Up The Tower (14 page)

The target had been a successful businessman at one point. He had fallen into ill-repute for forgiving corporate debts gained by individuals, choosing instead to let these debtors work for a period of five years and then eliminating all remaining debt, no matter what. These contracts—legally made—were iron clad, even by the corporate masters above the target.

It was a sort of arrangement Victor saw frequently. A man saw an unfathomable evil, and sought to lessen its blow by creating a more manageable evil instead. But the men running things did not respect this—or perhaps they respected it too much, enough to feel threatened by it and to send Victor out to do his work.

The man did not seem surprised by his death. Victor came into his shack in the night and found the man smoking a cigar, a tall bottle of beer half-emptied next to him.

“Ah,” he said, taking one last drag out the cigar. “Finally.”

Victor approached him slowly, but not hesitating. He did not quite know how to hesitate. It was dark in the room, however, and he did not want to miss on his very first job. Wouldn't that be something, to never miss a shot when it counted? His every aspiration.

The man stubbed out his cigar. He had not shaved for several days and his eyes were clouded and yellow. “You know, I would have thought it would have been last week. Drunk out of my mind, last week. It was my birthday. I thought you wanted to make it poetic. You remember what you gave me for my birthday last, brother?”

Victor flipped on the nearby lamp. Now he could see clearly. They both could.

The man was surprised, in a drunk sort of way. Mouth sliding open, hands grasping his thighs and side for nothing in particular.

“You're not him. You're...not my brother.”

“No,” said Victor, and shot him in the head.

Blood on the back of the chair, that was all. Tidy. Clean. Quick. Just like he had been told.

Brother, the man had called him.

The violence, the blood, these things did not stick in Victor’s mind very well. The wrinkles of his brain had been trained chemically and psychologically to let such images slide off smoothly.

But that word, that title—that stuck.

Victor had all sorts of benefits as he matured—he had been given the finest foods and wines to dine on, so he would not embarrass himself at any functions. He had been raised with care by a series of kind stewards and harsh drill masters. There had never been a time when he was left cold or hungry, never a time when he did not know what to do next.

The one thing Victor had never had, though, was family.

* * * * *

T
he inside of the room they landed in was covered in music posters—bands. Ana recognized them. A groovy Technicolor hologram of the Rock Rockers spilled over a noir-style Oldhat flyer, which bled into Longtown stickers and posters, propped up over a cut-out of Kadaya Sarin complete with resplendent tech circling around her face replicated by cheap holograms. In the corner was a small cot with a sheet metal headboard. The wind ripped through a series of papers—drawings, most of them. The loose leafs pushed around their feet.

Ana picked one up at random and looked at it—a crude representation of a cat done in colored pencil, though it seemed crude on purpose. Some kind of artistic manner, with the lines all shaky and flying off the cat, like it was exuding energy of some kind. Someone had lived here.

Somewhere in the ruckus her hair had started to fall down from the knot it was in. That was all right; no point in trying to impress Raj anymore. She reached up and let the blond mess all the way down. The tips of it brushed her shoulders.

Behind her, she heard bodies slamming to the ground. Ore was on top of Gary. Victor did nothing to interfere, watching impassively as Ore slammed her fists into Gary's face in three precise strikes, bloodying his nose and forehead. She used her real hand—the one not loaded with tech. Ana knew Ore could have easily killed Gary, if she wanted. Ana felt a very real and very welcome desire to see it happen, as a matter of fact. She had never seen a woman with the kind of power Ore had. That physicality.

Ore pulled Gary up by his collar then and gently pressed her the metal ridges of her tech thumb on his forehead.

“You listen,” she shook him. “That quake woulda happened one way or the other. I ain't no fool. So maybe what you did helped keep me alive. I don't know. What I do know is that if you think you can start messing with me while we're in here, I'm gonna split your eyes down across your jaw. You understand?”

Gary nodded, all surrender.

Ore stood up, and Gary followed, brushing himself off. His eyes ran over Ana—knowing, in the way that men’s eyes on her would always be knowing, intimating some fantasy that she never knew and always starred in. And then he opened his mouth again.

“You shouldn't break into places, that's all,” said Gary. “Maybe if you didn't break into places, people like me wouldn't have to stop you.”

“What? What you say?” Ore’s rage pulsed, quick and practiced. She grabbed Gary and lifted him up off the ground. “I
let you go
and you gonna throw it in my face, jazzkid? Talking 'bout, 'people like you.'” She shook him in her grip, and stepped over to the opening that the antenna had created. “Here's something about people like you—they fly through big-ass gaps in the building
real
good.”

“Okay,” Gary cracked. “Okay. I'm sorry. Sorry.”

Spitting, Ore threw him down to the floor. Ana’s heart pumped fast, flooding her brain and senses with awareness. Probably Ore knew that her threats to Gary served as threats to all of them. That was how these gangsters worked, wasn’t it? Keep everybody afraid. Keep tossing out those eggshells to walk on.

Not so bad a strategy.

“People like you.” Ore shook her head. “This ain't your damn place, you jazzkid slock. This guy belongs here more than you do, and he ain't even
from
this city. Is you?”

Victor shook his head no.

“See? People like you. You
trespassing
here, slock. Don't mouth at me again or I'll make you regret it.”

Gary wasn't looking at her anymore. He was looking out, out into the city wreckage. A hospital collapsed not far from where they were, smoke and fire pouring from its windows. A loud, strangely empty thrumming sound reverberated upwards, pushing the wind around as the air collapsed down into the demolished city landscape.

“My mom,” he said. “My mom...she's in there.”

Some shadow passed through Ore's face.

“Yeah, well.” She kicked some rubble out the window. “We're all losing somebody.”

The building shifted, groaning and twitching. Next to them, another building collapsed into itself, another fire. They could feel the trembles of its destruction even as high up as they were.

“We don’t have a lot of time,” said Ana, watching the building fall.

All around them were other tall, long buildings. Even if the Tower was built to last—and she didn’t know one way or another—it was only going to last so long with all those other buildings crashing into it.

“We can't stay here,” said Victor. “We have to go up. No building was built to withstand this sort of trauma. Nothing has been. If we get to the top, my people will come and pick us up.” He eyed Gary and Ore. “I guess you can come, too.”

“I got other business here,” said Ore. “You stay out of my way, I'll stay out of yours. Just keep that slock away from me.”

“We’re on the seventh floor,” said Victor. “We should get to the elevator. We have to get to the top.”

“The elevator won’t work,” Ore said. “It don’t work here.”

“The next floor, then.”

“That won't work neither. None of them work until you get to the thirtieth.”

They looked at her for a minute.

“Goddamn, ain’t none of you natives? The Faces...they build it that way for security. They don’t want anybody moving about that they don’t know. They don’t want it to be easy for no one.”

“Okay,” Victor nodded. “The stairs, then.”

Ore opened the door to the hallway and peeked out. “I don't see anyone. I think the stairs are right here.” She let the door shut a bit. “There should be stairs on either side of the building on every floor. Even before the quake, a lot of them were out.”

“Out?” said Ana. “What do you mean, out?”

“I mean they don't work,” said Ore. “They got too much crap in them, or they fell through. Piled with junk, that sort of thing. What you think, this is a nice place?”

“I thought...everyone wanted to live here who lived here.”

“Hell. You can build a nice a place as you want up there,” she pointed, “but it’s still stacked full of scoundrels and slocks down here. Up past the thirtieth, it gets nicer. But from the top down. All that crap close to Petrov and Wallop and...the Five Faces, I mean.” She shook her head. “Anyway.”

She headed up.

Victor held the door open, waving for Ana. He...the way he looked at her, Ana didn’t quite get it. But she wanted him near her. He cut an impressive figure—his muscles Olympian, his tight suit looking like boulders pressured together inside of it—but there was something off about him, about the attention he showed her. With most men sharing this sort of close proximity, holding the clear power he did over the situation, she would already be flirting. Ingratiating herself to him.

He protected her. She was made for being protected, she felt. There was a thrill in it that went straight to her core.

“Do you guys think my mom is dead?” Gary asked, still looking out the window. “I think she is. I think she might have been for a little while now.”

Ana didn't wait for Gary to join them. If he wanted to stay there and die, he could do it.

The stairway was narrow, unpainted. All surfaces concrete—steps, floor, walls, ceiling. At every turn in the stairs was a small platform and a tall narrow window letting light in.

It was odd to Ana that the sun was still shining outside. The sun just not caring. This earthquake, her whole world, was nothing at all in the realm of the earth. Like a planet stubbing its toe, maybe. It was an alien thought to her—not mattering. Not being the most important and fascinating thing in the room.

Ana didn't like that thought.

“You were in that house.” She tugged Victor's jumpsuit. “Before the earthquake. That shack. You were in it to kill someone, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

From beneath them, she heard the door swinging and banging open again—Gary finally following.

“Why?”

“That’s my job.”

A hitman. Probably corporate—that would explain why he was so quiet. Raj had told Ana about one or two he had met and hired. They all had emotion-dampeners in their brain, or else pills they took, or else they were just psychopaths.

There was light in the stairwell in addition to that from the narrow windows. Long electric wires piled in from every wall, loosened now after the quake. The wires connected to bright bulbs covered in small, orange, hard-plastic cages.

“So you just...kill whoever? Whoever stands in your way?”

“More or less.”

“You don't worry that maybe someone gave you bad information? That a person didn't do anything at all?”

“No.”

That was hot.

They traveled many floors in silence like this—hurrying upward. Around the tenth floor, they started to come across the bodies. Trampled, broken, pushed down into the corners of the steps.

So many. Bones smashed. Faces caved in. Women. Men. Children.

The four of them must have missed the rush in their journey getting into The Tower. Everyone else had been trying to get out.

The first time Ana came across someone that she could not step over—that she would indeed have to step through—her stomach twisted. She skipped upward, trying to make it as short as possible, and ended up tripping and then banging her knee on the step, spreading the man's loosened chest around. She was not the first to run over him.

This happened a second and a third time, and then several more. By the tenth time, on the fourteenth floor, she was not even hesitating anymore. Below her, she heard Gary swearing and cursing. A few of the bodies—mostly the ones in the corners on the turn platforms—still seemed a little alive. They would moan, or their heads would turn. It was grisly passage, moving up those stairs.

Above them, she heard Ore swear and then bang something around.

“Seventeen,” Ore said, swearing again. “Why did it have to be seventeen?”

The stairwell was blocked. Ana could not help but laugh—there was a sign warning about the stairwell structure being weak. Tumbling down the stairs were enormous chunks of concrete, thick metal pipes jutting out from them at odd angles. Gary probed at the concrete, seeing if any of it would move. It did—but only above him, the ceiling shifting. He backed away.

“We gotta go through the door. Across the floor.” Ore sighed. “I forgot about this damn floor.”

Victor put one hand to his ear—conferring with the transceiver quietly, palm over mouth. Finally, he nodded.

“We have to go through the door.”

Ore put her hands on her hips. “No kidding?”

“There should be another pair of stairs across the floor.”

“There is,” said Ore.

“That’s no problem, right?” Ana said. “Let’s just go, then.”

“It's a problem, all right. That's the seventeenth floor.”

They all looked at Ore, a bit blank.

“That's the dog floor. Petrov's dogs. That's where he keeps them.”

“Petrov?” asked Victor.

“Dog floor?” asked Ana.

“They unhappy. They starving. They gonna eat us.” She kicked the wall again. “Goddamn, this side. We gotta go down, I think, and then back up.”

As if the building was listening to her, as if the day was listening, as if God listened, sounds emerged from around them. The building groaned and creaked. Inside the stairwell, there was a loud crash. Dust and debris filled the narrow space. All of them coughing, bent over.

“Christ!” shouted Gary. “I only just made it past...it was gonna fall on me.”

He emerged from the dust cloud of the collapse.

“What did you do, Gary?” Ana asked. “You were messing around in there.”