Author Archive: jsomers

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.

The Ballad of the House Crew

Photo by Ann Zzz: https://www.pexels.com/photo/yellow-folding-metal-chairs-on-the-ground-11078857/

When I went to college, I had a job at the Student Center. My first year there, this involved me sitting, hungover, at a central desk where they sold candy and I was expected to dispense information that I absolutely did not possess. The Student Center staff was divided into a few separate units: There was the Workbench, which was a crafty sort of spot where people came to do screen printing or bake their sculptures, the office staff, the central desk area, and the House Crew.

The House Crew were tasked with setting up for events, lugging chairs and stages and sound equipment around, partitioning meeting rooms, and general cleanup. It was a lot of hard work, and I had nothing to do with them initially. I worked at that front desk and sometimes in the Workbench, which involved just sitting around and making sure people didn’t steal anything or set themselves on fire while using the equipment.

At some point, I decided I wanted to grow up a bit, make a bit more money, and, I don’t know, challenge myself? That can’t be right. But whatever 20-year-old Jeff’s reasons were, I decided to throw my name in for a management position. Each area of the Student Center had a manager who handled scheduling, payroll, and other issues, and despite a lifelong commitment to MEMO (minimum effort, maximum output), I decided to go for it. I was pretty confident I’d get manager of Workbench, but when the day came no one called me to let me know either way. There was a little party for all the new managers, so I toddled down there and forced the Director of the Student Center to inform me that I had not gotten the position in front of everyone, which was kind of humiliating.

Apparently living the MEMO life didn’t translate to success. Who knew1?

Our First Second Choice

My time came a few weeks later, however; two people had been installed as co-managers of the House crew for some reason, and they got into a dispute with the Director over the hourly pay rate for some of their folks. As a protest, they purposefully filled out payroll at a higher hourly rate for those workers, and were promptly fired. So I got the call to replace them, because, I assume, the field of potential managers was pretty thin.

I’d never managed anything before. I’d also never worked House Crew, because of my delicate writer’s constitution and ladylike hands. But I dived into that job with gusto. My main innovation was writing up minutes of our weekly staff meetings and distributing them to everyone, which I of course turned into a creative exercise. My Minutes were mini-stories, detailing fictional brawls, field trips, and supernatural happenings that occurred at each meeting. I wrote a few as epic poems, some as stage plays. In a lot of ways, those staff meeting minutes were prepping me for The Inner Swine, the zine I started publishing after I graduated college, which was similarly filled with ridiculous experimental stuff like that.

Was I good manager of the House Crew? Probably not. I’m not good at managing anything, so I was likely deeply mediocre. But I like to think that I brought a little fun into the job. Like a lot of the ephemera of my pre-Internet life, I wish I’d saved some of those meeting minutes; they’re all gone now, trashed shortly after they were handed out and forgotten by their recipients. And honestly they were probably only mildly amusing to the folks who were literally there. But I still kind of wish I had a few copies, just to see if I was really as clever as I thought I was2.

Since my heady days as Lord of House Crew I have carefully avoided any kind of managerial responsibility, and I think the world has been a better place as a result. You are welcome.

PANTS

Photo by Spencer Cooper: https://www.pexels.com/photo/portrait-of-a-man-in-a-leather-jacket-17750853/

All joking aside — and I do joke about pants a lot, perhaps too much, no, never, forget I said anything — my experiences with pants have always been fraught. I’ve come to suspect that I have suffered from a mild form of subtle body dysmorphia for most of my life, because the first time I bought a pair of pants that actually fit me somewhat accurately was about a year ago.

I remember when I got my first real, benefits-and-office kind of adult job working for a small medical publisher in New York City, and I bought some new clothes so I would look like a real adult instead of a deranged child (spoilers: I failed at this goal). I strutted into work feeling like a superstar (a superstar who was earning (checks notes) $17,000 a year (about $36k in modern monies) and who wore glasses the size of satellite dishes on his face, but still.

I have a photo from around that time, me and some co-workers standing around smiling. And my pants are frickin’ enormous. They look like two of me could have fit into them, and I honestly have no reason to believe that wasn’t possible. I stare at this photo and think, what the hell is wrong with me that I thought those pants fit properly? What was wrong with everyone else for treating me like a normal human being and not some kind of deranged monster?

Sad Trombone

Of course, fresh-outta-college Jeff was a different person. Dumber, certainly. Drunker, possibly. He resembled 10-year-old Jeff except fatter and with an even more dubious haircut, which is difficult to imagine, so it’s tempting to write off his enormous, ill-fitting pants as a trick of time dilation.

Except I still regular wear pants that threaten to fall down at inopportune times (are there opportune times for your pants to fall down? Research continues). I was out walking around town a few months ago, carrying heavy bags, and I had seriously worries that my pants were going to just shimmy down around my ankles at any moment.

Part of this is the 1930s Depression-Era cheapness my parents instilled in me. My whole immediate family were hoarders of different stripes, I’ve come to realize. Buttons, old clothes, books–they kept everything. My brother has never once thrown a single item away in his entire life. He has every computer he’s ever owned sitting in the basement, most likely infested with spiders, and even though most of them wouldn’t even boot up any more any suggestion of getting rid of them elicits nothing more than a puzzled frown.

All of this is to say that if I accidentally purchase a pair of pants made for a much larger person, I am too lazy to return them, as a rule (these whiskies ain’t gonna drink themselves) but also compelled to wear them, because I can’t throw them away.

Solutions? I could double my caloric intake in an attempt to fit into the pants, or learn to sew from Youtube videos and savage my pants into submission. But as I am very lazy I will choose C, just keep wearing those pants and enjoy the thrill of never knowing whether they’re going to slide down with a sad trombone noise next time I’m leaving the grocery store laden with bags, leaving me to shuffle pathetically across the street, tears streaming down my face, pants around my ankles, the youths of the neighborhood snapping photos on their phones and making me famous.

The (Competence) Struggle is Real

Photo by Sarazh Izmailov: https://www.pexels.com/photo/people-shoveling-snow-off-a-roof-11236043/

FRIENDOS, I was raised to be both cheap and self-sufficient, in the sense that I abhor spending money on things I can do half-assedly myself. This includes most home maintenance, which I approach with insane enthusiasm for a man so poorly prepared to do actual work.

I like to joke that I’m the second-worst carpenter in New Jersey because I was trained by my father, the worst carpenter in New Jersey history. This isn’t far from the truth; Dad had just enough construction and carpentry knowledge to be dangerous, and he passed on about half of what he knew to me in a vague, non-specific fashion. If I didn’t have YouTube this house I am sitting in right now would have burned down long ago, because I insist on doing many repairs and renovations around here I am absolutely not qualified to do. And when I do give in and hire someone, I find myself following them around and nodding, muttering any bits of knowledge I might have about plumbing or electrical work in order to convince them that I am a competent, adult man.

This combination of factors leaves me open to frequent humiliations, of course. A few years ago, for example, we had a lot of snow around these parts. A lot of snow. I became a little concerned that our roof might not be up to the load, so I decided to climb out there and do some judicious shoveling. The Duchess informed me that if I slipped and fell off the roof to my death she would be so angry at me she would leave my body to be eaten by squirrels, and I took this as a challenge and accepted it.

There’s a skylight out on that roof, which made navigating around on the slippery surface a challenge, and so naturally about five minutes into my roof-shoveling adventure I slipped and fell backwards directly onto the skylight, cracking it all to hell. I remember looking up and finding The Duchess staring at me from the bedroom window, just shaking her head at the jackassery she had just witnessed.

This was a problem, of course, because a cracked skylight meant snow and rain pouring into the house. I thought I could probably figure out a solution, but The Duchess insisted we call a contractor who had recently done work for us, and beg him for some help. What did I know about skylights, after all? There was probably a super secret solution or trick an experienced person would know.

I grit my teeth and made the call. I’m not exactly an old-school man when it comes to gender roles, but I feel the icy teeth of shame when I have to ask another man for help in my own house, so I dreaded this experience. Our contractor agreed to drop by and see what could be done. I told myself that at least there might be something to learn here. All I could think to do was drape a tarp over the skylight and secure it with elastic cords. The contractor might show me something I could then pretend to have known all along, and temporarily forgotten.

The contractor came, took a look at the cracked skylight, a look at my damp pants, and chose to make no comment. He then proceeded to … drape a tarp over the skylight and secure it with elastic cords.

My humiliation complete, I went inside to calculate the cost of a new skylight. The Duchess made me some hot cocoa, and I wondered when, exactly, I would start to feel like a grown up. Hint: It’s been several years since then and it still hasn’t happened.

‘The Salted Earth’ Excerpt

The final novel in the latest Avery Cates series, The Machines of War, is coming out on November 15th (pre-order it!). The fourth novella that comprises that novel, The Salted Earth, will also be available then. Here’s the first chapter of that novella for your reading pleasure.

THE SALTED EARTH

Part Four of THE MACHINES OF WAR

a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls

“There,” Marko said, pointing with a spidery metal arm. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

I inhaled cigarette smoke and squinted down at the holographic map of the installation. “A power surge,” I said after a moment.

Marko opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Yes. A power surge we didn’t cause.”

I spent a profitable moment examining my constant urge to smack Marko in the face. He was, at this thinned-out point in my increasingly unlikely existence, my oldest friend, and one of exactly two people left to talk to. And I wanted to strangle him on a regular basis.

You should read his old evaluations, Marin whispered in my head. You’re not alone.

Smoke curled up between us and I marveled. Cochtopa was absolutely packed with cigarettes. They were shitty and System-grade, but I was making my way through them at an unhealthy pace.

“A glitch,” I said. “This place has been collecting dust for years. And we just murdered its AI administrator.”

Me, Marin whispered, sounding affronted. You murdered me.

Marko shook his head. The control center was enormous, clearly designed for dozens of people. It was a circular room with banks of black-box data storage lining the walls. Long desk-like stations with data cube ports and holographic displays filled most of the room, but with just one activated and only one and a half people moving in the space, I imagined I could feel the weight of the mountain above us, pushing down, making the air dense and difficult to breathe.

The fucking System. We were literally inside its corpse.

“Maybe,” Marko said in a tone of voice that both implied doubt and made the urge to hit him rise significantly. “But it’s not just some circuit flicker. It’s significant, and the pattern is the same each time.” He glanced at me as if he suspected I was contemplating violence. “Also, it’s moving.”

“You think it’s a problem.”

Marko hesitated again. I was glad he’d learned to be careful. It was beneficial to our relationship.

“I think we have superficial control over this installation,” he said. “I think the code base is mammoth and there are layers that go back to the earliest days of the System. I think there are technological iterations that came long after I was iced out of things. I think there may be security layers we’re unaware of. I think, in short, that there’s no operating manual for this place, and we should not be ignoring anomalies.”

I nodded, standing up. I drew one of the Roon 87s I’d picked up from the armory and cracked it, peering into the chamber. “Okay. Let’s check it out.”

He blinked. “What, now?”

“If the System has a cute little Fuck You roaming the halls, I’d rather know sooner than later,” I said. “Where is it?”

“Deep. Down in some unfinished chambers, the projects that stopped dead when everything crashed.”

I studied the map for a moment. It was an area I’d never been to before. I was looking forward to a slightly different shade of gloom, a slightly ranker scent of sulfur. I touched the earpiece that had become my constant companion “Moreau?”

Cochtopa was a tomb filled with tech. Covered in dust, wrapped in plastic, stacked high on palettes in underground vaults so large you shuddered to run into the machines that had created them, there was every conceivable toy. Earbuds that worked through thick stone walls underground, with no central server or satellite necessary? The ghost of the System had them. Guns? Every fucking where, and piles of ammunition. Implants, augments, prosthetics? Yes, and grim, buried surgical theaters in which to apply them. Moreau was attempting an audit, digging himself deeper into the guts of the mountain every day, and after years of scrabbling after every bullet and N-tab, I thought the endless supplies were starting to drive him crazy.

After a moment, Moreau’s voice was in my ear, breathless but without a hint of static. “Yeah?”

I tapped the earpiece. “Danni?”

“Boss?”

“Want to go on a bug hunt?”

####

Every new area we invaded yielded an astonishing amount of late-System tech. There was one room filled with electric buggies running off power cells, each one programmed to follow one of several thousand prescribed routes through Cochtopa. All you had to do was punch in the appropriate code and it took off, smoothly steering around obstacles as it raced through the halls and crevices of the mountain.

Moreau, naturally, filled most of the cabin, which had been designed for normal-sized people, or at least their normal-sized avatars. Danni was crushed against me, squeezed every time the buggy took a turn. Moreau, in a mood I’d almost call jubilant, bristled with firepower—every time we cracked open a crate and found something new he added it to his arsenal. As someone else who’d spent a lifetime searching for bullets and piecing together guns from leftover parts, saying quick prayers against explosions every time he squeezed the trigger, I understood the urge. You never knew when the last vestiges of civilization were going to collapse on top of everything that had already collapsed, after all.

Danni carried a single gun: A Roon model 13, an older weapon for a more settled time, designed to be small and more of a discouragement for panicked rich people than a deadly weapon. I was sure you could kill someone with it, with some determination or creativity, but I suspected Danni liked how light and easygoing it was, and I supposed if I had the ability to lift hovers off the ground with my thoughts I wouldn’t worry much about what fucking gun I had strapped to my thigh.

“If this is rats,” she said, sounding tired, “I’m going to kick your Mr. Marko in the balls.”

“He’s not my Mr. Marko anymore,” I said. “He belongs to all of us, now.”

The buggy slowed and came to a stop, jostling us as it rocked on its suspension. The door popped up, and I crawled stiffly out into one of the familiar tunnels that snaked through the installation, the floor polished and smooth, the walls rough, conduits and pipes running along both sides up near the ceiling. I popped up a map of the place on a small vidscreen I’d scrounged from some random supply closet and zoomed in on our location.

“End of the ride,” I said. “Looks like the buggy’s programmed not to go any further because it’s technically off-map—we’re headed into a section of Cochtopa that was never finalized and added to the grid.”

Moreau grunted. “Fuckin’ typical. We find rides, we can’t use ‘em. Universe fuckin’ hates us.”

“We’re still alive,” Danni suggested.

In unison, Moreau and I grunted. I gestured at the little floating map and it zoomed in on the last spot where the power surge had been detected. It glowed softly in a field of unbroken, blank black on the map.

“That’s an unfinished, late-stage expansion area,” Marko buzzed in my ear, sounding like he was right next to me. “Looks like they stopped work on this project abruptly shortly before you, er, pulled the plug on the whole world.”

I hesitated a moment. “Before,” I echoed.

“Yup. Based on the logs I’m able to parse from here, all work on Auxiliary Tech-AV Development Zone 344 was halted about sixteen days before you and Orel went at it.”

I looked up into the darkness stretching out before us.

“No lights,” Moreau rumbled.

“Not connected,” I said, trying to pinpoint the spot where the light failed and the tunnel vanished. “But there’s a power surge.” I looked at Moreau. He nodded and suddenly there was a shredder in his hands, the slight whine of its powerup loud and ominous in the low light, a billion pounds of rock and tech above our heads.

“Fuck us all,” Danni muttered, fishing out a pair of low-light goggles and handing them to me. “We get fucking murdered gaining access to this place, turns out someone else is just living here, in the near-total darkness?”

Slinging the goggles around my neck as she pulled a second pair out of her bag for herself, I shrugged. Spectacular Dan had seen some shit and lived through some rough years with me, but I was the original, and I was used to the never-ending buffet of shit the universe had waiting for us all. For a while I’d thought I’d opted out, rotting away in the wilderness, content with my part in ending the world, but here I was, dancing to the same tune as always. One more job. One more death. One more excruciating torture session, one more week spent eating dust and drinking runoff and seething.

She’d learn.

Within a few dozen feet, the smooth, polished floor gave way to an uneven path of gouged and pulverized rock. The ceiling sloped downward and the walls closed in until we were walking down a corridor just wide enough for the three of us and just tall enough for Moreau to stand up straight. The rest of Cochtopa had been designed for some legendary race of giants, your presence in every room echoing off the walls. This sudden return to human scale was oppressive.

The tunnel advanced for a few hundred feet. We all slipped our goggles on, everything outlined in light, glowy blue, the universe ray traced. After another few hundred feet, the tunnel abruptly ended at a serious-looking metal security door, bolted directly into the rock. There was no keypad, handle, or obvious locking mechanism.

“That,” Danni said cheerfully, “is a door you’re not supposed to open.”

“Mr. Marko? You see our position?”

After a moment, Marko’s voice buzzed in our ears. “Yeah, Avery. There’s no door on the schematics. No wiring, either. If I had to guess, it was put in place to seal off whatever’s behind it.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I think you’ll probably have to blow it.”

Moreau brightened. I held up a hand.

“Zeke, any files in there relating to a seismic study of this place? As in, will blowing shit up bring the fucking mountain down on our heads?”

Moreau looked around. “They built this place to be a fortress, Avery.”

I pointed back the way we’d come. “They built that to be a fortress, you fucking simp. They stopped building whatever this was supposed to be.”

Moreau shrugged off his pack and advanced on the door. “Better grab some cover, then.”

Danni and I exchanged glances. She shrugged. “I’ve been contemplating suicide recently anyway.”

I sighed. “The universe won’t let me go that easy.” Somehow I knew that my death would be excruciating and humiliating, not sudden and simple. It gave me a strange sense of invulnerability. I waved at Moreau, and he gleefully began pulling explosive gel from his pack. He’d been itching to use it ever since we’d discovered crates of it piled up in one of the many, many storage areas they’d built into the mountain.

Danni and I watched as a ghostly, blue-outlined Moreau worked on the door, applying the gel with clinical precision.

“Man loves his work,” Danni murmured.

“You didn’t become a Stormer unless you enjoyed cracking heads and blowing shit up,” I said. “Shit, Little Moreau was probably pulling wings off flies as a kid.”

Moreau turned and trotted back towards us, moving pretty fast and nimble for such a slab of a man. He knelt down. There was no cover to take, so Danni and I crouched behind him.

“You motherfuckers,” he muttered.

“Relax,” Danni said, sounding almost giddy, “I got you, big man.”

It was strange. We’d formed a kind of friendly gang, stuck together in the world’s most impressive, most useless fortress of modern tech. My whole universe had contracted to these three people, and the last remaining ghost in my head, flickering in and out like a long-distance signal you were moving away from.

When the door blew, the goggles turned everything blindingly white. I shut my eyes and turned away with a snarled curse, and a rush of wind pushed past me. There was an incredibly loud sound of the door smacking into the rock walls, and then an eerie silence.

I opened my eyes. The goggles took a moment to flicker back online. Where the door had been was a rectangular opening leading to darkness. Stepping forward, I drew the Roon and held it down by my thigh. A chill breeze pressed against us as we approached. Moreau had the shredder in his hands, pressing himself against the scarred, pitted wall to the left of the ruined doorway, and Danni hung back, hands up, ready to throw some weight around.

Crouching down, I pressed myself against the wall to the right, then leaned over to peer into the space beyond. The goggles outlined the space in fine detail. It was a large cavern, the jagged ceiling way above us. The floor was relatively flat, and covered in what initially appeared to be bundles or sacks. But it only took me a second to realize what they really were.

“Bodies,” I said quietly. “We’ve got bodies.”

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The Friendliest Mugging of All Time

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-holding-an-empty-wallet-8515596/

It’s been a while since I’ve treated this blog as a blog, just writing random stuff every now and then and expecting people to care. I’m a little out of practice. I remember when starting a blog felt like something important, like a record of your life and thoughts. Ah, sweet innocence. The rise of social media made blogs more or less optional, and I’ve used mine as an ersatz novel publishing platform for some time now. But it’s kind of refreshing to just yammer on about stuff.

I grew up in the Heights neighborhood of Jersey City, on cliffs overlooking Hoboken and with New York City visible across the Hudson River. As a largely free-range kid in the 1970s and 1980s I had a pretty fun time rambling around. Jersey City was (and is) a sprawling, multi-ethnic city of a few hundred thousand people, is firmly in the grip of the Democratic political machine, and offered me a very cliche old-school childhood experience filled with stickball, games of Manhunt, and the occasional mugging.

Oh yeah, the crimes. While most of my childhood was pretty calm and peaceful, our house did get robbed once, and I was personally mugged three times as a kid. Once two dudes simply knocked me off a brand-new Huffy dirtbike and zoomed off on it, which happened so fast I still believe magic may have been involved. But the most memorable mugging I ever experienced was also the nicest.

Do Crimes, Be Polite

My friend Mingus (not his real name) and I hopped on a bus one day, intending to head to the mall for an afternoon of hijinks, but we got on the bus going the wrong way, and soon found ourselves traveling into an area of Jersey City we weren’t familiar with, the sort of area that would have felt like we’d stepped into an episode of The Wire if that show weren’t 20 years in the future. We panicked a little bit and hopped off the bus before we got any further towards, well, we didn’t know where we were headed. Canada? It wasn’t impossible, so we hopped off and started walking back towards the familiar.

A group of older kids soon fell in with us, walking along. They were friendly. They offered us cigarettes and beer (this was a simpler time), they asked us where we were headed and offered to give us directions. And then they shoved us up against a convenient wall and began going through our pockets.

I remember the Velcro wallets we had. Those were, for some reason, all the rage back then, these fabric wallets that folded into thirds and closed with a Velcro strip. Mine was camouflage and quite badass. And I remember hearing both of our wallets being opened, and then there was some giggling.

The kids helped us up. One of them handed my wallet back, holding the single dollar bill it had contained and grinning. “Y’all got lucky,” he said. “One fucking dollar.”

They were amused. They literally dusted us off and pointed us in the general direction of civilization, and let us walk away without further trouble. I remember being in a daze, of sorts: On some level I knew I’d just experienced a semi-violent crime. On another level, I felt like I could be friends with those kids. I think if they’d kept us around for five more minutes Stockholm Syndrome would have set in and I would have been willing to murder someone to join their gang.

I’ve always been an easy recruit.

Instead, we shambled back to the Jersey City we knew and made a collect call and my mother came and got us. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the mugging, which she suspected was a ruse to cover some transgression we’d committed (in the grand scheme of things, she could be forgiven for assuming as much, as I got into a lot of shameful shenanigans and had certainly invented quite a number of ruses to cover them up in my time).

Mingus and I never spoke about the incident. I mourned the dollar for a while; in my 1980 Kids’ economy that was a lot of money, earmarked for baseball cards and video games. Then I forgot about it all, though I still have an alarming tendency to assume anyone holding me at knifepoint is probably a lot of fun to hang out with.

The World’s Most Hidden CMOS Battery Ever

So! We’ve finished up posting Collections, the novel no one wanted to publish, and my strange brain won’t allow me to start a new weekly novel post here until 2024. Which leaves us with some weeks to fill here at the wee blog. But, luckily, life decided to screw me over this week and I suffered a computer crash for the ages, which I can now write about in hilarious detail.

Friendos, I am the Platonic Ideal of Intellectual Shallowness. I have a real skill: I am 100% that asshole who skims a Wikipedia article an hour before meeting you for drinks and then spends the evening confidently lecturing you on the subject. Maybe I’m the Platonic Ideal of Unearned Confidence? Nah, that’s just me being a white middle-aged cis man.

Anyways, I have a long history of fucking around and finding out when it comes to computers. My first PC was a Commodore 64, gifted to me by my parents when I was a wee lad and still filled with promise. Back then no one laughed when I told them I wanted to be a brain surgeon, and so my parents could be forgiven for thinking that the $200 in 1982 money was an investment in making me a billionaire computer genius. I mostly used the C64 to play video games, of course, amassing an enormous empire of pirated games utilizing a wide range of illegal programs that broke DRM. I also spent a lot of time typing programs directly into the RAM from computer magazines1. Naturally, none of these programs–which took days to keyboard–ever worked properly, and so I knew the bitter taste of computer failure very early on.

I bought my first real computer years later, and that’s when I started getting into trouble, because I got curious. Early attempts to dual-boot Windows and Unix resulted in many, many boot failures, and the thing was these all happened in 1998 or so. Imagine for a moment turning on your computer and getting a blinking cursor and nothing else, and you have zero other computers or access to online information. I had the Internet in some form, but with my PC blown to pieces by my tinkering I couldn’t get there. I had no smartphone or tablet, so I had to wait until the next day when I went to work, spend hours furiously Googling solutions, print out instructions, and go home to try everything until finally something actually worked2.

Twenty-five years later, things are very, very different.

This FileSystem Does Not Exist

My computer blew up on Monday evening. These things always happen at night, for some reason. Your computer never turns into a malformed paperweight when you’re up early and feeling clearheaded; it always discovers entropy when you’re tired and slightly drunk and trying to figure out if the tiny leprechaun named McSwiggins who keeps shouting that you have to BURN EVERYTHING, BOYO is real or not.

An old man screams into the void. Not shown: McSwiggins, but he’s there all right.

One moment I was editing the thumbnail images for the new episode of the podcast, the next I was staring at a reboot screen. Fine, I thought. Something got screwed up and I’d lose a few minutes of my time.

The computer made it to the desktop, then crashed again. This time I didn’t even get a POST. No BIOS. No nothing. It was very much as if my computer had simply ceased to exist. For a moment I worried that when I opened the case to peek inside, I’d find nothing but a note from some alternate timeline explaining that my Alternate Self had to steal my computer in order to save the future or something, and then I would be swallowed by a violent temporal anomaly and that would be that.

Now, in 1998 I had no way to access the vast troves of information out there on the Internet, but this is 2023, baby, and I have a phone, two old laptops, two old tablets, and my wife’s laptop. I had access to the information. I’m not afraid to assault my motherboard with a screwdriver and my sticky, whiskey-stained hands.

Nothing worked. The computer was dead. I pulled the hard drive out of it and hooked it up to an old laptop and confirmed I hadn’t experienced any data loss, which was calming, and then I decided to do a few basic triage steps to try to revive the computer: I resat the graphics card and the RAM, I checked all the plugs and connections. And then I thought I’d bleed the CMOS battery and clear that as well, which sometimes revives a confused motherboard.

Except, I couldn’t find the CMOS battery.

Now, if you don’t know anything about computer hardware that means nothing to you, but as a guy who has stared into the abyss of many non-functioning computers in his time, not being able to see the CMOS battery was disturbing. It’s normally a pretty simple process to unplug the CMOS and/or clear it with the jumpers, but here I couldn’t even see that fucker. I wondered, for a moment, if computer technology had progressed so far that they no longer used CMOS batteries, and I missed it because I am old and feeble.

I broke out the motherboard’s documentation, and discovered that the manufacturer had hidden the CMOS battery the way a Super Villain would have. The battery is a thin, disc-shaped thing, and they glued it to the back of another component, which was in turn obscured by another component. Salt in the wound: The plug was also buried behind something, and the only way to try to unplug it was to get in there with a pair of needles or something and use them like chopsticks. Which I did. I think I lost several pounds of body weight through sweat and anxiety.

You Have Failed

So, did I win? Well, a new computer has been ordered, so the answer is: No. That motherboard is fried and not coming back from the dead any time soon. Maybe it was the incendiary nature of my writing, my ideas too hot for the hard drive. Or maybe I just got unlucky. But the contrast with past computer problems was astonishing: Instead of losing everything on my hard drive and staying awake for six days straight as I tried to cobble together information to fix things, I … just used the Internet to learn everything I needed to know and retrieve any files I’d lost. What used to be a paralyzing moment of terror is now just a pain in the ass.

Except for that CMOS battery. That’s gonna haunt me to the end of my days.

Collections, the Whole Book

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

WELL, Collections is done. Ideally I’d have novels that had 52 chapters each and every time, but this time we shorted the year a little bit, but that’s okay.

If you’ve been reading along, I hope you’ve enjoyed the book. If you were waiting to download the whole thing so you could read it at your leisure like a normal person, now is your time to shine–links to the whole enchilada are below.

In a week or three I’ll ask for opinions on what the next weekly novel should be, based entirely on titles with zero other contextual information, because I am a tiny god here and can do as I please. Feel free to let me know your thoughts! Until then, thanks, as always, for reading!

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Collections: Epilogue

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

Epilogue

“Well,” Rachel said, glancing down at her watch. “I gotta run. Job interview.”

I blinked. “What happened to the library?”

She smiled at me, standing up and gathering her purse. I leaned back and stirred my civet coffee in its white cup. I reached up and touched the thick bandage on my nose, and wished I healed faster. Then I shot my cuffs in my new custom suit—full canvas, one-fifty thread count, double-breasted, notched lapels—and looked around McHales, which The Bumble and I had made into our unofficial clubhouse. We’d footed the bill for Falken to move on and still had plenty of scratch to live on for a while between what I’d scraped from my own apartment and what we’d picked up in Newark, though it wasn’t a retirement plan. We were the only people in it aside from the bartender, who was a young musician of the usual sort struggling to stay awake in the afternoon sun, a coffee cup on the bar in front of him.

The Bumble sat at the bar, engrossed in the sports page. A tiny cinnamon-colored kitten with long fur sprouting from its ears sat on the bar between The Bumble’s beer glass and a bowl of milk. Billy had found it out back and adopted it, and named it Stanley.

Rachel looked like a million bucks in a nicely-cut suit, big cuffs spilling out over her jacket, her hair pulled back in a long, shiny tail. She looked expensive, but that had always been Rachel’s main grift: She just looked expensive, no matter what. “They fired me the third day I just didn’t show up, dummy. That tends to happen. You can’t take an unannounced vacation at the Holland Motor Lodge in New Jersey and just go back to your job whenever you’re ready.”

I nodded. “You need anything?”

She shook her head and slung her bag over one shoulder. For a moment she stood there looking at me. “No,” she said. “Connie and I are having lunch next week, if you want to join us.”

I frowned trying to place Connie. Then I blinked again. “You’re having lunch with Rusch?”

Rachel smiled again. “Why not?”

I shrugged. “No reason. Just seems … random.”

“We spent days locked in a motel together. You get to know each other a little, that way. Anyway,” she said, and hung there awkwardly for a moment. I had a feeling that with anyone else, this was where Rachel leaned down and kissed their cheek. Instead, after a moment she just nodded and turned away. “I’ll stay in touch,” she said as she walked out of the room, not meaning a word of it.

For a moment I sat there feeling blue, bored and restless. Then there was a noise out in the main bar and Billy stood up, glanced at me blank-faced, and went out to investigate, returning seconds later.

“It’s the Jew,” The Bumble said, resuming his seat at the bar and picking up the sports page.

As The Phin entered the back room of the bar, I sat up a little and pushed a smile to my face. He looked exactly the same and was trailed by Michael and Maurice, blank-faced in their standard-issue black leather coats. They pretended they’d never seen me before and stayed up near the door, visibly irritated that The Bumble paid them no attention at all.

The Phin walked briskly back to me, carrying a stout-looking walking stick with a solid-gold lion’s head as a handle.

“You look like someone tried to kill you, kiddo,” he said, breathless, his face pink. “Can I have a seat? Talk a little business?”

I gestured at the chair. “Sure thing, Phin. How’s tricks?” This was protocol: The Phin had tried to beat money out of me not so long ago, and I’d burned down one of his joints, but even so you started off every meet with polite chat.

He settled himself in the chair with some grunting and heavy breathing, setting his walking stick on the table and folding his hands in front of him.

“We’re fine, thanks. Any chance of a drop of something? It’s thirsty work, tracking you down. You’re off the grid.”

I shrugged. “There’s a chance of anything,” I said, gesturing at the bartender. “But he lacks a certain enthusiasm for his job, you know?”

The Phin waved his hand over his shoulder, and Maurice strode purposefully towards the bar.

I eyed him carefully, and produced a thick yellow envelope from my pocket. “This is what we took from your people during the, uh, disturbance,” I said. “Plus fifteen percent over three weeks, to be fair. I thought you might think of it as a loan you forgot you approved.”

He reached out and took the envelope, weighed it in his hand theatrically, and nodded, stuffing it into his coat pocket. I watched him carefully. The Phin could choose to view this as a closed episode, or he could decide I owed him a tax. I didn’t have any backing any more, there was no one to intercede for me, so if The Phin put my name in the books I was going to have trouble.

Mo arrived with a full glass of whiskey and set it gently in front of him. The Phin waved him back to his perch with an irritated gesture and took a swallow, wiping his gleaming lips with the back of his hand.

“I’m inclined to go along with that, and here’s why,” he said. “Since Frank McKenna’s untimely demise, it’s fucking chaos. Where’s Frank junior? No one fucking knows. Chino’s dead, Mikey D’s dead, the kid’s missing. It’s fucking chaos.” He shook his head, then leaned back and laced his fingers over his belly, staring at me from under his eyebrows. “It’s also an opportunity.”

I raised my eyebrows. My nose throbbed. I wasn’t taking anything for the pain. I hadn’t seen Frank Junior after he’d entered the warehouse, and I didn’t know where he’d flown to. It hadn’t occurred to me to check up on him.

“Frank’s little kingdom is still there,” The Phin said. “It’s still in one piece, for a few more days, maybe. Because the kid’s missing. Frank Junior might come back with fresh muscle, put the house in order, so people are hesitating. Who cares if he comes back. Someone could step in there, and just take over.” He shrugged. “Wait another week and it’ll be five thousand kingdoms, each a fucking block long.”

I frowned. “You’re thinking I step in there?”

He threw his hands up. “Why not? You know Frank’s operations. You know everything. And you collect, kiddo.” he waved his hands again, leaning forward to reclaim his drink with a moist-sounding grunt. “We had our differences, sure, and you do fucking owe me restitution. But for years you paid that fat Irish bastard like interest on a bank account. He used to brag about you. You know how to make people pay you when the last thing in the fuckin’ world they want to do is pay you. That’s the secret, kiddo. You cracked the code.”

I nodded, thinking it over. It was ridiculous … but it wasn’t. It was what I did, just writ large. “And you want to back me?”

He winked. “Sure. I can’t take on Frank’s territory, his people wouldn’t like it. I’d spend more fuckin’ money and time conquering neighborhoods than anything else. Fucking gunplay, body bags, my friends on the force getting cold feet.” He made a disgusted noise and snorted. “You’ll have some unhappy folks, but most of ‘em know you and could work for you. But you don’t have enough seed money, or muscle. You don’t have political contacts. You were never sitting at the table, huh? So, I’ll be your fairy godfather. I’ll stake you. You need muscle, call me and I’ll send you more legbreakers, gunmen, whatever. You get into a spot of trouble, I can clear it up. All you do is step into Frank’s shoes and keep things runnin’, and be my vassal.”

I nodded. “And tithe to you. How much?”

“Thirty beans,” he said immediately. “I’ll be workin’ hard for you, kiddo. Thirty off the top to me. But I’m giving you a fucking territory it took McKenna twenty-five years to build. All you gotta do is not fuck it up.” He shrugged, slugging back his drink. “It’s worth it, I think. You think on it. Let me know tomorrow.”

He stood up, and the kitten suddenly leaped up onto the table in front of me and sat down, sniffing the creamer and trying to figure out how to get its snout into it. I watched The Phin huff his way through the bar towards his goons. At the doorway leading to the outer bar he spun, raised his cane, and winked.

“Good to see ya, Kiddo,” he said. “If Billy Bumbles ever learns English, tell him I said hi.”

Billy snorted and extended a crooked middle finger over his shoulder without turning around.

The Phin and his boys trooped out, and I picked up the kitten and leaned back in my seat, putting Stanley in my lap and dragging a hand over him. The cat rolled onto its back and grabbed my hand with its paws, pulling me to its tiny mouth and biting. It’s tiny teeth didn’t hurt at all, and I could feel it purring. I looked over at The Bumble, who looked back at me, shrugged and returned his attention to the paper.

It could be done. I hadn’t thought about it at all, but now that someone had said it to me, I could see it, how it would work. I knew everything I needed to know. I thought about the work involved in getting everyone in line, everyone paying up the right amounts on time, and my heart beat a little faster, saliva flooding my mouth. It was bloody work, but it was work I was good at, it was work I enjoyed. And there would be a lot of it.

I looked down at Stanley, who had rolled back onto his belly and suffered me to pet him, still purring, his eyes almost closed and his pink nose wet and glistening. I rolled him around in my hands and felt their power, the energy I had in me. I could hurt the cat, I knew. It would be easy; I could feel him vibrating with energy, nerve endings and blood vessels. I opted instead to scratch behind his ear, making him rub his head into the palm of my hand with pleasure.

I could hurt him, but I chose not to.

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Collections Chapter 37

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

37.

Frank went down easy, collapsing under me like he was made of papier-mâché with an undignified squawk of shock. The gun went off between us, and then it was just gunshots in the air, a drumline of them like bombs going off, punctuated by shouts, like dogs barking. Frank was stronger than a lifetime of rare steaks and bourbon would have led you to believe, struggling beneath me, trying to bring the gun to bear on me again. I had no leverage; with both hands on his wrist I put my weight into play to hold his arm down. After a few seconds of this he reached around and took hold of my hair, yanking back suddenly and viciously, tearing a clump out by the root and jerking my head back painfully.

Then The Bumble crashed into my field of vision, leaping onto Frank’s chest with surprising grace and speed, bending over him, big arms working. Frank started kicking and twitching beneath us like a madman, the gun in his hand leaping like it had a brain of its own, wriggling and twisting in my hands while the noise level grew and grew around us.

Then, with a sudden heave, The Bumble’s shoulders rolled and Frank jerked beneath us, then fell still. His arm went limp under my hands and the gun slipped from his fingers.

I stared down at it, panting, sweat pouring into my eyes. I looked up at The Bumble’s back; he remained turned away from me, shoulders heaving as he sucked in breath. I’d always known Billy had come up the ranks, just like any other big guy with no skills except his muscles and a willingness to take orders, but I’d never really thought about what that meant.

As I stared, Billy whirled and took hold of my arm, scooping up Frank’s gun and dragging me behind one of the Rape Vans, bullets digging up the pavement at our feet as we scrambled behind it. We leaned against the van and struggled for breath, and suddenly The Bumble was laughing. We looked at each other, and I found myself smiling back into his red, boulder-like face.

After a second, his eyes started following something over my shoulder, and the smile faded. Silently, he pointed.

I followed his gaze and saw Alt James, suitcase in hand and Alt Rusch a few steps behind, struggling to keep up with the big man’s long strides. They were just running away. The cops and Frank’s boys were spitting bullets at each other, popping up from behind cover in a weird little ballet, oblivious, and Alt James was just walking away. I suddenly remembered the strange, distant noises I’d heard right before Alt James had shown up.

“Motherfucker,” I breathed. He was using an alternate world to teleport around. Someplace like where he’d tried to leave me, empty and abandoned, with no traffic or cops to slow him down, but with the same infrastructure and layout. Zap himself over there, drive wherever he wanted to go, then zap himself back. Avoid obstacles, get the drop on people—he was going to disappear into the night like a ghost and show up again on my doorstep, grinning, implacable.

I looked up and grabbed the door handle of the van, hauling it open and throwing myself inside, scrambling over broken glass to the driver’s side. The keys hung in the ignition; as I turned them, the passenger door slammed and I found The Bumble sitting there, carefully buckling his seatbelt. I had a moment of affection for Billy: He smelled like onions and he thought hot dogs were food, and maybe he’d started off life as Frank’s eyes and ears on me, but fuck if he hadn’t turned out to be my best friend in the whole fucking universe.

The van started up, smooth and powerful. Trust criminals to always have tip-top vehicles. A spray of bullets ventilated the side door as I put it into gear, making me jump. I slammed my foot down on the gas and we lurched into a skidding, screeching motion, clipping one of the cops’ SUVs as we staggered out of the OK Corral, another spray of bullets trailing us and shattering my driver’s side mirror. I reminded myself that even if I was, in fact, some sort of weird immortal, Billy wasn’t, and I didn’t want to end our freshly minted love affair by getting him shot to death in Newark.

I eased up on the gas and circled the van around, searching for Alt James. I spotted him on the edge of the parking lot, a hundred feet away, getting into his Cadillac.

“Hang on,” I said, and spun the wheel, goosing the van into a tight turn until I had the Caddy in my sights, then mashing the pedal down and fishtailing for a few seconds, the van leaping forward just as I saw Alt James and Rusch slamming their doors, brake lights popping on. The van felt like a coffin rattling towards the incinerator as the speedometer inched past forty, fifty, fifty-five, but I kept the gas on and clench the wheel until my knuckles hurt.

The Caddy leaped into life and immediately peeled out, turning sharply left and accelerating. I started to turn the van and cursed, feeling it lose its grip, pulling my leg up and tapping the brakes a little, easing it into a wider turn and loosing seconds on the deal. The van ran like a top but it was a fucking box on wheels and didn’t want to do anything strenuous. By the time I had the Caddy’s brake lights in view again he’d gained twenty or thirty feet on me, and at sixty miles per hour I wasn’t gaining on him. We were both, however, gaining on the fencing around the parking lot. We’d crash the chain fence easy enough, but I tried to imagine the van’s suspension surviving the low concrete wall at sixty miles and hour and I couldn’t do it.

The streetlamps flashed by like silver trees, the noise of their passing roaring in through the shattered door windows.

Suddenly I could see an arm poking out of the passenger side of the Cadillac, quickly retrieved. As I watched, the suitcase of cash was thrust out and held for a moment out the car window.

“Ah, shit,” The Bumble said.

The suitcase flew back towards us, and I jerked the wheel but too late, the windshield disintegrating into a mist of shards. The suitcase clipped my shoulder and tumbled into the empty rear of the van as we went into a spin, tires squealing. We smacked into one of the streetlamps and everything came to a sudden stop, my internal organs swimming around with unspent inertia, the engine dying with a wheeze.

I looked over at Billy. He was looking back at me, his big calloused hands held up in front of him in a comical gesture of shock.

“That motherfucker just threw a half million dollars at us,” he said.

I started laughing, grabbing hold of the keys and turning the ignition. After a gurgling hesitation, the engine roared back into life. I floored the gas pedal again and the van staggered forward with a groan of tearing metal. Mashing my foot down hard on the pedal, I crept up on the Caddy, the whole van shaking and shuddering, air blowing in and moving around us like a living thing, connected and sinuous. We pulled up alongside the Caddy and I looked down at them; Alt Rusch stared back at me in abject terror, her wrinkled face white, her mouth open. She was saying something, her mouth just moving in silence, as she stared up at me. Her arms were spread, like she was trying to hold herself inside the car despite a pressure trying to expel her.

Beyond her, I could see Alt James’ hand moving over something between the front seats, something with glowing lights.

The moment I saw it, the noise began: A deep, loud screeching noise that sank into my chest and vibrated my bones, smacked into my head and gave me a headache. I winced and the van veered and wobbled as I lost control for a split-second. Grabbing the wheel tightly, I checked the speedometer—ninety-five—and leaned forward, watching the fence approach at disturbing speed.

“He’s going to pop!” The Bumble shouted suddenly.

I looked back at the Caddy. It suddenly looked … blurry, as if it was fading away. The noise got louder, piercing—I imagined it was shaking the van even more, that we were going to start popping bolts if I didn’t shut it down soon.

I looked from the Caddy to the fence. Then I looked over the Cadillac and saw one of the lampposts zooming towards us, a few feet past the Cadillac. I sucked in breath and wrenched the steering wheel to the left.

Tires screaming, we veered sharply and hit the other car with a hollow thud, bouncing me in my seat. The wheel jerked and moved under my hands as the Caddy turned with me, the lamppost right there, immediately in front of it. The noise had reached a volume that made me want to stick pencils in my ears, and then there was an explosion, or the sound of an explosion, and the lamppost flashed by and suddenly there was nothing resisting the van and we spun.

In sudden silence, I felt my stomach lurch inside me and I realized we were in the air. The sky flashed by, and then a streetlight, like a dim, orange moon. The silence was wonderful, the sense of weightlessness was wonderful. It was like I’d hit a ramp at seventy-five miles per hour and launched myself into orbit.

We hit the ground with a bang and the steering wheel hit me in the face with a wet snap, pain flashing through my head like a spike being driven home, wonderful, clarifying. The van skidded on its side for five seconds or so, then smacked into another lamppost and stopped dead, glass shattering and raining down on me, my whole body flopping once like a ragdoll. Then we were still, and everything was silent.

I unbuckled my seatbelt as The Bumble pushed the passenger door up and open. He climbed up onto the side of the van and reached down, taking hold of my wrist and hauling me up. I felt jittery and weak, like I’d been in a coma for a year and was trying to walk. My head was ringing, and blood was pouring down from my shattered nose in a disturbing way. The pain felt good. I wanted to reach up and squeeze my nose, see how bad it was, but resisted. There would be time enough for scab-peeling and bruise-squeezing later.

Dizzy, I patted Billy on the shoulder and jumped down to the pavement. My legs gave out and I fell, hitting my head again and making my vision swim. I started to laugh a little, and tried hard to swallow it as I pushed myself back to my feet, my hands, I realized, cut up and bloody. Glass clung to my coat and fell off in random showers as I moved, limping heavily towards the lamppost I’d steer him into.

The Caddy was gone. Tire marks started about fifteen feet away and stopped abruptly right before the concrete base—he’d managed to jump into some other place, some other version of Newark. Was there a lamppost there? Had he suddenly materialized out of nowhere and slammed into it at full speed and killed himself? He had to have. He would have been heading for a Newark he could still navigate, a Newark with the same streets, the same layout—the same lampposts.

I turned and staggered a few steps to my left, almost losing my balance. Billy was walking towards me, smiling. He looked like he didn’t have a scratch on him, like he’d been sitting on the sidelines watching.

“Well,” he said, “we got this, at least.” He held the battered but still-closed suitcase up in front of him. It was silence for a second as I stood there shaking and laughing, no gunfire or shouting behind us. And then, dim, distant: Sirens.

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Collections Chapter 36

Photos by Ali Karimiboroujeni and Aleksandar Pasaric

I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Collections every week throughout 2023. Download links below.

36.

Alt James noticed me looking at him and winked, making my leg twitch with the desire to kick him in the teeth. I imagined there might be an alternate universe where that would be possible, where I might take someone’s magic car through the noisiest invisible tunnel in the universe and track down some unsuspecting version of James and just assault him, but it wasn’t this universe. In this universe I was unarmed and standing next to The Bumble, and we were surrounded by Frank’s men on one side and the remnants of James’ cops on the other, guns fucking everywhere, dead bodies still staring in shock, chaos and open wounds.

I wasn’t entirely clear how Alt James had gotten his band of dirty cops to trust him, although having a dead body of his twin probably helped a little. There were only three of them left, led by the now-grimy and disheveled woman, short, a deep cut on her forehead and strands of dull brown hair hanging in her face. She watched everything from under her pale eyebrows, head tilted down, and looked fucking crazy, like she was going to go home and arrest some graffiti kids in her neighborhood and beat the living shit out of them just to relieve some stress.

It had started to rain, an annoying misty drizzle that you could ignore until you realized you weighed an extra fifty pounds because of the water your clothes had absorbed. Everyone else stood like they had more important things to worry about, like a fresh gunfight breaking out and everyone getting killed, so it didn’t seem smart to complain. I just stood there with the rain making me blink, getting in under my collar and dripping down my back. Everything had gone to fucking hell, but there was always hope things would go to hell again and all my problems would end up killing each other as planned.

About two blocks away, a car turned the corner, headlights washing over us. Everyone stiffened, but Alt James stepped forward immediately, hands up in front of him.

“These are my associates, is all. Mr. McKenna, let’s stay calm and do some business.”

Frank raised a hand and his crew did absolutely nothing, but that at least included not shooting at me, so I was pretty happy with the result. Everyone kept telling me I was immortal, but I had little desire to find out by direct experiment.

“All right,” Frank said laconically, smiling a little.

We waited in silence as the car pulled into the lot, rolled to a halt, and killed its lights. Everyone twitched a little when the doors popped open, but no one moved as Alt Rusch and the young red haired woman I’d met in the back of a car outside the Templar emerged, looking clean and pressed. They didn’t approach right away, just hung back.

“Go to this truck,” Alt James shouted over his shoulder, keeping his smile on Frank, “and bring me that suitcase.”

His version of Rusch glanced at the girl, shrugged, and set off, unlit cigarette dangling from her mouth. She looked thinner and more wasted than my Rusch, her skin looser, more brown spots on her. She opened the passenger door of The Second Coming’s SUV and rummaged around, finally emerging with his suitcase full of cash, holding it with both hands and dropping it at Alt James’ feet like a lead weight. He grinned and glanced down at it.

“All right, Mr. McKenna, let’s make a deal. I got a lot of money in this case you can have. It’ll clear up your losses, and make up for your trouble to boot.”

Frank’s eyes flicked down to the suitcase and stayed there. “I’m curious what a bunch of civil servants thinks is a lot of money.”

James nodded and kicked the suitcase, sliding it forcefully into Alt Rusch’s legs. She yelped and jumped; all of the assembled goons snickered a little, eliciting a venomous glare from Alt Rusch I tried, and failed, to imagine on my own version of the woman. This version of Rusch would slit your throat for gas money, I thought.

The old woman knelt down and snapped the case open. The bills were still neatly stacked inside. Frank stared at it for a second too long, and then shrugged, looking back up at James.

“All right,” he said with the same careless drawl. “What would you want for that kind of money?”

Alt James gestured at Alt Rusch without looking at her, and she closed the case again and stood up to kick it back over to him. He was an impressive sight, tall and armored up, a big chrome-plated auto tucked in his waistband, the god of fucking war. I saw the cops behind them exchanging some looks—not liking that James was giving away that much cash, not liking that they didn’t know what the fuck was going on, not liking any of this shit.

“Wait a fucking second,” the woman said, stepping around to cut between Frank and Alt James. “Wait a fucking second. Captain, you got dead cops back there. Right behind you. That your fucking twin killed. And you’re just conducting business as fucking usual with this piece of trash?”

She was livid, and a small fire of hope lit inside me. Maybe this was going to go off the rails and get bloody again after all.

Alt James didn’t look at her. “Walker, we can discuss this later, okay? You all came into this knowing there was risk. You all are gonna retire young riding on my back. You got complaints, go talk to Internal Affairs, see where it gets you.”

She shook her head. “This shit—”

“Fucking cops,” Alt James snapped. “You’re all fucking the same everywhere. Think you can take the money and still set the tone. But the money sets the fucking tone. You want to take a vote and walk on out, go on ahead, but be fucking quiet about it, huh?”

She didn’t seem inclined to move. “This isn’t what we signed up for. This isn’t what you used to be all about. Now, we—”

With a fast, almost casual move of his arm, Alt James drew the shiny chrome automatic from his waistband, pushed it against her shoulder, and pulled the trigger. The noise was terrible, like a sonic boom, and her shoulder exploded, red pulp sprouting like a geyser. She seemed to think about it for a moment and then spin around from the impact, her other hand fluttering up to clamp down on the wound as she stumbled and staggered, falling over her own feet and landing with a wail of pain on the floor.

Behind him, the other cops all jerked as one. He pointed the gun at the sky and pulled the trigger again without turning around. “Any of you feel like you gotta express your displeasure, this ain’t the time or place.” He waited a beat, then lowered the gun and shrugged a little at Frank, rolling his eyes and grinning.

“What I want,” he said evenly, like he hadn’t just shot a cop in front of witnesses, “is your boy. Falken. Bodily.” He shrugged. “Alive or dead, don’t matter.”

Frank glanced at the cop on the ground, being helped by two of the burly, bald cops in jeans and tight T-shirts, both of whom looked like they’d just lost their cherry on shitting their pants. I was enjoying the show, seeing these assholes who strutted around like their badges made them untouchable feeling a little heat. I liked watching them squirm.

“All right,” Frank said, looking back at Alt James. I could almost see the thought bubble above his head: He thought this was the easiest money he’d ever make. “That works for me. One little problem, though, Captain: I don’t have Falken. I gave up on that shithead a long time ago.”

A feeling of hot frustration started to burn in me. All this, and both these motherfuckers were going to walk away, and I’d likely end up with a bullet in my head for my trouble.

“These two know where he is,” James said, cheerful. He looked around. “Looks to me like you were planning on beating some shit out of them tonight anyway. Why not see if that shakes loose? I can wait. I’m a patient man.”

Frank looked at us, his face still. His Thinking Face, I knew. He chewed on something for a few seconds, and then smiled. “Chino,” he said. “Billy Bumble, bring ‘im over here, okay?”

I tensed up. Chino, daydreaming, took a moment to get his fat ass in motion, and came up to Billy gun in hand, which was bright. Under normal laboratory conditions, The Bumble could bend Chino into interesting shapes and use him as furniture. The gun evened things out. Billy gave him a shrug as he approached, and stepped over to Frank without assistance, his jowly face blank, his eyes sleepy. The Bumble wasn’t going to let some fat asshole like Chino manhandle him.

Frank nodded at The Bumble. “How you doin’, Billy?”

The Bumble shrugged, massive shoulders rolling. Frank nodded cheerfully. “Chino, give me your piece.”

Chino handed it over. Frank made a show of weighing it in his hand for a moment, then raised his arm, putting his shiny automatic against Billy’s forehead. Everything got quiet; even the cops stopped their cursing and muttering to stare. I stiffened and started to take a step forward, but Chino and the rest of Frank’s mutts turned and covered me, almost casually. Chino even had the balls to wag a finger at me, shaking his head with a grin.

“Billy,” Frank said, sounding almost tired, his injured hand cradled up by his chest, his belly straining the faith of his shirt buttons. “I’m fuckin’ tired of this, and I hate bein’ in fucking Newark, so tell me where the fuck you got Falken stashed and then we all go home.”

The Bumble’s eyes had opened slightly when Frank had put the gun against his head, but now were their usual sleepy slits. He shrugged. “Can’t do that, Frank.”

I put my eyes on Frank and kept them there, trying to judge his body language. I couldn’t believe he would fucking shoot Billy Bumbles like that, but then Billy had been cast out; he wasn’t part of Frank’s crew any more, so it wasn’t against the rules or any bullshit like that. And then it occurred to me that this was a process: He’d ask Billy, and if Billy refused to answer he’d shoot Billy in the head, and then he’d ask me, and Billy would be proof that he was serious. He’d chosen Billy because he thought Billy was the tougher one between us. And he was probably right.

My heart started pounding.

Frank nodded, and shoved the barrel of the gun hard against Billy’s forehead, making the big man wince. “Sure you can. One last chance, or I fucking blow the top of your head off.”

Billy shrugged again, but didn’t bother answering. Frank’s whole body kind of sagged, a defeated sort of movement, and I realized immediately he was going to do it.

I took a deep breath, told myself I was immortal, and launched myself at Frank.

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