by Forbes West
The frustration builds up as you continue to play this game of pretend. The constant trickle of rainwater into the sea behind you grates on your nerves.
“We gotta flush these people out into the open,” you say abruptly, and hope you don’t sound insincere.
“I say we forget about it and run,” Treena says, oddly and flatly.
Guy, looking around the wheelhouse with suspicion, states, “The Old Man at Midnight will meet us a couple of minutes away from McRoss. Just a few minutes down the road. We make the deal there. We still got so many leftovers from the star job.”
You nod hesitantly. “When?”
“Six days from now. Talked to him through his contact here in Stonetown at The Rhodie Bar. We gotta pick up the stuff, you and me, girlie.” Guy points to you. “And bring it on over. Treena, you have to...”
You talk basically nonsense for the next five minutes and then leave, getting off the hovering airship and walking back onto the dock. Guy follows you after a couple of minutes. The bogus plan you rambled off should be believable to whoever is listening.
“Has to be, right? They had to have bugged the ship back when Tek was driving it. Something Antediluvian, right? Weird bugging device?” you whisper to Guy.
Guy puts his hands around your waist. “You’re completely right. Gotta be. How else can they be onto us, unless Treena is selling us out.”
You shake your head, looking down.
“I doubt it. I mean, they…with her sister...” Guy says.
Jaime comes out of the ship, looking around the docks. “Crazy. Crazy, crazy world we live in. Told you it’d be an adventure, Sarah,” he says, punching your arm lightly.
“Alright, Treena will drop off the Ghia,” Guy indicates the car which is currently hanging by a cable next to the extra Ford Mustang, “a little way down the road.”
“You think they bugged the Ghia, too?” you ask. James Farson handed you back the keys to the Ghia the day you were expelled from the Mission.
Guy shakes his head. “If they did, we’d have been hit again, right? When we went out to the star that night?”
“Right.”
Jaime asks if you want to get something to eat and both of you refuse, too sick to even think about eating a single thing.
You drive the Ghia for almost nine hours, going right down the yellow X highway back to the Sargasso region. Guy sits in the passenger seat, smoking a cigar. You pass around the city, avoiding the wreckage of that once mighty place. No one says anything during the long drive, even when you take out one of the spare gas cans and fill up the tank again.
Guy takes a piss out in the grasslands as you wait.
With your ori-baton, you heat up a can of clam chowder to share while sitting next to each other on the hood of the Ghia. Guy can’t stop talking, mentioning places and things he has done around the area. He keeps a nervous wave of chatter going.
“Okay, let’s visualize this. This is something I do before any one of these big salvage ops. We shoot Mathias and Petty and potentially get a ton of money for doing it—the Witch-Lord has a huge reward on their heads. What will you do with the money if we survive this?”
You stare at him, wondering if he really wants to have this conversation. “I…I never thought about it, actually,” you say, truly stumped for a moment.
“We could potentially be sharing a million by the end of the month and you have no idea what you’d do with it?” Guy says with a hysterical and nervous laugh. Then he stops laughing. “Should we just call it off?”
“No, I just…” You look up at the sky, thinking about it. “I’ve always had this, uh, dream too, besides all the material stuff.” You shut up, really thinking. “When my dad and my brother were killed in a car accident, I kind of went into a shutdown mode for a month. I stopped speaking. My mother finally sent me to a doctor, and I got some help and some pills. My sister had died a year before, and it just made my head feel like it was full of noise. A thought came to me. A giant one that just stays flashing in my brain.”
Guy takes off his new white-framed sunglasses, setting them down as he listens to you.
“What’s happened out here is emphasizing this thought too, this dream. The thought is I don’t want to waste one hour on doing something for somebody else, working some b.s. nine to five job, day in, day out, for twenty years, getting fired, getting rehired, scrounging around for work. If we get a lot of money here, we’ve bought our freedom, permanently. Forever. No one controls us anymore. No more bosses. No more lost time. We don’t have much life to begin with, so why in God’s name are we wasting our lives on all this crap that doesn’t matter in the end? I don’t want to work in an office or anything, and if I can murder a couple of murderers that hurt our friend Saki to do so...” You wipe the tears away from your eyes. “You probably wanted a fun answer.”
Guy smiles, “Yes. I was visualizing a Maserati GranTurismo Sport, silver, convertible, and a home in San Francisco. I just like that city a lot. Is that gay?”
You start to laugh, wiping the tears away at the same time. Guy puts a hand on your shoulder. “I like that, too,” you say, kissing him again. “You taste like clam chowder.” Guy laughs a little. You think of Saki and their relationship and you feel a sort of hate build up against yourself. You are kissing someone else’s boyfriend. You are no better than Tyler’s girls back home. You smile despite the pain you feel inside.
* * *
Guy takes over the drive from here on in. You pray silently the whole way back to the Sargasso region, and your stomach clenches when you see the green reflector sign stating that the turn off for Mission Friendship is coming up. Guy turns in the opposite direction, towards where McRoss should be, and drives into the dry and weathered grasslands and the broken canyon-scape of the Sargasso Breaks.
“I think we’re getting too close now. We need to park so we can sneak up on it,” Guy says, the wind from his open window smothering some of his words.
He drives the Ghia deep into the thick grasslands, finally stopping with a few scrapes. You gather everything up and jump out.
“We’d better start moving away from the station, come around to the south. Otherwise, if they’re coming by air, they’ll see us.” Guy straps on the bulletproof vest he bought in Stonetown and gives you a yellow belt with a golden electrical box hooked into it. You realize what it is—a shield belt.
“Forget about it,” he says as you to try to reject it. “It was the last one they had. I wish we could get more. You only get a few shots before it breaks down. It’s older than the pyramids. You know it’s on when your skin feels a little stretched. That bastard Mathias has one, too. Probably a better one. They aren’t reliable. I’m sorry, but it’s better than having a real vest.”
You and he clomp through the grasslands in the dark, keeping your bearings by the small compass on Guy’s watch, barely talking and barely acknowledging the other’s presence. You’re able to see where you’re going as the seven moons are out in full, each one of them providing more than enough light to walk by. A Network van drives by along the yellow X highway, a big blue and white one with extra metal welded to it. It passes at full speed.
About an hour into your walk, you hear music playing, maybe Pink Floyd or some other psychedelic rock stuff. The music thumps through the landscape, probably the best neighborhood in the universe to play music this loud and for this long. Then you see the station.
McRoss is lit up under a mix of orange sodium lights and regular light bulbs behind iron cages. The lighthouse ship is still there, docked on the river, its light shining over the wasteland.
Guy motions for you to get down and to follow what he does: army-crawl in the high grass, keeping low and out of sight. Your nose itches like crazy, smelling the fragrant brush that you are crawling through.
“Neat looking boat,” Guy whispers and you nod, your head throbbing with all the adrenaline.
“We have to…wait, look.” Guy brings out binoculars, kneeling and rais
ing himself just above the grass. Three dark figures stand behind the chain link fence, next to a barbecue that glows orange from heated coals. Their shadows are long in the orange light of the station. Guy puts the binoculars to your eyes. The three figures each have a beer in their hand, and the van you saw driving by is there with its doors open.
“People you recognize?” Guys says, sarcastically.
You do. Three figures from your dream and waking life. Oscar Botha, Dee Ricco, and Dr. Wellington Cartwright.
They are talking and laughing. Guns are strapped to their chests and ori-batons armed with little orichalcum stones are lashed to their hips. They each wear thin, blue jackets that say Solomon’s House University on the back in gold letters.
“Gotta be our fan club,” Guy whispers. “Three guys— three attackers over the Arc Waters, right? Gotta be.”
“God, I hate the Network,” you say. “They really need to do background checks on people. I got my job in four hours.”
Guy blows out his breath. “They must’ve got our little false signals out of Stonetown, then. Your plan seems to be working, kid. Arrogant asses, too. Look at that—playing music, sipping beers...”
As you watch them standing around, enjoying their beers behind the chain link fence, you feel nothing but hate for them, true hate. These people are the face of Guy’s attempted murder. They killed Saki’s family. You swallow compulsively when you realize you are very scared of them now.
“Don’t be nervous. It’ll be like pulling out a tooth—a lot of pain and fright and then it’s over in a second,” Guy says, a little too quickly. He takes out his sawed off rifle with a pistol grip and slowly pulls back the bolt with a snick, brushing away some of the grass from his face. “And then I guess you feel numb afterwards.” He pats you on the back. “That probably didn’t cheer you up any.” He mutters a prayer under his breath and crosses himself.
“I didn’t know you were Catholic.” He kisses you. “Ever do this before?” you ask.
He shakes his head after a moment.
“They look a little too comfortable, don’t they, Guy? I mean, how can they just be...?” You shake your head. Those aren’t people on the other side of that chain link fence, just nightmares in human form. The dream has become reality again, right in front of you. You clench your palms so hard your nails dig in, leaving little bloody crescents.
Guy scopes out the situation with the binoculars. “Mathias and Petty must be tracking the Crue in Stonetown. They’ll rush back here once they realize it’s stuck on autopilot heading…well, wherever.”
Guy rolls his eyes over to you. “Must be it. We rush them right now, throw ‘em down. Blitzkrieg their asses.”
You nod. “Yeah. Yeah. Okay, then…we wait. Let ‘em get comfortable, really see if it’s the three of them. They’re drinking and barbecuing, right? Everyone who’s there should be around in the open or will be in the next few minutes. They seem pretty nonchalant. We hit ‘em after the beer hits them,” you say.
Guy scratches his nose. “Maybe. We’ll wait. Let’s try to take them alive, then. We can kill ‘em after we torture them. I want some damn answers. I want to know where Mathias and Petty are right now... We’ll wait,” he says with a sigh, readjusting his body armor. “Oh Lord, we will wait.” He looks up to the sky and makes a circling gesture.
For an hour you sit in the high grass, watching the three of them go back and forth, eating and drinking, their actions so normal and so trivial that you wonder if this is really the terror of the Sargasso or an evening in the park in your old hometown on Earth. Guy nearly hyperventilates next to you; you can almost hear his heart beating.
To you, these moments are something like going in front of the class before doing your five-minute speech on Kennedy, or when you were asked to do the Pledge of Allegiance. It is a performance anxiety, not a fear of death. That isn’t there. You are just afraid to screw up somehow and screw up badly. But the dream, the dream keeps replaying in your head, and you see their faces. You see your sister’s face as well.
The music coming from their radio has a funky, reggae beat and reverberates through the night. The three monsters relax on lawn chairs. Each of them had two or three beers. They’re fed and full of beer.
“Let’s do this, girl,” Guy says, his voice a little higher than normal
“On three?” you say.
“No.” Guy licks his lips. “Just fire for effect into the air. It’ll scare ‘em. You got dragon’s breath rounds, right? That’s the shells.” He pulls back the bolt on that bolt-action sawed-off rifle/pistol that he has. You have Winniefreddie’s shotgun with you, for practicality and for irony.
Guy takes off in a charge across the grasslands. You rush forward to keep up with him. He yells as loud as he can—it is scary, intense, frightening. A mad man’s scream. He crosses the yellow X highway in a full sprint and then, waving his ori-baton, rips out the chain link fence and throws it to the side. It makes a fierce screech as it is ripped out of its posts.
You fire the shotgun repeatedly, the bursts of flame lighting up the night sky, the booms shattering the stillness of the night.
The three bastards are still trying to get out of their lawn chairs when Guy using his baton telekinetically tosses the smoldering barbecue at Dee. She falls back with a scream, brushing off the hot coals as fast as she can, burning her hands and dropping the pistol she was quick enough to draw.
Treena jumps down from the sky and lands directly on top of the van. Her Tri-Skysurfer lands with a crash on one of the other buildings. She’s laughing as she waves her rifle around.
“Freeze! Freeze!” Guy says, covering them with his sawed-off rifle. “First asshole to move gets his brains blown out!”
The three have their hands up now. Dee Ricco, your former boss, is crouched on the concrete next to the orange coals and ash that flew out of the barbecue, her face dirty with soot and reddening from burns. “Alright, alright, alright...” she says repeatedly. Botha is on the ground next to her, his own hands up.
“Where’s Mathias?” you cry, terrified about where the outlaw is at that moment. “Where is he?” You fire the shotgun into the air and six feet of flame shoots out of the barrel.
Cartwright, who fell over backwards in his lawn chair, still has his beer bottle in his hand. He slowly puts it down. “Mathias? What are you talking about, Sarah?”
You walk over to him and put the barrel right into his face. “Don’t use my name. I know you,” you say. “I know your true face.”
Cartwright starts to speak before the door into the warehouse of McRoss Research opens to reveal his wife. She has her own assault rifle pointed at you.
“Put it down, Sarah,” she says, her voice quavering. “Please.”
You look a little bit too long in her direction, the barrel of your gun shifting to her, and Cartwright pounces on you. He throws you backwards, making you fall hard on your back and skitter down the yellow X highway. Your gun unloads into one wall of the warehouse. The doctor’s wife turns and fires wildly into the air, her burst of rifle fire making a savage popping sound in the night. Her shots hit you several times, knocking out your energy shield in just moments—five straight shots right into you bounce off because of your shield belt’s energy. Her gun jams. She then kicks the door closed.
Botha engulfs Treena in flames, the ori-baton in his left hand spewing out a jet of flame and fuel, while the gun in his right hand fires shots into her bulletproof vest. Then, with his ori- power, he flips the van over onto her, crushing her under its heavy weight.
Guy shoots Dee in the head, the bullet cutting through her and depositing in the wall behind her. The shot pushes her backwards, but not before she engulfs Guy in flames. He falls back in a scream, and drops and rolls to put the fire out. Then, with his own telekinesis powers, Guy slams Botha into the side of the van with a hard crack, knocking him out.
Still on your back, you shoot out a powerful burst of green lightning that misses Cartwright by an inch
, but makes him duck his head as he tries to pull his gun out. You leap to your feet, quicker than you have ever been in your life, thanks to the Grav-Mod.
“Come on, you son of a bitch!” you yell, drawing your revolver and firing quickly. But you miss all six shots, the gun dry firing on the last pull of the trigger.
Cartwright empties his clip in your direction as he fires from the ground. One shot pierces the edge of your ear, making you fall to the ground and drop the revolver. Blood runs down the side of your face as you pull out your small semi-automatic.
Cartwright is quick enough to telekinetically throw the lawn chair and what is left of the barbecue set right at you with his baton, trying to knock you back. He reloads quickly.
You manage to roll out of the way, though part of the barbecue hits your left leg hard.
You pump the trigger of the little gun as many times as you can, and the third shot catches him in the eye, right through his glasses. The doctor twitches and then lies still, blood running out the back of his head.
Botha gets up, still reeling from slamming into the van. You get him in your sights and pull the trigger, but there is nothing left except a dry click.
You look over at Guy, who is sitting on the ground. The left side of his face is pale; the right is bruised and burnt. His right eye is bloody and lifeless. He holds his limp right arm. The leather from his jacket has melted into his skin.
“Well,” he says, coughing. “Well. Go get him, Tiger. I’m just going to walk over here.” He flips the van telekinetically over with his ori-baton and shuffles over to Treena, stooping to heal her smashed figure.
“Treena’s here. I’ll be good.” Guy coughs and winces in pain. Treena’s eyes start to flash, and she wakes up with a nasty and bloody cough.
You reload the revolver, put away the small gun and start a limping jog forward, heading for Botha. As you round the side of one of the warehouse buildings, you can hear the shuffling noise of Botha trying to make a getaway. You catch a glimpse of Cartwright’s wife running with the assault rifle and try to pick up some speed, despite the pain in your leg. As you get closer, you gun her down without a second thought.