No Dogs in Philly, page 6
“Friar?”
He turned to look at her as if he’d heard her. Her vision began to flicker, his eyes opened wide, too wide, and his mouth, and they stretched and merged and formed a black hole where his face should have been. Her hearing cut out—all but a loud ringing, and a sound like a tiny maggot crawling across her eardrum, every scrape of its legs against her skin magnified a thousand times. Friar started walking towards her, an unnatural, jerking walk, and she wanted to run but her legs wouldn’t move. He drew closer and closer, jerking and twitching and she opened her mouth and screamed, but all that came out was thick, black, viscous strings, pouring out and then Friar was in front of her and she stared into the black and he reached up and—
A hand on her shoulder; she whirled and smacked him in the knee with her prod. He crumpled with an oomf and she screamed and kicked him with her steel-toed boots. She kicked and screamed for about a minute until she realized she was back, the hack was gone and she was normal, beating the ever-loving shit out of the hip guard who had probably just come to help. She stopped and grasped her knees, shuddering, thankful the kick knives in her boots hadn’t flipped out. She grabbed at her hip flask and took a long gulp. Fuck, she was too sober. The alcohol would flush her system, drunk her up, scramble her brain waves and make it harder for the hackers to lock onto her and crack her code. She took another swig and finished the flask and then snorted the contents of her ring stash—a mix of powdery accelerants that would blend with the alcohol and scramble her pattern further. Yeah, that’ll do it. Already she felt the ups and downs pulling her in every direction.
The hip was on the ground, moaning. For a second she thought of dashing, but it was hard to ignore her role in this tragedy. Plus, the hips looked after one another—community and all that bullhickey. Word got around and she didn’t want to alienate half the population of Philadelphia over a freak-out. She’d fix him up and then figure out the asshole trying to claw his way into her brain. Lou, maybe? Twenty grand was a lot to toss around, maybe too much. Maybe he sniffed more and was trying to drill into her accounts. Hah, fat chance, Eugene had all her cash, but of course Lou didn’t know that—or maybe he did now. Had they taken anything, any important thoughts? The sick feeling came back—the feasters, they were hacking her, trying to beat her to the prey, but no, that didn’t make any sense, they couldn’t know about her. Or care, even.
“Huh,” she said aloud. “Interesting. Alright buddy, let’s get you fixed up.”
She took a Panaceum Easy-Ject from her gun belt and jabbed it into his arm. He stopped whimpering. It would pump him up with painkillers, increase blood and platelet production, start him healing up. Wouldn’t do shit for bones, she knew—Panaceum my ass—and it was too slow for a bullet hole or a deep cut, but it was handy for the smaller stuff. He was looking at her, more confused than afraid, curling up at the pain and making it harder for her to see if anything was broken. She sighed.
“Look bud, I’m sorry about that. I had a freak-out, okay? You know how it is. I really didn’t mean to rough you and I’m gonna try and patch you up as soon as you unclench your asshole.”
He relaxed, a little, and she felt him up, making sure she hadn’t smashed any ribs or ruptured any organs. She didn’t think so. He’d be making a lot more noise for one thing, and also she discovered a layer of hockey pads under his flannel. Say what you would about the hips; they were resourceful. She patted him on the head.
“There you go bud, all set.” She hoisted him to his feet and peeled out a couple of hundreds. “For your troubles.”
He took the money and looked at it, looked at her, and then back at the money. Mute? Retarded? Who cared? She set off, back to Lou’s.
“You’re not right,” he called to her when she was about a dozen steps away. He had some kind of foreign/redneck accent. “You’d best come with me.”
She switched on her lobe camera and looked at him. He wasn’t pointing the shotgun at her. She turned and put her hands on her hips.
“Oh,” she said. “How’s that?”
“It looked to me from where I was lying,” ha ha, “that someone had been messing with your head. You’d best come with me.”
This took her a while to process. Was it a ploy? A robbery attempt? Had she over-dished again and now this idiot was after her money? But no, it didn’t seem that way. If this guy was a true hip and played by the book then he was honest, relatively. Which still didn’t explain why he wanted her to come back with him. So ask, dummy.
“Why?”
He nodded at a point just behind her. She turned and looked around, couldn’t figure it out. Then she realized he was nodding at the security spike, the two-story steel tree of antennae and monitoring devices. They were so common as to be invisible. She realized immediately what he meant—he wasn’t so dumb after all. If someone was hacking her implants then a good place to bounce a signal and sneak a peak was a good old-fashioned US security spike. There weren’t too many of those in the Fish. It was a good bet that she’d be safer from hackers there than just about anywhere else in Philly. Well, why not? She had time to kill and she was just about out of booze anyway. They made a good grog, the hips.
“Alright,” she said. “Lead on.”
Chapter 7
The hip was leading her astray. She hadn’t been much in the Fish but her map told her she wasn’t heading towards any of the major hip coops. Possibly it was a smaller one, unknown—they moved around enough—or her map could’ve been fried in the hack, or maybe it was just a secret entrance, but she didn’t think so. It smelled like a trap, or a hidden purpose at least. The terrain told her nothing—sinkhole streets with sewer-pipe bones and burning gas lines. Crumbling warehouses and factories, glimpses of gardens poking through—what were they growing? Corn? She was impressed with their horticulture, forcing green up out of ashy basements and asphalt fields.
She studied the hip, scanning for signs of deceit. He seemed relaxed enough—did he limp before or was that her handiwork?—not tensed, not glancing around for signs of compatriots. The shotgun he carried was an ancient Harrier model, more likely to blow up in his face than kick out a bullet, and she doubted any of the munitions he’d managed to scavenge or nick would put much oomph against the micromesh woven into her clothes. Still, he could get lucky and stick a pellet in her eye. Or a friend of his could drop a brick on her head. She sped up a little to walk by his side. He smiled and nodded at her. For the first time she really looked at him and saw he was good to look at, with kind green eyes, and younger than he’d appeared, though his beard had streaks of gray. He was dirty, but not filthy, and skin surprisingly free of blemish, boils, cuts, or disease. This wasn’t some wretch—he was a healthy man in his prime.
It bothered her, somehow, that her judgment had been so off. She thought she knew about the hips—what was there to know? They didn’t have jobs, didn’t have homes, half of them weren’t registered and they kept to themselves. She felt suddenly tired, incredibly tired, tired of thinking, and having her notions challenged. Why couldn’t things be easy? She let her mind drift—ambush be damned—to straight lines and right angles, a city of walls and sharp divides, clean separations between good and evil, person and object, worthy and unfit to live.
For the thousandth time she thought of skipping town, taking her five hundred thousand buckaroos and hopping the first jet outta this joint. She’d have to head to another zone, another Net, across the ocean maybe with the Eurocrats or the Sinomer or even the Xing-2 if she got desperate. It was a pipe dream, of course. The Gaespora would never let her skip town, order unfulfilled. They’d slap an injustice lien on her and in ten seconds flat every roly-poly would-be hero with a gun would be on her ass, lickin’ for the bounty. More and more she realized how stupid, how empty, how useless all this money was. Every bill had a string attached. Ten million. What would she do with it? She had no idea. It was just a number, a big, bold, impressive-sounding number that even the dumbest math reject could understand would make her rich. Friar, he was a thinking man—now haunting her for some reason (was that part of the hack or just her memory toilet coming unclogged while some bastard poked around in her skull?) He knew exactly where every dollar would go, what kind of instruments it would buy and how many fifty-foot holes he could secretly drill into the sewers. He had taken calculated risks until his sanity was worth more than a buck or two—and still lost in the end. She, she had just seen a fat piece of meat hanging from a tree and yanked, missing the bear trap underneath.
“You’re a detective.”
It was so quiet in this part of town that his voice startled her. Her Betty leapt halfway from the holster, drawn to her hand by twitchy nerves and custom magne-plants in her palm and trigger finger. He noticed the bustle at her side, like she had an angry pigeon in her pocket, but didn’t comment. She cursed that dimwit saw jockey but really it was her fault. She’d dialed the twitch response up about as high as it would go—better to shoot first and scamper—but now she saw it was a liability, showing off all her secrets before she got a chance to tease. Had he seen the gun? Did he know the ball buster in the barrel would rip a hole in him the size of a beach ball, hockey pads or no? She sent a command to the holster, switching out the ammo for flashers. They’d make a fuck of a noise and were bright as the Fourth of July, but they wouldn’t leave anyone in pieces.
“How do you know?” she said. How did he know?
“Saw you on the feed. You solved a mystery. Found a lost kid.”
“I thought you hips didn’t watch the feeds.”
“We watch them on a screen, as God intended. Nothing in our brains. Our thoughts are our own.”
“Sounds inconvenient.”
“There are more important things in life than convenience.”
“So, where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere safe.”
“For who?”
“For the both of us. I mean you no harm…though by God’s teaching you had given me the justice to raise a hand, you did ask forgiveness and I gave.”
That wasn’t strictly true, but whatever you want buddy. Somehow she trusted him. She got on the Net (already slow as hell here) and browsed information on the hips. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on—who wanted to study the homeless anyway? They had an organization, of sorts, or at least principles handed down by their God. The damnedest thing was that they seemed to follow them. She tracked through all the police reports and couldn’t find any incidences of hip aggression. There’d been posers, other homeless and vagabonds not taken by the Book, but it didn’t seem like the real hips had so much as slapped an ass without permission. There were plenty of accounts of vandalism though, massive amounts actually, almost all against Net fixtures—power stations, routing stations, security spikes, and the underground pipelines. Shit, they’d even launched rockets at satellite dishes and antennae. It was a war on modern society. She understood now why Vericast was lobbying for a population cull—round ‘em all up, fix ‘em with a plee collar, and stick ‘em in a factory gutting fish or folding sheets.
“What do you have against the Net—wait, no, what’s your name?” There we go, manners.
“My name is Ibrahim. But many of us take old names, and there are only so many to go around, so you may call me Hemu.”
“Delighted, I’m Saru.” They shook hands, sort of. He went in for some strange sort of grip greeting but she gripped tighter and forced it into a strong American handshake.
“Saru is an unusual name.”
“They told me it comes from another zone. My mom was a Eurocrat, Gaulian or one of those strange places, but I never knew her.”
“Your father?”
“An asshole. I grew up in the HMH, Hathaway Morning House. Won the lottery or something and got an education—not that it stuck.”
Yeah, the lottery for sure. Backwoods farm bitch to big-city boarding slut. Should’ve been a reporter, should’ve written a book on that place, blown it open. She oughta go back right now guns blazing and blow a hole in the wall, hold off the guards while the kids ran to freedom. She wondered how many got out, how many were right now filing their shitty plastic cafeteria knives into shanks, planning to slice the hall guard’s Achilles tendon and steal his keys.
“What about you?” she asked, not really caring. This talk was boring. The past was the past and nothing fixed that so it didn’t make no difference. Hemu seemed genuine in his requests so she’d given him more than a kick in the nuts, but all this talk was stupid. Who cared about families and parents and childhood tales? What the hell did that have to do with anything? Hemu started talking about his life, his parents growing up in the Fish…being cooks in the Walnut Coop, his great triumph stripping copper from an old subway car and trading it to buy long underwear for the whole coop. A hero. She switched on a comedy feed and watched two fat men run around slapping people with their cocks. She set her body to follow Hemu and her head to nod and her mouth to make a huh or noise of interest now and then.
Her instincts pulled her out of the feed—the system worked. It wasn’t danger but curiosity. They’d come to a building, a chapel, surrounded by a maze of massive brick warehouses and factories. Up in the darkening sky—how long had they been walking?—she could make out an artificial canopy of steel girders, rope nets, and carefully placed debris. Their location was hidden from surveillance, aerial and satellite, and nested in the middle of an industrial jungle. The chapel was pressed, squeezed between the walls of an alley, small, like a double-decker bus. It seemed ancient, carved of stone, gargoyles and monsters, and…fish? leaping out in master-crafted detail, stained-glass windows—real glass, real art, not a screen that switched to ads every thirty seconds—depicting…what did they depict? It seemed abstract, but the more she stared—was that a person? An ocean? A planet? What was this place?
She felt a hand on her shoulder, Hemu, and somehow it was reassuring. There was that feeling here, that tingle in her tits and hair along her spine, that something just shy of the natural was at work. Hemu was looking at her, and his face was serious.
“It was a risk, bringing you here,” he said. “You are connected to the Net, and the dark God that hungers, but my God said to me it must be so.”
“Oh did he?” she said, trying to sound wry but she was rattled. It was so quiet here, so strange, all these dead buildings with no noise. This wasn’t a city; it was a forest. She saw the plants—so many plants, growing from the cracks in the building, the grime between the bricks, the vines crawling over everything and the flowers, the white flowers like tiny bells everywhere. Where had they all come from? Were they native? She’d never seen them anywhere else.
“Come,” Hemu said. He led her inside, through the carved wooden doors into the warmth and light. There were pews, and hips, heads bowed, lips moving in quiet prayer. The floor was marble. Yes, this had been a chapel, McChristian maybe, but so old? Where had it come from? She tried to scan the Net but found a signal error. She was cut off, in a dead zone. At the far end where she guessed an altar would normally be was a large white statue. What was that girl the McChristians worshipped? Mara? Susan? Whatever, at some point it might have been her, but the face had been carved out, roughly, leaving an empty scoop in the head. Saru didn’t like the statue. She could tell that it was the source of the bullshit, that it was the thing making her hair go all staticky and running the thrill-sex touch up and down her skin.
“What am I doing here?” she asked, loudly, causing the hips to look up. She should be at a bar, drinking to keep her mind scrambled, chasing leads, checking on Lou, hunting down the bastards that had hacked her—pornographers, maybe, trying to rip out her sex life and sell it? Ha, bad luck buddies. This was a waste of time.
“You’re looking for a girl,” Hemu said, bluntly, feeding her back her own get-to-it tone. “A girl with blue eyes. We know her. We can find her.”
Well, that got her attention.
“You know her, her, specifically?” Wait, how? “Hey, how did you know I was looking for her?”
He gestured to the statue. “God told us.”
“Oh.” Goddamnit, what a waste of time. Hemu nodded at her, as if reading her thoughts.
“There are no dogs in the city,” he said.
“So?” She was ten seconds away from desecrating this place and laughing her ass back to civilization. “There aren’t many cats either, or—” but that wasn’t true, she realized. She’d seen cats, not many, but a few. So what? They were harder to catch than dogs; they could climb trees and scurry better. And they weren’t so dependent on handouts.
“So what?” she said.
“The other, the Blue God that follows the girl. It likes dogs. It wants to be a wolf.”
That was something. The other…he was talking about the alien. He knew about that. But to him it was all mixed up in religion. To the Gaespora it was a marketing gimmick. To Friar it was science. To this poor bastard it was divine intervention. And to her it was all just a fat pain in the ass.
“So you know about the…others?”
He nodded. “We have known about them longer than anyone. We follow the First. The Slow God who knows time and waits. She came when the skies lost their blue and told us how we could live in a world of dark. From Her we have learned peace. We have learned simplicity. We have learned to trust one another, and above all to turn from the Hunger. She knows the Blue God, has seen him in other worlds beyond ours. They are not the same but they know how to live without destroying one another. The Hunger does not know this. It knows only Hunger.”
“And what about the…” Shit, what would this nutcase call the Gaespora? The Green God? The Rich God? The Annoying God? Ah screw it; she couldn’t play this game. “What about the Gaespora? You know, the plant people.”
