Rue the Night
© Grace Bridges 2015
Cover Design: Grace Bridges
Published by Splashdown Books, New Zealand
All rights reserved
https://www.splashdownbooks.com
Join my Mailing List for monthly updates and free stories!
Rue the Night
Grace Bridges
It was half a minute to ten o’clock; the evening smoko break would be over in seconds. Shane McDermott’s internal body clock told him so as precisely as if he were watching a timepiece—which, in a way, he was, as the computer components embedded throughout his flesh were attuned to universal time. He wiggled his metal digits and reflections from its shiny titanium danced on the nearby building. Heck, even his little finger probably knew what time it was.
He cast an envious gaze at the cluster of other guards, his unenhanced colleagues, and sighed. None came too close to him where he hulked on the opposite end of the wide steps. They slouched and rested, indistinct figures identified by the glowing tips of their cigarettes, scattered about near the door to the police station. He supposed he must be fairly frightening, with his instant-kill augmentations, the bullets ready inside his finger, the death-blow awaiting in his fist. If only they knew how he hated putting his enhancements to use, never mind how hard it was to get blood out of metal joints.
Alone, he sat in the circle of light emanating from the implants in his forehead. He resisted the urge to scratch at the skin around them. It would only make the itching worse.
In the periphery of his vision, something moved. He turned his head and to his surprise and horror, locked eyes with a scrawny woman frozen at the street corner. She peered around the weathered red-brick wall of the building. Her clothing was ragged and insufficient for this cold. Her hair, tied at the nape, escaped in wisps as if she’d been running.
She gaped at him, confusion and compassion mingled on her face in a way that strongly reminded him of the last time he’d seen his mother; she’d probably never seen a cyborg before. Surely she knew the danger in being spotted this close to curfew, yet she did not duck back into the shadow.
For his part, the horror stemmed from the fact that if she was still there in twenty more seconds, he was expected to kill her.
He glanced at the officers. Apparently none of them had seen her—perhaps there was still a chance. He got to his feet, pushed through the men lounging on the entrance steps, and turned to face them. “Okeydoke, fellas, time to be back at your desks.”
The guards grumbled, but did as he said, extinguishing and pocketing their half-smoked cigarettes before shuffling past him into the station. Once, he dared raise his eyes to the corner. The woman was still there, and now he made out a cloth-covered bundle in her arms. Shane’s clock counted the seconds to curfew.
All at once it dawned on him why she’d been skulking around the back of the police station at such a dangerous hour. In view of the food shortage, and the relative abundance of scraps from the station’s mess, the officers had begun a compost heap in the lifeless yard, thinking that perhaps the decaying organics would do a miracle on the useless soil. And now this wretch had discovered the garbage and stolen from it to feed herself.
Shane allowed himself the tiniest of smiles as he dropped his gaze and entered the building last of all. He didn’t think the compost scheme had much chance of success—so far it had mostly attracted rats—and even if it did rejuvenate the earth, there would still be the problem of the seeds that refused to grow. The out-of-control terminator gene—like a contraceptive for plants—had already invaded and sterilised most of the world’s edible growing things and resulted in the current shortages.
Let the woman have her slop. Rather her than the rats.
He grasped the doorhandle to shut it behind him, with a distinct clink of metal on metal. He stared at his hand, and the way the neon tubes were mirrored in its surface as he turned it this way and that. After all this time he still couldn’t quite believe what they’d done to him—even though he had to spend a good deal of his off time polishing his various metal parts.
He wasn’t a killer.
Not really. He killed often, of course, but he was not fervent about it as some were.
“You ready to look over tonight’s route with me?” Speak of the devil. It was Fiona Butler, his one cyborg colleague in Belfast, and the most enthusiastic executioner he’d ever had the misfortune to meet.
He let his hand drop to his side, and his stomach lurched as its weight, greater than that of his natural hand, asserted itself and briefly set him off-kilter as it exerted tension on the muscles and nerve endings in the stump just below his elbow. “Aye, let’s run through it now.”
His mind counted out the passing of the seconds. The scavenging woman should be far away by now if she knew what was good for her, but he didn’t want to let Fiona start them out on the patrol too soon, just in case. He would have to edit his memory units so that there would be no evidence of the woman at his next sync, which was…at midnight.
They approached the map. Far from attaining the Senate’s claim to high technology, it was merely a collection of detailed paper street maps pasted together on the wall to create an image of the entire city. Each night someone marked off an approximate square and used a fat pen to designate a route that would cover all of the streets in that sector, with coloured pins to show the start and end. Shane hadn’t ever figured out exactly whose job it was—he supposed it was one of the administrative officers. He couldn’t bring himself to care, even though that person was the one who defined how he spent his nights and quite possibly, the identity of the people he would have to kill.
Completed map squares now covered most of the southwestern suburbs, but there were plenty more where they’d never walked a beat. At this rate, it would take years before they’d have to start over.
This particular base, although a few miles out from the city centre, was once advantageous in that it had been fortified by a tall wall that enclosed its yard and buildings. Now, of course, the walls had tumbled down around them and nobody had the resources for repair, least of all the distant World Senate they all worked for. Hence the ability of street strays to get right inside and pilfer the waste.
Since Shane and Fiona were the only two cyborgs in the city, they were mainly deployed on night patrol to enforce the curfew and let themselves be seen through grimy windows and gaps in curtains. If they came upon any person at large between the hours of ten and five, a single bullet from Fiona’s metal finger would finish that life story forever. He was partly glad she was so forward in her duties, as it meant he bore fewer murders on his own conscience, although he was still complicit by his very existence.
When Fiona had scanned the route map into the ocular implant hidden by her shades, they prepared to leave. Shane did not possess that particular enhancement, not that he minded keeping both his own eyes. Not at all. He couldn’t say the same of his hands.
They exited the building into a persistent drizzle and walked the length of the street with its enormous wall: eight feet of brick topped with eight feet of steel panels and then eight feet more of barbed wire. It was what the people had decided was necessary to stop the violence, a hundred years ago, and some said the feud still simmered beneath the surface. Never mind that the World Senate had made Irish reunification a moot point—the grudges of their great-grandfathers would not quickly crumble.
Shane felt a chill in his replaced extremities—the technicians assured him it was only ghosting on the part of the flesh limbs that had been discarded. He hated the thought that they had just been thrown away, as he’d been rather fond of his feet and h
is right hand: a fondness he considered to be not entirely unreasonable. Sometimes he inexplicably missed that one warty toe or the strange shape of the fingernail he’d almost sawn off as a child. He shivered, but not enough for his colleague to notice. The new parts should have been built with integrated heating, he thought for the umpteenth time. But they were made for no-nonsense functionality, not coddling of amputees.
Just as well the cyborgs’ metal parts were rustproof, otherwise they’d not last long here. Ireland might be relatively warm for its latitude, due to the surrounding seas and the winds that came with them, but the same factors brought frequent dampness. Subjectively, it could be very cold even this close to summer.
Fiona guided them along the designated roads according to the plan in her heads-up display. Everywhere was still and silent except for their heavy footfalls, though Shane did spy twitches of curtains here and there. The rows of houses stood watch over roads that were thankfully empty as they should be. Shane liked to imagine the family life going on inside the homes—a life now so far out of his reach that he could only dream of it.
Sure, those families were in want of the most basic of their needs, but they were together and those who came through these times would remain together in future if things ever