The Eternal Prison (7 page)

 

“A new job offer, you mean,” I said, draining my glass and heading back for the bar. “I’m not on fucking salary, Cal. I take your jobs because you pay well. And I enjoy my work.”

 

Behind me, he chuckled, sounding distracted. “Of course. Now, would you kindly attend to me? I don’t have much time.”

 

I refilled my glass and knocked it back, tasting nothing. I could drink all day and not feel a thing. I filled it again anyway and took it with me back to the desk. “Go ahead, Cal. I won’t be much use to you in Vegas anymore, though. I’m burned in that town after the Russian.”

 

He didn’t look up from his desk, his fat hands moving in intricate patterns, his eyes following the glowing icons and text streams. “Not Vegas.” He suddenly looked up and smiled at me. “Rejoice, my friend! You’re going home.” His hands finally stopped, and he cocked his head as if considering something. “We are at war. With the police, the SSF. And, frankly, it’s not going as well as I would have hoped—it is taking too much time. So a drastic, dramatic act is required.” He looked down again, hands moving. “And I wouldn’t worry about being burned—if you pull this one off, despite your small role, you’ll be burned
everywhere.
”

 

I watched his hands in fascination. “Uh, yeah? Who is it?”

 

This time he did pause and look at me from under his thin eyebrows. He didn’t say anything for a second, and then he smiled a little—a tiny, cold smile that conveyed exactly the opposite of what smiles usually conveyed. “Dick Marin, my friend. The King Worm himself.”

 

 

 

 

IV

EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST CROWD

 

 

 

 

“Oh, now, this is a fucking shame, a fucking shame,” Michaleen muttered, handing me a cigarette produced from some secret place as we watched Bartlett.

 

I accepted the cigarette wordlessly with a sweat-slick hand. I was already thirty-nine cigarettes in debt to Michaleen. Who knew where he got them from, and so far they’d been offered freely, but I was waiting for his pitch. Michaleen Garda was the name he’d given, and he had adopted me. Why the little man had so much pull in Chengara was still a mystery, since as far as I could tell, he was a funny little guy who kept book on anything with doubt in the outcome. But he pretty much ran the fucking prison.

 

Bartlett was a tall black guy, old but still in good shape. He stood in the middle of the yard, shirtless and shining with sweat, surrounded by a screaming crowd and taking on all comers. He turned his head a little and spat bright red blood onto the sandy ground, his swollen face twisted into a mask of purplish rage. He stared around at the crowd of inmates and extended his hand, curling his fingers in invitation. I could see his tormentors pretty clearly; the only one that caught my eye was the girl—tall and burned to a crispy red by the sun, which just made her body art look like complex veins of green rot crawling through her skin. She wasn’t pretty—no tits to speak of, and a nose that should have been broken a few more times in an attempt to get it back to its roots—but she was
interesting,
the way she’d sold off every acre of her skin for ink, all the way up to her neck and down to her ankles. Her face, unfortunately, was free and clear, and her broken, snaggly teeth crept out in a sneering grin far too often. She was wearing a pair of super-short pants and a top of stretchy material and nothing else, barefoot, her short, self-cut black hair tied up in several messy knots. I wanted to ask her what all the art meant, but I hadn’t gotten a formal introduction yet, and I didn’t know if she was the sort to kick you in the balls for asking.

 

Everyone else was just crowd.

 

“Come on!” Bartlett shouted, his hoarse voice like molten lead bubbling up out of that barrel-chested body. “Come on, you fuckin’ dogs!”

 

I leaned over and let Michaleen light my cigarette. “The Pig’s got heart,” I said. “You got to admit it.”

 

“Fucking cop has heart, yes, yes.” Michaleen nodded, lighting his own cigarette, his sharp eyes squinted and hidden beneath his bushy white eyebrows. “Heart indeed. I have no sympathy for the System Police, you know, Avery, but this is uncivilized. No one can take on five hundred men and live. They want the cop dead? Fine, fine—but do it civilized-like, you see?”

 

I nodded. I agreed in principle. Bartlett had been a captain in the System Security Force, burned for some unknown crime against Internal Affairs—the Worms, the cops called them. For some reason known only to Dick Marin and his gear-and-silicone brain, Bartlett had been sent here instead of just being killed. Though the way things were going, it was going to turn out to be pretty much the same thing. I held Michaleen’s cigarette in front of me as we sat on the dirt, watching the festivities.

 

“You want to help him out?” I suggested, curious where the little man was going with this. “You think he needs some friends?”

 

The little man turned and offered me a comically horrified face. “Help out a fucking Pig, man, are you insane?” He jerked his head toward Bartlett, who’d fought six men bare fisted so far and put them all down, and now stood panting and sweating, arms up weakly while the crowd voted who took him on next. “Whatever he did to bring Marin’s ire down on him, that’s on him, eh?”

 

I shrugged, looking around. “Okay.”

 

Chengara wasn’t much of a prison, I didn’t think. It was basically a huge yard surrounded by admittedly high walls. In the middle were two simple, cinder block buildings: a big cavernous one filled with cots and some tables where we lived, and a smaller one where the administration offices were. I’d never been inside the smaller one, which was a pretty formidable-looking structure, complete with some serious security systems—it didn’t even have windows. Each corner of the wall had a guard tower, where a single Crusher was always stationed with a high-powered rifle. The only thing that made Chengara hard to get out of was the desert. Just sitting there next to Michaleen, the heat was wearing me down, beating me into the ground. We received a nutrition tab and four pints of water every day, which meant we were all more or less dying very slowly as we baked in the sun—the idea of walking any distance without more water, food, or shelter was madness.

 

“You’re a bloody pill, Cates, you is. You want to help the Pig? Go ahead.” He swept a tiny hand around the yard. “No one’s stopping you.”

 

I shrugged. “It’s a fair fight,” I said. “He takes his chances, just like the rest of us.”

 

“Very wise, kiddo. That’s what I heard when I heard the name Cates, out of New York: Smart. Smarter than your average Gunner at least, which maybe ain’t saying so much.”

 

I nodded absently. Michaleen liked to talk. I was already bored with listening to him all the time. He was an endless stream of information, though, about the prison; over the last few days he’d filled me in on the way things were in Chengara Penitentiary. He’d told me there was no program or schedule—the Crushers barely appeared, and if they did, they did so in force, overwhelming and unforgiving—that we were more or less left to shift for ourselves, with no work, no activities, no structured time at all. And he’d told me that if you misbehaved enough to bring the Crushers out of their hidey-holes, you were carted off to solitary. And so far no one had ever returned from solitary.

 

“Let me ask you something, Mickey?”

 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shift and squint; he didn’t like being called Mickey. “Certainly, Mr. Cates,” he said, exhaling smoke through his wide, flat nose. “I am at yer service.”

 

“Why are you treating me like your long-lost son? Ever since I got here you’ve been fucking glad-handing me.”

 

He sat smoking, and I turned my attention back to Bartlett, giving the little man time to consider his answer. A new champion had been elected from the crowd, a broad-shouldered white guy with the flabby look of an Augment junkie who’d been away from his stabilizer meds, long dirty hair hanging down past his shoulders. He looked like he smelled pretty bad, and I considered it a rare talent to
look
like you smelled a certain way. The crowd of identical orange jumpsuits was shouting a hundred things at once as Bartlett watched the new guy circle around him, waiting for the first move.

 

As I watched, something in the longhair’s hand glinted brightly in the sun, and I narrowed my eyes, my heart picking up speed. He was taunting the ex-cop, circling around like a moon caught in the black man’s orbit, but he was keeping his hands down and back a little. I saw the glint again and struggled to my feet, my bad leg reluctant to move. I plucked the cigarette from my mouth and walked in my uneven roll toward the scrum, trying to will some life back into the leg, some flexibility. The longhair kept circling and shouting abuse, a fucking punk, trying to look tough but afraid to lean in and start it off unless he saw an opening for him to use the shiv. The crowd got louder as I got closer, and when I reached its outer perimeter, I took one last deep drag off the cigarette and tossed it aside, grabbing two shoulders in my hands and pushing my way through.

 

As I stepped into the empty space around the two men, the crowd noise died off, collapsing into a low murmur and then whipped away by the dry wind. The sun was like a lamp held over my head, an inch away, burning a circle onto the thin skin of my skull.

 

The punk noticed the silence just as I got to him and half turned as I reached out to grab his arm. He cursed in some language I didn’t understand, all consonants and clearing his throat, and tried to dance back from me. I caught hold of his jumpsuit and yanked, smacking my fist into his stomach as hard as I could and snatching at his wrist as I let go of his suit. His breath exploded out of him with a grunt and he tried to go down to his knees, but I twisted him around—liking the familiar feel of the move, like pieces of me dropping back into place—until his arm was bent back toward me and he was hanging from his wrist. I reached up and took the shiv from his weak grasp, a pretty thing made from a piece of sharpened stone and some dark, coarse fabric.

 

He smelled as bad as I’d expected.

 

I leaned down and put my mouth next to his ear. “You want to fight, you fight,” I said, panting. “You pull a pot sticker like this, you better be sure no one can take it away from you.” I gave his arm a yank, and he screamed, dropping limply to the ground when I released him. I turned, and there was Bartlett, staring down at me. He was fucking enormous. I’d never seen a bigger un-Augmented man in my life.

 

“Thanks,” he said, a grunt of a word, and spat at my feet, just missing my cracked boots.

 

I looked him up and down. Behind him, I could see a fresh trainload of Interesting People being unloaded behind the thick, electrified chain-link fence, including a tall, fragile-looking old woman with white hair cut very close to her pink scalp, her face deeply wrinkled, her eyes tiny, unhappy slits. Her black coat was too heavy and looked expensive, though it had seen some rough treatment on the train. For a second I imagined our eyes met, though at that distance it was impossible to tell, and I thought I recognized her—a face from the Vids. She was ancient and looked like a strong wind would blow her away, but in that instant I had an impression of strength that disturbed me. I wasn’t used to old ladies freaking me out.

 

“Fuck you,” I said to the cop without looking back at him, and stepped around. The crowd didn’t exactly part, but it was easier getting through it the second time. As I walked back to Michaleen, I examined the homemade knife and liked it—it was light and looked lethal, decently balanced, and easy to hide. I slipped it into the big pocket of my jumpsuit and resumed my seat next to the little man. A new combatant had already stepped forward, and Bartlett was beating him to a pulp with brutal, red-eyed efficiency.

 

Michaleen turned to squint at me, his fleshy face folded up into a mask of perplexity that was almost amusing. “That was an odd decision, Mr. Cates,” he said.

 

I shrugged. “He deserves to get killed in a fair fucking fight,” I said, accepting yet another cigarette as it was held out for me. “Besides, I spent years killing cops, and look where it got me.” I ignored the proffered lighter and slid the cigarette behind my ear. “Maybe I’ll see what happens when I save their lives.”

 

“Well, you’ve brought attention onto yourself, ain’t you?” he said after a moment. “You’ve led a blessed life, Avery, my boy—not a lot of prison time logged. Let me give you a lesson: attention’s the last thing you ever want.”

 

“I don’t learn easy,” I said with a sigh, feeling tired, sweating freely. Fuck his tiny air of midget wisdom.

 

The little man cackled. “Oy, that’s right, ain’t it, ain’t it. No one tells the great Gunner what to do, eh?” He sobered and looked down at his feet. “Which is why, Mr. Cates, I ain’t gonna
tell
you to do anything. I’m gonna
ask
you to listen to a proposition.”

 

I cocked my head but didn’t look at him. This was it; this was the pitch. I had a feeling my first three days in Chengara had been softened quite a bit by Michaleen, in unseen ways. I was interested to see what he thought all that was worth.