Cates 05 - The Final Evolution by Jeff Somers Read Free Book Online Page A

brought yen as well?”
    I studied her. “Yen you get in Mexico City,” I said. “Just in case you got a side business slitting throats at night.”
    She made a face but shrugged. “Very well. Help me push it out into the field.”
    I followed her into the dank interior of the shack and put a shoulder behind it.
    “Why are you going to Mexico City?” she asked, breathless, after we’d pushed the heavy thing a few feet, the axle squealing.
    I wasn’t breathing hard; my augments still managed my oxygen supply pretty well. “We’ve got an old friend to kill.”

SORRY ABOUT THE BLOOD

    “Where are we?”
    Adora didn’t look at me. “I don’t know. We passed Panama. Somewhere north of there.”
    Outside the cab the world was darkness, lightning, and rain. The windshield of the car glowed a soft blue, giving Adora a vector outline of the terrain and a constant readout on the battery, our elevation, direction, and speed. The geopositional satellites were all still up there, humming along, and the last week had been like going back in time, back into the System—we were connected.
    She was tired, her round face tight and her eyes puffy with strain. She sat hunched forward, her heavy overalls and thick gray shirt making her body a mystery. It had been a long time since I’d been this close to an attractive woman. I wondered how she’d managed to go this long without being molested, and then wondered if maybe she hadn’t. Her hair was pulled back into a complex knot at the back of her head, revealing small, perfect ears I found strangely compelling. I tried to keep my eyes straight ahead and my thoughts off the smooth skin of her neck; even if she was interested in a roll with someone like me—which was pretty unlikely—I didn’t have the time or energy for it. And I wasn’t going to risk our ride. I had no way of knowing if Morales’s information was accurate, but if it was, I didn’t figure Wallace Belling would be in that hospital for long.
    I twisted around in the safety netting and looked at Remy, who had been asleep for four days and showed no signs of waking up, ever. The interior of the four-wheeler was pretty sparse—the seats were bare metal, and the whole thing vibrated like a fluid earthquake when she put it in gear, grunting and sweating. My back ached, my legs were numb, and my eyes felt like they were glued shut. Another week in the front seat of her rolling coffin and I’d be ready to kill myself.
    “He still back there?” she asked.
    I looked back out the windshield. Trees, tall and slender with bushy tops, flashed by. We’d stumbled on a stretch of usable road, old and cracked but in one piece. The road came and went. Sometimes we were slurring up mud in the middle of fucking wilderness; sometimes we were bouncing through cratered battlefields with walls of fire burning eternally around us, and sometimes the skies parted, the sun shone down, and a fucking highway from pre-Unification days erupted out of nowhere, a vein of tar, and we’d bounce up onto it and suddenly everything would be smooth and easy, like the world had been built for us to drive on it.
    Lightning flashed, distant. I sighed, trying to stretch. “You’re not going back to Potosí, are you?”
    She didn’t respond. We’d been silent for so long, I thought maybe I’d surprised her. After thirty seconds or so, I shut my eyes.
    “You brought only food and cash. Judging the wad, it’s a lot of cash—for you. Probably every cent you’ve managed to scrape together. You don’t bring your life savings with you on a trip.”
    She bit her lip. “There’s nothing much going on in Potosí.”
    I laughed. “Sister, Potosí’s a fucking sewer, but it’s better than most of the world right now. At least the buildings are still standing. At least it’s not irradiated—fucking Las Vegas, you can’t go within a hundred fucking miles of it without being cooked from the inside out. Potosí’s got something like a