Sasha fired. A woman clutched her throat, staggered, and fell. A little girl cried, “Mommy!” and stopped to help.
I heard someone yell, “Stop! Stop, damn you!” and realized it was me. But they didn’t stop. They screamed their hatred and kept on coming. My stomach felt queasy, and bile filled my throat as I continued to fire. It was a one-sided battle in which their weapons were completely ineffectual and ours were deadly. The imperative “kill or be killed” is written in our genetic code somewhere, and that’s what we did.
Finally, when the last adult had fallen, and the children were sobbing at their sides, it ended. Some were wounded. I wanted to stay and help, but a series of inarticulate yells followed by the clang of distant footsteps forced a retreat. I was about to grab Sasha and drag her the length of the balcony when Joy tugged at my pants leg. “Come on! I opened the door.”
I looked, saw wires dangling from the now-open control box. and realized that Wamba had given his creation something more than a pleasing personality. Joy had initiative, technical expertise, and who knows what else. I made a note to kiss Wamba when and if I saw him again.
The next set of pursuers moved out onto the balcony, saw us, and charged. Their shouts became muffled as the door closed behind me. That’s when I realized that a stranger had joined us: a boy who was crying, knuckling his eyes, and looking to escape.
Sasha held the kid with one hand and a pistol with the other. Her eyes flashed with anger. “We need to find that bastard and find him now!”
I shrugged. “Great. But how? He could be anywhere.”
She gave me one of those looks, the kind that reminds me of how stupid I am, and knelt beside the boy. Her voice was level and tight. “Security cameras imply a control room of some sort, and that’s where the popper will be. Isn’t that right, boy? Where’s the control room?”
The boy looked resentful and tried to pull free. “You shot my sister!”
I expected Sasha to say something nice, to comfort the boy, so imagine my surprise when she put the gun to his head. “Now listen, you little shit! I shot your sister because she tried to kill me. Now, tell me where the control room is or I’ll splatter your brains all over the wall! Take your pick.”
Voices yelled and fists pounded on the door. I looked at Joy. She shook her head and smiled. Whatever she’d done to the lock mechanism would hold for a while. I turned to the boy. You could see the wheels turn. He hated our guts but wanted to live. It didn’t take long to arrive at the proper decision. The tears stopped and his eyes drifted towards my skull plate. “I won’t tell you where it is…but I’ll show you.”
The kid was no dummy. The longer he held onto the information, the longer he’d live. That’s what he assumed, and Sasha nodded agreeably. “Good, very good. Lead away. And remember, one false move, and I’ll blow your brains out.”
The kid knew his way around or was leading us on a wild-goose chase. One or the other. We followed him down the corridor, up a ladder, through an accessway, and out into a large passageway. It was littered with scraps of half-eaten food, empty booze bags, and pools of dried vomit. There was no doubt about it, the poppers liked to party. A box-shaped maintenance bot beeped and ate an empty food pak.
The boy held a finger to his lips; we nodded, and followed him down the hall. I went first, followed by Sasha and Joy. Though nearly obliterated by orange spray paint, the words “Control Center” could still be seen on the hatch at the far end of the corridor. I was proud of my ability to read them. There was no way to know if the popper was inside or not. A security cam stared unblinkingly back at me. Was the popper monitoring that particular shot? Waiting for us to walk into his trap? There was no way to know. He paused ten feet short of the hatch. I checked my weapon. “I’ll go first. Cover me.”
The kid nodded. Her face was pale, and her lips made a long thin line. She was scared, one of the more sensible things I’d seen her do, and a sign of inevitable adulthood.
I turned, planning to lecture the boy, and discovered he was gone. My heart beat a little bit faster, since I knew the little shit had every reason to run for the nearest com set and scream his head off. Time was critical.
I touched the button, and the hatch opened. I dived, rolled, and came up feeling foolish. Control panels lined the bulkheads. Vid monitors displayed miles of empty corridors. Air whispered through the vent over my head. The compartment was empty, or seemed to be, and my pulse started to slow.
The kid stepped through the door, swept the room with her weapon, and looked in my direction. I was halfway through a shrug when the popper dropped out of an overhead crawl space, landed on his feet, and shot Sasha in the back. She looked surprised, took a step in my direction, and fell flat on her face.
My weapon was light-years out of position. I fought to bring it around, cursed the gravity that slowed my hand, and prayed I would beat him.
There was time, plenty of time, time enough to notice that his eyes were cesspool black, that his teeth were very, very white, that he wore a gold crucifix around his neck, that his left shoulder had been bandaged by someone who knew what they were doing, that the weapon in his hand was a Ruger Dartmaster, that his finger was squeezing the trigger, that the pistol was jerking in my hand, that darts were walking their way up the middle of his body and punching holes through his throat.
The popper grabbed his neck, hoping to staunch the sudden flood, but blood oozed out between his fingers and dripped down the front of his shirt. I think he fainted then, and bled to death a minute later, but didn’t really care. The kid was, well, I didn’t know what she was, not a friend exactly, because friends don’t keep secrets from each other, but not a client either, because clients are about money, and I hadn’t thought about the fifty K in a long time.
No, the girl fell into some weird category I couldn’t quite put a name to, but felt as a confused mishmash of anger, fear, and sorrow. I knelt by Sasha’s side, searched for a pulse, and found one. I felt relieved, and scared because she needed help and I didn’t know what to do. The back of her shirt was wet with blood and her skin was whiter that it should’ve been. I saw a lump where her head had hit the deck.
“Excuse me…”
The voice came from behind me. I whirled, saw a middle-aged man standing in the doorway, and was in the process of squeezing the trigger when Joy ran towards me. “Don’t shoot! He’s a doctor!”
The man smiled and held his hands palms out. “Not a doctor, but a physician’s assistant.”
I must have looked doubtful because he gestured towards the dead popper. His voice had a sardonic quality. “I bandaged his wound…though the effort seems wasted.”
“He offered to help,” Joy added brightly.
I remembered the popper’s bandage, the expertise with which it had been applied, and got to my feet. The physician’s assistant watched me. He had thinning gray hair, a nose that looked larger than it should have, and about two days’ worth of stubble. I noticed that while his clothes were old, they were fastidiously clean, and had been fashionable once. His eyes were blue, as clear as a tropical sea, and free of fear. I got the feeling that everything that could happen to him already had. The choice was no choice at all.
“He shot her in the back, Doc. Do everything you can.”
The man nodded, knelt by Sasha’s side, and went to work. Metal flashed as he cut through blood-soaked fabric. Gauze appeared from the case by his side. Blood welled up and was wiped away. The entry wounds were high and to the right. Doc checked for exit wounds, found them, and slapped self-sealing premedicated pressure bandages over the holes. The bleeding stopped. He nodded his satisfaction, slipped a needle into her arm, and handed me a bag full of liquid. “Here, make yourself useful.”