Repo Men (26 page)

T
his will be my typing regimen: Two hours straight. I will try to get out the events of yesterday before my time is up, banging away at the Underwood as hard as I can without waking Bonnie. She is sleeping two cots over. It is good to have a real bed again.

We’re in a hospital, St. Anne’s, I think, holed up on a floor usually reserved for supplies and medications. This is a broom closet, though there are no brooms inside, and despite the relatively cramped interior, it’s a palace compared to the Gabelman shelf and the Tyler Street Hotel. Such opulence for my final days, such grandeur.

Top of the world, Ma. Top of the world.

It was time to ditch the warehouse and take our chances in the outside world. Asbury had said he’d be able to scratch up some new accommodations for us, and we had to take the run out to his flat in order to make the switch. Bonnie and I were anxious about leaving the safety of the shelf, which had essentially become our de-facto home. But the security guard was getting antsy with the two of us holed up there for so long, and I was beginning to doubt the safety of the whole complex. I’d begun to hear noises at night, footsteps in the darkness, a familiar hum shaking the walls. Best to leave. Best to relocate, again.

Heads down, walking quickly, avoiding eye contact with all other pedestrians, we hustled through the city streets, making our way quickly underground. It was morning rush hour by the time we reached the subway, and we were pressed in against a throng of passengers, buffeted by their coats and their briefcases and their stink. I hadn’t bathed in over two weeks, so I can only imagine the Guinness-record lengths those folks had gone without a dip.

The train rumbled through the city, bearing us to Asbury’s part of town. We were three stations away from our stop when I felt the tap on my shoulder, heard my name called out. I pretended to pay no attention, to be lost in reading the subway map, but another tap came, and another call of my name. The woman moved into my line of sight.

“Is it—oh my God, it’s you!” shrieked Mary-Ellen. She embraced me for a brief moment, then pulled back quickly. I could see her nose wrinkling at the tip, face pulling into a sour-lemon grimace. She’d gotten a whiff.

“Sorry, lady,” I mumbled, trying to turn away from my second ex-wife. “Got the wrong guy.” The wonders of living in the big city: It’s so large, you never have to see anyone you don’t want to, unless you don’t want to, in which case they’re right in front of your nose.

She slipped back in front of me, drawing my face up to hers. “Funny, funny, always a funny guy. You still ripping out organs for a living?” She had that grin on her face, the one she always wore whenever we got into arguments. It was nice to see that she was starting it up again where we left off, not missing a beat after almost fifteen years. Consistency is what I treasure in a woman.

Now the other passengers were beginning to clear away, pressing up against each other in an effort to let us perform our melodrama on an empty stage. To make matters worse, not twenty feet away, two transit cops started to take notice. They don’t have scanners or the power to repossess artiforgs, but they sure as hell know how to make phone calls. I had twenty or thirty transit cops on my own personal payroll back in the day; their info came in damned handy.

“Look, ma’am,” I said, trying to sound pissed off, “I don’t know you. Go away.”

“You don’t know me?” she said, volume rising with each word. “We were married, you sonofoabitch. Don’t pretend you don’t know who I am.”

The silence of our audience turned to murmurs as the transit cops moved closer. No matter their intentions, I didn’t want them any more involved in this than necessary. “Look,” I muttered to Mary-Ellen, dropping my voice to a whisper. “It’s good to see you and all, but I’d appreciate it if you’d just go away.”

She shook her head. “Go away?” she practically yelled, keeping her voice at a distressingly high level. “Isn’t that what you’d like—for all your problems to just go away? That’s how you deal with everything. Rip it out and toss it to the side. Well, not today. I’ve got to know—what’s a big, bad Bio-Repo man like you doing with his life these days, other than not sending any of the alimony I was promised. Still hanging out with that no-good friend of yours? Got a new wife, yet? Got a new—”

That’s when Mary-Ellen fell to the ground, shaking, tongue waggling to the filthy tiled floor, eyes rolled back in her head, that caterwaul of a voice blissfully silenced. I looked up to find Bonnie standing in her place, my Taser in her hand, the metal knobs sparkling with the residual energy of a job well done.

“And you let that one get away?” Bonnie mused. “I’d hate to meet the one you killed.”

I let them all get away, in a sense. Carol even gave me a chance to win her back. Once it was clear that our two-year marriage wasn’t working out, that I was spending less time at home than I was in the Union offices, she decided to kick me out of the house. This was the first experience of that kind for me; my other wives had gone off on their own, leaving me to the big, empty domicile. But Carol, who was never one to give up any of her material goods, was most insistent that I be the one to vanish from her life.

My first step was to get as far away as I could from Alabama, so I moved back here, transferring back to the main Union offices. Jake was the only one who seemed particularly thrilled about seeing me again, but the others were good-natured enough about stepping aside to get me back into the flow of high-level gigs. I found an apartment in a mid-rise building and set about readjusting my life for the thousandth time.

As soon as everything had settled down and I’d all but forgotten that I was anything but a merry bachelor, Carol called. “I’m giving you another chance,” she said. “I’m thinking that if you learn how to change, if you can compute a way to work with me instead of against me, we can figure out this marriage.”

So I put in for another transfer, moved back to Alabama, hauled my ass and meager furniture back into her wide plantation homestead, and gave married life another shot.

A week later, it was over, and she was suing me for divorce based on trumped-up charges of adultery. So much for second chances.

The rest of the trip to Asbury’s was a cakewalk in comparison. A few close brushes with the local cops, a slip or two down some side alleys, but we arrived at his building physically unscathed and took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor.

It felt wrong as soon as we stepped out of the elevator. Not quiet so much as empty. When we’d come the last time, there was music drifting down the hallways, kids scampering past our feet. Energy. Life. This time, it was like we’d been dropped into a soundproofed chamber; even the floorboards refused to creak.

“It’s a weekday,” I said out loud, reminding myself that the last time we came had been a Saturday. “Everyone’s at work.”

“Or at school,” Bonnie chimed in. She was feeling it, too. We moved on.

The door to Asbury’s apartment was unlocked. We knocked a few times, banging on the metal frame; it swung open in response to our pounding, and, with no other options, we stepped inside.

The Chinese screens were still set up, though it seemed to me that their positions had been changed. Instead of creating sections throughout the otherwise large living room, they had been arranged so as to create a single corridor twisting into the apartment, like the entrance to a hedge maze. “Asbury?” Bonnie called out, the mechanical twinge of her voice steady and even. “Are you home?”

The only answer we got was a whisper from the breeze, snaking in through an unseen open window. I tried to call out again, but my throat seized up. There was no point. Bonnie took my hand, and together, we stepped into the apartment.

Rather than enter the makeshift corridor of Chinese screens, I lashed out with my leg, kicking the nearest one to the ground. Halfway down, it bumped against another, and another, and soon we had a domino effect rumbling through the flat, sunlight strobing through thin sheets of paper as it all fell into a heap on the floor.

The Outsider was on the sofa. Reclining. Comfortable. A tray of uneaten food by his side. Head lolled back against the cushions, the very beginnings of a grin plastered on his face. By the time we reached him, both Bonnie and I knew he was dead.

There was a yellow receipt on his lap.

“We should go,” I insisted. “He can’t help us anymore.”

Bonnie was shaking; anger, fear, I didn’t know. “They killed him.”

“Someone did,” I agreed. “That’s what they do. I’ve told you the stories, I’ve—”

“There’s a receipt. They took something.”

They did indeed. Despite his Outsider status, Asbury had obviously obtained a loan quite some time ago from a small supply house in St. Louis, an independent boutique which made, of all things, artificial gall bladders. A wholly useless organ, transplanted into individuals who want it only for the status, the artiforg gall bladder is the pinnacle of mechanical hubris.

“That’s Asbury,” Bonnie sniffed. “Always wanted to be on top.”

His midsection was open, a flap of skin dangling down, intestines protruding slightly from the incision. A modicum of blood had seeped into the couch, but for the most part, I noticed that the gall bladder extraction had been done with expert, surgical precision. This was no hack job; it was Level Four, at least. Level Five, most likely.

My suspicions were confirmed a moment later. A very familiar signature rode the bottom of the receipt, scrawled there in wide John Hancock letters, more of a message than an autograph.

Jake Freivald had come for lunch.

Bonnie has just woken up, asked for the time. I told her to go back to sleep, that it was early yet, that she needed her rest. She doesn’t know that I’m going to turn myself in. She doesn’t know that I’ll be dead long before she even knows I’m gone. She doesn’t know that when I kiss her on the lips one hour from now, it will be the last time. I tell the truth, but I don’t need to divulge everything.

We decided to pimp him out. Bonnie and I both wanted to leave the apartment, knew we should get out of there, but our fate was inexorably tangled up with Asbury’s, and no matter what had happened to him, we had to be privy to it. Fortunately, his Ghost system was intact, modern, and extensive; whatever experiences he’d had right before his demise would have been fully recorded in this artificial memory bank. The gleaming silver nodes sticking out of his neck and skull were still in place, begging to be plugged in and turned on.

“One sense at a time,” I reminded Bonnie. “Which do you want?”

“Audio,” she said emphatically. “I don’t want to see it.”

I don’t know if I expected Asbury to move as we approached him, wires in our hands, ready to invade what used to be his brain, but he sat there motionless through the procedure, never losing that embryonic grin. It took me a few minutes to work back to my Ghost training sessions, trying to remember which nodes attached to which portions of the artificial brain. I didn’t want to plug the goggles into the taste center, or the headphones into the eye socket; the day had been strange enough without me trying to visualize the taste of radishes or Bonnie listening to the color red.

It was relatively simple to pop the contact lenses into my eyes this time around. I watched as Bonnie ripped the headset off its wire, pinned back a section of her ear, and plugged the frayed cord into her own input socket. We were attached, the three of us, an electric triumvirate waiting for show and tell.

It took a little digging with the scalpel, but I was able to find the Ghost system control box buried in a shallow groove beneath the Outsider’s chin. There was no counter, no control code, but I figured that a quick rewind would get us to where we wanted to go. Grabbing Bonnie’s hand in mine—“It’s just like a movie,” I told her. “Just like going to the pictures”—I found the replay switch and hit it hard.

A tray of food in front of me. Held in a pair of hands, also in front of me. The room telescoping past me, streaming by on all sides as Asbury walked to the sofa. I noticed that the Chinese paper screens were set up as they usually were, delineating workspace as opposed to the creepy corridor; that must have been done later.

Soon I was sitting on the sofa, prepping for the meal. The wall across the living room slid to one side, exposing an older television. It flipped on, the screen huge, curved at the edges, shows flipping by at incredible rates of speed.

“He’s humming,” Bonnie said, the voice seemingly coming out of the TV.

“Sitting down to eat,” I relayed to her. “Nothing yet.”

The food, lifted on a fork, headed for where the mouth would be. I marveled for a moment at how different Asbury’s vision was from mine. He must have scored some high-definition eyeball artiforgs to go along with the Ghost system, because every morsel of egg and toast was clear down to the crumbs, perfect resolution even at two, three feet.

“A noise,” Bonnie told me. “There’s a bump, a crash.”

Concurrent with this, the picture swung rapidly to the left, and I staggered a bit, trying to keep my balance. It was like going to one of those full-body movies at the carnival, where they make you stand in the middle of the footage and see how long you can take it. The flat was empty, same as it was before, and so Asbury turned his attention back to the television.

For five minutes, we watched the tube, me and the dead Outsider, Bonnie keeping us updated on the audio portion of the program. I was reluctant to fast-forward the replay, worried that we’d miss something crucial.

“Another bump,” Bonnie said suddenly, and the view twisted and spun as Asbury flipped to one side; I caught a glimpse of sofa, of his hands—my hands—pulling out a suitcase from beneath, popping open the latches, reaching for the pistol sandwiched inside, fingers about to grab metal—

And then stopping. The picture in front of me held still, Asbury’s swarthy arms reaching out toward the gun, holding steadily in place. “What happened?” I asked, trying to feel Bonnie’s hand in mine. “What’s going on?”