Apocalypse Alley

by Don Allmon

  And all the while there were the cuffs lying open beside him, like he was saying, Fuck you and your prisoner shit. Here’s what I think of that.

  BangBang had tried to kill him. It was such a crazy thought, it was easier to believe he’d imagined the whole thing. It was easier to believe it was the mouse’s fault.

  Roan had introduced him to the three that made 3djinn: BangBang (whose handle was technically !!, but that annoyed everyone), Critter (whose avatar was always some kind of small animal, some of them made up, with cute over-sized eyes), and C#Minor (who had no avatar at all). And a few hours afterwards in a shared virtual space, BangBang had watched Buzz with an intensity that bordered on bizarre as Buzz forged an ID. Then it was seven o’clock PST and Buzz closed down.

  BangBang had said, “Where are you going?”

  “Roan says I gotta get out more, so I got a date.”

  “Can I ride along?”

  “On my date? No.”

  BangBang wanted full access to Buzz’s sensoria, voyeurism dialed to eleven. He’d see what Buzz saw, tasted, touched, heard, everything.

  BangBang looked disappointed. “What are you gonna do?”

  “Probably we’ll jack a simflick together at my place.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  Buzz had laughed. There was a new buddy-adventure sim out that he wanted to try, and it was a lot more fun when a real person played along. You could turn off the simulated sex scenes and do it for real, or do both at the same time. Movie and a blowjob was a perfect date recipe as far as Buzz was concerned.

  BangBang stared at him like Buzz was the craziest thing he’d ever seen. “Don’t do that. Let me ride along. Your body’s in San Francisco? We can go to Fisherman’s Wharf.”

  “Only tourists go to Fisherman’s Wharf.”

  “I want to see the sea lions.”

  “They smell.”

  “I want to smell them. Let’s go out for ice cream.”

  “You can sim all that. No. I just met you. You ain’t riding me.”

  The kid went sullen. Buzz said goodbye.

  Buzz hadn’t understood. The kid (except he wasn’t a kid) could sim anything he wanted. At first Buzz had thought BangBang had wanted to ride the (hoped-for) blowjob. That had been creepy, but at least it made sense. But sea lions and ice cream? Who cared about that?

  Buzz didn’t remember that date anymore.

  And it took him a few months, but he’d learned more about BangBang. BangBang was in his late thirties somewhere. He’d gone into deep sleep when he was fourteen. He could have aged his avatar if he’d wanted, but never had. All his experience of the world was sims and cameras and maybe a ride if he found someone who’d let him. A Lord of Shalott accursed in his tower, and Buzz was the closest thing he had to a mirror.

  Weeks later, Buzz had closed down his project and BangBang turned to leave, and Buzz had said, “No date tonight. Let’s go for ice cream.”

  Seemed like forever ago, but it had been only two years give or take when Buzz Howdy had been sitting next to JT on that crap piece of a sofa in that crap studio apartment, watching the hologram rotate over the coffee table. The table was scarred by condensation rings like it had a ringworm infection. The holo projector was the most expensive thing in the room, with the exception of Buzz and JT themselves.

  Buzz smoked marijuana extract from a vapor pen. It was called Oregon Pixiedelic. It made him feel like rainbows. He passed it to JT. “You sure this is what you want? It’s hard to undo this.”

  JT said, “Yeah,” and took the pen from Buzz and inhaled while Buzz stabbed him in the shoulder with the hypodermic and chipped him.

  “Congratulations, you’re officially Jason Taylor, and ain’t no one who can tell you otherwise. You’re not a criminal anymore. Worst thing you’ve ever done is plagiarized your master’s thesis.”

  “Did you have to do that?”

  Buzz shook his head. JT had spent his life as a thief and a killer, but he balked at plagiarism. “No one’s perfect, Jason.”

  And JT/Jason had grinned that broad grin he had that made having tusks look cute instead of scary, and his eyes went a little glassy from the extract. “I owe ya, Buzz.”

  An ID as extensive as this one—five government databases, three credit bureaus, and a university hacked and quietly modified—Buzz would have charged anyone else a quarter million. “You don’t owe me nothing. It’s a favor for a friend.”

  Buzz took a deep breath, afraid of what he’d see. Then he closed his eyes and reviewed the visual he’d downloaded from COWBOY.

  The battle royal went down like this:

  JT’s drones pile on the Atari named DOC and tear it apart. Turrets mounted on the walls of the compound keep the other two busy.

  Through the door of the 3-D printer building comes the strobe-like images of another fight inside: JT cradles a teenage orc girl in his arms and cries. (The girl is his apprentice Dante.) Meanwhile, the elf, Austin Shea, armed with a bow and knives, fights Valentine. Austin is dazzling.

  They flee to a car in the lot: a Corvette Dawnstrike FX27. JT lays Dante in the trunk and a single drone climbs in over her, and they tear out of the lot before Austin even has a chance to close the passenger door.

  The cyborg stands obscured by the car’s dust.

  “They’re alive,” Buzz said aloud. “They got away.” He sent a copy of the vid to Comet.

  Comet’s voice, faint through Buzz’s trance: “Where did they go?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  The Corvette Dawnstrike FX27 was a ’74 limited-edition car still manufactured by Chevrolet as it had been for the last 122 years. It was print-on-demand, and the licensing fees were in the hundreds of thousands. It wasn’t a car either JT or Austin should have. Not legally.

  Like any car, it was GPS enabled. The car’s location was constantly tracked and registered in the Chevrolet database. If the car was ever stolen, which was highly unlikely given the aggressive (and in some places illegal) antitheft measures that came standard with the car, Chevrolet would share the car’s location with local and regional police as well as with the car’s owner, who was at liberty to hire whatever paralegal enforcement they felt was necessary to recover their property.

  Buzz knew that this car had been stolen by JT’s elven friend, Austin, several days ago. It was a quick data check to determine that the only 2074 Corvette Dawnstrike FX27 to ever be stolen was registered to Diego Silva, an LA businessman. Buzz noted the VIN and, using his long-time access to the LAPD/County systems (and the SFPD and the SPD and the PBI and a few others), he determined the car’s location as of five minutes ago (the last time the car’s location had been updated): lat 35°00’37.8” N, long 105°42’25.1” W.

  Route 66, just east of Albuquerque.

  Except Buzz couldn’t think of a single damn reason why JT or Austin would go east at all. They were both West Coast boys just like he was. Their whole lives were West Coast lives. Their cred was West Coast cred. And, sure, it was possible they might know someone in one of the other North American unions, but someone they would run to when they were being chased by a psycho cyborg and her bots? That didn’t seem likely.

  So Buzz started poking at the data, which was the thing that Buzz did best.

  LAPD/County’s data was for shit. None of the ephemerals were there, no packet headers, nothing that told him anything useful. So he went to Chevrolet. He needed the network traffic logs. He didn’t have an account, and it would take far too long to social one up, so he sent VIs crawling through the Indigo markets looking for somebody selling and waited.

  Comet was still at the sink. The water was running. He was shirtless. He dabbed at the back of his head with a washcloth. A bead of water ran down him: neck to shoulder blade to spine, following a path of least resistance, one seam of muscle on Comet’s genetically perfect body to the next, leaving a trail of itself behind it, diminishing itself until the tension between the bead and Comet’s skin was greater than its own we
ight. It stopped a few centimeters above the belt line of Comet’s reinforced jeans.

  Buzz wanted that drop of motionless water to slide the rest of the way down. It was distracting. He didn’t like it just hanging there, waiting for something to give.

  One of his VIs chimed. That was faster than he’d expected. It gave him a handful of Chevrolet accounts from disgruntled former employees. IT professionals were always so bitter. He tried all the accounts until he got in. He accessed the network logs, queried the overwhelming list with the Corvette’s VIN, and got a subset of the original GPS transmissions.

  Among the data recorded in the original GPS location packet was full forwarding route. The first bounce would indicate the cell tower ID number that had been closest to the Corvette at the time. The tower ID numbers he found were nowhere near the coordinates that had been transmitted.

  JT had spoofed the car’s GPS signal like any good car thief would do. And Buzz had found him anyway, like any good hacker would do.

  Buzz gave himself a congratulatory blowjob. It was virtual. He wasn’t hung like that, or flexible like that. It was a simstim he’d made when he’d been terribly high and wanted to know if he was any good at blowjobs. (He’d always thought he was, but who ever thought they weren’t?) It had been a surprisingly hard sim to make, the editing especially—because the whole thing had been so silly (and he’d been really damn high), it was broken up by recorded bits of his giggling. He played it for a few seconds, both tracks simultaneously, pitching and catching, the way some people played a soundtrack of crowds cheering.

  And that was how Buzz knew he was pretty damn good at blowjobs.

  He didn’t play the part where he came, because often enough it triggered the real thing, and with Comet standing right there, that was the last thing he needed. He opened his eyes just as the taste of his own cock faded.

  Comet was running a towel across his perfect back with its perfect muscles and its valleys of least resistance. The towel missed that one bead of water.

  Comet reviewed the combat vid Shaggy sent him. And once he was done, he played it again because he could hardly believe what he’d seen.

  Comet had fought Valentine and two Ataris, and if it hadn’t been for Buzz hacking COWBOY, he’d have died. (He’d give credit where it was due despite his distrust.)

  And yet there was Jason, crippled by grief over an unconscious Dante, and an elf with what kind of training Comet didn’t know, but it wasn’t military and like nothing else Comet had ever seen, and the two of them had held Valentine and her drones at bay long enough to escape in a Corvette.

  “The elf is Austin? This friend of Jason’s you mentioned? He’s good. Who trained him?”

  “He’s an elf.”

  As if elves didn’t need training, which wasn’t true. There’d been plenty of elves at the schoolhouse. Their glamours disrupted lectures and training sessions, and he’d always held the opinion they were only there because they liked the word ranger.

  “He’s good,” Comet said, as if what he wasn’t really looking at was Jason holding Dante while three utility drones—fucking utility drones!—tore up an Atari urban combat drone.

  Duke had always said there’d been something off about Jason—more than meets the eye—and he’d been right. His best friend had been lying to him all along, and this guy here, Buzz Howdy, this fucking hacker, was part of it.

  Comet eyed the cuffs on the bed.

  “I can’t tie my shoes one-handed.” Shaggy actually sounded a bit apologetic. “I’d use zip ties next time.”

  “Damn right I will.”

  Shaggy slipped on Comet’s jacket, and despite it all, fucking God, what a difference a jacket could make. The jacket was a deep-sea blue with yellow trim. Shaggy’s hair hung just over the collar. It gave him an edgy look he hadn’t had before. Cleaned him up some ways. Dirtied him down, others.

  Comet toweled himself off. He did it so Shaggy could see him, all the gentle muscle of him rippling like silk flags. He pulled a clean black compression T-shirt down over his chest. He made sure to do it slowly so Shaggy could watch the fabric stretch.

  Shaggy looked away. Comet thought he saw a blush there. “There’s another problem.” And Shaggy told him about Firelight, the wizard who had hired Valentine to kill them all.

  Firelight’s full name—his “asshole name” was what Shaggy called it—was Firelight Who Had Stood in the Maw of Abbadon the Red, Was Consumed, and Reborn. Firelight, for short. The way the story went was that Firelight (who was called something else then, but no one knew that name) had freed his spirit from his body and traveled the astral plane in search of wisdom and power like wizards often did. He found himself floating before the Great Wyrm Abbadon the Red and rather than flee (or wake up) like any sane wizard would have done, he dared ask the Wyrm for a small measure of its power. The Wyrm agreed to teach him the meaning of fire. It opened its immense jaws and immolated the wizard’s spirit, killing him in at least one sense of the word. Firelight awoke from his astral trance with a new name and burning alive, consumed by flames forever.

  All of this was just too much for Comet. Seconds ticked by. He finally landed on the only question that mattered: “What does this have to do with Jason?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just telling you who he is so that you know who we’re up against. And I know where Jason and Austin are taking Dante. We have to meet them there.”

  “If we follow them, we lead Valentine to them. We need to find her while she’s still in Greentown and take care of her here. Then Jason will be safe.”

  “We ain’t ever gonna be safe.”

  “I don’t care about you. I care about Jason.”

  “Fine, you don’t care about me. But, look. Valentine is just the tip of an iceberg named Firelight. So let’s say we take out Valentine here and Firelight sends his next mini-boss to kill Jason. Except we’re not there to help him because we’re still here.”

  Comet searched the hacker’s eyes (large and brown and too earnest to be true), looking for the lie there. He didn’t find one. “This wizard is that powerful?”

  “Did you not hear my story? You don’t get away with giving yourself a name like that without being an honest-to-God badass. As long as we’re split up and Firelight’s hunting all of us, none of us are going to survive, including Jason. But the four of us, together: Jason, Austin, you, and me? We’d have a chance. We’d have more than a chance. The two of us alone . . .” He shook his head, and copper locks fell over his eyes and he had to brush them aside. “We barely beat her in the alley.”

  And the guy made sense, Comet hated to admit. “Okay. We go after Jason. Where are we going?”

  Shaggy hesitated, then said, “Highway 93 north of Vegas. I’ll tell you the rest when we get there.”

  “Just tell me where . . .” and his blood pressure spiked bad enough his combat chems threatened to compensate. He took a deep breath and growled, “This ain’t the way to build trust in a relationship.”

  “Oh yeah, what is? Holding a gun to my head?”

  Comet snatched up the cuffs and let them dangle from his finger. “Prisoner.”

  But he pocketed them instead of snapping them on. He grabbed a med kit and a second pistol and strapped harnesses around his thighs. He stuffed his pockets with four preloaded magazines. Each magazine held twelve bullets. Including the two already slotted in his pistols, that meant seventy-two shots. He took two concussion grenades and tucked them in his jacket. He flipped the lights and locked the door behind him.

  In the hall, Shaggy descending the stairs before him, he thought better. He went back. He tossed the cuffs in the closet and shoved a handful of zip ties in his pocket instead.

  Buzz had a hundred square centimeters for his ass on that bike, a racer with forward seating. That meant Comet was crouched over the battery casing, head tucked behind the tiny windshield, and Buzz was supposed to spoon over the top of him. There were pegs for his feet that were slightly behind his hips, which force
d him to lean forward. It was awkward as hell. He wasn’t sure where to put his hands. Comet’s waist? That didn’t feel safe. Nothing about this felt safe. Neither of them were wearing a helmet. Comet said he didn’t own one.

  He’d ridden on this bike once already from Jason’s place to Duke’s bar—he’d even been handcuffed at the time—but they’d gone slow and the ride had only been a few minutes, so he hadn’t had the chance to build up a good solid panic (or maybe he’d already been so panicked the additional factor of the bike hadn’t amounted to much). This was gonna be different.

  “You ready?”

  “No.”

  Comet took off, zigzagged a few blocks until they were out of town, and then shot to 200 KPH in five seconds flat. Buzz’s hands went from Comet’s hips to around Comet, tight. He squeezed and held his breath. Buzz liked roller coasters, so he should have liked this, except roller coasters had magnetic fields and seat belts and shoulder bars, and here there was absolutely nothing to keep him from flying.

  “You don’t have to hold me like that,” Comet shouted. The bike itself made a hooty noise like some old-school UFO. It wasn’t loud. The 200 KPH wind was a roar.

  Yes, I do, Buzz thought. Yes, I do. I’ll die if I don’t. And Buzz held him even tighter around the waist.

  “Unless you want to, I mean,” Comet said.

  Buzz got the sarcasm just fine. He forced his hands back to Comet’s hips.

  “Don’t lean into the turns. You’re throwing my balance. Just look over my shoulder whichever way we’re turning.”