Night Shadow Page 3

  “Magdela!” I screamed between fits of coughing.

  “Harold!” Hands grasped my shoulder, and I looked up to find her standing over me. I don’t know if I guided her out through the newly breached wall, or her I. We ran arm-in-arm down the hallway as flames chased us, leaped into the stairwell, and bounded down the steps. The entire building seemed to shake with every footfall. All I could imagine was the stairs tumbling away beneath our feet or the towering tenement collapsing atop us.

  Some bit of luck, karma, or some long-forgotten god must have been on our side, though.

  We reached the ground, skidded into the hallway, and made a mad dash for the doors. The noise of collapsing masonry and creaking metal screamed behind us as we dove through the empty frames and rolled over the sidewalk. Dozens of hands reached out and grabbed at us. I looked up at our home as they dragged me across the street. Flame enveloped all four towers of The Quad.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Metal scraped against the pavement as the firebots marched down the street. The masses surrounded them, shouting and screaming. Some threw bottles, other rocks. One man lunged forward and shoved a robot, which swayed to the side but didn’t fall. He shoved it again. It turned and lashed out with a slender, metal arm.

  The man’s head jerked to the side as blood and teeth sprayed from his face. He spun and fell to the ground. As he looked up, his eyes met mine. Blood gushed from his open mouth as he gasped for air. His face was red, quickly turning purple. He spat and even more teeth joined the crimson pool below him. I looked up as he looked back, but the firebots had already continued their relentless march.

  I rolled over and pushed myself up, dragging a leg beneath me as I rose to my knees. Gentle, slender arms wrapped around me as I kneeled there, looking up at what had been home a few hours earlier. A narrow chin bit into my shoulder as Magdela rested her head next to mine. “I’m glad you’re okay,” she said.

  I glanced aside at her and couldn’t help but chuckle. “You make it sound like you saved me.”

  “Well...” She shrugged. “You were just lying there on the couch.”

  I shook my head in disbelief and looked back up at The Quad. I wasn’t even sure if we were safe across the street from it. If the towers collapsed, debris would fall over the city for blocks. “We should get out of here.”

  “What about them?” Magdela asked, nodding at the assembled crowd of thousands. Some were residents lamenting the loss of their home, same as us. Others were neighbors gawking at the spectacle. Cries of anguish rose amid the chaos. Crouched figures bent over prone forms. How many of them were wounded, how many dying, and how many already dead; I had no way of telling.

  Sirens filled the air in the distance, growing closer. “There’s your answer,” I said.

  Two long, broad firetrucks painted crimson and yellow rolled up to the buildings. The crowd dispersed, some having to run or be crushed beneath the massive vehicles. Jets of chemical fire retardant sprayed from turrets atop the behemoths, but they weren’t spraying the four burning towers.

  Instead, they covered nearby buildings in bubbling white foam. Standard procedure, from what I remembered. The New Angeles Fire Department wasn’t in the business of putting out fires, just controlling the spread. Once one of the city’s megatowers went up in flames, there was little anybody could do about it, anyway. And with four of them all burning at once, it would take an army of the trucks to even begin to quench the flames.

  More sirens wailed through the city night as police cars rolled up to nearby intersections. Boxy SWAT trucks followed close behind, spilling out heavily armed and armored officers ready to disperse the assembled mass of humanity. One truck sat low on its springs and swayed as something massive moved inside. A huge metal foot crunched into the pavement as an enforcement bot stepped out of the vehicle. The truck rose two feet as the weight was relieved from it, and the enbot planted its other foot on the ground.

  It took a step away and rose to its full height of ten feet. The hulking, ogre-like construct swiveled a comically small head with glowing sensors as it took in the scene. Long arms ending in grasping claws flexed as a second pair below them panned along with the head, these each ending at the elbow with a fifty-caliber machine gun.

  “Time to go,” I said.

  We pressed through the mass of humanity and disappeared into the shadows of a nearby alley as the police worked to disperse the crowd. The familiar clang and hiss of tear gas canisters echoed off the steel walls. Even as we threaded between the buildings, the acrid, metallic smell of it burned our nostrils. Tears welled up in my eyes as the irritant started working on them. And all we caught was a whiff of the stuff. Those still on the block where The Quad was burning would suffer much more.

  Emerging from the alleys a couple of blocks away, we hailed down an autocab. The small, driverless vehicle pulled up next to the curb and the passenger door slid open. “Sanrita, Rosie’s Diner,” I said as I climbed in and waved my wrist over the console-mounted barcode scanner.

  As the door slid closed, an electronic voice repeated our destination, and we were on our way. Magdela and I both drew in deep breaths of recycled air and let out long sighs. We hadn’t even had time to process what happened, but it felt good to sit down and let the autocab worry about the driving. I don’t think I could have driven just then, even had I wanted to. In any case, my car was in the garage under The Quad. By now, it was probably melted to slag.

  Magdela grabbed my hand. I hadn’t realized it was shaking. The other still trembled as I fished in my coat for my cigarettes, pulled two out, and lit them both at once. I handed one to Magdela and took a deep draw on the other.

  “No smoking, please,” the autocab’s disembodied voice sang out in an infuriatingly cheery tone.

  I kicked the speaker in the center of the console, caving it in and effectively shutting the thing up. The cost of repairs would be deducted from my account, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t in the mood to be badgered by a glorified toaster on wheels. Sparks and garbled static were the autocab’s only attempt to respond to the sudden violence.

  Before long, the pressed and towering tenements of The Glen gave way to the lower, broader tenements of Sanrita. These were all lined with shops, bars, and diners on the first floor. From experience—having once lived there—I knew the apartments above were barely more spacious than the one we’d left behind. Some might say it was a better part of New Angeles than The Glen, but in truth, it just had more character. It had different gangs roaming the streets, but there were still gangs. The apartments were a little bigger, but were still shitty and overpriced. The businesses were more plentiful and nicer, but still there only to keep the populace yoked to their addictions.

  Speaking of those businesses, we soon pulled up before a red neon sign that read “Rosie’s Diner”, although the latter part of the sign flickered more off than on from disrepair. The result was that it looked more like “Rosie’s Din” more than half the time. That wasn’t far off the mark either, due to the endless drone of grumbling customers and clanking of plates and flatware that always filled the place.

  The autocab tried to say something as we disembarked, but again nothing but static and sparks issued forth from the busted speaker. It pulled away as soon as we got out, most likely returning to the depot for repairs.

  I pushed open the door to Rosie’s and a familiar bell rang over our heads as we entered. The eponymous proprietor looked up from behind the counter and her eyes instantly grew wide. She strode over to a side door, opened it, and waved Magdela and me into the back room.

  “You two look awful,” she said as she closed the door and led us deeper into the storage room. Her bob-cut blond hair wobbled as she shook her head in dismay. “Come, sit,” she said as she dragged a couple of crates full of canned goods away from the wall for us to sit on.

  I would have struggled to drag even one of the heavy containers, but she moved them with ease. The only sign of effort was the gentle whirring of servos in Rosie’s shoulders. She placed a gentle hand on Magdela’s chin and turned her head to the side, carefully sweeping her hair back with the metal skeleton of her other hand. One of Rosie’s eyes twitched as she frowned at the bloody gash on Magdela’s temple. “Hang on,” the robotic waitress said. “I’ll get you patched up.”

  The door opened and closed again, and I looked up as Razor and Stitch walked through. The two gangbangers were regulars at the diner. Ostensibly, they guarded the place, as long as Rosie continued to pay the gang for ‘protection’.

  Of course, it was a racket. If she didn’t pay, they’d rough the diner up. Or her. In reality, there were so many gangs and so few cops in Sanrita that it did help keep Rosie’s safer. The gangbangers and Rosie used to have a tenuous relationship, evidenced by the damage to Rosie’s hand. But since I started working with the Chimeras, they’d formed a more cooperative rapport with her.

  At my insistence, of course.

  “The hell happened to you?” Razor asked, ducking low under some pipes to avoid messing up his tall, red-dyed mohawk. Chains jingled all around his leather-clad body as he moved.

  “I was about to ask the same thing,” Rosie said as she returned with a first-aid kit and set about tending to Magdela’s wounds.

  I looked down at myself for the first time since leaving The Quad behind and realized I was covered in ash and soot. My clothes were singed all over, and angry red blisters were forming on the backs of my hands. “Our place caught on fire.”

  Stitch looked down over Razor’s shoulder. He wore similar attired as his associate, down to a matching jacket bearing the gang’s namesake mythical creature on the back. The fundamental difference was that bright green, spiked hair covered Stitch’s head and a series of tiny silver hoops ran in line
s across his face—the piercings that had earned him his nickname. “Your apartment caught on fire?” he asked.

  “No. Yes... Well, our entire building caught on fire,” I stammered out as I fished around in the first-aid box for some burn spray.

  “I can help you when I’m done here,” Rosie said.

  “I’m fine, just take care of Magdela,” I said as I set about spraying the burns on my hands and forearms.

  “My knight in shining armor,” Magdela said, rolling her eyes so hard that, for a moment, I wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or passing out. “Anyway,” she continued, “it wasn’t only our building. It was the entire Quad. And it didn’t catch fire, the mayor’s new firebots set it on fire.”

  Stitch drew back and balled his fists, but was characteristically quiet in response to the news. Razor, on the other hand, wasted no time lashing out. “Son of a bitch!” he yelled as he kicked a nearby bottle of cooking oil, sending it spinning across the floor. “Fucking bots!”

  Rosie gasped and drew back.

  Magdela laid a warm, fleshy hand on the waitress’s cold, metallic one. “Razor!”

  The gangbanger spun around, and the fire in his eyes cooled to remorse when he saw the terrified service robot cowering before him. She could overpower him in a heartbeat, but that was why he and Stitch worked as a team. Together, they could tear her to pieces and recycle the leftover parts. “Sorry, Rosie. I didn’t mean you. It’s just...” His chest still rose and fell with rapid breaths, but he relented to clenching his fists in silence.

  “We understand,” I said as I tossed the burn spray back in its box and rose from the crate. “There are military grade robots roaming the streets. We’re used to living with bots working as bartenders, janitors, and waitresses.” I nodded to Rosie. “But other than enbots with the SWAT teams, this is something new.”

  “And it’s wrong,” Magdela added.

  “They can’t go around burning down people’s homes.” Razor was visibly restraining himself from punishing more of Rosie’s groceries.

  “Yeah?” Stitch chimed in. “Who’s gonna stop ‘em?”

  Razor planted a fist into his palm. “Maybe us.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What could you do?”

  “I mean: All of us.” Razor held his arms wide. “You brought the gangs together before. You can do it again. Only this time, we go bigger.”

  I shook my head. “What you’re talking about is all-out war on the city. We pulled a few jobs; broke up a few Bratva operations. But in the end, we didn’t make a difference.”

  “I think we made a difference to those girls at the docks,” Magdela reminded me. I wasn’t surprised she took Razor’s side, since she had been trying to break me out of my melancholy for weeks.

  I shook my head. “That’s small stuff, though. The big picture is a whole other story.”

  Stitch spoke again. “What will you do? Where will you go?”

  I opened my mouth to respond, but found myself at a loss. I hadn’t thought past finding safe harbor at Rosie’s.

  “Come stay with us,” Razor said. “At least you’ll have a place to crash until you figure it out.”

  “Thank you,” Magdela said, obviously relieved.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I mumbled.

  “And,” Razor continued, “if you decide to do something, you know the Chimeras will have your back.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The dream isn’t always the same.

  I’m seated. I can’t move. It’s dark. The odors of rusted metal, marine fuel, and sea air fill my nostrils. I struggle to see through the shadows. A single, grime-covered light flickers atop a narrow pole. Shipping containers box in the faint illumination. Shadows vaguely resembling men hover beyond the edge of the light. A figure sits across from me, tied to a chair, gagged.

  There is a gun in my hand. I don’t remember how it got there. I try to let go, but something’s squeezing my fingers against the handle.

  “What’s more interesting than a cop killer?” a disembodied voice asks.

  A finger presses down on mine. A hand is holding mine closed. I’m not aiming the gun. I’m not pulling the trigger. Despite that, it slides back. The hammer clacks down. The firing pin plinks against the priming charge of the round. And the world explodes into chaos.

  Boris leans over and my shot goes wide. He points and yells. The shadows all turn toward me. Muzzle flashes light up the night as bullets rain around my hiding place. One of them tears through my abdomen. I scream out, but I’m not sure if it’s in pain from the wound or rage as I watch Boris escape.

  Hands grab me and drag me across the rough pavement. My vision fades as I’m hauled into the back seat of a car. Tires squeal as bullets shatter the back window, sending shards of glass raining over me. I scream again.

  Musty air filled my nostrils as my eyes fluttered open. A dim blue glow filled the cramped room. I rolled over on a thin mattress lying on a bare concrete floor, not sure for a moment where I was. As the dream faded, reality seeped back to the fore of my mind.

  There was a basement under a pawn shop, a false back wall, and another, larger space. A long-forgotten storeroom deep under the center of a Sanrita tenement: The Chimeras’ hideout.

  I rolled back over and Magdela’s eyes met mine from a sofa against the wall. She should have been sleeping, but she sat there staring at me with a concern-filled gaze. She set aside a tablet she was working on, the source of the glow.

  “Another nightmare?”

  I nodded, then craned my neck to see what she had on the small display.

  She shut off the tablet and slid it into a bag, plunging the small space into darkness. “The same?”

  I guess whatever she was working on, it was none of my business. I wasn’t in the mood for prying, in any case. “Not really,” I said as I climbed up from the floor. A groan escaped my lips, accompanied by a dozen joints creaking and popping in protest.

  “What was different?” she asked as I joined her on the sofa.

  I looked around the small room to make sure it was empty. It was a room in as much sense as it wasn’t open to the main space, but it was using the term lightly. Makeshift plywood walls subdivided the large storage area, along with draped tarps, moldy sheets, and any other sort of barrier that could give the occupants some modicum of privacy.

  “The docks,” I whispered. “The first time. But, Frank was there. It was the sewer and the docks, mashed up. I think. It’s all foggy.”

  “Was I there?” she asked, batting her eyes.

  “Yeah, you were. Like the first time.” I rooted around the folds of the couch until I found the half-empty bottle of tequila I’d worked over the night before. I screwed off the cap and give the swill a sniff, scrunching up my face in disgust. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do.

  “You really should slow down on that,” Magdela said.

  “Mm hmm,” I mumbled as I pressed the bottle to my lips and turned it up.

  “So, that’s it?” she asked. “We’re just going to sit here, and I’m going to watch you drink? We need to come up with a plan, unless you want to rot in this hole.”

  “Well, have any bright ideas?” I asked.

  “I agree with Razor. I say we take the fight to the city. Tear it all down.”

  I shook my head as I screwed the cap back on the bottle. “That’ll only get a bunch of people killed. First sign of that kind of trouble and SWAT will roll out with the enbots and mow everyone down.”

  “They can’t kill us all.”

  “They don’t have to, that’s the point. They only have to kill enough to scare the rest off, and it’s over. And again, nothing changes.”

  Magdela stood up, paced across the small room, and spun around. “Then, what? We do nothing?”

  “No,” I said. “We find another place to live. Preferably something better than this place.”

  “Hey,” Razor called out from the other side of a paint-covered tarp. “This is our home, dude.”

  “Sorry,” I called back.