Duke glared at her, as if his misfiring memory were her fault, and took a step forward, tapping the tip of his knife against the side of his jeans. "Whatever. I'll have all the time I need to figure it out when you're working for me. Times are tight, you can't turn down a good job like that."
Lucy had the impression most people used it as a figure of speech, but when she got mad, it was like a red sheer curtain dropped from the sky and shaded the whole world. Later, she could say exactly why she did it—people using their power to take it from others drove her ten kinds of crazy—but at that moment, the "why" wasn't exactly foremost on her mind.
She leveled the umbrella and pulled the pin that functioned as its trigger.
The shot crashed across the courtyard. Duke didn't have time to look shocked or scared or sorry. The blast pounded him in the chest and he dropped in the kind of heap that doesn't get back up.
She whirled on the other two. They were more experienced than the boys she'd taken the car from; the third man already had a pistol rising toward her chest. She fired at the same time he did. Her arm went hot; his bullet whined off the brick wall. Her shot took him in the middle of the body and he fell with a high-pitched moan. She sprinted at him and aimed her now-empty shotgun at Brian.
He hesitated with his hand in his armpit. The man on the ground was fumbling with his pistol. Lucy flipped her grip on the umbrella and bashed his wrist with its reinforced handle. The gun skidded away. She cocked back golf-style and smashed the handle into his head. As soon as she felt it connect into his skull, she dropped and snatched up his pistol.
"You aren't too fast, Brian," she said.
"You shot them!"
"I did. And I'll shoot you, too. But I got a deal for you."
"I got friends in there." He jerked his chin toward the bar. "They won't think that was a firecracker."
"Could be, but they disarmed me when I came in. Anyone who heard the shots would guess they were Duke's way of taking care of me."
Sweat popped across his pale face. "What do you want?"
"Duke saw me at the docks, didn't he? Your little raid on the Chelsea Piers. Were you there with him?"
"I'm dead as soon as I tell you what you want to hear."
She shook her head. "I get good vibes off you, man. If you play it straight with me, I'll return the favor."
His eyes tick-tocked between hers. "It wasn't just a raid. It was a scouting mission."
"To do what?"
"To see how much we could take from you."
"And Distro gave it away without a fight." Lucy perched a grin on her mouth the way you'd set a pair of glasses on the end of your nose. "You're coming back, aren't you? To take a lot more than coffee."
Brian shook his head so hard his chin wobbled. "I don't know. I'm a grunt. Duke keeps me around because I helped him through the plague, but he doesn't exactly invite me to tribal council."
"Think you better get used to talking about ol' Duke in the past tense." She took a look at the door, which remained closed. "He never let slip anything more juicy?"
He slicked sweat from his beefy face, then froze again and looked at her with pure horror, terrified that he'd dared to move. When she made no move to plug him, he let out a shaky sigh. "Duke's been popping off about Distro ever since you started undercutting us on imports. No one understands how you bring them in so cheap."
Lucy was starting to get a bad feeling that "Duke" was more than a nickname. "And when exactly did this start?"
"This summer was when we noticed. July 4th, when you brought in the ice. Who has ice on July 4?"
"One more question," she said. "Any last words?"
The sweat sprouted from Brian's face anew.
"Just messing with you," Lucy laughed. "Seriously though, is there another way out of here?"
Arm quivering, he pointed past the planters at the end of the courtyard, which were overgrown with trees and grass. "Follow the hallway to the other side of the building. I don't know if it's locked."
"Thank you." She lowered her pistol. "Your friends are dead. There's nothing to do for them. If you're an honorable man, you'll give me a couple minutes' head start."
Defiance cracked the fear in his face. "And if I'm not?"
"Then think long and hard whether you want me for an enemy."
She grinned and backpedaled toward the other side of the courtyard, keeping an eye on him the whole way. He pivoted to watch. The metal door opened on a dark hallway. As the door closed, it stole the courtyard's sunshine with it, leaving her in a world of outlines and silhouettes.
Lucy jogged for the far end. She pocketed the looted pistol and touched her arm where the unnamed man had shot her. It was the slightest bit damp. A graze. She'd gotten lucky. Maybe the man with the scythe had been too busy licking his chops at Duke's blood to cast his white gaze on her.
Light glowed from the other end of the hall, which opened to another restaurant, dusty and cobwebbed. A skeleton was scattered across the floor. Despite the disuse, the front door worked fine.
If she'd circled back the way she'd come in, she might have been able to retrieve her bike without being noticed, but she didn't feel like rolling the dice on that. The Feds would just have to bill her for it. She ran west, then swung south at the next intersection. Her shoes pounded the asphalt. After a couple blocks, she eased up and pulled the spent red plastic cartridges from her umbrella, dropping them on the road with the tongue-clucking sound so particular to empty shotgun shells.
After a mile of flat-out running, it was pretty clear they weren't going to find her. She had zigged close to the shore and caught glimpses of river at each intersection. She saw a few bike chains and horseshoe locks discarded next to planters, but the bikes had been claimed long ago. The Feds must have wanted a monopoly.
That meant she had to cross the five-odd miles to the piers on foot. She was well-callused but earned some new blisters on her toes by the time she jogged in sight of the piers. She headed to the restaurant and climbed the stairs to the rotunda. Nerve looked up from the paperwork on his desk.
"Did you speak to the Kono?"
"You know, I think it went pretty well." Lucy threw herself in a padded leather chair and pulled off her shoes. "One of their people even offered me a job. As a prostitute, mind, which I wasn't too keen on. He seemed insulted when I turned him down. Long story short, I killed him and one of his friends, but here I am."
"You're joking."
"Want to smell my umbrella?"
"Are you fucking crazy?" Nerve's voice was unsettlingly level. "The Kono are violent. I don't need to launch a study to know that. What I do need to learn is whether this raid is the first spark of a brushfire. And you think the best way to embed yourself in their ranks is to gun them down on their home turf?"
"They made me. Recognized me from the raid. A person of lesser integrity might try to hide that from you, but I figure a leader is only as good as his intelligence."
He moved his hands to a drawer of the desk. "You're pretty calm for someone reporting a disaster."
"I may have made a spectacle, but I doubt I made anything worse." She peeled off her socks, smelled her foot, and made a face. "I grilled one of their men. The raid was a dry run. They can't compete with your prices, so they're looking to muscle you out instead."
Until then, Nerve's face had been a taut mask. Now, it came to life. He walked around his desk for a better look at her. His hands were empty. "He said that? How'd you get him to talk?"
"I guess I got a face men want to confess to. How do you import so cheap?"
"Efficiency. We measure and analyze every dimension of our business. Streamline every link of your chain of trade by 2%, and you wind up 20% ahead of the competition. Kono tries to cut costs by using slave labor, but slaves are inefficient. You have to devote a whole new infrastructure to capturing, buying, and guarding them. Hiring doctors to keep your investment healthy. Not to mention the motivation problem."
Lucy scuffed her feet a
round on the carpet to wipe off the sweat. "And the whole 'slave' part."
"That's the Konos' philosophical problem." Nerve pulled a chair across from her and seated himself, crossing his legs at the knee. "Say they try to conquer us. The risk is off the charts. They could wind up wiped out themselves. The only guarantee is that both sides' operating costs will rise—you have to hire troops, equip and feed them, deal with attrition. If they invested that money into their business instead, they're building a much safer long-term projection. To put it another way, would you rather invest in the market? Or in the lottery?"
"Man, it is a bad move to assume you're the only dude in town with both halves of his brain. What if their boss is just as smart as your boss? He's put his eyeball to the figures and seen he can't keep up if he plays by your rules. So he makes his own. Instead of coming after your bottom line, he comes for your throat."
"I don't think Hector Udall is that smart. I know Ash isn't. But you make a point."
"They're desperate. They just can't keep up with you." Lucy laughed. "They said you got ice in July. How'd you do that?"
"Ice isn't as fragile as you think. It insulates itself." Nerve pointed to the wall where a map of the United States and Caribbean was studded with pushpins. "Our trade network runs all the way to Venezuela and beyond to the tropics. We have access to goods no one else has. And ours never go out of season."
"Yeah, but unless you stashed UPS away in a bunker during the Panhandler, your shipping costs got to be crazy."
"Do they? What does it cost to ship goods?"
"I dunno, what about fuel?"
He shook his head. "Wind is free."
"Labor costs," Lucy said.
"We don't employ most of these people. They profit from the trade itself. Additionally, what is the real cost of employing a person to steer a ship from there to here?"
"Food and water."
"That's right. And before you object that no one would work for food and water, let me inform you that most former Americans now in their twenties and thirties spent the pre-collapse as students, receptionists, and customer service reps. Their entire lives played out in small rooms while older people told them what to do."
"After that, a life on the open sea sounds pretty sweet," Lucy followed. "And you're all too happy to exploit their thirst for adventure."
Nerve raised one brow. "They get a cut of the goods, which we're happy to exchange for liquor or bullets or anything else they think they need. The larger point is that it costs much, much less to sustain one life today than it did six years ago. Distro was the first to figure that out and build a network around it. Our lead is too big for the others to close."
"I'm sure Rome thought the same thing about the barbarians."
"Yet parts of it lasted a thousand years." Nerve leaned back and tugged a loose thread on the seam of his pocket. "Back to business. Considering your results, I don't know whether I should be rewarding you, but I checked in with my people. Your friend's with us."
Lucy swung up her head. "Tilly? Where is she?"
"Safe. You can see her in three days."
"You got a deal."
"Unfortunately, you've destroyed most of your value to me. I'm transferring you to security. If the Kono are on the warpath, we need to ramp up our scouting. Report to Major Deunsling two piers down."
It sounded exciting. It wasn't. Major Deunsling was a major pain in the ass, a humorless bitch who could stand to cut down on the fried fish. Lucy's new duties, such as they were, consisted of sitting on a rooftop overlooking Twelfth Avenue. In addition to binoculars, she was decked out with an analog bullhorn and a red lantern. If she spotted anything resembling an approaching war party, she was to light the latter and scream into the former.
Boring as hell, but she did her duty. Couldn't risk screwing the pooch when she was three days out from Tilly. She did some pushups to prevent herself from going crazy, and spent much time contemplating the tower that dominated Midtown, but mostly she watched the streets and waited for the Kono.
It was a good thing she'd made the trip. She'd figured Tilly would be in over her head, and she was right. Distro was too slick for the Kono to handle with anything but gunplay. The island was about to be drenched in blood. If the underpowered Feds jumped in to try to calm things down, it could wind up a three-way war.
Not exactly where Lucy had expected to end up. But she owed it to Tilly—and to Tilly's dad. Freshman year, Lucy's mom got worse than ever. She'd go missing for two, three days at a time. Seemed like she had a new boyfriend every month. Once when she left to get the groceries—a rare event, after she'd sold her car—Lucy went into her room and found the pipe and the baggie of crushed-up white crystals. Lucy thought about busting the pipe and flushing the meth, but left them intact. They would only help kill her mother faster.
You had the screaming matches. A few times, she and her mom scratched and punched each other and Lucy stayed home from school until the bruises faded. She made a few friends from similar circumstances; they liked drugs and older boys, who bought them beer and cigarettes and condoms. Even the 22-year-olds didn't quite know what to make of Lucy, keeping one eye on her, wary in the same way a man walking his dog after dark watches a skunk. But she knew it was only a matter of time.
Because she was on a Path. Same one her older sister, already pregnant again, had taken. Same one her mom had taken. It didn't necessarily lead straight to the Reaper, but it wound through his world. A world of lowness and predation not all that different from the one they'd all come to live in after the plague.
Before the end times, still in freshman year, she began to run away. First time, she slept in a park; on her third night, a man pulled a knife and who knew where it would have gone if Lucy hadn't screamed and a good man hadn't come sprinting in to run the other man off. Second time, she went to stay with one of the older boys, but he only wanted her to pay rent in one way, and he tried to get it through vodka and blunts. One night, drunk on shots, he'd taken it out and tried to make her touch it and when she wouldn't he yelled at her and stomped to his room to take care of it himself. After, he passed out in bed with his shirt on and pants off. Lucy had a wicked buzz, but she'd scooped up her clothes and laced up her shoes and ran. Left the front door open, too. With any luck, someone would stab him.
When she got home, her mom was sitting in the dark on the couch, pipe clutched in her hand, wreathed in the smell of burnt cleaning spray. "Who says I want you back?"
"Who says I want to be here?" Lucy said.
"How much longer before you go out and don't come home? He sniffs you out and he finds you. The police find you in a ditch with eyes so round they'll never close."
"You're crazy."
"I'm crazy?" The woman stood, unleashing an odor of sweat and a semi-sweet chemical stink like the disinfectant wipes she used to use on the counters. "I know why you're out there. You want to wind up like your sister? You that mad for children? Or do you just love the taste of sperm?"
The red curtain fell over the window of Lucy's eyes and her hands shook like branches in a winter wind but she went to her room and locked the door. When her mom pounded on it, Lucy put in her headphones and turned it up until she could hear nothing but the music. In the morning, her mom was gone. Lucy stole the change from her drawer and jogged out the front door.
She didn't want to go to school where her mom might find her so she hung around the library instead, surfing around the internet, then walked across town to the Burger King and ate a double cheeseburger and then sat there until an employee not much older than herself asked her if something was wrong.
She didn't head back to the park until after dark. No one saw her. She got through three nights that way. On the fourth, as she bundled up beneath a metal slide, shoes scuffed through the chips of red wood bedding the grounds. The slide blocked the man from the thighs up. His shoes were hard-worn brown boots with black laces so new the aglets hadn't yet begun to fray.
Silent as an owl
on the wing, Lucy drew the knife she'd stolen from one of the older boys. The blade was five inches long and the pommel was the head of a dragon.
"Hey," the man called softly. "You in there, Lucy?"
She blinked. "Who is it?"
"Vic Loman. Tilly's dad."
"I know you. What do you want?"
He swung his head below the slide to get a look at her. His gaze moved over her blanket, her pack, her knife. "You all right there?"
"Why, you looking to move into the neighborhood? Rent's cheap, but the schools ain't shit."
Mr. Loman continued to hang there, head sideways. "Tilly told me where you were. Come on out."
"I ain't going home."
"Who said anything about going home? You can come stay with us. What you can't do is live under a slide like a lost Yorkie."
She combed her greasy hair back with her nails. "If my mom finds out, she'll cut your nuts off."
"Let me worry about my nuts," he said. "What do you say?"
She said yes. And her life changed. Not to say it got perfect. She was still too different from the other kids, and she'd missed so much school she had to talk to both principals and the cop they kept around for security, and getting that sorted out was such a to-do she didn't see why she should bother at all. Also, after the first three days, Mrs. Loman made Vic spruce up the garage so Lucy could sleep there instead. Not that Lucy minded the space itself; it was clean of spiders and she had her own TV. But the fact Mrs. Loman didn't want Lucy in the house made Lucy want to piss in her closet.
But it got better. Stable. It set her on a new path, one that ran away from the man with the scythe. Lucy never forgot who to thank for that. And when the plague came, and Vic got sick, and he asked Lucy to look after Tilly, Lucy had sworn on her life that she would.
Tilly hadn't always made it easy on her, but so far, she had honored her promise.
Two crisp fall days dribbled past. After her shift, she climbed down from the roof and walked to the pier to check in with Nerve, but Kerry brushed her off. Lucy was miffed, but decided to give them one more day before raising any hell.
Reapers (Breakers, Book 4) Page 16
