The Digital Plague (38 page)

I could feel the universe pushing against me like wind in a sail, pushing me inexorably, gently toward its preordained destination—which was, unfortunately for Ty, a bullet in the Techie’s head, everyone linking arms and singing as we all got well again. Or some bullshit like that. My city gone, even if they repopulated the buildings. Glee gone.
Everything
gone.

And I decided, Fuck the universe.

Feeling weak, I jerked my arm and my blade snapped into place, the one thing left in the world that was still working properly. With a slash I cut through Ty’s bonds and then stood there wobbling a little. I let the blade slide back into its holster on its spring and brought the gun up, shuddering a breath into my ruined lungs.

“Ty,” I said raggedly, fighting an epic coughing fit that was beating its way up from my chest. “I’m going to get you out of this building.”

Fuck the universe. I was off the rail, and for the first time in a week felt normal again. I was probably going to die—it was a wonder I wasn’t dead
yet
—but for a while now I’d known I’d outlived my time. It felt all right. It felt
natural.
I was going to get Ty out of here, and he’d do his best.

Ty struggled upright, nose quivering, eyes damp and glassy. “Mr. Cates,” he said hoarsely, “Mr. Cates, Ty doesn’t know—”

“Ty,” I said tiredly, waving my gun toward the exit, “you’re not going to kiss me or anything, are you? We don’t have time.”

He smiled, convulsing into an unexpected laugh, radiating relief. As he opened his mouth to say something, the back of his head exploded, splattering a sticky mess of blood and bone onto the wall behind him. As if a supporting thread had been cut, Ty flopped back down onto the table.

I whirled, a push of adrenaline giving me a last burst of energy. Belling stood in the doorway, sweating and pale, one gun still outstretched toward me. His eyes shifted to me, and I squeezed my own trigger, getting a dry click in response.

Belling nodded, keeping his gun on me but not firing. “You never could go that last bit, could you, Avery?” he said, and in his mouth it was a curse. Wordlessly, he turned and strode away.

There was no moment of salvation, no feeling of disease evaporating. I felt as shitty as I had a second before. Whatever damage the nanobots had done to me had been done, and whether that was enough to kill me remained to be seen. A molten, distorted scream filled the room, and I felt Kev’s Push, harder than I’d ever felt before, crashing into my head like a boulder, flattening everything that was me. Before I could blink I’d bent my arm up and put my gun against my own forehead and pulled the trigger. Another dry click sounded like thunder in my ear. Behind me, I heard a volley of gunshots, and Kev’s Push vanished as suddenly as it had hit me, my arm dropping, the gun slipping from shaking, numb fingers. My legs disappeared and I hit the floor softly, just sort of sagging down onto it, feeling like every nerve ending I had left had been pulled to the surface through my pores, screaming and raw.

I heard a soft rustling behind me, and then Hense’s boots appeared near my head. She stood for a moment staring down at Ty, hands loose at her sides, one still gripping her automatic. Her hands were spotless: not a nick, cut, or bruise. I wondered if Colonel Hense was even human. I shifted my eyes and studied her upside-down face, and with a surge of adrenaline I remembered where I’d seen her before.

Hanging upside down from the ancient fire escape, guns still clutched in her hands.
I’d killed her. Years ago. She hadn’t been a lofty colonel back then, and she’d shown up moonlighting as bodyguard for one of my jobs. I hadn’t expected a bodyguard, and I remembered barely surviving the encounter.

I never actually killed the target.

Without a sound she turned and disappeared from view, and then those perfect tiny hands were sliding under my arms and pushing me into a sitting position with my back against the examination table. I looked up at her as she knelt before me. She stared at me. She wasn’t sweating. She wasn’t breathing hard. Why would she? She was a ghost. Her face was cocked at me like a bird or a cat examining prey, just like Dick Marin, and I thought,
Fuck me, she’s a fucking avatar.

If Marin had started making avatars out of the cops, we were all completely screwed. You’d never be able to stop someone who could just pull another body out of the fucking warehouse and return to kick you in the balls again and again.

She put one of her small hands on my cheek and looked at me, her face almost soft, a slight smile in place. A tiny flare of hope sparked inside me. I
liked
Hense, cop or no cop. “I am a woman who keeps her word,” she said softly. “Mr. Kieth is dead, and in your way you brought us here. I could quibble about details, but I see no reason to kill you, Avery.”

She wiped something off my face in a gentle, almost affectionate gesture. “Because the Monks will almost certainly do it for me,” she said quietly, patting my cheek and standing up. I watched her walk out of the room without another word as I struggled to suck air into my ruined lungs, too tired to even mind the pain.

For a moment Marko regarded me from the doorway, hands clenching and unclenching in indecision, and then he whirled to follow.

I heard the remnants of the cops pulling out, a few ragged shouts, Hense’s voice clear and unfatigued. A ghost. As they faded, silence crept in behind them, and for a while I just sat there, staring at Happling’s corpse. I thought of Gleason and tried to imagine what she’d say about this, what wise-ass remark, but I couldn’t think of anything. Then the distant sound of heavy boots running.

Day Ten:
I Should Have Been
Killing Monks

Right,
I thought,
that’s goddamn fair.
For a few moments I sat and stared blearily at the door, happy to not move. This was fitting. After all that, I was going to be torn to pieces by the last of Kev’s Monks, fifty or so still in the complex. We’d slipped past them and they’d arrived too late to save their boss, but here I was, the consolation prize.

In a strange way, I thought it was only right that Kev have his revenge. I’d led him down into Westminster Abbey and he’d died sitting on a bare concrete floor, one of Dennis Squalor’s digital avatars grinning down at him. Now I was sitting on a cold floor, high up this time but close enough. I sat there immobile. My arms weighed a hundred pounds each, useless lengths of bone and flesh, and the thought of moving them made my head ache.

Doors were being slammed open, glass shattering.

My eyes found Happling. The big man was staring at the ceiling, eyes wide open, mouth drifting. Blood had pooled around him, black and shiny, like oil. His hands were still curled into loose fists—the motherfucker was pissed off even in death. I thought of Hense again, and wondered if Captain Happling would show up again someday, grinning and asking me if I felt fast.

I wondered if all the cops I’d killed were going to come back one day.

I could hear the Monks approaching. As I stared at Happling, my heart unexpectedly began to pound in terror. They were going to crowd into the room with their blank, white faces, put their plastic hands on me, and tear me apart in silence, in
complete
silence.

Glancing at the door, I lunged forward and started dragging myself toward Happling. Sputtering bloody spit onto the floor, I slapped my hands onto him, pushing into his clothes and prying his Roon from his lifeless fingers. I flinched, with every movement expecting him to surge up and grab me, laughing and grinning blood. I found three extra clips in his front pocket, his body still warm beneath the clothes. I checked the chamber of the gun as I pushed myself as far back as I could get, opposite the door but on a slight angle, so when they came in I wouldn’t immediately be in their field of vision—though the Monks had heat vision and night vision and every fucking digital bell and whistle the tech of five years ago could offer, so I wasn’t sure how much my old tricks would help me. I’d never actually beaten a Monk in a fight, much less a squad of them. It didn’t matter. I racked the chamber and laid my extra clips in my lap and tried not to do the math that told me I didn’t have enough ammunition for fifty-four Monks. Trembling, I raised the gun and waited.

Time had stopped. I struggled to hold the gun up and stay ready while the echo of approaching steps seemed to get louder but never arrive. There was no talking, no shouting or other sounds. Just boots clicking on the hard floor, slowing as they got closer. I assumed they knew exactly where Kev was: his brain had been killed but his chassis still hummed with electronic life, sending out beacons, scanning frequencies. An immortality of deaf and dumb.

Doors slammed in the distance, and then there was total silence. They were just feet away, creeping toward me, probably scanning my heat signature and suddenly getting cautious. You could put a brain into billions of yen of technology, but you couldn’t improve the
brain
—put an asshole into a Monk chassis and he was still an asshole. Still, these were the assholes who’d survived. Through their initial conversion, through months or years of involuntary servitude, screaming endlessly inside, and then through the Monk Riots and the SSF’s steady attempt to wipe them out, they’d managed to remain sane enough to function.

I cleared my mind. I saw a line of trees at night, a dark wall of rustling leaves in the wind. I had no idea where I’d ever seen trees, but there they were. I felt everything drain away as I imagined it, just the soft sawing of the branches in the breeze, nothing else, no sound, no light, just me. My hands steadied, my breathing slowed, and my vision narrowed to the door, excluding Happling’s symmetric corpse and Gatz’s twisted form in a heap against the wall. Gatz’s white face was staring at me, and it took all my concentration to ignore it.

When they came, they came fast, two at a time materializing from thin air and bursting through the door. I fired once on instinct and the first Monk’s face exploded in a spray of white coolant. It crumpled to the floor as if it had just remembered it was a fucking ton of alloys and plastic. The second one leaped over the first with a graceful, silent move that was almost beautiful. I tracked it upward with a small tick of my wrist and put two shells into its face while it was still in midair. The range was about six feet. You’d have to paralyze me for me to miss at six feet.

By the time I reoriented on the door two more were through. I managed to knock down the first one with a shot into its nose, but the second swerved around it and was on me from the side. I swung my arm around just as it landed next to me and fired three times into its abdomen, knocking it back, but before I could make a kill shot two more were diving for me. I rolled, screaming in tearing pain, and slammed myself into the corner, bringing my arm up as a Monk with horrible, cancerous rust welts eating through its latex face landed with a earthquake-like jolt nearly on top of me. As I pulled the trigger it batted my arm aside and the shot took off its molded ear and part of its face, the ruined fake skin torn away to reveal the corroded alloy beneath. It grinned as it lashed out a hand and clasped my wrist painfully.

“Too slow, Meat,” it hissed, the words melted and ruined in its rusted, damaged mouth.

It squeezed my hand open and my gun dropped to the floor with a dead-sounding thud, and then another Monk was at my opposite side and a third was between them. The blank, identical faces peered at me, one pair of scratched sunglasses and two pairs of whirring, delicate camera eyes. Up close, I could see how time had treated them—their fake skin scratched and pocked with collision damage, the little servos of their eyes sounding labored and sluggish, their clothes filthy and tattered without any attempt at repair. So much, I thought, for immortality.

Two more leaped in behind them, and I knew I was dead. There were too many, and they were too fast. A lot of noise suddenly welled up outside the door, hard to identify. An off-rhythm pounding vibrated through the floor, as if someone were lazily hurling cannonballs at the building.

The Monk’s hands were on me, tightening.

“All this time I was killing cops,” I said, panting, “I should have been killing
Monks.
”

Rusty smiled down at me. “Your turn, Meat. Your
fucking
—”

The Monk jerked upward as if an invisible thread had been drawn taut. Everything paused for a second, and then Rusty leaped up and backward, sailing away from me and smashing into the far wall hard enough to shake the room and bring chunks of drywall down onto the Monk as it slid to the floor. The Monks around me whirled as one and then all four rose into the air stiffly, arms dropping to their sides, and smashed into the concrete ceiling, dropping back to the floor in front of me in a broken heap.

I didn’t try to move, certain I wouldn’t be able to anyway. Standing there, pale and haggard but calm, was Bendix, his terrible scar torn open and bleeding, one arm hanging loose at his side. He looked back into the corridor and then at me.

“Mr. Cates, you are one lucky bastard.”

He crossed over to where Ty Kieth’s body lay and stood there a moment, staring down at the Techie. Four more people entered the room behind him, young, round-faced kids in spiffy suits and long coats, three men and a woman. They were all binary, like the triplets I’d killed a week before—pale white skin and black hair. They hung back and watched Bendix like he was the Big Dog in the room. “Well, that’s done, at least,” he said. “It’s a waste, of course. Kieth should have been working for us.
With
us. A brain like that could have been accomplishing amazing things, properly funded. Properly channeled.”