“All right,” she said. “All right. But I’m detaching a trooper to shadow you at all times.” She turned and scanned her little unit. “You!” she barked, pointing at the round-faced trooper Happling always called Fat Girl. “Here.”
She trotted over, equipment jangling. “Sir.”
Hense didn’t look at me. “Shadow Cates. Take his orders, within reason. He is your CO until I say otherwise. Do not obey any order that risks his life unduly, understood? And keep him alive.”
The Stormer’s face remained blank, but she looked at me for a moment before nodding and sighed a little. “Sir.”
Hense stepped past her. “Captain, let’s move out. Mr. Marko, stick by the captain. Nathan, keep Mr. Marko out of trouble.”
I checked my gun. “What’s your name?”
Fat Girl just stared back at me. I gave it a couple of seconds and then hit her with my most insincere grin, polished in a hundred deals downtown. “How’d a nice girl like you end up kicking balls in the SSF?”
At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer me, but then she turned a little to scan the horizon, squinting. “I made a living cutting cow throats back when,” she said, her accent making everything sound exotic. “Then they fucking Droided the whole fucking combine and there ain’t too many other jobs out there, eh?” She looked back at me and spit a little to the side like she had the memory of chewing tobacco. “Besides, beats being you.”
I nodded and thought I bet it does. I turned and rejoined the rest of the squad, and Fat Girl followed me one step behind. Happling glanced back and I nodded, and with a gesture he set the group in motion. Nothing felt right, and I resisted the urge to spin around as I walked; I felt off-balance, like no direction was safe. The cops felt wrong, too-they weren’t moving like System Pigs, like they owned the street. They were moving like they were scared, as if they were in enemy territory. Only Bendix, tethered to a Stormer by a short leather strap, appeared confident, even as he stumbled and staggered along.
We moved up Thirty-first Street, heading east. About a block from the airpad the bodies ended, the street suddenly clean, empty. A few scattered possessions spilled out from the crowd, blown about by the wind, but once we’d passed that perimeter it was just pavement and the fading light, like everyone had gone inside, like pigeons, wanting a cool dry place to die. The Stormers moved in eerie silence, half crouched, shredders in hand; I could hear my own breathing, a painful hitch in my chest making me twitch with every inhalation. Now and then there were sounds off in the distance-gunfire once, shouting a few times, an explosion at one point that sounded huge and distant, like something we imagined. The cops didn’t pause or break formation, but I did, stopping at each noise to scan behind me and squint up at the dead buildings. Fat Girl stopped with me each time, saying nothing, her cowl pulled back into place so she was just another faceless cop like all the ones I’d killed over the years. I felt hot and grimy, a trickle of sour sweat down my back.
At Fifth Avenue we turned south and encountered more bodies, just a few scattered here and there, torn up, looking like they’d been lying facedown on top of a hand grenade when it had gone off, but otherwise relaxed, sitting with their backs against walls, arms down at their sides. All of them had bloody craters where their chests had been, deep, open wounds that went up their necks and onto their faces, drying blood caked everywhere. They appeared to be shouting at us but not making any noise, their lower jaws either gone or melted into a pulpy goo, yellowed and cracked teeth grinning. Eight or nine blocks south I could make out Twenty-third Street, where smoke rose in a haze over what had to be barricades. I knew if we went down that far we’d find a lot more bodies.
I was staring at a corpse still wearing a luxurious blond wig as she slumped forward against an old Vid installation when movement in front of us sent the cops instantly into a battle pose, the main group on their knees with shredders trained while four or five flyers headed for the sides of the street to press against the walls. As Fat Girl stepped protectively in front of me, I turned just in time to see four people shuffling out of a skyscraper lobby and moving toward us.
“Police!” One of them gurgled. “Finally!”
They weren’t in good shape. Their faces had a blackened, bruised look, their necks swollen up like balloons, each sporting several wet-looking sores. They were all men and, judging by their weight and clothes, they’d been prosperous enough until a week ago, when prosperity stopped meaning anything.
“We were okay until a day ago,” croaked one of them, his pale face scummed with beard, yellow bags under his eyes. His voice had a molten quality, and he cleared his throat constantly as he shuffled, making a gagging noise as if he had a large beetle trapped in there. “I knew you’d be back to secure the city.”
Happling made two sharp gestures and the Stormers flicked the safeties off their shredders in unison, the humming noise each made collecting together into a mild roar.
“Turn around,” Happling bellowed, arms akimbo, “or we will fire.”
The four men slowed down but didn’t stop. “Are you fucking insane? We’re citizens!” the guy with the molten voice said, hacking out the phlegmy words, a trickle of thick, black fluid spilling out the corner of his mouth. “You’re worse than those psychopaths across the street.”
I glanced past him to the midsized old building he’d pointed at, half a block away. It looked like every other old pre-Unification structure in upper Manhattan, blind window glass and stained old gray stone, worn down by pollution and time. It seemed as deserted as every other spot we’d passed, except the windows had all been boarded up from the inside.
Happling’s face was impassive. “You are ordered to step back to your previous location, citizen,” he said, managing to make the word citizen sound like an insult, “or we will kill you.” He paused and then raised both eyebrows. “Got that, shithead?”
For a moment I thought maybe they were going to turn back, to crawl into whatever stuffy hole they’d been hiding in to continue rotting out. Then the beetle-throated one shook his head and kept coming.
“Fuck it,” he warbled. “I’m dead if you leave us behind anyway. We’re all dead.”
I watched as Happling raised his hand slightly and held it there. Feeling hot and gummy, I was moving before I’d formed any conscious thoughts, pushing past my personal Stormer and through the thin ranks of Hense’s little army, putting a hand on Happling’s shoulder, intending to spin him around.
“Fuck this-they’ll either be dead or cured in a couple of hours, you goddamn-”
The big man moved fast, almost like a jump cut in my brain. One second I was standing behind him, reaching up to grab his shoulder, the next he had my hand in his, bending my wrist back painfully with inexorable pressure that forced me onto my knees. With his other hand he somehow produced his ancient automatic, pushing it against the back of my head, forcing me to stare down at the cracked pavement. I blinked down at the street, sucking in breath that tickled my chest and brought on a spasm of thick coughs. I hadn’t been handled that easily in years.
“Mr. Cates,” Happling said, not at all out of breath, “don’t get in the fucking way.”
A burst of ear-splitting shredder fire erupted as I twitched at Happling’s feet, hacking up what felt like a lung onto the street. Silence followed; I could hear the faint sizzle of the shredders’ muzzles as they cooled. Happling released me and stepped away but I remained on my knees, staring down at the glob of bloody phlegm I’d just produced.
Guess Kev knows I’m here, I thought. And he’s not happy.