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

by Lee Bond

  It was time to head off to the Convention Center. Now he knew Garth was definitely there, Chezzik decided he’d take the opportunity to hack the Center’s computer networks for proper Intel.

  ***

  “That was not normal.” Samantha watched the man in the white suit depart, feeling as if his eyes were somehow still on her.

  “You got that all the way right.” Gags pulled out his phone and dialed Rommen. Busy.

  “No joy?” Sam relaxed with her weapon.

  “He’s probably relaying information to Securicorps. Why Garth didn’t wait for an additional detail is beyond me. We need to get in …achooo… in touch with them.” Into the mike, “Someone get me the phone number for the … achoooo … goddamn Convention Center. In the meantime, see if we can’t pull up a full ID on our man in the bright white suit. Damn system only gave me a name, and some dates, none of which make any fucking sense. According to what we pulled, he's in fucking Brixton right now, which means either the English are interested in Nickels, or something … else. Guy like him probably makes friends wherever he goes.”

  ***

  Chezzik wasn’t entirely certain he was feeling all that … proper. Oh, of course he’d run all the necessary checks on the various integrated systems and whatnot and everything kept coming up all bright and shiny green, all across the board, but … he’d just traveled through time, hadn’t he? Who was to say that his systems could be trusted?

  It was weird. He was alive in the world, right that moment, a young, stupid lad knocking about in Manchester, contemplating signing up for some new trials being offered up by the government in an effort to get off the dole, to make some stupid little girl proud of him, to be able to look at himself in the mirror and call himself a man.

  “Me mum and dad were terribly impressed back then. Or now. Or whatever.” Chez remembered the beaming look of pride in his old mum’s face when he’d announced over breakfast that he was going to be joining a special new group inside the army, a kind of technical division, and that when all was said and done, they were going to transform him into the kind of soldier the world needed these days.

  And his dad, oh his dad, who’d hardly even bothered to give him the time of day, well, he’d had this kind of look in his eyes, hadn’t he just, an odd sort of shimmering shine to them boring old brown eyes, them eyes that’d gone off to the plant every day for the last fifty years to earn barely enough money to put food on the table and a foolish child through school.

  It’d taken Chezzik a long time. A long time to figure out what that look had been, and by the time he’d figured it all out, the face of the world had been changed. His mum and old dad dead and buried beneath a few thousand pounds of rubble as the Invaders had taken to razing shelters to the ground and he … well.

  He’d become Chezzik Elteren. Vanquisher of foes, destroyer of lives. In the end, though, the Invaders –and therefore the Invasion- had been beaten by a couple of American lads, using some kind of special purple space rock to kick all them alien arses. They’d fucked off for the hills after that, leaving the rest of the planet and the survivors to figure out their shit on their own.

  “Love the suit, man! Super retro!”

  “Sorry, wot now?” Chez slowed down enough to engage the young fella-me-lad sitting at an outside patio table with a long, frosty beverage before him. Internal systems automatically logged into the cameras, tracked the man’s progression through the small pub, found him at the point of sale through the video footage, logged his purchase through a credit card, then found his address. From there, it was a hop, skip and jump to hunt through the Web for the man’s social media accounts, email addresses, banking information, high school records.

  The whole nine yards.

  Chez was beginning to think this world really did have a lot to offer. No matter that the world was coming to an end in a few months. Why, if he did this right, he wouldn’t even return home. He’d just … he’d just do the whole Invasion thing all over again, right? He could hop across the pond, track his mum and old dad down, save them from being done for.

  Allen jerked his bearded chin at the dude in the suit. “Do behave.”

  Chez pulled at an earlobe. “Wot?”

  “Do I make you horny, baby?” Allen looked around, trying to find someone –anyone- who knew what the fuck he was talking about. There was no one. “Austin Powers, man. Austin Powers? Doctor Evil. Scott. Frau Farbissiner? Am I the only one who saw that movie?”

  “Mate.” Chez moved quickly and silently to the table proper, using a bit of the old cybernetic augments to make it appear to the dimwitted sot sitting at a table deep into his cups on a bloody Friday midafternoon instead of making something of his life as if he’d just materialized there.

  Smooth reflexes further enhanced by specialized muscle tissues lashed out and snagged the cold beer before it fell from the table, put into danger by young Allen Smythe’s knee-jerk reaction.

  “I do not know what the fuck you are fucking talking about, but if you persist in being a twat, I will firstly pull your lower lip up above your skull, then drill my fingers in through your goddamn earholes.”

  Allen blanched, then felt the seeds of irritation rise up as the asshole in the white suit took a long sip from his beer. His beer. “That’s mine.”

  Chez drained the light beer. It’d been … well, he reckoned if he were going to be honest with himself, it’d been a full four hundred years since he’d had his last proper ale, in … the Black Peake Point Pub, he supposed. You couldn’t rightly call what any pub in a Barternic brewed as beer, but in the future, there was no room for beggars. “Ah. Well, apologies, Allen Smythe of San Francisco. Shall we update your … Twitter account on this atrocity? Or perhaps Facebook? If you like, I can begin uploading images of this little encounter to your Instagram account. I see that you are quite fond of badgering all of your friends with pictures of beer glasses, both empty and full.”

  Allen stared wordlessly at the man in the suit. He didn’t know what to say. From the path of the conversation, it was like the man somehow knew him, but Allen had always swore that if he ever became friends with an Australian, he’d hang out with that Oz-lander day in and day out until the end of time.

  “Ah.” Chez put the empty glass on the table, a mindpiece politely ordering the fool another beer through the pub’s terminals. The waitress would see the order, assume Allen had gone up to the bar to order it, promptly forgetting to bring his fresh drink with him. “Cat got your tongue. While we are engaged in conversation, Master Smythe, allow me to ask you a question. It’s on the nature of the past and the future, and our role as it applies to doing what is right for yourself.”

  It was difficult to follow the man’s words, but Darren got the gist of it.

  “Uh. Okay?” the words came out of his mouth and he supposed he was okay with talking to the asshole when all he really wanted was either a beer or an escape route; technically speaking, it was his fault for being all movie guy with some random stranger on the street, but the other guy was perpetuating the whole assholishness by continuing to be an asshole.

  “Brilliant.” Chez whirled into a seat, beamed sunnily at the pretty little redheaded waitress as she brought Foolish Allen a fresh beer, twiddled his fingers farewell at her delicious backside, then braced his temporary friend. “It is inarguable that we are continually struggling against ourselves, yes? That tomorrow us may wake in the morning to regret yesterday us’s choices?”

  Allen took a long pull from his beer, wasting precious brain cells trying to figure out how the beer had arrived at the table in the first place before deciding that he’d fallen into an episode of the Twilight Zone. From what he remembered of the television show, it was at this point in the broadcast that it was just best to play along.

  “Hah.” Darren nodded, pleased he’d killed half the beer in that swallow. “All the time. All the fucking time.” It went without saying that right now him was fully regretting just a few minutes ago him and
his decision to talk to the fucking guy in the white fucking suit.

  “Just so.” Chez smiled. This was going swimmingly.

  It was dead certain Baron Samiel might not approve of this particular line of questioning or thought. Luckily, that fat odd bastard was mounted to a gigantic wooden chair somewhere in the future and was –if his words were to be believed- temporarily discommoded vis a vis time travel.

  “In my youth, Allen Smythe, I was a lot like you, hey? A bit of a layabout, a bit of a wastrel, carousing in pubs on the weekend instead of doing proper adulting and all of that. Never a care in the world. Then one day, I read an advert in the local paper. The government, you see, was beginning a new program, one that promised to change a man’s life for the better. All for the cause, of course.”

  “The cause?” Allen took another sip. They were skirting the boundaries of his willingness for metaphysical conversations. If only Dave was here. Dave would be all over this shit.

  Chez nodded, then leaned back in his chair. “Oh aye, the cause, lad, the cause. Saving Mother England from itself. You don’t look like the sort to pay too much attention to the rest of the world, and for that, you really aren’t doing yourself any favors, but in a nutshell, my son, England is not doing well. Not well at all. I, as a layabout, decided to join up.”

  “And were you made into the kind of man you wanted to be?”

  Chez opened his mouth to answer, then clicked it shut. Just for a moment. Was he the kind of man he’d always wanted to be? The question fell into a hole and never found purchase on the sides of him. In the beginning, stuffed full of cutting edge science, he’d felt … superhuman. They all had. They’d burned through their training in no time at all, absorbing information, translating data into real-world knowledge that was instantly applicable anywhere in the field.

  Then the black ships had appeared in the sky, jagged-edged, full of monsters out of your deepest, darkest nightmares. They’d rained down upon them all. All of his mates had died.

  He’d survived. Because a part of him had always been that back alley chav. Not a coward, not by a longshot. Oh no. Not a coward. But … something … tough.

  After that … four hundred years of life as an assassin. Killing things that couldn’t be killed by anyone else.

  Was he the man he’d wanted to be?

  Chez didn’t know the answer to that. He’d been spent too long as the man he was to rightly know any longer.

  “The question isn’t ‘am I who I want to be’, Master Smythe, but ‘if you were given a chance to make things better, would you’?” There. He’d asked it out loud. He was here, in the past. Himself was across the pond, doing something foolish. The memories were stored in crystal, should he ever wish to avail himself of the lunacy of youth.

  “Better?” Allen looked around for the waitress, mimed ordering another beer, then drained the glass when she acknowledged that another would be on the way. “Like … time travel?”

  “Just so.”

  A tiny little click resounded quite loudly through Allen’s skull at the odd man’s firm nod. It was a crescendo, roaring through his ears. He couldn’t put a name to the emotion rebounding across his insides right then and there, but Allen knew he had an opportunity to keep things just as they were.

  And that it was terribly important that he phrase the words just so.

  “I think,” Allen began, totally earnest for probably the first time in his adult life, “that … that we’re given one path through life, man. Like, the choices we make when we make them are the right ones. Because, uh, we’re making them. You just gotta trust in yourself, right? Because who we become is who we’re supposed to be. Some of us, like, may wind up bankers or the President of the United States of America and some of us may just be some guy who gets drunk in the afternoon because his fucking girlfriend left him for some asshole from fucking Des Moines who plays the goddamn fucking bongo drums, but my point, right, is that the world needs all of that. Needs a guy drowning his sorrows who regrets talking to a guy with a cool Australian accent, needs a sexy redheaded waitress bringing beers, needs all of it. If you start fucking around, changing all of that … what if the you you become isn’t the you the world needs? Like, uh …” Allen pointed at the man in the brilliant white suit, “are you okay with who you are right now?”

  “Mostly.” Chez really wanted some Wayfarer eyes. Then he’d be well set. “As I was prone to say in my youth, ‘I is a work in progress’. And I’m English, you cunt, not fucking Australian.”

  “Awkward.” Allen killed the entire beer in a single swallow, motioning with a raised finger for his unwanted companion to wait until he was done. When he was done, he let out an impressive belch that nearly rattled the table. “Now. I am not that smart guy, but I have seen Back to the Future nearly a hundred times, so I can totally work this. Say you call yourself and are like ‘hello me, here are the numbers for the lotto, good luck, mate, have a blarst’. The you you are right now, asking me these questions, would not be here. You’d be some rich fuckin’ guy somewhere instead of this very awkwardly intense dude in a white suit. Maybe you don’t wise up like you have, maybe you turn out to be like that idiot who tried to gold plate his balls. He died. Do you want to die because you tried to dip your dink in gold?"

  “No one never tried gold plating their coin purse.” Chez refused to believe it. A mindpiece found the relevant article on the Internet because there was a part of him that apparently missed idle surfing on the single greatest mistake the community of the Earth had ever made. Chez discovered that this particular mindpiece had already stored roughly three gigabytes of cat memes and was currently working on understanding the American fascination with Chuck Norris and his ability to apparently kick anything. “I stand corrected.”

  “Are … are we done here?” Allen asked, deflated. His day drunk was all but ruined, and now the only thing left for him to do was go and cry into a pillow over a broken fucking heart.

  “Almost, sonny Jim, almost.” Chez stuck out a hand, and when Master Smythe shook it, the assassin gripped it tight. “You has done me a solid, here, by keeping me from making what might’ve become a mistake, so I shall do you one as well. In sixty-two days, fourteen hours and thirty-three seconds, the allegedly safe San Onofre nuclear generating station will go hypercritical and blow the absolute fucking shite out of everything you see here. The devastation won’t be complete, but it will be the beginning of the end. From that explosion, holes will open in the sky, and through those holes, nightmares will flood the surface of the world. All our lives will change. For the worst.”

  “What. What. What. What should I do?” Allen tried prying his hand free from the other man’s grip, but his fingers were made of steel.

  “Doesn’t fucking matter, lad. You’re all dead to me. This whole world is barren ash and smoking craters where I’m from. Everywhere there is nowt but disease and disaster, misery and sorrow.”

  Allen watched the man in the white suit push away from the table, heart hammering in his chest fit to exploding. He fished his phone out of a pocket and started dialing Wanda’s number. If the world was going to end, he had some stuff to say to that bitch.

  ***

  Moscone Center. There were all sorts of big banners all over the place, announcing to anyone who gave a damn –of which, Chezzik was certainly disinclined- that some very important and influential people were poised to stand at a dais or podium or whatever and talk about very important things to a roomful of people who would then take those long, dry speeches and transform them into perfect sound bites for the global audience.

  According to the flier enthusiastically shoved into his hand by a lanky lad with the most awful taste in both hair, beard and clothing styles informed the futuristic assassin that not only were the smartest people in America going to be lording their intelligence over the masses, there was also going to be a boatload of technical displays.

  Things like smart solar panels, excellently engineered electric cars, blah
blah blah.

  It was genuinely hard for Chez to get excited about any of this, though he was considering hoarding a load of shite, burying it somewhere, then digging up the cache in the future, all so he could set himself up in proper style.

  Just because he didn’t like the premise of living in high fashion in one of those big block buildings that housed hundreds of thousands of people didn’t mean that he didn’t want to; they had all sorts of brilliant things inside of them, and to be honest, there were times that he genuinely loathed skulking about the ‘loads.

  The pamphlet had quite a bit to say about Master Nickels. Chez, who’d already read everything there was to know about ‘The Man to Save America’, wasn’t impressed. How could anyone indulging themselves in partaking of the pamphlet be okay with the fact that there was nowt there of any substance at all?

  The whole thing, from start to finish, was a slightly more energetic retelling of all the man had done, with an added fancy font. They didn’t even have a fucking picture. No one had a picture. Anywhere.

  “A goddamn travesty, is what it is.” Chez wanted to smack the heads of every single person milling around in front of the convention center. Wanted, actually, to shoot a few of them in the legs as well, just on general principles. “Whoever let this man sit down and start mucking about with the whole of the American infrastructure really didn’t have a proper think on it before signing all them papers, hey?”

  Still, Chez supposed it weren’t up to him to fix people’s minds, either through slaps or bullets, but to capture Nickels and secrete him away somewhere so the Baron might begin the arduous process of doing whatever it was the fuck that odd fellow found so important.

  So. First things first.

  He let loose a few mindpieces and told them to fuck off and not come back until they found summat of interest.

  The mindpieces didn’t go anywhere. They stayed right inside his skull and informed him that the entire building was completely and utterly locked down. All the doors were locked, all the fire shutters were down, all the internal communications and Wi-Fi and Internet and everything that not a single person in the United States of America could survive more than five seconds without was gone.