Excerpt: Micro Noir

Brother, let me tell you a secret: Sunrise over the Grand Canyon in late November is one of the prettiest things you’ll ever see. It looks like God Almighty Himself laid planks of light right across the whole wide open landscape, as if He’d decided that this was the perfect place to build His celestial ballroom; all that was missing was a heavenly choir led by Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw, snappy white wings a perfect match for their pastel dreamcoats, a host of gleaming instruments weaving perfect melodies while pairs of angels danced a buck-and-wing up and down the streams of brand new sunlight and across the layers of weary rock that were ancient when this great country of ours wasn’t even a gleam in the eyes of Europe’s wildest dreams.

I say “looks like” because while the scenery was something Cecil B. would have been proud to call his own, the situation right where I was standing had a lot more in common with things Down Below than it did with the visions of heavenly hoofers that had flashed across my mind for a split second after I climbed out of the dusty cardusty and felt the fresh morning wind on my tired face. Grateful for the silence, I shoved my hands into the pocket of my heavy tan trenchcoat to keep them warm and stared glumly out over the biggest damn ditch in the Americas, granting myself the luxury of looking disgruntled because from her position in the back seat, Betty couldn’t see my face.

Cheng could, though — from the inside, I mean. And the bastard actually laughed at me. The “sound” was like ground-up razor blades dusting up and down my nerve endings. In particular, my brain stem suddenly itched so bad that my left hand was halfway out of the pocket before I realized it. I shoved it back inside, refusing to give the virus the satisfaction of seeing me scratch the longer-than-I-liked-it hair at the back of my neck.

//Still you struggle.// There had been no humor in the laughter, and now there was only analytical coldness in the words that trickled into my Broca zone. Cheng was becoming a little less human with every passing day. //Surely you know better by now.//

“I know you’re still hiding in the bushes, Champ.” I kept my voice low, barely a mutter of inflected breath — talking out loud when dealing with Micros was a habit I couldn’t break even now, but Betty didn’t have to hear this little exchange. Or Mei. “If you’re such a big bad tiger, why not make your move?”

In the back of my mind, McTavish suddenly spoke up: @@Tyger tyger, burning bright/In the forest of the night...@@ The non-sequiter was followed by a familiar burst of mild confusion, and I half-snorted, silently blessing the Streptococcus pyogenes Micro in the tiny section of my mind that neither he nor the rabies virus could access. Trust McTavish to come up with a random scrap of memory from an old Host that would puncture the tension of my worst mood... or make things a helluva lot worse. Today it was the former.

@@Sorry, Ray.@@ Aw, now he was all contrite. I gave him a quick mental pat, hopefully one that the virus couldn’t see, and felt him wiggle like a big slow puppy. I was actually starting to give a damn about the dumb lug. That could be bad: I already had Betty to worry about, she of the waved chestnut hair and Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection, a gorgeous piece of leverage that Cheng and his sister Mei had been using to lead me around by the nose — from New York State to Arizona so far, and probably a helluva lot further before this road trip was done.

Speaking of puppies... from the back of the car I heard a loud whimper with a ripple of a growl at the end of it. The Betty’s voice, low and level: “He needs to go.”

Silence, but I could imagine Mei’s slight nod as she sat in the front passenger seat, small and erect and perfectly composed, not even turning her head to grant permission. I heard Betty lean across the car and open the rear door closest to me, more willing to reach across the mongrel than to let him squeeze out of the car past her own legs — she’d been scared of him since the night he’d joined our unlikely little club in Huntington, Illinois. With a scrabble of unclipped claws the dog scrambled out of the vehicle and shook himself with that odd rustling sound that all dogs’ skins make when they imitate the inside of a washing machine. A couple of seconds later I saw the movement of his lean body out of the corner of my eye as he headed off along the cliff edge toward the sunrise, sniffing at the dusty ground like a private dick trailing a bail jumper. At least one of us was having a good morning. I would have killed for a cup of coffee, black, and a plate of eggs and bacon to go with it.

A shiver ran down every nerve in my body as Cheng picked up on that thought and did a system check. In response, my stomach let out an audible growl that made the dog pause, head up and turning toward me, ears (one pointed, one chewed to rags) erect.

“Buzz off, Ivan,” I told him, and he did. What I wouldn’t give to be able to be able to go with him, just trot off down the trail and never look back... except of course there was Betty to consider, and no matter where I went — over the cliff, to Las Vegas, to the ends of the earth — Cheng would still be with me, lurking in my nervous system like that tiger we were discussing earlier. Not for the first time, I suddenly and whole-heartedly thres my willpower against his, trying to overthrow him, to make my hijacked immune system crush him like a sledgehammer smashing an anthill, to make the DNA he’d taken over write itself back to normal.

It was as much a pipe dream as a million angels dancing the foxtrot over the Colorado River. Cheng absorbed the mental punch like a cloud of gnats: sure, maybe I’d hit something, but the viral load was just too huge to be affected. I felt McTavish move up behind me (figuratively speaking), clenching his nonexistant ham-sized fists, ready to fight if I took point. I had — and it was useless.

“Ray?” From the back sat, Betty’s voice, her control (which she’d kept up for the last eleven days, like the little trooper she was) wavering a bit: the sound of concern.

“I’m fine.” Not true, but that didn’t matter: the tone of voice did. Level, but a little rough around the edges. Careless, although my heart was pounding against my breastbone with the backbeat of frustration. “Grab some rations, would ya, sweetheart? Might as well have breakfast while we’re here.”

Mei spoke for the first time since yesterday afternoon: “I will get them.” Now there was a voice that knew what cool really meant. The passenger door opened and low-heeled practical shoes deigned to touch the dust. The door closed — not slammed, oh no, not her — and a soft measured tread walked back toward the trunk. In spite of myself I turned away from the magnificent scenery to watch one of the finest pieces of work ever to come out of the Viral Tong territories.

Mei Ling was five foot two, maybe one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, and one of those specimens of womanhood where pale blue flame is wrapped up tightly in a silken package of cool mystery. Her jet-black hair (long enough to reach her waist, I knew) was pinned up in an austere bun by two black laquered pins and a cloisonne comb in the shape of a blue and emerald Oriental butterfly with embellishments of scarlet. She moved like a wave in a Japanese print, the subtle curves of her girlish body seemingly barely contained in the blue jeans, cotton blouse, and bulky sheepskin jacket I’d found for her back in Pittsburgh; the clothes, so alien to her culture and bearing, seemed to float a little in front of her like an optical illusion... or maybe I was so tired that my brain, stressed with both physical exhaustion and the mental strain of two resident Micro-cultures, was starting to lose its usually firm grip on reality. The alternative, that Cheng had miscalculated his finely tuned game of riding herd on my nervous system while not knocking it totally out of kilter, was a lot grimmer — but I had McTavish on my side, and even if he wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee he should be up to warning me if things started to really head south.

@@You know I would, Ray.@@ McTavish was trying to “speak” so that Cheng wouldn’t hear him; who knew how well he’d succeeded? The human brain is pretty roomy, but two Micros tying up the circuitry at once lends new meaning to the phrase “three’s a crowd”. I would have suggested to the bacterial Micro that he concentrate on hiding out in my respiratory system and try to operate from a place where Cheng wasn’t naturally inclined to lurk, but Cheng had warned me early on that any funny business could lead to not-so-pleasant consequences for Betty, so I kept that thought to myself.

Mei had reached the trunk and was opening it, the bulging curves of metal concealing most of her small body as she leaned in to open one of the boxes of military rations we’d found at an abandoned concentration camp outside of St. Louis and trusted were good to their printed word that they’d be edible until sometime around the year 2000. Watching her made bells go off in my head, and I’ll admit, in parts further south on occasion. Part of my fascination — most of it, hopefully — came courtesy of Cheng, who was closer to me now than a brother (ha ha) and who in human form had loved his sister with an almost savage intensity. I say “had” because Cheng, technically speaking, was dead — but with viral Micros, as I had discovered first-hand shortly after finding Mei in my apartment back in New York City,
“dead” could merely be exactly that, a technical term that enough determination could bend or maybe even break.

When Cheng (the human version) had been murdered by the Filovirus Tong almost a month and a half ago, he had transferrd his Micro-culture to his sister as he lay dying, and she had nurtured it alongside her own, refreshing an maintaining the matrix of his personality in viral form all the way across Asia, Europe, and an ocean to New York City, where they’d found one Raymond Leonard Archer, Esquire — lucky me. I still didn’t have a full picture in terms of why they’d taken a long and dangerous journey and what they hoped to accomplish here in America, but I had some pieces... and the edges of that particular jigsaw puzzle were made out of barbed wire. It didn’t help that Cheng (I suspected) was scrambling pieces of my memory whenever he felt I ws getting too close to a “Eureka!” moment. Like I said — bastard.

@@Uh, Ray?@@ My gaze was still fixed on the edge of Mei Ling’s hip that I could see around the flank of the ‘58 Marlborough, and McTavish sounded apologetic. @@Betty’s looking at you pretty hard.@@

“Yeah?” My tone was relaxed, but I cursed pretty emphatically in my mind’s privacy zone. The human brain edits visual and audio input like there’s no tomorrow, but Micros, who have access to the full data stream, can pick up things we miss: one of the advantages of being Host to a Micro-culture, like 99.99% of the human race. I was one of the exceptional 0.01%, impervious to the long-term predatory or symbiotic infections that most of my species either suffered or enjoyed, and I wasn’t used to having the obvious pointed out to me by a collection of invisible hitchhikers. I rised a narrow glance at Betty, which revealed that she’d already turned her face away from the canyon and from me — lips tight, eyes squinting, chin defiantly raised. She couldn’t have said Fine, look at her like you’ve lost your mind, I don’t care! more eloquently if she’d yelled it at the top of her lungs, but Betty’s not that kind of girl. And if I’d pointed out to her, quite reasonably, that I had lost my mind, or at least complete control of my nervous and immune systems, it wouldn’t have made a damned bit of difference. Betty Squire’s not the kind of girl to change her mind about her intuitions, either.

At least I could be grateful that she wasn’t tempermentally inclined to take out her frustrations on me, say, with a tent peg in the middle of the night, like Yael clobbering Sisera in the Old Testament — not that she could rationally accuse me of being responsible for her being in the wrong place at the wrong time on a windy night in the Big Apple... but in my admittedly limited experience with the female animal, I’ve observed that blaming guys for their troubles is a game that most of them play full-time.