The Digital Plague (5 page)

I managed to duck my head under my arms and took the impact on my shoulders. There was a familiar wet cracking sound nearby, and as I launched myself at the tangle of well-dressed bodies I spotted the girl’s head, bent at a bad angle, her eyes wide in shock. I wasn’t going to have to worry about being Pushed anymore, at least.

The hover flipped again, an instant transformation. I managed to slap an arm under one of the seats and held on for just a moment, releasing myself to plummet the last few feet right onto Shockley’s upturned face and neck. At the last moment he whipped both arms across his face and I stopped with a jerk, hung for a breathless second, and then rocketed back up to crash into the floor again, grunting as the rivets dug into my back and my skull bounced. I was pinned for a moment, but the hover obliged me again by suddenly yawing and losing altitude, rolling Shockley and his friend violently toward the cockpit.

I dropped at an angle, catching my chest on one set of seats, red pain shooting through my chest and straight into my head, as if a spike had been jammed up through one armpit. The hover yawed again, and I was tossed toward the rear, smacking into the flat wall there. I closed my eyes and flexed my hands, making sure I still had movement, and with a deep breath I pushed the pain aside and tried to clear my head. I grabbed onto the back of the row of seats and pulled myself up and forward. Hand over hand, I made my way toward the two men who were a jumble of limbs on the floor, hanging from seats. I clung to the seatback and reached down to roll Shockley over; he was unconscious, a blue and black welt on his forehead. The other man was groaning, feebly pulling at his coat, which was caught on a bolt in the floor, the tight fabric restricting his movements. I hit him hard against one temple, new pain shooting up through my arm, and he fell still.

The tearing, bending noise around me was hurting my ears as the hover’s displacers fought against physics to keep us in the sky. The air had turned burned and smoky, scratching at my throat. I pushed myself upright, leaning hard against the seats, and just panted for a second or two, sweat streaming down my face, one side of me feeling like someone had shoved a particularly long and well-barbed piece of rusty metal between two ribs. The hover began to shake violently.

Moving carefully, I climbed my way to the cockpit, one heavy step at a time. The back of the hover seemed to have its own immense gravity, as if a black hole had erupted into being just behind the plate metal, sucking at me relentlessly. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs, and every step was an effort of immense proportions. When I clawed my way through the cockpit door, I hung there, straining, and stared out the windshield. A stupid smile spread over my face. We’d drifted wildly north; instead of the city beneath us there was the rubble-dotted wilderness of the northern island, old abandoned Inwood just one long riot scar. The Unification Riots had burned half of Manhattan to the ground, because the only people who’d thought welding the whole world under one government was a good idea were the folks who planned on running things afterward. No one had ever bothered to rebuild it, and I was about to ride this hover straight into the scar tissue at roughly a hundred miles an hour.

The smile remained on my face even though I wasn’t feeling remotely humorous—it was like an alien thing on my face. I watched the ground approaching in deceptive slow motion and then glanced down at the pilot, lying in a shallow pool of blood on the floor up against the wall. I glanced back, twisting my head around to look at the triplets.

The whining noise of the displacers was ear-shredding.

I dived forward and took hold of the pilot’s chair, my ribs lighting up into a wedge of fire stabbing into me. I let out a strangled yell and tore two fingernails pulling myself into the chair, where I was able to just go limp and let gravity and inertia press me back against the thin cushioning, panting in painful little hitches.

“This isn’t fair,” I muttered. I didn’t have time for this. I had people to kill.

The displacers reached an almost silent crescendo so loud my ears couldn’t process it, and then, with a few hundred feet between me and the pitted bank of the river, they flatlined and went silent.

I could hear the wind howling as we tore through it. I breathed in tight, rapid snorts I couldn’t hear. Scrabbling with bloodied fingers, I pulled the safety straps across my body and clicked in. Without warning, the ground wasn’t coming in slow motion anymore—it was rushing up toward me faster than made sense.

Twenty feet up, I closed my eyes.

Day Three:
Keeping Panic at Bay with
Lies and Cheap Tricks

Thinking it was a bad idea, I opened my eyes anyway and blinked, feeling pain, one giant ache that stretched from my ass to my teeth. I tried to shift and stretch, but couldn’t move my arms. A rain of tiny glass shards floated up away from me, scattering against the sky, as if the cracked and spidered edge of the world were just inches away. Shaking my head again, I snapped awake and tried to bend backward, but couldn’t. An inch away from my right eye was a huge jagged hunk of glass, pointed straight at me. The thick windshield had shattered on impact; the nose of the hover was half buried in the dirt and snow, and I hung from the pilot’s seat by the safety straps. The whole cabin smelled like blood, copper, and salt. Thin, bluish smoke wafted up toward me, stinging my eyes.

I turned my head, glass clinking down from hidden crannies, and there was the pilot himself, or at least half of him, lodged precariously between my seat and the floor. He stared up at me with wide-open eyes that were startlingly green—bright and clear. I grimaced at him by way of apology and started trying to free my arms, which were pinned at my sides by the tight straps. As I moved, glass shards sprayed down, a dry sound. I kept stealing glances at the blade of glass just in front of me. One sudden drop and I’d be one of those beggars on Broadway, begging for yen. Or dead.

I didn’t have time to be fancy, though; a hover crash was a noisy, messy thing, and the System Pigs were no doubt going to get around to it. And I didn’t know if Shockley and his pal were dead or maybe coming to, irritated and able to slap me around without moving a muscle. My people were probably on their way again, tracing my implant, but I couldn’t take the chance—I needed to get moving. Besides, once the fucking suits got you on their lists, they just kept coming at you, and I doubted it made any difference if they were cops or paper-pushers.

Everything hurt. I shut my eyes to get the distraction of the glass shard out of mind and concentrated on moving my arms. I had a little give, so I breathed out as hard as I could and strained my arm, my ribs creaking in outrage. Sweat popped out on my forehead and dripped down onto the control panel as I moved, finally popping free of the straps, my body dropping another inch in the process, the sharp point of the glass digging suddenly into my twitching eyelid.

I tasted blood in my mouth. I was fucking broken.

Keeping panic at bay with lies and cheap tricks, I turned my head, slicing a shallow gash into my eyelid, until the tip of the shard was planted against my temple. How this improved things escaped me. I opened my eyes, rolling them around spastically, blood dripping into my right one and making me wink madly. I flopped my arm around but couldn’t locate the fucking clip on the safety strap. I rolled my eyes again and reached up for the glass shard, smacking at it, but the fucking thing was like a cockroach: it’d survived its own personal nuclear holocaust and saw no reason to give up the ghost now. It was as though it was welded in place.

I rolled my eyes again, breath sawing wetly in and out of my nose. My eyes fell on the dull, bloody handle of my blade sticking stiffly out of the pilot’s neck. I reached out for it, my shoulder and elbow crackling as I stretched. My fingertips caressed the handle, so familiar, something I’d made in countless empty hours, standing in freezing shadows waiting for a mark, sitting in Pick’s drinking on credit, passing hours or days trapped in a Safe Room while the System Pigs scanned and rescanned and fucking
re
scanned outside. With a final painful stretch, the jagged glass cutting a shallow wound across my cheek, I managed to get my thumb and forefinger on it and slowly pull the blade from the pilot’s neck. Warm blood trickling down my face, I braced my feet against the control bank below me and manipulated the blade until it rested against the palm of my hand. I closed my eyes again, dragging air in through my clogged windpipe, and concentrated, trying to clear my mind, trying to find the edge of the strap by feel and then sawing at it, moving just my thumb and forefinger, tiny, purposeful movements.

Something above me started to groan and creak, a metallic sound. It wasn’t encouraging.

I was good at clearing my mind, I had a trick for it. I imagined a clear sky, perfectly gray and scummed with clouds. I imagined it as super quiet—the sort of moment right before the city wakes up, that tiny window when everyone seemed to be passed out or asleep or finally dead, and it’s just the wind and your own breathing and something clicking or whirring in the distance, hover displacement over Mogadishu, whatever. Nothing else could get in. Nothing else existed. It always worked, the sky eventually melting into a blank field, my hands and thoughts operating independently.

But now, trying to cut myself loose, I couldn’t clear my head. It was full of people I’d killed.

They paraded through me in an endless loop, including the four people scattered and torn up around me. I wasn’t completely sure that Shockley and his pal were dead, but it was a good bet, and if I hadn’t stepped behind them in a dark room and put a bullet in their ear for yen, I’d killed them just the same. I saw every person I’d ever killed for money, picturing them at the moment my contract had been fulfilled: blown pupils, jagged flaps of skin with bone and yellowish fat clinging to them, piss and shit, and hands stretched out, pleading, hanging upside down from a fire escape. And then I saw myself with a hunk of glass jutting out of one side of my head, hanging from a strap. And then the slide show started again.

With a jerk the blade sliced the safety strap, my legs took my weight, and I was free. I carefully moved until I was out of the shard’s path, and climbed down through the cockpit windshield, wriggling through glass and dirt up and out. Gasping, I crawled out of the shallow crater the hover had created and rolled onto my back, gasping, the snow burning my face. When I’d caught my breath, I sat up and looked around. I could see the city a few miles south of me, and on my right was the goddamn Hudson, flowing black and evil as always. Inwood, the desolate nothing north of Manhattan, had been part of the city before Unification and the Riots, but as far as I could remember it had been overgrown fields, broken pavement, and rubble. I struggled to my feet, head pounding with each movement. My arms were numb. After a moment, I found my cigarettes, crushed and damp, picked out the best of the bunch and lit it, sucking in harsh, tasteless smoke.

Coughing a glob of phlegm into the snow, I turned back to the hover. It was remarkably preserved, sticking up out of the ground in more or less one piece. The safety cage might even have saved everyone’s life if I hadn’t done my best to fuck them all up first. Flicking my cigarette away into the sloppy air, I climbed back up into the cockpit. Pushing the pilot’s torso out of the way and getting blood all over my hands, I searched the bank of instruments in front of me and located the beacon unit, beaming our location and status back home every half second or so. Pulling myself up by the safety straps dangling down from the rear of the cockpit, I balanced myself and aimed a solid kick at the beacon unit, smashing it with the steel tip of my boot and sending a spark and whiff of ozone into the air. No need to make it easier for more fucking psionics to come by and toss me around.

Still hanging, I turned my head and glanced up into the cabin. All I could see was blood, and one remarkably shiny shoe jutting up into the air.

Carefully I set my feet on the control panel and put my weight on them, letting go of the safety straps. I located the satellite feed and tuned it to the low-frequency bands we used, frequencies that the cops and the government had abandoned. They were monitored, of course, so we didn’t use them much and switched frequencies on an hourly basis. I searched my memory for the right frequency and dialed it up, getting the hollow sound of an open connection for my trouble.

“I need a ride,” I said, sounding flat and hollow to myself. The silence absorbed my voice as if it had never been there.

“Who this?”

I didn’t recognize the voice or its thick, muddy accent. “Where’s Gleason?”

“Who
this?
”

I cursed softly, closing my eyes and praying for inner peace. “
This
is your fucking boss. You want to keep eating solid foods, put Gleason on the damn wire.”

I waited. The hollow sound filled the cabin, which began to creak worryingly again. I started to get nervous; every moment I sat out here in the middle of goddamn nowhere was dangerous, and my people were usually too scared of me to jerk me off like this. Heads were going to have to roll, and the thought made me tired. I preferred to just coast on the stories of past atrocities.

The voice came back with a dry, shuffling sound. “Glee not here.”

I blinked. “Where the fuck is she?”

There was another pause. “Glee dead. She dead.”

I stared down at the console. For no apparent reason, the voice repeated itself. “She dead.”

I felt nothing. For a moment I just squatted there, the hollow sound of the open connection around me, static and someone breathing. Gleason had come into Pick’s just a kid, a fucking kid, and even as she developed into a dangerous woman I’d never stopped thinking of her as a kid. Dead. It was impossible.