Free Cates 04 - The Terminal State by Jeff Somers Page A

panting, dripping blood, my hand in the air, his tiny gun aimed at my eye.
    Then my whole body lit up again, white fire snapping everything rigid and making rigidity a torture. This time I bit down on my tongue hard, blood flowing into my mouth as I tried to scream. Michaleen pushed me off of him like I was an inconvenient piece of scenery and I just rolled away, the shattered glass dropping away, forgotten.
    As my consciousness narrowed down to a dot, I heard the little man laughing breathlessly. “I told you, pups,” I heard him say, fading fast. “You been working wit’ me six months , you take whatever the fuck I hand you. He’s here two goddamn seconds , he’s trying to kill me. The man’s a hero .”
    Turned to cinder by Belling’s remote, I disappeared into darkness, and was glad for it.

VI
    THE MIDDLE FINGER OF GOD
    Hot, stiff, and awake. I opened my eyes and had a distorted view of a well-used tabletop, pitted and scratched, covered in endless layers of varnish. A glass of something brown and transparent loomed directly in front of me, a giant’s glass, everything receding from there. A heavily tattooed pair of hands were folded far away, impossibly tiny. Stamped on top of everything was the tiny text and graphics of my heads-up display, which was going fucking insane . Text was streaming from bottom to top at a furious pace in the left of my vision, and status bars were jigging and jiving in my right, going from red to green, one after the other. My HUD distilled everything about my physical state into a stream of numbers, code words, and unexplained graphics that didn’t mean much to me beyond a few basics.
    “Better be careful. The Middle Finger of God. Give you brain damage.”
    I lifted my head from the table and squinted at the freak who’d been with Michaleen at the old airport. He’d taken off his jacket to reveal a sleeveless black shirt, his arms lying on the table in front of him like heavy burdens he’d just dropped, lifeless and ridiculously humongous. His right arm was heavily inked starting at the elbow, bright, animated tats that moved constantly, a flickering horrorshow of colors and movement that I didn’t want to see. I shifted my eyes to his face, trying to wet my lips, but my tongue had turned into a swollen toad living in the dark cave of my mouth and didn’t want to do anything except make breathing difficult. I managed a grunt.
    I was seated at a dark wooden table next to a huge plate-glass window that had been starred pretty badly and was held together now by a complex system of gray tape. It was dark inside and raining outside, a muddy river creeping up a crumbling bank. Evidence of an old paved road and a concrete sidewalk could still be seen, slowly being sucked into the brown water, an inch a year. Across the river was another strip of crumbling pavement and a row of narrow, neat-looking buildings, rough stone, and peaked roofs. A line of trees adorned each bank, twisted, overgrown roots bursting from the ground, undermining the bank further, everything working together to destroy everything else.
    I glanced down at the table and found a glass of whiskey. I picked it up, staring at it. The weight felt wrong. Everything felt wrong. Gravity was pushing me up, and my tongue was a toad lodged in my mouth. The whole place smelled, a sweet, heavy scent that was pleasant at first but became sickening pretty fast. We were the only people in it aside from a terrified-looking blond girl behind the bar, hugging herself on the far end, as far away from us as she could get without leaving her post, her eyes fixed in our direction.
    “Old man is out back,” my minder said with a grin. “Taking Belling’s confession. This is Amsterdam.”
    “I know where I fucking am,” I said, leaning back. The bars in my vision suddenly stabilized and turned green, and I realized that I didn’t feel bad at all. I even felt good . I raised the glass and paused with it awkwardly in the air, and