Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [124]
We stood there for an eternity, without moving, as the other soldiers stared back at us. It felt as if the world had stopped.
I pulled the rifle from over my shoulder and shot the Lieutenant in the head.
That moment is there every second of my life. Just as a fact, like my muscles are a fact and the weather is a fact and the color of my hair is a fact. In retrospect, and maybe at the time, the rifle seemed to swing perfectly into position, to fit so snugly into my shoulder; and as I pulled the trigger I knew, as if my soul was carrying it home, that the bullet would hit the very atom I was aiming for.
That shot is my life, and for that instant I felt like an angel, of sorts: not redeeming, because I redeemed nothing, least of all myself. I was simply under a fate that fell from the heavens and flattened me into the ground. Sometimes when I wake in the night and wonder what has startled me, I think it is an echo of that shot, of that moment, and I wonder if it will ever cease.
Nearly cried quietly in the back of the car. I wished I could reach out to her, could tell her that it was a long time ago. I was glad that Vinaldi hadn’t described, and probably didn’t know, what we’d found in all of the huts in the village. The leftovers. We did what we could with skinFix and bandages, but it wasn’t very much. It wasn’t enough. Then we left the soldiers there, abandoning them to the forest.
Vinaldi was quiet, and then I heard a spark and the intake of breath as he lit a cigarette.
“One more little detail,” he said. “The man Jack shot, the Lieutenant? He was Arlond Maxen’s older brother. They were in the same unit, and Arlond made it back out.”
Nearly sniffed, and looked out of the window. She was a bright girl. She’d worked it out. Then in the rearview mirror I saw her eyes looking at mine, and she asked me a question. “What are you going to do now?”
I barely heard her, because I’d finally realized the Farms’ second purpose. They hadn’t been created just for spare parts. The group of men who came to them at night hadn’t been sneaking in. One of them owned the whole deal, and the payments made to the caretakers were simply to ensure their silence. I wondered why they’d never come to my Farm. I was hired under a false name. They couldn’t have known it was me.
It didn’t matter. The answer to Nearly’s question still came easily. “I’m going to kill Maxen,” I said.
“Is that going to solve anything?” she said sadly. “Is that going to bring anyone back?”
“I’m not doing it in the hope of solving something,” I replied. “I’m going to do it because I want to.”
We abandoned the car out in the Portal, and returned to New Richmond; Vinaldi and Nearly through the front entrance, me round the back, as usual. Vinaldi returned to his empire to check that nothing untoward had happened while we’d been gone, sort through his mail, that kind of thing. I asked him to subtly spread a rumor that I’d disappeared, and he said he’d put the word out. Nearly went home to shower, and realized that she’d in effect been on an unpaid holiday for the last couple of days, so maybe she was going back to work, too. I didn’t ask her.
I went back to Howie’s, and spent a while concocting likely deaths for myself. The most convincing story I could come up with was a drug overdose, which gave me pause. That’s not a great comment on a life. I slotted Mal’s disk in and got it to hack the name Jack Randall into the pending file on the list of city dead. The death couldn’t be absolutely official because that required a confirmatory code from the coroner’s office, but I made it appear that my body had been found in the Portal. The coroners could rarely be