by Brad C Scott
Deep breaths, Malcolm. So my counselor advises when hell claws at the gates. As if breathing holds much interest for me. But setting a good example does, so breathe deep and shut up. Nobody likes a complainer.
◊ ◊ ◊
When I reenter the squad bay, my reclaimers are gearing up, checking weapons and hard suits. My brothers and sisters, ready to throw themselves into the fire for each other. And for me. Damned idiots, but I love them for it.
“Worthy,” I ask, “have you mapped out all the best places?”
“Right here,” he replies, tapping his holobracer. “Every eatery, bar, and brothel in LA.”
“Wherever we end up, steaks are on me.”
“And the drinks?”
“Loser gets the first round,” I say with a nod at the holoboard, drawing a groan from Anderson.
Our ride becomes smoother, the hovership passing beneath the storm layer.
“Sixty seconds to mark,” broadcasts Spalleti. “Landing zone rerouted to Delta.”
“Delta?” Worthy’s look speaks eloquent volumes about the long slog ahead.
The squad bay’s view screens snap on, allowing us to observe our descent into the blighted heart of the City of Lost Angels. With the power grid shut down, downtown seems a tangle of timeworn shadows in the bruised light of a wet dawn. The hoary columns of pre-war commercial buildings, windowless and scarred, tower above the bleak landscape, grave markers for the benighted city. The stepped, circular pillar of the Bank Tower, its uppermost levels shorn off, great bonfires crowning its summit, seems a giant’s guttering torch against the dark; the curved profile of the Wilshire Grand, a titan’s rusted knifepoint thrust up from the murky depths below. Searchlights cast by drones and shifting lights at street level give lie to the seeming lifelessness, though in one place, darkness reigns: the bone pile of ground zero, a black pit of irradiated debris ringed by ruined, leaning superstructures. As we descend to the level of the tallest, their ponderous decay getting ever more evident, we veer southwest to our drop point.
Worthy hands me my helmet, and I stare at the reflection in the visor – a grim man with suspicious dark eyes glares back. Tightly contained madness lurks behind the severity. Not sure I can trust you anymore, old man. No offense. Worry lines, furrowed brow, and a wide jaw pulling down the edges of a mouth that’s forgotten the art of smiling: a face only a dead woman could love.
Feeling a touch on my arm, I glance over at Worthy’s face behind his visor, expression neutral save for a bare widening of one eye. I nod and sit straight, latching the helmet on and sealing the visor. Onboard systems light up my interior screen with sensory and tactical glyphs.
“Twenty seconds,” broadcasts Spalleti.
“Launch successful,” transmits Patton. “Establishing landing zone perimeter.”
Swiveling my head to review the squad confirms they’ve all got their helmets sealed, coil rifles readied, and hands gripping the hull handles. I needn’t worry – most are experienced with the sort of hell we’re about to enter. Only I am worried, instincts screaming at me to keep them on the hovership. I’d say a prayer for them, ask God to watch over them, but that’d be useless. The only faith that will save us today is in each other.
The hovership shudders and then touches down.
The hatch opens onto shifting darkness. I lead them into it.
CHAPTER 3
We make close contact a few miles in. Two members of what passes for the welcoming committee stand vigil before a gutted pre-war car slumped in our path. Whoever posted them there had more in mind than giving us the finger – the ragged, red-white-and-blue clothing hanging off them suggests a broader audience. And they’re not alone.
“Am I the only one who thinks this is creepy?” says Evans.
Hundreds of mannequins surround us, propped on the fissured asphalt and posed in the derelict structures flanking us. They bestride mounds of pale debris, sit in abandoned vehicles, and stare down at us from windowless openings. Most are dressed in pre-war clothing – leftovers from the former fashion district – though some are painted like whores or wear modern uniforms. All flaunt simulated radiodermatitis, their plastic faces furnace-mottled and peeling. Every last one faces the street, their blank doll stares imparting a nebulous collective gravity, a lineup of old-world victims mute with accusation.
“It’s just street art, Red,” says Murphy. “You want creepy? Try dating an artist who turns out to be a porn producer.”
“It’s like St. Louis,” says Anderson. “Dark Mark. Remember that one year they did the artist’s village thing with all the mannequins?”
“No,” I say, “that was a victory march.” Two nearby mannequins are posed to draw attention to a pre-war signboard propped atop the car’s roof, their synthetic arms pointed at faded black letters proclaiming: This is as low as we will go! Someone’s painted a radiation warning symbol over the quarter-century-old pricing beneath, a spiteful skull centering the three trefoil blades. “This is a funeral procession. This is rage.”
“Creepy,” maintains Evans.
Unnerving is right, like the rest of our walk in. The overlapping residential and commercial neighborhoods we passed through are reclaimed areas, yet we’ve encountered no one except furtive figures retreating down alleys. It’s still early, the sun serving only to lighten the gray overcast, but that’s not it. Sensors have picked up plenty of contacts up and about inside the buildings, yet the locals stay hunkered down. Twitched curtains. Dim shapes peering from lightless openings. The disquiet of being scrutinized by hostile eyes.
Outsiders in a war zone are always suspect.
A few miles north of our position, the storm has broken over downtown. By the chronic sounds of it, the enforcers are facing stiff resistance. The rumble of thunder competes with the staccato tapping of small-arms fire, the shrieking of railgun discharges, and the thump of explosions. We’re too far out to hear the screams and anguished cries for help, though we’ll be touching gloves with human tragedy soon enough.
◊ ◊ ◊
The radiological display ever-present on my visor’s screen spikes into the orange. Elevated levels of radioactivity, both beta and gamma, permeate the area. It’s nothing our suits can’t handle, but risky for civilians without our kind of protection. I follow the trail to where the readings are more energetic, threading my way through the forest of mannequins. My display geigers from orange to red near the concrete chunks and debris piled up curbside.
I stop and perform a quick check of the database. Sure enough, this area should be clean, its streets reclaimed long ago. Whoever set up these mannequins must have gathered up old fallout from elsewhere to incorporate into the display here.
“Can you believe this asshattery?” says Murphy.
“Stow it,” says Worthy. “In the five-CPS range, Redeemer. Normal protocols?”
Meaning, cool our heels until the equipment arrives – we left our hazmat gear and robots back on the hovership – and then get to work on the cleanup. That’s job one for us and will be until all the radioactive material left over from the war gets collected and contained. Or decays to non-dangerous levels first. And that kind of normal would be nice, but we don’t get off that easy, not today. Stomping on people’s necks takes priority.
“No,” I say. “It’ll wait. Mark it for cleanup.”
Murphy pulls a warning beacon from a belt pouch and heads to the rear of the column. She plunks it down where the mannequins begin and jabs at her holobracer to activate it. A radiation warning symbol pops up over the street, the holoprojection spinning and flashing in place, while a disembodied voice speaks a warning message, starting in Spanish – Peligro de radiación por delante. Por favor regresa. – though it will cycle through over a dozen languages. Until the current op is over, it’s the best we can do.
◊ ◊ ◊
We’re almost through the mannequins and elevated radiation when a warning glyph on my visor’s screen draws me up – Patton detects something ahead.<
br />
“Two unknowns,” he transmits, “updating tactical now.”
My visor’s screen superimposes a pair of bracket squares on an elevated walkway about a hundred meters ahead. A man and a woman are up there, midway between the two pre-war office buildings connected by the causeway, its concrete siding hiding them from view. No, not hiding: the audio feed reveals they’re a little too busy working each other over to pay us any mind.
“Could be lookouts,” says Worthy, voicing my own suspicions.
I give him a go-ahead nod and transmit, “Patton, high station.”
Patton gains elevation while Murphy and one of the rooks hustle forward, a tactical drone heeling after them. The rest of us maintain our position in the street, the other drone fading back to defend the rear, while I review our options. A decrepit four-story brownstone slumps to our left, its russet exterior chipped and grimy, every opening gutted and dark. Not ideal, but it’ll do if we need to get off the street. The partially collapsed parking structure to our right would serve better despite the cracks and carbonation discoloring its concrete facing. Spidery vines web it in faded greenery, extending into tears in the time-warped asphalt at our feet.
The two unknowns rise into view as they switch from horizontal to vertical, the man’s naked back now visible above the waist-high concrete siding, the woman held in front of him, their activity below our line of sight too obvious to mistake.
“I guess there aren’t any rooms nearby,” says Anderson.
“Should I shoot them, Redeemer?” asks Evans. “You know, to get their attention?”
The woman’s eyes go wide as she sees us over the man’s shoulder. She grabs the man’s head and turns it in our direction. They scramble to get themselves together, finding us of more interest now than each other.
“A coded signal has been transmitted from their location,” transmits Patton.
While the woman hides behind him, the man zips up before leaning forward against the railing to look us over. He’s young, mid-20s, with wild brown hair and meth-crazy eyes. I zoom in on the tattoo on his left arm – a dagger piercing a screaming skull – and check the database. It’s the marking for Los Solicitantes, a regional tech-salvage gang.
“What are you doing here, reclaimers?” shouts the man.
“Keep your hands where we can see them!” shouts Murphy, coil rifle trained from thirty meters out at street level below. “No sudden moves, or we will shoot!”
The young man flinches and raises his hands. “No worries! Take it easy! You must be lost, all the action is that way!” He thumbs back toward the ruined skyscrapers of downtown as the woman reaches from behind to wrap her arms around his bare chest. She’s even younger, late teens, with bruised, frightened eyes. “Need directions?”
My visor should be scrolling data on these two by now – identities, affiliations, and criminal backgrounds – but instead, their bracket squares remain untagged. Pinging their IDs gets us nothing because neither has one. No surprise, that – though neural interface devices are mandatory in the homeland, the ID laws don’t apply here. The terrorists and assorted lowlifes operating out of the zones take full advantage, though even law-abiding residents often have their ID chips deactivated due to privacy concerns. Facial recognition software’s also not working, meaning we’ll have to get their identities the old-fashioned way.
Voice amplified, I say, “Come on down and let’s talk.”
“Sorry, amigo, but I don’t know you!”
“What is Los Solicitantes doing in this area?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man!”
He didn’t even try to appear genuine, smiling as he said it, eyes laughing at us. He must be sure of backup, but how soon until the alarm signal he sent brings his friends? Not long – more bracket squares appear on my visor, the tactical display showing nine unknowns on approach, four from the front and five heading toward the brownstone on our left.
“Normandy two,” I say.
Reacting to my command and our shared tactical data, the squad redeploys into two-man fire teams. Evans hustles into the parking structure on our right, Anderson at her heels, heading for an elevated position on one of the upper levels. Worthy fades back with one of the rooks, moving to cover on the left side of the street behind a mound of rubble. Murphy and her partner fade back to hunker down behind a fire-gutted truck shell midway between us and the walkway with the lookout. The other rook – Rollins – stays with me, street center and exposed. Our two tactical drones, on weapons hold unless negotiation fails, hover into support positions.
Then we wait to greet our guests.
◊ ◊ ◊
“Company,” transmits Murphy.
Four hostiles emerge at street level from one of the buildings anchoring the elevated walkway. They have the look of gang enforcers, unarmored and wielding mismatched small arms. Move like them, too, disjointed and eager. They spread out and take cover behind a jumble of old cars littering the street.
“Do you want our kind of trouble?” I shout.
The lookout says nothing, just maintains that idiotic grin.
“How about our kind of trouble?” responds a coarse Hispanic voice from inside the brownstone to our left. “Best surrender yourselves, reclaimers! Cuz if not…” A white-painted skull emerges from the darkness in one of the windowless openings on the third floor. Fevered, auburn eyes stare out from the slits in the mask. The man’s gloved hand gestures and two more hostiles appear in openings to either side, RPGs on their shoulders.
“Easy,” I say, unmoving. For us, it would be. Without better tech, these jokers would have more luck with harsh language. It’d also be easy to let this play out, to give these gangsters a shot at escorting me to hell, but do I want to die here? Is this the place?
“Power down your drones!” shouts Skull Face, eyes tracking Patton as he descends in a hover from on high. “Do it now!”
Back off a bit, I thoughtspeak, we don’t want him to escalate.
Patton levels off with his lift fan at twenty meters above ground and fades back.
Open visor, I think, the hard suit decompressing as it retracts. I breathe deep, a lungful of cold sea air working its calming magic despite the taint of rust and lingering decay. Home at last. I lower my coil rifle and step over behind Rollins, down on one knee with his weapon trained up at Skull Face. Placing my free hand on his shoulder reminds me of my purpose. Words before weapons – Redeemer’s Third Oath.
“I’m Redeemer Malcolm Adams,” I say. “To whom am I speaking?”
“You want to talk?” says Skull Face. “Fine. Power down your death machines and then, then we can talk.”
“The drones are there for our protection. They won’t fire unless you fire first.”
“Is that so?” Dramatic sigh. “You come into my barrio and you want me to believe you’re not planning on destroying me, eh? Madre del Diablo.” Skull mask shaking from side to side, finger raised. “Ah, Redeemer, on such a day as this, why should I believe you?”
“I understand. Downtown is a battleground, there’s chaos on the streets, you’re not sure who you can trust. The enforcers –”
“Because you’re in green instead of gray, I should trust you?”
“A good question. Should you trust the people who cleaned up the streets and got rid of the radiation? The ones who made living here a reality? Without us, you wouldn’t have a barrio to defend.” I cast my gaze around the street before meeting his eyes again. “This your doing?”
Skull Face chuckles and shakes his head. “That loco, he’s dead. But yeah, your point, the city owed you. Past tense.” His gloved hand points toward downtown. “Now? You’re working for the enforcers, mi viejo amigo.”
“In position,” transmits Evans. “I have solution on the leader.”
“We’re not here for you,” I say, noting movement above in openings on the fourth floor, the distinctive ridged barrels of coil rifles sticking out. So they do have advanced weaponry. At
least that accounts for all nine of them. “We’re just passing through on our way to downtown. Lower your weapons, stand down, and we’ll be on our way. Nobody needs to die here today.”
“Bullshit!” he shouts, suddenly heated. “You hear that? That’s the sound of your people killing mine!” There must be a major engagement going on downtown, the distant pop of small arms a staccato symphony. “This is our city, not yours. You’re the trespassers. So you call off your death machines, Redeemer, and then, why, then we can talk like men, no?”
He makes a good case. Unfortunately for him, his demand is impossible – disarming is not an option. No compromise with terrorists – Redeemer’s Sixth Oath. Not that I believe they are, but almost anyone with a gun and a bad attitude qualifies these days. Still, perhaps a small concession will help de-escalate this.
“Alright,” I say. “I’ll have the tactical drones withdraw. Then you’ll stand down?”
“Por supuesto.” His unblinking eyes glitter, suggesting a smile behind the mask. “Then, we can all be friends.”
I gesture at Worthy. Reacting to his command, our two tactical drones hover up and over the parking structure and out of sight.
“How about the big one?” says Skull Face, pointing at Patton.
“He’s not a tactical drone. He’s a member of my team.”
“Oh, that’s convenient. Does he have a name, too? A loving familia at home?”
“Redeemer,” transmits Murphy, “the ones at street level look committed.”
Interesting. Give Murphy enough time, and she usually comes up with the correct read on a situation. I narrow my eyes and stare at Skull Face. What’s his game?
“No matter,” says Skull Face. “I don’t like him there. Send him away with the others.”
“I have the solution,” transmits Evans. Again. “Standing by.”
New tactical data comes in from Patton – a group of six more hostiles moving in our direction from a parallel street. All carry advanced weaponry. If they enter the parking structure to our right, Evans and Anderson will be compromised, the rest of us boxed in. So, that’s his game, stalling us until the odds swing in his favor. He’s operating under the faulty premise they ever will. And he’s misreading my reticence as weakness. Idiot.