Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped My Russians blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me,
How many men have you killed, for yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didnt know. Id lost count. I was dead. Id died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky, all of it in strange, muffled silence as my ears rang.
Well, shit, I thought, sitting up on my elbows.
Thats fucking strange.The Electric Church
The Digital Plague
The Eternal Prison
Copyright 2009 by Jeff Somers
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S.
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First eBook Edition: August 2009
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-316-05292-4
Contents
To my Danette, whose wrath I fear, whose support I require, and whose affection I treasure
SHORT WORK OF A FILTHY JOB
Stay down, the tall System Pig with the precise, fussy beard said in a reasonable tone of voice. Gentle pressure on my shoulders guided me to my knees, my wrists bound behind me. Or I will cut a few tendons and hobble you,
capisci?His partner was shorter and older, standing in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lower lip. His face was red and blistery, like hed fallen asleep in an oven, and he hadnt said a fucking word since Id been dragged out here. After a moment he scanned us quickly, nodded once to himself, and stepped around to join his partner behind us.I was soaked and shivering, the steady rain drumming down onto my shoulders and finding its secret ways inside. The street outside the remnants of Pickerings bar was half-flooded, inches of water in spreading pools. I was one of four assholes kneeling in the damp; I wouldnt have suspected four people remained anywhere below Twenty-third Street these days. Not alive, anyway.The two System Pigs whod scooped me up with their list of Very Important People had moved on down the block, taking their team of Stormers into a sagging old tenement. Every few minutes there was a gunshot or a shout, but otherwise it was peaceful, kneeling in the water, feeling the cold rain make its way down my back, my hands bound and no more decisions to be made. Id been ready for my execution, but I was just as happy to kneel here and think about nothing.I hadnt been myself for a long time. The Plague had sucked everything out of me.The guy next to me started murmuring something; it took me a moment to recognize it as praying, old ritual language. I remembered my mom praying when Id been a kid, her singsong voice, her tightly shut eyes. I opened my eyes and looked at my fellow Very Important People: none of them looked so important to me. They were wet, thin, and all three sported the ugly scars on their necks left by the Plague; a few months before, theyd been coughing blood and croaking, inches from death. And Id saved them. These three assholes. Id scratched myself bloody crawling around the fucking world, and it was because of me they were still here, still breathing.I looked around dreamily, this block I used to know so well. The System Security Force had already torn down half the buildings, flattening everything into rubble and then sending in Droids to crush everything into neat little cubes. I had no doubt more Droids would eventually roll in to collect the cubes, picking the whole place clean until youd never guess that any of this, any of us, had ever been here.The thought slipped off the shiny, smooth surface of my brain and disappeared.A block or two over, a huge Vid screen glowed silently, bright and frantic, beaming the mime-news to everyone within a few hundred yards. The clips were short and edited to convey most of the message without audio. Most of the stories were upbeat testimonials to how the System was recovering from the Plague, but Id been tuning into the underground Vid nets out of the Appalachians for the last few weeks, and I silently translated as the clips flashed by.First, fifteen seconds on how casualty numbers from the disease were still going down as more and more surprisingly tough and scrappy citizens emerged from hiding places, shaken but alive. Translation: the entire East Coast of North America was a fucking graveyard, and places as distant as Brazil had seen upward of 10 percent of their population killed. Two more days and the whole fucking world would have been dead, jiving and singing, doing dance moves.Then, a happy story about the citizens of the System of Federated Nations African Department discovering they had a food surplus and electing voluntarily to send huge shipments of organics and nutrition tabs to other areas of the System more affected by the Plague. This with lots of clips of smiling, celebrating people, people just fucking delighted to be living in the System. Translation: everyone, everywhere was starving
before the fucking Plague, and the way things were going n-tabs were going to be the new goddamn currency any day now. And if you didnt have any n-tabs, you could cut off a finger and payfeedsomeone with that, and wed all be eating each other, over and over again, the System gnawing itself raw.The rotten tenement down the street suddenly exploded, a plume of fire and masonry shooting out into the street below, the world shuddering and leaping. The skinny guy kneeling next to me cursed under his breath. I turned to watch the smoke and fluttering debris for a moment. It was beautiful.Theyre okay, Silvie, Fussy Beard behind me said, getting his report in his earbud. The rats are holed up in a secret room, packed in like fucking roaches, and blew a charge when Solly came sniffing around, but they tripped it too soon and killed two of
themselves, and we didnt even get a scratch. The two cops laughed. I smiled, too. This was fine. Everything was fine.The Vid was now showing Dick Marin, the Emperor himself. Director of Internal Affairs of the System Security Force; no one was telling Dick what to do these days. Dick was discussing the need for a reorganization in the wake of the Plague, in order to make things more efficient. Translation: his nominal bosses the Joint Council Undersecretaries, who thought
they ran the System, were starting to give Marin flak, and hed decided it was time to forcibly remind them of the real pecking order. From what Id heard, he was going to find out they hadnt been sitting on their hands, waiting for him to send his cops after them. I thought about the fucking mess things were going to become soon and for a second almost wanted to stick around, just to watch the fireworks.Here they come. Look at those shitheads!They came stumbling out of the dust and smoke, three more of us coughing and bleeding, followed by a knot of Stormers in their grimy, flickering Obfuscation Kit that struggled to map itself to the swirling smoke and rain they passed through. Then the two officers, the bald one and the stiff, good-looking smiler that had taken me down and checked me off their list of People of Interest, people too importantfor whatever mysterious reasonto just kill.The three prisoners were young kids, teenagers. They were all wearing long oily-looking coats and bright red pieces of cloth around their necks, black, homemade ink around their eyes melting onto their faces in gummy streaks. Id seen that a lot recently. It was a fashion. The one in front was tall and skinny, with deep cavernous cheeks and bright, wide-open eyes. He had a big scar on his forehead, old and leathery, and some fresh cuts all over his face. Even with his wrists laced up behind him, he walked steadily and with his head up. He was staring at me, and when the Stormers brought them over to us, he took an extra two steps and landed next to me as someone swept his feet out from under him, sending him to his knees.Fucking
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