The Digital Plague (6 page)

My eyes watered and I clenched them shut. I would not
cry.
I saw her, twelve years old, caught red-handed with one grimy paw in my coat pocket. I’d lifted her up by the wrist until her round little face was level with mine.

“Ooh, you’re fucking
scary,
” she’d spat at me. “I’m
terrified.
”

And then she’d jammed a small sharp blade into my belly, an inch deep, her whole little body quivering with the effort. She let out a cute, tiny grunt. Her eyes had flashed up to mine, eager. Behind her, I remembered Belling bursting into laughter, roaring at me.

I’d pulled her close as hot blood dripped down my belly, and I remembered her face going from savage triumph to wide-eyed terror with comical speed.

“I’m s-s-sorry,” she sputtered. “I’m sorry!”

I remembered smiling. “You’re sorry your knife is too small,” I’d said, and she’d smiled back, her whole face transforming into something beautiful. And now she was gone. Opening my eyes, I silently added her to my total.

“Give me,” I said, clearing my throat, “give me Belling.”

There was another pause, the dim sound of voices conferring, and then: “He, too.”

I blinked. I had the sudden urge to tear the feed out of the console, to rip up my fingers as I destroyed the whole goddamn cockpit. It was fucking impossible. I’d seen them both
hours
ago. They’d been breathing, talking. It was fucking
impossible.
Then I remembered Gleason at the restaurant, pink and sweating, looking terrible.

“What?” I managed to say evenly, making fists.

“He, too,” the voice said. “He not here, the old man.”

I punched my hand into the console, shooting pain up my arm. Knuckles aching, I did it again, smashing shards of plastic into the air. Fucking
Belling?
Belling was immortal.

“What do you mean,” I gritted out, each word a separate effort, “he fucking
not here?
”

More conferring, and I wanted to reach through the feed and strangle whatever moron I had working for me. “Forget it,” I said. “Repeat what I’m about to say or I will make a fucking
note
of you and I guarantee you will
regret
it. I need—”

I paused and cocked my head. A shiver of anxiety rippled through me, and I reached out and disconnected the connection. In the silence, there was no mistaking it: hover displacement, getting nearer.

Cops,
I thought. “Fuck me,” I muttered. “Looks like my ride is here.”

Day Three:
One Small Moment of
Happiness, Worth it

Horrified, I crouched in the ruined cockpit and took stock of my amazing situation: I’d been betrayed not once but twice by someone in my organization, my two key people were apparently, mysteriously, dead, I was unarmed, and I was surrounded by the dead bodies of official government representatives in the middle of flat wilderness that offered no hiding places.

I suddenly wished I was back in Newark. Blindfolded with a gun to my head sounded better than this shit, and Glee would still be there.

As the roar of the approaching hover grew steadily louder, I leaped up and pulled myself through the hatchway back into the cabin. The three bodies were jumbled together against one of the seats, blood smeared everywhere, eyes open and staring. I pulled myself up onto a seat and stared down at them for a moment, three more people who were dead simply because they’d met me. Reaching down, I smeared the still-warm blood onto my hand and began rubbing it onto myself, my face, my clothes, my hair. As the hover outside landed, kicking up a fine spray of dirty snow, I lay down between seats and pulled the nearest body, the girl, on top of me, put my head back, and stared up at the ceiling. There was always the chance they’d scan for heat signatures, but System Pigs could be arrogant and sloppy. They were still human.

Being a Gunner was about patience—all you did was wait. You waited in dark rooms for people to come home, you waited on busy streets for someone you’d only seen in blurry images to stroll by. You waited in perfect silence and you waited without moving, going mad, muscles twitching. I cleared my mind and fixed my eyes on a rivet in the ceiling of the hover, and waited.

Outside, there was a tangible tremor as the arriving hover settled onto the damp ground of the riverbank, and then silence. Immediately, I heard a cabin door sighing open, and two pairs of heavy feet hitting the ground.

“Control, this is Vaideeki Six-RR-Eight calling in a crashed hover. It’s got a civvy tag, SFN-NY-Eighty-nine-a. Someone get on the wire and tell the DPH we’ve found one of their bricks.”

The voice was smooth and unaccented, almost completely neutral, as if he’d learned English from aliens. I heard the heavy feet walking around.

“Copy that, control,” the voice continued. “Tell the Spooks we’ll secure their property until they find the fucking
time
to get here, and we’ll breathe real shallow.”

“What’s up?” said a second voice, just as neutral but lower and rougher, a smoker.

“We have been officially advised that this is a quarantine site, Sanjay. The Department of Public Health thinks we might be in trouble.”

“Fucking Spooks. Always doom and gloom from those freaks.”

I could feel the girl’s dissipating body heat on me and smelled her hair with each breath, my throat trying to close up and gag me to death. One of them stuck his head into the cockpit; I could see it as a tan blob out of the corner of my eye. The smell of pipe tobacco filled the air. I hadn’t seen loose tobacco in years. My eyes were watering. I didn’t dare blink, but watery eyes wasn’t good either—they’d notice, the fucking System Pigs knew death almost as well as I did. The hover began to shake and groan as he pulled himself up into the cockpit.

“Shit, look at this asshole,” the first voice—Vaideeki—said from above me. “Should have been strapped in, buddy.”

“You hear the Spooks are supposed to be reforming the army?” the second one shouted from outside. “Can you believe that? What the fuck do the Undersecretaries know about security, about breaking heads?”

“Forget it,” Vaideeki said. “Tricky Dick won’t
allow
that shit. Watch and see. That shit is going to blow up in their faces.” The hover vibrated again as a second set of steel-tipped boots climbed into the cockpit from the other side.

“I got four more in the back,” the second voice said. “A lot of blood. Looks like five for five, to me.”

“Uh-huh,” Vaideeki said. I wanted to get a good look at these two, at least keep them in sight, but I couldn’t take the risk. My eyes burned, dust falling on them like invisible snow and drying them up, turning them yellow and brittle. “Something’s off here, Sanjay. Look at the pilot. Why wasn’t he strapped in?”

“Had generator trouble and got up to try something,” Sanjay offered. I pictured him shrugging.

“Nah—think about it. You’re sticking a brick through the air and you lose power, you lose steering, whatever. Do you leap out of your seat and go apeshit? All the controls are
designed
to be within reach from the chair—that’s the point. You stay in the safety straps.”

“All right, genius, you stay in the straps. This is some DPH idiot we’re talking about. One of Ruberto’s assholes. You’re asking me if I think one of those shitheads might panic and fuck up? Hell yeah.”

“Them, too?
All
of them, just deciding to have a fucking dance party while the hover’s going down, hard? Get DPH on the wire. Find out what this hover was up to.”

I heard the second cop talking into the air, implanted sensors transmitting his voice back to SSF HQ at The Rock. I swallowed slowly, almost choking and having to suppress an explosion of coughs that shook me silently, making my torso twitch. The girl wobbled slightly on top of me as I tried to get my body back under control.

I heard the first one, Vaideeki, pulling himself into the cabin, grunting with the effort. My eyes were tearing fiercely and it was getting hard to stop them from fluttering. I gripped the blade tightly as one of his boots came into my peripheral vision, just a huge blurry object that shoved at the girl’s body on top of me, pushing her this way and that. I saw how it would unspool: he’d notice something—sweat seeping from my pores, the tears pooling in my eyes, the soft, barely-there rise and fall of my chest as I let air painfully slip slowly in and out of my burning, screaming lungs. Something; the System Pigs were too well trained to miss it all. He’d see something and pretend he hadn’t, a tiny hesitation, maybe, the only sign that something had registered. He’d even turn away from me and take an easy step, saying something to his partner, and then he’d whirl, tearing his gun from its holster hanging low near his hip.

Maybe I’d even beat him. Maybe I’d flash the blade and sink it into his throat before he could get the shot off, or the shot would go wide as he staggered back in shock. And then what? And then I go for his gun, fast, pushing off the hundred pounds of dead fucking psionic and trying to snatch the auto from his slackening grip and come up ready to shoot before his partner—who I could only hope had been standing there with his mouth open and his dick in his hand while all this went on.

More probably, I thought with a rising edge of near panic, the second cop would blow my head off about five seconds before I could even locate him.
Most
probably, I wouldn’t beat the first cop, and I’d just end up dead with nothing to show for it.

The second cop’s voice burst into the cabin, so loud and sudden I almost jumped. “DPH isn’t giving us shit. Says it’s official business under Ruberto’s paper, we need a fucking writ to get into it. You wanna call the Colonel?”

“Shit,” Vaideeki muttered. “Fuck that. We’ll put those pieces of shit down as
uncooperative
in the report and let it simmer. There’s a reckoning coming for all of them, brother, mark my words.”

His lower body came into view: purple pants, the crease razor sharp, a long leather coat that swirled around his ankles, the boots shiny but serious, the sort of boots you cracked ribs with. Purple fucking pants. I could see him slowly turning around, feet planted on the back of the last row of seats, like he was studying the cabin carefully, looking for hints.

“No shots,” he said to himself.

The second cop grunted his way into the cabin, the hover shaking fiercely. “Whole thing’s gonna fall over we keep pushing our way through it,” he complained, letting loose a wet smoker’s cough that started my own convulsions anew, my whole body quivering with the effort to keep from sputtering. I narrowed myself down, concentrating on the blade in my hand, gripping as tightly as I could, keeping my arm loose and ready to move. I pushed everything else out of my mind and got ready, forcing my stiff muscles to relax, to go slack, tracking the two cops as they moved awkwardly through the cabin. When the moment came, I wasn’t going to waste any more time. I plotted how to throw the girl’s corpse off me, where I could plant my foot to get good leverage, what I could hang on to for stability.

Suddenly, Vaideeki turned sharply, one arm shooting up. “Go ahead, Control,” he said in his smooth, advertisement voice.

His partner continued to kick around the cabin, but you could tell from his movements that it was just for show, just to look busy. I wanted to stretch so badly I thought a bullet in the head might be worth it. This was how people ended up dying, I thought. It was a choice. You were lying there, suffering, fighting something, some black cancer in your gut or a bullet in your chest or a tumor like a rock in your brain, and you fought and fought until you couldn’t fucking stand it any longer, and you just gave up and let go, for that one small moment of happiness, worth it, worth everything.

“Copy that, Control, on our way.” Vaideeki half turned, legs spread awkwardly to keep his balance. “We got an all-hands situation midtown. Old Pennsylvania Hotel.”

“What about this mess?”

Vaideeki started climbing down toward the cockpit. “Fuck, it’s the DPH’s brick. Let them come up here and clean it up. We’ve been ordered back into the city. You want to wire the King Worm and tell him no, you got higher
priorities?
”

“Shit, no,” Sanjay muttered, following his partner.

“Fucking animals downtown,” Vaideeki said as he planted one foot square on my upturned wrist, crushing it under his weight as he pulled himself over me. I almost stabbed him in the calf out of sudden reaction, pain shooting through me and lighting up all the other broken parts of me like a pinball hitting every damn bumper in sight. “What we need is a fucking natural disaster, clear everything out below Twenty-third. Don’t know why we don’t just go down there and clean that shit up.”

“You said it,” Sanjay agreed, and then Vaideeki’s foot was off my arm, the pain burning down into the muscle, into the bone. Their voices faded as they went chatting through the cockpit and back out into the snow. I started to shake but kept my eyes open and fixed on the ceiling, tears leaking down into my hair. I kept as still as I could until I heard the displacers kick in, roaring into life, splitting my ears, the whole hover rocking gently in the field as they lifted off. I sat up and whimpered, moving every muscle spastically, dragging my sleeve across my watering eyes. I sat for a moment or two, stretching out, and then slowly climbed weakly to my feet and went back into the cockpit. I scanned the transmitter again, seeking out our frequencies, but on each and every one all I got was the hollow, empty sound.