Repo Virtual by Corey White (read a book .txt) 📗

tearing as the dog on the left dug its claws into the roof of a silver Toyota, crouching, ready to jump. The other was to Enda’s right, a blue mass shifting in her peripheral vision.

The dog on the right jumped—Enda turned, opened fire, and side-stepped. She peppered the dog’s head with bullets and cracked apart its skull casing. It knocked her shoulder as it passed, crashing into the water and sending Enda reeling. Too late Enda saw the second dog. It pounced. She was off-balance, unable to dodge away. Its weight slammed into her chest and knocked her to the ground, beneath the waters.

Actuators churned the filthy water, stained by every bit of trash that ended up in the gutters—stained by the garbage that made the foundations of Songdo. Water that had stewed underground for days, finally rising as storm drains and runoffs conceded the battle with the sky.

Light filtered through water like a dirty window. All sound distant, distorted.

One metal paw pinned Enda against the asphalt. Its claws flexed, dug into her flesh, and added her blood to the street soup. She screamed, the sound visible in spheres of air that bubbled to the surface.

She still had the gun, clutched tight in her hand. She brought it around and opened fire—explosions bloomed effervescent beneath the water, the noise flat and endlessly distant. She fired until the pistol was empty. Still the dog held her tight against the road.

Black flooded into Enda’s vision. Water reached her lungs. She tried to cough; pain tore through her chest as her body spasmed.

Release.

The weight lifted off her chest and Enda burst out of the water gasping, then sputtering. JD grabbed her and pulled her to her feet. In his other hand he held his wrench.

“You okay?” he asked.

Enda coughed, pain like knives in her chest instead of water. She nodded, and JD’s grip on her loosened and he stepped away. Enda steadied herself. Her eyes followed JD, the wrench flashing beneath the streetlights as he bashed the dog until it finally stopped moving. JD’s chest heaved as he struggled to catch his breath, slick-washed face glowing under city lights. Troy was on the far side of the street, helping a mother carry her children through the rising water.

“I’m disappointed, JD.”

Enda and JD turned at the voice, coming from one of the damaged dogs, standing unsteadily beside the WRX. Light sparked from the cracks and bullet holes in its skull, and black smoke poured from between its plated armor.

“Kali,” JD said.

“Soo-hyun is here.” Kali’s voice sounded rough and robotic, amplified by the dog drone’s loudspeaker.

“If you hurt them, I swear to god I’ll make you pay.”

“That is entirely up to you, JD. All you need to do is bring me the virus. I’ll give you twenty-four hours. If you don’t deliver it by then … well, I can’t be held responsible for what Red might do.”

Troy returned, and took JD’s bag and Enda’s half-empty magazine from the abandoned WRX. He offered the clip to Enda and took JD’s free hand and squeezed. Enda ejected the empty mag from her pistol and slotted the spare from Troy. The dog watched her as she chambered a round.

“Hey, Kali? That your name?” Enda said.

“Yes?”

Enda aimed at the dog’s wide cyclopean eye.

“I’ll be seeing you real soon.”

Enda emptied the clip into the dog’s skull.

“We need to keep moving,” Enda said, holstering her gun.

It was a hundred-year flood, though at that point in the Anthropocene, “five-year flood” would have been closer to the truth. Lessons had been learned from the last flood, but nothing could truly halt the creeping rise of the sea.

Strong winds and heavy rain lashed the city’s residents, cowering from the storm in cafés, bars, and virtual simulations of battlefields, star systems, brothels, and film sets. Random city blocks winked into darkness as power failed, but everywhere data continued to travel across the endless lengths of fiber optics buried in Songdo’s foundations.

A few miles offshore, the hurricane churned like the eye of some ancient god sitting in judgment.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Two blocks east, they found a bus route still running. The crowd that waited by the curb threatened to spill out onto the street as it reached critical mass. A bright green auto-bus pulled up at the stop, wheels forming a huge wave that splashed over the gathered crowd. The people closest to the curb tried to step back but the mass of bodies kept them in place, pitiless as the shore. One woman was quick enough to angle her umbrella against the water, but the rest of the human barricade was drenched.

Enda pushed JD and Troy onto the bus, and squeezed in behind them. She coughed the ragged, painful cough of inhaled water, and shivered in her drenched clothing despite the heat of condensed humanity that closed in around her. Enda hugged herself—and her gun—with one arm, the other reached for the handhold that ran along the length of the vehicle.

“That was Kali, then?” Enda said, trying to distract herself from the chill that burned her skin.

JD nodded. “I never should have agreed to the job, but”—he shrugged—“money’s money.”

Too crowded to stop, the bus quickly covered a dozen city blocks, the windows fogged with condensation from all the rain-damp bodies. The swift progress instilled a false security in the riders, broken when the overhead announcement system crackled.

“This bus is terminating service,” it said cheerily in English and then Korean. A chorus of groans filled the packed conveyance. “We apologize for the inconvenience. Be safe and please do not drive on flooded streets.”

The doors opened. Enda, Troy, and JD were ejected by the press of bodies, stepping onto a sidewalk already underwater. Commuters waiting at the bus stop stared in confusion as the passengers disembarked. The empty bus closed its doors and did a U-turn, skirting the edge of the next intersection, flooded deep as a swimming pool. One auto-cab sat half-submerged, its headlights shining dimly beneath the undulating waters.

Slowly the crowd broke up, some brave souls wading