Noir (25 page)

In the hotel lobby, the television audience spread out on the sagging couch and upholstered chairs hadn’t stirred. The program’s addicts and hustlers were still going through their paces, copping and geezing, while the tubed-together viewers received their sympathetic hits. Whatever glow of the outside flames landed on their gray faces, it wasn’t enough to ignite their interest.

“I’ll take my room key now.” McNihil had dragged the kid up to the lobby desk. He dropped him onto the floor and pinned him with a foot to his spine, so he wouldn’t try running away. “Any’ll do.”

“You’re fuckin’ crazy.” The desk clerk looked aghast behind the heavy mesh screen. His face was radiant with sweat and he had a fire extinguisher cradled in his arms, as though the mob outside were about to burst through the lobby doors. “Get the connect outta here.”

The metal drawer beneath the grille pushed against McNihil’s stomach. He looked down and saw the familiar comforting shape of his
tannhäuser and the pack of asp-head tools he’d previously deposited with the clerk. McNihil scooped them up, dropping the gun into his free coat pocket and holding the tools in one hand. “I still need a room. I paid for one, remember?”

“Aw, Christ …” The clerk got the sick, dismayed look that comes with the realization that one has just handed a high-caliber weapon over to another person. He hurriedly pulled money out of a cashbox, shoved it into the drawer and back toward McNihil. “Look, there’s a refund. Now just get moving, pal. I don’t want you around here.”

“Can’t.” McNihil shook his head in a show of regret. “Still got a little business to finish up.” He spread the pack of tools open on the narrow shelf in front of the grille. On a bed of cushioned black leather lay a row of shining surgical instruments, their polished steel and honed cutting edges touched with the fire mounting outside the End Zone Hotel. “I would’ve preferred a little privacy for this part—hey, he probably would—” McNihil nodded toward the struggling figure under his foot. “But if you want it to all happen right out here in the open …” McNihil shrugged and picked up the scalpel with the biggest blade. “I’ve worked under worse conditions.”

The desk clerk looked even more panicked than before. His stare shot past McNihil, to the lobby’s door and windows. None of the crowd had noticed that McNihil was inside the hotel. But it wouldn’t be long before they did.

“All right, all right.” The clerk hurriedly snagged a key off the board behind him and shot it out in the drawer. “Do it, and then just get out of here, for God’s sake. Please—”

McNihil rolled up his tools and picked up the key. “Thanks,” he said as he dragged the kid away from the counter.

The elevator, an antique cage, was out of commission; the kid’s head bounced against each stair as McNihil hauled him two floors up.

He slammed the hotel room’s door shut and turned the lock; leaving the kid squirming in the middle of the floor, McNihil pulled up the dirt-smeared window and looked out. The bonfire permeating the skeletal 747 had grown larger, the flames leaping as high as the surrounding rooftops. The crowd had grown larger as well, having gone well beyond the critical-mass point; McNihil could see the eddies and ripples running through the closely pressed bodies. At the edges of the open space, the street levels of the empty buildings had been broken
into, with flames and smoke pouring out of the shattered windows and plywood barriers.

Get to work
, McNihil told himself. Fortunately, this part always went fast. Other asp-heads had always admired his speed with the knives.

McNihil knelt down with his tool pack. He rolled the kid facedown, turning the gel-encased head to one side so the exposed nostrils could still draw in some breath; the kid’s lungs weren’t superfluous yet. An agonized scream managed to pierce the clear mask, coming out as a muffled, distant wail, as McNihil jabbed the first sharp-edged tool into the vertebrae between the kid’s shoulder blades. Using anesthetics had never been part of an asp-head’s job description; he had a few bee-sting syringes and quick-dispersion epidermals in the pack, and had used them on occasion, but there was no present need. The shouts and excited cries coming through the window drowned out whatever noises the kid would make.

Blood had started soaking into the T-shirt, as though the white fabric had been wounded rather than cut. McNihil grabbed the edges on either side of the knife and tore the shirt to either side, exposing the kid’s skinny torso. There was no need to look as he reached over to the pack for more of the glittering tools; years of practice in the field had put his hands on autopilot.

From kneeling, he raised himself onto his haunches, to keep the pooling blood from getting on his trousers. The wet red seeped through the worn carpet and beneath the soles of McNihil’s shoes. He balanced himself with one hand against the kid’s bare shoulder, leaning over the torso and guiding the tools as they worked. At one time, when he’d first started out as an asp-head, McNihil had dispensed with any of the autonomic surgical tools, preferring to do everything manually—he’d wanted to get the feel of cracking bone and neatly shearing flesh right into his hands. But, just as the older asp-heads had warned him, he’d started getting twinges of carpal tunnel syndrome in his wrists, and he’d gone to using the clever little machines.

At the back of the kid’s neck, the retractor device had expanded itself crabwise, flaring the gristle and muscle sheathing the spinal column. The miniature plow of the auto-incision knife had worked its way down toward the kid’s waist, steered by a few correcting taps of McNihil’s fingers and the machine’s internal terrain-recognition program. Following behind came the mantislike bone saw, stopping in position
over each vertebra and mapping the projected depth and angle of its blade with quick ultrasound pulses. The saw needed a confirm signal before each cut; McNihil checked the grid on a handheld monitor before thumbing the proceed button; a fine spray of blood and bone dust drifted up as the tiny whirling blade descended.

As the devices inched their way farther apart, from nape to buttock, they set up a focused irradiation field, keeping the incision free of contamination. From micropore nozzles in the metal, a yellowish haze of nitromersol spread over the violated flesh, the mercuric compound acting as a backup disinfectant. Even if there hadn’t been a personal element in the favor McNihil was doing, asp-head professionalism would have ensured a neat, antiseptic job.

He glanced up at the room’s open window. Flames higher, shouts louder; glass shattered and rained across the mob-filled streets—McNihil could see, in his mind’s eye, the razorlike fragments nicking the oblivious, upturned faces. The people below would be lapping their own blood as it trickled into the corners of their mouths. Which would, he knew, only make them thirstier for someone else’s. His, mainly.

“Let’s wrap it up.” McNihil spoke aloud, as though the surgical devices were not only clever but sentient. He’d had this set a long time; they were almost to the status of pets, cared for and maintained. As if it could sense the controlled urgency in his voice, the tractor knife gave a last surge, opening up the kid’s back to the base of the spine. The kid had lost all consciousness, as McNihil had expected; there was a limit to what fear could keep awake, before pain temporarily annihilated it. For McNihil, that was just as well; the last segments of the procedure were tricky and delicate enough that he didn’t need the body quivering and jerking around.

He’d already brought out and inserted another pair of retractors like the first, up by the kid’s head. The second one, positioned halfway down the back, pushed its curved claws outward, exposing not just the spine but the viscera clustered below the ribs. Those were of no importance now; the kid had no further use for them. McNihil picked up the auto-incision knife and set it aside, so the last retractor could settle into place and force the bleeding flesh apart.

In a few more seconds, the bone saw had finished its work; McNihil removed it as well. The spider-clawed feet penetrated the blood-soaked carpet as the bright opticals and other sensors faded to empty black.

From the pack of tools, McNihil’s quick hand extracted an inert polymer ring. One pull telescoped it into a flexible tube, open at one end, a tapered bulletlike seal at the other, the whole thing longer than the kid’s split torso. The retractors and saw had exposed the protective meninges encasing the spinal cord, the bundled nerves running through the core of the kid’s torso. The machines went to work again, slicing through the dura mater, then the tangled arachnoid layer beneath. Using their finest, tweezerlike implements, the retractors peeled back the fragile pia mater, revealing raw and naked nerve tissue. With one of the smaller, nonautomated knives, McNihil made a series of cuts, freeing the spine from its elongated nest. He lifted and compressed the blood-specked sacral plexus and slipped it into the open end of the polymer tube. Cutting with one hand and drawing the ring opening up with the other, in less than a minute he had the tender spinal material encased in the tube. The ring rested against the back of the kid’s neck; McNihil pulled the tab inside, releasing another hydro-gel inside the tube. This one had a mesh structure woven into the substance; as it expanded and protectively encased the spine, oxygenated microfilaments formed a temporary life-support for the human tissue. The tube’s outside shell turned stiffer and harder, responding to the gel’s precisely calibrated lowering of temperature. McNihil knew he had a few hours, just time enough to get the trophy to where it needed to be.

The cerebral matter was the last that had to be taken care of. A judgment call for McNihil: he could either do a quick-and-dirty extraction, pulling the entire brain out of the skull and packing it with him, or he could take the time to let the cleverest of his tools pare away the unnecessary segments. The easiest and fastest would have been to just lop off the kid’s head guillotine-style and wrap it in a freezer pack, carry it out of here like a bowling ball in a bag—he’d done that before, in situations less time-pressured than this. It was considered bad form in asp-head circles, though; the microsurgery that was needed to reattach the brain portion to the top of the spine was a lot of work for the agency techs—McNihil still had enough favors to call in that he could get it done, but he didn’t want to deplete his account. Plus, the results were never as good, trophy-wise, as an original, unsevered connection.
I may be getting old
, thought McNihil,
but I’ve still got pride issues to deal with
.

He shifted his position closer to the kid’s head. The tiny hotel room’s carpet was now soaked from wall to wall with blood, the sagging bed
and battered chest of drawers like islands in a red sea. “Damn,” said McNihil aloud; he’d brushed his knee too close to the kid’s shoulder and gotten a smear on his trousers leg. He hated spending the money for dry cleaners. He reached over and grabbed another pair of tools from his pack.

With a few quick blows from a calibrated chisel, he split the skull open like a thick-shelled egg; the scalp tore from nape to brow, revealing the soft matter beneath. Between the two red, empty hemispheres of bone, McNihil set the big spider—that was what the asp-heads themselves called the device—and let it go to work.

McNihil stood up, knees creaking, and went over to the room’s window. The smell of burning architecture filled the night air. Now he wished he’d given the panhandling gantry a donation; his hopes of coming in here, doing the job, and getting back out with no big excitement had evaporated. Just getting out, with his baggage and trophy intact, was going to be something of a problem. The mob had improvised torches from the fire crackling through the 747 carcass; with all of the unoccupied buildings already lit, the action had spread to the others. McNihil turned from the window and inhaled, trying to detect whether the End Zone Hotel had become part of the action.

He glanced down at the prostrate form on the redly shining carpet. The spider was halfway through its procedures; the steel refrigerant needles had plunged through the brain, their course determined by the device’s initial mapping scan. The drop in temperature and simultaneous oxygen delivery from the fibers radiating out from the probes would prevent any gross cellular decay. The second, more detailed scan was under way—McNihil could tell from the pattern of LED’s flashing across the spider’s mirrorlike carapace. As he watched, the small lights blinked out; the articulated knives lowered from the device’s underside and began carving into the soft, wet tissue beneath.

Wedges of cortex, neatly sliced as though by a butcher’s knife, were expelled from the gaping skull, landing on either side, trembling and seeping into the blood-soaked carpet. From a storage bin in the spider’s thorax, delicate claws plucked out tiny cylindrical memory shunts, each with a self-branching data capacity. The little claws, precise as a watchmaker’s screwdrivers, tapped the shunts into place, soft-welding them to the brain’s neurons and synapses.

Another few minutes crept past, as the spider device continued its
surgery. The hotel room was a relatively sterile and quiet environment, compared to the battlefield situations for which the technology had originally been devised. The asp-heads had made their own adaptations to it; they weren’t interested in stabilizing soldiers with head wounds as much as getting trophies reduced down to a convenient traveling size.

The twin piles of discarded brain matter had grown to mounds a couple of inches high, pinkly weeping blood. The core of the subject’s memory and personality, all that had made the kid the punk he was, had been reduced to an oblate sphere the size of a tennis ball. Almost all of the brain stem had been cut away; there was no longer any need for the stilled and equally discardable organs to be regulated. The connection between what was left of the cortex, studded with the shunts and a few other implanted devices, and the tube-encased spine, was pristine and inviolate. McNihil reached into the skull with one hand and lifted the cortical essence; with his other, he took from the pack another gel-filled casing and enveloped the exposed tissue with it. He flipped the activation tab and, as the gel inflated to protect the carved-down brain, sealed the casing to the longer tube.