Yea, verily, it is once again time to post a free novel one chapter a week! This year’s novel is FOREVER MAN. Enjoy!

And so Viktor Danik became my best friend, and we had adventures.

.o0o.

There were no cops. No police. Anywhere. I tried to think of the last time I’d seen a police officer in any scenario, and realized it had probably been years. In the streets around Danik’s there were Danik’s people, men and women in suits and ties with guns jammed in their waistbands, on patrol and keeping order. And beyond Danik’s area there were other gangs, doing the same: Business needed order. If everyone fled, if people couldn’t walk the streets or run a business, no one would be around to bet on The Game and buy cocktails, drugs, sex.

Danik was a businessman. He made, I discovered, a clear distinction between being a businessman and being a thug. His contempt for the latter was epic.

He had a special hatred for Esmundo Brusca, never articulated. He was perfectly polite in every way, taking care to always refer to Brusca in measured, even tones, and the only hint that Danik hated the man was in his continued and persistent use of the term thug, which, I came to realize, was Danik’s ultimate insult. A thug was thoughtless, and cruel, and stupid. If you were a thug, Viktor Danik despised you.

Brusca’s people did not patrol the streets.

.o0o.

Our first adventure involved my suit and shoes, of which Danik disapproved. I told him that I’d spent the last few weeks barefoot after being blown out of my apartment in an explosion, and his sole comment was to speculate that this explained the near complete collapse of the Yeung Chan. He didn’t bother to explain who that was. He also didn’t offer much sympathy, but he did regard Jenks’ old boots and the tattered, patched aspect of my Funeral Suit as abominations.

I was reluctant to let him do anything about the suit. I was meant to die in this suit, and no matter what it took that was going to happen. Somehow repairing it at this point seemed sacrireligious.

The shoes I was willing to compromise on. Danik had his car brought around and we went to his Cobbler. The car was an enormous black craft that glided as if it was on a pocket of air, driven by a painfully blond woman, thin and with a pale face covered in metal studs in a complex pattern, wearing a ridiculous old-fashioned chauffeur uniform. Between her saucy strut and Danik’s bland expression of utter disinterest, I assumed it was her idea.

She drove us from the center of the city out towards the edges, across two bridges into a wilderness of crumbling old buildings and streets that had begun the busy process of collapsing into lakes of stagnant, putrid water. On the corner of one barren street, a single light on the third floor of a building. The car stopped. We sat for a moment.

“You cannot go after Brusca directly. Alone.”

“At the old warehouse.”

Danik nodded. “Where he spends his time. He is guarded. Well. You alone, perhaps with me and a few others, we would not succeed. And if you are thinking you will simply walk in, dare them to try and kill you, let the universe punish them – I remind you that Brusca knows you. He knows of you. He will not be so foolish. You cannot be killed, but you can be taken. He has already proved that.”

I thought about it. Danik let me think for a moment, and then urged me out.

The silence was awful. The streets seemed to vibrate with the absence of sound.

The little man greeted us in the hall as we stepped from the stairwell. He was bald and came up to my elbows, dressed in a meticulous little green suit that shimmered and shined as he moved in the dim, candle-lit hallway. He greeted Danik warmly, and ran his eyes up and down my sad suit, held together with tape, and sniffed.

His apartment was crowded with shoeboxes and garment bags, mobile hangers, and clothes and shoes everywhere. It smelled like leather and polish, and there was a narrow pathway through the apartment and a small sitting area with two chairs and a tiny table. The little man offered Danik tea and seemed to assume that I was some sort of servant until Danik stopped him with a soft hand and indicated that I should get tea as well with a regal nod of his head. The little man sniffed at me again, but brought two cups.

I was ordered out of my suit and the tattered, torn clothes disappeared into some mysterious back room. Danik and I sat in comfortable awkwardness for half and hour, forty minutes, and the Little Man returned.

The suit didn’t look new, but it looked better than it had in weeks. The repairs were expert and subtle, and when I pulled it back on it smelled and felt fresher, steamed and pressed. At a distance, I supposed it would pass for a legitimate suit of clothes.

Danik had very detailed requirements for my shoes. He used a lot of vocabulary I was unfamiliar with. The Little Man nodded excitedly, rubbing his hands together obscenely, and then he leaped to measure my feet with a series of instruments that hinted at a level of foot-measuring competence I had never encountered in my life, or suspected was possible. He expressed a certain amount of dark surprise at the calloused and scarred condition of my feet, but he troupered his way through this with unflappable professionalism.

When finished, Danik stood up and shook his hand, and the little man ushered us from his apartment with promises of imminent delivery and total satisfaction. On the ride home, I sat and stared out the window and felt confused for the first time in years.

.o0o.

It was strange, the things that remained in play. Hospitals. Whereas the police had abandoned the city and left it to its own devices, the hospitals were largely still staffed, somehow. They’d evolved into cash-on-the-barrel operations, with the staff collecting fees up front, accepting barter, and occasionally dispensing charity in the form of a free procedure.

There were no ambulances, but if you could drag yourself, numb and bleeding, to the hospital, there would be someone there to take care of you.

Rumor was there were corpses piling up in the basements. When Danik and I stepped into the lobby of the hospital, I sniffed the air carefully, but there was no scent of decay. It smelled like ammonia and liquor. There was a low murmur of suffering in the air; the lobby had once been grand and was now crammed with makeshift beds, each one filled with a thin body covered by a uniformly thin and blue blanket.

“What do we find here?” I asked, watching a trio of scrawny nurses in white uniforms that had been stained irregularly with dried brown blood glide and float among the patients.

“The way to Brusca,” Danik said quietly, shooting his cuffs. I was beginning to realize that Danik had been looking for an excuse to go after Brusca for a long time. “Come. Third floor.”

I didn’t follow immediately. “We don’t just walk in? Me in front, drawing fire?”

Danik raised one hand in the air as he walked into the midst of the beds. “By all means, do so.”

I hesitated for a moment, and then followed him, pushing my way through the ocean of unfortunates. There was a low-level vibration of noise everywhere, people groaning their way through the day. Instead of the pristine plastic IV bags I remembered, there were makeshift jars with lids taped on with duct tape, plastic tubing snaking down to disappear in the thin linens.

Responding to intuition, I turned and found our driver walking behind me, silent. She froze, arms in the air, one foot off the floor, and stared at me until I turned to follow Danik. I knew she was behind me, and the utter silence freaked me out.

Danik led me to a fire door that led to the emergency stairs, which were now just the stairs. He paused and turned, and the three o us were crowded together in the hot, dim space, noise above and noise without and very little oxygen to be had within.

“There will be resistance,” Danik said. “Two guards roaming the floor, two on the door. And he himself may be armed. We must proceed cautiously.”

“Who?” I asked. “Who’s up there?” The noise of the hospital was muffled, just distant voices.

Danik turned and started up the stairs, drawing a large, chrome-plated handgun from under his arm. I turned and the blond girl had produced a similar gun that looked likely to blow her backwards into the wall if she fired it. She reminded me of Moira in a basic, superficial way: Tiny, skinny, not pretty exactly. I pictured Moira’s rope tattoo and silently judged this one to be about one-half Moira strength.

Good enough, maybe. I pulled Jenks’ gun from the holster at my armpit.

“Brusca’s son,” Danik said quietly. “You have met him.”

I pictured the thin young man fetching drinks in Brusca’s warehouse office. Not a bad-looking guy in his well-tailored suit. Too skinny. I thought he could certainly be Brusca’s son.

“Why’s he in the hospital?”

Danik didn’t pause, leading me up the stairs. “He spends much of his time here.”

I watched Danik walking up the steps. He’d thought on this and come up with a plan and tested it out in his mind and probed it and adjusted it and now he was finally able to put it into action. Why, I wasn’t sure. Not because of me; he’d had me on the payroll for years and done nothing. Never even mentioned Brusca’s name. Something had inspired Danik to leave his bar and re-enter an active role in his affairs, and suddenly I was worried.

We paused outside the door to the third floor, listening. Danik motioned and the blond stepped forward. “Go down to the second floor and come up the other stairs. Be circumspect. Distract, and only engage when we do, yes?”

She nodded, once, and turned back, re-holstering her gun as I drew Jenks’ from my own shoulder holster. Danik leaned casually against a wall.

Danik took a step back. “You take point. I will cower behind you, as you cannot be killed.”

I nodded. Why not? I’d been treated as an object for a long time, and by Danik for longer than most. Besides, this was what I’d come for. To walk into rooms and have people try to kill me, and use this curse as a weapon for once. I’d come here to live for a little while longer, since I didn’t have any choice anyway.

Danik held up a hand. “Wait for the distraction.”

We stood there, breathing the hot, stale air of the stairwell, noise above and noise below. Danik didn’t say anything. Didn’t feel the need for small talk. After a moment, we heard it: Shouts, movement. Danik held up three fingers, then two, then swept his hand towards the door in invitation. I gripped Jenks’ heavy gun and pushed the door open, stepping into a brightly-lit hallway, white and blue, a thick green line painted on the floor. Grit under my unfamiliar shoes that felt hot and tight on my feet after so many weeks of being free and swollen and caressed by the air.

Danik was behind me. “Room 307,” he whispered.

At the other end of the hall, two tall men in loose-fitting button-down shirts and trousers held what looked like automatic rifles. Their shirts looked like bowling shirts, and they looked like soft, fat men, the sort of guys who were tough guys in old black-and-white movies with high-waisted belts and sucked-in stomachs. They were blocking the blond girl, guns held in front of them about waist-high.

Two women guarded the room itself. They were just as tall as the men, if a little less heavy, tan skin and loose, flowing shirts and trousers. The women’s arms were inked up with complex, blue and black tattoos of flies and other insects. They were distracted by the drama on the other end of the hall, watching the confrontation with bored, still faces.

I started walking.

The other rooms on the floor were occupied, which surprised me. In the first, an old man sitting in a wheelchair and staring despondently at the floor. In the next, what looked like a whole family huddled on the sagging bed, a man, a woman, two daughters, intertwined, eyes open, just existing.

The women didn’t turn to look in our direction. When I was just a foot away, I raised the gun to be level with the nearest woman’s head. She had long black hair, frizzy and uncontrolled, and bad skin, an angry rash emerging from her hair line and wrapping down around her neck and disappearing under the fabric of her shirt.

I froze.

She was still watching the two men demand that the blond lie down on the floor and put her hands behind her head. The blond pretending to be either without language or wits or possibly hearing, hands up in the air in a frantic appeal for understanding but no words coming out of her mouth. I’d killed hundreds of Players, I’d killed dozens of people just in the last few weeks. But the Players had taken the odds. They’d known what they were up against – despair on one side, and the Forever Man on the other side, the man who’d never lost The Game – and the people who’d gotten in my way had all tried to kill me first.

I couldn’t just shoot someone in the head, in cold blood. It felt … unfair. I blinked, squinting, trying to see the way forward, but I was frozen.

Then she startled, and whipped her head around, and my finger twitched in shock and the gun jerked in my hand and her head exploded all over her partner in a burst of red and white and yellow, a fine mist of it spraying my face. She slumped into her partner and they both slid to the floor like they’d simply decided to go limp.

I stared down at them. Heard a shout, a scuffling noise, and felt Danik move, grabbing a handful of fabric from my jacket and pulling me close. Three sharp, loud popping noises. A sizzling silence.

Slowly, I looked around. The two men were on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. The blond stood over them with her gun held down by her hip, her sunglasses making her look like some sort of insect. I looked down at the floor and saw my own feet being engulfed by a pulsing flow of deep red blood.

I turned my head to look in the room. Mijo lay there in the bed, hooked up to instruments and tubes, one of which disappeared into his mouth. He stared at me with wide, terrified eyes. No one had ever looked at me with such fear before.

I kind of liked it.

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