“Saddle up, Americans!” Canny boomed, clicking back the hammers on his shiny silver guns in unison. “Let’s go hunt some fucking Monks!”
XXXI
THE MELTING ASPHALT SOUND
The alarms were everywhere. I was breathing alarms, inhaling the noise and exhaling the noise, the air thick with it. In the near distance, I could hear steady gunshots, punctuated by occasional shouts-my team causing a professional-grade ruckus. The hall was narrow and made of plain gray concrete, lit by bare bulbs at regular intervals. We walked; me, then Gatz and his luggage, then Kieth, occasionally finding Monks slumped on the floor, their heads exploded, evidence of Canny Orel’s Merry Pranksters. I felt disoriented. When I closed my eyes I could picture our location on the mental diagram of the complex, a red dot moving slowly but steadily. But with my eyes open, I was lost-every hall was the same gray stone, the same bare bulbs, the same damp, heavy feel. It wasn’t a place for humans.
At every intersection, Kieth called out a direction, shouting over blaring alarms and the sparkle of gunfire. When we came to the first door, I had Gatz pull the hover containing Dawson forward. As soon as we got Dawson within a foot of the door, it snicked open, and we resumed our ordered march.
“Ave, you okay?” Gatz ventured in a low, strained voice, like thumbtacks in my ear.
“Fuck no,” I said without looking back at him. “I’ve been dead, you cocksucker. Cut me some slack.”
There was an explosion of distant, echoed gunfire and screams. I didn’t pause. We were so close, so fucking goddamned close. I wasn’t going to get this close and fail. I wasn’t going to go down with Barnaby Dawson’s digital laughter ringing in my ears.
“Keep going straight, Mr. Cates,” Kieth shouted. “We’re very close. This whole place is in chaos, if I’m sniffing these packets correctly. There’s activity everywhere.”
“Ever see a thousand wolves tear a rat apart, Cates?” Dawson cackled in his bubbly, engine-oil voice. “It’s really, really entertaining.”
We were sloping downward, and the chilly damp feel of the upper areas of the Abbey compound was giving way to heat, heavy and resisting. “Kieth, what the fuck’s going on up there?”
Kieth pressed his hand against his ear. “Tanner! Milton! What’s happening?”
We walked a few steps. My hand was aching, so I tried to loosen my white-knuckled grip on my gun.
“They’re stuck,” Kieth said breathlessly. “Penned in. A lot of Monks. It-it-” he paused. I just kept moving. “I’ve lost contact. All I can hear is noise-shouting.”
“Someone’s still alive, then,” I offered. “Which way?”
“What? Left, then straight toward another doorway-wait!”
I stopped, staring straight ahead at the door we were approaching. The walls were perfect gray concrete. They joined the floor and ceiling with computerized precision. The door was like all the others we’d passed by or through; steel, dull, with no handle or obvious way to open it. We’d moved away from the ruckus Orel and crew were causing, and I could barely hear the gunshots. I waited a count of five.
“What is it?” I said, gritting my teeth against the urge to scream. I felt trapped. Tons of stone and metal on top of me and a thousand murderous cyborgs all around. Every muscle was tight, every pore open, desperation and terror leaking out. A mile above, London ground along unawares. I didn’t know what time it was, but I knew there were faded, thinned men and women standing on the Dole Line, while sleeker, sharper men and women moved through them, picking them off. While fat, expensive cops grabbed everyone by the ankles and shook vigorously to see what would fall out of everyone’s pockets.
Underneath, we had screams and gunshots and the echo of my ragged breathing.
“Mr. Cates, Ty doesn’t pretend to know everything, but Jesus, something’s going on right behind that door.”
The melting asphalt sound of Dawson’s laughter bubbled up again, and I closed my eyes and tried to grit my teeth harder in response, the sound slicing up my spine. My teeth, I imagined, would shatter at any moment.
“You made it, Cates,” Dawson gurgled. I stared at the door and imagined his voice as dark fog, spilling over the edges of the hover crate and pooling on the floor. “That’s the only entrance to the Inner Sanctum. The Holy of Holies where Brother Squalor contemplates his slice of forever and counts the heads as they roll in!”
I opened my eyes and stared at the door.
“I can’t open it,” Dawson continued, managing somehow to convey glee through his warped digital voice. “Only Squalor and his Cardinals can. Have you ever met a Cardinal, Cates? I’ll bet you haven’t. If you had, you wouldn’t be here.”
“You can’t open it?” I asked.
That dripping cackle again. “You can’t either. Right about now there are five hundred Monks homing in on you. You’re trapped like, dare I say it, like a rat!”
I turned around and looked at Dawson, who lay smiling in the portable coffin, a mess of wires and insulation and coolant fluid. I shifted my eyes to Kieth, who stared back with pop-eyed nervousness, clearly terrified of what I would ask him to do next. “Can you pry this fucking door open?”
He leaned sideways to run his eyes over the door. He shrugged. “Maybe. Ty’ll have to do some scans, trace some wiring. Might need some spare parts, which Ty did not bring. He might also just as easily fuse everything shut pretty solidly.”
I nodded. It was always some fucking thing. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t even been a month since Dick Marin had scooped me off the streets of Manhattan and ruined my fucking life. “Kev, make sure Captain Dawson is telling us the truth, okay?”
“Right,” Gatz whispered, turned, and leaned down over the Monk, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead. After a moment, he straightened up, putting a hand out to the wall to steady himself. “Go ahead, ask,” he gasped, breathing hard.
“Can you open that door?”
Dawson shook, his whole torso vibrating. “No,” he finally oozed. “Can’t.”
I nodded, reached out, and grabbed Kieth by the shoulder. I spun him around so that he faced the mutilated Monk. “Anything in that motherfucker you can use? Monks are just crammed full of interesting tech, aren’t they?”
Kieth nodded, his shaved head reflecting the dull white light. “Yes. Very possibly.”
I nodded. “Rip ’im up, Ty. Take whatever you need.”
“Hey, Avery,” Gatz said between loud breaths. “They’re getting’ closer, huh?”
I paused, listening. Kieth started to say something about the door, so I reached out and clamped his lips shut with one hand.
The shouts and gunshots were getting closer. Fast.
“What the-”
Before I could finish, Canny Orel suddenly appeared around the corner, guns shining in his hands, running full-tilt. Seconds later one of the twins followed. Orel actually looked disheveled: hair mussed, coat torn, a large dark stain spreading through his shirt on one side.
“Well, Mr. Cates, I hope you no longer need a distraction,” he said, skidding to a halt in front of me. “We did our best but there are a large number of the infernal machines hot on our trail.”
Despite his appearance, he wasn’t out of breath at all, and calmly flushed his used ammo clips and began reloading.
“Ms. Milton,” he added casually, “did not survive the onslaught.”
“Jesus fucked,” I swore. “How-”
“No time!”
As if they’d been drilling for years, Tanner dropped to her knees below Orel and they both opened fire on three Monks who raced around the corner. The Monks went down one, two, three, each a headshot, each from Canny, who moved his gun with surgical precision: Bam! A tic to the right bam! A tic to the left bam! I couldn’t help but admire it.