by Jamie Sawyer
I realised that they were one and the same voice: a voice I’d heard so many times in dream and reality that I should’ve recognised it immediately.
Elena sat in the corner of the room, dressed in her yellow vac-suit. She smiled.
I went towards her. Tried to pull my body from the bed.
“Lie back, my love,” she said. “I can wait. I’ve waited this long. The dead have patience, if nothing else.”
“I tried…” I said. My voice dried up in my throat.
“Maybe just not hard enough. What’s it going to take? To actually make you stand up to all this. To make you realise that only you can change it?”
A figure sat in the opposite corner of the room. Half in shadow, I could only make out the lower portion of the spectre’s face. Most certainly a man, chin speckled with irregular and patchy stubble. His breathing was laboured, sibilant.
But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t move my body – couldn’t twist that extra distance to make out the rest of the face.
The stranger sat with his hands – about as worn and tired as his face – on his lap.
Sweet Christo…
There was something in those hands. The glint of metal: a familiar object that I hadn’t seen in such a long time. Something I thought that I had lost for good.
My father’s revolver.
Whoever the stranger was, his face twisted in a ragged smile: an expression that was filled with cruel malice, and chilled me to the core.
Elena laughed. “Only death seems to motivate you, Conrad.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
RUINS OF THE OLD WORLD
Twenty-three years ago
I was nineteen years old when Carrie came back.
Demarco and I were on the thirty-eighth floor of what had once been the Penobscot Building. The Penobscot was the tallest remaining tower in the Detroit financial district: in the ruins of the old world. I’d chosen our location carefully – above those levels already plundered by the street scavs, out of range of the security drones and probes. They could fly but they were only anti-grav: even those machines had their limits.
“Good spot,” Demarco said. He nodded at the window. “I can see across most of the Metro from here.”
I snorted. Drank from my flask – a nice metal model, something I’d acquired on my last hunt. The water was warm and bitter.
“Nothing I want to see out there,” I said.
I’d seen the results of the bomb too many times. I had a portable Geiger counter on a lanyard around my neck; the plastic casing scratched and scuffed. It purred a regular background noise: a reminder that every hour, minute and second I spent in the blast zone was time shaved off my life.
Fuck it. It was decent work and if I didn’t do it then someone else would.
Demarco stalked between a pair of blackened office desks, keeping low. Save for the jagged glass fragments lining the frame, the window behind him was completely blown out; casting the black office interior in dull morning light.
“Just sit down and eat,” I said. Pulled the goggles from my face, let them hang around my neck. “We’ve been going at this for hours.”
Just elevated from boyhood; Demarco looked much younger than his actual age, but he talked much older – had the lingo of a kid who’d seen things beyond his years. His hair was cut short, patchy in places. Like most of the Metro, he was a child of the bomb: carried glaring white welts on his neck and shoulders. Those were the product of long-term radiation exposure, of a lifetime spent searching the bombed-out tenements and the decayed inner city.
I sprawled on the floor, facing the window, and opened my shoulder bag. It bulged with recovered relics. Simple low-value items like handheld electronics, packets of cigarettes, even a couple of food tins. I carefully scattered the items across the floor.
“You’re missing out,” Demarco said.
He was almost as good a scavenger as me; save for that dangerous streak of curiosity. He grinned in the dark, peeking over the office desk at the rectangle of grey light outside.
“Keep away from the window,” I ordered. “That’s how they find you, more often than not.”
“It’s quite a sight…”
Demarco was referring to the remains of old downtown, the rotten heart of the Metro. Of course, I’d seen the views from the towers as well. Maybe, to someone, they were impressive; the jagged black skyline, the fused glass and steel monstrosities that had once been buildings. But it just reminded me of what the Alliance and Directorate had done to each other. There was evidence of that all around me. The thirty-eighth-floor office of the Penobscot had been working as usual the day that the bomb dropped on Detroit Metro. Some of the employees still sat at their desks; now eternally tethered to the melted plastic workstations and swivel chairs. A body sat a couple metres from me. It was impossible to tell whether the blackened husk of a corpse had once been a man or a woman. More bones and dust than flesh: all moisture sucked from the body by thirteen long years in the dark. The thing grinned that dead smile – a stylus still held in desiccated fingers, ready to operate a computer that was equally spent.
I jumped up, grabbed at the skeleton’s hand. It was a good-quality stylus; something to add to the day’s meagre trawl.
Demarco eventually came to sit in my sheltered spot away from the window. He was covered in a thin sheen of sweat and dust; eyes peering out of a matt facemask of ash. I watched him empty his own bag to the floor: very careful to separate his treasures from mine. He shook his head. Fished in the pockets of his coveralls – we both wore those, marked up with the insignia of some long-deceased Earth-bound corporation – and poured some smaller items onto the ground as well.
“Bad show, Con,” he said. “Not much for a morning’s work.”
“Better than Rachi’s gang,” I said. I pulled open a chocolate bar with my teeth, bit at the contents. It tasted soft and stale. “They spent the whole day out on Eleventh Avenue; came back with nothing.”
Neither of us had anything of especial worth. I knew enough about nuclear war to understand that the electronic devices I’d foraged would probably be fried; I figured maybe I could break those down, sell on some of the components. The other items might get me a few credits, and the tinned foods looked edible, but none of it would get me past the next meal.
I took another swig from my flask.
“It’s getting harder,” Demarco said. “You got to admit it.”
“Maybe,” I said, swilling the warm liquid around my mouth. It was laced with anti-rad drugs. Not the high-end stuff that the clinics sometimes handed out, but the street version. Not as effective; much easier to acquire. “If you’re so worried about the rads, then drink up. I haven’t seen you take a taste all day.”
Demarco gave me a sideways smile. Broke out an inhaler from his coveralls: a dirty plastic amphet sucker. He took a mouthful from the device.
“I ain’t worried about rads,” he whispered. “I’ll be long gone before Geiger takes his dues.”
Making a living was getting harder: much harder. The lower levels of the office buildings and towers of the business district had long ago been searched and plundered. That drove those looking for pre-war treasures deeper into the blast zone, increasing the risk to radiation exposure. I didn’t know the exact location of the blast zone but my best guess was that we were a couple of klicks from ground zero.
It had been thirteen years since the single nuclear warhead had dropped on Detroit. Successive governors installed to oversee the Michigan State – puppet politicians talking the Pentagon’s war-rhetoric – had promised to repopulate the downtown. It all cost money: the UA didn’t have enough of that to go around, and Detroit downtown fell to the bottom of a long list of priorities.
“What you thinking about, boss?” Demarco asked me.
“Nothing much. Just the war.”
“It wasn’t a war, man,” he said. He gave a muted laugh. “Congress called it a ‘tactical nuclear exchange’.”
“Sounds li
ke a war, shits like a war. Probably is a war.”
Demarco grinned again. “You heard about the real war? The xeno war?”
“Course. I hear just like everybody else.”
“They’re saying that there are bug-eyed fishmen coming from beyond the stars. Invading human space. Taking prisoners and all that shit.”
“You really believe it?”
“I want to believe. I want to believe that we aren’t alone – that there’s something bigger than this.” He paused, scratched at the tumours on his neck. “More than that: I want to believe something is going to come down here, and mop up all this crap – to force us to start again.”
“But fishmen? Sounds like bull.”
Demarco shrugged. “I got an uncle in the UA Army. He’s a sergeant or something. Came back from the Rim; started telling stories about aliens. Real nasty bastards.”
There were plenty of stories going round about the new threat to Alliance security – to human security – but nothing confirmed. Back then, I wasn’t sure what to believe: the politicos and the military were quick to debunk the rumours as Directorate propaganda. It seemed inherently unlikely; but the rumour mill was gaining momentum. Time-delay on civilian space comms meant that news we received on Earth – hundreds of light-years from the edges of explored space – was years old.
“Wasn’t your old man in the military?” Demarco asked.
I sighed. “No. He wasn’t. And he sure as fuck didn’t fight fishmen.”
Jonathan Harris. My father. I never spoke about him; never thought about him. Out here – in the blasted inner-city wasteland – no one cared where you really came from. I made my own bio; lied when I needed to. I watched Demarco as he rearranged his day’s take. We’d inevitably part ways soon, and my real history wouldn’t matter. That, or as Demarco had predicted, Old Death would come calling for him. Children of the bomb as gifted as him didn’t last long. I’d move on to another gang – change my story again.
“You ever think about joining up?” Demarco said. “Getting off this rock?”
“No. Can’t say that I have.”
“Maybe we should.”
“What, and fight your uncle’s fishmen?”
“It’d beat scraping a life down here in the piss and the shit.”
“Not for me. Not when there’s still plenty for the taking down here.”
I waved my hands at the desiccated building around us.
“Maybe you’re right,” Demarco said. “Come on. We should be getting on. Still another six floors above us—”
Up until that moment, the building had been maddeningly quiet. We only had the dead for company; the other scav crews knew that we were working the Penobscot, wouldn’t dare to encroach onto our territory.
The silence was broken by a barely audible whirring.
Demarco went to one knee, scrambling with his bag: eyes on the big empty window.
“Maybe it was the building?” he babbled. “Maybe the structure is coming down?”
While that was possible, the noise had nothing to do with the building coming down and we both knew it.
The noise was unmistakably an anti-gravity engine.
A drone.
It appeared at the window, hovering outside: as though it was afraid to enter the structure. As big as a man, the drone was armoured and spherical. Faceless, it was equipped with a handful of multi-vision sights that blinked and flashed. Its frontal facing was interrupted by several cylindrical devices: the muzzles of unidentified projectile weapons.
“Oh, fuck, Con!” Demarco said. His face was splashed with sweat, neck corded with distress. “We’re done!”
I already had my shit together, had started backing up to the door we’d used to get in.
“Stay low and follow me.”
“We’re fucked! They have infrared, motion sensors—!”
“You don’t even know what any of those things are.”
“They’ll kill us, Con!”
I agreed with that.
Although the blast zone was dead, unoccupied, it was still owned. Big business wouldn’t relinquish its hold on the existing structures and the contents: still regularly used security patrols. This far inside the blast zone, the drones were the law. They didn’t ask questions, didn’t care about our reasons for being here. They terminated trespassers with extreme prejudice.
Demarco and I scrambled into the corridor outside. Vaulted a displaced filing cabinet.
The drone lost its compunction about entering the tower. I heard it crash through the window frame, the whine of its engines growing ever nearer. A searchlight popped on behind us; sent jagged splinters of hard light over the darkened interior of the corridor.
Getting out of the building had become our only objective.
Smaller than me, faster than me, Demarco dashed on ahead. He made for the stairwell. The floor was at an angle, slowing us.
The searchlight spun behind me. There was more crashing as the drone went through a wall. Brickwork and dust poured along the corridor.
“Go, go!” I shouted.
The building creaked, expressing disquiet at the drone’s invasion. How had it gotten so high? I was no technician but all scavengers had a basic understanding of how the drones worked. It was common knowledge that their anti-grav engines only operated close to the ground—
Not this one, I answered, as the drone gained on us.
We both leapt through an empty window, into another blasted office space. Demarco skidded on a pool of water – something dripping from above him – and rolled into the remains of a Penobscot employee. He gasped, jumped back in revulsion: an unconscious, human reaction to something we’d both witnessed a hundred times before. I grabbed his collar, dragged him between a line of desks.
Everything fell silent for a moment. I braced behind the desk, breathing in short, controlled gasps. I kept one hand on Demarco’s chest – could feel his beating heart through the bones of his ribcage – because the look in his eyes told me that he was going to run at any moment.
“Stay with it, Demarco!” I whispered.
“Maybe it’s gone?” he murmured.
Just because that was what we wanted didn’t make it so, but it was quiet enough for that to be true. I listened. Could only hear the regular creak and whine of the tower. I relaxed my hand. Demarco righted himself and peeked over a stack of gutted computers.
The drone suddenly rammed the office doorway with such force that part of the ceiling came down. It used the bulk of its great spherical body to batter its way through the wall, clipping the frame without concern. The chase was on again.
“Just move!” I ordered.
The drone emerged from the dust cloud created by the collapsed ceiling at full speed: metal shell barely touched. It collided with a desk, hard enough to ram it aside.
“This way!” Demarco yelled.
“No,” I shouted back, above the noise of the advancing drone. I pointed in the opposite direction. “It’s through there.”
Demarco shrugged, moved off on the route he’d indicated.
Coughing, mouth full of carbon fibre and plaster dust, I paused for just a moment: paralysed by indecision. The insides of the towers looked similar at times; could be misleading.
With the drone metres behind me, I decided to follow Demarco.
The drone was relentless. It moved at full pelt, searchlight inadvertently illuminating my path.
We emerged into another corridor – somewhere dark, without any natural light. It stank of rot and wet. Pools of rainwater collected on the warped floors. Demarco pounded ahead, wheezing so hard that it almost hurt to listen to him.
“This way!” he bellowed. “Th…through here—!”
He hit the double safety doors at full speed, slammed them open with his shoulder—
There was light beyond the doors.
Light from outside.
Demarco stopped. He pulled back from the ragged edge of the collapsed floor.
Inste
ad of a stairwell, the building terminated in a wide void. It looked like an entire section had fallen in on itself, creating a thirty-metre drop to the next – equally unsafe – floor.
Demarco wobbled at the edge of the drop. He turned to me, arms out to steady himself. His expression recognised that we’d gone the wrong way.
The drone crashed behind us.
Demarco’s eyes snapped to the other side of the collapsed floor. It was a good six metres – a difficult jump in ideal circumstances, an impossible one in these. I immediately realised what he was going to do.
“Demarco! No – you’ll never make it!”
He underarmed his satchel and hurled it across the gap. The bag crashed into a wall on the other side.
The drone’s engines were just outside the doors now: it would be on us in seconds.
“Better to die trying than not try at all!” Demarco yelled.
Demarco took two steps back.
I went to grab him, my own bag slipping off my shoulder – into the hole in the floor.
Demarco jumped.
He shouted – a loud, guttural roar – as he went, his arms winding, legs outstretched.
The drone paused at the door. It wasn’t programmed for surprise; had no way of expressing that emotion on its fixed metal features, and yet I felt a wave of bewilderment emanating from the machine.
Demarco reached for the far floor, fingers clutching at the air as he went.
He missed the other side of the hole by metres. His wiry frame sailed down through the hole.
I looked away. He made a loose, wet thumping sound as he hit the floor.
Dead.
The drone swivelled on the spot. Caught me in its searchlight. I gingerly raised my hands, palms up. It was over. There was no point in running any more.
It wasn’t until then that I realised there was an insignia printed on the drone’s hull.
ALLIANCE ARMY.
“Harris, Conrad?” the machine asked in abrupt monotone.
I nodded.
“Harris, Conrad?” it asked again. “Provide verbal response.”
