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

by Lee Bond

  The quip fell flat, the General got this greedy look in his eyes, and then everything went absolutely batshit bananas.

  ***

  Rommen couldn’t wait. He wasn’t in the best of positions, but he couldn’t wait. Garth was too smart to outthink. He saw that now. He’d had eyes on Garth the whole time except for the last few minutes, so his ex-employer could’ve done anything at all, made any calls he’d wanted to make, set things up so that his efforts to free the world from Garth Nickels failed.

  And that was fine. It was just fine. He still had to make the effort, didn’t he? He’d set all this in motion, planned it all for months, readied himself to deal with the strange effects of time travel, he’d lured the General down here on the premise that he was going to be getting hold of Garth and his wonderful brain, hadn’t he?

  He’d done all that. Planned all the distractions. Paved the way for success.

  There was still a chance. Still a chance it would work.

  It had to work. It had to. Garth was distracted. As long as he could kill the man sufficiently enough to keep him from using the phone, this would all come to a shocking, simple end.

  Rommen deShure pulled his sidearm and took careful aim. The bloggers and journalists on either side of him took note of the weapon, screamed, then scrambled away.

  “This is fine.” Rommen whispered. “This is okay. Uncle Sam knows what’s best. Uncle Sam has the interests of the world in mind. Uncle Sam wants this.”

  Rommen squeezed the trigger. Just like he’d been trained to do. Squeezed …

  ***

  “Roger.” Devlin smacked the backs of the heads of the agents nearest her, hating the fact that they were all relying on Nickels-provided commlines and regrettably pleased that they had something better than what the General was using.

  “We’ve got legit eyes on the target. Stairwell and corridor structure, fifteen feet directly opposite the stage where Nickels is. We’ve got to move. The moment Rommen opens fire is the moment the General’s men lose their cool. This whole day is fucked.”

  Everyone boiled out of the back area, rushing through the curtains, deploying themselves just as they’d been trained, eyes automatically tracking through the bodies on the stairwell structure as identified by their eyes in the crowd.

  It took a long second, during which time, the General’s men panicked and re-aimed on the gun-toting Federal Agents, only to find the occasional handgun pressed ever so gently to their temples.

  “Fuck my life.” Devlin squirmed, caught between duty and obligation. There were too many people on the structure for any of her people to open fire safely, and the soldiers on the floor were too antsy to do anything but respond automatically with their very large weapons. Tabbing the mike in her combat armor, Devlin began issuing orders.

  But it was too late.

  A shot rang out…

  ***

  There was an explosion, a terrible sound of concrete and glass and steel all being ripped to pieces and something heavy and quick-moving fell to the ground, right in the middle of the room, right next to General Habercome.

  “All right,” Chezzik Elteren hollered loudly enough to be heard in the next country, “who in the fuck just shot Garth Nickels?”

  And then, because it really did look as though someone had killed the man he’d traveled a considerable distance to not-kill, Chezzik shot General Habercome in the head and proceeded to kill a few other soldier-type lads in their silly army fatigues before they could do anything at all about.

  Once he were sure his dominance had been established, and for the time being, it seemed that it was, even though there did also seem to be quite a few more weapons in close proximity to the man he was here to not-kill that was appropriate, Chezzik looked around for Garth Nickels.

  Ah. There he was. Systems aboard told Chezzik that Garth Nickels had taken the bullet high in the chest, and that he’d been knocked backwards into the curtains. Those same systems suggested that Nickels probably wasn’t dead, just injured.

  “Well.” Chezz sheathed his guns and started stomping through the crowd that were running this way and that as though all ability to think like a person had been stripped from them. “Isn’t that wonderful? Still get my eyes, after all. Oi, you lot, put your guns down or I will kill you. Everyone last fucking one of you.”

  ***

  Devlin’s team didn’t need confirmation from their commanding officer, not when it came to stuff like this.

  A tall man appears through an exploding roof who promptly kills the General in the room and then a handful of his men with expert precision, you do not wait to hear what he has to say. You do not give him room to move.

  You engage, you execute.

  That was all.

  Concerns for friendly fire disappeared. The reporters … everyone … was finally fleeing, running into other rooms, hiding behind displays, doing whatever they could to make themselves less of a target.

  Which was a thing they all should’ve done quite some time ago, but people hungry for the news had never proven themselves to be interested in self-preservation.

  The Feds opened up.

  The strange man with the black hair and the too-pale skin transformed into a blur.

  More screams. More shrieks of pain. More sounds of the dead and dying.

  ***

  Chezzik moved on, enhanced senses picking Garth out. Elevated heart rate, but not to the point where the man was panicking. The kind of physiological response to being shot, but only typical in the case of someone who’d been shot quite a bit and knew what to expect.

  The sort of man who viewed being shot as more of an inconvenience than anything else was a bloke who needed special handling.

  Who was this Garth Nickels?

  The futuristic assassin couldn’t wrap his head around it. Obviously, Nickels was the kind of person to attract some intense dislike, if he’d somehow managed to wind up on the wrong side of Baron Samiel.

  But who was he?

  Thus far, it seemed like anyone capable of presenting him with any kind of a challenge had chosen to opt out of any further shenanigans, so Chezzik decided that he might just try to have a bit of a chinwag with the mysterious Garth Nickels.

  Who knew what he might learn?

  ***

  “Hey. Yeah. It’s me. Of course it’s me. You … you think I’d risk this if something fucking unplanned for hadn’t happened? Like, seriously, crazily, unplanned for?”

  Chezzik’s ears almost literally rotated around on his skull the moment the whispered conversation was detected. Shot. Surrounded by Army men and Federal agents who were all dead, being stalked by an assassin from the future, and the target was on the tellyphone?

  Amazing.

  “Yeah, look. Some kind of assassin. From the future? I dunno, he was moving kind of fast and I kind of fucking got shot by Rommen after all. No. I got no fucking clue who this guy is, except he's all ... future-y. Yes, I fucking know I suck at that. Stand three inches to the left after you make that terrible Telephone game comment. Ah, great, here comes the fucking nose … ouuuuch.”

  Chezzik hopped lithely onto the raised platform, booted the dais out of the way and stared long and hard at Garth Nickels. Black haired, funny lenses, well-built, shot in the shoulder, bleeding from the nose and from around some terribly awkward-looking solid lenses, the man he’d been sent into the past to control was busy shoving a phone into his pocket.

  “You … look … familiar to me.” Garth gasped, struggling to move back out of the way of the obviously augmented assassin from the future.

  “I get that. I am a very handsome fellow. People wish they could see me all the time.” Chezzik whistled at the amount of blood pouring out of Garth’s various orifices. “Is the man using some sort of poisoned bullet? Are you dying? What is …”

  Words failed Chezzik as Garth Nickels, the man he was here to keep from bothering the Baron, disappeared in a flash of light that had his eyes stinging like mad.

>   A few seconds after that, everything reset.

  ***

  Garth watched Rommen head out the green room door, wishing things were different, knowing that it would never happen. deShure’s die was cast, he was on the road to his destiny, one that had to’ve been laid down sometime after his birth but well before joining Securicorps.

  “This sucks.” Garth scrolled through the buildings schematics again. He needed to make certain that when he did the big reveal, he had access to everything. No information could flow out at all, not through a single cellphone, a single picture, a single email. Even the electronically locking doors needed to be his.

  No one was getting out of the convention center.

  An ominous vibration tickled his leg.

  The phone. He pulled it loose and held to his ear, dreading what was to come.

  “Are you fucking serious? I only…”

  ***

  “I suppose it’s going to be too much to hope that this particular game of telephone will screw the message up.” The quip fell flat, the General got this greedy look in his eyes, and then everything went absolutely batshit bananas, Garth counted to two, then stepped very carefully three inches to the left…

  Rommen’s bullet slammed harmlessly into the thick velvet curtain.

  Chezzik Elteren burst through the glass roof.

  Mayhem, chaos, and discord.

  Chezzik’s Big Day Out

  “It is positively quaint out here.” Chez commented to the bloke standing beside him at the crosswalk. “All of this sunshine and whatnot. And this air. Hain’t breathed it’s like since, well, since, I guess right now. Though in a different country altogether. And, now that I think on it, not even really then. English atmosphere, you know what they say.”

  Sebastein hit the walk sign button a few more times in desperation. The light-skinned man in the immaculate white suit wasn’t saying or doing anything that was … out of the ordinary, but there was just something about the man. He was … yes. That was it. He was being too polite. Even for San Francisco.

  There were none of those supremely subtle insinuations that he was better than everyone else, that he was smarter or better looking or had a better apartment or a finer taste in wine or anything like that.

  It wasn’t natural.

  “How d’you mean?” Sebastien hit the button a fifth and sixth time. He knew the button was there to make people feel as if they had control over their lives. Knew it and hit for a seventh and eighth time.

  “Hm.” Chez grabbed hold of a nearby wireless signal and filtered it through his onboard systems. Partitioning a portion of his intellect inside the skull to begin a legitimate search for one Garth Nickels, the assassin turned babysitter elaborated. “Well, the air in London, right? Thick as all get out. Cut it with a knife and fork, they say. ‘course, the atmosphere there hain’t got nuffink on the Great Wasteload of North Afrique, or even Southern Load of Egypt. Now there’s a couple of places you want to be immune to radiation and poisonous gasses, I can tell you. I were chasing a ‘loader out there, hey, took a run right for the Gypta Pit … skin went the most impressive shade of red before sloughing clean off the bone. After you go through summink like that, a little extra car emissions … hardly seem like complaining about, hey?”

  Sebastien looked around, wondering why the man in the immaculate suit was ignoring everyone else in the crowd.

  There were about eight other people, all waiting like sheeple to cross the road. There was a girl with effervescent pink hair and impressive facial tattoos, and a … well … what was possibly a man with the sort of mutton chops you’d only find in a history book … so why him?

  He hammered the walk button again and again.

  Chez clicked his fingers happily a few times when his Internet search began getting hits on the inestimable Garth Nickels.

  “Cor Blimey, this bloke Nickels has been up to all sorts, hasn’t he just? Busy lad, three months. You know anyfing about this Nickels lad, Mister …” digging into the man’s PIDpak with brilliant subtlety, the futuristic cybernetic assassin ran a quick search on his identity, “Ah. Right. Mister Sebastien Tranh. Oh, you is a school teacher, that is well brill. I remember I had this teacher in school when I was a lad, wonderful fella by the name of Gil. Chatra Gil. Taught by the Jesuits, he was. Just the most tickety-boo accent. Man could teach algebra all day long, every pupil sat in his or her chair wi’out moving the whole time.”

  It took Sebastien a long second to realize that the man in the immaculate white suit had used his name, and that his profession was now out there, as well. “How … how do you know my name? W-w-what I do for a living?”

  The school teacher supposed he couldn’t blame the people also waiting to cross the road from moving further away from him and the other guy. San Francisco was chock full of the strange and uncommon. You just had to open yourself up and be willing to go along for the ride.

  But rakishly tall, incredibly thin men in suits so white they were almost phosphorous simply did not appear out of nowhere, bringing up your name and occupation without reason.

  More importantly, it was an experience that one Sebastien Tranh wanted nothing to do with. He hammered on the button some more, considered moving into the middle of the crowd of people eyeing them both nervously, and was ultimately forced to stay right where he was; Mutton Chop Guy was giving him the most intense look and Manic Pixie with Pink Hair had her rape whistle out and that was the end of that.

  “Oh.” Chez tapped a temple knowingly. “You know how it is.”

  “Why. Won’t. This. Button. Work?” Sebastien Tranh hammered on the button for all he was worth. “It’s supposed to sort of work, right?”

  This, pleadingly to the silent crowd of spectators equally pretending he didn’t exist and paying attention to everything that was happening just on the off chance that something terrible occurred so they could sell their videos to the highest bidder.

  “No need to panic, lad.” Chez gestured at the crosswalk signal. “I am preventing the signal from working until I is get the basic information I need.” He tapped his temple again. “I am getting loads of uninteresting, dry, super boring data from the Internet concerning Garth Nickels, yeah, but like, nuffing of intrinsic value. It’s all money and stuff. I is pick you, Sebastien Tranh, because of no particular reason. So how about you answer my question and I can fuck off.”

  Manic Pixie with Pink Hair spoke. “He runs an Arcade.”

  “That’s right!” Sebastien agreed loudly.

  “Nah.” Chez shook his head dismissively. “Not coming up in the search.”

  “No but she’s telling the truth!” Seb pummeled his brain for something, anything that’d get this guy –who may or may not actually be controlling the crosswalk signal with the power of his mind- to go the hell away. “There was a huge gala opening. A few days ago! He invited practically the entire city to come and party. Even had that band …the one that no one but, apparently he, likes … the …”

  “Nickelback.” Mutton Chop Master threw his two cents in; although they weren’t in the busiest section of the street and he figured running across the street without getting hit by one of the speeding cars was definitely possible, doing so in motorcycle boots that hadn’t yet been broken in was just taunting Fate.

  Chez held up a commanding hand, cutting everyone off and turning the whole crowd silent. His mind delved deeper into the strata of the Internet, the wholly conscious portion of himself simply marveling at the efficiency of his control.

  This was what he’d been reconstructed for, not ingloriously slogging through Wasteload after Wasteload or hunting through dilapidated Barternics or tunneling into the forgotten history of the world in search of his next target but this.

  Slicing through nearly eternal reams of digital data, burrowing into secrets, masterfully, wonderfully, being more.

  Still, though, a part of him was already missing the terrible coffee you could find in the DSB.

  Ahah!

&n
bsp; There! Newspaper clippings, online video clips on everything from YouTube to Vimeo and beyond, ranging from pathetically grainy and more of a dream of the experience all the way up to professionally recorded and enhanced full-length songs, all in front of a structure …

  “Nah, wait a minute, this is the ‘eadquarters for Changeco… blimey. Dual address?” Chez shook his head in disgust. “Who in their right fookin’ mind does two different fings at the same spot? That’s ridiculous. Like, I is tell you, I is looking right now at the fings coming out of his labs and that’s shocking enough, hey, shocking enough to have all sorts of governmental eyeballs keeping an eye on the lad. Industrial espionage all over the place, I warrant. And now he’s running an Arcade over top? This man hain’t even heard the word ‘security’ before, I bet. Crikey!”

  “Can … can … can we go now?” Sebastien hit the button half-heartedly. “I … we have … places to go.”

  Chez snapped his fingers and the lights turned red. The walk sign came on. The assassin paid the fleeing locals only a bit of attention. His mind was turned to the task of locating Changetech/Arcade of Awesome on an actual map. Worrying about a handful of natives running to the police or anyone else was very low on his list of priorities.

  “Still, though.” Chez uploaded a virus targeting local police departments, no longer amazed at the efficiency of his software. He’d been through a lot in the intervening four hundred years. He was loaded down with programs and codes that could turn this world of the past into his plaything if he so chose. If anyone started looking for him, he’d know within seconds. “Better safe than sorrow.”

  There. A brilliant smile split Chez’s austere face. The location of where the man hung his hat shone in his mind’s eye.

  “Time to go see this man’s habitat.” Chez put one foot in front of the other. “Can’t wait to see just how poorly protected he is.”

  ***

  “Blimey.” Chez pursed his lips thoughtfully as his cyborg eyes scanned the property. “I is take back everything I said. This man is fully aware of his value.”