The Digital Plague (2 page)

Newark. Newark wasn’t even a city anymore, it was a blast crater that happened to have a few dozen buildings still standing here and there. For years it had been a backwater for criminals and independent sorts who fled the cities proper to escape the System Cops and the crowds and, ever since the Monk Riots, whatever Monks who’d managed to hang on to control of themselves and avoid the SSF cleanup. A surprising number were almost sane.

I felt in my pockets and found my cigarette case and gun, right where they were supposed to be—my captors had been so confident they’d left me my weapon. As I shook out a cigarette and stuck it between my dry, chapped lips, the anger inside me swelled until I thought I’d start vibrating. I was Avery Cates. I’d killed fifty-four people. I’d killed Dennis Squalor and destroyed the Electric Church, crawling around beneath Westminster Abbey and leaving a half dozen dead friends in my wake. I’d been betrayed by Dick Marin, the fucking unofficial emperor of the whole damn System, but I’d survived and even put a bullet in his artificial, avatar face. I was Avery fucking Cates, and they’d left me my
weapon.

I turned to face the hover. Belling was standing in front of it, glaring at everything as if personally affronted—which he should be, since he’d been in charge of my security. I could see Candy, fat and dark, peering at me from inside the cabin, which meant Glee had grabbed whoever was available. I liked Candida—she had a round face that was always laughing, and she hadn’t screwed me yet—but she was useless in a fight.

Belling gave me his stern face, humorless and terrifying. “What are we doing, Avery?”

I lit my cigarette and sent a cloud of blue smoke into the dirty air. I turned and started walking for the hover, the kid acting as a crutch.

“We’re going to crack some heads,” I said. “Get Pick on the horn and start him digging into the grapevine. Send someone over to Marcel and buy out a contract for information—have him get the word out, a million yen to anyone who gets us next to whoever the fuck did this.” Marcel, fat and lazy on his throne in his ancient hotel, hadn’t moved under his own power in years and thought way too much of himself, but he could get shit done, for the right price. “Take a fucking head count and let me know if anyone’s out of place. Glee and I are gonna do our bad-cop worse-cop routine and milk some of my straight contacts. Reach out to whatever System Pigs like taking our money and see if they have any information. Let New York know that Avery Cates is fucking pissed off, and things are going to get hot.”

I was a big fucking deal these days.

“Okay, okay,” Glee said. “Avery—you sure you’re okay? Your neck is kind of—”

She sounded a little shaky. I hissed into her ear, clutching her to me to conceal the fact that I was suddenly hot and dizzy. “I am not fucking okay, kid. I was fucking
sold out.
I was on my
knees.
I had a rod in my
goddamn ear.
I am angry, Glee. I am not okay.” As we neared the hover, the two guards hastily stepped aside, their eyes on the horizon. I let her help me put one leg up into the cabin and turned back to the kid, putting a numb hand on her shoulder. Gleason was on a very short list of people I thought I could trust. As I spoke my eyes shifted up and over her to look at Belling, who’d turned to regard me, hands in his coat pockets. No one would ever trip up Belling like that, I thought. “Get us up in the air and get to work. I want to know who the fuck did this, and I want to know
fast.
” I looked around the shattered remnants of the city. “I am going to have to kill a lot of people.”

Day Three:
Ear to Ear, Fat Man

“Now, don’t worry,” I said. “She won’t hurt you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see with some pride that Glee kept her face impassive, aping the hardassed stare I’d tried to teach her. The other woman in the elevator with us was gorgeous, but I’d found that everyone who lived above Thirty-fifth Street or so was beautiful. Beautiful had gotten boring. Who knew how old she was, either; everyone uptown seemed to be a uniform twenty-five, unless they were hauling garbage or scuttling along at your feet, trying to shine your shoes before you got wise and told them to get the hell away from you.
Twenty-five
had gotten boring, too. She was blond and blue-eyed because blond and blue eyes were in this season, and her waist was ridiculously, comically narrow, giving her a wasp shape that gave me a bellyache.

When I looked at her, she flinched. I winked.

We were gliding down from the rooftop hover dock to the seventy-fifth floor, where the government had seen fit to lease space for the Regional Office of Waste Disposal. Recently the civil government had been spreading its wings, eating into the System Pigs’ budgets and taking back some of the jobs traditionally done by the SSF. Word was the cops weren’t happy about it. Technically any citizen of the System had access to local government offices, appointments appreciated but not required—all very friendly. The funny thing was, buildings like this one didn’t have any street access at all—you had to take a hover to the roof and worm your way down. It was a neat way to keep the riffraff out without having to post so much as a sign.

The elevator smelled like the Wasp, a pleasant mix of cigarette smoke and perfume that always made me think of women, especially the high-end hookers down on Bleecker Street, fifty thousand yen just to chat them up. Gleason was spit-shined, her long red hair pulled back in a neat tail, her face scrubbed clean. She wore the hell out of the black suit and coat, although the coat was long for her and pooled around her boots. She looked older than her fifteen years, her face bland and her eyes murderous. I felt a strange sense of pride, looking at her.

“Quit it, Avery,” she said softly. “You’re giving me the heebies.”

I turned back to face the doors of the elevator. The collar of my shirt was scratching me and my neck throbbed, the tiny wound on its side refusing to heal and still leaking pus. As we sank, I considered the well-hidden security camera embedded in the cab ceiling and calculated its coverage, deciding that it didn’t really afford any hiding spots at all.

At the eightieth floor, the doors snapped open and the elevator’s shell spoke softly around us:
Eightieth floor, thank you. Eightieth floor, thank you.
The Wasp edged her way toward the doors, her bright, clear eyes—a little wider and rounder, I thought, than was natural—locked on me. For some reason, even in an expensive suit, forty thousand yen of synthetic fabric itching me something fierce, I still made people nervous. It might have been the wound on my neck. Or maybe it was just the blood under my fingernails.

As the doors snapped shut again, Glee cleared her throat thickly and dragged one of her sleeves across her nose. Spitting a glob of something green and thick onto the cab floor, she grimaced.

“I don’t know what I picked up,” she muttered, her voice a little hoarse, “but it fucking
sucks.
” The deep voice and the suit made her look older, and I didn’t like it.

I sighed. “Mind your manners,” I said. We were playing a role, and eyes were on us.

She grinned a little. “Uh-oh. Avery’s embarrassed. Avery’s
mortified.
”

I couldn’t help smiling a little. Gleason always got to me. “Fuck you, kid.”

She dragged her sleeve across her nose again. “Tell me why we’re visiting the fucking
Waste Disposal
office again?”

The doors snapped open to reveal a long hallway carpeted in a deep, green pile, the walls a uniform white. Identical doors lined the sides, each marked with a small plastic sign. Cloudy white bubbles on the ceiling housed cameras that tracked us. You couldn’t take a piss uptown without being monitored. There was no smell to the air at all. I never got used to the scrubbed air.

“We’re here, little one,” I said as we stepped out of the cab, “because I have a burning need to know who in fuck thought they could snatch me off the street and fuck with me. I have a good asset here.”

“Ooh, Avery’s angry. Avery’s
pissed off.
” She kept pace with me as we walked down the hall. The first-name bullshit had started a few weeks ago, and I was letting it ride for a while, see if she figured out that it was a liberty before I had to smack the lesson into her. “In the Department of Waste Disposal?”

Glee didn’t get uptown much and was used to a more direct approach to things. “Everybody’s got shit to get rid of, kid,” I said, stopping in front of one of the doors. “And it all goes through here at one point or another.” The door snapped open and I pushed her in ahead of me.

The door admitted us into a tiny reception area, the carpet sucking at my feet as we let the door shut behind us. The Droid behind the white for-show desk was vaguely humanoid, with a feminine torso, an oval head, and two spindly arms. When you got close you could see it was attached to the desk and was just a visual aid for the office’s shell.

“Welcome to the Office of Waste Disposal, North American Department, Local Office Five-five-six,
” the shell breathed gently around us.
“Do you have an appointment?”

I paid it no attention, stepping around the desk and striding down a shorter hallway lined with unmarked doors. At the third one on our left I turned and stopped, smiling into the tiny camera mounted in it, Glee hidden behind me. After we stood there for a few seconds the door whisked open; I took hold of Glee’s arm and pulled her in with me quickly, the door zooming back into place a second or so after she’d cleared the threshold.

“Hello, Reggie,” I said, smiling in what I hoped passed for friendliness. “Due for another treatment, I see.”

The office was so small Glee and I had to stand very close to each other, hips touching. A foot or so in front of us was a tiny desk with no obvious way for anyone to get around it, and entombed behind the desk was a fat, dark-haired man in his shirtsleeves. He was wedged in behind the desk so tightly it made me feel uncomfortable in sympathy. A half-burned cigarette dangled just below his pencil-thin mustache, its smoke sucked up aggressively into the crank air and never even reaching my nose. A paper-thin screen between us displayed several smaller boxes of information just inches from his face. As I spoke he started forward and gestured violently, the screen going opaque in an instant.

“Hell, Avery, you scared the shit out of me,” he gasped. “Who the fuck is this?” His tiny little eyes were buried in flesh, but I could see them roam up and down Glee’s body, pausing blatantly at chest level. I clenched my jaw and pushed my hands into my coat pockets. Glee just stared down at him, her cheeks red and her forehead a little damp.

“This is my associate,” I said. I gestured at the fat man. “This is Reggie, my contact here.”

They stared at each other for another few seconds. Reggie liked to eat, and every year he had a fat-sucking procedure performed that shed two hundred pounds in an hour, followed by a series of skin-tightening treatments. These were expensive procedures, and in me—or, more precisely, my yen—Reg had found salvation. In January he was svelte and tanned, and then slowly expanded over the months until by December he was a goddamn beach ball.

“You’re not supposed to bring anyone else with you,” Reggie said slowly, his eyes settling lazily on Glee’s chest again. “It’s dangerous.” He brightened without looking up at me. “Unless this is for
me?
”

I flared my nostrils and leaned forward to slap him lightly across the face, not hard enough to hurt. “Eyes on me, Reg,” I said easily, stepping back. “Eyes on me.”

He blinked and gave me a piggy little stare. “Fuck you, Avery. This is a bad time. You’re not popular with certain people, you know, and the Optical Facial Scanners seem to be under the impression you’ve been seen on security cameras in government offices.” He shrugged. “So I have to ask you to leave.”

I ignored this, pushing my hands into my pockets. “I need info on Newark, Reg. I took a little involuntary trip out there recently and I want to know who’s got fingers in that trash heap, who’s carting shit out there or from there, who’s bribing you to let it happen.”

He tried to lean back casually, lacing his hands behind his head, but his girth pushed his belly into his desk and made him grunt in discomfort. I noticed his cigarette was nearly all ash and watched in fascination, waiting for it to shake off. “I just told you, Avery, this isn’t a good time.”

I glanced at Glee, who looked back at me and shrugged. For a second I was aware of how grown-up and poised she’d become, apparently overnight. I looked back at Reg with my grin in place, calibrated to convey amusement. This fat piece of shit thought he was in charge. I realized I could smell him, Reg’s brand of sour sweat too much for scrubbers.

“Reggie, let’s be friendly. Let’s have a conversation, and when we’re done you say, Ave, this one’s on the house, on account of I was a fucking asshole when you showed up. And then I say, Shit, Reggie, I surprised you, so maybe you weren’t in top form, and we part friends. Okay?”

He kept trying like hell to look relaxed even though it was obvious he was straining to hold his position. “Get out. What are you going to do, slap me again? You’re unarmed, Avery. You didn’t get through rooftop security with a gun.” He raised his eyebrows. “You think stories about you scare me. Fuck off.”

He was right, I didn’t have a gun. Getting past security in a building containing even a pissant government agency could be done—anything could be done—but it was troublesome, and unnecessary.

“Glee,” I said. She took a half step forward and snapped her arm out stiffly, a homemade bone blade leaping into her hand. I had a similar one in my boot. With practiced ease she whipped it across his face, producing a tiny red wound on the tip of his bulbous nose. She grinned down at him, her blue eyes wide and lit up.