It turned out to be more than fine. Haldor was able to jump almost twice his normal height, standing, and could take six-foot strides at an incredible pace. His handball team soon rocketed to the top of the Icelandic charts, Icelanders seeing no reason that an unusual surgery should require artificial handicaps in aid of the other teams. The carbon-fiber and titanium bones in his legs bonded perfectly with his muscles such that they flexed slightly, giving him more power and speed than his even his surgeons had imagined. Haldor spent eight wonderful months as the world's most famous man before turning up dead of morphine overdose in his Nike-sponsored summerhouse in Denmark. It turned out that addiction ran in the family.
Since then the U.S. Army, NATO, most of the Caribbean and a hundred individual profiteers had tried to replicate the surgery. The idea of supermen that could out-run and out-jump any normal man appealed enormously, but the realities of massive body reshaping cut everyone's fantasies short. Being kept flayed alive for a month in a salt tub was not, it turned out, especially healthy, and finding the right balance of muscle growth and hormone therapy was almost impossible. Haldor Haldorsson had been a miracle, but he'd inspired the world to think of their bodies as something malleable. One year later a Taiwanese baker underwent the surgery after being run over by a tank and survived. Another wave of attempts followed. It produced three successes, in Russia, Japan, and Austin. John Tucker was one of the winners in the karma lottery that time - and the only previously unharmed volunteer for the procedure. An estimated 130 people weren't so lucky and were left permanently crippled; the process didn't leave a solid enough bone structure to fit normal prosthetics. Two people died. A year after that the bodmod scene had truly taken off, and the cage-fights like those that Marcus competed in began to overtake sports like "normal" boxing. But there had yet to be any more successful Rood's - most folks were happy taking a prosthetic leg and a lifetime of walking to a month of pain and the possibility of being permanently relegated to a wheelchair.
The upshot of this was that a single tattoo from John Tucker earned him about as much as Tonx made in a week of work at Greener Pastures. It also made him a lot easier to find. Tonx headed downtown, the Texas heat making tiny rivulets of gel trickle down his temples as he went.
He and John had been talking about how to make getting Roo'd safer for years now; being Roo'd had been Tonx's dream before he had gotten into MIT, and being out hadn't diminished his dream any. But Tonx was neither as crazy as John nor any less intelligent, and he wasn't ready to take the risk until he had a reasonable chance at success. Recently John had been sending him a steady trickle of emails hinting that he had found some new information, but they'd always been couched in terms of cash flow. Tonx didn't hold it against him - John knew a lot of people, and sometimes getting information cost. John knew Tonx wanted to get Roo'd bad, and Tonx knew John would put him at the head of the list if he ever got the cash, but for now John's lips were sealed. Which was okay - John was a purist. He wouldn't sell the info to the military, he'd make sure a true bodmodder got it first. That didn't make Tonx any less anxious; there were plenty of bodmodders with money out there, and Tonx wanted to be one of the few while there was still time.
After too much time in the afternoon sun Tonx finally found what he was after. Tucked in the basement level of a three-floor polyplast apartment building was the gleaming green sparkle of neon. A glance through the window told Tonx he had the right place and he slouched his way through the undersized doorway. The AC hit him like a blow to the chest, over dried air artificially chilled by a dozen old units mounted in the windows along the top edge of the wall. This was the place. Seven pairs of eyes turned and sized him up as he came through the door, the dim light of the beer sign over the bar illuminating countless rugs and cushions covering the floor around the bar. Tonx had gotten lucky - three of the teenage boys situated in careful nonchalance around the low table in the center of the room were sporting skeleton grins like his. Their luminescent piercings slowly pulsed a reddish hue in a broad imitation of a skull's smile, intricately permed and pressed curls held up with foot-long fakir needles. The remaining two boys wore identical floor-length carbon-fiber trench coats and wraparound sunglasses. Neos. Serious throwback culture there, thought Tonx - despite the Matrix's cult following he was always surprised to see the dated style reappear. The one girl on the floor with the boys was broad-hipped and overweight, white folds of flesh puckering out between the cotton strings of her undersized corset. Her wonderbra exhibited all the gravitationally impossible qualities its advertisements promised, the wattles of her chin pooling slightly where her bizarrely tanned cleavage met with her neck. The curlicues of her eye makeup were uneven, Tonx decided, but her lips looked great. Probably her first mod.
He walked up to the bar. The massive lump of a woman there had her arms folded impassively, the grayish-white plugs of earphones protruding from uneven ears. Her chin nodded slightly in tune with the unheard music, and her deep-set eyes glared over Tonx's shoulder. Someone took a pull from the oxygen bar set in the table on the floor behind him, the burbling sound long and clear.
"Bear" he said.
"Tonx" she replied, her eyes snapping to his, her broad smile spreading to reveal three golden teeth and one silver cap. Bear was serious old school, had been piercing and tattooing for years up in Seattle. She'd moved to Austin for reasons unknown, her steady hand and solid bedside manner making her an instant favorite. Trouble was, she didn't go in for anything more high-tech than antibiotic cream, and most of her clients weren't content with that. He'd spent a few drunken nights teasing it out of her and had been impressed to learn that her reasons were spiritual: she felt that bodmod was a ritual to be honored, a rite of pain and passage, and using machines or tech tools to do the otherwise impossible went against the meaning in it. Not that she held it against those that chose to go that way - just that for her, she only wanted to do what she could do with her own two hands. Bear was a true-blue bodmodder, and Tonx had to respect her for sticking to her guns even if he disagreed with her reasoning.
The downside of all this was that she only really got older folks and kids in her shops, people that were too chickenshit to go for what they usually really wanted. Kids like the ones sitting behind Tonx now.
Didn't matter. Bear was a good egg, as Tonx's dad used to say, and he knew he could trust her. He pulled up a stool and nodded towards the lone beer tap.
"Buy you a drink, Bear?" he asked. She smiled, thick natural muscle rippling up the side of her head and into her graying crew cut.
"You know I don't drink, you little cunt. But I'll cred you a free one for bringing me the looks from the boys there." She glanced briefly over his shoulder at the kids behind him, and Tonx smiled. He could tell by the furtive whispers that he'd been recognized. They'd be messaging their friends now, the bar's reputation jumping on the newsgroups even as he sat there. The mods styles he'd invented weren't popular everywhere, but where they had stuck his name was worth something. Bear should be able to count on a week or so of good business due to the visit. It was a strange currency, but the beer was cold and free for of it.
"Thanks, Bear." He chatted with her a while longer, probing her willingness to work with some of the newer biological inks like the jellyfish-derived glow stuff, asking about the mod scene in Austin, feeling out biz. Eventually the conversation lulled and he asked how to get in touch with John Tucker.
"Wondered if you'd come to ask about the boy" said Bear, turning to hack a meaty fistful of wheat grass from a small field growing on the shelf behind the bar. She stuffed it into a tiny press mounted on the underside of the bar, pulled a shot glass of juice with a steady hand.
"Clear out that beer with this and I'll make some calls."
Fifteen minutes later Tonx had an address fed into his comm and a note to send her some samples of ink from a supplier he'd found a few weeks ago in Malaysia. He bought a pack of smokes from Bear and headed out the door, nodding briefly at the kids as he went. The skullheads nodded in unison back at him, the Neos staring motionlessly, fat girl asleep on the floor. Too much oxygen.
Since they'd pumped him full of boiled black Cuban heroin Poulpe had found himself significantly happier with life. The crazy Hispanics who'd rescued him had been exceedingly sloppy about the whole affair, but effective. That the Boers had underestimated the crude techniques his contact's representatives were willing to use was clear. He would be nervous about the actual data trail they left later, but for the moment he was high as a kite and couldn't bring himself to care one whit.
At the moment he was playing with his toes, noting with some interest that four of them were broken on his left foot. He recalled distantly that the Boers had broken them before they'd put him in the car, most likely so he wouldn't try to run away.
"Shit! Hey you crazy fuck, cut that out! You're going to have to walk on that soon!" yelled the taller fellow, the one with the magazine-perfect face, pores artificially shrunken, skin a glowing golden brown.
"You're like a delightful pastry, brushed with egg whites before baking" sighed Poulpe through the tiny sliding window between the truck bed and the cab.
"And you're like a fucked up gringo somebody overdosed on smack" growled Esco, more at Baby than at Poulpe. Baby shrugged impassively at his side, fingers sliding up and down and over the black plastic knob of his controller. He'd wired in a chord to the thing, of course, and was busily obtaining coordinates for their next stop. Pharoe had told them to head to Texas, towards Austin, and to keep the Frenchman safe and in their sight. This was the part of the game Esco didn't like, the politicking in which he was clearly a lackey. He didn't like being a driver, didn't appreciate the tiny ante part of the job. Could be they'd be driving from mini-mart to mini-mart in the backwaters of Austin for weeks, providing distanced proof they had the package, taking him away again, getting shot at out of nowhere, having to kill sixteen-year-old Columbian prostitute-ninjas when they bust through his door waving swords while he was trying to pluck his eyebrows. It was messy.
Esco didn't like messy. Poulpe began to sing songs of the French revolution in the back of the truck bed, comfortably sprawled out on the metal-cased wiring of the big gun, oblivious to his dehydration and miscellaneous injuries.
Baby was right that the heroin had taken care of the Frenchman's whining and sniveling, but he wasn't at all convinced it had improved the situation. The man needed professional care, and while keeping him full of water and in the cool of the air-conditioned truck ought to help his heatstroke, that foot was going to need more. And when he came down from the smack… It wasn't going to be much better than before at all. Poulpe began humming loudly in the back and Esco slid the window shut with a snap.
"Take the next exit" said Baby, late-afternoon sunlight glinting off the Virgin Mary where his eyes should be. "We got some brothers running a restaurant here. Pharoe's bought us a nice meal and some protection until we get our next location."
Esco pulled off the highway into the deep blue shadows pooled on the off ramp, the truck cooling suddenly as they plunged into the shade. Baby gave him a few more directions, the lazy shopping malls aggregating around them like garbage in a pond, Starbucks and Targets and juice shops and sandwich chains. As they passed from one shopping center to another the buildings showed less plastic, developed nailed-on shingles, piles of trash in the corners of their lots. They began to see dark and peeling paint, hand-made signs appearing in the windows. Esco realized he was reading Spanish more than English when Baby told him to pull into a lot, pointed to the store at the far end of it. An ancient hardware chain had been taken over by one of the ubiquitous mexicali restaurants sprawled across the countryside. Cultural kudzu, clinging to people's need to eat. As they approached Esco could see that the store had originally been called Sears. The new owners had tacked up red neon over the blue sign, adding an "n" and an "o" where the "a" had been. Sears became Senior's, the accent over the n done in squiggly glow-in-the-dark spray-paint.
He hoped they had plantains.
The truck pulled up next to half a dozen others of similar make and style, albeit likely without hardware like theirs. Shovels and blowers and wide-feed lawnmowers were mounted on polyboard sidings glued onto the beds of the trucks with fat worms of plasticene. Chew cups and shotgun racks gleamed dully in the fading sunlight through the open windows. A dog barked from the back of one of the trucks, followed it with a weird chittering sound.
Sick dog, thought Esco as he got out of the truck. Inside, Baby was reclining his seat, cussing at the Frenchman to move over towards The Big Gun. The truck was modded so the seat could recline all the way back, a false jacket and bag resting over Baby's legs and midsection. The rest of him laid back into the bed of the truck where he could control his toys in peace. The Frenchman was making things difficult, but eventually Baby got him moved over. Esco lit a cigarette in the meanwhile, eyeing the cars, considering his angles. Eventually he reached in across Baby's knees and pulled the flechette from the glove compartment. Baby had cleaned and reloaded it while they'd drove, running through the process by touch on the back of a porn mag held over his lap. Esco tucked it into the small of his back, stretched out his arms a few times, loosening up his bad elbow. The bruise the Boer had given him was bad, but from what he could feel there wasn't any breakage. The icepacks and anti-inflammitories he'd used on the drive helped, but it still hurt like a bitch. He hopped on his toes to wake up his legs and peered in the cab to make sure Baby was fully covered. He could see all around the truck from his headset, but there was no sense in tempting fate. The Frenchman mooed loudly in the back and Esco winced.
"What're you sending in?" he asked Baby's knees.
"Fox. Here." said Baby.
From beneath the truck a small, lumpy figure crawled out, its round head facing skywards as it walked on all fours. Once it stood next to Esco it bent its back legs and rose smoothly to a standing position, its front legs becoming arms. The creature was a panoply of colors, exposed wires and ducting welded across its back and between its limbs and body. It was garage work at its finest, Baby's hacked darling. The thing packed enough firepower to take down a legion. If it didn't break down first.
Fox tilted its head and snapped a neat salute at Esco. He took another drag of his cigarette, regarding the tiny robot next to him, and then turned and slammed the door to the car. The day was fading.
Baby had to make Fox break into a run to keep up with him on his way to the restaurant.
Esco pushed through the heavy door and entered a giant hall. The bar stretched out nearly a hundred meters in front of him, a metal lattice making an artificial ceiling on which candles and chemsticks flickered and glowed. The place was nearly empty, a small cluster of tables near the door hugging the bar. The rest faded into dimness. Voices stopped when Esco entered, plumes of smoke from cigarette-fueled conversation slowly rising and vanishing into the darkness overhead. Half a dozen cowboy hats perched on the tables, nearly twenty dark men next to them sitting motionless, watching him.
He went to the bar. The short Mexican behind the bar said nothing when he asked for a beer. Esco'd figured there'd only be one kind, and was right. An unmarked bottle of piss yellow liquid appeared in front of him. He put a twenty on the table, kept one finger on it as he leaned forward towards the bartender.
"I'm here to talk to the owner" he said in Spanish. He knew it was Puerto-Rican Spanish, knew it marked him more clearly than his mods or clothes or attitude. He wheeled on his chair, beer in hand, leaving the bartender behind him to sort out the rest. Fox was standing in the shadows near the door; if the bartender tried anything he'd get a laser in the eye for the effort. At least, Esco hoped Baby would do as much.
Somebody to Esco's right tossed back a shot glass of an oily yellow liquid. Esco went to do the same, realized his beer wasn't opened. His eyes tightened as he frowned and reach his arm out level to the bar on his right, let the top of his bottle rest against the edge of the bar, pressed. The cap popped off and beer sizzled against the cement. Esco's shoulder muscles screamed but he smiled sweetly, slowly brought the beer back in front of him, wiping off its edge and flicking the drops towards his shoes. He hadn't done that in years. It fucking hurt.
But it worked. The guy who'd swallowed his shot stayed seated, cigarettes began their cargo cult missions from mouth to table, beers were slowly mouthed over. Nobody said anything. Esco watched the crowd. The crowd watched Esco. Baby, via Fox, watched them all. Esco hoped.
The sound of boots came echoing up slowly from the vanished dark rear of the room. A figure entered the bar from the shadows to Esco's right, a tall figure dressed a in neat white shirt, sturdy black trousers. Esco watched over his right shoulder, noticing the tiny golden cross, the neatly cropped hair, the six-foot frame wrapped in loose solid mass. As the man approached Esco slowly turned to meet him, stood when he came close and extended a hand.
The man slapped his palm against Esco's own, leaned close and kissed his cheek. He smelled of bay rum and aftershave, of rich tobacco meant to be packed in pipes, and most importantly, a sweet fine scent of hot fried plantains. The man whispered a few words of Spanish the way Esco's parents spoke it, held his body close for a moment before leading him back to the shadows. Esco was smiling.
Five hours later Baby had setup perimeter defenses of his own around the back office Fuentes had given them. They'd feasted on fresh fried plantains and chorizo burritos dripping with sizzling grease and served up by a small grayed and grizzled woman Fuentes introduced as his Mama. It was, barring the burritos his own mama had made, the best Esco'd ever had.
Now they sat watching the last of the sunset over the dusty remains of a cornfield behind Senior's. Every three minutes a soft shuffling noise reminded them that Fox was patrolling the hallway behind them, every ten minutes a small flash showed the black flyer zipping by against the tree line on its way around the house. Esco inhaled deeply from the thin white hand-rolled he'd gotten from a red-eyed old man parked by the far end of the bar after they'd eaten. Fuentes' appearance had worked magic on the crowd, and they smiled when Esco returned to them. Baby slid in easy, ignored and smiling as always. Baby liked all his mods internal, enjoyed the anonymity of his mulatto background and easily forgettable looks. Esco thought Baby didn't much care how his face looked - it belonged parked behind a headset anyway.
The Frenchman moaned slightly, the comedown troubling his already fitful sleep. They'd sedated him once they got him inside, splinted and tied up his foot before he had a chance to start feeling it. Fuentes had given them some stuff to accelerate the healing, but it'd still be a while before he was walking steady.
Baby had sent word to Pharoe that they'd reached their first destination. Now, they waited.