Avery Cates 2 - The Digital Plague

by Jeff Somers

  “Redundant manual repair module,” he said with a shrug. “Almost no one knows these exist, since most of the work is done digitally or by Droids.”

  I kept staring at him. Here he was, the living kill switch to the little devils eating up the human race, floating around inside me and biding their time. I had a gun in my hand and every other living and not-living thing in the area distracted. My arm wouldn’t move, though. I’d made a promise; I’d given my word. As I stared at Kieth I thought, Fuck my word. This wasn’t about honor. This was about living, and not just me.

  I checked that, tightening my grip on my gun. Why lie to myself? It was about me living. The rest of the world was a bonus.

  My arm twitched and started to bring the gun up but then I paused, a blurry feeling of calm, pleasant buzzing seeping over me. A much better idea, I thought, was to investigate the entry point, see if it posed a threat of infiltrating Monks. A grin, crooked and loose, formed on my face. “Shove over,” I suggested, stepping forward and jamming the gun into my coat. “Show me how you got in.”

  Kieth blinked in surprise but did what he always did when you moved toward him—backed away. I followed down into a cramped space where we had to almost embrace, crouching over the prone shape of Mr. Marko, who stared up at me as sweat streamed down his face from every pore, and Kieth gestured at a dark crawl space behind me barely wide enough for someone my size to fit into. I dreaded it on sight. Once inside I would barely be able to breathe, much less move myself along.

  Still, the curious feeling of cheerful laziness filled me, an oily, viscous sensation that coated every thought I had. Should I report this to the Pigs? The feeling said no, too much trouble. Should I squeeze myself into the crawl space and hump to the entry point, make sure of it? The feeling said emphatically yes, that was an excellent idea. I gave Kieth the same crooked smile.

  “Stay here,” I suggested. “I’m going to check it out.”

  Kieth jumped as if he’d been stabbed with a pin. The banging noises, carried by the hull, were just as loud in the hole as they’d been up above, but with extra echo, as if they were happening deep below the earth. “Mr. Cates! I can assure you—”

  I didn’t stop to listen. Without hesitation I pushed myself into the pitch-black tube and began wriggling forward. I felt fine. I was calm, almost happy, and perfectly sure of my actions. It was a familiar feeling, and as I wriggled through the greasy ductwork toward a slowly growing pin of watery light, I wondered idly why it seemed familiar. It wasn’t an urgent worry, just a mild curiosity I was confident would resolve itself eventually.

  Sweating and gasping, I managed to slide the last few feet down to a thin wire grating that separated me from the outside world. Peering through it, I had a good view of the muddy ground beneath the hover and could tell the grating was hidden inside a surrounding well of metal not easily seen from anywhere but directly below. I could see the mechanism that snapped a protective plate over the grating when the hover was pressurized. The Monks would likely not discover it for some time yet.

  I watched, bemused, as my arms reached out and smacked against the grating, easily knocking it out of its clips. It fluttered to the ground and didn’t even make any noise I could pick out amid the din. As I let myself slide forward, I realized I was still smiling, the expression stuck on my face. I decided I would worry about it later.

  The ground jumped up at me and I landed awkwardly, tumbling out onto the wet earth. I lay there for a moment, staring up at the scorched, riveted underbelly of the hover, its landing gear looking monolithic, like trees made of metal and cable. The noise around me had swollen back up to full size, but I wasn’t concerned. Sitting up, I stared around for a few moments before struggling awkwardly to my feet, hanging on to the bottom of the hover for balance, my head ducked uncomfortably. I stumped out from beneath the hover and found myself in the middle of a battlefield.

  The Monks were everywhere, clinging to the hover like barnacles. I staggered forward, smiling around, feeling at peace as I watched the Tin Men pounding their alloyed hands—some without any skin covering the chromelike fingers—into the hover’s hull while a constant stream of them assaulted the narrow hatchway, getting chewed up by the Stormers within for their troubles. None took any notice of me as I limped toward the river, where their leader stood with its arms folded across its chest, looking like a new penny. Wa Belling stood next to it, and for once didn’t look particularly pleased with himself. It was such a new expression for the old man that I was momentarily startled, the whole world seeming to rush back into me for a heartbeat, and I remembered when I’d felt this way before: years ago, in New York, before everything.

  I studied the Monk as I approached. It still seemed like a good idea, and I didn’t worry about it because I knew I didn’t have much choice. My decisions were being made for me.

  When I was right in front of the Monk I stopped and gave it the benefit of my loopy smile, cocking my head to one side. After another heartbeat all the calm burst inside me, bitterness and fear rushing in to take its place, my whole body shuddering with suddenly remembered pain and anxiety. I kept the smile in place, though. I was Avery Cates. I smiled at everything. Even ghosts.

  “Hello, Kev,” I said. “You’ve looked better.”

  XXVII

  Day Nine:

  It’s What I Do

  Long ago I’d been Pushed by Kev Gatz, my old, dead friend, and I knew the feeling, I knew the print of his mind on mine. He was better at it, more refined and more in control, but now that he’d lifted the Push off me I recognized it, and recognized it from earlier at the church, too. I stared at him and my carefully maintained cool started to melt away as he smirked his plastic Monk face at me, trying to smile.

  Kev and I had rattled around New York for years. He’d always been a little cracked, a little strange, and the only thing that had kept him alive was the Push, the psionic power he’d been born with. Somehow he slipped under the SSF’s radar and hadn’t been disappeared like every other kid who showed any kind of mental talent—kids who grew up to be the Shockleys and Bendixes of the world—and had managed to become a minor criminal, a bottom-feeder. And when I’d gotten the Squalor job, when Dick Marin had rammed the Squalor job hot and glowing up my ass and told me to kill the founder of the Electric Church or be killed, I’d taken Kev Gatz with me as my psionid ace in the hole. He was the only reason my plan had worked, and it had cost him his life.

  I remembered him slumped against the wall. I remembered I’d been hiding behind a cart when he’d been killed.

  “How—?” I started to say, and then found I hadn’t actually formed a coherent question.

  “Thanks for showing us where Ty is hidden,” he said as three Monks detached from his retinue, retracing my steps and ducking under the hover. “Avery, do you know how long the human brain remains viable—and functioning—after death?”

  I shook my head a little, the most movement I could manage.

  “I know. He told me. Long enough,” Kev said. “You left me there. You left me. Good old Avery, my only friend. The only person who ever gave a rat’s ass about poor old weird Kev Gatz. You bullied me into helping you, Avery. You bullied me and you hit me and you treated me like shit, and I took it because I thought you were my friend. And then I saw your boots walk off and just leave me in that fucking hallway. Just left me there like trash.”

  His face had gone blank again, and with the sunglasses I couldn’t tell if his little camera eyes were on me or not. “They came for me. A few minutes after you left me there, they came for me. Know how long it takes to process a corpse into a Monk, Avery? I do. Twelve minutes, once the body is strapped in. Twelve fucking minutes. And then there was no doubt. No headaches. No trouble thinking. Just a wonderful voice, Avery, telling me he’d made me and I was his son, and telling me what to do. Telling me how to keep myself in repair. Telling me how to find other brothers who’d survived, who were functional. Telling me to have my revenge.”

  I
worked my mouth once or twice, and finally got enough saliva into it. “This is revenge? Against me?”

  Kev leaned forward slightly, and I felt the numb touch of his mind on mine, holding me perfectly still as his stiff, molded face pushed close to mine. “This is revenge, Avery, against everyone.”

  From behind I heard Kieth’s ragged voice as he shouted incoherently. I couldn’t move, but I knew how he probably looked in the grasp of a few Monks, being dragged from his hiding spot: eyes wide, nose vibrating, head glistening with sweat. After a few beats he stopped shouting and started calling my name.

  “Cates! Mr. Cates! What’s happening!? Mr. Cates!”

  My head was held stiffly in place, staring back at Kev.

  “This is a course correction, Avery,” he said, his voice modulated to be calm and pleasant, as if we were discussing drinks after dinner at the fucking club. I had the feeling these weren’t Kev’s words. “This is a controlled burn. One thing I can say about what happened to me, Ave, is that I found clarity. You know what being a Monk is, Avery? Why it’s so hard to stay in control? It’s pain, Ave. It’s been pain, pain flowing through me like fucking blood. It just hurts, all the time.”

  Kieth was dragged past us. The Techie had stopped shouting and just stared at me as he was pulled along. I managed to move my eyes enough to follow him.

  “But I have Him,” Kev continued. “Helping me clarify. That’s what we’ve all done. And we decided it would simply be easier if there weren’t so much meat around.”

  Meat. I struggled against his Push. Kieth and him within feet of me, a gun in my pocket, and I was standing there as if someone had cut my spinal cord.

  Kev reached out and put a dead plastic hand on my shoulder. “Go, Avery. Go home, or as close as you can get, and spread yourself around. We want you to be directly responsible for as many people as possible. Okay? Go home and scratch out a few more days, and then I’ll collect you, and then—then—you will be punished. You think the System Pigs are bad, Avery? So bad you’ve spent your whole life like a roach, scuttling away from their terrible light? Listen, my old friend: just wait when they’re finally gone and you must worry about me.”

  He lifted his hand and pushed me in the chest, oddly gentle. Again I had the impression he was quoting someone. “Go,” he said, and I went, against my will.

  As I walked slowly back toward the hover, the Monks retreated, trading fire with the cops in a perfunctory way. Bullets sizzled past me once or twice, but I couldn’t make myself move, not even to duck or dodge. I cursed up a storm as I was propelled toward the hover, praying the fucking cops didn’t mistake me for something else and decide to snipe me just because of Best Practices and shit. About halfway there, a Monk veered across my path, running silently, smoothly, and as it passed a few feet in front of me its head exploded in an off-white mist and it dropped to the mud. My puppet body just stepped over it, calm and steady, while I bit off a stream of Fucking hells and tried to clench my fists. I might as well have tried to pop my eyes out of my skull. Kev had me in his grip.

  When I was within a few feet of the hover, Hense appeared framed in the hatchway, wind moving her hair around. She looked tiny, like the wind might just pick her up and send her sailing off. Her eyes were as flat and steady as always, but I had the nervous feeling that if I hadn’t been absolutely necessary for her survival, I’d already be dead.

  “What the fuck,” she said slowly, “was that bullshit?”

  My leg ached, a deep, steady ache without a pulse, without relief. I wanted to cut it off myself, just tear through the bone and tendons and rip it off, replace that bottomless ache with some real pain, something sharp and satisfying. Something I could pick at. I deserved it. Knowing she couldn’t kill me yet, I pushed past her and pulled myself into the hover. “We’re old friends.”

  I paused in the hatchway, hip touching Hense’s hip and liking the way it felt. The hover cabin was a fucking charnel house. Five or six of the Stormers were dead, their ObFu flickering, torn up and bloodstained. Another half dozen were getting field dressings, one of whom, expert appraisal told me, was a waste of time and resources.

  “Hell,” I said, looking around, “you fucking had guns, right?”

  Something the relative mass of a planet hit me in the chest, and I was lifted off my feet and sailing through the air. I landed in the mud and Happling was on top of me, his face almost as red as his hair. His hands were on my throat, and like that, I couldn’t breathe. I bugged out my eyes and pushed feebly against him. He was like a goddamn boulder on top of me. One of his hands slipped away from my neck, allowing me to suck in a quick breath, my mouth opening wide at the unexpected opportunity. Which was a mistake, because suddenly Happling’s gun was jammed into it, knocking a loose tooth out. It landed in my throat, making me gag.

  “The Spook missed this,” he panted. “This is a modified M nineteen eleven semiautomatic. Not standard issue, but we all have to have our fucking vices. It’s fucking ancient. Pre-Unification. You can’t even get ammunition for it. I have three bullets left, you piece of shit. I’ve got dead cops in there. And you know that fucking monster? You give the fucking Techie to it?” He panted a few breaths, warm against my face. “I’ve been saving these three shots. Right now I’m considering giving all three to you, as a fucking gift.”

  I gagged on the barrel, making wet noises around it.

  “Yeah—kill you, kill me. Got it, you fucking asshole. Got fucking it. How many times you gonna say it? I should have killed you back in the Rock, you fucking cop killer.”

  “Captain Happling!” I heard Hense bellow, amazing volume for such a small woman. “Stand down!”

  I wondered idly how often Happling was almost going to kill me. His eyes were the brightest green I’d even seen, like rot beaming down at me. Bloodshot and bright white, too, dilated. The man was insane. I considered, tonguing the metal, and after a contemplative snort of phlegmy oxygen through the narrow aperture that had once been my nose, I decided, Fuck this asshole. Like an amateur he’d left my arms free, and I knew he wasn’t going to shoot me, so I snaked one hand down between us and grabbed his balls like they were mine. He froze for a second, and I smacked my forehead up into his nose and scissored my legs, flipping him over like dead weight and letting his momentum carry me on top of him. I pushed his wrists into the mud and put all my weight onto them. Happling was roughly six times my size, so I didn’t doubt he could flip me off if he wanted, but for a moment we just stared at each other.

  “Captain Happling!” Hense shouted again. “Stand the fuck down.”

  Happling blinked. “Yes, sir,” he said in a barely audible whisper, eyes locked on me. I released him and rolled over, and just lay there in the mud for a moment, dragging in breath. Then Hense was kneeling over me, looking surprisingly clean and coiffed.

  “Cates,” she said in that flat, disinterested voice, “you got a story to tell us?”

  “The Monk, the leader—I knew him when he was . . . before he was a Monk.” I watched him die. I got him killed. “We have history.”

  Her face didn’t shift. “So maybe you weren’t a completely random choice to be patient zero?”

  I squinted up at her. “Maybe.” Groaning, I sat up, forcing her to stand up awkwardly. “He was—is—a psionic. A Pusher. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed. We need to track down Kieth. We need to figure out where they’re going. Your Mr. Marko still alive?”

  She nodded, holding out one pleasantly dry hand and helping me to my feet with surprising strength. “Yes. He’s terrified, but I’m getting the impression that isn’t an unusual state for him.” For a moment she kept hold of my hand. “We have an agreement,” she said, and we stared at each other.

  I nodded and let go. “Then get your gorilla in line. Let’s dump bodies and get that hover in the air, and maybe Mr. Marko can help us figure out where we need to go.”

  She gestured at Happling, who immediately climbed to his feet and holstered his ancient gun, silently
falling in behind us as we returned to the hover, which now looked as if it had crash-landed. “And what do you plan to do once we get there, Mr. Cates?”

  I didn’t look at her. “Kill people. It’s what I do.”

  XXVIII

  Day Nine:

  Wave His Hands in the Air

  and Rain Death From the Sky

  Afraid and too exhausted to do much of anything, Marko took longer to be coaxed out of hiding than to get the brick into the air. Sweating and jumping at every noise, he picked up the boards and cables Kieth had left behind and in a few moments a shudder passed through the hover, and we were in business. Talking in low voices among themselves, the Stormers finished pushing bodies out the drop-bay doors. Kiplinger had taken a bad shot to the chest, a sucking wound that wheezed with every shortening breath he took while his squad shouted around him, trying every useless trick in their field medical kit. He finally turned blue and died as they all shut the hell up, staring down at him and then looking at me. I just stared back, and they said nothing, dragging his body over to the doors and pushing him out with the rest.

  I kept my eyes on the opposite wall, thinking back over the past week and farther back, to Westminster Abbey and Kev getting killed. He’d been dead, and an hour later so had Dennis Squalor. I’d ended up with Wa Belling as a partner. It should have been Kev. I realized that after all those years I didn’t really know what Belling’s motivations had been. With Kev I would have known, I would have had a friend at my side. And none of this shit would have happened.

  I wondered how many people were dead now. How far it had spread. Kev—or the voice he kept talking about—had wanted me to be the source, and eventually to know it. To torture me with the idea that I’d killed everybody. The whole fucking world. I stared at the bare metal cabin wall, dented and perforated by bullet holes, my hands tight on my knees, scabs on my knuckles cracking and oozing blood. There wasn’t any point in keeping up my list anymore. I’d never even know most of the people I’d hustled off to death now.