Man Behind the Wheel (The Next Half Century Book 1)

by Steve Rzasa

  As he left the store with bags in hand, Rome caught a glimpse of the kid’s reflection in the sliding glass doors. He talked on his implant, back turned.

  Probably not good.

  Rome wheeled his bike to the other side of the street. There was a crosswalk strip on the road, but he didn’t bother with it. Cars on either side of him halted, their sensors arresting progress until he was safely clear of the minimal traffic. No one in either set of vehicles looked up at him. None of them even turned around in the backward facing seats.

  So far, he hadn’t seen any LEOs.

  There was a car dealership down the block made of concrete and glass walls, with row after row of cars gathering dust on the corner. The window nearest to Rome blurred and ran an ad. It showed a sleek Halcyon, spinning its wheels down an immaculate stretch of paving, with countless shining cars around it.

  “Get where you want to go. Do what you want to do. Don’t worry. I’ll keep you safe. I’ll be there for you, wherever we are.” The voice was seductive, feminine—a sultry version of Marcy, he realized. Or at least, it was meant to be. The voice didn’t seem as halting as the comps he’d dealt with. Slicked up, no doubt, to better sell the vehicles.

  It didn’t do anything to improve his mood. He started riding. Thoughts of Aldo pining over a damaged and potentially lost Marcy faded into the background.

  Come on, Rome. Think.

  Sara was in the wind—literally—with the thieves. Whoever their leader was, had stayed hidden. Two men were dead, and significant property damage done at FTZ West. Warrants for his and Aldo’s arrest. Gabriela tasked with bringing them in—likely carting Thad around, too.

  But why him? It didn’t make sense. As a contracted pursuit specialist with approval from the feds and FTZ to operate the interstate highways, he wasn’t the person he’d pick to set up as an accomplice.

  The next thought slammed into him with all the force of the Condor hitting the ground in a crash landing.

  FTZ. Someone knew. Someone inside had access to his personnel records, and used his past against him. It made sense. With that kind of history, he’d make a tempting scapegoat.

  His implant blinked. It was Aldo, sending a text only message.

 

  “Hell.” Rome pulled over and activated the Net, hoping Aldo’s tricks kept him invisible in the process.

  There it was. Sooner than he’d expected, but they’d put it all out there.

  “—suspects are Pursuit Specialist Roman Franklin Jasko and Information and Support Specialist Aldrich Harold Burns, independent contractors operating as Resolve Interception, Inc., licensed and based in Philadelphia with U.S. DOT permission. Unnamed sources confirm that Jasko was a habitual illegal driver, with multiple counts of—”

  Rome cut off the signal. Perfect. Just perfect.

 

  Rome glanced over his shoulder. A police car rolled by slowly, and one of the officers inside watched him from behind mirrored sunshades. The sight made him wish he’d gone ahead and shaved his head, just like he’d badgered Aldo to get rid of his beard. Anything he could do to throw off facial recognition scans would be good.

  Yeah. He’d better.

  ~

  He spotted the car’s fender in the sunlight about a quarter mile away, tucked down inside the dry riverbed. The dark maroon shimmered, taking on silver streaks, but seemed to hiccup. It didn’t transition entirely to the new color. Whatever Aldo was doing with Marcy had hit a glitch.

  A high-pitched buzz tickled his senses. It came from the northeast, spindly and white with blue markings. Rotors spun into blurs on the ends of four wings, each one slender and tapered at the tips. Patrol drone.

  Great. Rome had no idea whether it saw him. Those things carried at least two omni-directional cameras. It didn’t appear to be one of the more advanced models that came equipped with IR or basic facial recognition. He watched it stop midair and change direction and altitude, before continuing a slow, deliberate path.

  He knew that pattern. Standard search, prompted by something nearby that had drawn its attention.

  It would ignore him, for now.

  Rome stopped his bike by the mouth of the creek bed where the terrain began its descent between dusty banks. He toggled his implant. “Aldo, I’m here. We’ve got company.”

  “You think? Yeah, I noticed.” Aldo’s voice was as high-pitched as the drone’s rotors. “Can’t tell if it’s spotted us—Marcy’s got it tracked on passive scans.”

  Marcy was operational, then. “How’s she doing?”

  “Clunky. My fault, for severing as many connections as I did.”

  “Don’t worry about it. We had to cut her off, you know that.”

  “Re-color’s not going so hot.”

  “I noticed.”

  “And the new registration number won’t upload.”

  Rome crouched low, and picked his way down the bank. Using brittle roots as handholds helped delay his slide. “I’ve got eyes on the drone. Do what you can about the registration. Cover it with your jacket if you have too. Anything to keeping it from reading the Halcyon.”

  “Well, it won’t get anything from the comp, that’s for sure. We’re disconnected from everything. I’ve double-checked…”

  Rome didn’t like the way he trailed off. “Aldo?”

  “Um.”

  “What is it?”

  “We’re transmitting a locator signal.”

  “Aldo…!”

  “I don’t know how! I thought I used every possible precaution.”

  Rome rubbed at his forehead. “You have to be kidding me.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m on it. I’ll block whatever the carrier signal is and…”

  “Forget that. We have to take care of the drone.” He saw the entire length of the Halcyon now. The maroon was nearly gone, having faded to a pink hue behind the new silver exterior.

  Aldo cracked open the door, and pulled himself out, dragging his jacket.

  “Get the registration numbers covered.”

  “I’m on it.” Aldo staggered around the back of the car. He flung the coat like a matador’s cape.

  The buzzing intensified. Rome didn’t bother looking for the drone. He ran for the car, churning up the ground. His mind moved faster. The drone would look for registration numbers first. Barring that, the make and model of the car. Of course, whatever signal was leaking from the Halcyon could give the drone everything it needed to positively ID them both.

  Twenty steps to the car.

  Aldo was back in his seat. Whatever he did on the displays was invisible to Rome, blurred by privacy blinders at that distance. The drone noise grew louder until the spidery craft appeared, stark like a manmade cloud against the cobalt sky.

  It immediately banked for the car.

  “Okay, it saw us,” Aldo’s voice reverberated, carried both on the wind and on Rome’s earpiece. “That’s bad.”

  “Toss me a spazzer.”

  “You’re kidding, right? They’re tuned to the human nervous system, and only then to a specific—”

  “Shut up and give me the gun!” Rome slid into the side of the car, and popped open the driver’s side hatch.

  Aldo tossed him the spazzer. Rome caught it one-handed.

  “I’m jamming its signals as best I can,” Aldo told him. “’Course that means I had to open up our signals again—which, with Marcy unhooked, isn’t easy.”

  “If you’re angling for a commendation, save your breath.” Rome powered the spazzer up to its maximum level. He raised it skyward.

  The drone buzzed down, the black dome of a camera swiveling on its underside.

  Rome fired. The air rippled around the energy discharged, distorting everything, including his view of the drone. Its rotors stuttered and its body shuddered under the touch of the bolt. Rome didn’t deviate his aim. He kept the drone centered in the pulse, even as the power indicator flashed yellow and then blood red.

  “You’re gonna fr
y the thing!” Aldo said.

  “That’s the idea!”

  “Not the drone, idiot, the spazzer!”

  Rome fired a second time. A steady vibration increased. Heat stung Rome’s hands. He gritted his teeth. Sweat broke out on his face and chest. The air around the spazzer poured off hot. He fired again.

  Sparks exploded from the drone. Its rotors stopped, whirred at top speed one last time, and then the entire vehicle spun in a lopsided spiral down to the riverbed. The impact severed half its arms and crumpled the underside. Smoke twisted into a gray tendril.

  Rome dropped the spazzer at the same time. It sizzled where it hit the dirt. He fell to his knees and shoved his hands deep into the dirt. The cooler layer soothed the burning sensation.

  “You okay?” Aldo crouched nearby. He prodded the spazzer. “Man. I told you.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Rome examined his palms. They were red, but otherwise looked undamaged. “The jamming—”

  “No problem. If the drone got anything out, it may have emitted a distress beacon before you fried it. Don’t think they know anything about who it was.”

  “Won’t take FTZ long to figure us out, though. Let me stow the bike and we can get out of here.” Rome stood up.

  “Wait.” Aldo caught his arm. “That news on the Net. What they said… they’re spamming, right? It’s just a thing to make us an even hotter bounty, isn’t it?”

  Rome frowned. “Look. I haven’t been clean with you. What they’re saying about me—that I was an illegal driver—it’s true. I ran modded cars twenty years ago, starting in high school. Got a lot of people hurt that way—in wrecks, in fights. I didn’t give it up until a Driver caught me.”

  “Freddie?”

  “That’s the one. The best. Trained me and a bunch of other Drivers, and was a great mentor before retiring from pursuit contracts and taking up a desk job at FTZ. We learned how to use our love for the freedom of driving to do good, to do right by the law and for the safety of others.” Rome leaned on the fender. “Not long after, I met Kelsey and found out a man could love more than himself. That became more true when Jake was born, and then Vivian. Now it’s all crashed.”

  “Not everything is. Marcy’s good. That whole time we were running? She was crunching numbers for the decryption from the android’s CPU. And she got them.”

  “You’re serious.”

  “Serious as ever. Got it all uploaded to my comp-panel. We can go after them.”

  Rome nodded. “That drone could have tipped someone off.”

  “I know.” Aldo didn’t meet his eyes. He seemed more interested in the tips of his shoes. “The tag—I was wrong. Thought I had it severed. But she has a backup transmitter. I never even knew it was there.”

  “Probably built in by the manufacturer.”

  “Yeah.”

  Windblown dirt stung Rome’s face during a moment of silence. “You know what we have to do, then.”

  Aldo’s expression was pinched, but he nodded.

  He buried Marcy in the side of the ravine.

  Funny. As Rome stood there, he folded his hands in front and recalled an echo of the liturgy he’d always known. May the Lord bless you and keep you…

  Crazy. Marcy was just a comp.

  Aldo patted the last bit of dirt over the shallow—grave?—he’d dug. He set a milky white lump of quartz over top. “Sorry, Marcy, that we couldn’t do better. You were a good partner.”

  He didn’t say anything else when they got back in the car, or when they started off down the road, past Sunnyside, or when they got onto the Eighty-Two South toward Oregon. Rome drove as steady as possible with the auto-steering engaged. It was a backup to Marcy’s navigational programs, but nowhere near the same level of sophistication. No regular traffic and nav updates via their signals, but at least the proximity sensors operated.

  But Rome was still at the controls. He darkened the windows and windshield as much as possible to avoid attention. They’d have to come up with something more permanent.

  Aldo sat slumped in his seat. No holos, no displays. He had the electric razor in his hands. “Where are we going?”

  “To see an old friend.”

  “I thought Freddie was with FTZ.”

  “Freddie can’t help us. Not until I can find a secure means to communicate. We’re headed to Wyoming. There’s someone we can trust there.”

  Aldo nodded.

  He hadn’t even eaten anything.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE EIGHTY-TWO AND THE EIGHTY-FOUR were smaller connectors, linking the Ninety with the Eighty Free Travel Zone. Patrols were correspondingly lighter. A few times, Rome started from a sleep when the Halcyon chimed that drones overflew their position.

  Once it was a Condor.

  But Aldo had them disguised for the time being. The Halcyon was a deep, shining chrome, and its registry numbers were an amalgam that—as far as FTZ was aware—Rome and Aldo did not have in their databanks. Aldo had fabricated a new set from scratch in the first hour and a half of their 13-hour trek.

  The next half hour, he’d rigged up his comp-panel so that it could drive the Halcyon.

  It wasn’t nearly as responsive as Marcy, but at least Rome could stow the steering column and the other cars around them would register it as driverless. Plus, Rome had no desire to drive clear through the night. He leaned into the headrest and watched out the window as the dim white and yellow glow of passing vehicles made traffic a stream of fireflies.

  They drove into a 30-mile stretch of wireless induction charging panels and the Halcyon immediately lit a graphic of the power core’s level. It had dipped below 40 percent. Rome’s eyes blurred as he drifted into sleep, giving him double vision of the charging progress.

  Aldo shaved. Red hair rained onto his jacket, which he’d spread out on his lap as a makeshift apron. It still got all over the floor, dusting his shoes and the seat, too.

  Rome didn’t have the heart to bother him. Every whine of the razor, every clump of fiery hair, must cost Aldo.

  The Eighty FTZ across southern Wyoming was barren as Rome had ever seen a highway. Sure, vehicles passed them every once and a while, but the bulk of them were freighters, huge convoys of them. Eight passed them end-to-end, doing 100 miles per hour. The Halcyon synced with the local Famtrac and passenger car traffic, which held at a steady 90.

  The rolling landscape around them was bathed in blue—pale, powdery shades for the dry hills, dark navy for the sparse vegetation and shadows. Suddenly, a dark shape barreled alongside the Eighty, its cockpit lit up with a yellow beacon. Tiny red lights marked the ends of hundreds of containers—some boxy, some cylindrical, others spherical—all streamlined for high-speed rail travel. The train blasted by the Eighty traffic at 184 miles per hour—so the Halcyon told him, its basic nav sensors registered the speed at too dangerous for road travel.

  Rome blinked at the red numbers on the dash. 2 a.m. A faint green glow encased Aldo’s side of the car, silhouetting his seat. He was turned toward the window.

  “Can’t sleep?” Rome’s mouth was as parched as the ravine at Sunnyside. He dug down by his seat, and located a hydrator bottle. He drained a third of it, clean and cold.

  “No. And I’ll clean up the mess whenever we get where we’re going.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Cheyenne was a thick cluster of lights on the otherwise dark plains. Warren Air Force Base clung to the side of the city, its lights and fences demarcating its boundaries. Rome squinted. Could be there were mechs on maneuvers, bounding across the hardscrabble terrain.

  Could also be that there were armored vehicles parked there, just like the kind stolen by Sara and the band of thieves.

  The Halcyon exited onto a main road lined with hotels, restaurants, and boxy storefronts. Some were still under construction—skeletal frames next to which a pair of construction bots slumbered like lethargic giants. Some appeared to date to the last century.

  Five minutes later they were in a pa
rking lot, empty except for the Halcyon and weeds. The building was a flat, one-story with smoky brown glass for windows and rough textured walls that mimicked adobe. There were six business spaces, each one big enough to fit two Halcyons side by side: a Thai restaurant, a pet store, two vacant fronts, a cybernetic parts dealer, and…

  “A church.” Aldo’s lip curled. He looked as if he might be sick.

  “That’s the one.”

  The air outside whipped along, cold and dry. Even with the glare of city lights, Rome made out countless stars.

  “Well, that’s just great. We won’t have any trouble with one of those.” Aldo shook out his jacket and brushed hair off the seats.

  The sign read “Greeley Lutheran” in plain black letters on a pale blue panel. Unlike the rest of the business signage, it was not lit, nor did it feature a hologram as the cybernetic parts shop did. A disembodied hand of metal and plastics swiveled as Rome walked by.

  “You planning to scan in? At two in the morning?” Aldo shrugged on his coat. He sealed it, and wrapped his arms around himself. It took a few seconds, but eventually an orange glow emanated from the cuffs and collar.

  “That is the plan.” Rome’s jacket likewise adjusted its warmth to match the outdoor conditions.

  “Dumb plan.”

  There was a flat black panel mounted outside the door. Rome placed his palm on its surface. It lit up red around the edges. When he removed his hand, the message “Occupant Notified” scrolled across the panel in amber text.

  Rome waited for movement inside.

  Aldo tucked his hands into his pockets. “Crap. Has to be below zero out here. In April!”

  Rome’s implant told him it was 40 degrees. No doubt the wind chill made it feel worse, but not as bad as Aldo intimated. “Welcome to Wyoming.”

  A light appeared through the window. Rome made out the silhouettes of chairs, arranged in six rows of ten each, plus a pulpit and several closed doorways. A man’s shape filled one of the doorways—a black shadow on a gold rectangle.

  “I should mention now, Wyoming has next to no gun laws,” Rome said.

  Aldo patted down his jacket. “My spazzer.”

  “Relax.”

  The door slid open on a powered track. The man standing there was huge, nearly 7 feet tall with arms as thick as trees and the body of a professional bot fighter, wrapped up in a flannel robe. He was balding with a thick gray beard and skin more like leather.