The Immortality Virus (6 page)

A loud bang from next door almost made Grace go for her disruptor, but the subsequent high-pitched screech told her it was just her neighbors, still fighting. They seemed to be going for an all-time record if they were still at it. And she didn’t like the sound of that bang–had they upped the stakes? Usually it was just the yelling.

A mouth-watering smell from the kitchen prompted Grace to check the steak. It was brown, so she decided it was done. She turned off the oven and put the steak on a plate.

Another bang, farther away than the earlier noise, rang through the apartment. It sounded like it was coming from the stairwell.

This time, Grace did pull out her disruptor.

“Sam,” Grace said. “Pause search. Save results and shut down.”

“Good bye!” the computer chirped.

There were footsteps in the hallway. Wild scenes ran through Grace’s mind. It was The Establishment. They’d figured out what she was up to and had come to kill her–or torture her for more information. But then, why would they need her for information when there was obviously a snitch in Matt’s circle of confidantes? No, they would just kill her. Maybe it would be quick.

Loud pounding on the door. Grace’s fingers tightened on the disruptor, which felt slick in her sweaty palm.

“Open up! Police!”

Grace’s heart tried to pound out of her chest.
Why would the police come for her?
They had been leaving one another alone for a long time now. As she stood there, indecisive, she remembered the last thing her old captain had said to her when she left the force: “If we ever cross paths again, I
will
have to kill you.”

Grace began working for the Kansas City Police Department as soon as she left college at twenty-five years old. It wasn’t exciting work. Despite her degree in criminology and her eagerness to investigate crimes and help make the world a better place, she spent over thirty years pushing around paperwork in the mail room. She thought the day they first put her on a beat would be the happiest day of her life.

How naive she had been.

Bill McMillan was a veteran on the force, well respected by his peers and loved by his superiors. She found it hard to contain her excitement when she slid into the passenger seat of his hovercar on the day they pulled her out of the mail room.

“Harper, isn’t it?” McMillan asked as he drove the hovercar off the roof of police headquarters downtown. The view of Kansas City from this height was striking and strangely beautiful. The people didn’t look so wretched from up here. They just looked like a million tiny dots forming a strange and abstract portrait.

“Yes, sir,” Grace said. “It’s an honor to be working with you.”

McMillan snorted, a sound of disgust that made Grace’s face burn. “This ain’t a glamorous job or an exciting one. It’s a dangerous one, as my former partner can attest.”

His former partner had been killed in the line of duty the week before. Grace didn’t know the details–they never let those out.

“Anything’s better than the mail room,” Grace said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure. Kid, you’re probably a lot like I was fifty years ago when I first took up the beat–full of ideas about how you’re going to make this city a safer place. Well, that’s not what we do. It’s all we can do to keep the city from falling into anarchy, and frankly, what we got ain’t too far off.”

Grace remained silent, not quite willing to believe him but afraid he was right. It’s not like she hadn’t wondered before what she could do if everyone else had already failed. But she couldn’t let go that easily, especially not on her first day away from the mail room.

“All right, here’s our first stop.” McMillan pointed out the window, down at a thick section of crowd below them. “You’ll get good at recognizing these things eventually.”

McMillan slowly brought the hovercar down, right over the heads of the people. For a minute it looked like he planned to land right on top of them, but he maneuvered slowly enough to give everyone time to scatter.

“Have your sidearm ready at all times,” McMillan said as he shoved open the door, pushing several people out of the way in the process.

Grace followed suit, a little awkwardly. She still wasn’t sure what they were doing, but as word spread through the crowd that the cops had arrived, people began to scatter in all directions until finally, Grace and McMillan reached the epicenter of the disturbance–a naked man of indeterminate age with what appeared to be a knife wound across his throat. Large amounts of blood pooled in the dirt beneath him.

“Check him for an ID chip,” McMillan said.

Grace checked both wrists, but didn’t find the tiny metal button that acted both as tag and as a neural interface for portables. She also did not see any sign that such a chip had been ripped out of his skin by the same people who had stolen his clothing. This man had probably been born on the streets. “Nothing.”

“Good,” McMillan said. He sub-vocalized an instruction to his portable. It must have opened up a com link because a moment later he said, “Send a cleanup crew to my location beacon...no ID... 10-4.”

McMillan turned to Grace. “All right, let’s go.”

“W-wait! Shouldn’t we find out what happened here? Someone murdered this man.”

McMillan actually laughed, a sound that infuriated Grace. He caught a glimpse of her face and the laughter died immediately. “Just like me. I bet I said all the same things my first day. It ain’t fair, is it?”

“So you’re just going to accept it? Accept a man being murdered in the middle of a crowd of witnesses? You’re going to accept not knowing his identity and not letting his family know he’s dead?”

“The cleanup crew will take fingerprints,” McMillan said. “The census gets almost everyone’s fingerprints. If they come up with a contact, they’ll let them know.”

“And if not?” Grace asked.

“Then he’ll join the ranks of the nameless, faceless dead. C’mon, let’s go.”

Grace didn’t move.

“Look, before the day’s out we’ll handle a dozen more like this. We don’t have time to ask questions or take statements. We don’t have time to properly examine the body or the area for clues–most of which have been taken away by other unfortunates.”

It took her a moment to find her voice. When she did, her words dripped out like acid. “Would we have had time if he’d had an ID bracelet?”

“
We
would not have. We’d have called in the homicide team and they’d decide. Get in the car.”

This time, Grace complied, but she sat in stony silence as McMillan lifted off and began circling the area anew.

“It helps if you don’t think of them as human,” McMillan said after awhile. “More than one officer has called this job pest control.”

“What do
you
call it?” Grace asked.

“Me?” McMillan seemed to consider the question for a while. “I call it necessary evil. And I also call it over. As soon as I’m done training you, I’m moving on to investigations. Six more months of this shit, and I wash my hands of the whole thing. Maybe I can make a difference there.” After a long pause he said. “Probably not, though. There’s a lot of pressure to only spend city resources investigating crimes that affect ‘real’ people.”

“How much money do you have to have to be considered real?” Grace asked. “Do I count?”

“Police protect their own,” McMillan assured her. “We’re the right hand of the KC Governor, and in return he protects us.”

“Don’t I feel special,” Grace said. “What about everyone else?”

“Depends if we’ve done a good enough job protecting everyone who’s got more money. If so, and if we’ve got time left over, then yeah.”

The excitement Grace had felt earlier that day evaporated in an instant. She stared out the window at the crowds below, so tiny from this height. They did look a bit like ants from up here.

Pest control.
Somehow, she couldn’t make herself believe it.

* * *

She played the game for almost a year, bending the rules when she could, but not breaking them. She would work late (off the clock) if she could find out about the murder victims (and they were almost always murder victims) before the cleanup crew arrived. Maybe one time in fifty she’d even find the murderer. Not that she could arrest them–she’d tried that once only to receive an earful about how crowded prisons were–but she cold dish out street justice. This usually involved disarming the perpetrator and handing them over to the friends and family of the victim.

It definitely wasn’t a glamorous or exciting job. McMillan had that right.

On the one-year anniversary of that day, Captain Marcus Flint called Grace into his office for a chat. Captain Flint had something that Grace liked to call presence–a force that surrounded him and gave him power over others. Physically, he was only a little taller and broader than the average man, his hair a little darker than the average brown, and his eyes a little bluer than a sunny day. When he looked at you, though, he seemed to see into your soul.

“I’ve been watching you for a while,” Flint said without preamble. “I’ve been keeping what I’ve seen from my superiors. They wouldn’t like it.”

“Wouldn’t like what, exactly?” Grace asked.

Flint smiled. The expression sent daggers of ice through her. “Let’s not play games. Your new partner is a little uncomfortable around you and has asked for reassignment. I’m granting it. You’ll be on your own for a while.”

“Good,” Grace said. In truth, her new partner couldn’t keep his hands to himself. He probably wouldn’t have said anything to the captain if she hadn’t broken his finger the last time he’d patted her ass. At least he’d been intelligent enough to call the broken finger an accident.

Captain Flint sat down across his desk from her and folded his hands together. “Can I be honest for a minute?”

“Yes.”

“I like you, Grace. You’ve got spunk and idealism. As long as you don’t hurt anyone, I don’t want to stand in the way of that. But we need to set a few ground rules. First, your vagrant investigations come out of your own time. I won’t pay you overtime for it.”

“That’s the way it’s always been,” Grace said.

“Second,” Flint’s voice rose in volume as he dismissed her protests. “You don’t bring any of your sidelines here.”

“I haven’t since you told me off the first time.”

“Third,” Captain Flint said, raising his voice still more, “and most importantly, stay away from The Establishment. Make sure your investigations and your form of personal justice don’t come anywhere near them. I can’t protect you if they do.”

Grace rolled her eyes. She wasn’t even sure how truthful Flint was being. After all, he almost qualified as Establishment himself. He certainly worked closely with the governor, city council, and local businessmen.

“You don’t understand,” Captain Flint said. “Whatever you’ve been told, this is their police department. We may answer to the voters on paper, but in reality, everyone answers to them.”

She did understand that, actually, but she didn’t say so. “Anything else?”

Captain Flint stood up. “Get out of here. And don’t forget what I said.”

* * *

She didn’t forget. Not exactly.

The last day she would ever spend on the force began like any other. She started her beat at four in the afternoon, not a bad shift in late spring, when the sun lit the city past eight o’clock. Spring also had a tendency to take the edge off the violence. A strange sort of warm glow seemed to settle down over everyone. It put people in good spirits and even made them more generous.

That day, one of the wealthiest citizens of the city arranged a nutri-bar drop around dinnertime. Thousands of shiny wrappers filled with sustenance showered the heads of the people below.

It wasn’t a rare treat or anything. It happened at least twice a week in an attempt to keep the violent acts of hungry, desperate people to a minimum. Usually, there was quite a bit of fighting that went on over the food, but something about spring seemed to keep the anger at bay. Grace even spotted a man handing a nutri-bar to a child who had been unable to catch one for herself.

As the sun began to set and the people headed for their favorite patches of earth to settle in for the night, Grace turned on the spotlights and headed north across her beat. She landed several times to break up a few fights, but only called the cleanup crew for one death between eight and ten o’clock, that one apparently self-inflicted.

She felt good as she neared the northern border of her beat. She was just about to swing around and head back south when her searchlight fell across some kind of frenzied action or brawl that rippled through the crowd like a serpent. It looked suspiciously like a chase in progress.

She landed her hovercar just ahead of the movement, readied her sidearm, and stepped out of the vehicle. That’s when she heard a muffled cry and saw the three figures who had caused the disturbance, two of them dragging the third.

Grace didn’t even stop to think. She ran after them, down a dark alleyway between two warehouses. She had to jump over a few people sprawled in the narrow space, mostly trying to get some sleep and pretend not to see or hear anything from the other end.