Rat tried to smooth his fur. He could crash the riot and get stuck. But if he waited, either the spook or the fed would be stepping on his tail before long. Rat had no doubt that both had managed to plant locator bugs on him.
“ ’Course, riot crashing don’t come cheap,” said the cabbie.
“Triple the meter.” The fare was already over two hundred dollars for the fifteen-minute ride. “Shoot for Bay Two—the one with the yellow door.” He pulled out his wallet and started tapping its luminescent keys. “I’m sending recognition code now.”
He heard the cabbie notify the cops that they were coming through. Rat could feel the Checker accelerate as they passed the cordon, and he had a glimpse of strobing lights, cops in blue body armor, a tank studded with water cannons. Suddenly the cabbie braked, and Rat pitched forward against his shoulder harness. The Checker’s solid rubber tires squealed, and there was the thump of something bouncing off the hood. They had slowed to a crawl, and the dead closed around them.
Rat could not see out the front because the cabbie was protected from his passengers by steel plate. But the side windows filled with faces streaming with sweat and tears and blood. Twisted faces, screaming faces, faces etched by the agonies of withdrawal. The soundproofing muffled their howls. Fear and exhilaration filled Rat as he watched them pass. If only they knew how close they were to dust, he thought. He imagined the dead faces gnawing through the cab’s armor in a frenzy, pausing only to spit out broken teeth. It was wonderful. The riot was proof that the dust market was still white-hot. The dead must be desperate to attack the bunker like this looking for a flash. He decided to bump the price of his dust another ten percent.
Rat heard a clatter on the roof; then someone began to jump up and down. It was like being inside a kettledrum. Rat sank claws into the seat and arched his back. “What are you waiting for? Gas them, damn it!”
“Hey, Fare. Stuff ain’t cheap. We be fine—almost there.”
A woman with bloody red hair matted to her head pressed her mouth against the window and screamed. Rat reared up on his hind legs and made biting feints at her. Then he saw the penlight in her hand. At the last moment Rat threw himself backward. The penlight flared, and the passenger compartment filled with the stench of melting plastic. A needle of coherent light singed the fur on Rat’s left flank; he squealed and flopped onto the floor, twitching.
The cabbie opened the external gas vents, and abruptly the faces dropped away from the windows. The cab accelerated, bouncing as it ran over the fallen dead. There was a dazzling transition from the darkness of the violent night to the floodlit calm of Bay Number Two. Rat scrambled back onto the seat and looked out the back window in time to see the hydraulic doors of the outer lock swing shut. Something was caught between them—something that popped and spattered. The inner door rolled down on its track like a curtain coming down on a bloody final act.
Rat was almost home. Two security guards in armor approached. The door locks popped, and Rat climbed out of the cab. One of the guards leveled a burster at his head; the other wordlessly offered him a printreader. He thumbed it, and bunker’s computer verified him immediately.
“Good evening, sir,” said one of the guards. “Little rough out there tonight. Did you have luggage?”
The front door of the cab opened, and Rat heard the low whine of electric motors as a mechanical arm lowered the cabbie’s wheelchair onto the floor of the bay. She was a gray-haired woman with a rheumy stare who looked like she belonged in a rest home in New Jersey. A knitted shawl covered her withered legs. “You said triple.” The cab’s hoist clicked and released the chair; she rolled toward him. “Six hundred and sixty-nine dollars.”
“No luggage, no.” Now that he was safe inside the bunker, Rat regretted his panic-stricken generosity. A credit transfer from one of his own accounts was out of the question. He slipped his last thousand-dollar bubble chip into his wallet’s card reader, dumped $331 from it into a Bahamian laundry loop, and then dropped the chip into her outstretched hand. She accepted it dubiously: for a minute he expected her to bite into it like they did sometimes on fossil TV. Old people made him nervous. Instead she inserted the chip into her own card reader and frowned at him.
“How about a tip?”
Rat sniffed. “Don’t pick up strangers.”
One of the guards guffawed obligingly. The other pointed, but Rat saw the skunk port in the wheelchair a millisecond too late. With a wet plot the chair emitted a gaseous stinkball that bloomed like an evil flower beneath Rat’s whiskers. One guard tried to grab at the rear of the chair, but the old cabbie backed suddenly over his foot. The other guard aimed his burster.
The cabbie smiled like a grandmother from hell. “Under the pollution index. No law against sharing a little scent, boys. And you wouldn’t want to hurt me anyway. The hack monitors my EEG. I go flat and it goes berserk.”
The guard with the bad foot stopped hopping. The guard with the gun shrugged. “It’s up to you, sir.”
Rat batted the side of his head several times and then buried his snout beneath his armpit. All he could smell was rancid burger topped with sulphur sauce. “Forget it. I haven’t got time.”
“You know,” said the cabbie, “I never get out of the hack, but I just wanted to see what kind of person would live in a place like this.” The lifts whined as the arm fitted its fingers into the chair. “And now I know.” She cackled as the arm gathered her back into the cab. “I’ll park it by the door. The cops say they’re ready to sweep the street.”
The guards led Rat to the bank of elevators. He entered the one with the open door, thumbed the printreader, and spoke his access code.
“Good evening, sir,” said the elevator. “Will you be going straight to your rooms?”
“Yes.”
“Very good, sir. Would you like a list of the communal facilities currently open to serve you?”
There was no shutting the sales pitch off, so Rat ignored it and began to lick the stink from his fur.
“The pool is open for lap swimmers only,” said the elevator as the doors closed. “All environments except for the weightless room are currently in use. The sensory deprivation tanks will be occupied until eleven. The surrogatorium is temporarily out of female chassis; we apologize for any inconvenience . . .”
The cab moved down two and a half floors and then stopped just above the subbasement. Rat glanced up and saw a dark gap opening in the array of light diffuser panels. The spook dropped through it.
“ . . . the holo therapist is off-line until eight tomorrow morning, but the interactive sex booths will stay open until midnight. The drug dispensary . . .”
She looked as if she had been water-skiing through the sewer. Her blonde hair was wet and smeared with dirt; she had lost the ribbons from her pigtails. Her jeans were torn at the knees, and there was an ugly scrape on the side of her face. The silk turtleneck clung wetly to her. Yet despite her dishevelment, the hand that held the penlight was as steady as a jewel cutter’s.
“There seems to be a minor problem,” said the elevator in a soothing voice. “There is no cause for alarm. This unit is temporarily nonfunctional. Maintenance has been notified and is now working to correct the problem. In case of emergency, please contact Security. We regret this temporary inconvenience.”
The spook fired a burst of light at the floor selector panel; it spat fire at them and went dark. “Where the hell were you?” said the spook. “You said the McDonald’s in Time Square if we got separated.”
“Where were you?” Rat rose up on his hind legs. “When I got there the place was swarming with cops.”