Digital Plague

XXX Day Ten: I Was Pretty Sure Bullets were no Longer Going to be Enough

“All clear,” the round-faced Stormer said to me, her cowl dangling behind her head. “Watch your step, now. They’re all pretty soft.” She sounded like she’d stepped on plenty of softening corpses in her time.

I imagined the smell around me like a green haze, it was so thick and heavy. We were just a block away from the remnants of the Pennsylvania Hotel, but I felt I’d arrived in a strange new city-a city of silence, of smoke. A city of dead bodies rotting in the cool June sun.

They were everywhere, looking a little better than I would have expected, a little fresher. The airpad was past me behind its cinder-block walls and security checkpoints; the empty space around it had always made me a little itchy, all that air around you. I preferred the tall canyon walls of ancient, crumbling skyscrapers or the bursting pipelines of downtown, flesh pressing against you. The big open square felt like eyes on you.

We’d landed, rough and shaking, just outside the airpad, crushing a few dozen festering corpses beneath us. The bodies fanned out from the airpad in a crush, swelling in their clothes, luggage piled around them. They all looked like they’d been eaten alive, their chests and necks pulpy wounds, bones showing through ravaged skin. I stepped carefully through them, staring down and picking out details-good clothes, jewelry, clean fingernails. These people were rich. Their eyes were all open, and most were untouched, staring at us.

“Fucking hell,” Happling muttered next to me. “This shit is disgusting.” He pointed. “Entry wounds. Shredders. I don’t know what’s eating these poor bastards, but what killed them was good old-fashioned guns.”

We both glanced over at the airpad walls. The gates were shut but it appeared empty, and Marko hadn’t gotten any response to his hail. I scanned the crowd again. Every now and then I had the sense that the mass of bodies rippled, but I couldn’t catch it to be sure.

“Poor bastards,” Happling said, turning away. “Just trying to get out.”

I lingered on the closed gates for a moment. Fucking cops. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Happling would have given the order to shoot, too, if he’d been in charge of the airpad with a crush of desperate people trying to get in. I stood there for a moment with the sour wind pushing against me, listening to my own coat flapping. There was a muffled burst of gunfire in the distance, there and gone just as suddenly. Happling and I looked at each other, the big man grinning at me as he chewed tobacco.

“Not everyone’s dead,” he said, sounding happy. He spun away. “Troopers! Form up! I want to see a fucking humping formation in thirty seconds!”

I remained where I was for a moment, staring at the crowd of corpses around me, just to ram home the point that I wasn’t one of Happling’s troopers. As I turned to follow him a hand shot up from the jumble of bodies and grabbed my ankle in a slick, loose grip.

I stumbled backward as one of the corpses seemed to pull itself toward me, a jowly man in an impressive suit, his lower jaw missing, his throat a wet sore, blood oozing from the ruined skin. His tongue, fissured and blackened, writhed in the open space above his neck like a worm.

Panting, I tried to flee backward, and stomped my free foot down onto one of the inflating bodies around me. It went right through the softened chest as if I were stepping into half-dried mud, a spray of jellied blood, black and chunky, splattering me as I lost my balance and fell back onto my ass, the jolt sending a shock of pain through me that made my vision swim.

The jowly guy, flesh jiggling loosely, peeling away from him in spots, continued to feebly pull himself toward me, tongue working like he was trying to talk and hadn’t yet noticed that his jaw was gone. He had no eyes, just scabby craters in his face where they’d been eaten away. I bottled up a scream-Avery Cates did not scream-and searched for my gun, hands trembling. For a moment I couldn’t find it, panic swelling inside me, and then I felt its familiar hard shape in my pocket and pulled it out, pointing it down at the ghoul clawing toward me, its soft hands on my thighs. I stared at it for a moment, hands shaking. I’d done this. This had started with me.

I pulled the trigger and the shot was fucking thunder, the loudest thing you’d ever heard. The ghoul’s head exploded, the torso dropping down onto my legs and disgorging a thin gruel of fluid from the neck that soaked into my clothes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Stormers drop into combat positions and then slowly relax.

“Fucking hell,” Happling bellowed.

I continued to stare at the ghoul’s torso for a moment. A mercy killing, I told myself. Poor bastard was better off dead. As I stared it twitched and I hurriedly pushed the gun back into my pocket and climbed painfully to my feet, walking as briskly as I could toward the group of cops, wincing every time I stumped onto my fractured leg. Bendix, still blindfolded, with his arms bent painfully back behind him, stood calm and still among them. When I was a few feet away, a noise to my right made all of us whirl and drop, the metallic rattle of readied guns echoing off the street. A block south, a small crowd of people sprinted across Eighth Avenue, just shadows against the sky, and disappeared past the corner.

For a moment, we all just crouched, ready. Bendix stood without moving, smirking.

“All right,” Happling said, “don’t get your panties in a bunch, kids. Form up, weapons check, give me a D-nine formation, and let’s move out.”

I kept moving my eyes from point to point and holding my focus, searching for any sign that someone was holding back, skulking around a corner, waiting for us to turn away. As I watched, a second group of people burst into the intersection, running full speed across the street, and were gone.

“Avery?” Hense said from behind me.

I stood up, joints popping, gritting my teeth. Turning your back on a possible threat was suicide-you learned that right away when you were a kid-but the whole city was a goddamn three-sixty threat, so it didn’t matter. I stumped over to Hense and nodded, moving past her. “This is my city,” I said. “Follow me.”

Her hand fell on my shoulder, surprisingly strong, and pulled me off-balance, forcing me to stop and turn. “Avery,” she said, expressionless, “you are the only reason any of us are still alive. You will not march out in front like a goddamn target.”

I smiled. “Your concern is touching, Colonel.”

She took me by the arm and pulled me toward her troopers, most of whom, I was pretty sure, would gladly put a bullet in my head themselves. “You let us form up around you, and you duck when shooting starts, understood?”

I shook my head. I wanted to use her name, but it stuck in my throat. “Stop thinking like a fucking cop protecting some ass-hat VIP from up the Mountain. You want to get me killed? Then parade me around in the middle of a brick of Stormers. You want me to make it down this street alive? You’ve got fourteen Stormers, the gorilla man, Marko, and Bendix, who’ll tear your head off the moment he can see you. You really think you’re going to control this situation? I need to be fluid.”

She glanced at my splinted leg. “Fluid?”

I bunched my jaw muscles and swallowed. “Let’s get moving.” There was a scrape behind me, followed by a soft grunt, and her eyes flitted over my shoulder and then back to my face. I resisted the urge to whirl around, the urge to whirl and just dump a whole clip into the empty space I knew would be there. New York was a Ghost City. I was pretty sure bullets were no longer going to be enough.

“All right,” she said. “All right. But I’m detaching a trooper to shadow you at all times.” She turned and scanned her little unit. “You!” she barked, pointing at the round-faced trooper Happling always called Fat Girl. “Here.”

She trotted over, equipment jangling. “Sir.”

Hense didn’t look at me. “Shadow Cates. Take his orders, within reason. He is your CO until I say otherwise. Do not obey any order that risks his life unduly, understood? And keep him alive.”

The Stormer’s face remained blank, but she looked at me for a moment before nodding and sighed a little. “Sir.”

Hense stepped past her. “Captain, let’s move out. Mr. Marko, stick by the captain. Nathan, keep Mr. Marko out of trouble.”

I checked my gun. “What’s your name?”

Fat Girl just stared back at me. I gave it a couple of seconds and then hit her with my most insincere grin, polished in a hundred deals downtown. “How’d a nice girl like you end up kicking balls in the SSF?”

At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but then she turned a little to scan the horizon, squinting. “I made a living cutting cow throats back when,” she said, her accent making everything sound exotic. “Then they fucking Droided the whole fucking combine and there ain’t too many other jobs out there, eh?” She looked back at me and spit a little to the side like she had the memory of chewing tobacco. “Besides, beats being you.”

I nodded and thought I bet it does. I turned and rejoined the rest of the squad, and Fat Girl followed me one step behind. Happling glanced back and I nodded, and with a gesture he set the group in motion. Nothing felt right, and I resisted the urge to spin around as I walked; I felt off-balance, like no direction was safe. The cops felt wrong, too-they weren’t moving like System Pigs, like they owned the street. They were moving like they were scared, as if they were in enemy territory. Only Bendix, tethered to a Stormer by a short leather strap, appeared confident, even as he stumbled and staggered along.

We moved up Thirty-first Street, heading east. About a block from the airpad the bodies ended, the street suddenly clean, empty. A few scattered possessions spilled out from the crowd, blown about by the wind, but once we’d passed that perimeter it was just pavement and the fading light, like everyone had gone inside, like pigeons, wanting a cool dry place to die. The Stormers moved in eerie silence, half crouched, shredders in hand; I could hear my own breathing, a painful hitch in my chest making me twitch with every inhalation. Now and then there were sounds off in the distance-gunfire once, shouting a few times, an explosion at one point that sounded huge and distant, like something we imagined. The cops didn’t pause or break formation, but I did, stopping at each noise to scan behind me and squint up at the dead buildings. Fat Girl stopped with me each time, saying nothing, her cowl pulled back into place so she was just another faceless cop like all the ones I’d killed over the years. I felt hot and grimy, a trickle of sour sweat down my back.

At Fifth Avenue we turned south and encountered more bodies, just a few scattered here and there, torn up, looking like they’d been lying facedown on top of a hand grenade when it had gone off, but otherwise relaxed, sitting with their backs against walls, arms down at their sides. All of them had bloody craters where their chests had been, deep, open wounds that went up their necks and onto their faces, drying blood caked everywhere. They appeared to be shouting at us but not making any noise, their lower jaws either gone or melted into a pulpy goo, yellowed and cracked teeth grinning. Eight or nine blocks south I could make out Twenty-third Street, where smoke rose in a haze over what had to be barricades. I knew if we went down that far we’d find a lot more bodies.

I was staring at a corpse still wearing a luxurious blond wig as she slumped forward against an old Vid installation when movement in front of us sent the cops instantly into a battle pose, the main group on their knees with shredders trained while four or five flyers headed for the sides of the street to press against the walls. As Fat Girl stepped protectively in front of me, I turned just in time to see four people shuffling out of a skyscraper lobby and moving toward us.

“Police!” One of them gurgled. “Finally!”

They weren’t in good shape. Their faces had a blackened, bruised look, their necks swollen up like balloons, each sporting several wet-looking sores. They were all men and, judging by their weight and clothes, they’d been prosperous enough until a week ago, when prosperity stopped meaning anything.

“We were okay until a day ago,” croaked one of them, his pale face scummed with beard, yellow bags under his eyes. His voice had a molten quality, and he cleared his throat constantly as he shuffled, making a gagging noise as if he had a large beetle trapped in there. “I knew you’d be back to secure the city.”

Happling made two sharp gestures and the Stormers flicked the safeties off their shredders in unison, the humming noise each made collecting together into a mild roar.

“Turn around,” Happling bellowed, arms akimbo, “or we will fire.”

The four men slowed down but didn’t stop. “Are you fucking insane? We’re citizens!” the guy with the molten voice said, hacking out the phlegmy words, a trickle of thick, black fluid spilling out the corner of his mouth. “You’re worse than those psychopaths across the street.”

I glanced past him to the midsized old building he’d pointed at, half a block away. It looked like every other old pre-Unification structure in upper Manhattan, blind window glass and stained old gray stone, worn down by pollution and time. It seemed as deserted as every other spot we’d passed, except the windows had all been boarded up from the inside.

Happling’s face was impassive. “You are ordered to step back to your previous location, citizen,” he said, managing to make the word citizen sound like an insult, “or we will kill you.” He paused and then raised both eyebrows. “Got that, shithead?”

For a moment I thought maybe they were going to turn back, to crawl into whatever stuffy hole they’d been hiding in to continue rotting out. Then the beetle-throated one shook his head and kept coming.

“Fuck it,” he warbled. “I’m dead if you leave us behind anyway. We’re all dead.”

I watched as Happling raised his hand slightly and held it there. Feeling hot and gummy, I was moving before I’d formed any conscious thoughts, pushing past my personal Stormer and through the thin ranks of Hense’s little army, putting a hand on Happling’s shoulder, intending to spin him around.

“Fuck this-they’ll either be dead or cured in a couple of hours, you goddamn-”

The big man moved fast, almost like a jump cut in my brain. One second I was standing behind him, reaching up to grab his shoulder, the next he had my hand in his, bending my wrist back painfully with inexorable pressure that forced me onto my knees. With his other hand he somehow produced his ancient automatic, pushing it against the back of my head, forcing me to stare down at the cracked pavement. I blinked down at the street, sucking in breath that tickled my chest and brought on a spasm of thick coughs. I hadn’t been handled that easily in years.

“Mr. Cates,” Happling said, not at all out of breath, “don’t get in the fucking way.”

A burst of ear-splitting shredder fire erupted as I twitched at Happling’s feet, hacking up what felt like a lung onto the street. Silence followed; I could hear the faint sizzle of the shredders’ muzzles as they cooled. Happling released me and stepped away but I remained on my knees, staring down at the glob of bloody phlegm I’d just produced.

Guess Kev knows I’m here, I thought. And he’s not happy.