Strawman Made Steel (2 page)

I leapt from the bed and yanked the bucky
out in one motion. I retrieved the cassette and bore it into the darkroom.

Sitting on a bench by the film bin was a
machine that looked like a shredder that had been plumbed into the building, an
automatic developer. The air smelt faintly acrid. I nudged the developer and heard
the wonderful sound of chemicals slosh in its reservoir.

I switched it on, removed the film from the
cassette, and fed it into its dark slot.

Three minutes―

Two and half of which were needed for a
fast-develop cycle.

So I waited.

I sat in the dim red effulgence of the
safelight and listened to the whine and trickle of the machine’s intimate
parts, and thought about how I’d come to be sitting in a New York hospital at
11:04 on a Sunday night performing fugitive radiology, my life hanging on the
quality of a China-made chemical pump.

A bitch with demon eyes
is where my thinking got me.

My flank wore an impression of her teeth,
just below the bottom rib. I lifted my shirt and cupped a palm over the sticky
wound. I couldn’t cover it.

I should have known she had military stock
in her. The crazy eyes. That odd smell like sulfur. Hocks higher than a pony.

 
The
job had looked routine. Client was a native of Liberty Borough―the posh floors.
He’d hired me to recover the title deed to a steelworks he claimed to own, and
pointed me where I might find it, a scrap-metaller out Eastside.

I didn’t find any title deed, but I did
find a four-foot tall psycho and―like I said―his bitch from the Abyss.

(The automatic developer coughed once and
went back to its percolating. I tasted sweat on my lips. My left foot didn’t
want to stay still.)

The psycho was the scrapyard’s
nightwatchman and a model employee. He must have seen me drop from the fence
into the dark on the side farthest from the yard’s nightlamp, but waited until
I was at the workshed picking its lock before he holed me up. He grinned more
gold than teeth and sicked the dog on me―she barreled me over like a king wave,
swift and weighing a ton. And muted like only gen-mods can make a dog. It wasn’t
until she pulled her teeth free that I knew she’d bitten me. The air poured in
like alcohol.

That’s when shorty told me I had twelve
minutes to live unless I took the antidote. He held out both hands, and I saw
in the glow of a gas lamp what looked like a bug cupped in each palm. I told
him I’d had dinner, didn’t need the bugs.

“Not bugs, pills,” he said. The red and the
blue, and I knew then what had bitten me.

He said I could pick one, and die with even
odds. Or I could answer him one question and he’d give me the right pill.

I didn’t wait to hear the question. He hadn’t
bothered to frisk me, which was his first mistake. His only, in fact. I drew my
.38 and put a bullet in the dog’s left eye. (There is one downside to demon
eyes―they’re an easy mark.) Then I sapped the psycho with a piece of junk that
might have once been a funnel.

After that I ran as if the bitch had risen
undead and chased me on sepulchral feet. I ran feeling sick in the stomach, not
because the poison had begun to work, but because I knew it would.

Here’s a tip for those new to a place and
don’t want to die: treat an actuary to lunch. Actuaries are the math whizzes
that work for insurance companies. They have tables full of sublime trivia.
They have summaries of vehicle thefts in Tri-State by make, model, and city
block. They have whole files on which restaurants will give you food poisoning
so violent you’re vegetative before you can sue. And deaths―they
love
deaths. Highest paying odds if played right, double indemnity be damned. Death
by automobile. Death by falling object. Death by heart attack, stroke,
aneurism. Death by garden variety ineptitude. Death by suicide. Each method
could be sliced fifty different ways―by race, color, religion, and creed; by
time of day, income, and hobby.

And then there’s the curious Death by
Other. Imagine
that
for an epitaph: here lies Janus McIlwraith, felled
in his prime by Other.

I didn’t like the sound of it either.

So I ran from the scrapyard, arms pumping
like pistons, and each hand cradling a pill that might keep me from becoming a
statistic.

In the darkroom, I dug a hand into my pants’
pockets and retrieved one of the psycho’s pills from each. I’m not sure why I
had kept them separate. Perhaps I thought they might fuse like gummy bears
under the heat of my exertion. I placed them on the bench in the safelight
lying like a stain over everything. They looked like two curled-up wood lice.
My eyes played tricks in the poor light, and I couldn’t tell which was paler.

My guts finally jerked from more than
indigestion or fear. The poison was beginning to cascade.

I guessed I had less than a minute. But I’ve
been called a pessimist.

The poison in my body came from a
particular brand of Other, which my friend the actuary labels Unregisterd
Xenotropic Fauna. Still a pretty wide net.

I had run into my first specimen of a UXF
on a case two years prior, a small-time racket breeding military grade
prov-dogs for the black market. Whoever first engineered the beasts was a
genius. Poison glands, and reticulate sinuses and hollow teeth to deliver the
toxin. But the genius is the toxin itself, because it’s not one but two. It
switches. By purely man-made gene sequences it is coupled to the bitch’s
estrous cycle. It fluxes as she comes on and off heat. And the kicker: the
antidote for one toxin catalyzes the second, and vice versa. One clots hard in
the blood; the other mushrooms in pockets of gas. Regardless of which finds a
mainline, the result is embolitic catastrophe. Cessation of circulatory
function. On the street, it’s called being a corpse.

An image fleeted across my mind, of a
million guerrillas hunched in solitude like me, dredging for the courage to
play Russian roulette with two pea-sized bullets.

The automatic developer piped a single,
triumphant tone and spat my film out. I lunged for it with a smile I imagine
looked like a rictus.

The film was tacky and smelled like a porta
potty. It stuck to the lightbox on an angle. I snapped the lightbox on and
scrutinized the image of my innards. My bones glowed, white continents in a
dark sea. I located the curve of my pelvic girdle, and the rib immediately
above. I leaned toward it until my nose touched the film and peered at the
darkness between.

Was that a little island cluster an inch
south of the rib? A salt and pepper speckle?

That had to be hard-clot.

Or random X-ray scatter.

What the hell. It was getting hard to think
over the roar of blood in my ears. I chose.

I scooped up the pill on my right, the cure
for hard-clot, and dry swallowed.

In the ten minutes that followed, while I
waited for cramps that never came, I didn’t once look again at the X-ray. No
buyer’s remorse for me.

Whether by skill or luck, I’d chosen right.

I rolled the film into a tube, tucked it
into my coat, tidied up, and made for the door. I had a headache to drown.

That’s when I noticed a trail of red
starbursts across the tiles. The cut on my arm was deeper than I’d thought. The
door’s handle turned under my hand. It opened and I came face to face with a
nurse.

She stared at me, her mouth a little o.

“You,” she said.

“Me.”

A frown puckered her clear skin.

“You said last time was the last time.”

I shrugged.

Her eyes hunted over my shoulder and then
the folds of my coat.

“Sorry about the mess in the toilet,” I
said.

She waved it away.

“I suppose you’re not going to explain this
either?”

I shook my head.

She sighed, then quirked a smile. “When I’m
old and grey?”

Then something made her glance along the
corridor. “You’d better go.” She indicated the blood. “I’ll fix this.”

“Thanks,” I said. She was a good kid.

I took the stairs and strolled past
Emergency. They were selling like hot cakes.

Took me half an hour to hail a cab on
Lexington, but―strange to say―I relished the walk. I had no fear of bitches
with demon eyes.

I knew nothing like that would walk the
earth for another century.

— 2 —

I retched one final time.

It was morning. I tried again to force
coffee into the bag of acid that had once been my stomach.

The time was 7.43 and I had work to do. I
donned my coat and, with a wet paper napkin, worried at the blood staining one
sleeve. The paper pilled off and made a mess. I tossed the pink ball of mush in
the bin.

In the hallway, I hesitated in front of the
full-length mirror and took inventory. I looked like a dog’s chew-toy. I needed
a shave. It could wait.

I stepped into the mirror.

I left behind the hallway. I left behind my
flat. I left behind Manhattan Island in the first blush of the new millennium.

Somewhere, backstage of Reality, in
corridors no wider than a forgotten taste and no longer than a yearning gaze, my
image and I met, shook hands, and went our separate ways.

How’s it feel, the mirror travel? Like slipping
into a cool bath on a summer’s day; like being strained through razors steeped
in a lake of fire; like déjà vu.

I stepped out on the far side, feeling my
way with dumb hands, remembering the previous night’s tumble onto a restroom
floor. My shoulder fired off an after-shock of pain.

I stood a moment while the fog in my head
dispersed. The fog was manageable on short trips―I’d left Hell’s Kitchen and
arrived in Harlem, as the crow flies barely three miles. I had no idea what was
the longest trip my flesh could handle, but I intuited a trip to London would
make me a vegetable. I’d tried for Staten Island once. Worst hangover I ever
had.

I watched the trip-slick fade from the
mirror’s surface. It never ceased to fascinate me, like a bubbling pot or a burning
log. It moiled like oil on water, shrank into itself and disappeared with a
sound like soda fizz, and left me staring at my own reflection.

Then I turned to bask in another view.
Through the soot-grimed glass of a window on the twenty-seventh story, I saw
straight down the spine of Manhattan Island.

I could watch that forever, too.

In many ways it resembled the city in which
I had woken, a piled-up mass of concrete and steel. Lights were dying, one by
one or in blocks, as morning bloomed. The streets were thronged.

But this Manhattan existed in the future.

The mirror had taken me three miles, and
two-and-a-half centuries.

Far off at the island’s southern tip, the
horizon was blotted by a two-thousand-foot giveaway: the hulking, haze-dimmed
contours of Liberty Borough, an impossibly thin mountain of built habitat.
Liberty was the first true ecology. A single structure lumped over blocks of
Lower Manhattan, which could’ve swallowed the Empire State and barely raised a
belch.

Farther south the silhouettes of the other
vast ecologies, Lincoln, Jervis-Battery, and Goiĕ, were smaller smudges. But
Liberty was enough to remind me I wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

The mirror had taken me to New New York.
Newer York.

Contrary to popular hope, this future city
was not so much bright, as cunning. It had to be. When the apocalypse turned
out the lights, only the cunning survived. When the nightmare fell between one
second and the next, and plunged the world into darkness, she forged a way through
chaos to the other side—scarred and listing a little, but still the queen of
cities.

This apocalypse wasn’t the big one with the
horses, the famine and plague and pestilence. Although plenty of that followed.

This apocalypse didn’t bring anything. It
took something. Something very small.

It took the electron.

That’s my version, anyway.

The history books say the Event stole man’s
ability to reliably harness electric charge and all that entails, power grids,
computers, telephones, TV—at its core, the near speed-of-light actuation of
physical bodies at a distance.

The poets say the gods toppled Einstein and
once more made Newton king.

I say some pipe burst in Reality’s
plumbing, and muscle matters again on the streets of New York.

But this morning my thoughts concerned
something more mundane. My aching side reminded me I had a score to settle.

I padded out of the room on dust-damped
treads, debated taking the stairs, and instead tugged the pull-rod that called
the elevator.

On the ninth floor I found the door to my
office unlocked, and braced myself for a sermon.