Cates 04 - The Terminal State (2 page)

“Why you lookin’ to leave, eh, Av’ry? ” Dingane shifted and spat into the sawdust on the floor. “Y’got a good thing here. Roof, food, friends. Should not walk away from dis, I don’ think.”

I looked past Dingane. “I got unfinished business. Debts to settle.”

The cop—ex-cop—turned to survey the place, sizing us up. He was tall and heavy, a gone-to-fat heaviness encased like a sausage inside a heavy leather overcoat, which looked battered and salty, and a dark-blue suit that had seen better days. His shoes were woefully unprepared for the mush outside, with a noticeable hole in one through which I could see his bare toe, pink and squirming. You didn’t need to see his credit dongle—assuming he still carried one like a totem—to know this ex-cop had seen better days.

He still had that gloss, though. That cop arrogance. He’d somehow escaped Marin’s avatar purge, and he’d somehow wriggled away from the civil war to go adventuring, but even without backup or a discretionary budget or fucking
shoes
he still thought he was going to run the show here. His hair was bright red and thin, a halo around his pink head. His cheeks hung from his face like they were full of ball bearings and sagged with weight, and his eyes were watery and red.

As I watched, the cop picked up his cup without looking at it and delivered it to his wet mouth. Tipping it back without hesitation, he swallowed the shot whole and returned the cup to the bar without comment or visible reaction. My respect for the man went up a half inch. Anyone who could drink Bixon’s poison without wincing or coughing or bursting into flames had something going on.

Glancing to my right I found, as always, Remy staring at me. Remy had lost
his
gloss; he was starting to look like a normal human being. I didn’t know how old he was or why I always had squirts running after me like I was fucking Santa Claus, but Remy was coming along from the spoiled little brat in his shiny shoes screaming about his daddy. He was firming up, and I even had hope he’d someday stop calling me
Mr. Cates
. Then we had to work on the staring, but to be honest it came in handy. I nodded my head slightly, and the kid was up off his crate immediately and out into the storm.

“Listen up!”

The ex-cop’s voice was booming, deep and smooth, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. His eyes, though, roamed the space nervously, and his hands were curled into fists. The music stopped on a dime.

“My name is Major Benjamin Pikar,” he shouted, turning slowly to make sure we all got the benefit of his jiggling jowls. “And I am here to protect you!”

Major. I eyed him up and down and decided he’d given himself a promotion. His coat was captain, if that.

Our mayor, who’d been elected by dint of referring to herself as the Mayor until we couldn’t stand it anymore, behaved herself and kept her eyes off me. Gerry was an amiable old hag who’d been a banker before the Plague. She’d lost her family during that little fun ride and had been in Chicago when the friendly folks of the System of Federated Nations Army had sent in five hundred thousand single-use bomb drones armed with F-90s, field-contained armaments. Wandering south out of the wreckage, she’d found us here in Englewood. She was skinny, with a huge triangle of a nose that bobbed up and down whenever she talked and gray eyes permanently squinted from years peering at holographic data streams. The last time one of these ex-pig entrepreneurs had shown up to save us from the big bad world, Gerry’d leaped up to announce she was the mayor and would speak for the town, and I’d been forced to knock her unconscious.

“I have been assigned by order of Richard Marin, Director of Internal Affairs for the System Security Force, to take administrative charge of this settlement, bring it in line with the laws and customs of the System of Federated Nations, and organize your defense against both the insurgent forces and ... criminal aspects seeking to take advantage of you,” Pikar said with a straight face. I wondered, briefly, why Marin never just cut the cord and promoted himself to director of the Whole Fucking World or What Was Left of It After the F-90s.

Can’t
, the man’s outdated ghost whispered in my head.
Programming limits. They thought by limiting my position they limited
me.

Pikar looked around to see how well his shit was floating, and he didn’t look pleased, his red face getting darker, his knuckles white at his sides.

“Perhaps you have heard,” he managed to say calmly, putting his hands on his hips in a practiced motion that pushed his coat back to reveal the twin guns under his arms and the battered badge clipped to his belt, “rumors of SFNA Press Gangs in the region.” He nodded crisply. “I can confirm this.”

I glanced at the two windows, small and cloudy, set into the front wall. Against the snow, I could clearly see dark forms gathered at each, and I put my eyes back on Pikar to make sure he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t; he was caught up in the pitch. I knew what was coming next. I could have written the script for him.

“There is no reason to fear, however, as I am here now to organize your defense against these dangerous rebels.” He was all business now. He’d given us the scare, showed us the cannons, and now came the offer. He turned to signal Bixon for another drink. Bixon, as wide as he was tall, was all beery muscle without a hint of augments. He just stood there behind his rotting makeshift bar, hands hidden and caressing, I had no doubt, his prize possession: a personally restored 10-09 shredder, original SSF issue and held together, literally, by tightly wound strands of silvery wire. It had seven rounds left, and odds were it was going to explode in his hands if he ever dared fire it, but it still made grown men who knew what it was shit their pants when they saw it.

“I will require the following items in order to fund and organize my office here,” Pikar boomed, tapping his fingers on the bar. “First—”

I’d had enough. “First, shut the fuck up,” I said. I didn’t say it loud. Everyone heard me anyway. This was what I got paid for, if you counted a roof over my head and enough tasteless gruel to keep me alive—not to mention a bottomless tab at Bixon’s—as pay. I hadn’t received any better offers, so I’d stayed on, kicking asses and running shitheads along.

The ex-cop looked at me, and to his credit all his nervous tics were instantly gone, replaced with the careful stillness of someone trained to handle himself. “Excuse me, citizen? ”

I stood up, wooden cup in one hand as I slid my other one into the oily pocket of my raincoat. Waving the cup around, I pushed my hand through the slit cut into the pocket and put my palm on the butt of my prized Roon—the best handgun ever made—oiled every night and cleaned every other, gleaming and smooth like there was no such thing as rust, decay, or death. I made for the bar, working hard to keep the pain and stiffness in my leg from showing. “I said shut the fuck up. You’re making this place smell worse than it normally does with that bullshit, and that’s saying something.” I placed my cup on the bar. “Sorry, Bix.”

Bixon nodded, his eyes still locked on Pikar. “No worries, Avery.”

Pikar turned his head slightly toward Bix, but kept his eyes on me. Logging the bartender as a combatant, marking his position, probably noting for the first time the absence of visible hands. He shifted his weight and angled his hand from his belt to tap the badge.

“You don’t want to fuck with police, friend,” he said. “This is official business.”

I nodded, leaning with my back against the bar. The badge had shorted out and didn’t have the cheery gold glow of the holograph anymore. “From what I hear, the System Pigs’ business these days is tripping over themselves retreating from the army. You ain’t the first asshole to wander in here out of the fucking snow with holes in his fucking shoes trying to shake us down. You’re looking for soft touches. Keep walking until you find some.”

That was his one chance, I decided. Fair was fair. Couldn’t blame a man for trying to score. Only for pushing his luck.

He kept his flat little eyes on me and his hands perfectly still. His jowls, though, were quivering, rhythmically, bouncing slightly with every thudding heartbeat that kept his face purple. Then he smiled.

“New York,” he said, jolly now. “The accent. You’re Old Work from the island, right? Spent a few weeks in some Blank Rooms here and there, uh? ”

I shrugged. “You don’t know me.” He probably knew of me, my name, but it didn’t matter.

He nodded. “Maybe not. I know your type. Strawman, stuffed with shit. You all think this piece of turd is your hero?” He suddenly asked the room. “You’re betting on the wrong man.”

My own heart pounded and my stomach was complaining about Bixon’s swill. A cold sweat had popped out on my face too, and I wondered if there was any way to turn puking my guts out into an advantage in a gunfight.

“Look out the windows,
friend
,” I advised. “We’ve called out the militia.”

He squinted at me. I almost felt sorry for him: Every cop in the System had been transformed into an avatar, usually against their will. He hadn’t. That meant he’d been in some backwater post, a fuckup out in the middle of nowhere, or else he’d been running a lot longer than I’d imagined. Desperate. Shot on sight if the army found him, packed into a data brick for leisurely debriefing whenever the immortal Dick Marin felt like it if the cops picked him up—he was screwed. He wanted to look, but he didn’t want to be stupid, didn’t want to
look
stupid. That was all he had left. The aura of a cop.

Everything falling apart, sure. Dingane had it right. Even the System Pigs were just ghosts these days.

The shadows in the windows looked good. Menacing. Remy and his friends had balls, sure. They didn’t have any
guns
, but you couldn’t tell that through the windows. It didn’t matter if Pikar looked or not, if he saw men with rifles or kids pissing their short pants—it made him think, it fucked him up, and that was all it was meant to do.

He snorted. “I’m taking control of this settlement,” he said slowly. “I am ordering you to hand over whatever it is you’re fondling in your pocket and take your seat.”

I had everyone trained by this point, and I was pretty sure I could count on them to stay still and not do anything I’d regret. Except Bixon. I struggled to keep my eyes off the barrel-shaped asshole and contented myself with hoping he didn’t move. The whole place was still and quiet, narrowed down to Pikar and me, my aching leg and stiff back. I wondered, for a second, if Pikar was aching too, how old he was, what he’d been through.

And then he moved.

It was good, too. He’d taken the windows seriously and realized that with me and Bix standing across from him we were nailed in crossfire, so he went low, crouching down and yanking his guns out beautifully, both clear and in his hands in a blink as he duckwalked to put his back against the front door, out of the imaginary rifles’ sight-lines. Jerking the Roon up and out of my pocket, I put two bullets an inch or so from his left ear and then threw myself up and back onto the bar, giving myself a million tiny splinters as I pushed myself across, dropping behind it like a sack of wet cement.

As I righted myself on the floor, I saw Bix heaving the shredder up with a yell, and before I could stop him he depressed the trigger and the familiar headsplitting whine filled the room, the 10-09 barked and jerked up out of Bixon’s hands, spluttering six rounds into the ceiling before it smacked Bix in the nose hard enough to break it.

I hedgehogged up, poking my head over the bar just long enough to take in the room and then dropping back down, braced for the
pop pop pop
of a trained shot. There was nothing, no noise at all. I heaved myself back up with a grunt and let the bar support me for a moment, the Roon pointed at Pikar, who was slumped in front of the door, his belly a swamp of blood, one arm still up, holding his gun on me. Everyone else was still sitting, frozen, like this was all just the fucking floor show.

Pikar grinned blood. As I slowly walked the length of the bar to step around, his gun followed me, inch by inch. Just as I cleared the crates, his finger twitched, sending me to the floor with a choking grunt. Instead of the thudding bark of a shot, there was just a dry click. I pushed myself back up to put the Roon on him. The cop was just laughing, still holding the gun on me. As I got to my feet, he pulled the trigger a dozen more times, getting the same dry click each time.

“You shot me with a fucking
shredding rifle
,” he sputtered, flecks of bloody spit spraying from his mouth and landing on the floor, where the dry wood soaked them up forever. “You fucking
rats
. I don’t even have any fucking
bullets
.”

I stood up and kept the shiny Roon on him. My ass burned like someone had stabbed a million tiny pieces of wood into it. “What kind of asshole pulls his piece if he can’t do anything with it? ” I hissed. I was angry. I wanted to slap his face for being a fucking asshole. “Were you going to throw it at me? ”

“Fuck you.” He sighed, deflating. He was still holding his useless gun on me, even though his arm shook with the effort.

“Avery,” Gerry suddenly said, her voice a scratchy whisper. “Okay, man, the situation’s calmed. We’ll take care of him from here.”

I nodded without looking at her. Pikar was still smiling at me. “You were a cop,” I said. “You know how this works. You pull a gun, you take the consequences.” I’d learned a lot about the human race over the years. I’d learned that the dead didn’t stay dead. I’d learned that no good deed ever went unpunished. And I’d learned that trying to have a code of honor got you a lot of people telling you how much respect they had for you while they were beating your head against the floor.

Ignoring the dull pain in my leg, I took a bead and put a shell in Pikar’s face. Then one more in his chest just to be safe, making him twitch and flop. I turned and stumped back to the bar, slipping my Roon back into place and then putting my shaking hands flat on the bar. The only cure for Bixon’s rotgut was more, and fast. It only got deadly when you stopped.