Cloud Country Read online

  “John,” she sobbed. “You fuckers…I’m so sorry, John…”

  The trummans stripped her down, ripping away her robe, kick-rolling her to the base of the cross, where they dragged her up and strapped her in. She felt John’s blood, slick against the metal. Her body lolled forward, head hung, gravity straining against her wrong-bent joints and muscles. The door slammed, and the trummans left, grunting, and the light left with them. Saru hung in the dark. It was very cold. There was sound, at least, to keep her company, the hum of the engines, the echo of distant boots and cries, the rattle of loose parts in the air vent. She wrapped herself in the noises of the airship, sending her mind out far, as far as it would go from her body, because there was only pain.

  A trumman came in, goggle-eyed. A rectangle of light grew with his entry and then slammed gone. Dark again, except his eyes, twin circles of red. His breath was a mechanical rise and fall, like some steam-powered beast. The eyes advanced, growing closer, with the rattle of a cart, squeaky wheels and instruments. In her swimming vision the trumman appeared like an elzi or a feaster, but there was no song, no background uausuausuau, and she knew this was just a creature built by humans, and his evil was the common, punch-clock evil of a person just doing her job. Then, a voice, the pretty, perky voice crackling from some unseen speaker.

  “Welcome to Hathaway Security’s Easy Confessional: Justice, Delivered. You have been convicted of TERRORISM. For your safety and convenience, please confess now.”

  Words jumbled out of Saru’s mouth, a confession, maybe? Yes, I punched her in the face. I’d do it to you too, you fucker, if I could. Say, you feel like letting me down from here? How about you just untie one hand so I can scratch my ass—you bastard! Let me down! Let me go! I’ll fuck your mother with a brick, you fucking shit bastard cunt mother…just words, out like froth, like a dumped-out chamber pot. Yes, I let the girls die, I let Jojran die, McCully die, Ria die, John die, I let them all die. I wasn’t good enough, couldn’t figure it out, didn’t know—just untie me and I’ll kill you too!

  The trumman picked up a drill or a needle or some bastard hybrid of the two—Saru could see its metal holding the light, the red glow from the trumman’s eyes, bright in the so-much-dark. It was a thought probe. He was going to drill into her head and steal her memories, and after that…? She struggled, shook and squirmed in her chains, so that with his first stab at her temple, the needle broke. There was a muffled, mechanical fruck, like a man just trying to get through his day, who didn’t need this shit right now. He cuffed her with a heavy hand, metal glove, nausea traveling up from the mush of her broken nose, and she puked, a dribbly white bird-shit slurry, all over his brand-new torture suit. He swore-grunted again, and this time he hit her until the dark wasn’t just in her eyes, but in her ears, her mouth, her skull, her brain, and she felt like maybe it was going to settle down in there and just about stay dark forever. Then there was the hornet prick of the needle drill in her temple, probing deep, and a hot pressure as it blew its chemical load. Faint sensations of more pricks, scratches and scrapes, more mandibles of the thought probe being bolted and screwed and drilled into her…the darkness thick and strong and deep and drowning…

  “…for your safety and convenience, please confess now…please confess now… please confess now…”

  And then came the memories, a forced replay, as her captors invaded her brain.

  7. Confession

  Saru’s hands trace the wall, fingers against the rough boards and stuck gum, and once or twice a warm mush that can only be puke. When her hands draw back, she totters and falls over herself, forward onto the floor, sticky home of a thousand spilled drinks. The world keeps spinning overhead.

  “Jesus Christ!” someone yells, and they step over her, kicking her in the process.

  Laughter, and a hand reaches down through the fog to grab her boob. Her own hand intercepts, and there’s a yelp of pain and more kicks. She screeches like a bat, and claws herself to her feet, and claws at the pants and shirt of the offending shoe person. The laughter turns to shouts and more “Jesuses!” belted out, and they’re gone. Saru laughs to herself, and stares down at her hand, which has bits of someone else’s hair and skin. The world spins around and slowly comes to a stop. She wipes her hand on her blouse. Shit. She is sobering up.

  Fog and neon, and lasers through the fog, and music, a heart-rattling thump. Bodies, so many bodies on the floor, dancing, and jostling, and groping one another. She dances too, or at least she bounces against the other bodies as she sways, bottle of bottom-shelf rum in one hand, clear, label-less poison, raised to her mouth for waterfall swigs, and the rest runs down her chin. She grabs a man with a pretty face, or maybe he grabs her, and they drag themselves to the bathroom. The stall door crashes in against her boot, to reveal some poor girl scared shitless, tripping over her dropped skirt as she screams and shuffles out. The two of them howl with laughter, before Saru drags him in, and tears off his belt, and fucks him, head banging against the toilet. She finishes and then thrusts him away. He laughs, and she punches him squarely in the jaw.

  “Crazy bitch!” he snarls.

  His fist rises, but she jabs again, pow!, and then pounds with flat fists against his head and back until he runs. She totters to a sink to lean and study herself in the mirror, that same fuck-all grin, sex-wet hairs, strands drooping like satisfied lovers across her forehead, fat hickey on her neck. She scooches around, and leans her ass against the sink, and flips through the man’s money clip, dropping the IDs on the ground like wishes, and pocketing the cash. Whiskey time.

  *

  …I was young, Saru thinks, thoughts from the present drifting in, the nightclub bathroom flickering back to the torture cell, techno beat blurring into the thump of heavy engines, neon club lights swirling into the twin red circles of the goggled trumman. How young? Was it fifteen, fourteen, yesterday? Stupid, stupid, but how was I to know better? Everyone else knew better, well, lots of people, anyway…stupid, but oh it was fun…

  And in the mass of moving bodies on the dance floor, all the rubbing, and touching, and feeling into one another, Saru understood how some alien being looking from far, far away, through its alien telescope, might witness that scene and think that this was humanity’s natural state. She saw in her mind’s eye the dance floor of her youth replicated in the writhing holodomor of the UausuaU, and that twin sensation of laughter and despair coursed like an ice floe through the branching of her neurons…

  *

  A flock of helicopters overhead, their roar and wind beating down the saps below, the low people chained to the ground, covering their ears or bringing their hands up to shield their eyes from the attacking dust. A group of lords heading to work, or a party, or just blasting around in their whirlybirds for fun. There’s no need for the noise, they could be silent, Saru knows from the feeds, but the bastards like that roar, like the little ones below to know who’s boss, to suffer the inconveniences of their passing by. She spits, and stares after them, longing to launch a rocket, to watch the bright star of an RPG collide with one of those lordly whirlybirds and drag it down to Earth in a shower of metal and blood.

  It’s hot, too hot for the pea coat, and she thinks of tossing it, leaving it in the gutter, or as a joke to wrap around some elzi, as if it could make any goddamn difference. But the coat is new, and it’s a little bit expensive, and she hasn’t really solved too many cases yet, and anyway she looks bad as hell so she’s keeping it. She’ll just let the sweat have its lubricating way with her. Alright, time for business. The case of the cheating husband? No. The case of the stolen welfare check? No. The case of the missing daughter? God no—what a load of crap. Why is she wasting her time with this?

  It leaves one option: the case of the men with guns and drugs in the basement of the corner store across the street. Well, it isn’t really a case. No one has hired her to look into it. It’s more like she’s been roughing up users across McClellan Street, shaking ‘em down for tips. So she s
ees who they buy from, and who he buys from, and who she’s buying from. And where they’re stashing their sky. The sky she doesn’t care about. It’s good for a quick up, a useful jolt of I’m-Invincible! but it’s not like she needs kilograms of it—and what? Is she going to sell it? No, she’s in this for the money, and if she does it right she can walk out with a fat heft o’ dough, and maybe a few guns so she can sleep at night after.

  There he goes, the muscly bald man with the electric-blue glowing forehead tat, like all these Panzer thugs. Subtle as a billboard, but who’s going to stop him? Well, she’ll find out in a few minutes. She finishes her cigarette and flicks it at an elzi belly-crawling down the street. She doesn’t smoke, but it seemed like a convenient way to get in all her home-brew stimulants, and Bam! it’s starting to do the trick. All the lines, all the edges on things get sharper and closer, and not just because she’s now walking towards the store. She sees the world in high def, hears things sharply, the people she pushes out of her way seem to go so slowly, and their curses and complaints come out like sluggish brown-noises. She dials up the power on her Adrenalizer, her first big-girl implant, her first major-league body mod. Her heart beats faster and faster, the arteries in her wrists and up her thighs engorged and racing with blood. She can feel them twitching and straining against her neck, and she quivers with the thrill of wanting to hurt. This is it, honey, time to see what you’ve got—are you gonna win this life, you gonna move on up in this world?

  Just as she reaches the door, hand on the metal handle, seeing herself reflected in the dull shine, the pink heart of whatever random shirt she’d thrown on, the (very nice) new pea coat, and her face, how much of a girly face it is, and how much of a little girl she seems in that reflection, playing dress-up, playing soldier—she has a doubt. She recalls corpses, crucified, hung on chain-link fences, zigzag Panzer gang signs carved into their bellies so their guts peeked out. Images of a shopkeeper, a gangly foreign man not knowing any better, chasing the Panzers off his stoop with a broom, beaten and kicked, broom handle shoved up his ass and out his throat. Her hand lets go of the handle and drops to her side.

  Saru reaches up and opens the door, and is through it in quick steps. Before the bell tone is finished she reaches the counter and stabs the startled attendant in the neck with an icepick. No, it’s a nerve wand, but she imagines the blood of actually stabbing him, and the doubt flickers up again. The nerve wand paralyzes him, the surprise taxidermied on his yellow, saggy face. She pats his cheek and he falls like a board, and she’s already melted away the closet door lock with a QuickHot. In the closet she finds the trapdoor to the basement, and the doubt returns. The thump of the body—had they heard it? Or the snap and fizzle of the QuickHot? Are they crouched, guns pointed at the entrance? And how many of them are there? And how far do these stairs go? Plan! Why didn’t she plan this better—or at all?

  Saru yanks up the handle of the trapdoor and tosses down a makeshift flash bang, bought in an alley off Broad Street. It bounces down the stairs, bonk, bonk, bonk, and silence.

  “What the hell?” drifts up to her ears.

  In her imagination she sees the thugs picking up the makeshift grenade, seeing the wires and the scavenged parts, and laughing, knowing the pure amateurishness behind it. She is cold, whole body cold, and the need to pee and the urge to run is vibrating in her legs, but she can’t get them to go. Footsteps coming up the stairs, the trapdoor opening, and a bald head with wide white eyes, as wide as the power of surprise. Already her hand is flicking forward, moved by some fear, or the drugs, or the demands of the adrenaline, and she stabs the nerve wand straight into the right white eye, burrowing the needle to the hilt. A scream cut short by the paralyzing drugs, and he tumbles backwards down the stairs. Shouting and rage below. She tosses her second—and last—flash bang, and it bounces and explodes in a glorious white flash that blinks up at her through the cracks in the trapdoor.

  Now shouting and swearing, and this is it! She grabs her baton from her belt, the metal police variety, and flips up the trapdoor, and charges down into the confusion below. Men, four of them, tightly packed, holding knives and clubs, and rubbing at squint-closed eyes. She bashes the first man on the head, and he reacts by grabbing blindly at her. His hand closes on her wrist, and he yanks her into a bear hug that pops a rib.

  “Here!” he screams to his friends. “Over here!”

  With the strength of her wrist, she flicks the baton up into his testicles, until his grip loosens and she slips out. Now a good hard slam in the nuts, and then to the temple, and he drops. A gun swung in her direction, fired in an automatic spray, and a scream and sound of chopping meat as it splits apart another blinded thug. She dives low, and crouches under a card table, worming her way behind the man with the gun, praying their ears are ring-deaf to her rat scuffles. Rising, she bats the man’s wrist, sending the gun bouncing and skittering across the floor. She cracks him in the face, and then beats his skull, until he too drops. The last man has found the stairs, and is scrambling up on hands and knees. She tries to walk coolly over, but instead dashes, and gives him a solid whack on the back of the head. He slumps.

  Saru takes the cash from their pockets, and the bills scattered across the card table—a few measly thousand—and then searches the dingy basement for the stash. Nothing, just empty cardboard boxes, no drugs, no money, just a big fuck-you. This is where they keep their shit, right? Right? Was the day wrong? Had they moved it early? One of the thugs starts to stir, and she clubs him again, and then goes around and zip ties their arms and legs. She walks up the stairs, heart and blood still racing. She’s surprised to see daylight, and people, and—cops. The front officer is tall, and good-looking, curly-haired and smiling. There are lots of shiny badges and bars on his blue chest.

  He holds out his hand, expectant. Gritting her teeth, she counts out all the money she took from the thugs and hands it over. He raises an eyebrow and she just stares, furious. He pats her down slowly, hands exploring, lingering, taking their time. He confiscates her sky and the other stimulants. The nerve wand is still stuck in one of the thug’s eyes.

  “What’s your name?” the cop asks.

  “Fanny,” Saru says. “Fanny Duvak.”

  *

  …was that the day? When she stumbled into the system? Had she really blurted her fake name out like that, or had the words been tacked on later, a trick of memory? Such dumb pride, but it felt good, felt good to raise her head and look that cop in the eyes like she knew shit, when she’d just lucked past getting killed and had lost money in it all anyways. Or was it another day? Another botched operation—operation, ha! Like she was a marine or something. They had been so scary at the time, the Panzers, and the other gangs, vicious, with lots of muscles, and short tempers, with clubs and knives and guns. They had been big fish to her then, before she saw them as they were, just scared or stupid young people, desperate like anyone else, and the desperation turning violent, and the violence becoming more and greater—what did you expect? A person has to think life’s gonna get better, and if a gun does the trick then so be it. That had been fear to her then, and it was hot, and it was delicious, and it left her all tingly and free, but she didn’t know fear, not then, not until she started getting into the Wekba…

  *

  Screams and cries, growls and barks—a cross between a zoo and a madhouse. Saru steps carefully, slow-lowering each foot in a roll from heel to toe, so she makes no noise. There are traps here, lots of them—trip beams launching flechettes or spraying acid, razor snares, needles in the floor, pressure plates, sonic sensors, and, of course, good old-fashioned cameras. The abandoned factory is a maze, rooms to nowhere, with no purpose other than a pit to fall into, crumbling stone walls, hallways that loop and twist and double back, and wide, empty spaces where the ceiling slants into a crawl. She stoops, and scans the area with her night vision, detection implants straining to find the electric heartbeats of traps, measure and countermeasure.

  Three pi
pe mouths yawn from the wall ahead, each bearded with stalactites of sludge. Sewage? Chemicals? She scans the sludge. Water. Algae. Nothing fatal. Nothing that won’t wash off if she ever makes it home. She knows without checking her implants that the screams are coming from the pipe on the left. It’s just wide enough to shuffle through at a crouch. She enters cautiously. A blip appears on her vision, a red dot, an alarm beacon placed in the tunnel mouth. Her target has scattered these fuckers everywhere, like breadcrumbs. With a sigh, she takes her jam box from her belt for the ten-thousandth time, and zaps the beacon. There’s a pleasant ding in her head, the jam box telling her the deactivation of the beacon was successful, and she moves on, shuffling like she’s trying to walk and piss at the same time. The idea brings a laugh; she doesn’t let it fly, but she nurtures it silently, a spark of armor against the screams.

  There is light ahead, a circle of gray that looms larger and larger—pause, another fucking beacon!—and then she is at the opposite end of the pipe, crouched in the shadows, staring into what appears to be a kennel. The screams and barks and growls and cries are a wall of sound, drowning her in their madness. She sees in the nearest cage a monkey covered in welts and sores, scratching with bloody paws against the red-stained bars of its cage. It turns to her and she gasps and swears, curses caught and drowned within the chaos of screams—the monkey has no face, just a raw mess of scab with slits for eyes and mouth. She scans the floor below the pipe and sees a pressure plate, and gently lowers herself a step beyond, and scans again. Monkeys, possums, rats, shrieking and squealing, covered in cuts and scars and burns, limping on crushed legs, ripped-off tails, torn-out fur. These are the old toys, kept around just in case. She’s looking for the new ones.

  She stalks forward, swatting away the soup of flies buzzing around her head, adding their zzzzz to the background of cries, landing in black shrouds across the twitching forms of animals too weak to shake them off. Her eyes lock on the door on the opposite wall, straying only to scan for more traps, desperate to avoid seeing the animals—don’t do it! Don’t think about it. Don’t let it get inside your head. Focus! Focus on the door! She feels the Betty sliding its way out of its holster, ready to leap into her hand, finger twitching, yearning to shoot whatever mad bastard could put this nightmare together. Step by step, heart pound, breath out, brush away the flies fucking on her lips.