Digital Plague

XIX Day Eight: Meanwhile I’m Keeping Civilization Going

“Hell, they’re all nonfunctional,” Marko said, spinning around slowly with one of his handhelds. “Been here for a long time.”

“You’re brilliant,” Happling said from his perch on top of his bag of guns. “You needed a fucking mini-mainframe to tell you that?” He’d rolled up the starched white sleeves of his shirt, his muscles bulging as he gripped the shredder. He looked like a goddamn recruitment poster.

I was concentrating on not falling over as I strolled around the bizarre group of dead Monks. Hense was on her long-range scanner trying to raise SSF HQ for some obscure reason-personally, I thought the last thing we wanted was more cops, but I had to admit I was prejudiced, since most cops immediately started kicking and punching me when I met them. It was possible, being a cop herself, that she found them fun and interesting. I imagined she was trying to make contact to explain herself, or maybe trying to touch base with an informer who could tell her if any SSF were in pursuit: she’d stolen a hover, allowed two other cops to be killed, and made off with a prisoner who hadn’t been entered into the database, after all.

The newly risen sun tinged everything gold, a soft halo of light clinging to everything. Despite the rust, the torn plastic skin, the torn-out wires and staring, dead camera eyes, even the Monks looked almost beautiful. I stared at one that had been posed with both arms in the air as if in a moment of triumph, and struggled down into a sitting position on the damp ground, pulling out my gun and popping out the clip. Counting the shell in the chamber, I had fourteen shots. I’d done plenty with less, but never in the middle of fucking nowhere, a Ghost City the only thing in walking distance.

I snapped the clip back into place and pocketed the gun. Squinting over at Hense, I watched her for a moment.

“Waste of time,” I said.

She didn’t look up. “Taken under advisement.”

“It’s a waste of time, Colonel,” I said. “New York was on the edge of a fucking breakdown when we left. You think it got better? You think anyone’s looking for you right now?” I shook my head. “We should be moving. We don’t even know if the neat little suppression effect my pet nanobots have on us all is going to last.”

“You’re not in charge of this expedition, Cates,” she said without looking at me.

I stood up, grimacing inwardly as I forced my way through the million or so separate aches that had coalesced into a single gauzy misery inside me. “When you all start coughing up blood,” I said breathlessly, holstering my gun, “you can catch up.”

I took two steps, forcing myself to move smoothly and confidently, and then Happling was in front of me, my nose pointed right at his chest. He had the shredder leaning against his shoulder, pointed at the sky. His face had gone dark red again as he pushed a fat finger into my chest.

“The colonel said sit the fuck down, Cates.”

I looked from Hense to the behemoth. “Point of order, boss. She said I wasn’t in charge. Fine by me, Big Red,” I pushed my own finger into his chest, which was disturbingly hard and broad, the goddamn alpha male right there in front of me. “I’m not in charge. I’m not even part of it.”

His finger became a fist, pushing me backward. “Sit the fuck down, you piece of shit.”

I forced my stiff face into a smile. The cops were no different from anyone else in the System: you backed down, you gave an inch, they swarmed on you like fire ants and picked you clean. “What, you’re gonna beat the tar out of me every five minutes forever, Happling? That’s all you fucking pigs know how to do, huh?”

Happling’s face seemed to fold in on itself, his fair eyebrows coming down toward his scruffy ginger beard. “You better watch your tongue. You pieces of shit piss on everything and we have to clean your shit up, and then you piss and moan about the manner in which we do so. Fuck you. I know you, Cates. You’re a fucking parasite. You kill people for money, and meanwhile I’m keeping civilization going. If I’d killed you last week, the world would be a better place today.”

He was breathing heavily through his nose, his whole body expanding and contracting with each breath. “I kill people for money,” I said. I leaned forward, rocking off my heels. “I kill cops, too, but not for money, friend. Since you’re so busy keeping civilization going, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’ve never killed any people, right?”

His mouth kinked into an ugly smile. “I don’t kill people,” he said. “I kill shitheads. And I assure you, Mr. Cates, there is a goddamn difference.”

For a moment, we stared at each other. I had to crane my head painfully to maintain eye contact. “Do you think-”

“Enough,” Hense said without raising her voice. She hadn’t even looked up from her comm unit. “Let’s get moving.”

I looked back at Happling. He winked. I stepped around him. “Let’s go save goddamn civilization.”

We were farther than a mile out, but Hense set a bone-crushing pace, marching off in a swirl of black leather overcoat, broiling just to look at. We weren’t far from major roads, either, encountering a weed-cracked highway in just a few minutes of panting march. Hense led the way with Happling taking up the rear, his massive gun balanced across his arms, his skin already peeling in the sun. Marko and I were herded between them, neither of us happy.

The silence was excruciating. I’d never been without the noise of a city around me-screams, threats, hover displacement, gunshots. All we had was the creak of our shoes on the ancient road and the wind pushing the weeds around, as close to total fucking silence as I’d ever experienced. The silence remained with us even as the city started to form up, shattered buildings and crashed hovers, occasional desiccated corpses and more rusting, dead Monks. Paris hadn’t been much even before the Monk Riots, a shitheel city that had taken a beating during Unification, when half the populace had risen up and declared independence, repudiating the Unification Treaties. Six years Paris had burned, holding out. And then the System Security Force had been formed, and that was the fucking end of that. One thing the SSF always knew how to do was put down riots.

“Squalor’s not dead, you know,” Marko said suddenly.

Hense glanced back at us but didn’t say anything. “Sure he is,” I said. “I fucking killed him.”

Marko shook his head. “Squalor’s brilliant, man. Squalor could hack anything. You killed a Dennis Squalor. You killed a version of him. He’s around.”

I looked around. “Is he here with us, right now? Can only you see him?”

Marko looked at me as if he wanted to say fuck you, but thought better of it. I went back to sweating and aching and taking in the breathtaking scenery of broken buildings and melted asphalt. The city was firming up as we got closer to its core, old even before Unification came along to ruin everything. It had been the outer areas and suburbs that had flared up; the city core had seen little trouble, at least until all the Monks fleeing London had arrived and made Paris theirs.

We’d fought our way through new undergrowth to a roadway running roughly northwest by southeast, broad and broken up. Most of the old signs had crashed to the pavement, the red squares with A4 printed on them hanging limply from rusted bolts or pounded into the deteriorating asphalt like tiles. The sun was blazing down on us, and the muddy, shit-colored river was on our left, placid and low between its banks. It wasn’t much warmer than New York, but the clear sky was what made it feel strange-to go from snowy, greasy New York to this sort of dry heat. These days you never knew what you were going to get.

The silence continued to make me queasy, and the air didn’t smell like anything, a sterile kind of wind. There was no distant scent of smoke, or the close-up smell of terror, or even the acidic urine aroma of irritated people. It felt like we were walking through a void.

Hense marched without a moment’s hesitation, directed from time to time by a word from Marko, who was tracing the nanobot signals beaming out from all of us every second, assuring themselves. She didn’t look back at us, didn’t nervously touch her gun or even seem to be sweating.

As the river curved slightly to the west, I could see a large building looming up in front of us. The road started to rise and curve into a rat’s nest of half-collapsed thoroughfares, and we had to climb up then drop down a few levels to get back onto the riverbank, which Marko insisted was our best bet. Hense just kept going, confident, I supposed, that Happling-grinning, with his monster gun capable of cutting someone in half with a single second-long burst-would keep me and the Techie in line. Which was absolutely correct, since I had no intention of testing Happling’s temper. I just took the dusty, rusted railings in my hands and swung myself over, biting my tongue against any urge to cry out or even grunt, dropping down onto broken pavement as lightly as I could. When Happling followed us down, I could imagine the fucking ground shaking.

The building in the distance resolved itself into a jumble of stone with spidery arms sprouting out of the sides as if holding up the walls. A tall, thin spire jutted out from the middle, and two squarish towers rose up on either side. As we got closer it became clear that it occupied an island separate from the east bank that had once been reachable by bridges now just stubs of stone and twisted metal. Around it, Paris consisted of short, square buildings, many blasted away yet some remarkably preserved. Still, nothing on the horizon was as tall or imposing as this thing.

I knew the answer before asking. “Hey, Marko,” I said. “Where we headed?”

He pushed his chin at the island. “The church. There’s a fucking storm of traffic coming from that church.”

We made our way down to the river and stopped amid the ruins of one of the bridges, the old pylons jutting out of the water like teeth. A crumbling wall ringed the island, and we all stared at it for a moment, contemplating how hard it was going to be to swim across and clamber up, all without knowing what we were going to find there.

“Mr. Marko?” Hense said, squatting down and sounding just slightly out of breath. “See anything?”

Marko was already wandering the broken rubble at the river’s edge with his eyes glued to his screen. “Aside from the digital traffic, I’ve got one heat signature that’s in the right range for a human. I wouldn’t see any Monks that way, though.”

“Fuck the Tin Men,” Happling growled, crumbling a cigarette in his hands and jamming the tobacco into his cheek. “The ones swam over here ain’t going to give us any problems. That’s why they’re still here, in the shithole of the universe.”

Hense rocked on her heels, staring across the water. “No one knows we’re here. No one could be expecting us.”

“Sure,” Happling drawled, spitting brown juice onto the ground. “Because smacking a hover into the ground just a few miles away wouldn’t have been noticed by anyone.”

She cocked her head slightly back toward him but didn’t say anything. For a moment she just stared off into the distance, the sun hidden behind scummy clouds. “Wait for night.” She stood up and turned to face us, five feet and a hundred pounds, and I was pretty sure she’d make me hurt plenty if I ever tried to lay hands on her. “Mr. Marko, see what you can see, and find out what you can about that building. Nobody go more than a few feet from Mr. Cates.”

Marko sat down where he’d been standing, staring at the screen and moving his slender fingers. “There’s nothing there, Colonel. A minor heat sig, all the air traffic we’ve been tracking between it and the nanos, and nothing else. No hot wire, no cavities-just old stone and empty air.” He snapped his little device shut and peered at us with squinty, screen-blinded eyes. “If there’s anything over there, Colonel, it’s one person.”

I reached down and picked up a rock, chucking it into the water just to watch it be swallowed, the water like heavy oil, barely rippling. “All right,” I said, heart pounding. “Let’s go, then.”

“Wait for night,” Hense said from behind me. I could picture the tight shake of her head.

“No,” I said. “What, you think night’s going to make a difference? Anyone over there expecting us is expecting us. If Marko can’t see them, then either they can’t be seen or they aren’t there. Either way, waiting doesn’t accomplish anything.” I shrugged off my coat and started going through the pockets, transferring anything useful to my pants. “I’m diving in three minutes, Colonel. What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

I dropped the coat to the ground and slid my gun securely into a front hip pocket. My arms were mottled blue and gray, but I felt better than I had in days, adrenaline coursing through me, the pain receding. I thought I might actually get to kill someone responsible for this, for Glee, for New York, and everyone else I’d just murdered without meaning to. I was almost cheerful as I picked my way to the water’s edge and started taking deep breaths, my cracked ribs poking me with each inhalation.

“Fuck it,” Hense said from behind me. “Lead on, Cates.” She sounded amused.

I wasn’t paying any attention anymore. I took three terrible, ragged breaths and then threw myself into the water. It was cold-surprisingly cold, a slap of freezing liquid against my body. My clothes soaked it up and got heavy, and after just a minute or so I was panting. Behind me, I heard them slip into the water, and pretty soon we were all making a lot of noise as we swam to the island. About halfway down the west side the retaining wall had been smashed up a little, and we were able to pull ourselves out of the evil river to stand dripping beside the massive building. I stood breathing hard and suppressing coughs, examining the structure. A grayish white, it was eerily preserved. I thought of the church in Newark and marveled at whatever ancient instinct people’d had to leave the fucking churches alone while they burned down the rest of the world.

We took a moment to check weapons and equipment. Marko did another scan and nodded wordlessly. Happling and I crept along the wall toward the front, where the two towers thrust up above us. There was a big open square right outside the church, the city silent and crumbling in the near distance. We paused to study the three huge doorways, curvy triangles with doors missing, darkness spilling out of them and fading the air around us. I glanced down at a circular stone set into the ground with words printed on it: point zero des routes de france. I didn’t know what it meant, if it had ever meant anything.

The doorways were empty, just black shadows. Happling pointed at the far one and I nodded, moving quickly to push myself against the wall and then creeping over toward it. We glanced at each other again and simultaneously stepped inside.

I took a moment to let my eyes adjust. My lungs were still burning, and it felt like I’d pulled a whole new set of muscles, but I stayed still for half a minute, letting my eyes find the light.

The interior of the church was a narrow hall, its rounded roof impossibly high over our heads. The rotted remains of what had once been benches littered the area directly in front of me, but far ahead the floor cleared and a raised platform sat under a row of empty, gaping window frames. I glanced right and spied Happling across from me. He looked around and shrugged. I didn’t see anything either. I nodded back and took a step forward; he faded back a step and lowered his shredder to cover me.

I started walking, my feet making quiet, wet sounds. My heart rattled against my chest as if trying to break out, and everything inside me had turned to liquid, ready to spill out. My own breath sounded thunderous, wheezing in and out of my ruined nose, and sweat dripped into my good eye and every scratch on my body, setting me on fire. I kept my gun out in front of me, low, my finger alongside the trigger. I reminded myself that I had fourteen shots, I was exposed, and I was counting on a System Pig who hated me to provide cover.

As I got closer, I saw that the raised platform wasn’t empty. It was made of polished stone with a checkerboard design, and it supported a large cube of clear material like glass. A man was sitting inside the cube, which was actually a small transparent room, complete with a small cot, a table and chair, and a bank of equipment hooked together by the usual black cables. The man was sitting cross-legged on the floor of his little cube, lazily waving at a Vid screen, the Vid’s light flashing on his bald head and impossibly long nose.

I stopped, blinking. “Ty?”

Ty Kieth looked up sharply, sheer terror passing over his familiar face. Then he smiled, a huge, damp grin that looked a lot like mingled relief and happiness.

“Oh, fuck,” he said, his voice raspy, rough. “Oh fuck is Ty happy to see you, Mr. Cates.”