by Don Allmon
—Plenty of things go as fast as we do. Any Ferrari or Bugatti, a whole bunch of muscle cars, there’s even a sixty-year-old Cadillac almost as fast but it ran on gasoline. The Namir Plainstalker drone can sprint at 350 for three minutes. Any helicopter, peregrine falcons—
—Falcons.
—When they dive-bomb, yes. And five roller coasters: Abu Dhabi, Shanghai—
—You’re kidding me.
—Cincinnati, Paris—
—Fine, you keep watching for roller coasters.
—And Brussels. I will.
—You do that.
—I will.
Dr. Maria de los Dolores Benavides Owens, in residence at PUCSD Hospital, was an expert in the manipulation of pluripotent stem cells. Comet had entered her care less than twenty minutes after the motorcycle accident that had killed him.
She and a team of scientists had revived him and had not only regrown everything that needed regrowing, but had reprogrammed his genetic code using a targeted retrovirus technique that was common for some cosmetics purposes—the kind of purposes popular with porn stars and midlife-crisis divorcees—except Comet’s genetic reprogramming had been far more extensive than that.
The medical record had a huge number of images. Buzz didn’t have the stomach to watch them.
Comet had lost control of his motorcycle, and the bike had slid some fifty meters before coming to a stop. He’d slid seventy. There were places where the fabric of his jacket had gotten so hot from the friction it had melted to him. His face had been unrecognizable. How had his brain survived? Was it possible to rebuild it? Rebuild it from what? He had to have huge gaps in his memories.
Buzz, used to technologies that were practically magic, had never seen something like this. Comet, rebuilt, was some kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
Except Victor Frankenstein had never loved his creation, and Buzz had no doubt that Duke loved Comet deeply.
A different story, then: Pinocchio.
Did Comet even know the lengths to which Duke had gone to bring him back to life, the favors he’d called in, and the money he’d spent? That would explain Comet’s devotion.
But that didn’t feel right. Comet didn’t know, did he? Comet didn’t seem like the kind of person whose devotion could be bought. He was devoted to the man who mentored him because that man deserved devotion. Probably he’d been devoted to Grandmaster Jen the same way.
Buzz tried to imagine loyalty like that. BangBang and 3djinn?
Jesus fuck no.
Roan, and JT, and Austin?
Yes, them.
How was it that everyone in the world seemed to be loved by someone except him?
Travel Advisory: Gamma Spiders
When the network presence came back, Buzz sniffed it. He got a bit of information, enough to guess he was detecting a vehicle’s subnet, and then the presence vanished. Someone had detected his snooping around and turtled up, disconnecting themselves from the network entirely. That wasn’t the kind of thing normal people did.
Buzz released a squad of VIs to comb the network—spies and informants—reinforced his own firewalls, and made sure the tires were patched.
He felt the bike slow. He snapped out of his trance and sent, —I don’t think this is a good time to slow down. Then he saw what lay ahead. “Oh shit.”
They stopped. Everything went weirdly quiet without the sound of the electric engine or spinning chain or wheels on pavement. The moon had risen full, and the webs in front of them glowed beautiful and silver. No longer the random single strands that had decorated the utility poles and wires for the last several kilometers, the webbing here draped in huge sheets across the highway, bound together by threads thick as powerlines, a spun mass, a great tent, a pavilion for some fantastic emperor, suspended from wires and posts and running farther than Buzz could see in the night. The husks of dried sage and lavender hung in it, blown there by the wind. A tunnel ran through the mass. It was ragged, as if something huge like a semi or something fast like a Corvette had plowed straight through and kept going.
“Can we go around it?”
“It’s a light bike, but I don’t know about off-roading with someone on the back. That ground out there looks loose.”
“Can you see the spiders? Your eyes, I mean.”
“Spiders are endothermic, and the webbing is just as radioactive as the spiders. Everything glows.”
“Radioactive? How radioactive? I’m just a normal human, remember.”
“Is that what you are? You’ll be fine. This webbing looks old. I think we’ll be fine.”
Buzz looked behind them and saw nothing but darkness. But if it was Valentine behind them, she wouldn’t need headlights any more than Comet did. The network was quiet. His VIs waited. A bit like spiders, he thought, and that made him shiver. “All right, then, let’s go.”
Comet took them through. The road was straight, but the webbing hung in tatters everywhere and heaped on the pavement like old blankets. He wove the bike back and forth between all of it. The webs were old, just like he’d thought, but if any of them were still sticky, they could mess up the bike.
He scanned the silver walls and ceiling for signs of movement. Moonlight filtered through the threads. Sounds were strangely muffled. The webs smelled of old forests and dust. From time to time, the webbing cleared, and they’d be under moonlight for a split second and then back within the long silver tube. Behind them, their wake made the whole place tremble. The stirred-up wind pulled brittle webbing free. Light as air, the sheets spun, dervish ghosts, and were long out of sight before they ever touched ground.
Comet didn’t like it. Gamma spiders were attracted to movement.
Through the heat sensors of his rear camera, he saw the hot, square shape of a car. That was almost a relief—not spiders, at least—but the car was running without headlights. —Car at our six, he sent to Shaggy.
And maybe Shaggy tried something then because the car sped up, closing the gap between them meter by meter—the red, orange, and yellow-white glowing block of its engine getting larger and brighter in his camera eye.
—It’s her! Shaggy sent. —Go faster!
Comet tried, but there was too much debris in the road, too much hanging from the ceiling above. He slalomed through it, best he could. A sheet of webbing brushed his arm so lightly he didn’t even feel it, but it clung to him. Behind, the car didn’t even try to dodge the piles of tattered silk. It plowed right through it all.
He passed his pistol’s slaving to Shaggy, and he felt the guy pawing at his thigh holster trying to pull it free. The car came closer. It was immense, blocky, as un-aerodynamic as a car could be and nearly half engine to compensate. It was silver by moonlight. Its hood ornament, the Spirit of Ecstasy, flickered hologram-blue above a tangled RR logo. The ornament was animated, so her winglike gown billowed behind her. Valentine was trying to run them down in a goddamn Rolls-Royce.
Shaggy shifted his weight erratically, trying to turn to get off a shot, still too afraid of falling off the bike.
The car grew closer and closer, ten meters, eight, six, five. Headlights came on, exploding blindingly bright.
—Fire, goddamn it! Because if that thing so much as tapped their rear wheel, they were going down.
They punched through webbing, Comet not caring any more than to get ahead of the Rolls.
The pistol thundered. A single divot and a spiderweb of cracks appeared in the windshield. Shaggy cursed blue. The Qayin was a high-powered pistol made for a hulk of a soldier, or someone genetically restructured. Shaggy was neither. He’d had to shoot one-handed, and it was a miracle he hadn’t dropped the gun or broken his wrist.
Comet hit webbing. It stuck to the front of the bike and over his face. He tried to tear it away, only to tangle it everywhere.
The Rolls was too close, a meter behind. Shaggy shot and whined through the network about his wrist. The windshield cracked more, but didn’t break.
No more space, no more time
, the Rolls was upon them. —Hold on, Comet sent, swung left, and braked. The Rolls howled past them and tried to sideswipe them but missed and plowed into the thick webbing of the walls.
The damage rippled through the delicate structure, and Comet could feel the questioning pressure of the spiders’ telepathy on his skull.
Windshield draped with webbing, still Valentine didn’t stop. She didn’t need to see to pilot the car. She had cameras and sonar.
The trunk of the Rolls opened. Robotic eyes glowed from the crack: BANDIT and COWBOY. Gun barrels slid out.
Comet sent, —The tires. You said they were a vulnerability. Can you hack her tires?
—Short range.
—How short?
—Half a meter.
Half a meter? That little shit. He’d made it sound like he could do it a kilometer away. —Get ready. Give me the gun. He ignored all Shaggy’s sputtering protests.
The rear wheel was too close to the bots, so Comet went for the front. BANDIT and COWBOY opened fire as Comet swung right.
Comet hit the gas and zipped up the passenger side of the Rolls. The passenger window came down the way Comet expected.
The spiders’ telepathic pressure in his skull went white hot, and alien images flooded his mind: crazy web-spun geometries like it was spells the spiders wove, palaces of silk, spires adorned with arachnid banners.
Comet and Valentine unloaded their pistols at one another, unable to aim, both of them locked in the pain of the spiders’ psychic assault, all spray, bullets wild. The Rolls jerked right and slammed into them, pinning Comet’s leg between the car and bike. The car forced him to the edge of the road even as the bike slid up the length of the car to the front wheel. Webbing battered him as they skimmed the walls of the tunnel. They trailed veils. Glowing shapes moved within the walls.
—Now, Shaggy now!
And then just like that, the Rolls disappeared behind them with a rubber-burning screech as Shaggy locked its brakes and blew its airbags for good measure.
Shadows, dim, many-legged, and glowing faintly with radiation, swarmed the Rolls. The psychic pain subsided, and then all that was behind them. The spider-spun tunnel ended and opened to sky. Comet accelerated, bike whining terribly like it shouldn’t.
“You did it! You did it!”
The afterwards rush hit Comet hard, even harder than in the alley. Adrenaline energy with no place to go blended with the strange sexual wiring Duke had given him. Comet went hard and against all his better sense, every instinct told him to pull the bike over and celebrate. And maybe that was what they needed to sort the two of them out. Comet shook his head, fighting the fuzz of sex and endorphins and adrenaline. This wasn’t the time or the place for a hard-on. There was no room for it in his jeans. There was no room pressed against the body of the bike.
Shaggy took care of it. —I think I’ve been shot.
Travel Advisory: Cannibal Country
On the right side of the highway was an ancient single-story motel. The sign said MOTEL, as if you couldn’t tell what the building was. The sign was dead. The lot was empty. Most of the windows were broken. Some of the room doors stood open.
On the left was a fueling station, a Phillips 66 so old it didn’t even have hydrogen. It had the old gasoline pumps, though the tanks buried under them had probably not held gasoline in thirty years. It had one building: a service garage. Its walls were reinforced with extra plywood and corrugated metal sheeting. Surrounding the building was a graveyard of cars abandoned during the Second Zombie Apocalypse. They had prices painted on their windshields. Comet couldn’t imagine who there was to buy them. Beyond the fueling station was nothing but scrubland.
Comet turned the bike into the Phillips’s lot, and a sharp chemical stink hit him. He stopped short.
“What’s wrong?”
“Land mines.”
“How do you know?”
“I can smell the explosives.”
“In the road?”
“No. Out there,” he said with a nod to the land around them. “And a whole lot more in that garage.”
Shaggy leaned out and scanned the darkness. “What’s out there?”
Comet saw nothing either. “Dunno.”
“We should keep going.”
“I need to take a look at your arm. And there’s something wrong with the bike.” The bike’s self-diagnostic was flashing yellow and red lights in Comet’s head.
They both looked at the garage. The whole place smelled like rust. A breeze sighed through the burnt-out signage and broken-down cars: a lovely, eerie, hollow whistle.
They both looked behind them, fearing headlights.
Shaggy said, “Do you think she survived?”
It seemed hard to imagine. Between the spiders’ telepathy and her broken-down Rolls, it didn’t seem like anyone could have survived. “Hell yes, she survived.”
But what else could they do? He kicked the stand down and they slid off the bike. “Take off the jacket. Let me see your arm.”
Comet took the first aid kit from the bike. Shaggy winced when he tried to take the jacket off by himself, so Comet helped him.
“Can we turn on the headlight?” Shaggy asked because they were working by the glow of Comet’s eyes alone.
“No.”
Shaggy took off his flannel overshirt too, and there was a nasty bruise that showed black by Comet’s blue eyes. No puncture though.
Comet sighed, relieved. The jacket had done what the jacket was meant to do.
Shaggy saw the damage and smiled.
“You know you’ve been shot, right?”
“I know.” He showed his arm to Comet like Comet hadn’t seen it, and his grin was pain-hazed but it was broad and dimpled and V-shaped and proud as fuck. As if in Shaggy’s squirrelly head, getting shot had been a rite of passage.
“Ain’t never been shot before, have you?”
“No.”
Comet snorted a laugh and smiled also. He picked up the jacket and stuck his finger through the scar the bullet had made, dug into the pulverized insert, and there it was, deformed a bit and caught in the fibers. He dug the bullet out and gave it to Shaggy. Shaggy put it in the same pocket of the jacket where he kept his St. Christopher.
Comet told him to wait here, and he walked slowly toward the service station’s garage. He could smell the chemicals of the explosives even buried. Software translated the odor into a visual overlay.
He’d taken barely ten steps before a voice called out, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Comet turned. Beyond Shaggy and the bike, in the middle of the motel’s lot, stood someone with a high-powered flashlight. The glare made it hard to see, and Shaggy was shielding his eyes with his good arm. Comet’s eyes filtered the light until he saw the man clearly. He was a worn-down-looking man, older, bearded. The flashlight was duct-taped to a shotgun.
“Land mines,” the man said. “You two ain’t cannibals, are you?” He glanced at the bike. “No, y’ain’t. You got bullet holes in your bike.” As if bullet holes were proof of a socially acceptable diet.
More than bullet holes scarred the left side of Comet’s bike. The molding covering the engine was shattered and hanging by one loose bolt. Webbing gummed up everything. How the bike was still running, Comet didn’t know.
“Spiders,” Comet said to the man.
“Spiders with guns. Damned things just keep getting smarter. And here everyone thought it would be the cockroaches what took over.”
He lowered his gun and came toward them.
Comet said, “You seed those mines?”
“Yep.”
“What for?”
“Ghouls in the hills. Like cannibals, but crazy and desperate. Don’t care how long you been dead. They’re running out of graveyards. Send scouts down from time to time. I keep the lights off and they forget I’m here. When they remember, the mines remind them to keep away. You’re safe long as you stick to the highway.”
“Why do you
stay?” Buzz asked.
“Where else would I go?”
“Almost anywhere.”
“We need to repair the bike,” Comet said.
“Aye-ah. Maybe I can help with that. Whaddya got for trade?”
They negotiated a few Hooah! bars and ten antibiotic tablets from Comet’s med kit in exchange for the man repairing the bike.
Comet asked, “You got running water?” and the man nodded to the motel. Comet said to Shaggy, “You clean that arm up. Put some paste on it.”
Shaggy sent to Comet, —You trust him?
—I don’t know yet.
Shaggy got some all-purpose med-paste from the kit and started for the motel. Comet stopped him. He filled a hypo with life monitors. The tiny nano-bugs would swim around in the guy and detect all kinds of things. “Should have done this before.”
Shaggy pulled away from him, scowling, but then relented. Comet injected the bugs.
Buzz rubbed where he’d gotten the shot. He stopped at the highway’s edge and said, “This safe?”
“You walk straight that way and it’s safe,” the man said, and Comet confirmed, no mines there.
Buzz crossed the parking lot, eyes on the ground like he could see the mines. The life monitors reported his heart rate had skyrocketed, and he calmed again only when he disappeared inside a random motel room.
Comet watched the station attendant work on the bike. He watched the road to the south for Valentine. He watched the hills for ghoul scouts. And he watched Shaggy’s vitals. Five minutes later, Shaggy’s breathing went soft and even, and his heart rate slowed and steadied. Comet shook his head. Comet was out here on high alert. Shaggy was taking a nap.
Comet sneezed from the mildew. The light in the bathroom was on. Low wattage and failing, it barely lit anything. On one of the twin beds, Shaggy slept sprawled flat on his back. He looked like he hadn’t lasted a moment. He lay at a curve, one leg on the bed, the other dangling off the side, one hand resting over his chest, the other curled above his head. His breath whistled through his freckled nose.
Comet lifted Shaggy’s leg by the cuff of his jeans (Comet’s jeans) and set it on the bed. He thought maybe he’d take the guy’s sneakers off at least, but he didn’t.