Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

“And there it is on your phone.”

“And there it is on my phone. Just rescind my access to it in twelve hours, and I’ll call that a sign of everything going well.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” said Tallow. “Time for me to go home. Officers.” He meant Bat and Scarly by this, and they responded by marching dutifully to the door.

“Mrs. Westover.” Tallow gave her the kindest, warmest smile he could find.

“Thank you,” she said brokenly, and then looked down at her hands.

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Tallow said, and they left.

In the elevator, Tallow tossed his cell to Bat. “Westover put a password on that app. Change it.”

“Why?” asked Bat, nearly fumbling it.

“Because if he knows the password he can rescind the app’s access to Ambient Security.”

“He could also just deactivate the registration code.”

“He could, but it’d take him longer, because his own access to Ambient Security is on that code.”

“That,” said Scarly, “didn’t go as well as it could have. Did it?”

“No,” Tallow admitted. “No, he’s decided it’s a game to be played all the way through. Stupid. I feel sorry for his wife.”

“I’m not sure I do,” said Scarly. “Except that she’s got all the classic symptoms of an untreated psychotic break. That, I feel bad about. Everything else, not so much.”

“None of it’s her fault, Scarly.”

“You think? The way I see it, when she didn’t up and leave him the minute he explained all that, it became her fault.”

“You’re forgetting,” Bat muttered, tapping away at the phone. “If she’d up and left him, the next thing that happened, the absolute next thing, would have been him giving her name and general description to CTS. I wonder what kind of gun CTS would have chosen for her.”

Scarly gathered breath for an outburst, which Tallow expected would involve judging and autism, but then she leaned against the elevator wall and deflated. “Yeah.”

“Oh well,” said Tallow, as the elevator opened up on the ground floor of Aer Keep. “It’s getting late. Time I went home, I guess.”

THE HUNTER pushed the door just a little farther open, and stepped into the dark room.

An inhuman voice shrieked “Say hello to my li’l frien’,” there was a sharp flurry of detonation flashes, and the hunter felt multiple impacts on his chest and face. The lights came on, harsh and bright, blinding the hunter. He fired the Colt in front of him, but the hideous metallic din didn’t stop, and now it was screaming “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.”

The hunter staggered back into the hallway, wiping his face. His vision was blasted and hazy, but he could make out vivid orange paint on his fingertips. The metal screaming wouldn’t stop. The hunter ran for the fire door, fearing neighbors would be brought to the corridor by the noise. The hall creaked and tilted in his vision, becoming a dark tunnel, and he could see the sounds, suddenly, as pistoning metal tentacles, fucking their way through the wall and the floor after him.

The hunter hurled himself through the fire door and down the stairs. He had to stop at the next landing and throw up. The vomit spread through the floor and the walls, turning the stairwell into a wet red digestive tract. He kept running down the stairs, almost slipping twice on his own vomit where it coated the soles of his shoes.

The hunter burst into the hallway, still half blind, trying not to scream, feeling bruises bloom and stiffen his flesh where the thing had attacked him. Through the glass of the front door he saw a tall flapping creature, some black-winged half-human thing moving its long awful limbs and shouting words he couldn’t decipher.

On the run, the hunter put two bullets through the glass and into the thing’s chest, smashed through the door by main force and momentum, and didn’t even break stride over the body on the ground as he sprinted off into the night.

PACKED INTO Tallow’s car, he and the CSUs were five minutes away from Tallow’s apartment when he said, “Kill the lights.”

Bat took out his own phone and thumbed something into it.

“This is what you did with my Twine unit.” Scarly sulked. “That cost me a hundred bucks.”

“What?” said Tallow.

“The thing I wired into your lighting circuit. That lets me turn your lights off over the Internet.”

“That cost a hundred bucks?”

“Yes. And I had to wait for it.”

“Damn,” said Tallow. “I hope he doesn’t shoot it.”

“You’re not funny. I am also not thrilled about my paintball gear being cannibalized for this idiot stunt.”

“Hey. Your office is filled with dangerous junk. Paintballs, dyes, detonator caps, God knows what else. You planned to use it all one day, right?”

“Well,” said Scarly. “Actually, some of it’s stuff that Talia won’t let me keep at home.”

Tallow blew stale air out of his lungs, wound down the window, and tried to get a chestful of something sweeter. “Our guy does two things. He kills people and he hides in plain sight. I want him marked. If he can’t hide, he loses power. If we can take that from him, we finally, finally have an edge on him. We just have to be patient tonight.”

“And lucky,” said Bat.

“That too,” said Tallow. “But both Turkel and Westover are pretty sure I’m going to get hit tonight. I wonder where Machen is.”

“Jerking off inside his money bin,” said Scarly.

Tallow found a parking space on the street that had the front of his apartment building in sight. The lights in Tallow’s apartment were off. He pulled into the spot and turned the engine off. “Okay. I’ll take the rear exit. Scarly will take the side escape. Bat can take the front.”

“Why do I get the front?” Bat whined.

“Honestly? Because this is our guy, and our guy doesn’t strike me as the sort of guy who usually takes the front door. He’s a hunter. I’m expecting him to come in and out of the back exit, with the fire escape as a secondary measure.”

“So now you’re saying I can’t handle CTS?”

“Make your mind up, Bat. Either you’re upset because he might come out the front, or you’re upset because I think Scarly is probably a better shot than you are.”

“I can be pissed about both. I am very clever and a good multitasker.”

“Get out of the car and check your gun, Bat.”

“I already checked it.”

“Check it again.”

Tallow got angry at himself, at the nerves in his own voice. Bat didn’t meet his eyes.

They got out of the car. Tallow locked it up and lifted and reseated his Glock, and they walked toward his apartment building.

“Wow,” said Scarly. “You live in a shitbox.”

“Take the side,” said Tallow, just as his apartment window shattered and a gunshot smacked the air with a flat report.

“Move,” Tallow said, and broke into a run. He was authentically terrified. He tried to count off imaginary time. He trusted that Fuck You Robot’s motion sensor had lit off the explosive caps behind the dye-filled paintballs, and that the one gunshot was an instinctive squeeze of the trigger as the things hit his man. He would have quickly worked out that Tallow wasn’t in the apartment and would be heading down. Tallow attempted calculations: How fast could someone run down that narrow stairway? Would his man have tried the elevator? Not while he was covered in fluorescent orange paint, probably, but if he made it into the elevator before anyone came out to see what the noise was—but it was a gunshot, and people tended not to come out from behind their doors to look for actively firing guns…