The Hammer Falls Page 14

  “So what are you doing here?” he said. “Aren’t you all supposed to be back on the road by now?”

  “Trask canceled a couple of the promo events, so we still have time to make Albany. Besides, they’re kicking you out of here in the morning anyway, right?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “I brought you your netlink.” She offered it to him. “Thought you might like it to pass the time.”

  “Thanks.” He took it, looked at it, thumbed the print reader.

  There was a message from Jack. A twinge of fear wormed into his belly.

  “What?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Your face just went from ghost to phantom.”

  “It’s nothing.” He wanted to get out of bed, put his feet on the floor, gather up his belongings, and jet back to Las Vegas. But the EKG/injector had not yet been installed. He might keel over just walking out the door. Realizing how cavalier such thoughts had been in the past, he knew that now was different. The grave beckoned him now, closer than at any point in his life, even the times he had been killed. Why was he so reluctant to die now, compared to all those times he had faced it in the pit? Was it because his final moment of mortality was staring into his face, so close he could smell its breath, or was it because of something else? Had it ever felt any less real? Going into every fight, he was always aware that something unexpected could happen, the kind of thing that would preclude regeneration, or worse, leave him a vegetable or an invalid. There were more than a few fighters like that; long forgotten pieces of meat kept alive by tubes and nurses.

  He had also spent the last hour wondering how he could scrape up the cash to pay for the injector in the first place.

  “I thought I should tell you something,” Tina said, smiling crookedly. “We know you don’t have the scratch, so we passed the hat. They’ll be coming to put in the injector in about half an hour.”

  Horace’s mouth fell open, and words would not come. Here he was again—the washed-up old has-been living off the charity of others. Fresh anger rose in him. “No, you can’t—”

  She waved him off. “Swallow your macho pride, it’s already done. Besides, you got enough to worry about. I tried to ask Bunny about what’s up with you, she seemed to know something. I’ve never seen her shut up so fast.” Elbows on her knees, Tina glanced repeatedly between Horace and her clasped hands as she was talking, and cleared her throat a little. “Trask says we’re pulling out in the morning....”

  She kept talking, but Horace retreated into anger. Why would these people throw together their hard-earned money in times so hard for a beaten-down old man with nothing left to offer anybody?

  No one wants to see a sick old man die. Was it that simple? Was that how he saw himself now? How long would he let other people help him limp along?

  “How’s Lex?” he said.

  “Still an asshole, but a little more tolerable now that he’s been put in his place. He’s gonna have to win in Albany. He had to regenerate a cheekbone. On top of what he had to pay you, he’s broke. No more new shoes for Jocie.”

  “That woman—”

  “Is a fucking succubus, didn’t I try to tell you?”

  “Yeah, you did.”

  “Right now, they’re back in their compartment, scheming like Machiavelli’s bastard kids.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Get this, I heard them talking one night, right? Have you heard about these new cybernetic implants, you know, for the vagina?”

  He chuckled, even though his throat was still dry, “The porn-star ones that pulse and vibrate?”

  “Right. One night she was trying to talk Lex into buying her one of those, along with breast implants.”

  “Could be interesting.”

  “If by interesting you mean dripping with putrescent pustules. Did you see that thing when she went down? Looked like an old catcher’s mitt.”

  He chuckled, and pain shot through him. “Don’t make me laugh.”

  At that moment, Dr. Pentz walked in. “It’s time, Mr. Smith,” she said. “There’s a taxi outside.”

  The taxi took him to a run-down building in a neighborhood abandoned by everything except stray dogs and vermin. Graffiti plastered the few walls still standing. But this building, what looked like a hundred-year-old medical clinic, had a moving van parked out front. A couple of orderlies helped him from the taxi to the front door. The moment he passed inside, the feel of the building changed. The interior was ancient but spotless. Two thin, pale-skinned people sat in the ancient waiting room, watery-eyed, beaten down, dirt-poor, but hopeful. All the fixtures and architecture were old, built before the turn of the twenty-first century, but the equipment in the operating room looked new enough to be functional. Dr. Pentz was there with two nurses.

  “What is this place?” Horace said.

  “It doesn’t exist. Completely off the grid,” Dr. Pentz said.

  “But why?”

  She tied a surgical mask around her face. “We have a corporate medical system that turns human life into a commodity, a profit margin. Some of us still believe medicine is more than that. We acquire equipment and supplies as best we can from bankruptcy auctions, refurbishing salons, charitable donors.” She gestured him toward an upright surgical chair.

  The procedure itself took remarkably little time. They placed a palm-sized box of plastic and stainless steel, about two centimeters thick, directly over his heart, and secured it to his flesh with some sort of subcutaneous molecular adhesive.

  “As we discussed,” Dr. Pentz said, “this device will monitor your heart. It’s powered by bio-electricity and body heat. If you experience another cardiac arrest, it will inject your Go Juice, as you call it, directly into your heart via high-pressure molecular injectors. No needles, but it will sting significantly.”

  “That’s okay, Doc. I’ve already had a needle in my heart today.” He chuckled, but her brow remained furrowed.

  “The device is fairly durable, as long as no one hits it with a weapon. If it’s torn off, you’ll have a square of muscle laid bare. That will also sting significantly.”

  Horace looked down at it, grinning in spite of her wry tone. “You’re a peach, Doctor. What happens if I push this red button?”

  “You give yourself a full dose. Overdo it, and your heart will probably explode anyway.”

  “How many doses does it hold?”

  “Three.”

  “What if I need to refill it?”

  “There’s a reservoir here under this flip-up stopper. Just pour it in.”

  “I shoulda gotten me one of these years ago! Anything else I need to know?”

  “Nothing that you’ll listen to.”

  “I know you don’t approve, Doc, but thanks.”

  “Be well, ‘Mr. Smith.’ You’ll be free to go in a few hours, after the adhesion has finished setting. Meanwhile I have other patients.”

  After they had gone, he eased back into the chair, picked up his netlink, and looked at it. There was still that message from Jack, hovering over him like a harbinger of merciless doom. Did he really want to know? Something told him that it was bad.

  Jack’s message:

  THIS CAME OUT AN HR AGO. POSTED ON UNDRGRND FEED. GOT UR NAME ON IT.

  The message was attached to a video. He connected to the video. It opened to a happy scene of dancing teddy bears and frolicking unicorns with the caption:

  A LOVE LETTER TO THE HAMMER.

  The video dissolved to a dark smear of grainy, jumpy video that eventually resolved into a dim room of cinder-block walls. Two fluorescent lanterns hung from hooks in the ceiling. Standing in the center of the room was a woman, nude, bathed in pale, flickering light, with ropes knotted around her wrists, pulled tight toward opposite walls. Brown hair shadowed bruised, puffy cheeks and eyes. Blood ran from her nose. She was weeping through a filthy-looking gag. The netlink screen was too small for him to discern if she was really Lilly, but from here the tall, willowy body
certainly looked like hers. He knew the curve of her breasts, the shape of her nipples, the bones of her slim hips.

  Something thick and bitter welled up in his throat.

  Three shadowy men occupied the shadows around her, all of them swathed in black clothing, patent leather hoods with pinholes for eyes and ragged slashes for mouths. The camera approached her, and the weeping grew louder. The dull steel of a knife blade appeared in the frame in the other hand of the camera operator. A tuneless humming started from the camera man, as if getting ready for some mundane everyday task that was not altogether unpleasant.

  The camera circled her, ducking under her arm. The humming continued, and her weeping turned to whimpering. The other men remained still.

  The cameraman laid the flat of the knife blade against her naked back. She flinched away from it. He stroked her with the steel, slowly and sensually, as if it were a lover’s feather. The point raked a line of pink welt across her petal-soft skin. There were the two moles below Lilly’s right shoulder blade. The point of the knife paused there, as if considering whether it should connect the dots.

  Horace clutched a hand over his mouth. He wanted to turn it off, tear his eyes away, but he didn’t dare. He had to know.

  The knife moved out of frame, which hovered upon her shoulder blade, slid up her long shapely neck toward the side of her head.

  The frame jerked slightly. She gasped, flinched, and cried out in pain.

  Nausea washed through him.

  The video cut to a black silhouette in a shadowy room. Jars glinted on shelves surrounding the silhouette’s chair. “Sleep well, Hammer, get your rest,” said Yvgeny Mogilevich’s voice. “Because I’m going to fuck you. And I’m going to keep fucking you until I can’t fuck anymore.”

  The video dissolved to the face of a brightly grinning teddy bear. The teddy bear winked.

  Across the room, Tina slept in the chair.

  He had kept the volume on the video low, but the sound of the woman’s shocked outcry stabbed deep into his brain and writhed like a speared cobra.

  Helplessness washed through him in a sick deluge like he had never experienced before. A few hours out of commission, and he had lost her. Or maybe he had lost her.

  At least there was one bright side. If Lilly and her kids were already dead, suicide missions were always easier to pull off than rescues.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Amid the predawn mustering of light at the horizon, with a sweatshirt covering the box implanted into his chest, Horace walked out the front door of the clandestine clinic to the taxi. It drove him through empty, debris-strewn streets to where the road train waited. Alone in the taxi with no driver, the unfamiliar weight of the box hanging there in the center of his chest, gave him too much time trapped with his thoughts. Horace’s battered old heart clumped along as it had for a while, but today with a more uncomfortable weight upon it—all these people he barely knew were treating him like family. They didn’t have to call the ambulance. They didn’t have to pay for his new injector out of their own pockets. They didn’t have to wait for him, losing money with every passing minute in lost promotions and missed appearances. The thought of it brought a tightness to his chest, a thickness to his throat, neither of which came from his bum ticker.

  The moment he stepped into the door of the rearmost car, the power plant began to hum with strength.

  Bunny’s voice came over the PA system, “All a-board!”

  The train eased forward.

  Back in his berth, Horace eased himself into the chair. He still had the bruises from Lex to contend with. At least the lacerations under his chin had been bandaged.

  Unfathomable weariness suffused him. Everything hurt. His eyelids felt like sandpaper. Lead weights hung from every limb. He hadn’t slept a wink while waiting for Dr. Pentz to give him the green light to leave. Every time he closed his eyes, the knife slid across the inside of his eyelids, across her naked back and the two moles he knew so well, and her gasp of shock sent another lump into his throat. Another pile of guilt, a whole goddamn smorgasbord of it. He scrubbed a hand over his stubbled face.

  He took his netlink toward the front of the train and encountered one of the other fighters, Saul Shockwave, a short, spitfire of a man with his hair twisted into a pincushion of bleached spikes.

  “Glad to see you up and around, Hammer,” Saul said with a solemn nod.

  “I’m much obliged to you. To all of you.” Horace offered his hand, and they shook earnestly. His voice still sounded like he’d smoked eight cigars in a row, but at the sound of it, heads emerged from the berths.

  With the lump still in his throat, he shook hands all the way to the front of the car. Jocie and Lex, on the other hand, were not to be found.

  The same happened in every car moving forward, going through the gym, one fighter after another offering their hands, their respect, their admiration, anecdotes about the first time they had seen him fight. It was too much. By the time he reached the front of the train, the thought of another well-wisher made him want to flee like a wounded buffalo.

  Bunny answered his knock immediately. “Come on in, Mr. Harkness.”

  He shut the door behind him. “You’ve already done plenty, Bunny, and I’m grateful for that, but...there are some things I gotta know.”

  She regarded him from her kitchen table, where a bowl of breakfast paste sat before her. “Are you hungry? I can offer you some of this. It’s not bad if you drown it in sweetener.”

  “No, thanks.” There wasn’t a cell in his body that felt like eating after what he had seen. “There’s...this video.” How could he even expect her to watch such a thing? “Could it be faked?”

  “What kind of video?”

  He sighed. “Maybe a snuff film. I’ve seen blood and gore scattered from here to Timbuktu, but nothing has ever affected me like this,” he said.

  She flinched a little. “Do you love her?”

  “It’s my fault. That’s their way, the Russians. Cross them and they kill your whole family. I should have known better. I was afraid they would go after her.”

  “There was nothing you could have done differently.”

  “I didn’t have to cut Dmitri Mogilevich’s head off and leave it in his lap, for starters.”

  Her lips quirked into a grim smile. “Maybe, but I’ve been around, too. I’ve been in the joint. I can say with certainty it wouldn’t have mattered. They would still have gone after her or her kids. They always go after the kids...” Her voice cracked and trailed off. She clasped trembling hands across her stomach. “The only thing you could have done differently would have been never to get involved with them in the first place.”

  “Never been a foresight kinda guy.” If he was honest with himself, he’d thought he would either be able to repay the debt or be dead anyway.

  Bunny’s eyes drifted to the 2-D photograph of Young Bunny with two daughters, her face tightening into a mask.

  After a long moment, he said, “Are they alive?”

  Her gaze never left the photo. “I’m sure they are. Somewhere. Working off mom’s ‘debt to society,’ complete with brainwashing and full medical.” Then she swallowed hard, shook herself, and straightened up. “Okay, I’ll have a go at your video.”

  She sat back in a chair. Her eyes fluttered slightly, looking simultaneously inward and outward. “There’s all kinds of chatter, it’s hard to sift through. Found the video.”

  “Can something like this be faked?” he said.

  “Maybe. Have you seen the John Wayne and Audrey Hepburn version of Gone with the Wind? Any visual image can be faked with enough time, equipment, and skill.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’m not a video expert. I don’t know what to look—oh, my god!”

  “You’re watching it now?”

  Her hand clutched her mouth. She nodded, her gaze staring into the depths of the net. “Sick bastards! Pardon my language. Just FYI, the FBI is looking into it, too. They have bots that sn
iff out this kind of thing. The footprints of their crawlers and sniffers are everywhere around this thing.”

  “Maybe the FBI can find her.” Federal law enforcement still existed, but had been diminished by decades of budget cuts and scandals.

  She snorted. “Do you think an organization like the Russian mob can exist without the sufferance of the government? The FBI only investigates when the stink reaches heaven. I’ve been doing a little more sniffing of my own, by the way. This guy’s name, Dmitri Mogilevich, it shows up all over the place. Front companies and dummy corporations daisy-chained all the way to the moon. They have their fingers in hundreds of pies, and I’m still counting. Trouble is, I can’t do anything to them.”

  “So, do you know someone who can check out the video?”

  “Already sent the message.” Her eyes focused on him again. “If he’s awake, he might get back to us before the water’s hot. If he’s not, it’ll be a few hours. Want a cup of tea?”

  Horace took a deep breath and rubbed a hand over his stubbled pate.

  “So how do you feel?” she said.

  “About which part?”

  “Your heart.”

  He rubbed the flesh around the box embedded in his chest. “Like a shopping cart with a wobbly wheel.” The urge to just leave Bunny alone roared through him—it was a dangerous thing, being his friend.

  She got up, poured some water into a teapot, and put it in the thermolator to warm. “You like cardamom?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind. I’ll make you some tea. You should try it. It’ll help calm you down. In fact, given your condition, you should probably make that a way of life.”

  “I’m starting to get that.” He pointed at the ear and back of his skull. “So what’s it like?”

  “Being a slicer? Having an AI embedded in my brain? Having a firehose to the entirety of human knowledge and folly pumping into my head? Which do you want first?”

  “Your call.”

  She set out a cup for Horace, and with strange precision measured out some tea leaves into a ball of wire mesh. “Well, first of all, it makes me one of the most cynical people on Earth. Twelve billion people on this planet and half of them are below average intelligence—or below average ethical standards. The rampant stupidity of so many just boggles my mind, and it’s all up there to pour into your head like vomit, all the time and forever. And you know, there’s just as much sweet and uplifting stuff out there, people helping people, inspiring people, but it’s so hard to remember any of that in this deluge of sewage that would spew directly into my brain if I’d let it.