Emperor-for-Life: DeadShop Redux (Unreal Universe Book 6)

by Lee Bond

  Hack wasn’t so sure he was concerned about their honesty; a lot of money –in materials for building Garth’s vision and in expensive hardware- was being spent on a daily basis, and if the man went off the handle, he wasn’t so sure he wouldn’t be compelled to do the same. At the very least, he wouldn’t prevent any of the workers from liberating easily sold contraband.

  At least he had verification better picture of what was going on. Piecing the man’s activities together since Rommen had dispatched him to follow their employer, Hack knew Garth Nickels was on the hunt for a very particular kind of scent, one that was ‘spicy and tangy all at the same time’.

  Hack couldn’t smell anything other than what every person he’d questioned so far could smell. Construction odors. Cooking food. Most recently, the unforgettable tang of fiberglass booths full of bodily waste baking in the noontime sun. If there was anything else to smell, their man Nickels had the senses of a bloodhound.

  “Rommen.” Hack clicked the walkie button.

  “Go for Rommen.”

  “Our man’s looking for a smell.” Hack shut his eyes. He could see Rommen, in his workspace, scowling as he tried to work out if he’d heard things properly.

  “10-9?”

  Goddamnit. “A smell, Rommen. He’s wandering around the base … site … looking for something that smells. A particular odor.”

  “He’s been at it for over an hour now.” Rommen’s line clicked out and then back in again. “Where is he now? We need to rotate you out and get someone else on him.”

  Hack called up the map they’d made of the site on his smartphone. “Quadrant 3. Looks like he’s doing a perimeter sweep. From the direction he’s going, he’ll probably go through 2, then … if I had to guess, he’ll hit the parkade last. Only structure he didn’t go near. You sure you want to switch me out?”

  “10-4, Hack, I do. Just because our man hasn’t responded to your presence doesn’t mean he doesn’t know you’re there. He’s not what he seems to be and I don’t like it. We’re going to do our best to keep this contract, even if that means pissing him off. Copy?”

  “That’s a copy, Rommen. I’ll keep eyes on until I’m swapped. You got me on the tracker?”

  “I do. Sending Samantha your way. Out.”

  “Roger, Rommen. Out.” Hack tucked his phone away and began loping across the open field, keeping his body as low to the ground as possible without sacrificing speed; if Nickels was aware of his presence, the tactic would make it harder for him to be seen, even across an open field.

  Hack couldn’t shake the feeling that something was about to happen. The site seemed to vibrate with that special tingly anticipation that you only ever felt in warzones, almost as if the land itself was aware that any second now, the entire area was going to explode into bloody violence.

  ***

  Garth wasn't overly fond of large concrete structures like parkades, even ones he owned; there were too many damned places for people to hide and plan insidious plans against honest and mostly innocent techno-tycoons looking to overthrow a temporally incongruous pocket dimension, but after finding the small hole in the exterior chain-link fence and detecting the subtle-yet-overpowering spicy reek at last and following it directly to the parkade, he wasn't exactly spoiled for choices.

  The contractors who'd designed and eventually poured the quick-drying cement -really, Garth was beyond impressed it'd gone up in ten days, complete with rain gutters, stairwells and ramps and things he'd never even known parkades had, like … speed bumps- had wanted to go big or home right from the start, insisting that his arcade was going to need a ten level parking lot full of elevators, not to mention built-in surveillance nodes and, like, other things that Garth had honestly not even listened to because he wasn't building a freaking sports stadium.

  The Specter had put a quick end to the man's dreams. He was more than willing to hemorrhage cash all over the place … when it made sense. Even if the arcade and the drive-in movie theater brought kids from all over the goddamn city, there was -frankly speaking- no goddamn fucking way in hell he was gonna put up with all the extra headaches that'd come from that many more guests.

  Sooner or later, Samiel's forces were going to show up, ready to cause all kinds of problems. As real or unreal as everyone around him may or may not be, their corpses would make all kinds of mess and it'd be hard as hell to deal with ODDities and a host of dead bodies. So as much as John Smith of Smithcrete Industries imagined that the arcade was going to pull kinds in from all over the planet like Wally's World, the arcade was in fact going to be a niche-y establishment that allowed x amount of people in per day and that was it.

  Garth blinked and a thin wisp of unwanted presence washed by, neatly insinuating itself underneath all the other odors. There was still no incongruity-warble splitting the air, so that was something.

  Dammit.

  The stink was here. It was a high, thin wavering stink curling through his nostrils and just wouldn't go away. Whoever or whatever was up there, they'd been there for a while now.

  "Who'd'a thunk," Garth said to himself as he walked around the bright yellow and black caution tape strung across the two posts on either side of the ground level entrance, "that people would ignore such an effective barrier? Hate to admit it, but maaaaaaaaaybe Rommen's insistence we get a more … conventional surveillance method in place for the time being might be a good idea. Well. Not good. Reasonably well informed. God I hate doing things more than once. Thank Baby Jesus Inna Tuxedo I went with just the basics. Walking up ten goddamn floors would have me all out of wind and shit. So embarrassing, fighting the forces of evil when you gotta take a breather in the middle. If it's even that. If it's some fucking rotten eggs or a leftover sangwich, oh man. Pissed, I will be.” Garth angled himself towards the ramp that'd take him to the second level of the parkade, certain it was neither eggs nor sandwiches but something from his past he was forgetting.

  Shit like that usually bit back, and bit hard.

  ***

  Samantha spoke quietly into her mike, cursing inwardly as their potentially retarded employer disappeared into the guts of the temporarily out-of-bounds parkade. Hack hadn't been kidding. The man was wide as a brick house, smarter than any three guys she might know personally, but he also had the worst goddamn sense in the world. Reminded her of the Japanese business mogul she'd protected in LA late last year. Surrounded by all that silicon and cocaine, he'd just turned into the biggest idiot. She’d caught a whore trying to gut him like a fish with the most unreasonably large Bowie knife on the planet.

  He was back in Japan now, never likely to return.

  "Rommen, the man's entered the parkade, just as Hack figured. There's a small entrance hole cut into the southern exterior section of the fence in Quadrant 6. From where I'm standing right now, the pathway is very nearly completely obscured by the drive-in parts, three cranes and two of those garbage bins. The chance that there are people in this parking structure is tolerably high."

  "Copy that. I'll dispatch Richie and Ballast to your location. Hold tight where you are. There's no way of knowing how many or what types of hostiles might be in there. Richie, Ballast, shag ass over to the parkade as soon as. Make it less than that. Make it yesterday. Cordon the area. The rest of us will be en route in three."

  "Roger."

  "10-4. On my way."

  Samantha sidled up beside one of the cranes that'd effectively turned this entire section of the site into a clusterfuck. That old, familiar feeling of a battlefield before the war heated up settled across her skin and for the first time since bailing out of Desert Storm 2, Samantha Hargreaves wished she was wearing full gear.

  ***

  Birchcreek shook his head. "Why you letting our guy get into this, Rommo? It doesn't seem like something we should be doing. I mean, chances are he's gonna run into some junkies looking to score some copper or whatever, but this is the kind of thing we're here for, yeah?"

  Rommen didn't bother looking up from
the command console he was on; there were a handful of GPS tags wandering around the far side of the parkade, but not for long. The last thing he needed right then is anyone with a smartphone taking any videos or pictures of Garth Nickels getting involved with anyone. "I don't trust the man."

  Birchcreek laughed so hard he thought he was going to pop a vessel in his eye. "When the hell’s that ever mattered, Rommo? Last detail, the guy kept trying to sneak out of the house when he thought I wasn't looking. Just couldn't get enough tail. Finally ran a string of sluzzas right to his door to keep him safe. Still tried to bust out every now and again. Had to bounce him against the wall a coupla times. He got the lesson.”

  "The Deflorence kid?" Rommen grunted. "Rich kids with richer, unethical daddies are the worst kind of kid. You hear he got got in Miami?"

  "Yeah. Daddy didn't like paying our bills, so he went with a local Floridian company, some low-rent group. Didn’t do his diligence, missed a cousin's cousin's girlfriend who was in Zoe Pound. But you didn't answer my question."

  Rommen issued commands to Varely, urging him to put the speed on and get the idle workers out of the area as soon as possible, then finally looked up at Birchcreek. Originally a hard-core member of SOCOMD before he wound up kicking the living shit out of one of his teammates for using the sanctity of the organization to run drugs and underage prostitutes, Birchcreek was one of the toughest men in any of the units working for Securicorps.

  If there was anyone in the detail who'd understand what he was doing and why, it'd be Birchcreek.

  "You met the man, right? He did that weird one on one with all of us on the first day? Asked me about my favorite movies, what I liked to eat, what I'd do on a Friday night if I wasn't ready to die for some guy I didn't know properly, that sort of thing?” Rommen continued when the whipcord lean Australian nodded sarcastically. "Says he's only ever done the required tour of duty for the Swiss Army. You think that's entirely the truth?"

  "Truth, mate?" Birchcreek shook his head, hands fiddling with the GPS tracking badge around his neck. He wanted to take it off when he went piss, because come on, but … Nickels was everywhere. "That man looks hard enough to be running his own crew in some of the filthiest spots in the world. Tough enough to come out on top, to boot."

  "Right?" If word of this got to his superiors, Rommen knew for damned sure he'd be bounced out of Securicorps. Wouldn't be hard to find new work, but the next step down was a long way down. "Then there's the rest of everything."

  "The whole refusal to listen to reason thing? Blindly ignoring all your suggestions? His steadfast insistence he's got it covered?" Birchcreek laughed. "Or is it how all his very specifically drawn up deployment patterns for our patrols, while seeming to be perfect, actually have several gigantic holes in them? Holes big enough to let a six foot two, blue eyed, black haired truck through without us ever noticing?"

  "Yes, yes and yes again." Rommen took a deep breath, locked eyes with Birchcreek and exhaled. He needed someone on the team that knew what was happening so when -if- things went pear shaped, he'd have -at the very least- someone who understood. He'd had a few guys like Birchy on his particular side across the world, fighting Uncle Sam's fight, delivering Democracy, securing oil, fomenting change. It made the burden less. "I don't know why the man's lying, but he is. I think he's not worried about his personal safety because he's got the kind of training you don't see very often. If he is as capable as I imagine, then I'll back off and stop pressuring him. If he isn't, and the shit he's about to get into causes him problems, I plan on using that to my advantage. Make sense?"

  Birchcreek watched the small cluster of lazy workers get rousted by Varely, chuckling at the way the GPS tags had them scattering like scared birds. "Dangerous game, mate, dangerous game. This little experiment of yours goes wrong, we're looking at more than a failed deployment, we're looking at criminal charges."

  "Tell me I'm wrong, and I'll get Samantha and the others in there right now." Rommen said earnestly. "I value your opinion. You've done good work in the past, so if you want, I can make that happen."

  Birchcreek pushed away from the workstation, fiddling with the GPS tracking badge again, working the angles on Rommen's problem. On the one hand, he was right. Nickels was a problem client, probably the worst they'd ever had, and they'd only been on-site for a few days.

  Oh, they'd had clients like Nickels before, but the difference between those others men and Nickels was that they really made no effort in disguising or hiding their attitudes, whereas it seemed their current client was doing everything in his power to jam them up. So yeah, he deserved to get jammed up.

  You spend enough time living the hard life, you became all about object lessons. The impending trouble Nickels was possibly inserting himself into would be one hell of a good one.

  On the other hand, Rommen could be wrong. He could be reading too much into Nickels' demeanor. The hardness and the implications of high levels of training could be nothing more than illusion. If the man got injured or worse -killed- they would all be in the shit. Birchcreek didn't much care one way or the other for himself, he had enough juice 'round the world to bounce back wherever he cared to set his feet, but the others … they were still fresh. Working hard on building their careers. The death -of someone on the path to resurrect America- would be a stain too difficult to wash clean.

  It was a tough call.

  Birchcreek grinned that grin of his. "Fuck it. You're right. This guy has some kind of training, from somewhere in the world. I'm curious to see how he handles himself. If there's anything going on in that parkade, which we don't even know yet."

  Rommen accepted Birchcreek's vote of approval. Good. He repeated the Aussie's sentiment, though without the same conviction. "If there's anything."

  ***

  Parking level 2 was completely empty, save for some piles of leftover building materials and a couple bags of garbage left behind by the workers. Not enough to get pissy over, but Garth sure as hell hoped that the rest of the crew -all three hundred of them- were going to be a little more diligent in their …

  "Shit." Another necessity slotted itself into the ever-growing list of things needed to run a proper business. Well, one that wasn't staffed by, like, robots and clones and things, anyways. "I'm gonna need to hire cleaners and shit. Good Christ. How in the hell does anyone make any money in this era?"

  He was gonna have to start making more money. His plan for super-secret global domination lay in the balance!

  Stage 2 of the global quadronic circuit gambit would need ramping up very soon, which meant more sleepless nights toiling away building the gadget that’d hopefully take the whole world -and augmented-reality fans everywhere- by storm. If not, if it somehow failed to take off … governments and institutions the world over were going to have an assload of questions for him, none of them easy to answer.

  "’Hey, Mister Nickels," Garth said to himself, pretending to be a lawyer, "could you please explain to the court why you handcrafted somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen million autonomous drones and then launched them across the globe? And while we're on the topic, sir, could you explain in precise language exactly why they each followed a very carefully crafted route that, on inspection, seems to be remarkably similar to circuits?’ Yeah, no thanks. That sounds like a fucking nightmare."

  The reed-thin odor that'd drawn him out of his lair and had him wasting all this fucking time was sharper than ever, but hadn't spread itself throughout level 2, putting his clandestine, mysterious visitors up on 3.

  Which would be in full view of basically everyone in the area. If things went South ...

  "Nah." Garth denied himself the concerns. "Things are gonna be totally fine. Just some weird smelling vagrants looking to hide out until nightfall, so they can sneak out and steal all my shit. Yeah. Completely one hundred percent nothing to worry about."

  The snide part of his personality and the other part of his personality -the one that doubted everything- suggested t
hat not only was he wrong, they reminded him that any familiar smells he might be smelling were probably not the result of hobos because he’d never really chilled with hobos.

  Rapists, murderers, assassins and crazy-people, absofuckinglutley. But no hobos.

  Garth cheerily told both parts of him that were being dicks to fuck off. He trudged up to level 3, practicing what he was going to say on his approach to the completely friendly, completely harmless, super-non-confrontational hobos that were hiding out up there...

  ***

  “I don’t like this, Sketch.” Ferret, eighteen, rubbed his hands up and down his face, trying to feel something other than the strange surge of energy that came when you did a fresh batch of Alphonse. It was the same as always, a rolling tide of white hot frenetic motion cutting down to the basic parts of who you were, what it meant to be alive, what it meant to be. Ferret both loved and hated the drug.

  Loved it because when he was high on it, all the shit and stuff his old man had put him through disappeared in a haze of fog, a delicious forgetting that transformed him into the person he knew he could’ve always been if he’d been given half a chance. Loved that he felt smarter, wiser, like some kind of old, ancient thing wrapped inside a tight-fitting Ferret-skin, dispensing words of wisdom to the younger Ferret.

  And like all serious users of extremely hard-core drugs, Ferret hated Alphonse, once called Z, originally named Ziggy, rumored to be called Ziggurat-Alpha, when it came off the floor and into the trucks and into the hands of the guys who sold the stuff, because Alphonse was a straight motherfucker to come down from.

  You felt stretched even tighter. You were made out of glass, your veins delicate Christmas tree ornaments inside paper thin-skin. One wrong move, you’d break. You knew it. Your mind raced a million miles a minute, your heart beating so slowly you sometimes thought your best friend was dead when really, he was just napping.