Strawman Made Steel Read online

  STRAWMAN MADE STEEL

  Copyright © 2012 by Brett Adams

  All rights reserved.

  A Dweoming Well Book

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events of locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover art by Jeanine Henning

  www.jeaninehenning.com

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Connect with the Author

  Discover other Titles by Brett Adams

  — 1 —

  I fell through a mirror into the women’s restroom on the third floor of Lennox Hill Hospital, Manhattan, at 10:59 on a Sunday night.

  I slapped onto a steel bench like a side of beef, tumbled and fell, knocking a glass from the sink as I went. The glass beat me to the floor, struck the tiles and shattered. I landed spread-eagle on a welcome mat of glass splinters.

  My arms screamed about the splinters, but I lay still, straining to hear over the noise of my lungs if anyone had noticed me arrive.

  A cistern dripped into the silence, and overhead a florescent tube flickered spastically, washing cubicles in two-tone light. Behind me the mirror’s surface was unbroken and still stained by the trip-slick―a patch like oil on water, as if Reality had hemorrhaged. The stain shrank and disappeared in the time it took me to stand and dust myself down.

  It was a mess, and I hate to leave a mess. But two thoughts were rolling around my head like amorous marbles:

  One ― From now on, a good client was a guy who only had skeletons in his closet, and

  Two ― If I just stood there, I’d be dead in eight minutes.

  I was in the Golden Hour, the window of time following traumatic injury when prompt treatment can prevent death.

  I needed an X-ray. But I couldn’t waltz downstairs to the ER and ask for one. I’d be dead before I’d signed the waiver, and if by some miracle I wasn’t, when they found what was in me, I’d be top of the CIA’s interesting people’s list for the term of my natural life—which is to say, dead.

  I exited the restroom into a dim corridor. The day-lights were doused, and only pale little orbs glowed in a line overhead. A surge of vertigo struck me, and for a moment I was a plane and they were telling me to land.

  Not a soul stirred in the gloom.

  My body hurt. Landing on the sink like that had torqued my clavicle. My forearm felt wet. My flank ached. But it was all background noise.

  I reached a T-junction. A sign pointed right: Radiology.

  I turned left.

  An orderly emerged from an elevator wheeling a bed, and turned down another corridor without sparing me a glance. Down that way were fusing bones and clotted bowels; down that way were new mothers and diapers the size of postage stamps. The corridor might as well have been a telescope, and the ward Mars.

  Seventeen steps and I turned again.

  I wanted an X-ray, but Radiology would be buzzing, even at this time of night. I needed a quiet place to gauge my body. Another twelve steps―I noticed them now, like each breath―and I reached a solid white door. It had a number on it, 312, and a name, Diagnostics. Helpfully vague.

  It was a good thing I’d been on the other side of that door before. On my first visit, I’d been carrying a bullet wound, and after much searching had stumbled across Room 312. But that visit I’d had plenty of time to stumble.

  I leaned on the handle, but it didn’t budge. I think I swore.

  I fumbled in a pocket of my coat for a tension rod and a pick, a size 3―not too heavy, not too light. The lock was a Kingston. That was no problem, only it would eat another twenty seconds of my life.

  While I worked the lock, another fear sprang up. The door’s being locked was a bad sign.

  I sprung the mechanism, leaned on the handle, and pushed the door open with my good shoulder. I shut it behind me, and sniffed the pitch-black air. Stale but only just.

  My hand groped over the wall and found the light switch. I pressed it, and banks of fluorescent tubes clattered to life, making me squint.

  They revealed a rectangular room, tiled floor, and walls painted a surgical green. Sitting squat in the middle was a cantankerous analog X-ray machine, an old Centrix. At the sight of it, I breathed again, and realized I hadn’t since I’d found the door locked.

  The machine had once served an adjoining medical clinic until the clinic had been co-opted for beds. Since then it had handled overflow from the four digital machines downstairs. But its days had to be numbered.

  It was still here.

  I guessed I had six minutes.

  I ducked through a curtain into a partition that ran the length of one wall. It looked out on the machine through a leaded portal, and served as control center and darkroom.

  Film. That was the next hazard.

  I killed the darkroom light and fired the safety. It filled the cramped space with a red glow. I tugged the top drawer of the film bin open―empty. The second drawer held two unopened boxes of film. I ripped one open and removed a sheet.

  On top of the film bin was a cassette for the Centrix. I sprung its hinge and sat the film flush in the guides, then snapped it shut and went back through the curtain.

  Five minutes.

  The X-ray machine was a flatbed. I yanked the bucky out of the bed, inserted the loaded cassette, and pinched my finger slotting the bucky home. I felt the blood blister fill in seconds.

  Then comes the part where the patient lies down to be needled with cosmic rays. The only problem was that usually there is someone sitting in the control room telling you to lie still and―importantly―pushing the buttons.

  Back through the curtain.

  On a control panel that looked like it had been pulled from the bridge of the original Starship Enterprise, I found the AUX button and pushed it for five seconds. A warm-up indicator blinked orange. Forty more seconds for that.

  For a hospital, it was doing a good job of killing me.

  The orange light stopped blinking and told me the X-ray tube was warm. I twisted a knob and ramped the kilovolts to eighty for maximum penetration. I might fry, but didn’t want to get the film back and find I’d left the lens cover on.

  I patted my pockets, hunting a lump that would be a ball of string. I pulled it free and found an end. In its short life it had been used to dry socks, train beans, and persuade a grifter. Tonight it would save my life.

  That was my intention, anyway.

  I looped its frayed end around the switch on the control panel that triggers an exposure. The switch was a post-type, poking a half-inch out of the panel surface. My fingers had a tremor, but I fumbled a knot. It wasn’t pretty, but it only had to hold once. Then I spooled the string around a cabinet handle above the switch, so that it was counter-slung, pulley-wise. The switch needed to snap up.

  I backed out of the control room slow as a dynamiter laying a fus
e. By the time I reached the X-ray machine, the string snaked across the tiles in lazy loops and disappeared beneath the curtain.

  I lay down on the flatbed, and hand-over-hand drew the string taut. I fought the tremors beginning to rock my body and lay still. I closed my eyes. Somewhere, someone was crying. I debated pulling the string.

  The debate went pro-string, two to one.

  I pulled.

  The string jerked an eighth of an inch, a fish nibble. My heart skipped a beat. I kept pulling, and it jerked again, a deliberate bite. My fish was hooked.

  I heard the switch in the control room snap up, and...

  Nothing.

  No X-ray.

  I had four minutes to live.

  Sweat beaded on my forehead while I racked my brain for the missing piece of the puzzle.

  And then I remembered: beneath the panel was a footwell, and in it, on the floor, was a deadman’s switch, an interlock. If it wasn’t depressed, no X-ray. Trap for beginners. Design courtesy of Paranoid Fitters Inc.

  Back through the curtain, careful to skirt the string, but running now.

  From a shelf I grabbed the heaviest book I could find―Grey’s Anatomy―and lumped it on the interlock. I reset the exposure switch.

  I dove through the curtain and threw myself back onto the flatbed, drew up the string slack, and pulled.

  I heard the switch snap up again.

  Then, with a faint click, the X-ray aperture opened. A billion photons beat my image onto the film, and then the aperture clicked shut. The exposure was done.

  I leapt from the bed and yanked the bucky out in one motion. I retrieved the cassette and bore it into the darkroom.

  Sitting on a bench by the film bin was a machine that looked like a shredder that had been plumbed into the building, an automatic developer. The air smelt faintly acrid. I nudged the developer and heard the wonderful sound of chemicals slosh in its reservoir.

  I switched it on, removed the film from the cassette, and fed it into its dark slot.

  Three minutes―

  Two and half of which were needed for a fast-develop cycle.

  So I waited.

  I sat in the dim red effulgence of the safelight and listened to the whine and trickle of the machine’s intimate parts, and thought about how I’d come to be sitting in a New York hospital at 11:04 on a Sunday night performing fugitive radiology, my life hanging on the quality of a China-made chemical pump.

  A bitch with demon eyes is where my thinking got me.

  My flank wore an impression of her teeth, just below the bottom rib. I lifted my shirt and cupped a palm over the sticky wound. I couldn’t cover it.

  I should have known she had military stock in her. The crazy eyes. That odd smell like sulfur. Hocks higher than a pony.

  The job had looked routine. Client was a native of Liberty Borough―the posh floors. He’d hired me to recover the title deed to a steelworks he claimed to own, and pointed me where I might find it, a scrap-metaller out Eastside.

  I didn’t find any title deed, but I did find a four-foot tall psycho and―like I said―his bitch from the Abyss.

  (The automatic developer coughed once and went back to its percolating. I tasted sweat on my lips. My left foot didn’t want to stay still.)

  The psycho was the scrapyard’s nightwatchman and a model employee. He must have seen me drop from the fence into the dark on the side farthest from the yard’s nightlamp, but waited until I was at the workshed picking its lock before he holed me up. He grinned more gold than teeth and sicked the dog on me―she barreled me over like a king wave, swift and weighing a ton. And muted like only gen-mods can make a dog. It wasn’t until she pulled her teeth free that I knew she’d bitten me. The air poured in like alcohol.

  That’s when shorty told me I had twelve minutes to live unless I took the antidote. He held out both hands, and I saw in the glow of a gas lamp what looked like a bug cupped in each palm. I told him I’d had dinner, didn’t need the bugs.

  “Not bugs, pills,” he said. The red and the blue, and I knew then what had bitten me.

  He said I could pick one, and die with even odds. Or I could answer him one question and he’d give me the right pill.

  I didn’t wait to hear the question. He hadn’t bothered to frisk me, which was his first mistake. His only, in fact. I drew my .38 and put a bullet in the dog’s left eye. (There is one downside to demon eyes―they’re an easy mark.) Then I sapped the psycho with a piece of junk that might have once been a funnel.

  After that I ran as if the bitch had risen undead and chased me on sepulchral feet. I ran feeling sick in the stomach, not because the poison had begun to work, but because I knew it would.

  Here’s a tip for those new to a place and don’t want to die: treat an actuary to lunch. Actuaries are the math whizzes that work for insurance companies. They have tables full of sublime trivia. They have summaries of vehicle thefts in Tri-State by make, model, and city block. They have whole files on which restaurants will give you food poisoning so violent you’re vegetative before you can sue. And deaths―they love deaths. Highest paying odds if played right, double indemnity be damned. Death by automobile. Death by falling object. Death by heart attack, stroke, aneurism. Death by garden variety ineptitude. Death by suicide. Each method could be sliced fifty different ways―by race, color, religion, and creed; by time of day, income, and hobby.

  And then there’s the curious Death by Other. Imagine that for an epitaph: here lies Janus McIlwraith, felled in his prime by Other.

  I didn’t like the sound of it either.

  So I ran from the scrapyard, arms pumping like pistons, and each hand cradling a pill that might keep me from becoming a statistic.

  In the darkroom, I dug a hand into my pants’ pockets and retrieved one of the psycho’s pills from each. I’m not sure why I had kept them separate. Perhaps I thought they might fuse like gummy bears under the heat of my exertion. I placed them on the bench in the safelight lying like a stain over everything. They looked like two curled-up wood lice. My eyes played tricks in the poor light, and I couldn’t tell which was paler.

  My guts finally jerked from more than indigestion or fear. The poison was beginning to cascade.

  I guessed I had less than a minute. But I’ve been called a pessimist.

  The poison in my body came from a particular brand of Other, which my friend the actuary labels Unregisterd Xenotropic Fauna. Still a pretty wide net.

  I had run into my first specimen of a UXF on a case two years prior, a small-time racket breeding military grade prov-dogs for the black market. Whoever first engineered the beasts was a genius. Poison glands, and reticulate sinuses and hollow teeth to deliver the toxin. But the genius is the toxin itself, because it’s not one but two. It switches. By purely man-made gene sequences it is coupled to the bitch’s estrous cycle. It fluxes as she comes on and off heat. And the kicker: the antidote for one toxin catalyzes the second, and vice versa. One clots hard in the blood; the other mushrooms in pockets of gas. Regardless of which finds a mainline, the result is embolitic catastrophe. Cessation of circulatory function. On the street, it’s called being a corpse.

  An image fleeted across my mind, of a million guerrillas hunched in solitude like me, dredging for the courage to play Russian roulette with two pea-sized bullets.

  The automatic developer piped a single, triumphant tone and spat my film out. I lunged for it with a smile I imagine looked like a rictus.

  The film was tacky and smelled like a porta potty. It stuck to the lightbox on an angle. I snapped the lightbox on and scrutinized the image of my innards. My bones glowed, white continents in a dark sea. I located the curve of my pelvic girdle, and the rib immediately above. I leaned toward it until my nose touched the film and peered at the darkness between.

  Was that a little island cluster an inch south of the rib? A salt and pepper speckle?

  That had to be hard-clot.

  Or random X-ray scatter.

  What th
e hell. It was getting hard to think over the roar of blood in my ears. I chose.

  I scooped up the pill on my right, the cure for hard-clot, and dry swallowed.

  In the ten minutes that followed, while I waited for cramps that never came, I didn’t once look again at the X-ray. No buyer’s remorse for me.

  Whether by skill or luck, I’d chosen right.

  I rolled the film into a tube, tucked it into my coat, tidied up, and made for the door. I had a headache to drown.

  That’s when I noticed a trail of red starbursts across the tiles. The cut on my arm was deeper than I’d thought. The door’s handle turned under my hand. It opened and I came face to face with a nurse.

  She stared at me, her mouth a little o.

  “You,” she said.

  “Me.”

  A frown puckered her clear skin.

  “You said last time was the last time.”

  I shrugged.

  Her eyes hunted over my shoulder and then the folds of my coat.

  “Sorry about the mess in the toilet,” I said.

  She waved it away.

  “I suppose you’re not going to explain this either?”

  I shook my head.

  She sighed, then quirked a smile. “When I’m old and grey?”

  Then something made her glance along the corridor. “You’d better go.” She indicated the blood. “I’ll fix this.”

  “Thanks,” I said. She was a good kid.

  I took the stairs and strolled past Emergency. They were selling like hot cakes.

  Took me half an hour to hail a cab on Lexington, but―strange to say―I relished the walk. I had no fear of bitches with demon eyes.

  I knew nothing like that would walk the earth for another century.

  — 2 —

  I retched one final time.

  It was morning. I tried again to force coffee into the bag of acid that had once been my stomach.

  The time was 7.43 and I had work to do. I donned my coat and, with a wet paper napkin, worried at the blood staining one sleeve. The paper pilled off and made a mess. I tossed the pink ball of mush in the bin.