Czytaj książkę: «Spares»

One

Wide shot.

New Richmond, Virginia. Not the old Richmond, the historic capital of historical old Virginia, that sprawl of creaking tedium, but the New. The old Richmond was destroyed over a century ago, razed to the ground during riots which lasted two months. After decades of putting up with dreadful shopping facilities, a bewilderingly dull Old Town and no good restaurants to speak of, the residents suddenly went non-linear and strode across the city like avenging angels, destroying everything in their wake. It was great.

Spin doctors blamed downtown decay, crack wars, the cast of the moon. Personally, I think everyone just got really bored, and either way good riddance to it. The old Richmond was a content-free mess, a waste of a good, level patch within sight of the pleasingly pointy Blue Ridge Mountains. Everyone agreed it was much better off as a landing strip, a refuelling point for the MegaMalls.

The MegaMalls are aircraft – five miles square, two hundred storeys high – which majestically transport passengers from one side of the continent to the other, from the bottom to the top; from wherever they've been to wherever they seem to think will be better. The biggest oblongs of all time, a fetching shade of consumer goods black, studded with millions of points of light and so big they transcend function and become simply a shape again.

When oblongs grow up, they all want to be MegaMalls.

Inside are thousands of stores, twenty-storey atriums, food courts the size of small towns, dozens of multiplex cinemas and a range of hotels to suit every wallet which has a Gold Card in it. All this and more arranged round wide, sweeping avenues, a thousand comfortable nooks and crannies, and so many potted plants they count as an ecosystem in their own right. Safe from the rest of the world, cocooned 20,000 feet up in the air.

Heaven on earth, or cruising just above it: all of the good, clean, buyable things in life crammed into a multi-storey funhouse.

Eighty-three years ago, MegaMall Flight MA 156 stopped for routine refuelling on the site of old Richmond, and never took off again. It was merely a bureaucratic problem at first – the kind that the massed brains of all time could never have got to the bottom of, but which some poorly paid clerk could have solved instantly. If he'd had a mind to. If he hadn't been on his break.

After a few hours, the richer patrons started leaving by the roads. They didn't have time for this shit. They had to be somewhere else. Everybody else just complained a little, ordered another meal or bought some more shoes, and settled down to wait.

Then, after a few more hours, it transpired there was a minor problem with the engines. This was a little more serious. When you've got a problem with a car, you open the hood and there it is. You can point at the errant part. When the engine's the size of the Empire State Building on steroids, you know you've got a long night ahead. It takes fourteen people just to hold the manual. The engineers sent repair droids scurrying off into the deep recesses, but eventually they came back, electronically shaking their heads and whistling through their mechanical teeth. It was only a minor problem, they were sure, but they couldn't work out what it was.

More passengers started to leave at that point, but on the other hand, some people decided to stay. There were plenty of phones and meeting rooms, and the Mall had its own node on the Matrix. People could work. There were enormous quantities of food, consumer goods and clean sheets. People could live. There were, frankly, worse places to hang around.

They never got the engines going again. Maybe they were fixable, but they left it a little too late. After a couple of days people started to make their way in from the outside; people who'd been homeless since old Richmond went up in flames; people who lived in the backwoods; people who'd heard about the food courts and just wanted a spot of lunch. They came off the plain and out of the mountains and hammered on the doors. Initially, security turned them back like they were supposed to, but there were an awful lot of them and some were pretty pissed. For them the only thing worse than having to live in Richmond had been not having it to live in any more.

The security guards got together and came up with a plan. They would let people in, and they would charge them for it.

There was a period, maybe as long as six months, when Flight MA 156 was in flux, when no one was really sure if it was going to take off again. Then the tide turned, and people knew it was not. By then they didn't want it to. It was home. Areas inside the ship were knocked through, torn down, redeveloped. The original passengers staked out the upper floors and began to build on top of the Mall, competing to see who could get furthest from the mounting poor on the lower levels. A secondary town grew up around the Mall at ground level – the Portal into the city.

Eventually, the local utility companies just plumbed the whole lot in, and New Richmond was born. Apart from its unusual provenance and extreme oblongness, New Richmond is now just a city like anywhere else. If you didn't know, you might think it was just a rather bizarre town planning mistake.

But it's said that in a lost room, somewhere deep in the bowels of the city, there remains a forgotten suitcase, left there accidentally by one of the first families to leave, a mute testament to the city's birth. Nobody knows where this room is, and most people believe it's just an urban myth. Because that's what Flight MA 156 is, these days. Urban.

But I've always believed it, just like I wonder if sometimes, on some nights, the city itself must raise its eyes when it hears the other MegaMalls trundling slowly overhead. I wonder if it watches the skies, and sees them pass, and knows in some way that's where it should be. Up there in the heavens, not battered onto the Earth. But then which of us doesn't believe something like that, and how few of us are right.

‘Two hundred dollars,’ the man said, his eyes trying to look cool and watchful at the same time, and making a fearful mess of both. He wasn't talking about what I was trying to sell. I wasn't even in New Richmond yet. It was after eight o'clock at night and I was losing patience and running out of time.

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘Fifty is the rate.’

The man laughed with genuine amusement.

‘You been away or something man? Shit, I can't barely remember when fifty dollars was the rate.’

‘Fifty dollars,’ I said again. I guess I was hoping if I said it often enough I'd end up neurolinguistically programming him. I was standing in front of a door, a door which was hidden in the basement of a building in the Portal settlement, the high-rise nightmare of ragged buildings and shanty dwellings which surrounds New Richmond proper. I was there because this particular building had been constructed right up against the exterior wall of the city, inside which I needed to be. I'd put up with being frisked on entry by the street gang which was currently controlling the building, and had already paid twenty dollars ‘tax’ on my gun. I didn't have two hundred dollars, I barely had a hundred, and I was in a hurry.

The man shrugged. ‘So go in the main entrance.’

I stuffed my hands into my jacket pockets, fighting back anger and panic in equal measure. ‘And don't be thinking about bringing out your gun,’ he continued, mildly. ‘Cos there's three brothers you can't even see with rifles trained on yo ass.’

I couldn't go in the main gates, as he well knew. No one came to this part of the Portal town if they could enter New Richmond through one of the legitimate entrances. Going in that way meant running your ownCard through the machines, thus broadcasting your name to the cops, the city administration and anyone else who had a tap on the line.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I've been this way before. I don't need a guide, I just need to get past you. Fifty dollars is what I have.’

The man turned away and signalled into the darkness with an upwards nod of his head. I heard the sound of several sets of feet padding out of the darkness towards me.

‘You still piecing your action from Howie “The Plan”?’ I asked, casually. The footsteps behind stopped, and the man turned to look at me again, eyes watchful.

‘What you know about Mr Amos?’ he asked.

‘Not much,’ I said, though I did. Howie was a medium-time crook operating out of the eighth floor. He ran some girls, owned a bar, and had pieces of the drugs action so far down the chain that he was tolerated by the real heavy-hitters above. He was a fat, affable man with a surprising shock of blond hair, but he was fitter than he looked and knew how to keep a secret. Late at night, when most of the customers were gone, he'd been known to sit in with his house blues band and play a hell of a lot better than you'd expect. He didn't have the Bright Eyes, but he could have done. He was a stand-up guy.

‘Just enough,’ I continued, ‘to tell the wrong people about some of the deals they don't know he's into. And if he thinks that information came from you guys, well …’

‘Why would he get to thinking that?’ the man asked, though he was losing heart. These guys were below bottom-rung lowlife: hardly on the ladder. They most likely didn't even know where the ladder was, and had to use steps the whole time. Running this door was as close as they got to operating in New Richmond. Guys like that don't want to tangle with the jungle inside. It bites.

‘I can't imagine,’ I said. ‘Look. Fifty dollars. Then on my way out I give you the other hundred fifty.’

For all he knew I was never coming out, but fifty was better than no cash and a lot of potential grief. He stepped aside. I peeled the notes off, and he opened the door.

‘And I'll give you an extra twenty,’ I added, ‘if you keep any mention of me off the list you sell to the cops.’

‘Don't know what you're talking about,’ he said stonily, but there was a change in his attitude. ‘But I'll take your twenty.’

I nodded and walked through the door. It shut behind me, and for the first time in five years I was inside New Richmond.

The door led into an old service corridor, which meandered towards the lower engine block through miles of dank and creepy corridors. There's nothing of value to be had there, and that's why nobody had cared when external construction had covered up the entrance. The one thing no one was going to be trying to do was get the engines going again. There's an old story which says one of the original repair drones still toils away down there somewhere, grown old and insane, but even I don't believe that.

For a long time the door was forgotten, and then somebody rediscovered it and realized its potential value as a covert entrance to the city. An adjunct to the service corridor leads via the exhaust ducts to a hidden and little-known staircase, which leads up to the second floor of the old Mall.

But I wasn't going to be going that way. I quickly followed the corridor for two hundred yards, past panels etched and stained with rust. It's eerily silent down there, perhaps the only truly quiet part of the city. The corridor took a sharpish right turn, and you could see the dim and intermittent lights in the ceiling disappearing towards the next turn, about half a mile ahead. Instead of following them I gathered myself and leapt upwards, arms straight above me, hands balled into fists. They hit a panel of the roof and it popped up and over, revealing a dark space beyond. I took a quick glance back to ensure no one was watching, jumped up again and pulled myself up through the hole.

When I replaced the ceiling panel I was left in a darkness broken only by yellow slivers of light which escaped through cracks in the floor. I straightened into the slight hunch which is required for New Richmond's lost ventilation system, and hurried forwards into the gloom. Every now and then I heard some fragment of life floating down from the city. An aged gurgle, soft clanks grown old, the occasional ghost of speech caught accidentally in some twist of corridor above and echoed down to the graveyard below. I had always felt that walking this corridor was like creeping through New Richmond's ancient and barren womb, but then I've always been a bit of a moron.

After about half a mile I passed under one of the main entrances. You can tell because of the sound of hundreds of feet coming in, going out. I stood underneath it for a moment, remembering. I used to come the covert way sometimes for kicks, but the main gates are the way you enter if you want to appreciate what you're getting into. You walk into a foyer which is twenty storeys high, a taster of the opulence you can expect if you've got clearance to go above the 100th floor. There used to be glass windows on all of the levels which tower above you, but they were walled in once they'd become lowlife areas. It's like standing in the biggest and gaudiest shower cubicle of all time. You walked up to the desk, ran your ownCard through the machine, and established your clearance. I used to live in the 70s, and so I'd walk over to one of the express elevators, get in, and be shot up into the sky.

Not tonight. Tonight I was threading my way like a snake through endless tunnels, and I wasn't going to the 72nd floor because there was nothing left for me there. I was in New Richmond because I needed money, and had only one way of getting some. I was going to go in, get the money, get out — and then turn my back on Virginia for good.

We'd reached the Portal settlement in the early evening. It had been raining all day, and was getting colder and darker by the minute. Virginia doesn't fuck around in winter, especially not these days. Virginia says, ‘Here, have some winter,’ and then delivers. The spares had been on their last legs by then, a joke I'd made to myself knowing it to be in bad taste and not altogether caring. They'd never felt the cold before, and the scraps of my clothing I'd distributed amongst them weren't anywhere near enough.

There hadn't been many people on the streets, thankfully. You don't go to the Portal to promenade, particularly not at night – it would be less trouble to stay in your apartment and mug yourself in the comfort of your own home. Howie Amos once ran a service which did just that; you called him up, said you were thinking of going out into the Portal, and he'd send someone to rough you over within half an hour or you got a dollar off. It was surprisingly popular.

I corralled the spares into a tight group and herded them down the streets in front of me, sticking close to the walls and out of the light, trusting Suej and David to help me keep the others in line. I'd explained why we had to come here, and why it could be a problem for me. They all did what they were told, and I hurried us along for about a mile until we were outside Mal's building.

I paused outside and looked back the way we'd come. The roads in the Portal are very straight, running out from New Richmond in the centre like a giant spider's web. You can stand in the middle of one and see as far as the rain will let you. Yellow streetlights lined the way, throwing pools of light which were rich and sickly, like cream ten minutes before it goes off. Beyond the limits of my vision was the edge of the Portal, and beyond that the road which led out into the dark Virginia countryside. A long way down that road were the Blue Ridge Mountains we'd come from, matter-of-fact geology covered with a hell of a lot of trees. For the first time it struck me how much the roads in the Portal looked like tunnels, and that was when I began to accept that the last five years really had happened to me.

I shouldered the outer door open and led the spares into the hallway, which was an inch deep in chill water. Loud music was thumping from somewhere up above. I told the spares to stay still and to hide if anyone came, and vaulted up the wooden staircase which spiralled up into the darkness. When I got to the 3rd floor I took a deep breath, shook some of the water out of my hair, then knocked on Mal's door.

Mal did a double-take which would have done a cheap comedian proud, and then he just stood there, mouth hanging open, hand still holding the door. He was wearing a pair of battered cut-offs which showed off the scars on his legs, and a ragged T-shirt which hugged his new paunch and looked like about five people had lived and died in it without showing it any water other than rain. He was backlit by a bare bulb, and from somewhere deep in the bowels of his apartment came the smell of cooking – noodles, almost certainly. In all the time I'd known him I don't think I'd ever seen him voluntarily eat anything else.

Finally he got it together, blinked and tried to smile.

‘Jack,’ he croaked, eerie calm coming about level with utter stupefaction. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

‘Social visit. Old times.’

‘Yeah, right. The pope's due later too.’ He closed his eyes tightly for a moment, and pinched himself on the bridge of the nose. ‘You in trouble?’

‘Yep,’ I grinned, trying to keep myself from hopping from foot to foot. Tension, of about seven different kinds. I nodded towards the gloom of the apartment. ‘What's cooking?’

‘Noodles,’ he said, eyeing me warily. ‘You want some?’

‘Depends how much you've got. I'm not alone.’

‘How many guests are we talking?’

I took a deep breath. ‘Including me, seven,’ I said. His eyes opened wide and he shook his head – not in negation, just bewilderment. I tried to make it easier on him. ‘Well, six and a half, I guess.’

‘That's a lot of noodles.’

‘Too many?’

‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘I buy in bulk.’ He turned back towards his apartment for a moment, biting his lip, considering. I noticed that he wasn't wearing his shoulder holster and wondered whether that meant he was out of the Life, or just less paranoid these days. More likely he'd been cleaning his gun when I knocked. The two things I didn't think Mal was ever going to get were less paranoid or out of the Life.

Then he turned back to me, eyebrows raised in friendly resignation. In one sighing breath he asked, ‘Where are these guests now and just how much unhappiness am I risking by letting them into my life, however fucking briefly?’

‘I left them downstairs,’ I said, realizing that I ought to get back to them very soon, whichever way this went. Mal's building is where bad people go to have fun. That's why he's paranoid – and also why he likes it. ‘I just need to leave them with you for an hour, then we're out of here.’

‘Why didn't you call ahead?’

‘When I want to ask old friends for lunatic favours I like to do it in person. Also, I didn't have any change.’

‘And the trouble rating?’

‘What scale are you talking?’ I was gabbling, strung tight. I had to let Mal see I was okay, because otherwise he was likely to get freaked. Being freaked would in fact have been a reasonable reaction, but I didn't want him to know that yet.

‘One to ten.’

‘I don't know,’ I said, suddenly giving in and getting panicky. ‘At least ten, possibly higher, certainly getting worse by the minute.’

Mal let go of the door.

‘Get them up here.’

I let out a short exhalation of relief. ‘Mal …’

‘Yeah, all that,’ he said, brushing my thanks aside. ‘And then you're going to go get me a jar of Japanese pickles. I forgot I'd run out.’

‘I'm going into the city. On the way back I'll get you the biggest jar of Samoy I can find.’

Mal rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘Samoy pickles are from hunger. Get me Frapan or nothing.’

‘For a guy who eats so much you've got terrible fucking taste.’

‘You got that right,’ he said, shaking his head again. ‘Look at my choice of friends.’

I grinned and walked the couple of yards to the shadowy stairwell. I thought I was going to have to shout, but I saw Suej's face in the darkness, upturned anxiously towards me, and just gestured instead. She turned to David and they corralled the others up. Mal and I waited while they trooped upstairs, Mal's face eloquent with laconic intrigue. Out in the slightly less murky light of the corridor the skin on his face looked a little ruddier than it had, and there were lines around his eyes which hadn't been there when last I'd seen him.

We're getting old, I thought. Suddenly we're nearly forty and getting old.

David was the first to reach the landing. He came up with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his jeans, limping slightly from where his leg had been operated on. The jeans had originally been mine, and were inexpertly folded up at the bottoms and belted tight around his waist. He looked younger than his fifteen years, even though his face was still set with the belligerence it had assumed the moment we left the Farm. Jenny came up right behind him, huddled into her coat and still looking frightened and alone. I'd tried to patch things up with her in the last twenty-four hours, but she still thought she was to blame, and I hadn't really had time to convince her otherwise.

Suej came up next, leading Nanune by the hand. Suej looked okay, like a normal fourteen-year-old, apart from the scar on her face. Nanune looked scared shitless, and with only one leg was having difficulty climbing the stairs. When she reached the top she caught sight of me, and appeared momentarily relieved, which was nice. It's been a long time since anyone has looked relieved to see my face.

And then finally Mr Two, carrying the bundle in his arms. Mal coped reasonably well with the rest of them, but when he saw a teenager who stood about six five, carrying a small brown sack with a head protruding from it, I did catch a twitch on his face. Mr Two stood straight-backed on the landing, glared abruptly both ways, and then let his head drop as if he'd been switched off. The spare in the bag said, ‘Nap.’

Come on guys, I thought to myself. Let's try to act like normal people.

‘Is your friend letting us rest here?’ Suej asked.

I nodded. It was going to be a while before they directly addressed anyone other than me. She beamed, and whispered to Nanune.

‘Is it nice? Is Ratchet here?’ Nanune asked, and I shook my head.

‘No and no, I'm afraid,’ I said, winking at Mal. ‘But at least it's not raining.’

I introduced Mal to the spares by name. Suej and David shook his hand, and I caught him noticing David's missing fingers. Then Mal stood to one side and gestured them into his apartment. They trooped in, Mr Two ducking his head to get under the lintel.

Mal's apartment was pretty much as I remembered it. In other words, I knew what to expect. The spares didn't. Ten years ago he'd knocked down most of the internal walls, so that from anywhere in the apartment you could see the huge window he'd put in. This gave a view straight onto New Richmond. Mal had chosen to live outside New Richmond proper. He claimed he liked to get away from it every now and then, from the dark fizz and spark of the life inside – yet he'd deconstructed his apartment so he could see the building from wherever he stood. The interior decor was about what you'd expect from a single man who spent half his time drunk and the rest painfully sober. It was a mess, to be honest: baroque chaos overlaid with the smell of countless noodle-based meals.

Nanune actually started crying. Mal scowled at her and started kicking piles of stuff towards the walls.

‘Do you still have your display up?’ I asked quietly. Mal looked at me and nodded. ‘You couldn't, like, drape something over it?’

Mal grunted and trudged down the end, towards the window, and pulled a rope which ran down the wall. A sheet dropped from the ceiling, covering what was pinned on the walls – pictures of people who had been murdered in New Richmond. It covered them only briefly, unfortunately, because it carried on falling to the ground. Mal swore softly, grabbed a chair, and set about repairing the set-up.

Meantime, I led the spares into the area which served as his sitting room. I shoved huge piles of crap out of the way until there was enough space for them to sit fairly comfortably. Jenny's arms were wrapped tightly around herself, and her eyes were far away. In a nimbus of light from some partially hidden lamp, she looked beautiful and frail. Nanune still looked terrified, but Suej sat close to her, murmuring something. There were no words in what she was saying, but even I could feel the comfort in it. It was tunnel talk, I guess. Mr Two looked like he would withstand a direct hit by a tactical missile, and so I guess the spare on his lap was alright too. Considering the current circumstances.

‘How long are we going to be here?’ David asked. I realized he looked tired, though like a child trying to prove it was worthy of staying up late, his eyes were still wide open.

‘Not long,’ I said. ‘A couple hours. Just enough for me to go get some money. Then we're going to buy a truck and get out of here.’

‘To where?’ This had been David's constant refrain for the last twenty-four hours.

‘I still don't know,’ I said. ‘Somewhere safe.’ Jenny looked up at me and I winked at her. A ghost of a smile.

‘Florida?’ Suej asked hopefully.

‘Maybe,’ I said. A long time ago I'd told her about a place I knew there, and it had become fixed in her mind as a kind of nirvana. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was very unlikely we'd make it halfway there before we were caught.

I turned to Mal. ‘What's your water like these days? And don't say “wet”.’

‘There'll be enough if they don't all stay in too long.’ Mal had always known what I meant, especially when I was asking favours. I nodded to Suej, who understood, and she started drawing up a rota for the spares to wash. They weren't used to being dirty, and I knew that the one thing I could provide which would increase their short-term standard of living was a shower. It's good that there was that one thing, because there wasn't a lot of everything else, and wasn't likely to be in the foreseeable future.

‘We'll get your clothes washed … later,’ I said, vaguely, and wandered over to the window.

It was still raining outside. It always seemed to be raining in the Portal. In summer it's fat drops of dirty rain, in the winter thin biting lines of sleet – but it generally seemed to be dropping at least something out of the sky. The locals believe that it's rich people on the roof of the city, taking delight in pissing off the edge onto the lowlife below. Judging by the colour of some of the rain, they could be right.

New Richmond looked the same as it always had. Eerily so. That shouldn't have been surprising, and yet it was. I'd seen it in the distance on the way through the Portal, but that had been different. Seeing it through Mal's window was like seeing myself in one particular mirror again after a very long time away. I stared out at the points of light, the studs in the mind-fuckingly large expanse of wall. It still looked extraordinary, still said to me, as it always had, that I had to be inside it.

‘Are you okay?’

I turned to see Mal standing beside me, proffering a cigarette. ‘Yeah,’ I said, lighting one and savouring the harsh scrape of carcinogen on lung. I'd run out that morning, and not wanted to risk going into a store until the spares were safely stowed. He let me stand for a moment, then asked what he wanted to know.

‘Where have you been, man?’

For a moment, in the darkness of his apartment, Mal looked just as he always had. As if no time had passed, as if things were still the same and I had a home to go to after I'd finished chewing the rag with him. I shivered, realizing that I was crashing, that adrenaline was turning sour.

‘Didn't Phieta tell you? I asked her to let you know.’

‘I never saw her again, Jack. No one did. After you disappeared I put the word around, in case she knew something. But she was just as gone as you.’

‘I'm sorry, Mal. I thought about calling you. I just couldn't.’

He nodded, and maybe he understood. ‘I'm really sorry about what happened,’ he said. I nodded tightly. I wasn't going to talk about it. ‘If it's any consolation, the word is Vinaldi's having problems recently.’