The Digital Plague (41 page)

Excellent. I feel like shit. Feels like someone put a razor blade in my chest. I’m taking e-tabs until I pass out.

Monday, 10:44 a.m.:
So, I feel like someone’s cut me open, removed a few pounds of necessary materials, and closed me back up. I don’t dare look in the mirror. There was blood on my pillow when I woke up. I’d rather not see what I look like.

Shit, the city is quiet. I tried to go downstairs, but they finally got around to setting the building shell, and the elevators are locked. My own shell won’t boot now. It’s like living in an empty, hollow building. I can’t even get my own front door open. I don’t have any food in the apartment—who keeps
food
in the apartment? If this emergency goes on much longer, I won’t have to worry about coughing up my own lungs. I’ll be dead.

Think I have a few n-tabs here and there, some older than fucking
I
am—or parts of me, anyway.

Monday, 7:48 p.m.:
Oh crap, I slept for a long time and feel worse than ever. Everything is so quiet. There’s plenty on the Vids, though you’d never know anything’s going on from it. Serials, those half-minute dramas everyone’s so nuts about these days, but no news. Well, news, but nothing local. They’re demonstrating in Tokyo again because they’re so terribly happy, and the police have caught some murderer who was very much wanted in Cardiff of all fucking places. But the fact that I can’t leave my own apartment? That I’m coughing up my own lungs? Nothing. Not a peep. I

Monday, 9:33 p.m.:
You keep thinking the worst has come—there were shots outside. One minute everything is so quiet I can hear myself wheeze, the next it’s like a war outside. Just a burst, gone just as fast as it started, and then it was silent again. Then more shots. I’m frightened. I’ve turned off all the lights by hand and I’m just sitting here in the dark, and every time there are more shots outside I jump and want to scream.

Monday, 10:21 p.m.:
Okay, I keep falling asleep. Or passing out. Shots keep waking me up. It’s so hot in here. I can’t breathe.

Tuesday, 6:09 a.m.:
Unbelievable. There is a man

outside my window. He is

walking along the narrow ledge, slowly, picking his steps with great care as he is twenty-seven stories up and there is barely room for one foot at a time on the ledge. He doesn’t look good … oh, shit … I bet neither do I. His neck is just a huge open wound. I wonder how he got out there, and if I should try to get out there, too. But this seems like a lot of work. I’m so tired.

Tuesday, 9:15 a.m.:
Right. I woke up unable to breathe

like there was a mass of soggy cotton jammed down my throat. I took some a-tabs, but I barely feel them.

I’m going to have to get out of here or I’m going to … die here. I don’t know what I have or what’s going around, but I know I need to leave this apartment.

Damn. Getting out of the apartment’s no bother—just pull the manual lock override. Getting out of the building is another matter.

Emergency lockdown means the building shell won’t budge. I’m not even sure the elevators will run. I … don’t know

Tuesday, 10:55 a.m.:
Excel—Oh, shit

I don’t even think I can walk. I tried to stand up and just fell over. And that was … an hour ago. There’s a big bloodstain on the rug where I was, too.

Ah, it’s fucking unbelievable. I’m going to die. That quack Killicks kept telling me they were doing wonders in Europe about death—pushing it off, making it more of an inconvenience, but where the fuck is he now?

There’s finally something on the local Vid spectrum. Not much, just a grim-faced DPH asshole telling us to remain indoors and not panic. It’s a loop—he talks for five minutes and then starts again. Stay inside. All is well. DPH is scooping up the bodies as they fall from your ledges and keeping our city clean. Downtown is certainly not on fire again, and you are all not going to die. Ever. Fuck.

Hey

Tuesday, 3:02 p.m.:
Yikes. The power’s out.

Outside, far away, something exploded—my windows rattled and everything in the place jumped—and then

dead. It’s stuffy as hell in here, and I can barely breathe. I wonder what the battery life on this handheld is? I’m

set it to sound-activated to try and stretch it. Though I don’t know why I’m

gasp into it. Habit, I guess. And shit, aside from cataloging the spongy red shit I’m

all over the place by size and weight, what else do I have … to do?

Tuesday, 3:05 p.m.:

Tuesday, 4:33 p.m.:
Unreal—this can’t be allowed. Isn’t

wondering about all of us? Or am I the only one trapped in here? I’ve been in bed for hours,

puking myself up onto the sheets. I’m so hot. This can’t be. This can’t, I mean, I have
friends,
I have money—did every single other person just up and leave the city? I can’t even get out of my own building now. I could maybe drag myself down to the lobby,

every third floor, but then what? I don’t even know if the doors will open with the power out.

Right. And if I can get out of the building, so what? There’s no one to take me anywhere. And it’s not like there’s some magical hover to take me somewhere.

Tuesday, 5:05 p.m.:

Tuesday, 5:15 p.m.:
Exit Tricia—shit. I should try to get to Bellevue. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’ve been chipped. There have to be doctors at the hospital, don’t there? Better than just dying here.

Tuesday, 6:15 p.m.:
No … I think … I think I’m on … Twentieth …

Tuesday, 6:21 p.m.:

Tuesday, 6:23 p.m.:

Tuesday, 6:34 p.m.:
Daddy always

I guess … trying to walk … down … so … many … fucking stairs … when you … only … have … half a lung left … wasn’t …

Tuesday, 6:45 p.m.:
don’t want … don’t want

Tuesday, 6:47 p.m.:

Tuesday, 4:23 a.m.:

When the government asked me to write this book, I wanted to refuse. I had planned a busy summer of drinking beer on the deck and watching my cats hunt sparrows, and writing a book would, I knew, take up precious hours of my day. The scientists sent by the government were adamant, however—something about the space-time continuum, me being my own grandfather, and avoidance of future events so terrible they shuddered every time the subject was returned to. Eventually they got around to mentioning huge advance monies and nationwide promotion, and since I was getting sleepy by that point, I hastily agreed.

When my lovely wife, Danette, found out, she didn’t believe me about the government scientists and whatnot, which didn’t bother me because in the movies the noble hero is always doubted, made fun of, and mildly beaten by his wife before he’s revealed as, well, the hero. But she remained my biggest supporter and fan throughout the process, and it could not have been done without her. Every time I made her read a draft of the book, she would hit me on the head with her shoe and shout, “Better! You can do better!” And then she’d dry my tears and I’d revise, and it
would
be better.

My agent, Janet Reid, and my editors, Devi Pillai and Bella Pagan, are three women who can probably kill a man from across the room, just thinking about it with their huge, pulsing brains. Every time I sent a draft of the book to one of them the ideas and suggestions they returned to me were humbling in their genius. It was a privilege to receive sternly worded Edit Letters from each of them.

My sainted mother was interested in my writing even before there were huge advance monies to be contemplated, and also she brought me into this world and somehow ensured my survival until I was able to care for myself, at approximately age twenty-eight. When, coincidentally, my wife took up the job.

As always, Jeof, Ken, Misty, Cassie, Rose Ann, clint, Karen, and a host of other disreputable people served as inspiration, in very strange and indescribable ways, for this and many other stories. Most of them won’t be pleased to read this, and there are probably lawsuits in the works right now.

And no acknowledgments would be complete without a shout-out to Lilith Saintcrow. Lili, you took a bullet for me in Berlin and joked through the entire back-alley operation, my flask of bourbon your only anesthesia. As soon as the State Department closes the investigation and I get my passport back, I’m taking off for Panama to collect our bounty.

Jeff Somers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating from college, he wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey brought him back to his homeland. In 1995 Jeff began publishing his own magazine,
The Inner Swine
(
www.innerswine.com
).

The Web site for
The Electric Church
can be found at
www.the-electric-church.com.

If You Enjoyed
The Digital Plague,
Look Out For
The Eternal Prison
By Jeff Somers

My Russian frowned and pushed his hands back into his pockets. From below his collar a smudge of ink was visible— a star atop what I assumed was a crown, the symbol of high rank. I reached up and scratched my chest where my own prison tattoo still burned. Prison had been good for me. I didn’t like to think about it too much, about Michaleen and Bartlett and the others. It hadn’t been a good time, an
enjoyable
time, but it had been a
necessary
time for me. It boiled me down and I’d come out of it the better man.

He saw me looking and smiled. “You know what it means?” He suddenly jerked his sleeve up, revealing two and half of the blurry skull tats on his arm. “And these?”

“Prison work,” I said, keeping myself still, feeling the bodyguards’ eyes on me. “Where’d you get the art?”

“You know what it means, my friend?”

I smirked, figuring that would annoy him. “I know what it’s
supposed
to mean, Boris. Anyone can slap some ink on you.”

“My name is not
Boris
,” he complained. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as me after all. I wasn’t used to being the smartest guy in the room. “And where I come from, they kill you for false emblems like that. Buy you a drink somewhere and slit your throat, you fall back onto a plastic sheet, five minutes later it is like you were never there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How many? Five? Ten? You think
ten
is a big number?” If I’d had a skull for every person I’d killed, I’d be a fucking shadow, I’d be nothing
but
ink.

“Numbers do not matter. You New York boys, always counting.” He peered at me. “You are sure you did not work the Brussels job? I heard your name, very clear.”

“Then someone is lying to you,” I said. I’d been sucked into Chengara Penitentiary and hadn’t made it too far away since getting out. “The last two times I made it to Europe, things didn’t go so well for me.” The two big boys behind me hadn’t moved, not even to loosen up their coats.

He nodded, crimping his lips as if to say, yeah, okay, whatever you say. “You know my people?” he said suddenly, voice soft and casual, like he was asking me if I liked his shirt. I didn’t. My own shirt was white and scratchy and a little tight around the neck, like it’d been made for a different man. “You know who I work for?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding. “You’re connected. You’re a high roller. You run this town— for your boss. You live in this fine suite in this ancient hotel, you go from an air-conditioned room to an air-conditioned mini-hover— it’s fucking cute, like a little toy— to an air-conditioned room every day and probably haven’t sweated in ten years.”

He chuckled, nodding and stepping around me. “
Da
,” he said jovially. “
Da!
And you were sent to kill me. It is funny. Now, if you will excuse me, I must have my dinner. Lyosha and Fedya will finish your conversation.”

I turned to watch him walk back into the restaurant, the door shutting behind him as if on a motor of some sort. I looked at one of the big guys, and then at the other. They were slightly different in the shape of their rounded heads and the angle that their mouths hung open, but were essentially the same person occupying different space. I wondered idly if there would be an explosion if they accidentally touched.