Jeff Somers - Digital Plague

“Too slow, Meat,” it hissed, the words melted and ruined in its rusted, damaged mouth.

It squeezed my hand open and my gun dropped to the floor with a dead-sounding thud, and then another Monk was at my opposite side and a third was between them. The blank, identical faces peered at me, one pair of scratched sunglasses and two pairs of whirring, delicate camera eyes. Up close, I could see how time had treated them-their fake skin scratched and pocked with collision damage, the little servos of their eyes sounding labored and sluggish, their clothes filthy and tattered without any attempt at repair. So much, I thought, for immortality.

Two more leaped in behind them, and I knew I was dead. There were too many, and they were too fast. A lot of noise suddenly welled up outside the door, hard to identify. An off-rhythm pounding vibrated through the floor, as if someone were lazily hurling cannonballs at the building.

The Monk’s hands were on me, tightening.

“All this time I was killing cops,” I said, panting, “I should have been killing Monks. ”

Rusty smiled down at me. “Your turn, Meat. Your fucking -”

The Monk jerked upward as if an invisible thread had been drawn taut. Everything paused for a second, and then Rusty leaped up and backward, sailing away from me and smashing into the far wall hard enough to shake the room and bring chunks of drywall down onto the Monk as it slid to the floor. The Monks around me whirled as one and then all four rose into the air stiffly, arms dropping to their sides, and smashed into the concrete ceiling, dropping back to the floor in front of me in a broken heap.

I didn’t try to move, certain I wouldn’t be able to anyway. Standing there, pale and haggard but calm, was Bendix, his terrible scar torn open and bleeding, one arm hanging loose at his side. He looked back into the corridor and then at me.

“Mr. Cates, you are one lucky bastard.”

He crossed over to where Ty Kieth’s body lay and stood there a moment, staring down at the Techie. Four more people entered the room behind him, young, round-faced kids in spiffy suits and long coats, three men and a woman. They were all binary, like the triplets I’d killed a week before-pale white skin and black hair. They hung back and watched Bendix like he was the Big Dog in the room. “Well, that’s done, at least,” he said. “It’s a waste, of course. Kieth should have been working for us. With us. A brain like that could have been accomplishing amazing things, properly funded. Properly channeled.”

I snorted and was amazed I had the energy to be amused. Properly fucking channeled. That was hilarious.

He glanced at me, and at once I found myself paralyzed by an invisible fist, almost unable to breathe. Just do it, I thought savagely. Just get it over with and fuck all this bullshit.

“You are a lucky man, Mr. Cates,” he said, turning and walking toward me. “You have a guardian angel. When I was dispatched on this mission I was given very specific orders, and I was given discretion to kill you if it seemed necessary for the survival of the human race-that’s a technical term, you know, SHR. In any scenario wherein I deemed your death not to be necessary for the survival of the human race, I was directed to leave you alive. You’re a Person of Interest, Mr. Cates, at least to Director Marin, and for the time being we are still taking Director Marin’s requests seriously. Though the time for that is fading, I think.”

He leaned in close, his open wound wet and puckered near my nose. I imagined I could smell him, but the fact was I couldn’t push enough air through my ruined nose to smell anything. His eyes were a little yellowed, dry and used up.

“You do not,” he said as I dropped back to the floor in a heap, “seem all that interesting.”

Turning, he waved his good hand in the air as he walked away. “The human race will, apparently, survive,” he said. “And the King Worm can fucking collect his own trash.” He spun out the door and his fellow psionics turned without looking at me, without saying anything, and followed. I lay where I was and watched him go, and then it was just me and my old friends. Nothing’s changed, I thought. It’s still assholes in nice suits running the world.

Enduring the ache in my leg that never left me these days, I sat at the bar in silence. I pushed some of the trash onto the floor with one hand; the place had been ransacked at some point, like every other place in Manhattan. The doors had been torn from their hinges, the windows smashed, and just about everything carted off. I imagined the thieves enjoying their booty for all of three days, days in which they coughed blood and spat out their own lungs, days in which the city fell apart around them. I sat on the last stool left intact in Pickering’s and felt the heavy dust I’d disturbed settling on me, seeking to reclaim the surfaces it had come to think of as its own.

Outside, the constant blaring of SSF loudspeakers was distant and tinny, official voices stepping over each other. New York was sick with cops and government-there were more Pigs and kids in suits crawling around the wreckage than citizens. People had survived, and more were arriving every day to pick over the carcass of the city. The city was dead. I’d lived in it my whole life, and I could smell it decomposing around me. The new people were maggots who’d infest it, tunnel into it, make it into something new. It would still be here, but it wouldn’t be my city anymore.

I was thirty-six. I had nothing.

Scratching at my beard, which I’d let grow into an unruly, tangled mess of gray and black, I stood up and stumped down the familiar length of the bar, my bad leg stiff and painful. It might still heal some and get some movement back, but I’d never dance again. It didn’t matter.

I paused by the door where, years before, I’d sat with Kev Gatz and Nad Muller, drinking Pick’s gin and plotting grand things. All of them worm food, the schemes only the dust they were buried in.

Somewhere outside there was an explosion and a jumble of shouts.

The SSF and the government were at each other’s throats, Undersecretaries claiming authority over the cops, Dick Marin telling them to shove their authority up their pencil-thin assholes. Word was the government was pouring yen and matйriel into the new Army, and that the System Pigs would have bigger worries very soon. I believed it. The Pigs were, in the meantime, chasing down every last motherfucker they saw as a possible threat or a possible resource. I’d heard rumors from all over the world-Mexico City, Vancouver, Kinshasa-that people were being rounded up and shot in the head in record numbers, the fucking cops just hammering and hammering without any of the old rules or traditions. Rumor was you couldn’t even bribe them anymore, not that yen was worth shit anymore anyway. They came with high-end brass running the show, fucking colonels and up, kicking their own troops in the balls, fucking famous criminals, good people lined up in alleys and shot in broad daylight, and screw the citizen who saw something and complained. The cops weren’t even hiding you in the shadows when they executed you these days.

I’d seen it in Manhattan, too. I’d heard Marcel had been taken away from his little throne room and left alive-rumor was the fat fuck had walked on his own dwindling legs for the first time in five years, weeping. I’d been by his little hotel the other week, just out of curiosity, and it had been a morgue, the rotting bodies of Marcel’s little court all dead with their SSF straps still around their wrists, the Stormer cables still coiled up where the troops had hit the ground. There was no sign of Marcel, and he would rot for goddamn weeks before he disappeared, so it might even be true.