Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (6 page)

I stared at it, listening to Remy grunt and swear his way toward us. Then I looked at Adora.

“There’s no cousin, is there?”

She shrugged. “Having a cousin keeps some of the creeps away.” She jerked her chin at Remy. “You bought the battery; I figure you are serious.”

I nodded. “We are. But serious men can’t be trusted either. I’ve known some
really
serious men, and most of them were bastards.”

She shrugged again. I liked the roll of her shoulders. The overalls didn’t give you much clue, and no one was eating well these days, but I had an impression of curves. “If I worried about every potential rapist I came across,” she said, emphasizing
potential
just enough, “I would never leave the house. You have brought yen as well?”

I studied her. “Yen you get in Mexico City,” I said. “Just in case you got a side business slitting throats at night.”

She made a face but shrugged. “Very well. Help me push it out into the field.”

I followed her into the dank interior of the shack and put a shoulder behind it.

“Why are you going to Mexico City?” she asked, breathless, after we’d pushed the heavy thing a few feet, the axle squealing.

I wasn’t breathing hard; my augments still managed my oxygen supply pretty well. “We’ve got an old friend to kill.”

SORRY ABOUT THE BLOOD

“Where are we?”

Adora didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. We passed Panama. Somewhere north of there.”

Outside the cab the world was darkness, lightning, and rain. The windshield of the car glowed a soft blue, giving Adora a vector outline of the terrain and a constant readout on the battery, our elevation, direction, and speed. The geopositional satellites were all still up there, humming along, and the last week had been like going back in time, back into the System—we were connected.

She was tired, her round face tight and her eyes puffy with strain. She sat hunched forward, her heavy overalls and thick gray shirt making her body a mystery. It had been a long time since I’d been this close to an attractive woman. I wondered how she’d managed to go this long without being molested, and then wondered if maybe she hadn’t. Her hair was pulled back into a complex knot at the back of her head, revealing small, perfect ears I found strangely compelling. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead and my thoughts off the smooth skin of her neck; even if she was interested in a roll with someone like me—which was pretty unlikely—I didn’t have the time or energy for it. And I wasn’t going to risk our ride. I had no way of knowing if Morales’s information was accurate, but if it was, I didn’t figure Wallace Belling would be in that hospital for long.

I twisted around in the safety netting and looked at Remy, who had been asleep for four days and showed no signs of waking up, ever. The interior of the four-wheeler was pretty sparse—the seats were bare metal, and the whole thing vibrated like a fluid earthquake when she put it in gear, grunting and sweating. My back ached, my legs were numb, and my eyes felt like they were glued shut. Another week in the front seat of her rolling coffin and I’d be ready to kill myself.

“He still back there?” she asked.

I looked back out the windshield. Trees, tall and slender with bushy tops, flashed by. We’d stumbled on a stretch of usable road, old and cracked but in one piece. The road came and went. Sometimes we were slurring up mud in the middle of fucking wilderness; sometimes we were bouncing through cratered battlefields with walls of fire burning eternally around us, and sometimes the skies parted, the sun shone down, and a fucking highway from pre-Unification days erupted out of nowhere, a vein of tar, and we’d bounce up onto it and suddenly everything would be smooth and easy, like the world had been built for us to drive on it.

Lightning flashed, distant. I sighed, trying to stretch. “You’re not going back to Potosí, are you?”

She didn’t respond. We’d been silent for so long, I thought maybe I’d surprised her. After thirty seconds or so, I shut my eyes.

“You brought only food and cash. Judging the wad, it’s a lot of cash—for you. Probably every cent you’ve managed to scrape together. You don’t bring your life savings with you on a trip.”

She bit her lip. “There’s nothing much going on in Potosí.”

I laughed. “Sister, Potosí’s a fucking sewer, but it’s better than most of the world right now. At least the buildings are still standing. At least it’s not irradiated—fucking Las Vegas, you can’t go within a hundred fucking miles of it without being cooked from the inside out. Potosí’s got something like a society—you’ve got trade, a social order. Fucking hell, kid. You could do worse than Potosí.”

“That’s fucking depressing,” she said. “If Potosí is so wonderful, why were you so eager to leave?”

I opened my eyes. “People were trying to kill me.”

She smiled. “And you have a man to kill in Mexico.”

I smiled. “You think that’s bullshit.”

She shrugged. “You’ve got a man’s gun, that’s for sure. Junior back there has a gun with a fucking capital G, yes? But working for Morales doesn’t mean shit. The world is filled with men who want to be hard.”

I shut my eyes and tried to work the dull ache out of the small of my back. It was impossible. “Is that what I’m trying to be? A hard man?”

“You talk like one. Everything is a threat. Everything is funny and nothing is true.” She shrugged again. “In Potosí a lot of people talk like that. Most are dead, now. The army occupied us, you know. For six months we had a major in charge of the town, five thousand soldiers, armor units, silver hovers in the air. They set up military courts—jokes, bad jokes, but anyone caught stealing—shot dead. Caught breaking curfew—shot dead. Don’t want to sell them your… your last
fucking
cow… shot dead.” She paused, her hands tight on the stick. “The hard ones, they usually didn’t have anything hard to say when facing the firing line.”

I nodded. “We tend to lose our sense of humor when we get executed, I’ll grant you that. But I’m pushing forty, sister. Life expectancy keeps dropping, from what I can tell, and t widans every year I’m that much more amazing.”

She laughed, a sudden outburst of snorting and choking that was mildly disturbing. I popped open one eye and turned my head to look at her. She was shaking with sudden laughter, her whole body jerking with the force of it.

I let it drift, and she didn’t say anything more. We rode along in silence for a few minutes, the rain lashing the rusted chassis, the silent lightning giving us a glimpse every now and then as the four-wheeler sailed down the road. I liked that she wasn’t afraid. I was tired of people being afraid when they saw the gun, when they found out who you were. I liked being laughed at. It reminded me of New York, years ago, Kev Gatz and I crawling through the sewers and starving to death. No one had been impressed by me back then, either, and it was before the Squalor job, before London and Rose Harper and everything that came after, ruining me and then coming back to ruin what was left.

Poor Avery
, a voice whispered in my head, making me jump a little.

Salgado?
I thought, and waited. She didn’t say anything else. When I’d been in Chengara Penitentiary, they’d stuck needles into my brain and tried to upload me to the prison mainframe for storage, but the army had crashed the party and I’d been disconnected before they’d completed the work. Somehow a bunch of other people’s stored minds had backwashed
into
me, and three of them had lasted long enough for me to get used to them talking to me. My old pal Grisha had told me those three had survived probably because I’d known them, somewhat, in real life. Dolores Salgado, former Undersecretary of the System of Federated Nations, had been in prison with me. The old bat had been important, and then she’d been in prison, and then she’d been dead, and I somehow had a copy of her in my brain.

The lightning flashed, and Adora sat forward, slowing us down. “Fuck,” she muttered. “Looks like some trees in the road.”

I hunched my shoulders and leaned forward too, squinting. My augments, buried in my head, sharpened my vision slightly and the darkness outside took on a pale green clarity, like my own personal moon beaming down. A few hundred feet ahead four trees, thick trunks a few feet around, lay across the road, blocking it completely at a point where sheer rocky hills rose up on either side.

She let us glide to a halt, then sat for a moment peering into the storm.

“We can’t go off-road here,” she said, calm and thoughtful. “We could back up a ways and try, but in this weather it might not be a good idea. I’m going to scout around a bit, see if there’s any way around.”

I stared at the trees as lightning flashed again, and as Adora started to squirm out of the safety netting, I put a hand on her arm, my HUD rippling in my vision as adrenaline dumped.

“Wait,” I said. I felt her stiffen under my hand—it was, I realized, the first time I’d ever touched her. I took my hand off her shoulder carefully and pointed. “The trunks are cut smooth—these trees were cut down,” I said. “This is a roadblock.”

She looked at me, then back at the scene in front of us. “Out
here
? You telling me people just camp here waiting for someone to show up every year or so?”

I bit back some mean-spirited words, twisting around to try and peer out the back. “They’ve got a trip somewhere down the road, probably right where the pavement starts—it’s rough and rocky there, and you wouldn’t notice a pressure plate. Can run something like that off a battery for years. All it does is light a bulb a mile up the road, and the team goes into action.” I looked forward and nodded. “Trust me, we’re about to be killed and robbed.”

“I’ll back out,” she said, sounding suddenly young and nervous.

“Too late,” I said. There was movement out near the felled trees. I shrugged off the safety netting and heaved myself up off the hard seat in order to pull my gun. I checked the chamber and flicked off the safety, twisting my arms up to slide the gun into my shirt collar, pressed against the back of my neck, cold and uncomfortable. I twisted around and lashed a hand into Remy’s face. He grunted and opened one eye.

“Trouble,” I said. “Stay here and keep her alive.”

He opened his other eye and raised an eyebrow. I turned and popped open the door, letting it rise up on its hydraulic hinges. I put my hands up into the pelting rain.

“Coming out!” I shouted.
They’ll be behind you
, I thought. Pincered. That’s how I would do it.

Hands up, I stood and stepped into the wind and rain. The door slammed down as I stepped clear. I looked behind us and saw the chain they’d stretched across the road, a heavy rope of metal. Two of them stood in front of it, just silhouettes, no guns that I could see. Guns were problematic—not the guns, which were fucking everywhere, but the ammunition, which was fucking nowhere. I turned to face forward again and decided the two behind me didn’t have any barkers.

Up ahead was just one figure, but it carried a scoped weapon, a rifle of some make. The details were stolen away by the rain and the dark. Lacing my hands behind my head, over the cold butt of my Roon, I started walking forward.

“We don’t want trouble!” I shouted. “We have nothing to steal!”

I was just buying a few seconds. I put my eyes everywhere as I shuffled forward, looking for anyone hiding on the edges, which would be the smart play. I didn’t see anything.

“Are you fucking simple?” the woman up ahead shouted back, her accent harsh and German sounding as she pointed the rifle at me. “That fucking wagon’s worth a fortune. That’s close enough.”

I didn’t stop walking. In the old days she would have just cut me down, sprayed some bullets and hosed the four-wheeler down later. If she even had bullets; these days they were too expensive to just waste. “Come on,” I shouted back, trying to keep my shoulders down and cowed, my voice shaky. “You can’t—”

Without rushing, I yanked my gun up out of my collar and took two steps to my left as I got my grip and raised it up. With a squawk she let loose, the rifle spitting flares and jerking in her wet hands. I took a brath and squeezed the trigger twice, and the vaguely feminine shadow by the trees dropped without another word.

I let myself fall to the muddy pavement and I rolled toward the four-wheeler, shouts following me. I pushed myself under the vehicle and rolled to the opposite side; in the pitch dark I figured I’d disappeared, as far as the others were concerned. Pulling myself up into a crouch on the other side, I peered around, finally spying two shadows creeping up toward us, pressed against the embankment, two assholes who couldn’t be sure I hadn’t caught some rifle fire, and who couldn’t pass up the vehicle. The battery and solar collector alone were worth the risk.

I steadied myself against the body of the car and took a careful bead; no sense in wasting bullets. I took another breath—and suddenly sensed someone behind me, a last-second wet smack of bare feet against the pavement. I ducked and someone scraped me, knocking my head painfully into the solid metal of the wheel well and rolling with a grunt onto the pavement. My vision lit up red and I sprawled on the ground, rain drilling down onto me, into my eyes and mouth, choking me.

Before I could get up, they were on me—a kid. Fifty pounds, maybe, tiny hands on my wrist, digging in nails and trying to pound the gun out of my hand. I reached up blindly and took hold of some wet, greasy hair and yanked with all I had, spinning them off me and getting a screech as a reward. I rolled away and pushed myself up in time to see a dark shape leaping for me. I swung my gun at it and clubbed it down just as two more shapes skidded from behind the four-wheeler. They slid to a halt as I raised my arm, putting their arms up as if I gave a shit. Before they could say anything, I fired twice and put them both down.

The kid was a few feet away, sniffling. Warily, I stood up and limped over to the huddled shape. My leg didn’t normally bother me these days, with my implants regulating my pain, but during times of exertion the dull ache, familiar and dreadful, faded back in like a signal being picked up.