by Kaleb Schad
“I had to try,” the boy said. He used the shirt from his shoulder to wipe his nose.
“I know. I would have, too. It was a good plan.”
And it had been. Get the lady and the JACKK to try and kill each other and then find a way to wreck the survivor. Enemy of my enemy kind of shit. Yet, Tyler didn’t like thinking of this boy as an enemy anymore. When had that happened?
“You don’t look good.”
“You should talk,” Tyler said. He looked at the door, then down the stairs behind him. “Why didn’t you run?”
“Where? They’ll just blow me up. I don’t have the overclock key or the recombinant.”
“Maybe you don’t need it. They haven’t shot you up with the recombinant, activated the stegs. Maybe without that the overclock won’t work either? You could run again. Get out of the LCP.” Tyler checked his watch. “I could get you out of the building.” And not get Staern? What was he saying? After everything to get here? He wouldn’t have time for both.
He whispered, “I could do that for you.”
“I need the recombinant,” Ben said. He had matched Tyler’s whisper, but beneath it were cinder blocks. The kid needed the recombinant. Got it. And Staern had it. That worked out fine for Tyler. Heading the same way as me, kid? Jump on, I’ll give you a lift.
Tyler looked through the window in the door. “Staern?”
The boy shook his head. “Everyone’s dead. I think the fighting stopped. You don’t have to kill Ms. Sara anymore. There’s another one, like you, in there.”
Another Twitcher, Tyler thought. That complicated things.
The boy sniffed and wiped again at his nose.
“It’s been a long couple of days, hasn’t it?”
The boy nodded, crying silently.
After a couple of seconds, the boy said, “Mr. Tyler?”
The kid didn’t say anything again for a long time. Tyler could tell it took something deep inside of him to find the next words.
“I’m sorry.”
Before he knew what he was doing, Tyler had pulled the child up and enfolded him into a hug, his human hand holding the boy’s head to his chest, bloody hair splayed between Tyler’s fingers. The kid’s arms wrapped around him, returning the hug, and Tyler could feel something Skimmers had forgotten, somehow, somewhere over the last hundred years—the touch of family—as if the boy were pouring himself into Tyler, filling him from the inside out with something firmer than love. Steely sunlight. Clarity. Resolve. Purpose. These were words Tyler thought might come close.
The boy filled Tyler with something worth dying for.
His head started to buzz and the world twisted for a moment before settling. He looked at his watch. -00:00:11:13.
“You deserve a chance,” Tyler said. “Come on. Let’s do some enemy-of-my-enemy kind of shit.”
He was going to die. His watch might say ten minutes plus, but Tyler knew his time was up now. There was no way he could beat a healthy JACKK.
“Kid,” Tyler said. He was holding the door to the stairwell open, looking through the window of the emergency drop-gate. He could see the Twitcher on the other side typing a code into the panel to raise the gate. “Stay in the stairwell. Be ready to run if…” He let the thought finish itself.
“Okay,” the boy said. “And Mr. Tyler?”
Tyler looked at him.
“My name is Ben.”
Tyler closed the door.
Eighteen rounds left in the MK-9. Twelve in his rifle. Thirty prayers.
The first sign of death was the smell of burning flesh. A smell Tyler knew well. The gate crawled upwards, as if it understood the ridiculous melodrama it was a bit player in, building tension between two stars. Until the windows had raised too far, they evaluated one another as if seeing in a mirror for the first time. Is this what I look like? Although this Twitcher had opted for total optic replacement, where Tyler had wanted only one, a choice he was regretting at this moment as the smoke made his natural eye water. This Twitcher was younger than Tyler, stronger. He looked to be three or four centimeters taller and maybe twenty kilos heavier. It wasn’t fat. Cybernetic studs poked from his forehead under a beanie cap. He looked insane—the ragged smile not helping.
Tyler never took his eye off of the Twitcher, never blinked, despite the burn. Now was not a time for blinking. Normally, Tyler knew, striking first and fast was the best strategy, but not with a Twitcher. He’d never fought one before, but he knew the rules would be different. This man would be faster than Tyler. There was no advantage that he could think of that would help him through this.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” the Twitcher said once they could speak. He tapped one of the steel carotids in his neck.
“Not anymore, no.”
The man finished reloading his sidearm, holstered it and rested his hands on another one of those Mark 41s. He’d probably shoot from the hip, Tyler knew. It would be an arc from low right to high left. If Tyler could side-step and roll, he could dodge the low shots and go under the high ones.
“Am I going to be your first?”
“What’s that?”
“The first fight you lose since getting JACKK’d?”
Tyler smirked.
“Nah,” he said. “I think I’ve probably lost every day I’ve lived.”
“Is that philosophy or something?”
“Sure.”
Tyler would have to shoot twice before spinning and again immediately after to keep the Twitcher from getting a second
salvo in.
“The Cull dead? I’m not supposed to kill the Cull, but he ran when the fighting got started and I haven’t seen him since.”
“Yeah, he is.”
“Bummer. They didn’t tell me why you all were doing this.”
“Philosophy. Or something,” Tyler said. “We don’t have a lot of time. Shall—”
Dammit, the Twitcher was fast. Tyler had thought he would at least see a flinch or something, but one second he was talking and the next the Mark 41 was vomiting bullets. Tyler slid to his right, firing his own rifle twice, missing, then crouched and spun back to his left under the arc of rounds. While crouching, he swept his foot towards the Twitcher’s legs and at the same time fired two more rounds. The Twitcher skipped over the sweep-kick, but took the two rounds in the gut. Tyler heard the demoralizing foop of a melmoth vest under his shirt.
For fuck’s sake. Would nothing ever be easy?
Ben went up on his tiptoes to look through the window. They were fighting now. He could hear the guns, but couldn’t see a whole lot and what he did see was more motion and blur than understood.
That was a lot of bodies in there, it was good the hallway was so wide. Mr. Tyler would have room to move. Ben could see Ms. Sara. Her head was on her neck crooked, in a way that Ben had never seen before, so that she looked kind of like a dead owl. He was glad she was dead. All of them.
Then he saw the recombinant. Mr. Tyler had told him to stay in here, but Ben was tired of other people telling him what to do, of hoping other people would protect him and take care of him. It wasn’t very far from the door. Maybe…
Distance. Maybe if he got some distance, he would have time to think. Tyler stepped around one of the wood columns, then fired three times as he raced to the next column. Compared to the other guy’s gluttonous gun, Tyler sounded like a miser with his shots.
Tyler felt a bullet enter and leave his left biceps, then finally rest inside his torso, just past the ribs. Rigid heat riddled his chest.
He dropped to his knees and slid behind the column for cover, wooden splinters raining over him, falling inside his shirt. He fired two more shots from behind the column, one of them missing wide, but the other finding the Twitcher’s arm.
“Thirty-seven,” the Twitcher shouted. He fired at Tyler again. The edges of the column were being chewed away as if a flock of furious woodpeckers had taken the column to task. “I’ve been shot thirty-seven times now since getting JACKK’d and I’v
e never felt a single one. Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?”
No, Tyler thought. Not. Fucking. Cool. Because he was feeling all of that bullet the Twitcher had just sent his way.
When he heard the click of the Twitcher’s gun, he rolled out from behind the column and sprinted towards the man, firing the final three rounds from his rifle. Two Silent Uprising bodies lay between them. The Twitcher let the rounds hit his vest and sprinted towards Tyler. Just before they reached each other, the Twitcher kicked the head of one of the bodies. It exploded like a water balloon splaying shrapnel made of bone, brains and tissue across Tyler’s face. Before he could blink away the gore, the Twitcher jackhammered the butt of his rifle into the side of Tyler’s skull.
Ben eased open the stairwell door. Mr. Tyler wasn’t going to win. The other guy was really beating on his face with the rifle and it looked like Mr. Tyler couldn’t stand very well.
He ran for the recombinant. Not three steps from the door, he slipped on someone’s intestines laying in the hallway like a tripwire. He landed on his amputated arm and screamed.
Skipper Johnson. That was a name Tyler hadn’t thought of in a long time. The Red Lithium Big S1m had killed by smashing his face against a pylon seven or eight times. S1m’s swollen girth glistening with sweat. Skip had been the closest thing to a friend Tyler had in the Lithiums.
As the butt of the Mark 41 dropped again, Tyler wondered if this is what it felt like for Skip. No matter how big the nanocellotics could make your muscles, they couldn’t insert a cushion between your brain and the inside of your skull. So when the Twitcher’s rifle slammed into Tyler’s face over and over, it wasn’t just the broken cranium that hurt, it was his grey matter playing chicken with the inside of that cranium that really screwed things up. The world sang from under cotton balls. Muffled nonsense.
The Twitcher was talking to him. He was smiling and his lips were saying words, but Tyler couldn’t put them together. Something about seeing ghosts.
Then Tyler saw the boy. He was laying on the floor next to the woman. This seemed bad, but Tyler’d be damned if he could remember why. Something about the silver plunger by the woman. The thing the boy was reaching for. Reaching. There was something Tyler should reach for. The Twitcher wasn’t looking at Tyler right now, he was looking at the boy and that meant now was the time, but for what?
They say there is such a thing as muscle memory. The Chinese call it mushin. No-mindedness. Later, not much later, only minutes, Tyler would think maybe that’s what happened. His hand found his sidearm, pulled it free of the holster, pushed it to the Twitcher’s chest and pulled the trigger so fast it sounded like an automatic weapon. Melmoth vest or not, at this range it didn’t matter. The splatter rounds tore into the Twitcher, blooming beneath his skin.
The Twitcher coughed, slapped away Tyler’s gun and went at him with a thunderstorm of kicks, elbows and punches. He blocked some, ate others. The Twitcher caught one of Tyler’s punches and hyper-extended the arm in an elbow lock, breaking bones. More punches. Tyler choked on a lost tooth. Fell backwards.
On his back, he spotted his pistol and rolled twice until he was up against a column and able to scoop up the pistol. The Twitcher chased him while he rolled, kicking at Tyler between steps. Tyler came up on a knee and railed out with the MK-9.
“Got you, motherfu—”
Tyler stopped just before squeezing the trigger. Somehow, somewhere, while Tyler was picking up the pistol, the Twitcher had picked up the boy, dangling, thrashing. A desperate shield.
“Don’t,” the boy screamed.
The Twitcher’s life gurgled in his voice as he said, “Wouldn’t want to hurt the—”
Tyler didn’t let him finish. He lunged forward and scooped the Twitcher’s legs together, spearing his shoulder into the kid and pushing him into the Twitcher’s perforated chest as they hit the ground. Both child and Twitcher grunted. The kid slipped the man’s arm over his face, then slid away.
And then it was something more than fighting. It was more than tactics and timing. The Twitcher was good, had been trained by the best, had the best sync-skills installed, but it couldn’t compare. It couldn’t. It wasn’t the same as a life with the Red Lithiums, fighting for them, then fighting to escape them. It wasn’t the same as a life after the Red Lithiums, living on hollow streets selling whatever you had to offer—willing or not—to whomever was awake and buying. And it wasn’t the same as six years of JACKK life, murdering at a national level.
He climbed on top of the Twitcher, landing meteors in the man’s face. The Twitcher bucked and rolled so he was on top, Tyler beneath, but Tyler pushed the man’s face away. He wrapped a leg behind the man’s neck and cinched it under the knee of his other leg, forming a triangle choke. He could feel the carotid sheaths dig into his thighs. The man grunted and tried to stand, but Tyler rocked his weight and brought them back to the ground. Tyler used his broken arm to hold the man’s head and started punching with his flesh hand. The bullet buried in his side scraped against a rib with every heave. He broke the man’s nose, then his cheek bone under the right eye, then the man’s left Sakanaya cracked and sank into the socket, then the left cheek bone, then the brow ridge over the right Sakanaya. The Twitcher tried to block the punches with his one free hand, but Tyler batted it down and continued with machine insistence. With every punch, the skull gave way to jagged mush, the bones in no way designed to withstand Tyler’s JACKK. He could feel his own hand collapsing under the onslaught. But wasn’t that what he’d been created for? Wasn’t this his only value?
When the Twitcher’s face was concave, an abstract of a man, Tyler stopped. He lay gasping, staring at the copper scrollwork on the ceiling.
Tyler couldn’t help himself. “Did you feel that?” he whispered.
The boy offered Tyler his hand to help pull him up.
Tyler’s pain went vertical with him. He looked at his watch. -00:00:04:06. The sixty-second fight had taken seven of his last minutes. Already the swelling in his left elbow made it impossible to bend his arm more than ten or twenty degrees and his right hand was a gnarled mess of digits and porcupining bones. He probed the gunshot in his side. Breathing was hard, but he didn’t think he would die before his four minutes were up.
He drew his MK-9. Three rounds left.
They had done a number on Malcolm Staern’s hallway. Thirteen of the Silent Uprising soldiers lay dead, some shot to hell, others bludgeoned. And there, Sara. She’d been shot and trampled in the fight and what was left twisted at odd angles. Iron colored hair bubbled out of a tear in her environment suit’s hood.
“For something to live,” the boy said, “something else has to die, right? Isn’t that what you told me?”
“At least she died for something.” If Tyler owed her anything, he owed her credit for that.
“She was going to use me to kill the High Laners she didn’t like, she said.”
“I didn’t say it was something worthy.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.”
Phosphorous pain flashed behind Tyler’s eye, in rhythm with his pulse. It was getting hard to hold his head up.
“I thought you were going to shoot me,” the boy said. “To get that Twitcher. I thought you wouldn’t care and would shoot through me.”
“Never.” Tyler rested his hand on the boy’s head, his hair gelled with blood and soot. “Not ever.”
He guided the child towards Staern’s suite. “Let’s finish this.”
When Tyler did finally die, in those terminal seconds, he would think back to this moment, his mutilated body heaving against Malcolm Staern’s doors and feel this was the happiest he had ever been. A copper joy sparking through him. Hard fought. A reward years in the earning, but earned it was. It was earned.
“He’s not here,” the boy said.
The fuck he wasn’t. They’d checked. Sara had said they had access to his schedule, that they had people watching him.
He panned his MK-9 across the room again.
The ceiling soared seven meters over their heads, with glowing iridescent panels. Two walls were nothing but glass, Elia’s lights sprawling to the edge of the earth. In the recessed center of the room, a ring of black leather couches circled a holopad projecting the death scene in the hallway. A half-drunk glass of wine next to it.
“He’s not here,” the boy said again, sitting on the steps leading down toward the holopad. An odd laughing-sob slipped out as he sat.
“He’s here,” Tyler said. “You don’t use a Twitcher for a body guard unless there’s a body to guard.”
Then the wall to their left beeped. What Tyler’d thought was a decorative wall panel betrayed itself as an elevator. Staern was chicken-shitting outta’ here. The holopad had shown him enough.
Tyler hobbled toward the elevator, the boy following.
Before the door was even half open, Tyler shoved his gun through the crack, sighted on the helicopter thirty or thirty-five meters away. Rich fucks. Should have known Staern’d have his own Avalon Six ready to skirt him off like the crotch wart he was. Slip into the night. Those two GE CT-26 Thrusters and a whisper-silent rotor only helped if you got in the air, though.
Malcolm Staern was climbing into the Avalon, one hand grabbing a handle to pull himself up, a heavy nylon bag in the other.
Tyler fired twice. The first round shattered the cockpit window, the second the pilot’s head.
The display on the back of Tyler’s gun read “1.” One bullet left. One head left to shoot. That math added up just fine.
The wind up here was something Tyler hadn’t expected. Arrows along the perimeter of the landing pad lit up and rotated as the wind shifted direction, numbers ticking up and down tracking its speed. From here, Tyler could see the known world. For better or worse. He almost felt he could reach up and touch the Veil, it’s cotton glow reflecting city lights. It wasn’t a word he used often, but Tyler thought it might even be beautiful.
