Hardwired (12 page)

Every coastal city has one, the low-lying district that was too big to dike off when the seas began to rise–– only New York tried to keep the Atlantic at bay with its vast encircling wall, but the dikes were broken in the Rock War and now Manhattan is the largest Venice of all, swept by gray waters at the spring tides, the boiling white wave-caps climbing the empty streets, swirling among the broken ruins, snatching at the ankles of the people who still live there, who witness the slow erosion, the giving back to the sea, of the greatest city of legend…

But there isn’t much of a tide in Tampa Bay, just an inch or two, and the Venice here is more stable, the tranquil bay content to eat at the city only gradually, reserving its biggest bites for the summer storms. When the waters rose, the port was dredged and deepened but the residential and business quarters were allowed to fade away, the expensive beachfront property losing itself by millimeters to each tide. From the sea marches a progression of devastation, the farthest buildings out little more than rubble, perhaps a chimney or two; inland are the buildings that lean out to sea, as if in anticipation of the inevitable fall, or display their looted interiors following the collapse of a seaward wall. Some are almost untouched: the massive stone walls of some old office buildings remain upright, stained but defiant, and far inland, where the water only stands rippling a foot or two above the old pavement, the buildings stand intact, almost livable.

They have long since been gutted, of course, stripped of furniture, of wood and wiring. After the war the buildings were home to thousands of refugees come to undamaged, occupied Florida from the devastation in the North, and the desperate occupancy did not improve them. The refugees left some things behind on their own junk heaps, scavenged or homemade furniture, mattresses, rotting blankets, heaps of mildewed clothing. Things that could be of use to a new generation of refugees.

There aren’t many who live in Venice now, only a few determined eccentrics, wanderers passing through to someplace else, and those on the run who have exhausted the other possibilities for places to hide. Runners like Sarah.

The taxi is on a road built above the tide line, a causeway looping out into the city of ruins and flanked by pellucid water, heading eventually across the bay to drowning St. Petersburg. Shattered windows seem to peer into the taxi. “Stop here,” she says, and as the taxi’s flywheel disengages, she begins shoving bills through the bulletproof shield. If it’s to be her last, she thinks, let the tip be a big one.

The driver counts the money in surprise as Sarah skates down the embankment, warm water greeting her as radio conversations crackle and snarl in her head. Her ankles are embraced by water lilies as she walks down a shallow bay between a pair of apartment buildings. Behind her, not quite daring to look, she hears the Mercury’s low hiss on the causeway. She steps through a doorway into an apartment foyer, the audio in her head dimming.

The room is full of darkness and bright, wet sounds. Silt rises around her feet as ripple reflections dance on the ceiling. Mildew crawls up ancient, defaced wallpaper, algae devour the scrawled obscenities of the last inhabitants. An imbecile fish strikes at her shin repeatedly, tasting something he wants. The elevator doors are open, revealing broken mirrors, a drooping cable. Walking carefully on the crusted carpet, Sarah takes the stairs to the landing and gives herself a two-second glance past a broken, dagger-edged pane.

The Merc has crawled another 300 yards down the causeway and pulled over to the side. Two heads are peering out as the traffic slices past. Sarah reaches for the control and turns off the police calls that track letters above her vision. The two are leaving the car, walking back along the highway verge. Sarah moves up the stairs.

Echoes of her childhood ring from the broken walls, from the litter lying on the landings. How many years did she live in a place like this? Hiding in the broken corners, playing in the glass-strewn hallways? Now to return, having-once again-no other place to run. Sarah, returning to the corridors of a childhood memory, come back to play another game of hide-and-seek. The stairway is well lit through shattered windows, the walls streaked by every downpour. A mad profusion of fungus grows on each landing. Tired planks sag under the stained carpet. Sarah is leaving footprints in the sodden mess, a track for the two soldiers to follow.

It’s an old trick, laying footprints down a hallway, then walking backward in one’s old tracks. She moves with childhood ease, familiar scents and memories rising as she skates backward through the rubble. Then a leap to one side, into a darkened apartment, and wait, poised to move. A hiss of hardfire up each nostril to trigger her hardwired nerves, to make the neurotransmitters leap as they run jangling down the neural communications net. Listening. Tasting the sweat on her upper lip. Heartbeat and respiration climbing silently through the gears, ready to provide blood and oxygen to the tissues when the time comes…

How many times had she done this as a girl? Hid in a dark room while the drunken hurricane that was her father raged outside, shouted his threats, banged on the doors, Daud’s trembling arms around her while she tasted the scent of their mingled fear? But there are overlays on that childhood memory now, pictures of darker violence, of snagboys lying bloody in alleys next to their bags of merchandise, of runners caught in the sodium glare of police spotlights as their feet scrambled for traction on the wet concrete, of Weasel running its red cybernetic errands into the darkness of some terrified heart. But never anything like that earlier fear, the white nights with her father, the terror as the bedroom door finally gave way, the hinges tearing out amid pale moonbeam slivers of wood while her father stood silhouetted in the yellow hall light, the broken bottle in his hand…

They are coming: Sarah can hear the brush of feet on the crumbling carpet. She blinks the sweat from her eyes, opens her mouth wide and tries to breathe deeply, silently. Weasel stirs in her throat, swallowing her tongue. It is possible that these two might actually have guns, and that will mean a very fast evaluation of their strength during the brief seconds they are visible to her, and perhaps a change of tactics. The drug is making her nerves leap, urging her to move. There are dim phantoms dancing at the peripherals of her vision. She forces herself to stand still.

The first one moves past, intent on the footprints, a silhouette for only a second-and Sarah sees a young man with jumpy eyes and a blond pompadour slicked forward, a sleeveless leatherjacket, tattoos on the wiry upper arms, a club–– no, a baseball bat–– hanging loosely in the left hand. And then the next appears in the frame of the doorway, and Sarah is moving.

She sends the Weasel for his eyes, a straight-out strike like a flicker of lightning, but he’s seen the movement out of the corner of one eye and manages to jerk his head around, and Weasel strikes a glancing blow to the cheekbone that leaves a red furrow... But the strike has brought his hands up high to cover, leaving him open for the thrusting kick she delivers to his midsection with all the force of her moving body. He staggers, his arms flailing. The ice-gleam of a knife reflects shards of light over the carpet, disappears into the darkness. Sarah retracts Weasel and takes a gulp of air, already spinning toward the guy with the baseball bat. Both of these boys, she realizes now, are shorter than she is; she’ll take whatever reach advantage she can.

A glance over her shoulder for a rear kick into the knifeboy’s midsection that helps to propel her forward and the knifeboy back, he landing on his tail with an eruption of breath while Sarah flies like a spear to the target; but pompadour’s too fast. The bat’s swinging in a hissing arc before the boy even sees what’s coming at him, and Sarah’s moving forward and knows she’s going to be hit. She tries to buffer it with her arm but takes it almost full force in the side, her armored jacket spreading the impact but not enough. The breath goes out of her in a rush and she slams into the wall; but as she bounces she’s already spinning inside the range of the bat. She can smell the lilac scent of the grease on the boy’s hair as she goes for his eyes with her nails.

He drops the bat, which is what she wants, and grabs her wrists, bearing down, hauling her arms apart, crucifying her for the knife from behind. His tattoos ripple as he matches her strength. She tries for his groin with her knee but he turns a hip and takes the strike on his thigh. There is a grin on his face now, partly just the rictus of combat, but Sarah can tell that he’s pleased he has a woman where he wants her, helpless, spread across his front.

She puts Weasel through his left eye and the grin becomes a bubbling scream. He falls, a bundle of random movements, blood welling up into the ruined socket. Weasel may have scarred part of the forebrain. Sarah’s already retracting Weasel to strike again, spinning just in time to block a kick and a punch from the knifeboy, but another punch strikes her breast and she feels pain crackling up her all-too-efficient nerves.

He’s wired-Sarah can tell that right away. The reflexes of a second dan or so implanted in crystal in his animal brain, hardwiring to boost his speed. But the reflexes of a five-foot-two Korean do not necessarily adapt to a six-foot Occidental without a lot of practice, and that kind of discipline is foreign to most of the streetboys Sarah has ever met... Sarah has interwoven her own reflexes with those of her chips, making the hardwired reflexes her own, integrating their patterns with Weasel.

Their fight is sharp and close, the blood from his cut cheek spattering her as they punch, grapple, butt. Weasel leaves bloody weals on his forearms as he tries to block its strikes. She comes in close and drives her forehead into his face, and then she is standing over his unconscious body as she fights for breath and listens to the sudden clamoring stillness. Stars are flickering in the extremes of her vision. The pain that her fear had denied is having its revenge. Sarah massages her breast and ribs, breathing hard, leaning for a blessed moment against the mildewed wall. She finds the knife and baseball bat...and wonders, for a moment, what kind of message she wants to leave.

These are not Cunningham’s people, obviously, just a couple of streetboys going for a reward, not fully understanding what league they were trying to play in. Vicious and stupid though they are, Sarah can’t really bring herself to leave a pair of bodies here in the ruined hallway, but yet it might be politic to leave an example for other streetboys who might consider trying the same thing. A pair of high-visibility object lessons in plaster casts might work wonders. The pompadour has lost part of his brain anyway, so Sarah settles for breaking his left arm with the baseball bat. The knifeboy will wake up with a pair of smashed collarbones. Sarah tosses the baseball bat through an apartment door, retrieves her pocketbook, and leaves with the keys to the Merc.

By the time Sarah climbs onto the causeway her ribs are throbbing with each step. The Mercury’s seat is patched with duct tape and scorches her thighs with its baking heat. A Miraculous Medal hangs from the rearview mirror. She has to move the seat back to give room to her long legs.

She starts the machine and races up the causeway, heading for St. Petersburg, sweeping past the gutted shells of Venice. The sea breeze gusts through the window and cools her. She can feel the hardfire wearing away, her nerves slackening, the adrenaline wave teetering on the edge of a crash, and so brings the inhaler from her pocketbook and gives herself another rush to carry her across the waters of the bay.

In front of her a city is melting in the afternoon heat. She tastes the rushing wind as she arcs high over the water. Soon, Sarah knows, she will reach the peak, begin her fall. But not just yet. For now, she wants only to keep climbing.

Chapter Five

Arnold is a young panzergirl with wiry, muscled arms and dark hair cut short around her sockets. She’s got a good reputation, has been running freelance for years. For the last two days, she’s been a member of Cowboy’s party.

It’s been a ten-day celebration, a series of binges up and down the Rockies, filled with a revolving-door succession of panzerboys, mechanics, thirdmen, retired deltajocks who could never learn the new technology...the large, loose, migratory network that likes to think of itself as the underground. They’ve been toasting their new legend, the man who opened Missouri to their midnight traffic. The party’s current location is the bar of the Murray Hotel in Livingston, Montana, and it will probably stay here for a couple of days while people move in and out, buying Cowboy drinks and trying to absorb a part of his legend.

Cowboy’s panzer is sitting in a hidden barn in West Virginia. It’s too dangerous to bring it back, even on a legitimate run on the highways without cargo, so Cowboy took the bullet train west from Pittsburgh to Santa Fe, and since then he’s been careening in his Maserati up and down the mountain states from one panzerboy watering hole to the next.

Talking to people, mostly. He’s got reasons.

“Your last run had problems, right?” he says.

Arnold grimaces into her bourbon/rocks. Country hob thuds from the dance floor, where panzerboys and local ranchers are putting more energy into sizing each other up than into dancing. Some little blond girl has laser earrings that are tracking red fire on the walls and the other dancers, on the surprised face of the bartender. Cowboy can catch glimpses of her among the dance crowd.

“Two runs ago,” Arnold corrects him. “One of the Sandman’s fuel trucks didn’t make the rendezvous. Had to hide the panzer in a fucking coulee for two days. With a town just over the next ridge. I could’ve been taken by a farmer in broad daylight.”

“The Sandman ought to have paid you a bonus for that.”

Her look is scornful. “Him? You kidding?”

“Someone,” Cowboy says quietly, “ought to’ve made him.”

The bourbon pauses en route to Arnold’s lips. She puts the glass down and looks at him. “Who did you have in mind, Cowboy?”

The blond dancer’s laser earrings track a dancing spot of crimson light across Arnold’s cheek. Cowboy feigns nonchalance and signals the bartender for another round.