The Eternal Prison

Book 3: Avery Cates

by Jeff Somers

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

I knew the mechanics of death-and I was caught in its gears.



Avery Cates is a wanted man. After surviving the worst bioengineered disaster in history, Cates finds himself incarcerated-in Chengara Penitentiary. As Chengara has a survival rate of exactly zero, the system's most famous gunner must do some serious plotting. And a betrayal or so later, he achieves his goal. At a price.



All he has to do now is defeat some new personal demons, forge some unlikely alliances, and figure out why the people he's killed lately just won't stay dead.

Release date: August 12, 2009

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 480

Sample

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 he’d fallen asleep in an oven, and he hadn’t said a fucking word since I’d 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 Pickering’s bar was half-flooded, inches of water in spreading pools. I was one of four assholes kneeling
in the damp; I wouldn’t have suspected four people remained anywhere below Twenty-third Street these days. Not alive, anyway.


The two System Pigs who’d 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. I’d
been ready for my execution, but I was just as happy to kneel here and think about nothing.


I hadn’t 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 I’d 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, they’d been coughing blood and croaking, inches from death. And I’d saved them.
These three assholes. I’d 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 you’d 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 I’d 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
didn’t have any n-tabs, you could cut off a finger and pay—feed—someone with that, and we’d 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.


“They’re 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 didn’t 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 he’d decided it was time to forcibly remind them of the real pecking
order. From what I’d heard, he was going to find out they hadn’t 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 important—for whatever mysterious reason—to 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. I’d 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 manners,” the kid hissed.


“You okay with these chumps?” Baldy shouted.

“Fuck, Mage,” one of the cops standing behind us shouted. “Yeah. We can handle babies and gramps, here.”


The kid next to me sucked in blood from his nose and spat it onto the street in front of us, where it was immediately washed
away. “Babies, fuck,” he muttered.


This was fine. Everything was fine. I didn’t have any outrage anymore. I knelt there feeling nothing but cold and wet. No
anger, no sadness, nothing. I was just waiting for the next thing, and not feeling terribly interested about it, either. I
wondered, idly, if they would shoot me in the head if I stood up and started to walk, or if I’d just get another beating.
I wanted the bullet, but I didn’t want another beating.


The two cops in charge signaled their Stormers, and the whole herd of them marched off to clear another building on their
list. After a moment it was just the rain and wind again, the sucking noise of the System Pigs’ boots as they stepped under
a scrap of roof still clinging to the building behind us.


“I’ve got a blade,” the kid said suddenly, his eyes locked on the street in front of us and his voice steady. He knew better
than to whisper—the cops couldn’t hear him, but I could. He knew better than to look at me or to move or to do anything except talk in a steady, controlled voice. “I can get my fingers on it, saw myself loose, and pass it to you.” I remembered
when I’d been sixteen, running the streets with a blade and nothing to lose. I’d pulled some demented shit back in the day—it
had been all about survival, from one day to the next. Then I got some yen and some standing, and it became commerce and reputation.
And then one day a pair of System Cops had come to make me an offer I wasn’t allowed to turn down, and then I’d been angry.
I’d been angry for years.

I saw Gleason, cold and dead, changed by the Plague into something terrible. I wasn’t angry anymore. I wasn’t anything.

“My two guys will jump in,” the kid said, spitting blood into the street again. “Well… one of them will. I dunno about the
other one. We take these two cocksuckers out. Fuck, I was willing to take my chances alone, but you look like you’ve seen
some shit, huh? A player. That’s luck. I’ve always been lucky.”


I closed my eyes. The kid was probably nicknamed Lucky or Chance or something fucking ridiculous like that, probably had it
tatted onto his chest in big block letters with some fucking dice or playing cards or something. He was right, though; the
two Pigs weren’t paying us much attention—to them we were just shivering assholes who’d gotten a foot up their ass, who’d
gotten the point. If we moved slow and secret for ten seconds and then fast and furious for ten more, we had a good shot.
If their Stormers and bosses didn’t pick that moment to return. If I let the kid take most of the chances. And if our two
minders didn’t turn out to be like some of the cops I’d known, like Nathan Happling or Elias Moje, mean and tough and full
of unpredictable tricks.


Or Janet Hense: inhuman, unbeatable.

All this I thought by rote, mechanically, some programmed part of my brain just clicking and whirring along the usual routes,
slamming into hardwired decision trees onto new paths and arriving at the expected destination. None of it was connected to
my body. There was no flood of adrenaline, no familiar spark of rage and terror. There was nothing. I knew I wasn’t going
to move. I wasn’t myself anymore: I’d become a ghost. And it felt good to be a ghost.


The kid waited for me to say something. He didn’t move. The kid had discipline. He wasn’t going to be impatient and blustery,
wasn’t going to threaten me and waste time. I liked him. I wished him luck. I thought about telling him I would go for the
smaller cop first, if I were him, because the tall one liked to talk and threaten, which probably meant he was all bullshit.
The short one just stared at you, and that made me nervous. But I didn’t say anything.


“We got like a minute here,” the kid said. “Those other bitches come back here, we got a problem. We gotta move right now.”
His shoulders rolled, and I could tell he’d sliced himself free. It was impressive. “Here,” he hissed at me. “Take it.”


I closed my eyes again. Fuck you, I thought. You don’t tell me what to do, when to do it, or when to give a fuck. I’d be happy enough to keep kneeling here until I died of hunger. A few heartbeats ticked by, ragged and lurching. Opening
my eyes, I saw the kid turn his head to look at me.


“What the fuck, man? Take it.”


A few months ago, I would have reached out and grabbed this hunk of snot by the ear and pinched until he cried, and fuck,
I would have enjoyed it. Now I just wanted him to volunteer to shut the fuck up and let me die in peace. It wasn’t that pinching his ear wouldn’t
have solved my problem. And I still would have enjoyed it. But it would simply require way too much effort. I was old, and
I’d survived things no one should have to. Survive, that is.


“Don’t tell me you’re going pussy on me. Fucking hell.”


A spark of something, something molten and corrosive, flared up in my belly, flickering on for an instant and reminding me
of… and then it was gone, snuffed out, drowned in a black inky flood of who gives a fuck and I just smiled, looking up at the Vid hovering above the rooftops. It was showing a bright, clean, pure white nutrition
tab factory in Brazil, smiling tan people in clean white jackets processing raw protein and minerals into tiny white pills
that guaranteed no one was going to starve to death. The tag line informed us it was the fifteenth new factory opened this
year, and n-tab production was at a record pace.


I closed my eyes, smirking. Translation: you are all going to starve to death, probably sooner than later. Shit was falling
apart. Marin’s snatch of People of Interest was just the beginning, I figured.


“Shit,” I heard the kid mutter. “Fucking bitch.”


He fell silent, and then it was just the rain again and the sucking noise of one of the cops behind us on the move. Bitch. The word sank into my neck and made swallowing difficult.


“What are you two fags jawing about?”

The cop’s breath smelled like dead fish and cigarettes. He knelt down between us with the casual ease of someone who’d been
in charge of every situation he’d encountered, ever, his face almost close enough for his trim little beard to scratch my
cheek. He plucked the cigarette, damp and cold, from his mouth and put a hand on each of our shoulders, pulling us toward
him.


“No fucking talking, okay? You two want to suck each other off, wait until you’re alone. Be decent about it.”

I wondered why every fucking cop I’d ever met was afraid of the queers. Me, I’d worked with plenty of them, and they were
just as dirty and apt to shiv you in the back as everyone else, but no more so. Then, before I could even think to tell him
that this wasn’t right, this was too soon, the kid jerked his elbow hard into the cop’s face, crunching his nose into a pulp
and knocking him back onto his ass. It was an easy move, a surprise move with the cop off balance and in a dumb position,
and it had been hard to resist, but I knew better. The easy move wasn’t always your best move.


The rest of it happened outside my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn my head to see, but I could hear, and I knew exactly how
the choreography went—it was a short, unhappy skit. The cop was on his back like a turtle, nose a fountain of blood, and the
kid leaped on top of him with the blade, swinging it down in a dramatic, stupid arc to slice the throat presented to him.
I could see the kid’s face, the same face I’d made a million times—not ecstatic, not excited. Grim. Twisted up in concentration,
trying to make short work of a filthy job.


And then the gunshot, and the kid sailed into my field of vision like a cannonball had hit him in the stomach, landing a foot
or two away with a big spray of dirty water. He lay there in the street clutching his belly as blood poured between his fingers
and blended into the ocean around him.


“Moda-fucka!” the first cop hissed, lurching to his feet and into my sight. I didn’t look up at his face. He stood there next
to me for a few seconds, just panting through his mouth, and then half twisted around. “Danks, Silbie.” He stepped out into
the street, sinking into a puddle up to his ankles, and approached the spluttering kid. For a few seconds he stood over him,
hands curling and uncurling. “Moda-fucka,” he repeated more softly. He breathed in through his smashed nose violently, his
whole body shaking with the effort to suck air and blood through it, and then spat a prodigious glob of blood and snot onto
the kid, followed by a solid kick to his stomach that made him scream and flip over.


“You piece of shit,” the cop hissed, kicking the kid again. “You know what, Silvie? Upon further fucking reflection,” he huffed, landing another kick to the kid’s side, “and study of the fucking lists”—another kick—“I don’t think this particular shithead is all that fucking important after all.”


One more kick. The kid started to crawl, pulling himself feebly forward through the puddle of rainwater with one hand. The
cop drew his handgun and pointed it lazily down at him and waited.


From behind me, the other cop, the one with the blistered face, spoke up. “Not to me, that’s for sure.” He sounded sad, like
he’d seen this little play before and hadn’t liked it the first time.


With a nod that sent a little mist of blood spray around, the other cop squeezed off a shot. The kid’s head did a quiet little
explosion and he sank down into the water as if relieved. The cop stared down at him for a moment and then nodded, holstering
his gun and yanking a handkerchief from his coat to press against his flattened nose as he stepped back behind the rest of
us without even a glance. I stared at the kid, slowly joining his ancestors in the sewers of Manhattan Island.


“There’ll be heat for this, because of the lists,” Blisterface said without emotion. “You’re fucking filling out the Incident Report.”


“I’ll fill out the fucking SIR,” Fussy Beard snapped back. “That’s you all over, Silvio. Afraid of fucking paperwork.”

I kept my eyes on the kid for a few seconds, watching. He was just dead, though, like I should have been years ago, like everyone
I’d ever known—give or take a few shitheels I didn’t care about—was dead. The cops’ talk descended into murmurs behind me,
indistinct and predatory. I closed my eyes, and it became just the rain and the wind. I was a ghost.




Las Vegas was a scrub of a town, an electric grid in the middle of the fucking desert, guarded by the burned-out husks of
ancient hotels. You could walk through the inhabited town in ten minutes and be in the extended graveyard that was the old
city, and I was getting the fifty-yen tour following the Russian around. You could get anything you wanted in Vegas—easier
if it was illegal. There were no cops in Vegas; I wasn’t sure if there had ever been, but now that the cops and the Spooks
were at war, there wasn’t a cop within five hundred miles of the place.


Romanov’s was a dump from the outside—pink-gray stucco, bars on the windows, and weak, jittery neon—set between happy-ending
bars and burlap-window opium dens. Inside, it was plush, red velvety material everywhere, brass on the bar. Although the waiters
were all Droids on wheels, skimming across the floor with terrible efficiency, the bartender was a human in a black suit,
bright eyed and pasty faced, speaking English like he’d memorized it off cards. He didn’t like the look of me but took his
cigarette from his mouth long enough to saunter over and toss a napkin onto the bar. There was music in the air, a tinkling
piano, and I could see my Russian in the mirror across from me, which was good enough.


The bartender stopped in front of me, his dark hair hanging in his face. He picked tobacco off his lip and spat it onto the
floor. “You have yen?” he asked.


I smiled, tossing my credit dongle onto the bar. “Sick with it.” One thing I still had was yen. Problem was, you needed a
fucking wheelbarrow of it to buy anything.


He looked down at the dongle for a second but didn’t bother to pick it up and scan it. He sighed, almost in disappointment.
“What will you have?”


I liked his accent. It was hard to understand, but it sounded nice. He was Russian, of course, of some sort—maybe he was Bulgarian
or maybe he was a fucking Cossack, but it didn’t matter: he was Russian for all practical purposes. Everyone in Vegas was
a fucking Russian—they owned the city, if you wanted to call it a city. Mainly because no one else wanted the piece of shit
out in the middle of nowhere. The Russians were keeping Vegas going through sheer determination, though things had gotten
easier recently since the army had moved into the Southwest. I hadn’t seen a System Cop in months.

“Doesn’t matter, I can’t taste anything anymore anyway. Gin,” I said. “Warm.”

He snorted, producing a glass and dropping it in front of me. “Gin. Fucking prole, yes?”

I winked, pulling a cigarette from my pocket. “Fucking right.”

My Russian was an old guy, short but broad in the shoulders, with the tight look of a man who’d been lean and tough his whole
life. He was old, silvery hair thick and short on his head. In the mirror he was sitting at a table crowded by two tall, plump
baldies who sweated freely in their standard-issue leather coats. My Russian was clasping the hands of a tall, thin man with
waxy skin and a shiny suit: the owner. They were beaming at each other so forcefully, pumping hands, I wondered which one
hated the other more. The dining room was pretty full, lots of swells out for a nice meal, mostly fat men in suits so fucking
pretty they were almost gowns. There was a nice buzz of noise in the air.


The bartender poured my drink, and I lit my cigarette, sending a cloud of bluish smoke into the air. I picked up my glass
and swallowed the drink in one gulp, ticking my head down toward the glass before he could put the bottle away.


“Another,” I said.

“You really can’t taste anything, eh?” he said, squinting at me and pouring another.

“Or feel anything.”

“Bullshit.”

In the mirror, I watched the tall, waxy guy walk away from My Russian and plucked my cigarette from my mouth. I pushed the
red coal against the top of my right hand and held it there, white smoke curling up. I counted five, watching My Russian in
the mirror sweep the room with his tiny, thin eyes, and then put the butt back in my mouth, waving my hand at the bartender
to show off the blackened welt. “Not a fucking thing.”


“That’s impressive.” The bartender nodded, leaving the bottle on the bar as a sign of good humor. “Nerve Augment?”

I shook my head, picking up my glass and staring into the cloudy liquid. “Something that happened to me in prison,” I said
slowly, one of my moments coming on me, a strange, slow feeling in my thoughts. I shook my head a little and let it slide
past me—it only got worse if I tried to force a memory. “I don’t like to talk about it.” I toasted him and drank my shot off
as he spun and walked away. As I was setting the glass down, I felt the air around me getting crowded. In the mirror, My Russian
and his two sweaty bodyguards had suddenly gotten much nearer.


“My friend,” My Russian said, “I have been seeing visions of you all day.” He spoke with the weird precision foreigners brought
to English, every word bitten off, newly minted, invented a few seconds ago. “Why is that?”


I returned my cigarette to my mouth. Without looking around at them, I shrugged. “I’ve been hired to kill you.”

In the mirror, My Russian shot his cuffs, and I caught a glimpse of a dark, blurry skull tattoo on his wrist. Fucking Ivans
and their bullshit: the Russians had been just about the only organization to survive Unification, and it had made them fucking
batty with the symbols and rituals. It wasn’t pretty, of course—they made most of their yen through drugs, heavy shit sold
to the bottom rung of the System, mostly designer, unstable, and as likely to pop a vessel as get you high. The cops had no
patience for narcotics—Dick Marin, the Director of Internal Affairs and pretty much king of the cops, set the tone there—and
they beat up on the Russians every chance they got, and the Russians were quick to put a bullet in the head of anyone who
looked like a weak link to them.


They’d never made much of a dent in New York, back when there’d been a New York. The locals had closed ranks against them, and the System Pigs owned New York the way the Russians owned Vegas.
There’d been a couple of attempts over the years, but it had ended in tears. But the Russians had survived.


Everyone in that organization had done terrible things. Terrible Things was their fucking initiation rite.

My Russian cocked his head at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. His two bald friends joined in after a second
of hesitation. Their boss looked around as if he’d made a terribly funny joke, soaking up the room.


“Come have a drink with me, my ghost,” he chuckled, turning away. “Talk to me.”

One of the bald giants leaned down, but I forestalled that bullshit by standing up, blowing smoke around. “Touch me, Boris,
and I will break a finger.”


He grunted, straightening up. “Name not Boris.”

I nodded. “Finger will still be broken,” I advised, pushing through them. I jerked my head at the bartender, who was back
to leaning against the wall, watching me walk by with slitted eyes and smoke curling up from his own cigarette. He flicked
his hand from his waistband, and my credit dongle leaped at me. I snatched it from the air.


“Spaaseeba,” I said, just a collection of sounds I’d learned. I tucked my dongle away into a pocket.


“Nice knowing you,” he said to my back.

I grinned.

The place was air-conditioned aggressively, but I imagined I could still sense the heat out in the desert. It had been 113
at noon, though it was expected to cool down to a manageable 104 by midnight. I hated Las Vegas. It was like living in someone’s
armpit.


They led me toward the back, passing the packed tables, and kept walking past all of the heavy-looking red padded doors marked
private and took me through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The black, humming cooking unit took up an immense amount
of space, swollen within the tiled room, just a cube of rough black metal with neat, tidy conveyor belts inching out of it.
It was idle at the moment, there being more activity at the bar than the menus, but I didn’t like the way it hummed, an almost
silent vibration that reached inside me. I pushed my hands into the loose pockets of my ill-fitting suit, too heavy for the
weather and full of my sweat, soaked up lovingly and held jealously. I wasn’t made for this town. Too hot, too empty, too
old.


My Russian kept walking through the empty kitchen and out the back door into a fenced-in lot that smelled like rot, the wet,
heavy smell hitting you in the face and settling down to soak into your clothes and skin. Weeks from now I’d be smelling like
this fucking parking lot. I kept smiling, though, trying to look my new friends over. All of us thought we knew exactly where
this social call was ending, and all that remained was to see who was right.


I put my eyes on My Russian and ran them up and down his shiny suit, deciding he wasn’t carrying a barker. The Russians—the
higher-ups, at least, the real old-school Ivans—had a fetish for strangulation, a wire shining out in the darkness. I’d heard
they regarded any murder that didn’t require you to get right up close to the mark—a knife, a piano string—as pussy work.
American murder.


Pussy or not, the two bald mountains had two guns each, big ones, under their arms. They didn’t look fast, and their coats
were too tight for that kind of move—it would bunch up if they tried to pull both at once, and if they were going to pull
them one at a time they were fucking morons for carrying two anyway. The two bodyguards stopped and let My Russian and me
take a few steps more, so that I ended up between him and them, the two huge balls of flesh between me and the door.