Shapers of Worlds Volume III, page 6
Of all the stupid, hick towns . . . sometimes, I hate being right.
I nodded at Carmichael. “She wants to throw her life away, let her. You know better. Step away from her and the body. I’m not bluffing. I’ll sterilize this whole town if I have to. She touched the body; there’s a good chance she’s already a carrier.”
“Well, then, you’ll just have to shoot me too. Here, I’ll even make it easy.” He kneeled down on the floor and put his hands behind his head.
I really should just shoot them both. “Why?” I asked.
His lip curled up as he bared his teeth at me. “I told you. I got sick and tired of having to shoot people. Watching them get shot really isn’t that much better.”
I held Carmichael’s eyes with my own. One clean shot, and it’d be over. He’d known that when he kicked my gun away. Hell, he was waiting, asking for it . . .
I breathed and aimed, the red light dancing in the middle of Carmichael’s forehead. . . but I hesitated before pulling the trigger.
I can shoot an infected six-year-old, and hell, I’d enjoy shooting Caroline, but I couldn’t bring myself to shoot Carmichael. One lousy preacher.
Damn it. I flipped the red light off and switched to manual aim despite the flashing orange light in the corner of my Feed. I don’t care what the Feed says. I make shots like this on my own. “You sure about this?” I asked Carmichael as Caroline edged farther behind him, trying to maximize her cover. I held my breath and waited, watching her.
The preacher smiled as Caroline hit her mark.
I exhaled and pulled the trigger.
My disrupter beam tore through Carmichael’s bionic leg. He screamed and dropped to one knee. Integrated pain receptors are a real bitch that way. I barely had to re-aim before firing again.
Caroline stared at me in the kind of wide-eyed shock I’m more used to seeing than I probably should be. The expression didn’t leave her face as her body collapsed to the sterile tiles.
It took a second for Carmichael to catch on. I watched as his face transitioned from shock to an expression I also saw all too often. Failure.
“Told you I’d do it.”
He reached under his duster and pulled out a gun—an older model. I set my tracking light on his trigger hand—not that I needed it, but I thought it sent the right message. Carmichael looked up at me with another look I was used to seeing. Hate.
Well, on the bright side, there was something to be said about being back in familiar territory. I shook my head. “Don’t push me, Carmichael. It never ends well.” For a moment, I thought he’d do it.
Instead, he lowered the gun. His eyes never came off me, though.
My audio Feed cracked. “Billie?” MAX said. I breathed out a mental sigh of relief even as I picked up an edge of panic in his metallic voice. “Please say those were your rounds going off.”
MAX was back online.
I nodded to Carmichael’s leg. “Put pressure on that. You’re dripping hydraulic fluid everywhere,” I said before switching to my private audio Feed. “MAX? Glad to hear your voice. Was worried that sonic grenade did you in this time.”
“Reboot, Billie, reboot. Status?”
I kept my eyes on Carmichael even though he watched me as if I were no better than a piece of trash on the floor. It didn’t matter; looks like that never made it far past my periphery. I wasn’t shooting him. He wasn’t infected. I didn’t care how much he hated me. However, I also couldn’t just let the gunfight slide back at the CDC.
I switched my audio Feed back to external. “Copy, MAX. Two dead; the widow and the preacher. Tried breaking quarantine.” I gave Carmichael a pointed look. “And shooting me. I don’t know about you, MAX, but between the T7s and the sonicators, I’m pretty well done with this place.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more, Billie. More excitement than I anticipated.”
“I’ll say. Initiate sterilization and meet me at the doors to help transfer the infected body. Shoot anybody in the head who tries to stop you,” I added, then switched my audio off.
Carmichael laughed from where he sat on the floor, not entirely sane-sounding. “You know what they say about you, Billie? You’ve got sociopathic tendencies. That’s why they stick you with the damn robot.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.” I headed over to my quarantined body and reset the containment field. Everything greenlighted; the sonicators hadn’t completely destroyed it. I was ready to go.
Carmichael laughed, again not completely sane-sounding. “You know what I think? You’re just another evil, soulless CDC son of a bitch.”
“Nothing I haven’t heard before.” Especially from survivors . . . keep the conversation functional. “You got an old biosuit in back?”
I waited until he nodded, wary.
I figured as much. “Put it on. If you are infected, it’ll contain it. You’ve got a couple minutes before this place disintegrates. I suggest you use them. My guess is you know where the back door is.”
He didn’t say anything else, just his silent accusation at me as he stood up on his good leg and hobbled back toward the office.
I shook my head and grabbed my contained body. “I hope it was worth it,” I shouted over my shoulder.
No answer, just the scrape of Carmichael’s leg across the floor.
Hell, maybe he’d even live. Part of me hoped he did. The rest of me just couldn’t be bothered caring.
Body in tow, I headed for the wooden church doors to go meet MAX and our transport.
Nobody is supposed to love a funeral.
I guess that just makes me one sick puppy.
COURT DAY IN SHELOCTA COUNTY
By Robert Penner
The drug van was always full on court day, even before it got to the parking garage by City Hall: soccer moms nodding off on the back seat; working folks smoking crack; college and high school kids stocking up with Modafinil or microdosing on psilocybin. Then, once downtown, the people scheduled for arraignments and trials and sentencing would find it. In the CCTV blind spot. The blue van with the tinted windows and Seeds of Faith Christian Academy stencilled on the side. Right where they got told it would be, right where it always was on Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9:15.
You could tell the first-timers as they approached, wide-eyed, trying not to stare at the windows, sweating through their best clothes, exhausted by uncertainty.
“Open door,” Chris would say, and humid air would boil in: cat piss, wet cement, mildew.
“Mary sent me,” the first-timer would say.
“Gary sent me.”
“Gerry.”
“Larry.”
A list of sociopaths on the take. Deputy sheriffs and security guards in crisp uniforms. Pepper spray, handguns, walkie-talkies, polished shoes with which to kick the shit out of you. They would send the newbies over, and Chris would nod them in. Give them reassurances. Take their orders. Distribute product.
Traffic- and family-court refugees.
DUI. Child custody. Trespassing. Petty theft. Indecent exposure. Public intox. Vandalism. Possession. Prostitution. Fraud. Nothing serious. Nothing big. Just the usual lines of escape, the usual dead ends and cul-de-sacs and arbitrary inevitabilities. Crushing banalities. Lots more women than there used to be. Lots more moms on the hook for truant teenagers. Lots of bewildered women trying to look confident: cigarettes in shaking hands, cheap blazers and old skirts, fresh pantyhose, hair pulled into tidy ponytails and buns, ankles turning in high heels.
Skinny Finney was there. Skinny Finney was always there on court day. Already waiting. Pulling his long limbs up into the van after his big rolling head. Perched right behind the driver’s seat. Grinning. Personable. Hands flapping about, as harmless as moths. Working on the sad moms. Trawling for clients. Sniffing out that easy legal-aid money.
“Maxine sent me,” today’s sad mom said, and Finney practically licked his lips.
Maxine was gold. Maxine with the friendly smile and the “Honey, you okay?” and the gentle hand on the forearm. Maxine at the metal detector. Maxine the big earner on the drug-van payroll. Maxine, who could smell despair and loneliness, who could unerringly pick the users out of the queues and the crowds. She was gold.
“Will I be back in time?” the sad mom kept asking, and Finney kept yes-yes-yes-ing her, but she didn’t relax until she asked Chris and told him the number of the ticket she’d been dispensed, and he laughed.
“Shit,” he said. “Yeah, we’ll get you back in time.”
Finney gave him a grateful wink.
“Whenever the system crashes, there’s a backlog,” he said, and she slumped. “Sometimes it takes all week to catch back up.”
“They said it would just be a couple of hours. I only took the one shift off.”
She was on the phone—“It’s Jen,” she said. “I’ll be late.”—when the Professor yanked open the door.
“Is this the magic bus?” asked the Professor.
Chris had taken a class with the guy back in the day. Before the loans ran out. A tenure-track nihilist. Religious Studies. Mysticism. Asceticism. Always talking about Sanskrit. About Pali. Always talking about the translations he was working on. Always talking about illumination and darkness.
The incandescent white sky was filled with drones. The robotrucks hemmed them in, the semitrailers like shining walls. Nothing moved. DUI stared at the ads flickering across his window: law firms, insurance companies, expungement services, churches. Child Custody was texting. Possession and Petty Theft were in a quiet conversation. The Professor was squeezed in the back with the soccer moms—they were the only regulars left—his thick thighs pressed against theirs, periodically sucking on his crack pipe, hands crawling about when he wasn’t.
The soccer moms: first on and last off. Chris trailed after the school buses in the morning, picking them up one by one. Free of their kids, they got high and fell asleep, free of the dead weight of maternity, free until four o’clock, when Chris returned them to the ground, to their stops, and they opened their eyes to the world, opened their arms to their children.
“Koestler & Koestler,” said Jen.
Finney barked with laughter. “Those shysters.”
They had done a few lines of coke and were passing a bottle back and forth.
“Take it easy there, Doc,” Chris said as the Professor’s fingers vanished in the shadows.
The man recoiled.
“Do I know you?” he asked. “From school? Have I taught you?”
Chris shrugged.
The Professor stared. Eyes like worms. Fingers like worms. Words like worms.
“Did you hire them off the internet?” Finney asked Jen.
There were buzzards high above. Circling on an updraft. Much slower than the cycling drones. Too many of them. Too many drones. News drones. Police. Too concentrated. Too low. An accident, maybe. A roadblock.
“Take the Orangeville Exit,” said Chris, and the right signal came on.
“They were on the list the court sent,” said Jen. “Right at the top.”
“Of course they were,” said Finney. “They pay good money to be there. Right at the top. First in line for the cull.”
A state-police drone was hovering right above them. The state police always made Chris nervous. Not like the borough cops. The borough was fine. The borough knew the state of play. But you never could tell with the state police. You didn’t know who they were, their names, who they were related to, where they went to school.
“How soon till the Orangeville exit?” Chris asked. He glanced in the mirror. The Professor was staring at him.
“Five minutes,” said the van.
“All you get with Koestler & Koestler are the cheapest algorithms and a call centre in India,” Finney said. “No local interface. No actual lawyers.”
The drone dropped a little lower, hovering not ten feet away from the windshield.
“You can’t have been much if I don’t remember you,” said the Professor. “I remember the good students.”
“What about Black Lick Road?” asked Chris. “How quick can you get us onto Black Lick Road?”
“Three minutes,” said the van.
“You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Jen,” Finney said. “It’s a terrible law, an unjust law. Isn’t that right, Chris? The truancy law?”
“It’s a bullshit law.” He stared up into the blank sky. They were off the highway: rolling hills, overgrown farms, chemical plants hidden behind trees, crooked houses and ragged yards, boarded-up gas stations with old pumps like rotten teeth. Every third building was a Pentecostal church: The Holy Spirit Laboratory of God, A City Burns Upon the Hill, The Blood of Jesus Flowing, The Lord Sees You Where You Are.
“You know they just built a women’s prison near Erie?” Finney said. “State-of-the-art. Massive. Coincided with all the new anti-truancy laws on the books. And the old ones they sharpened up. Punishing parents for the crimes of the young. No more incarcerable men, so they found a way to monetize the single moms.”
“Really?”
“Really,” said Finney. “Some of those prisons and criminal-defence bots and lobbying firms are owned by the same umbrella corporations. Isn’t that right, Chris?”
“That’s right,” said Chris. “The sons of bitches.”
“We’re all just wind tunnels for debt,” said Finney. “It blows right through us from one company to the next. Blows through everyone. Even the Professor back there,” said Finney, and they all looked back at him.
“Is he really a professor?”
“Well,” said Finney. “He teaches for a university.”
“What’s that?” said the Professor. “What are you saying?”
They had been back to the courthouse and dropped off DUI, Child Custody, Possession, and Petty Theft, but Jen stayed behind to party for one more circuit. The Professor had come up front to hit on her.
“Finney isn’t a lawyer so much as a stringer for an AI,” the Professor said.
“A lawyer?” Jen was wide-eyed.
“I work for a law firm,” said Finney. “Yes.”
“A law firm?” sneered the Professor. “A bottom-feeding profit-maximizing limited-liability corporate scavenger, vacuuming up government contracts and churning out felons.”
Jen frowned.
“It was just a matter of time until he gave you his card,” the Professor said.
“Is that true?” Jen said.
“We have better financing than Koestler & Koestler,” said Finney. “We have better ratios, and we have a human face.”
“Finney.” The Professor searched for his crack pipe. “The smiling mask that hides the seething void.”
Chris remembered the Professor’s lectures as a sequence of narrated images: south-Indian temples adorned with pornographic statuary; endless chains of ass-fucking Buddhist monks painted into manuscripts; tantric gods; grinning demons; erotic Jesus on the cross. He remembered boredom. Heavy eyes. His head filled with sand. He remembered staring at test questions: rows and rows of numbers; circles; the scratching of pencils; the Professor’s voice rumbling on and on like the big trucks on the highway; the buzz of the fluorescent lights, flickering, blinking, an endless hum, endless as the chains of monks fucking each other in the ass, endless as the drones and the vultures circling above.
They picked up the Senator’s wife at her beautiful house in the suburbs. She had called Chris to say she needed a ride to the hairdresser. She sat in the passenger seat and smoked ketamine and weed. He smoked a little with her. He put on her music: gentle machine-generated noise barely punctured by rhythm or melody.
Jen stared at the woman’s profile, entranced by her clothes, her perfection. Aghast. The Professor and Finney kept talking.
“They banished me to the satellite campuses,” the Professor said. “To online teaching. Terrible hours. They dock my wages and take me to court. But it’s a matter of principles.”
Finney rolled his eyes.
“If I choose to tutor students in my spare time,” the Professor said, “it is none of their business.”
“It’s theft,” said Finney.
“How can I steal my own knowledge?” The Professor’s voice got louder.
“You signed a contract,” said Finney, and the Professor flushed.
“Contract!” he shouted, and Jen winced. “It is an unfair contract! Unlawful! It exceeds itself!”
The Senator’s wife stared straight ahead. Her sunglasses distorted the world, stretching it across the gentle curve of the lenses. The horizon glided across their centre like a snake around the world.
“Pipe down there, Doc,” said Chris.
The Professor glared at him but subsided.
“Are you sure I don’t know you?” the Professor asked.
Chris watched the sky.
“It exceeds itself,” the Professor muttered.
Jen had long missed her court date. Finney was reassuring her as the drug van circled through Shelocta County for its seventh circuit: I-can-fix-it-I-can-fix-it-I-can-fix-it. He spewed strings of incomprehensible words: citation networks, machine executables, case-based reasoning, outcome assessments. He explained how to switch from Koestler & Koestler to Friedmann, Stiegler, Becker & Bent: “You can do it on your phone; you can do it right now.”
The Professor was out of money. Out of drugs. Impatient to get dropped off at work. Angry. Sullen.
The sky had cooled to blue but was still filled with drones. The soccer moms were still asleep in the back, slumped against their seatbelts, against each other; arms tangled, hair tangled, dreams tangled, worlds tangled. The Professor still stared at Chris.
“I know you,” he said. Worms were in the Professor’s mouth, in his eyes, his beard. “I see you. I know you.”
Chris put his feet up on the dashboard and leaned against the window. He yawned. One more circuit and his shift was over. One more circuit.
“Take the Orangeville Exit,” he said, and the van’s right blinker came on.
