The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  But instead of walking behind you, the Shäd spread out in front of the line, moving from member to member. They’re holding out photographs in their gloved hands, looking closely at each member of our cluster through mirrored visors.

  The nearest Shäd approaches. Those ventilators they wear are not just the usual air purifiers, you realize. They’re connected to oxygen bottles on their hips. You’ve never been close enough to see that before. “We are looking for someone,” the Shäd says through his mask.

  The fuck? All this over an MIA? People go missing in the middle countries all the time.

  “This is her picture. We have been told she may be called Chenra, or Chenray. Have you seen her?”

  You glance left, blood going cold, because that’s your name. Miko stares at the ground and shakes his head. Ann, her long black hair tangled up in ventilator straps, shrugs. Cheetah cluster won’t rat you out.

  But why the hell are shock troopers from Hauz Shäd hunting you? You’ve been on a few nondescript battery raids, run the outlander position on some basic convoy stops, but you’re not officer class. Just a runner and a gunner from nowhere.

  You’d be sick from fear if you even understood any of this.

  You’re mainly confused.

  The toxic air is rasping at the back of your throat. The ever-present dust is making your eyes water.

  It has to be some kind of mistake. Whoever they are truly hunting has used your name, or has a similar name, and these very dangerous private security troops ended up crossing the midlands to find you.

  “Anyone who gets us this woman can have the solar panels in the trailers here,” the man repeats, pushing the photo at you.

  “Yeah, let’s have a see,” you mutter, leaning forward on your knees.

  He steps closer and you take a look.

  It’s you. There’s no mistake.

  But you know for sure you’ve never had your hair cut up above the ears like that. Or so flat.

  The teeth are all wrong. White. Like someone has painted them. Different positions, too. Shit, do you have a long-lost twin sister or something like that? The woman in the picture does look eerily like you.

  But it can’t be.

  A whole shipment of solar panels. If they’re telling the truth . . .

  You stand up. “Are you serious about those solar panels?”

  A helmeted nod in response.

  “What’s your business with that woman?” You jerk your chin at the photo.

  “A client needs to talk to her.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Just a conversation.”

  You take a deep breath. Cheetah has given you food and lodging. Given you a trade. You were thirteen when they found you trudging across a dune up in the lower peninsula of the Holy Michigan Empire. They treated you well. Better than you’d feared when you saw the motorcycles roaring across the sand toward you.

  Even if you get shot, or kidnapped, a solar shipment would help all the clusters here. And if there’s one thing you are, it’s loyal to the people who show you the way forward to a better life.

  “Then I’m Chenra, Cheetah cluster. I claim the reward of the solar panels.”

  “Che! I’ll follow you!” Miko tries to stand, but one of the Shäd casually kicks him back down with a boot to the shoulder.

  “You can’t come where we’re going,” the mercenary laughs through her respirator.

  • • • •

  Hauz Shäd has a strong reputation for following contracts to the letter, so you’re not overly worried anyone will get screwed over here. All that crap about them eating the flesh of people they’ve killed is just rumor. Collapse jitters.

  Sure enough, as you’re taken up toward the head vehicle, the trailers are being disconnected from the trucks. Several cluster members climb aboard, open the rear doors, and shout in delight. Outriders watch you go by and nod in respect.

  You don’t see Miko anywhere. He’s a ghost when he needs to be. He’s not going to be happy about his gunner getting kidnapped.

  Clusters don’t carve promises into skin and swear blood oaths to protect each other to death as a meaningless gesture. They’re planning to watch and follow you, to have your back. So you’re going to play along, see what comes of this bizarre attempt to kidnap you.

  If you manage to get out of this and back to the clusters, they’ll all owe you big. Maybe even get you a promotion. You could end up a driver inside the shielded cockpit of an attack pickup. Maybe even get some scrip for hydroponic fruit from down near Fort Wayne.

  The truck at the head of the convoy has an extended cab over the battery frame. The up-armored doors hiss open and the Shäd on either side of you point inside. Other Shäd are putting new tires on the truck because your Browning has torn them up.

  You clamber up and into a sumptuous small office.

  The door shuts behind you, and you wait a split second for your eyes to adjust.

  Inside it is like something out of an old pre-Collapse magazine. On some small level, when perched on a shitter and leafing through the faded pages, you’d convinced yourself that those photos were fantasies and fakes. But the interior of the back of this truck cab is all clean white leather, glossy polished wood, and black electronics.

  There are no spliced wires, jury-rigged equipment, or bolted-on extras. Everything in the interior screams newly manufactured. And the air. It’s crisp, cold, and doesn’t burn with pre-Collapse irritants. The filters in here have to be brand new, not salvaged or refurbished. This all has to be from one of the city enclaves, you think. Because no one makes stuff anymore. Or maybe things are turning around somewhere on the continent and this truck has been manufactured, not reclaimed.

  You remain standing, suddenly hyperaware that bucket seats like the ones around the table back here don’t get sat on by dusty road agents like yourself. But the man sitting on the other side, framed by a pair of flickering flat screens showing long lists of data and charts, waves a hand for you to sit.

  So you sit.

  “I think I know who you are,” you say, a little tentatively.

  The man, brown hair thinning at the top and showing some gray, his blue eyes slightly faded with time or sun, nods back at you. “We have met.”

  “You’re the gold trader. From the Toledo Bazaar. Armand.”

  You remember that he’d been overly interested in you when you’d come in to trade gold for solar equipment. At the time you’d written it off as him perving out. You’d stepped back to let Miko handle the weighing of the jewelry, confiscated from various folk attempting to run the toll road without paying.

  “I am Armand.” The gold trader does still seem interested in you, but he isn’t leering. He looks concerned when he leans forward across the table.

  “So what’s all this about?” you ask.

  “Someone is trying to kill you.” The truck lurches into motion. You stand up, fear and anger stumbling over themselves as you grab the door handle. It’s locked, of course.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” You reach for the knife in your boot, something that the Hauz Shäd goons didn’t bother to pat you down for. Maybe because they didn’t think a woman would have one, or maybe they didn’t care. That seemed more likely.

  “As I said: someone is trying to kill you,” the gold trader says, looking at the knife in your hand but not looking alarmed. “I’m rescuing you before they do.”

  “Didn’t ask to be rescued.” You twitch the knife at him. “Take care of myself well enough, thanks.”

  “But you actually did ask me,” the man says. He slides the photo, the one that the Shäd had showed everyone on their knees in the line, across the table.

  “I don’t—” you start to say.

  “You did ask me to rescue you. The you that I’m staring at right now.”

  You stare at the photo. “Nothing you just said makes any sense to me.”

  “I know.” He taps a command out on the nearest screen. Readouts that you don’t un
derstand flicker on, replacing the text. Bars representing power levels. Complex math scrolls across other screens. Hieroglyphs you don’t understand.

  “This will feel weird,” he says, and slides his finger up one of the screens.

  The world outside the windows inverts. Not upside down, but inside out. It’s an impossibility that causes your stomach to lurch and your mind to scream as reality, for the briefest moment, ceases to make sense.

  • • • •

  A loud explosion rocks the trailer behind the cab. The truck shudders to a stop. Smoke trickles in through the office. This could have been something Miko did, now that the trucks are all far enough away that the clusters are safely running off with the panels.

  When you grab the door, it thankfully opens. “Go!” Armand shouts, choking on the smoke.

  You stagger down out onto the road, coughing and then retching.

  You take a last shuddering breath and straighten up, frowning. The road you puked all over is a seamless expanse of newly poured asphalt. It’s faded, the lines are patchy, but there are no major potholes. Or, there were places that had been potholes, but were filled in.

  The truck has pulled over to the side of the highway, onto a gravelly shoulder. There’s smoke pouring out of the trailer and Shäd are running around, likely trying to stop the fire.

  But you hardly pay attention to that. You’re staring down the highway, where a car is screaming down toward the group at high speed.

  Shit, shit, shit you think. You’re all under attack.

  But no one pays it any attention.

  It whips past, the wind shoving at you, and then with a whine it’s gone.

  Armand the gold trader is watching you closely. “What else do you notice?” he asks, smiling slightly.

  “The air is filtered,” you say.

  But that doesn’t make any sense.

  You turn and spot the green. Some kind of short plant covers the dirt, miles and miles of it. You think back to books and magazines you’ve scavenged in the past.

  “Soybean?”

  “Genetically modified to handle these levels of carbon and a variety of pollutants, yes,” Armand says.

  “Did we travel back in time?” you ask, trembling and thinking back to the moment the world outside the cab’s windows inverted. About half of Cheetah cluster can’t read, but you’ve pored over moldy, yellowing pre-Collapse novels. They’re not as valuable as the textbooks, encyclopedias, and practical nonfiction that are near currency, but you’ve read some freaky shit and this is the first thing your mind throws up as a possibility.

  The wind is cool on your exposed skin. You all wear leathers, but that’s for protection against falls and the acid rain if you get caught outside. You’re always sweating in them. The cool wind makes you want to strip down and let it play across your skin.

  The gold trader smiles. “Well, the air is more breathable here. It’s like the air where you were eighty years ago. But it’s not time travel. It’s a middle RCP world.”

  “What?”

  Armand’s faded blue eyes tighten. “RCP: representative concentration pathways. It’s a name given to scenarios given to how much greenhouse gas is dumped into the atmosphere. This world right here, it never hit the Collapse. Every world has a different value, based on how they handled things.”

  You look around the fields, the smooth highway, and look up at the blue sky. No haze. No impending thunderstorms. A low RCP world. No, middle, he had said. You can’t imagine anything nicer than this. It looks so glossy and early-2000s. “You’re like the fucking ghost of What Christmas Could Have Been.”

  Now you have a faint suspicion of how he could just give away a trailer of solar panels without blinking. This place you’re standing in, whatever it is, is a rich paradise compared to the dust bowl of the midlands.

  You’re half-convinced he drugged you and and took you to some sort of promised land, but there are no gaps in your memory. Some of the outriders talk about Edens like this. But they’re usually under a dome of some sort. A green, air-filtered paradise in a dust-pocked hellhole of algae farmers and people running around with respirators.

  And lots of perimeter security.

  Or sometimes they’re rumored to be built deep underground, the light all artificial.

  Some of the eggheads predict that eventually humanity will just . . . fade away. The heavy amounts of carbon our forefathers dumped into the air had long since hit greenhouse runaway. The heat being trapped causes more clouds to build up, which in turn causes more heat. Eventually we won’t be able to breathe outside. We’ll go full Venus.

  Maybe after that, it will just be assholes in domes, and everyone outside dead.

  But all this is no dome. Not this big. And you are definitely not underground. You’re outside.

  Another car rushes down the freaking highway like it’s no big deal. One of the Shäd approaches Armand. “It was one of the capacitors. We have enough spare for the next incursion but we should really hit up the depot on the other side, or make the trip to a depot here.”

  “Oxygen?” Armand asks, his face twitching with annoyance.

  “Enough to pass through.”

  “Let’s do it. We’re on a tight schedule.”

  You’ve taken several steps away from the quick meeting. Armand notices and focuses his attention back on you, switching back from a commanding presence to something softer. You instinctively feel defensive. Manipulated.

  He smiles at you. “This is going to be a lot to take in, but we don’t have much time and there is a great deal at stake. I know you can absorb this all quickly. I’ve seen you do it before.”

  Phrases like that, his familiarity with you, are starting to fuck with your head. “Talk,” you say, and jut your chin forward a bit. He can play all friendly, but you have an invisible wall up.

  Good God this air is fresh and sweet. You could almost drink it.

  “If I know you, and we go way back, you and us, you’ve gotten your hands on anything you can read. Even in that shitty dust bowl we were just in. That was a universe, right next to this one that we’re in right now.”

  It’s the sort of thing you talk about to a buddy, lying on the hood of a truck and pushing cannabis through a respirator while staring up at the stars. Imagining that this universe is inside of an atom inside of a cell of a blade of grass inside another universe and on and on. It’s great stuff when you’re high. The idea that a better, different universe could be an impossible razor’s width away if you could vibrate over there in just the right way.

  But Armand is trying to pitch that it’s real. That he’s taken you over into an alternate reality. An alternate history. And looking at the rolling fields of farmland, growing crops, you think it has to be true.

  You listen to his explanation and ask, “And you cross over with a truck and trailer?”

  “Self-contained mobile operations center,” he says.

  And you’re going to ask why it needs to be mobile when gunfire rips through the Shäd milling about the edge of the road. The fearsome mercenaries are taken completely by surprise as ashen-faced Cheetah cluster warriors advance from underneath the trailer and wherever else they’d been hiding.

  This isn’t the first shipment Cheetah cluster has slipped aboard to fuck up later. Revenge, hijacking, or otherwise.

  Shäd fall, shot in the back, and others are tossed from the top of the one trailer behind the massive truck, bodies limp. Armand spins around to take in the ambush, and you take the moment to slip behind him, press a knife against his throat.

  “Jesus Christ, Che, this is not a good time,” he whines.

  Miko jumps down from between the trailer and cab, road dust caking his road leathers. He raises a hand in greeting as you shove Armand forward.

  “Where the fuck are we?” he asks. “And what’s wrong with the air?”

  For a moment, you think about it. Would any of what Armand said make sense to a man like Miko? He only sees what is right in front
of him. Profit now means good living now.

  You need to find out more about what’s going on before you can try managing upwards. “Let’s get into the trailer.”

  Miko smiles. “See the salvage?”

  There might not be any. Not if there’s some universe-crossing engine there.

  But you can’t imagine that someone would be packing Shäd and crossing worlds with a long trailer hauled behind them if they were just coming to pick you up. There’s got to be something else going on. You want to see for yourself.

  You prod Armand’s throat with the knife enough to draw blood when you reach the rear of the trailer, eyeing the thick doors and the security keypad down at the bottom of the door. “Time to open up.”

  “This is a huge mistake,” Armand says. “We need to be moving along.”

  His voice cracks slightly, so you believe he’s nervous about something. Whether it’s about what you and Miko are going to see in a second or something else, you’re not sure.

  “Open up, or we slit your throat. Then we leave you here and take the truck anyway,” Miko says.

  Armand swallows nervously. “Che, you know this is a bad idea. Kill me, and you’re stuck here.”

  “Stop calling me Che,” you tell him. “That’s not my name. It’s Chenra.”

  “You usually like being called Che, it’s something of a joke for you,” Armand says.

  You don’t see you and Armand being buddies, no matter what world or alternate reality you were ever both in. “Open up or maybe I take my chances being stuck here. I like the air,” you hiss at him.

  It’s not a lie. Armand can hear that in your voice.

  He taps out a code, simple numbers that you memorize, and the doors slowly fall open toward the ground to make a ramp. Miko moves in ahead, pistol in the air and his road leathers creaking slightly as he walks carefully into the dimness of the trailer. You follow, pushing Armand ahead of you.

  Your eyes adjust. To the front of the trailer there’s machinery. Pipes and wiring. Shit-tons of wiring. Readouts glowing in the dark. A pair of Shäd are waiting, weapons aimed right at you. But Armand shakes his head at them, despite the knife you’re keeping by his throat.