The Eternal Prison (4 page)

 

Rule number one was, sometimes making the first move made sense.

 

I launched myself at the one I’d decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side. I wasn’t worried about the noise; My Russian expected a few shots. A few more and he might send the waiter out to see if we needed anything, but not yet.

 

I came up into an unsteady crouch and fired three times, quick, where the other bodyguard had been a second before. He was still there, for a moment, and then toppled over, hitting his knees and then falling over face-first. I stayed low, listening to the sudden silence, feeling the heat on me, straining my senses.

 

Rule number two was to never assume. It wasn’t nice, but I turned and found Lyosha, put my gun against his head, and made sure he was dead. Then I stepped over to his buddy and did the same, warm blood spraying me lightly. You assumed people were dead, they had a habit of coming up behind you at the worst times. I’d been assaulted by dead people so many times I’d become paranoid about it.

 

I turned and jogged back toward the door in a wide arc, approaching from an angle, taking soft, easy steps. I knew I didn’t need to worry about getting the door open—I had magic. By sheer force of will the door was going to pop open. After five steps it did just that, and a big, thick-necked woman with a goddamn shotgun held across her body, a streak of absolute darkness, stepped halfway out into the yard. She peered out into the lot, muttering to herself, not seeing me coming at her. I just kept approaching, holding off; you couldn’t shoot someone in the back. I wasn’t a big believer in justice, but everyone deserved to at least see it coming.

 

I was just a few feet away when she suddenly turned, hissing something I couldn’t make out and swinging the shotgun around, slow and clumsy. I squeezed the trigger, and she whipped around, sending one blast from the shotgun into the night air and falling awkwardly against the door, propping it open with her body. I leaped forward and plucked the shotgun from her loose grip; studied the wet, ugly wound I’d created in her chest; then looked into her staring eyes. With a quick glance into the bright, empty kitchen, I broke open the shotgun and let the shells drop out, then tossed it away to my right, the shadows swallowing it. After putting an insurance shell into her, I edged into the humming kitchen. The crank air being pushed out of the vents above rushed past me like someone had opened an air lock out in the desert. I stopped right inside and wasted a moment or two, listening, watching the swinging doors that led to the dining room.

 

As I stood there, the doors swung inward and admitted a pair of serving Droids, skimming along the floor bearing dirty dishes. As the swinging doors snapped closed, I caught a glimpse of the busy dining room, all reds and browns, plush fabrics that looked heavy and old. My Russian was sitting back toward the front of the place, laughing and holding a drink up as if making a toast. I looked straight at him as the doors swung shut again, gliding slowly on their tiny motors, but he never looked up at me.

 

I raised my gun and let the clip drop into the palm of my hand; it was difficult coming by hardware these days, most of it coming out of scavenge yards down south, Mexico generally, where the SSF’s grip was getting a little sketchy under pressure from the army. For six yen a week kids sorted bullets into calibers and hand-filled clips, which were then sold to assholes like me for a thousand yen a clip. I wasn’t sure where the fucking bullets came from, loose and sometimes ancient as hell, and I generally expected my gun to blow up in my hand every time I pulled the trigger. It kept things exciting.

 

I exchanged the old clip for a fresh one and snapped it into place as quietly as I could. I wasn’t paid to scamper around waiting for the safe moment—I was paid for results, and now that My Russian was aware of me, there was no better time than the present, before he called his people and brought the hammer down—a wall of fat guys in leather coats, a team of idiots with garrotes in their pockets and my picture on their little handhelds. Besides, my instructions had been pretty clear: My Russian had to die
tonight.
I’d agreed to terms, and terms had to be upheld. I took a deep breath and racked a shell into the chamber gently, deciding that the best way to do it would be to be fast—no wasted movements, no wasted time.

 

I put the gun down low by my thigh and pushed my way into the dining room. I walked quickly and steadily toward My Russian, my eyes on him the whole time. Momentum was the key—no one paid me any attention as I crossed the room, just part of the blur of motion around them.

 

When I was halfway to his table, My Russian glanced at me, then looked away, his face a pleasant mask of polite enjoyment. Then he snapped back to me, his expression tightening up, his hands jumping a bit on the table like he’d thought about doing something and then killed the idea. It was too late by then; I was at his table. I should have just brought the gun up, killed him, and walked out. But I stood there for a moment with my gun at my side. I wasn’t sure he could see it.

 

“Lyosha and Fedya will have some explaining to do, yes?”

 

I shook my head. “No. And neither will the kitchen help.” I gave him another second, but he just sat there staring at me, his hands balled into fists. Macho asshole, no gun because he was
tough.
Fuck tough. Tough got you killed.

 

I raised the gun and there was no reaction at first—I’d expected a hubbub from the crowd, some noise, chaos. But I’d been away from civilization for so long I guess I’d forgotten the rules, how it worked. I raised the gun and put it a few inches from My Russian’s face—not close enough for him to grab it easily or knock it aside—and nothing happened. There were people just a few feet away, eating their dinners, but no one was even looking at me.

 

My Russian stared at the barrel. “You know who I am, my friend,” he said slowly, licking his lips. “Maybe you wish to be rich?” His eyes jumped up to my face and then tightened up. “No, I see you do not wish to be rich. Perhaps you don’t wish to
live,
either. You are not a young man. You know who I work for. This will not be forgotten.”

 

I nodded. “You draw a lot of fucking water out here. And now it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what you did, but you pissed off the wrong people, and here I am.” Talking was for amateurs, but I wanted to give him his say. When you killed a man, you had to let him have his last words, if you could.

 

He was shaking now—with fear or rage, I couldn’t tell. “You do not care who I work for, then? But you do not understand.

 

It is not like the old days, where we run from the fucking cops and they chase us behind the furniture. We are
part
of things. We are
partners.
You do not fear
us,
but do you fear Cal Ruberto? Ruberto, the Undersecretary.”

 

I blinked. Now there was a sudden shout from across the room, and the whole place got quiet for a second, followed by a hissing wave of whispers. Cal Ruberto was Undersecretary for the North American Department and, nowadays, a major general in the New Army. The Undersecretaries had been running things—as much as Dick Marin and the System Cops would let them—since the Joint Council had gone senile years ago, but now they had some muscle. Ruberto wasn’t just an Undersecretary anymore. He was a fucking
general.

 

“You do not fear my boss,” My Russian continued. “But maybe you fear Ruberto. Maybe you fear the whole damn System behind him.”

 

I stared down at him a second longer, then cocked the hammer back. “Cal Ruberto,” I said, “is
my
boss.”

 

I squeezed the trigger, the gun making a thunderous crack, My Russian’s face imploding as he was knocked backward, spraying me with a fine mist of brains and blood. I stood still another moment, thinking that I was almost at the point where I felt nothing when I admitted that.

 

Then I spun around, bringing my cannon with me, and stood there dripping blood, running my eyes over the crowd. Most of them ducked down as I looked at them, crouching in their seats. There were some shouts, but no one was moving. I let my gun drop to my side again and stepped quickly toward the entrance. There would be no cops, but you didn’t kill a man with a crown on his chest in this town and just walk away whistling.

 

I crashed through the doors and into the hot, empty desert night, slipping my barker into my pocket. I imagined My Russian’s blood baking onto me, turning into a shell. The street was busy, crowds of people who made up the infrastructure of the Russians’ private city out for the night. I just pushed through bodies, looking up at the dark, hulking shapes of the ancient hotels on the horizon, huge complexes rotting in the sun, marking the outer edge of a rotting city slowly filling with sand and choking sunlight. A man could get lost in the darkness there forever, if he wanted. In the heat, forever was a lot shorter than you might imagine.

 

Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped My Russian’s blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me,
How many men have you killed, for
yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didn’t know. I’d lost count. I was dead. I’d died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky, all of it in strange, muffled silence as my ears rang.

 

Well, shit,
I thought, sitting up on my elbows.
That’s fucking strange.

 

 

 

 

II

JUST STILL ALIVE

 

 

 

 

My leg ached.

 

I figured it would ache for the rest of my life. It was amazing I could even walk on it, really. My lungs still burned when I walked too fast or if I smoked, too; the fucking Plague was going to be on me forever.

 

The Plague. I thought of Gleason, saw her face, smudged with dirt and giving me that sarcastic smile. At first I couldn’t quite place the feeling that soured inside me, and then I realized that I
missed
her. I missed her making fun of me, and I missed showing her things, teaching her. Thinking of her made me angry, so I pushed her away.

 

I wanted to shift my weight, ease up off my bad leg and let the blood flow a little, but I couldn’t move. I was strapped in standing up, inside a skeleton of blackened metal that smelled like rust, held stiffly and painfully upright. I could move my fingers some and my toes and my eyes. Not that my eyes were much use to me. I had a half million subtle angles of the sweating head strapped down in front of me, about two inches between us. The whole train car was packed with bodies, each of us pumping unhappy heat into the air. Sweat poured down my face into my eyes, making me blink madly.

 

“This is why,” someone muttered from a few spots behind me. “Democracy. Fucking democracy. Revolution. This shit right here.”

 

“We
got
democracy,” a deep voice boomed from further back. “No one’s got a vote. We’re all equals.”

 

There were some subdued snickers at that, and then the first voice came back, screeching at throat-searing volume. “
Fuck you, you fucking Pig! I know you’re a Pig! Burned Pig! I’m gonna slit your fucking throat!
”

 

I closed my eyes as everyone on the fucking train started shouting, the noise blurring into a sludge of hoarse white noise. I was thirsty. I’d woken up strapped in and had no idea how long I’d been here, smelling my fellow prisoners and wishing I could somehow will my own leg to just wither and drop off. Every now and then there was some indication of speed, a sudden yawing as the train took a curve, but for the most part it was as if we were standing still. From what I could tell we were moving just slightly slower than the goddamn speed of light.

 

After a moment the voices all shut off at once, leaving behind a trail of dry coughing and muttering. I kept my eyes shut and enjoyed the relative peace for a moment.

 

“Cut your fucking throat,” the first voice muttered again, sandpaper on rotten wood.

 

We’d all been collected in the cleanup of the East Coast after Squalor’s Plague. I didn’t know how many people had died—if New York had been any indication, it was all of them—and the cops had brought in reserves from every tiny little shithole of the System and banged on every door left standing in the whole fucking city, putting bracelets on wrists and bullets in ears, following an executive order by Dick Marin, Director of Internal Affairs. Some of us had been shoved onto the trains. Whatever the reason, instead of an execution in the ruins of Pickering’s bar, I’d been checked off a list and loaded onto transit. I guessed Marin was still my own personal guardian angel.