Spares (2 page)

“Two hundred dollars,” the man said, his eyes trying to look cool and watchful at the same time, and making a fearful mess of both. He wasn’t talking about what I was trying to sell. I wasn’t even in New Richmond yet. It was after eight o’clock at night and I was losing patience and running out of time.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Fifty is the rate.”

The man laughed with genuine amusement.

“You been away or something, man? Shit, I can’t barely
remember
when fifty dollars was the rate.”

“Fifty dollars,” I said again. I guess I was hoping if I said it often enough I’d end up neurolinguistically programming him. I was standing in front of a door, a door that was hidden in the basement of a building in the Portal
settlement, the high-rise nightmare of ragged buildings and shanty dwellings which surrounds New Richmond proper. I was there because this particular building had been constructed right up against the exterior wall of the city, inside which I needed to be. I’d put up with being frisked on entry by the street gang that was currently controlling the building, and had already paid twenty dollars “tax” on my gun. I didn’t have two hundred dollars, I barely had a hundred, and I was in a hurry.

The man shrugged. “So go in the main entrance.”

I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets, fighting back anger and panic in equal measure. “And don’t be thinking about bringing out your gun,” he continued, mildly. “‘Cos there’s three brothers you can’t even see with rifles trained on yo’ ass.”

I couldn’t go in the main gates, as he well knew. No one came to this part of the Portal town if they could enter New Richmond through one of the legitimate entrances. Going in that way meant running your ownCard through the machines, thus broadcasting your name to the cops, the city administration, and anyone else who had a tap on the line.

“Look,” I said. “I’ve been this way before. I don’t need a guide, I just need to get past you. Fifty dollars is what I have.”

The man turned away and signaled into the darkness with an upward nod of his head. I heard the sound of several sets of feet padding out of the darkness toward me.

“You still piecing your action from Howie ‘The Plan’?” I asked, casually. The footsteps behind stopped, and the man turned to look at me again, eyes watchful.

“What you know about Mr. Amos?” he asked.

“Not much,” I said, though I did. Howie was a medium-time crook operating out of the eighth floor. He ran some girls, owned a bar, and had pieces of the drugs action so far down the chain that he was tolerated by the real heavy-hitters above. He was a fat, affable man with
a surprising shock of blond hair, but he was fitter than he looked and knew how to keep a secret. Late at night, when most of the customers were gone, he’d been known to sit in with his house blues band and play a hell of a lot better than you’d expect. He didn’t have the Bright Eyes, but he could have. He was a stand-up guy.

“Just enough,” I continued, “to tell the wrong people about some of the deals they don’t know he’s into. And if he thinks that information came from you guys, well…”

“Why would he get to thinking that?” the man asked, though he was losing heart. These guys were
below
bottom-rung lowlife: hardly on the ladder. They most likely didn’t even know where the ladder
was
, and had to use steps the whole time. Running this door was as close as they got to operating in New Richmond. Guys like this don’t want to tangle with the jungle inside. It bites.

“I can’t imagine,” I said. “Look. Fifty dollars. Then on my way out I give you the other hundred fifty.”

For all he knew I was never coming out, but fifty was better than no cash and a lot of potential grief. He stepped aside. I peeled the notes off, and he opened the door.

“And I’ll give you an extra twenty,” I added, “if you keep any mention of me off the list you sell to the cops.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said stonily, but there was a change in his attitude. “But I’ll take your twenty.”

I nodded and walked through the door. It shut behind me, and for the first time in five years I was inside New Richmond.

The door led into an old service corridor, which meandered toward the lower engine block through miles of dank and creepy corridors. There’s nothing of value to be had there, and that’s why nobody had cared when external construction had covered up the entrance. The one thing no one was going to be trying to do was get the engines going again. There’s an old story that says
one of the original repair drones still toils away down there somewhere, grown old and insane, but even I don’t believe that.

For a long time the door was forgotten, and then somebody rediscovered it and realized its potential value as a covert entrance to the city. An adjunct to the service corridor leads via the exhaust ducts to a hidden and little-known staircase, which leads up to the second floor of the old Mall.

But I wasn’t going to be going that way. I quickly followed the corridor for two hundred yards, past panels etched and stained with rust. It’s eerily silent down there, perhaps the only truly quiet part of the city. The corridor took a sharpish right turn, and you could see the dim and intermittent lights in the ceiling disappearing toward the next turn, about half a mile ahead. Instead of following the lights I gathered myself and leapt upward, arms straight above me, hands balled into fists. They hit a panel of the roof and it popped up and over, revealing a dark space beyond. I took a quick glance back to ensure no one was watching, jumped up again, and pulled myself up through the hole.

When I replaced the ceiling panel I was left in a darkness broken only by yellow slivers of light that escaped through cracks in the floor. I straightened into the slight hunch required for New Richmond’s lost ventilation system, and hurried forward into the gloom. Every now and then I heard some fragment of life floating down from the city. An aged gurgle, soft clanks grown old, the occasional ghost of speech caught accidentally in some twist of corridor above and echoed down to the graveyard below. I had always felt that walking this corridor was like creeping through New Richmond’s ancient and barren womb, but then I’ve always been a bit of a moron.

After about half a mile I passed under one of the main entrances. You can tell because of the sound of hundreds of feet coming in, going out. I stood underneath the entrance for a moment, remembering. I used
to come the covert way sometimes for kicks, but the main gates are the way you enter if you want to appreciate what you’re getting into. You walk into a foyer which is twenty stories high, a taste of the opulence you can expect if you’ve got clearance to go above the 100th floor. There used to be glass windows on all of the levels that tower above you, but they were walled in once they’d become low-life areas. It was like standing in the biggest and gaudiest shower cubicle of all time. You walked up to the desk, ran your ownCard through the machine, and established your clearance. I used to live in the 70s, and so I’d walk over to one of the express elevators, get in, and be shot up into the sky.

Not tonight. Tonight I was threading my way like a snake through endless tunnels, and I wasn’t going to the 72nd floor because there was nothing left for me there. I was in New Richmond because I needed money, and had only one way of getting some. I was going to go in, get the money, get out—and then turn my back on Virginia for good.

We’d reached the Portal settlement in the early evening. It had been raining all day, and was getting colder and darker by the minute. Virginia doesn’t fuck around in winter, especially not these days. Virginia says, “Here, have some winter,” and then delivers. The spares had been on their last legs by then, a joke I’d made to myself knowing it to be in bad taste and not altogether caring. They’d never felt the cold before, and the scraps of my clothing I’d distributed amongst them weren’t anywhere near enough.

There hadn’t been many people on the streets, thankfully. You don’t go to the Portal to promenade, particularly not at night—it would be less trouble to stay in your apartment and mug yourself in the comfort of your own home. Howie Amos once ran a service which did just that; you called him up, said you were thinking of going out into the Portal, and he’d send someone to
rough you up within half an hour or you got a dollar off. It was surprisingly popular.

I corralled the spares into a tight group and herded them down the streets in front of me, sticking close to the walls and out of the light, trusting Suej and David to help me keep the others in line. I’d explained why we had to come here, and why it could be a problem for me. They all did what they were told, and I hurried us along for about a mile until we were outside Mal’s building.

I paused outside and looked back the way we’d come. The roads in the Portal are very straight, running out from New Richmond in the center like a giant spider’s web. You can stand in the middle of one and see as far as the rain will let you. Yellow streetlights lined the way, throwing pools of light that were rich and sickly, like cream ten minutes before it goes sour. Beyond the limits of my vision was the edge of the Portal, and beyond that, the road which led out into the dark Virginia countryside. A long way down that road were the Blue Ridge Mountains we’d come from, matter-of-fact geology covered with a hell of a lot of trees. For the first time it struck me how much the roads in the Portal looked like tunnels, and that was when I began to accept that the last five years really had happened to me.

I shouldered the outer door open and led the spares into the hallway, which was an inch deep in chill water. Loud music was thumping from somewhere up above. I told the spares to stay still and to hide if anyone came, then I vaulted up the wooden staircase that spiraled up into the darkness. When I got to the 3rd floor I took a deep breath, shook some of the water out of my hair, then knocked on Mal’s door.

Mal did a double take which would have done a cheap comedian proud, and then he just stood there, mouth hanging open, hand still holding the door. He was wearing a pair of battered cutoffs which showed off the scars on his legs, and a ragged T-shirt that hugged his
new paunch and looked like about five people had lived and died in it without showing it any water other than rain. He was backlit by a bare bulb, and from somewhere deep in the bowels of his apartment came the smell of cooking—noodles, almost certainly. In all the time I’d known Mal I don’t think I’d ever seen him voluntarily eat anything else.

Finally he got it together, blinked and tried to smile.

“Jack,” he croaked, eerie calm coming about level with utter stupefaction. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Social visit. Old times.”

“Yeah, right. The Pope’s due later too.” He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and pinched himself on the bridge of the nose. “You in trouble?”

“Yep.” I grinned, trying to keep myself from hopping from foot to foot. Tension, of about seven different kinds. I nodded toward the gloom of the apartment. “What’s cooking?”

“Noodles,” he said, eyeing me warily. “You want some?”

“Depends how much you’ve got. I’m not alone.”

“How many guests are we talking?”

I took a deep breath. “Including me, seven,” I said. Mal’s eyes opened wide and he shook his head—not in negation, just bewilderment. I tried to make it easier on him. “Well, six and a half, I guess.”

“That’s a lot of noodles.”

“Too many?”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I buy in bulk.” He turned back toward his apartment for a moment, biting his lip, considering. I noticed he wasn’t wearing his shoulder holster and wondered whether that meant he was out of the Life, or just less paranoid these days. More likely he’d been cleaning his gun when I knocked. The two things I didn’t think Mal was ever going to get were less paranoid or out of the Life.

Then he turned back to me, eyebrows raised in friendly resignation. In one sighing breath he asked,
“Where are these guests now and just how much un-happiness am I risking by letting them into my life, however fucking briefly?”

“I left them downstairs,” I said, realizing that I ought to get back to them very soon, whichever way this went. Mal’s building is where bad people go to have fun. That’s why he’s paranoid—and also why he likes it. “I just need to leave them with you for an hour, then we’re out of here.”

“Why didn’t you call ahead?”

“When I want to ask old friends for lunatic favors I like to do it in person. Also, I didn’t have any change.”

“And the trouble rating?”

“What scale are you talking?” I was gabbling, strung tight. I had to let Mal see I was okay, because otherwise he was likely to get freaked. Being freaked would in fact have been a reasonable reaction, but I didn’t want him to know that yet.

“One to ten.”

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly giving in and getting panicky. “At least ten, possibly higher, certainly getting worse by the minute.”

Mal let go of the door.

“Get them up here.”

I let out a short exhalation of relief. “Mal…”

“Yeah, all that,” he said, brushing my thanks aside. “And then you’re going to go get me a jar of Japanese pickles. I forgot I’d run out.”