The Eternal Prison (2 page)

they
ran the System, were starting to give Marin flak, and he’d decided it was time to forcibly remind them of the real pecking order. From what I’d heard, he was going to find out they hadn’t been sitting on their hands, waiting for him to send his cops after them. I thought about the fucking mess things were going to become soon and for a second almost wanted to stick around, just to watch the fireworks.

 

“Here they come. Look at those shitheads!”

 

They came stumbling out of the dust and smoke, three more of us coughing and bleeding, followed by a knot of Stormers in their grimy, flickering Obfuscation Kit that struggled to map itself to the swirling smoke and rain they passed through. Then the two officers, the bald one and the stiff, good-looking smiler that had taken me down and checked me off their list of People of Interest, people too important—for whatever mysterious reason—to just kill.

 

The three prisoners were young kids, teenagers. They were all wearing long oily-looking coats and bright red pieces of cloth around their necks, black, homemade ink around their eyes melting onto their faces in gummy streaks. I’d seen that a lot recently. It was a fashion. The one in front was tall and skinny, with deep cavernous cheeks and bright, wide-open eyes. He had a big scar on his forehead, old and leathery, and some fresh cuts all over his face. Even with his wrists laced up behind him, he walked steadily and with his head up. He was staring at me, and when the Stormers brought them over to us, he took an extra two steps and landed next to me as someone swept his feet out from under him, sending him to his knees.

 

“Fucking
manners,
” the kid hissed.

 

“You okay with these chumps?” Baldy shouted.

 

“Fuck, Mage,” one of the cops standing behind us shouted. “
Yeah.
We can handle babies and gramps, here.”

 

The kid next to me sucked in blood from his nose and spat it onto the street in front of us, where it was immediately washed away. “Babies, fuck,” he muttered.

 

This was fine. Everything was fine. I didn’t have any outrage anymore. I knelt there feeling nothing but cold and wet. No anger, no sadness, nothing. I was just waiting for the next thing, and not feeling terribly interested about it, either. I wondered, idly, if they would shoot me in the head if I stood up and started to walk, or if I’d just get another beating. I wanted the bullet, but I didn’t want another beating.

 

The two cops in charge signaled their Stormers, and the whole herd of them marched off to clear another building on their list. After a moment it was just the rain and wind again, the sucking noise of the System Pigs’ boots as they stepped under a scrap of roof still clinging to the building behind us.

 

“I’ve got a blade,” the kid said suddenly, his eyes locked on the street in front of us and his voice steady. He knew better than to whisper—the cops couldn’t hear him, but I could. He knew better than to look at me or to move or to do
anything
except talk in a steady, controlled voice. “I can get my fingers on it, saw myself loose, and pass it to you.” I remembered when I’d been sixteen, running the streets with a blade and nothing to lose. I’d pulled some demented shit back in the day—it had been all about survival, from one day to the next. Then I got some yen and some standing, and it became commerce and reputation. And then one day a pair of System Cops had come to make me an offer I wasn’t allowed to turn down, and then I’d been angry. I’d been angry for
years.

 

I saw Gleason, cold and dead, changed by the Plague into something terrible. I wasn’t angry anymore. I wasn’t
anything.

 

“My two guys will jump in,” the kid said, spitting blood into the street again. “Well… one of them will. I dunno about the other one. We take these two cocksuckers out. Fuck, I was willing to take my chances alone, but you look like you’ve seen some shit, huh? A player. That’s
luck.
I’ve always been lucky.”

 

I closed my eyes. The kid was probably nicknamed Lucky or Chance or something fucking ridiculous like that, probably had it tatted onto his chest in big block letters with some fucking dice or playing cards or something. He was right, though; the two Pigs weren’t paying us much attention—to them we were just shivering assholes who’d gotten a foot up their ass, who’d gotten the point. If we moved slow and secret for ten seconds and then fast and furious for ten more, we had a good shot. If their Stormers and bosses didn’t pick that moment to return. If I let the kid take most of the chances. And if our two minders didn’t turn out to be like some of the cops I’d known, like Nathan Happling or Elias Moje, mean and tough and full of unpredictable tricks.

 

Or Janet Hense: inhuman, unbeatable.

 

All this I thought by rote, mechanically, some programmed part of my brain just clicking and whirring along the usual routes, slamming into hardwired decision trees onto new paths and arriving at the expected destination. None of it was connected to my body. There was no flood of adrenaline, no familiar spark of rage and terror. There was nothing. I knew I wasn’t going to move. I wasn’t myself anymore: I’d become a ghost. And it felt
good
to be a ghost.

 

The kid waited for me to say something. He didn’t move. The kid had discipline. He wasn’t going to be impatient and blustery, wasn’t going to threaten me and waste time. I liked him. I wished him luck. I thought about telling him I would go for the smaller cop first, if I were him, because the tall one liked to talk and threaten, which probably meant he was all bullshit. The short one just stared at you, and that made me nervous. But I didn’t say anything.

 

“We got like a minute here,” the kid said. “Those other bitches come back here, we got a problem. We gotta move right now.” His shoulders rolled, and I could tell he’d sliced himself free. It was impressive. “Here,” he hissed at me. “Take it.”

 

I closed my eyes again.
Fuck you,
I thought.
You don’t tell me what to do, when to do it, or when to give a fuck.
I’d be happy enough to keep kneeling here until I died of hunger. A few heartbeats ticked by, ragged and lurching. Opening my eyes, I saw the kid turn his head to look at me.

 

“What the fuck, man?
Take it.
”

 

A few months ago, I would have reached out and grabbed this hunk of snot by the ear and pinched until he cried, and fuck, I would have
enjoyed
it. Now I just wanted him to volunteer to shut the fuck up and let me die in peace. It wasn’t that pinching his ear wouldn’t have solved my problem. And I still would have enjoyed it. But it would simply require way too much effort. I was old, and I’d survived things no one should have to. Survive, that is.

 

“Don’t tell me you’re going
pussy
on me. Fucking hell.”

 

A spark of something, something molten and corrosive, flared up in my belly, flickering on for an instant and reminding me of… and then it was gone, snuffed out, drowned in a black inky flood of
who gives a fuck
and I just smiled, looking up at the Vid hovering above the rooftops. It was showing a bright, clean, pure white nutrition tab factory in Brazil, smiling tan people in clean white jackets processing raw protein and minerals into tiny white pills that guaranteed no one was going to starve to death. The tag line informed us it was the fifteenth new factory opened this year, and n-tab production was at a record pace.

 

I closed my eyes, smirking. Translation: you are all going to starve to death, probably sooner than later. Shit was falling apart. Marin’s snatch of People of Interest was just the beginning, I figured.

 

“Shit,” I heard the kid mutter. “Fucking
bitch.
”

 

He fell silent, and then it was just the rain again and the sucking noise of one of the cops behind us on the move.
Bitch.
The word sank into my neck and made swallowing difficult.

 

“What are you two fags jawing about?”

 

The cop’s breath smelled like dead fish and cigarettes. He knelt down between us with the casual ease of someone who’d been in charge of every situation he’d encountered, ever, his face almost close enough for his trim little beard to scratch my cheek. He plucked the cigarette, damp and cold, from his mouth and put a hand on each of our shoulders, pulling us toward him.

 

“No fucking talking, okay? You two want to suck each other off, wait until you’re alone. Be decent about it.”

 

I wondered why every fucking cop I’d ever met was afraid of the queers. Me, I’d worked with plenty of them, and they were just as dirty and apt to shiv you in the back as everyone else, but no more so. Then, before I could even think to tell him that this wasn’t right, this was too soon, the kid jerked his elbow hard into the cop’s face, crunching his nose into a pulp and knocking him back onto his ass. It was an easy move, a surprise move with the cop off balance and in a dumb position, and it had been hard to resist, but I knew better. The easy move wasn’t always your best move.

 

The rest of it happened outside my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn my head to see, but I could hear, and I knew exactly how the choreography went—it was a short, unhappy skit. The cop was on his back like a turtle, nose a fountain of blood, and the kid leaped on top of him with the blade, swinging it down in a dramatic, stupid arc to slice the throat presented to him. I could see the kid’s face, the same face I’d made a million times—not ecstatic, not excited. Grim. Twisted up in concentration, trying to make short work of a filthy job.

 

And then the gunshot, and the kid sailed into my field of vision like a cannonball had hit him in the stomach, landing a foot or two away with a big spray of dirty water. He lay there in the street clutching his belly as blood poured between his fingers and blended into the ocean around him.

 

“Moda-fucka!” the first cop hissed, lurching to his feet and into my sight. I didn’t look up at his face. He stood there next to me for a few seconds, just panting through his mouth, and then half twisted around. “Danks, Silbie.” He stepped out into the street, sinking into a puddle up to his ankles, and approached the spluttering kid. For a few seconds he stood over him, hands curling and uncurling. “Moda-fucka,” he repeated more softly. He breathed in through his smashed nose violently, his whole body shaking with the effort to suck air and blood through it, and then spat a prodigious glob of blood and snot onto the kid, followed by a solid kick to his stomach that made him scream and flip over.

 

“You piece of shit,” the cop hissed, kicking the kid again. “You know what, Silvie? Upon further fucking
reflection,
” he huffed, landing another kick to the kid’s side, “and study of the fucking
lists
”—another kick—“I don’t think this particular shithead is all that fucking important after all.”

 

One more kick. The kid started to crawl, pulling himself feebly forward through the puddle of rainwater with one hand. The cop drew his handgun and pointed it lazily down at him and waited.

 

From behind me, the other cop, the one with the blistered face, spoke up. “Not to me, that’s for sure.” He sounded sad, like he’d seen this little play before and hadn’t liked it the first time.

 

With a nod that sent a little mist of blood spray around, the other cop squeezed off a shot. The kid’s head did a quiet little explosion and he sank down into the water as if relieved. The cop stared down at him for a moment and then nodded, holstering his gun and yanking a handkerchief from his coat to press against his flattened nose as he stepped back behind the rest of us without even a glance. I stared at the kid, slowly joining his ancestors in the sewers of Manhattan Island.

 

“There’ll be heat for this, because of the lists,” Blisterface said without emotion. “
You’re
fucking filling out the Incident Report.”

 

“I’ll fill out the fucking SIR,” Fussy Beard snapped back. “That’s you all over, Silvio. Afraid of fucking paperwork.”

 

I kept my eyes on the kid for a few seconds, watching. He was just dead, though, like I should have been years ago, like everyone I’d ever known—give or take a few shitheels I didn’t care about—was dead. The cops’ talk descended into murmurs behind me, indistinct and predatory. I closed my eyes, and it became just the rain and the wind. I was a ghost.

 

 

 

 

I

AMERICAN MURDER

 

 

 

 

Las Vegas was a scrub of a town, an electric grid in the middle of the fucking desert, guarded by the burned-out husks of ancient hotels. You could walk through the inhabited town in ten minutes and be in the extended graveyard that was the old city, and I was getting the fifty-yen tour following the Russian around. You could get anything you wanted in Vegas—easier if it was illegal. There were no cops in Vegas; I wasn’t sure if there had ever been, but now that the cops and the Spooks were at war, there wasn’t a cop within five hundred miles of the place.

 

Romanov’s was a dump from the outside—pink-gray stucco, bars on the windows, and weak, jittery neon—set between happy-ending bars and burlap-window opium dens. Inside, it was plush, red velvety material everywhere, brass on the bar. Although the waiters were all Droids on wheels, skimming across the floor with terrible efficiency, the bartender was a human in a black suit, bright eyed and pasty faced, speaking English like he’d memorized it off cards. He didn’t like the look of me but took his cigarette from his mouth long enough to saunter over and toss a napkin onto the bar. There was music in the air, a tinkling piano, and I could see my Russian in the mirror across from me, which was good enough.