by Don Allmon
From behind the motel: a flash of light and a plume of dirt and smoke. COWBOY and BANDIT shot that way, COWBOY leapt up the debris of the building and over. BANDIT circled around, passing so close to the window they watched from that they both crouched, afraid it would see them. Valentine, smart enough to sense a diversion, moved closer to Comet’s bike. It sat there like bait.
The rattling and popping of gunfire came from behind the motel.
—How long do we wait?
Shaggy was getting edgy. Comet put his hand on Shaggy’s shoulder to calm him. —When I go, you follow, and keep low, okay?
—Yeah, yeah, okay.
More shots, different direction now. Another explosion, the flash of it over the motel. Another and another.
—Jesus, how many of them . . . and then Shaggy trailed off.
—Oh shit, Comet sent.
They came around the far side of the motel. They came around the near side. They came over the top. Some drove jeeps and ATVs and more clung to the sides. Most simply ran or climbed.
They were human and alive, not zombies, but their eyes were pale and wide, and their nails were long. They screamed and howled battle cries and spun hooked nets and shook machetes. They weren’t careful where they drove, and some were run over. Those behind took the time to stop, but not to help their injured. Their machetes hacked, and they left mounds of broken bones and chopped meat and ran on swinging limbs over their heads like trophies.
Shaggy stepped back, pale and wide-eyed.
COWBOY and BANDIT ran with the ghouls, firing into them. They flung nets in return, and those did more to hamper the drones than guns or knives did. The drones’ legs tangled and they fell. The drones cut themselves free as ghouls dog-piled them and beat them with clubs.
Comet sent, —Now!
—I’m not going out there! and Comet had to drag him away from the window and out the door.
Across the highway, more lights blazed as all the old, beaten-up cars in the station lot came to life. They inched forward, all of them at once. Their tires suddenly spun and squealed and they lurched toward the ghouls. Valentine had taken control of them all, each one a half-ton weapon under her command.
The highway and lot became a demolition derby like nothing Comet had ever seen. Ghouls ran everywhere, cars spun and battered into each other, some drifted too far and triggered mines and the vehicles bounced a meter into the air on a column of smoke, guts blown sky-high.
Comet smiled at the bedlam stink of it. This was perfect. This was better than he’d hoped. And though he’d never admit it—not even to Blitzen in his most drunken moment—this here felt like home.
He counted deep breaths with Shaggy to help calm him because the hacker was on the verge of panic, then they ran out into the maelstrom. So much chaos, so much smoke and dust kicked up, they didn’t bother to hide. They held hands as they ran because if they were separated, neither would ever find the other again.
Something struck the motel sign. It tumbled and crashed in a spray of sparks, and ghouls cheered and lights flickered everywhere.
Behind a car, overturned and smoking, Comet told Shaggy to stay there and hide.
—Where are you going? But he did as he was told, huddling in tight to the dirt-caked chassis.
Comet disappeared into the smoke and dust.
—There’s a stockpile of mines in that garage, and I want them. There’s a bridge ten K north of here. We’re going to cross it, and then we’re going to blow it up. It’ll take her hours to find another way across the river.
Buzz flinched with every single explosion, no matter how far away. He’d never been in a war zone before. He didn’t even like to sim them. And sure, he’d been chased by killer helicopters at a druid’s lodge, but that had still been nothing compared to this. He was shaking, so pissing-himself scared that it wasn’t hard at all to just stay and hide. He held the pistol in both hands and aimed it at every looming shadow or strobing headlight that pierced the dust. He fought the urge to ask Comet to keep talking just so Buzz would know he was okay and coming back.
He didn’t belong here. BangBang had been right—Buzz should be somewhere safe while Comet did the heroics. He was nothing more than a hostage crisis waiting to happen.
Another explosion, and he pressed tighter against the axle of the BMW. It was a BMW; not one of the ghouls’ dune buggies or jeeps, but one of Valentine’s cars turned up on its side. And there he was, right beside it.
Maybe he could be worth something after all.
—Comet, I’m gonna try something.
—No. Stay where you are. I’m on my way back.
—It’ll just take a minute.
—I said stay where you are!
He dug in his pocket and found a small chip: a wireless adaptor. What were the chances Valentine would drop one of her wrecked cars from her network? In the heat of the battle, she wouldn’t think of that, would she? If he could access it, he could access her.
The air vibrated with gunfire, shouting, detonations, and screams, the sources all lost in the smoke and night but for flashes. He tried to climb the car to the window, couldn’t with his hands full, so tucked his pistol down the back of his jeans.
One leg over the car’s side and he was high off the ground and exposed.
Something lashed out of nowhere and wrapped his arm: a handmade net covered in fishhooks. It tangled around the sleeve of Buzz’s jacket (Comet’s jacket). It jerked tight and yanked him from the car. He landed hard, wind knocked clean out of him, stars everywhere.
A ghoul, horror-show fresh, dragged him by the net. Two more rushed him with nail-studded clubs. He fished for his gun, but it had been knocked free. The locator told him where it had fallen, and he tried to scramble for it, but the net held him. He tried to untangle himself, but the hooks just dug into his hands and deeper and tighter into the jacket sleeve.
They raised their clubs two-handed over him, and he screamed and kicked.
Comet appeared amid darkness and dusk, Jedi eyes blazing, and shot all three—bambambam. He cut the netting from Buzz’s arm in one slick move. He helped him up and held him closer than he needed. —Are you okay?
—Yes.
He wanted Comet to yell, I told you to stay put! or something like that, but Comet didn’t. He only looked worried and relieved, and that was so much worse than being yelled at.
Comet scooped up Buzz’s pistol, and they ran through the crashing and explosions and choking dust. Slung over Comet’s shoulder was a burlap bag, two cylinders the size of small coffee cans inside. Buzz pocketed the chip, no point in it now if they were leaving the dead car.
The smoke parted, and there stood the bike and the Rolls and Valentine. Her coat flared as she turned on them, but Comet was the faster shot. She dove behind her Rolls. A trail of fist-sized bullet holes tracked behind her as Comet fired.
—You’re driving! Comet told him.
—I don’t know how! Buzz was a San Francisco boy. He’d never learned how to drive anything.
—I’ll guide you.
Buzz straddled the bike and brought it to life, and he prayed to no one in particular to let him do this one thing right. Comet tapped his senses the way porn stars did, the way BangBang did when he was riding: sharing just a hint of proprioception and equilibrium and vision. It felt like a sigh—and he let Comet guide him the way someone might guide the hands of an inexpert pool player, intimacy impossible to ignore. He felt like they overlapped.
This was the reason people learned to play pool.
—Go, Buzz, go! Comet unloaded the rest of his rounds at Valentine and the Rolls in a steady stream meant to keep her down. Even with Comet’s help, Buzz almost spilled them over first thing, but he kept it upright and it became easier the faster they went. Comet fired two last shots at Valentine and they tore back onto Highway 93.
Gray in the east, break of dawn.
Behind them, Valentine had extracted her drones and her newly slaved cars from the melee. It had taken her minutes and e
ach minute that passed had given them more of a lead. Valentine’s vehicles or the ghouls or both had triggered mines and explosions boomed. Comet had cheered silently with each one and hoped that one or the next got her, but the liquid chrome surface of the Rolls was unmistakable behind them. It didn’t matter. She’d never catch them now. It was only a few minutes to the bridge, and if it was half as much of a wreck as the satellite images showed, the two mines Comet had stolen and were now slung over his back, placed correctly, would be enough to drop the whole thing into the canyon.
Shaggy kept the bike upright. Their speed made it easy, though Shaggy was nervous, as nervous as Comet had been that first time he’d piloted it. He touched Shaggy gently through their shared space, and felt—or imagined he felt—Shaggy smile, the way you could with people you guided.
And then, of course, the engine stalled entirely. They coasted for a half second and lost speed. Then the engine kicked back in with a lurch that nearly made them spill. Diagnostic alarms sounded.
Shaggy’s shoulders tensed up.
Comet sent, —We’ll make it. Only seven K to go. It was only one stutter. Valentine and her fleet were a few hundred meters behind.
A fleet of twenty cars swarmed around her Rolls. She formed them into a pincer, with her fastest cars at the tips, Buick in the center, and the Rolls-Royce two cars behind it. The crescent spread wider than the highway itself and spewed hot contrails of Idaho dust.
Formations facilitated control over large numbers of drones by allowing the controlling mind to reduce sets of variables to one, the same way astrophysicists were able to reduce the Earth’s gravitational source to a single point rather than distributed across the entire mass. The cars’ movements were uncanny. None waited for another to get out of the way. They all moved at once, a single living thing.
The gray horizon went to orange like they were speeding along Mars, yellow sun through dust. Dust writhed across black asphalt, the illusion of priceless watered steel, perfect.
The bike stuttered and stuttered again. Lost speed again and again: 250 fell to 230; 230 to 210. Comet cursed the bike. He cursed Jason for building something that broke when it was shot at, like Jason should have fucking known when he’d made the thing that a cyborg with a whole fleet of cars would chase them from one apocalypse into another.
—We ain’t gonna make it, are we? Buzz sent.
—We’re going to make it, Comet said, without believing it himself.
Fifty meters behind them, BANDIT and COWBOY sprang from the Rolls’s trunk and bounded from hood to hood, one to each tip of the crescent formation.
—Drop the mines?
—She’ll see them, and they’ll miss. But if I’m close enough, maybe . . .
Aloud, he mumbled, “‘I’m gonna be an airborne ranger. Live a life of guts and danger. Airborne ranger, guts and danger. I’m gonna be an SF medic. Get me some funky anesthetic.’”
—Are you singing?
He wouldn’t have called it singing. It was some bit of memory from better times. Something to center him. —My mantra.
—That’s not a mantra. That’s “Airborne Ranger.”
—That’s my mantra.
—What are you doing?
—I’m going to go back there and slow her down.
Silence.
—All you have to do is just keep going down the road. Nothing fancy.
Shaggy sent, —In my pocket’s a wireless adaptor. Let me feel your fingers. And Comet opened himself wide to the hacker. There was nothing left that they weren’t sharing. Comet felt through the pockets. —Not that. Not that. That! There! That’s what I was trying to do at the hotel. Comet, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—
—You can hack her the way you did before?
—No. Not her. The cars. They’re old. Old security. If you get the chance.
He didn’t think he would. He took the adaptor anyway.
The bike stuttered again; 210 to 175 and Valentine’s swarm closed fast and eerily quiet like a sandstorm. The cars were so damn near now, Comet could feel the wash of heat from the road pushed forward by them.
—Steady. Steady. You got it. You’re doing great, Comet sent. He chanted, mocking, over their network, —I wanna be a cyber jockey. Stealing porn from my Kawasaki. Airborne Ranger, guts and danger. Cyber jockey, Kawasaki.
And he leapt from the bike.
You didn’t become Grandmaster Natalia Jen’s favored student by having a crazy streak. You did it through discipline, focus, and drive. Comet’s crazy came later, after he’d died and come back. Or maybe it had always been there, and this new body Duke gave him just meant he didn’t have to hide it anymore.
It wasn’t magic, what Comet did. It wasn’t even what Jen had taught him. When he’d gotten his eyes, he’d learned that what everyone said was true: technology eroded your qì, and he’d had to learn everything over again. So he couldn’t fly, not like he used to, but he could jump really fucking high and fake the rest.
Directly behind them was the Buick Valentine had used to ram the motel, still in one piece: his target.
The height of his jump gave Valentine too much warning. Valentine braked the whole fleet of cars, just a tap that threw Comet’s timing.
He landed one foot on a bumper held by one bolt. That final bolt gave, and the whole piece vanished underneath, twisted and flattened and shattered just like Comet should have been, but that one foot had been enough. So instead of his dramatic three-point landing guns blazing, instead of getting crushed by twenty cars, he was flung across the Buick’s hood. He let momentum roll him into a somersault, and twisted so that he slammed back-first and sideways into the windshield. It buckled under him. Shatterproof, it didn’t break.
At their crescent points, COWBOY and BANDIT’s mantis heads whipped around, abandoning Shaggy for the more immediate threat, laser-beam eyes seeking.
Comet leapt up, pulled one mine from the bag because one mine popped near that Rolls-Royce and the fight was over and they were free.
Except COWBOY and BANDIT saw it and opened fire. He had no time to throw.
Comet bounded the three meters to the Hyundai Daisho next to him. Valentine flexed the formation. She juked it left and right so Comet landed on a moving target, had to work to keep balanced, no chance for a good throw. He carried the mine like a football in the crook of one arm as he jumped to another. The drones chased him with bullets and skipped across cars themselves, one car to the next, trunk to hood, hood to hatchback, glass and plastic bursting and tearing. The wind whipped a spray of debris behind them. Comet landed on the tail end of an old Volvo; BANDIT landed with him and COWBOY on a Kamugen sedan alongside.
He tried to leap again, but BANDIT snagged his pant leg and hauled him back down. He hit the hood hard with a whump, and the sweat-slick mine went flying, and no scrambling after, no wild flailing let him catch it. It disappeared amid the cars. He sent the command and popped it anyway, nowhere near the Rolls, but any damage was better than none. A car bucked and shimmied off the highway. “Fuck!” he shouted. He’d wasted one of his mines.
The swarm closed in. If they managed to get in front of him and encircle him, all they had to do was slow and Shaggy would be forced to stop, and this would become a fight they wouldn’t win.
Buzz tried not to watch. He tried not to let each explosion or fusillade behind him draw his attention from the road. He focused on Comet’s life monitors, everything elevated the way they should be given what he was doing. Buzz had troubles of his own.
Valentine hammered the bike’s firewall. Buzz shrugged it off. Valentine proxied attacks like an amateur. They were all fake. Valentine was no amateur. They were taunts and distractions.
The road decayed rapidly as they neared the gorge. Chunks of turned-up asphalt rose like old-time glacial shores. He wove past, getting the hang of it now.
Ahead: the bridge. God, that chasm was deep. There’d been nothing like this fifty years ago. One apocalypse after another had wracked this land, and
the Snake was the new Colorado.
The bridge was a truss bridge built sometime after the apocalypse that had cleft the river chasm into a land-borne Mariana Trench. And then had come The Bomb. The bridge was two lanes and in the worst repair a bridge could be and still be called a bridge.
Two K away. Thirty-eight seconds.
Balanced on the hoods of shifting, swerving cars, the drones on either side of Comet attacked hand-to-hand as if Valentine couldn’t help but show off. Comet ducked some blows, side-stepped others, blocked the rest, and they came so fast and hard, the impact-proof plating in his jacket began to break down. He struck back, precision strikes at the drone’s joints and hydraulics, where they were the weakest.
His fists slammed into BANDIT and his torn-up knuckles left red-smeared dents. BANDIT stumbled back even with four legs, and Comet kept up his attacks, pounding and kicking. Its claws dug into the car as it slid off the hood.
The cars veered crazily beneath him as Valentine tried to save her drone. It didn’t work. BANDIT fell and was crushed beneath everything.
No time to celebrate: COWBOY attacked while he was off-balance, arms unfolding and striking so hard they’d have broken bone on anyone else, bouncing Comet car to car.
Around Buzz, cars closed in, the formation tightening into a column anticipating the two-lane bridge.
Twenty seconds.
Comet slid across slick hoods uncontrolled. He grabbed for purchase on anything he could. He caught a handful of glass from the Buick’s shattered windshield, and the windshield gave. He was back where he’d started. He threw himself into the car as gunfire sprayed where he’d been.
Her cars were everywhere around Buzz, ahead and to the side, and he finally realized what Comet must have known all along and would never admit: their plan wasn’t going to work. She’d cross the bridge with them, and they weren’t going to escape.
Fifteen seconds.
Comet rolled into the Buick, down to the floorboard. Bullets tore through the car’s roof and side windows, and everything above him vanished into the wind, torn away. One bullet struck the armored plating in his jacket, and it felt like an elbow to the back.