Michael Smith - Spares

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

spares

For Paula,

who lights up the forest.

Our kind. Us people. All of us that

started the game with a crooked cue,

that wanted so much and got so little,

that meant so good and did so bad.

JIM THOMPSON

‘The Killer Inside Me’

Epigraph Our kind. Us people. All of us that started the game with a crooked cue, that wanted so much and got so little, that meant so good and did so bad. JIM THOMPSON ‘The Killer Inside Me’

Part One: Dead Code PART ONE Dead Code

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part Two: The Gap

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Part Three: New Richmond

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Michael Marshall Smith

Copyright

About the Publisher

Wide shot.

New Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond, the historic capital of historical old Virginia, that sprawl of creaking tedium, but the New. The old Richmond was destroyed over a century ago, razed to the ground during riots which lasted two months. After decades of putting up with dreadful shopping facilities, a bewilderingly dull Old Town and no good restaurants to speak of, the residents suddenly went non-linear and strode across the city like avenging angels, destroying everything in their wake. It was great.

Spin doctors blamed downtown decay, crack wars, the cast of the moon. Personally, I think everyone just got really bored, and either way good riddance to it. The old Richmond was a content-free mess, a waste of a good, level patch within sight of the pleasingly pointy Blue Ridge Mountains. Everyone agreed it was much better off as a landing strip, a refuelling point for the MegaMalls.

The MegaMalls are aircraft – five miles square, two hundred storeys high – which majestically transport passengers from one side of the continent to the other, from the bottom to the top; from wherever they've been to wherever they seem to think will be better. The biggest oblongs of all time, a fetching shade of consumer goods black, studded with millions of points of light and so big they transcend function and become simply a shape again.

When oblongs grow up, they all want to be MegaMalls.

Inside are thousands of stores, twenty-storey atriums, food courts the size of small towns, dozens of multiplex cinemas and a range of hotels to suit every wallet which has a Gold Card in it. All this and more arranged round wide, sweeping avenues, a thousand comfortable nooks and crannies, and so many potted plants they count as an ecosystem in their own right. Safe from the rest of the world, cocooned 20,000 feet up in the air.

Heaven on earth, or cruising just above it: all of the good, clean, buyable things in life crammed into a multi-storey funhouse.

Eighty-three years ago, MegaMall Flight MA 156 stopped for routine refuelling on the site of old Richmond, and never took off again. It was merely a bureaucratic problem at first – the kind that the massed brains of all time could never have got to the bottom of, but which some poorly paid clerk could have solved instantly. If he'd had a mind to. If he hadn't been on his break.

After a few hours, the richer patrons started leaving by the roads. They didn't have time for this shit. They had to be somewhere else. Everybody else just complained a little, ordered another meal or bought some more shoes, and settled down to wait.

Then, after a few more hours, it transpired there was a minor problem with the engines. This was a little more serious. When you've got a problem with a car, you open the hood and there it is. You can point at the errant part. When the engine's the size of the Empire State Building on steroids, you know you've got a long night ahead. It takes fourteen people just to hold the manual. The engineers sent repair droids scurrying off into the deep recesses, but eventually they came back, electronically shaking their heads and whistling through their mechanical teeth. It was only a minor problem, they were sure, but they couldn't work out what it was.

More passengers started to leave at that point, but on the other hand, some people decided to stay. There were plenty of phones and meeting rooms, and the Mall had its own node on the Matrix. People could work. There were enormous quantities of food, consumer goods and clean sheets. People could live. There were, frankly, worse places to hang around.

They never got the engines going again. Maybe they were fixable, but they left it a little too late. After a couple of days people started to make their way in from the outside; people who'd been homeless since old Richmond went up in flames; people who lived in the backwoods; people who'd heard about the food courts and just wanted a spot of lunch. They came off the plain and out of the mountains and hammered on the doors. Initially, security turned them back like they were supposed to, but there were an awful lot of them and some were pretty pissed. For them the only thing worse than having to live in Richmond had been not having it to live in any more.

The security guards got together and came up with a plan. They would let people in, and they would charge them for it.

There was a period, maybe as long as six months, when Flight MA 156 was in flux, when no one was really sure if it was going to take off again. Then the tide turned, and people knew it was not. By then they didn't want it to. It was home. Areas inside the ship were knocked through, torn down, redeveloped. The original passengers staked out the upper floors and began to build on top of the Mall, competing to see who could get furthest from the mounting poor on the lower levels. A secondary town grew up around the Mall at ground level – the Portal into the city.

Eventually, the local utility companies just plumbed the whole lot in, and New Richmond was born. Apart from its unusual provenance and extreme oblongness, New Richmond is now just a city like anywhere else. If you didn't know, you might think it was just a rather bizarre town planning mistake.

But it's said that in a lost room, somewhere deep in the bowels of the city, there remains a forgotten suitcase, left there accidentally by one of the first families to leave, a mute testament to the city's birth. Nobody knows where this room is, and most people believe it's just an urban myth. Because that's what Flight MA 156 is, these days. Urban.

But I've always believed it, just like I wonder if sometimes, on some nights, the city itself must raise its eyes when it hears the other MegaMalls trundling slowly overhead. I wonder if it watches the skies, and sees them pass, and knows in some way that's where it should be. Up there in the heavens, not battered onto the Earth. But then which of us doesn't believe something like that, and how few of us are right.

‘Two hundred dollars,’ the man said, his eyes trying to look cool and watchful at the same time, and making a fearful mess of both. He wasn't talking about what I was trying to sell. I wasn't even in New Richmond yet. It was after eight o'clock at night and I was losing patience and running out of time.