by Forbes West
You think to yourself for a simple second. “I wish I could just call somebody to get picked up out here. Why can’t we call?”
Hamilton shakes his head. “Radio transmissions get blurred out over distances of two miles, something about EMP and something else. It blows out circuit boards, too. That’s why you won’t find any cars or trucks built past ’81. I mean, look at this lot here.”
Hamilton points to the Ghia.
“I could use my tower—it’s been boosted with some of the ancient stuff,” Hamilton says. “But it’s not as if it's a private telephone. Anything I say is for public consumption.”
You and he talk some more, but the reality is that you’ve decided to take off tonight, on your own. He said you could have the car, at first. It wouldn’t be stealing. You down that Jack and soda, feeling unsteady on your feet, and you and John speak nothing of consequence until going to your separate beds.
You doze off and on during the night until the little alarm clock you wound up goes off with a ring that startles you. You grab the little thing and quickly shut it off, listening to see if John is up. His snores are labored and end with a sort of rasping cough. Your head hurts and your stomach feels like it is distended and bloated—your second hangover so far. You swing your legs over the side of the bed and then tiptoe out of the bedroom in your flight suit.
Looking around his little apartment space, you find a yellow pad and write Hamilton a message, telling him that you need to leave, that you don’t want to put him through any further danger considering what your situation is, and that you will leave the car in the Mission parking lot. You apologize for leaving him behind. You sign it, S.
* * *
The first rays of light are coming in over the Sargasso Breaks as you walk out into the parking lot, your sneakered feet crunching asphalt. You have grabbed the .38 again along with the ori-baton that has a blue-white ori rock set into it that was made to look like the Leo snake astrology sign.
There’s a set of binoculars on the seat of the Ghia, and you toss them into the back seat as you climb inside, along with your gym bag full of Dii-Yaa cash. As you release the parking brake, a little meow comes from behind you. You turn and find Slinks, somehow, some way, curled up in the back of Hamilton’s car.
You are thunderstruck and horribly confused by his reappearance. You look at the chain link fence and back to Slinks. “How…” you start to say, and then Slinks meows again. You pick him up and hug him tight, thanking God he is back and somehow he found you. It is like one of those cheesy tabloid stories you always hear about a pet finding its master after ridiculous circumstances. You sit there for a good moment, and then put the little guy down.
You press Slinks to sit down on the passenger seat, where he watches you with such a great amount of kitty concern, his little face a constant O of amazement. Maxie the dog- robot watches with what you guess to be bewilderment, not making any true move to stop or sound the alarm, though its one good headlight eye flashes faster and faster as it sees what you are doing. Getting out of the car and taking a walk over to the gate, you open the lock and roll the car back onto the yellow X highway without turning on the engine. After a brief pushing match with Maxie to get it back behind the gate, you lock the gate and scramble back inside the car. The engine starts after a couple of stuttering tries and you drive to the highway. You think of leaving the gate key behind when Hamilton calls out to you, and you stop the car. He walks over and leans his large frame into the window. How he got past the gate you do not know.
“Look,” you start before he quiets you.
“You earned this,” he says, his voice slightly accented and strange sounding. He hands over a small black ring with a little orange rectangle on its top. “You earned this. Press on the rectangle there at the top of the ring, and you can turn invisible for thirty seconds at a time. It recharges after two minutes. This can occur only at night. Only after the sun sets. It’ll protect you. You passed the test; you earned it.”
His face changes into Scratch’s for a just a moment, and then returns to normal. “Be seeing you.”
He walks back inside the station. “There’s a storm coming, Miss! I’ll blow it off course for you.”
Hamilton levitates several feet above the ground. His arms are outstretched, and his eyes have now taken the strong appearance of almost pure white light. Lightning comes from his chest, eyes and hands, and bounces across the entire sky.
He descends to the ground, and then sits down on the asphalt.
He looks up at the sky, staring.
You slip the ring onto your finger without a second thought and leave.
After the first hour on the road, you start to feel a little more relaxed, a little more comfortable with your surroundings. The car’s engine, sounding decidedly like a lawnmower, runs and runs and you feel increasingly sleepy. The long yellow X highway flashes on and on, running over the next hill and beyond. Thick and dark clouds stream across the sun-filled sky, casting long shadows onto the grasslands. They seem to be rushing away from you.
The second hour you see some shapes pass in and out of the clouds, up and down, right to left. You stop the car at the side of the road, leaving the engine on, and look out at the shapes, making out that the things have sort of sails on them—not airships per se, but something like the airships. You grab the binoculars.
Looking out again, you see that there are actually people flying through the clouds.
You focus on the one that is going up and down and flipping around a dark cloud embankment that blocks part of the early morning sunlight. A guy is on this modified windsurfer thing. It has the surfboard and the plastic sail. Two other sails slightly turn towards the ground projected from the side of the surfboard, like wings. A large metal cylinder with wires sticking out of it and glowing a light green is attached to the back of the surfboard. The person on it is tied with a sort of cable and wears a backpack.
Drops of rain fall against your bare skin. You see lights behind these flying people, like the lights of city skyscrapers blinking through the haze. Sargasso-3 is not that far off.
It is then that you notice smoke in the distance, a black column of it streaming into the air. You think you smell the stink of spilled gasoline in the wind. Unsure, you get back into the car and drive for a couple of minutes, rounding the top of a hill until you can see a Network police cruiser burning, the engine blown. You get out again and walk gingerly forward, looking every which way to see if anyone is still around, if the attackers are still nearby, ready to pounce on you. Your heart starts that sick beat and your stomach begins to cramp. Tarot cards are sprayed all over the place, maybe thirty or fifty of them thrown about, some gently flipping over in the wind. Those damn M and P cards showing the Devil, and the man and the woman who are chained to the Devil’s throne.
The bloodied and burned bodies of two young men lie on the side of the road. One is face down, the other has been shot in the arm and chest. His body leans against the burning police cruiser.
You know who these two are. Robert Fuller and Tadeo Marcelino, the Counters that escorted you on your first day.
You look at the cards scattered around the road, some of them slowly moving away from where they were dumped.
A scene plays in your head, a movie you watched on video a long time ago at your friend’s house when you were not supposed to. “Hey Captain, what’s that?” Lance says in Apocalypse Now. “Death Card,” Martin Sheen says. “What?” Lance says. “Death Card. Lets Charlie know who did this,” Martin Sheen says.
You run back to the car, maneuver around the destruction, and hit the gas as hard as you can, making Slinks hiss and cry out from the sudden maneuver, and keep moving, then hit the gas as hard as you can. He is thrown against the car door, then glares at you as he washes his paw.
Ten minutes further down the highway you come up to an overturned motorcycle. There are a thousand pieces of debris scattered all over the highway, little pieces of chrome and bits of glass from the windsc
reen. The motorcycle’s rider must be nearby and may need immediate help. You think of turning around but your sense of simple human responsibility blocks you. Someone must’ve been hurt. Blood is spread all over the highway. As you look around for the injured driver, you can see that the debris is drifting away towards the right shoulder. They wink out of existence in tiny flashes.
You speed up again to pass the scene. Right then and there what you fear the most happens. There is a small explosion under the car, a metallic crack and bang loud enough to hurt your ears. You’ve run over some sort of mine or explosive trap and the left rear tire is shredded. The car glides to a stop, and you pound on the steering wheel before looking over your shoulder, figuring any second that whatever killed those people is just around the corner, waiting to finish you. But nothing else happens. The trap went off, your car is dead, but you and Slinks are still alive.
After looking around again for wherever the motorcycle rider must have crash-landed, you climb out carefully and look up and down that deserted road. The yellow Xs have stopped flashing. You have your pistol in your hand, ready to go. As you stand there, watching, searching, an overwhelming feeling of dread comes over you. You need to get out of there right now. But then your knee explodes into a thousand needlepoints of pain. You never heard a shot, never saw a flash, never saw anything. You just feel the pain as your body drops to the ground, and scream as you realize your shredded leg now hangs off your body. Something pulls you forward and you crawl towards the shoulder, not thinking of what to do next other than just to get off the damn road.
That’s when you see the two of them stand up from the high grass fifty yards away, a young man and a woman. She’s a Ni-Perchta in a scuffed up black leather jacket with a full helmet on, visor down—the only way you can tell she is Ni-Perchta is by her photo negative skin color and the long strands of platinum hair falling out of the helmet. She puts out her hand and your pistol floats towards her.
You think you recognize Mathias from the wanted poster, but a demonic-looking red and yellow mask covers the lower half of his face. He’s carrying something that looks like a sawed-off M-16 with a flashlight for a barrel and a black cord plugged into a metallic backpack. He wears a revolver like a cowboy, strapped to his thigh.
“Tall for a girl, ain’t she? Long streak of piss for a woman, I am right or am I sorry to be wrong?” Mathias says, his cockney accent slightly muffled by his mask. His eyes glow a deep green for a second, then turn to blue. He hangs up his sawed-off M-16 by hooking it into the metallic box on his back. You recognize that voice from where your co-op was ambushed.
The Ni-Perchta woman nods, and then uses an ori-baton to lift a couple of hidden Kawasaki motorcycles out of the grass and onto the highway. You moan and continue to crawl towards the shoulder, knowing that this is the end. These are killers, and they’re going to laugh and joke around and then murder you. You can feel the bullet thumping through your skull before the shot is even fired. Fear engulfs you. You just want it to be all over. Slinks runs past you and disappears into the high grass.
The two walk forward, the young man grabbing the Ni-Perchta woman by the hand, like a lover would. You try to stand up on your good left leg but you fall over again, sweating, desperate to get out of this, wanting to be somewhere, anywhere but here.
Mathias speaks again. “Looks like one of those bugs you step on in the street. You just manage to crush the one half and the other half is still moving forward like nothing goddamn well happened, doesn’t she? Sort of an insect with half of the life squished out, ain’t she? Sort of desperate, ain’t she, Miss Jenny Petty?”
The Ni-Perchta woman nods, taking off her helmet. She’s beautiful of course, even with those surreal skin tones. However, one eye is whitened and blind looking, scarred deeply.
“Stop crawling around like that,” Mathias says to you, as fast as he can spit out the words. “Stop crawling around like that, you ain’t a bug, you’re a woman, for crissake. Be a woman.”
You feel yourself lifted off the ground and slammed back onto the side of the Karmann Ghia. You don’t even see Mathias flick his ori-baton with his wrist—seemingly he just thought it and it happened.
You watch the two of them and try to hang on to the car like a drowning man trying to cling to a life preserver. There’s a fire in your leg. It is horrible to look at—a blackened, cauterized, and still slightly bloody mess where your knee is supposed to be.
“Cat got your tongue and gotcha by the short ‘airs, is that right? Sarah Oooooooooorange?” Mathias says, frightening you with his knowledge of exactly who you are.
The Ni-Perchta raises one hand, palm outward and towards you. It sparks like an electrical outlet on the fritz. There is a slight white glow around the periphery of her eyes.
Mathias takes out a long-barreled six shooter from an inside pocket of the old school army jacket he is wearing. “You see, girl, I could’ve burned you where you stood. I could’ve shot you from cover and sprayed the fried contents of that skull of yours six ways from Sunday. But I am not a dog. I do my thing straight up, you understand me? Me and Miss Jenny Petty here, we are upstanding people.” He turns to his Ni-Perchta girlfriend, who watches you with a sort of ugly, earnest intensity, almost perversely sexual. “Keep ‘er covered, lovely.”
He walks up to you and actually gives you the six-gun. “I wouldn’t try raisin’ that shooter. Miss Jenny Petty here has an ‘air trigger personality, you know that?” He backs away slowly, fifteen paces. Miss Jenny Petty looks very nervous now, like Mathias is doing something very unexpected.
“You’ve wasted a lot of our time, Sarah Oooooorange. Funny meeting you out ‘ere.” He takes out a cigarette from a tarnished silver case, snaps his fingers and a small flame seems to come out of his thumb. With this he lights the cigarette, takes a puff through the hole in his mask, and puts the case away.
“You know my name is Sarah...”
“Sarah, Sarah, Sarah...” Mathias grins.
“Oh. God,” you croak out, tears filling your eyes. Your chest heaves up and down as you hyperventilate, and your whole body is sweating. Your hands feel so weak and the gun is too heavy.
The Ni-Perchta woman, Jenny, blinks quickly.
“I’m Charlie Mathias and this is Miss Jenny oh so Petty. Well, look, Sarah Orange, this is ‘ow we are going to do this. I ain’t a coward and I ain’t one to give somebody no chance, alright? I challenge you, girl, for being in our road. So you’ve got that six-gun there—that’s a Smith and Wesson New Model No. 3 I just gave you. A very particular one. The very particular gun that killed Jesse James. I figured if I get killed one day, which will probably be very soon considering what’s happened to the rest of us, I’d like to go out with the same weapon, right? ‘Cept I won’t be stupid enough trying to dust off a picture and have some ponce shoot me in the back of me head, right? This is going to be an old fashioned, ‘igh noon show down.” Mathias clips his ori-baton back to his studded belt.
Then, moving at a horrifically fast speed, he draws the pistol strapped to his thigh and takes a shot at you, blasting out the driver side window with an explosion of glass that rains down onto the highway. You scream. In the same motion, he puts the gun back into its black leather holster.
“But you gotta be faster than that,” he says, and tosses his cigarette away.
You start sobbing and then begging. “P-please, j-j-just let me g-go.”
“I-I c-c-can’t. Now on three. And on the three now, not on the two,” He puffs out the last tobacco smoke as he speaks.
The Ni-Perchta woman looks now as if she is ready to say something, but can’t.
“Oh, and…” Mathias draws again and shoots you in the right arm. The sound of the gun firing rolls like thunder. You drop your own gun onto the highway. A large ribbon of blood flows down your arm, but no pain, which makes your heart pound away in terror. You can smell the gunpowder and your own skin burning. “Left handed, too. Robert Ford shot ol’ Jesse with his left, okay there
?” He brays with laughter, sounding like a donkey. The Ni-Perchta girl looks absolutely shocked at his behavior, a part of your brain idly notices.
You are mentally screaming as you try to balance and pick up the gun, which starts to float up to your hand. Your mind has become a white slate with only pain running through it. Your life plays out like a silent film reel. You see everything up to this point and you think of the tarot cards, of waking up on the beach, Sargasso-3...
You grab the gun and manage to pull the hammer back with your thumb. You keep the barrel pointed to the ground.
“Alright, then, this one will be right between the eyes, so don’t worry. One.” You try to ready yourself to outdraw him and kill him first.
“Two.” His fingers dance alongside his holster. “P-please,” you say out loud, your eyes raised to the sky.
“Three!” Mathias draws and shoots you twice in the belly, dropping you to the ground. Hot lead perforates your sternum, giving you pain that is so intensely hot that you wish you were already dead. Gasping for air, you feel very, very cold. Realization washes over you. You are bleeding out. Dying. So far away from everyone and everything you love.
Petty walks towards you and you have time to wonder if she’s going to shoot you, too. When she raises her baton, you close your eyes, positive that the end has come. But then, in the moment before your death you find yourself fully healed. Sick to your stomach, but healed.
Mathias kneels down and grabs his gun, jamming it back into its holster as you cough and hack. “You’re lucky whose sister you are,” he whispers. “You understand? You get me? This is a lesson, nothing more, nothing less. You spread the word to all your other parasite friends—especially the Network men. This is Not. Their. Planet. Don’t go into the old cities. Don’t bother the Ni-Perchta. Just leave.” Mathias slaps you on your rear, hard. “What I just did was just a light spanking.”
The two of them jump onto their cycles and drive off.
You stand up slowly, shakily, and then promptly collapse. You are still covered in your own blood. You stand and fall back down again. When you try again, your legs slip out from under you, so you rest your head against the car door, trying to slow your breathing.