Dead Mann Walking (7 page)

It was pretty big, an L-shaped deal with a couch, a couple of beds, even some shelving with old photos. Ashby threw himself on the couch and bobbed his head. Boyle headed straight for a big drafting table set up against the wall. On it, I made out plans for the factory complex, full of notes in colored Magic Marker. Boyle wasn't just one of the smart ones—he was doing better than some livebloods.

I pulled out my recorder, thinking I'd make an entry, then forgot what I'd wanted to say. Wouldn't be the first time. Instead, I looked over Boyle's shoulder. Using thumb and forefinger, he peeled up the masking tape holding the paper.

Curiosity got the best of me. “Still got a lot of dexterity in those digits, too. Grave diggers' strike? Kept refrigerated until use?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “My IQ only dropped fifteen percent. I could work a real job if someone would hire me.”

Turgeon cleared his throat. “You won't have to work anymore, Mr. Boyle.”

Still peeling, Boyle asked, “How much are we talking?”

“Roughly? Forty million.”

“Whoa! Heh-heh!” Ashby said.

The kid was happy enough, but something about it bugged Boyle. “And not a penny for Marty and Cara?” Was he regretful? Certainly confused. “What could they have done?”

“I'm sure I don't know,” Turgeon said.

Boyle straightened, ready to go, then slumped into the chair in front of his drawing board and muttered, “Forty million.”

“Buy a fast-food place! Heh-heh!” Ashby said. “Lickin' Chicken! Merger Burger and Fries and Lies! Heh-heh.”

Turgeon blinked with every
heh
.

Frank was more contemplative. “I could open a home for chakz. Someplace safe.”

“If that's what you want, easily, Mr. Boyle,” Turgeon said. “My firm would be happy to help you manage your finances, as we did for your father.”

While Eggman yammered, I scanned the pictures. The glass was clear. He cleaned them regularly. There were a few self-portraits, no surprise, given the head shot Turgeon gave me. Others had him arm in arm with a slightly older, taller man, likely his significant other.

I thought maybe he kept Ashby around because he reminded him of an old lover, but the kid looked nothing like the man in the photo. Then I spotted a three-shot, both men along with a fair-haired cherub with an aquiline nose. Bingo. Boyle smiled in all the photos, but in the individual shots he had a practiced expression. Those with the older man put a real smile on his face. In the shots with the boy, his grin was widest. He looked really . . . happy. The boy was the one Ashby looked like, or would've if he was younger and still alive.

I tapped the frame. “Son?”

“Duncan. Adopted from Russia.”

“Can I ask . . . ?”

He rolled up the plans. “I came home one day and found Kendrick, my husband, beaten to death. We'd had some problems, fights that got physical. The police knew I had a temper. I was found guilty and put to death. Duncan was deported.”

“And some suppressed DNA test showed someone else was there?”

I don't know why I said it, but he gave me a look. “It wasn't suppressed. It was botched. My father had the samples retested, but it took a long time. The results came in after the execution. He tried to stop the RAR, but it was the law.”

“Huh.” Except for the choice in gender, Boyle's story sounded familiar. Not really unusual, though. Crimes of passion are big on the hit parade. What was weird was that Boyle, like me, wasn't guilty.

“They catch the real killer?”

He shook his head.

I didn't know if the story awoke any uncomfortable feelings for him, but I felt something. I don't know what, but it didn't feel good. Antsy about the similarity, maybe.

Boyle stood, rolled plans under his arm. “Let me give these to Thornell. He has to reposition the scouts.”

“They spotted us easily enough,” I said.

“In a Humvee with headlights,” he answered. “The hakkers have taken to walking their cycles in the last half mile. That way you can't hear them until it's too late.”

Turned out that was exactly what they did. Even rats learn how to run a maze.

We were halfway down the hall when a series of shrill whines made the stale air shiver. What nerves I had left vibrated in tune. The dead stumbled from their rooms, trembling.

Boyle barked orders. “Back inside. Stay quiet. Remember, this is the last place they'll come.”

The whining increased. The rats wanted cheese.

Boyle pointed at my flashlight. “Turn that damn thing off!”

I clicked the switch and we all stood there, wrapped in the dry, dusty dark. The whine grew denser, wilder, morphed into a whirring like a robot-locust plague. I could hear the loose dirt and rocks kicked up by their wheels.

Ashby said, “Heh-heh.” The others huddled around Boyle.

“They have to use the main road,” he whispered. “If there aren't too many, Thornell and the others will scare them off.”

Half a minute later, moans mingled with the whining. They'd met the fake ferals. If the plan worked, the swarm would turn tail and head home.

“Heh-heh.”

We heard a mash-up of engine revving, moans, crunches, and some inventive liveblood cursing, but the swarming sound never returned. They'd broken formation.

“Boyle?” I said. “Sounds to me like they're running everyone down one by one.”

“I know.”

“A couple of us might be able to make it to the Hummer.”

He clenched his teeth. “I can't leave everyone.”

“Don't go, Frank! Heh-heh.”

Not wanting anyone else to hear, I shifted nearer to Boyle and whispered, “You could do a lot of good with that money, but only if you stay in one piece.”

He exhaled, which, since he didn't need to breathe, meant he was thinking. I'll never know what he would have said next. Thick beams flooded the windows, lighting us all in an eerie blue-white. It matched everyone's skin except Turgeon's.

The lights spun this way and that as the bikers oriented themselves. The hall looked like a crazy discotheque, but instead of dancing, we all froze as only the dead can.

My flashlight had bounced back from the filthy glass, but their cycle high-beams were ten times brighter. There was hope, but not much. Even if they could see inside, we could be taken for trash. They might leave, move on to the factory.

Or . . . they
could
check in here first, for the hell of it.

I was praying for the first option when the glass doors swung open. But it wasn't the hakkers. It was Thornell. He stumbled in, carrying something thick, long, and dripping under his right arm.

Turned out it was his left arm.

Boyle rushed to his side. “What the hell happened?”

“Car wouldn't burn twice. Not enough light. They only saw a third of us, decided they could take us. They were right.”

The door was still open. No one followed Thornell in, but when the cycles passed again, their headlights came through unfiltered. Cradling his arm, Thornell dived for cover. Boyle pushed Ashby behind him.

“Heh-heh.”

“There a basement?” I asked.

Boyle shook his head. “Yeah, but it's a dead end. One way in, one way out. They come in, we're cornered.”

I tried counting the headlights and gave up at seven. “We're
already
cornered.”

Turgeon looked at me, eyes wide like he was ready to bawl. Instead he said, “Now?”

I nodded and he pulled out his gun. I pulled my own piece from my waistband. Some old cop instincts still intact, I crept across the reception area.

Moving up to one of the narrow windows, I took a look outside. It was real chiaroscuro, a play of dark and light. The dark part wasn't so bad, just a bunch of abstract silhouettes against a blasting sound track of horrid cries, screaming engines, and macho whoops. It was the light that got to me. Every now and then a cycle headlamp threw a neat circle on some chak, man or woman, their face twisted in agony as they watched some piece of their lifeless body hacked off.

And why? Because some demented, drunken child-kings thought they were fighting the good fight for truth, justice, and sick fucks everywhere.

I had the gun, sure, but if I shot one of those idiots, if I so much as clipped him,
I'd
be the one they tore up next. And it wouldn't just be the hakkers after me. If I got away from them, it'd be the cops, the army, all society. The next morning, the cable-TV pundits would be yakking about me, how I was the one who finally gave them the excuse they needed to round up and destroy every chak in the country.

There were screaming, buzzing engines, and moaning bodies everywhere. Like a camera flash, a headlight lit one of a dozen nightmare scenes. An old chak, cotton white hair where the skull wasn't exposed, knelt with his head down like he was praying. But he wasn't; he was staring at his two severed arms on the ground in front of him.

A liveblood, white safety helmet and brown outfit making him look like a plastic bald eagle, saw him. It all went to silhouette again, but I could still make out what happened. The liveblood braked, spun, and headed for the old chak. The LB's machete was out, aimed at the old man's neck. The chak didn't notice.

A pain bubbled in my gut. I knew it well. Utter helplessness. Utter helplessness with one difference: I had a gun.

Before I realized what I was doing, I'd aimed and pulled the trigger. My first shot cracked the window glass. The second entered the liveblood's head. As it snapped back, the rest of him followed, flying off his bike. Riderless, the rice grinder fell sideways, skidded, and stopped. Its spinning front wheel knocked one of the severed arms. It twirled like a bottle in an adolescent kissing game. When it stopped, the fingers pointed my way.

It was loud; it was dark. By rights, no one should have spotted me in that little narrow window. But hunting in a pack is an old, old instinct. Everyone has it, especially the ones who look stupid. It's like they give up on things like reason and individuality in exchange for group instinct. When one of their number falls, the whole pack senses it.

Out of nowhere, five, six of the dog-men zoomed up to the body. His fresh blood glistened in their headlights like liquid ruby.

“Shit! Cyrus!”

So he had a name. Good for him. Bad for me. One looked at the way the body had fallen, then snapped his snout toward my window.

I ducked, but not fast enough.

“There.”

The pack came toward me, toward all of us. I'd brought them. They burst through the entrance, rode into the lobby, popping wheelies, gunning engines, their machetes up and ready. And there wasn't any door I could slam, not even to keep them out of view for a while, just a solid concrete wall against my back.

W
hat's that Tom Waits song where everything's broken? Wasted and wounded? Can't remember. What came next was something like that, though, an apocalypse in a broken teacup. It wasn't important to the universe, or even the next town over, but it was intimate, and messy as hell.

Hakkers swarmed the space like rats entering a bakery, giddy from the smell of food, mad with hunger. A chain saw, teeth whirring, grunted in my direction. I stood there, dumb as a post. The blades made contact with the wall, inches from my head. Cold bits sprayed my face. Plaster or dried flesh—I didn't know which. I only knew I was glad it wasn't part of me.

I'd be next. No reason to think otherwise. So this was it, or as close to “it” as a chak gets. What do you do in that moment? Me, I closed my eyes. I pressed my hands into the wall behind me. I tried to focus on the concrete's feel against my palms and fingers. I tried to think about anything except what was right in front of me. Common sense tells you it's better not to be paying attention when they cut you up.

And they say if you really, really work at it, you can do that: slip out of your body, away from the here and now, especially if you're a chak, since you're half-gone to begin with. But instead of working with me, taking me to my happy place, or at least a cheap motel, my brain came up with something I probably read on a bubblegum wrapper:

Right. Fuck you, memory. Just fuck you.

No chain saw, though. A hand grabbed my shoulder. When it pulled, I followed, stumbling along. I kept my eyes shut until a low voice said, “Basement. It's all we've got.”

It was Boyle. Somehow he'd managed to keep his head, arms, and legs when all those about him were losing theirs. Did he serve in a war? He acted like he'd been trained, yanking me with one hand, pushing Ashby with the other. All I could think was that he was saving the wrong guy. He should've been helping Turgeon. He was the one who could get him the money. Not that I was planning to mention that.

Bit by bit we stumbled through the Mixmaster of a lobby. There was one thing in our favor: The hakkers, bless their tiny brains, were too stupid to get off their bikes. For every lug wrench swing or chain saw swipe, they spent twice the time repositioning their grinders, as if staying in the saddle were a rule of the game. That gave Boyle the time to steer us down the hallway.

Ashby moved like a pull toy with a broken axle. With every shove he'd take a few steps, slow, and then stop. As we neared the end of the hall, a steel fire door came into view. Boyle let go of me and gave Ashby a final push that sent him teetering along like a penguin.

“Run!” Boyle shouted at the kid's back.

Then he did something that made me think he wasn't so smart after all. He turned back toward the lobby.