Bob’s body put the beetle back on the ground, and his mind began scuttling off in it.
3
In the recesses of the shelves behind the bar, Vince watched cockroaches dart between dirt-encrusted bottles, their antennae waving in the darkness as they waited. He could only imagine what it must be like upstairs. “Could we get a room?” he asked, wishing he hadn’t.
The bartender leered at them. “I could get you a fresh one.”
“Yeah, that would be…” For a second Vince thought he was offering a clean room, until the jab in his ribs from Agent Connors. Ah, he meant a fresh girl. “No, this one’s fine.” He turned, winking at Agent Connors, taking in the scowl on her mud-and-blood splattered face. “Just the room.”
There were a few regulars sitting at the bar, eyes staring straight ahead, their thoughts not on the future but the past. Vince wished he was one of them.
Two days ago they crash landed in the bayous of Louisiana. Spinning on impact, Vince’s turbofan bounced off Agent Connor’s aircraft, lessening the blow. Within seconds Vince extricated himself, amazed to be alive, and was running off through knee-deep water when his conscience hit him. He returned to pull the unconscious Agent Connors out of her cockpit, then splinted her broken leg before she came around. Slogging through the muck, he managed to find a small patch of dry ground.
For two days they struggled to stay alive out there. Once Connors regained consciousness, she made attempts to get in touch with her support teams, but they weren’t responsive. This area of Louisiana was on the fringe of government control. Vince didn’t stop her trying. He figured whatever the charges were, he was better off fighting them in court than fighting off whatever was in the swamp.
Connors tried to establish her control over the situation, but Vince had tossed her weapons into the swamp when she was unconscious. Vince didn’t like guns. That turned out to be a bad idea. Their arrival brought scavengers of all kinds—garbage drones, swamp people, animals. While the machines and humans gave them a wide berth as Connors hurled verbal threats at them, the alligators weren’t as easily dissuaded. Neither were the cottonmouths, deadly poisonous snakes that crawled everywhere.
Even with all that, the biggest problem became water. The standard-issue med kits in the turbofans didn’t contain water purification tablets, and drinking the raw bayou water would bring on diarrhea or worse. As the day waned on the second night, battered and thirsty, with hope of rescue evaporating and the gators getting braver, Connors gave in. Vince managed to flag down some good old boys out hunting, and they’d hitched a ride into New Orleans.
The bartender in front of Vince curled his lip. “No rooms available, mister.”
Vince frowned—the hologram outside said vacancy, as well as the online feed. “But your—”
“Did I stutter?”
New Orleans had been abandoned for a generation, at least officially. Doubly doomed, it was sinking while the oceans were rising, battered by wave after wave of monster hurricanes. Ninety percent of what used to be the city was below sea level, swamped, the old levees having long given up. Without the finances of New York to hold back the oceans, what remained of New Orleans had long gone feral.
Vince was about to argue when he felt another jab. Agent Connors flicked her chin toward the media hologram floating behind the bar. Vince looked up to stare into his own eyes. An image of his face was floating in the middle of the broadcast. “The former founder of Phuture News, Vince Indigo, indicted in federal courts today on conspiracy charges, is reported dead in a crash—”
The bartender glanced at the hologram. “Like I said, no rooms. Don’t want my place wrecked in a raid.”
“—New Orleans has been quarantined by DAD in a reported viral outbreak—”
“Should just throw you to them,” growled a man hunched over his beer beside them. Black goggles covered most of his face, a sharp metal spike protruding from one eye. His leather vest was open to the waist, revealing skin laced in red welts of scars.
“Mind your tongue, Sledge,” barked the bartender. “We don’t give anyone up to the farmers, but that”—the bartender looked Vince square in the eyes—“don’t mean I want you here.” He rubbed stubble atop his head, then reached under the bar and threw something at Vince. “Now get out.”
Vince recoiled, half expecting a grenade, but it was a first aid kit. “Thanks,” he mumbled. He followed Agent Connors to the door. She was limping on her broken leg—well secured in a fast-cast—but their infected wounds were more of a problem.
Exiting the swinging saloon doors of the bar, they were hit by a wave of sweetly-putrid humidity and an explosion of noise—Bourbon Street. Officially New Orleans might have been abandoned, but unofficially, it was a backwater playground. The surrounding ten-block area was one of the few that remained above the high tide line, the swollen Mississippi swallowing the rest. Masses of revelers thronged the street, thousands of matchsticks rubbing shoulder-to-shoulder in the powder keg of the ancient Latin Quarter. Pounding music poured out from the sense-shifting doorways of bars and nightclubs.
“I think we should just drop her and run,” said Hotstuff, materializing beside them in a halter top and shorts.
It was a thought Vince had wrestled with more than once, but whatever was chasing him was hunting Agent Connors now as well. When she tried to radio in, her credentials were revoked. She had no response at all. The enemy of your enemy could be a friend, and right now, after losing track of Bob and Sid, Vince needed all the friends he could get—and besides, he was confident he could ditch her pretty quick the moment he didn’t need her.
“I’m going to remind you again that you’re still my prisoner,” Agent Connors said. A hulking mandroid, more machine than human, stumbled into her and she swore, shoving it away. Turning, it laughed, reeking of alcohol, and spun back into the crowd.
“And maybe I should tell this crowd that you’re FBI.”
Drones hovered overhead, hawking the newest synthetic drugs, skinshops, and real-human-meat kebabs—delicacies left over from body mod surgeries. Human-animal chimeras—of course Grillas, but also frog-faced thugs and reptilian conmen—hung in doorways between the mechanoids and humanoids. Flashes of New Orleans’ past forced themselves into Vince’s sensory frames, reality skins that were being pumped out as hard and fast from the bars almost as furiously as the music, and all of it drenched in alternating stench-waves of sweat and urine.
Pain shot through Vince’s back. “Can we stop for a minute? Get a drink?”
Agent Connors nodded. She didn’t look any better than Vince felt.
That being said, Vince felt as comfortable here as Agent Connors was uncomfortable. Louisiana was where his family originated. He smiled. The world still needs lawless places. He always liked a good party. Even if the world burned down around this place, people would still be coming here to celebrate, and to hide. The world needed criminals just as much as it needed heroes—and anyway, the difference between a criminal and a hero was more often a matter of timing than moral compass.
At least, he hoped it was.
4
“Silicon gone wrong, ‘bad glass,’ get it?” Sibeal was trying to explain why her group was called the glasscutters. “We hunt down bad glass, errant digital organisms.” She looked at the ceiling. “But I wouldn’t call them criminals. Really they’re just misguided pieces of code.”