Cates 04 - The Terminal State

Table of Contents

 

The grunt put his face in mine, wrapping his arms around me and squeezing with excruciating, surprising force, making my ribs bark and trapping the shredder between us. Blood had spilled out over his mouth and chin, making him look suddenly older, more dangerous.

“Still got the thumbs, old man,” he panted at me. “You gonna break ’em with your mind? ”

I liked this guy. I liked the troops better than the cops—the cops were all fucking attitude, dandies in their rich suits, even before they’d all been forcibly turned into avatars, Droids with digital brains. They had more metal in their brains than I liked, sure, but we all had faults. I tended to kill everyone I met, more or less by accident.

Before I could tell him about my growing affection toward him, Remy rose up in the air and attached himself to the back of the soldier, his skinny arms locking around the grunt’s neck. Before I could even blink, he’d leaned in close like a fucking lover and bit the grunt’s ear, a savage, tearing bite.

The guard screamed. It was a high-pitched, boyish scream. He staggered off me, his arms slapping up at Remy, and I smiled, thinking,
That’s my boy
.

BY JEFF SOMERS

The Electric Church
The Digital Plague
The Eternal Prison
The Terminal State

 
 
 

 
The Terminal State

 

 
JEFF SOMERS

 
 
Hachette Digital

 
Published by Hachette Digital 2010

 
Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Somers

 
Excerpt from
The Unit
by Terry DeHart
Copyright © 2010 by Terry DeHart

 
The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 
All characters and events in this publication, other than
those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious
and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

 
All rights reserved.

 
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

 
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eISBN : 978 0 7481 1836 6

 
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To my darling wife, whose surplus of good
judgment makes up for my near-complete lack of it,
for ass-kickings richly deserved, and for love
I’m not nearly worthy of.

“Evry’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 it felt like it was taking a layer of your throat off as it went down to boot. I was a murderer, Plague survivor, and 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.”

He was right—the System was cracking open—but that was no reason to encourage him. After years of plotting against each other, the System Police and the civilian government had been in open civil war for a year, piling up bodies and destroyed cities, burning through yen and bodies, building up these sudden fleets of military-grade hovers and weapons, things that hadn’t existed for decades, since unification had ended war for fucking ever, didn’t you know. The whole world, bound together for a while, one government, one police force, no armies in sight. And now we didn’t have police anymore, just armies, and it didn’t matter who won. You just wanted them to get it over with
fast
, before they killed everyone.

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? Av’ry’s in the
revenge
bidness, huh? You lis’n to Dingane, m’friend, an’ be happy. Fo’get these two men made you so fuckin’ angry.”

I gave him a frown, a steady unhappy expression. “There’s a reason you’re crawling the fucking earth trading in junk and reclaimed ammunition, and I’m sitting here
hiring
you. When someone sells me out”—Wa Belling, handing me over to Kev Gatz and the Plague—“lies to me and leaves me for dead”—Michaleen, staring down at me from the hover as it drifted away, leaving me to be bricked in Chengara—“I don’t fucking
forget
.”

You’re small
, a voice whispered in my head. I blinked, ignoring it.

Suddenly he was grinning, happy to oblige. Just like everyone else, if you were polite you got static. If you showed them your fist, they got polite. “You pay’n the bills heeyah, so ohkay,” he said hurriedly. “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 who 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. 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? And the Geeks—oh, fuck, the fuckin’ Geeks, Av’ry. Dey band t’gether, you know that? SPS? All these fuckin’ Techies, throwin’ shit down.”

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 they’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. Me and Dingane, 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 t’ing 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 again, pleased with himself. I shut my eyes again. “Yeah? ”

I pictured the place again: one door in the front, a heavy piece of wood on crude but solid hinges, one in the rear of the room 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.

Behind me, the band was chicken pickin’ their way through a complex 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.

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
, the voice whispered faintly and was gone. Not a ghost, since Dick Marin was still—well, alive wasn’t the right word for it, but still in existence.

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. Both o’ dem. 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.
Both of them
. I figured Michaleen would be in Europe—I wondered if Belling was working with him again. Knowing a city was a good start.