The Digital Plague Read online

  His breath was all around me for a second, warm and sweet, and I imagined thousands, millions of those tiny drones being pulled from me like an invisible wind, burrowing into him, setting his death in motion. Across the room Terries opened his eyes and blinked at me in shock, frozen for a moment. I picked the spot. A gap between two monitors that showed me his belly—a gut shot wasn’t immediately lethal, but it was painful and incapacitating, useful when you wanted to put someone down without making a decision just yet. His head rose above the equipment like a red moon, coiffed and shaved, manicured, and I could kill him with a twitch if I wanted to.

  My eyes found Jabali, who stood frozen in place, his gun half lowered. His eyes met mine and he extended two fingers from his grip on the automatic. Two cops behind me. Not much chance of putting them both on their asses with my smooth balletic moves. I put my eyes back on Terries. Everything had gone completely to shit so fast, I was still catching up. I knew I didn’t deserve anything. I knew I was a bad man. But this was getting ridiculous.

  There was a certain freedom in being completely fucked, though. I thought, Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, and squeezed the trigger just as the cop behind me shoved the barrel of his gun viciously into the shallow skin on the back of my head, and my shot went wild. Terries dropped to the floor with a screech. I hadn’t killed him, though, because he proceeded to scream and thrash around.

  “You,” the cop said, almost in my ear, “are a stupid little shit, huh?”

  I closed my eyes and thought, yep. I heard the rustle of fabric and winced just before the butt of his gun.

  XII

  Day Six:

  I Might Even Survive

  Emerging from gauzy semiconsciousness, I found I was trapped in a room with assholes.

  There were two of them, big guys with permanent scabs on their knuckles and nicotine stains on the tips of their fingers. One was older, maybe thirty, balding and running to fat. He wore a purple suit that had been skillfully cut to hide his paunch, the fabric shimmering as he moved. He made a big show of removing his hat and jacket when he stepped into the room, and every time he left the room, which he’d done a dozen times already, he made a big show of putting them both back on again. It would have been amusing to watch if he hadn’t spent all his time in the room beating the fucking tar out of me.

  The other one was sitting on a table near the door of the Blank Room, eating cigarettes and watching. He looked like he was going to burst out of his suit, the shirt collar straining to contain the bulging veins and muscles of his neck. He had a stiff-looking shock of red hair that stood up from his head as if it hadn’t been washed in a long time and bright green eyes that might have been augments, the way they shone at me in an unbroken stare. He chewed his tobacco steadily, hands clasped in his lap, legs dangling forgotten. He was wearing a simple black suit with shiny black shoes, thick soled and sturdy.

  “The only reason you’re still alive,” Purple Suit wheezed, wiping sweat from his brow, “is because we haven’t gotten permission to kill you yet.”

  One of my eyes was swollen shut, and my lips were split and rubbery. I nodded my head at him.

  “Don’t you fucking nod, you piece of shit—”

  He was losing steam, so the kick he landed on my chest wasn’t enough to knock me over. The chair I was tied to—a battered gray metal one—just skidded backward a few inches, leaving me sitting there gasping and heaving, a thin trickle of blood dripping from my mouth. Purple Suit put his hands on his knees and bent over, breathing heavily. He didn’t look too good. Every ten or fifteen minutes he’d been leaving the room, leaving my sphere of influence, I thought, and each time he returned he looked worse. I imagined my little invisible drones eating away at him, a bit at a time, waking up each time he walked out the door and going to sleep again each time he returned.

  Red just turned his head to spit and stared at me.

  “Goin’ out, Happ,” Purple Suit said, wheezing and coughing.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Just need a break. Watch him, okay?”

  As Purple Suit went through his laborious dressing routine, coughing wetly the whole time until his round bald head was a fiery shade that was starting to resemble his suit, the other cop just stared at me. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, thick angry veins. He hadn’t left the room in two hours and looked healthy as a horse.

  “I’ll make sure no harm comes to him,” he said tonelessly.

  They’d scanned my face, of course, me and Jabali, and figured they’d hit the jackpot: Avery Cates, cop killer. Officially, I had no record, but every cop in New York—maybe the whole System—knew me. I’d come to in the Blank Room and it had been just these two ever since, Purple Suit tuning me up with standard SSF dedication to his job, Big Red sitting there and staring. I couldn’t tell if he was enjoying it or not; he just stared. The room was featureless and silent, just me, a table, a chair, and two System Pigs who didn’t even ask me any questions. They weren’t beating information out of me, they were just beating me. I’d killed a lot of cops. Not as many as they thought I had, but enough.

  I let my head drop onto my chest. They hadn’t logged me in officially; they’d wanted me all to themselves for a while, and if my name had popped up on everyone’s screen they’d have been forced to kick me upstairs. I would have floated above their level pretty quickly. So, I wasn’t officially there. Anything might happen. Shit, I might even survive.

  Big Red suddenly spoke. “How’s it feel to have every single person within a mile of you want you dead?” he asked cheerfully, his face suddenly animating. His smile was terrible, too wide and too strong.

  I moved my dry tongue over what was left of my lips, making them sting. “Normal,” I croaked back, blowing bloody snot everywhere.

  He nodded. “Don’t worry. We won’t kill you. We’re going to beat you half to death, then nurse you tenderly back to health and well-being. Then we’ll get two more guys in here to beat you half to death. We’re going to start a club.”

  I struggled to breathe. My throat felt tight and flooded.

  Big Red slid off the table and produced a single unfiltered cigarette from a pocket. He crushed it in his big hands and extracted a wad of tobacco from his palm and stuck it between his gums and cheek. “There’s a new policy, you see, sent down from the fucking Mountain. The King Worm says, here’s a list of people you can’t kill, on pain of my wormy fucking boot up your quivering ass. So even though you’re not really here, we hesitate: you can’t take a shit without Dick Marin knowing what color it was and how often you grunted.” He rubbed his hands clean, paper and tobacco dust falling to the floor. “Your friend, the haircut, isn’t on any list, though. You can stop worrying about him.”

  I tried to close my eyes. My left one was already swollen shut, so there was no change, and my right one wouldn’t close all the way. I hadn’t known Jabali well, or for long. I added him to the list.

  Big Red knelt down until his face was even with mine. His bright eyes bulged from their sockets, his angular face skeletal. His jacket hung open and I saw the glint of his holographic gold badge sizzling coldly in its little metal wallet and the black, lightless form of his gun in its holster, low under his shoulder.

  “I’m Captain Nathan Happling, Mr. Cates,” he said softly. “And I’ll be your personal tour guide through this expe-rience.”

  I started to laugh, swallowed some blood, and began coughing, each spasm making me feel like my eyes were going to just pop out of my head and roll across the floor. I liked this guy.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been in the Blank Room; consciousness came and went. I’d been tuned up by System Pigs before, but never like this. Before, there’d been a point to it, information to be extracted, a lesson to be learned. This was just an endless beating. They didn’t want anything from me, they didn’t need me to do anything for them. I was a cop killer and they were happy to have me, unofficially, in their grasp.

  I faded back as P
urple Suit returned to the room, pale and glistening with a cold-looking sweat. He walked in stiffly, grimacing. Happling was back on the table, chewing away, his buggy eyes tracking his partner as he staggered toward me, leaving his coat on for a change.

  “It’s fucking pandemonium out there,” he said, panting.

  “Peace and quiet in here,” Happling said. “You okay, Bob-O? You’re looking a little under the weather.”

  “Fuck you, Happ,” Purple Suit growled, standing in front of me. “I think—” he started to say, and then collapsed into a wave of heavy, thick coughs that kept him bent over double for a minute, his face filling with dark color. When he got himself back under control, he grunted and spat a glob of reddish, spongy phlegm onto the floor. We all stared at it for a moment.

  “Bob-O,” Happling said quietly. “Maybe you oughta take a break.”

  Purple Suit half turned toward Happling, then stiffened, his head bending to the side in an unnatural way as a choking noise hissed out of him. Then he collapsed, falling in a heap onto the floor. For a second both Happling and I just stared down at him.

  “Uh-oh,” Happling said softly, sliding off the table. “Bob-O’s down.” He crouched down near the other cop and glanced at me, one eyebrow up, his mouth twitching into an almost smile. “You didn’t kill him . . . with your mind, did you?” he asked, and then exploded into raucous laughter, feeling up Bob-O for a pulse.

  I revised my earlier impression: I was trapped in a room with an asshole and a fucking psycho. I concentrated on breathing through the rapidly narrowing aperture that had once been my mouth. When the door to the Blank Room flashed open again, I was almost happy—anything would be better than being trapped in this tiny, shielded space with Big Red Happling, guffawing over the soon-to-be-corpse of his partner.

  For a moment she was framed in the doorway, a tiny, tiny black woman with skin so dark she looked burned, her hair a curly mass of reddish brown in a cloud around her face. Maybe my age, maybe younger, it was impossible to tell. I had the quick, confusing impression I’d seen her before, but fuck, I’d seen hundreds of cops and tried to forget each one as quickly as possible. She was pretty. Or would have been if the eyes set in that round, symmetrical face weren’t the hardest eyes I think I’d ever seen.

  “Captain,” she bit off, sounding like the picture you’d find under unamused if you looked it up.

  To my amazement Happling leaped to his feet. “Sir,” he said, taking a step back.

  “Oh, at ease, you jackass,” she snapped. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Happling backed away from Purple Suit as if escaping something invisible. “He just collapsed, sir.”

  The woman’s eyes were dark brown, giving the impression of dark holes in her face. They jumped from the body on the floor to me, and then to Happling, the expression on her face never changing. “Is he dead?”

  Happling glanced down at Purple Suit and then back up at the wall across from him. “Not yet,” he said, with just the barest hint of his spastic smile.

  I ran my swollen tongue over my lips. “Who the hell are you?” It felt good to sass the cops; I had nothing much to lose on the deal. It wasn’t as if they were going to give me credit for taking this shit like a man, after all, let me walk out of there alive.

  She flicked those empty eyes at me and held them there for a moment, her whole body so perfectly still it made me nervous all over again—it was the sort of stillness that usually preceded violence. “Colonel Janet Hense,” she finally said, stepping into the room and letting the door flash shut behind her. She was carrying a small, thin leather briefcase and was dressed in all black: smartly cut pants that looked good on her, a thick black turtleneck shirt, and a sumptuous-looking black leather jacket. Tossing the briefcase onto the table, she stared at Happling for a second or two, seconds he spent studying the far wall as if his life depended on figuring out what it was made of. Then she turned to me, reaching inside her jacket.

  For a split second, I tensed, thinking, Shit, the SSF calls in the big shots to put a bullet in your head.

  But it was just a tube of leather that twisted open to reveal a skinny, shiny metal flask and a metal disc.

  “Drink, Mr. Cates?” Hense said, her blank eyes on me as her hands set about twisting and turning the pieces into an ersatz bar. “Gin. Real gin.”

  This was unexpected, and all my alarm bells sounded for a second. I doubted the Pigs routinely poisoned people in their Blank Rooms, and I reminded myself that I had nothing to lose anyway, so I forced myself to relax. “Got a straw?”

  She’d twisted the disc into a cup and unscrewed the cap from the flask, and now she stared at me again for a moment. “Cut ’im loose,” she said.

  Happling visibly stuttered, his arms twitching and one foot shooting out before he stopped himself. He looked at her. “What?”

  “Cut Mr. Cates loose,” she said slowly, biting off each syllable, “so we can have a fucking drink like civilized people.”

  Happling hesitated for a second more, his big hands clenched and his throat working within the tight, painful-looking circle of his collar. Then he launched himself at me, a thin blade suddenly flashing out from one hand with a snap. He disappeared behind me and with a jerk my hands were free. My arms were completely numb, and my feet were still bound to the chair. I willed my arms to move, and they did, in a creepy way that seemed completely separate from me. Hense leaned forward and held the shiny cup out to me and I saw my alien hand reach up and take it. I held it in front of me, the smell of liquor very strong. I stared back at her, the cup shaking slightly in my grasp. I was aware of her smell: natural, a good, woman’s smell.

  She held up the flask, nodded, and tilted back a deep swallow. I shrugged inwardly and did my best, dashing the cup against my broken lips and getting most of the liquid inside my mouth. There was a moment of searing pain, and then the liquor made its way down my throat, where it bloomed in sudden warmth, the first good feeling I’d had in . . . hours? Days? Who the fuck knew.

  Hense held out her hand and I returned the cup. She carefully crushed it back into its original form and replaced everything inside the leather case, fastidious and precise. I watched her through my one squinted eye, waiting. In my experience, when System Pigs were nice to me it was a very bad sign of things to come. The last time one had offered me a drink, he’d almost cut off both my thumbs a few minutes later.

  “We had an interesting conversation with DPH director Terries about an hour ago,” she said suddenly, her eyes fixed on the flask, her voice level. “When he came to in the hospital. He’s concerned that he’s going to die very soon, and his doctors seem to agree. He told us to find you, that you were the key to the sickness that’s stirring up downtown. It took me a long time to locate you, however, as several officers had taken you into custody and not logged you in.”

  Happling stood at attention, his eyes aimed up at the ceiling.

  She let that marinate for a moment and then finished tying up her flask. “I have not passed this information on yet, for Captain Happling’s sake. Tell me what’s going on, Mr. Cates.”

  I cleared my throat and spat blood onto the floor. “I tried telling Tweedledum and Tweedledummer,” I said, my throat burning as if I were exhaling gravel. “Twice.”

  For a second or two, we all contemplated Purple Suit.

  “Tell me again,” she suggested.

  I told her again. I had it boiled down to a tight two-minute pitch by now. “As for you, take a look at Tweedledum. You get more than a few feet from me for any period of time, you’re on a countdown to that.” I raised my head, trying to blow some of the scabby mess out of my nose and clear the airway. A sudden crazy hope flared in me, and the word survive popped into my head again. “Look, take it to Marin. Tell Marin who you’ve got here. Tell him why I’m here.” Dick Marin wouldn’t pass up a chance to personally execute me, I didn’t doubt, but he’d also take this shit seriously.

  “Don’t fucking tell me what to do,�
�� she said in a lazy, unconcerned tone. She looked at Happling and he looked at her, shrugging his eyebrows. Then she looked back at me. “A few feet away from you, huh? Terries didn’t mention that. He just insisted you be brought to him for lab work. How fast?”

  I shrugged. “Seems like it varies. I don’t know why.”

  She nodded, taking a deep breath. “Captain Happling, take charge of Mr. Cates.”

  Happling nodded and strode around behind me. The chair tilted backward until I was looking up at his pale face. He grinned down at me and said in a bizarrely warm, friendly tone, “Hands in your pockets, buddy, okay?” and then, incredibly, he winked down at me. “If I see your hands, I break them.”

  He spun me around so he could drag me behind him, and I heard the door flash open again. “Mr. Cates,” Hense said briskly, “you are now my property. You will be within ten feet of me and Captain Happling at all times. If you try anything, we will shoot you dead and find out if you need to be alive to have this miraculous preserving effect on people.”

  “Colonel, sir,” Happling said in a tentative, unhappy voice. “New directives on POIs state we’re supposed—”

  “Fuck the directive on Persons of Interest, Captain,” Hense said coolly. “This man doesn’t get more than ten feet away from me under any circumstances, understood?”

  There were two or three beats of silence. “Understood, sir.” Happling finally said.

  When she spoke again, the harshness was gone for a second. “If what Terries and this piece of shit say is true, Nathan, we’re dead if he gets more than a few feet away from us. Dead like your asshole partner back there. What do you think happens if we log Cates in? Do you think the fucking King Worm is going to let us tag along?”

  Happling grunted. “I said understood.”

  The corridor beyond the Blank Room was empty and clinically white: clean and monochrome, the bright lights hurting my eyes. I counted fifteen lighting fixtures as I was dragged backward, and then the world tilted and I was pulled into an elevator. In the second before the doors snapped shut, I saw three fat drops of blood on the nice clean floor. This cheered me up for some unknown reason.