Soda Pop Soldier (15 page)

“Hello,” she answers sleepily.

At that moment, I know it's over. I'd suspected it for a long time. Now, I knew it. She'd slept somewhere else, with someone else. The fact that I was having to call my own live-in partner and act like I was some nimrod coworker calling in because she was late for work made me feel lame. And wounded.

I'm over it.

I hang up.

I take a slug from my thermos, which I squeeze back into one of the trench's deep pockets, pull out the rumpled soft pack of smokes, and light up. You're not supposed to smoke on the subway, but since they're free to ride, the transit authority doesn't patrol them anymore. I light the cigarette, sit down in one of the few remaining orange plastic seats, and blow a big cloud of smoke at the completely empty car.

I wonder what the subway was like back when they used to be crowded.

At Grand Central I find the old hippy couple's kiosk.

There's no sign of Iain. Either he'll show to reschedule all his contacts and let us know when the game's going to resume, or he'll take our money and run. I stand around for a moment. The massive hall is quiet as late-morning winter light throws long dusty shafts across the high walls, leaving the side tunnels in darkness. Sancerré once told me that there was a lot more to Grand Central than people knew. Levels, apartments, hidden corridors. She said she'd once attended a party at Grand Central around a swimming pool filled with alligators.

Now it's empty and quiet.

I imagine someone's making her breakfast right now. Or maybe they're both getting dressed. Guilty, ashamed, Sancerré is probably dreading facing me. Why do I care if she feels guilty? Or maybe they're happy, giggling, excited about what they've done and what it means. A secret I'm not part of.

A small Asian boy who'd been sitting on nearby steps at one end of the main hall gets up and walks purposefully toward me. I know he's going to hit me up for something.

But he doesn't.

“You Wu?” he asks.

“What?” I say after a confused pause in which I try to blend game reality with real reality while wearing a hangover. I fail. “What?” I say again.

“I said, are you Wu?”

I look around. Too weird.

“You're not Wu,” he pauses, his hard look turning to one of disappointment. “Guess not; sorry, chump.” I stand there watching him walk back to his spot on the steps. Maybe a quicker guy, like some avatar built for the entertainments, would've realized sooner that a contact attempt just went down. But I'm not some hard-boiled gumshoe or a high-flying financier of international intrigue. I'm hungover, and the innate gothic gloom of the old station and the blueness of an all-night storm binge leave me feeling slow and numb. Before I can walk over to the kid, Iain, in designer combat boots, expensive jeans, and that butterscotch leather coat he always wears, walks around the side of the kiosk. The hippy couple, who I thought had been awake, begin to snore in unison behind their mirrored blue faux SoftEyes. The kid remains sitting on the nearby steps.

“Yo, there you are,” says a smiling Iain, revealing an Iain I've never met before. Friendly Iain. “You know, I don't even know your name.” Yesterday he couldn't have cared if I'd been mugged and beaten ten steps from him, now he wants to be my new best friend?

“It's Meatball McGillacutty, what the hell do you care?” I don't feel like playing games right now. I'm out a thousand bucks, soon to be homeless, and my girlfriend's sleeping with someone else—ex-girlfriend, that is. My regular job, which I love, is going over the hill and into history just like Custer's Seventh. So I'm not telling some scumbag Black dealer my real name. He can go straight to hell.

Which is exactly what he doesn't do. Instead he pulls out a very real-looking Glock subcompact ten mil—I've seen them in various games I've played—and sticks it right under my chin.

“You don't wanna tell me your name, fine,” whispers Iain close and coldly. That's the Iain I'm familiar with. “But politeness goes a long way in business and you . . . you ain't being polite.”

His eyelids hang at half-mast like some prehistoric predator lizard. He's been here before, and I'm pretty sure he's been on both sides of the outcome. The side where he doesn't pull the trigger, and the side where he does.

I glance over at the Asian kid still sitting on the steps.

“John Saxon,” I lie. I don't know why I lie. I got that one from the Asian kid. He reminds me of Bruce Lee, and I'm a big fan of
Enter the Dragon
. It's stupid of me to lie. But like I said, I'd had enough for one day.

Iain tilts his pistol away from my chin, almost pointing it at his own face.

“
Laissez les bons temps rouler,
Chumpchange; that's more like it.” He tucks his pistol behind his back under his coat like some two-bit entertainment thug and looks at me all combed-straight-back blond hair and bright one-chipped-tooth smile. Except that his eyes are still souless, incapable of any real warmth or affection.

“I'm really, really, sorry, John,” he begins in a sincere tone that again doesn't match the eyes. “I'm really sorry about your game going down an hour in. Listen, man, no one saw it coming, it just happened. And sorry about the gun; it's just that I've had to run around pacifying all you angry game geeks and a few others. Listen, I'm gonna do you a solid; let me give you a brand-new character disk. I got a new stack last night, new characters and everything. The game's going to reset after midnight tonight and then everyone's logging back in. Cool?”

No, it isn't cool. Why does he want my character disk? I kinda like the Samurai. I wasn't married to the idea of running him and maybe I can get a better start, but the truth is I didn't want to give it to Iain.

I've had enough of having things taken from me.

“You know,” I say, like it's all a big hassle and I'm slightly afraid of offending him, which I am, “I'm not going home till late and, truth is . . . I like the Samurai; I'll just keep him. Thanks anyway.”

For a moment his eyes flash intense superheated anger, and then an invisible hand seems to restrain him, correct him. Like he's remembering something from his court-ordered anger management classes, which I'm sure have played a big part in his rehabilitation from the various crimes he's been convicted of. Or someone just sent him a text on one of his SoftEyes. Or whispered in his ear.

“Okay, that's cool, my brother. We're all cool.” His hands were suddenly up as he backs off a few steps.

But it isn't cool. Alarms are going off. Time to get out. I glance over my shoulder at the Asian kid, who is still sitting, still looking at his shoes. When I turn back to Iain, I swear I catch him looking over my shoulder, off to the left and into the shadows of a tunnel that leads down to the empty rattling trains.

“All right, gotta go,” I say.

Iain's mouth, unlike his lizard eyes, wishes me good luck. But the congeniality of the moment before the gun has disappeared. Almost as if it hadn't ever been there.

I turn and walk away, hoping to make it out into the brutal cold before Iain puts two in my back. As I walk past the kid I mumble, “Follow me in five.” I hope Iain doesn't hear.

I'm not clever enough to come up with anything else.

Outside in the snow, with barely a car passing on the ice-swollen streets, I wait under a raised track in the shadows of what looks to be a long-abandoned diner. Literally, people don't come down to this part of town anymore. High above, on the Grand Concourse of Upper New York, I can see a train of slip cars hanging beneath the road, winding its way underneath the cityscape above. Someday I want to be rich enough to live up there and ride that car every day.

I wonder if “up there” is where Sancerré spent the night.

Maybe.

“You Wu or not?” comes the voice from below as I stare rubelike, up at Upper New York. The kid, who at first look seems oddly, if not expensively dressed, stares up at me with disgust. His short pants are a new temperature-converting material made by NikeAtlantis that I'd seen hitting the streets of late. The shoes, thin-skinned runners, obviously also temperature dominant, were HyperGear friendly, which meant the kid's parents, or whoever, had the money for him to delve into CompuWear.

“Yeah, I'm Wu.” First karate-kickin' John Saxon, now the enigmatic Samurai Wu.
What's next?
I ask myself and then think about lighting a cigarette. Instead I fish out my plaid thermos and, cool character that I am, pat the secret pouch where my Black disk is hidden.

“Yeah, my grandfather says to give you this, chump.” He hands me a slip of paper. You don't see that much these days, paper, though the “grandfather” would explain that little mystery.

“Okay, so cool,” says the kid. “See ya around, chump.” Then he's off on a FlexyBoard he pulls from one of his pockets, hovering out across the deserted snowbound streets of Forty-Second. He disappears down an alley a few blocks later.

Unfolding the note I read, “Don't give up the Samurai.”

Chapter 12

T
he war starts up again at 6:30 that night.

I'd met RiotGuurl an hour earlier in loadout. Our avatars now stare at each other as we text back and forth in-game. For some reason she'd rejected a visual link and after bugging her once or twice about it, I let it go. I don't need this, whatever it is, along with everything else. I need to focus tonight.

I equip my grunts with an infantry loadout for two squads. The remaining two I mix with sniper and antiarmor teams. Our mission tonight, as outlined by RangerSix on Monday morning, is to hit the airfield in the plains beyond WonderSoft Garage. Way behind enemy lines. Meanwhile, the main body of our force and WonderSoft will be converging head-on in the hotly contested rice paddies of Eastern Highlands.

RiotGuurl and myself are tasked with striking the airfield, which, curiously, no one has ever bothered to name. Fever is going in with us, riding medic. Kiwi is attached to the main force and leading a full infantry company of heavily armed grunts near the main action. Command is hoping he'll be able to raise his kill count and avoid any personal deaths by being near enough the action to make a difference. RangerSix likes Kiwi; it's the number crunchers at ColaCorp who have problems with his stats. Even though his frequent deaths were often accompanied by high enemy kill counts as he ended up being the guy who covered our butts in what had been five weeks of continuous retreat, the accountants focus on the numbers they choose to focus on. They've scoped the numbers the way they want to see them, and that way does not portray Kiwi in a good light. If we lose Eastern Highlands tonight, then we're down to Song Hua Harbor, our home base. If we lose that, we're faced with elimination from WarWorld, and it's the effective end of professional online gaming for me.

“How come you didn't show up at the bunker the other night?” I text RiotGuurl.

On-screen, my grunts are shuffling up the cargo ramp, overloaded with weapons and special gear, and into RiotGuurl's matte-black special ops Albatross. Everywhere tanks and troops are organizing inside the loadout hangar. Below the stubby wings, near the squat VTOL engines of the Albatross, RiotGuurl's crew is busy loading drone gun packages on the weapon mounts.

“Didn't feel like it,” she texts back. “Getting ‘ganked' by that Vampire was humiliating. I will tonight, after we knock out the airfield. Promise.” She adds a leering emoticon that dies laughing, then explodes.

“I got hammered,” I text. Lame, but I'm looking for any kind of opening with her. Maybe she's a party girl.

She doesn't reply.

“JollyBoy's painted the target,” she writes back.

She's probably just received the intel specialist's survey report.

“Says there's a lot of infantry, no AA,” she continues. “Good for me. Bad 4 u.”

I find it hard to believe WonderSoft isn't protecting that airfield with at least a few antiaircraft guns. We'd lost most of our air power early on, but they still had AA units and it would be stupid of them not to put 'em on the airfield. What else were they going to do with them?

“I don't know about that,” I reply. “They might have them hidden and ready to bring out once the server goes hot. Has he marked an LZ?”

I wait as my platoon finishes loading itself onto the spec ops Albatross. Thirty-nine killer grunts armed to the digital teeth with state-of-the-art modern weaponry, ready to take the airfield. My plan is to have my infantry set up a perimeter while my snipers and antiarmor stay under cover, ready to take care of the expected enemy counterattack that will show up once we take control of the airfield. After dropping us off at the LZ, RiotGuurl will fly a figure eight across the airfield and deploy all the drone gun packages. If we can hold the airfield for an hour, it'll be ours. Then we can start producing reinforcements locally, right in WonderSoft's unprotected supply lines. That could stop WonderSoft cold tonight. That is, if everything works as planned. It could be the break ColaCorp is hoping for.

But then I remind myself, it's always a great plan, until you meet the enemy.

“Yeah, he found an LZ,” she texts back. “Sending it to you now . . . listen, my life's complicated. I shoulda been there that night but I had to work after the battle. You seem like a nice guy . . . you're a good gamer . . .”

Fever's avatar appears in loadout and pings us with tie-dyed emoticons crooning some old-school song about only needing love.

“It's just that . . . ,” continues RiotGuurl in text, “I don't have any room for a new friend. I hope that's cool?”

Man, everybody's so concerned about their cool rating lately.

“Yeah,” I send back. “My life's no picnic, either, right now. Maybe later.”