The Eternal Prison (51 page)

 

Yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, I Tasered some old man by the dole until he pissed himself and passed out. This is who I am. Forever.

 

 

 

 

Acknowledgments

When my Future Self emerged from his homebrew time machine in my devastated living room back in 1987 and told me to write this book, I was dubious but took notes anyway because it seemed like the right thing to do. Plus my Future Self was pretty drunk and belligerent, waving around a silver batonlike thing that might have been some sort of death ray. The notes remained locked inside a fireproof strongbox for twenty years until that fateful day when my publisher sent a team of thugs to my home to extract signatures on new publication contracts, and I needed an idea fast. I am quietly assured by my Future Self that the publication of this book will lead me to world domination.

 

Along the way, many folks have helped: First and foremost, my
beautiful wife, Danette,
who alternately kicked my butt when it needed kicking and dressed my wounds when they threatened the writing progress. She remains the most perfect wife, partner, and motivator known to modern science.

 

My agent
Janet Reid
continues to feign amusement with my ways and negotiates the heck out of everything my name appears on, often appearing in a flash of purple smoke anytime I reach for a pen to sign something. This is sometimes awkward in restaurants when the check comes, though it makes fleeing from expensive meals a little easier.

 

My editor
Devi Pillai
always starts our conversations by telling me how great I am, which I appreciate, and then starts talking, and somehow by the end of the conversation I have agreed to write more books for her, wash her car, pick up her dry cleaning, and scrub her shower tiles. These books would not be as good as they are without her help and patience, not to mention her ability to control me with her thoughts.

 

Everyone else at
Orbit Books
for putting up with me and for doing a fantastic job of putting these books together and then convincing folks to purchase them.

 

And of course, I have to thank everyone who bought a copy of
The Electric Church
or
The Digital Plague,
without whom I’d just be another crazy man on the street corner, waving a stained and torn manuscript about as I drunkenly demand that everyone pay me a dollar.

 

Finally, if not for the quick reflexes and fearlessness of the world-famous
Lili Saintcrow,
this book would likely never have been written, as I would likely have perished in a Russian prison, disavowed even by my own government. Thanks, Lili!

 

 

Extras

 

 

 

 

Meet the Author

Barbara Nitke

JEFF SOMERS was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. After graduating college, he wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey brought him back to his homeland. In 1995, Jeff began publishing his own magazine, the
Inner Swine
( www.innerswine.com [http://www.innerswine.com]). The Web site for
The Electric Church
can be found at www.the-electric-church.com [http://www.the-electric-church.com].

 

 

 

 

Introducing

if you enjoyed

THE ETERNAL PRISON,

look out for

THE TERMINAL STATE

by Jeff Somers

“EVERY’TING fallen apart,” Dingane groused, rubbing his dry, cracked hands against his unshaven chin. “T’whole fuckin’ world, yeah?”

 

I raised the wooden cup from the wobbly table and held it in the air between us, steeling myself. I’d tasted some terrible things in my life, but the moonshine Bixon made out back routinely tasted like it had been filtered through corpses, and felt like it was taking a layer of your throat off as it went down to boot. I was a murderer, a Plague survivor, and a wanted man, and I still had to steady myself before each shot.

 

“Quit your fucking bellyaching,” I advised Dingane, “and tell me if you got my stuff.”

 

Dingane paused, nasty, and then thought better of it and smiled. I immediately wished he hadn’t, green teeth and black gums, and I tipped the shot into my mouth to distract myself from his grin. My throat tried to close up in instinctual defense, but I was ready for that and just worked it on down. I breathed through my mouth.

 

“Ohkay, ohkay,” Dingane said, affecting a jolly expression. “Av’ry is impatient today, uh? You pay’n the bills heeyah, so ohkay. I got mos’ de stuff you ask. Not easy t’transport heavy shit, t’big shit.” He spread his chalky hands. “No ’overs any mo’, Av’ry. From here t’Florida you can’t get no ’overs. An if you
could,
the fucking armay be shoot’n your ass
down,
trust. So I can’t get the big items. And bullets is hard. Ammo. Hard. No one makin’ any’ting anymore. Nowhere. Mexico, sheeit, usesta be, Mexico you get
any’ting,
now, no. Nothin’
in
Mexico ’cept armay and cops, armay and cops, shootin’s at every’ting, bombing t’cities back to fuck.”

 

It was my fate to listen to Dingane bitch and moan every now and then. I’d pulled his ear a few times to discourage him, but Dingane was one of those leathery fellows that looked a fucking century old and acted like pain didn’t mean shit to him anymore, which maybe it didn’t. Easier to let him talk about how the whole world was going to piss. I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

 

That didn’t mean I couldn’t move things along. “Hell, Dingy, can’t you shut up for one fucking minute?”

 

He gave me the grin again. “Sho’ can, Av’ry, but I thought y’wanted news of your order, huh? You wanted clips, mag’zines, for what’ver caliber I could get. I got some, I got some, but it ain’t cheap or easy. N’one down south makin’ ’em up an’more. I gots to go
far afield,
you dig?”

 

I let Dingane talk. It was good cover. I closed my eyes and pictured the place, Bixon’s uninsulated shack with the long bar made up of crates in the back, the wobbly tables lashed together, the big ugly metal stove in the middle of the room glowing red, pulsing with heat, making the whole place smell like my own armpit and stinging the eyes with soot and smoke. Better than outside, where snow was howling—the weather was fucked up; you never knew what you were gonna get these days. Rumor was, it was all fallout from the war screwing up the climate, but who the fuck knew. I’d never been in this part of the world before. Neither had most of us.

 

I thought of Old Pick, long dead now. I thought about everything that fat old bastard had known, the data of lifetimes, the oral history of every criminal worth remembering in New York since Unification. And who knew what water he’d carried across the line from pre-Uni times. All of it gone now, like it’d never happened. And there’d never be another Pick, ever. Not these days.

 

The tables, six of them, arranged randomly in the tight space beyond the bar, more or less around the stove that stood in the middle. Dingane and I, the Mayor and her cronies playing dominoes, Tiny Timlin and some of the other kids looking puffy and sick, on their fourth or fifth dose of Bixon’s poison. Bixon himself, behind the bar, a man who had never washed once since I’d known him, more beard than human at this point. All of them just flotsam, people fleeing the war and dead cities abandoned by one side or another, showing up here. For the most part, if you could lend a hand, you were pretty much welcome.

 

If you couldn’t lend a hand, or didn’t want to, and stuck around anyway, that’s where I came in.

 

“And this utter ting you ask me to look into, I t’ink I got you something.”

 

I popped open one eye and put it on him. The black bastard was grinning, pleased with himself. I shut my eyes again. “Yeah?”

 

I pictured the place once more: one door in the front, a heavy piece of wood on crude but solid hinges; one in the rear that led out to the back, where Bixon created his horrible juice. I didn’t know how he made the stuff, and I didn’t want to know; if I went back there and found him milking some terrible giant green worm, I wouldn’t be surprised.

 

And then, bellied to the bar and examining his cup of booze dubiously, the Badge.

 

Not a Badge anymore, but certainly an old System Pig. I didn’t recognize him —

 

Me either,
Marin whispered faintly, and was gone.

 

— but he had the look.

 

“Yeah,” Dingane said, leaning forward so I could get a real good whiff of him, a courtesy. “Europe, I’ear. Amsterdam. Solid source, uh?”

 

I shook my head, opening my eyes again. I didn’t hear from my ghosts much anymore, but they still popped up once in a while, still there, still complete and whole. Amsterdam. I figured Michaleen would be in Europe. Knowing a city was a good start.

 

The cop—ex-cop—was turning 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 that 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 make out 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, he 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.

 

Behind me, the band was working through a complex guitar set, chicken-picking their way through a series of chords that managed to sound pretty good even though they had ten strings between the three of them. They were old guys, fucking ancient, but everyone here did something. If you couldn’t work the fields or make booze or kick the shit out of people when the
Mayor
told you to, you played a bass line on a single string and made it sound snappy.

 

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 he’d even stopped calling me
Mr. Cates
. Next 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, was behaving herself and keeping 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 army, the friendly folks of the SFNA, 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 and decided to stay. 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 of peering at holographic data streams. The last time one of these 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.