Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

A wine-red stain is blooming under his shirt. Elliot remembers the ricochet off the side of the Heron. Mirotic sits down. He methodically rolls his shirt up and exposes a weeping bullet hole in his side. Elliot can see the shape of at least one shattered rib poking at his skin.

“Fuck,” Mirotic says, in a burble of blood.

Shattered rib, punctured lung, and probably a few other organs shredded to pieces. Gnasher bullets are designed to disperse inside the body. “Where is it?” Elliot demands, squatting down face-level. “Where’s the morphine?”

Mirotic’s face is pale as the old Earth moon. He shakes his head. He tries to speak again, says something that might be autosurgeon .

“I’ll get the autosurgeon,” Elliot says, even though he knows it’s too late for that. “Where’s the morphine?”

No response. Elliot frisks him, and by the time he pulls the vial out from Mirotic’s waistband his hands are slicked scarlet. He clutches his fingers around it and gives a shuddering sigh of relief. Mirotic’s eyes flutter open and shut, then stay shut. Elliot gets to his feet, head spinning, as Mirotic’s vitals blink out.

When he goes back around the corner of the Heron, Elliot finds Santos is dead, too. One of the fleeing monsters drove a wedge of bone through her skull, halfway smashing her clamp. Blood and gray matter are leaking from the hole. A single spark jumps from the clamp’s torn wiring.

Tolliver is crossing himself and his shoulders are shaking. There’s a fevered flush under his skin.

“We’ll burn her,” Elliot says. “Mirotic, too. Any bones left, we’ll crush them down to powder.”

“Alright,” Tolliver says, in a hollowed out voice. His eyes fix on the vial clutched in Elliot’s bloody hand, but he says nothing else.

Lying on his cot with his limbs splayed limp, Elliot is in paradise. He feels like his body is evaporating, or maybe turning into sunlight, warm and pure. He can hardly tell where his sooty skin ends and Tolliver’s begins.

“Did you kill him for it?” Tolliver’s voice asks, slurred with the drug.

“Ricochet,” Elliot says.

“Would you have killed him for it?” Tolliver asks.

“Wouldn’t you?” Elliot asks back.

As soon as they dealt with the bodies, he went to the tent to shoot up. Tolliver followed him, and when Elliot offered him the syringe, already high enough to be generous, he took it. Elliot doesn’t know how long ago that was.

“What made you like this?” Tolliver asks. “What got you so hooked? What fucked you up so bad?”

“There’s no one thing,” Elliot says, because he is floating and unafraid. “It’s never one thing. That would make it easier, right? If I was a good person, and I saw something so bad this is the only way I can…” He puts a finger to his temple and twists it.

“Forget,” Tolliver supplies.

“Yeah,” Elliot says. “But there’s no one thing. This job kills you with a thousand cuts.”

“But there must have been one thing,” Tolliver says. “One thing that got you stuck leading a con squad. Mirotic says. Said. Said you used to be somebody.”

Elliot doesn’t want to talk about that. “Was it Santos?” he asks, running his fingers along Tolliver’s hip.

“What?”

“The nights I message you but you don’t come,” Elliot says. “There was someone else.”

Tolliver shakes his head. “You really are a piece of shit,” he says, almost laughs. “You thought that had to be the reason, huh? Never thought maybe some nights I don’t really feel like fucking a drugged-up zombie who plays some pornstar in his optics the whole time?”

“I don’t,” Elliot says.

“Your wife, then,” Tolliver says. “That’s even more fucked.”

“I don’t play anything in the optics,” Elliot says. “I just see you. That’s all.”

Tolliver’s voice softens a little. “Oh.”

On impulse, Elliot sends him the clip. He watches it at the same time, watches his daughter’s head turn, her bright eyes blink.

“She’s grown,” he explains. “Twenty-some now. Her and her mother live on old Earth. Only thing they hate more than each other is me. If I was going to get out, it would’ve been years and years ago.”

He moves his hand to Tolliver’s arm, wanting to feel the cool plastic of his flay under his fingertips.

“They didn’t put me with a con squad as a punishment,” he says. “I volunteered.”

He looks down into the exposed swathe of red muscle on Tolliver’s arm. There are tiny specks of luminescent blue nestled in the fibers. He feels a deep unease slide under his high.

“I don’t want to get eaten from the inside,” Tolliver says. “I don’t want them using my bones.”

The poison yellow nudge appears in Elliot’s optics.

“Trigger me,” Tolliver says. “Right now. While everything still feels okay. You trigger me, and then do yours.”

“Could take the arm,” Elliot says. “The autosurgeon.”

“You said this job kills you with a thousand cuts.” Tolliver uses his good hand to find Elliot’s and squeeze it. “I’m not going to be a welder. I don’t want to be some fucking skeleton puppet, either. Let’s just get out of here. And let’s not leave anything behind.”

His hand leaves, but leaves behind a cool hard shell. Elliot runs his thumb along the groove and recognizes the shape of Tolliver’s incendiary grenade. He cups it against the side of his head. He thinks, briefly, about what the pick-up team will find when they finally arrive. What they’ll think happened.

He thinks of Tolliver’s file, the one he opened and read only once, how Tolliver had smothered his grandfather in his sleep and said it was to stop his pain, even though his grandfather had been healthy and happy. Nobody was good here. Not even Tolliver. But the two of them, they are a good match.

Outside, the cyclops starts to wail. Elliot adds his upvote to the queue, and Tolliver goes limp in his arms. His thumb finds the grenade’s pin and rests there. He thinks back to the last time everything still felt okay, then plays it in his optics, watching his daughter before she knew who he was.

“She’s awake,” his wife’s voice sings. “Just looking around…”

Elliot breathes deep and pulls the pin and waits for extraction.

In the dusked-down gym, Oxford Diallo is making holo after holo his ever-loving bitch, shredding through them with spins, shimmies, quicksilver crossovers. He’s a sinewy scarecrow, nearly seven foot already, but handles the ball so damn shifty you’d swear he has gecko implants done up in those supersized hands. Even with the Nike antioxygen mask clamped to his face, the kid is barely breathing hard.

“He’s eighteen on November thirtieth, right?” I ask, cross-checking my Google retinal but still not quite believing it. I’m sick as anyone of hearing about the next Giannis Antetokounmpo, the next Thon Maker, but Oxford Diallo looks legit, frighteningly legit.

Diallo senior nods. Oxford’s pa is not one for words; that much I already gleaned from the silent autocab ride from hotel to gym. Movie star cheekbones, hard sharp eyes. The stubble on his head has a swatch of gray coming in. He’s not as tall as his son, which is like saying, I don’t know, the Empire State Building is not as tall as Taipei 101. They’re both really fucking tall, and the elder’s got more heft to him, especially with the puffy orange fisherman’s coat he has on. I guess he’s fresh enough from Senegal that the climate-controlled gym feels cold to him.

On the floor, Oxford moves to a shooting drill, loping between LED-lit circles, catching and firing the ball in rhythm. High release, smooth snap of the wrist. The nylon net goes hiss hiss hiss. He makes a dozen in a row, and when he finally misses it jolts me, like a highlight compilation has somehow gone wrong. That’s how good the stroke is.