The Final Evolution

Book 5: Avery Cates

by Jeff Somers

Genres: Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Dystopian

Synopsis

The world is dying. With avatars replacing humans and the birth rate non-existent, the human race is almost extinct. In the end, it comes down to Canny Orel; Avery's long sought after nemesis -- transformed now into something other than human. Orel might hold the secret to humanity's salvation, if he can be convinced -- or forced -- to relinquish it. And when Cates chances on a way to trick his old master, he suddenly has a choice to make: get his long-delayed revenge, or save the world.

Release date: July 1, 2011

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 382

Sample

“Tell me something,” I said, easing the barrel into the soft spot on the back of his neck just below the skull. “How’s someone
as stupid as you get a job like this?”


He tensed for a moment, then slumped a little. “I used to be smarter.”

I smiled, pressing the gun down hard while I hugged him with my free arm, feeling him up for surprises. I was alive and I
felt good. “We all used to,” I said. “Me, I used to be a fucking genius.”


I found a gun shoved down into his crotch, a battered old alloy auto with the safety chiseled off, ready to blow his balls
off if he zipped up wrong. I weighed it in my hand.


“It’ll go easier on you if you tell me what else you’ve got.”

He chewed on this for a second or two. It was dark and cold as hell, the wind whipping up over the ruined outer wall of the
old church and smacking into us. I stared over his shoulder at the glowing whitewashed walls, twin bell towers sticking up into the blue-black sky like broken bones. The
church proper was ringed by the remnants of the old wall, a tiny, squat cottage connected to my right, the roof a vague memory.
The whole world was being worn down, erased, one inch at a time, filled with empty, abandoned buildings like this. In twenty
years the cottage would be gone down to the foundation. So would I.


“Nothing,” he said, giving me a little shrug. “I’m just supposed to yell the alarm, give ’em some warning, anybody gets past
me.”


“Yell if you want to find out what your brain feels like flying through the air,” I said. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. We’re
inside already anyway. Walk me in.”


If he was in the mood to be reasonable, I was in the mood to let him live. I’d killed enough assholes already. Why be greedy.

“All right,” he said after another moment.

I pocketed his gun and let him put an inch or two between us, then followed him toward the church. We scraped along the frozen
dirt for a few seconds in silence.


“Listen,” he said quietly. “There’s two guys on the first floor, right inside the doors.”

I nodded. “We know.”

“Let me take the slip,” he said. He didn’t say it pleading. He just asked, like he was asking for a cigarette. “I’ll catch
hell if I walk in there with you pushing me along.”


I studied the back of his head. He was younger than me, but so was everyone. His head was shaved and a delicate tattoo of
a spiderweb had been penned onto his skull, a blurry blue design done in a shaky hand. It glinted slightly in the cold moonlight.
For a moment I considered just letting him run. My gut told me that he would just melt away and never bother me again, but I hadn’t lived this long
by taking stupid chances, so I sighed as if thinking about it and then I brought my Roon down on top of his head as hard as
I could.


He dropped to the ground silently, and I stepped over him, glancing up at the hill that framed the church against the sky,
a dome of green and brown. There was no noise aside from the crunch of my boots on the frost.


I crept forward. When I was a few feet from the big wooden double doors, they swung outward on silent, greased hinges.

“You stupid fuck,” I hissed. “What are you thinking? You check your field, or you’ll get punished.”

“Yes,” Remy said, leaning against the doorway with one of his ersatz brown cigarettes hanging from one lip. “The day you can’t
handle one guard who doesn’t know you’re coming, Avery, I’m dead anyway.”


I looked him over. He’d grown like a weed over the last three years, getting broad and tall, every movement taut and powerful.
He’d let his black hair grow out, hanging over his face, and he’d started a beard, a thick scum of hair that enveloped his
cheeks and neck, making him look even skinnier, strangely. He dressed in black, like an asshole, but I pardoned him; he was
still just a kid. And I liked him. It always surprised me how much I liked Remy.


“All right,” I said, giving him a little slap on his cheek as I pushed past him. “Then today’s lesson is, don’t rely on someone
else doing their job to keep you alive, you stupid fuck.”


“Stupid fuck” had become my term of endearment for Remy.

Just inside the doors were two bodies, big guys sprawled in the sawdust poured all over the floor, a bloody mess. They were
both locals, tall beefy guys, tan skin and long, dark hair tied back into tails, guns in their slack hands. Both had tiny,
small-caliber holes in their heads. Remy favored big guns but he could work small if the occasion called for it. I’d taught
him that, and I had a moment of weird pride, instantly soured. I stood there studying them for a moment while the kid closed
the doors behind us.


“You didn’t have to kill them,” I said, carefully. I didn’t want to prompt another speech about the military augments in his
head that might explode at any moment—from decay, or stray microwaves, or an old SFNA officer with a spare remote in his pocket.
I’d heard it too often. I had the same augments, forced on me by the Press Squad, but mine had been damaged. The one time
someone tried to pop me with a military remote—a blackjack, the old soldiers called it—it hadn’t killed me, though I wished
it had, for a while. When Remy didn’t respond, I sighed. “Quiet work, though,” I said, looking back at him. His face was impassive,
as always. He hadn’t spoken for the first six months after we got out of Hong Kong, and even now he wasn’t one for speeches.


“I think that was lesson three,” he said, crossing his arms in front of himself. “Noise gets you killed.”


The church had been gutted and was just a cold shell of old wooden beams and empty windows. Up front there was a twisting
set of stairs, apparently held together with wishes and good intentions, leading up to a sagging balcony that wrapped around
three of the walls. I could see a door at the top of the stairs, a gleaming steel number that sported a nifty DNA-swipe magnetic
lock. It didn’t work anymore, of course; electricity was hard to come by in Bolivia. Everything was hard to come by, everywhere, since the System had fallen into a million little pieces.


“No one at that door?” I wondered aloud, walking forward and turning my head this way and that, trying to see everything,
get the place fixed in my head.


“Assholes,” Remy said by way of explanation. “Garces is nobody. A local strongman. I’m amazed he has a steel door instead
of some glass beads on string.”


I clucked my tongue. “Don’t be fucking cynical, Remy. Yeah, Garces doesn’t run anything half a mile away from this fucking
building, but Morales is paying us a lot of worthless yen to kill him. And my intel says there should be two assholes at the
front door and one asshole at the back door.” I gestured up at it. “That bothers me. This lack of assholes.”


“Well, there’s us,” he said with his usual flat tone.


I checked my Roon, scorched and battered but still smooth as silk—no one made guns like the old Roon corporation, rest in
peace—then I took out the first guard’s iron and looked it over. It was no Roon, but it looked like it wouldn’t blow up in
my hand, at least, so I slipped it back into my coat pocket.


“Well, let’s find out what’s up there.”

I walked toward the stairs, thinking. Remy was right—Garces was a local boss, one of a million who’d sprung up when the army
and the cops had dissolved, scattering, the System of Federated Nations getting unfederated over the course of a few chaotic
months. The fact that the best people he could hire were low-quality wasn’t surprising. It still felt wrong; I’d learned that
when unexpected things happened, it usually went badly for you. We’d been working so much lately, I was in practice, and in shape—my augments, my gift from Colonel Malkem Anners and Michaleen Garda,
were damaged but still partially functional. I still had a flickering heads-up display in my vision, pain got washed away
immediately, and when my heart rate kicked up I got calm and clear. There was no reason to discount my instincts.


I paused at the foot of the stairs and listened. The steps were old wood, bowed in the center and reinforced here and there
with metal braces; they would creak like hell. The hallway behind the door was about twenty feet long, and there was another
door that led to Garces’s office. I was standing there, judging the physics and the chances I’d be heard when the steel door
swung open and a skinny, short man with his long black hair tied into a tight, thick braid stepped out onto the landing.


For a second we stared at each other. “¿Qué la cogida?” he said, taking half a step backward.


I put my gun on him, moving fast, my old augments giving me an adrenaline-sick edge of speed.

“Aqui,” I said, using one-third of my usable Spanish and gesturing at the floor. “Aqui.”


He nodded, raising his hands up like an ass. Never do anything you aren’t ordered to, I always told Remy. Don’t give shit
away—if someone forgets to tell you to put your hands where they can be seen, keep your fucking hands where they’ll do you
some good. He started coming down, muttering something I couldn’t quite catch with each step. Watching him, I cheated my way
to his left, and when he was a few steps from the floor I reached out, took hold of his ankle, and spun him crashing to the
ground floor.


Remy was suddenly there, one boot on the poor guy’s neck, his massive double-action revolver pointed at the guy’s head. Startled, I dashed forward and gave Remy a shove, knocking
him off balance and sending him stumbling into the wall, his heavy gun making him lean. I hooked one hand into our new friend’s
collar and dragged him behind me as I stomped after the kid.


“Why the fuck do I have to always remind you to not just fucking kill every-fucking-body?” I hissed. Remy was hunched over, staring up at me from around his own shoulder, his cannon aimed at
the floor. It was a ridiculously large gun, heavy and loud, but it would put a fist-sized hole in someone’s chest, and Remy
was attached to it despite the fact that bullets for it were rarer than clean water these days. His hair hung in his face
and he made no attempt to move, to challenge me. He just stayed hunched over as if expecting a kick, and shrugged awkwardly.


“That’s what we do,” he pointed out.


“Fuck,” I said and sighed, looking back up the stairs. “Maybe it would be nice to ask our new friend here what’s behind that
door? How many men up there?”


He nodded, slowly straightening up. “Sure, okay, Avery.”

I stared at him again, my prisoner just waiting politely for our attention to swing back to him. Remy disdained caution, because
Remy thought he knew how he was going to die, and thought the knowledge made him immortal in every other situation. Until
his augments popped, he figured he was protected by fate. And no matter how many times I told him he was an asshole for thinking
that, he was never convinced.


“Okay,” I finally said, letting my guy drop to the floor and turning to put a boot on his chest and my gun in his face. “Hola, muchacho,” I said, gesturing up the stairs. “¿Cuantos?”


He grinned, again putting his hands up by his face to signify that he wasn’t a threat. I didn’t need his hand gestures to
know that; he’d already shown me his belly and asked me to scratch it. “No mas,” he said eagerly. “No mas, señor.”


I nodded. “Gracias,” I said, smiling back. His tan face lit up and he looked like he was going to keep talking, so I leaned down and smacked
my Roon into his forehead just hard enough to knock him cold—the rusting augments in my head made such precise adjustments
easy enough. I straightened up and gestured at Remy to precede me up the stairs.


“Don’t be an asshole,” I warned him as he slipped past me, all youthful energy and grace, sinews and adrenaline.

“We are here to kill Garces, right?” he whispered back. “We’re not just going to be rude to him, call him some names, right?”


I started up the stairs behind him. As I’d suspected, they creaked and wiggled under us like it was going to be the last thing
we ever did. “Shut up and keep your eyes open,” I suggested. “When you have the urge to be an asshole, ask yourself if I can
still beat the shit out of you. If the answer is yes, think twice.”


Teaching the kid was hard work.

He reached the sagging balcony and stepped to the right, pushing himself against the fragile railing and raising his cannon.
I stepped to the door and put my hand on the handle, glanced at the kid, and then pulled the door open in a sudden, smooth
lunge. Remy tensed and then relaxed, shrugging.


I stepped in front of him and took lead. The hallway was made of warped wood slats on the floor and pockmarked drywall. Two
doors on the sides had been boarded over crudely, leaving just the big, heavy wooden door with the shotgun slat at the other
end to worry over. It made sense to limit the approaches; Potosí was not exactly a stable little city, and Garces hadn’t become
one of a dozen or so tiny chiefs in it through glad-handing and arranged marriages—a direct assault on his offices wasn’t
out of the question. If his guards weren’t all local simps who couldn’t be trusted to raise an alarm, the hallway would have
been an effective way to bottleneck intruders and poke a gun through the slat, raking them with fire from behind the door,
which I expected would be steel-plated on the other side.


We paused just outside, standing with our backs against the opposite walls, and looked at each other. Putting a finger up
to my lips to forestall Remy’s traditional approach of Extremely Loud and Shoot Me If You Can, I reached over and gently pressed
down on the door handle. It moved easily and unlatched with a soft click that sounded like a shotgun blast to my ears. Wincing,
I froze and waited to see if the door was going to explode, but nothing happened. I took a deep breath, my HUD flickering
in my vision, all levels green, and pushed the door inward, stepping immediately to the left, gun out but held low.


Feeling Remy step in behind me, I took in the room. It was a nicely appointed office and almost felt civilized; Potosí was
the definition of the sticks, but this place was old-school: wood paneling on the walls, a stained but thick and sound-swallowing
red carpet on the floor, the opposite wall dominated by two huge floor-to-ceiling windows. The left wall was all shelves, empty, the sunburned outlines of something or many somethings, square and all different heights,
still staining the old wood. In front of the empty shelves was a massive wooden desk, dark stain with deep scratches, flat
and empty. Two men sat on my side of the desk in old, busted-up, plush leather chairs, the upholstery blistered and bursting.
One was a huge blob of a guy, pale white with dark red hair, a face made of freckles and sweat. The other was almost as big,
dark tan and with glossy black hair spilling back over his shoulders like a wave of ink, a thin pencil mustache adorning his
upper lip.


Behind the desk sat Manuelo Garces, who ran half of Potosí with all the imagination and verve of a drunk pissing on his shoes.

He was about my size, and ten or fifteen years younger. He wore what passed for a nice suit in these shattered times, and
his head was close-shaved and sported a few scabs where an unsteady hand had cut him. He was a good-looking kid, his face
round and happy, symmetrical and balanced. He didn’t look like a guy who’d come up in the slums of Potosí, slitting throats
and stealing anything not nailed down, a guy who’d survived the breaking of the System and the civil war that had left Potosí
and everything around it for ten miles or so a scab of destruction. He looked like a kid I would pay a thousand yen to run
messages for me.


In my peripheral vision, I saw Remy step in after me, shut the door quietly behind him, and then step forward and right a
little, getting out of the door’s way in case someone unexpected came in. When he just stood there with his ridiculous gun
held down by his crotch, I relaxed. The kid liked taking chances and sometimes caused trouble.


I looked at Garces. He had his hands under the desk.

“I’m not here to kill you,” I said. “So don’t pull that boomstick out unless you want to piss me off.” Then I glanced at his
two guests. “You two aren’t on my list of chores today, so you have a choice here: You can jump out the window, or I can shoot
you both in the head. You’ve got five seconds.”


They both stared at me for a beat, then looked at Garces, who shrugged his eyebrows at him in the international gesture for
I don’t give a fuck. The redhead looked at me.


“We’ll go without a fuss—”

“You’ll go out the window,” I said, affecting boredom, playing my role like I’d done a million times before. “Or you’ll stay
here forever.” We weren’t that high up—they might break a leg; they might get messed up, but the drop wouldn’t kill them.
If they made me kill them I was going to make it hurt, out of sheer irritation.


In some ways, the world was easier, now. The System didn’t exist anymore—except for a hunk of Eastern Europe, where a rump
of the old System Security Force hung on. Dick Marin—The King Worm—was gone. At some point the Joint Council’s army had nuked
Moscow into a shallow crater, vaporizing his servers. The news had already been a few months old when I’d heard it, and I’d
felt nothing—which was curious. On my list of people to hate, Marin had been number three. Knowing he was gone should have
felt like something.


The cops were hanging on, though. Everywhere else had just fallen to pieces. City states, small countries, a constantly changing ocean of sovereignties. Most places were run by people like Garces, gangsters who could pay for muscle
to keep the peace, or by mercenaries who’d settled down with their troops. A lot of the old army officers had set up tiny
kingdoms for themselves after the army had collapsed, with their units as security. It was fucking chaos, and chaos was good
for business. There were no System Pigs breathing down your neck, beaming your face across the ocean, hunting you down. There
were no Vids pasting your name everywhere and telling people to report seeing you. I could throw these two slobs out the windows
and no one was going to investigate, no hovers were going to rip the roof off the place and dump a battalion of Stormers into
the room. No one was going to care.


They still didn’t move, so I shrugged and brought the Roon up, cocking the hammer with a dramatic click. That got them both
out of their seats, Remy shifting gracefully to his left to keep Garces covered.


For a second we just stared at each other. Then I sighed theatrically. “If you’ve never jumped out of a window before,” I
offered, “the best advice I can give you is to take a running jump—it’s easier that way, instead of leaning out in excruciating
increments—and protect your head.”


Red still stared at me. “You’re… not serious.”

Remy laughed, a cold, sudden snort. Remy hadn’t known me back in New York, before the Plague. He knew only the new Avery.
The new Avery wasn’t as kind and gentle as the old.


I ticked my aim downward and put a shell at Red’s feet, making him jump and yelp. The pair scampered backward toward the windows
and I turned toward Garces.


“Remy,” I called out. “Make sure they jump.”

Garces was relaxed, a smile on his face. He stared back at me with his hands folded in his lap. At the sound of one of the
windows scraping open his eyes flicked over my shoulder and then immediately back at me. He pushed his grin into overdrive
and raised one hand to point at me.


“Avery Cates,” he said.

I shrugged. “You’re Psionic. Read my mind and shit, huh?”

Garces shrugged back as a pair of yowling screams pierced the air behind us, suddenly cut off. “You’re the only gringo Gunner with a Bottom working around here.” He ticked his head toward the windows. “You cost me money, there.”


“Fuck your money,” I said, easily, taking a seat in one of the busted leather chairs.

He took that in stride. “I’m guessing I’m down four men, too.”

“Just two. The other two will live, unless they die of shame.”

He nodded. I could see how he’d clawed his way to the bottom ladder of the post-System world. He was smart enough, and he
stayed calm under pressure. “All right,” he said, his accent subtle, giving his words a round feel I kind of liked, like every
word was linked to the last by a thin line of silk. “Let’s negotiate.”


I shook my head. I had the Roon aimed at his face, my arm resting on the arm of the chair. “We’re not negotiating. I just
have a question I have to ask you before I transact my business. Something I ask everyone these days.”


The office was damp, I realized. It smelled moldy. If I looked up at the ceiling, I’d probably find a deep brown water stain,
but I didn’t bother looking. Garces was a two-bit neighborhood boss—the world had tens of thousands of assholes at his level, now, shitheads who thought having
a dozen big guys sending up tribute to you made you important. I’d known really important people. I’d been in the same room with them, made deals. Garces was a nobody, and I was about to remind him of
the fact.


“By all means, Mr. Cates,” he said, spreading his hands to indicate compliance. “If I can answer, I will. And then we can
discuss who has hired you, and what it will take for you to go and kill them instead.”


I didn’t react. Every asshole in the world thought he was brilliant, that no one had ever had such a brilliant idea before.
And there were probably Gunners who made deals like that, starting bidding wars, waking people up in the middle of the night
to announce the latest bid, and would you like to bid higher or take a bullet to the face? But Gunners like that usually ended
up dead sooner rather than later. The one thing people wanted in a Gunner was reliability. You didn’t like to think that hiring
me was just opening up a fucking auction.


“My question is, have you ever heard of men named Michaleen Garda, Wallace Belling, or Cainnic Orel?”

Garces squinted at me, cocking his head. “Orel? Everyone knows of Cainnic Orel, Mr. Cates. He has been dead for twenty years, I hear.” He smiled. “Or do I hear wrong?”


I nodded. “And the other names?”

He leaned back in his seat. “Never heard either one.”

I nodded again. I never expected any kind of shocking answer, but we’d traveled half the world since Hong Kong and I’d made
it a standard thing, just asking. It was surprising what you could find out just by asking. I looked around the office. Chances were I was never going to have my revenge on Michaleen, aka Cainnic Orel, the most famous Gunner
in the short, doomed history of the System, or on his lieutenant Belling. Both of them deserved to die, and I deserved to
be the one to kill them, but I wasn’t going to get any closer to that crawling around the wreckage of civilization killing
little shits like Garces for pennies.


Wallace Belling had told me, three years and forever ago, that the fat times, as far as contract murder was concerned, were
back. And he was right. I had more work than I could handle. The whole world was boiling, everyone grabbing what they could
and riding the bull until it bucked them off, and the easiest way to skip your wait in line was to hire someone like me and
delete a few people from the queue. I wasn’t working Orel and Belling’s legendary level, the Dúnmharú, a stupid fucking name
that still made people lie awake at night with a gun in their hands, but I was sleeping indoors every night when most people
were experimenting with a diet of dirt occasionally supplemented with their own fingers, and I was still alive, despite the
odds. It was the best deal I was going to get, and every day I didn’t get an interesting answer to my questions, I got happier
with my lot in life.


Standing up, I pushed my gun into my coat pocket. “Nice place you got here,” I said, walking toward the door. I felt good.
My augments weren’t as effective as they’d been when the military had first implanted them, making me feel like a kid with
perfect balance and endless energy, but they kept my leg from aching and my lungs from burning, and I slept like a baby at
night, just a black stretch of peace and recuperation. I spun and walked backward for a few steps, feeling light and lively. “Too bad it’s going to be someone else’s tomorrow.”


His sudden expression of pale horror was hilarious. “You said you were not here to kill me!” he shouted, veins bubbling up
under his skin. I got the impression that Garces was a screamer, when you didn’t have a gun on him. That made me feel good.
Screamers deserved to be shut up.


“I’m not,” I said, hooking a thumb at Remy, who stood in front of the desk with his cannon held calmly in front of him. “He
is. He really enjoys this part.”


The mud sucked at my boots and splattered all over my pants and coat as we walked through downtown Potosí. I didn’t know what
Potosí had been like before the civil war, but Potosí today was a pimple where trash collected, a scab of a city where nothing
had been rebuilt, just repurposed. It was a town of blue tarps, thick plastic sheeting laid over destroyed roofs, stretched
to form rippling walls, used in architectural ways I’d never imagined. Who even knew there was so much blue tarp in the world,
just stockpiled everywhere, ready to be deployed after the field-contained armaments had churned your city into a maze of
rubble and bloody mud.


“Do you see him?” Remy asked without looking at me.

I nodded. The sun was incredibly bright and had absolutely no warmth; it was just a huge pale disk in the sky reflected off
of every iced-over pool of water and sheet of frozen, off-white snow. The streets had been churned by a thousand feet into
pudding that wanted to pull you down into the earth and hold you there, absorbing you. Some of the more enterprising people had laid down wooden slats outside
their buildings, but for the most part it was just the sucking mud and a hundred assholes shoving you this way and that. Potosí
had never been a big town, but it seemed empty all the time, half the old ruins unoccupied, no one hurting for space.


Even so, a walk downtown always got on my nerves.

I stopped and pretended to examine some knives on a fragile-looking cart that had no wheels. The proprietor was an extremely
thin black man with a puffy white beard exploding off his face in several contradictory directions; his beard looked like
. . .