The Clone Apocalypse (13 page)

The U.A. MPs must have known that several people had run down this street and that there’d been shooting. They could see the crowd around me, but the farther we ran, the more the herd thinned. A couple of men slowed to a stop ahead of me. I streaked past them. One of them yelled, “Hey.”

That short spook, the one I was chasing, slid as he tried to round another corner. He might have been fifty feet ahead of me, but I was gaining quickly. I heard shouting behind me. Somebody had finally noticed us running from the scene.

Damn, I wished Freeman had come.

The guy made a sharp turn and started up an alley. That turn helped me more than him. Anything that got me off the street was fine by me.

Not much light in that alley. I heard him stumbling over trash or boxes; it could have been a cat for all I knew. I followed, hitting debris and rolling my ankle, but not injuring myself. No sprain, no break, I kept running. He reached a door, wasted a second opening it, and darted through. I followed. It didn’t matter if the building was filled with convalescing patriarchs or armed assassins. I no longer cared. I kicked the door open and ducked to one side. One gun fired at me, and it belonged to my rabbit. He fired three shots into the stone wall on the other side of the alley. Fired in an enclosed hall, those shots sounded as loud as howitzer shells.

I had an M27 and the beginnings of a combat reflex; you better believe I wanted to shoot the bastard. I wanted to dive in low, firing as I leaped. I hoped his friends would come to join him.

I had learned to control my combat reflexes more or less. I drew a steady stream of oxygen in through my nose, spooled the air in my lungs, and exhaled through my mouth. I counted moments and listened to the beat of my heart.
You need him alive,
I told myself.
You need him alive.

I grabbed the lid from a nearby trash can, clapped it against the door to make a loud noise, then flicked it out, holding it vertically so that he would see the circle instead of the edge. The bastard shot two holes in it and ran.

I heard his footsteps on the tile floor and followed.

The shooting attracted attention inside the building. People stepped out of doorways. Had this been a military barracks, they would have come with guns, but these were locals. They liked the Unifieds more than us clones, but not enough to shoot at me.

Seeing me run past his door, one old man yelled, “Who is he?”

I almost yelled, “War criminal.” Instead, I sprinted ahead without speaking a word.

You can shoot him in the leg,
I told myself. Maybe not the thigh. Hit the wrong part of a man’s thigh, and he’ll bleed to death in a matter of minutes. That was the inner, upper thigh. You’d never hit it if you were aiming for it, not on a running man. I needed the bastard alive, and I wasn’t aiming for it, which meant he might spin or trip as I shot.

I couldn’t take the risk.

He spun and shot at me. We were still in the hundred-foot hall of a small apartment building. The lighting was low, restaurant bright, not office bright. There might have been twenty apartment doors between him and me, some had opened, but when most people saw guns, they closed their doors and hid.

With my combat reflex now in full gear, I saw the world around me so clearly that it seemed to move in slow motion. I saw the bastard plant his right foot, spotted the twitch of his shoulder, and watched as his left shoulder swiveled back. The gun was in his right hand; eons passed as the muzzle lifted and pointed in my direction.

Can’t risk killing him,
I thought.

He was still aiming wide when the combat reflex got the better of me and I shot at his planted right foot. Good thing I had an M27 instead of a Weinstein; my first shot hit his ankle. The bullet flattened when it hit bone and just about disintegrated everything after that. The guy screamed and dropped, his momentum spinning him around as he hit the floor.

What a quandary I caused for the people living in these apartments. We were both dressed like civilians, both young, and both armed. They hadn’t seen the Nader or the Weinstein pistol, and my clothes were as clean as his . . . cleaner, my pants didn’t have blood all over them. I might have been the cop and he could have been the criminal for all they knew.

The innocent bystanders had no one to phone for help. Since Unifieds had taken over the neighborhood, they couldn’t call for the regular police, and the U.A.P.D. didn’t exist. That’s what happens when neighborhoods turn into war zones. It isn’t fair. War isn’t fair.

SEVENTEEN

I had caught myself a U.A. intelligence man of some sort. I had no idea what role he played in their organization. I had shot him to stop him from running, but my bullet did a lot more than hobble him; it left the bastard screaming on the ground, his foot attached only by a few thin strips of skin and muscle.

My M27 pointed at his face, I said, “We can take this game in two directions. Either you tell me what I want to know, or I stick my finger up into your ankle and start playing with nerve endings.”

Someone yelled, “Hey! What happened here?” I looked up to see two soldiers at the other end of the hall. Good thing I had ditched the Weinstein. Hitting them at a hundred feet with my M27 came as second nature.

Muffled screams came from behind the nearest doors. I scared these people, but that didn’t matter to me. By this time, my reflex had hit full stride. Doing violence provided me with a sense of serenity. Compassion was not even an afterthought.

The U.A. spy looked at his ankle and sobbed. He had no fight in him. If he’d held on to his gun, he wouldn’t have had the will to shoot me or himself. He sobbed like a little child, rocking back and forth, chanting words that came out in an incoherent wail.

Remaining cold and calm, I said, “You’re going to take me to your headquarters.”

“Get specked! Get specked! Get specked! Get specked!” he screeched, huffing and puffing and hyperventilating between words as his voice became shriller.

I said, “Wrong answer,” and pulled him toward me by his nearly missing foot.

What a noise he made. I regretted that move even before I released him. The guy wailed like a sidewalk siren. It was deafening. His shrieks echoed through the halls. Anyone in the alley would have heard him; he was louder than the gunshots.

“Where are your headquarters?” I repeated.

“Don’t, don’t, don’t,” he sobbed. “You specking bastard. You bastard . . .”

I made a theatrical grab for his leg, and he flinched, but he didn’t talk, so I flipped him on his stomach and searched him for knives and guns and garrotes. I’d have to carry him to a car if I wanted his help, and I didn’t want him slicing my neck or back. Seeing the amount of blood he’d lost, I removed my belt and cinched it around his calf. As I prepared to tighten it, I said, “This is going to hurt,” then I yanked the belt tight, tied the slack into a knot, and twisted that knot so tight that it stanched the flow of blood.

He, of course, narrated the entire operation by screaming in my ear.

I took the sorry bastard by the jacket and slung him over my shoulder like a man carrying a gunny sack. As I walked toward the door, I growled, “You lost a foot so far. How much more do you want to lose?”

He only sobbed.

Was I willing to torture him? Under normal circumstances, I rejected torture as an option. Even with the hormones running through me, I knew the difference between hurting people and torturing them. Normal circumstances didn’t include my entire nation dying from a manmade flu over the next few days.

I thought about signaling for MacAvoy and my Marines to begin their invasion but decided against it. Not yet. I didn’t have the lab. I had a spy, but I got the feeling I’d rendered him worthless.

We got to the front door of the building. Three soldiers stood by on the street by a car they had commandeered. In the daylight, they might have recognized me as a clone, but the light was to my back. They saw my profile, my height, my camouflage. I shot them before they reached for their guns.

“Lucky you, we have a car,” I said. I opened the passenger door and flipped him in. He fetched his skull a hard lick against the roof, but he was already in shock and might not have felt it.

I drove a few blocks away, found an empty curb on a mostly dark street, and parked. I looked at my victim and saw that he had gone comatose. “You don’t get to sleep through this, pal,” I said, and slapped him. His head lolled back and forth, and he stared at me.

I said, “Don’t you make me work your leg. Don’t you do it. I’ll stick my finger right up that wound if I need to.” Even then, even with the combat reflex pumping adrenaline and testosterone into my blood to provoke me, I knew I had already crossed a line with that bastard. I’d cross another if I had to, but I didn’t want to.

I grabbed his chin, pointed his face at mine, and yelled, “Listen to me! You listen to me! I am going to fill your life with pain in another moment.

“Where is your headquarters?”

“No headquarters,” he stammered.

“No headquarters?” I yelled. “Bullshit. Bull specking shit! Where’s your lab?”

Still sounding like he was in an eerily dreamy state, he said, “No lab.”

“There has to be a headquarters! There has to be a lab!” I slammed my fist into the dashboard of the car, and muttered, “How the speck did Sunny get that shit?”

He seemed to wake out of his stupor. He moaned. Buried in that moan, he repeated the name, “Sunny.”

She wouldn’t have cooked it up herself,
I thought.
She’d have needed scientists and the equipment.
Developing a strain of the flu, a modified virus that would affect an entire population, something like that would require an enormous facility. They couldn’t have set up a facility like that in some random suburb.

There are a lot of schools and hospitals and research centers around the capital,
I reminded myself. They wouldn’t have started from scratch. The Unified Authority probably had a lab in space or maybe on Terraneau. They would have developed the strain there and shipped it to Earth.

Sitting beside me, the pathetic shell of the man slipped in and out of delirium. He sat slumped in his car seat, so limp he could have passed as an invertebrate, and babbled. “Sunny . . . Sunny,” and he giggled and sobbed. “Sunny . . . Allison . . . she did it.”

“Did what?” I asked. “Who is Allison?”

“That’s why you came.” He laughed. The dying bastard smiled and laughed and groaned. His teeth chattered. He said, “She killed you.”

I said, “Do I look dead?”

“But that’s why you’re here. She did it.”

I didn’t like what he was saying; it sounded too specking close to the truth. I asked, “How do you know Sunny?”

He said, “I know Allison. She said you’d all be dead by now.”

“Who is Allison?” Realizing that he was trying to tell me something, I asked the question gently.

He must have bitten his lip involuntarily; he had bloodstains on his teeth. He said, “Captain Ewan said she killed you. You’re Harris. You’re the Liberator. You’re Harris.”

“Where is Sunny?”

He laughed this dreamy, lazy giggle and seemed to fall asleep. I shook him, slapped him, started to grab for his ankle. He moved a hand to stop me, but he was weak, and I batted it out of my way.

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

I laid two fingers on the outside of the ankle. I didn’t press them into the wound. I didn’t squeeze. He needed to know that I could hurt him, and there was nothing he could do about it. “How do you know Sunny?”

“. . . know Allison Ewan . . . my boss,” he shouted.

“Your boss,” I repeated.

“Intelligence,” he said, rushing the words as if handing me a bribe.

Not everyone in intelligence is a spy. Spies gathered the data that intelligence analysts interpreted. He might have been the technician who maintained their satellite links. He could have been a saboteur or an interrogator or an assassin. The more I thought about his possible job titles, the less sympathetic I became. Adrenaline and testosterone surged through my system, flooding my thoughts, stimulating my bloodlust; I could barely keep myself together. In another few moments, my combat reflex would wane, and only violence would keep the hormone flowing. The pangs of withdrawal would begin.

“Don’t know where she lives. Don’t know where she lives. Don’t know where she lives,” he chanted.

“Where do you go to meet with her?” I asked.

“Don’t know where she lives.”

“Meet her,” I said. I shook him, grabbed his jacket and drew him toward me, then slammed him back into the seat. “Where do you go to meet her?”

“Never met Sunny. Met Allison,” he said.

I sighed. The bloodlust had nearly taken over, but I had regained control of myself. Torturing this man would get me nothing; he was a dead end. If I were going to get anything out of him, he would have spilled it by now.

I reached across the car and opened the far door. That woke the bastard. He asked, “What . . . what are you doing?”

I said, “I’m letting you go,” which was the truth, but not the whole truth. Restarting my hunt would be dangerous even without the poor bastard’s blood all over my clothes. I planned to let him out of the car, then shoot him.

He said, “You’re going to shoot me.”

What do you say to that? I couldn’t leave him alive, or he’d start screaming. I could have pointed out that he’d just tried to shoot me. Instead, I said, “You can get out, or I can shove you out.”

I felt bad about saying that, but in a moment I’d pull the trigger, and the reflex hormones in my blood would surge. Any regrets would be forgotten.

He said, “No. Please.”

The boy wanted to live. His foot was shot off, and he was in shock. Pain had clouded his brain, but his survival instinct remained.

He put up his hands, and stammered, “I know where she kept the poison!” and I thought,
God bless the will to survive.

EIGHTEEN

I saw the neighborhood and realized that I had never understood Sunny. The girl I had known lived in a luxury apartment, dressed like a model, attended law school at Harvard, and came from a wealthy family. She was pampered. She was spoiled.

The neighborhood this dying U.A. spook took me to see was a forgotten row of two-story tenements. The war hadn’t reached this neighborhood, but it wouldn’t make the streets any uglier when it did.

The unending row of apartment buildings butted right against the street, old buildings with dirty concrete steps leading to doors with iron bars over their windows.

By this time, my prisoner had settled down. He still felt the pain from his nearly disintegrated ankle, but he’d fallen into a meditative, almost comatose state.

“You still there?” I asked him.

“Specking clone. I hope you die,” he muttered.

You’re going to get your wish,
I thought. We drifted through streets without streetlights. Light glowed inside some windows, but it wasn’t bright, and sometimes it flickered. Some of these people probably used fire to cook.

“Is Sunny in one of these apartment buildings?” I asked.

“Allison,” he mumbled.

We’d driven east, away from the bar and the trouble I’d stirred up. We traveled so far east that we might have left the Unified Central District behind. This could have been the free zone, maybe even EME territory.

“Is this Coral Hills?” I asked.

“What?”

“What part of town is this?” I asked. I hadn’t ever been to Coral Hills; I just knew of its existence. I said, “Are we in Coral Hills? It’s a suburb.” Travis Watson was hiding there when he contacted us, and Sunny found the convoy we sent to extract him. The pieces of the puzzle fit together.

I didn’t need to ask which building was Sunny’s. Up the street, one building glowed more brightly than the others. High-intensity discharge lamps shone down on the street from the roof. Bright, steady light glowed in the windows. The rest of the street looked like it had been removed from the power grid; this building appeared to have its own generator.

Now I had a job ahead of me, and the last thing I needed was an errant hostage. Part of my brain said to kill the bastard. That was the bloodthirsty wing of my brain, the haunted wing in which my ghosts and demons lived. It was also the part of my brain that gave me the best advice.

I said, “I’m not sure what to do with you.”

He didn’t answer.

“Killing you would be the smart move.”

“Please . . .” He whispered the word.

I said, “I could lock you in the trunk.”

“What if they kill you?” he asked.

“Good point,” I said. “You better hope I survive.”

If he made a lot of noise, started beating on the lid and screaming, he’d attract attention. Some good Samaritan would inevitably let him out.
Those damn Samaritans bite you in the ass every time,
I thought. I could tie his hands, but I didn’t need to. He’d lost a lot of blood and wouldn’t last long. Hell, he could barely keep his eyes open, let alone scream for help. He’d die before I got back, speeding the process would have been humane.

We drove five blocks north, deeper into the darkness. There were houses around us, maybe people watching. I turned off my headlights and coasted on, driving as silently as my stolen sedan was able, until I reached a sheltered spot. I said, “I can hit you or I can shoot you,” and then I slammed the butt of the M27 across his head to knock him out.

Killing him would have been kinder.

Kindness
. I’d killed this man’s friends, shot off his foot, tortured him, kidnapped him, and now I had knocked him unconscious.
He would have killed me,
I reminded myself. He’d even tried. He worked for Sunny. How many people had she murdered?

I stepped around the car and pulled out my limp and barely breathing hostage. I picked him up, loaded him into the trunk, then I drove back onto the main road, around that building, and parked a few blocks away. If any of the locals saw me stash the guy in the trunk of my car, they’d try to rescue him.

This is the part of town where Travis and Emily hid,
I thought as I drove.
They must have been somewhere nearby.
Could Rhodes have been visiting Sunny when they caught him? Was she looking for Rhodes when she spotted the convoy?

I found a quiet block and pulled up to the curb. Somebody entered a doorway and watched me. Maybe he had mistaken me for a burglar. He showed me his knife. I showed him my gun. He stepped back into his building and closed the door.

August in Maryland, the night was humid and the buzz of the cicadas nearly drowned my thoughts. Languid air, so thick you could feel it, coated the street. The cloudy sky filtered beams of moonlight as they shone down on buildings. The alleyways were dark with shadows.

I’d entered a bad part of town. Crates and boxes and junked bikes littered the lanes. Broken glass sparkled in the gutters along the street. Up ahead, Sunny’s building glowed like a star, bright white floodlights shining down its dingy walls.

I saw movement.

Silhouettes surfaced and disappeared from the windows. I watched long enough to see a man with a rifle peering down from the roof. He’d go first.

I reached into my pocket and pulled the little signal disc my briefing officer had given me. When I hit that button, I would send a signal to MacAvoy. It would give him my location. My Marines would pour in from the west, and MacAvoy’s soldiers would flood in from the east. They would close in on my position. I would only need to secure the building until they arrived, and they would do the rest.

I decided to wait a little longer before sending for MacAvoy.

Sticking to the alleys and watching the skyline, I trotted toward a three-story building that sat kitty-corner to Sunny’s. Two days earlier, I had learned that you can’t reach the roofs of these buildings using their stairs, so I found my way to the rear of the building and climbed to the roof using a creaking, groaning fire-escape ladder.

Sounds carry across quiet streets at night, but nobody paid attention to me. Maybe the languid air muffled the creaking. Maybe these people were used to creaking ladders. When I reached the roof, I huddled beside a ledge and waited. If the sniper on the other roof heard me, he’d be on alert. He’d investigate, but hopefully, seeing nothing, he’d lose interest.

In the game of sniping, the prize always goes to players who are patient and alert. I let one minute pass, then another before I crawled toward the ledge that overlooked Sunny’s building.

The M27 was a versatile weapon, built for use as both a pistol and a rifle. It had a short barrel, too short for serious sniping. Short barrel be damned, the M27 was accurate to five hundred yards. If I missed this shot, it would say more about me than my weapon.

All the lights on the roof shone down from its edges. To spot my target, I’d need to look past the glare and into the darkness—good cover. I sat behind a ledge, and I waited.

Just when I started to suspect that I had imagined the sniper, the man emerged, dressed in black and carrying a darkened weapon. I spotted his movement first, something I sensed more than saw. When he crept by a skylight, I finally got a fix on him for a moment, but he vanished back into the shadows before I could shoot.

I selected one of the skylights, aimed my M27 in the air above it, and waited for the sniper to step into my bead. Seconds passed. A minute. Something moved near the far ledge of the building, but I ignored it. If I chased phantoms in those shadows, I might lose a real shot.

A few drops of rain fell, just a meaningless sprinkle. They dried as soon as they landed. A moment later, the rain stopped.

A shape appeared above the skylight. I squeezed the trigger, a single shot that sounded like a misfiring engine or possibly a car crash. M27s are not particularly loud, and its echo vanished into the night. No one came to see what happened. Maybe they’d seen the rain and mistaken my shot for thunder.

As I climbed down from the roof, people peered at me through a couple of windows, civilians of all ages and sizes. I stared right back at them. Some of them hid; others pretended to look at their own reflections.

One way or another, the battle would hinge on the next three minutes. I reached into my pocket and signaled my troops, then I sprinted toward the building.

Two men came out of the alley to meet me. They had guns, but they hadn’t yet raised them, and I shot them before they identified me. I peered down the alley to make sure they didn’t have friends waiting in the shadows. The alley was empty, a long, tight squeeze between two buildings. Most of the windows were dark, but a few were lit. Toward the back of the alley, both buildings had networks of fire escapes. The buildings sat so close to each other that their balconies and ladders looked laced together.

Having eliminated the guards, I leaped the stairs at the front of the building two at a time. The front door was glass; I could see into a hall that led straight through the building. I saw a staircase and mail slots and men rushing through doorways. They fired at me.

The front door splintered; its glass panels shattered into shards and needles. I saw men emerging from distant buildings, aimed my M27 at the lights along the roof, and returned the street to its native darkness.

Gunfire slashed at walls on the other side of the street. I couldn’t tell if they were firing at me or at some phantom they’d imagined. A gunman barreled out of a nearby building and fired in my direction; his bullets hit nowhere near me. I sprang from my hiding place, looked through a window, saw men approaching the shattered door they’d shot out, and waited in the shadows. One of the men stepped out to the street. I held my fire until two more came to join him.

The Unifieds returned fire. They weren’t shooting to kill me, they only wanted to keep me pinned in the alley. They must have sent people around the building to trap me, but by the time their friends arrived, I had slipped through a gap in a fence.

Only a few seconds passed before one of them found my escape path and followed, but I was gone. They had to move slowly and methodically in case I had set up an ambush; I didn’t worry about those clumsy specks ambushing me.

The tenement next to Sunny’s was a dilapidated two-story with faux-marble stairs and rugs so threadbare they might as well have been burlap. As I entered the building, a man in combat armor came running into the hall. If he’d looked in my direction, I would have shot him. He didn’t. He entered the door across the way without a second glance as I walked up the stairs.

More Marines streamed down the stairs. I froze. These were Unified Authority Marines, shielded combat armor and all. One of them grabbed me by my collar, and said, “Suit up. Some dumb speck attacked the nest.”

I nodded and continued up the stairs.

There must have been a couple hundred men living in the building, and from what I could tell, every last one of them was a U.A. Marine. I wondered what would happen if one of them recognized me, but the shaved head and the fake beard did their jobs.

So did MacAvoy’s soldiers. I heard gunfire and ran to a window in time to see personnel carriers and Schwarzkopfs round a corner. The trucks were armor-plated and immune to fléchettes.

Soldiers poured out of the backs of the trucks like paratroopers jumping from planes. Seeing the soldiers, the Marines lit up their armor. Unlike the U.A. Marines in their armor, MacAvoy’s men wore sturdy BDUs and carried M27s, which should have been useless against shielded armor, but these boys carried MacAvoy’s special rounds.

The fléchette cannons fired hair-width fragments of depleted uranium coated with neurotoxins. The ammunition was deadly, but light and inaccurate beyond fifty feet. A good marksman with an M27, on the other hand, could hit targets from a few hundred yards. From what I could see, none of the soldiers on that transport would have qualified for a Marine Corps marksmanship ribbon, but their aim was close enough for paintball.

MacAvoy said he only had a hundred thousand armor-busting rounds, but these boys shot like they had an endless supply. They had their M27s on autofire at walls, windows, and shielded Marines alike.

I didn’t waste time watching. Now that the firefight had turned hot, we ran the very real risk that the Unifieds would torch their computers before we got to them.

I sprinted up the stairs to the second floor and entered a hall. The apartments to my right faced Sunny’s building. I kicked out the first door. Her building was so close, no more than ten feet away. Looking through the windows, I saw people running, some with guns and some without.

I ran back out to the hall, spotted a couple of U.A. Marines, and stepped out of their way as they jogged to the stairs. Maybe I should have shot them in the back, but MacAvoy’s men would massacre them soon enough.

I ran to the last door on the right, kicked it in, and saw what must have been the only two civilians who lived in the building. They sat on the floor in the corner of their apartment, two middle-aged women, huddled and crying. They saw me and screamed. My combat reflex told me to shoot them. It warned me that enemy soldiers would hear them wailing. I ignored my reflex, and they stopped screaming though they continued to hug each other and sob.

I opened the window and stepped onto the fire escape. Below me, the fighting continued on the street. By this time, some of the shielding on the Marines’ armor had failed and a trickle of men in darkened armor fled into the alley for safety. Had they spotted me, they still could have shot at me. Even with their shields out, their fléchette cannons would work perfectly well.

Frankly, MacAvoy’s boys scared me more than the Unifieds. The occasional bullet skidded across the buildings, scraping bricks and shattering windows. If I made it through this battle, and the Empire survived the next few weeks, I would have a word with MacAvoy about his soldiers’ marksmanship.

I would need to leap somewhere between ten and fifteen feet to land on Sunny’s building, then I’d need to climb down the fire escape. It was a bit of a jump. I hoped I landed quietly. I didn’t want to attract unfriendly attention.