Junkyard Cats

by Faith Hunter

  I really needed to give myself a full mani.

  From the corner of my eye, I caught a flash of movement. A big solid-gray cat was crouched on the roof of the office, one of the two breeding males of the prides of junkyard cats. His fighting partner, a black-haired, green-eyed male devil, raced along a branched, prewar electrical pole leaning against an old earth-mover. Dang cats had heard the sound of the bike and come to investigate. I tried to remember the last time I had provided the junkyard cats a ritual offering—dead goat or cave bat—and nothing came to mind. The most I’d had to share lately was my water and some goat milk. Nothing high in protein. I hoped they’d behave, but they were cats, so it wasn’t likely.

  “He’s changing gear. Still armed,” Mateo murmured into my earbud. “Lighting a cigar.”

  That was a good sign. I couldn’t see an assassin taking time to start a smoke.

  The two male cats inched closer to the edges of their perches. As one, the hunting females raised heads and looked over the open space I currently occupied, then back to the entrance, before hiding again. I had no idea what they were looking at, but the prides were synchronized enough to be scary; it reminded me of the bicolors and their modifications. Reminded me again that I had made mistakes over the years. Big ones.

  My visitor walked around the corner. Two meters tall, with a strong neck and broad sloping shoulders, a chest like a brick shithouse, narrow waist, and huge hands, each finger wearing a ring, like disconnected knucks. Fast-looking and rangy, if rangy was also big enough to play offensive tackle in the NFL. Bugger was big. Sweaty brown hair was cut two centimeters long and lay flat to his skull, his beard a half centimeter of buzz. Brown skin, maybe Hispanic, maybe American tribal, maybe mixed Cauc and Surprise Special, like me. Little Mama hadn’t known her ethnic heritage and Pops hadn’t cared. My visitor’s brown eyes were hard and focused on me. He was neither happy nor unhappy. A smart, violent man with a job he liked and was scary good at.

  He must have left the protective gear on the bike, because he wore battle boots, no cold coat or pants, no sunglasses or helmet, just brownish Harley Davidson riding plex and a loose, long-sleeved T-shirt in desert camo. Over his shirt, he wore an OMW kutte, the official riding vest of the Outlaws, and though I had mostly expected it, my body went into battle stillness.

  The leather vest was worn and raw in places, and was fully covered with chapter patches from a whole bunch of the pre-war states. More significant were the patches from post-war foreign countries. He had traveled the world for the Outlaws even after the peace treaty. This asshole was a very important dude in the OMW. He had been called to serve everywhere.

  Maybe most important, he had a patch from the mother chapter in old Chicago. Criminy. Whoever he was, he was more than a full patch member, more than just a made-man. His patches showed he had moved up in the world from a nobody to a national sergeant-at-arms—also known as an enforcer—which meant he reported to the vice president of the entire club. The club motto patch—“God Forgives, Outlaws Don’t, ADIOS”—was worn and . . . maybe blood-splattered. In this day when any drop of blood could instantly ID the donor, that was brave. Or scary stupid. Or proud of the death of his enemies. I went with door number three. There was a dark bulge at his belt, a handgun, butt exposed—a big-mother semi-automatic. The grip was marked with a scarlet skull and crossbones. The biometric marker indicated it was linked to him alone. An expensive, high-tech, killer’s gun. Assassins used them when they wanted to make a statement.

  “Bugger,” I muttered aloud to Mateo.

  “Not interested,” the visitor said with an easy smile. He stopped in the shade of the office, his head nearly touching the overhang and directly under the gray cat. He stood hipshot and puffed on the cigar. The smell of the smoke and the sight of the kutte reminded me of Pops, and I narrowed my eyes against tears. I couldn’t afford an emotional reaction now. I sipped, waiting for the moisture to dry out in the heat.

  He puffed several times. Clenched the cigar in his teeth. Smoke curling up but missing his eyes.

  “You say you got a cold one?”

  His voice was low and gravely. And his mouth did interesting things around the cigar. If I needed to goad him, I could. He looked like the kind of man who’d be irritated at being accused of getting friendly with another man, and his reaction to the word bugger confirmed it.

  “If you’re here to waste my time, no. If you’re a paying customer, cash only, I got beer. Stout.” I flashed a now-smooth fingernail at the beers. “Bottle’s been out of the cold for two minutes, but in a holder, in the shade. It’s still drinkable.” I didn’t hold up the bottle, but I did place a finger on the flip table’s release button.

  He didn’t move.

  “I might be buying. You the boss?”

  “It’s his day off. I’m Smith’s Junk and Scrap’s receptionist and accountant. I can make any deal he can make. Maybe better.”

  “Why better?”

  “Because I know what bills are due tomorrow. He never looks and wouldn’t care if he did.”

  The two fighter cats turned in unison and stared at me, right where my finger was perched on the release button. That meant there was a female directly behind me, watching and transmitting the info to all the other cats. The cats had mad mental skills and they communicated by scent or body language or fricking ESP for all I knew. My neck crawled with near panic. I didn’t like a hungry pride cat behind me. I’d seen them scavenge for protein. It was not pretty.

  The Outlaw puffed. Smoke blew out and dissipated. The silence went on too long, as if this was a test. The hairs on my nape lifted despite the sweat and I felt almost cold. Nerves scuttled along my skin like bicolor ants, and my wrist burned, wanting to be used. But he was too far away, thankfully. My heart rate sped. And I blew it.

  “You got a handle I can use? Or is Enforcer good enough?”

  The man went still as a bot.

  Bloody damn. I’d just proved I knew what he was. I lied fast, part truth, part fabrication.

  “My mama used to date an Outlaw. He got his teeth knocked out by an enforcer. He deserved it. I never forgot the patch.”

  The man waited. Considering. Sucked on the cigar. Smoke curled. It was harsh, stronger than the burned Maltodine stink.

  “What’d he do?” he asked at last. “The man your mama dated.”

  “He was using cocaine. He beat Mama. He tried to beat me. I hid. Then the enforcer came. We never had that problem again.”

  “His handle?”

  “Darson. Or as I called him, and all bikers since, Asshole.”

  He considered, his eyes tightening as he pulled the name up from a memory Berger-chip. Darson had been given an attitude adjustment when I was ten or eleven. I’d witnessed it. It had been bloody, but the reports said he went through voluntary withdrawal, never used again, and he stopped beating up his old lady and her daughter. They had all been killed in Seattle at the first of the war, right after the Chinese landed. Or, like a lot of records, their reported deaths might have been wrong.

  “I’m Jagger.”

  “Good name for a pit bull. Gold gets you the best pricing, but cash is good too. What are you buying?”

  He didn’t react to being called a dog. “I got cash.” Which said nothing about whether or what he was buying, but my persona would have accepted that.

  “You want that beer while it’s cold, you can come over.”

  “What’s on the other side of the table?” he asked instead.

  I glanced down at my lap. “I’d have expected a better come on from a pit bull named Jagger.”

  He smiled. I smiled. He went for the handgun. I flipped the table, ducked, and aimed. He was fast, but he was human, and I wasn’t where I’d been. He was looking down the barrel of the M249 Para Gen II Belt-Fed Machine Gun. The gun’s retrofit auto sights and war-time firing mechanism were trained on him. I had a good forty-six centimeters of ammo ready to go.

  Meanwhile, I was now protected by a flap of m
aterial constructed from part of a space-capable warship. I was effectively shielded from anything he might be carrying. Lucky, that. Because he was holding a 40-caliber H&K, a mid-war weapon created for close-in work against the Russian bloc in Eastern Europe. I’d been right. A blow-’em-to-hell-and-back, down-and-dirty, leave-a-message-splattered-on-the-walls weapon.

  “Nice,” he said. Outlaws might use pulse weapons in wartime, but they were all gun nuts at heart. And the Para Gen was a made-man’s fantasy gun.

  The motion revealing the haft of a knife in a hip sheath, he put away the down-and-dirty gun. I didn’t put away the Para Gen. He walked over, watching as the barrel followed him. He chuckled as if having an auto-targeting system and enough ammo to rip apart an elephant was amusing. He stopped in front of the barrel, and it was pointed at his solar plexus. I returned to my chair, feet up like before. Shoved the extra beer across to him with my boot. It slid with a smooth sound, leaving behind a trail of water. The stouts had been on a separate table leaf and hadn’t flown into the desert air. I’d never waste good beer.

  I drank down half of mine. He looked over my weapons as he popped the top and drank his. Stopped. Lowered the bottle. Studied me. His eyes changed. The lie had been perfect. But that was when I knew I’d screwed up. I just didn’t know how bad.

  He blew a smoke ring. I didn’t care much for most tobacco, but good quality cigars were an exception. The smoke and the scent fit him. Something like longing filled me. Longing was dangerous. My wrist itched. I narrowed my eyes at him. Not that he could tell much behind my orange lenses.

  He tapped ash. Talked around the cigar. “I’m looking for a kutte.”

  Holy hell.

  “Oh?”

  “Special kutte. Been missing a while. Tracking sensor was activated a week ago.”

  I had admitting to knowing about Outlaw Militia Warriors, so I couldn’t say I didn’t know what he was talking about. Pops’ OMW kutte was in the vault, vacuum-sealed. I hadn’t touched it. No one had. Not even air had touched it. No way it had been activated.

  If Harlan had been decomposing in his kutte, it was a goner and I was screwed. OMWs didn’t burn kuttes except at a proper ceremony.

  However. Pops’ kutte wasn’t the only one on site.

  I set my mouth as if I was thinking through inventory; I figured it out fast. My kutte was hanging in my wardrobe. It had a few ancient wartime sensors implanted in the patches, warnings about fumes from gas-attacks, a radiation sensor, that sort of thing. All of them had gone offline years ago as the batteries finally died. But there was one particular sensor, one I hadn’t thought about in years, that had been put together by Pops just before he passed, after I’d been swarmed by bicolors and after I’d had my run-in with a Mama-Bot, but before I’d had to run. If its battery had survived the war and the years . . .

  I blinked behind my sunglasses and took a slow breath of dry desert air.

  “Triggered a week ago? What triggers it?” I asked, as fear began to glide across my shoulders and down my spine. Because I already knew.

  “PRC warriors or bots,” Jagger said casually. Too casually. His eyes watching me intently.

  Since there were no more warriors from the People’s Republic of China left alive this far east, that meant an autobot was nearby.

  A PRC warbot was on my land. A Perker. Its presence had triggered the sensor and notified the mother chapter I was in trouble.

  I came slowly upright. Dropped my feet.

  As Mateo processed the same things I had, he cursed into my earbud, softly, long, and inventively. His voice carried anger, as much as his metallic voice allowed. Mateo hated Perkers and with good reason.

  I looked at the hunter cats. They were no longer looking at me. Or the OMW. They were tracking something. Cat heads swung back and forth as they accumulated info and stored it in their linked consciousness. Something besides the enforcer was on the property.

  Bloody damn hell.

  In my peripheral vision, I tracked the cats as I put it all together.

  Each PRC warbot—Perkers in the lingo—was unique, created by the massive things the U.S. military called Mama-Bots. They were built according to a bot algorithm only another bot could understand. The PRC Mama-Bots had pulled themselves out of the waters of Possession Sound, Washington, and begun destroying everything in their paths. With the detritus of destroyed cities, their mechanical nanobots built Perker Crawlers. The Crawlers crawled off the Mama-Bot assembly lines by the thousands and hitched a ride on anything that moved, crossing the country, moving east until they found a place that looked nice, a town or small city, which they destroyed and took apart to make more of themselves. Or, they buried themselves in the soil like mines, hidden where they could stay for years.

  Each Crawler had a timer or trigger that set it off. When activated, they’d dig themselves out of the soil, like locusts or cicadas, and go hunting. Find a target. Destroy it. Perker Crawlers could be the size of a tank or as small as a wheelbarrow, but none had been seen in the West Virginia desert in more than five years, mostly because there was only stone near about, no soil to bury themselves in. Also, they had to travel to get here, and here was the middle of freaking nowhere. Crawler AIs were smart. They went to cities where they could cause mega-damage, not into a desert of stone.

  Unless one had been targeted at me, or deliberately dropped off near here, and something had triggered it to come hunting me. And the Perker then set off the kutte. The fear-sweat trickling down my spine went cold in the heat.

  “A week ago,” I clarified softly, “you say the sensor you’re looking for was triggered. By a Perker.”

  A week ago a Perker had entered my land. My kutte had sent out an alarm to OMW central. Yet Mateo and I and our exquisite security system hadn’t received the alarm or spotted the Perker. Because we hadn’t been looking. We’d gotten sloppy.

  Bloody damn, bloody damn, bloody damn!

  In my earbud, Mateo suggested a sexual activity that was anatomically impossible by anything with bones. I rolled to my feet, slamming my ungloved hand into the war-sleeve at my side. It clamped around my hand, forearm, and molded to fit up to my bicep, the scales adjusting to my slender form instead of the muscular dead soldier I’d taken it from. Moving faster and smoother than pure-human. Way faster. I aimed my weapon at my assassin, and a piercing green laser centered on his chest with a soft hum and latched on.

  He tensed all over at the transformation in my body language and position. And my speed. And the fact that I was now wearing a functioning section of military Dragon Scale exoskeleton anti-recoil armor, a war-sleeve with a Smith & Wesson XVR 460 Magnum now poking out the end. His expression said he recognized that the S&W’s auto targeting system had acquired the target. And the target was him. Which was way more impressive to warriors than the big, in-your-face Para Gen.

  My visitor was a dead man smoking. Double dead. The two weapons trained on him would churn him to hamburger. The Asshole puffed, squinted, and grinned.

  “Defenses,” I said to Mateo, now not caring that Jagger heard. “Anything?”

  “Nothing followed him. Scanning vids and stills from perimeter cams. Searching everything from the past week.”

  “We got problems,” I said to the OMW enforcer as the female hunter cats leaped or belly-crawled to join the fighter cats. They were in two groups, staring in two directions. We had two Perkers? “You know how to fight, Jagger?”

  “Happy to make your acquaintance,” he said, relaxed, still amused. “But you have me at a disadvantage.”

  He puffed. A perfect smoke ring left his mouth.

  A disadvantage? Oh. I knew his name. I hadn’t given mine.

  “I asked you a question,” I half-growled.

  “I do okay. I survived the Battle of Mobile.”

  Mateo laughed harder than I’d ever heard him. It would have been a belly laugh, if he had a belly. Anyone who survived the Battle of Mobile with all his limbs and his mind intact was a miracle man with th
e luck of the Irish.

  “I like this guy,” Mateo said. “Ask if he’s ready to rumble.”

  His breathing had sped up. Mateo was getting ready to go to war.

  “Update,” I demanded of him.

  Jagger’s eyes narrowed. He flicked them everywhere, seeking out the location of my confidant. Or his war-time instincts had finally gone on alert.

  Mateo said, “I got nothing. Nothing on scans, but the cats’ body language says we have more than one Perker. Behind the Outlaw and behind you. Attempting to pinpoint positions.”

  Behind my glasses, my eyes darted, searching, seeing nothing. My body tensed to make the rush to the airlock door and the armored-and-weaponized office. But between my position and the office there was a wide-open space, no cover, and Jagger.

  Mateo needed to detect the Perker Crawler, or Crawlers, before I moved. To Mateo I said, “Do a stills comparison. Look for something that didn’t get caught by the perimeter motion sensors, moving too slow for the monitors, a Crawler, something that’s in a different place every time an auto shot is taken.” The sensors were set to go off if anything moved more than two centimeters an hour. The security system took pics every fifteen minutes no matter what.

  Jagger’s body didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed as he took in my demand about a Crawler warbot.

  “Anybody can survive,” I said to Jagger, pushing him, needing to push something, fight someone, my body flooding with chemicals and adrenaline. “You know how to fight, Asshole?”

  “I was born fightin’.”

  “Yeah? You fight many Crawlers when you were wearing diapers?”

  “No sign of Crawlers,” Mateo said, “no sign of entry point.”

  Asshole puffed once more, but he didn’t look so amused or relaxed now. “I’ve taken on a Perker Crawler. It’s been a good five years since I saw a slow-bot.”

  The Mama-Bot Perkers had made thousands of Crawlers. No way had they all been destroyed.

  “Same for me,” I said. “Crawlers don’t have good hiding space here.”