Gun Machine

Westover scowled. “He wouldn’t go there.”

“Really? And yet you told your wife to avoid that area.”

“He sleeps somewhere around there. That’s all I know.”

“So your meeting was to provide him with a car and…?”

“Money. And to pursue the idea of providing him passage out of the NYC area.”

“I see,” said Tallow, who was experiencing the air in the room as thick and choked with the tangle of lies being puked out by both of them. Westover wasn’t going to say one true thing to him. Or, worse, he was going to salt his lies with lonely little grains of truth, and Tallow would have to sift everything through the imperfect sieve of what he knew to be correct. He needed to get one useful thing out of Westover.

“Tell me about this Ambient Security thing of yours. Does it work on mobile devices?”

Westover frowned, genuinely thrown by the new track of the conversation. “Sure. Why?”

“Give me twelve hours’ access to it.”

“Show me your phone,” said Westover. Tallow did. Westover appraised it. “Isn’t that a little pricey for a cop?”

“I don’t buy a lot of clothes,” said Tallow.

“No. No, I imagine not. Hold on, let me get my phone.” Westover stepped to a nearby merchant’s chest made from artfully distressed wood. Or, thought Tallow, possibly wood actually salvaged from an ancient shipwreck. Tallow looked up at the sound of a clicking.

Scarly had her gun on Westover. “If anything other than a phone comes out of that drawer, sir, I will put two in you, right in front of your wife.”

“It’s all right,” Tallow said. “Mr. Westover’s on our side now. Isn’t that right?”

“Right,” said Westover, coming away from the drawer with a phone held out for Scarly’s benefit. “Switch your Bluetooth on, Tallow.” After a few moments of tapping and fiddling, an app had been copied to Tallow’s phone, and a registration code and password entered into it.

“There,” said Westover. “On the standard setting, it’s going to give you live feeds from whichever Ambient Security cams surround your GPS location. Tap that, and you go to the Forward setting, grabbing the live feed from the cameras ten to twenty yards ahead of your location.”

“What’s that for?”

“Pursuit,” said Westover, looking at Tallow like he was an idiot. “Do you not understand what my company does? We’re going to take your job, Tallow.”

“I believe I’ve had the company lecture on that once or twice,” Tallow murmured.

“Right. With Ambient Security, I can outsource and crowd-source the very concept of criminal pursuit in this city. The red button launches a speakerphone call to a live operator in the ops room. I don’t need a bunch of cops and cars on the ground. I could chase and take down a speeding car with one operator using the Forward setting and a drone.”

“Very clever. I’ll be sure to tell the first deputy tomorrow. You’ll need another advocate in the department once Turkel’s gone, after all.”

“Huh,” said Westover, bluntly surprised. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks. So what do you need access to Ambient Security for?”

“Well,” said Tallow. “I want to take a drive to Collect Pond Park before I head home, have a look around, and I figured that with this, I wouldn’t have to get out of the car.” He threw Westover a crooked, friendly grin and watched Westover relax just a little. “Also, I wanted to see if you’d cooperate. Ensure you’re on board with all this.”

“And there it is on your phone.”

“And there it is on my phone. Just rescind my access to it in twelve hours, and I’ll call that a sign of everything going well.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” said Tallow. “Time for me to go home. Officers.” He meant Bat and Scarly by this, and they responded by marching dutifully to the door.

“Mrs. Westover.” Tallow gave her the kindest, warmest smile he could find.

“Thank you,” she said brokenly, and then looked down at her hands.

“We’ll see ourselves out,” Tallow said, and they left.

In the elevator, Tallow tossed his cell to Bat. “Westover put a password on that app. Change it.”

“Why?” asked Bat, nearly fumbling it.

“Because if he knows the password he can rescind the app’s access to Ambient Security.”

“He could also just deactivate the registration code.”

“He could, but it’d take him longer, because his own access to Ambient Security is on that code.”

“That,” said Scarly, “didn’t go as well as it could have. Did it?”

“No,” Tallow admitted. “No, he’s decided it’s a game to be played all the way through. Stupid. I feel sorry for his wife.”

“I’m not sure I do,” said Scarly. “Except that she’s got all the classic symptoms of an untreated psychotic break. That, I feel bad about. Everything else, not so much.”

“None of it’s her fault, Scarly.”

“You think? The way I see it, when she didn’t up and leave him the minute he explained all that, it became her fault.”

“You’re forgetting,” Bat muttered, tapping away at the phone. “If she’d up and left him, the next thing that happened, the absolute next thing, would have been him giving her name and general description to CTS. I wonder what kind of gun CTS would have chosen for her.”

Scarly gathered breath for an outburst, which Tallow expected would involve judging and autism, but then she leaned against the elevator wall and deflated. “Yeah.”

“Oh well,” said Tallow, as the elevator opened up on the ground floor of Aer Keep. “It’s getting late. Time I went home, I guess.”

Thirty-Four

THE HUNTER pushed the door just a little farther open, and stepped into the dark room.

An inhuman voice shrieked “Say hello to my li’l frien’,” there was a sharp flurry of detonation flashes, and the hunter felt multiple impacts on his chest and face. The lights came on, harsh and bright, blinding the hunter. He fired the Colt in front of him, but the hideous metallic din didn’t stop, and now it was screaming “Fuck you fuck you fuck you.”

The hunter staggered back into the hallway, wiping his face. His vision was blasted and hazy, but he could make out vivid orange paint on his fingertips. The metal screaming wouldn’t stop. The hunter ran for the fire door, fearing neighbors would be brought to the corridor by the noise. The hall creaked and tilted in his vision, becoming a dark tunnel, and he could see the sounds, suddenly, as pistoning metal tentacles, fucking their way through the wall and the floor after him.

The hunter hurled himself through the fire door and down the stairs. He had to stop at the next landing and throw up. The vomit spread through the floor and the walls, turning the stairwell into a wet red digestive tract. He kept running down the stairs, almost slipping twice on his own vomit where it coated the soles of his shoes.

The hunter burst into the hallway, still half blind, trying not to scream, feeling bruises bloom and stiffen his flesh where the thing had attacked him. Through the glass of the front door he saw a tall flapping creature, some black-winged half-human thing moving its long awful limbs and shouting words he couldn’t decipher.

On the run, the hunter put two bullets through the glass and into the thing’s chest, smashed through the door by main force and momentum, and didn’t even break stride over the body on the ground as he sprinted off into the night.

Thirty-Five

PACKED INTO Tallow’s car, he and the CSUs were five minutes away from Tallow’s apartment when he said,