Revolution (Replica) (16 page)

Shrimp flashed her his gold-toothed grin. “Floor’s fine for now. I don’t wanna squish you.”

Agnes tried with no success to hide the crestfallen look on her face, taking Shrimp’s refusal as a rejection. Nadia was pretty sure he hadn’t meant it that way, but even so, she was pleasantly surprised when Shrimp took one look at Agnes’s face and scooted over to lean his back against the leg of her chair.

“Could use a backrest, though, if that’s okay with you,” he said, settling in comfortably with his arm and shoulder touching her leg. Then he gave Nate an apologetic look. “I know y’all’re goin’ nuts, but it ain’t safe for you out in the streets.”

“Even when we’re supposedly under Maiden’s protection?” Nate challenged. “I thought everyone was supposed to be terrified of him and do what he says.”

Shrimp shook his head. “Morons who fuck with Maiden don’t live long ’round here. But there’s a new one born every day, and the dark is gonna give people ideas. You wanna risk it, fine by me. But I ain’t babysitting you out there.”

Nate scowled and shoved an errant strand of hair away from his face. He was in need of a haircut, or at least some hair product, and it looked like it was one more thing that was driving him crazy.

“So we’re all going to sit back and do nothing while conditions get worse and worse?” Agnes said, an unmistakable challenge in her voice.

Nadia had expected Agnes to talk to Shrimp about the need to fight Dorothy sometime when they had privacy, rather than when everyone was gathered together. That’s what Nadia would have done, anyway. She worried that Shrimp would get extra defensive with an audience, but of course Agnes knew him better than Nadia did.

Shrimp made a face and groaned. “Not this again.” He twisted around so he could look up at Agnes, the twinkle gone from his usually lively eyes. “Maiden ain’t gonna help you fight the government. Thought you
got
that.”

Agnes nodded. “I do. I’m not asking Maiden to help. I’m asking
you.
”

Shrimp’s eyes went almost comically wide, and at first all he could do was gaze at Agnes in speechless shock. Like it had never occurred to him that he could do something independent of his brother. He rose slowly to his feet, looking down at her.

“Are you shittin’ me?” he finally asked. “D’you have any idea what Maiden would do to you if he found out you were tryin’ to recruit me?”

Shrimp spoke right over her attempted protest. “There’s only room for one chief ’round here, and that’s Maiden. You start trying to get people to join your little resistance, Maiden’ll see it as a challenge to his authority. You don’t wanna see what happens to people who challenge his authority.”

“Do some of them end up with tattoos around their wrists and throat?” Agnes challenged, looking him straight in the eye.

“Only the really lucky ones,” he fired back. “Though you ask any of his girls if they feel lucky, they might tell you a different story.” He squatted down in front of Agnes. “I can protect you,” he said, then swept his gaze over the rest of them as if he just remembered they were there. “
All
of you. But not if you try to steal his people.”

“We wouldn’t—”

“That’s how he’d see it,” Shrimp said firmly. “I know my brother. Know how he thinks. I’m as much his property as anyone else in the Red Death, and you’re trying to recruit me behind his back.”

“So he’d be okay with letting Thea win? You think the Basement is hell now? Wait till you see what it’s like when Thea
really
gets going.”

He shook his head in frustration. “Maiden is in charge, and I’m tellin’ you, he only cares about money, and territory. We can hide and protect you here. But the Red Death is not going to become your personal army of righteousness. End of story.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One
thing Nate would give Agnes: she was persistent. Shrimp had seemed pretty implacable when she’d attempted to recruit him on Tuesday, but that didn’t stop her from trying again on Wednesday, and yet again on Thursday. With similar results, naturally. Shrimp was certain his brother wasn’t civic-minded enough to take any action unless directly threatened, and having met the guy, Nate was inclined to agree. The frustration of sitting around in hiding like frightened children was getting to all of them, and bickering became a favorite pastime as they gathered in Shrimp’s apartment every night to do nothing.

On Thursday night, Nate decided that if he spent one more hour in Dante’s presence the two of them were going to kill each other, so after dinner, he suggested that Kurt come down to their apartment with him, leaving the girls and Dante upstairs at Shrimp’s place. He figured perhaps a little alone time with Kurt might help smooth over some of the sharp edges on his temper, and he didn’t care that everyone would know what the two of them were up to.

They headed down to their apartment at the same time that Shrimp left for his nightly rounds, but when they reached the eighteenth-floor landing, Shrimp blocked the door with his hand.

“You can play later,” he said. “First, I wanna show you something.”

Nate frowned at him. “Show us what?”

“You’ll see. Now come on.”

Nate glanced at Kurt to see if he had any idea what was going on, but Kurt just shrugged and said, “Only one way to find out.”

Nate would much have preferred to stick to the original plan, but he doubted Shrimp’s request could be counted as optional. Not to mention that the thought of venturing outside and getting some fresh air was extremely appealing.

The thought lost some of its appeal as the three of them descended the seemingly endless stairs, and Nate tried not to think about how much fun it was going to be to climb back up. Under his breath, he cursed Dorothy for her Draconian decision to cut all power to the Basement and wondered how long she was going to keep this up. Surely,
surely
it wasn’t going to be forever.

When they reached the ground floor, Shrimp pulled out some electronic gizmo that was clipped to his belt, and mumbled something cryptic into it. A man’s voice emerged from the gizmo, his words indecipherable—to Nate at least—behind the crackle of static.

“Walkie-talkie,” Kurt explained, seeing Nate’s puzzled look. “Runs on batteries and uses different frequencies than phones. The range on ’em is real short, but it’s better than nothing.”

Shrimp nodded. “We lose phone service enough it’s useful to keep some around, just in case. Though its never been out more than a few hours before, and we don’t have all that many batteries.”

Shrimp pushed open the door into the lobby, leading Nate and Kurt out the front entrance. The bodyguard bookends were still there, stationed behind their bulletproof glass, barely visible in the oppressive darkness of the blackout. Nate figured shining his flashlight on them to get a better look would be a really dumb idea, so he kept the beam pointed at his feet, though having armed men in the shadows at his back made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

“So, where’re we going?” Kurt asked.

“Block and a half over,” Shrimp replied, gesturing vaguely to the left and beckoning them to follow.

Granted, Nate hadn’t been paying a whole lot of attention to his surroundings when Shrimp had originally guided them to the red tower, but the neighborhood seemed to have deteriorated since he’d last seen it. There had always been a generous layer of litter—once you got about fifty yards away from the red tower—but there was even more of it now, and the narrow alleys between the buildings were all overflowing with garbage bags. Nate shone his flashlight down one of those alleys as they passed, the beam catching a pair of glowing eyes staring out at him. He couldn’t see the creature the eyes belonged to, but he hoped it was a cat.

“They stopped collecting trash when they put up the blockades,” Shrimp said.

“Because trash collection is a ‘nonessential service,’” Nate muttered, wondering if any of the assholes who’d approved Dorothy’s decision had any idea what it was like to have garbage piling up in the street.

Nate certainly wasn’t getting the “fresh air” he’d been fantasizing about. The garbage bags were full of rotting food people had had to throw away when their refrigerators died, and the gentle evening breeze carried that stink everywhere.

Despite the unpleasantness, there were still people on the street, transacting business as usual. Nate suspected the big drug money came from larger transactions than the petty sales in the street, but there was still a lot of money changing hands, and Nate guessed that recreational drugs were more popular than ever.

Of course, drugs weren’t the only things being sold, and despite the piles of garbage, a couple of the alleys they passed on the way to wherever they were going echoed with moans and grunts. Nate shuddered and felt vaguely queasy. No way he was shining his flashlight down one of
those
alleys.

Eventually, they came to a stop in front of a high-rise that looked just like all the others. Nate momentarily wondered why they had stopped. But then Shrimp shone his flashlight on a figure huddled on the pavement at the side of the stoop.

It was a man, possibly of Hispanic origin, although it was hard to tell. His hair was a mass of mats and snarls—not neat, cultivated dreadlocks, but the kind of mats you’d expect on someone who’d been stranded on a desert island for three years. An equally ratty beard hid most of his face, except for the two hollow sockets where his eyes should have been.

“This is Handy,” Shrimp said, the beam of his flashlight fixed on the man’s face. “He used to be Maiden’s right-hand man, back in the day.”

Handy squirmed as if trying to make himself comfortable, and Nate heard the clink of metal on metal. That was when he realized for the first time that Handy was chained to the railing of the stoop. The beam of the flashlight moved away from his face down his chained arm, illuminating the rusty metal cuff around his wrist, and then the bent and twisted ruin of his hand. Nate’s stomach turned over and played dead.

It looked like every one of Handy’s fingers had been broken in multiple places and then allowed to heal while the bones were out of line. There was no way he’d be able to use those fingers to grasp anything, and when Shrimp moved the flashlight beam to his other hand, Nate saw that it was just as bad.

“Handy grew up with Maiden,” Shrimp continued. “The two of them were tight. Right up until the time Handy put those hands on the wrong girl, one of Maiden’s. Maiden doesn’t share, and Handy knew that.”

His flashlight beam moved again, this time shining on Handy’s chest, which was clearly visible through a huge tear in his shirt—a tear that had obviously been put there so the message tattooed across Handy’s chest was visible:
DON’T FUCK WITH THE MAIDEN.

Nate swallowed hard, hoping he wasn’t about to puke. He was going to see images of those empty eye sockets and ruined hands in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

Shrimp mercifully turned his flashlight away from the poor bastard.

“I don’t wanna bring Agnes to see him,” Shrimp said. “But I thought maybe you guys could tell her about this so she’ll understand why I keep saying no to her.”

“And you didn’t just tell her yourself because you wanted us to look all green and pukey when we talked to her,” Kurt said, and as hardened as he was by his life in the Basement, his voice came out a little shaky.

“Something like that.”

The breeze shifted direction, bringing a whiff of Handy’s body odor along with the scent of rotting garbage to Nate’s nose, and he lost his battle to keep his gorge down. Turning away, he emptied his stomach out into the gutter. He heard the squawk of Shrimp’s walkie-talkie, but he was too busy heaving to make out what was being said.

Until Shrimp practically shouted, “We gotta go. Fast!”

Nate wasn’t sure he could have taken a step, despite the urgency in Shrimp’s voice, if Kurt hadn’t grabbed hold of his arm and given it a firm yank.

*   *   *

Shrimp
had been gone for about fifteen minutes when there was a knock on his front door.

Nadia had been standing at the window, staring absently out into the darkness of the Basement, occasionally glaring up at the blimp that continued to circle, displaying Dorothy’s message over and over and over. She jumped when she heard the knock at the door, whirling around. Based on the way Dante also jumped at the sound, Nadia suspected he’d been at least halfway asleep. Agnes might have been, too, though perhaps she’d just been lost in thought. There really was
nothing
to do—Shrimp didn’t have any books around they could read, and as long as they didn’t dare recruit from among Maiden’s people, they had nothing to talk about.

Nadia shared a puzzled look with Dante and Agnes. There hadn’t been a single visitor to Shrimp’s apartment since they’d arrived—probably because Shrimp was almost never around except when he was sleeping.

“Hello?” a woman’s voice called from the hall outside. “Anyone home?”

Natural politeness had Nadia wanting to answer; natural caution urged her to stay silent. Caution won. Shrimp had promised nobody would mess with them at his place—but he’d also told them not to leave the building while the power was still out, so obviously they weren’t as perfectly safe as he liked to pretend.

“It’s Kitty,” the woman continued, undaunted by the lack of response. “Maiden’s girl?”

Dante and Agnes both looked at Nadia, putting the burden of decision on her. Kitty had to know they were here—there was enough light from the candles to be seen around the edges of the door when the hallway was dark. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to snub Maiden’s girl. Even if he’d made it clear she wasn’t important to him, that she was no more than a pretty trophy to trot out as a cautionary tale.

Still uncertain how to proceed, Nadia approached the door and glanced out the peephole, just to confirm their visitor’s identity—and to make sure she was alone.

“Maiden wanted me to chat with you,” Kitty said, a hint of a tremor entering her voice. “If I don’t do what he says, he’ll hurt me. Please let me in.”