Elizabeth Bear: Hammered

He quits twitching and his eyes fly open, but there’s nobody home. I’ve seen it before. The funny purple color will drain out of his face in a couple of hours, and he’ll be just like any other vegetable. I should have let him kick it when I could. Kinder than letting him live.

You’re a hard woman, Jenny Casey. Yeah, well, I come by it honestly. “Shit,” I whisper. “Another kid. Shit.”

I wipe cold sweat from my face, flesh hand trembling with the aftershock. I’ll be sick for hours. The only thing worse than the aftermath of a plunge into combat-time is stepping up to the edge and then backing off.

All right. Time to make coffee. And throw Razorface’s gangsters out onto the street so I can pat him on the shoulder, with nobody else to see.

• • •

Later, I wash my face in the stained steel sink and dry it on a clean rag. I catch myself staring into my own eyes, reflected in the unbreakable mirror hanging on my wall. I look chewed. Hell, you can barely tell I’m a girl. Not exactly girlish anymore, Jenny.

Hah. I won’t be fifty for a month.

You wouldn’t think I’d spend a lot of time staring in mirrors, but I never got used to that face. I used to stand there and study it every morning when I brushed my teeth, trying to figure out what the rest of the world saw. Vain as a cat of my glamorous good looks, don’t you know?

Stained torn sleeveless shirt and cami pants over a frame like rawhide boiled and wired to bone. An eagle’s nose— how come you never broke that witch’s nose, Jenny? — the skin tone and the cheekbones proclaim my three mostly Mohawk grandparents. Shiny pink burn scars. A prosthetic eye on the left half of the face.

Oh, yeah. And the arm. The left arm. From just below the shoulder it’s dull, scratched steel — a clicking horror of a twenty-year-old Canadian Army prosthesis.

“Marde.” I glance over at Face, who hands me another cup of coffee. After turning back to the steel table, I pour bourbon into it. Shaking my head, I set mug and bottle aside. My arm clicking, I hoist my butt onto the counter edge.

“Where’d he get it?” I hook the orange chair closer with my right foot and plant it on the seat, my bad leg propped on the back. Hell of a stinking summer night, and it’s raining again. The tin roof leaks in three places; rain drums melodiously into the buckets I’ve set underneath. I run wet fingers through white-stippled hair. It won’t lie flat. Too much sweat and grime, and I need a shower, so it’s a good thing the rain’s filling the rooftop tanks.

The left side of my body aches like the aftermath of a nasty electrical jolt.

Face rolls big shoulders, lifting his coffee cup to his mouth. The ceramic clinks against his prosthetic teeth, and then he eases his body down into another old chair. It creaks under his weight as he swings his feet up onto the counter beside me, leaning back. Regarding me impassively, he shrugs again — a giant, shaven-headed figure with an ear and a nose full of gold and a mouth full of knife-edged, gleaming steel. The palms of his hands are pink and soft where he rolls them over the warmth of the mug; the rest of him shines dark and hard as some exotic wood. A little more than two-thirds my age, maybe. Getting old for a gangster, Face.

“Shit, Maker. I got to do me some asking about that.”

I nod, pursing my lips. The scars on my cheek pull the expression out of shape. Face’s gaze is level as I finish the spiked coffee in a long, searing swallow. The thermostat reads 27 °C. I shiver. It’s too damn cold in here. “Hand me that sweater.”

He rises and does it wordlessly, and then refills my cup without my asking. “You drink less coffee, maybe eat something once in a while, you wouldn’t be so damn cold all the time.”

It’s not being skinny makes me shiver, Face. It’s a real old problem, but they give it a longer name every war.

“All right,” I mumble. “So what do you want to do about it?” He knows I don’t mean the cold.

Face turns his attention to the corpse-silent child on my narrow bed. “You think the shit was bad?”

I bite my lip. “I hope he was allergic. Otherwise—” I can’t finish. I wonder how many of those little plastic twists are out in the neighborhoods. I rake my hand through stiff hair and shake my head. Hyperex is not a street drug. It is produced by two licensed pharmaceutical companies under contract for the U.S. armed forces and — chiefly — for the C.A. It’s classified. And complicated.

The chances of a street-level knockoff are slim, and I don’t think a multinational would touch it.

“What the hell else could it be?” I wave my left hand at the twist on the table. The light glitters on the scratches and dents marking my prosthesis. He doesn’t answer.

After setting my cup aside, I raise my arm to pull the sweater up to my shoulder. It snags on the hydraulics of the arm and I have to wiggle the thread loose. Cette putain de machine. Face doesn’t stare at the puckered line of scar a few centimeters below the proximal end of my humerus. Did I mention that I like that man? I pause to comment, “Half a dozen tabs in there. You want to try one out, eh?”

Then I drag the black sweater over my head, twisting the sleeves around so the canvas elbow patches are where they should be, mothball-scented cotton-wool warm on my right arm only. The left one aches — phantom pain. My body trying to tell me something’s wrong with a hand I lost a quarter century back.

Long slow shake of that massive head, bulldog muscle rippling along the column of his neck. “I don’t want this shit on my street, Maker.” A deep frown. I hand him the bottle of bourbon by my elbow, and he adds a healthy dose to his cup along with a double spoonful of creamer and enough sugar to make me queasy. What is it about big macho men that they have to ruin perfectly good coffee?

I’m shaking less. I nearly triggered earlier, and the reaction won’t wear off for a while yet, but the booze and the caffeine double-teaming my system help to smooth things. I raise my own cup to my lips, inhale alcohol fumes and the good rich smell of the roasted beans. Fortified, I brace myself and go down deep, after the memories I usually leave to rot. Old blood, that. Old, bad blood.

Two more breaths and I’m as ready to talk about it as I’ll ever be. “I’ve never seen anybody do that off a single hit, Face. We’d get guys once in a while, who’d been strung out and on the front line for weeks, who’d push it too far and do the froth-and-foam. But not off a tablet. The Hammer’s not like that.” I glance over at Mercedes, who is resting quietly on my cot. “Poor stupid kid.”

“He’s cooked, ain’t he?”

I nod slowly, tasting bile, and reach for the bourbon. Razorface hands it to me without even looking and I kick the chair away and hop down, holster creaking, wincing as weight hits my left knee and hip. There’s a lot of ceramic in there.

I gulp a quarter mug. It burns going down. Nothing in the world ever tasted quite so good. Jean-Michel. Katya. Nell. Oh, God. Nell.

I fight my face under control and turn back to him, thrusting the bourbon his way. “Drink to your dead, Face?”

Face’s lips skin back from his shark smile as he waves the bottle away. Thick, sensitive lips, with the gray edge of an armor weave visible along the inside rim where they should have been pink with blood. I don’t like to think about his sex life. “I’m gonna find that dealer, Maker.”

“What about Merc?”

Face looks at the kid. “His momma will take care of him.”

“Better to put a bullet in his head.”

He looks at me, expressionless.

“What’s his mother going to do with him? Better to tell her he’s dead. He isn’t coming back from this.”