by Peter Liney
I turned to Gigi. No way was she gonna admit it, but she was looking distinctly frightened.
“You okay?” I asked.
“’Course, I am,” she said, as if I’d just insulted her in some way.
I nodded, doing her the favor of taking her at face value, swinging down Union, ignoring all the beggars at the lights.
“Where ya going?” she asked.
“Won’t take long.”
“I wanna go to the house!” she protested, but nothing was gonna divert me from what I had in mind.
I hadn’t told anyone, especially not Lena, but I had an ulterior motive for returning to the City. I knew there’d be no chance of seeing Doctor Simon at his home surgery, not with all its many layers of security, but I was hoping there might be a way at St. Joseph’s, presuming he still did his two days a week there. All I needed was somewhere discreet where the two of us could have a cozy little chat.
Actually, it wasn’t that difficult. I wasn’t gonna risk going to his office or surgery, but I knew somewhere where I could pretty much guarantee he’d show up at some point. Gigi and me managed to bluff our way into the underground parking garage by pretending she was my daughter and in excruciating pain, her putting on quite a show, me acting like an over-protective and possibly unstable parent. The guy did give the limo a bit of a look, but in a city where there was so much damage and destruction, it didn’t seem to concern him that much, and yet another blood-curdling scream from Gigi finally prompted him to wave us through.
It wasn’t hard to pick out the Doc’s new auto; there was this big, elegant Bentley, looking all custom-made and optioned to the hilt. You could’ve lived in that thing for a coupla years and still not known your way around. I found a place almost opposite it, easing his battered old limo into the shadows in the corner, knowing he’d get a horrible shock when he saw it.
“You sure that’s his?” Gigi asked, looking at the Bentley.
“Oh yeah,” I said, noticing the pools of water around it, that someone had cleaned and polished it ’til it looked like it was made of mirrors.
We didn’t have to wait that long. A little after five, the familiar figure of Doctor Simon appeared from the elevator and walked briskly toward the Bentley, his clothes and his restored immaculate appearance belying that little trick Jimmy’d played on him the last time we saw him, removing his implant and changing his records so he was locked out of his privileged existence for a while.
I waited ’til he was almost at the Bentley, then jumped out and made my way over so I arrived as he was opening the door. The look on his face, the collapse of his jaw, was a real picture. I never said a word, just pushed him inside and immediately followed.
“Long time no see,” I said, closing the door behind me.
For a moment he was apparently too stunned to do anything, then his hand went to his inside pocket, presumably for some kinda security device. I immediately grabbed his forearm.
“Just keep them where I can see them,” I told him.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“A history lesson—what the hell’s been going on?”
He paused for a moment, still staring at me, then his expression started slowly changing and I could’ve sworn there was part of him that was almost relieved to see me. “Lots of things,” he eventually replied.
“Like what?”
“Clancy,” he said, ignoring my question, “why the hell did you come back?”
“Various reasons.”
“You must’ve seen on your way in—?”
I nodded. “D’you still take care of her?”
“I’ve got no choice,” he replied. “She’s insane.”
“This is gonna come as a helluva shock to ya,” I told him, “but you never needed to be a doctor to know that.”
“That was before . . . Now,” he said, “she’s introduced all these emergency powers. She’s in total control of every second of our lives. Everyone’s terrified.”
“I’m not surprised,” I muttered, remembering the beating she gave me, how she’d damn near killed me with those special limbs of hers, the gruesome way she punished all those who disappointed her.
“And she’s not the only one,” the Doc informed me. “Not anymore.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“She’s got this elite Bodyguard—they’ve all got prosthetics.” He stared at me as if a little fascinated by the expression slowly appearing on my face.
“You’re kidding . . . ?”
“They had to choose between arms or legs; they weren’t allowed to have both—just to be sure she’d always be the strongest.”
“They had their limbs removed too? How many—?”
“I don’t know how many there are . . . Enough.”
I was damn near speechless: things were even worse than I’d imagined. The way I saw it, they’d only need about twenty or thirty of those damn mutants to take out the whole City. “Is she still searching for us?” I asked.
“Yeah, but she’s had other things on her mind. She’ll get to you,” he said, like it was nothing if not inevitable.
“Does she know where we are?”
“I don’t know—maybe. I did hear you’d gone over the mountains.”
“Shit!” I groaned.
“Why did you come back?” he repeated, as if there was plainly no logical answer to that question.
“There’s a lotta weird stuff going on,” I told him. “I wanna know why.”
“Like what?”
“Well, for one, people spontaneously combusting.”
I told him what we’d seen earlier, expecting he’d be as shocked as we’d been, but he wasn’t.
“Implants, I would guess,” he ventured.
“Implants?”
“They’re doing a lot of experiments—that’s what’s been preoccupying her. She wants everyone to have one. At first it was voluntary: people were told it was good for their health, that this thing would sit in their body monitoring them, picking up any early warning signs of disease—”
“How the hell does it do that?”
“It can change form: sometimes it’s solid, sometimes liquid, sometimes it seamlessly blends with the host tissue. Of course they launched it with a real fanfare, an Infinity campaign to convince us what a great thing it was—and free, too. Then stories started going around about what was really happening, that they weren’t so much volunteers as guinea pigs, and suddenly no one wanted to know any more . . . that’s when she really went crazy. She started sending out these snatch squads, taking people off the streets, kidnapping them from hospitals . . . prisons. They’ve been working on it day and night, constantly modifying the program, the moment they think they’ve got something testing it on any number of ‘volunteers.’ As a result, there are hundreds of screwed-up experiments wandering around.”
“Right. Hence all the crazies?”
“They only let them go because they’re so sure they’ll find a way of making them respond later.”
“Respond?”
He glanced at me and I sensed that just at that moment he was completely on my side. “She’s working on the removal of all free will.”
“Jesus!”
“If she gets her way . . . she’ll use these things to control us all.”
“What about those guys who spontaneously combusted?”
“At a guess, some kind of variation of punishment implants.”
“Like the satellites?”
“Similar. From what I’ve heard they sit inside people and monitor what they do; ready to act, not just as judge and jury, but to hand out retribution the moment the host body breaks the law. Do something minor—petty theft, criminal damage—it’ll make you feel sick for a while; do something more serious, it might give you months, even years, of chronic pain or unpleasant illness. Unlike the satellites, it doesn’t take away your mobility, but something far more precious: your health. The ultimate deterrent is still the same: when those men were about to ki
ll you, their implants simply executed them from within their own bodies.”
Again I found myself just staring at him. I mean, I’m the original dumb old big guy, it’s not exactly an unfamiliar situation for me to find myself out of verbal ammunition—but I couldn’t imagine there’d be too many people able to handle what he’d just told me. Like so many before her, Nora Jagger was out to take over the world—only in her case, it sounded like she was well on her way.
“How’s Lena?” the Doc asked, as if, amongst all the gathering darkness, he still saw her as a pinpoint of light.
I’d been so caught up in what he was telling me I’d forgotten for a moment why I was there. “She’s fine,” I said, but he continued to stare at me, eagerly waiting for more. “It’s a boy,” I eventually informed him.
“Clancy!” he cried, his excitement irrepressible. “That’s fantastic!”
“Yeah. For us,” I said firmly, just in case he was getting any ideas.
“I’m so pleased.” For some time he sat there silently, plainly rolling the news over and over in his head. “I’d love to see him.”
I was shaking my head even before he’d finished the sentence.
“She’d never know,” he added. “I give you my word.”
“Last I heard, a thousand of your words couldn’t buy bird-shit,” I said, reminding him of how he’d double-crossed us.
Again he went quiet, I guessed appreciating how he was sitting smack-dab on the most delicate of fault lines, and I glanced over to check Gigi was all right.
“People are starting to get that bit healthier. There are certainly fewer zombie-sick around,” he told me, obviously electing to try reason. “Jimmy did everyone a big favor destroying the satellites and stopping the pollution, but”—again he hesitated, and I had a pretty good idea where he was going with this—“despite the occasional pregnancy, to my knowledge, no one’s actually had a healthy baby. The terms have got longer, one or two premature ones we had hopes for, but as yet it’s just you two.”
I sighed: he might’ve had his priorities but I had mine, too. “Lena’s gone blind again,” I announced.
“Oh . . . I’m sorry.”
“That day we escaped—probably ’cuz of the Bitch throwing her up against the wall,” I said, feeling a certain pleasure at taking up Gigi’s nickname for Nora Jagger.
“I did warn you,” he said. “It’s rare, but it does happen. Mind you, it was a heavy impact.”
For a while we sat in silence, both of us, I think, beginning to appreciate the cards we were laying out on the table. I didn’t have to say it, but I did anyway. “Can you operate on her again?”
He hesitated, the expression on his face slowly changing. “Well. I don’t know,” he said, and for the first time in the conversation he was sounding his smooth old confident self. “I’d have to take a look, do some tests.”
“I thought you might,” I replied sarcastically.
“It would be better if I came to you,” he said.
“For who?”
“Everyone.”
Again I went quiet, feeling slightly apprehensive that I hadn’t thought this through properly; just like when I used to play chess with Jimmy on the Island my attention was so firmly fixed on the main prize, I was always in danger of wandering into a trap.
“I won’t harm them, Clancy. I promise you,” the Doc reassured me. “You can be there all the time.”
“It’s up to Lena,” I eventually replied, realizing I needed more time to think, that I couldn’t make such an important decision for both of us.
I glanced across at Gigi again; she’d powered a window down and was looking distinctly bored. “Gotta go,” I said.
Despite my fear of doing something unforgivably stupid, and the deeply disturbing things he’d just told me, I gotta say, it was still one helluvan amusing moment. The doc caught sight of Gigi, immediately recognized her, then finally realized what that battered old piece of shit disintegrating away in the corner was.
“Is that my limo?” he cried.
“Yep. That’s it.”
His mouth dropped open so violently he might’ve had a small charge of dynamite between his teeth. “Oh, my God! . . . What have you done to it?” he cried, tumbling out of the Bentley.
“Just a little wear and tear.”
“Wear and tear!”
I gotta say, I hadn’t really given it that much thought, but I could see it was a bit of a mess, what with all kinds of fungus growing all over it from the cave, several panels that’d been ripped off by growlers the night we escaped from Infinity, the paintwork down one side melted and pockmarked from the fire in the barn—yeah, “a bit of a mess” is what I’d call it.
“I don’t believe this!” he cried, walking around the limo, each angle apparently worse than the last.
“We’ll fix it up,” I told him.
“Where’s the lid to the trunk?” he wailed, his eyes now gaping almost as wide as his mouth.
Gigi gave a pointed sigh, obviously getting a little bored with the whole thing. “Can we go?” she asked.
“When are you next here?” I asked the Doc.
“What?” he asked, too preoccupied to really pay me any mind.
“When are you next here?”
“Thursday,” he eventually managed to reply, still staring at the limo as if someone had spat on the Mona Lisa or held a dirty protest in the Sistine Chapel.
“I’ll think on about Thomas,” I said, climbing in beside Gigi.
I hated myself for doing it, I really did; using access to my baby son as a means of bribing someone felt wrong, but I didn’t see any other option. Worse still, I didn’t even know if Lena wanted the operation—we’d not discussed her sight in ages. I was just going on how she’d behaved before the first time, making out it wasn’t that important—but maybe this time it was genuine, maybe she really didn’t feel it was something she had to do.
I made a point of shaking Doctor Simon’s hand through the limo window before I pulled away, I guess trying to cement our new understanding that we were both starting all over again, as if, if I treated him like a gentleman, he’d behave like one, instead of merely looking the part. The last view I had of him was in the rearview mirror, still gaping after what was left of his former pride and joy.
“What did he say?” Gigi asked, as we emerged up onto street level.
I hesitated. “A lotta stuff.”
“Is everything okay?”
“More or less,” I replied, not wanting to discuss Nora Jagger or her new powers or ambitions, especially bearing in mind that both of us had attempted to kill her.
What the hell she’d do if she knew the pair of us were back in the City, I couldn’t imagine. Rip the whole damn place apart to find us, I’d have guessed—her and her new Bodyguards.
“Turn left here,” Gigi indicated, jolting me out of my thoughts, and I hit the brakes and eased my way over.
The fact that there were more vehicles around and still the occasional street closed off meant we got caught in a kinda low-key rush hour, and by the time we arrived in this old residential street down by the river, the light was starting to fade and Gigi struggled for a few moments to pick out the right place. Mind you, with each and every building daubed with some form of graffiti or urban art, they did look kinda similar.
A good few years back you’d have had to have paid a pretty penny to live in a place that backed onto the river, but after the Crash you couldn’t give them away. People who never really had the money to purchase in the first place—even having to borrow their deposits—were forced to put their properties up for sale. The only trouble being there weren’t any buyers, and one by one they were repossessed, boarded up, taken over by squatters and now, prompted by what looked like a couple of major fires—maybe accidental, maybe not—there’d plainly been something of an exodus. There were still a few people around, but they didn’t look that comfortable about it: keeping their heads low, scurrying away rather than ris
k being approached, as if a direct question might damage them in some way.
The “safe house” turned out to be a basement apartment; it might’ve been more intact than most but it didn’t look any more lived-in. We parked the limo in an alleyway leading down to the river and walked back. Gigi approaching with understandable caution.
“D’you think they’re still there?” I asked, having my doubts.
“I dunno,” Gigi replied, suddenly acting surprisingly nervous.
“Don’t look like it to me,” I commented as we stopped in a doorway opposite and a little ways down the street.
For a moment she didn’t say anything and I realized she was getting irritated with me. “You don’t have to be here,” she told me, and I nodded and promptly shut up—I really didn’t understand what was going on, what this was all about.
We must’ve waited for a good half-hour, watching out for any movement—for anyone coming or going—not sure what to do. At one point she went over and peered down over the railings, trying to look through the dirty windows, then turned and headed back.
“See anyone?” I asked, though it was obvious she hadn’t.
“Nope.”
“So what d’ya wanna do?”
She hesitated for a moment, took in the way the night was starting to gather, then came to a decision. “It probably doesn’t work,” she said, digging deep into her pocket and bringing out a key.
I was a little taken aback—why hadn’t she said something before?—though at least it proved she was telling the truth, that she really had lived there. “Only one way to find out,” she told me.
We slipped over as unobtrusively as we could: just two more people minding their own business on Mind-Your-Own-Business Street. Gigi briefly hesitated, as if gathering her strength, then went down the steps with me following closely on behind.
To both her and my surprise, the key still worked, and after a couple of shouts of “Hi!” and getting no reply, we entered. Thankfully, I’d remembered to bring a flashlight with me from the limo, though I hadn’t remembered to check the battery, which, going on its light, was pretty close to expiring.
