The Digital Plague (30 page)

I smiled. “Your concern is touching, Colonel.”

She took me by the arm and pulled me toward her troopers, most of whom, I was pretty sure, would gladly put a bullet in my head themselves. “You let us form up around you, and you
duck
when shooting starts, understood?”

I shook my head. I wanted to use her name, but it stuck in my throat. “Stop thinking like a fucking cop protecting some ass-hat VIP from up the Mountain. You want to get me killed? Then parade me around in the middle of a brick of Stormers. You want me to make it down this street alive? You’ve got fourteen Stormers, the gorilla man, Marko, and Bendix, who’ll tear your head off the moment he can see you. You really think you’re going to control this situation? I need to be fluid.”

She glanced at my splinted leg. “Fluid?”

I bunched my jaw muscles and swallowed. “Let’s get moving.” There was a scrape behind me, followed by a soft grunt, and her eyes flitted over my shoulder and then back to my face. I resisted the urge to whirl around, the urge to whirl and just dump a whole clip into the empty space I knew would be there. New York was a Ghost City. I was pretty sure bullets were no longer going to be enough.

“All right,” she said. “All right. But I’m detaching a trooper to shadow you at all times.” She turned and scanned her little unit. “You!” she barked, pointing at the round-faced trooper Happling always called Fat Girl. “Here.”

She trotted over, equipment jangling. “Sir.”

Hense didn’t look at me. “Shadow Cates. Take his orders, within reason. He is your CO until I say otherwise. Do not obey any order that risks his life unduly, understood? And keep him alive.”

The Stormer’s face remained blank, but she looked at me for a moment before nodding and sighed a little. “Sir.”

Hense stepped past her. “Captain, let’s move out. Mr. Marko, stick by the captain. Nathan, keep Mr. Marko out of trouble.”

I checked my gun. “What’s your name?”

Fat Girl just stared back at me. I gave it a couple of seconds and then hit her with my most insincere grin, polished in a hundred deals downtown. “How’d a nice girl like you end up kicking balls in the SSF?”

At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but then she turned a little to scan the horizon, squinting. “I made a living cutting cow throats back when,” she said, her accent making everything sound exotic. “Then they fucking Droided the whole fucking combine and there ain’t too many other jobs out there, eh?” She looked back at me and spit a little to the side like she had the memory of chewing tobacco. “Besides, beats being
you.
”

I nodded and thought
I bet it does.
I turned and rejoined the rest of the squad, and Fat Girl followed me one step behind. Happling glanced back and I nodded, and with a gesture he set the group in motion. Nothing felt right, and I resisted the urge to spin around as I walked; I felt off-balance, like no direction was safe. The cops felt wrong, too—they weren’t moving like System Pigs, like they owned the street. They were moving like they were scared, as if they were in enemy territory. Only Bendix, tethered to a Stormer by a short leather strap, appeared confident, even as he stumbled and staggered along.

We moved up Thirty-first Street, heading east. About a block from the airpad the bodies ended, the street suddenly clean, empty. A few scattered possessions spilled out from the crowd, blown about by the wind, but once we’d passed that perimeter it was just pavement and the fading light, like everyone had gone inside, like pigeons, wanting a cool dry place to die. The Stormers moved in eerie silence, half crouched, shredders in hand; I could hear my own breathing, a painful hitch in my chest making me twitch with every inhalation. Now and then there were sounds off in the distance—gunfire once, shouting a few times, an explosion at one point that sounded huge and distant, like something we imagined. The cops didn’t pause or break formation, but I did, stopping at each noise to scan behind me and squint up at the dead buildings. Fat Girl stopped with me each time, saying nothing, her cowl pulled back into place so she was just another faceless cop like all the ones I’d killed over the years. I felt hot and grimy, a trickle of sour sweat down my back.

At Fifth Avenue we turned south and encountered more bodies, just a few scattered here and there, torn up, looking like they’d been lying facedown on top of a hand grenade when it had gone off, but otherwise relaxed, sitting with their backs against walls, arms down at their sides. All of them had bloody craters where their chests had been, deep, open wounds that went up their necks and onto their faces, drying blood caked everywhere. They appeared to be shouting at us but not making any noise, their lower jaws either gone or melted into a pulpy goo, yellowed and cracked teeth grinning. Eight or nine blocks south I could make out Twenty-third Street, where smoke rose in a haze over what had to be barricades. I knew if we went down that far we’d find a lot more bodies.

I was staring at a corpse still wearing a luxurious blond wig as she slumped forward against an old Vid installation when movement in front of us sent the cops instantly into a battle pose, the main group on their knees with shredders trained while four or five flyers headed for the sides of the street to press against the walls. As Fat Girl stepped protectively in front of me, I turned just in time to see four people shuffling out of a skyscraper lobby and moving toward us.

“Police!” One of them gurgled. “Finally!”

They weren’t in good shape. Their faces had a blackened, bruised look, their necks swollen up like balloons, each sporting several wet-looking sores. They were all men and, judging by their weight and clothes, they’d been prosperous enough until a week ago, when prosperity stopped meaning anything.

“We were okay until a day ago,” croaked one of them, his pale face scummed with beard, yellow bags under his eyes. His voice had a molten quality, and he cleared his throat constantly as he shuffled, making a gagging noise as if he had a large beetle trapped in there. “I knew you’d be back to secure the city.”

Happling made two sharp gestures and the Stormers flicked the safeties off their shredders in unison, the humming noise each made collecting together into a mild roar.

“Turn around,” Happling bellowed, arms akimbo, “or we will fire.”

The four men slowed down but didn’t stop. “Are you fucking insane? We’re citizens!” the guy with the molten voice said, hacking out the phlegmy words, a trickle of thick, black fluid spilling out the corner of his mouth. “You’re worse than those psychopaths across the street.”

I glanced past him to the midsized old building he’d pointed at, half a block away. It looked like every other old pre-Unification structure in upper Manhattan, blind window glass and stained old gray stone, worn down by pollution and time. It seemed as deserted as every other spot we’d passed, except the windows had all been boarded up from the inside.

Happling’s face was impassive. “You are ordered to step back to your previous location, citizen,” he said, managing to make the word
citizen
sound like an insult, “or we will kill you.” He paused and then raised both eyebrows. “Got that, shithead?”

For a moment I thought maybe they were going to turn back, to crawl into whatever stuffy hole they’d been hiding in to continue rotting out. Then the beetle-throated one shook his head and kept coming.

“Fuck it,” he warbled. “I’m dead if you leave us behind anyway. We’re all dead.”

I watched as Happling raised his hand slightly and held it there. Feeling hot and gummy, I was moving before I’d formed any conscious thoughts, pushing past my personal Stormer and through the thin ranks of Hense’s little army, putting a hand on Happling’s shoulder, intending to spin him around.

“Fuck this—they’ll either be dead or cured in a couple of hours, you goddamn—”

The big man moved fast, almost like a jump cut in my brain. One second I was standing behind him, reaching up to grab his shoulder, the next he had my hand in his, bending my wrist back painfully with inexorable pressure that forced me onto my knees. With his other hand he somehow produced his ancient automatic, pushing it against the back of my head, forcing me to stare down at the cracked pavement. I blinked down at the street, sucking in breath that tickled my chest and brought on a spasm of thick coughs. I hadn’t been handled that easily in
years.

“Mr. Cates,” Happling said, not at all out of breath, “don’t get in the fucking way.”

A burst of ear-splitting shredder fire erupted as I twitched at Happling’s feet, hacking up what felt like a lung onto the street. Silence followed; I could hear the faint sizzle of the shredders’ muzzles as they cooled. Happling released me and stepped away but I remained on my knees, staring down at the glob of bloody phlegm I’d just produced.

Guess Kev knows I’m here,
I thought.
And he’s not happy.

Day Ten:
Rich Boys Who’d
Actually Survived

Reeling, I pushed myself up, scrubbing my chin clean and placing my foot over the bloody glob. I didn’t know what had changed Kev’s mind about keeping me going, but I knew without a doubt how long I’d be allowed to live once the cops realized I was no longer necessary—or even beneficial—for their own survival, deal with Hense or not. I squinted through the sunlight, my cheeks hurting, as she walked forward with her handgun to toe the four newly dropped citizens and make sure they were dead, her face blank. I didn’t think she would actively betray our deal; she might even make some effort to uphold it. I didn’t know why, but I felt I could almost trust her. But Happling, her huge red gorilla, he wouldn’t hesitate, and without her captain’s support it wouldn’t be long before an unfortunate accident occurred.

Hense nodded to herself and then at Happling, retreating back into the loose crowd of Stormers. Next to me, Happling started booming out his orders, and the troopers scrambled back into line. As we started moving down Fifth again, stepping over the bodies we’d left in our wake, I struggled to contain the twitching irritation in my chest that wanted to explode into a fresh coughing fit while I moved my eyes over the block, trying to gain some advantage.

I knew where we were, of course, and I was pretty sure I’d been in the building on our left that the unfortunate citizen had indicated. None of the other options raised any sort of memory, so I stole a long glance at the building on the corner. I remembered that it had an open lot or something in the back, a patch of dead earth with a huge sewage drain in the middle of it, rusting and fucking dangerous. I was burning through my memories of the place, trying to remember if the drain hooked into the main sewage system, trying to remember how you got from the front of the building to the back. If I could get into the sewers, I could get anywhere in Manhattan, including Bellevue. When a single shot churned up a divot of asphalt right in front of Happling, the cops stopped as a body.

Without hesitation I kept moving, slowly, edging my way toward the side of the street.

“Far enough, Chief,” a voice called from somewhere within the building. “Now turn and go around.”

I scanned the facade as I moved. The sun hit it on an angle, giving each worn, dusty brick a deep shadow. The windows had been boarded up sloppily with gray, rotten wood that looked ready to disintegrate and stared blindly back at us. There were a million gaps and cracks where a sniper could be holed up. I saw the Stormers drop their cowls back into place, instantly becoming one faceless blob of cop, scanning the place, switching between heat and infrared scanners, trying to isolate the voice.

Hense stepped forward, and a second report tore through the air. The Stormer Bendix was tethered to suddenly did a whole-body shake and crumpled to the street in silence. I blinked in shock as Bendix reached down and smoothly unclipped himself, taking off in a blindfolded, handcuffed run down the street. Hense looked back at Bendix as if committing him to memory while I wondered why they’d chosen
that
trooper, of all the targets on the street. Before I could linger on the subject or even examine the body, another shot cracked out, echoing off the steel valleys of Manhattan, making us all hunch down in instinctive, useless ducking motions.

“I said, go around,” the voice called out. It was a pleasant male voice, deep and gravelly. He managed to make it sound polite. I was about ten feet from the wall, moving carefully. The front door was shut tight and probably barred on the inside, but I knew another way in. Midtown wasn’t like downtown Manhattan; there weren’t countless Safe Rooms and hidden tunnels—but there were a few secrets.

Hense peered up at the building. “Did you just fire on System Security Force officers?” she asked in disbelief. “
Twice?
”

“We’re not sick in here,” the voice responded, sounding not at all impressed. “It’s proximity that does it. We’re not taking any chances. Now, all I’m saying is, go
around.
Go one block west, cut down south, and then turn back east. You do that, we don’t need to have any goddamn trouble.”

I forgot about Bendix; this was my chance. As I slowly sidestepped my way to the wall, keeping my eyes on cops, my chest flexing with another spasm, I saw one Stormer suddenly straighten up and put a hand to his ear. My eyes flicked to Happling, who cocked his head a fraction and then nodded. They’d gotten a fix on the sniper, and I figured he was about to find out how well the SSF—even defrocked SSF like Happling and Hense—liked being shot at.

Hense looked at her captain for a moment and then nodded, turning back to the building. “I don’t know who you are—”