Digital Plague

XXVII Day Nine: It’s What I Do

Long ago I’d been Pushed by Kev Gatz, my old, dead friend, and I knew the feeling, I knew the print of his mind on mine. He was better at it, more refined and more in control, but now that he’d lifted the Push off me I recognized it, and recognized it from earlier at the church, too. I stared at him and my carefully maintained cool started to melt away as he smirked his plastic Monk face at me, trying to smile.

Kev and I had rattled around New York for years. He’d always been a little cracked, a little strange, and the only thing that had kept him alive was the Push, the psionic power he’d been born with. Somehow he slipped under the SSF’s radar and hadn’t been disappeared like every other kid who showed any kind of mental talent-kids who grew up to be the Shockleys and Bendixes of the world-and had managed to become a minor criminal, a bottom-feeder. And when I’d gotten the Squalor job, when Dick Marin had rammed the Squalor job hot and glowing up my ass and told me to kill the founder of the Electric Church or be killed, I’d taken Kev Gatz with me as my psionid ace in the hole. He was the only reason my plan had worked, and it had cost him his life.

I remembered him slumped against the wall. I remembered I’d been hiding behind a cart when he’d been killed.

“How-?” I started to say, and then found I hadn’t actually formed a coherent question.

“Thanks for showing us where Ty is hidden,” he said as three Monks detached from his retinue, retracing my steps and ducking under the hover. “Avery, do you know how long the human brain remains viable-and functioning-after death?”

I shook my head a little, the most movement I could manage.

“I know. He told me. Long enough,” Kev said. “You left me there. You left me. Good old Avery, my only friend. The only person who ever gave a rat’s ass about poor old weird Kev Gatz. You bullied me into helping you, Avery. You bullied me and you hit me and you treated me like shit, and I took it because I thought you were my friend. And then I saw your boots walk off and just leave me in that fucking hallway. Just left me there like trash.”

His face had gone blank again, and with the sunglasses I couldn’t tell if his little camera eyes were on me or not. “They came for me. A few minutes after you left me there, they came for me. Know how long it takes to process a corpse into a Monk, Avery? I do. Twelve minutes, once the body is strapped in. Twelve fucking minutes. And then there was no doubt. No headaches. No trouble thinking. Just a wonderful voice, Avery, telling me he’d made me and I was his son, and telling me what to do. Telling me how to keep myself in repair. Telling me how to find other brothers who’d survived, who were functional. Telling me to have my revenge.”

I worked my mouth once or twice, and finally got enough saliva into it. “This is revenge? Against me?”

Kev leaned forward slightly, and I felt the numb touch of his mind on mine, holding me perfectly still as his stiff, molded face pushed close to mine. “This is revenge, Avery, against everyone.”

From behind I heard Kieth’s ragged voice as he shouted incoherently. I couldn’t move, but I knew how he probably looked in the grasp of a few Monks, being dragged from his hiding spot: eyes wide, nose vibrating, head glistening with sweat. After a few beats he stopped shouting and started calling my name.

“Cates! Mr. Cates! What’s happening!? Mr. Cates!”

My head was held stiffly in place, staring back at Kev.

“This is a course correction, Avery,” he said, his voice modulated to be calm and pleasant, as if we were discussing drinks after dinner at the fucking club. I had the feeling these weren’t Kev’s words. “This is a controlled burn. One thing I can say about what happened to me, Ave, is that I found clarity. You know what being a Monk is, Avery? Why it’s so hard to stay in control? It’s pain, Ave. It’s been pain, pain flowing through me like fucking blood. It just hurts, all the time.”

Kieth was dragged past us. The Techie had stopped shouting and just stared at me as he was pulled along. I managed to move my eyes enough to follow him.

“But I have Him,” Kev continued. “Helping me clarify. That’s what we’ve all done. And we decided it would simply be easier if there weren’t so much meat around.”

Meat. I struggled against his Push. Kieth and him within feet of me, a gun in my pocket, and I was standing there as if someone had cut my spinal cord.

Kev reached out and put a dead plastic hand on my shoulder. “Go, Avery. Go home, or as close as you can get, and spread yourself around. We want you to be directly responsible for as many people as possible. Okay? Go home and scratch out a few more days, and then I’ll collect you, and then-then-you will be punished. You think the System Pigs are bad, Avery? So bad you’ve spent your whole life like a roach, scuttling away from their terrible light? Listen, my old friend: just wait when they’re finally gone and you must worry about me.”

He lifted his hand and pushed me in the chest, oddly gentle. Again I had the impression he was quoting someone. “Go,” he said, and I went, against my will.

As I walked slowly back toward the hover, the Monks retreated, trading fire with the cops in a perfunctory way. Bullets sizzled past me once or twice, but I couldn’t make myself move, not even to duck or dodge. I cursed up a storm as I was propelled toward the hover, praying the fucking cops didn’t mistake me for something else and decide to snipe me just because of Best Practices and shit. About halfway there, a Monk veered across my path, running silently, smoothly, and as it passed a few feet in front of me its head exploded in an off-white mist and it dropped to the mud. My puppet body just stepped over it, calm and steady, while I bit off a stream of Fucking hells and tried to clench my fists. I might as well have tried to pop my eyes out of my skull. Kev had me in his grip.

When I was within a few feet of the hover, Hense appeared framed in the hatchway, wind moving her hair around. She looked tiny, like the wind might just pick her up and send her sailing off. Her eyes were as flat and steady as always, but I had the nervous feeling that if I hadn’t been absolutely necessary for her survival, I’d already be dead.

“What the fuck,” she said slowly, “was that bullshit?”

My leg ached, a deep, steady ache without a pulse, without relief. I wanted to cut it off myself, just tear through the bone and tendons and rip it off, replace that bottomless ache with some real pain, something sharp and satisfying. Something I could pick at. I deserved it. Knowing she couldn’t kill me yet, I pushed past her and pulled myself into the hover. “We’re old friends.”

I paused in the hatchway, hip touching Hense’s hip and liking the way it felt. The hover cabin was a fucking charnel house. Five or six of the Stormers were dead, their ObFu flickering, torn up and bloodstained. Another half dozen were getting field dressings, one of whom, expert appraisal told me, was a waste of time and resources.

“Hell,” I said, looking around, “you fucking had guns, right?”

Something the relative mass of a planet hit me in the chest, and I was lifted off my feet and sailing through the air. I landed in the mud and Happling was on top of me, his face almost as red as his hair. His hands were on my throat, and like that, I couldn’t breathe. I bugged out my eyes and pushed feebly against him. He was like a goddamn boulder on top of me. One of his hands slipped away from my neck, allowing me to suck in a quick breath, my mouth opening wide at the unexpected opportunity. Which was a mistake, because suddenly Happling’s gun was jammed into it, knocking a loose tooth out. It landed in my throat, making me gag.

“The Spook missed this,” he panted. “This is a modified M nineteen eleven semiautomatic. Not standard issue, but we all have to have our fucking vices. It’s fucking ancient. Pre-Unification. You can’t even get ammunition for it. I have three bullets left, you piece of shit. I’ve got dead cops in there. And you know that fucking monster? You give the fucking Techie to it?” He panted a few breaths, warm against my face. “I’ve been saving these three shots. Right now I’m considering giving all three to you, as a fucking gift.”

I gagged on the barrel, making wet noises around it.

“Yeah-kill you, kill me. Got it, you fucking asshole. Got fucking it. How many times you gonna say it? I should have killed you back in the Rock, you fucking cop killer.”

“Captain Happling!” I heard Hense bellow, amazing volume for such a small woman. “Stand down!”

I wondered idly how often Happling was almost going to kill me. His eyes were the brightest green I’d even seen, like rot beaming down at me. Bloodshot and bright white, too, dilated. The man was insane. I considered, tonguing the metal, and after a contemplative snort of phlegmy oxygen through the narrow aperture that had once been my nose, I decided, Fuck this asshole. Like an amateur he’d left my arms free, and I knew he wasn’t going to shoot me, so I snaked one hand down between us and grabbed his balls like they were mine. He froze for a second, and I smacked my forehead up into his nose and scissored my legs, flipping him over like dead weight and letting his momentum carry me on top of him. I pushed his wrists into the mud and put all my weight onto them. Happling was roughly six times my size, so I didn’t doubt he could flip me off if he wanted, but for a moment we just stared at each other.

“Captain Happling!” Hense shouted again. “Stand the fuck down.”

Happling blinked. “Yes, sir,” he said in a barely audible whisper, eyes locked on me. I released him and rolled over, and just lay there in the mud for a moment, dragging in breath. Then Hense was kneeling over me, looking surprisingly clean and coiffed.

“Cates,” she said in that flat, disinterested voice, “you got a story to tell us?”

“The Monk, the leader-I knew him when he was… before he was a Monk.” I watched him die. I got him killed. “We have history.”

Her face didn’t shift. “So maybe you weren’t a completely random choice to be patient zero?”

I squinted up at her. “Maybe.” Groaning, I sat up, forcing her to stand up awkwardly. “He was-is-a psionic. A Pusher. It doesn’t matter. Nothing’s changed. We need to track down Kieth. We need to figure out where they’re going. Your Mr. Marko still alive?”

She nodded, holding out one pleasantly dry hand and helping me to my feet with surprising strength. “Yes. He’s terrified, but I’m getting the impression that isn’t an unusual state for him.” For a moment she kept hold of my hand. “We have an agreement,” she said, and we stared at each other.

I nodded and let go. “Then get your gorilla in line. Let’s dump bodies and get that hover in the air, and maybe Mr. Marko can help us figure out where we need to go.”

She gestured at Happling, who immediately climbed to his feet and holstered his ancient gun, silently falling in behind us as we returned to the hover, which now looked as if it had crash-landed. “And what do you plan to do once we get there, Mr. Cates?”

I didn’t look at her. “Kill people. It’s what I do.”