Nemesis Games

Chapter Thirty-eight: Amos

Ash sifted down, coating everything with a few millimeters of gray. Everything stank of it. They got off the road to let relief convoys go by twice, and then once when an old electric service truck whined by, its bed filled with six or seven huddled figures. They slept when it got too dark to see, hauling the bikes into the bushes or alleys. The dead guy’s emergency rations tasted like crap, but they didn’t seem to be toxic.

After four days, the plants along the roadside started showing signs of dying: green leaves turning brown and curving toward the earth. The birds, on the other hand, were going crazy. They filled the air with chirps and trills and songs. It was probably sparrow for Holy shit, what’s going on, we’re all gonna die, but it sounded pretty. Amos tried to keep clear of the bigger cities, but there wasn’t a lot of space left in that part of the world that wasn’t paved.

Passing through Harrisonburg they were followed by a dozen dogs for about ten kilometers, the pack building up its nerve to attack. He let Peaches go ahead for that part, but it never got serious enough to make him spend bullets. When they started getting in toward Baltimore, there stopped being a way to keep clear of people.

They were still about a day from the arcology, and the smell of the world had changed to salt water and rot, when they ran into the other crew. They were moving down a commercial street, the bikes making their soft chain-hiss, and he caught sight of the others in the gloom, heading toward them. Amos slowed down, but didn’t stop. Peaches matched him. From the smear of light in the east, he guessed it was about ten in the morning, but the darkness still made it hard to be sure how many of them there were. Four he could see for sure. Maybe more trailing a little way behind. Hard to say.

They were smeared with ash, the same as everything. If they had weapons, Amos didn’t see them. Handguns, maybe. So he had them for range if he wanted to start shooting. They were walking, so outrunning them was also an option, if it came to that. Thing was, Peaches didn’t look like anywhere near the threat she was, and pretty much everyone was going to be going off appearances. It was that kind of misunderstanding that got people killed.

The other group slowed down, but didn’t stop. Wary, but not disinterested. Amos stood up on his pedals.

“Peaches? How’s about you hang back a little.”

“Draw down on them?”

“Nah. Let’s be neighbors first.”

Her bike slowed and fell behind. Ahead on the street, the others made their own calculations and came to a different conclusion. All four stepped out toward Amos together, chins raised in a diffident greeting. No trouble unless there’s trouble. Amos smiled amiably, and it occurred to him this was exactly the kind of situation that had taught him how to smile like that.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” One of the four stepped closer. He was older. He moved gracefully, center of gravity low. Maybe a veteran. Maybe just someone who’d boxed some. Amos pointed his smile at the guy, then the other three. Tension crept up the back of his neck and into his shoulders. He breathed through it, forcing himself to relax. “Coming from Baltimore?”

“Monkton,” the fighter said.

“Yeah? Towers or the flats?”

The fighter’s mouth twitched into a little smile. “Z tower,” he said.

“Zadislaw,” Amos said. “Had a friend lived there once. Long time ago. How is it up there?”

“It’s ten thousand people in a box with no food and not much water.”

“Not so great, then.”

“Power supply’s all fucked up. And Baltimore’s worse. No offense meant, but I’d say you’re heading the wrong way.” The fighter licked his lips. “Nice bikes.”

“They do what we need ’em to,” Amos agreed. “Only gets worse south of here. We’re walking away from the strike.”

“Keep going south, though, it gets warm again. That’s where we’re headed. Baja complex.”

One of the others cleared her throat. “I’ve got a cousin down there.”

Amos whistled between his teeth. “That’s a hell of a walk you got there.”

“Walk there or freeze here,” the fighter said. “You and your friend there ought to come with us.”

“I appreciate the invite, but we’ve got people we’re meeting up with in Baltimore.”

“You sure about that?”

“It’s more like a working hypothesis, but it’s the plan for now.”

The fighter’s gaze flickered down to the bike again, then up to Amos’ face. The man studiously avoided looking at the rifle hanging on Amos’ back. He waited to see which way they were going. The other man nodded.

“Well, good luck to you. We’re all going to need it.”

“That’s truth,” Amos said. “Tell Baja hi for me when you get there.”

“Will.”

The fighter started off down the street, the others with him. Amos loosened the strap that held the rifle, but he didn’t draw the weapon. The four walkers moved down the ash-gray road. Peaches rode up, passing them. The last in their formation turned to watch her pass, but no one made a move.

“Everything all right?” she asked.

“Sure,” Amos said. The shadows of the other crew faded into the gloom.

“Talked them out of any unpleasant actions?”

“Me? Nope. They did most of that themselves. Best defense we’ve got right now is everyone’s in the habit of not killing each other and taking their shit. Pretty soon, people are just going to start assuming anyone they don’t know is out to slit their throats. If they’re lucky.”

She looked at him. Her face was smooth, her eyes intelligent and hard. “You don’t sound upset at the prospect.”

“I’m comfortable with it.”

With every kilometer traveled they came closer to the sea and the stink of rot and salt grew worse. They hit the high-water mark: the place where the charge of the floodwaters had broken. The line of debris was so clear and distinct it looked deliberate. A short wall made of wreckage and mortared with mud. Once they passed it, the ash was thick with mud and the roads were covered in broken wood and construction plastic, ruined clothes and waterlogged furniture, blackened plants killed by darkness and ash and salt water. And the bodies of dead people and animals that no one was going to bother cleaning up. The bikes threw up gobbets of the muddy road and they had to push harder, bearing down with all their weight, to keep the wheels spinning.

When they were still about twenty klicks from the arcology, Amos ran into a pit filled with water and covered over with a scum of ash. It bent the bicycle’s front rim. He left it where it lay, and Peaches dropped hers beside it.

He was aware of voices around him. Every step of the way, they were being watched. But between having rifles and not seeming to have anything much else, no one tried to stop them. All around, the ground floors of the buildings were gutted, walls cracked by the pitiless water, and the contents of the stores and apartments and offices puked out into the streets. Some places, the second story was just as bad; some places it was better. Above that, the city seemed almost untouched. Amos kept imagining the place like it was a healthy-looking guy with exposed bone and gangrene from the ankle down.

“Something funny?” Peaches asked.

“Nope,” Amos said. “I was just thinking.”

The arcology was no different. It loomed up among the ruins, towering over the debris-choked streets now the way it had over the maintained streets before. The reactor that powered the vast building seemed to still be running, because lights glowed in half of the windows. If he just put his hand over the bottom layer, Amos could almost pretend the ash was snow, and all this was nothing more than the worst Christmas in history.

They trudged into the lowest level. Icy mud stuck his pants to his skin up to the knee. Glass pipes and footprints showed where people had been but there was no one standing guard. At least no one they saw.

“What if your friend’s not here?” Peaches asked as Amos poked at the elevator’s call button.

“Then we think of something else.”

“Any idea what?”

“Still nope.”

He was more than half-surprised when the elevator doors opened. Flood damage could have ruined the mechanism. Of course it could also get stuck halfway up, and they could die in it. When he selected the club level, the screen clicked to life. A broad-faced woman with a scar across her upper lip sneered out at him.

“The fuck you want?”

“Amos. Friend of Erich’s.”

“We got no fucking handouts.”

“Not looking for any,” Amos said. “Want to talk about a job.”

“No jobs either.”

Amos smiled. “You new at this, Butch? I have a job. I’m here to see if Erich wants in. This is the part where you go tell him there’s some psycho in the elevator wants to talk with him, then he says who is it, and you say the guy calls himself Amos, and Erich tries not to look surprised and tells you to let me up and—”

“For fuck’s sake!” Erich’s voice was distant, but recognizable. “Let him up, or he’ll talk all day.”

Butch scowled into the screen and blinked out to the blue arcology menu system. But the car started up.

“Good news is he’s here,” Amos said.

Erich’s office looked the same as the last time Amos had been in it—the same wall screen showing the same ocean view, the rubber ball instead of a chair, the desk encrusted with decks and monitors. Even Erich didn’t look different. Maybe better dressed, even. It was the context that changed it all. The screen showed an ocean of gray and white, and Erich’s clothes looked like a costume.

Butch and the four other heavily armed thugs with professional trigger discipline who’d escorted them from the elevator walked out, closing the door behind them. Erich waited until they’d gone before he spoke, but the tiny fist of his bad arm was opening and closing the way it did when he was nervous.

“Well. Amos. You’re looking more alive than I’d expected.”

“Not looking too dead yourself.”

“As I recall the way we left it, you weren’t ever coming back to my city. Open season, I called it.”

“Wait a second,” Peaches said. “He said if you came back here, he’d kill you?”

“Nah,” Amos said. “He broadly implied that one of his employees would kill me.”

Peaches hoisted an eyebrow. “Yeah, because that’s different.”

“If this is about the old man, I haven’t checked to see if he made it or not. Deal was he kept the house, and I did that. More than that, and I’ve got other problems.”

“And I got no trouble to cause,” Amos said. “I figured things had changed enough maybe the old rules weren’t a great fit for the new situation.”

Erich walked over to the wall screen, limping. A few seagulls circled, black against the colorless sky. From the last time he’d been there, Amos knew the buildings that should have provided a foreground. Most of them were still in place close in. Out toward the shoreline, things were shorter now.

“I was right here when it happened,” Erich said. “It wasn’t a wave like a wave, you know? Like a surfer wave? It was just the whole fucking ocean humping up and crawling onto shore. There’s whole neighborhoods I used to run just aren’t there now.”

“I didn’t see anything happen,” Amos said. “The newsfeeds and the mess after were bad enough.”

“Where were you?”

“Bethlehem,” Peaches said.

Erich turned back to them. There was no anger in his face, or fear, or even wariness. That was good. “So you’re headed south, then? How bad is it up there?”

“Not that Bethlehem,” Amos said. “The one in the Carolina admin district.”

“Where the Pit is,” Peaches said, raising her hand like a kid in a classroom. Then a second later, “Was.”

Erich blinked and leaned against his desk. “Where the third strike hit?”

“Close to there, yeah,” Amos said. “Lost that tequila you gave me with the hotel, so that sucked.”

“All right. How are you still alive?”

“Practice,” Amos said cheerfully. “Here’s the thing, though. I’ve got a job. Well, Peaches has a job, and I’m in. Could use some help.”

“What kind of job?” Erich asked. A sharpness and focus came into his voice, talking business. It was like watching someone wake up. Amos turned to Peaches and waved her on. She hugged stick-thin arms around her torso.

“Do you know Lake Winnipesaukee?”

Erich frowned and nodded at the same time. “The fake lake?”

“Reconstituted, yeah,” she said. “There’s an enclave on Rattlesnake Island. The whole place is walled. Independent security force. Maybe fifty estates.”

“I’m listening,” Erich said.

“They have a private launchpad built out onto the lake. The whole point of the place is that you can drop there suborbital or down from Luna or the Lagrange stations, and be walking distance from home. Everyone there has a hangar. Probably nothing with an Epstein, but something that could get us to Luna. Going through the road, you couldn’t get past the checkpoints, but there’s a way in from the water. The boathouse locks are compromised. Put in the right code, and they pop open even if the security chip’s not in range.”

“Which you know how?” Erich said.

“I used to summer there. It’s how we got in and out when we went slumming.”

Erich looked at Peaches like he wasn’t sure how she’d gotten in the room. His laugh was short and hard, but it wasn’t a no. Amos picked up the pitch. “Idea is we get in, grab a ship, and head for Luna.”

Erich sat down on the ball, his legs wide, and rolled a few centimeters back and forth, his eyes half-closed. “So what’s the score?”

“The score?” Peaches asked.

“What are we taking? Where does the money come in?”

“There isn’t any,” Peaches said.

“Then what do I get out of it?”

“You get out of here,” Amos said. “Place was kind of a shithole before someone dropped the Atlantic on it. It’s not getting better.”

Erich’s wasted, tiny left arm squeezed tight to his body. “Let me get this straight. You’ve got a score where I go seven, maybe eight hundred kilometers, sneak past some private mercenary death squad, boost a ship, and the payoff is that I get to leave everyone and everything I’ve got here? What’s next? Russian roulette where if I win, I get to keep the bullet?” His voice was high and tight. He bit the words as he spoke them. “This is my city. This is my place. I carved my life out of the fucking skin of Baltimore, and I spent a lot doing it. A lot. Now I’m supposed to put my tail between my legs and run away because some Belter fuckwit decided to prove he’s got a tiny little dick and his mama didn’t hug him enough when he was a kid? Fuck that! You hear me, Timmy? Fuck that!”

Amos looked at his hands and tried to think what to do next. His first impulse was to laugh at Erich’s maudlin bullshit, but he was pretty sure that wasn’t going to be a good idea. He tried to think what Naomi would have said, but before he came up with anything good, Peaches stepped toward Erich, her arms out to him like she was going to give him a hug.

“I know,” she said, her voice choked with some emotion Amos didn’t place.

“You know? What the fuck do you know?”

“What it’s like to lose everything. How hard it is, because you keep thinking it can’t really be gone. That there’s a way to get it back. Or maybe if you just act like you still have it, you won’t notice it’s gone.”

Erich’s face froze. His bad hand opened and closed so fast, it looked like he was trying to snap the tiny pink fingers. “I don’t know what you’re talking—”

“There was this woman I knew when I went in. She killed her children. Five of them, all dead. She knew it, but she talked about them all like they were still alive. Like when she got up tomorrow, they’d be there. I thought she was a lunatic, and I guess I let that show, because she stopped me one day at the cafeteria and said, ‘I know they’re dead. But I know I’m dead too. You’re the only bitch here thinks she’s still alive.’ And as soon as she said that, I knew exactly what she meant.”

To Amos’ astonishment, Erich started to weep and then blubber. He fell into Peaches’ open arms, wrapping his good arm around her and crying into her shoulder. She stroked his hair and murmured something to him that could have been I know, I know. Or maybe something else. So clearly something sweet and touching had just happened, even if he wasn’t clear what the fuck it was. Amos shifted from one foot to the other and waited. Erich’s wracking sobs grew more violent and then started to calm. It must have been fifteen minutes before the man pulled himself out of Peaches’ embrace, limped to his desk, and found some tissue to blow his nose.

“I grew up here,” he said, his voice shaking. “Everything I’ve ever done—every meal I ever ate, every toilet I ever pissed in, every girl I ever rolled around with? It’s all been inside the 695.” For a second, it looked like he was going to cry again. “I’ve seen things come and go. I’ve seen shit times turn into normal and turn back to shit, and keep telling myself this is like that. It’s just the churn. But it’s not, is it?”

“No,” Peaches said. “It isn’t. This is something new.”

Erich turned back to the screen, touching it with the fingertips of his good hand. “That’s my city out there. It’s a mean, shitty place, and it’ll break anyone who pretends different. But… but it’s gone, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” Peaches said. “But starting over’s not always bad. Even the way I did it had some light in it. And what you’ve got is better than what I had.”

Erich bowed his head. His sigh sounded like something bigger than him being released. Peaches took his good hand in both of hers and the two of them were silent for a long moment.

Amos cleared his throat. “So. That means you’re in, right?”