Hammer Town Read online

  “Yeah, right.” Jason laughed.

  “Tell you what, Jason. Get out on the street. If you get the girl before Hammer does, I’ll give you the bonus.”

  “Thanks, boss!” Jason smiled and left. As he stepped onto the moving walkway it anticipated which way he wanted to go and started moving.

  James watched him move away. The smug little bastard was sure he could do the job, but then he didn’t know Hammer or the streets the way James did. It might take some talking, but in the end she would do it – if it could be done.

  “Chair up.” The chair pushed up so that it took him as little effort to stand as was possible. He got onto the walkway. “Garage,” he ordered. In a few minutes he was in the garage under the building, and he’d maybe had to walk a grand total of ten feet. “Computer, send car.” In seconds his car stood before him. “Door, open.” It did, and he got in. “Door, close.” It did, and his restraint slipped on automatically. “Take me to 148 West Street in HammerTown.” The car took off. “Play music.” The dygarhythms started to play. He sat back and relaxed. Ten minutes later he entered HammerTown.

  The whole place gave him the creeps. It was like walking back in time. He saw a bunch of Constructionists working with anachronistic tools to build a home, of wood no less! Their air hammers made a loud piercing sound as they shot things called nails into the wood. Not many steel or plastic homes here. Not many computers, either. In fact, very few machines of any kind.

  The Constructionists were a religious cult that believed that man was never meant to live in a push-button, computerized world. They believed hard work and personal contact were all important if one wanted to live a righteous life.

  McVee lived in HammerTown. That’s how she had gotten the nickname Hammer. Well, that and the fact that she used an air hammer as a weapon.

  James liked McVee, but he didn’t understand her religion, and he didn’t understand her.

  The car stopped in McVee’s driveway, an open thing with no roof or walls. In fact everything in HammerTown was just kind of open and airy. If he thought about it too much it would give him nightmares.

  He walked up to her door. “It’s James Rank,” he told the door. It didn’t open. “James Rank,” he said again. The door remained closed, and it took a second for him to realize why. Then he remembered where he was. He looked for and found the little button that was by the door. He pushed it and it made a noise inside the house.

  “Come in!” He heard Hammer scream from inside.

  He looked at the round thing on the door at waist level and tried to remember how it worked. Finally he grabbed hold of it and turned. After a moment he remembered to push and the door opened. He walked through and kept going, then remembering that the door wouldn’t close itself he went back and shut it. He could never get used to this shit.

  “I’m in the kitchen!” she hollered.

  James walked through the house – under his own power – to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was a real trip. The Constructionists got in their cars and drove to these places and bought their food, or they grew it themselves in these things they called yards. Their appliances were all separate, and they prepared and cooked their food themselves. There was this thing called a sink that always fascinated James. Water ran into it from a tube, and it held water – for what purpose he had no idea.

  As weird as James thought the Constructionists were he couldn’t help but admire them. They lived a very hard life.

  McVee stood at the sink holding a container under the metal tube to fill it with water. When it was full she shut the water off by hand and then walked over and poured it into this little machine. “Rank, good to see you,” she smiled. “So were you talking to my door again?”

  “Yes. Fer the life of me I don’ know why you live like this.”

  She laughed and pushed a button on the machine. It started making tea. James could smell it. It smelled good. That was the one thing he liked about HammerTown – all the smells – food cooking, wood, grass. Computers just couldn’t replicate it.

  “You want some tea?” she asked.

  “Ah…” He’d never eaten there before, and he wasn’t sure that it was safe, but it smelled so damn good. “Yeah.”

  “Well, sit down take a load off.”

  She waved towards a chair at a table, and he sat down. The chair didn’t rise to meet him, and he hit it so hard he almost fell over. McVee laughed.

  “Primitive,” he mumbled. She poured two cups of tea, set one in front of him, and sat down with the other across the table from him. “You know if you would keep your computer on I wouldn’t be forced to travel out here every time I have an assignment for you.”

  “And what does it take? Ten, maybe fifteen minutes of your precious time?” she asked.

  “In some cases that fifteen minutes can be the difference between life and death,” James said.

  She shrugged and took a sip of her tea. He tried his carefully, then smiled and sighed.

  “Good?” she asked.

  “Out of this world,” he said.

  “So everything about us is not so bad?”

  “I don’ have any trouble with Constructionists. I don’ understand why ya would choose to make so much work for yourselves, but I don’ have any problem with it.”

  “If God had meant for us to live in a push-button, computerized world, It wouldn’t have given us opposable thumbs. You think we’re lunatics, but where is the sanity in having the computers and the machines do everything for you so that you have to go to the gym three times a week just to keep your body from atrophying?”

  And that was basically the foundation of their faith.

  “So... what’s the problem with this job that you know that I don’t want to do it?” she asked, suddenly changing the subject.

  “Oh, God! I wish you wouldn’ do that,” James said, a bit unnerved.

  “Hey, don’t blame me. The agency was the one that pushed me to get the empathy implant,” Conner said with a smile.

  Conner McVee was a shop job, a cyborg, a relic from a time before they made shop jobs all but illegal in the trade. Even after eight years of working with her he still wasn’t sure just what she was capable of. How much was flesh and how much was machine. He wasn’t even sure how much of her ability was her and what had been mechanically enhanced.

  Back in the old days when Conner McVee had first started out, the business had been very competitive. Brakston Agency, which James ran for the corporation as his father had before him, had used everything at their command to make them number one. Conner McVee had made them a lot of money, and the company had put a lot of money into her.

  “James?” she prompted.

  “You ain’t gonna like it, but the computer says yer the only one with an acceptable success ratio.”

  “And we all know that computers are never wrong,” she scoffed, making a face.

  He ignored her. “It’s a good payin’ job. Your part will be two million up front, five on completion.”

  “God in a car, man! What the fuck’s the job?” she asked suspiciously.

  A more eloquent man would have found some gentle way of weaving into it. He had never been a man of many words. “Tarent Powers’ daughter was kidnapped from right outside PowersTowers by some of Mishy’s hired thugs. Now I know that...”

  “I’ll do it,” she said too quickly. Her hand was shaking, but that was the only sign that she was feeling anything.

  “I expected a fight...”

  “Why? The girl didn’t do anything to me.”

  “It needs to be discreet.”

  “Yeah right,” she laughed. “By now everyone and his dog knows that she’s been kidnapped. Hell, she may already be dead.”

  “All the more reason to get right on it,” James said. “If the girl’s still alive she isn’t likely to be much longer.”

  “I’ll load my gear, jam up my computer, and I’m on the road.”

  “I’ve got everybody on it, and you’
ll all be linked in,” he said. “We’ll keep a trace on ya.” She glared at him then with her one eye, and he felt like his dick was crawling back into his body. He had hit an extremely exposed nerve. One of her implants allowed them to monitor her every movement for a fifty mile radius. It was an extremely sore spot because it was the one piece of hardware in her body that she hadn’t authorized.

  “Don’t get too close. If I need help I’ll yell. Otherwise stay the hell out of my way.”

  “I never put the trace on ya unless you’re workin’,” James said.

  “That’s not really the point is it, Rank?” she said through clinched teeth. “The point is that you can do it any time you like.”

  He nodded his understanding. “Are you going to be all right with this? Because I could put...”

  “If you could have thought of anyone else who could have done it, you would have assigned them already. I’m fine with it.” She got up from the table. “I’ll get my gear up and you can put me on line.” She left to get ready, and he drank his tea. He looked around quickly, saw that she wasn’t coming and drank hers, too. It was good. He went and got another cup and drank it, too. He was about to get another one when Conner walked out in full pack. “I’m out of here. Get back to the office and line me up.”

  He nodded and followed her out to the driveway. “Door open,” he said. His car door opened. As he got in he saw McVee open the door of her primitive car manually.

  So much wasted energy.

  “Car, drive back to the agency.” Suddenly he had to go to the bathroom very badly, and he shuddered to think what that might be like in HammerTown. “Car, go faster.”

  Chapter 2

  He had stuck the girl in a tiny cage with rusty metal bars, in the middle of a smoke-filled room. Her cat was curled up beside her. She was starting to stir.

  “Why’d ya take the fuckin’ cat?” Jakelord asked. His every nerve was on edge. This whole thing had been a big mistake. He didn’t really see any way out alive. He silently damned the day that he had decided that money was his god. “I said... Why’d ya take the fuckin’ cat!”

  The man he was talking to shrugged, and Jakelord smacked him. Why the hell had he done this? He hadn’t wanted to do it. He didn’t want to tangle with Tarent Powers. He was a little bitty bad man and he didn’t really play the big leagues. But sometimes you had to make a stand. Tarent had gone after Mishy, and if he succeeded at getting rid of Mishy, little Jakelord couldn’t be far behind.

  Besides, Mishy had paid Jakelord a butt load of money, and there was that worshipping money as a god thing that he had to deal with.

  Just a few more minutes and he could relax. He didn’t have to kill the girl. Waiting for weeks for her to poke her head out of the building had been the hard part. They had gotten away undetected with the help of some of Mishy’s high tech guys and his own skill as a computer jumper. All Jakelord had supplied was the code busting and some muscle. The girl had come out on her own. All he had to do now was wait for Mishy to come and get the girl, but the longer he sat here with the girl waiting for Mishy, the more likely it was that Tarent’s boys would find him first, and no amount of money was worth dying for.

  He didn’t think.

  The girl was wide-awake now, and she trembled with fear as one man licked the bars of her cage. “Can we fuck her?” he asked Jakelord.

  She cringed.

  “No, you can’t fuck her.” Jakelord ran over and kicked the man. “Just leave her the fuck alone till Mishy gets here. Whatever’s going to happen to her, Mishy’s going to do it. Not me.”

  “She’s beautiful, man,” another man said looking with lust at the half-dressed woman in the cage.

  “Yeah, and she’s going to stay that way at least until Mishy gets here,” Jakelord said. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Where the fuck is he anyway?”

  Elantra pulled her shirt tighter around her. It had torn at some point. The place stank and it was dark. There were only two small windows at the very top of the wall and Elantra could see that it was dark outside. There was one small bulb burning in the middle of the dank room, and a rickety wooden staircase with no rail led down to the floor from a door twelve feet above them. There were about a dozen rough-looking men and women in the large room sitting on what might have once been nice furniture but was now filthy and disgusting. Several of them were wearing weapons in plain sight, dressed in clothing in not much better repair than the furniture they sat on.

  Elantra swallowed hard. These didn’t look like the people her father did business with. These looked like... well, they looked like... not very nice people.

  “My father is going to be very angry,” she said. She got shakily to her feet and picked up the cat.

  “No shit!” Jakelord said, and all his men laughed hysterically.

  “I say we fuck her, and then we kill her,” one of them said.

  “Dead people don’t talk,” another one agreed.

  “And if we’re going to kill her anyway we might as well fuck her.”

  “Why don’t we kill her, and then we can fuck her,” yet another said.

  “Shut the fuck up!” Jakelord screamed. “We ain’t gonna fuck her, and we ain’t gonna kill her. Not in any order. We’re going to sit here and pray that Mishy gets here and takes her off our hands before the cops or Tarent’s hired goons come and blow our fucking asses away.”

  Elantra held her cat in front of her like a shield. “My father doesn’t have any goons. I’m sure that if you gave me back now, my father would be willing to make sure that the police give you a fair break.”

  They all laughed. “Little girl, what do you think your daddy does?”

  Elantra never had been really sure. “I think... I know he’s in imports and exports...”

  They rolled with laughter.

  “Yeah, he imports drugs and programs and exports hookers and programs,” Jakelord laughed.

  “What do you mean?” Elantra asked, confused.

  Jakelord walked up to the cage. “You really don’t know? Honey, your daddy is the biggest gangster in FreightCity. Hell, if he has his way, eventually he’ll own the whole damn place.”

  “My father is a legitimate business man.” She pulled her blouse even more tightly around her.

  They all laughed. “And I’m the fuckin’ president,” Jakelord said.

  There was a knock on the door at the top of the stairs, and suddenly the room got very quiet except for the sound of people jumping to their feet and the cocking of guns. Elantra, feeling that it might be helpfull, started screaming. Jakelord cocked a rifle and stuck it through the bars into in her face. “Shut the hell up!” he hissed. “Or I’ll blow your pretty head off.” She was quiet.

  A voice screamed through the door, “Jakelord!”

  Jakelord looked relieved and lowered the rifle. “It’s Alex. Let him in,” he ordered.

  One of the thugs started to open the door. Someone on the other side kicked the door open, and the man opening it was slung off the stairs. He fell screaming to the ground and landed with a thud. He screamed out in pain as his leg broke in two places. A man, apparently Alex, bloody and badly beaten was held like a shield in front of the person who walked in behind him. Then Alex was tossed down the stairs to land at Jakelord’s feet. The injured Alex looked up at Jakelord with a mixture of fear and apology.

  A woman stood alone at the top of the stairs. Elantra stared at her in disbelief. She was like a character the computer might generate; tall, thin, well muscled, and not quite real. Her long, straight hair was jet black. Her skin was well tanned, and her one eye was the brightest blue Elantra had ever seen. There was a patch over the other eye. She was wearing a simple tank top and what was left of a pair of pants. She held a weapon that looked like it was capable of eliminating everyone in the room with a simple sweep of her arms. There were primitive tools hanging from a belt she wore around her waist. She looked at Elantra, and Elantra felt like she could no longer breathe.

 
The woman scanned the room until she saw Jakelord. Then she smiled a smile that made Elantra’s flesh crawl. Before she could speak, Jakelord muttered in a voice filled with respect and fear, “Shit! It’s the Hammer.”

  The woman fixed Elantra with a stare then, and Elantra looked away.

  The Hammer turned her attention back to Jakelord. “I have no beef with you, Jakelord. We have been friends a long time, family. I came for the girl, and if you give her to me we’re OK.”

  “Hammer... It’s not that easy, man. Mishy’s gonna have me killed if I lose the girl.”

  Hammer smiled. “I’m takin’ the girl, Jakelord. Don’t get in my way.”

  A man in the corner moved to fire his weapon. With a flick of her wrist and without turning to look, Conner aimed and fired. A sixteen-penny nail smashed into the man’s forehead, blowing up most of the man’s skull in the process. He gasped once and fell to the floor, his body erupting in a fit of spasms.

  Elantra couldn’t control the scream that was ripped from her lungs.

  Jakelord shuddered. “Let the girl go! Let her go!” he ordered. One of his boys started unlocking the door. “Hammer... what do I tell Mishy?”

  Hammer started down the stairs, talking as she went. “Tell Mishy I came and I took the girl. Tell him I said I’d make it right. Tell him I said if he did anything to you, I’d kill him.” She reached in, grabbed the girl by the arm, and dragged Elantra out of the cage. She looked at the cat Elantra held and made a face. “Come on.” She dragged her up the stairs and out of the basement, and Elantra knew in that instant that nothing was ever going to be the same again.

  Jakelord watched them go.

  “What we gonna do, Jakelord?” one of the boys asked.

  “Hope that Mishy’s as afraid of Hammer as I am,” Jakelord answered.

  “What did she mean… tell him she’d make things right?”

  Jakelord smiled broadly. “I think it means Tarent isn’t going to get his little darlin’ back till The Hammer gets what she wants.”