#08 A MOUSE CALLED JUNE
Roof of the Palmer House Hotel
Downtown Callisto City (Callisto, Jupiter IV)
Present day
“What happened to the Monsutā once you guys got back to the surface?” Bill Murray asked.
Ali spit her bubble gum. A colored trickle drooled on her chin. “Zéphyr disappeared with it the next day, when I went home to the Kitty and met Lee,” she said, wiping her lips with the back of her sleeve before sticking her candy on a rusted rivet.
“And the fire? That was you? The barbershop exploded on live TV. That was awesome!”
“That’s the problem with us,” I sighed, trying to light up one of my cigarettes I was saving. “We rarely go unnoticed.”
“What about the FBI? Did you get your bounty hunter’s license back?”
“We received an unexpected visit from the two agents, Mr. De Mornay and Mr. Gross, shortly after…” I interjected, beating the dust off my tail out of frustration as I couldn’t properly light my cigarette. “While I had my head in the nuclear reactor!”
Ali laughed. “Lee bit their ass. We didn’t hear more from them until yesterday.”
“What do you mean?” Bill Murray asked, helping me with his Zippo.
“The unfamous June Roger is alive,” I explained, puffing. “And according to Mr. Gross, she’s holed up in this building with mercenaries of the Thanatos data-cartel.” Ali pointed to the 50-story sweatshops we were watching with her thumb. “Ready to be exfiltrated off-world despite the Jovian arrest warrant.”
Bill Murray raised an eyebrow. “So the feds were good guys?”
“Not really…” I grumbled. “Let’s just say they were short of competent agents in the area.”
The trash heap in front of Ali beeped. Lost amid the old Quisp Cereal boxes and other household garbage, a bulky walkie-talkie loudly alerted us of an incoming communication.
Bill Murray grabbed the device and turned up the volume. We could hear Agent Gross’s deep voice: “Kitty? Are you still there?”
“For ages, indeed…” I whined as the actor spun the walkie-talkie in my direction so I could rant more easily.
“We have a visual on our friend the Freak-mouse! The cartel’s helicopter was damaged over the slums, meaning she won’t be escaping through the roof as planned—God Darwin! Watch that taxicab asshole!” Screeching tires and honking horns drowned his last curses.
“Are you kidding me?” bellowed Ali, grabbing Bill Murray’s tiring wrist. “We’re starving here for nothing!”
Agent Gross shouted orders to his partner at the wheel, before coming back to us: “We also lost quite a bit of time in a TV van, stuck in an alleyway reeking of garbage!”
“This isn’t a contest!” I interjected. “Where’s Mighty Mouse? Where’s our luscious contract?”
“She’s gonna break through the east side!” De Mornay exclaimed, realizing a skid destroying—from the noise—someone’s newsstand. “According to our team stationed a few floors below you, she’s about to jump on a subway train!”
“I’ll get her!” Ali immediately replied, springing towards the hatch while stepping over the silent Bill Murray.
“What?” I reacted. “Wait!”
Too late, my partner was already outside and running to the edge of the roof. Below, the subway tracks snaked towards the bay’s spaceport.
I too leaped outdoors through a hole big enough to accommodate my stomach, before turning back to the actor who poked his nose through my former surveillance post: “Goodbye, Mr. Murray! It was a pleasure meeting you!”
“Alas, Nothing lasts forever, fellas!” smiled the sapiens, waving his hand through another gap. “Goodbye, Ali!”
“See you around, Bill!” shouted the latter before throwing herself head first into the void.
I ran to the edge. Below me, my partner drifted away, helped by the hot wind. Thanks to her genetically modified body, she could almost gracefully land on the Blue line subway train and not almost gracefully crash head on onto it.
“By the 79 moons of Jupiter!” I swore.
I turned around. Hidden under an orange tarp, the Kitty was just waiting for my pads to join the mad chase.
Blue Line subway streetcar
Downtown Callisto City (Callisto, Jupiter IV)
Same time
I landed on the train, bending the shiny metal roof. My clone body absorbed the biggest part of the impact. My head, the other. With my nose shattered and slightly dazed, I straightened. A monumental mistake.
The wind coupled with the speed ejected me backwards, and I caught the red handle of a safety hatch at the last second. Once back on track, I progressed slowly while remaining crouched, elbow in front of my eyes to protect myself.
“Lee? Do you read me?” I tried, bringing my implant as close to my lips as possible.
The train’s frantic race took me through the tall black towers of downtown Callisto City, slaloming between the bright and giant advertisement holograms. Window-cleaning robots, fat insurance brokers and other curious white-collar workers passionately followed the live events.
“I’m in the ship, a little further back behind the unmarked FBI truck!” Lee answered. “But I need to stall because the line is about to dive underground after the next block!”
“Do you have a visual on June?”
A stained flier brushed my cheek. I used it to clean my bloody nose, before the whistle of a bullet grazing my tight startled me. In the distance, June Roger and his Thanatos mercenaries didn’t want to share their little bumpy ride, and started shooting at me.
“I’d throw a lovely rocket, but…” Lee snapped as I saw the Kitty pass by on my left in the busy air traffic.
“Don’t worry, partner. I’ll take care of this! Ali style.”
The subway slowed as it approached a curve, and I could leap forward, gun in hand. As I made my way to the front, I gradually got rid of the escort that accompanied the Freak mercenary. The subway racing towards the ground, I gained the high spot.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Easy Peasy.
A fourth and last body crashed into the parking lot below just before we entered the underground passage. Almost deafened by the screech of the brakes and an alarm triggered by the passengers, I jumped to the text cars burning my lungs. Meanwhile, June Roger reached the conductor car, dodging the few traffic lights sparsely lit on the rocky ceiling.
“Gotcha, bitch.”
I aimed at her. But she disappeared into the blinding light of a huge advertising screen after the tunnel exit. I lost sight of my contract because of a goddamn teaser for the new season of Cyber Macho.
I swore, and Lee invited himself back into the chat channel as the subway rocketed up to city heights and the polluted skies: “Ali! June jumped again!”
“What? She’s a mouse, not a fucking wallaby! Where is she?”
“The construction site… left!” Lee replied as the link was disrupted by static. My wrist implant alerted police vehicles soaring in our direction were scrambling the comms. “I have to go… before being shot down for flying too close to Wrigley Fields!”
“Roger that!”
I saw the Kitty disappear into the smog above the starscrapers.
“Take care of yourself, girl!”
“Trust me!”
Of course, I appeared to be reckless. And a nutrigel delivery drone hit me head-on.
A shower of greasy fries followed my short fall. I landed with them on a sand pile at the center of a construction site for a new residential high-rise. I rolled breathless to a rough concrete floor and crashed into a wall made of bricks. Under the impact, several of them came apart along a bunch of iron rods dangling nearby. While the bricks struck my stomach, the rods impaled themselves into the ground—a few centimeters away from the parts I would have grown if I hadn’t won the chromosomal lottery.
“I’m getting sick of this!” I yelled, dusting off my aching limbs.
“So do I!” a familiar voice intervened.
June Roger stood in front of me, in the middle of construction workers running away. The fake reporter with whom Zéphyr and I had conquered the moon-city’s sewers no longer resembled the friendly little mouse. The silver flames that had cooked the Radio Freaks army had eaten away her mutant face and hair. Under Jupiter’s shy light, she looked more like the disgusting Monsutā than the Miami Mice puppets.
My contract had ditched its discreet .38 for a shotgun with automatic sights. As loud as it was effective, the latter pulverized a chunk of the wall above my head. A new batch of bricks landed on my head before a construction drone mechanically refurbished the hole with creamy cement.
After repairing his weapon with large red rounds that didn’t bode well, the Freak pointed it in my direction again. “You gonna pay for what happened to me in the fucking sewers!” she threatened. “For letting me roast like a goddamn squirrel!”
“Oh that was that?” I joked, following with my eyes her purulent scars running from her temple to her neck. “I thought your back-alley surgeon screwed up your lifting pretty good.”
Telltales slowly lit up on the side of her rifle while I enjoyed my last moments of peace in Solaris. I was going to miss my cyber girlfriend. Lee, too. Burger King even more.
“Geronimo!” someone shouted.
I opened my eyes again. In the sky to my right, a curious man in a dirty bathrobe was swooping towards my position on a hang glider.
“Bill!” I exclaimed, recognizing my tank mate.
“Who?” reacted June, turning around.
Bill Murray hit the merc full force, and she disappeared through the scaffolding and dust of the impact.
The actor stopped dead in his tracks, defying the strange laws of physics in lesser gravity. He lay on the ground, arms crossed amid his hang glider’s aluminum pieces and torn canvas.
“Is everything all right?” I asked as I stood up and grabbed my gun.
Bill Murray sat up with difficulty. “John Candy doesn’t know what he’s missing,” he breathed, both hands on his forehead where a bump grew. “Where did she go?”
“Over here. You betta rest... and thank you.”
“You’re welcome...” he sighed while laying down again. “Good luck.”
Stepping over the bent uprights of the scaffolding, I followed the chaos propagated by the Freak. I found her half a minute later, with all four legs deeply embedded in a fresh concrete screed.
“Enjoying a fine cement-flavored mud bath, June?” I asked as I strode over the pipe continuously spilling toxic additives.
She struggled to catch her breath. With several ribs likely broken, she was wetting the hardening surface with numerous drops of blood. “You won…” she spat before trying to brush away the gray oatmeal dripping into her eyes. Unfortunately, her hands were deeply soggy, and she stumbled to the side. Beaten. “Just tell me one thing…” she gasped. “The girl with you… was it Zéphyr, the Data Maiden?’
I stepped up to the edge of the deadly pool. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
She coughed. “Yeah—knew it. The holosuit gave her away. That explains why she got the Monsutā-fuck back…” The man-made Swamp of Sadness devoured her legs. She was sinking fast.
“Her shenanigans with the Guild are none of my business.”
“You’re not the type to ask much anyway. Nor thinking too much,” she growled, as she tried to swim towards me. Without much success. “I learned a few little secrets about Zéphyr, you know… It has to do with the Moon. Don’t you want to hear them before you turn me over to the feds?” June held out her one uncluttered hand to me.
“She will tell me about it if she thinks it’s important.” That idiot couldn’t understand that my girlfriend always had my absolute trust.
“You don’t know what you’re walking into!”
“At least it’s not a concrete screed…” I said, sitting on a whirring generator after grabbing a heavy jackhammer.
The pneumatic drill hit a pedal. The generator spit a black cloud through a canister in my back, startling me. Its engine roared, and a huge crunching sound resounded on the other side of the floor under construction. Behind June, a massive automated steamroller hissed before being set into motion.
I smiled, resting on the jackhammer’s handle. All I had to do was to wait before collecting June’s Finger-IDentification. And just the FID. The Bureau would deal with the rest.
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