Digital Plague

Extras Meet the Author

Barbara Nitke

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.

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.

The one I was looking at- I thought he was Lyosha but wasn’t sure why I thought that- grinned. “You break my finger now?”

I sighed, feeling tired. “Sure, why not,” I said. I could do the math: two of them against one of me, alone in a back lot, their friends inside and everywhere, fuck, the whole damn city. They hadn’t frisked me or tried to take my own gun away. I chose not to be insulted. I reached up and took my crappy cigarette from between my lips and held it carefully between my thumb and forefinger.

Lyosha flicked his own cigarette into the air and exhaled briskly, shrugging his shoulders, getting loose. The butt fell limply to the ground as if the air was too thick to travel through, the coal bright on the dark, shadowed ground. For a moment we all stood there, hands hanging free, each of us waiting to see who would move first. First move was a losing move- it telegraphed your intentions, and when you had more than one person to deal with it, guaranteed at least one gun was going to find its way onto you and make some painful alterations. The air around us was completely still, like hot jelly, and I was reminded of the yard back at Chengara, where I’d gotten a free but excellent education on how to fight when outnumbered.

Rule number one was sometimes making the first move made sense.

I launched myself at the one I’d decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side. I wasn’t worried about the noise; my Russian expected a few shots. A few more and he might send the waiter out to see if we needed anything, but not yet.

I came up into an unsteady crouch and fired three times, quick, where the other bodyguard had been a second before. He was still there, for a moment, and then toppled over, hitting his knees and then falling over face-first. I stayed low for a moment, listening to the sudden silence, feeling the heat on me, straining my senses.

Rule number two was to never assume. It wasn’t nice, but I turned and found Lyosha, put my gun against his head, and made sure he was dead. Then I stepped over to his buddy and did the same, warm blood spraying me lightly. You assumed people were dead, they had a habit of coming up behind you at the worst times. I’d learned that in Chengara, and it was a hard lesson to unlearn. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to unlearn it.

I turned and jogged back toward the door in a wide arc, approaching from an angle, taking soft, easy steps. I knew I didn’t need to worry about getting the door open- I had magic. By sheer force of will the door was going to pop open. After five steps it did just that, and a big, thick-necked woman with a goddamn shotgun held across her body, a streak of absolute darkness, stepped halfway out into the yard. She peered out into the lot, muttering to herself, not seeing me coming at her in the dim light on an angle. I just kept approaching, holding off; you couldn’t shoot someone in the back. I wasn’t a big believer in justice, but everyone deserved to at least see it coming.

I was just a few feet away when she suddenly turned, hissing something I couldn’t make out and swinging the shotgun around, slow and clumsy. I squeezed the trigger and she whipped around, sending one blast from the shotgun into the night air and falling awkwardly against the open door, propping it open with her body. I leaped forward and plucked the shotgun from her loose grip, studied the wet, ugly wound I’d created in her chest, then looked into her open, staring eyes. With a quick glance into the bright, empty kitchen, I broke open the shotgun and let the shells drop out, then tossed it away to my right, the shadows swallowing it. Stepping over her, I edged into the humming kitchen, going from the heavy darkness to the brittle cold light, all the crank air of the restaurant rushing past me like someone had opened an airlock out in the desert. I stopped right inside and wasted a moment or two, listening, watching the swinging doors that led to the dining room.

As I stood there, the doors swung inward and admitted a pair of serving droids, skimming along the floor bearing dirty dishes. As the swinging doors closed I caught a glimpse of the busy dining room, all reds and browns, plush fabrics that looked heavy and old. My Russian was sitting back toward the front of the place, laughing and holding a drink up as if making a toast. I looked straight at him as the doors swung shut again, gliding slowly on their tiny motors, but he never looked up at me.

I raised my gun and let the clip drop into the palm of my hand; it was difficult coming by hardware these days, most of it coming out of scavenge yards down south, Mexico generally, where the SSF’s grip was getting a little sketchy under pressure from the Army. For six yen a week kids sorted bullets into calibers and hand-filled clips, which were then sold to assholes like me for a thousand yen a clip. I wasn’t sure where the fucking bullets came from, loose and sometimes ancient as hell, and I generally expected my gun to blow up in my hand every time I pulled the trigger. It kept things exciting.

I exchanged the old clip for a fresh one and snapped it into place as quietly as I could. I wasn’t paid to scamper around waiting for the safe moment- I was paid for results, and now that my Russian was aware of me, there was no better time than the present, before he called his people and brought the hammer down- a wall of fat guys in leather coats, a team of idiots with garrotes in their pockets with my picture on their little handhelds. Besides, my instructions had been pretty clear: my Russian had to die tonight. I’d agreed to terms, and terms had to be upheld. I took a deep breath and racked a shell into the chamber gently, deciding that the best way to do it would be fast- no wasted movements, no wasted time. I didn’t want anyone else to get hurt, no matter how rich- they’d just come out for a nice dinner; if they were willing to leave it between me and my subject, I had no reason to include them on my bill.

I put the gun down low by my thigh and pushed my way into the dining room. I walked quickly and steadily toward my Russian, my eyes on him the whole time. Momentum was the key- no one paid me any attention as I crossed the room, just part of the blur of motion around them.

When I was halfway to his table, my Russian glanced at me, then looked away, his face a pleasant mask of polite enjoyment. Then he snapped back to me, his expression tightening up, his hands jumping a bit on the table like he’d thought about doing something and then killed the idea. It was too late, by then; I was at his table. I should have just brought the gun up, killed him, and walked out. But I stood there for a moment with my gun at my side. I wasn’t sure he could see it.

“Lyosha and Fedya will have some explaining to do, yes?”

I shook my head. “No. And neither will the kitchen help.” I gave him another second, but he just sat there staring at me, his hands balled into fists. Macho asshole, no gun because he was tough. Fuck tough. Tough got you killed.

I raised the gun and there was no reaction at first- I’d expected a hubbub from the crowd, some noise, chaos. But I’d been away from civilization for so long I guess I’d forgotten the rules, how it worked. I raised the gun and put it a few inches from my Russian’s face- not close enough for him to grab it easily, or knock it aside- and nothing happened. There were people just a few feet away, eating their dinners, but no one was even looking at me.

My Russian stared at the barrel. “You know who I am, my friend,” he said slowly, licking his lips. “Maybe you wish to be rich?” His eyes jumped to my face and then tightened up. “No, I see you do not wish to be rich. Perhaps you don’t wish to live, either. You are not a young man. You know who I work for. This will not be forgotten.”

I nodded. “I know who you are. You’re organized. You draw a lot of fucking water out here. And now it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what you did, but you pissed off the wrong people, and here I am.” Talking was for amateurs, but I wanted to give him his say. When you killed a man, you had to let him have his last words, if you could.

He was shaking now- with fear or rage, I couldn’t tell. “You do not care who I work for, then? But you do not understand. It is not like the old days, where we run from the fucking cops and they chase us behind the furniture. We are part of things. We are partners. You do not fear us, but do you fear Cal Ruberto? Ruberto, the Undersecretary.”

I blinked. Now there was a shout from across the room, and the whole place got quiet for a second, followed by a hissing wave of whispers. Cal Ruberto was Undersecretary for the North American Department and, nowadays, a Major General in the New Army. The Undersecretaries had been running things- as much as Dick Marin and the System Cops would let them- since the Joint Council had gone senile years ago, but now they had some muscle. Ruberto wasn’t just an Undersecretary anymore. He was a fucking general.

“You do not fear my boss,” my Russian continued. “But maybe you fear Ruberto. Maybe you fear the whole damn System behind him.”

I stared down at him a second longer, then cocked the hammer back. “Cal Ruberto,” I said, “is my boss.”

I squeezed the trigger, the gun making a thunderous crack, my Russian’s face imploding as he was knocked backward, spraying me with a fine mist of brains and blood. I stood still another moment, thinking that I was almost at the point where I felt nothing when I admitted that.

Then I spun around, bringing my cannon with me, and stood there dripping blood, running my eye over the crowd. Most of them ducked down as I covered them, crouching in their seats. There were some shouts, but no one was moving. I let my gun drop to my side again and stepped quickly toward the entrance. There would be no cops, but you didn’t kill a man with a crown on his chest in this town and just walk away, whistling.

I crashed through the doors and into the hot, empty desert night, slipping my barker into my pocket. I imagined my Russian’s blood baking onto me, turning into a shell. The street was busy, crowds of people who made up the infrastructure of the Russians’ private city out for the night. I just pushed through bodies, looking up at the dark, hulking shapes of the ancient hotels on the horizon, huge complexes rotting in the sun, marking the outer edge of a rotting city slowly filling with sand and choking sunlight. A man could get lost in the darkness there forever, if he wanted. In the heat, forever was a lot shorter than you might imagine.

Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped my Russian’s blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me, How many men have you killed, for yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didn’t know. I’d lost count. I was dead. I’d died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky.

Well shit, I thought, sitting up on my elbows. That’s fucking strange.