James Knapp - The Silent Army

Now.

When she passed by me, I grabbed her by the wrist. I put my other arm around her thin waist and pulled her into the alley. She stumbled, but I held her as the brown paper bag slipped out of her hands. A bottle popped when it fell and hit the ground. An older man who passed by glanced down toward us, but didn’t even slow down. He could not see me; just some staggering drunk.

“Hey!” she yelped, and I clamped my hand over her mouth. She stuck both her legs out straight, but her heels just scraped along the wet blacktop as I pulled her deeper into the alley.

“Quiet,” I said in her ear.

I hauled her behind a trash bin, out of view. Running water ran down an open storm drain and helped cover the sound of her struggling. I forced her back and slammed her to the brick wall, then moved my right hand over her bony chest. I shut off the stealth cloak’s field, and her face went white as she saw me appear.

“You,” she whispered.

My open palm snapped apart, and my forearm split apart to my elbow. As the two halves splayed apart, she stared at the tip of the blade hidden there.

“Wait!” she said. “You’re not supposed to kill me!”

The blood rushed under her skin, and I watched the veins that pulsed along her neck. The blade was in position. One pneumatic blast would send it through her heart.

“You need me,” she gasped.

“There’s nothing I need you for.”

“You said the fate of everything was in my hands.”

“I never said—”

“In my visions. You said it.”

I was about to kill her, but that stopped me. The exact nature of their abilities was something that we hadn’t determined yet, but there was no disputing that they were real or at least based on reality, on possible outcomes. Imposing will or manipulating minds could be done by anyone, if not as well, but not the precognition. We didn’t know what it was, but we knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t prediction. The data points to lead them to their visions simply never existed. Nothing led them to the conclusions they reached; they just saw the end result and they were usually, if not always, right.

Fawkes had warned me against listening to her, but still, I was curious.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but that’s what you told me. You come to me in my dreams, and sometimes when I’m awake. You keep trying to tell me something, something important.”

“You saw me in a vision?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“The green room,” she said. “You come to me in the green room.”

I didn’t know what she was referring to. “And I spoke?”

“You were the one who told me to go to Nico two years ago,” she said. “The last time, you told me the city will burn.”

I remembered her back at the restaurant. Motoko had said that too.

“What did I mean?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know why the messages come through you. Maybe I’m fixated on you …”

She stopped to think about that, curious, like she’d forgotten where she was. It wasn’t until I moved, stepping in closer to her, that she snapped out of it.

“You know something,” she said. “Or …some version of you does. You told me the fate of everything will be in my hands. You need me….”

She was bargaining for her life, I knew that, but I believed she meant it. I didn’t know what it meant, but I believed that she saw what she’d described. Part of me wanted to question her further, to extract the truths out of her ramblings, but there wasn’t time for that.

“You’re trying to tell me something,” she stammered. “You need me for something, or else the whole city will—”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have my orders.”

Her eyes were desperate for a few more seconds, and then she seemed to give up. She closed her eyes and let out a long, hoarse sigh.

“Can I at least have a drink first?” she asked. One of the bottles from her bag was intact. I reached down and picked it up.

“Here.” I held it out by the neck.

She opened the bottle and then tipped it back. She drained nearly a quarter of the bottle before she choked and sprayed liquor from her nose. She bent over coughing and, I thought, laughing.

“I’m going to die in an alley,” she said, smiling with tears in her eyes. “I knew it was too good to be true…. I knew all this was too good to be true….”

“It usually is,” I said.

“You want to know what I did last night?” she said, ignoring me. “I killed someone. I killed the guy that killed my friend…. I think I might have actually done it before. I actually killed somebody. Hey, didn’t you used to be a cop?”

“Detective.”

“Right …so doesn’t it bother you, then? To kill people?”

“Did it bother you?”

“Hmm …not really. It felt …good, actually,” she said, taking another drink. “It’s weird. I thought it would freak me out, but it felt pretty good. It felt …right, like he deserved it. You know? Is that how it feels when you do it?”

“No.”

“I saw you die, you know.”

“What?”

“I saw it right before it happened. I called Nico, and he tried to save you.” She frowned. “I actually tried to help you….”

“What do you know about that?”

“I know he went down there, down in the factory, for you, back then. I know he’s been looking for you ever since.”

I’d indulged her, and myself, for long enough. I positioned the blade back over her chest.

“He does it because he still loves you,” she slurred.

I heard the shot before I knew what it was. It boomed through the small alley, and I pitched back suddenly as a collective gasp came from the sidewalk. I noticed several people on the street stop, and some looked over toward us. When I looked down, I saw black blood blooming there. I looked back at Zoe and I saw the gun. It was small, with silver plating and a pearl grip. Smoke drifted from the barrel as warning messages appeared in the air, flickering in between us. My signature wavered before snapping back.

The gun was small, but it had left a large hole. The armor plate under my skin had been pierced. Blood gushed as the nanos assembled a clot, then jetted in a stream as the pinhole closed. Zoe stared with her eyes wide.

I pushed myself off the brick wall behind me, the bayonet firing out as I did so. It whipped through the air as she stumbled backward, then slipped and began to fall. The blade’s tip snagged on her coat, slashing it as she fell into a puddle.

She kicked back, away from me, pointing the gun in front of her. I reached to bat it aside and land the blow, but wasn’t quite fast enough. She fired two more shots into my torso, and I staggered back from her. My signature warbled again, then came back, but not as strong as before. Back on the street, people had started to run.

The blood was coming out fast. My system couldn’t work around the trauma.

I’m hurt. Requesting retrieval.

The confirmation came back as warning messages continued streaming. I tried to reach for Zoe, but she was too far away. When I tried to move, my leg didn’t respond. I stumbled forward and went down on one knee.

I could still kill her if she came close enough. I held out my free hand, the blade by my side with its tip scraping the ground.

“I need to tell you something,” I whispered.

“Why do I keep seeing you?” she asked, looking down at me through the tangles of her hair. “Who are you?”

My heart signature flickered. She stood five feet away, not sure what to do.

“Come closer …and I’ll tell you.”

She stepped through a puddle toward me, and I lunged. My leg didn’t perform as well as I’d hoped, but it held as I pushed off the blacktop. I grabbed her collar and pushed the gun aside as she went back on her heels. We fell into a pile of wet trash bags, her struggling beneath me as the blade came down.