Spares (25 page)

“Stay there or I’m going to blow your head off,” I shouted at him. Not very original, but there you go. Some phrases are hard-wired into the male psyche. When the need arises, out they come. The guy knew this, and gave it about as much heed as it deserved, continuing toward the door. The crowd were less sanguine, and dived to get out of the way; opening a channel to the exit, exactly what I didn’t want.

Nice one, Jack, I thought: tactical mastery as usual.

A second to make a decision. I needed the guy alive—I wanted to talk to him. But if he got to Suej, everything was over anyway.

I shot him, carefully.

The bullet caught him in the neck and spun him round, but he was a big fucker and kept on going. I parked another in his back and launched myself off the bar, flying raggedly over rows of heads and smashing down onto him. We crashed to the floor, a space suddenly clear around us; I tried to turn the fall into a roll but he was quicker than me and kicked me back down again as he pulled out his gun. I twisted immediately and took some splinters in the face as the patch of floor where my head had been exploded.

I decided I was tired of being shot at in bars and that I didn’t need to talk to him
that
much.

My gun was half empty before he staggered; I pushed myself to my feet with one hand, still firing with the other. The problem with guns is that they don’t kill people as quickly as you might think. Shooting people doesn’t send them flying backward in a graceful arc. It just tends to really annoy them. I lunged forward and grabbed his neck, my hand slipping in the biology spilling out of the hole there. I got him on his back and knelt over him, hand still on his throat and a knee on each arm, gun firmly pointed at his forehead. His face was thin and not very clean, eyes deep set and dark. Under his coat it looked like he was wearing army fatigues which hadn’t been troubled by water in a while.

I knew I didn’t have long before the cops arrived, so I made it simple for him. “Tell me who you are and where you’re from or I’m going to spread your brains all over the next floor down,” I panted, feeling warmth spilling out of his neck onto my fingers.

He bucked and nearly threw me off so I put another bullet through his collarbone at close range.

“You
know
where I’m from,” he said, through a mouthful of blood. He seemed to be grinning.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “And it’s pissing me off. Are you SafetyNet, or what?”

The man laughed, sending another gout of mess up through the remains of his lungs. “Ain’t no safety net there, Randall. You know that.”

From behind, I heard someone whisper “They’re coming,” and knew that time had run out. I stood up and left him lying there, knowing he wasn’t going to tell me anything. Then as an afterthought I shot him in the head. Not very polite of me, I know, but then he didn’t want the best for me either.

“Jesus—what is it with you and public places?” Nearly shouted. “Were you, like, mistreated in a bar as a kid?” I’d obviously slipped back in her estimation to big violent
dude with a drug problem, maybe even further than that. “Wherever you go it’s the same fucking movie. Don’t you-get tired of it?”

“One, he could have been the guy killing women,” I said, pushing her and Suej quickly along the street. “Two, he could have killed Mai. Three, either he or his friend cut Nanune’s fucking
head off
, and four, I don’t want to discuss it.”

We ran out into Road 2, the smaller of 67’s main drags. I could hear sirens in the distance, cops on platforms surfing toward us from the station on the other side of the floor. The platforms are simply that, four-inch slabs with Hovers underneath; one cop drives using the lectern at the front, the others do what the hell they like. I kept us moving away from the bar for as long as possible, and then, when I saw a flashing light turn the corner into our road, yanked the girls into a sidestreet. The platform rocketed past like a very low-flying bird with parasites on its back, and I hoped the bar wasn’t about to experience an “incident.” The cop piloting was bombed out of his mind and the others were waving their guns around like cowboys on a runaway riverboat.

When the platform was safely past, we ran back out onto the street and sprinted across it, into another side road and then through to the waste ground behind. Once it had been a botanical garden. Now it was just a mess, some descendants of the original plants still struggling for life, most dead and gone. Yellow streetlights were strung along the edges of the grounds, but the interior was dark and abandoned.

“Where are we
going?”
Nearly panted. “And are you going to shoot anyone when we get there? if so, I think I may pass and take in a movie instead.”

There was an elevator on the other side. I pointed to it.

“Down to your apartment,” I said as we ran into the gloom. “There’s stuff I left there. Then Suej and I are disappearing. Probably for good.”

“Well hey, it’s been nice knowing you,” Nearly said angrily. “And when I say ‘nice,’ I don’t mean it.”

I was about to try to say something conciliatory when Suej suddenly ground to a halt in front of me. I almost collided with her and instead skidded to a stop, a growl ready on my lips.

It never made it out.

We were in the middle of the waste ground by then, two hundred yards from anything in any direction. The sirens still blared in the distance, but apart from that it was quiet and still. Suej was staring into space with her mouth open. There was nothing there.

“Suej?” I said. “What—?”

Then something morphed out of the shadows. A flicker at first, a shimmer like shadows changing places to music I couldn’t hear. At the threshold of audibility a sound, like many hands clapping but speeded up and far away.

Then a shiver went through the ground and the space between us fractured into noise and light.

Suej shrieked as the birds exploded into being, a hundred mad, happy orange sets of wings and ear-splitting cries crashing into fluttering life, Living flames shot up into the air, but went nowhere; movement and noise contained into stillness, as if everything in the world was trying to be in the same place at once. It was impossible to discern the beginning of one scream and the start of the next, or one bird and another.

I found Suej’s hand in mine. She was pulling me toward the elevator. Her face was white with shock and surprise, and she ducked and twisted against things that weren’t even there. Nearly just stared at us, following, as we stumbled toward the elevator. Behind her the birds slithered and ran into invisible tracks in the air, tearing passage back the way they’d come.

We fell into the elevator and stared out into darkness as the doors closed and sealed us in.

“What the hell’s
wrong
with you guys?” Nearly shouted, stamping her feet. I ignored her and put my
arms round Suej’s shoulders, as much for my own comfort as hers. She was trembling like an animal caught in headlights, rooted to the spot. I thought she’d been struck mute but suddenly she looked up, blue eyes staring straight into mine.

“You know what that was.” Her voice spiraled into accusation and terror. “You
know”

“You saw the forest in the elevator before, didn’t you?” I asked. She nodded feverishly.

“What are they?” she wailed. “Where are they from?”

“Hello? Calling planet Jack…” Nearly shouted, as the doors opened onto 66. She was beside herself with anger and fear.
“What are you guys talking about?”

“You didn’t see them?” Suej asked her incredulously, and Nearly just stared as if finally realizing that she’d spent the day with two people who should have been weaving baskets and knocking back Thorazine. I stepped quickly out of the elevator, my arm still round Suej. I was trying to work out what was happening, but it was all coming at me too fast. Some final penny had been thrown in my lap, some huge great hundred-dollar special edition coin out of the sky. I’d have done anything to be able to hurl it back before I worked out what it meant.

“See
who?”
Nearly demanded, hurrying along beside us.

“The birds,” I said, knowing she hadn’t. Suej shouldn’t have been able to either, and come to that, neither should I. They shouldn’t have been there at all, just like the scene in the elevator which I’d assumed was a Rapt-induced flashback. I was shaking violently, not feeling very tough at all.

“Suej,” I said. “What were you staring at in the bar, on the way out?”

“The door frame,” she said. “The wood was acting funny.”

Everest, wall-diving, the mad, happy birds. It was all leading to one place. The forest.

I wasn’t going back there again.

A rasping sprint along deserted corridors to the corner of Tyson and Stones; a huddle outside Nearly’s door. She was scrabbling for her keys and I was staring wildly around when the door lock spoke to us.

“There’s someone inside,” it said. “Just thought you might like to know.”

“Who?” Nearly yelped, as I pulled out my gun. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t just have it surgically implanted in my hand.

“He didn’t say,” the lock replied mildly, as if its mind was on other things. “He had keys, so there wasn’t much I could do.”

“Howie?” I asked Nearly, trying not to panic.

She shook her head, backing away from the door. “He’s my manager, not my boyfriend.”

I took Nearly’s keys and stood in front of the door. Fresh clip into the gun. Not many left, but the way things were going I wouldn’t be around to need them for much longer.

Nearly tugged at my sleeve. “This is going to be bad news,” she opined. “Let’s find somewhere else to be. Seriously, I hear Florida’s nice…”

“It is, but I have to get Mal’s disk back,” I said. “It’s all that’s left of him.”

Nearly, very nervous now: “Like, I respect that and everything, but I really think we should…”

I put the keys in the door and turned. “Best of luck,” said the lock, and I took a step into the corridor beyond. A quiet sound from the living room, like feet moving on carpet.

“Who’s there?” I inquired. No reply. I walked a couple more steps down the hall. “I have a gun and I’m in a strange kind of mood,” I added. “So whoever you are, don’t fuck me around.”’

Still nothing, except that scuffling sound. It wasn’t going to go away, and neither was I, so what else could I do but just take a deep breath and burst into the room.

Johnny Vinaldi looked up impatiently, pacing around the floor.

“Where the hell have you been?” he said, and I just stared at him openmouthed.

Nearly dithered between coffee and a line of coke, and in the end opted for both. Suej went into the kitchen to help with the former, and I stayed in the living room with Vinaldi.

“He got away,” he said. “How, don’t ask me to tell you. He’s surrounded by a boatload of the guys I think of as my least disappointing men, not to mention hundreds of teenage dancing people, and he blows out of the club like a lungful of smoke and just disappears.”

“But he didn’t get you,” I said, lighting a cigarette. I didn’t know whether “I wanted to be having this conversation. Events had pushed Vinaldi and me together in ways I didn’t understand, but I still wanted him dead. Each sentence I spoke to him felt like unfaithfulness. I wasn’t going to waste many words.

“True, and I’m enormously psyched about that, as you can imagine, but Jaz—whom I know you have little respect for, and I can understand that but he is loyal to me beyond reason and good at hurting people, so what can I do?—is in the MediCenter with bullets in disturbing places. His brother Tony is dead, and three others are not as healthy as they used to be.”

“I just killed a guy who I think was an associate of the man with the lights,” I said. “In a bar on sixty-seven.”

Vinaldi looked up at me then, finally stopping his pacing. “I’m impressed,” he said, with apparent sincerity. “It’s been a long, long time for us. These guys, I think they’re still there.”

“Johnny, why are you here and what are you talking about?” I still had my gun in my hand and I wasn’t completely sure that I wasn’t going to use it on him.

“I know who the man who came to my club was,” he said, lighting a cigarette of his own. The clattering in
the kitchen seemed a hundred miles away. “And that’s why I know now it wasn’t you who sent me that box or was violent to me in the shadows of my business.”