The Digital Plague (29 page)

“The way the nav systems are fried, combined with the shudder I’ve got from peeled back plates, I’d say I can get us into the goddamn city of New York,” Marko said, his eyes locked on the dashboard readouts. “I’m going to aim for the Madison Square Airpad. Plenty of room to crash there.”

I considered saying something, but the Techie was sweaty and had the deep-focus stare of someone struggling to not scream, so I opted to look back at Hense. “All right, so we walk.”

She looked at me for a moment, then shifted her gaze past me. “Mr. Marko,” she said, “how’s your stick? Think you can maintain a deployment position?”

“Can I make this hover
hover?
” Marko asked, blinking sweat out of his eyes. “Sure. It won’t be pretty. Your boys know how to drop with a little bit of yaw?”

“I don’t know,” Hense said, turning to Happling, “I’ve never seen them drop before. Captain, get set for a drop and form a security ring. We can’t have Mr. Cates taking any more chances.”

Happling nodded and spun out of the cockpit. “Mr. Marko,” Hense said, looking back at me. “When we arrive at Madison Square, give me fifty feet and let me know when you’re as steady as you can manage. Mr. Cates,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “I’m sending my men down to have a look before we risk our magic talisman. Any objections?”

I shook my head. “As long as it’s understood that when we reach the hospital, I’m the one that kills Ty Kieth.”

Silence greeted this. I looked at my cigarette coal, feeling dirty. They thought I was being bloodthirsty. And a traitorous bastard who killed friends after promising them he wouldn’t. But Kieth wasn’t Glee’s revenge—that was Gatz. Ty Kieth’s death was the cure. Someone would end up pulling the trigger on Ty; it was unavoidable. Might as well be someone friendly. Ty deserved to have someone look him in the eye and speak to him when his time came, and there was no one else. Once that was taken care of, there would be time for revenge.

“Very well,” Hense said, standing up. “Mr. Marko, let us know when you’re ready.”

She ducked out of the cockpit, leaving me alone with the Techie. I heard him open his mouth to suck in a deep breath.

“If you say a fucking word to me,” I said to the cigarette, “I will tear your goddamn tongue out. It has to be done.”

I heard his mouth click shut. I didn’t feel powerful, or smart. I felt like a piece of shit. I put the cigarette back into my mouth and drew in smoke. It tasted terrible, stale and bitter. We sat there for a few minutes, the shouts and thumpings of the Stormers as they geared up for a drop coming to us through the bulkhead and filling up some of the space. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, the silence, Marko knowing this about me, so I stood up, dropped the red-hot butt onto the floor, and pushed into the cabin.

I’d never seen a Stormer drop up close. From the ground, where I’d usually watched them while cowering in some hole, gun in sweaty hand, praying not to be noticed, they always looked like something from a nightmare: half invisible in their Obfuscation Kit, gliding to the ground on beautiful silver threads, raining down murder on us fearlessly, wordlessly.

Up close, their ObFu was stained and torn, and some were having technical difficulties, flickering on and off. The Stormers didn’t have their cowls on yet, and their faces were sweaty and unshaven and blotched with dirt and blood. They stank—the whole cabin smelled like marinating humans, powerful enough even for me to notice, and I’d spent far too much time cowering in holes with other people to ever really notice body odors again. The silver drop cables were old and worn, some a little rusted at the connectors, and snaked from the drop poles to their belt clips in a jumbled mess on the floor. They shuffled and rearranged themselves as Happling barked orders, and chattered loudly, making jokes. They looked like a lot of unhappy, overstressed people instead of silent death machines sent to kick our asses. I leaned against the wall and watched, feeling my leg throb in time with my pulse.

Hense glanced at me. “You gonna be able to keep up? You look pretty banged up.”

I shrugged. “I’ve been worse. I’ve been
dead.
” I never got tired of that line.

She nodded and put a hand on my shoulder. “Fine. But you can’t be killed, understood? Don’t make me take extreme precautions.”

“You’re two officers and fifteen exhausted Stormers with low ammunition and no chance of resupply,” I said, liking the weight of her hand on me. “You need my gun.” I studied her as she turned away, thinking this was someone I could work with. I
liked
her.

Happling was crushing two cigarettes in his massive hands, a small, eager grin pushing through the gloomy expression on his face. “All right, faggots, listen up: we’re treating this as a VIP drop, got that? Hold your fucking formation on the way down and I want to see a
tight
pattern when you hit the bricks. Keep in mind this tub is damaged and is being piloted by some idiot who hasn’t been outside a lab in decades, so there’s gonna be some English on the cables. Establish the situation and radio up a report right away. You have
full fucking discretion
when on the ground. Dumb Shit,” he said, pointing at one of the Stormers, “the word
discretion
means
unrestrained exercise of choice,
which means take whatever action you deem necessary, which means shoot anything that fucking looks like a threat, got that?” The Stormer didn’t say anything, which seemed to satisfy Happling.

“All right,” Marko’s voice crackled over the comm. “I’m
hovering.
It’s not a pretty sight, so be prepared for some corrections.”

“You heard the man,” Happling said, stuffing the crushed tobacco into his cheek. “Fat Girl, open the bay.”

Without hesitation the Stormer standing nearest the bay controls flipped them open and mashed a big green button. As the bay doors split open and rapidly shrank into the skin of the hover, the Stormers went through a flurry of tugging and slapping, checking each other’s hookups and pounding each other’s shoulders to confirm the checks. The wind came pouring in, roaring and pushing around us. Then, wordlessly, they formed up into lines three rows deep, the first row crouched low, balanced, while the back two stood ready.

From my vantage point in the back I could see the skyline but not the ground below us. Columns of smoke rose into the air, some white and fluffy, some dark and ominous.

Hense nodded silently. “Go! Go! Go!” Happling roared, brown spittle spraying from his mouth, and the first row of Stormers leaped out of the hover, followed immediately by the second row and then the third, drop lines humming as they spooled out. One second they were outlined against the gray sky, the next it was just wind racing around the cabin and Happling looming in front of me, arms akimbo, like a goddamn titan observing the mortals. We stood there waiting for a few moments.

“Cap,” one of the Stormers’ voices crackled around us, thick with a musical accent. “Cap, this is Team Leader.”

Happling spat tobacco juice onto the floor. “Go ahead, Team Leader,” he boomed, then turned to look at Hense. “No gunfire.”

“Cap, send the VIP on down. No threats identified. Hell, we got nothing but bodies down here.”

Day Ten:
I Was Pretty Sure Bullets
were no Longer Going
to be Enough

“All clear,” the round-faced Stormer said to me, her cowl dangling behind her head. “Watch your step, now. They’re all pretty soft.” She sounded like she’d stepped on plenty of softening corpses in her time.

I imagined the smell around me like a green haze, it was so thick and heavy. We were just a block away from the remnants of the Pennsylvania Hotel, but I felt I’d arrived in a strange new city—a city of silence, of smoke. A city of dead bodies rotting in the cool June sun.

They were everywhere, looking a little better than I would have expected, a little fresher. The airpad was past me behind its cinder-block walls and security checkpoints; the empty space around it had always made me a little itchy, all that air around you. I preferred the tall canyon walls of ancient, crumbling skyscrapers or the bursting pipelines of downtown, flesh pressing against you. The big open square felt like eyes on you.

We’d landed, rough and shaking, just outside the airpad, crushing a few dozen festering corpses beneath us. The bodies fanned out from the airpad in a crush, swelling in their clothes, luggage piled around them. They all looked like they’d been eaten alive, their chests and necks pulpy wounds, bones showing through ravaged skin. I stepped carefully through them, staring down and picking out details—good clothes, jewelry, clean fingernails. These people were
rich.
Their eyes were all open, and most were untouched, staring at us.

“Fucking hell,” Happling muttered next to me. “This shit is disgusting.” He pointed. “Entry wounds. Shredders. I don’t know what’s
eating
these poor bastards, but what
killed
them was good old-fashioned guns.”

We both glanced over at the airpad walls. The gates were shut but it appeared empty, and Marko hadn’t gotten any response to his hail. I scanned the crowd again. Every now and then I had the sense that the mass of bodies rippled, but I couldn’t catch it to be sure.

“Poor bastards,” Happling said, turning away. “Just trying to get out.”

I lingered on the closed gates for a moment. Fucking cops. I didn’t doubt for a moment that Happling would have given the order to shoot, too, if he’d been in charge of the airpad with a crush of desperate people trying to get in. I stood there for a moment with the sour wind pushing against me, listening to my own coat flapping. There was a muffled burst of gunfire in the distance, there and gone just as suddenly. Happling and I looked at each other, the big man grinning at me as he chewed tobacco.

“Not everyone’s dead,” he said, sounding happy. He spun away. “Troopers! Form up! I want to see a fucking humping formation in thirty seconds!”

I remained where I was for a moment, staring at the crowd of corpses around me, just to ram home the point that I wasn’t one of Happling’s troopers. As I turned to follow him a hand shot up from the jumble of bodies and grabbed my ankle in a slick, loose grip.

I stumbled backward as one of the corpses seemed to pull itself toward me, a jowly man in an impressive suit, his lower jaw missing, his throat a wet sore, blood oozing from the ruined skin. His tongue, fissured and blackened, writhed in the open space above his neck like a worm.

Panting, I tried to flee backward, and stomped my free foot down onto one of the inflating bodies around me. It went right through the softened chest as if I were stepping into half-dried mud, a spray of jellied blood, black and chunky, splattering me as I lost my balance and fell back onto my ass, the jolt sending a shock of pain through me that made my vision swim.

The jowly guy, flesh jiggling loosely, peeling away from him in spots, continued to feebly pull himself toward me, tongue working like he was trying to talk and hadn’t yet noticed that his jaw was gone. He had no eyes, just scabby craters in his face where they’d been eaten away. I bottled up a scream—Avery Cates did not scream—and searched for my gun, hands trembling. For a moment I couldn’t find it, panic swelling inside me, and then I felt its familiar hard shape in my pocket and pulled it out, pointing it down at the ghoul clawing toward me, its soft hands on my thighs. I stared at it for a moment, hands shaking.
I’d
done this. This had started with
me.

I pulled the trigger and the shot was fucking thunder, the loudest thing you’d ever heard. The ghoul’s head exploded, the torso dropping down onto my legs and disgorging a thin gruel of fluid from the neck that soaked into my clothes. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Stormers drop into combat positions and then slowly relax.

“Fucking hell,” Happling bellowed.

I continued to stare at the ghoul’s torso for a moment. A mercy killing, I told myself. Poor bastard was better off dead. As I stared it twitched and I hurriedly pushed the gun back into my pocket and climbed painfully to my feet, walking as briskly as I could toward the group of cops, wincing every time I stumped onto my fractured leg. Bendix, still blindfolded, with his arms bent painfully back behind him, stood calm and still among them. When I was a few feet away, a noise to my right made all of us whirl and drop, the metallic rattle of readied guns echoing off the street. A block south, a small crowd of people sprinted across Eighth Avenue, just shadows against the sky, and disappeared past the corner.

For a moment, we all just crouched, ready. Bendix stood without moving, smirking.

“All right,” Happling said, “don’t get your panties in a bunch, kids. Form up, weapons check, give me a D-nine formation, and let’s move out.”

I kept moving my eyes from point to point and holding my focus, searching for any sign that someone was holding back, skulking around a corner, waiting for us to turn away. As I watched, a second group of people burst into the intersection, running full speed across the street, and were gone.

“Avery?” Hense said from behind me.

I stood up, joints popping, gritting my teeth. Turning your back on a possible threat was suicide—you learned that right away when you were a kid—but the whole city was a goddamn three-sixty threat, so it didn’t matter. I stumped over to Hense and nodded, moving past her. “This is my city,” I said. “Follow me.”

Her hand fell on my shoulder, surprisingly strong, and pulled me off-balance, forcing me to stop and turn. “Avery,” she said, expressionless, “you are the only reason any of us are still alive. You will not march out in front like a goddamn
target.
”