Up The Tower (10 page)

Ore didn’t answer.

“Let’s say chicken. I don’t think you’d use a dog’s bones, not even if you hadn’t been the one to snuff it. Look at that,” he said again to his man. “ A collection of people did this, you know? A community.”

“It's a dung heap,” said Ore. “Why are you here, Wallop?”

“Dung heap? No respect.” Wallop shook his head. “Your own damn place. If you ain't got what you want, you oughta love what you got, girl.”

“Sure. I love my dung heap. It's so nice. Twice a week the Dam goes out of its way to bathe the place for me. It's so goddamn nice. I'll never want anything else, it’s so nice. Why are you here beating me? Ain't you got innocent people to hurt?”

“Don't that imply you ain't innocent, seeing as I'm down here with you?” He laughed. “Ah hell, we both know you ain't innocent. As to why I'm here...” he waved his hand through the bone arrangement on the door, letting them clink. His tech sprouted xenon-flashes in the darkness. “I don't get out of The Tower much. Petrov, you know. His goddang security. Doesn't allow for much fun, yeah?” Every word punctuated with a movement of his shoulders, his hands. Theatrical. He was laying it on for his own amusement—he really hadn't been out in a while. “I miss fun. I miss little intimidations like this sort. And I like you. You're a lot of fun, girl.”

“Go to hell.”

“Hell? It ain't so long a drive from this place. Maybe I will.” He grabbed her by the head. The thick ridge of his tech hand ran over her eye—her missing eye. The eye he took. “I'm sentimental, I suppose. Somebody in that Tower ought to be.”

“Why. Are. You. Here?”

“You know what I'm doing here, girl. You know why men come in the night with pipes and sticks to beat on someone. You know that. Why you in a rush for me to say it? Words is all you got left, girl. It's just words between you and the rest of this. Why not enjoy them?”

“Say it, then. I want you to say it.”

“You're out, girl.”

“Because of one bad job?” She shook her head. “Come on.”

Wallop shrugged. “Out is out. New policy we put together. No more failures. None. Our high tolerance of failure will only create a failing organization.”

“That sounds like Petrov.”

“Then it sounds like you should know it's for real, and you're out.”

There was no sympathy in Wallop’s eyes. No wavering.

“Goddamn you.” She was defeated. “Goddamn you to hell.”

“God!” Wallop laughed. “God, indeed. God ain't in this place. What the hell would God do with Junktown? He ain't been here. He wouldn't know what to do with it if he came.” He laughed again. “God. You're a funny girl.”

“I'll kill you, Wallop. Straight dead.”

Wallop took some time for that, mouth moving without words, eyes floating.

Finally, he said, “I'm letting you live now, a courtesy. We live and die on courtesies of others in times like these. Or you do, anyway.” His smile in the darkness was a crooked thing. “You done work for me, it weren't all bad. But you're out, girl. No more work for you in Junktown.”

She wasn’t even enough of anything for him to kill her; not even after a straight threat. She wished he had killed her. She wished he had tried. At least then she could go out fighting. At least then she would know what she was living against, even if for just a moment.

Wallop and his fellows disappeared in the darkness. She watched him—the lights of his coils, his hands flickering in the darkness of the street much longer than his body did.

For a long time after Wallop took her eye and broke her arm, Ore tried to convince herself that the episode was just her paying her dues. Women had it hard in Junktown, young women harder than most. If she treated it like it was nothing, then it would be nothing.

It was something, all right. It was a badge of shame there to remind her of how little she meant to a man who loved nothing more than himself.

Work in Junktown was all she had. Getting out of the city meant somehow grabbing enough cash to get past the barricades or the Dam—impossible, without work—or trying to sneak through, which left most folks dead.

Barring some act of God, she would be dead or insane in less than a year.

* * * * *

S
amson walked around the copbot, looking for the same place he had opened it before. Its head was dented there, but the nanotech had healed over the hole.

“You fixed yourself.” He was impressed.

“As I recall,
you
fixed
me
. This is what you said, remember?”

“...Yeah.”

“You are losing water. There is a large source down there.” Partner pointed.

“That’s the Mississippi. We can’t go there. And I’m not...I’m not losing water.” He wiped his face, cleaning the tears. “Stupid baby.”

“I am not a baby. I am a
copbot
. I am
Partner
.”

Partner wagged its legs in the chair. Arms in its lap. It looked ready for a haircut.

“Yeah,” said Samson.

That was something like Crash would say, calling him a baby. Crash called everyone a baby, though. With Samson, it always hit close to home.

There was a kind of beautiful simplicity to his work. Nothing ever depended on him, not really. You didn't have to promise anything to a machine. You didn't have to hope it would call you or that it would keep its promises or wait for it to return. They just acted when they were supposed to act.

He had never experienced much of family, outside of Crash. His first memories were living in a small apartment in this very building—playing with his omni-ball in their forty-second-floor apartment, tossing it from one end of the wall to the other and waiting for it to crawl back. Each time it struck the wall, it would teeter back to him in a different form. Standard animals like dinosaurs and bears, but also twisting conflagrations of circles and cylinders, each metal flap folding and unfolding like origami.

He was seven. In the back of the apartment—though he hadn’t known it then—his mother and father were getting high. Then, men with guns came in and shot them everywhere. Bloody parts sliding down the walls, through the holes from all the bullets and shells. His parents weren’t killed for the drugs, though many others had been killed for such in the past. Rather, his father, on his latest drug run, had stolen a bag of nanochips from his dealer to give to Samson. This was how Samson had built the omni-ball.

Samson had a sister, Ore. She had been gone, then. She was always gone. He had many feelings about her, and most of them he wished were as gone as she was. Crash had told him she had died years ago, on the streets. Crash had said he would never let Samson out in the streets.

You won’t die, though? Right, Crash?

Crash took him then—impressed with the omni-ball he had made. Crash had told him, also, after a few years, the real reason his parents were killed. Crash told him all about the nano theft. Though perhaps he didn’t frame it that way when he revealed the information, Crash had told Samson the reason he should blame himself.

Maybe that had been intentional. Samson wasn’t so very dumb. It was another way for Crash to control Samson—to foster that sort of guilt. It didn’t matter, even if Samson could imagine the information in that way. His guilt of surviving that brutal murder was the lens through which all other influences and information came through.

The omni-ball sat high on a shelf in his workshop. Not his first invention, but one of the first he could remember actually thinking about making. Before that, Samson’s thoughts weren’t really turned on—he had no planning, no forethought. Tools and materials had been in front of him, and he had made it all work. His mother and father were so impressed.

Marie. Marie and Archibald Castelle. Those were the names of his parents.

“When we do start?” asked Partner. “What are we doing? Is there more fixing?”

“Yeah,” said Samson, firing up the blowtorch. “More fixing.”

One straight blow through the neck. It would take maybe ten seconds. He figured Partner wouldn’t ask too many questions. He hoped he wouldn’t.

Nah, baby. You done me good. I ain’t gonna die.

From outside, he heard a horrible rumbling, like mountains whirling against one another, like the sky opening up, like God muttering curses in some titanic, craggy voice.

Tongues of flame spouted up in the distance, and smoke began to billow outside his window—the explosions near, if far below him. Even as high as he was, he could hear screams through the whipping of the wind. He shut off the blowtorch and rushed to the window.

From his vantage point, it almost looked like an eye opening up in the city—long lids of buildings swinging backward, revealing a terrible, endless pupil that would never stop trying to swallow him whole.

“Tremors of the earth!” Partner stood up and began to catch the falling scraps of the room. “Disaster! Turmoil! Crisis!”

An earthquake, all around them. Beneath them. Alarms sounded. He felt like a sailor on a ship being dragged down into a maelstrom. Even if you jumped out—especially if you jumped out—everything would just get worse.

He had to get out. The top of The Tower—Crash’s escape pod. Samson had put it together ages ago, when he was ten. He had made it work, dammit. He hadn’t built the whole thing himself, but he had done all the circuitry, all the tech. It wouldn’t fly for long, but it would be enough to escape this death trap of a building.

Crash would no doubt be on his way there. Samson had to beat him. He could beat him there, and then he could wait for him and save him. That would be good.

The notion of The Tower falling was intrinsically foreign to Samson, who had never lived anywhere but there. But now it seemed certain as well as foreign, like some djinn stalking after him, casting shadows of bad luck in his path.

Everything rocking and spinning, waves of tools and rubbish landed on Partner. The copbot buried underneath it all.

“This is heavy!” Partner’s hand busted through the pile, searching for an exit.

The Tower bent and shifted, shaking all of Samson’s room out of his tiny window, which broke almost instantly. He landed hard next to the window, cutting his hand on the shattered glass.

In front of him, now—very nearly
above
him—tall towers of his shelves and cabinets skidded down the wall.

It would crush him.

* * * * *

G
ary woke into chaos. Everything in the broken basement was moving.

He spun upward, standing quick. There was a sudden and loud crack behind him. Where his head had been, a crag of shelf rock was.

Very suddenly, with a disconcerting amount of certainty, Gary realized he was probably going to die.

There had never been a more motivating thought in all his life.

With an agility he didn’t even know he had, he ran up the wall beneath the hole in the ceiling, grabbing exposed pipes to pull himself up to the surface. He barely even noticed the pain from being caught under the rubble. These were aches, scrapes—all things he could live with.

Out on the street again. The concrete swirled and erupted. With a titanic moan, an enormous fist of earth rose up nearly twenty feet and buried two unlucky, drunken sods into the ground.

Trapped underground. The terror of it. He would not cope with such a fate. He swiveled, he shuffled, looking for a plan.

Where was the woman he stopped? Where was the gangster?

He hadn’t known she was a gangster, of course...but she was black, and had one eye, and all that cheap pneumatic tech besides. That was what gangsters looked like.

And where was Ana?

The ground moaned again, pushing up underneath him. Oh, god. There was no time to focus on such things—not even the love of his life. More chaos all around him. Generators tumbled out from windows and exploded. Shrapnel fired everywhere, breaking windows, busting pipes open. The flying metal cut down people running and screaming in the streets.

Gary did the only thing he knew to do in such an overwhelming situation.

Hands up to the air, legs powering away across the tumultuous ground, he screamed.

No words, no attempts at word. Just sound; primal sound. Something to the tune of “Ahhh.”

Scrambling into the street—the concrete rolled like ocean waves—he passed several other people doing the same thing he was. This made him feel better, and he only screamed the louder. Together, they were accomplishing something! Their fear surely would save them. A building—or a collection of buildings all built on top of each other—toppled in front of him. He screamed, and the people next to him screamed, and they abruptly changed course to the semi-same direction to the East.

The Dam! Yes, they were going there. It was high up and very sturdy because it held back the waters of the Mississippi. That was a good place to go.

Where was Ana? Still on his mind. Always there. That was her place. Was she all right? Had she figured out how essential it was for her to get to the Dam?

If she died—so many people were dying.

If she died...Gary didn't know what he would do. His heart would be broken. Broken! He had planned on spending the rest of his life in love with her, whether she knew it or not. She needed to know. He deserved her knowing.

The quake seemed to gather itself somewhat—concentrating its force. The earth still moved, but it seemed more in the process of adjusting rather than exploding upward as it had before. Cars sunk into the roads around him, and long sections of pipe pushed up through the skin of the concrete like a bad doctor's needles.

And then a building was pushed up, cast out from its foundation like a rotten tooth and poured out onto the street and buildings around it. Dust showered over Gary. Rocks landed like rain. He ran adjacent to the fall, blind in the dust.

Ground still mixed under his feet, but turning through one corner and then another, following the crowd, he got out of the dust. The Dam showed in the distance—more buildings had fallen, showing where it was from blocks away. Gary ran to it—stepping over the fissures of the ground and hopping up on cars, screaming all the way. If he stopped screaming, it was only to catch his breath. This happened often.