Reapers (Breakers, Book 4)

by Edward W. Robertson

  Ellie paused at the alley's edge. From blocks away, a truck engine grumbled over the muffle of the snow. "We're close."

  They parked their bikes just inside the alley. Ellie walked in the truck's tracks to minimize her own, snow creaking beneath her shoes. She thought the alley fed straight through, but it hit an unruly hedge and made a right turn behind the restaurant. The dunder of the engine rose sharply. Ellie glanced back at the mouth of the alley, then hurried around the corner. She ran smack into Nan.

  Ellie fell back. The old woman gaped. Behind them, a truck lumbered into the alley and slid to a stop. With its engine idling, two men popped their doors and moved to the front of the truck, pistols on their hips, and waited.

  15

  Lucy grabbed the door handle and rattled it hard. "Tilly! Open this door!"

  "What are you doing here?" Tilly said.

  "What do you think? I came here to find you."

  Inside, Tilly laughed, a sick, wretched lurching. "Why do you think I left, you fucking idiot?"

  "To see the big city?"

  "That was just the cream in the coffee. I left to get away from you."

  Lucy's jaw went tight. She hammered her fist against the door. "You don't know what you're saying. Open this door and look me in the eye."

  "Fuck off, Lucy. Turn around, tuck your tail, and go on home."

  Lucy crouched and pulled the .22 from her ankle holster. Kerry grabbed her wrist. "What do you think you're doing?"

  "Get your hands off me so I can shoot this door down, you brute." She yanked her arm, but he held firm.

  "Tilly?" he said. "It's Kerry Malone. Can I come inside? No funny stuff."

  Tilly laughed. "I already said all I got to say!"

  "She came a long way to see you. I don't think she's going to go away without an explanation."

  The hallway went quiet except the buzz of the lights. "Make her get away from the door."

  Kerry pointed down the hall. "Why don't you stand over there a minute, Lucy?"

  Lucy tried to pull away again, but the guy's grip was like an iron bear. "She's my friend. Why don't I go in and talk to her?"

  "How about you let me find that out?"

  "This is goddamn childish." She swore and relaxed her arms. Kerry raised his eyebrows, then let her go. She put away the gun and walked down the hall and sat down on the cool stone floor.

  The door opened. Kerry held up his hands and went inside. Tilly shut and locked the door, leaving Lucy with herself.

  She had figured Tilly might do some whining and crying. The typical Tilly pleading. But it had never crossed Lucy's mind that Tilly wouldn't walk out the door with her. This was such an unexpected turn that Lucy spent the next five minutes sitting on the floor in a kind of awed silence.

  Kerry exited the room, smiled back inside, and gently closed the door. He flicked his fingers in a "come here" gesture and walked to the stairwell. Lucy followed him down to the lobby like a trained dog. They exited under the watchful eyes of the guards. After the cavernous dimness of the foyer, the brittle yellow daylight felt harsh and revealing.

  Kerry stood on the sidewalk and watched the empty street as if waiting on a date. "Got a smoke?"

  She dug into her bag and passed him one. "Winters are hard here, huh? Nothing but wind."

  He lit it and inhaled and scowled at it, as if expecting something different, something better. "Did you come all this way just to see her?"

  "It was my idea to come up here," she lied. "Then Tilly did first. She does that, acts before she's had the chance to think it through. I just wanted to make sure she was all right."

  "She won't talk to you."

  "Figured that much."

  "You okay?"

  "Why wouldn't I be?"

  He shrugged and exhaled into the cold morning. "Probably for the best."

  "How's that?"

  "Nerve's had his eye on her ever since you brought her up. His girlfriends don't tend to last."

  Her nerves thrummed. "He murders them?"

  "No, he doesn't murder them, what does he look like, the Dating Game Killer?" Kerry gave her a disgusted look, like she'd been proposing to start a serial killing partnership themselves, then took a drag and made a rolling motion with his hand. "He's a big believer in utility. A thing has it or it doesn't. When it doesn't, you throw it out and move on."

  "So he'd throw her out of Distro."

  "Just hope he waits for spring. Winters are rough here." He tugged the collar of his leather jacket. "Coming up, I had this friend we thought we'd play baseball together—this was years ago, before your time. Some day we'd turn double plays for the Mets. The Orioles, if we had to. Every day, we'd head to the park, throw a ball around, hit batting practice. Every day for three years.

  "Then one day he isn't there, it's just me and my glove. Next day at school I ask him what happened and he gives me the shrug. Well, it doesn't take a genius. I ask around and sure enough, he's got into drugs. Every day for two months I'm bugging him about baseball, hey, I think we make the team this year, and it's always the same: Yeah, sure, I'll see you on the field. Then I go out for tryouts and he isn't there."

  "What happened?" Lucy said.

  "I made the team." Kerry stared down the street, the buildings squeezing the space between them into a narrow path, the world beyond them lost. "I didn't see much of Mike after that. Ran into him at a party two years later. He didn't recognize me. Wouldn't have recognized his own mother. But what can you do? What, I drag him by his ankles to the baseball diamond? Tape the bat to his hands? When a person walks away from you, you can't force them to come back. They have to want to come home for themselves."

  Lucy tipped back her head at the Empire State Building, which was so close she couldn't see its top. "Probably died in the plague anyway."

  Kerry got a funny look on his face. "Probably."

  Together, they rode back to the pier. Lucy pulled more scout duty. She biked uptown and climbed her building and sat on the roof. Wind riffled the river. She picked pebbles off the tar-papered surface and chucked them to the street. It was too far away to hear them land.

  He was right, of course. Lucy had done plenty of running away and the only times she'd come back was when the place she'd run to had wound up even worse than the one she'd left. Could be her mom knew that's how it would go and that's why she'd never come looking for Lucy. Then again, more likely the woman had been too strung out to notice.

  Tilly had told her to go to hell and Lucy's first instinct was to tell her to go to hell right back. To stomp out of the city and leave Tilly to be caught in the grinders of war or tossed in the street by Nerve after he'd had his fun. If she came out of it alive, maybe that would teach the girl a thing or two.

  Except Lucy had made a promise to Mr. Loman. Granted, he was dead now and would never be the wiser if she broke it. Lucy didn't believe in ghosts. Or, for that matter, God or the Devil or even Death, at least not the robed skeleton her mother had been ranting about since Lucy was born. People liked to personify these things to pretend they could be beaten. If the Devil is some red dude with a pointy tail, well, one good right cross ought to knock him on his ass. But if the Devil isn't a person, but a force—hurricanes and earthquakes; greed and starvation; that voice inside you that insists there is nothing more important than getting those crystals into your lungs—well, you're just fucked, now aren't you?

  And she did believe in evil. The virus had made sure of that. No God and no Devil meant there were no commandments from on high, but everyone was born with a set of commandments within. If you broke your inner rules, your heart's own code, that opened holes in you that evil surged to fill. It'd tear you up like cancer. Shred your brain worse than syph. Call it guilt if you like, but the way she saw it, guilt was something imposed on you by other people. The corrosion she was talking about came from within. Impossible to heal.

  She didn't have a choice, then. She would bring Tilly home. She was just going to have to get creative.
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br />   She went about her job, spending as much time gazing at the Empire State Building as she did the streets. Two days later, she was daydreaming about rappelling in through Tilly's window when the clatter of hooves rang down the street.

  She lit her red lantern, swung it south, and ululated into her bullhorn. Ten blocks south, at the observation deck of a blue glass office, a matching red lantern flared to life.

  Lucy ran to the north edge of the roof. Some twenty horses pranced down Twelfth Avenue, each bearing an armed man. She ran to the stairwell and lit her personal lantern and raced down the steps. By the time she hit the ground, the troop was already two blocks down the street, horses' tails swishing back and forth.

  But they weren't in any special hurry. That was curious. Lucy detoured a block east, then sprinted dead south toward the piers. There, men and women heaved barrels, sandbags, and sawhorses into a barricade. Rifles took aim on her chest.

  She threw up her hands. "Do I look like Sherman's March? It's Lucy, you idiots."

  The guns lowered. She ran down the pier. Around the back of the clothing store, Nerve spat orders to armed stevedores, pointing them into position along the docks. At his right hand, Kerry saw her and nodded.

  Nerve glanced at her and his face creased with irritation. "Grab a rifle and get on the lines."

  She took one from the woman with glasses who ran the records department and also apparently served as emergency quartermaster. Most of the good guns had been taken; Lucy's didn't even have a scope. She found an empty spot near the middle of the lines and rested her rifle over a sawhorse.

  "This ain't my job," the man next to her muttered.

  "Think you'll get overtime?" Lucy said.

  He wrinkled his nose as if she'd joked about his dead mother and turned his attention to the entry to the piers. Up the block, hooves tocked on the asphalt. The Kono approached ten abreast, a second line on the heels of the first. Each rider bore a personal armory: several had assault rifles slung over their chests; some carried scoped rifles crooked in their arms; others wore a pistol on each hip.

  "Hold your fire," Nerve said from behind the lines.

  The riders stopped a hundred feet from the barricade. A lone figure ambled forward, separating from the host. Bearing and size looked female, but when they spoke, Lucy was no longer sure.

  "You in there, Nerve?" the warlord called. "Or did you hire someone to take the bullet for you?"

  Nerve stood and walked toward the lines, shrugging off the aid of Kerry and two other security members who tried to fall in beside him. Lucy hadn't heard him raise his voice before and his words thrust across the damp, cold air.

  "You're not here to shoot, Ash," he said. "If you are, your tactics are decidedly Civil War."

  Ash—who Lucy had tentatively decided was male—flipped up his sunglasses and laughed. "If I were here to fight, you'd already have three of my bullets in your ass. I'm here to cut you a deal."

  "Bring it to the main office. I don't run Distro."

  "I'm not wasting my breath on that old son of a bitch. You're the arm of this place same way I am for mine. Arms are the ones that move things."

  Exasperation stole into Nerve's voice. "Then quit talking and talk."

  Ash laughed and glanced back at his troops, inviting them to share the fine wordplay. "I know you don't want a fight, Nerve. Let me guess, it's 'inefficient.' Good news: Kono's willing to collude. You get everything south of 49th, we get everything north."

  "Including Central Park."

  "Plenty of other parks down here. The best water access, too. The Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridge. Holland Tunnel. If you wanted, you could even take City Hall. Shit, I'm starting to think I screwed myself on this one."

  "The most important resource on this island isn't the parkland or the infrastructure." Nerve walked past the barricade, hands clasped behind him, lecturing. "It's the population. Most of whom have aggregated around the water and farmland of Central Park. If Distro gives up that market, we may as well relocate to Jersey."

  "Hey, if that's your choice, I'm happy to send some of my boys to help you move. Promise they won't break nothin'."

  "Splitting up the city makes sense. Neither of us can take full advantage of its potential by ourselves. But we can't forfeit Central Park."

  Ash leaned over his horse's neck and glared at Nerve in disgust. "Man, I can take it from you whenever I want. Hey, I'm the mayor of Central Park! What are you going to do? You going to fight me for it?"

  Nerve rolled his eyes at the sky. "We'll offer the farmers more goods for lower prices. What's your plan then? Chain them in the park? Plead with them to buy local?"

  The man's high voice took on a pronounced edge. "We'll see how eager they are to bargain-shop after we break a few of their kneecaps."

  "So then when we do ride in, they join us and rise against you too."

  Ash spit on the pier, scolded his horse, and wheeled around. A couple other riders spat, too. The dock workers eased down their rifles but waited behind the barricade until the rattle of the hooves faded to the north.

  "Security team, take alert position," Nerve said. "Rest of you, let's get back to work."

  The man beside Lucy shouldered his gun and stood. "We get paid extra for this?"

  Nerve stared him down. "The next time they ride in, would you prefer to remain unarmed?"

  He strode toward his restaurant headquarters. Lucy supposed he'd just ordered her back to the rooftop with the lantern, but she jogged after him.

  "Who was that?" she said.

  Nerve glanced back. "I'm not paying you to ask me questions."

  "A well-informed workforce is an effective workforce, right? You really think that dude is going to sit on his thumb while you squeeze him out of business?"

  "I made him doubt. Winter's coming. He won't want to fight. He'll wait until spring. And discover it's too late."

  "Does he run the Kono?"

  "Like he said, he makes it move. If he digs in his heels, the old man won't be able to push forward."

  Nerve entered the restaurant. Kerry barred the way for Lucy. She gave him the eye and walked uptown and climbed back up her tower.

  She saw nothing there but birds, clouds, and the bucket-like water towers on top of nearly every old apartment and office. There was no sign of the Kono the next day, either. Maybe they were huddled uptown, arguing their next step, burning time while Distro undercut them one string at a time. Nerve had done a convincing job. Lucy wasn't privy to the ins and outs of Manhattan politics, but messing with Distro sounded like a bad idea.

  The day after, she had a rare day off, so instead of crouching on top of an apartment block watching for the Kono, she spent it crouching on top of an office block watching the Empire State Building.

  Traffic was at its relative heaviest in the morning. Men and women dribbled out on bikes and on foot. Two heavy-hitters emerged from the parking garage with horse-drawn carriages. A few of the non-VIPs pulled enough weight to warrant bodyguards, or at least boyfriends whose overprotectiveness extended to the carrying of automatic weapons. Including chauffeurs and armed guards, the day's total departures numbered less than fifty people. Manhattan wasn't quite the metropolis it used to be.

  An hour before noon, she descended and crossed the street and entered the Empire State Building's revolving doors. Inside the regal stone halls, a thick-set man blocked her way.

  "Pass?"

  "That's my plan," Lucy said.

  "You don't got a pass, or a face I know, you swing right back out that door."

  "And what if I make it worth your while to take a long look at the ceiling?"

  The man didn't hesitate. "You want to bribe me? Sure. Did you know the Empire State Building now features a prison?"

  "I don't see how it's a crime to want to see my friend. She lives upstairs."

  "You want me to ring her up?"

  Lucy gritted her teeth. "You know, I just remembered she's at work. Maybe I'll try back tonight."
/>   The man smiled wanly. "See you then."

  She went back to the rooftop across the street. She liked the feeling of looking down on people. She did just that for several hours more until, in the middle of the afternoon, Nerve rode down the street on a horse, tied it to the iron railing of a sidewalk planter, and removed a bouquet from its saddlebags. He adjusted the collar of his snappy powder blue suit and walked inside the tower.

  Lucy hissed between her teeth and descended to the ground floor to watch through the lobby windows. After ten minutes of waiting, she sat crosslegged on the cool tile floor, umbrella across her knees. A fat man walked outside and brushed Nerve's horse. The horse defecated. An hour and a half after he'd gone inside, Nerve walked out the front door, glanced over his shoulder, and spoke to someone in the lobby.

  Lucy popped up and stalked across the street. She didn't trust horses, not at all, but she walked up beside Nerve's and patted its neck and stroked its mane.

  Nerve finished his conversation and turned toward his mount. He registered Lucy but didn't break stride.

  "What were you doing in there?" Lucy said.

  "Careful," he said. "My horse bites."

  "Business? Or pleasure?"

  He shook his head and reached to untie the reins but she moved in front of him. He glanced back toward the doors, then advanced until their faces were just inches apart. "You've fucked up your own business too much to think you can inject yourself into mine."

  She didn't pull back. "You stay away from her. Plenty of other girls in this city who aren't my friend."

  "You think she's your friend?" He laughed and shuffled around her to unloop the reins. "You live in a different world, don't you? If it hurts to bump into reality, maybe it's time to go back home."

  He slung himself into the saddle and clipped down the street, bouncing rhythmically. She watched him go, then glared through the clean glass windows on the ground floor of the Empire State Building. She envisioned stomping inside, shotgunning the guards, clocking Tilly on the head, slinging the girl over her shoulder, and jogging across the bridge to her car.