Digital Plague

V Day Three: Keeping Panic at Bay with Lies and Cheap Tricks

Thinking it was a bad idea, I opened my eyes anyway and blinked, feeling pain, one giant ache that stretched from my ass to my teeth. I tried to shift and stretch, but couldn’t move my arms. A rain of tiny glass shards floated up away from me, scattering against the sky, as if the cracked and spidered edge of the world were just inches away. Shaking my head again, I snapped awake and tried to bend backward, but couldn’t. An inch away from my right eye was a huge jagged hunk of glass, pointed straight at me. The thick windshield had shattered on impact; the nose of the hover was half buried in the dirt and snow, and I hung from the pilot’s seat by the safety straps. The whole cabin smelled like blood, copper, and salt. Thin, bluish smoke wafted up toward me, stinging my eyes.

I turned my head, glass clinking down from hidden crannies, and there was the pilot himself, or at least half of him, lodged precariously between my seat and the floor. He stared up at me with wide-open eyes that were startlingly green-bright and clear. I grimaced at him by way of apology and started trying to free my arms, which were pinned at my sides by the tight straps. As I moved, glass shards sprayed down, a dry sound. I kept stealing glances at the blade of glass just in front of me. One sudden drop and I’d be one of those beggars on Broadway, begging for yen. Or dead.

I didn’t have time to be fancy, though; a hover crash was a noisy, messy thing, and the System Pigs were no doubt going to get around to it. And I didn’t know if Shockley and his pal were dead or maybe coming to, irritated and able to slap me around without moving a muscle. My people were probably on their way again, tracing my implant, but I couldn’t take the chance-I needed to get moving. Besides, once the fucking suits got you on their lists, they just kept coming at you, and I doubted it made any difference if they were cops or paper-pushers.

Everything hurt. I shut my eyes to get the distraction of the glass shard out of mind and concentrated on moving my arms. I had a little give, so I breathed out as hard as I could and strained my arm, my ribs creaking in outrage. Sweat popped out on my forehead and dripped down onto the control panel as I moved, finally popping free of the straps, my body dropping another inch in the process, the sharp point of the glass digging suddenly into my twitching eyelid.

I tasted blood in my mouth. I was fucking broken.

Keeping panic at bay with lies and cheap tricks, I turned my head, slicing a shallow gash into my eyelid, until the tip of the shard was planted against my temple. How this improved things escaped me. I opened my eyes, rolling them around spastically, blood dripping into my right one and making me wink madly. I flopped my arm around but couldn’t locate the fucking clip on the safety strap. I rolled my eyes again and reached up for the glass shard, smacking at it, but the fucking thing was like a cockroach: it’d survived its own personal nuclear holocaust and saw no reason to give up the ghost now. It was as though it was welded in place.

I rolled my eyes again, breath sawing wetly in and out of my nose. My eyes fell on the dull, bloody handle of my blade sticking stiffly out of the pilot’s neck. I reached out for it, my shoulder and elbow crackling as I stretched. My fingertips caressed the handle, so familiar, something I’d made in countless empty hours, standing in freezing shadows waiting for a mark, sitting in Pick’s drinking on credit, passing hours or days trapped in a Safe Room while the System Pigs scanned and rescanned and fucking rescanned outside. With a final painful stretch, the jagged glass cutting a shallow wound across my cheek, I managed to get my thumb and forefinger on it and slowly pull the blade from the pilot’s neck. Warm blood trickling down my face, I braced my feet against the control bank below me and manipulated the blade until it rested against the palm of my hand. I closed my eyes again, dragging air in through my clogged windpipe, and concentrated, trying to clear my mind, trying to find the edge of the strap by feel and then sawing at it, moving just my thumb and forefinger, tiny, purposeful movements.

Something above me started to groan and creak, a metallic sound. It wasn’t encouraging.

I was good at clearing my mind, I had a trick for it. I imagined a clear sky, perfectly gray and scummed with clouds. I imagined it as super quiet-the sort of moment right before the city wakes up, that tiny window when everyone seemed to be passed out or asleep or finally dead, and it’s just the wind and your own breathing and something clicking or whirring in the distance, hover displacement over Mogadishu, whatever. Nothing else could get in. Nothing else existed. It always worked, the sky eventually melting into a blank field, my hands and thoughts operating independently.

But now, trying to cut myself loose, I couldn’t clear my head. It was full of people I’d killed.

They paraded through me in an endless loop, including the four people scattered and torn up around me. I wasn’t completely sure that Shockley and his pal were dead, but it was a good bet, and if I hadn’t stepped behind them in a dark room and put a bullet in their ear for yen, I’d killed them just the same. I saw every person I’d ever killed for money, picturing them at the moment my contract had been fulfilled: blown pupils, jagged flaps of skin with bone and yellowish fat clinging to them, piss and shit, and hands stretched out, pleading, hanging upside down from a fire escape. And then I saw myself with a hunk of glass jutting out of one side of my head, hanging from a strap. And then the slide show started again.

With a jerk the blade sliced the safety strap, my legs took my weight, and I was free. I carefully moved until I was out of the shard’s path, and climbed down through the cockpit windshield, wriggling through glass and dirt up and out. Gasping, I crawled out of the shallow crater the hover had created and rolled onto my back, gasping, the snow burning my face. When I’d caught my breath, I sat up and looked around. I could see the city a few miles south of me, and on my right was the goddamn Hudson, flowing black and evil as always. Inwood, the desolate nothing north of Manhattan, had been part of the city before Unification and the Riots, but as far as I could remember it had been overgrown fields, broken pavement, and rubble. I struggled to my feet, head pounding with each movement. My arms were numb. After a moment, I found my cigarettes, crushed and damp, picked out the best of the bunch and lit it, sucking in harsh, tasteless smoke.

Coughing a glob of phlegm into the snow, I turned back to the hover. It was remarkably preserved, sticking up out of the ground in more or less one piece. The safety cage might even have saved everyone’s life if I hadn’t done my best to fuck them all up first. Flicking my cigarette away into the sloppy air, I climbed back up into the cockpit. Pushing the pilot’s torso out of the way and getting blood all over my hands, I searched the bank of instruments in front of me and located the beacon unit, beaming our location and status back home every half second or so. Pulling myself up by the safety straps dangling down from the rear of the cockpit, I balanced myself and aimed a solid kick at the beacon unit, smashing it with the steel tip of my boot and sending a spark and whiff of ozone into the air. No need to make it easier for more fucking psionics to come by and toss me around.

Still hanging, I turned my head and glanced up into the cabin. All I could see was blood, and one remarkably shiny shoe jutting up into the air.

Carefully I set my feet on the control panel and put my weight on them, letting go of the safety straps. I located the satellite feed and tuned it to the low-frequency bands we used, frequencies that the cops and the government had abandoned. They were monitored, of course, so we didn’t use them much and switched frequencies on an hourly basis. I searched my memory for the right frequency and dialed it up, getting the hollow sound of an open connection for my trouble.

“I need a ride,” I said, sounding flat and hollow to myself. The silence absorbed my voice as if it had never been there.

“Who this?”

I didn’t recognize the voice or its thick, muddy accent. “Where’s Gleason?”

“Who this?”

I cursed softly, closing my eyes and praying for inner peace. “This is your fucking boss. You want to keep eating solid foods, put Gleason on the damn wire.”

I waited. The hollow sound filled the cabin, which began to creak worryingly again. I started to get nervous; every moment I sat out here in the middle of goddamn nowhere was dangerous, and my people were usually too scared of me to jerk me off like this. Heads were going to have to roll, and the thought made me tired. I preferred to just coast on the stories of past atrocities.

The voice came back with a dry, shuffling sound. “Glee not here.”

I blinked. “Where the fuck is she?”

There was another pause. “Glee dead. She dead.”

I stared down at the console. For no apparent reason, the voice repeated itself. “She dead.”

I felt nothing. For a moment I just squatted there, the hollow sound of the open connection around me, static and someone breathing. Gleason had come into Pick’s just a kid, a fucking kid, and even as she developed into a dangerous woman I’d never stopped thinking of her as a kid. Dead. It was impossible.

My eyes watered and I clenched them shut. I would not cry. I saw her, twelve years old, caught red-handed with one grimy paw in my coat pocket. I’d lifted her up by the wrist until her round little face was level with mine.

“Ooh, you’re fucking scary,” she’d spat at me. “I’m terrified.”

And then she’d jammed a small sharp blade into my belly, an inch deep, her whole little body quivering with the effort. She let out a cute, tiny grunt. Her eyes had flashed up to mine, eager. Behind her, I remembered Belling bursting into laughter, roaring at me.

I’d pulled her close as hot blood dripped down my belly, and I remembered her face going from savage triumph to wide-eyed terror with comical speed.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” she sputtered. “I’m sorry!”

I remembered smiling. “You’re sorry your knife is too small,” I’d said, and she’d smiled back, her whole face transforming into something beautiful. And now she was gone. Opening my eyes, I silently added her to my total.

“Give me,” I said, clearing my throat, “give me Belling.”

There was another pause, the dim sound of voices conferring, and then: “He, too.”

I blinked. I had the sudden urge to tear the feed out of the console, to rip up my fingers as I destroyed the whole goddamn cockpit. It was fucking impossible. I’d seen them both hours ago. They’d been breathing, talking. It was fucking impossible. Then I remembered Gleason at the restaurant, pink and sweating, looking terrible.

“What?” I managed to say evenly, making fists.

“He, too,” the voice said. “He not here, the old man.”

I punched my hand into the console, shooting pain up my arm. Knuckles aching, I did it again, smashing shards of plastic into the air. Fucking Belling? Belling was immortal.

“What do you mean,” I gritted out, each word a separate effort, “he fucking not here?”

More conferring, and I wanted to reach through the feed and strangle whatever moron I had working for me. “Forget it,” I said. “Repeat what I’m about to say or I will make a fucking note of you and I guarantee you will regret it. I need-”

I paused and cocked my head. A shiver of anxiety rippled through me, and I reached out and disconnected the connection. In the silence, there was no mistaking it: hover displacement, getting nearer.

Cops, I thought. “Fuck me,” I muttered. “Looks like my ride is here.”