Cates 05 - The Final Evolution (20 page)

“We have rad suits that can withstand such exposure for perhaps an hour,” Grisha said, leaning forward. “We must work
together
, Director Hense. Are we different species? Perhaps we are. But we are species on the brink of extinction, both.” He leaned back again. “We offer you a way. But it must be our way.”

She shook her head. “I arrest you, and search radiation zones—preserved settlements with lethal-dose ionizing rad levels. I find him without you.”

Grisha shrugged his face, pulling the corners of his lips down. “Yes. Maybe you even find him before your automatic shutdown routines kick in. Maybe you go through a dozen false leads and then time runs out, yes?”

She continued to stare. Without transition, or any movement on her part, the doors to the four-wheeler popped up, letting in the brisk Berlin air. “I will have officers as part of the extraction team. Cates can be your
Taker
, but I will have hands there to keep him on target.”

Before I could say anything, Grisha nodded. “Agreed. Yes. But they will follow Avery’s orders. Avery will be lead on the extraction team.”

I closed my eyes, feeling the gentle rock of the chassis as everyone struggled to unglue themselves and exit. I didn’t like any of this. If he were here, I would have told Remy to always exit a vehicle last; if there was an ambush waiting, let someone else take the brunt of it. And then I would have told him to also always know your exits, so you don’t get trapped inside. And then he would have nodded and yawned and asked me if I had anything alcoholic to drink stashed away somewhere.

I opened my eyes and shook myself. I had work to do. I pushed myself along the oddly comfortable upholstered seats and pulled myself from the four-wheeler; Hense and Gall and Grisha were already on the huge stone steps leading up into the building, which stretched away majestically to my right and left. Some weak, watery sun had poked its way through the clouds, and the sensation of open space felt strange and oppressive.

One of the poor assholes in a gray uniform, similar to SPS’s jumpsuits, stood in front of me. His head had been shaved to a pink, round ball, and he squinted at me with a dopey, ludicrous grin on half his face.

“Hullo, Avery,” he said.

I looked back at him, and after a moment a shock of recognition hit me. Without his bloom of hair, his stupid glasses, and the extra thirty pounds, I would not have recognized Ezekiel Marko under most conditions.

“Zeke,” I said, giving him a grin, for a moment everything else forgotten. I had a soft spot for Mr. Marko. Then I frowned. “You used to have better fashion sense.”

His whole round head turned crimson, and his face folded up. It took me a moment to realize that good old Zeke Marko was fucking
livid
.

“I’ve been assigned to be your technical liaison,” he said. Then he paused and looked over my shoulder, his eyes squinted. “I made my way south after we crashed, and did okay for a while. Then I got caught between a press unit for the army and the police, and I chose what I thought was the lesser evil.” He indicated his uniform with a sweep of his hands. “I’m a fucking indentured servant here, now. Because I got burned and ran, they don’t trust me to put me in an avatar—which I’m glad for—but they need people like me to work on their little problem.” Suddenly he looked back at me, and I was shocked at the sustained anger and directness of his gaze. The Marko I’d known had been a timid little shit, worming his way through life. “Don’t p them, Avery,” he whispered, leaning in.

I blinked. “What?”

“Let them all go dormant,” he whispered, his eyes jumping around nervously. “Every last fucking one of them.”

YER GONNA NEED MORE GUNNERS

“If this is what they’re calling booze,” Gall said, “I haven’t been missing much by way of fucking
civilization
by staying out in the cold.”

We all stared down at our glasses with a mixture of dismay and embarrassment. When our minder, a blank-faced, skinny captain named Mehrak, who never smiled or reacted in any way to anything we said to him, had told us there was liquor to be had in Berlin even Grisha had gotten excited. Mehrak had been assigned to escort us around the city, and he’d taken us to a grand-looking restaurant on the other side of the big forestlike park we’d ridden through, directly across from ancient, rusting rail tracks. The place was staffed by unhappy-looking workers in the gray uniforms—slaves, basically, who’d been brought into Berlin one way or another and implanted with a chip that set off alarms if they strayed too far outside the city limits. The cops swore they’d set them all free once things settled down, but I knew as well as they did that things never settled down. Not that much.

The menu consisted of three items: potato stew, bread hard enough to commit murder with, and potato liquor. The greasy sheen on the stew made me gag, so I’d contented myself with a tall glass of cloudy booze, which turned out to have been made from dead rats and old cheese, based on the taste.

Once convinced, Hense had proven almost eager to cooperate, which made me nervous. She’d hammered away at everything, pushing for advantages and control, which was to be expected, but she’d
bargained
, instead of dictating, which meant either she was in a weaker position than we suspected, or she was playing us. Since she was right in the middle of a long line of people who’d fooled me, and badly, in my life, I wouldn’t have been surprised. In the meantime, she’d agreed to put what was left of the SSF at our service. She’d even agreed to let us keep the actual location of Michaleen’s fortress, where he was incubating or molting or greasing his hinges or whatever, until the last minute. Either she was desperate, or we were going to get brutally fucked in the end.

Either way, a drink had sounded about right.

I raised my glass. “To the end of everything,” I said. “And about fucking time.”

It was a strange moment. It felt calm and almost happy, like everything was draining out of the world and leaving a brief moment of static before it all went black, and suddenly Horatio Gall and Grisha felt like my friends. Some of the other tables in the place were filled by gray-uniformed workers—on breaks, I guessed. They stared and kept silent. I figured the fact that Hense had issued orders to let us keep our weapons didn’t make us seem too friendly.

“Fuck you,” Gall said,re kling as he winced his way into a sip of his drink.

“Nothing ends,” Grisha said with a faint smile. “There are just new ways of doing things.”

Mehrak said nothing. He stood a few feet away with his hands in his pockets, his sunglasses on to ward off any attempt to engage him. He was an avatar, of course, but he looked like he’d been quick and nimble as flesh and blood, the sort of cop who would chase you into places you didn’t expect to be chased into.

“Besides,” Grisha said, suppressing a cough after his swallow of deadly booze, his whole body shivering, “that is why we are here, to make sure things continue.”

A group of workers emerged from the interior of the restaurant, each bearing two glasses of booze in dirty hands. There were three of them, one man and two women, all middle-aged and tired looking. Thinking that if they actually drank both I’d be in some personal fear of them, I watched them pause awkwardly when they saw us, and then sit down at a table behind me.

I looked back at Grisha. He sat easily, studying me with a frown. He was the most competent man I’d ever met. Not especially talented in many ways: not the best shot I’d ever seen, not a brilliant inventor, nothing like that. He was just a collection of pretty fucking good at everything rolled into one person. I never would have pegged him as someone wanting to save the world.

“You think of your friend,” he said suddenly. He held up his glass, smiling archly. “He would have enjoyed this?”

His kindness made me angry. I thought of Remy, again, saw him going inside and demanding a jug of this acid, getting into a fight when they said no, getting hauled away and beaten up somewhere, then crawling back to where I was, bruised and scabbed, not sorry. Never fucking sorry.

I’d never had friends. Running with snuff gangs in Old New York as a kid, tossing a handful of dirt into some dandy’s face and knocking him down, fifteen, twenty sets of hands invading every possible pocket in seconds, ripping everything free and then running through the twisty old streets—you kept whatever you got your hands on. No sharing. If you wanted something someone else got their hands on, you had to take it. I hadn’t had some worn-down old Gunner showing
me
the ropes, some old man to make jokes about death with. I’d learned everything on my own. My first job gunning, I didn’t even have a gun yet. Guns were expensive. Knives you could make out of shit you found, sharpened pieces of soft metal, plastic. No one showed me
how
. No one listened to me bellyache for hours on end about my hard deal, how I had metal in my head, how I’d been abandoned.

Friends made you weak, and weak made you dead. I looked weak to Grisha, I thought, the Russian fuck laughing at me, really. Of course he was. I’d laugh at some old asshole misting up over one particular dead body in a long road made of dead bodies.

I thought about smashing my glass into Grisha’s face, finally finding out just how tough he was. I thought about telling him to fucking mind his business. I thought about telling him I kept seeing Remy in my mind, staring eyes empty, hands curled into stiff half fists, that I’d had hopes for him, of finally teaching someone something useful. I thought abut drinking off my entire glass in one gulp and seeing what happened.

Instead of all that, I just looked away. “Yeah, he would have.”

“It is not your fault. That old man was the most powerful Pusher I know of. You had no chance.”

“Fuck you,” I said before I even thought it. “I’m forty fucking years old, give or take. I’ve
survived
. I know better. Turning my back, relying on him, letting that old cunt Belling distract me.” I kept staring off into the distance. “I’ve been fucking pushed and pointed for
years
by Michaleen Garda. Cainnic Orel. Whatever his name is. Years. Who knows how long—I’m so fucking stupid it might be from fucking
birth
. And along the way, anyone I tried to keep fucking
alive
got killed. I could keep us here a month just talking about the people I’ve killed, or let be killed.” I laughed suddenly. I didn’t feel it; it just crawled out of me. “I’m motherfucking
death
, Grish. You spend enough time with me, you’re dead.” I laughed again. “Shit, for a while during the Plague, that was the literal fucking
truth.
” I was glad I’d put my glass down. My hands were clenched so tight I would have crushed it, slicing my hand to pulp. “Fucking cops, Grish,” I said. “They hired the Pusher. Put him on me.
They
killed Remy. And here I am, working with them, showing them my belly.”

I didn’t have to look to know that Grisha and Gall were exchanging a lingering look of alarm. I’d been on the other end when someone you were working with suddenly started to bark. You saw all your plans go out the window. You saw all your investment wasted, and you started thinking about cutting your losses and getting a new partner. I blinked my eyes rapidly a few times and took a long pull off the glass, resisting the urge to pound the table, and looked back at them.

“The translation is: Fuck you,” I said.

Grisha narrowed his eyes at me a moment, then nodded. “Yes, fine.” He pointed at me. “You have a chance
now
, you self-pitying asshole,” he said slowly, steadily. “You are concerned about those who have gone before? Save those who are
still here
.” He leaned back again. “We need you, Avery. You have a skill set and experience no one else in the world has anymore. We cannot simply advertise for world-class assassin, intimate experience with legend Canny Orel preferred. And we cannot pursue petty revenge. We also cannot choose our partners.”

Anger made me lean forward until the table bit into my belly. “So what, I’m just one of your fucking
resources
? I’m—”

“Avery!” he shouted, slamming his hand down on the table. “
Yes
, you are fucking
resources
. I
do not have any to spare
, and I have no fucking
time left
. No one does. Get that through your fucking thick, selfish skull. Am I using you? Yes! Poor Avery. Poor, poor Avery. I am
using
you to save the human race from extinction.” He sat back, staring at me. “I make no apology. I also do not play games. I do not lie to you.”

I realized I was on the edge of my seat, my muscles quivering, ready to launch myself forward. For a second all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears, and then—someone was clapping.

Directly behind us. I turned, and the three people at the table behind me were staring at us, just a foot or so away. The woman right behind me was smiling at me, clapping her hands in a deliberate, steady rhythm.

“Oy, this is a fine scene, innit?” she said, her eyes on me. “The great Avery Cates, bawling and trembling. And you think yer comin’ after
me
?” She looked past me at Grisha. “Yer gonna need more Gunners.”

I KILL
EVERYBODY

I experienced one of those rare moments of total, paralyzing shock—I couldn’t make it fit in and make sense. The woman wasn’t my age but wasn’t young, her reddish hair dry and bristly and mixed with gray, her complexion stained red with gin blossoms—she’d lived hard. She was smiling at me in a relaxed, confident way, but I’d never seen her before in my life. This was a fact. There was no wiggle room in it.

“What?”

She cocked her head the other way and smiled. The smile was vacant and terrifying—there was nothing in her eyes. They had rolled up, showing just the whites, and vibrated slightly. Behind her, her friends stared in puzzled agitation.