Night Call Page 18

  “I see.” Allen sat there processing what I’d told it, and I took another big swig. I hadn’t expected to relive the War tonight, but then, I hadn’t been prepared for any of what had happened today. The War wasn’t my favourite thing to recollect …

  “Detective.” I felt Allen shaking me.

  I tried to refocus on the kitchen and the robot. But I didn’t feel like being awake, and I didn’t feel well. “I’m good, metal man, just … tired …” Soon, I wasn’t bothered by my thoughts any longer. As my brain burnt itself out, I slumped to the floor and shut off for the night.

  “Back end opening in three. Get ready!”

  Grey steel, darkness except for the muzzle flash from the machine guns mounted on the side of the tin can illuminating the small windows to the outside. I smelled the stench of sweat and gunpowder. The Lewis Gun Mark VI in my hands weighed heavily after three hours of moving into position, but I had enough strength to grab the top lever and chamber the first round of many. Sinclair to my right, a nameless body to my left. The only way I knew it was Sinclair was from his breathing; he was far calmer than any of the others.

  “Hey, El, you good?”

  “Yeah, y-yeah, I’m good, Paddy.” My fingers were raw already, and I hadn’t fired a shot. A mortar shell whizzed by us and hit the ground, sending waves through our ranks. Too close for comfort, but not close enough to do us damage. Any moment now we’d be over the Austros’ trench, and then we, the Cleanup Crew, would do our job: making sure no one shot back at the Manuals.

  “I’ll stick by you — you lead, though. After all, your gun fires faster than mine.” He chambered a round in his own Springfield and checked his 1911. “Think there’ll be a lot down there, El?”

  “Paddy … I can’t …” It was hard to breathe. I’d never taken another person’s life before. It was choking me, the thought of ending another’s life. Someone’s son, or father, or brother. They’d never come home. But I might not come home, either — then what use would I be? Whether we lived or died, the fight continued. We would just stop caring, because there would be nothing left to care about.

  “Go, go, go!” the CO barked, and the rear cracked open. The bright sky was clogged with black smoke and gunfire.

  We tumbled out into a trench. The tank continued on away from us, and some stragglers in the back were rattled with gunfire — three of us were dead before we’d even started. The mud nearly swallowed me whole, and Sinclair grabbed my arm and hoisted me up, propping me up against a wall as we scanned the area. I immediately realized that I wasn’t standing in mud. The sticky substance was red, not brown, and the place where my head had been moments ago was where a human heart may have been beating.

  “El!” Sinclair grounded himself. Two Austro-Hungarian soldiers rounded a corner and hesitated as they, too, tried to process the carnage.

  My weapon was levelled at them, but my finger didn’t pull. We stared at each another for an eternity, only snapping out of it when the clack of Sinclair’s rifle released a bullet into one of their chests. Then I pulled the trigger indifferently, loosing half my magazine into them and seeing both fall. A Manual trudged overhead, metal legs blocking out the sun, and another tank made its way close to the trench to deposit another wave of the Cleanup Crew.

  I made my way to the freshly dead. Their bodies were unmoving — I wouldn’t have been able to control myself if they had still been alive after that. Past the curve of the trench, to my left, another Austro appeared, firing off a rifle in my direction as I grounded myself behind one of the bodies. The Lewis Gun fell from my hands, and I reached for my sidearm, which had slipped off of me during my initial entry into the trench.

  The dead body I was hiding behind had a gleaming silver handle on it. I reached for it, levelled it, and fired off two rounds. The Diamondback kicked much more than I was prepared for, but it made two holes the size of my fist in the body of the other man. I got up from the mud and gore to retrieve my rifle, which was clogged from the filth. Sinclair was behind me, rechambering his rifle as he stacked up to the dirt wall.

  “What you got there, El?”

  “German pistol. Lost the other one.” I twirled the revolver in my hands. It felt natural. Felt good. Then again, the adrenalin hadn’t run out yet. I’d probably be sobbing at what I’d had to do after all this was over. Austros had been salvaging German weapons since the latter swapped sides, so it wasn’t uncommon to find a treasure like this on a new corpse. The whine of pneumatic pressure being released filled the air, and I looked up to see the top of the Manual from earlier peeking over the dirt wall. Must have busted a support on its leg, seeing as it wasn’t moving as fast as it should be. “You go forward. I’m hopping up to fix big boy over there.”

  “Roger dodger.” Sinclair tipped his helmet and ran forward through the deserted trench, and I slung my machine gun over my shoulder and climbed up the trench wall.

  The Manual came into view, as did the field of barbed wire, mortar fire, and tanks advancing toward Strasbourg. The device was well over thirty feet in height, with pneumatically driven legs as large as my body and a central cockpit in the chest of the machine where the human pilot sat. Two large arms sprouted from the top of the central body, the right one carrying a large .50-calibre machine gun, the other missing below the mechanical elbow.

  The pilot inside was peering through the bulletproof glass mounted at the front of the machine, looking right at me to get my attention. Approaching him, I could see the large metal chest piece mounted on him was tightly locked around his chest, limiting his movement. I also saw some blood on said chest piece, but it wasn’t enough to warrant concern.

  “Hey, hey, Cleanup Crew this deep in no man’s land?” the pilot laughed as I climbed his machine’s back. “Check my pressure tank, see how things are going up there for me.”

  “For the pneumatics?”

  “For the Trauma Harness.”

  I wrestled with the back end for a while before I found a mud-covered dial leading to a well-protected tank at the top of his Manual’s back. The dial gave me both a general idea of how much pressure was going into that chest piece to keep him alive, as well as roughly how much morphine was being put into his system. “You’re at thirty-five. Is that good?”

  He laughed, the monstrous hands of the Manual gripping his rifle as he reloaded a fresh clip of .50 rounds from the belt connected to its shoulder. “Excellent. It means I’m coming home for Christmas. Get my leg fixed up and you can ride me to the end.”

  “I got you!”

  I laughed and headed down, reaching the leg, which was as large as I was. I stripped the main hose, which had frayed, and fitted a new adapter on it. The hose was jutting out of a shelled piece of steel, revealing the inner workings of the left leg, and it wasn’t too hard to find my way around repairing the damn thing.

  I had trained for months learning how to fix these things head to toe, and this was the easiest repair I’d had to do in quite a while. I peered over at the Manual’s missing arm, seeing a hole where the pilot could stick an arm out to fire his sidearm.

  “What happened with the arm?” I yelled.

  The operator looked through the hole to speak. “A 21 Morser hit me, nearly took out my real arm. Reloading is going to be a bitch, but I got the time to do it now. How are the trenches?”

  I paused, the scene of gore rushing back. I nearly threw up in the middle of the repair. “F-fine, clear. Mostly clear.”

  “Good, good, Cleanup Crew doesn’t have much to clean up.” He laughed, gripping the main rifle in his machine’s right hand tighter as he prepared to take off as soon as I finished.

  Moments later, a whirring sound filled the air over the hissing pneumatics. I had little time to react, but the Manual operator twisted his machine and nearly crushed me. I was about to scream at him, but an explosion knocked the machine off of me and sent me skidding several feet across the mud. My teeth were like rubber, and I couldn’t feel anything. Everything in my body was ringing
and numb, like I couldn’t work it properly.

  The Manual stood, its back mangled by the direct hit from a Diesel. The Central Powers’ war machine was almost double the width of a Manual, carrying two built-in 20mm cannons on its arms, one of which it had just used to fire a shell into the Manual’s back. The hill roughly fifty feet ahead of us must have given it a chance to get closer to us, its lumbering speed picking up as gravity pulled it to more level ground.

  The Allied Manual swung at it, trying to tear open its chest cavity and access the many pilots driving the Diesel, but its strikes were no match for the double-plated armour. The larger robot crushed the newly repaired Manual’s leg, trapping it as the Diesel stuffed one of its cannons against the bulletproof glass, trying to get to the operator.

  I didn’t know what happened next — either the operator was alive and fired his pistol at the Tesla Battery, or the cannon hit the Manual’s power source. A blinding light enveloped me, and the hairs of my beard and my eyebrows were singed. The explosion was less shrapnel than pure energy. The sound practically split my head in two and seared my closed eyes.

  After the heat had dispersed, I stood up and gathered my bearings before approaching the carnage. The Diesel’s front half no longer existed, and most of the Manual had been vapourized by the explosion, not even leaving a body to mourn. I fell back down, crawled to the trench, and rolled into it. Sinclair made his way to me moments later, and though he spoke, I couldn’t hear. I felt water on my face — not mud or blood, but water. Tears. I got up and ran alongside him. It was so quiet — I couldn’t hear anything. Another Manual fell and tipped into the trench, another blew up like a tin can over a stove.

  I couldn’t see — but it wasn’t because of the explosion. It just didn’t make sense. The crunching underfoot was either rocks or bones, either mud or organs. The metal falling from the sky was either Austrian, German, or American, but always covered in blood. It was all so fast, so sudden. I collapsed into the trench, and my brain didn’t want to remember anymore. Sinclair shoved me to my feet, running toward a blown-apart wooden plank that served as a door. He shoved me through.

  I felt myself falling down into the mud, my feet leaving the floor, darkness enveloping me as the warm dirt surrounded me …

  And when my eyes opened, there was the orange glow of fire, the smell of gunpowder and alcohol, and a hard wooden floor against my body.

  I got up to investigate my surroundings, but I already knew where I was. I always came here when I dreamed. I came here too often, yet I had only been here once in reality.

  I had a Thompson in my hands, my Diamondback in its holster. Behind me was the door I’d come in through. It was connected to a large warehouse, which was currently being raided.

  Morello was sitting in front of me. Three mechanical fingers on his right hand wrapped around his pistol, which lay on the desk. He’d been expecting me. I knew how it went down — how it always went down whenever I had this dream — but he never did. How many times had I shot him? Not on that night, but since that night, in dreams?

  “What are you planning, Roche? Going to take me in?”

  “No.”

  A bullet exited the submachine gun. Morello’s gun fell from his grip, and he doubled over from the shock of the impact. I walked around the desk and stood over him. I tried shooting him differently each time, but he always clutched the same wound. I couldn’t change the outcome; it always ended the same way. He knew it. I knew it better.

  The expression in his eyes changed from one of confidence to fear. Mine changed from fear to anger. Luciano was dead, and soon he would be, too. Two kingpins dead, but with a cost attached. He looked up, putting up his hands to shield his face from the barrel of my revolver.

  “Don’t kill me, Roche. Please.”

  “We’re beyond please, you coward. You took something from me, now I’m taking your life as recompense.”

  A door in the hallway behind me burst open. The raid was in full swing. Sinclair entered the doorway of the room, his eyes filled with concern. I turned back to Morello, my finger already squeezing the trigger. But this time, I didn’t see Morello. No, I saw a pair of green eyes. And then, a moment later, they were bright-blue eyes.

  “Elias, don’t.”

  This time, like every time, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop it.

  My eyes snapped open. A featureless ceiling stared back at me.

  I was in my own bed, lying on satin sheets with my shoes on the floor beside me. I still had my clothes on. I sat up and cupped my head in my hands. There was light coming in through my window, which meant I had slept through the night for once. I immediately felt the sting of the bruised purple flesh on my wrist and suddenly remembered what had happened the night before.

  I’d fucked up bad. I had to try to fix things. I wondered if Allen was still here. I glanced at my closet and thought about changing, but I didn’t have the luxury of time, so I just got up and left. I probably smelled worse than Yuri out there, but duty before beauty.

  Allen was standing by the living room window staring down at the street. Had it been here all night? I supposed it didn’t matter, since it didn’t sleep. Or did it? Hopefully it wouldn’t grill me on my little episode the night before. The last thing I needed was to relive the War two days in a row.

  “Morning, Allen.” I gave it a nod and walked into the kitchen, my gaze lingering on the notches on my fridge handle, as well as the empty bottle of booze on the floor. I grabbed a mug and slotted it into the coffee machine, hooking it up to the Tesla Battery in the wall. The machine whirred and spat black liquid into the cup. I downed my shot of caffeine for the day.

  When I turned back to Allen, I saw that it hadn’t moved an inch.

  “Allen?” I called again. It seemed to jump, turning to me with a bewildered look on its face. “You okay there, bud?”

  “Yes, Detective Roche, I was … pondering.” It turned back to the window and the city beyond it. The fluorescent bulbs on the underside of the Plate poured light on the Lower City and through the window. They almost made me forget that it wasn’t real sunlight.

  “Pondering?”

  “Yes.”

  I walked over and stood next to Allen. Snow was falling through the Plate’s turbine frames. The immense hatches above the rotating blades were open to relieve pressure from the building snow on the Plate. In less than a day, what with the snow falling from the sky and the upper streets, and heat no longer coming down to buffer the temperature, the Lower City had been covered in a white blanket. It was still pouring into the streets. Most traffic had stopped, and cars were stuck in at least six inches of snow. People mostly scurried through the streets on foot or took the subway this time of year. But in the distance, I saw the great artery that was 7th Avenue gleaming, its towering billboards still shining across the city, even in daytime. The city would never stop the flow of traffic on 7th. On the contrary, they’d do anything to keep it going — but for what purpose, I wasn’t sure.

  “Care to elaborate?” I asked. “You seem to forget there are proper and improper times to keep quiet.”

  “I was pondering whether to let you leave this apartment.”

  “I’m surprised the handcuffs are off.” I rubbed my wrist. It still ached, even after more than a dozen hours of sleep, and the flesh was purple and budding with welts. “Would you trust me if I gave you my word that you could?”

  “I believe you could disprove my suspicion that you are constantly searching for violence. I’ll be very astute in assessing you. If you exhibit the slightest suggestion of being violent toward another individual without reason, then I apologize, but I will bring you in as a criminal. I understand you are an invaluable asset to the 5th Precinct, which is why I’m giving you another chance before reporting you to higher authorities.”

  “That means a lot, Allen, thanks.” I lit a dart and slapped Allen on the back, my hand ringing in pain. “Just to make things easier for both of us, we’ll do things you
r way. I don’t care if it’s slow or painstakingly thorough. I’ll concede and let you lead.”

  “Excuse me?” Allen’s head turned toward me at lightning speed. I’d genuinely surprised it.

  “You were right I’m a reckless mess of a human being. So to keep things, er, manageable, we should do things by the book for now. Your way.” Both of us straightened up. “This time. And only this time. Let’s see how effective you are as a leader, not just a partner. But remember, if things get iffy, I’m back on top.”

  “Well, that’s an interestin’ change of pace for ya, Roche.”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin, reaching for my empty holster as I turned. Sinclair — that rat bastard — was sitting on my couch with a smirk on his face. Allen must have asked him to come over after what happened yesterday. He lit a cigarette.

  “Fuck, man …”

  “Blind as a bat, even after sleeping off the drink all night. Man, you caused one hell of a ruckus yesterday. The G-men went wild and locked down Times Square after your stunt. ’Course, we covered for ya, as usual.”

  I looked at Allen, who was giving me a stare to remind me that this was yet more damning proof of my recklessness. “What are you doing here, Paddy?”

  “Whoa, it’s Patrick to you in front of the recruit there.” He jammed a finger at Allen before sucking on his dart. “Toby came to me lookin’ for you, and almost immediately after that the metal man over there called to tell me about last night. We heard about what ya found up on the Plate — about the Automatic signals. Toby did some scoutin’. Says he used to buy parts from a bunch of racketeers at Chelsea Docks. And since there was a crime in the Lower East End early yesterday, that has to be the place.”

  “It, not he,” I reminded him. Habit.

  “El, just drop it for —”

  “You know which warehouse on the docks?” I asked.

  “I mean, they’re all connected. There’s three, right? If we don’t find the stuff in one, I’m sure the other two got something.”