The Eternal Prison (10 page)

 

“Didja know your father at all, son?”

 

This with breathless casualness, like it had just occurred to him. A thrill went through me, and I grinned at the air in front of me.

 

“He’s dead,” I said. “This I know for a fact, so don’t tell me you’re my dear old pa, okay?”

 

He laughed—and I thought it was probably the first real laugh I’d ever heard the little bastard allow, his head shooting back and his shoulders rolling joyfully. “Oh, Mr. Cates, I got hundreds of ’em. Bastards, I mean. I been doin’ my part. But”—he bent over briefly, guffawing, staggering as he walked—“but none of ’em are as fucking
gigantic
as you, yeah?”

 

I couldn’t stop a smile from twitching onto my face. “All right. What about him?”

 

He straightened up, wiping one surprisingly small hand down his face. “I knew him, a little. Not long and not deep, but I knew ol’ Aubrey.”

 

The thrill kept vibrating within me, becoming a buzzing electrical current making my skin itch. I had very few memories of my father. I remembered him in a greasy black uniform, a waste disposal worker, and I remembered him shrinking in a huge hospital bed, getting smaller every time I looked at him. A few other random things—him drinking beer from a bottle, a fucking bottle. Him laughing, missing one tooth. Him screaming at my mother, once, terrifying. That was it. “Bullshit,” I said. “He worked. He had a job.”

 

“Shit, Avery—before Unification,
everyone
worked. At something.” He waved one hand in front of him. “I’m not saying we exchanged love letters and shared our deepest souls. Our paths crossed. We shared the neighborhood for a while. That’s all. I just wanted to say, he was a good man, Avery. Every son deserves to hear that. He had his opportunities to turn away and sink low, and he resisted.”

 

I swallowed thickly. “And?”

 

He sighed. “Where I come from, Avery—the
time,
you understand—knowing someone from the neighborhood meant something. It was a bond. It wasn’t just a grudging greeting when you passed in the street, it was being from the same area.”

 

My mind was suddenly racing, flipping through my small stash of memories. “You don’t sound local to me,” I said, licking my dry lips.

 

“I didn’t say I was born there, Avery. Anyway, I can’t convince ya of shit if you’re suspicious. Just wanted you to know. You want to know why you. Two reasons. The first is because I knew yer people, okay? I ain’t leavin’ you behind, Avery, and I ain’t gonna stand by while Aubrey Cates’s son gets his brains sucked out of his skull, okay?” He looked down at the dirt for a moment, grimacing, and then glanced up, sunny again. “Now, here we are.”

 

I wanted to ask him questions, to grill him about it all, the fucking liar. Because I
wanted
to believe him. But he’d stopped purposefully where three other prisoners sat baking. A few pockets of prisoners sat around here and there in the sun, sucking down their water rations, chewing their nutrition tabs, looking weak and dejected. Every day weaker and more dejected, I guessed. Nearby, the cop, Bartlett, sat gleaming, his jumpsuit undone to his waist, his torso and face a maze of fresh scars and ugly, purple bruises. We looked at each other as I approached but said nothing.

 

The two of us stood there for a moment with nothing but the sun burning us to ash and the hot, heavy wind pushing lethargically against us. I wasn’t impressed. The toughest one of the trio was definitely the illustrated girl I’d noticed before. Her ink was faded and blurred, amateur prison work all of it, but it was colorful and it was
everywhere.
Birds and dragons with long, stretched-out feathers of green and red and gold intertwined with each other, circling around her limbs and up her torso to her neck, where actual figures were abandoned for a more monotone set of bluish patterns that crawled up and disappeared beneath her short, dark hair. Only her face, sharp and angular, was spared. She was scrawny-thin and looked older, I guessed, than she actually was.

 

She eyed me up and down in a frankly sexual way that made me a little nervous, lingering on my crotch with a raised eyebrow. I gave her a steady look until she brought her eyes back up to my face, but then she held my gaze with no hint of worry until I looked away. She reminded me of the tough broads that had always hung out in Pickering’s in the good old days. I felt like I knew her immediately.

 

Sitting on the hard-packed sandy ground a little removed from her were two others. The first was a skinny older man in affected, ancient wire eyeglasses. One of the lenses was cracked, and he looked about as tough as a flower.

 

“This is Grigoriy, Avery,” Michaleen said.

 

The old man grinned. “Call me Grisha.”

 

I grinned back. “Fuck, what in hell did
you
do to get in here?”

 

“I stole some things,” he said in a thick Russian accent. He smiled at the floor. “They would like them returned but cannot get to them.” He tapped his head.

 

To the side, Bartlett suddenly guffawed, rich laughter booming into the still air. We all ignored him. He was a burned System

 

Pig in a prison. He was already a ghost, and we were treating him accordingly.

 

A Techie,
I thought.
Hell, the old man’s putting together a
team. Like he’d been hired to do a job.

 

“Grigoriy also has a knack with explosives. I see you’ve introduced yourself to Marlena Niks,” Michaleen continued, gesturing at the illustrated girl. She twitched and a knife was in her hand, a real knife, smuggled in somehow. She danced it across her knuckles once, showing off perfect balance, and then it disappeared again. I nodded, more impressed that she’d gotten it inside than with her bullshit tricks.

 

“I’ve heard of you,” I said, memory blooming. “Niks, out of Philly. Call you Skinner. A Taker—you find people.”

 

She grinned. “People who don’t want to be found. Wanna fuck?”

 

Michaleen and I ignored her with the same slight tick of our heads, turning to regard the third of the little man’s recruits, a young black girl who was lying back on her elbows, basking, her dark skin gleaming with sweat. Like Bartlett, she’d stripped down her jumpsuit to the waist, unconcerned about her tiny, bare breasts. She looked like she’d last eaten about a year ago and held herself with an exaggerated carelessness that told me she was terrified.

 

“And this is the Christian,” Michaleen said. “I don’t know her real fucking name. She’s —”

 

“She’s our Snake,” I said, eyeing her skinny, flexible body. I let the question of why Michaleen thought he needed someone skilled at squirming through small openings and getting out of locked rooms drift, and kicked the kid lightly. “What’s your name?”

 

The Christian opened one eye and studied me for a moment, then closed it again and stretched luxuriously.

 

“She don’t talk,” Michaleen said. “Only heard her once, and she was fucking
praying.
To
god.
”

 

I nodded at her. I’d never met anyone who believed in a god before. “What are you? Catholic?” It was a word I’d heard, long ago, in ancient times. Had it been my mother? A female voice.
Catholic.

 

She just stared at me. I gave her a few seconds and then sighed. “All right,” I said, losing patience. “You want to break out of this hellhole. Fine. You’ve got yourself a Taker to steal necessaries and find out info for you, a Techie to hack security systems, and a Snake to get inside tight spaces—pretty fucking handy for an escape, and glory be it’s like a fucking criminal hall of fame in this place, so recruiting’s easy.” I jerked my thumb back at myself. “I’m old and stiff, I don’t move fast anymore, I need a lot of space, and I don’t make friends easy. Why am I here?”

 

Michaleen smiled, putting a cigarette into his mouth, his eyes dead and flat as always. “Well, shit, Avery. That would be reason number two, as we were discussin’. Escapin’s likely to be a messy business, and no doubt we’ll need to kill a few people.” He winked. “And no one in this place is better at killin’ people than you.”

 

 

 

 

VII

YOUR ONLY CHANCE OF SURVIVING ME

 

 

 

 

I watched the kid sprint out of The Rock like she was being chased by a swarm of bees. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t want to be that close to the System Pigs, either. I couldn’t enter SSF HQ easily; my face would be scanned upon entrance and moments later I’d be flagged—I was supposed to be in prison, or dead, not standing outside with a cigarette and a fairly new set of clothes.

 

I watched the kid duck the rare pedicab and the thin foot traffic, running at me with the sort of malnourished energy I hadn’t felt in twenty-five years. Her features were vaguely Asian, and she had pale, fish belly skin, tight against her bones. She was wearing an old coat too large for her but in decent shape. Compared to Vegas, New York was fucking
freezing,
though I couldn’t feel it. And empty. And smelled vaguely like something was burning in the distance.

 

“They take the message?”

 

She nodded, her round face grim and serious. I’d found her down near the old Stadium—one of the last bits of old New York, of
my
New York, that was still there. Squatters were still living there, if you called that living, but even I could tell their time was coming. Under the Emergency Powers Act that had been in force since I’d destroyed—or thought I’d destroyed—Dennis Squalor and the Electric Church, Dick Marin had ordered most of downtown bulldozed since the Plague. It was a wasteland, rubble and cleared lots, some with the beginnings of new construction in place, some just weeded and abandoned. Fresh, new Vid screens proclaimed new luxury homes were coming. As soon as Marin could get the pesky civilian government and their not-so-civilian army off his back, I guessed.

 

Who was going to live there was another question, since New York was pretty empty. The Plague had killed three-fourths of the old population, rich and poor alike, and the cops had cleared out most of downtown enthusiastically afterward. Even standing right outside SSF Headquarters, in the center of everything, I thought I could hear my steps echo against the buildings.

 

“Fucking Pigs,” the little girl snarled, wiping her nose. “Lookin’ at me like I done somethin’. I’ll cut their fucking throats.” She squinted at me. “Fifty yen. You said.”

 

I nodded. At first I’d thought she reminded me of Gleason, but she didn’t. I held out my credit dongle, and she stared at it suspiciously before producing her own. We swiped and she glanced at the tiny indicator on hers, finally nodding. “Okay,” she said and took off at a run. I didn’t blame her. She stood out uptown—and shit,
all
of Manhattan was uptown now. I watched her dashing through the dribbling traffic until a roar of speeding hovers took my eyes up to the gray sky, a formation of a dozen silvery bricks busting ass overhead.

 

Uptown wasn’t the same anymore, either. As empty as it felt, there was still a crowd—but it was all cops. Cops everywhere, all of them—even the officers—in riot gear, big sweaty gas masks and shiny black armor that made them look like bugs. You could pick out the Crushers, still; they slouched and held their shredding rifles like they were afraid they’d explode in their hands. If you squinted you could pick out the pips on the officers’ collars: One for a lieutenant, two for a captain, three for a colonel. Four, I assumed, would mean a major, but you didn’t see many of those on the ground. Pairs or triplets of cops were on every corner, and I figured they had Optical Face Scanners wired into their masks, passively snapping every face that came into range and running it by the SSF database, just in case. There were no
people,
just cops, scanning each other. I kept my head down and my sunglasses on and tried to keep moving, to keep transporting my cigarette from my mouth to my hand and back again. Mobile OFR scans were state of the art, but they needed precision. Give ’em blur and they spat out garbage.

 

I waited, pacing and staying in motion. It was exhausting.

 

It was a wide avenue, the pavement cracking and a couple of sinkhole-sized ruts threatening the spokes of all the pedicabs. There were still some posh restaurants spilling out onto the street, sparse groups of bored-looking pretty people in expensive suits toying with a glass of wine or a portable Vid. Interspersed were some empty buildings; one narrow sliver of old stone had gray boards stamped over all the windows, making it look blind. Some of the restaurants had signs posted announcing shortages—one had no more coffee, another could offer no fresh vegetables. I stared at that one for a moment, trying to remember if I’d ever eaten a fresh vegetable in my life. I didn’t think I had.

 

The people, what was left of them, had changed a little, too. Right outside Cop Central, Rockefeller Center, and some of the folks staking claim to a few feet of pavement were a little rough around the edges. Not exactly my sort of folks—not downtowners, most of whom had died in the Plague—but still, not the shiny, artificially young swingers who usually populated uptown. I watched one skinny guy on the other side of the street for a few minutes—he was professionally eyeing everyone who walked by, performing thirty-second appraisals. His coat was pretty nice, expensive and in good shape, but his shirt was ancient and patched, and his shoes had no soles. I stared at his feet for a while—the illusion was fucking amazing as long as he stood flat-footed, but every time he lifted a foot there was a flash of bare, tough skin. A Pick, I decided, looking for someone with a loose pocket and a credit dongle they wouldn’t miss for a while. I smirked and looked around more carefully, smiling to myself when I spotted his partner, who was actually wearing the same coat, standing just halfway up the block, engrossed in the Vid screen looming over the intersection. Soleless Joe snatches the dongle, walks briskly past his handler, and drops it into a pocket, and even if the Pick gets sussed he walks away, blameless. Unless the System Pigs wanted to get some exercise. Uptown had alleys, too.