The Digital Plague

Book 2: Avery Cates

by Jeff Somers

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

They spread, Mr. Cates.... Once a single microscopic unit enters the body, it begins replicating. Once there are enough units in the body, they begin...consuming.



Avery Cates is a very rich man. He's probably the richest criminal in New York City. But right now, Avery Cates is pissed. Because everyone around him has just started to die-in a particularly gruesome way. With every moment bringing the human race closer to extinction, Cates finds himself in the role of both executioner and savior of the entire world.

Release date: May 12, 2008

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

I

Day One: I Knew the Mechanics of Death Better than Anyone

I was going to have to kill a whole lot of people.

“Keep walking, Avery.”

I didn’t like how he kept calling me Avery in that distorted voice, like he knew me. It made me nervous. It was one thing to be sold out by someone in your own organization and sent into a fucking ambush; chances were, when you got sold on a bounty, you were just entering a startling gauntlet of upsells. Eventually you discovered the original bounty had been laid out by some Chinese gangster halfway around the fucking world. And I was big money these days: Avery Cates, cop killer.

This is what happened when you were successful in the System: you wore a target.

It was cold, a strong wind pushing a metallic smell up my nose with prejudice. I estimated ten or twelve people around me, though only two had spoken so far. Both sounded like they were using a digital morpher to mask their voices, which made me wonder if I knew the pieces of shit who’d sold me out. Anger, green and corrosive, bubbled inside me. I didn’t work with anyone I didn’t know, so a friend had sold me out, and it made me angry. If I’d been psionic—even a tiny, microscopic little bit—I would have been able to burn off the blindfold with my thoughts. As it was I was listening, trying to pick up clues. For when I came back and killed every last one of them.

That Avery stuck in my head.

I didn’t know how long I’d been unconscious—one second I’d been on Hudson Street, pale sun fighting its way through the scummy clouds, yellowed acidic snow crunching beneath my feet, and then an explosion behind my eyes, red and yellow and orange. When I came to, I was on a hover, blindfolded, my hands bound in rubber bracelets. I knew the buyers were heavy hitters because of the hover—a ride like that took money and plenty of it. That made me feel better; if I was going to be fucking sold like cargo, I at least wanted it to be serious people. People I wouldn’t feel bad about killing later.

I tried to walk steadily, but the ground was uneven and I kept tripping. The world was an endless howling wind that pressed against me, making me lean into it, panting with effort, and the icy ground beneath me crunching like tiny bird bones as I walked. I had no idea where we were; there were buildings, judging from the echoes, but no people. The suburbs of Manhattan didn’t lack for Ghost Cities, so that didn’t really narrow it down. Go an hour or so in any direction and you would find empty towns filled with collapsing buildings and riot damage. Gangs of Wilders sometimes took them over and tried to start permanent settlements, but the cops were pretty good about stamping that shit out, and so every year the countryside got bigger and those monuments to pre-Unification got smaller.

In case anyone was watching, I kept a smirk on my face. You had to keep up appearances. If my file hadn’t been cleared by Dick Marin, Director of SSF Internal Affairs and pretty much the biggest ballkicker in the System these days, I probably would have been number two on the System Security Force’s Most Wanted List, right behind the legendary—and probably dead—Cainnic Orel. You couldn’t be the SSF’s number two and get scared every time you found yourself blindfolded—it looked bad. Besides, I knew it was only a matter of time before my people found me; a transmitter chip under the skin of my right hand would lead them here. The only question was, would my people get here before I was sold off to the next outfit?

My people were mainly Belling—older than he’d been when he’d helped me on the Squalor job, but still the best Gunner I’d ever seen—and Gleason, who was just a kid but who’d proven herself to me a dozen times already. She did things the way I wanted them done, because she’d learned everything from me. They’d grab up some muscle, of course, but I didn’t care about the muscle. Belling and Gleason were pretty much my people in total.

“Stop, Avery.”

I stopped and beamed my invisible smile around. I started to say something, but my throat filled with phlegm and I had to hack up a warm mass of it onto the ground. “Stop talking to me like you know me,” I finally managed.

“We are old friends, Avery,” the voice responded. I was trying to catch the rhythms, the beats and pauses he used, see if it tugged at a memory. “Kneel, please.”

I turned slowly until I thought I was facing the voice. “Give me a hint.”

There was a scrape and the dry sound of fabric, and I flinched a second too late as something resembling a cannonball in heft and weight slammed into my stomach. I went down on my knees as requested, overbalanced, and landed face-first in sharp, iced-over snow. I lay there trying to breathe but just sort of twitching like a dying fish.

“Thank you, Avery,” the voice continued, calm and electronically blurry. “Pull him up.”

Someone was moving toward me, and then there was a fist in the fabric of my coat—a good coat, expensive—that hauled me upright. I hung there, limp, struggling to get my burning lungs back into motion.

“A hint? Avery Cates, the king of fucking New York, right? How many people have you killed?”

Fifty-four, I thought. Personally.

“I know you keep count, Avery. But how many have you simply destroyed, leaving them shattered, ruined? So many, right, Avery? More than you even admit to. More than you even know about, since some of us were simply never noticed. You couldn’t pick me out of the multitude.”

Slowly, I was able to pull a thin thread of cold air into my lungs. My head pounded with a fuzzy, painful pulse, as if an artery had burst and my brain was filling up with blood. I’d bitten my tongue when I’d gone down, and the salty rust taste of blood was making me nauseous. And then I went still and cold, because the frozen muzzle of a gun had been placed against my forehead. Revenge shriveled up inside me and faded away. I could hear birds in the air, a multitude of calls. I’d never heard so many birds in my life.

“For all these things, Avery, you deserve to die.”

Everything had changed. These weren’t swaggering assholes trying to throw a scare into me, this wasn’t just shipping a fat payday out to some bigger fish. I was used to the threat of instant, unforeseen death—every day of my life. Having it brought right up under my nose so I could smell it was shocking, though, and I froze up.

Behind my blindfold I closed my eyes. There are better ways to die, I thought, my heart pounding. I’d lived longer than I’d ever imagined, and I felt like I’d been tired for most of it, always scrubbing along on no sleep, scrabbling. I found a part of me, small but distinct, was suddenly happy. The wind leaned against me, making a hollow noise. The snow on my face burned slightly, and I’d be red there for a few days. The gun pressed into my skin and hurt, and I found myself leaning into it, pressing against it, like digging at a scab.

I guessed my people weren’t going to be in time.

“This is not an execution, Avery,” the voice continued. “This is an assassination. Not yours. But an assassination none the fucking less.”

I was ready for it. I would not speak. I clenched my jaws and held my eyes tightly closed, trying to clear my mind and think, but there was nothing to do. I was bound and blind and there were at least ten people around me. I knew the mechanics of death better than anyone, and I was caught in the gears. This was the System, after all; a day hadn’t gone by that I couldn’t remember death there with me, just walking along. From my father’s dirty, foul-smelling hospital room right before Unification, when there’d been separate countries and half a chance for a decent life, to this moment, death was always there. Except for the Monks, and Dick Marin. And even their batteries had to run out sometime.

Almost hidden by the wind, I heard distant hover dis-placement.

“Give me his neck,” the voice said.

A new set of hands—hard, cold hands encased in creaking leather gloves—took me by the hair and chin and bent my head painfully to the left. There was an endless moment of silence as I knelt there, held in place by two pairs of strong hands, thinking Do it, do it, just fucking do it. Something stabbed into my neck like a fragment of glass being dragged along my jugular, a pain that went on and on. Then something cold was being pumped into me, a cold I could feel as it traveled in my blood, like a worm wriggling in my papery veins.

I’d gritted my teeth so hard they ached. I hadn’t said a word. The fragment of glass was dragged back again and then was gone.

“Good-bye, Avery,” the voice said. “And don’t worry: when it is over, you will be punished again. He has told me how this will end. And He is never wrong.”

The two pairs of hands vanished simultaneously, and I toppled over onto my side. My neck throbbed, and although it was fading, I could still feel the cold lump moving through me, warming as it went. I thought that if it didn’t warm up enough before it hit my heart or brain I’d be dead, a shock aneurysm flooding me with black, smothering blood.

The hover displacement was louder now, and I could hear my kidnappers beating retreat. I flipped myself back up onto my knees, grit and sharp-edged stones biting through my pants into my skin, and stayed that way, the snow lightly burning my skin, my hands numb from the bracelets, listening to the heavy boots crunching in the snow and the hover getting closer, until the displacement started to beat against me, invisible fists. The ground shuddered beneath me as the hover settled home, the engines cutting off abruptly and leaving me, for a moment, with just the wind and my own ragged breathing. Blood, warm and wet, trickled down my neck and soaked into the fabric of my shirt.

I made fists with my hands as I heard the hover’s hatch snap open. I worked my mouth up and down, trying to maintain control over myself. I’d been close to death a dozen times. Hell, I’d been dead for a brief time in London all those years ago.

I was angry.

“Chief?” I heard Gleason call out. She’d come a long way from a skinny kid who liked to play with knives. She’d been one of our first recruits when Belling and I had returned from London, rich, traumatized, and already marked for death by Dick Marin and his System Cops. “Chief, you okay?”

I heard their feet packing down the snow. I was shaking with the rage that had filled me, adrenaline tearing through my veins. I thought that if I wanted, I could snap the restraints with just a twitch. Whoever these fuckers were, they’d had their chance. They’d had me on my knees, hands bound, and for some reason they’d walked away. I didn’t know what they’d done to me, but I wasn’t going to forget and I wasn’t going to count my fucking blessings.

“Keep your eyes open,” I heard Belling shout, his smooth voice agitated. “Fucking amateurs.”

“Hold on,” Gleason said into my ear. I could smell her, a clean, nice smell, and felt her tugging at the rubber bracelets, and then heard the familiar snick of one of her blades. Gleason liked knives. Refused to carry a gun, saying that guns were for shitheads, for street soldiers downtown. She could throw a properly balanced, custom-made knife from across the room, in the dark, and kill you every single time. I remembered when Glee had been this skinny little girl, almost fucking mute. Now I couldn’t shut her up, usually.

A tug and my hands were free, the bracelets snapping away into the air. I stood and whirled, tearing the blindfold from my face. I paused for a moment, blinking in the bright, white sunlight. We were in a city, all right, standing in front of a church. Around us, the city was a deserted field of rubble, with buildings jutting up here and there like broken teeth. The ground around the church had been cleared and was a clean, uniform off-white, a sheet of frozen snow. The fucking church was enormous; broken, pitted steps rising up to a set of empty doorways. Above the doors was a gaping hole, a few ragged spikes of old stone still jutting up. The sheer weight of the thing beat at me in pulses, as if it had been eroded from softer rocks around it by acid rain and pollution.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked, struggling for breath and control. Without a word, Glee moved her shoulder under my arm and took some of my weight, her long red hair fanning out in the wind. I allowed her to without even thinking about it—anyone but Gleason I’d have twisted their arm back behind them. With Glee, I leaned down and let her help me stumble about.

“Newark, Avery,” Gleason said, looking around. “You okay?”

Newark. Newark wasn’t even a city anymore, it was a blast crater that happened to have a few dozen buildings still standing here and there. For years it had been a backwater for criminals and independent sorts who fled the cities proper to escape the System Cops and the crowds and, ever since the Monk Riots, whatever Monks who’d managed to hang on to control of themselves and avoid the SSF cleanup. A surprising number were almost sane.

I felt in my pockets and found my cigarette case and gun, right where they were supposed to be—my captors had been so confident they’d left me my weapon. As I shook out a cigarette and stuck it between my dry, chapped lips, the anger inside me swelled until I thought I’d start vibrating. I was Avery Cates. I’d killed fifty-four people. I’d killed Dennis Squalor and destroyed the Electric Church, crawling around beneath Westminster Abbey and leaving a half dozen dead friends in my wake. I’d been betrayed by Dick Marin, the fucking unofficial emperor of the whole damn System, but I’d survived and even put a bullet in his artificial, avatar face. I was Avery fucking Cates, and they’d left me my weapon.

I turned to face the hover. Belling was standing in front of it, glaring at everything as if personally affronted—which he should be, since he’d been in charge of my security. I could see Candy, fat and dark, peering at me from inside the cabin, which meant Glee had grabbed whoever was available. I liked Candida—she had a round face that was always laughing, and she hadn’t screwed me yet—but she was useless in a fight.

Belling gave me his stern face, humorless and terrifying. “What are we doing, Avery?”

I lit my cigarette and sent a cloud of blue smoke into the dirty air. I turned and started walking for the hover, the kid acting as a crutch.

“We’re going to crack some heads,” I said. “Get Pick on the horn and start him digging into the grapevine. Send someone over to Marcel and buy out a contract for information—have him get the word out, a million yen to anyone who gets us next to whoever the fuck did this.” Marcel, fat and lazy on his throne in his ancient hotel, hadn’t moved under his own power in years and thought way too much of himself, but he could get shit done, for the right price. “Take a fucking head count and let me know if anyone’s out of place. Glee and I are gonna do our bad-cop worse-cop routine and milk some of my straight contacts. Reach out to whatever System Pigs like taking our money and see if they have any information. Let New York know that Avery Cates is fucking pissed off, and things are going to get hot.”

I was a big fucking deal these days.

“Okay, okay,” Glee said. “Avery—you sure you’re okay? Your neck is kind of—”

She sounded a little shaky. I hissed into her ear, clutching her to me to conceal the fact that I was suddenly hot and dizzy. “I am not fucking okay, kid. I was fucking sold out. I was on my knees. I had a rod in my goddamn ear. I am angry, Glee. I am not okay.” As we neared the hover, the two guards hastily stepped aside, their eyes on the horizon. I let her help me put one leg up into the cabin and turned back to the kid, putting a numb hand on her shoulder. Gleason was on a very short list of people I thought I could trust. As I spoke my eyes shifted up and over her to look at Belling, who’d turned to regard me, hands in his coat pockets. No one would ever trip up Belling like that, I thought. “Get us up in the air and get to work. I want to know who the fuck did this, and I want to know fast.” I looked around the shattered remnants of the city. “I am going to have to kill a lot of people.”

II

Day Three: Ear to Ear, Fat Man

“Now, don’t worry,” I said. “She won’t hurt you.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see with some pride that Glee kept her face impassive, aping the hardassed stare I’d tried to teach her. The other woman in the elevator with us was gorgeous, but I’d found that everyone who lived above Thirty-fifth Street or so was beautiful. Beautiful had gotten boring. Who knew how old she was, either; everyone uptown seemed to be a uniform twenty-five, unless they were hauling garbage or scuttling along at your feet, trying to shine your shoes before you got wise and told them to get the hell away from you. Twenty-five had gotten boring, too. She was blond and blue-eyed because blond and blue eyes were in this season, and her waist was ridiculously, comically narrow, giving her a wasp shape that gave me a bellyache.

When I looked at her, she flinched. I winked.

We were gliding down from the rooftop hover dock to the seventy-fifth floor, where the government had seen fit to lease space for the Regional Office of Waste Disposal. Recently the civil government had been spreading its wings, eating into the System Pigs’ budgets and taking back some of the jobs traditionally done by the SSF. Word was the cops weren’t happy about it. Technically any citizen of the System had access to local government offices, appointments appreciated but not required—all very friendly. The funny thing was, buildings like this one didn’t have any street access at all—you had to take a hover to the roof and worm your way down. It was a neat way to keep the riffraff out without having to post so much as a sign.

The elevator smelled like the Wasp, a pleasant mix of cigarette smoke and perfume that always made me think of women, especially the high-end hookers down on Bleecker Street, fifty thousand yen just to chat them up. Gleason was spit-shined, her long red hair pulled back in a neat tail, her face scrubbed clean. She wore the hell out of the black suit and coat, although the coat was long for her and pooled around her boots. She looked older than her fifteen years, her face bland and her eyes murderous. I felt a strange sense of pride, looking at her.

“Quit it, Avery,” she said softly. “You’re giving me the heebies.”

I turned back to face the doors of the elevator. The collar of my shirt was scratching me and my neck throbbed, the tiny wound on its side refusing to heal and still leaking pus. As we sank, I considered the well-hidden security camera embedded in the cab ceiling and calculated its coverage, deciding that it didn’t really afford any hiding spots at all.

At the eightieth floor, the doors snapped open and the elevator’s shell spoke softly around us: Eightieth floor, thank you. Eightieth floor, thank you. The Wasp edged her way toward the doors, her bright, clear eyes—a little wider and rounder, I thought, than was natural—locked on me. For some reason, even in an expensive suit, forty thousand yen of synthetic fabric itching me something fierce, I still made people nervous. It might have been the wound on my neck. Or maybe it was just the blood under my fingernails.

As the doors snapped shut again, Glee cleared her throat thickly and dragged one of her sleeves across her nose. Spitting a glob of something green and thick onto the cab floor, she grimaced.

“I don’t know what I picked up,” she muttered, her voice a little hoarse, “but it fucking sucks.” The deep voice and the suit made her look older, and I didn’t like it.

I sighed. “Mind your manners,” I said. We were playing a role, and eyes were on us.

She grinned a little. “Uh-oh. Avery’s embarrassed. Avery’s mortified.”

I couldn’t help smiling a little. Gleason always got to me. “Fuck you, kid.”

She dragged her sleeve across her nose again. “Tell me why we’re visiting the fucking Waste Disposal office again?”

The doors snapped open to reveal a long hallway carpeted in a deep, green pile, the walls a uniform white. Identical doors lined the sides, each marked with a small plastic sign. Cloudy white bubbles on the ceiling housed cameras that tracked us. You couldn’t take a piss uptown without being monitored. There was no smell to the air at all. I never got used to the scrubbed air.

“We’re here, little one,” I said as we stepped out of the cab, “because I have a burning need to know who in fuck thought they could snatch me off the street and fuck with me. I have a good asset here.”

“Ooh, Avery’s angry. Avery’s pissed off.” She kept pace with me as we walked down the hall. The first-name bullshit had started a few weeks ago, and I was letting it ride for a while, see if she figured out that it was a liberty before I had to smack the lesson into her. “In the Department of Waste Disposal?”

Glee didn’t get uptown much and was used to a more direct approach to things. “Everybody’s got shit to get rid of, kid,” I said, stopping in front of one of the doors. “And it all goes through here at one point or another.” The door snapped open and I pushed her in ahead of me.

The door admitted us into a tiny reception area, the carpet sucking at my feet as we let the door shut behind us. The Droid behind the white for-show desk was vaguely humanoid, with a feminine torso, an oval head, and two spindly arms. When you got close you could see it was attached to the desk and was just a visual aid for the office’s shell.

“Welcome to the Office of Waste Disposal, North American Department, Local Office Five-five-six,” the shell breathed gently around us. “Do you have an appointment?”

I paid it no attention, stepping around the desk and striding down a shorter hallway lined with unmarked doors. At the third one on our left I turned and stopped, smiling into the tiny camera mounted in it, Glee hidden behind me. After we stood there for a few seconds the door whisked open; I took hold of Glee’s arm and pulled her in with me quickly, the door zooming back into place a second or so after she’d cleared the threshold.

“Hello, Reggie,” I said, smiling in what I hoped passed for friendliness. “Due for another treatment, I see.”

The office was so small Glee and I had to stand very close to each other, hips touching. A foot or so in front of us was a tiny desk with no obvious way for anyone to get around it, and entombed behind the desk was a fat, dark-haired man in his shirtsleeves. He was wedged in behind the desk so tightly it made me feel uncomfortable in sympathy. A half-burned cigarette dangled just below his pencil-thin mustache, its smoke sucked up aggressively into the crank air and never even reaching my nose. A paper-thin screen between us displayed several smaller boxes of information just inches from his face. As I spoke he started forward and gestured violently, the screen going opaque in an instant.

“Hell, Avery, you scared the shit out of me,” he gasped. “Who the fuck is this?” His tiny little eyes were buried in flesh, but I could see them roam up and down Glee’s body, pausing blatantly at chest level. I clenched my jaw and pushed my hands into my coat pockets. Glee just stared down at him, her cheeks red and her forehead a little damp.

“This is my associate,” I said. I gestured at the fat man. “This is Reggie, my contact here.”

They stared at each other for another few seconds. Reggie liked to eat, and every year he had a fat-sucking procedure performed that shed two hundred pounds in an hour, followed by a series of skin-tightening treatments. These were expensive procedures, and in me—or, more precisely, my yen—Reg had found salvation. In January he was svelte and tanned, and then slowly expanded over the months until by December he was a goddamn beach ball.

“You’re not supposed to bring anyone else with you,” Reggie said slowly, his eyes settling lazily on Glee’s chest again. “It’s dangerous.” He brightened without looking up at me. “Unless this is for me?”

I flared my nostrils and leaned forward to slap him lightly across the face, not hard enough to hurt. “Eyes on me, Reg,” I said easily, stepping back. “Eyes on me.”

He blinked and gave me a piggy little stare. “Fuck you, Avery. This is a bad time. You’re not popular with certain people, you know, and the Optical Facial Scanners seem to be under the impression you’ve been seen on security cameras in government offices.” He shrugged. “So I have to ask you to leave.”

I ignored this, pushing my hands into my pockets. “I need info on Newark, Reg. I took a little involuntary trip out there recently and I want to know who’s got fingers in that trash heap, who’s carting shit out there or from there, who’s bribing you to let it happen.”

He tried to lean back casually, lacing his hands behind his head, but his girth pushed his belly into his desk and made him grunt in discomfort. I noticed his cigarette was nearly all ash and watched in fascination, waiting for it to shake off. “I just told you, Avery, this isn’t a good time.”

I glanced at Glee, who looked back at me and shrugged. For a second I was aware of how grown-up and poised she’d become, apparently overnight. I looked back at Reg with my grin in place, calibrated to convey amusement. This fat piece of shit thought he was in charge. I realized I could smell him, Reg’s brand of sour sweat too much for scrubbers.

“Reggie, let’s be friendly. Let’s have a conversation, and when we’re done you say, Ave, this one’s on the house, on account of I was a fucking asshole when you showed up. And then I say, Shit, Reggie, I surprised you, so maybe you weren’t in top form, and we part friends. Okay?”

He kept trying like hell to look relaxed even though it was obvious he was straining to hold his position. “Get out. What are you going to do, slap me again? You’re unarmed, Avery. You didn’t get through rooftop security with a gun.” He raised his eyebrows. “You think stories about you scare me. Fuck off.”

He was right, I didn’t have a gun. Getting past security in a building containing even a pissant government agency could be done—anything could be done—but it was troublesome, and unnecessary.

“Glee,” I said. She took a half step forward and snapped her arm out stiffly, a homemade bone blade leaping into her hand. I had a similar one in my boot. With practiced ease she whipped it across his face, producing a tiny red wound on the tip of his bulbous nose. She grinned down at him, her blue eyes wide and lit up.

“Ear to ear, fat man,” she said, coughing wetly. “If Avery says so.”

Reggie quivered, his loose skin rippling unnaturally as a tiny drop of bright red blood formed on his nose. His eyes moved from me to her and back again. Licking his lips, he squinted at me. “What, you’re going to murder a government official in his fucking office, Avery?” He shook his head. “Never gonna happen.”

I shrugged. “You’ve got ten seconds, Reggie, and we’re gonna find out.”

Next to me, Glee sighed softly, an excited, feminine sound. Reggie stared at her for a moment and then seemed to deflate like he was undergoing his fat-sucking process as we watched. “Fucking hell. You’re still gonna pay me, right?”

“Reggie,” I said, leaning forward and pulling my portable shell cube from one pocket, “we’re just going to have to think on that.”

Glum now, he accepted the cube and slid it into his desk unit, hands working deftly. Glee stepped back and leaned against the wall, a coughing fit racking her.

“Okay, okay,” Reggie muttered, all business now, his thick-fingered hands moving quickly, his screen flashing through records. “Newark. Nothing officially in Newark, of course, so there won’t be any front-line records—nothing so easy, eh?” He grinned at me in a flash, trying to be my friend again. “But there’s always a record.” Ash finally fell off his cigarette, leaving him with a burning stub in his mouth and a pile of soot on his belly. “If they’re moving anything substantial to and from Newark, someone’s got a record. You got a time frame? Any other parameters I can search on? If it’s just WD records it’d be a few seconds, but if you want me to cross-check data points on the entire NE Department, it’ll take a while.”

I shrugged. “I’ve got time.”

He nodded, sweat appearing on his brow. Behind me, Gleason had recovered and was completely silent, chewing her. . .