iBoy (30 page)

He shrugged. “What else could I do?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “My mum died in a car accident —”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

I stared at him. “Are you seriously trying to tell me that you were the driver of the car that ran over my mum?”

He looked at me for a moment, his face deadly serious . . . and then, all of a sudden, his face broke into a smile and he started laughing. “I had you going for a while there, didn’t I?” he said. “I really had you going . . .”

“I don’t understand —”

“I didn’t
kill
her,” he said, still laughing. “I was just fucking with you, that’s all.”

“You
didn’t
kill my mum?”

He shook his head, grinning. “Like you said, what do
I
know about the truth?”

O’Neil and Gunner were both laughing, too, now, snorting away at enjoying Ellman’s excellent joke, and as the car filled with the sound of their stupid braying voices, I just looked out the window and tried to think about things. Was Ellman lying or not? Had he really known my mother? Had anything he’d told me about her been anywhere
near
the truth?

I couldn’t think about it.

It was too hard.

I blanked out my emotions for a while and concentrated instead on trying to coordinate the cyber-map inside my head with what I could see through the car window. It didn’t take me long to work out that we were on the west side of the towers now, heading back north toward the industrial park . . .

I looked at Ellman. He’d stopped laughing now and was just sitting there, smoking another cigarette, gazing indifferently at me.

“Why do you do it?” I said to him.

“Do what?”

“All this . . . fucking people up, hurting people, raping, killing . . . I mean, why do you
do
it?”

He shrugged. “I told you before, it’s just business.”

I stared at him. “Business? How the hell is raping and killing people
business
?”

He sighed. “You don’t understand —”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s all about power,” he said. “Everything . . . the whole fucking world, it’s all about power. If you’ve got it, you survive. If you haven’t, you don’t. Simple as that. Power is the law. It rules the fucking world. You understand? And down here . . .” He looked out the window, indicating the passing streets, the towers in the distance, the world of Crow Town. “The only law down here, the only means of acquiring and establishing and maintaining your power, is violence.” He stared hard at me. “Rape, murder, whatever . . . it’s not personal. I don’t do it for fun. I mean, I’m not saying that I
don’t
enjoy it, because I do, but that’s not
why
I do it. I do it because it shows everyone else who I am, what I can do . . . it shows the world what I am.”

“And that’s it?” I said. “You kill and rape and brutalize people just to show the world what you are? That’s your
reason
?”

He shrugged. “It’s as good a reason as any.”

I stared at him. “But you must know it’s
wrong —
”

“Wrong?” He laughed. “What the fuck’s
wrong
got to do with anything?” He looked at me. “D’you think it’s
wrong
for a dog to kill a cat?”

“That’s totally different.”

“Why?”

“Dogs are animals — they don’t know any better.”

“What, and you think
I
do? You think any of us do? Fuck, man . . . we’re all fucking animals — none of us know any better.”

As we sat there staring at each other — a wimp and a devil, iBoy and Hell-Man, together in the backseat of a black Range Rover — I wondered for a moment if perhaps, in a twisted kind of way, he was right. Maybe neither of us
did
know any better. Maybe we
were
just animals. And maybe . . .

I stopped thinking about it then. The car was beginning to slow down. I looked out the window and saw that the Range Rover in front of us had turned right and was heading slowly up an unlit lane. We followed it. The lane was uneven, pitted with cracks and potholes, and as the car lumped and rolled its way upward, the twin beams of the headlights illuminated the ghosted remains of the old industrial park: rusted dumpsters, vacant factories, empty industrial units, abandoned warehouses . . .

The car in front was turning right again, this time into a square of wasteground that had probably once been a parking lot . . . a parking lot for the employees who’d probably once worked in the dilapidated warehouse on the far side of the wasteground.

“Follow them round the back,” Ellman told Gunner.

We followed the car in front as it rumbled across the wasteground, over to the warehouse, round the back . . . and that’s where we stopped.

I looked over at the other car, trying to catch a glimpse of Lucy, but it was too dark to see anything.

“Don’t worry,” Ellman said to me. “You’ll see her in a minute.”

I looked at him. “What are you going to do with her?”

“The same thing I did to your mother.”

“What?”

He smiled coldly. “You should have seen the look on her face when I ran that bitch over.”

“But you said —”

“Yeah, I know. I said I was only joking about Georgie . . . but I wasn’t.” He grinned at me. “Or maybe I was . . . but I guess you’ll never know now, will you?”

He moved so incredibly quickly then, hammering his head into mine with such stunning speed and power, that I didn’t have time to feel confused. I didn’t have time to feel anything. The only thing I was vaguely aware of was a sudden shuddering impact, a momentary flash of blinding pain . . .

And then nothing.

The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.

Richard Dawkins

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
(1995)

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and staring across the interior of the warehouse at Lucy. My head was throbbing, my vision was blurred, my mouth was soured with the taste of blood . . . and, after I’d struggled uselessly for a few moments, I realized that I could barely move. I was securely bound to an iron girder by tightly wound lengths of wire. My hands, my feet, even my neck . . . everything was so firmly tied that the only thing I could move was my head.

But none of that mattered.

All that mattered was Lucy.

She was about fifty feet away from me, on the other side of the warehouse. She was on her knees, and Ellman was standing in front of her with a long silver knife in his hand. Her mouth was still taped up, but the gun had been removed from her head, and Hashim wasn’t with her anymore. Instead, he was standing right beside me. And now that he’d realized I was conscious again, he raised the pistol and leveled it at my head.

As Ellman sensed Hashim’s movement and glanced over at me, the blade of his knife caught the pale yellow light of an electric lantern hanging from the wall, and just for a moment the reflected flash of light seemed to illuminate the whole warehouse. It was a fairly big place, with rust-ridden sheet-metal walls, a crumbling concrete floor, and dozens of frayed electric cables dangling from the ceiling. There wasn’t much else to see: the blackened remains of old machinery, some cracked wooden crates, empty gas canisters, a couple of dilapidated chairs . . .

“What do you think?” Ellman called out to me. “Do you like it?”

I didn’t answer him, I was too busy checking out where the others were. Hashim, as I said, was right beside me; O’Neil was behind Ellman and Lucy, leaning on a windowsill; Tweet was sitting in one of the old chairs, calmly smoking a joint; and the two drivers, Gunner and Marek, were standing over to my left by a pair of wooden doors.

Six of them.

One of me.

And I didn’t even have any iPowers.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Ellman said. “You not talking to me anymore?”

I looked up to see him crossing the warehouse toward me.

He grinned at me. “How’s your head? I haven’t broken anything in there, have I? You know, smashed a few circuits or something?” He stopped ten feet or so away from me. “Or can’t you tell without a signal?” He reached into his pocket, brought out his BlackBerry, and studied the screen. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Still no bars.” He looked at me, smiling. “How about you? You got any?”

I said nothing.

He put his phone back in his pocket. “I’m guessing,” he said, “that without a signal, you’re fucked.” He looked at me. “Am I right?”

Again, I said nothing.

He carried on smiling at me. “No signal. No WiFi. No phone, no power.” He nodded his head, miming the head-butt he’d given me. “No force field either.” He glanced at Hashim. “What d’you say, Hash?”

Hashim grinned. “Yeah, I’d say he’s completely fucked.”

Ellman stepped closer, staring into my eyes. “Of course, you
could
be bluffing, couldn’t you? You could be
pretending
to be powerless, lulling us all into a false sense of security, and then, when we least expect it —
zap!
” He clapped his hands together. “You fry us all.” He grinned at me again. “But the only problem with that is that you
can’t
fry us all, can you? I mean, right now, you could probably blast me and Hash, but the others are too far away. So even if you
did
take out the two of us, there’d still be Tweet over there, and Gunner and Marek, and don’t forget Yoyo . . . you see what I’m saying? You blast me and Hash, you’re still going to be tied to this girder, and Yoyo’s still going to get to play with your girly.”

I looked over at Lucy. She was still kneeling there, her head bowed down, her eyes empty and still, shocked into nothing . . .

I couldn’t let anything happen to her.

Not again.

I
had
to do something.

“What do you reckon, Hash?” I heard Ellman say. “You think he’s bluffing?”

“Like you said, it don’t make no odds,” Hashim said. “They’re both going to get fucked anyway.” He started laughing then, a curiously childish sound, which for some reason really irritated me. I ran my tongue round the inside of my mouth, turned my head, and spat a gob of blood into his face.

“Fuck!”
he yelled, jerking away.

Ellman laughed as Hashim wiped the bloody spit from his face. I glanced over at Lucy again and saw that she hadn’t moved. She was still just kneeling there, dead to the world.

“Luce!”
I called out.
“Lucy!”

She raised her head and slowly looked over at me.

“It’s going to be all right!”
I called out to her.
“Don’t worry, everything’s going to be —”

A crack of pain ripped into my face as Hashim hit me with the barrel of the gun. I tried not to cry out, but I couldn’t help it. The pain was so raw, so ugly, it felt like my face had been torn apart. I turned my head toward Hashim, watching through tear-stung eyes as he raised the gun again, his eyes blazing with anger, and I braced myself for another blow . . .

But then I heard Ellman’s voice, “That’s enough.”

I saw Hashim hesitate, desperate to hurt me, but not quite desperate enough to disobey Ellman. Still glaring at me, he lowered the gun and stepped back.

“Not now, OK?” Ellman said to him. “I want him conscious for now . . . I want him to know what’s happening. All right?”

Hashim nodded.

“Afterward,” Ellman said, “you can do what you like . . .” He turned to me. “You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? I mean, you know what I’m going to do.”

I didn’t say anything, I just stared at him. But I wasn’t actually looking at him. My eyes were open, but in my mind they were closed. I was digging deep inside myself now . . . deep into my iBrain, my iSenses, my iPowers . . . looking for something . . . anything . . . searching, searching, searching . . .

There was still no signal, no reception, but I had to find something . . . I
had
to. I
had
to be iBoy to stand any chance of saving Lucy.

Ellman had started taunting me about my mother again now — “. . . and I’ll tell you something else about me and little Georgie, and this’ll
really
give you something to think about . . .” — but I wasn’t listening to him. I couldn’t listen. I was iBoy, and we weren’t there. We were deep down inside ourselves, reaching out, stretching . . . stretching . . . stretching up into the sky . . .

“. . . and I bet
she
thought about it, too . . . I mean, we did it a lot, me and Georgie, even when she was working the streets, she still wanted me all the time . . . they always do . . .”

. . . and we knew it was there somewhere, we
knew
the signal was there . . . maybe half a mile away, maybe less . . . a few hundred yards . . . just round the corner . . . it was there, they were there. The radio waves from the nearest base station, the frequencies . . . the cycles . . . the pathways were there . . . and the stray static electricity all around us, we both knew that
that
was there, too . . . and if we could somehow focus it back to our signal receptors . . .

We closed our wide-open eyes and concentrated.

“. . . so, anyway,” Ellman continued, “the thing is, when Georgie got knocked up back then, there’s a pretty good chance it was me . . . and if it
was
me . . . well, fucking hell . . .” He laughed. “Do you see what I’m saying?”

. . . and
now
we were feeling something . . . a boost, a
rise
, something in the air, something out there that was lifting us up . . . out of our head . . . taking our reach and pulling it up through the roof, into the night sky, up over the old buildings and factories . . . and then . . .

“I could be your fucking
father
.”

Then we had it.

“Hey! Are you
listening
to me?”

A connection. A solid connection.

“Say something, fucker! Fucking
say
something!”

We had a
connection
.

I opened my still-open eyes and saw Ellman’s face, twisted with rage, staring into mine.

“If you were my father,” I said to him, “I’d kill myself.”

Without saying a word, he raised the long silver knife in his hand, gently placed the needle-sharp tip against my forehead, and slowly drew the blade down my skin, deliberately not cutting too deeply, still wanting to keep me wide-awake . . .

And I could feel the pain, I could feel warm blood running down my face.

But it didn’t change anything.

We were still connected.

“Fucking superhero,” Ellman sneered, taking the knife away and examining the bloodied tip. “Looks like you bleed the same as every other fucker I’ve ever cut.” He looked at me. “Now let’s see how you beg.”

I could feel the power surging inside me as he turned away and began walking over to Lucy . . . but what could I do with it? If I zapped Ellman and Hashim now, it wouldn’t make any difference. I’d still be tied up. And the wire that was binding me to the girder was wound so tightly, and there was simply so much of it, that my chances of blasting it away or melting it with a burst of electricity were pretty slim. And even if I
could
zap my way out of the wire, taking out Ellman and Hashim at the same time . . . well, O’Neil and the others would still be there. And although there was a chance, just a very slight chance, that once Ellman and Hashim were out of the picture, Gunner and Marek and Tweet might decide to cut their losses and run . . . there was no way that O’Neil was going to back down.

He’d get to Lucy before I could get to him.

And I couldn’t let that happen.

I couldn’t let
him
get anywhere
near
her.

I was, as Hashim had so eloquently put it, completely fucked.

And so, with a wretched heart, I just stood there and watched as Howard Ellman strode through the dusty light toward Lucy.