From outside I heard him shout back, “But very fucking weird.”
Hense was out the hatch after him. I glanced at Marko, who was still slumped on the floor, and then I brushed past him, trying to force my body to move steadily. I still almost fell out of the goddamn hover, recovering sloppily in the damp grass. Hense and Happling hadn’t gone more than a few feet away before freezing. I stopped immediately.
We were surrounded by Monks.
I hadn’t seen so many of the Tin Men in years. Now and then a beggar or a crazy one wandered around bothering people, but after the Monk Riots most had been destroyed by the System Pigs in one of their rare useful moments, and aside from the small bands of them in the wilderness they weren’t common, or much of a problem. Now there were at least fifty in the clearing, and they all appeared to be dead and posed in a variety of positions.
The hover had flattened some trees and emerged from a small wooded area bordered by a broad band of grassy land that maybe had once been a road. A circular clearing spread out around us, enclosed by a concentric ring of trees. The Monks were all mutilated-missing limbs, wires and boards spilling out of holes torn in their chassis, some burned or melted or plagued by rust, some bodies without heads and other heads without bodies. They littered the space around us like sullen monuments grouped in little tableaux, bent and fixed into position. Some had obviously fallen over, and a few appeared to have bird nests in their abdomens.
The three of us looked around. It was warm, the sun rising on the horizon, the air heavy with humidity. There was a lot of animal noise in the distance-birds calling, something crashing through the trees-but we remained silent, just staring, until Marko tumbled out of the hover, falling to the ground with a grunt.
“Well,” Happling said, lowering his rifle, “welcome to Paris, shithole of the fucking universe.”
XIX
Day Eight: Meanwhile I’m Keeping Civilization Going
“Hell, they’re all nonfunctional,” Marko said, spinning around slowly with one of his handhelds. “Been here for a long time.”
“You’re brilliant,” Happling said from his perch on top of his bag of guns. “You needed a fucking mini-mainframe to tell you that?” He’d rolled up the starched white sleeves of his shirt, his muscles bulging as he gripped the shredder. He looked like a goddamn recruitment poster.
I was concentrating on not falling over as I strolled around the bizarre group of dead Monks. Hense was on her long-range scanner trying to raise SSF HQ for some obscure reason-personally, I thought the last thing we wanted was more cops, but I had to admit I was prejudiced, since most cops immediately started kicking and punching me when I met them. It was possible, being a cop herself, that she found them fun and interesting. I imagined she was trying to make contact to explain herself, or maybe trying to touch base with an informer who could tell her if any SSF were in pursuit: she’d stolen a hover, allowed two other cops to be killed, and made off with a prisoner who hadn’t been entered into the database, after all.
The newly risen sun tinged everything gold, a soft halo of light clinging to everything. Despite the rust, the torn plastic skin, the torn-out wires and staring, dead camera eyes, even the Monks looked almost beautiful. I stared at one that had been posed with both arms in the air as if in a moment of triumph, and struggled down into a sitting position on the damp ground, pulling out my gun and popping out the clip. Counting the shell in the chamber, I had fourteen shots. I’d done plenty with less, but never in the middle of fucking nowhere, a Ghost City the only thing in walking distance.
I snapped the clip back into place and pocketed the gun. Squinting over at Hense, I watched her for a moment.
“Waste of time,” I said.
She didn’t look up. “Taken under advisement.”
“It’s a waste of time, Colonel,” I said. “New York was on the edge of a fucking breakdown when we left. You think it got better? You think anyone’s looking for you right now?” I shook my head. “We should be moving. We don’t even know if the neat little suppression effect my pet nanobots have on us all is going to last.”
“You’re not in charge of this expedition, Cates,” she said without looking at me.
I stood up, grimacing inwardly as I forced my way through the million or so separate aches that had coalesced into a single gauzy misery inside me. “When you all start coughing up blood,” I said breathlessly, holstering my gun, “you can catch up.”
I took two steps, forcing myself to move smoothly and confidently, and then Happling was in front of me, my nose pointed right at his chest. He had the shredder leaning against his shoulder, pointed at the sky. His face had gone dark red again as he pushed a fat finger into my chest.
“The colonel said sit the fuck down, Cates.”
I looked from Hense to the behemoth. “Point of order, boss. She said I wasn’t in charge. Fine by me, Big Red,” I pushed my own finger into his chest, which was disturbingly hard and broad, the goddamn alpha male right there in front of me. “I’m not in charge. I’m not even part of it.”
His finger became a fist, pushing me backward. “Sit the fuck down, you piece of shit.”
I forced my stiff face into a smile. The cops were no different from anyone else in the System: you backed down, you gave an inch, they swarmed on you like fire ants and picked you clean. “What, you’re gonna beat the tar out of me every five minutes forever, Happling? That’s all you fucking pigs know how to do, huh?”
Happling’s face seemed to fold in on itself, his fair eyebrows coming down toward his scruffy ginger beard. “You better watch your tongue. You pieces of shit piss on everything and we have to clean your shit up, and then you piss and moan about the manner in which we do so. Fuck you. I know you, Cates. You’re a fucking parasite. You kill people for money, and meanwhile I’m keeping civilization going. If I’d killed you last week, the world would be a better place today.”
He was breathing heavily through his nose, his whole body expanding and contracting with each breath. “I kill people for money,” I said. I leaned forward, rocking off my heels. “I kill cops, too, but not for money, friend. Since you’re so busy keeping civilization going, I’m gonna go ahead and assume you’ve never killed any people, right?”
His mouth kinked into an ugly smile. “I don’t kill people,” he said. “I kill shitheads. And I assure you, Mr. Cates, there is a goddamn difference.”
For a moment, we stared at each other. I had to crane my head painfully to maintain eye contact. “Do you think-”
“Enough,” Hense said without raising her voice. She hadn’t even looked up from her comm unit. “Let’s get moving.”
I looked back at Happling. He winked. I stepped around him. “Let’s go save goddamn civilization.”
We were farther than a mile out, but Hense set a bone-crushing pace, marching off in a swirl of black leather overcoat, broiling just to look at. We weren’t far from major roads, either, encountering a weed-cracked highway in just a few minutes of panting march. Hense led the way with Happling taking up the rear, his massive gun balanced across his arms, his skin already peeling in the sun. Marko and I were herded between them, neither of us happy.
The silence was excruciating. I’d never been without the noise of a city around me-screams, threats, hover displacement, gunshots. All we had was the creak of our shoes on the ancient road and the wind pushing the weeds around, as close to total fucking silence as I’d ever experienced. The silence remained with us even as the city started to form up, shattered buildings and crashed hovers, occasional desiccated corpses and more rusting, dead Monks. Paris hadn’t been much even before the Monk Riots, a shitheel city that had taken a beating during Unification, when half the populace had risen up and declared independence, repudiating the Unification Treaties. Six years Paris had burned, holding out. And then the System Security Force had been formed, and that was the fucking end of that. One thing the SSF always knew how to do was put down riots.