Noir Page 44

  November had already turned, following the bright tracery of the parsifal’s bullets. Now she gazed at the torn front of McNihil’s shirt and jacket, the fabric ripped by the bullets, a few shreds dangling like frayed ribbons. There wasn’t even any blood, though enough of McNihil’s flesh was exposed to show that he hadn’t been wearing any body armor, Kevlar mesh, or anything capable of stopping the hot, fast metal.

  Her gaze moved up to McNihil’s face. A simmering anger showed there.

  “That really pisses me off,” grated McNihil’s voice. “When you do something stupid like that. I’m trying to keep it together. For a little while longer, at least.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  CORPSES KICK ASS

  You shouldn’t be standing…” Harrisch gazed up in fear at the figure looming in front of him. “Not anymore…”

  Standing, hell. November had watched in amazement as the asp-head had strode across the hotel’s buckling, crumbling rooftop. He shouldn’t even be moving, she thought. McNihil looked in even worse shape now, with the front of his shirt all torn up from the bullets out of Harrisch’s weapon, than when she had found him downstairs in the hotel.

  McNihil reached down and plucked the emptied weapon out of the exec’s trembling hands. “You don’t need this,” said McNihil. He flung it away, over the side of the collapsing hotel, past where his own tannhäuser had skittered across the roof. “You should’ve asked, before you started going off like that. I could’ve saved you the trouble.”

  “Wait a minute.” November’s gaze moved between the two men. Or man and whatever McNihil had become. A corpse? she wondered. Corpses kick ass like this? “What’s going on?”

  “It’s simple.” McNihil glanced over at her. “All this stuff about the job-that was all crap. It was never the important thing.” He gave Harrisch a sharp nudge in the shoulder, jabbing a fingertip at the other man. “Was it?”

  Harrisch shrank back into himself. He nodded, as though trying to mollify the specter standing before him. “That’s true,” he said in a quavering voice. “What we wanted out of you wasn’t the job-we didn’t care whether you completed it or not. Just your taking it on was enough for us to win. All you ever amounted to was a delivery system.”

  “I know all about that.” McNihil showed his version, even uglier, of the other’s smile. “I know that I wasn’t the first, either. The first one was Travelt, wasn’t it? Only he found out what you were doing with him; he figured out that you’d made him into the vector, the infectious agent for the TOAW project. That was the only reason you gave him the prowler he used. The transference of his personality, his core essence, into the prowler wasn’t an accident, something that wasn’t supposed to happen; it was planned that way from the beginning. His prowler was specifically designed that way, to receive Travelt’s essence and carry it into the Wedge. Because he’d already been infected with TOAW. With Travelt aboard, the prowler could sneak TOAW in past whatever defenses the Wedge might’ve had, infect and spread TOAW throughout the whole Wedge until it was one big vector pool. Like a venereal disease, only a custom-built one. Anybody going in or out of the Wedge, whether they were using a prowler to have their fun or doing it in their own skin, would be infected. Pretty neat.”

  “True…” Harrisch gave a weak shrug. “The Wedge and its… inhabitants, let’s say… they were our pilot project. The idea was to see how it worked out with that subject population, assess the results, and refine the technology, see how we wanted to go on from there.”

  “But it didn’t work out that way.” A measure of satisfaction sounded in McNihil’s voice. “Travelt’s prowler, with Travelt’s contaminated essence, went into the Wedge-but nothing came back out. It didn’t matter whether Travelt or the prowler ever showed up again, and it was just as well if they didn’t. As a matter of fact, you made sure it was a one-way trip for him; once the transference between Travelt and the prowler had been made, you had his original body killed, right there in his cubapt. Or did you do it yourself?”

  “That’s not important.” Harrisch’s expression turned to a scowl. “But you know there are some things better left… undelegated.”

  “Doesn’t matter to me,” said McNihil. “And the result was the same for Travelt. But what you weren’t expecting was that there was no indication of TOAW having been delivered into the Wedge by Travelt’s prowler. Within days, there should’ve been some signs of infection spreading. The first victims should’ve been turning up, both inside the Wedge and outside, all through the Gloss. But nothing happened. That’s when you knew something had gone wrong. That’s when you figured you’d need another delivery system.” McNihil’s voice tightened, harder than it ever had before. “And that’s when you came to me.”

  “We wouldn’t have had to,” muttered Harrisch, “if that little connector Travelt had done things right.”

  “What you mean is, if he’d done what you’d wanted him to. But somehow he figured out what was going on, that he’d been infected with TOAW, that he’d been turned into a vector for spreading the contagion. And he found a way of containing it. Of not spreading it. So you had to come to me. Not because you wanted me to locate Travelt’s prowler, or find out what’d happened to him, or any of that line you handed to me. Like you said, all I had to do was take the job, just go into the Wedge and try to find out what happened to Travelt, and that’d be enough. Because you’d made sure I was infected as well, that I’d become a TOAW vector the same as Travelt and his prowler had been. You figured that somebody-or some thing-in the Wedge had caught Travelt’s prowler on the way in and eliminated it, so it wouldn’t spread its contagion. But you knew I’d be smarter and tougher than Travelt and his prowler, and I’d get past whatever barrier had been put up for the Wedge to defend itself. That would’ve been a real good plan,” said McNihil with grim vehemence. “If it’d worked.”

  “What do you mean?” A new apprehension appeared to rise inside Harrisch. “Of course it worked. It had to. You went into the Wedge-you were carrying the TOAW infection-”

  “You dumb connector.” McNihil’s voice tinged darker with contempt. “You screwed up with Travelt because you didn’t realize that the prowler you laid on him would also give the game away. There was something in the Wedge, all right; something that could figure out what you were trying to do. Something a lot older and smarter than all of your corporation put together. It read out Travelt’s prowler and what it was carrying like a neon sign on a dark night; you could’ve put it on a billboard and it wouldn’t have been any plainer. So even before the transference took place between him and the prowler, he knew something was up. He knew you’d connected him. And he found someplace to go.” McNihil’s voice softened, as though still impressed. “Someplace where the contagion would be locked up, where TOAW wouldn’t spread from him to the Wedge. Someplace where you wouldn’t be able to find him, where he’d be… safe. And even happy. Someplace where you’d never be able to find him. But I found him, all right. And he told me all about it. Everything. Some of it I knew before. And the rest? It just confirmed all my suspicions, about you and DynaZauber and TOAW, about all of it. Believe me; there weren’t many secrets left when Travelt and I got done talking.”

  “Then you should’ve realized,” said Harrisch, “that you’re the one who’s connected. Just by being here, you’ve spread TOAW into the Wedge. And from here, it’ll go everywhere. The Wedge is now the perfect vector pool for us-”

  “That’d be true… if I hadn’t taken a few little precautions. To keep the contagion from spreading. To eliminate my vector potential.”

  “How could you do that?” The asp-head’s words seemed to baffle Harrisch. “If you didn’t find out about it until you went into the Wedge and found Travelt, and talked to him-it’d be too late by then!”

  McNihil slowly shook his head. “You’re assuming too much. I knew enough about it-about the contagion-before I got to the Wedge. When I came and met up with you at the hospital, I had already taken care of it. It w
as too late for you then. I had already done what I needed to do.”

  “But… that’s impossible. You wouldn’t even have known you were infected with TOAW. How could you do anything if-”

  “Because I did know,” said McNihil simply. “I knew I’d been infected, and I knew how it’d been done. What the vector agent was, that I got TOAW from. The same one you used to give it to Travelt. The comparison of TOAW to a venereal disease, something that’s sexually transmitted from one individual to another, isn’t just a metaphor. Travelt and I caught it from the person that we’d both had intercourse with-that little cube bunny, the one that hung around his cubapt; and then, when you had me come over to look at Travelt’s corpse, she followed me back to my place and put the moves on me. You must’ve had her down at the DZ labs, getting her ready to be a contagion vector, long before you hooked her up with Travelt.” The shake of McNihil’s head was slower and sadder. “Poor little thing. I didn’t even find out her name. She did her job, and she was gone. I suppose you took care of her, too.”

  “Like you said. She’d done her job.”

  Nice, thought November. She didn’t even know who they were talking about, but she could figure out that whatever had happened was entirely typical of the way Harrisch operated. Somebody-some poor little thing-always gets it.

  “But still-”The look of confusion didn’t disappear from Harrisch’s face. “How could you tell you were infected? It doesn’t show; TOAW doesn’t work on a visible basis.”

  “Not for you,” said McNihil. “But you forgot. I don’t see things the way you do. Some things that are real and visible for you, I don’t see-and vice versa. TOAW as a contagious disease is a metaphor-and I can see some of those.” McNihil tapped the side of his face. “My eyes are different. You knew that, but you forgot, or you didn’t think it was important. But it is. Because the way I see things, that kind of vision… it translated your TOAW-as-disease metaphor into something visible for me, something I could see. An actual disease, a physical contagion, with symptoms I could see and feel right on my own body.”

  “Yeah?” November was both repelled and fascinated. She couldn’t see anything wrong with him. But then, she realized, I wouldn’t be able to. I don’t have his eyes. “What kind of disease?”

  “Come on. What do you expect?” McNihil displayed no embarrassment. “The designers at the DynaZauber labs put together TOAW using a venereal-disease model-so naturally I’m going to see it that way. One of the classic varieties; the symptoms are pretty hard to mistake. But just to be sure, I had to get checked out-or tried to.” He glanced over at Harrisch. “That was another reason I wanted to meet with you at the hospital. Killing two birds with one stone. Before I came up to the burn ward for our little conversation, I had time to swing by the communicable-disease clinic on the ground floor; it’s their job to find out who’s come down with what. And they couldn’t find anything. They couldn’t even see it-not the way I could. That just confirmed what I’d already pretty much figured out. That something else was going on. Something that had DZ written all over it.”

  “You knew,” marveled Harrisch. “You knew that much-and you still took the job.”

  “Why not?” McNihil shrugged. “It was the only way to get you off my ass. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The cube bunny had done her job, and now I was supposed to do mine. And then everything would’ve been just the way you wanted it, with TOAW successfully inserted into the Wedge. With everybody lining up, to come in and get contaminated. That’s a fine old tradition with these sex-based industries, isn’t it? Historically, you’re going with the flow on that one; even making a profit from disease isn’t that much of an innovation.” The contempt in McNihil’s eyes turned to pure loathing, something that appeared to November as deep and instinctual, the gaze of a human creature toward a particularly noxious arachnid. “It would’ve all worked out so well for you and everybody else at DynaZauber, except for one thing. I found a way to keep the contagion from spreading. There may be diseases in the Wedge, but none of them are TOAW”

  “That’s impossible.” Harrisch stared wonderingly at the asp-head. “If you went into the Wedge at all, if you had any contact with anyone there-you would’ve spread it. Sex isn’t necessary for the transmission.”

  “Why not before?” The unquieting thought had just occurred to November. She instinctively drew a little farther away from McNihil. “If you were already infected-why wouldn’t you have been passing it on before you went into the Wedge?”

  “Because TOAW’s got a lock on it.” McNihil glanced over at her. “You don’t have to worry. The DynaZauber labs wired a bonding inhibitor into TOAW, so they could mess around with it all they wanted back at DZ headquarters and not worry-or at least not much-about anybody catching it there.” He pointed with his thumb toward Harrisch. “That’s why this connector’s not worried about catching it. He’s got the bonding inhibitor as an adjunct to his immune system, like a vaccine. Just another way that TOAW is such an improvement over all those old-fashioned type diseases; with this one, only the right people come down with it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s great for him.” A surge of anger welled up inside November. “But I don’t have any kind of inhibitor.” If I’d have known, she thought viciously, maybe I wouldn’t have come to this little party. “I’m running around here without protection.”

  “Simmer down,” McNihil told her. “You don’t have anything to worry about, either. It’s not a problem for anyone. Not now. Like I said, I took care of it.”

  “You’re lying.” Trembling, Harrisch rose up on his knees. “There’s no way. At the clinic-the Adder clome showed me the proof that he’d disabled the bonding inhibitor on you. As soon as you walked out his door, you were an active infectious agent. A TOAW vector-”

  “He may have taken out the inhibitor-but just doing that wouldn’t make me a vector carrying a transmittable disease. I’m way ahead of that one.” McNihil gave the exec a grim fraction of a smile. “You and the TOAW designers back at DZ headquarters overlooked something. You made TOAW communicable between humans and humans, between prowlers and humans, between prowlers and prowlers-you thought you’d covered all the bases. But it’s still essentially a biological disease. A disease for the living.”

  “Wait…” November reached her hand toward his arm, as though there were some way that she might intervene in what had already happened. “Don’t…”

  The identical surmise flashed behind Harrisch’s startled gaze. “You’re crazy-”

  “Probably. But that doesn’t change things.” With both hands, McNihil pulled open the front of his shirt. “The dead can’t infect the living. Not that way.”

  November could see the wound, the bullet hole above and through his heart. He would’ve had to have used his own weapon, that monstrous tannhäuser he was always carrying around, to have done that kind of perfect damage. It looked like it’d stopped bleeding a long time ago, an old wound, something that would’ve decorated the inhabitant of a stainless-steel morgue drawer.

  “Of course,” she murmured. “Now it really does make sense…” The pieces had already started to fall together; now they flew toward one another even faster. “That was why you went into hock, to pay for the skin grafts and everything else I got at the hospital. It wasn’t just to keep me alive, to put me back together and out on the street. It was the debt; it wasn’t a drawback to the arrangement. It was what you wanted.” She had talked to the dead before, in another place far from this one; she’d gotten used to it. And to what they said. They always tell the truth, thought November. Maybe because they no longer had anything to lose by it. “To be in debt,” she mused, thinking about McNihil’s words. “To be so far into the hole, owing so much money, that your own death wouldn’t get you off the hook. You’d be one of the indeadted, a walking corpse-like those ones down in the south of the Gloss.”

  “Exactly.” McNihil gave a quick nod. “And when you’re reanimated because of outstanding debts, you�
�re automatically assigned to whatever ongoing job you might have that has the highest possibility of making enough money to pay off what you owe. I already had this gig with DynaZauber, so I was allowed to go ahead with it. Only the job I had been given was to find out what happened to Travelt and his prowler-and I did that. It’s not my problem if what these people really wanted was for me to infect the Wedge with their TOAW project. Because that didn’t happen; the vector modeling after a venereal disease was too close; it can only be transmitted from one living thing, a human or a prowler, to another. They forgot about the dead. But that’s all right.” This nod was slower, with obvious satisfaction. “I didn’t forget about them.”

  “You didn’t do it for me at all.” November was amazed at how much clearer that made things. “You just needed to rack up the debt-and doing it at a hospital is the fastest way. Everybody knows that.”

  “It’s nothing personal,” said McNihil. “And you got something out of it.”

  “No, no-it’s okay. I don’t mind.” The thought struck her, that he’d already been dead, entering into the land of the dead and making it his own, when she’d been coming back from it. He must’ve done it, she thought, right after he finished talking with Harrisch at the hospital. When he’d been by himself again, up in that shabby little apartment of his. Just took out his gun and-did it. When they’d been putting her back together, fitting a new skin to her, he’d already had a hole drilled through his heart. A real one at last, to match the metaphorical one. “As long as… it’s what you wanted.”

  “Connect this.” Harrisch’s snarling voice broke in. “I don’t care if you think you did the job we hired you for or not-you’re not getting paid. You’re not getting a penny from us. That debt you’re carrying around? It’s yours for good. If you think you’re headed for a quiet grave, that you’re not going to be indeadted forever-you’re really connected. Anybody connects around with us, gets a long time to regret it.”