V

MEN WITH JOBS, THE VANISHING SPECIES

It was too bright, too open. I mashed one finger down on Gatz’s buzzer. I could hear the soft female voice of his apartment’s Shell calling out, “Visitor at the door! Mr. Gatz. Visitor at the door!” Gatz liked to set his Shell to “female” and talk back to it, cursing and calling it names.

The gray mass of people pushed past me in both directions. Millions of people every day in New York had no jobs, they just darted around looking for something to steal, someplace to sell it, and maybe some free grub here and there. I felt exposed, and my head ached. I suspected the Safe Room was the only thing that had saved my life from the assorted other bottom-feeders, most of whom would have slit my throat out of simple fear if they’d been able to see me.

I leaned on the button again. That flirty fake voice was starting to bug me, it was so fucking cheerful. There was nothing to be cheerful about.

Finally, the front door buzzed. I stepped inside quickly and shut the door behind me, scanning the crowd before mounting the broken escalator and humping it upstairs. Gatz shared the room with two other people in shifts of eight hours. It was just a room with a cot in one corner, a couch that didn’t look too moldy, a kitchen module, and a water closet. Grim, but it was off the street and behind a thick metal door, which provided at least minimum security against the sneak thieves, cutthroats, and other desperate creatures.

Gatz opened the door and stepped aside, waving me in. He wore just a pair of shorts, and his thin, wasted body glowed with ghostly pallor. He was wearing his sunglasses, which relaxed me, because Gatz needed to look you in the eye in order to Push you.

I didn’t really understand the Push. I’d only experienced it once, really; Kev Gatz had been a new face around town back then, a skinny asshole with an attitude. Like just about everyone else, I’d become determined to teach him a hard lesson-you had to hit people first, never let them think you were soft. When I came after him he just took off his shades, and the moment he got a good look at me I felt this calm, peaceful feeling spreading over me. I was suddenly content to just stare at Kev. I didn’t feel anything, want anything, think anything. I was just there.

To Kev’s credit, his revenge wasn’t anything terrible. He sent me away relieved of all my money and gave me a task: Write I will not try to shake down Kev Gatz ever again one hundred times on paper. I was on line thirty-three before it wore off, and I stopped in the middle of the word try and just blinked, everything rushing back to me. The motherfucker-he made me laugh, and when I met up with him again I had to admit that aside from being bug-eyed afraid of looking him in the eye even by accident, I liked that about him.

I sat down on the couch and put my feet on the cot. I fished out some precious cigs and offered him one, which he took silently, sticking it behind his ear. He slumped back down onto the bed next to my feet and squinted at the Shell’s screen. “Fuck, Avery, I’ve got forty minutes before the Teutonic Fuck gets in.”

The German. No one knew his real name. He worked freelance security around the city, cracking heads and guarding drug mules. He was obviously augmented, illegal all the way and probably going to die young. Augments bought on the black market were almost always deadly. Currently, however, the German was a mass of rippling muscles and rage, and he’d made it known to Kev that if Kev wasn’t out of the room when he got back, he’d toss Kev out the window, because the German needed his beauty rest.

“I’m in trouble, Kev,” I said, lighting my cig. “I need help.”

Kev nodded. “How much you paying?”

Ever practical, that was my Kev. I did some quick mental calculations. “Forty.”

“Forty,” Kev repeated, liking the number, “for what?”

“I gotta get out of New York for a while, and it might be tricky. I think my face is in the air with both the SSF and the Electric Church.”

Gatz was scratching his eyes under the dark lenses. “The EC? The fucking plastic Monks standing around telling us how great it is to have mechanical brains? You serious?”

I gave him the short version of my evening. It was hot as fuck up in his little room, and rivulets of sweat were burrowing through my body hair. It smelled like three unwashed men had spent the evening farting continuously, and I fought the urge to just hold my breath.

“Holy shit,” was Gatz’s only comment. “You are fucked, Ave. How long you think you have?”

I shrugged. “No time at all, I’d say. I gotta go underground right away. And I’ll need your special talents to make that happen.” I exhaled smoke into the room. “So, move.”

“What the fuck do you expect me to do? I’m not muscle, Ave.”

He was, though, in a way. “Kev, I need you to be my guardian angel. Make people leave me alone without getting into gunplay or such shit.” I also wanted someone I thought I could trust, and there were precious few of those, but I felt a weird affection for Kev. It was like having a pet.

He shook his head. “Fuck, man-Ave, you’re a friend and all, but this is a lot of danger for forty. System Pigs? I don’t know.”

I decided not to tell him the SSF was probably the lesser of two evils here, from what I’d seen and heard of the Monk. I was pissed-I’d done Kev plenty of favors. He owed me, and to find out he had the same short memory as the rest of the shit out there made me angry. I waited a moment, until the gaunt little fuck started stretching, scratching himself. Then I dove forward, pushed him up against the outdated Vid screen on the wall, and had him by the neck, and I made sure he could feel my breath on his face. I used my thumb and kept his face turned away from me-it was dangerous not to control Gatz’s field of vision. No one knew that better than me.

He couldn’t explain it, the Push. Kev didn’t even know how old he was, precisely. He’d always been plagued with headaches, bouts of hysterical blindness-he’d always assumed he had a tumor or some other terrible malfunction and wouldn’t live long. Then one day, he was getting his ass kicked somewhere, and he was just staring at the guy, wishing the guy would stop hitting him… and the guy stopped, just stood there.

“Listen to me, you little shit,” I rasped. “I am in deep shit here. Deep fucking shit. I need help. You won’t lift a finger for me unless I’m fucking bleeding for you? I’ve saved your ass how many times? Put that shit aside. You think I won’t fucking hurt you if you leave me hanging in the wind here?”

His breath whistled in and out of his nose; he didn’t even try to struggle. I knew how to beat him. “Fuck, Avery, fuck, come on! Get off me! Of course I’m gonna help you-of course I am.”

“’Cause normally I don’t mind your bullshit,” I went on as if he hadn’t said anything. “Normally I let your bullshit slide, Kev. You being all fucked up all the time. You acting like just because you got the Push, you can do anything you want. I let it go. Okay? But I am in some deep fucking shit here, asshole, and I will not tolerate being kicked in the balls, all right?”

For a second there was just Kev’s whistling breath. Then: “Look me in the eye when you say that, Avery.”

Kev did not possess what you might call a sophisticated brain, or any desire to plumb the mysteries of his life. Once he determined that he had this power, he accepted it as the way of the universe and just used it as best he could, to survive. If it didn’t leave him a shivering, weakened shell every time he Pushed someone, he’d probably be the biggest fucking criminal in the world right now. As it was, this incredible power gave him just barely enough of an edge to keep him alive a little longer than otherwise would have been possible.