Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (12 page)

Somehow, he didn’t think the Bone Grinder had ever lost any sleep, or had any trouble with mirrors. They’d called the man “the Monk” in those early days, before the Riots. He was dubbed “the Bone Grinder” afterwards. His name tag said “V. Caine,” and that was all anyone knew. It was his habits, of course, that earned him the tag “Monk” among the guard. Didn’t drink, didn’t fuck, as far as anybody knew, women or men. Always on time, precisely. Worked out regular, regular practice on the gun range, knew the regs book forward and backward. You’d think a guy like that would be a stickler for procedure, but he wasn’t. When the chief first assigned the Monk to be Lantz’s partner, Lantz had no idea just how far outside the rules the Monk was willing to go.

Lantz stood, sighed, and looked at Pauls. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

Outside the air was cooler, the late summer breezes coming in from the zones. It was late, only a few people left on the streets. As the two guardsmen walked slowly down the street, Pauls said, “I’m sorry, I shoulda thought of that. You didn’t want to talk about it in there.”

“
I ain’t exactly falling all over myself to talk about it anywhere, Jack,” said Quid. “But I figure you got a right to know.”

“
Okay,” was all Pauls said, letting Lantz find his way to the story in his own time. They walked in silence for a block or so.

“
You remember that guy, Amira?” Lantz said at last. “Worked for the Unions?”

“
Real heavy duty fighter, martial arts and all that? Used to bodyguard sometimes for that Union leader, what was his name, Kwant or something?”

“
That’s the one. You know the Monk was the one took him down?”

“
Yeah, I heard that. Shot resisting arrest, right?”

Lantz chuckled, but there was no humor in it. “Yeah, the Monk shot him. Eventually.

“
It was back about the time the Riots started. Amira had become a real pain in the ass, and the powers that be had decided to ‘bring him in for questioning.’ The Monk and me were assigned to it. Unofficially, we were told, it didn’t really matter what his condition was, even dead was okay, as long as we brought him in. At the time, I wondered if they meant they’d rather we brought in his corpse, but I was a guardsman, not an assassin, and besides, I figured the Monk would want to do it by the book, so I was looking at we were gonna bring him in alive, if we could. Messed up, maybe, but alive.

“
So we go down to the place we were told he was staying—a little transient hotel off Becker. Grungy little joint, dunno if the bell worked or not, but we didn’t bother trying, y’know? We just head in and up the stairs to the fifth floor, where Amira’s supposed to have a room.

“
Well, we get to the fifth floor, and somebody must have tipped him off, because guy’s coming out of his front door, a backpack over one shoulder. I’ve got my piece out, but the Monk still hasn’t touched his. Amira turns and sees us, he just drops the pack and stands there with this cocky smile on his face, and he goes, ‘What, only two of you? My reputation must be slipping.’

“
Now, here’s where it starts to get weird. The Monk, he takes off his gun belt and hands it to me, and I’m looking at him like, ‘What the fuck?’ and trying to keep one eye on Amira at the same time, and the Monk goes, ‘No. Only one of us.’

“
And then I get it—the Monk wants to go one-on-one with this guy. Amira’s got a rep as the most badass fighter the union guys have, and the Monk is gonna measure himself against him. Or that’s what I thought.

“‘
Hold your fire,’ the Monk tells me. ‘No matter what happens.’ Well, I nodded, but inside, I’m thinking, shit on that, if this thing goes bad, I’m gonna plug this union bastard. So I set down the Monk’s gun belt, but I keep my own piece out and ready.

“
They circled each other in that hallway for a minute, and then they went at it. Man, I tell you, I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I’m thinking, shit, this is like an exhibition fight people would pay big bucks to see, and it’s going on in this grungy little hallway with nobody watching but me. Up and down that little hall, with kicks and punches and head-butts, faster and harder than you’d believe, and moves I never seen before, on both of ’em.

“
But that part of the fight, it don’t last all that long. Pretty soon, the Monk gets in a kick to Amira’s knee, and I could hear the bones snap. Must’ve hurt like a sonofabitch, but Amira just grunts when he goes down, and he never loses his guard. He’s down there on one knee, skootching around to face the Monk as he circles him. I open my mouth—I’m gonna tell the Monk okay, man, he ain’t going anywhere on his own; you beat him, let’s take him in. But I seen the look on the Monk’s face, and I shut my mouth again. The Monk takes a couple more shots, which Amira manages to block, and then gets in a good kick to the head. Amira’s down, one hand and one knee, and the Monk stomps on that hand, all he can give it, and I hear more bones snapping and crunching.

“
This time I do speak up, and I go, ‘Okay, Caine. Enough, man. Let’s take him in.’

“
He looks up at me, and he don’t say a word, but I swear, the look in his eyes, he was ready to come after me, never mind I had a gun in my hand. So I shut up again. I go to turn away, ’cause whatever the Monk’s got in mind, I know I don’t want to see it, but then I realize, if I’m gonna stand by and do nothing, if I’m gonna let this happen, the least I can do is have the guts to watch this poor fucker’s last moments.

“
They were long last moments.

“
Y’know, we talk about somebody taking someone apart in a fight, but I don’t use that expression anymore, ’cause I’ve seen it done literally. The Monk must have broken every damn bone in Amira’s body, one by one, taking his time, letting the guy suffer. And Amira, he never makes a sound other than a grunt now and then, like he won’t give the Monk the satisfaction of hearing him scream.

“
Finally, when Amira’s nothing but a pile of ground meat, lying there in that hallway, the Monk walks over to me and picks up his belt. He buckles in, takes out his gun, and shouts, ‘City guard! Don’t try to run, or we’ll shoot!’

“
And then he shoots the guy.

“
To be honest, I don’t know if Amira was still alive or not. The Monk walks over, picks him up, and throws him out the fifth story window, right through the glass. He looks down there for a minute, and then turns to me, and says, ‘He shouldn’t have tried to run. Bad luck he was making for the window. Drop like that, he probably broke every bone in his body.’

“
Then he grins, and walks past me down the stairs.”

“
Holy fuck,” said Pauls. “That’s some cold shit.”

“
Yeah.”

“
And you stayed partners with this guy for how long after?”

“
Couple of months. Never saw him do anything like that again. Oh, he was pretty brutal in the Riots when they actually started, but no more than some of the other guys, at least not that I saw. Then come the fighting down by the power plant. Some of the union boys had guns, and I took a shot in the thigh. Laid me up for over a month. When I come out, the Monk had been assigned a new partner, and they put me with you.”

“
Right,” said Pauls. “By that time, they were calling Caine ‘Bone Grinder’ instead of ‘Monk.’”

“
Yeah. I dunno how he came by that tag, but I can guess.”

The two walked another block in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts.

“
When Grinder disappeared after the Riots,” Pauls said at last, “I never did get the whole story on that. You figure some of the unionists got him, or maybe some of Amira’s friends or family?”

Lantz shook his head. “Nah. Take more than an angry crowd of unios to take that bastard down. My guess, he figured even Jaworski had limits, and he couldn’t get away with shit like that forever. I think he blew town, maybe out to the zones, where there ain’t any law to speak of. Long as the Railwalkers didn’t catch up with him, he could do whatever the fuck he wanted out there.”

They stopped walking and stood in silence for a moment. Finally, Pauls asked, “Are you drunk?” They had been drinking long and hard that night, neither of them walking an even keel when they left the bar, but both stood steady and straight now.

“
No,” said Lantz.

“
Me neither,” said Pauls. “What do you say we do something about that?”

Lantz nodded, and the two guardsmen began to walk toward a smear of neon that could be seen down the street.

12. WOLF

One of Morgan’s talents is she’s what they call a “comber.” She hooks up to the net and searches. She’s got several programs she sets up with different search parameters. Sets them searching, and sits there watching the screen. There are four windows open on screen, with text and pictures flashing by faster than you or I could take them in. But Morgan’s in this sort of fugue state, where she’ll pick up on relevant items out of the thousands flashing by on the screen. While the programs refine their results, Morgan’s refining them, too, and the combination of their results is winnowed through again. She finds some amazing stuff this way.

This morning Morgan would be doing her combing thing on the victims. With so many, it could take a while. Rok and I decided to head out. We were pretty useless while Morgan was doing her thing, and we wanted to look into what had happened with Andrew Foreman. We were going on the theory that the Beast had snuck into the CA Tower disguised as the janitor, and the hit-and-run accident that had put the real janitor in the emergency room seemed a little too convenient.

We stopped at the main desk. Pappas, the older sergeant who’d painted the watercolor we saw in the wardroom, was on duty. He was a small, thin guy with a large head and a lined face, who smiled easily and pleasantly. I asked him about the vehicle in the hit-and-run.

“
Have to query Traffic for that,” he said, and held up a palm. “Don’t worry, I’ll get it for you.” He tapped at the keyboard of his desk unit, peered at the screen. “They nailed the vehicle. Fifteen year-old Quantum Roller. Registered to a Jemison Farris, 348 C Street. Owner claims the vehicle was stolen, but he didn’t bother to report it. He does have an alibi: he was at work. His boss and the time clock both vouch for him.”

“
Thanks, Pappas.”

“
Hey... you guys going down there? To see Farris?” I nodded. “That’s Alphabet City—Mutant Central. Watch your backs down there.”

We said we would.

We set out on foot. It was a longish hike from One City Plaza out to Alphabet City, but we both wanted to get more of a feel for the city than we were getting while holed up in the tower, or being ferried to incident sites in guard vehicles. Around the Bay City area it generally stays pretty warm for a month or so after Summersend, but today it seemed like Old Man Autumn wanted to give us a little preview. As we walked up Third Avenue, the sunlight was pale, if bright. The slanting light turned the buildings on one side nearly white, while the buildings on the opposite side cast bluish shadows halfway across the street. I noticed people were tending to walk on the sunny side. It wasn’t actually cold, but the shadows held a cool nip that folks weren’t acclimated to yet.

Before too long the buildings were getting shorter, and there were fewer granite, concrete, and plasteel structures, and more brick and adobe. At 35th Street we crossed a wide, open plaza with a farmer’s market, filled mostly with Oriental and Latino faces, where women in black carrying string bags weighed and judged tomatoes, corn, rice and beans, while kids ran or skateboarded between the stalls.

Within a few more blocks we were entering the ghetto.

Every city has its ghettos. Historians tell us that before the Crash the country attracted millions of immigrants, and it was usually the most recent immigrants who occupied the ghettos, while the previous inhabitants of the bottom rung moved up one social station, from abject poverty to merely poor. Irish were replaced by Eastern Europeans, who were replaced by Italians, and then Orientals. Africans, of course, were being brought over as slaves during a lot of that time, but really only entered the social structure as though they were immigrants after the Freedom War. And so the cycle went, from the Founding Times until the Crash. There aren’t nearly as many immigrants anymore, so ghettos since the Crash have been made up of a haphazard cross-section of groups, depending on the location. In San Angelo it’s mostly whites. Santa Brita’s ghettos are Chinese and Russian. In Gatesville, where the ruling classes are mainly Indian and Chinese, it’s mostly Latinos and black, with a scattering of whites. Places like Bay City, which allowed mutants in, usually had a mutant ghetto.

As we drew further into Alphabetland runabout traffic slowed, then ceased. There were fewer wreaths, corn dollies, and other seasonal decorations, too. Less of a sense of celebration. Foot traffic thinned out until, as we approached Avenue C, there was only a group of five walking a block behind us. We unbuttoned our tunics for easy access to our guns. Rok muttered, “Next corner,” and I nodded.