Xavier slowly opened the box and caught the stench immediately. He grimaced and gagged as he pushed the meal away, his breakfast tainted with the waste product of one of the inmate’s previous meals. The two bearded lifers smiled grimly as they tucked into their meals, savoring each bite and watching Xavier. Xavier knew he had to make his first tough decision, and he glanced across at other tables and saw dozens of other cons watching, waiting, some of them exchanging items as bets were placed. He thought of his little child and for a moment he felt the grief return to wash over him like a black wave, fought back tears that welled uncontrollably in his eyes.
The two bikers began to chuckle, one of them shaking their head as they saw the fluid beading in his eyes. Xavier thought of his child for a moment longer, and he wondered what she would think of him if he were to simply do nothing, say nothing, to take the punishment even though he had committed no crime.
His tears vanished as the wave of his grief lit up with flames of rage. Xavier stood up from his seat, reached across with one hand and grabbed the back of the nearest lifer’s head as with the other he lifted the breakfast box and upturned it into the bearded man’s face, shoved hard and ground the mess into him.
The lifer let out a wail of disgust and fury as he propelled himself backwards into the man sitting at a table behind as he tried to get away from the filthy mess smeared across his face and mouth, the box falling away to reveal excrement lodged in thick clumps in his beard. Xavier jerked backwards and up off the bench, on his toes and ready as the other lifer leaped off his seat, his fists clenched like giant rocks by his sides.
Prisoners scattered from the two tables as other convicts staggered back in horror as they saw the excrement wedged into his nose and beard. Roars of disgust went up from them as they retreated away. Xavier glanced up at the watch station and saw the guards looking down at him, neither helping nor hindering.
Xavier silently reached across to the lifer’s seat and picked up the clean breakfast before he sat back down. The uproar in the hall died down as the sticks bellowed across the hall.
‘Two–one–eight–Mike, get to the infirmary and get that mess off your face! What are you, some kind of animal?!’
The lifer seethed, his chest heaving and his eyes filled with murderous rage as he lifted one thick arm and pointed right at Xavier.
‘You’re mine!’
Xavier, his heart thumping in his chest and his skin tingling with prickly heat, smiled back at the lifer.
‘You’re gonna need better perfume to get me.’
A burst of grim laughter rippled across the hall as Xavier took a long, slow bite of the lifer’s breakfast.
‘Two–one–eight–Mike, move, now!!’
Snarling with impotent fury, the lifer turned and stalked away toward the sally port.
Xavier took another bite of the breakfast and looked across at the other lifer, who watched him with a look of absolute hatred, his voice rolling like boulders across the table to Xavier.
‘We’re gonna slice you open a bit at a time, and make you eat yourself.’
Xavier, his pulse still racing, drowned his own fear with a chuckle.
‘I’ll taste better than your friend right now.’
The lifer scowled, but Xavier knew that his bravado and veil of fearlessness would only last so long. He figured the respect he’d gained in the eyes of the other inmates would buy him a couple of extra days of life at most.
***
V
Fourth Precinct Station
New Washington
Built on the corner of a block that looked as though it had probably been the first ever built in the station, the precinct was a blocky, angular building stained with the coalesced filth of ages. Nathan figured that once its walls would have been of shimmering steel but now they looked almost like brick, countless years of exposure to the brilliant sunlight and moisture trapped within the city.
A faint drizzle had been falling since they’d arrested the youth after his clash with Nathan, drenching the streets with the exhaust of human lungs. Many of the city’s inhabitants spent a lot of their time fighting off infections such as the common cold, which thrived in these humid and closely packed environs. That a cure for the cold hadn’t been found in the four hundred years since Nathan’s birth was no surprise to him even though humanity had found within its capabilities the technology to travel to the stars.
Nathan walked into the precinct and caught an elevator up to the second floor, where Betty was already processing the youth. Filled with miserable looking wretches yanked from the streets of the city for all manner of crimes, processing was also known as the “cattle–yard”. Nathan eased his way through the raucous of complaining suspects, all manacled to the walls where they sat as they gesticulated and shouted, and headed past the main desk to a security door that led into the station proper. He entered his access code and then walked through the door, which dematerialized before him as it detected his ID chip and cleared him, despite what he carried in a black bag. He’d been required to call that in before arriving, in order not to set off every alarm in the precinct.
‘Hey, Jay! Look who we have here!’
Lieutenant Emilio Vasquez looked up from his workstation at Nathan, Lieutenant Jay Allen also casting a serene gaze in his direction as he grinned from ear to ear.
‘Well whaddya know, Emilio? We’re honored!’
Both of the officers were attached to the precinct’s Anti–Drug Unit. Jay was a career officer who had joined the corps from high school in New Chicago, while Vasquez was a former Marine who had switched to law enforcement for the increased chance of picking up hot dates due to his uniform. The pair could not have been more different and duly were inseparable partners with five long years’ service behind them in the unit.
‘How y’doing fellas?’ Nathan asked as he tossed his jacket over the back of a chair while the two detectives stood to greet him.
‘How’s life in traffic?’ Vasqeuz grinned as he shook Nathan’s hand. ‘Not too rough for you? Nice uniform. I used to have one of those, about ten years ago.’
‘Or was it twelve?’ Allen chimed in. ‘Long time ago, and all that. We’ve moved forward since.’
Nathan didn’t miss the jibes. ‘It’s temporary, okay? Lieutenant Foxx says it’s to help me learn the city’s ropes.’
‘Sure,’ Vasquez intoned. ‘Five years’ service on the streets is the average, so I heard.’
‘Could go as high as ten, given that you’re four hundred years late to the party,’ Allen added.
‘Where’s Kaylin?’ Nathan asked. ‘I’ve got something for her.’
‘I bet you have,’ Vasquez said as he jabbed Nathan’s chest with one finger. ‘She’s outta your league bro’, too hot to handle.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ Nathan said. ‘And speaking of too hot to handle, what do you make of this?’
Nathan opened the black sack and dumped the military grade weapon he’d taken from their perp’ onto Vasquez’s desk. The former Marine stared down at the weapon and then shot Nathan a serious glance.
‘Bro’, where’d you lay your hands on this?’
‘North Quarter, during a robbery. One cop down but he’ll be okay.’
Vasquez pulled on latex gloves before he picked up the weapon and examined it.
‘This is military grade,’ he said, ‘Darkwater MM–15, automatic, thirty round cartridge, good for a hundred meter shot. You said you found this on the streets?’
‘Got first–hand experience of it from the wrong end of the barrel,’ Nathan said as he gestured over his shoulder to the jacket hanging off the back of Lieutenant Foxx’s chair. Vasquez and Allen looked at it and saw the large burn mark in the center.
‘Man, this shouldn’t be out there,’ Vasquez said. ‘Military weapons are destroyed when they’re retired from service, period, unless they’re held in the armory reserve.’
Nathan was about to answer when another voice did so.
‘They’re melted down and recycled to prevent criminals getting their hands on them.’
Nathan turned as Lieutenant Kaylin Foxx strode toward them. She was slim but moved somewhat like a cat, always alert, as though she walked on her toes. Her elfin features were topped with a tight bob of silvery hair that shimmered in the office lights, and she was dressed in a smart suit that folded over her chest from hip to opposite shoulder, tight pants and boots, her pistol swinging on her hip as she moved up to Nathan.
‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Got scared witless by old
Buzz
already?’
‘We got a perp’ in holding, opened fire on a cop with this,’ Nathan said as he gestured to the pistol Vasqeuz was holding.
‘How old is it?’ she asked the former Marine.
‘My service time,’ Vasquez replied, ‘no more than ten years. It was being superseded by the MM–17 when I left the corps. There shouldn’t be any left in existence except in museums planet–side, and there definitely shouldn’t be any on the streets.’
‘What do you think?’ Nathan asked Foxx. ‘Some kind of ring running inside the military, selling off high–grade weapons to criminals?’
‘I don’t know,’ Foxx replied. ‘Let’s go talk to your perp’ and see what he has to say. You got him in processing?’
‘Betty’s taking him to holding right now. You wanna do the interview?’
Foxx looked Nathan up and down for a moment. ‘It’s your snatch, so you’ve got the interview. I’ll sit in.’
‘Seriously?’ Nathan asked, suddenly excited.
‘Sure, but get the hell out of that traffic uniform first or nobody’s gonna take you seriously.’
***
The interview room was a drab box of four walls, the paintwork scratched and the air stained with the scent of stale coffee and the unwashed masses routinely manacled to the steel chair bolted to the floor opposite where Nathan sat.
Opposite him sat the youth he had arrested, still with his hood concealing his features and the glow of a prosthetic eye visible in the shadows within as though he were some kind of demon. Not much shocked Nathan these days, especially after everything he had seen since he had been awakened from his four hundred year slumber just a few months before, but the part–human presence before him still felt unreal somehow.
‘So, you want to tell me what happened?’ he asked, keen to establish a dialogue with the kid and get him to speak like a human being.
The hooded figure did not move, but the glowing red eye swivelled up to look at Nathan, the iris shimmering with laser light that made him briefly wonder whether such a device could become a weapon or not.
‘I want a lawyer.’
‘I want answers,’ Nathan replied, trying to ignore the strange digital timbre of the kid’s voice. ‘You opened fire on a cop, kid. You’re facing prison time for it, you understand that?’
‘I didn’t shoot nobody.’
‘That’s not what forty or so witnesses have said,’ Nathan shot back, ‘and that’s not what happened to me, or did you already forget the four or five shots you took at me?’
The hooded face vanished again as the kid looked down at his boots. ‘I was scared.’
‘Yeah, that’s what they always say:
wasn’t me, I was just scared
, that’s why I tried to kill a cop.’
‘I din’ try to kill nobody!’
The kid’s fist slammed down on the metal surface of the table, anger flaring in his bionic eye like a distant star.
‘Lose the hood,’ Nathan ordered him.
‘Like hell.’
Nathan leaned closer. ‘You don’t talk to me like a human being, I’ll stop treating you like one. Lose the hood or I’ll rip the damned thing clean off.’
The youth looked at him for a moment longer and then he reluctantly reached up and pulled the hood back.
Nathan managed not to recoil from the sight of the kid’s face. Both of his eyes were constructed from a metallic matrix that extended down to his cheeks and up onto his brow, the surface laced with hair–thin glowing tendrils that Nathan assumed were electrical connections of some kind. The kid’s scalp was shaved and criss–crossed with scars, and his throat was also a fusion of metal and skin around the thorax and the upper chest.
The door to the interview room shimmered and vanished as Lieutenant Foxx strode in.
‘Asil?’
Nathan blinked and turned to her. ‘You know this guy?’
If metallic, glowing eyes were capable of showing any kind of relief, Asil’s expression now collapsed as he looked up at Foxx.
‘They got me all jammed up ma’am,’ he uttered quickly. ‘I din’ kill nobody, and this asshole started chasing me and I had to run and then the damned woman cop near ran me flat with her cruiser and…’
‘Slow down,’ Foxx snapped, raising one hand at Asil. The kid fell silent as the interview room door closed behind her. ‘Okay, start from the point where you showed up on that block with that gun in your hand.’
Asil sighed, stared at the table top as he replied.
‘I was mindin’ my own business on fourth when I got collared by a hood by the name of Scheff. He’s a local runner for Shiver, said he needed a favor and there was plenty of
slapdash
in it for me.’
Nathan looked up at Foxx. ‘Cash,’ she said, ‘gang slang.’
While his knowledge of current slang wasn’t quite up to speed, of “Shiver” Nathan knew all too much. North Four had become the epicentre of the
Shiver
trade: a new form of
bio–implant
drug that caused the user to experience two lives of unimaginable ecstasy at once via an exotic and highly dangerous shifting of perceived reality, the user “shivering” between each. The drug took advantage of the fact that the human brain could “lucid dream”, a near–awake state that allowed dreams to be experienced as absolute reality: the phenomenon was natural but short lived and hard to control. Unlike the
Lucidity Lens
, which limited the amount of time one person could spend in an alternate reality and which was regulated by law,
Shiver
gave the user complete control, leading to an addiction that eventually led to substance abuse, brain overload, an inability to distinguish between reality and dreams and eventually death by misadventure. The proximal cause was usually suicide, either by the use of the drug or by an individual’s inability to procure more of it, forcing them to face reality on its own terms.