by Kaleb Schad
The kid picked at his gel pack, squeezing suspended bubbles from one end to the other.
“People are terrible, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“I used to think everyone was nice.”
The blood bot beeped that it was finished. Tyler uncoupled the tube from his arm’s port, then looked at his watch. -01:04:28:16 He netted thirty minutes. A damn half hour.
“They’ll use you the second they can.” He stood and let the tube drop into the cradle. “And when they’re done, they’ll toss you aside. If you’re not looking out for yourself, don’t think anybody else is. That’s what I’d tell you if you were my kid, I guess.”
“But I already figured that out, didn’t I?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “I guess you did.”
Four magazines for his Mark 37 left. He loaded one into the gun and the other three he clipped into the pouches on the front of his combat vest. Three magazines for his MK-9. Again, one in the gun, two in his belt pouches. The melmoth shirt was a mess. Partial punctures and rusted blood riddled the armor from the barrage he’d taken at Cerebus, making it useless. He tossed it in the corner.
Then he saw the thetabiencort canister. The silver promise rested on his cot among his tools. He picked it up and turned it under the light and he could see himself reflected in the side of it, stretched and distorted and he thought that was appropriate.
What was he doing here? Everything hurt. Every tendon, every muscle, every bone, every thought. What did he think would happen when he killed Staern?
He turned the canister over and saw the outlet for the medicine, the valve waiting to be inserted into a plunger. He could do it. Send a cascade of poison spurting into his body. Sleep. Forget about Staern Life Sciences and Cullings and nanocellotics. Forget about time. Never look at a watch again. There was appeal in giving up. Retreat backwards, for once. Who would judge? Like Sara said, who would even notice?
But someone would notice, wouldn’t he? Because what would happen to him?
If Tyler died now, what would happen to the boy?
Doing what Tyler had done for six and a half years for the LCP, he knew the sounds of panic, as clear as a bird’s trill. He jammed the rest of his gear into his backpack. Sara appeared at his door, her hair pasted to her shining forehead.
“Ben’s gone,” she said, breathless. “A nurse took him.”
Tyler slung his assault rifle over his shoulder and was in the hallway before she finished speaking. A nurse. That sweaty, clumsy bastard. Tyler was furious at himself for not recognizing the signs.
“When?”
They reached the ladders and began taking the rungs two at a time. It made Tyler crazy how slow everyone moved.
“Minutes. The barge isn’t long now. We went to get him ready to move and he was missing. Holoscanners showed everything three, four minutes ago.”
The Silent Uprising base had been converted from an underground refinery, seven stories of operations well hidden from LCP satellites. Seven stories doesn’t sound like much until you are waiting for twenty fat-ass soldiers and an old lady to climb ladders all while your kid is being taken by a strange man. Wait. Your kid? The hell.
Out of the silo, surfacing in a hangar-like building. The hangar housed the SU’s fleet, a couple of shiny sedans, Mercedes, if Tyler wasn’t mistaken, seven Ford Crusades, those utility jeeps with the gatling mounts and twelve white vans. Twelve vans. Tyler had counted thirteen when they had arrived.
“Can you track it?” Tyler asked.
Sara shook her head.
Amateurs.
Two squads of ten men had followed them.
“We’re splitting up,” Tyler said.
Sara tossed him a throat mic. “This is scrambled.”
Tyler plugged the mic into his synport as he sprinted full-tilt after the kid. His heart was pounding and he felt the familiar flow of juice from his JACKK, but something tainted it. It was weaker than normal and his chest hurt where the kit’s distributor cap was embedded.
Outside, squinting against the midday sun, Tyler scanned the oil field. Four minutes wasn’t much of a head start. If Tyler were a betting man (and right now all the chips were on the table), he’d bet they’d head for Ribic Lane, then onto the Byway.
He crossed the service road into Water Well, the suburb butting up to the refinery. The buildings here were taller, six or seven story structures, mostly residence towers. He would be able to hop scotch between them. Using a combination of fire escapes and power conduit, he shimmied up one of the buildings, then chased from one end to the other looking for the van. Nothing.
Four minutes. Traveling sixty, seventy kilometers per hour max on these shit roads. That puts them four-ish kilometers out. He should be able to spot them from here. What if those dumb crusader fucks didn’t read the clock right? What if it had been more than four minutes?
He vaulted from rooftop to rooftop as he raced north along Third Way. There. Half a kilometer ahead. They were heading to the Three-twenty on-ramp. Tyler could cut them off at Fifth and Ribic if he didn’t miss a beat.
Tyler started coughing when he landed on the eighth rooftop and had to stop and hold onto a ventilation pipe. He felt like he’d swallowed a campfire. Was this it? He looked at his watch. Twenty-three hours left. Not for the first time, he wondered if it could be wrong.
He was running again. The next building was several stories taller than the one he was on and he had to leap onto someone’s patio. He plowed into the plastic doors, then pried them open. Inside a man lay naked in his cradle, plugged into a synmap and IV. He didn’t move at the sounds. Tyler tore through his unit and into the hallway. Up the stairs to the roof again.
Four more jumps—his lungs hauling breaths in and out, his knees and heels throbbing—and he was in assault position on the van turning onto Ribic. He swung his Mark 37 up to his shoulder, barely allowing his Sakanaya to provide a targeting solution before firing. He emptied his clip into the engine, pieces of radiator and plastic and fiberglass sparkling in the sun. The van lost control, rolled on its side and shrieked along the pavement, wedging itself against the far building.
The passenger door popped like a hatch. A woman with strawberry hair and blood across her forehead braced her wrists in the hinge of the door and fired. She was fast—one of the soldiers, then—but Tyler was faster. He dropped the Mark 37, unholstered his sidearm, railed out and fired twice. Just as her first bullet powdered against the concrete facade at Tyler’s feet, his two shots entered her forehead above her left eye. The splatter rounds confettied the back of her skull.
Breathe. Breathe. Slow your breathing. The boy was still in there. He had to be okay, Tyler told himself.
After a full two seconds of watching the driver’s side, scanning for thermal images and finding nothing, Tyler climbed down the building, holding his MK-9 on the driver’s side the entire way.
Once on the street, he crept around the bottom of the tipped van, the axels and drive train exposed, raw and impotent. The back hatch was open, one door swung fully around to rest on what was now the roof of the van, the other on the street like a ramp. The nurse knelt on what used to be the inside wall, holding a gun to the boy’s head.
“It’s too late,” the nurse said. “I already called. They’re coming.”
Tyler sighted on the nurse’s face. The man’s trigger finger was tense. Too tense.
“Let the kid go,” Tyler said.
“They’re taking me into the High Lanes. I’ve earned it. If you want to live, run.”
“Mr. Tyler,” the boy said. “He’s also mean.”
Tyler’s arm twitched as he held it straight out. He tried to use his cybernetic arm to steady it, but he could see the barrel randomly moving a half-degree off target. That had never happened before. How certain could he be of his next shot?
“Kill him,” the boy said. That was two. Two people now the boy had asked Tyler to kill. A hollowing out happened somewhere inside Tyler’s belly. S
ure, they both deserved it, but the requests from the kid?
“You’re a nurse, right,” Tyler said.
“Shut up,” he said. His freckles were blazing, panicked blood flushing his face.
“So you get how funny adrenaline is,” Tyler said. “How it shoots you full of cortisol which sends your lungs into overdrive.”
“I’ll kill him if I have to.”
“This gets more oxygen to your ticker and your ticker goes crazy getting that oxygen everywhere it needs to go. Thing is, everywhere it needs to go doesn’t include your brain. The good ol’ prefrontal cortex doesn’t help you fight or flight, right? So it gets a little oxygen starved when you’re stressed.” Tyler needed to get the nurse to slacken his grip on the pistol, release the trigger from the breaking point, so any dying spasm wouldn’t accidentally set off the gun.
“You’re not thinking clearly,” Tyler said. “It’s not your fault. Your brain is doing the best it can with what it’s getting, but right now, you think holding a gun to the tumor SLS is coming to pick up is a good idea. And you think a JACKK can’t shoot you before you can kill the kid.”
The nurse lifted his face from behind the boy to glare at Tyler and said, “I’ve thought it all thr-“
Tyler’s gun bellowed its final argument, the roar echoing inside the van. The man slumped forward, blood baptizing the kid.
The boy scrambled out from under the dead nurse and ran to Tyler and gave him a one-armed hug, burying his face in Tyler’s stomach. He was shaking, but not crying. Silent. Tyler lifted his arms as if he were afraid to touch the boy. He looked at the kid, unsure of what to do. This was the first time in two years he’d been touched by another person not trying to kill him. Sure Sara had tried her pass at him, but that was pure manipulation. This was…more. More honest. More innocent. More…right.
He lowered a hand to rest on the boy’s head. His hair was full of the nurse’s blood.
The kid let go, stepped back and looked at Tyler. Those were not the boy’s eyes, Tyler knew. Those were not the eyes of the boy he had found in his cabin.
“If you can be counted on for anything it’s that, right? Why have antlers if you’re not going to stab people?” the boy said. “And don’t call me tumor. My name is Ben.” He walked away.
Tyler looked at the dead nurse in the back of the van, slumped over himself as if praying. He looked at his shirt where the kid had hugged him. At the bloodstain the kid’s hug had left. At the echo of violence.
“It’s over,” Sara said.
They stood, Tyler, the kid, Sara and her two squads of soldiers on top of one of the buildings Tyler had just crossed in his chase. Four kilometers away, SLS drones, Crawlbots and LCP police were laying waste to the Silent Uprising’s headquarters. A cacophony of heavy assault weapons and mechanized devastation skittered through the streets.
“We can’t go on,” Sara said. Her wet eyes reflected the explosions. “We have to call off the assault.”
“No,” Tyler said.
“No,” the boy said.
Both Tyler and Sara looked at the boy. His hair was matted into brown, bloody clumps and his amputated arm was bleeding, the bandages soaked through and tattered.
“I want to see Mr. Staern,” the boy said.
“He thinks he won,” Tyler said. “It’ll take time for them to know if the boy is in there.”
“Two squads isn’t enough.”
“I’ll do it alone, then.”
“No,” the boy said. “Together.”
Together? Not twenty-four hours ago the child was begging to run. When had this happened? Tyler couldn’t help but think something had broken in the child, that Tyler had broken it.
“Get us through the Veil,” Tyler said.
“You think you’re that good?” Sara looked at the bloodstains in his shirt and pants from being shot, the stains from the kid’s hug. “You don’t look that good.”
As if to put the lie to Sara’s words, Tyler’s guts knotted on themselves and it took all of his strength not to let his legs go out from under him. Nausea swept upwards from his core. He checked his watch. -00:22:21:42 It was officially starting, Tyler knew. Twitcher Denouement.
While Tyler caught his breath, the drones and LCP police retreated from the Silent Uprising’s base, falling back several blocks. Once safely away, a red light congealed above them, cutting through the night’s clouds. It splashed crimson across all of Water Well as it lanced through the warehouse deep underground. A plume of dirt and debris rocketed into the air. A second later the sound of the explosion reached them.
“An orbital strike,” Sara said. “What were we thinking?”
Once Tyler could breathe, the pain easing, he said, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
They had summoned a dry-bulk cargo barge down the Little Marek, its shipping containers stacked three high and pulled by a Stetson Allen Escort Tug. Even with three azimuth thrusters, to Tyler it felt as if they were swimming through wet concrete. Of the sixty containers, fifty-nine were filled with oats, soy beans and corn from Cerebus West.
That last one? Twenty-two armed men and women escorting a child home so they could kill his father.
It would be three hours to the Veil. At first, Tyler and the boy had taken turns peaking through the camoflaps masking the ingress ports, but it hadn’t taken long for the boy to grow bored. Now he slept, his head on Tyler’s shoulder. Tyler listened to the slight whistle from the boy’s breathing, his lower lip shining with drool.
The boy’s amputated arm lay across Tyler’s lap, capped with a hard-case over the Numball gel. What bandages were visible were stained. Tyler examined his own flesh arm, his intravenous port and the lines of the JACKK system buried just beneath the skin, the purple, drug-riddled veins like rivers in a pale desert. His heart hadn’t slowed below a hundred beats per minute for the last hour and the pain he felt told him that whatever meds his kit had were either all used up or no longer effective. Whispers of death.
“He’s sleeping?” Sara settled next to Tyler, their backs against the wall. The other SU soldiers had given Tyler and the boy their space—lots of it—mostly huddling at the rear of the container.
“I guess,” Tyler said.
Sara nodded, then, acting cool about it, said, “By now, you must have recognized how important Ben is to us.” Like that. Not a question.
“Sure,” Tyler said. “I recognize it.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear that.” The chick didn’t buy it, Tyler could tell. Too savvy for that. Give her anything, give her a sharp nose for bullshit.
“But he’s going with me.” And what happens to him from there is entirely my choice, Tyler thought.
“Tyler. An orbital strike, for the love of God.”
“Yep.”
“He’s our ace. You have to know that. Without him…after today…I can’t even think about it.”
“You’ll need to, because you aren’t getting him.”
“One man! You would waste him to kill one man, when I would use him—he would help us—liberate and save the lives of millions? People you might even know who are going to die in eight years. For what? For High Laners? Sooner if they start releasing Culls like Ben into the population. You would let this once-in-three-generations possibility slip through our fingers? For revenge? Stupid, meaningless revenge?”
She was shaking, her whisper unable to contain her frustration.
Would he kill the boy for revenge? This child with flaking blood from the nurse still in his hair?
“You give a whole lot of shits about a whole lot of people who don’t give any for you. Because they don’t. They don’t give a shit about anything or anyone that doesn’t come through a syncast or start with the number seven and end with ten. What’s a High Laner like you care? Who crowned you ‘Skimmer Savior?’”
“Who else will, Tyler? Don’t they have a right—the most fundamental right of all—to live? They have no representation, nobody looking out for them, and even if they
did, they aren’t allowed awake long enough to complain to someone. Yeah. I give a shit.”
“Then what? Stop the Cullings? Resource Gap doesn’t go away. Skimmers aren’t going to wake up and find a bunch of jobs that don’t exist and learn how to farm on land so radiated your nads turn to watermelons. You folks didn’t start this because you’re a bunch of sick fucks like killing people in their sleep. You going to let everyone starve to death? Do you know what happens when people are hungry? I’ve operated in the Midlands. They don’t sit in their huts waiting to die.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. You think the Cullings are justified.”
At that point, Tyler would have agreed to anything as long as it was the opposite of what this over-privileged, over-fed horse wanted.
“Maybe they are.”
He instantly regretted the words. He swallowed, opened his mouth to speak, closed it.
“Kill them all,” Sara said, really looking at him now. She’d done something with her anger, put it someplace, and what remained were green eyes that were almost steel-grey.
“You want fair.”
Sara shook her head and picked at the fingernail on her left thumb. Purple dirt under the nail. They could feel the hum of the tug boat.
“All I have left is to beg, Tyler. Please. I am begging for the lives of millions. Don’t take Ben with you up to Staern’s after you get the recombinant. We could do more good with him than killing ten Malcolm Staerns would.”
Not a horse. A fucking pit-bull.
“Look, maybe you can take the recombinant and any other Culls we find in the lab.” Over his dead body. She’d be dead by then, anyway. Anything to get her to shut up. “But the boy goes with me.”
They held each others’ eyes for a long time.
“Sure,” Sara said. She pushed against the wall to stand.
“And it’s not,” Tyler said.
Sara straightened her jacket, stood waiting.
“My revenge. It’s not meaningless.”
She rejoined her team at the rear of the container.
When Tyler looked down at the boy, his eyes were open.
