by Jeff Somers
“You have a choice?” He laughed, lowering his hands with a glance at Lukens. “My dear, feel free to shoot me if I make any false moves. That will be our deal.”
She nodded and spat on the floor as if chewing an invisible wad of smoke. “All right.”
He looked back at me. “You’re half the man you were yesterday, Avery, and sledding downhill. You have one System Pig here who is not taking your orders, but we’ll list her as an asset on the assumption that since she hasn’t killed you yet, she probably won’t, and may even kill your enemies in the meantime. You—what the hell is your name?”
Marko blinked. “Ezekiel Marko,” he said, sounding confused.
“Ezekiel?” Belling repeated wonderingly. “Well, Zeke, my friend, what are you bringing to the operation?”
“Uh,” Marko frowned in thought for a second, then held up his little device. “Uh, this.”
“Ah,” Belling said with a sour twist of distaste. “A Techie. My favorite people. Very well; I assume you are skilled?”
Marko nodded slowly. “Uh, according to my OFS of you, you’re fucking Cainnic Orel.”
Belling waved him aside. “Optical facial scans are notoriously unreliable,” he said, “and the database you are pulling from is an official SSF one, yes? Years out of date, I assure you.” He looked back at me. Somehow he’d filled up again, swelling until he was Wa Belling again, bouncing on his feet and speaking in that subtle brogue I knew so well, maybe the last living member of Canny Orel’s old Murder Incorporated. “You have no choice, Avery. You and I, even at half speed, can take down any mark, I think. And we have more resources here than we’ve had at low times in both our careers.”
This was true. When I was young, I’d pulled off some high-profile hits, just me and my gun. It took years of crawling the streets to develop contacts, to get in with someone like Pickering for information, to cultivate the reputation that got you loans, information, extra hands when needed. I pulled myself upright and pushed my gun into my pocket. “All right, Belling. You’re right: no choice.” I needed his gun, and I wasn’t sure I’d succeed if I tried to kill him. If I put him on the run—well, fuck, I didn’t need Wa Belling in the fucking shadows in addition to all my other woes. I held out my hand. “We have a deal. But only until Kieth is dead. After that I plan to make you suffer.”
He eyed my hand warily. “You’re a man of your word, Avery,” he said, stepping forward, “and I am not. But for what it’s worth, I promise this: until we’re done here, you can trust me absolutely. As for suffering, I expected nothing less. We’re each making deals with the devil.”
I almost believed him. You’re a man of your word, I repeated to myself and thought of Kieth, upstairs. Shit, I thought, you’re thinking of last week’s Avery Cates. Hating him, I pumped his hand.
I took a slow, deeper breath, taking my time with it in order to avoid triggering more coughing. “All right, what intel do you have?”
“Little man,” Belling said over his shoulder to Marko, “do you have floor plans of this complex on that delightful little device?”
Marko nodded, rushing forward. “I do!” he said briskly, thrusting the screen toward Belling. “I have floor plans, wiring networks, plumbing, air ducts—none big enough for a person to crawl through, however.” He was sweating lightly, whether from excitement or the first stages of his own nano invasion it was hard to tell. Based on the way he was looking up at Belling, as if he’d found god, I decided it was excitement.
Belling nodded, turning to me. “I know where they’re holding Kieth, and I know the basic deployment of the Mutant Freak’s fellow Monks. We know their strength and resources, Avery.”
“Do we know their strength? Isn’t Kev up there making new Monks right now?”
Belling blinked. “Making Monks? No, not exactly.”
I frowned. “Then why a hospital complex? He wants Monks to take over once we’re all dead, Belling. That’s the whole idea.”
Belling shook his head. “You’re behind the curve as usual, Avery,” he said in a fatherly tone that made me want to split his lip. “Monks were five years ago. You think that was Kev Gatz designing this nanotechnology? Kev Gatz? I’ve seen melons with more mental energy than that asshole. This kind of tech comes from a genius, Avery. Someone with a pre-Unification degree.” He raised an eyebrow. “You must have heard Mr. Gatz talk about Him, yes? The voice in his head? Didn’t you wonder who that was?”
“Holy fucking shit,” Marko said suddenly, sucking in breath. “You’re talking about Squalor. You’re talking about Dennis Squalor.”
Belling’s eyes stayed on me, but he nodded. “Avery, Kev’s got Squalor in his ear, telling him what to do, how to do it. Monks? Squalor’s lost his manufacturing base. His corporeal body. His political clout. He’s personally keeping Kev Gatz from flying apart at the seams, from what I can tell. The rest of the Monks, Kev’s followers, look like the rarities who survived the destruction of the suppression signal—strong minds, I’d guess. Crazy, sure, but crazy in a focused way.”
I shook my head. Something was roaring inside it, making it hard to think. This shit wasn’t fair. “I destroyed Squalor,” I said slowly.
“Avery,” Belling replied, “Squalor was a digitized intelligence. You destroyed his server.” He fluttered his smooth, un-scarred hands in the air. “He’s in the air. And he’s looking for a way to rebuild. Monks were yesterday’s tech. The way Mr. Kieth tells it, what Squalor’s doing now is, in Techiespeak, utilizing the available resources.”
I turned, keeping my eyes on Belling, and grabbed Marko by the collar, pulling him in close. “What the fuck,” I said slowly, “does that mean?”
Marko swallowed, his wide eyes on me, hands limp at his sides. I felt I could have lifted him off the floor. “I think it means all these dead people aren’t going to stay dead.”
Belling smiled and shaped one hand into a gun, poking it at us. “Bingo.”
XXXIV
Day Ten:
I am Very Impressed,
Mr. Belling
I followed Belling as he enjoyed his voice some more. “Come along, Americans, we’ve got some deep shit to wade through before we even get to kill the incredibly annoying Mr. Kieth.” He whirled and walked backward a few steps, looking almost fucking ebullient. Americans—Belling was old, and he remembered the world before Unification. Who knew where the fuck he’d been born, but I hated that he knew more than me, that he’d known the world before Unification. I hated Wa Belling. I’d never liked the man but I’d respected him. Now I could hardly wait to kill him, the one person, maybe, in this whole mess who fucking deserved it.
Deserved. I pictured Kieth, just trying like hell to stay alive. I didn’t doubt he’d work like a demon to reverse all this if given half the chance, but there didn’t seem any choice: if it took him a week to do it, there might not be anyone left to save. It wasn’t fucking fair, and it was making me angrier every time I thought about it. I’d never liked Kieth, either, but we’d worked together for years, and I knew the Techie had never screwed me on purpose. He didn’t deserve this. I didn’t deserve to have to do this.
“Are you serious?” I asked, staring into the rusty interior of the elevator cab, my mind still trying to process what I’d just been told. “You came all this way to commit suicide by elevator?”
“As I may have mentioned when you were perhaps light-headed from coughing up your innards, Avery, your presence here is no secret, and trying to skulk about when your old friend can scan your location anytime he pleases—can have your location beamed into his brain at will, in fact—is just human folly. Gunners avoid folly, or so I’ve always believed. We are a hard-bitten, realistic breed, although you’ve always been a sensitive type, apt to go blubbery at the sight of sunsets and butterflies and good-looking women.”
We stared at each other, and he grinned.
“The elevator got me down here. It will get us back up. Stealth is wasted effort at this point. Go straight at them,
Mr. Cates, and never mind the maneuvers.”
He was right. We might waste hours creeping around looking for a secret way up, only to find Kev waiting for us. If our arrival was news, well, at least we knew the odds: fifty-four against four, although I wasn’t sure I should count Marko as a whole person.
“Mr. Marko,” I said suddenly, “you’re a cop, right?”
He looked up from his little screen, surprised. “I’m a Technical Assistant.”
I nodded. “For the SSF. Do you know how to handle a gun?”
He stared at me like I was speaking some bizarre language, and then Belling strode over to him, producing one of his shiny custom-made Roons from somewhere within his coat and proffering it to the Techie. “Here,” Belling said impatiently. Marko regarded it dumbly, so Belling leaned in and pressed the gun into his hand. “You pull the trigger and it goes boom,” the old man said. “Just point it away from yourself. And me.” Belling looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. “Satisfied? Come here, let’s get organized. Zeke, show us the main floor, right above our heads.”
Marko continued to stare at the gun in his hand, worth more on the black market—at least the black market that had existed a week ago—than he probably cleared in legal SSF pay in a year. He slid it gently into one of his pockets, as if it might explode if he held it too tight. Which, I decided, was the preferred attitude of useless Techies when handed a gun in my presence. It was the ones who started pointing it at things and squinting that you had to worry about.
“Okay, this is where I think we are,” he said, slowly at first and then with increasing speed as he got back to his comfort zone, voice bouncing off the ancient pocked cement. “This subbasement level here.” I leaned over Belling’s annoyingly broad shoulders and saw that he was zooming in on a large, square-shaped area on the plans, all load-bearing columns and ramps. “Which is, as we all know, more or less closed off from the main complex at this point, used only as a bridge between the main levels and the mechanical rooms, which they never bothered shifting upward. It’s directly below the core of the complex. The lobby is . . . here, and . . . here’s the main offices.”
Belling stabbed a long, elegant finger at the screen. “Here’s where our boy is, Mr. Cates.”
I stared down at the plans. “That’s an operating room.”
Belling nodded. “That is the Mutant Freak’s office.”
“How many in there?”
“Just Kieth and the Freak.”
I waited a beat. “What’s the catch?”
Belling seemed amused, like his old self again. “Aside from the fifty-three other Monks that are patrolling the space, the fact that the Freak knows you’re coming and that he’s not only a fully functioning Monk but a psionic as well? Why, Mr. Cates. I know you’ve come up in the world over the last few years, but I think those are catches enough, don’t you?”
My chest spasmed but I managed a thin smile. “No, Wa, after the last few weeks, in all honesty, I don’t.”
“As always, Wallace Belling aims to please,” he said, still grinning. “You will note that in order to get to the Freak’s office, we will have to go through this rather large area here.”
“The general admission area,” Marko said, nodding, “and the emergency room processing area.”
“Wa,” I said, “what the fuck’s up there?”
“Walk and talk, Avery. There’s no time to waste.” The old man spun and strode purposefully for the elevator, producing two more guns from inside his coat. I limped after him, pulling Lukens and Marko along in my orbit.
“Your man Zeke here can probably shade in the fine points, of course, but what you’ve seen so far—this plague—is just the first stage of the nanobots processing. Once the body has been killed and allowed to, well, marinate or something, reach some level of early-onset rot that is somehow magically necessary, they take over.” He stopped to sweep his hand toward the yawning elevator cab. “They reanimate. The bodies.”
I stopped in front of him. “They come back to life,” I said slowly.
“No,” Belling corrected, putting a hand on my back and pushing me gently into the elevator. “They reanimate. Except better.”
We all entered the cab and turned to look out into what appeared to be perfect darkness, Lukens sweeping the field with her shredder as Belling plucked his rusted pry bar from the cab floor and used it to pull the doors shut. As they clicked into place, a double row of circular buttons lit up to one side. I’d thought the basement had been quiet, but inside the elevator we’d found a new level of silence.
Belling reached over and jabbed one of the buttons near the top. The cab lurched disturbingly, making us all stumble and reach for the walls, and then nothing happened for several seconds as we gently swung there in the dark. With a lazy grinding noise the cab began to shudder, which I took to indicate movement.
Marko’s face was so close to his handheld I thought he might swallow it. “This is some thick code, Mr. Cates. I can only see the packets being transmitted, but there’s some serious shit going on nearby. I’ve got signals burning off the nanobots like crazy.” He looked up at me and licked his lips. His beard had gotten a little tangled and crazy. “I’m guessing at some of this, based on papers Squalor published in his youth and some of the work I’ve seen Kieth do in European cases—we study some of them in training—but I think . . . I think the nanobots are remaining functional after biological death and taking over respiratory functions.” He stared at me for a second and then ticked his head. “They’re breathing and pumping blood. People get sick, they die, and then the nanos . . . bring them back.”
A full-body shiver swept through me. “Why?”
“Mr. Kieth,” Belling said, his voice melodious in the darkness, “called it Phase Two. Squalor cannot fabricate Monks anymore. Even if he has a handful of intact, unused chassis around, even if he searches the dumps of the System for burned-out chassis that can be reused, he no longer has the ability to acquire new converts. As I understand it from Kieth, the nanos kill you—brain death, at least—then keep you upright and walking, and start to link together to form a brain.” I heard his coat rustle as he shrugged. “And there you go: breedable Monks.”
Lukens muttered, “Fucking hell.”
For a second we all stood there in silence. I understood why Belling had cut and run—things must be getting pretty hot with Kev and his merry band of Monks, and it didn’t sound as if the immortality he’d been offered was what he’d been expecting.
The cab shuddered again, and I felt a distinct gravitational drag as a metallic screech filled the air. We lurched up and then settled back, lurched up again and finally stopped dead, flat silence rushing into the tight space. We waited, looking around for some sign of progress.
“Aw, hell,” Marko muttered.
“Baby,” I heard Lukens mutter.
“Patience,” Belling whispered, waving a negligent hand in our direction.
I thought, If this is a trap, if this is Belling fucking me in the ass again, then this is when it comes. I resisted the urge to check my gun’s action, to check the chamber and feel it move in my hands, and settled for tightening my grip on it. I was hot and my head swam, and the constant, maddening itching in my chest had taken on a burning edge I didn’t care for. I pictured the tiny little bastards inside me, tearing, ripping, filling me with my own blood. I straightened up, reached out my arm, and put the barrel of my gun against the back of his head. “Wa, I’m having a crisis of faith back here. And I swear, if you’ve—”
With another lurch the cab squealed into motion again and shuddered upward for several seconds. I left my gun where it was, and Belling ticked his head toward me slightly. “Patience, Mr. Cates.”
“Fuck you, patience. We are being eaten alive.”
“Mr. Cates, I was in Kampala thirty-three years ago with Mr. Orel. A young man. We’d been hired by the Americans to assassinate three Germans, because the Americans—well, those Americans—were trying to derail
the Unification process. On entering the country our documents were questioned, we had some trouble escaping, and I was shot in the back. Bullet lodged in the muscle. Pain like you’ve never imagined. Every movement felt like someone was cutting me open with a dull blade, and there was a chance of paralysis. I did not complain. I did not recuse myself from the operation. The bullet was there when we were finished, and I had it taken care of then. I was patient.”
I tapped the back of his head sharply. “I am very impressed, Mr. Belling.”
There was a soft ding and the elevator stuttered to a halt. Belling grinned in the dim light, picked up his pry bar, and snapped the doors open with one grunting heave.
Horrible yellow electric light flooded our little space, making me wince. Belling turned back to us and drew one of his guns. Behind him was a blank white wall pockmarked with large jagged holes and an unbelievably wide blood streak that disappeared behind Belling’s smiling face, continued past him and off into infinity, clotty red turning a dull, crusty brown. The smell was sudden and monolithic, something so terrible and rotten that it defeated any attempt to break it down into its component horrors. I gagged and immediately convulsed, unable to breathe as my lungs heaved. I went down to my knees and puked stringy blood from my own lungs, my vision going black, little red dots dancing in front of my eyes.
I started to stagger out of the cab but Belling placed a hand on my chest.
“Avery,” he said, standing there backlit and terrible. “This is going to be hard. On you.”
I breathed shallowly and the red dots in my vision pulsed with my ragged heartbeat. “Why?”
For the first time I could remember, Belling looked unhappy. “Because some old friends are waiting for you.”
