Heavy Weather Read online

  The nozzle slid its way down a narrow road of pain along his throat. Alex felt the fleshy valve within his chest leap and flap as the tube touched and penetrated. Then the numbness struck, and a great core of meat behind his heart simply lost sensation, went into nothingness, like a core mechanically punched from an apple.

  His eyes filled with tears. He heard, more than saw, Dr. Mirabi touching taps. Then the heat came.

  He'd never known that blood was so hot. The fluid was hotter than blood, and much, much heavier, like fizzing, creamy, molten lead. He could see the fluid moving into him through the tube. It was chemical-colored, aqua blue. "Breathe!" Dr. Mirabi shouted.

  Alex heaved for air. A bizarre reverberating belch tore free from the back of his throat, something like the cry of a monster bullfrog. For an instant he tried to laugh; his diaphragm heaved futilely at the liquid weight within him, and went still.

  "El nina tiene un bulto en la garganta," said Concepcion, conversationally. She placed her latex-gloved hand against his forehead. "Muy doloroso."

  "Poco a poco," Dr. Mirabi said, gesturing. The worm gear rustled beneath the table and Alex rose in place, liquid shifting within him with the gut-bulging inertia of a nine-course meal. Air popped in bursts from his clamped lips and a hot gummy froth rose against his upper palate.

  "Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"

  Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and he felt another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinking ancient bubbles like something from the bottom of LaBrea.

  Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up his neck, his cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to be sick. He felt lovely. He felt free. He felt without constraint. He felt pretty sure that he was about to die.

  He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or last words, or an eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. His lungs were like two casts of and bonemeal, each filled to brimming with hot ber. His muscles heaved against the taut liquid bags two fists clenching two tennis balls, and his ears road and things went black. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat, thud-thud, thud-thud, each coau shock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs with booming subaqueous clarity.

  And then the beat stopped too.

  ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of her target, on the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour in line outside the clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over the border. The customers lined outside the clinic were the seediest, creepiest, most desperate people she'd ever seen who were not actual criminals. Jane was familiar with the look of actual criminals, because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been emptied of felons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergency weather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, the actual criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted criminals, in their tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it down to Nuevo Laredo, because they'd be marooned on the far side of the Rio Grande by their 6overnment tracking software. Nobody in the clinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were clearly the kind of people who had many good friends wearing them.

  All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinister breathing masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or to avoid spreading an infection that they already had. Or probably just to conceal their identities while they bought drugs.

  The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antiseptic medical white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-ons with vivid designer colors.

  The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presence of a pair of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off the backs of the paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up the clinic steps, through the double doors, and to the barred and bulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.

  There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexican heroin." Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there being little demand for this legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.

  Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath the window. The pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studied the results on the network link, and began to show real interest. Jane was politely abstracted from the line and introduced to the pharmacist's superior, who escorted her up to his office. There he showed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a designer endorphin a thousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned down his offer of a free trial injection.

  When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, the supervisor's face clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, and Jane was shown out the clinic's back entrance, and told not to return.

  Keep It Simple, Stupid. The famous KISS acronym had always been Jane's favorite design principle. If you need access, keep it simple. Bribing the staff of the clinic sounded like the simplest solution to her problem. But it wasn't.

  At least one of the staff seemed happy enough to take her bribe money. Over a long-distance phone line from Texas, Jane had managed to subvert the clinic's receptionist. The receptionist was delighted to take Jane's electronic funds in exchange for ten minutes' free run on the clinic's internal phone system.

  And accessing the clinic's floor plans had been pretty simple too; they'd turned out to be Mexican public records. It had been useful, too, to sneak into the building under the simple pretext of a drug buy. That had con-finned Jane's ideas of the clinic's internal layout.

  Nothing about Alex was ever simple, though. Having talked to her brother on the phone, Jane now knew that Alex, who should have been her ally inside the enemy gates, was, as usual, worse than useless.

  Carol and Greg-Jane's favorite confidants within the Storm Troupe-had urged her to stay as simple as possible.

  Forget any romantic ninja break-and-enter muscle stuff.

  That kind of stunt hardly ever worked, even when the U.S.

  Army tried it. It was smarter just to show up in Nuevo Laredo in person, whip out a nicely untraceable debit card, and tell the night guard that it was ~iejanaro Unger out the door, or No bay dinero. Chances were that the guard would spring Alex in exchange for, say, three months' salary, local rates. Everybody could pretend later that the kid had escaped the building under his own power. That scheme was nice and straightforward. It was pretty hard to prosecute criminally. And if it ended up in a complete collapse and debacle and embarrassment, then it would look a lot better, later.

  By stark contrast, breaking into a Mexican black-market clinic and kidnapping a patient was the sort of overly complex maneuver that almost never looked better later.

  There'd been a time in Jane Unger's life when she'd cared a lot about "later." But that time was gone, and "later" had lost all its charm. She had traveled twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she was on foot, alone, in a dark alley at night in a foreign country, preparing to assault a hospital single-handed. And unless they caught her on. the spot, she was pretty sure that she was going to get away with it.

  This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called "Salsipuedes," or "Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modest clinic, it had two other thriving private hospitals stuffed with gullible gnngos, as well as a monster public hospital, a big septic killing zone very poorly managed by the remains of the Mexican government. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past, marked with a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Her unpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Just like the jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to see that jitter, the fear and the energy racing along her nerves. She knew that the jitter would melt off like dry ice once the action started. She had learned that about herself in the past year. It was a good thing to know.

  Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight, cdlular phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to her webbing belt, hidden inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipme
nt check was a calm-ritual. She zipped the paper suit up to the neck, over icr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain white antiseptic mask.

  Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.

  Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half the city block went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearly there had been some changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipal power grid. Jane Unger's first terrorist structure hit had turned Out to be less than surgical.

  "Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were always hacking around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegal network linkups around here. . . . They called the hookups diablitos, "little devils," another pretty apt name, considering that the world was well on its way to hell. . . . Anyway, it wouldn't kill them to repair one little outage.

  Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Greg would drop macho hints about his military background doing structure hits. Jane had never quite believed him, before this.

  Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trail boots. She cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles, then ghosted across the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damply underfoot. She stepped up three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-black akove at the clinic's rear exit, and checked the street behind her. No cars, no people, no visible witnesses... . Jane pulled a translucent rain hood over her head, cinched and knotted it. Then she peeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough plastic surgical gloves.

  She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.

  The clinic's door opened with a shudder.

  Jane had structure-hit the door earlier, on her way out of the clinic. She'd distracted her security escort for two vital seconds and craftily jammed the exit's elaborate keypad lock with a quick, secret gush of glue. Jane had palmed the aerosol glue can, a tiny thing not much bigger than a shotgun cartridge. Glue spray was one of Carol's favorite tricks, something Carol had taught her. Carol could do things with glue spray that were halfway to witchcraft.

  Despite the power outage, the door's keypad lock was still alive on its battery backup-but the door mistakenly thought it was working. Smart machines were smart enough to make some really dumb blunders.

  Jane closed the door gently behind her. It was chilly inside the building, pitch-black and silent and sepulchral. A good thing, because she'd immediately begun to sweat like crazy in the stifling gloves, hood, overalls, mask, and boots. Her armpits prickled with terror sweat as if she were being tattooed there. Cops-or worse yet, private-industry investigators-could do plenty with the tiniest bits of evidence these days. Fingerprints, shoeprints, stray hairs, a speck of clothing fiber, one lousy wisp of DNA...

  Jane reached inside her paper suit through a slit behind its hip pocket. She unclipped the penlight from her webbing belt. The little light clicked faithfully under her thumb and a reddish glow lit the hail. Jane took a step down the hall, two, three, and then the fear left her completely, and she began to glide across the ceramic tiling, skid-dancing in her damp paper boot covers.

  She hadn't expected burglary to be such a visceral thrill. She'd been inside plenty of ruined buildings-just like everyone else from her generation-but she'd never broken her way into a live one. A rush of wicked pleasure touched her like a long cold kiss on the back of the neck.

  Jane tried the first door to her left. The knob slid beneath her latexed fingers-locked. Jane had a handheld power jigsaw on the webbing belt that would slice through interior door locks like a knife through a wedding cake, and for a moment her left hand worked inside the paper suit and she touched the jigsaw's lovely checkered rubber grip. But she stopped. She wisely resisted the urge to break into the room just for the thrill of it. Would they be locking Alex into a room at night? Not likely. Not night-owl Alex.

  Stubborn, mean-tempered, night-owl Alex. Even at death's door, Alex wouldn't put up with that.

  Next door. Unlocked. Room empty.

  Next door. It was unlocked too. Some kind of janitor's supply, rags and jugs and paper. A good place to start a diversionary fire if you needed to.

  Next door. Unlocked. The room stank. Like cough medicine cut with absinthe. Little red-eyed machines on the walls and floor, still alive on their battery backup. Jane's dim red light played over a big empty bed, then on a startling knot of hideous shadow-some kind of half-wilted monster houseplant.

  She hadn't found her brother yet, but she could sense his presence. She slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her back against it. The reek in the room pried at her sinuses like the bouquet off a shot of cheap whiskey. Jane held her breath, playing the penlight around. A television. Some kind of huge clothes hanger like an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe. . . scattered tape cassettes and paper magazines

  Something was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. It was coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane stepped toward the machine and played her light across the floor. Some kind of bedpan there.

  Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a dark nasty liquid, some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like fine coffee grounds had sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organic scum threading the top, just like a vile egg-drop soup. As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of the stuff plummeted into the pot.

  Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. A human mouth there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff blue tongue. The head was swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap at the forehead. Some kind of soft rubber harness bar was jammed into the gaping jaws. .

  They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shoulders strapped, both his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped down against the padded surface. His knees were bound, his ankles cuffed. The whole rack was tilted skyward on a set of chromed springs and hinges. Up at the very top, his pale bare feet were like two skinned animals. Down at the bottom, his strap-swaddled head was just above the floor.

  They were draining him.

  Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved hand against the mask at her mouth.

  She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then she fought the disgust, and she crushed that too.

  Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved hand at the side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his sweat.

  He was alive.

  Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. The fear and disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hot surge of hatred. This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage, for the sons of bitches who were used to using it. Jane didn't have time to learn.

  She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved the whole contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, and Alex, onto the mattress, with one strong angry heave.

  The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches on his wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-top lock-down nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all four of the evil things in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whine and a muted chatter-with a sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic. Not too much noise, really, but it sounded pretty damned loud inside a blacked-out building. Someone might come to investigate. Jane patted the glue pistol in its holster at the back of her webbing belt.

  When the last strap went, Alex tumbled off the rack into her lap. She rolled her brother faceup and checked his eyeballs. Cold, cold as a mackerel, even while his fevered skin was as hot as the shaved hide of a lab rabbit.

  She'd have to carry him out.

  Well, Alex had been pretty easy to carry the last time she had tried it. When he'd been five years old, and she'd been ten. Jane knelt on the bed and methodically clipped her jigsaw back onto her belt, inside her paper Suit. And then she thought somberly about the strength that it would take to do this thing.

  Jane rolled off the bed onto her feet, grabbed
her brother by both his slender wrists, and heaved.

  He slid across the sheets like an empty husk. Jane jammed her left shoulder under his midriff and hoisted him in a fireman's carry, flinging her left arm across the backs of his knees. . . . The moment she had him up, she realized that she was strong enough-more than strong enough. There was nothing left of her brother but birdbone and gristle.

  Fluid gurgled loudly out of him and spattered the backs -of her legs.

  Jane staggered through the door and into the hail. She heard footsteps overhead, somewhere up on the second floor, and a distant mutter of puzzled voices. .. . She lurched down the hall toward the exit and pulled the jimmied door open, right-handed. Her brother's lolling head cracked against the jamb as she stumbled through.

  She pulled the door shut behind her, then sank to her knees on the cool pavement of the alcove. Alex sprawled bonelessly over her in his backless medical gown. She slid Alex aside onto the chill stone paving.

  Breathing hard, Jane felt at the webbing belt and yanked out her cellular phone. She pushed little glowing yellow numbers with her thumb.

  "Hello," her car recited cheerfully. "I am Storm Pursuit Vehicle Charlie. There's no one aboard me right now, but if you have an ID, you can give me verbal orders. Other-. wise, leave a message at the beep."

  Jane pressed the digits 56#033.

  "Hello, Juanita," the car replied.

  "Come get me," Jane panted. "You know where. Come quick."

  SHE'D FORGOTTEN HOW fast Charlie could move when there were no human beings aboard it. Freed from the burden of protecting human flesh from g-forces. the robot car moved like a demented flea.

  Charlie landed on the street in front of her with a sharp hiss of pneumatics, at the far end of a twenty-meter leap. It then began noisily walking sideways, up and across the pavement.