Racers of the Night: Science Fiction Stories by Brad R. Torgersen (25 page)

Putting on her helmet, she quick-cycled the bike’s primaries and was airborne in moments.

• • •

The hospital corridor was quiet. Word hadn’t gotten around yet from the department. All Camarro had to do was flash her badge at the door, and the two hospital guards keeping watch at the door let her in.

Maddox’s ICU suite was dark. Only the soft flashes of the med bed’s computer could be seen. She walked slowly, fists clenched as she approached the silhouette sitting propped up on pillows.

“Who’s there?” Maddox asked the blackness, his voice weak and raspy.

“Who do you think?”

“Christ … I guess you’ve come to finish the job. You didn’t have to kill Tee and Laura, you know.”

“I didn’t kill anybody, Jeff. And you know it.”

There was a spate of laughter, followed by coughing. The med bed’s signs fluctuated.

“Sure could have fooled me. I never took you for the jealous type, Cammy.”

“What did she say, Jeff?”

“Who?”

“The one who did this to you.”

“You mean you?”

“It wasn’t me, Jeff. I
swear
it. I hate you like I hate nobody else, but that was never a good enough reason for murder. I was hoping to put you away for the killings that have been happening on the Scene. I was sure it was you. Now, I’m guessing it was someone else. Someone who is using my identity.”

A soft, small light popped on over the med bed’s suspended IV rack.

Maddox looked old, and broken. A sad creature. His eyes were clear and unfogged by rec drugs, probably for the first time in years. He looked hard at Camarro as she stood at the foot of his bed, her riding leathers still dripping water from the trip across town in the misting rain.

“I thought you’d killed me,” he said softly. “The doc tells me if it wasn’t for my security people rushing in, I’d have been a corpse.”

“Jeff, if I wanted you dead, I’d do it right now. Please, listen carefully.
It wasn’t me.
Whoever did this to you, she’s behind the club murders, and she’s got my husband now. I need to find out what she told you.”

“I don’t know how you got past the gate without me being notified first. It was like you just appeared in the bedroom, out of the air. You … she … said that she was hungry for the old days. That she was sorry for what happened when you—she—Woke Up. She said she wanted to make it up to me. Well, Tee and Laura were game—they said they’d never had a simuman before—and we’d just thrown the blankets back on the master bed when she went berserk. Like the Tasmanian devil, whirling and lashing with fists and feet, too quick to see. Tee and Laura, they got it worst. She saved the last for me. I was crawling on the floor, begging, and all she did was smile.”

“She didn’t say anything more?”

“Just that it would soon be time to take things back to where they’d all started.”

“That’s what she said?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly the door to the ICU suite popped open, flooding light into the room. Camarro got a glimpse of a standard blue police uniform, and that was it for her. She’d been prepared since the moment she’d enter the suite. There were no exits anywhere, besides the windows. She hit the largest one going full speed, smashing through the double panes and falling two stories to the roof, where she landed, rolled, then got to her feet and sprinted across the roof, bits of glass flying off her back. She got to the roof’s edge and dropped another story onto the skybridge that connected the hospital’s south wing with the parking garage. She ran the length of the skybridge and jumped down onto the concrete of the garage’s top level, which was open to the sky. She arrived at her bike just as the elevator doors on the other side of the top level opened, spilling uniforms.

“Camarro! Stop!”

Al Guadron was in the lead, his legs and arms pumping.

Camarro slammed the ground wheels into effect, screeching across the concrete and headed straight for Al. He rolled out of her way, as did the other police with him, and she pulled back on the control bars and punched the bike into the sky.

A quick scan of the patrol wireless told Camarro all she needed to know. She was to be detained at first sight, with force if necessary. Martinez’s orders.

There would be no way of entering the traffic pattern now, not without her signature being relayed to the nearest patrol cruisers, which would swoop on her like hawks on a rabbit. She kept it at roughly rooftop-level, steering around the skyscrapers and scaring the crap out of people on the balconies as she soared past. It was totally illegal to be flying manual this fast while this low. But Camarro didn’t care. She’d deal with the fallout once she got Nate back.
If
she got Nate back.

She checked her navigation and aimed south, across the rumpled roofs of warehouses. In the distance she could see the giant hulks of the harbor cranes lining the shore of Elliot Bay.

An idea came to her mind.

Jinking due west, Camarro flew until she was out over the water. She quickly programmed in a series of commands to the bike’s auto-navigator, then slowed to a reasonable speed, stood up out of the saddle, and threw herself off.

The water of the bay was freezing when she hit.

Camarro kicked hard for the surface, breaking just in time to see her bike swerve around and punch off in a northwesterly direction.

The swim back to shore took minutes, the water filthy and oily.

When Camarro climbed out, she found she was just south of the old football and baseball stadiums.

Precisely where she needed to be.

• • •

The Spiked Collar was its usual chaotic self. Men and women dressed in various types and stages of bondage wear crowded the two bars, as well as the dance floor. The multi-tiered performance stages were lit brightly from above, club members mingling sexually with the paid staff actors as they cavorted through any number of sadomasochistic scenarios. Harsh, blaring music blasted from stacked speakers that guarded the corners, and nobody paid Camarro much mind as she slowly wove her way through the din, towards the stairs that lead up to the back hallway of dressing rooms.

It had been years since she’d worked the place. But it felt just like home. In the worst, most indescribably horrible way. Only thoughts of Nate kept Camarro moving forward, past the drunken, stoned, and otherwise altered patrons, some of whom actually recognized her and had to be politely—if firmly—declined.

She hit the stairs slowly, but purposefully, getting up to the second level and rounding into the dressing room corridor, seeking the very last door on the right.

If there had been any point in knocking, Camarro didn’t see it now. She worked the old-style brass knob, and walked in.

Nate’s eyes landed on her from where he lay hog-tied on the couch. He was naked, save for his boxer briefs, and his hands and feet appeared to be swollen and purple.

“You always did tie too tightly, Jaguar.”

“I think he likes it,” said Camarro’s twin as she emerged from the dressing room’s single, tiny bathroom. She had on riding leathers almost identical to the ones Camarro wore, though Camarro’s were soaked and discolored from her impromptu swim in the bay.

Jaguar’s hair had been changed to match Camarro’s too, though again Camarro’s drooped and ran wetly across her cheeks, the stench of the harbor beginning to fill the room.

“Oh my,” Jaguar commented, “what have you been doing?”

“Doesn’t matter. The police will be looking for me elsewhere. We can settle this here, alone. Undisturbed.”

“Perfect. Camarro, you haven’t lost your edge. Take your weapon out, remove the clip, and throw it to me.”

“One thing first. You let Nate go.”

“No.”

“Either he walks out of here, now, or I do.”

“If you turn around and leave, I’ll slit his throat.”

“If you slit his throat, I’ll kill us both. First you, then me.”

Jaguar seemed to consider, her hands on her exaggerated hips. She really did look like Camarro in that outfit and with that hair. There were so many twins, triplets, and quadruplets in the simuman universe. Batches and lots produced from the same manufacturing plants, differentiated only on the subtlest of levels. Post-Awakening, most of them worked hard to look and act and talk as differently from one another as they could. This was the first time Camarro could recall a simuman deliberately trying to play upon her similarity to a sister. What else had Jaguar been doing in Camarro’s guise, since Camarro’s departure from the Scene?

“Tell you what, Cam. You go take a shower, get that muck off you, and we’ll discuss it further.”

“Untie Nate first. He loses circulation in his hands and feet for too long, he might lose something.”

“I’ll
loosen
them.”

“Fair enough.”

Camarro watched as her twin went to the couch and gently re-did the knots on the ropes that kept Nate strung up. Sweat poured from his head, but he seemed visibly relieved, even if his eyes still showed immense anger, mixed with fear. A ball gag kept him from doing much more than grunting. Camarro ached; to see him humiliated in such a fashion. Deep inside she swore to herself that nobody would ever do anything like that to her husband ever again.

Camarro stepped past her twin to the bathroom, and drew the curtain, which Jaguar threw back.

“Uh-uh,” Jaguar said. “I get to watch. Wouldn’t want you pulling anything sneaky, would I? Your weapon.”

Camarro knew better than to test her twin. Jaguar appeared unarmed, but she had Camarro’s quickness and reflexes. She could break Nate’s neck in an instant if she were so inclined.

Camarro tendered her sidearm, sliding the clip from the handle as she did so. Then she took off her clothes, as Jaguar observed. Too closely, for Camarro’s taste.

“Stop that,” Camarro said.

“Stop what?”

“You know what. I left the Scene precisely to get away from being ogled like at.”

“This isn’t the Scene, Cam. This is you and me.”

Camarro stepped into the shower, again unable to draw the curtain because Jaguar wouldn’t let her.

“Do you remember how we used to perform together?” Jaguar asked.

“Of course I do,” Camarro said, hastily running shampoo through her hair.

“Don’t you ever miss it? Don’t you ever miss
me?”

“Not really. We were puppets, Jaguar. No control.”

“But we were lovers!”

“Love denotes emotion. There was no emotion in what we did, or how we did it. We were actors, playing our roles.”

Jaguar’s expression grew cross.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t feel anything, because I
know
you did, Cam.”

Camarro rinsed her hair and began soaping the scum off the rest of her body.

“Physically, yes. But inside … nothing.”

“Nothing? Absolutely nothing??”

“You’re saying it was different for you?”

“Yes! Of course it was different!”

Camarro stopped and stared at her twin. Was it possible? Camarro had been one of the first to Awaken. For her it had been a moment of pain and trauma. But that didn’t mean it was like that for all the simumans in the world. Perhaps the process had been gradual for Jaguar. Perhaps her awareness had crept upon her, like a rising tide, rather than hit her down the middle like a thunderbolt, as had happened in Camarro’s case.

“I’m sorry, Jag. I never knew.”

Jaguar was livid.

“That’s because you never took the time, after you Awoke. You ran away and left us—left me—behind like we never mattered. I kept waiting for you to come back and you never did. You never, ever did.”

Camarro rinsed her skin and stopped the shower, reaching out a hand for a robe, which Jaguar hesitantly provided.

“So how come you had to kill people over it,” Camarro finally asked.

Jaguar’s eyes went glassy, her thoughts obviously turned sharply inward.

“Because they were going to leave, too. Lotus and the others.”

“And the human victims?”

“Interlopers,” Jaguar said, almost spitting the word. “Wooing Lotus and Mustang and Mercedes, and some other people you never met. The humans would visit us at the clubs and buy private performances, during which they’d tell us they wanted to take us away from the Scene, help us have real lives. They told us they loved us.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Camarro said, drying her hair.

“It was a lie,” Jaguar said, ice in her voice.

“Nate and I aren’t a lie.”

Jaguar glared at Camarro, her hands clenched on the butt of Camarro’s sidearm.

“Now what,” Camarro asked, her arms spread wide in the narrow confines of the bathroom.

“Go back out to the dressing room,” Jaguar commanded.

Camarro did as she was told.

Nate was nowhere to be found, the rope that had kept his ankles joined to his wrists was unraveled and laying empty on the floor. The door to the dressing room hung slightly ajar.

Camarro had to resist the urge to whoop for joy.

Jaguar ran to the door and looked out, then spun and slammed the door shut, blocking Camarro’s escape.

“It doesn’t matter now,” Jaguar said, quickly putting the clip to Camarro’s sidearm back into the gun, then working the slide. She pointed the weapon at Camarro’s chest, where a direct hit would do the most damage. The skull was polycarbonate-plated, and would probably withstand having a railroad car run over it. But the fuel cells and other mechanometabolic processes were what could kill a simuman, if ever those processes were interrupted or destroyed.

“Your Nathan is out of the way, and now you can be mine again. Take off the robe.”

“Just tell me one more thing,” Camarro said, dropping the robe and standing bare and beautiful in the lights from the dressing room’s single vanity. “Why did you have to go after Jeff Maddox?”

“You were his favorite. I knew he’d tried to get you back before I could.”

“But I hate Maddox. He is detestable.”

“Don’t lie. I know you went to his house.”

“Because I thought he was doing what you’ve been doing for the past week.”

“It doesn’t matter, Cam. I’m not letting anyone else ever come between us again.”

Jaguar stepped across the room and stood close to Camarro, the gun barrel almost touching Camarro’s sternum between her large breasts. Jaguar reached a hand up and—just as she’d done at the Gilded Cage—ran a finger along Camarro’s jaw.