by Brian Craig
The man with half a face sighted along the barrel of his gun at Charlie Atlas’s forehead, and said: “You got two choices, fat man. You can take your freakin’ gang back to the bar, and go back to your game of pool, or I’ll turn your brain to the same kind of cold porridge you got all over your shirt-front. And if your friends out in the corridor vote that you got to be a hero, every freakin’ one of them will be dead before morning. That’s not the Spiders talking, it’s GenTech. Okay?”
Harriet could tell that it wasn’t okay. In fact, she could tell that the man with half a face had just made himself an extra enemy. Charlie didn’t like to see his boys maltreated, and he didn’t think Cyril had been anywhere near provocative enough to deserve what he’d got. On the other hand, Charlie was no fool. He could tell when he was out of his depth. He knew—and Harriet knew too—that there was nothing Charlie could do but back off. She knew that Charlie and the Boys would feel pretty sick about it, but there it was. She felt pretty sick about it herself.
“You’d better not hurt Harriet,” said Charlie, in the most menacing tone he could muster. “Harriet has a lot of friends.”
It was news to Harriet. She appreciated the gesture, impotent though it was.
“It’s okay, Charlie,” she said softly. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have called. I didn’t mean to get Cyril killed—I’m really sorry.”
“That’s better,” said Pasco, who still hadn’t lowered his gun. “The tension’s going out of the situation already, you see? Harriet’s a businesswoman, and we’re just here to do a little business—that’s all.”
The doorway looked very big and very empty once Charlie Atlas was no longer filling it. In fact, the room seemed very much larger, because he had dragged Cyril’s body out with him.
“That wasn’t very sensible, Harriet,” said Pasco grimly. “The Kid should have warned you that we’d mean business this time. He hasn’t done you any favours by dragging you in, and you don’t owe him any in return. He’s overstepped the mark, this time. He’s already dead—just living on borrowed time. Like the Atlas Boys, you have only two choices, Harriet. You can be on Kid Zero’s side, or you can be on our side. There aren’t any neutrals any more. Which is it to be, Harriet?”
“I’ll get you the disc,” said Harriet faintly. Pasco let her go while she rummaged around for it. She wondered briefly whether she ought to have made more copies, but realized that she was too deep in the shit to think about pulling flankers.
She handed the disc to Pasco, who glanced a it briefly before passing it on to his friend.
“How many are there?” he asked.
“Four,” said Harriet tonelessly. “The Kid took the other three. One to stash, he said—the rest he’s going to try to get to the CIA. The guy who gave it to him was a government agent of some kind. The Kid wants to complete the delivery.”
The man with the ruined face looked at his friend, who looked back stonily.
“Where’d he go?” asked Pasco silkily.
“I don’t know,” said Harriet truthfully—but this was one of those time when the truth just wasn’t enough.
Ray Pasco broke the implant from her left ring-finger. She heard the snap before the pain caught up with her, because sound travels faster through the air than electrical impulses travel through the nerves.
She fainted. Old age was on her side, and it wasn’t going to let her take much suffering. She’d have been only too pleased to fall into a dream, but she didn’t. She fell into some dark pool of pain, where she was out of touch with the world but hurting through and through. It wasn’t a pleasant place to be, so she struggled to get back again.
When she came round, she found that she was curled up on the floor with a close-up view of Ray Pasco’s boot. The man with the ruined face was talking to a Spider who’d just come in—not the one who’d headed the cutting crew. The cutting crew had gone.
“…heading north-west,” the Spider was saying. “Five hours ago. If you step on it, you might just catch him.”
“It’s good,” Pasco’s companion said. “We can concentrate the search. Maybe we can put the word out without attracting too much attention.”
Harriet gave out an unearthly groan, trying to sound as if she was about to die, and rolled over. Then she pretended that she was unconscious again. Pasco nudged her in the ribs with his toecap, but he was too preoccupied to take a closer look. That was good.
Her right hand was now shielded by her body, and there was a low-lying connect-point from which she could control some of her supplementaries. She couldn’t interface with the net, but she could open up some outside lines. She switched on half a dozen voice-mikes, then opened up an old wire Zagorski had run into her equipment. She was certain that Yam On Wan had a good tap into Zagorski’s machinery—and that meant that anything else which was said would be half way around the world within minutes.
“Why north-west?” asked Pasco. “He’s doubling back—that doesn’t sound to me like he’s trying to get to the government. There’s nothing out there but sand and ghost towns.”
Harriet withdrew the connection, and groaned again. This time, Pasco bent down to pick her up. He wasn’t as wide as an Atlas Boy but he was every bit as tall, and he held her up as easily as if she’d been a rag doll.
“What did he tell you, Harriet?” he asked—but she could tell that the menacing manner was all bluff. He thought that if he hurt her, she’d only faint again.
“He told me that what he had was really big,” she said, trying to sound terrified. “He told me that it was worth millions—but the Kid don’t care about money. He just wants to give it away, to anyone who’ll use it to hurt GenTech. He wants to crack your org wide open.”
Are you listening, boys? she added silently, offering up a prayer that this wasn’t just going on to some stupid tape that Zagorski wouldn’t play back until Christmas.
Pasco set her down in the vacant chair, then looked around.
Too late! she cried in the empty reaches of her head, hoping that she was right.
“Burn it out,” said the man with the ruined face to the Spider. “Turn it all to slag. Take the woman out by the back way, and pass her on to our people when they can get down here. They can use drugs to find out whether she really knows any more or not, but we don’t have time to play right now. Preston and I had better go out the same way, in case we get held up by more moronic giants. So far, our luck’s held—we know when the Kid left and which way he went—it’s only a matter of time before we pick up the trail. With luck, we might nail him today or tomorrow—but either way, he’s finished. There’s nowhere at all he can go.”
“You got it,” said the Spider shortly.
“And you have a big pay-off coming right down the line,” said Pasco. “If you can keep your mouth shut. Carey Castle will monitor every signal that goes out of this place, and if one word of what you just overheard gets broadcast, you’re dead.”
Harriet was trying hard to be convinced that Ray Pasco was locking the stable door after the horse had already bolted. Ten to one she was right, but there were no certainties in life, alas.
She wanted to say something brave and defiant, like “You’ll never get the Kid,” but she didn’t have the strength, let alone the certainty. She could only hope that GenTech’s drugs would give her pleasant dreams—and that when Kid Zero’s reckoning finally came, Lady Venom would get in a bite or two in order to even up the score.
7
There were times when Homer Hegarty hated his job.
He loved being a TV star—not only because the pay was ten times better than he’d ever made teaching college but also because he was a bit of a sucker for the line of patter which he fed the punters, about being the only man in America who could see the writing on the wall—but being a TV star was only the tip of the iceberg. The rest of it was travelling the country with a fleet of copters and cameras, on the road six days a week, living in crappy motels and trailer-parks. It was the sick and schticky busi
ness of trying to weave epic stories—or mock-epic stories, anyhow—out of the petty squabbles of brainless assholes, most of whom had as much real backbone as the average jellyfish.
Homer hated his job most when it took him to the parts of America which had been shitholes even in the good old days. The worst of all those shitholes, in Homer’s anything-but-humble opinion, was Texas. He firmly believed the old joke about God having made a real mess of landscaping Texas but worming his way out of trouble by creating a bunch of potential settlers so mind-bogglingly stupid as to like it just the way it was: flat, infertile, and ugly as hell.
The trailer-camp where he and his team were presently lodged was out on the edge of the Staked Plains. It was technically only semi-desert, but that “technically” covered a multitude of sins. It was the back of beyond, where even sandrats and scavengers had a hard time making out.
The trailer-park had only one advantage: it was secure. In fact, its owners claimed that it was every bit as secure as the older PZs—which Homer was prepared to believe, having recently visited New York and Chicago. The security men called themselves the Delta Force and claimed to have belonged to a crack regiment of the U.S. Army in the days before privatization, but Homer didn’t believe that—these guys were too bright ever to have been real soldiers; some of them could even read. He figured that they were ex-juvie gangculters who’d survived long enough in the NoGos to know how to move upmarket.
Homer figured that he needed an outfit like Delta Force to watch his rear, even though most of the gangsters thought he was the next best thing to God. There were always crazies out there, who might figure that the quickest way to become a celebrity was to knock off the guy who was the nation’s number one celebrity-broker.
Tonight, Homer had retired early to his trailer. He always had a trailer to himself, and rarely entertained people there. He liked his own company, and talking to himself was the only chance he ever got to hold a conversation on a reasonable intellectual level. Also, he liked to have time to read; it was a habit he’d never shaken off, even though his years teaching college were long-gone, and he treasured it all the more during those times when the job made him sick. Tonight, not for the first time, he was reading Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols. He found it utterly engrossing, as he did any opportunity to escape into the abstract realms of philosophical thought, where he need not be bothered by the stink of the shitheap that the modern world had become.
He was so engrossed in the book, in fact, that he didn’t even notice the door of the trailer open and close. It wasn’t until the reek of sweat and dirt told him that someone else was present that he looked up—and by that time, the party in question had sat down on the spare bunk, opposite to the one in which Homer was lying.
For one awful moment, Homer thought that he was a dead man. He looked into the anonymous, characterless face of a juvie panzer boy: gaunt, hollow-eyed, inhuman. It seemed like the contemporary mask of the Grim Reaper, come to carry him off to some mysterious Underworld where all the dead, unwanted children of the world played games of murder and destruction.
But then he saw that the face wasn’t characterless. He saw that there was intelligence and curiosity in those pale blue eyes, and that a kind of smile played around the thin lips. He realized that it wasn’t anonymous, either. He was face-to-face with one of those unlucky souls whose sordidly violent exploits he had—with great difficulty and even greater irony—transmuted into the stuff of legend.
He was glad to see that the Kid wasn’t pointing a gun at him. He was so glad to see it that he didn’t even try to reach for the alarm bell that would have brought half-a-dozen Delta Force heavies racing to his aid.
“Hi Kid,” he said, trying with all his might to sound as if this sort of thing happened all the time. “You wanna beer?”
Kid Zero nodded.
Homer got up lazily—but his eyes were busy, searching the shadowed corners just in case the Kid had brought that big rattler with him. There was no sign of it. He opened the fridge and pulled out a couple of cans. He tossed one casually to the Kid, who caught it effortlessly.
“How long since you last ate?” Homer asked.
“Twenty-four hours or so,” said the Kid laconically. “Had a few hi-pro biscuits. Been on the road all day.”
Homer dug a packet of corn chips out of the cupboard and threw them after the beer. “Only got a microwave,” he said. “I live on packet stuff, mostly. You tried these new ready meals with tissue-culture beef in ’em?”
“Sure,” said the Kid, between corn chips. “Anythin’ll do—nothin’ too spicy, though. I don’t like my food to bite back.”
Homer riffled through the packets, found a beef stew that didn’t wear too heavy a disguise, and poured the contents into a plastic dish. He added water from the cooler, fastened the lid, and shoved it into the microwave. When he turned round again the Kid was staring at the cooler.
“Rich living, hey?” Homer observed gently. “The next best thing to real meat and all the water I can drink. You can take a shower later, if you want.”
The Kid’s eyes clouded over briefly, as if the thought of taking all his clothes off was instinctively off-limits.
“Hey,” said Homer. “You already took a hell of a risk coming in here. If you can trust me this far, you can trust me the last few inches. Why would I turn you in when you’re one of my best meal tickets?”
“Later,” said the Kid. “This isn’t a social call.”
“I didn’t figure it was,” Homer admitted. “Something going down that you want me to know about?” He felt uneasy as he said it. He often got tips over the phone about where and when there was going to be action, but never from Kid Zero. That was one of the things he had always respected in the Kid—there weren’t many people around who weren’t hungry for publicity, but the Kid had always seemed to be one of them.
“Yep,” said the Kid. “I don’t know what it is, but I know I ain’t big enough to handle it on my own. I figured you might know what to do—and might be the one man in the world able to do it.”
Homer realized that his former feeling of uneasiness had just been a tease. It was displaced by something an order of magnitude worse. The microwave beeped at him and he gave the stew a quick stir with a fork before shoving it back again. Then he took a long swig from the beercan.
“Look, Kid,” he said. “There’s one thing you have to realize before we go any further. We aren’t on the same side, you and me. What I say on my show is a line. I’m not saying that it’s all bullshit, because it isn’t. But it’s patter for the punters, to make a story out of a sequence of incidents. All that stuff about the outlaws being the inheritors of the real America, the true champions of freedom …it may not mean exactly what you think it means. I’m not an outlaw, Kid. I’m not even a historian. I’m just a guy trying to make a living. I got nothing at all against GenTech—I’m not in their pocket, but they run ZBC and ZBC runs me. The water in that cooler is GenTech water; the ice in the fridge is GenTech ice; the meat in your stew is GenTech meat. I can’t help you fight your crusade, Kid—I can’t even pretend to understand or sympathize with what you do, in spite of what I say on screen. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear,” said the Kid. “But you’re all I have. You’re the only person I know who might—just might—be able to help me.”
There was a pause while Homer watched the microwave’s timer counting down towards zero. Ask not for whom the beeper beeps, Homer, he said to himself. It beeps for thee.
The beeper beeped, and Homer took out the stew. He gave it one more stir for luck, then passed it to the Kid along with the fork. The Kid got stuck in, but without any particular impatience or inelegance. Not for the first time, Homer Hegarty wondered who Kid Zero could possibly have been before he became Kid Zero. Nothing showed on his record, despite GenTech-aided enquiries made by various Ops who had tried to get an inside line on him. If the Kid had any loved ones, he was careful never to go near them lest he ex
pose them to danger. Homer liked that—it was just like the old comic book superheroes, jealously protecting their secret identities.
By the time the Kid had finished the stew, cleanly and efficiently, Homer figured he was ready to hear the bad news.
“Okay Kid,” he said. “Give me the story.”
The Kid told him a long story about shooting down a GenTech helicopter, and about a government agent who’d staggered out of the burning car, and about taking a PC disc to the Underground.
“I stashed one of the copies Harriet made me,” said the Kid, when he finally wound down. “One’s still with the bike—Lady Venom’s looking after it for the moment. This one’s for you.”
Homer looked at the little packet which the Kid was holding out to him. It was in a plain wrapper, but to his imaginative eye it had POISONED CHALICE written on it in big red letters, just above the invisible skull and crossbones. He reached out and took it anyway.
“What do you expect me to do with it?” he asked hoarsely.
“That’s up to you,” said the Kid. “It’s yours—do whatever you want. Send it to the president, or some big wheel in Chromicon. What I’d like you to do is to find someone who can read it for you discreetly, and then make your mind up what ought to be done—but if you can’t do that, it’s okay. You can trash it, if you want to. Stick it in the microwave and switch on, if you’d rather not know.”
Homer knew that he’d just received some very good advice. Sticking it in the microwave and switching on was the clever man’s way to health and riches. But he did take leave to wonder whether the Kid might have read him right. Was Homer Hegarty really a man who would rather not know?
Faced with the choice of being Socrates or a happy cabbage, Homer thought, a man ought to choose Socrates every time—but only if he didn’t have to drink the hemlock. Damn you. Kid Zero, he said to himself. Damn you to Hell and back again. Get thee behind me, Satan, and stay off my case. I’m a ZBC clown, not freakin’ Faust.
