Cates 04 - The Terminal State (20 page)

I didn’t feel anything.

I was empty, clinical. My HUD was bright and fully operational, showing my heart rate at the top of the red zone, my blood pressure off the scale, brain activity jagged and spiky—I felt none of it. I was steady and serene, and even when four more hands latched onto me, pulling at me, fingers digging into my skin, I felt nothing—no pain, no irritation. Just a stream of data to analyze, a reaction to calculate. Lazily, I rolled my shoulders and twisted out of their grasp, and decided the time had come to get this over with.

Taking my time, I pushed up and got my knees under me. I dropped the empty clip from the Roon and fished a fresh one from my pocket, slamming it into place and racking a shell into the chamber with my bloodied hand. I turned, swinging the gun out in front of me, and every face that got between the gun and the floor, I put a bullet in. It was beautiful, in a way, the perfection of it, the precision of my own movements. It was like I thought of something and it happened without me having to make any of the intervening calculations or movements.

A young woman in a nice, ridiculous fur coat pulled herself up, face locked in a snarl, rising slowly from the floor as she leaped for my throat. I slashed the gun down onto her head, bones crunching in both my hand and her head, her graceful backward slump gorgeous, ballet.

Rolling to my side, I freed my legs, twisting my back beyond its limits, and popped up into a crouch on the top of the bunk. I scanned the roiling crowd, eyes stopping on a young girl almost directly across from me, her red hair limp and greasy looking. Her coat was nice enough, and her skin was healthy and pale; she looked like a rich kid who’d gone to seed, like the occasional narcs who stumbled downtown in Old New York and never made it out again, sucking their credit dry and slowly absorbed by the neighborhood. She was probably not yet twenty, middle aged and didn’t know it, her eyes wide in terror as she stared around. I found I had the time to just crouch there and stare at her for a while, studying her. Gleason, I thought, would have been about her age. The thought seemed to come from outside of me, beamed in, as if the cosmos suddenly wanted me to remember her for some reason, to remember that she’d still be alive if she hadn’t hooked up with me and my fucking crazy ideas about making the System hurt, about staying off the Rail, about training her up to be just like me.

That was before the Plague, before I’d been cut down to size. Taught my lesson.

I’d paused long enough for the good citizens of what was left of the System to get their second wind; they’d come this far and if a few of them were dead and a few more sputtering blood onto the floor, all the more fucking reason to tear me apart. I felt hot, and realized with a start that I was perspiring heavily, sweat running off of me in slow, syrupy rivulets. My HUD was a dark, angry red, every status bar slammed into the top of its scale.

There was a determined group of six men and one woman, all soft looking, well dressed and white skinned. One of the men already had a broken nose and swollen eyes, but he came with the rest of them, rushing me all at once, advancing on me with mouths open, screaming something too slowly to make out. I leaned forward slowly, shifting my weight to absorb the shock of their impact, but movement behind me, a wavelike bounce shuddering through the bunk, made me spin, one hand easing out and taking hold of an offered calf, a half-inch of brightly tattooed skin showing between the heavy hem of the pants and the cracked leather of the sturdy boot. I rolled myself forward, timing it out with ease, letting momentum and gravity pull me down toward the floor as I yanked on the leg, pulling a dense, heavy figure up and over my head as I landed, slamming him into the approaching group and knocking them all on their asses. My projectile tucked and rolled into a passable landing, and when he popped up on the balls of his feet I realized it was Adrian, glaring at me, a fresh scrape along his forehead oozing blood into his eyes. He had a jagged knife in one hand but had lost his piece of shit Hamada.

He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear him and just smiled as I absentmindedly stiff-armed a broken-nose asshole who’d spun and rushed at me as best as you could rush in the crowded car.

It was so
easy
. I didn’t even fire the fucking gun, I just punched and slapped and pushed. I felt like I could have kicked their collective ass all day long—every face that got close enough, I smashed a fist into it, every flicker of movement behind me, I spun easily and hit low. When I got tired of it, when it had gone on for long enough—though I didn’t know how long it had been—I took hold of a convenient body and lifted it up, tearing fingernails and sending a fresh sheet of sweat streaming down my face, and threw it into the remaining crowd of screaming, huddling people. I spun, and had a split-second image of Mara scowling at me before she smashed the butt of her gun down on top of my head.

 

 

Full of fucking surprises
.

Something smelled terrible, and I regretted everything I’d done in my life, ever, the endless subtle trail that had led to me smelling this. I tried to flinch my face away from it, but the moment I tried to move, my head pain bloomed ... everywhere. My right hand throbbed, my left arm was seared deep with something hot and sharp, my ribs ached and my neck was frozen stiff. I felt weak and dehydrated, and immediately I began shivering, which hurt even more.

I opened my eyes, and the dim red light of the train’s interior burned my eyes and set fire to something in my head, which joined in the general throbbing. Mara’s face pushed into my vision, filling it as she frowned down at me.

“You don’t look good, you fucking psychopath,” she said.

I tried to say something. My mouth opened and a thin wail dribbled out of me.

“That was not too smart,” I heard the Poet say. Suddenly, my head was pounding. All of my HUD bars were yellow and well below normal. The fucking exclamation point was blinking in the corner again, but I flinched away from it. I never wanted to fucking do that again. “You almost killed
me
, you fuck. It was . . . disturbing.”

“Disturbin’?” Mara spat, moving away from me. “We got sixteen fucking corpses here he killed with his
bare fucking hands
.”

I turned my head, sharp stabbing pains shooting down my back. The car had been transformed into a slaughterhouse. Most of its former population was gone, but the vibration under me told me the train was still in motion, speeding along. Bodies rolled on the floor around me, limp and bloodied, and the whole space smelled like blood.

“Where...” I whispered, hoarsely, my throat seizing up in pain. “Where—”

“Herded ’em into the next car,” Mara snapped as the Monk suddenly knelt next to me, lifting my limp arm in its cold, plastic hands, its face still frozen in that unfortunate grin I’d started to assume was a malfunction. “They didn’t need too much encouragement.”

The Monk began an efficient examination, retrieving a small handheld from its coat and running it lightly along the perimeter of my body with one hand as it prodded and poked me with the other, getting some weak moans and grunts from me in response. Satisfied, it pushed the handheld back inside its coat and produced the LED screen again.

AS EXPECTED: YOU ARE IN SHOCK, AS IF YOU HAD SURVIVED WEEKS OF DEPRIVATION AND ABUSE. YOU WILL RECOVER WITH FLUIDS AND REST, BUT BE WEAKENED. YOUR AUGMENTS WILL NOT FUNCTION AT FULL CAPACITY WITHOUT SERVICE; YOU WILL EXPERIENCE DEGRADED FUNCTION. I WOULD GUESS THAT ONE MORE INVOCATION OF THE EHA ENHANCEMENT MODE WILL EASILY KILL YOU.

I nodded slowly, feeling like my brain was softly bouncing up and down inside my skull. “You think so, huh? You’re fucking brilliant.”

I slowly forced my way up onto my elbows, sweat popping out on my brow again. The Poet ambled over and held out a single N-tab and a small canteen to me. I took the tab in a shaking hand and swallowed it, then took the canteen, intending to just take a sip. When I handed it back to him, gasping, I’d drained it, water running down my chin, my whole body shaking. My stomach instantly seized up and tried to send everything right back up again, so I clamped my mouth shut and took some deep breaths, swallowing rapidly until it subsided.

Michaleen Garda had done this to me. I wouldn’t be on this fucking train, wouldn’t be crammed full of augments, wouldn’t be sitting here feeling my internal organs turn into cheese if not for that stump of a man. I ran my dry, swollen tongue along my lips and smiled, sitting up and trying to balance myself so I wouldn’t slump over.

“It got a little sloppy,” I said, pushing hard to make my voice steady and loud. “So fucking what? You don’t look like a girl who cries herself to sleep at night about innocent victims.”

I had to play my role. I was going to fuck Mickey over, and to do that I needed his resources. I was going to get into Hong Kong, I was going to find Londholm, and then I was going to take the fucking augment. I was going to pull it hot and throbbing from Londholm’s head. And Mickey could come after me, or I would go after him, with the augment as leverage. I hadn’t figured out how to deal with Mara and the frag settings, the tiny bomb inside my head, but I still needed her anyway so I could afford to wait for inspiration.

She threw her hands in the air. “Sloppy? He has the fuckin’ gall to call it
sloppy
. And now look at you. Gray and shivery. What happens, we get a call from those friendly Psionics now, shakin’ the train about, and you like a piece of greasy paper there?” She squatted down on her haunches in front of me. “Mr. Cates, no fuckin’ offense, but I could kill you with some harsh words right now, the way you look.”

I smiled. “You’ve got a heart of gold, Mara, worrying about me like that.”

She snorted. “You’re an
investment
, boyo.”

I cocked my head a little. Something about Mara again made me feel like I knew her. It was elusive, and I couldn’t make her stick anywhere, but the feeling stayed with me.

“I’m fine,” I said slowly. I gathered myself and pushed up onto my feet, rushing into it to get some momentum, terrified I’d lose my balance and fall over. I found I still had my empty gun in my hand, and I slipped it into a damp pocket. “We were outnumbered and I took care of it. We’re still headed in the right direction, and if this is the first time you’ve had to ride with corpses, I’ll eat my fucking gun, so stop bellyaching.”

I worked hard to stop the shivering. I shuffled forward to the pocket door leading from the car and squinted through the cloudy plastic window across the gap to the next car coupled to us. Faces were pressed against the opposite door, staring back at me, calm and unblinking. I stared back. I imagined the story they’d tell as they fanned out into what was left of the world.

She smiled. “Naw, ain’t t’first time I’ve ridden with the dead, Avery,” she said. She shook her head, turning away. “You clean this shit up a little, though. No reason we have to bathe in the gore like some fucking savages, eh? ”

I sighed and turned around, holding my shaking hands in front of me. I froze. Against the rear wall of the train car, staring at me with wide, sightless eyes, was the red-haired girl I’d spotted earlier. The icy white skin of her throat turned mottled and bruised. My hands twitched and my breath turned solid in my throat, choking me.

Stop crying
, Dick Marin’s ghost whispered to me.
She ain’t the first
.

When the train stuttered to a stop, I was jolted awake from a black sleep, dreamless and perfect, like being smothered in myself. I came back online immediately and remembered everything, the rotten smell in the air all I needed as a prompt. My head was pounding and my mouth dry and gummy; I fought the immediate urge to dry heave. My heart lurched in my chest, heavy and staggering, and I wasn’t sure if I could stand up without letting Mara know how weak I was.

The Poet sat next to me, putting his Hamada back together more or less without looking at it. He’d taken off his coat, and his metallic tattoos squirmed and flashed on his neck and arms, tiny people in elaborate inks being killed over and over again. He grinned at me, his sudden, thick beard and big reflective glasses making him look like an alien, something not human.

“Welcome back, my friend,” he said cheerfully. “We have all arrived somewhere. Not where we wished for.”

I licked my lips and tried to swallow. We’d pushed the bodies off the car hours ago, the wind slamming past us with enough force to make it difficult to breathe, but the car was still a swamp of jellying blood and sweat. I felt listless and without energy, and immediately wanted to go back to sleep.

Forcing myself to move, I sat up and made a show of stretching luxuriously. “Well, let’s get out there and see where we are.”

“No reason to rush,” the Poet said, waving one hand negligently. “Take a moment and relax. A long walk ahead.”

I stared at him for a few moments. The smile lingered as he reassembled the gun with long, nimble fingers. He was, I realized with a start, being kind to me. I wanted to punch him in the mouth. I wanted to make him eat his pity and regret it. Kindness got you fucking killed. You weren’t afraid of people you felt pity for.

After a moment, I looked away. If Adrian Panić smelled blood in the water and started throwing his weight around, let him. I was tired of playing the fucking game. No one had played it better than I. Decades of acting, decades of staying a step ahead of every piece of shit swimming in the same pond as you—no one had been better at it. And where had it gotten me?

I started shivering again. To hide it, I surged up, letting momentum carry me upright. Once there, my vision hazed and I got light-headed for a moment, my legs going noodly, but my HUD flashed yellow and suddenly I felt better, my military augments adjusting my chemistry. I didn’t know if I was actually better or if it just felt that way, and I wasn’t sure if it made any difference.