The Digital Plague (34 page)

“Mr. Marko,” I said suddenly, “you’re a
cop,
right?”

He looked up from his little screen, surprised. “I’m a
Technical Assistant.
”

I nodded. “For the SSF. Do you know how to handle a gun?”

He stared at me like I was speaking some bizarre language, and then Belling strode over to him, producing one of his shiny custom-made Roons from somewhere within his coat and proffering it to the Techie. “Here,” Belling said impatiently. Marko regarded it dumbly, so Belling leaned in and pressed the gun into his hand. “You pull the trigger and it goes boom,” the old man said. “Just point it away from yourself. And me.” Belling looked back at me and raised his eyebrows. “Satisfied? Come here, let’s get organized. Zeke, show us the main floor, right above our heads.”

Marko continued to stare at the gun in his hand, worth more on the black market—at least the black market that had existed a week ago—than he probably cleared in legal SSF pay in a year. He slid it gently into one of his pockets, as if it might explode if he held it too tight. Which, I decided, was the preferred attitude of useless Techies when handed a gun in my presence. It was the ones who started pointing it at things and squinting that you had to worry about.

“Okay, this is where I think we are,” he said, slowly at first and then with increasing speed as he got back to his comfort zone, voice bouncing off the ancient pocked cement. “This subbasement level
here.
” I leaned over Belling’s annoyingly broad shoulders and saw that he was zooming in on a large, square-shaped area on the plans, all load-bearing columns and ramps. “Which is, as we all know, more or less closed off from the main complex at this point, used only as a bridge between the main levels and the mechanical rooms, which they never bothered shifting upward. It’s directly below the core of the complex. The lobby is … here, and … here’s the main offices.”

Belling stabbed a long, elegant finger at the screen. “Here’s where our boy is, Mr. Cates.”

I stared down at the plans. “That’s an operating room.”

Belling nodded. “That is the Mutant Freak’s office.”

“How many in there?”

“Just Kieth and the Freak.”

I waited a beat. “What’s the catch?”

Belling seemed amused, like his old self again. “Aside from the fifty-three other Monks that are patrolling the space, the fact that the Freak knows you’re coming and that he’s not only a fully functioning Monk but a psionic as well? Why, Mr. Cates. I know you’ve come up in the world over the last few years, but I think those are catches
enough,
don’t you?”

My chest spasmed but I managed a thin smile. “No, Wa, after the last few weeks, in all honesty, I don’t.”

“As always, Wallace Belling aims to please,” he said, still grinning. “You will note that in order to get to the Freak’s office, we will have to go through this rather large area here.”

“The general admission area,” Marko said, nodding, “and the emergency room processing area.”

“Wa,” I said, “what the fuck’s up there?”

“Walk and talk, Avery. There’s no time to waste.” The old man spun and strode purposefully for the elevator, producing two more guns from inside his coat. I limped after him, pulling Lukens and Marko along in my orbit.

“Your man Zeke here can probably shade in the fine points, of course, but what you’ve seen so far—this plague—is just the first stage of the nanobots processing. Once the body has been killed and allowed to, well,
marinate
or something, reach some level of early-onset rot that is somehow magically necessary, they take over.” He stopped to sweep his hand toward the yawning elevator cab. “They
reanimate.
The bodies.”

I stopped in front of him. “They come back to life,” I said slowly.

“No,” Belling corrected, putting a hand on my back and pushing me gently into the elevator. “They
reanimate.
Except better.”

We all entered the cab and turned to look out into what appeared to be perfect darkness, Lukens sweeping the field with her shredder as Belling plucked his rusted pry bar from the cab floor and used it to pull the doors shut. As they clicked into place, a double row of circular buttons lit up to one side. I’d thought the basement had been quiet, but inside the elevator we’d found a new level of silence.

Belling reached over and jabbed one of the buttons near the top. The cab lurched disturbingly, making us all stumble and reach for the walls, and then nothing happened for several seconds as we gently swung there in the dark. With a lazy grinding noise the cab began to shudder, which I took to indicate movement.

Marko’s face was so close to his handheld I thought he might swallow it. “This is some
thick
code, Mr. Cates. I can only see the packets being transmitted, but there’s some serious shit going on nearby. I’ve got signals burning off the nanobots like crazy.” He looked up at me and licked his lips. His beard had gotten a little tangled and crazy. “I’m guessing at some of this, based on papers Squalor published in his youth and some of the work I’ve seen Kieth do in European cases—we study some of them in training—but I think … I think the nanobots are remaining functional after biological death and taking over respiratory functions.” He stared at me for a second and then ticked his head. “They’re
breathing
and
pumping blood.
People get sick, they die, and then the nanos … bring them back.”

A full-body shiver swept through me. “Why?”

“Mr. Kieth,” Belling said, his voice melodious in the darkness, “called it Phase Two. Squalor cannot fabricate Monks anymore. Even if he has a handful of intact, unused chassis around, even if he searches the dumps of the System for burned-out chassis that can be reused, he no longer has the ability to acquire new converts. As I understand it from Kieth, the nanos kill you—brain death, at least—then keep you upright and walking, and start to link together to form a brain.” I heard his coat rustle as he shrugged. “And there you go: breedable Monks.”

Lukens muttered, “Fucking hell.”

For a second we all stood there in silence. I understood why Belling had cut and run—things must be getting pretty hot with Kev and his merry band of Monks, and it didn’t sound as if the immortality he’d been offered was what he’d been expecting.

The cab shuddered again, and I felt a distinct gravitational drag as a metallic screech filled the air. We lurched up and then settled back, lurched up again and finally stopped dead, flat silence rushing into the tight space. We waited, looking around for some sign of progress.

“Aw, hell,” Marko muttered.

“Baby,” I heard Lukens mutter.

“Patience,” Belling whispered, waving a negligent hand in our direction.

I thought,
If this is a trap, if this is Belling fucking me in the ass
again,
then this is when it comes.
I resisted the urge to check my gun’s action, to check the chamber and feel it move in my hands, and settled for tightening my grip on it. I was hot and my head swam, and the constant, maddening itching in my chest had taken on a burning edge I didn’t care for. I pictured the tiny little bastards inside me, tearing, ripping, filling me with my own blood. I straightened up, reached out my arm, and put the barrel of my gun against the back of his head. “Wa, I’m having a crisis of faith back here. And I swear, if you’ve—”

With another lurch the cab squealed into motion again and shuddered upward for several seconds. I left my gun where it was, and Belling ticked his head toward me slightly. “Patience, Mr. Cates.”

“Fuck you, patience. We are being
eaten alive.
”

“Mr. Cates, I was in Kampala thirty-three years ago with Mr. Orel. A young man. We’d been hired by the Americans to assassinate three Germans, because the Americans—well,
those
Americans—were trying to derail the Unification process. On entering the country our documents were questioned, we had some trouble escaping, and I was shot in the back. Bullet lodged in the muscle. Pain like you’ve never imagined. Every movement felt like someone was cutting me open with a dull blade, and there was a chance of paralysis. I did not complain. I did not recuse myself from the operation. The bullet was there when we were finished, and I had it taken care of then. I was
patient.
”

I tapped the back of his head sharply. “I am very impressed, Mr. Belling.”

There was a soft
ding
and the elevator stuttered to a halt. Belling grinned in the dim light, picked up his pry bar, and snapped the doors open with one grunting heave.

Horrible yellow electric light flooded our little space, making me wince. Belling turned back to us and drew one of his guns. Behind him was a blank white wall pockmarked with large jagged holes and an unbelievably wide blood streak that disappeared behind Belling’s smiling face, continued past him and off into infinity, clotty red turning a dull, crusty brown. The smell was sudden and monolithic, something so terrible and rotten that it defeated any attempt to break it down into its component horrors. I gagged and immediately convulsed, unable to breathe as my lungs heaved. I went down to my knees and puked stringy blood from my own lungs, my vision going black, little red dots dancing in front of my eyes.

I started to stagger out of the cab but Belling placed a hand on my chest.

“Avery,” he said, standing there backlit and terrible. “This is going to be hard. On you.”

I breathed shallowly and the red dots in my vision pulsed with my ragged heartbeat. “Why?”

For the first time I could remember, Belling looked unhappy. “Because some old friends are waiting for you.”

Day Ten:
Like Breathing
Death Itself

“Explain it to me,” I snapped as I followed Belling into the hall. I was getting sick and tired of mysteries.

“It takes a bit of time,” he said conversationally, as if discussing the action on his gun or the juice rates on illegal loans off the Bowery. “First they have to die—that varies, as you’ve no doubt noticed. Some go right away, some linger for days while their chests collapse and they cough blood. Once they’re dead, there’s that
marinating.
They look dead. They
are
dead. But those tiny little buggers inside them are doing something.”

“Repairing damage,” Marko said without looking up from his handheld. “Bringing the physical shell of the body back into basic operating shape. Sealing off and rebuilding broken vessels. Taking cellular material from the portion of the body they won’t need anymore—the brain—and modifying it to create stem cells, which are used to repair arteries and destroyed organs.”

“Thank you, Zeke,” Belling rumbled, stopping outside a pair of swinging doors and turning back to us. The square panes of glass set into the doors showed a darkened room beyond lit only by a scattering of signs suspended from the ceiling, a rainbow of cheery colors in the gloom. “Whatever it is, people pop up after a period of time—hours sometimes, days mostly. They come
back,
Avery. They’re not who they were. They’re not even human anymore. They’ve got blood pumping through their veins, they’re breathing, but the nanobots are directing things. They’re like biological robots.” He looked at me. “Your people, Avery, were the first ones to go down with this. They’re the first ones to come back.” He jerked his head over his shoulder. “Kev’s got himself a couple of bodyguards. And more on the vine.”

I stared over his shoulder at the doors, feeling a slow anger filling me like syrup, steady and thick. I’d spent my whole life trying to walk the line—for
this
bullshit? This was my reward? I didn’t have people anymore; they’d been stolen from me. My city was gone, a shell filled with corpses, corpses that would, it seemed, soon be up and dancing to Dennis Squalor’s tune. I’d played by the rules for years, and I’d been beaten and shot at and thrown around like a fucking rag doll. I was sick and fucking tired of waiting for my reward.

“More on the vine,” I said dully.

Belling raised his eyebrow again, and I thought that one of these days I would hold the old man down and shave that fucking eyebrow off. “A few days ago, Mr. Cates, New York reached a tipping point. Most of the population was sick or dead, our friends the System Pigs, like the useless tubs of shit they are, were getting scarce—no offense, my dear—and things were going haywire everywhere. People had even stopped
looting,
Mr. Cates, if you can imagine it, because there was no longer any point. Thousands, packed into the hospital like logs. Five days ago they started accepting patients without Health Department Underskin Chips, and about three days ago there wasn’t any staff left to stop people. People just kept coming. Didn’t know what else to do, I suppose. Most are dead now, of course … for the moment.”

“For the moment,” I repeated. I felt like my latent psionic powers were bubbling up. If I just waited a moment or two, I’d be able to set people on fire with my fucking
thoughts.
This shit was unfair, and I wasn’t going to play along anymore.

“Last I checked, there were three operational in there,” Belling said. “I’m not sure if any others have come online. Avery,” he looked down and made a show of checking his gun as he spoke, “they’re not who they were, anymore. They’re robots, really. Just biological robots. Don’t forget that.”

I looked at him, suddenly feeling burned out, emotionless. I was just feet from putting an end to this, and I was ready to get it done, one way or another. “Monks?” I asked. “Old-school Monks?”