The Digital Plague (22 page)

I shut everything out of my mind, picturing grass in the evening wind, swaying. I took a sighting on the space just in front of Wa as he ran and relaxed every muscle in my arm, squeezing the trigger as if it were made of glass.

The hammer dry-clicked.

Belling swung around at the slight noise, guns coming up, but kept moving. He tossed three or four quick rounds my way as I dropped hard to the floor, and then he was back in the shadows.

Cursing, I dropped the empty gun and took off, feet skidding on the smooth floor as I struggled to get traction. I had no weapon, but Wa didn’t know that, and if nothing else I might herd him back toward my new best friends the cops. As I tore up the middle aisle, I caught a glimpse of Belling as he flitted from the sides out the front. Body burning, I put everything I had into running.

I knew better than to burst out into the night; I veered for the door on my far left and put my back against the wall between it and the middle door. Trying to control my breathing, I listened for clues, wondering what I was going to do if Belling surprised me. Insult him cruelly, I supposed.

“Avery,” a new, strangely familiar voice called from outside. It sounded like someone was pushing molten metal through his voicebox instead of air. “Come on out, Avery. You’re not going anywhere.”

After a moment, I linked the voice with the memory—me, on my knees, in Newark. Just—what, a week ago? A shiver went through me. Slowly, I inched for the doorway and angled my head around the edge, peering into the square outside the church. I stared for a long time, frozen. The square was full of Monks.

Day Eight:
A Few More Inches
to the Wilderness

Dull rust spots were visible on the Monks’ faces, they were so close. The sound of a few dozen Monks being perfectly still in the midst of a dead city was complete silence. I remained hidden behind the doorway, peering carefully around its edge. I was shocked; I hadn’t seen this many Monks—this many
fully operational
Monks—in years. The ones you saw begging and stumping around Manhattan were sad, pathetic jalopies you didn’t think twice about shoving out of your way. These looked to be all original equipment, which maybe meant guns, but it also meant they were all a little rusted, a little banged up. I ran my eyes over them, counting the dents and tears in their white skin, the rips in their clothes. They all held themselves with that perfect, still confidence that hinted at hardwired reflexes and nuclear cores ticking away their half-lives, and they’d survived, but it obviously hadn’t been easy.

I hated them on sight.

Belling stood in front of them looking freshly pressed and relaxed, among friends, his arms at his side with gleaming Roons for hands.

“I’d like you to meet my benefactors, Mr. Cates,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

A Monk stepped forward. This one looked so new I thought I could smell the fabric of its coat. In the darkness its face appeared to float above a faint outline of a body. For one horrible moment it smiled at me, a snapshot grin.

“Avery,” it said. “You are as fucking slippery as ever. I never would have imagined I’d run into you here, although He told me it would happen. Come on out. We can see you perfectly well. Perhaps,” it continued in a louder voice, “the System Security Force officers and their pet Techie would like to come out as well?”

I folded myself back against the wall, heart pounding. Fifty, sixty Monks. None of whom looked crazy. Digital sighting, laser guidance, reflexes by the fucking CPU clockspeed—and I had two unhappy System Pigs up my ass. And the one motherfucker I
wanted
to kill was locked inside a bulletproof cube. I thought I’d just stay pasted against the wall for a while, see what shook out. Let a few thousand more people die.

And then a slow lassitude stole over me, creeping down from my head through my whole body, a peaceful, easy feeling.
What the fuck,
I thought. I wasn’t about to fight off sixty goddamn Monks—and Wa Belling, and what was the point, anyway?

Feeling strangely happy—just letting everything slip away, as if I’d been hanging from a rope for days and finally just let go—I rolled right and stood in the doorway. The Monk gave me that bastard grin again.

“Thank you, Avery. Ah, the police. Thank you, officers.”

I was walking toward them, taking my time, all my worries distant memories. Turning my head, I was mildly surprised to see Happling and Hense emerging from the big middle doorway of the church. Hense was as tidy and tight-lipped as ever, guns held loosely by her side. Happling was soaked with sweat, his white shirt pasted against his huge chest, arms threatening to split the sleeves, the shredder still looped around him. His red hair looked black in the night, pasted against his forehead.

The Monk cocked its head at us. “Where is your Technical Assistant?”

Happling stumbled a little, a lopsided, stroked-out grin forming on his face. “Gone.” He winked then, a slow-motion crumpling of one side of his face. “Yours, too, fucking freak.”

The Monk stared, not moving, and for a moment anger swept through me, a flame of sulfur that singed me and was gone. It didn’t say anything, but five or six of the Monks silently broke away from the group, moving past us so close I could hear the heavy thud of their steps entering the church. One limped, with an off-center, rolling gait.

The gleaming new Monk stepped forward and intercepted me, putting an arm around me. A million screaming jeebies broke out like sweat on my skin, but I just let it happen. Its arm was heavy on my shoulders.

“Walk with me, Ave.”

It steered me away from the group, off toward the water. “It’s a fucked-up world, Avery, right?” Its voice was exactly the voice I’d heard in Newark, the same melted tone. It looked factory fresh, but it sounded like shit. “You know what? When I was flesh and bone, I was a fucking mess. I never realized it. Could never focus on anything. Always depressed. And the
headaches.
And then I’m Monked, you know? And I know
you
think that’s a terrible thing, but for me, it clarified everything. I was a hundred percent better after that. And He has helped me stay in good condition, you know. To make sure I don’t backslide.”

We were at the edge of the crumbling retaining wall, and we stopped. The feeling of complete, terrible calm was still with me, and I stared down at the muddy water, where a watery moon stared back at me.

“I’d love to push you in, Avery,” it said, voice low and easy. “You’d fucking sink like a stone and be dead in minutes. That’s how fast things happen in this world. Minutes.
Minutes.
Do you know how long the brain stays alive after the body has died, Avery? A long goddamn time. A lot longer than you’d think. Long enough for a body to be retrieved and the brain extracted, placed in one of these Monks, at least. Minutes—it all comes down to minutes. Everything changes in just a few short minutes. How many people do you think you’ve left for dead, Avery? I don’t think you can even count how many people you’ve stepped over so Avery Cates the Great and Terrible could go on living a few more miserable fucking weeks.”

I listened and felt nothing. The water was strangely beautiful.

“I’d love to push you in,” it repeated. “But you still have work to do. Things will take their course, of course. It’s unstoppable now, and my sources tell me New York is quarantined and about to fucking burn to the ground. I want things to move faster, so I need you out there, spreading yourself around. I know you, you cocksucker. I know you’d never dream of sacrificing yourself. So you’ll scuttle around like the roach you are and move things along, won’t you?”

It spun me around and we started back toward the group, where the cops stood with Belling. The Monks emerged from the church silently.

“Mr. Kieth has escaped,” the Monk said, its hand tightening painfully on my shoulder, “with the help of your pet SSF Techie, who is smarter than he looks. That is problematic. But I know him as well as I know you, Avery, and I know he’ll stay alive, which is all I really need from him. We will, of course, search the city and find him. It isn’t really a human city anymore, after all. It is
our
city, and I doubt Mr. Kieth will find it very hospitable. Very well. Officers,” he said, stopping and letting me shuffle forward to stand with them, “I’d gladly kill you as well, but He has told me I need you to keep Mr. Cates alive. I fear if your colleagues arrive and find you dead and Mr. Cates here alone, they will simply execute him on the spot. So I need you to remain alive to vouch for him.”

We all stared at him. I realized I didn’t even mind the pain anymore. I felt
good.

The Monks began to file away, falling into line and marching for the river. The leader spread its hands. “This is a mess, right? Fuck it. It’s the System. It’s always a fucking mess. Everything falling apart in goddamn slow motion, every moment. Look at this—Paris—a huge goddamn city. Lost. Lost and no one even trying to get it back. Every year they lose a few more inches to the wilderness, to the weeds—to
us.
”

The Monks behind him were marching straight into the river, just walking into the water and slowly disappearing. In the distance, I noted with vague interest, I could hear hover displacement.

The Monk leaned in toward me. “Go home, Avery. Go home and scuttle about, spread yourself around. If they’ve managed to contain things, to set up a clean zone, that’s exactly where they’ll bring you, huh? And good-bye to that.” It reached out and put its cold plastic hand on my face. “I’m glad, though, that I got to see you like this. Hurt, desperate. All that fucking yen you got for killing all those people—not even counting the people you left behind along the way—and here you are. It’s
good.
” It turned to follow the last of the Monks. “He told me it would be good. He whispered to me when I was reborn and promised me revenge. I didn’t even know what the word meant until he spoke it to me.”

I watched him go. “I know you,” I said to the air, and then Belling was in front of me.

“Avery,” he said, and then stopped, holstering his guns and shooting his cuffs. His face looked odd to me with his scum of beard and deep lines. “I
am
sorry our paths crossed like this. Even the best of us fear death. You, I know, understand.”

Fuck you,
I thought lazily, not really feeling it.

I watched, vaguely curious, as Belling was carried across the river by four of the Monks. He held the edges of his coat up out of the water and stared at the sky. I followed his gaze and saw the hover, a fat bug of light floating slowly through the sky, like a star crashing to Earth from a light-year away. At the sight of it, a hard kernel of anxiety bloomed in my chest, still smothered by a relaxed unconcern. I watched it slide across the sky, dropping lower and lower, displacement screaming around us, making us stagger backward. As it passed over the church it dropped to a few dozen feet above us and landed behind the building, shaking the whole island.

For a second the night was quiet and peaceful.

The kernel of alarm grew, like a pearl forming around a piece of grit, swelling and shunting aside the lethargic calm that had enveloped me.
Hovers were never a good thing,
I thought.
I should be worried. I should be moving.

Shouts behind us, and then the familiar sound of boots in sync. We stood there admiring the night as Stormers formed up around us, moving stealthily and invisibly, detectable only by the blur of their motion as their Obfuscation Kit struggled to keep up with the terrain behind them. In seconds we were surrounded, the Stormers taking on the colors of the muddy water and the silvery sky behind them, their face masks empty space staring at us.

I shivered, alarm making my muscles twitch. Hense and Happling looked at me sharply, then around at the Stormers as if they’d never seen them before—which maybe they hadn’t, not from this particular angle, anyway.

The Stormers didn’t say anything. They didn’t have to, since they were gathered together in the international symbol of
We will kill you if you move.
My mind was whirring along merrily, trying to figure out what the fuck had just happened to us, and in the near silence I heard boots crunching their way around the side of the church. This was standard operating procedure for the System Pigs, of course; first the Stormers gathered, and then the officers in their brightly colored plumage came around to start the ritual ball kicking.

The footsteps turned flat and hollow on the flagstones, and I squinted at the approaching figure, looking for a clue to the exact type of ball kicking we were in for. As he drew closer, a chill stole over me, smothering my anger. I was no expert, but I was starting to think that every goddamned psionic working for the government looked the same.

He’d once had the ageless look I remembered from Shockley and his friends back in New York; this one still had the round face and big eyes, but a jagged red wound, dotted with pinker, smooth flesh, puckered one side of his face, a lightning bolt of broken skin. It gave him some years. As he walked I noted his left arm hanging down stiffly at his side. He stopped in front of us and squinted, his whole face scrunching up, muscles pulling skin into unfamiliar shapes.

“Mr. Cates,” he said. “I hear you like to kill government employees. It may take more than a hover to do me.” He looked around. “There is supposed to be one more? A Technical Associate?”

For some reason I wanted to laugh. I let a smile twitch my face. “The TA is AWOL.”