Spares (6 page)

The first shot caught his shoulder, sending his wide; the second parked in his lungs and sent him stumbling backward. I leapt up the stairs still shooting, piling shots into the darkness, the gun jumping and bucking in my hand.

After the seventh shot he was no longer firing. I saved one and ran in a crouch up the remaining stairs, being careful when I turned the corner but opening out on seeing him twisted on the floor against the wall.

When I reached him I kicked the gun out of his
hand and yanked his head up. The face was unknown, one eyelid fluttering and his breathing ragged. The body below the face was a mess which wasn’t going to survive. I slapped the guy and leaned in close to him.

“Who sent you?” He just stared at me, eyes glazing. I slapped his face again to keep him perky. “Give me a name.”

“Fuck you,” he said eventually. “You’re dead.”

“Not yet, I think you’ll find, and not nearly so close as you.
Who sent you?
Safety Net?”

His lips managed a smile. He said nothing.

“Last chance,” I said. He tried to form the words “Fuck you,” but it was too much of art effort. I looked in his eyes, and knew he wasn’t going to tell me. I respected that. So I dragged him by the throat to the banister and swung him into the slats as hard as I could. They broke; he went through and tumbled down the stairwell.

His legs hit the banister going down, twisting his fall so his head caught it the next time round. When he landed far below he hit the earth like a bag of wet sticks landing in a shallow pool.

Mal’s door looked shut, but when I got up close to it, I saw the panel of the door wasn’t quite snug with the jamb. I held my breath, listening, and slid another clip into the gun.

I couldn’t hear anything. I debated quiet versus noisy, lost patience, and just kicked it in.

The long room. Empty and dark. A pot of noodles tipped over the floor in the foreground, still steaming. Down at the end, spread in front of the window, a body.

I took a step into the room, swung right. Nobody. Walked to Mal’s room, the bathroom. No one. Then I ran over to Mal.

One through the temple, one in the mouth, and one to the back of the head.

I lost it for maybe five minutes.

When I got it together again my throat was raw, and I realized I’d been shouting. Mal’s body lay still on the
floor, not in any way healed or made less dead by my lack of control. Now that I was no longer making noise, I could hear movement in the corridor. I loped to the door and swung it wide.

It was the two men from the floor below, standing at the top of the stairs. Come to see what was going on, to see if there was money to be made from it.

“Fuck off,” I suggested. The rat-faced one in front leant against the banister, all cool indifference.

“Or what, homeboy?” he said, with a blank-faced smile. I knew the look. You learn it on the day you discover that with most teachers, if you just front them down, they won’t be able to do anything. It’s a lesson you can take out into the world, into any number of grimy situations. Most people, if you front them hard enough, will not call your bluff.

I am not most people. That’s part of my problem.

I jammed my gun into rat-man’s forehead hard enough to dent his skull, and spoke very clearly.

“Or,” I said, “I blow your head all over your friend’s face. And then blow
his
head off. And then go down to your apartment and kill everyone I find until I run out of bullets or you run out of friends.”

He looked at me, eyes wide, and took a step backward onto the staircase. Then he spat fluently at the floor beside me. He was going, but protocol required some exit line. I felt like ricocheting off the walls, but I waited for it. You’ve got to let them have their line. It gives them a sense of closure, and the episode finishes for good. If more people let their enemies have the last word the world would be a safer place.

“Be seeing you,” he said, eventually.

“That’s getting old,” I snarled. “You’re not even the first person this
evening
to say that. Think of another and E-mail it to me.”

They clattered sullenly down the stairs.

I turned and saw Suej standing in Mal’s doorway, her eyes wide and filled with terror.

The others were gone.

I hadn’t rescued Suej from anything, simply brought her somewhere worse. I held her close, watching over her shoulder as Mal’s blood hardened on the floor, and knew that we weren’t going anywhere tonight.

Suej sat in an old and bedraggled armchair in Howie’s private office, sipping from a mug of coffee. The smell of it filtered across to me, as I sat in front of Howie’s desk and looked at my hands. It reminded me momentarily of Ratchet; a strong, rich coffee aroma, in a place which was secure.

Maybe we should have stayed at the Farm, I was thinking. Maybe this was just one long fuck-up, and all that could happen was that it would get worse. I glanced at Suej, and then looked away. I should have been worrying about the spares, but all I could think of was Mal. The things we’d seen, the things we’d done. Right back to The Gap, twenty years ago. All that was gone now, turned into a dream because there was no one alive to share it with.

The guys at the hidden entrance yukked when we arrived, evidently thinking, “Mr. Howie was right: here’s the strange dude again, lurching toward his fate.” They started trying to charge for Suej, took one look at me, and decided it wasn’t worth it. Or maybe it was Suej’s
face that did it, the blank Incomprehension, and loss. This was the first time in her life David hadn’t been within reaching distance, and she looked miserable and alone—almost like a real human being. It was also the first time I realized that I wasn’t going to be enough, that being surrogate Daddy only went so far. Exactly the sort of news I needed at that stage.

On the way through New Richmond’s tunnels I’d got the bones of what had happened from Suej. Mal had been doling out the first bowls of noodles when he’d thought he heard a noise outside the door. He tried to get the spares into the loft space of his apartment. Only Suej and David had understood; she went up the ladder first, David trying to herd the others toward her. Panic, incomprehension, and fast, flashing movement: it must have been just like when we left the Farm, except that I wasn’t there and they had to try to cope with it on their own.

Then a knock at the door—hard—a “Let me the fuck in” knock. Mal opened it, gun held behind his back, first turning out the light. Usually a sound tactic—but it just meant that the killer mistook him for me, and blew his lights there and then. As the killer planted another couple in Mal’s head, two other guys ran into the apartment. They cracked David and Mr. Two across the face and dragged everyone out. Suej watched through a crack in the ceiling, knowing there was nothing she could do and rightly judging that I’d want her not to get killed. The men fumbled round Mal’s apartment and then left, leaving the killer to clean up any stragglers who arrived.

Me, in other words.

It had to be SafetyNet. Somehow they’d tracked us. I didn’t know how and it didn’t make much difference. The result was the same: Mal got wasted, when it should have been me.

The men who’d done this had to be found, had to be killed, and it was going to be my job. Finally, I had a task I could understand.

When I got back to Howie’s bar my plan was simple.
Dump Suej, borrow all the bullets Howie had, and go fuck somebody up. Though a little rough round the edges, the plan had worked for me. It hadn’t for Howie, and he—with Paulie slightly shamefacedly helping—had physically prevented me from going. There would still be, he opined, plenty of people who’d like to whack me for free, and never mind the five thou gig. He didn’t know about the spares, and I didn’t try to explain any of the history or mention SafetyNet, so he probably just thought I’d gone nonlinear.

But he wouldn’t let me go, and he was probably right, and that’s why I was sitting in his office and smoking furiously. Howie had people out asking questions for me, against his better judgment. He thought I should just take Suej and get the fuck out of town. I’d refused, and we were waiting for word to come back. In the meantime he sat in his chair opposite me, watching through the one-way mirror as the bar filled up for the small hours session.

Eventually he turned, and looked at me shrewdly for a moment. “I’ve had a better idea,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any money in Date Canceling.”

“You could be right.” I lit another cigarette and waited, as I had so many times before.

“So try this. You know how women eat cake?” I didn’t answer, so he filled in for me. “Instead of having a normal-sized piece—you know, like a proper
slice
—they have a tiny sliver. A tiddly-widdly bit. Generally, my research shows, it’s about a twenty-degree angle of pie. You know why they do this?”

“No,” I said. I knew what he was doing, and was content to play along. He was relaxing me, in his roundabout way. I thought that was okay. I felt I could do with some relaxing.

“They do it because they think that if they have a piece that small, then in some way it doesn’t count. It’s too tiny. It slips through the calorie net, like candy you eat in a car. Then they can have another piece a bit later
on—less than twenty degrees, of course—and
that
piece won’t count either.”

“Howie, what are you talking about?”

“You watch, next time you break bread with a babe. You’ll see I’m right. So this is the plan—I come up with a new diet. All you have to do is buy circular food. Whatever you want, you can have it—so long as you make sure that you never have more than twenty degrees at one time. What do you think?”

“Complete and utter nonsense,” I said.

“Possibly, possibly—but who knows? Women understand some weird shit. Maybe they’re on to something.” He winked, leant over to a small fridge and pulled out a couple of beers from the multitude inside. “As you can see, there’s a lot of beer. More than enough.”

“For what?”

“For however long it’s going to take you to explain. I still say you should blow town, but I’m not letting you out of here before you calm down. Against my better judgment, you’re going to be crashing in my storeroom tonight, Jack. These are aggressive people you’re dealing with. Tell me what the hell’s going on.”

I knew I was going to have to tell someone sooner or later. I’d assumed it would be Mal. As I took my first sip of beer in a long time, I looked at Howie’s face and realized that it was going to be him.

I met the spares five years ago. I was thirty-four. I was put in a car and driven out of New Richmond in the middle of the night by someone, a woman who wasn’t my wife but who’d taken the trouble to find me when everyone else had given up. There’s a two-week period of my life which has just disappeared, and one of the very few things I’m sure about is that I want to leave it that way.

I didn’t really know what the Farms were back then. Well, yeah, I did know. Vaguely. I’d driven past one once, wondered what they were, asked someone, got
half the story. I knew more or less what they were for, but not how they did it, and at the time I didn’t really care too much.

We arrived in that scrag-end of night when the sky turns from black to blue just before dawn. The complex was a couple of miles outside Roanoke, handy for the hospitals. It was a two-story concrete building up against a hillside, a drab gray structure which from the road you’d probably assume was something to do with the military. In front there was a small compound where collection vehicles parked for the brief periods they spent at the Farm. The whole place was ringed by an electrified fence, like so much else these days. In back were the tunnels, but you couldn’t see them. They went straight into the rock.

I was left outside the compound, and waited shivering for the dawn and the representative from the parent company who was supposed to be coming to meet me. I waited two hours, two of the most wretched hours of my life. I’d evidently shot up from a bad batch and my head was completely fucked. I didn’t really know where I was, but that was giving me no relief. It was like being dead without the peace.