Episode One: Look Back in Anger (3 page)

“There must be something to satisfy you. Something you want from me. Otherwise you wouldn’t bother with this personal visit. You’d have one of your lackeys sent down to do your dirty work.”

“Perhaps I just enjoy causing you grief.” He flashed his teeth, malevolence masquerading as a grin.

“I’d almost believe it, but I
know
you. What do you want?”

Arles canted his head thoughtfully, and gave the playful pretense of having to put some thought into the words that followed. “You said it yourself. I’m here for Sam.”

Marx didn’t speak for a long time. Not to tell him to go to hell or even to open barter. The silence made Arles’s smile grow absurdly wider. Even he would admit he looked a bit like the rabid dog when he permitted the malice inside to touch his face.

“No,” Marx finally said. “She won’t do it. I won’t make her.”

Arles allowed his features to shift back to something less crazed, and scooped up that precious picture of his stepsisters once more. “Well, now, let’s be truthful. You can make her do a lot of things. Just not the one thing that really matters to you. Not yet, but soon, I’m guessing. Unless someone gets in your way. Again. That seems sort of my job, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t. Play dumb. Play old and feeble and win her through sympathy. That’s the game plan, right?”

“She’s afraid of you. With good reason.” Marx’s lips peeled back from his teeth threateningly as he gave Arles a long, appraising survey. “She thinks you’re a monster. A disgusting man. Nothing you can do now will change her mind.”

Arles’s smile wavered just a bit. He gave the image in his hand one last look, then spiked it onto the desk so hard it sparked and hissed as parts of the fractured screen sprayed out all over Marx. “Here is the deal, Daddy. She’s mine…and while she’s mine, you get to keep limited lordship over the company. I can’t have her distracted with ideas of you living under a bridge and handing out blowjobs for sustenance. So you keep the job, and you keep the other two girls, for now, and you count yourself lucky I’m only here for Sam.”

“She doesn’t want you!”

“Did I mention I’m not alone? Not this time. You can’t win this. Not against me. And especially not against me, and all of
them
.”

The old man’s hands stilled in their furious attempts to right the now shattered image display, stilled completely as he became calculating ice. Arles knew him well enough, knew he was running the options in his head, and knew it was only a matter of moments before he had his answer, if not his woman.

“You call her, get her down here now, and convince her to leave with me any way you have to, or I call
my
family. That is a terror you know you don’t want gunning for you.”

* * * *

“You know I don’t like guns, right?” Alex turned the weapon over in his hands, studying it like a spider caught between his fingers.

“Quit being such a little Nancy. It’s just a few interconnected pieces of metal. It don’t bite.” Jesse steadily fieldstripped one of the many weapons laid out on the table as he voiced his disapproval. He took the gun apart as if it were held together by Velcro—a bunch of quick snaps and he was done. It was amazing how Jesse managed to hit every cowboy cliché without even trying, from the low-hanging Stetson hat he wore to the beer he chugged periodically while working. The man was everything Alex wasn’t. Except for short—that was a shame they shared.

Jesse wiped his hands on his jeans, leaving grease stains behind that would have sent Alex to the showers instantly and on a panicked search for a change of clothes. Why did being a man seem to mean being filthy and poorly dressed? Ugh, no way he was getting gun grease on his shirt.

Setting the gun down, he pulled a piece of the old newsprint covering the hotel table out from under a stack of others and brought it to his lap. He stared at it a moment, wondering how practical it would be to wrap himself in it like a mummy before starting again on the gun cleaning. A glance at Jesse’s scowl put him off the idea fast, so instead he lifted the crinkly paper and tucked it into the neck of his silk shirt like a dinner napkin.

“Seriously?”

“What? I’ll never get grease stains out of silk.”

“Well, maybe you should wear something a little more durable.”

Alex picked up the gun from the table. “Like denim or whatever dishrag material your shirt is made of?”

“You watch yourself, boy. Bullets go through newsprint, you know.”

Alex suppressed a growl. “I like my clothes. It’s not my fault I don’t own anything befitting gun scrubbin’.” Trying on Jesse’s accent left a horrid taste in his mouth.

“Keep runnin’ your yap. I’ll have your daddy put your narrow ass on a train and you’ll be home by morning.”

“Oh, would you? Please?”

“You’re the one who asked to be more involved.
Now
you’re involved.”

“Not at some sleazy hotel picking at gun guts. I don’t even like guns. I want to be out there. With the rest of them. Doing what we do.”

“This
is
what we do. Before you get a gun in your hand, you have to learn to respect it. No one on this team wants you armed and ignorant. The instant you saw trouble, you’d be all flailing arms and spraying bullets.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“That is a subject very much up for debate.”

Alex looked at the gun for a long moment. “Why can’t we at least stay with Arles? He has a nice place. Clean sheets, a bathroom you can turn around in without having to back up first. Why do we have to stay in this roach bucket?”

“Arles has his own can of worms he’s sifting through. We’re just here to back him up.”

“It’s a woman. What kind of backup can we possibly provide?”

Jesse snapped the gun back into order and rubbed a soft cloth over its metal flesh, then waggled the weapon at Alex. “All the help he needs.”

“What, are we gonna shoot her? That’s one hell of a dangerous courtship. Has he tried just sending flowers?”

The gun twirled in Jesse’s hand and was suddenly cocked and aimed right at Alex’s nose. Alex looked down the barrel, and then to all those teeth Jesse flashed in a vicious grin. A grin turned all the more unsettling by the deep scars that raked up the side of the man’s face. “Keep it up, pup, and you can forget about the train. Daddy’ll be shipping you home in a shoe box.”

It was a little early in the night for threats, even if he knew they were empty. Jesse was only two beers in. Alex’s shoulders slumped. Okay, so maybe he could do with a bit more work, a bit less whine. He set the gun down and slipped a hand into his pocket, then pulled his long red hair back and tied it into a ponytail on top of his head, ignoring Jesse’s snort of disgust. It was bad enough he was going to have grease all under his nails. No way was he getting it in his hair too. Jesse could kiss his ass.

He picked the gun up and turned it over in his hands a few times before giving a section a good tug. Just like he’d seen Jesse do a hundred times before. It didn’t budge. He turned the gun again, but just as it hit him he was now looking down the barrel like an idiot, Jesse reached across the table and smacked the nose of the gun away from his.

“Boy, are you that stupid? You tryin’ to get your head blowed off?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to do this!”

“First you make sure all the safeties are engaged.”

He looked it over, pushed in the little levers. Check.

“Then you take out the magazine, and make sure there ain’t any bullets in the chamber.”

That step took a bit longer. He had to figure out how to eject the magazine, and then—the slide snapped closed on the tip of his finger. It was much harder to continue following Jesse’s verbal cues after that, what with his injured finger in his mouth and all. “This sucks. Guns are stupid.”

“Says the kid sucking on his finger.”

“It hurts!” He popped his throbbing finger from his lips and dropped the last two pieces of the gun onto the table. “And I’m not a kid.”

“Then stop acting like one.” Jesse scrubbed a hand over his tired face, then picked up another gun from the lineup. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. You can’t fight. You scream and run at the sight of anything with fangs or claws. You can’t even help with prep. Alex, really, you should be at home with your computers and accounts. I’m sorry, son, I really am. You’re just no good in the field.”

He stared back at the man for a moment, resisting the urge to continue sucking his finger. “I can do things. I can do a lot of things.”

“Yeah, the gadgets and wires and hacker shit.” Jesse ripped the magazine from the gun in his hand. “A monkey could be trained to do that.”

“Then why don’t they have you doing it?” The finger went back between his lips, despite the overly sweet smile he put on.

“That’s it!” The gun smacked against the table as Jesse’s hands emphasized his words. “You’re just trying to piss me off to get out of this, aren’t—” It smacked again, but this time the boom that followed cut all berating short.

Alex fell forward, the back of the chair exploding behind him. It took a moment for the pain to hit, for the ooze of red soaking the newsprint to make sense.

“Oh…shit.” Jesse set the gun down and slowly got to his feet, then reached across the table to push Alex’s sagging body back in the chair. “And…yeah,
that’s
why you always make sure the safety is on.”

The world crashed in on Alex, the light above the table searing through his eye sockets as he reeled from the stabbing pain mushrooming in his shoulder. Jesse lunged to catch him but missed as the chair toppled, dropping him onto the stained rug. He had a moment to be angry, a moment to be disgusted—there was no telling what foul, unmentionable things coated the carpet his face was now smooshed against—just a moment to be aware of his body responding against his will, and by then it was too late. His bones cracked, his clothes twisted and tore, and in an instant he was staring at black-and-scarlet paws coated in the goopy red that still gushed from his shoulder.

He scurried away from the pile of clothes—ruined despite the newsprint napkin—and launched himself under the bed.

“Great, just great.” Jesse kicked at the clothes pile. “You’re going to get dog hair and blood on everything, and your dad is going to kick my ass.”

Alex’s growl was a trill of annoyance. He wasn’t a damn dog.

Jesse chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, I know. You ain’t a dog. But with that rubber band in your hair, you kinda look like a pissed-off Pomeranian. It’s cute. We should take some pictures. You know…just as soon as you stop bleeding everywhere.”

II

“I killed him, Jerr.” The whine in Sam’s voice grated her nerves, but at least she wasn’t sobbing anymore. Even when her vehicle allowed her to ride hands-free, and she didn’t need to see the road to get to where she was going, the tears in her voice had initially confused the hell out of the electronic navigator. Luckily she’d caught the error and course corrected before she ended up in Timbuktu.

“He was such a cute little pup too. Enjoyed being alive so much.” Sam tugged off her wrist link and unfolded the device, setting it in her lap to access the touch screen. She sniffled as she scrolled through Mr. Morris’s billing information and sent it back to Jerri at the home office. “I feel like a murderer.”

“You didn’t kill him. You know it’s not the same thing.” Jerri’s voice filled the car with reassurance so strong she could have been sitting right next to Sam. “Besides, if anyone killed him, it was that asshole Morris.” Jerr’s voice had
that
tone, the one that said the woman was dangerously close to an explosive political rant even before she spoke again. “I swear, some people shouldn’t be allowed to have pets, SynthPets or otherwise. There needs to be a law. A competency test or something to weed out the losers.”

“Oh my God.” Sam wiped her face with a fistful of tissues, glancing up through the windshield to make sure the car’s navigator hadn’t gotten her lost in the city again. “What if it had been an organic? A real dog?”

“Honey, I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s living in an AnyTown development, a low-end AnyTown development. No way he could afford a real animal.”

“He has kids. And that little boy of his is going to come home and find his dog dead. Because I killed it.”

“If that little boy is anything like his father, he probably won’t care. I doubt anyone is going to care as much as you do right now.” Jerri’s sigh echoed in the vehicle’s cabin. “I’m going to stop letting you go out on service calls. At least once a month you get your heart ripped out.”

Sam stuffed her used tissues into the trash compartment before checking her destination on the car’s NavScreen in the dashboard. Maybe she would take a detour? Just skip work for the rest of the day and… “Oh, the Fudge Factor is having a sale on cupcakes. I think I am going to be late getting back.”

“Sam, no. No sugar. That’s just going to make you feel worse.”

“Creamy custard filling…” She pulled up the full menu on the screen and flipped through one delicious-looking goody after another. “Red velvet…”

“Sam! If he hadn’t called you fat, you wouldn’t even be thinking about this right now.”

“Pig.”

“What?”

“He called me a pig. And a cow. And a cunt.” She settled back into her seat, cradling the unfurled wrist link against her knees. “Last one messed up a perfectly good barnyard theme.”

“Oh, that’s it. On the next software update, that asshole is getting a Cujo.”

“No. Just let it go. I’ll be fine. Not like it’s any worse than I’m used to.”

“You shouldn’t have to be used to it. No one should have to get used to that. The guy is a dick. And…for the record, you are not fat. Okay? You’re natural. Tits and ass don’t make you fat. There is a difference. A huge difference.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m the huge difference. A huge, fat difference.”

“I wish you wouldn’t beat yourself up like that, honey. A lot of guys would fall all over themselves to have you.” Jerri was quiet, and then she chuckled. “I bet Mr. Morr-ass is just gay.”