Jeff Somers - Digital Plague

I nodded. Everyone was just scrambling to stay alive. We started moving in the direction he’d indicated, me on point and Lukens bringing up the rear, shredder back in her hands.

“Why the hell do they have this place so bright?” Marko mused as we walked. “I can see firing up whatever bullshit security tech this complex has, but they’ve got this thing burning. I don’t get it.”

I swept my useless eyes this way and that as we walked, making more noise than I liked. “Fifty-three Monks, you said.”

“Yeah,” Marko agreed. “That I can see.”

Controlled burn, Kev had said to me. This is a controlled burn. “Fifty-three Monks who expect to pick up the pieces of the System in a few weeks when this is over. And this complex is a hospital.”

“Yeah? And?”

The elevator loomed up in front of us, rusting doors covered in faded, ancient graffiti, the two call buttons missing, disconnected wires spilling out of the wall. I stepped forward and ran my free hand along the seam between the doors, dust spilling down onto the gritty floor. “They’re not going to run the whole world with fifty-three fucking Monks, Mr. Marko. They need the power because they’re making more Monks.”

Screaming rust, the elevator doors split open in response to some not so gentle pressure, revealing an empty, shadowed shaft, a damp-smelling breeze blowing gently against us. I leaned in and peered down into almost total blackness and then up, where enough light was filtering in from various sources to outline the dim shape of the elevator car hanging several floors above us. Realizing I was sweating freely, I pulled myself back and looked at Marko.

“Any juice in there?”

He leaned into the shaft with his handheld and stared around for a few seconds, then pulled back and nodded. “Yep. Either they’re using this elevator-which would be insane, considering the last time anyone serviced it-or they didn’t have the time or knowledge to route the power selectively and just juiced the whole place. But that shaft is hot.” He frowned. “I’ve also got a lot of nano traffic… but nothing like what I was seeing before. There’s been a-”

He trailed off to a low mumble, talking to himself, and I stopped listening. I considered, taking quick, shallow breaths. I’d identified the threshold where my lungs rebelled and spasmed, sending up chunks of myself in bloody packets, and if I stayed just shy of that point I could control the urge to cough. It was like living underwater. “I don’t suppose you could get that elevator to come down here?”

The Techie cocked his head. “I might, Mr. Cates, but I’m not sure that would be such a good idea, actually. It’d be noisy and would probably attract attention, and as I thought I just pointed out, that car has been hanging there for decades at best. The chances that it would drop us to our deaths are pretty even.”

I nodded, swallowing blood back into myself, a light fever film all over me. “Excellent.” It was always the fucking Hard Way. Even when I’d just been a street-level Gunner, popping shitheads in a crowd for five hundred yen at a time, it had always been the hard way. Too many people, too many bodyguards. A mark who traveled underground all the time. A mark who wore body armor head to toe. A mark buried inside Westminster Abbey. A mark guarded by a System Pig on the take.

I paused, something tickling my brain again, a memory. Before I could pursue it, a horrible grinding noise came from the opened shaft and a shower of quickly fading sparks danced downward inside it. Before I could form a question for Marko, I watched in curiously delighted horror as the ancient lights inside the shaft banged on one after the other, most of the bulbs immediately exploding in a flash of soured light. The ones that survived gave the shaft a sickly yellowish glow.

The slow screeching began descending. Kev knows we’re here, I thought. I didn’t feel him on me, no Push that I could detect, but I was disinclined to move. Kev was coming, or Kev had sent some of his minions to finally kill me off, and I was relieved. I was tired. Exhausted. I turned to spit blood onto the ground while Lukens circled behind me, the climbing whine of her shredder filling the air, to cover the elevator doors when it arrived.

The car made terrible noises as it lowered itself, rust on rust. Dust shook down the shaft in front of us, and when the cab finally came into view it did so slowly, hitching and shaking like a square box being rammed down a round hole. It sank a few feet past the floor before shuddering to a stop, and then-silence. I could hear the rainlike sound of sprinkling dust and then the low, keening sound of complaining metal filling the cavernous space around us.

After a moment a booming noise came from within the elevator cab. Marko jumped and quietly moved farther back, his eyes locked on his little device. The Stormer didn’t flinch. She just stared at the elevator doors, one short finger resting lightly on the trigger of her rifle. The booming repeated twice, and then the cab’s doors parted about half an inch as the tip of a pry bar appeared between them. With a warping, grinding noise the doors were slowly forced open, centimeters at a time, with a jerking motion that hinted at great effort. One more inch, two inches, and I could see movement. Three more, and I could see hands. As the doors split open enough for someone to shoulder through, I finally raised my gun, which shook in front of me embarrassingly.

With a final wrench the doors slid all the way open as smoothly as they’d been designed to. A single figure stood in the shadows within. He dropped the pry bar, which made a metallic rattle, and put up his hands.

“Don’t shoot. I’m an old man.”

“Fucking hell,” I spat out, keeping my gun trained on him. “Wa, you’re a goddamn virus.”

He stepped slowly from the elevator, hands up, looking a little less pressed and neat than I was used to. Even his motion was less fluid, a little more brittle, as if Wa Belling had grown old over the past few days, a lifetime catching up with the old man. “From what I hear, Avery, you’re the virus, yes?” He gave me a raised eyebrow, an expression that used to convey endless disdain and amusement. It looked tired and forced now. “At any rate, I’ve come to throw myself on your tender mercy.”

“He’s not emitting any signals,” Marko announced. “He’s not carrying any devices, aside from four guns and some ammunition.”

“Of course not,” Belling said, smiling. “I’ve come to sur-render.”

“Fuck you, surrender,” I barked, coughing. “You did this to me. You fucked me, Wa. You fucked everyone.” I staggered forward, pushing my gun at him and making him retreat, raising his hands higher. A part of me thrilled at making Wa Belling retreat. “You killed Glee, Wa,” I hissed, my whole body shaking. “You had her chewed up and fucking digested. ” I knew that if he’d come here to kill me, he’d have an excellent chance of doing so. One Stormer and a rusted-out Avery Cates wasn’t a match for the man who’d successfully posed as Canny Orel for years. I felt like I’d turn to dust if someone so much as used harsh language on me.

“I fucked everyone,” he admitted, his hands still up in the air. “And I got fucked in return.”

I struggled for control. I wanted to make him suffer. I wanted to hurt him. But I had a job to do, and Belling could help. “How’d you locate us?”

He waggled his bushy white eyebrows. “I tracked your nanos, Avery. They all know you’re here. You’re filled with transmitters. You can’t take a piss, the Freak up there doesn’t know about it.”