B-spine Read online

  First published on Kindle December 2011

  Text copyright © Cam Winstanley 2011

  Cam Winstanley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Cover design:

  Chris Stocker

  www.chris-stocker.co.uk

  Cover photography:

  Dreamstime.com © Tobias Losch

  Shutterstock.com

  B-SPINE

  BY

  CAM WINSTANLEY

  Email: [email protected]

  Twitter: bspine2098

  Delisted State Highway 114

  Opdyke, Texas

  Tuesday 24 December

  06:53 am

  OXYGENATED HAEMOGLOBIN DROPPING, lactic acid rising, heart rate right in the red. Five miles short of the landing zone, Danny’s pushing the bike beyond its operational limits. Five miles short of the landing zone, Danny’s starting to forget the gunshot and the parking bay’s dripping wall and starting to think that he might actually get away. Five miles short of the landing zone, Danny’s bike sees the armadillo on the road and Danny doesn’t see it at all.

  All Danny knows is the bike’s dials are redlining and he can’t slow down until he reaches the airship. There are a billion heartbeats a life and he’s burning two hundred of the bike’s every minute and he’s worried that it’s too much. Core temperature, gauged by a thermosensor stapled into the bike’s colon, is creeping high enough to cause neurological failure. Danny’s racing through the desert with a finger curled round the boost trigger, a steady dose of glucose and glycogen in adrenaline-saturated saline giving the bike no breathing space. Soon, very soon, cramps will stop the wheels spinning faster than a sledgehammer to the ribs.

  They’re heading due east into dawn’s first light when the bike sees the armadillo and Danny’s looking back into the darkness to see if he can spot any vehicles from the facility chasing him. Bike and armadillo share a shocked look as the bike recalls its Pavlovian conditioning. It knows flat blacktop is good. It knows anything blocking the way forward should be avoided.

  The bike cuts left but the armadillo, startled by the headlight, cuts the same way and seals everyone’s fate. Danny feels the tug through the handlebars and tries to looks ahead just in time to feel the front wheel thump into the animal and the front suspension slamming upwards.

  Viscera jets through mouth and anus. Danny’s visor mists with sprayed blood. He feels the wrench of tearing cartilage and connective tissue and is sure he’s feeling his own neck snap when it’s just the bike’s knee joint rupturing as the suspension tops out and the front wheel buckles under. The splintered armadillo flips into the air. Danny and the bike go crashing down.

  Scuffgel and Kevlar-3 inserts on Danny’s one-piece leathers abrade on the asphalt as he sprawls across it for long seconds. Then he’s off the road and slowing in a rattle of scrub vegetation and gravel and a hammerhead cloud of billowing desert dust.

  For a moment, silence. Winded, Danny lies on his back, staring up at a black sky fringed with blue, watching dust settle on his blood-spotted visor. When he realizes it’s just a lack of noise and that he’s not dead, he takes a deep breath and sits up jerkily and hears himself wailing hysterically.

  He wipes his gloved hands over his chest and raises them up to see them drip down back onto him. Black wetness on black leather that can only be one thing. He kicks to clear the leg trapped under the bike and the sandy dirt he drags through feels wet and heavy. He rolls away, stands up quickly and uncertainly, staggering as he flips his splashed and dusty visor open and sees he wasn’t the one making the noise after all. There, on the ground, is the bike. Splashing and bucking in a spreading pool of its own warm leaks.

  Screaming.

  The front balloon Goodyear looks odd now, twisted round and drooping from smashed legs showing short fur and white, glistening bone now that the plastic concertina suspension covers have gone. The magnesium alloy engine casing’s peeled back too, exposing one of the drive legs. Fragile intake ducting and filters lie scattered on the road and in the uncertain dawn light, Danny can see an exposed lung as the bike draws in bloody froth and air.

  Without the immaculate honeycomb body panels to shape it into a vehicle, he can make out the organic lines beneath, see the legs and chest and neck. Standing next to it screaming into the desert, he’s having trouble thinking of it as just one more malfunctioning livedrive.

  He pulls at the satchel on his back, slips the strap over his head and pops the clips. They’d given him the satchel and the equipment and a full briefing the week before and told him how to use everything. Inside are two faked ID cards – upgrades on his work clearance to get him in and out. Inside too are the product samples they were after, five doses in a foam case that seems to have survived the crash just fine.

  The satchel had something else when they’d given it to him, five blocks of dollar bills tightly bound by paper bands. Danny reaches for what he’d brought in place of the money. They’d sworn he wouldn’t need one to get in but Danny had bought it any way and, as it turned out, he’d needed it to get out.

  He hefts the revolver. Chrome steel, black rubber handle, vented spine along the eight inch barrel. It’ll punch a man three steps back, the guy at the gun fair had promised him. Send a hardball round clean through an engine casing. Back in the parking bay, the man waiting smugly and confidently next to the bike had looked scared enough when Danny had pulled it and leveled it. He’d fired twice, maybe more. But had it knocked him back? Danny remembers hair and bone and brains hitting bare concrete wall but can’t recall if the man flew before he dropped.

  The screaming tails off while the bike sucks in another agonized breath and Danny sees where the double sets of ribs overlap and branch out from both A and B-spines. He can’t bear another scream like the last one. Point blank, he fires. He shifts aim to undamaged casing where he thinks the heart is and fires again. Then everything’s quiet and he’s alone in the echoing gun blasts.

  No – not alone. As the sun finally breaks over the horizon he sees the airship circling the landing zone and, for a moment, thinks he can still make it. Then acid bitterness burns his stomach as it loops and rises and starts to run from two other airships, dark jellybeans against the brightening sky. They’re a mile away, maybe more, but looping arcs of tracer fire keep his pick-up ship moving as the chatter of automatic fire rolls across the desert towards him.

  Beneath the airships, long shadows cast by the low sun pick out riders on camels. They’re the facility pickets he’d heard about so many times, roving squads who spend weeks at a time covering the perimeter. Danny turns away in disappointment and there, back down the road he’d fled along, traffic from the compound finally comes into view. The airships wheel round to face him, the camel riders are inbound, the vehicles are less than a minute away.

  Adrenaline burned down to cold weariness, Danny looks for options and finds none. He puts the revolver back in the satchel and fumbles for the arming pin in one corner. If he’d stuck to their plan, he’d have left the satchel back in the lab, the trigger held flat by a cupboard door until someone was unlucky enough to go searching for it. But Danny had always planned on taking the samples, not lives. If the man in the parking bay hadn’t cornered him, it would have worked out fine.

  He strokes the sample case and shakes his head at the riches they never brought him then arms the C4 charge in the satchel. Facing the oncoming vehicles, h
e hugs the bag to his chest and pushes the revolver under his chin.

  He braces, a tear squeezing out as he screws his eyes tightly shut. He can’t do it, can’t pull the trigger. He takes a few quick breaths then braces and tries again. He can’t. He stops hugging the satchel so hard and hears the spring-loaded mechanism snap. He’s got a minute before the explosives in the satchel do the job for him and less than a minute before everyone arrives on scene. If he can do it before then, only the camel riders will be close enough to judge whether the shot knocks him back three steps or not…

  Tuesday 11 March

  12:42 pm

  MIDWEEK, THE TAIL-end of midnight, Kirsty thumbs the janitor’s button and keeps an eye on the street. The block’s run down and dark, Hub conservancy policies switching their electricity to a neighborhood working nights whose need is greater. The street’s frosty but swept clear, recent flurries of snow cleared to thaw out in concrete-lined pits linked to the Hub’s water supply.

  She shivers, rings again, looks round again. Since she’s a federal officer, she’s untouchable, everyone knows that. But anyone crazy enough to mess with her would, she thinks, live on a block like this. A glow grows behind the wire-reinforced glass of the front door and she eases off the buzzer.

  Bolts slam – bang, bang, bang. Chains rattle top and bottom, this being one of the poorest neighborhoods in Toronto Hub District 45. The door creaks open, catching on more chains. The janitor peers out, his lamp burning factory-surplus livedrive fat, hissing softly and wafting bacon smell. He’s probably the same age as Kirsty, maybe as old as thirty, but his bad hair makes him look older. He says “Yes?” Suspicious even though he’s expecting her because he doesn’t trust his neighborhood either.

  With a well-practiced motion, Kirsty reaches round and slides Slate from the padded slot in her works ruck. There, on its ten inch backlit screen, is everything he needs to know – her ID, his call logged, her unit logo. “Federal Environmental,” she says.

  His eyes randomly scan areas of Slate’s screen. Nobody ever reads the work log, it’s just standard protocol to show it. He loses interest in the screen and looks past it to her. She gives him a second to take in the embroidered fallball cap and high-cut fleece jacket. She takes offense when he keeps on looking, taking in legs toned by endless cycle miles and clad in mid-calf lycra. She clicks her fingers in his face... “Hey, up here… What’s the emergency?”

  “The Boiler,” he says, “it looks bad. Very bad.”

  “I’ll need to get inside to look at that,” says Kirsty.

  He squints past her into the darkness of the street. “You want to bring your bike inside too?” he asks. “Nothing lasts long in this neighborhood unless it’s bolted down.”

  “It’s safe where it is,” she says. “The perks of being a Fed are long hours, poor pay and the guarantee that anyone who messes with me does fifteen to twenty on a penal farm out in Kansas.”

  “Well if you’re sure,” he says.

  “I’m surer than sure,” she says. “The only reason I took this crummy job is ‘cos I hate being jerked around.” He looks like he believes her and drops the last chain.

  They shuffle carefully down blistered paint hallways in the lamp’s uncertain light. Kirsty keeps one hand on the wall. She feels past the Remington twelve gauge the janitor’s left propped against the wall as prudent insurance against late-night callers.

  “So… how’s it going?” asks the janitor.

  “Other than I’m working a midnight to nine shift making pointless small talk to a stranger?”

  He coughs. “Umm... yeah, apart from that.”

  “Pretty bad, since you asked,” she says, cheerfully. “How about you?”

  “About the same,” he says. “The bad news is I’ve got scagbanders in four out of fifteen apartments so they play their god-awful music while they’re getting high. The good news is we’ve only been getting nine hours electricity a day since January so at least they can’t play their stereos for as long as they used to.”

  Kirsty rolls her eyes. Basic world’s-gone-to-hell pissing and moaning isn’t hard to come by in the Hub after a long, cold winter. “You think that’s bad,” she says. “I spent all afternoon baking for my friend’s coming home party when I should have been in bed. Now I hate baking but it’s not every day a pal comes home but by the time I had to start my shift, the only guest who hadn’t showed up was him.”

  He nods his balding head nod as he fumbles with keys on his belt loop. “I share your pain. A couple friends of mine been serving three years hard time on one of those penal farms you mentioned. But not in Kansas though, one of the Dakotas, maybe. Know a few residents here with a son or daughter fighting the Hondurans down South too and not all of them’s going to ever come back neither.”

  “That’s the crazy thing about my friend, Scott,” she says. “He’s not serving time and he’s not in the military either. Three years back, he just upped and left the Hub.”

  “For real?” says the janitor. “Every time I turn on cable access, President Vandernecker is telling me it’s a crime to leave the Hub. That travel’s a luxury none of us can afford until this whole energy crisis blows over.”

  “That’s what I hear too,” she says, “which is why we’re all so curious to see where he ended up. Only Scott never showed up to his own party.”

  The janitor opens the basement door and despite her best efforts, Kirsty recoils at the smell. “And now my life gets even worse.”

  He lights the stairs down for her then hangs the lantern to unscrew the Boiler’s access panel. Kirsty pulls out her Maglight, shakes it to get a charge and looks around. For a crummy rental block, the janitor’s got things squared away. The basement looks worn out but clean, foodfuel containers stacked neatly, vent pipes fitted and maintained. It really shouldn’t smell as bad as it does.

  The janitor works one-handed, pegging his nose with the other. “I knew the Boiler must be hurting bad because the power output’s been rolling up and down all week,” he honks. “Got it right in the neck from the residents bitching ‘bout how their heating’s barely on so I came down here to smell this foul mess. And I admit it, other than piping in feed and straightening out kinks in the waste pipes, I know as much about livedrives as the next guy…”

  “Which is nothing, right?”

  He nods. “Sure. To me they’re just cattle that rattle, right? But this smell, I know that ain’t right…” He gratefully steps aside as the Boiler panel swings open and the full force of the stench takes Kirsty’s breath away.

  Kirsty’s Maglight beams into a Meat4 Power Elktronic Boiler, the primary heavy-duty wetware model used by residential Toronto. She’d expect to see a tan hide crisscrossed with the plastic staples and stitching of B-spine surgery. She should smell warm, wet grass breath with a faint aseptic undercurrent. She should hear slow, deep breathing within the wide ribs of the livedrive.

  Instead she smells dereliction, the torch beam shining off sepsis and open sores and clumps of tissue and hair that secondary wetware should have cleaned away.

  “Where are the secondaries?” she asks, flashing the torch in a search round the corners.

  “Say what?”

  “The secondary wetware,” she says. “Look like white mice but without tails. Manufacturer’s requirement for this Boiler is ten minimum.”

  “Yeah, the little white mice,” he says. “I pulled the last one out dead months back. Must have asked for replacements ten times and then filed another ten written requests, just to cover my ass, you know? But my boss, the landlord, he’s always grumbling about margins. It’s his life work to cut corners and keep overheads down. Fucking landlords, ay?”

  For a moment she thinks about telling him about the block she owns, her on the top floor, fourteen well-maintained apartments on the other floors. But she remembers all the how and why questions she gets when she’s done it before and decides to keep it to herself.

  Instead, she pulls Slate and brings up the case lo
g with a twirl of her finger on the screen. She shoots stills of the Boiler’s serial number and access panel so Slate can cross-reference to Meat4 Power installation records. As Slate connects to the Boiler’s internal diagnostics, she shoots visual close ups of the fluttering pulse in its neck and records short, shallow breaths. The diagnostics window opens next to the visual feed. It’s one weak and underpowered livedrive.

  She points Slate at the janitor to shoot some Q&A visuals. “Do you stick to the correct, factory-certified nutriceutical regime for this product?” she asks.

  He sighs theatrically. “The landlord, he brings foodfuel in unsealed, unmarked containers. I ask for factory-branded product but what can I do? I can only feed it what I get given. That’s really bad isn’t it?”

  “It’s really bad,” she confirms, stepping back from the Boiler and breathing easier. “Left like this, it won’t last another week.”

  He shrugs. “Then I’m screwed. When this thing goes off line and the residents have no warm water or heat, they’re going to lynch me.”

  Kirsty tries to think it through but can’t get over the smell. Two months without secondaries and with this level of surface ulceration, she’s pretty sure there’ll be maggots choking up the sump. “Okay, so you’ve got ten written requests to your boss over this, right?”

  “On just the secondaries,” he nods. “And at least the same again complaining about the off-brand foodfuel.”

  “Well that’s a smart move,” she tells him. “Go send them to my Slate and we’ll meet outside. You got any smokes?”

  He pulls a pack and offers it to her but she shakes her head. “Don’t do it myself. We just need a reason to stand outside.”

  After the basement, the night’s cold doesn’t seem so bad any more. She glances at her bike and it’s there, of course, still propped up against an unlit street light. No one’s dumb enough to steal anything stenciled ‘Property Of Federal Government’.