“It’s so wonderful to be alive,” she says, “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“Cutting rejoo.”
“If people made sense, we wouldn’t have psychologists.” And we wouldn’t buy dinosaur toys for kids who were never going to make it anyway. I grit my teeth. None of them make any sense. Stupid moms.
Alice sighs and runs her hands across her thighs, kneading herself, hiking up her skirt and digging her fingers into her flesh. “But it still doesn’t make any sense. It feels so good. You’d have to be crazy to stop rejoo.”
“Of course they’re crazy. They kill themselves, they make babies they don’t know how to take care of, they live in shitty apartments in the dark, they never go out, they smell bad, they look terrible, they never have anything good again—” I’m starting to shout. I shut my mouth.
Alice looks over at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
But I’m not. I’m mad. Mad at the ladies and their stupid toy-buying. Pissed off that these dumb women tease their dumb terminal kids like that; treat them like they aren’t going to end up as compost. “Let’s not talk about work right now. Let’s just go home.” I force a grin. “I’ve already got the day off. We should take advantage of it.”
Alice is still looking at me. I can see the questions in her eyes. If she weren’t on the leading edge of a rejoo high, she’d keep pressing, but she’s so wrapped up in the tingling of her rebuilt body that she lets it go. She laughs and runs her fingers up my leg and starts to play with me. I override the magline’s safeties with my cop codes and we barrel across the Causeway toward Angel Spire with the sun on the ocean and Alice smiling and laughing and the bright air whirling around us.
Three AM. Another call, windows down, howling through the humidity and swelter of Newfoundland. Alice wants me to come home, come back, relax, but I can’t. I don’t want to. I’m not sure what I want, but it’s not brunch with Belgian waffles or screwing on the living room floor or a trip to the movies or… anything, really.
I can’t do it, anyway. We got home, and I couldn’t do it. Nothing felt right. Alice said it didn’t matter, that she wanted to practice.
Now I haven’t seen her for more than a day.
I’ve been on duty, catching up on calls. I’ve been going for twenty-four hours straight, powered on coppers’-little-helpers and mainlined caffeine, and my hat and trench coat and hands are pinprick-sprayed with the residue of work.
Along the coastline the sea runs high and hot, splashing in over the breakwaters. Lights ahead, the glow of coalfoundries and gasification works. The call takes me up the glittering face of Palomino Cluster. Nice real estate. Up the masslifts and smashing through a door with Pentle backing me, knowing what we’re going to find but never knowing how much these ones will fight.
Bedlam. A lady, this one a pretty brown girl who might have had a great life if she didn’t decide she needed a baby, and a kid lying in the corner in a box screaming and screaming. And the lady’s screaming too, screaming at the little kid in its box, like she’s gone out of her mind.
As we come in through the door, she starts screaming at us. The kid keeps screaming. The lady keeps screaming. It’s like a bunch of screwdrivers jamming in my ears; it goes on and on. Pentle grabs the lady and tries to hold her but she and the kid just keep screaming away and suddenly I can’t breathe. I can barely stand. The kid screams and screams and screams: screwdrivers and glass and icepicks in my head.
So I shoot the thing. I pull out my Grange and put a bullet in the little sucker. Fragments of box and baby spray the air.
I don’t do that, normally; it’s against procedure to waste the kid in front of the mother.
But there we all are, staring at the body, bloodmist and gunpowder all over and my ears ringing from the shot and for one pristine crystal second, it’s quiet.
Then the woman’s screaming at me again and Pentle’s screaming too because I screwed up the evidence before he could get a picture, and then the lady’s all over me, trying to claw my eyes out. Pentle drags her off and then she’s calling me a bastard and a killer and bastard and monkey man and a fucking pig and that I’ve got dead eyes.
And that really gets me: I’ve got dead eyes. This lady’s headed into a rejoo collapse and won’t last another twenty years and she’ll spend all of it in a single-sex work camp. She’s young, a lot like Alice, maybe the last of them to cross the line into rejoo, right when she came of age — not an old workhorse like me who was already forty when it went generic — and now she’ll be dead in an eye blink. But I’m the one with dead eyes.
I take my Grange and shove it into her forehead. “You want to die too?”
“Go ahead! Do it! Do it!” She doesn’t stop for a second, just keeps howling and spitting. “Fucking bastard! Bastard fuckingfuckfucking— Do it! Do it!” She’s crying.
Even though I want to see her brains pop out the back of her head, I don’t have the heart. She’ll die soon enough. Another twenty years and she’s done for. The paperwork isn’t worth it.
Pentle cuffs her while she babbles to the baby in the box, just a lump of blood and limp doll parts now. “My baby my poor baby I didn’t know I’m sorry my baby my poor baby I’m sorry…” Pentle muscles her out to the car.
For a while I can hear her in the hall. My baby my poor baby my poor baby.… And then she’s gone down the lifts and it’s a relief just to be standing there with the wet smells of the apartment and the dead body.
She was using a dresser drawer as her bassinet.
I run my fingers along the splintered edge, fondle the brass pulls. If nothing else, these ladies are resourceful, making the things we can’t buy anymore. If I close my eyes, I can almost remember a whole industry around these little guys. Little outfits. Little chairs. Little beds. Everything made little.
Little dinosaurs.
“She couldn’t make it shut up.”
I jerk my hands away from the baby box, startled. Pentle has come up behind me. “Huh?”
“She couldn’t make it stop crying. Didn’t know what to do with it. Didn’t know how to make it calm down. That’s how the neighbors heard.”
“Dumb.”
“Yeah. She didn’t even have a tag-teamer. How the heck was she going to do grocery shopping?”
He gets out his camera and tries a couple shots of the baby. There’s not a whole lot left. A 12mm Grange is built for junkies, nitheads going crazy, ’bot assassins. It’s overkill for an unarmored thing like this. When the new Granges came out, Grange ran an ad campaign on the sides of our cruisers. ‘Grange: Unstoppable’. Or something like that.
There was this one that said ‘Point Blank Grange’ with a photo of a completely mangled nithead. That one was in all our lockers.
Pentle tries another angle on the drawer, going for a profile, trying to make the best of a bad situation. “I like how she used a drawer,” he says.
“Yeah. Resourceful.”
“I saw this one where the lady made a whole little table and chair set for her kid. Handmade it all. I couldn’t believe how much energy she put into it.” He makes shapes with his hand. “Little scalloped edges, shapes painted on the top: squares and triangles and things.”
“If you’re going to die doing something, I guess you want to do a good job of it.”
“I’d rather be parasailing. Or go to a concert. I heard Alice was great the other night.”
“Yeah. She was.” I study the baby’s body as Pentle takes some more shots. “If you had to do it, how do you think you’d make one of them be quiet?”
Pentle nods at my Grange. “I’d tell it to shut up.”