Obfuscation Kit struggled to keep up with the terrain behind them. In seconds we were surrounded, the Stormers taking on the colors of the muddy water and the silvery sky behind them, their face masks empty space staring at us.

  I shivered, alarm making my muscles twitch. Hense and Happling looked at me sharply, then around at the Stormers as if they’d never seen them before—which maybe they hadn’t, not from this particular angle, anyway.

  The Stormers didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to, since they were gathered together in the international symbol of We will kill you if you move. My mind was whirring along merrily, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened to us, and in the near silence I heard boots crunching their way around the side of the church. This was standard operating procedure for the System Pigs, of course; first the Stormers gathered, and then the officers in their brightly colored plumage came around to start the ritual ball kicking.

  The footsteps turned flat and hollow on the flagstones, and I squinted at the approaching figure, looking for a clue to the exact type of ball kicking we were in for. As he drew closer, a chill stole over me, smothering my anger. I was no expert, but I was starting to think that every goddamned psionic working for the government looked the same.

  He’d once had the ageless look I remembered from Shockley and his friends back in New York; this one still had the round face and big eyes, but a jagged red wound, dotted with pinker, smooth flesh, puckered one side of his face, a lightning bolt of broken skin. It gave him some years. As he walked I noted his left arm hanging down stiffly at his side. He stopped in front of us and squinted, his whole face scrunching up, muscles pulling skin into unfamiliar shapes.

  “Mr. Cates,” he said. “I hear you like to kill government employees. It may take more than a hover to do me.” He looked around. “There is supposed to be one more? A Technical Associate?”

  For some reason I wanted to laugh. I let a smile twitch my face. “The TA is AWOL.”

  Happling shivered. “What the fuck is this?” he said, his words firming up as he went, like he was coming back online.

  “Howard Bendix,” the newcomer said, his rainbow-colored ID suddenly held up for inspection. “Assistant to Under-secretary of the North American Department. Ah, weapons,” he muttered, nodding his chin casually in our direction. As if a magnet had been turned on, the guns leaped from the cops’ hands, their arms jerking forward. The guns skittered behind Bendix and stopped in a neat little pile. He glanced at them and then turned back to us.

  “You’ve all been put under my discretion, Mr. Happling,” Bendix said.

  Happling studied the ID and looked past it at Bendix’s young-old face. Then the big redhead turned and spat thickly onto the ground.

  “Fucking Spooks,” he said.

  XXIII

  Day Nine:

  I Can’t Even Imagine

  Why You’re Still Alive Now

  Leering at Happling with my wrists bound behind me, I was snugly secured to the seat as we waited for liftoff, held in place so tightly I had to regulate my breathing to avoid choking myself. Happling, face almost purple, stared at me from the seat directly across from me, so near our knees were touching. I wondered if he was going to stroke out right before me. Hense was to my right, but I couldn’t turn enough to get a good look at her. From what I could tell, she’d closed her eyes and gone to sleep.

  The Stormers were seated all around us on the perimeter of the hover cabin, headgear off, smoking cigarettes. I didn’t like looking at them, with their weird, ghostly bodies and their normal, sweaty heads.

  My hands were going numb. I distracted myself by trying to figure out where Ty and Mr. Marko were hiding themselves.

  I had no doubt they were on the hover—Techies couldn�
�t survive without their tech, their black boxes and endless, snaking cables, the guts of one machine soldered into another. Considering that for hundreds of miles in any direction there was nothing but creeping wilderness and some untamed Monks, when I put myself in Ty Kieth’s huge, soggy brain it was pretty obvious he’d head for the one place where he’d be in control: the hover. For someone like Ty, wiring into a standard government hover was child’s play. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover he was already controlling the damn ship.

  I looked back at Happling. His jaw was working feverishly, bunching and unbunching as if he were chewing something. His eyes shifted right and his face turned even darker, and then Bendix was at my elbow, holding a large digital clipboard in his good hand. He stood there staring down at us for a moment.

  “Complaints, Mr. Happling?” he said. Happling’s head jerked around and up, the cords on his neck bunching out as he fought against the tele-K’s pull. “If you don’t want your neck broken, keep your bullshit on simmer, okay?”

  “Stop calling me mister,” Happling growled. I could hear the straps on his wrists creaking. “I am a Captain in the System Security Force, you piece of shit. You don’t have any authority over me.”

  Bendix flipped his clipboard around, the screen lighting up. “You have been released, dishonorably, from the SSF, Mister Happling, along with your friend here, and handed over to Undersecretary Ruberto’s authority. This is a copy of Marin’s memorandum, if you care to read it.”

  Happling stared at Bendix. The air around him had gone quite still.

  “He burned you,” Bendix went on, flipping the clipboard back around. “So quit your bellyaching. Unlike Mr. Cates here, I don’t need you.”

  “Did they explain to you that you’re a dead man, that you’re dying right now?” I asked, smiling.

  Bendix smiled back. “Yes, Mr. Cates, I am aware of the risks involved in contact with you. Unlike these two pieces of shit, these traitors, I am not going to kidnap you in a pathetic grab at a few more days of life. I am happy to sacrifice myself for the good of the System of Federated Nations.”

  “Holy fucking bullshit,” Happling muttered. Bendix’s eyes flicked to him, and then Happling screamed, his whole body tensing up as he struggled wildly with his restraints. The Stormers all shifted in their seats, watching.

  “My training,” Bendix said slowly, “has been very thorough, Mr. Happling. I can break bones without touching you, so please be quiet.”

  He turned to look at me as Happling continued to shiver and choke across from me. “Mr. Cates, I’m bringing you back to be dissected and tested, so we can solve this little problem and put it behind us. You probably won’t survive this process. I know you were granted a pardon of sorts by Director Marin as part of your dealings with him, but the System has technically been in a state of emergency since the Monk Riots, and it is completely within Undersecretary Ruberto’s authority to declare you property of the state.”

  I nodded. “We’ll see how patriotic you are in a few days, kid.”

  Bendix smiled, his face twisting in various contradictory ways. Behind him, Happling’s face had gone a shade of reddish blue that didn’t look healthy. I had to hand it to the government—they apparently knew how to train their tele-Ks.

  “I think you’ll be dead before me,” Bendix said, tucking his clipboard under his arm and turning away. “New York isn’t a secure area at the moment,” he said as he strode away. “Once we’re in the air we’ll be heading for Washington, where a team has been assembled to analyze you, Mr. Cates. So you know that no remnants of your organization will be on hand for any bullshit.”

  I watched him exit the cabin, the hatchway popping open as he approached and snapping shut as he stepped through it. Showy bastard, I thought. Happling slouched forward, sucking in an endless, shocking breath as his face returned to an almost normal color.

  I leaned in so close I could have licked his ear. “We have to gain control of this hover.”

  The big man was sucking in air desperately, his chest heaving. “Are you fucking crazy?” he gasped. “We’re restrained. Disarmed. Surrounded. By Stormers. With a goddamn. Spook.”

  “And if we end up in Washington on this hover, we will be dead. Shit, you will probably be dead somewhere over the fucking Atlantic. I can’t even imagine why you’re still alive now.”

  Hense spoke, her voice rough and blurry. “Because we’re surrounded by SSF, and even a jackass like Bendix is afraid to kill two cops in cold blood in front of them.”

  I flashed back to a Vid show announcing that the civilian government was resurrecting the military, and suddenly thought it made sense. Every branch of government needed to be able to kill the members of the other branches. It was how things got done.

  “Hey.” I lunged forward and hit Happling lightly with my head. “Pull your shit together. We have to gain control of this hover.” I had no idea how we were going to do this, but knowing for a fact that you were a dead man if you didn’t move soon was a great motivator.

  He glowered at me from under his eyebrows. “Fucking hit me again, and—”

  “Kill me later,” I said. “Kill me after.” I glanced at Hense. “I think our Techies are stowaways.”

  Her head twitched slightly, the tiniest movement toward me. “How do you know?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think. Ty Kieth is the key to our survival. I think he’s hiding on this hover. Now get your heads out of your asses, officers, and help figure out what to do.”

  I didn’t think Hense was going to respond, that maybe she’d had the fight kicked out of her. Then she nodded curtly, looking me in the eye. “All right, Avery,” she said. She held my gaze for a moment. “You never give up, do you?”

  I shrugged my eyebrows, picturing Glee and thinking I’d love to give up. For a moment it was just Hense and me, and I knew she understood at least one thing about me, because she was exactly the same: we knew only one way. She scanned the cabin, looking at all the Stormers, who looked back at her expressionlessly. Finally she oriented on one, a round-faced veteran, maybe twenty-five, receding hairline shaved close, his face pale and glistening with sweat. A crappy filterless cigarette dangled from his lower lip, burning, forgotten.

  “You,” Hense said, her voice suddenly the clipped, projected colonel’s voice she’d perfected. “I know you.”

  The Stormer looked down and took the cig from his mouth. After a moment he nodded. “Yes, sir. Was on the team in the Bronx a year ago. Beatin’ on the Kabeer Gang in the bowling alley.”

  Hense nodded. “Your name’s Kiplinger, right?”

  The Stormer didn’t look menacing anymore. He looked embarrassed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t fucking talk to her,” a round-faced girl snapped. She was red cheeked and healthy looking, a big girl who was comfortable in her skin. She spoke in a stretched drawl, as if she liked tasting the words. “And don’t call a busted ex-officer sir, eh?”

  Hense waited a few beats, keeping those terrible eyes on Kiplinger and ignoring the girl completely. “You know this is bullshit, trooper. You know you’re being played by the Spooks. We’re SSF. We’re cops. You’re going to side with the fucking Spooks?”

  Kiplinger studied his cigarette as if the secrets to the universe were contained in it. “We were assigned by direct order of—”

  “Fuck the direct order,” Hense said, her voice rising in volume. All the Stormers were staring at us now. “This is bullshit. We are SSF. That freak in there is not a cop. You don’t think this shit stinks?”

  “Fuck you,” the round-faced girl said, taking a breath between the words, looking right at Hense—which I could personally attest took balls—and blowing a strand of her limp brown hair from her face. “You were burned by the Worms, eh? You’re not cops anymore.”

  Hense turned her head with a birdlike, precise movement, her eyes on the girl, who tried to stare back but looked away after a moment. It was hard, I guessed, to forget that Gold Shield. “We
were? We were? What’s your name, trooper?”

  The girl studied her fingernails. “Name’s Lukens,” she said, visibly stopping herself from adding sir to the end. “You want my digits, too, Colonel?”

  “Trooper,” Hense continued, “if the King Worm burned us, where are the Worms? You really believe Internal Affairs decided to fuck us and then sent the fucking Spooks to collect us?” She looked back at Kiplinger. “Use your fucking heads. You’re being played. And when Marin finds out what’s going on here, none of you are going to survive the encounter. If nothing else, he’s going to have to delete all of you to keep this sort of embarrassing bullshit quiet. Police, helping the fucking civvies fuck with police.”

  Some of the Stormers were looking at each other. They didn’t like this. I could feel a new tension in the room—hell, I was starting to feel outraged, listening to Hense’s clipped, commanding voice. I glanced at Happling, and he was sitting up straight, breathing loudly through his nose. He looked like a man who could burst through his bonds with a shrug.

  “Kiplinger,” Hense barked, “get the fuck over here and release Captain Happling and me.”

  The Stormer was looking at the floor miserably. “Colonel, I—”

  Hense sat forward as if willing him up. “Trooper, when this shit hits Marin’s desk, the King Worm is going to be angry. He is going to be pissed off, and if you think any of you are going to survive the experience, you are fucking sadly mistaken. This is fucking treason. We are police, and that freak up front is not, but you’re taking his orders like a fucking faggot because he has a scan of a fucking memorandum? Are you seriously that stupid, trooper? Fuck you, then. Once we handle this situation, I’m going to personally break you and ship you off to Chengara, trooper, where I’ll keep you on ice until shit settles down and then I’ll take some goddamn vacation and spend a few weeks there pulling your teeth out and breaking your fingers.” She turned her head to the Stormer next to Kiplinger, a younger woman with frizzy black hair and a bad, greasy complexion. “You, what’s your name, trooper?”