How to Save the World Read online

  This is a work of fiction, and all characters, places, and events depicted herein are entirely imaginary. The fact is, life will never be this heinous or cool, so it's a good thing we have fiction.

  How to Save the World

  Written by: Tam MacNeil

  Cover art: Pixel

  Cover design: Canva

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  One

  It's a grim, dark little hovel in a grim, dark little section of town. It's far enough away from the shinigami, and near enough to a train station for when they need to get out.

  The stupid stray dog that Alex started feeding when they first came here is lying curled on the bed, which is fine, because the bed is full of bugs anyway, so they’re fucking on the carpet.

  “Babe,” Sean whispers into Alex’s mouth. Alex breathes his name back at him, breath heavy with vodka and the minty, ashy stink of the cigarettes he likes so much.

  “Gonna fuck you, O'Connell,” he says. His voice is a growl from all those cigarettes.

  “Any day now, Beridze.”

  A pause. Hiatus. Break in the action. Warm and thrumming, Sean lies back and waits. Alex makes a noise. The kind of noise he makes when he can’t line up a shot, or the wind changes, or shinigami have closed a train station and they’re going to have to walk. Sean makes the effort to raise his head and suss out the problem. “What?”

  “Where’s the goddamned lube?”

  “By the gun cases, asshole.”

  Outside sirens go screaming by. The world is ending. The shinigami hit the harbour last night and someone, or a pair of someones, put a bullet in the brain of the city’s main defense contractor this morning. The TV says the assassins were spotted leaving the scene, but nobody's found them. Not yet. Wonder who they could have been.

  Sean lies there and listens to the sound of bags unzipping, a little grumpy about how this is taking way longer than it should. Then Alex is back, fingers cool and slick and right where they ought to be.

  “I didn’t come here for a finger fuck,” Sean says after a minute, and when he can make his voice work again. Alex laughs, hauling one of Sean’s legs up under his arm.

  “Good, cause I’m not here to fuck you with my fingers.”

  Alex pushes down and Sean rocks under him, head thrown back, open mouth filled with Alex’s tongue.

  This is how they live. Killing, fucking, fighting. It’s a hell of a living.

  They came to Sevastopol to put a bullet in the brain of Elena Ivanov, the head of International Defensive Systems Inc, which is a pretty fancy name for not much of a company. It was an easy job. Windless day, and Eastern Europe has been so crazy since the shinigami started attacking that it was no trouble at all to site her in the street and blow out her brains. Could have been anyone. A pro-shinigami cultist. A lone nut. A nationalist terrorist. A business competitor.

  Sevastopol’s already heavy with the shinigami fear, and he can’t understand the words but he can hear the tone of the news anchors and it sounds to him like they can’t decide if this is the best or the worst day of their lives. Doesn’t really matter. Neither Alex or him ever get involved in politics. If Cameron says they’ve got a job to do, then they don’t care where they go.

  Sean pulls his blanket around himself a little more. They slept on the floor again, adding cum and drool to the gross red carpet and its constellation of mystery-stains. The stupid dog is still on the bed. He’s in for a surprise when they get on the early train out and there’s no soft-hearted asshole to buy him ground meat from the goddamned butcher anymore.

  Speaking of soft-hearted asshole, Sean cracks open his eyes to have a look at Alex, who’s moving around the little apartment making what’s going to pass for breakfast. Judging by the smell of it, breakfast is instant noodles and instant coffee. Again. And the TV's chattering away in whatever the language is. He’s bad with languages. Alex does that stuff.

  “Should I get up?” he asks, groggy and growly.

  Alex looks up from pouring hot water into a cup. “You wanna live?”

  Sean hauls himself upright.

  “We’re on TV.”

  That jolts him. “Seriously?”

  “Not us,” Alex corrects, “Cameron. SysCorp.”

  “Oh.” He calms back down. “Why? The mechs?”

  “Yeah. The pilots. Poor fuckers,” he adds. “Looks like the CBC got some footage and now the BBC’s picked it up.”

  “Annex, I bet.” Another player in the security industry. Everybody knows they hate the mechs. They’ve been trying to shut down the mech program since it started up.

  “Yeah. Jesus,” Alex whispers then. “Jesus.”

  Sean doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. They haven’t talked much about the mechs, but they once saw one of the pilots strapped in place in the cage, coming in from battle with a shinigami. They strap them into the interface so that they can’t get knocked off in combat, but he’s pretty sure that’s not the only reason. The woman they saw had a comms mask over the bottom half her face. The whites of her eyes were totally red, and blood was pouring out from under the mask. When they got her off the machine and peeled off the mask she started screaming the way people scream when they think the pain’s going to kill them.

  “Sounds like the DND’s told him he can’t have any more of their people.”

  “Good time to be on the other side of the world then,” Sean mutters. Cameron is not a man you say no to. He’s not a man who’s going to shut down a multi-billion dollar project because he can’t get pilots. And he’s not the kind of person who’s going to change the things that are making it so hard for him to get those pilots. He’ll just get them other ways. A real good time to be on the far side of the world.

  Alex looks back at him. “You getting up or what?”

  He groans, pulls the blankets up over his head again, and tries to go back to sleep but he can’t. Now he’s thinking about Cameron and the mech program and his head is starting to get going. He sighs, kicks off the blankets, and hauls himself to his feet.

  “Your ass sore?” Alex asks, giving him a filthy grin.

  “Crazy, isn't it?” Sean answers. Alex’s grin turns a little smug.

  “Aw, you shoulda said.”

  Sean gives Alex a half-lidded look and takes the cup off coffee that’s most full. “I wasn’t complaining.”

  Alex makes a contented little noise. He pours a little more water into the second mug and then checks his phone.

  “Who is it?”

  “Chen.”

  Their handler. Sets everything up, makes life easy for them. Used to do this stuff herself, till her spotter got counter-sniped in London. Serves him right for being a shitty spotter. Anyway, now she’s all logistics. “She says the money’s in. We can move.”

  “Good,” Sean says. “I hate this fucking city. When’s the train?”

  Alex checks his phone. “In twenty-seven minutes. Gonna be ready, princess?”

  The next job is in Tbilisi. It’s a little one. A quiet thing, not political, or at least, not conventionally political. The shinigami have hit the airport, and there’s a five-mile quarantine zone till the mechs get in, so they take the train, and see from the windows the orange glow of the pyres.

  “If they come,” Sean says softly, staring through the window as he does, “Will you go with me?”

  Alex looks at him for a long moment. Sometimes Sean gets down, but not usually like this. “You feeling it?” he asks.

  Sean says nothing for a while, the train is quiet except for the metallic clack-clack-clack of the rails. “Maybe,” he admits.

  Alex nods. “Me too.”

  It’s a lie. He knows the song of the sh
inigami. Remembers the night his parents got him and his little sister Ava out of bed, how they all walked down to the water together. He remembers the warm scrape of asphalt under his bare feet. He remembers the hot sand, it was August after all, and then the shockingly cold water.

  English Bay seemed to come up to embrace them, and the shinigami were standing in the water like trees, and as dark the space under the basement stairs, star-dashed like the sky. He doesn’t think he’ll ever understand why he didn’t want to die the way all the rest of them did. They all just kind of lay down in the water and went to sleep, but the water was too cold for him, it made him shiver, and he wanted to keep breathing.

  They rode the water like corks, like garbage, hair and clothes floating like seaweed and the fog horn mourning off the point. He stood all through the night and in the morning, after the first shinigami attack on the Canadian coast, he had been the only thing not bloated in the bay. It was the very start of the apocalypse, but nobody knew it then.

  Alex puts his feet up on the seat opposite and lets his head roll back.

  “You think they got their own mechs over here?” Sean asks. He can hear the strain in Sean’s voice. Trying to punch through the haze that falls when the shinigami have been around, the miasma that fills up the air, the contagion they leave.

  “Dunno,” Alex says, opening one eye to look at him. “But Cameron will send the one in the Tank. And anyway, they got nukes.”

  Sean smiles suddenly, swift and unpleasant. He’s probably thinking of dying in the flash of a nuclear blast, and now Alex knows it’s the shinigami call he’s feeling.

  “Hey,” Alex says. “I’m not dying with you. Not tonight. We’ve got a job to do tomorrow, and I need a goddamned spotter. Got it?”

  Sean blinks. He shakes his head a little, rubs his face with one hand like he’s tired. “Yeah,” he mutters. “Sorry. Fucking shinigami.”

  They get off the train and have to walk to the rendezvous and by then they’re far enough from the effects of the shinigami that Sean’s himself again, grinning and confident and mouthing off about eastern Europe. It’s a warm night, humid but not oppressive. And the rendezvous is a bar, which always helps.

  Sean’s the one who looks over at Alex and flashes that big, cocky smile, the smile that means here we go and follows the big thug into the back of the bar. Alex squeezes the glass under his hand. He doesn’t like it when Sean goes somewhere that his mouth can get him into trouble and Alex can’t get him out, but Sean’s the talker, and HQ said English would be fine.

  This is how they do it. How they’ve always done it, since they first started working together when they were nothing but kids. Sean doing the talking and Alex doing the listening. It’s how they work, and they’re good at it. So good they’ve got a reputation and a name.

  They’re called the Fifty. Sean likes to joke that it’s because you can buy them both for twenty-five bucks a piece, but it’s because they did fifty kills in a year a couple years ago, all of them political, every one of them a one-shot kill. Even Cameron was impressed. They got a week in Vegas and a good hotel and suits and a pair of gorgeous cars for that week. Cameron gave them money to spend in the casinos but they just bought booze and drugs and fucked on every surface of the suite and made each other stupid promises and pretended they were rich and famous and never going to have to work again. It was a good week.

  He drinks down the vodka and then orders another. Three’s the limit, anything more than three and he won’t be able to shoot straight. Three’s plenty. He’s just halfway down the third glass when Sean comes back, all easy swagger, and Alex can’t wait to fuck him again, but there’s work to be done.

  They take the deposit, a gym bag stuffed with American dollars, because it’s eastern Europe and a lot of things still happen in cash over here. Then they go back out into the warm and humid street. They dump the bag at the drop point, and walk back to the place they’ve got, an empty apartment with the For Sale sign still hanging in the window, to get their stuff, the gun they're going to use, and the weird Soviet surplus ammo that smells like ammonia, and get to the range to set up.

  Alex doesn't like the gun and it takes all afternoon to get set up. That night they crash on the apartment floor, since the place is empty and there's no furniture, and in the morning Alex gets them a cab on up to the cathedral and then they walk the rest of the way. It’s not so far. Nice neighborhood. Lots of white houses with pillars in the front. Good view of the jewel-bright blue water. Lots of cover.

  They set up and Alex gets a fix on the guy easy while Sean spots. The window doesn’t even shatter, the bullet just punches through. The wall of the room turns black with arterial spray. One shot is plenty. They take apart the rifle, slip it into the case, throw the case into the bag and get walking, then catch a cab, drop the guns at the safe house, pick up their new passports. Then they’re cousins, Tomaz and Vlad Sidlichenko. At least, till they clear customs in Canada.

  Eleven hours later they meet the guy with the new set of passports in a cafe in Toronto and they check into a hotel as Americans, Mr. and Mr. James and Stephen Barnes-Rogers, which Alex thinks is hilarious, but Sean doesn’t read very much and he doesn’t get the joke. They eat. They watch TV. Alex drinks till he's drunk and Sean tucks him into the big, lumpy bed. Morning comes and there's a cab waiting and they've got a flight to catch.

  They’re going back to Vancouver. It’s where HQ is, and where Cameron is, and where the shinigami first made contact with humanity. For a while there wasn’t much left of it. But it’s hard to kill a city, even if it sits at the epicenter of an apocalypse, and now that Cameron’s mechs are starting to drive back the shinigami, it’s healing up again. It’s where they’re both from, so it’s home, but Sean’s not excited to get back. He’s been doing some thinking about that. About Vancouver, and about Cameron.

  “I don’t want to fuck that guy any more,” he tells Alex while they’re drinking coffee from paper cups, waiting for the boarding call.

  “Who? You mean Cameron?”

  Sean nods and Alex laughs.

  “So what? I never want to fuck him. He’s like a hundred years old and all he wants is to stick his dick down your throat till you choke.”

  Sean doesn’t say anything. He wants to say something, something about how he doesn’t see why they should have to, but Alex shrugs and says, “What are you gonna do? He’s the boss. We gotta keep him happy.” Then he looks at Sean with a frown. “What?” he asks.

  Sean’s been wondering about it all before, watching too much TV in their safe-house and hotel rooms and watching how people, you know, go to work and then go home, and they don’t have to fuck the boss. And when the boss is trying to make them fuck, it’s because there’s something wrong with the boss and he’s the bad guy.

  He’s been looking stuff up on the internet. He knows better than to use their phones for that kind of thing, but eastern Europe is still full of internet cafes, and Alex once showed him the Simple English page for Wikipedia. So when Alex was sleeping off a hangover in Odessa, Sean went out and found a cafe and spent hours reading, first the page on assassins, because he wanted to know if they were there, then the article on hit men, then human trafficking, then Stockholm Syndrome page, and then child soldiers and child abuse and then everything, everything, until his phone buzzed and it was Alex.

  You dead?

  And he knew he’d been out too long and should go back. He didn’t say anything about it, wasn’t sure what to think about it. But he’s had a week to think now, and some of those articles kinda stuck with him. Now Sean knows what he wants, and what he wants is to be left alone.

  “We’re good at what we do,” he says. “We’re real fucking good. What if we don’t need Cameron. What if we did it on our own?”

  Alex laughs and looks around. The airport is packed, people coming, going, sleeping on bags, playing on phones, staring off into space. Nobody gives a fuck about their conversation. Still, Alex leans in and lowers his voice. �
��Sean, we can’t go out on our own.”

  “Why not?”

  Alex opens and closes his mouth a couple times.

  “Seriously,” Sean says, leaning forward too. “We don’t need him. We’re not kids anymore.” He doesn’t add, he asks too much even though he feels like it’s true. Cameron touches them both like he owns them, and maybe he does, and maybe that’s fair considering they get a place to go, and access to a network of safe houses, and a medical team if things go bad, but Cameron’s got a hell of a cruel streak.

  Last time they were in Vancouver he hurt Alex, hurt him so bad that Alex snuck back into their apartment like a beaten dog and went right to bed. Took more than a day for him to get up and moving properly, even to get up and use the bathroom. Sean had been seriously thinking of taking Alex down to a hospital, even though they’re not really supposed to go to hospitals because they don’t have ID and things get sticky. So Sean had stayed up for two nights running because a part of him had been afraid that whatever had happened to Alex was too much, afraid that Alex was going to die.

  Sean doesn’t like Cameron, never has, but he used to need him. Needed a place to go. Liked guns and was good at them, and Cameron was good to them because of it. Or it seemed like that, when he was broke and hungry and Cameron came along and promised him everything and all he had to do was point the gun where he was told and get naked once in a while. But the more he reads, the more he’s getting to hate the guy. He’s been necessary, up till now, but he might not be necessary any more.

  “Seriously, Alex, don’t you think we can do it ourselves? I don't think I've ever seen you miss a shot.”

  Alex makes a little noise, mmgh, “Come on. Where are we going to get the guns? Where are we gonna stay when things go bad?”

  “We can figure that out. Cameron isn’t a fucking genius, he’s a dirty old man with a lot of money and a couple friends in the DND. We’ve got a good reputation, we can make our own money, set up our own shit.”