The Terminal State Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  I - I DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR IT. I HAD PEOPLE TO KILL

  II - WE GONNA SET THINGS RIGHT, MR. CATES

  III - YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE ANY OF THEM

  IV - YOU SURVIVED ME. NOT MANY HAVE

  V - THE MAN’S A HERO

  VI - THE MIDDLE FINGER OF GOD

  VII - JUST THE WORST THING THAT HAD EVER HAPPENED TO THESE POOR PEOPLE

  VIII - I WILL BE IRRITATED. YOU WILL ALL BE DEAD

  IX - THE DOOR CAME, AND THE DOOR WASN’T HAPPY

  X - A LITTLE LOVE AFFAIR MADE UP OF LONGING GAZES AND UNREQUITED VIOLENCE

  XI - MUCH RATHER HE DIES FOR ME

  XII - DEATH AIN’T WHAT IT USED TO BE

  XIII - A SURGE OF BLOODY JOY

  XIV - WITH A HEADSHOT, IF POSSIBLE

  XV - SILT OF THE FUCKING EARTH

  XVI - A TRIUMPHANT MOMENT OF BAD DUMB LUCK

  XVII - SHE AIN’T THE FIRST

  XVIII - IF I WANT SUICIDE, I’LL JUST SLAP YOU IN THE FACE AND CALL YOU NAMES ...

  XIX - AIN’T EASY MEANS IT AIN’T CHEAP

  XX - THE ONLY WAY OUT IS FORWARD

  XXI - AT LEAST I STILL HAVE MY LOOKS

  XXII - WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE LIVING

  XXIII - WE WERE ALL ROBOTS

  XXIV - YOU SURE DO MAKE FRIENDS EVERYWHERE YOU GO

  XXV - THEY RESTED, THEY PLANNED, AND THEY CAME BACK

  XXVI - SHOOTING HEAT BEAMS FROM HER EYES

  XXVII - OPERATING UNDER THREAT OF THE MIDDLE FINGER OF GOD

  XXVIII - A REALLY POOR QUALITY OF HARDASS

  XXIX - A LONG HISTORY OF POKING ME WITH A SHARP STICK

  XXX - THE HAPPIEST MOMENT OF MY RECENT LIFE

  XXXI - THE PERFECT PLAN, A CLOSED CIRCUIT WITH THE CADENCE BEING DEATH

  XXXII - I’M MAKING A BET HERE

  XXXIII - AGAINST ALL MY BEST INSTINCTS. GO ON, KILL US ALL

  XXXIV - RIDING HERD ON MR. CATES AND HIS CHARMING ARRAY OF PERSONAL TICS

  XXXV - I’LL DO IT

  APPENDIX

  Acknowledgements

  extras

  about the author

  Teaser chapter

  THE TERMINAL STATE

  The grunt put his face in mine, wrapping his arms around me and squeezing with excruciating, surprising force, making my ribs bark and trapping the shredder between us. Blood had spilled out over his mouth and chin, making him look suddenly older, more dangerous.

  “Still got the thumbs, old man,” he panted at me. “You gonna break ’em with your mind? ”

  I liked this guy. I liked the troops better than the cops—the cops were all fucking attitude, dandies in their rich suits, even before they’d all been forcibly turned into avatars, Droids with digital brains. They had more metal in their brains than I liked, sure, but we all had faults. I tended to kill everyone I met, more or less by accident.

  Before I could tell him about my growing affection toward him, Remy rose up in the air and attached himself to the back of the soldier, his skinny arms locking around the grunt’s neck. Before I could even blink, he’d leaned in close like a fucking lover and bit the grunt’s ear, a savage, tearing bite.

  The guard screamed. It was a high-pitched, boyish scream. He staggered off me, his arms slapping up at Remy, and I smiled, thinking, That’s my boy.

  BY JEFF SOMERS

  The Electric Church

  The Digital Plague

  The Eternal Prison

  The Terminal State

  The Terminal State

  JEFF SOMERS

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Somers

  Excerpt from The Unit by Terry DeHart

  Copyright © 2010 by Terry DeHart

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN : 978 0 7481 1836 6

  This ebook produced by JOUVE, FRANCE

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  To my darling wife, whose surplus of good

  judgment makes up for my near-complete lack of it,

  for ass-kickings richly deserved, and for love

  I’m not nearly worthy of.

  PROLOGUE

  IT ONLY GOT DEADLY WHEN YOU STOPPED

  “Evry’ting fallen apart,” Dingane groused, rubbing his dry, cracked hands against his unshaven chin. “T’whole fuckin’ world, yeah? ”

  I raised the wooden cup from the wobbly table and held it in the air between us, steeling myself. I’d tasted some terrible things in my life, but the moonshine Bixon made out back routinely tasted like it had been filtered through corpses and it felt like it was taking a layer of your throat off as it went down to boot. I was a murderer, Plague survivor, and wanted man, and I still had to steady myself before each shot.

  “Quit your fucking bellyaching,” I advised Dingane, “and tell me if you got my stuff.”

  He was right—the System was cracking open—but that was no reason to encourage him. After years of plotting against each other, the System Police and the civilian government had been in open civil war for a year, piling up bodies and destroyed cities, burning through yen and bodies, building up these sudden fleets of military-grade hovers and weapons, things that hadn’t existed for decades, since unification had ended war for fucking ever, didn’t you know. The whole world, bound together for a while, one government, one police force, no armies in sight. And now we didn’t have police anymore, just armies, and it didn’t matter who won. You just wanted them to get it over with fast, before they killed everyone.

  Dingane paused, nasty, and then thought better of it and smiled. I immediately wished he hadn’t, green teeth and black gums, and I tipped the shot into my mouth to distract myself from his grin. My throat tried to close up in instinctual defense, but I was ready for that and just worked it on down. I breathed through my mouth.

  “Ohkay, ohkay,” Dingane said, affecting a jolly expression. “Av’ry is impatient today, uh? Av’ry’s in the revenge bidness, huh? You lis’n to Dingane, m’friend, an’ be happy. Fo’get these two men made you so fuckin’ angry.”

  I gave him a frown, a steady unhappy expression. “There’s a reason you’re crawling the fucking earth trading in junk and reclaimed ammunition, and I’m sitting here hiring you. When someone sells me out”—Wa Belling, handing me over to Kev Gatz and the Plague—“lies to me and leaves me for dead”—Michaleen, staring down at me from the hover as it drifted away, leaving me to be bricked in Chengara—“I don’t fucking forget.”

  You’re small, a voice whispered in my head. I blinked, ignoring it.

  Suddenly he was grinning, happy to oblige. Just like everyone else, if you were polite you got static. If you showed them your fist, they got polite. “You pay’n the bills heeyah, so ohkay,” he said h
urriedly. “I got mos’ de stuff you ask. Not easy t’transport heavy shit, t’big shit.” He spread his chalky hands. “No ’overs any mo’, Av’ry. From here t’Florida you can’t get no ’overs. An if you could, the fucking armay be shoot’n your ass down, trust. So I can’t get the big items. And bullets is hard. Ammo. Hard. No one makin’ any’ting anymore. Nowhere. Mexico, sheeit, usesta be, Mexico you get any’ting, now, no. Nothin’ in Mexico ’cept armay and cops, armay and cops, shootin’s at every’ting, bombing t’cities back to fuck.”

  It was my fate to listen to Dingane bitch and moan every now and then. I’d pulled his ear a few times to discourage him, but Dingane was one of those leathery fellows who looked a fucking century old and acted like pain didn’t mean shit to him anymore, which maybe it didn’t. Easier to let him talk. I wasn’t going anywhere anyway.

  That didn’t mean I couldn’t move things along. “Hell, Dingy, can’t you shut up for one fucking minute? ”

  He gave me the grin again. “Sho’ can, Av’ry, but I thought y’wanted news of your order, huh? You wanted clips, mag’zines, for what’ver caliber I could get. I got some, I got some, but it ain’t cheap or easy. N’one down south makin’ ’em up an’more. I gots to go far afield, you dig? And the Geeks—oh, fuck, the fuckin’ Geeks, Av’ry. Dey band t’gether, you know that? SPS? All these fuckin’ Techies, throwin’ shit down.”

  I let Dingane talk. It was good cover. I closed my eyes and pictured the place, Bixon’s uninsulated shack with the long bar made up of crates in the back, the wobbly tables lashed together, the big ugly metal stove in the middle of the room glowing red, pulsing with heat, making the whole place smell like my own armpit, and stinging the eyes with soot and smoke. Better than outside, where snow was howling—the weather was fucked up. You never knew what you were gonna get these days. Rumor was it was all fallout from the war screwing up the climate, but who the fuck knew. I’d never been in this part of the world before. Neither had most of us.

  I thought of Old Pick, long dead now. I thought about everything that fat old bastard had known, the data of lifetimes, the oral history of every criminal worth remembering in New York since Unification. And who knew what water he’d carried across the line from pre-Uni times. All of it gone now, like they’d never happened. And there’d never be another Pick, ever. Not these days.

  The tables, six of them, arranged randomly in the tight space beyond the bar, more or less around the stove that stood in the middle. Me and Dingane, the Mayor and her cronies playing dominoes, Tiny Timlin and some of the other kids looking puffy and sick on their fourth or fifth dose of Bixon’s poison. Bixon himself, behind the bar, a man who had never washed once since I’d known him, more beard than human at this point. All of them just flotsam, people fleeing the war and dead cities abandoned by one side or another, showing up here. For the most part, if you could lend a hand, you were pretty much welcome.

  If you couldn’t lend a hand, or didn’t want to, and stuck around anyway, that’s where I came in.

  “And this utter t’ing you ask me to look into, I t’ink I got you something.”

  I popped open one eye and put it on him. The black bastard was grinning again, pleased with himself. I shut my eyes again. “Yeah? ”

  I pictured the place again: one door in the front, a heavy piece of wood on crude but solid hinges, one in the rear of the room that led out to the back where Bixon created his horrible juice. I didn’t know how he made the stuff, and I didn’t want to know; if I went back there and found him milking some terrible giant green worm, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Behind me, the band was chicken pickin’ their way through a complex series of chords that managed to sound pretty good even though they had ten strings between the three of them. They were old guys, fucking ancient, but everyone here did something. If you couldn’t work the fields or make booze or kick the shit out of people when the Mayor told you to, you played a bass line on a single string and made it sound snappy.

  And then, bellied to the bar and examining his cup of booze dubiously, the Badge.

  Not a badge anymore, but certainly an old System Pig. I didn’t recognize him.

  Me either, the voice whispered faintly and was gone. Not a ghost, since Dick Marin was still—well, alive wasn’t the right word for it, but still in existence.

  But he had the look.

  “Yeah,” Dingane said, leaning forward so I could get a real good whiff of him, a courtesy. “Europe, I ’ear. Amsterdam. Both o’ dem. Solid source, uh? ”

  I shook my head, opening my eyes again. I didn’t hear from my ghosts much anymore, but they still popped up once in a while, still there, still complete and whole. Amsterdam. Both of them. I figured Michaleen would be in Europe—I wondered if Belling was working with him again. Knowing a city was a good start.

  “Why you lookin’ to leave, eh, Av’ry? ” Dingane shifted and spat into the sawdust on the floor. “Y’got a good thing here. Roof, food, friends. Should not walk away from dis, I don’ think.”

  I looked past Dingane. “I got unfinished business. Debts to settle.”

  The cop—ex-cop—turned to survey the place, sizing us up. He was tall and heavy, a gone-to-fat heaviness encased like a sausage inside a heavy leather overcoat, which looked battered and salty, and a dark-blue suit that had seen better days. His shoes were woefully unprepared for the mush outside, with a noticeable hole in one through which I could see his bare toe, pink and squirming. You didn’t need to see his credit dongle—assuming he still carried one like a totem—to know this ex-cop had seen better days.

  He still had that gloss, though. That cop arrogance. He’d somehow escaped Marin’s avatar purge, and he’d somehow wriggled away from the civil war to go adventuring, but even without backup or a discretionary budget or fucking shoes he still thought he was going to run the show here. His hair was bright red and thin, a halo around his pink head. His cheeks hung from his face like they were full of ball bearings and sagged with weight, and his eyes were watery and red.

  As I watched, the cop picked up his cup without looking at it and delivered it to his wet mouth. Tipping it back without hesitation, he swallowed the shot whole and returned the cup to the bar without comment or visible reaction. My respect for the man went up a half inch. Anyone who could drink Bixon’s poison without wincing or coughing or bursting into flames had something going on.

  Glancing to my right I found, as always, Remy staring at me. Remy had lost his gloss; he was starting to look like a normal human being. I didn’t know how old he was or why I always had squirts running after me like I was fucking Santa Claus, but Remy was coming along from the spoiled little brat in his shiny shoes screaming about his daddy. He was firming up, and I even had hope he’d someday stop calling me Mr. Cates. Then we had to work on the staring, but to be honest it came in handy. I nodded my head slightly, and the kid was up off his crate immediately and out into the storm.

  “Listen up!”

  The ex-cop’s voice was booming, deep and smooth, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. His eyes, though, roamed the space nervously, and his hands were curled into fists. The music stopped on a dime.

  “My name is Major Benjamin Pikar,” he shouted, turning slowly to make sure we all got the benefit of his jiggling jowls. “And I am here to protect you!”

  Major. I eyed him up and down and decided he’d given himself a promotion. His coat was captain, if that.

  Our mayor, who’d been elected by dint of referring to herself as the Mayor until we couldn’t stand it anymore, behaved herself and kept her eyes off me. Gerry was an amiable old hag who’d been a banker before the Plague. She’d lost her family during that little fun ride and had been in Chicago when the friendly folks of the System of Federated Nations Army had sent in five hundred thousand single-use bomb drones armed with F-90s, field-contained armaments. Wandering south out of the wreckage, she’d found us here in Englewood. She was skinny, with a huge triangle of a nose that bobbed up and down whenever s
he talked and gray eyes permanently squinted from years peering at holographic data streams. The last time one of these ex-pig entrepreneurs had shown up to save us from the big bad world, Gerry’d leaped up to announce she was the mayor and would speak for the town, and I’d been forced to knock her unconscious.

  “I have been assigned by order of Richard Marin, Director of Internal Affairs for the System Security Force, to take administrative charge of this settlement, bring it in line with the laws and customs of the System of Federated Nations, and organize your defense against both the insurgent forces and ... criminal aspects seeking to take advantage of you,” Pikar said with a straight face. I wondered, briefly, why Marin never just cut the cord and promoted himself to director of the Whole Fucking World or What Was Left of It After the F-90s.

  Can’t, the man’s outdated ghost whispered in my head. Programming limits. They thought by limiting my position they limited me.

  Pikar looked around to see how well his shit was floating, and he didn’t look pleased, his red face getting darker, his knuckles white at his sides.

  “Perhaps you have heard,” he managed to say calmly, putting his hands on his hips in a practiced motion that pushed his coat back to reveal the twin guns under his arms and the battered badge clipped to his belt, “rumors of SFNA Press Gangs in the region.” He nodded crisply. “I can confirm this.”

  I glanced at the two windows, small and cloudy, set into the front wall. Against the snow, I could clearly see dark forms gathered at each, and I put my eyes back on Pikar to make sure he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t; he was caught up in the pitch. I knew what was coming next. I could have written the script for him.

  “There is no reason to fear, however, as I am here now to organize your defense against these dangerous rebels.” He was all business now. He’d given us the scare, showed us the cannons, and now came the offer. He turned to signal Bixon for another drink. Bixon, as wide as he was tall, was all beery muscle without a hint of augments. He just stood there behind his rotting makeshift bar, hands hidden and caressing, I had no doubt, his prize possession: a personally restored 10-09 shredder, original SSF issue and held together, literally, by tightly wound strands of silvery wire. It had seven rounds left, and odds were it was going to explode in his hands if he ever dared fire it, but it still made grown men who knew what it was shit their pants when they saw it.