Up The Tower (15 page)

“It wasn't me, I swear! I was just looking at it. Trying to see if there was a way past.” After a moment, he added, “There wasn't.”

“Goddammit,” Ore said, coughing and spitting. “Goddammit, I hate dogs.”

It was evident to Ana that—even with the threat of dogs behind the door—if the only way they had out was up, then they needed to get up soon. Already the building was falling apart around them. It was only going to break more. Victor—apparently sensing this same need—cracked opened the door, gun at the ready. Barks bounced off the walls around them, but they did not sound like they were approaching.

Ana examined his gun for a moment—large, much larger than his already big hands. Victor was in better shape than even Raj, who had help from his chemicals and his robo-trainers and his surgeries. And yet still, Ana found Victor unappealing, even though he was clearly handsome.

The men in her life were either protectors, lovers, or nothing. It was clear which strata Victor belonged.

Slowly, cautiously, Victor closed the door.

“Let’s be quiet.” Victor put a finger to his lips. “They all seem to be pretty spooked, and they’re gathered up in a corner. Barking their heads off. Anyway, we might be able to sneak past. If we remain quiet.”

“Oh god.” Gary wiped his hands over his face. “Death by dog. Oh god.”

“You’re in a pile full of death in this place, son,” said Ore. “Get used to it.”

She left the door open behind her. Gary swore and stomped silently, tossing out lewd gestures behind her.

Taking care not to consider a single thing that she was doing, Ana followed Ore, Victor right behind her.

The room was large—it seemed to be the whole floor, in fact, with several cubicle walls torn through or falling down. Some kind of enormous office, planned and never finished like the rest of the Tower. All the half-built walls pushing and winding through the limited space made Ana think of a cavern, of rock walls built by haphazard water trails over several centuries.

Before she took five steps, she had already counted seven dogs in the corner—if you could even call such enormous beasts by that name. They circled and bit at each other, growling at some invisible fiend in the corner. Maybe that was the direction the quake came from. Ana had heard that dogs knew such things, sometimes.

Dogs—in Ana’s world—were tiny, docile, happy-tongued little creatures that fit in your lap or your purse or sometimes even a pocket, if someone was high class enough. Like Kadaya Sarin and her extra-miniature Rhodesian Ridgeback, Pip. That dog even had its own tech, a tiny series of gentle grappling hooks keeping him connected to Kadaya even when she sang in concerts. Pip could hop off her expensive dresses, swing about, and always return to his safe little pocket.

These dogs were not those kinds of dogs. These dogs were not any kind of dogs that Ana had seen before. These dogs were
beasts
.

Outside, narrow tower lights spiraled away to keep hoverfloats and drones in line and to prevent them from crashing into the Tower. Didn't really matter anymore. The shadows from the light rotated over dogs’ enormous circling forms, so that Ana could not get a good look at one for very long. But she got a good enough look to be scared, to know that the dogs’ mouths could easily encapsulate her arm or her neck or even her entire head.

She had heard of dogs of this type. Wild dogs, living in packs in the middle of Junktown. Some years ago, it had been one of the dangers of traveling through the slum without protection. Ana only traveled through the city proper in the first place for entertainment—festivals, parties, and the like—so it had been easy to find safe ways to go. Dog attacks happened day and night for nearly a year, and then all of a sudden they stopped. The city congratulated itself, applauded its law enforcement, but everyone knew this was a lie. Cops only got called after the fact of any crime. The only people patrolling streets were gangsters—and so everyone knew that gangsters had stopped the dogs.

And maybe they had taken the most vicious, the meanest among the animals, and dedicated them to breeding.

The large hall was criss-crossed with tall load-bearing pillars, each one straining and bending. Large shelves of pipe-filled concrete caved in everywhere. Walls that led nowhere. Offices built but never finished. Empty portals in rows of steel and concrete like some kind of industrial forest.

If it was an industrial forest, then the dogs were industrial killers. Layered with grease and dirt. Black with dried blood. Dust poured off them as they barked and howled. Their leathery faces ragged, layered in long pink scars. Every coat a badlands, with spires of fur floating in odd directions. Ana whimpered, seeing them more and more clearly, and hurried after Ore.

The light shifted slightly. The hall became more visible. Bones. Beneath the dogs were bones. Bones, ragged pieces of hair, mutilated flesh.

Oh, no. No, no. Why did she have to see that?

Not seeing all those body parts would have changed nothing, she knew that. But what was anyone's situation but a collection of perspectives?

Halfway across the big open hall now and the dogs still hadn’t noticed them. Step by step, careful, slow. Taking the time to step around what she now realized were frequent piles of dead bone and tissue. Through the rotating lights, she saw the end of the large room—or a wall, at any rate, and what she hoped in the shadows was a door.

And then Gary stepped and stumbled on a big pile of bones, prompting a series of very appropriately Garyish yelps. He was so tired, could barely keep himself up. He swore loudly—and all the dogs zeroed in on him.

Victor grabbed Ana’s arm, sprinting full speed. “Run,” he said, almost idiotically calm. “Run, run, run.”

But Ana was slower than him. He tried to push her forward, and Ana twisted in his grip.

“I've got it!”

He pushed still, sprinting faster, and Ana twisted all the way out. Victor stumbled and hit a wall. The dogs got closer and closer.

Gary ran at Victor. “I've got him, Ana, don't worry!”

She wasn't worried—she was running. Behind her, she could hear the dogs snapping up, their jaws working around and grunting out deep, horrible barks that echoed off the walls. She matched Ore pace for pace, running beside the smaller woman. The sound of the dogs approaching punished her ears. Their scratches on the floor, the heavy pounds of their paws slapping after her. Every sound they made was violence, potential and actualized.

Finally, a door at the end of the room—the stairs. Once there, Ana stopped and looked back.

Gary tried to help Victor up. The dogs bearing down on them, a snarling cloud of teeth.

“Get off,” said Victor. “Get off!”

Still insistent, Gary grabbed and pulled at him, and Victor pushed him away. Too much time. A dog landed on Victor's chest, and another latched onto his arm.

“O-oh god.” Gary abandoned all help, rushing away. “You should run!”

Victor elbowed the dog on his arm and then rolled, knocking more off his body. The dogs circled around him, all attention to Victor.

“Run, Ana!” he shouted. “Go!”

She did not go. Gary ran around a network of interconnected walls and arrived at the door, blood trailing down his pants and his shoulder. He tried to tug her through the door, and she slapped him away.

Gun in hand now, Victor blew a hole through the head of one dog and then another. The other dogs remained undeterred, snarling, snapping. He tried to shoot as he ran, but one dog leapt up and clamped down on his hand and the gun. Victor fired into him, the dog’s brains trailing out on its back, but its jaw remained locked.  He punched another dog and released the gun, freeing his hand.

He closed on the exit. Dogs trailed after him. Ana held the door ready.

Victor careened past Ana into the stairwell, pushing her aside. Ana banged the door shut quick as she could. Tufts of a dog’s tail caught in the door. Three of the beasts managed to rush through the door before Ana closed it. Outside, bodies slammed into the door and wall.

The three dogs inside leapt up on Victor, crowding his chest and arms. Ana tried to grab him, but he pushed her away again, and he and the dogs all tumbled over the rail.

Ana did not see his fall, but she heard him land, again and again, tumbling on down the stairwell.

* * * * *

G
ary knew his father quite well before the old man was murdered. They were pals, buds. If he could think of something to do on a Friday night, often it was to hang out with his father.

Gary’s father, Arnold, worked as an accountant for a drone security firm. The firm made tiny drones that protected the small, head-sized drones which constantly surveyed the population, identifying consumption choices and recording data about shop choices, clothing, fads, trends, all that sort of thing. Most laborer homes—such as Arnold’s, as accountants were smack-dab in the middle of the laborer class—were required to have small ports in the walls or ceilings to allow the drones inside for recording at any time of the day. The machines had full, unrestricted access to consumers—except when it came to those in the fringe.

The problem with the fringe, Gary’s father would explain, was that they still buy everything but they don’t want to work in a proper damn job like everyone else. They want to make money, but they don’t want to do it the tried-and-true way, working up with a corporation and creating some loyalty.

Gary did not point out, during these talks, that his mother had been traded from one corporate area to another within Tri-American for almost ten years straight, working for nearly two dozen sub-corps in that time. That didn’t seem like loyalty to him, but why stir up the hornet’s nest?

Anyway, Arnold’s sub-corp, SharpeTech, built tiny wasp-like drones to follow around the eyebot drones, sending out sub-lethal stingers (bullets) loaded with subduing effects (poisons). Without these—and heck, even with them—folks in the fringe would go out of their way to down the drones. Sometimes the drones were broken out of protest, in an attempt to establish some privacy. More often, though, it was to create tech scrap for bootleg cybernetics shops and doctoring stands.

So, there was a lot of accounting to do, what with all the new drones coming in, the old ones getting scrapped or repaired, and constant upgrades required to make everything hang together.  When Gary’s father got home, his brain was usually tired out—working the standard eleven-hour work day, just like any of his compatriots who weren’t really that serious about getting ahead, only getting by—and he was ready to absorb some mindless entertainment.

Arnold and Gary alternated between several channels, but mostly what they watched came down to two things:  Singer Contest and wrestling.

Singer Contest, sponsored by Tri-American (everything was sponsored by Tri-American in their house, even the toilets, otherwise Arnold would be arrested and Gary likely sent off to a manufacturing camp in the Yukon), was a weekly program in which the world’s best amateur singers from the fringe and laborer classes competed for a shot at Citizenship. Kadaya Sarin had won some time past—the only real, permanent winner in the past five years, as Gary recalled.

There had been other winners, of course—every season had to have some winner—but Kadaya was the only one who hadn’t had her Citizenship revoked. None of the others were able to produce consistent hits. Either you were helping stitch the fabric of the economy together, or you were helping it dissolve. Singer Contest winners, mostly, just won larger responsibilities.

Wrestling was a little less depressing. Classic displays of good and evil on display—Gary’s favorite was Jack “Grizzly” Baer, and Arnold’s was “Hot Shot” Henry Shots. Steel cage hover matches, tag team tussles, battle-battle-battle royale-royales, Shots and Baer would do it all. Sometimes they fought each other, and sometimes even for the title. Those were grim nights—son and father shouting over each other to cheer on their favorite, and the loser’s fan sullenly striding off upstairs to pout.

But they would always make up the next day or so; Gary would bring his father flowers or maybe a basket of candy he picked up from a street vendor, or Arnold would bring Gary a spare drone from work to examine. Gary loved science, after all. Anything to do with computers. He really thought he could make it up to Citizenship one day, just so long as he kept his nose to the grindstone and learned all there was to know about his field.

Too bad he had only gotten his start at eight years old. Too late, most of the time, for any would-be strata-jumpers.

It was a nice existence, trading wins and thoughts with his dad. Gary liked it. There was structure and a routine.

Then, one day, Arnold’s sub-corp laid him off, and redacted his pay for the past five years, suddenly finding his work to be sub-standard. This left him in debt to the tune of more than six figures—an impossible amount to pay off with the amount of time he had left before mandatory retirement at eighty-six.

Gary came home that afternoon and found Arnold on the couch where they watched all their shows. Over his father's head was one of the waspbots that he had crunched numbers for, that he had spent years of his life devoted to. The waspbot floated quick, buzzing on one side of Arnold's head and then the other.  It turned to fire at Gary, but only hissed out empty pneumatic sounds—all its stingers had already emptied into Arnold.

“No mess,” said his father’s note. “No burden.”

* * * * *

T
he Tower, even as high up as Samson and Partner were, broke and bent inward. Like an old scarecrow left out in the wind too long, it had started its lean. It would only lean so far before it broke. Everything was on a tilt.

Below them, Junktown burned. Junktown drowned. There was nothing of itself left, not anymore. He and Partner stood next to a window, a bit frozen. They watched as the Dam burst, the full tides of the Mississippi releasing onto the city below. Enormous chunks of concrete and metal slammed into the overturned and leaning buildings, obliterating them. The Tower shook as house-sized concrete boulders slammed into its base.