by Kim Oh
The sky and the blazing Southern California sun was blocked for a moment as the guy stepped over me. Then I sensed his blurry outline as he leaned down – one of his hands grabbed my shoulder and rolled me onto my side, as he stripped the backpack off me.
“Hey! Are you all right?”
The same damn question. Every time – you’re lying there on the ground, obviously not enjoying yourself, and somebody out of the blue wants to know how you’re doing. I’m fine, I was tempted to say, if I could’ve spoken at all – my jaw was throbbing with a dull but massive ache right about now. Just working on my tan.
But it was coming from somebody different. Not the guy with the Challenger and the muscles, who’d flattened me – at least that had changed. I’d flopped again onto my back when he’d let go of me and managed to groggily raise my head, just enough to make out another vehicle, which had stopped up ahead at the side of the freeway. It was the paramedics van I’d passed a little while ago. The crew inside must’ve seen what had happened, with me being shoved over to the side, and they’d pulled over to check if anyone had been injured. Which was nice of them, I had to admit – but then again, that’s the line of work they’re in. I could see that the van’s driver and his partner had climbed out and were heading toward me.
“Back off, jerks –”
More weirdness from the Challenger guy, giving a murderous glare to the paramedics. He had the backpack dangling from one hand. The arrival of the paramedics had distracted him from whatever his next move was going to be.
I didn’t care what the guy was trying to accomplish. My head was still spinning, with the scene around me fuzzing in and out of focus. But I was conscious and functioning well enough to roll over to one side, pull the .357 out of my jacket, and let off a shot in the general direction of the Challenger guy –
Amazing how quickly everything changes when you fire a gun. Even if you don’t hit anything. There’s the world before you pull the trigger, then there’s the way it is afterward.
If nothing else, it gets everybody’s attention. The guy’s line of sight jumped toward me, his eyes widening as they caught hold of the big ugly weapon wavering in my grasp. That startled him enough that he nearly dropped the backpack. Before I could get off another shot, he scrambled away from me and toward his car.
I got to my feet, still wobbly. The only thought inside my head was that the guy had my delivery with him – and if he got away with it, jamming on the Challenger’s accelerator, then I wasn’t going to get paid.
Which wasn’t going to happen, if I could help it.
He’d left the engine running, but he didn’t have time to get the car into gear, before I was at the passenger side window. There’s a lot of solid mass to a .357 – it’s a big chunk of metal in your hand. And more than enough for me to bring the butt of its grip hard against the window glass. The first blow was enough to spider-web the window, cracks running to the corners. The second blow sent pebbly bits of glass across the car’s front seats. I leaned forward, holding the gun muzzle only a few feet away from the guy’s face. He froze, hands gripping the wheel.
“Don’t even think about hitting the gas,” I told him. “I’ll blow your head off before you touch the pedal.”
“You’re making a big mistake –” His eyes narrowed to a seething glare.
“How many times have I heard that before.” I reached in with my free hand and grabbed one of the straps of the backpack beside him. “And not just in the movies.”
I straightened up, pulling both the .357 and the backpack out with me. “Get out of here –” I waved him on with the gun. “If I see you on the road again, trust me, I’ll get really bitchy about it.”
That was just a quick calculation on my part, letting him go instead of putting a bullet between his eyes. I knew those paramedics were behind me, watching everything that was happening here. As a general rule, I try not to kill people when there are witnesses around. It complicates things.
He gave me another hard, lethal look – then made his own calculation, about how much further he could push things. His right hand grabbed the gearshift and slammed it hard into first, just as he punched the accelerator. The Challenger took off so fast, my hair whipped across my face. I stepped back and tracked the car with a level swing of the .357 in my grip, just so he’d have one last good look at it in his mirror.
FIVE
“You’re bleeding –”
I had managed to chase off the Challenger guy, and I was still holding on to the backpack that I was supposed to deliver in San Francisco, but I was functioning on autopilot. When time’s critical, and you need to get business done fast, sometimes you have to whip out the piece without thinking.
“Come over here –” One of the paramedics, baby-faced with a dirty blond crew cut, tugged at my arm. “We’ll get that patched up.”
That should’ve been my first clue. Same as my not picking up on there being something fishy with the Challenger guy, when he’d pulled over and stopped, rather than just speeding off after he’d run my motorcycle over against the freeway guardrail. Paramedics aren’t cops – they’re not required to hang around when there are guns going off. And I was still holding one, dangling down at my side, with my other hand clamped tight on one of the backpack straps. These guys should’ve been inside their van, with the doors slammed shut, calling the police to get on the scene ASAP.
“Where?” I raised the backpack so I could run my hand over the side of my jaw, aching from where I’d gotten slugged. “Where am I bleeding?”
“Come on.” The paramedic pulled me toward the back of their van. “It’ll be okay. Nothing major –”
I looked at my fingertips and didn’t see any blood on them. What that meant, my stuck-in-neutral brain couldn’t figure out. The adrenaline surge that had gotten me up on my feet, gun in hand, and snatching the backpack from the Challenger guy – that’d ebbed away, as fast as it’d come on. Some functioning part inside my head wanted to just climb back on board the Ninja, kick it into gear, and boot out of here as fast as possible. Another part figured that might not be such a good idea just yet, with the pavement still tilting and swaying under my feet. Wouldn’t do any good – to say the least – for me to wobble back out into the middle of the freeway traffic and get flattened by some eighteen-wheeler.
Whatever – given the state I was in, I couldn’t even make the call. I let the paramedic lead me to the rear of the van.
Something was going on back there – something I hadn’t been expecting. My brain-rattled head cleared enough that I could see the van’s rear doors were both flung open, and another couple of guys were unloading some big ungainly object. That made four of them, when you counted the driver I could still see behind the wheel, plus the one who was steering me over there. Way too many – with that big a crew riding around in the van, plus whatever the hell that thing was they’d brought with them, there’d barely be room to lay somebody out on a stretcher and get them to an emergency room. The oddball details were piling up faster than I could keep track.
Now I got a better look at the mystery object. The two guys who’d pulled it out of the van were now busily setting it up, unfolding bits and pieces and locking them into place. Shiny white, roughly square-shaped, with multibladed propellers at each corner – it was some kind of an aerial drone, like you see on the news or on some website with lots of embedded YouTube videos. Not the military sort, those Predators that show up in coverage from some crappy part of the world, that shoot missiles at pickup trucks full of bearded men with Uzis and Kalashnikov rifles, and leave nothing but black, star-shaped burn marks on the ground. This one was more the sort you usually see with a video camera attached underneath, that can hover right outside the window of some posh hotel suite and peer inside, so high-tech paparazzi can get shots of celebs climbing on top of each other. The camera was missing on this one, though, with a pair of small grappling hooks in its place.
I didn’t have time to wonder why a paramedi
cs van would be carrying around a drone. Maybe these guys were off duty, and they were all heading out somewhere to play around with their expensive toy. The one who’d led me over to the van now pushed me down sitting at the edge of the open rear doors.
“Look –” I started to stand back up. “I need to get going –”
“Don’t worry.” The guy reached behind me, toward the equipment racked inside the van. “This’ll fix everything.”
Next thing I knew, he’d shoved me by one shoulder, flat down on the van floor. With his other hand, he slapped a breathing mask over my nose and mouth and held it there tight. I could hear, from somewhere behind me, the hiss of a pressurized gas cylinder’s release valve being opened up.
That’s probably the main thing about being the size I am – which is not much. Even a weedy guy like this could get the upper hand on me. Or at least until I can do something about it. Maybe if I were bigger, they wouldn’t automatically figure they could get away with it, and that’d save everybody a lot of trouble.
Whatever it was being pumped into the mask on my face, it had a sweet, solvent-like odor – like somebody had squeezed a dozen tubes of airplane glue into a five-pound bag of sugar. For a second, with the first inhalation I took, my vision unfocused, and the van’s interior pulsed outward as though it were a rubber balloon. My hands went limp, dropping both the .357 and the backpack’s strap. I would’ve been completely gone if I’d taken a second breath of the gas –
Instead, I turned on one side and slammed my knee hard into the other guy’s groin as he leaned over me. That produced a sudden and gratifying gasp of pain from him – his eyes went wide in shock as he doubled over. The hand that had been clamping the mask to my face now folded around his crotch. Which was mainly what I’d wanted to happen – the mask flopped around on the van floor like a tethered butterfly, as I cleared my head with a deep lungful of air.
If I’d still had the .357 in my hand, I would’ve made sure that this guy wasn’t going to cause me any more trouble. I wouldn’t even have had to fire it – just stick it in his face. But before I could jump down to the pavement and find where I’d dropped the gun, he recovered enough to throw an arm around my neck and wrestle me onto my back. I grabbed at his forearm with both hands, prying it far enough away from my throat so I could keep breathing.
“Go!” He shouted to the driver, up ahead. “Get out of here!”
From over my shoulder, I caught a glimpse of the driver’s panicked, wide-eyed gape – then he recovered himself enough to whip back around in his seat and floor the accelerator.
The rear doors slapped back and forth as the van shot up to speed. I pulled my legs up just in time to keep them from whacking me in the knee. That left the problem of the guy with his arm around my throat. I let go of his forearm with my right hand, so I could spear his gut with the point of my elbow, then snap the back of my fist into his nose. The spurt of blood shocked him enough to send him sprawling back onto the floor of the van.
We were already going too fast, careening along the side of the freeway, for me to dive out the rear doors – especially given that the driver might change into the right-hand lane at any moment and then really pick up speed. Plus, the guy who’d jumped me had recovered enough from my knee to his groin to take another run at me. He obviously had his own adrenaline thing going – not just from the pain, but also from a girl having delivered it to him. His eyes were two narrowed slits as he lurched forward from his kneeling position, grabbed me around the waist, and knocked me onto my back.
I landed part way out of the van, the sill’s bottom edge digging across my shoulder blades – one of the rear doors slammed against my arm, then rebounded all the way open again. The gas cylinder, trailing its hose and face mask, rolled toward me. I grabbed it with both hands, figuring I could use it to club the guy as he leaned over me.
The stenciled cylinder markings, if I’d had time to read them, would’ve confirmed that these people weren’t real paramedics. The stuff was cyclopropane, which hasn’t been used in hospitals and emergency rooms for years. Yeah, it’ll knock somebody out, all right, but it’s majorly flammable and explosive – which is how I knew about it, from the crash course I’d gotten from Cole on all the handy ways to blow stuff up. Wherever this bunch had scored the van and other equipment from, they must’ve gotten the outdated anesthetic thrown in with everything else.
I managed to get one good blow against the guy, landing the butt end of the cylinder across his chest. Would’ve been better if I’d hit him across the face, which is what I was aiming for, but he was already too close for me to get that much of an angle on him. All I achieved was to piss him off even more – he lifted me up a couple of inches and threw me backward.
If he’d gotten a little more distance on his toss, I wouldn’t have been able to keep myself from falling out of the van and landing hard on the pavement racing beneath its wheels. As it was, I twisted to one side, the sill jabbing against the bottom of my rib cage. I dangled head-downward, still holding onto the gas cylinder.
It slipped in my grasp, far enough for the release valve to strike and grind against the pavement. I could just barely hold on to the cylinder’s rounded base, as the hose and face mask were ripped off and went flapping in the distance behind the van. The valve controls snapped off next, and the bare metal sparked as it dragged along the pavement.
That was enough to ignite the cyclopropane gas hissing from the tank’s broken outlet. A fierce blue flame jetted out, nearly a yard in length.
I tucked the cylinder under one arm, so I had a hand free to grab onto one of the doors and pull myself up. The guy who’d tried to gas me before now scrambled back away from the flame searing toward him. Something like that tends to put you in charge of the situation. I climbed back into the van, aiming my accidentally improvised flamethrower right at him. I cut him off from the front seat area – he had nowhere to get away except by flattening himself against the inside wall. His eyes widened in panic as I swung the cylinder around, bringing the flame up toward his face. He dived headlong toward the rear doors, trying to grab hold of one of them. He missed his grasp as the doors swung out on their hinges. Momentum carried him the rest of the way into the open air – he seemed to hang suspended there for a split second, then he landed shoulder-first on the pavement, tumbling like a sack of discarded laundry.
There wasn’t time for me to watch what happened to him. I charged ahead with the cylinder – its flame shot between the van’s front seats, spreading across the inside of the windshield. The driver had enough presence of mind to slam on the brakes, hurtling me forward. I didn’t have to bring the flame around toward him – he was already throwing his door open and diving outside. I tossed the cylinder out after him – it hit the ground and spun like a Fourth of July pinwheel – and climbed into the seat.
The space at the side of the freeway was too narrow to do a three-pointer and turn the van around. So I slammed it into reverse and punched the accelerator pedal, one-handing the steering wheel as I twisted around to look back over my shoulder. The van’s right side scraped along the guardrail as I fought to keep from fishtailing out of control.
Through the flapping rear doors, I spotted the guy who’d tried to knock me out with the cyclopropane gas. Blood streamed down the side of his face as he got to his feet, wobbling and dazed. Then he turned his head and spotted the van hurtling toward him – too late, though, because I wasn’t stopping. The van’s left rear corner clipped and tossed him in a cartwheel to one side.
The others spotted me as well. They’d just about finished whatever they needed to do, to get the drone set up and operational. It sat on the pavement between them, one of the pair kneeling down and tightening the final bolts on the four rotor struts sticking out from the center. Both guys glanced up as they heard the van barreling in their direction, slamming into the rail every few yards as I wrestled with the steering wheel. The one standing up had a remote control box in his hands, with a long whip-like
antenna – he shouted something at the other guy,
that I couldn’t hear.
Tossing the wrench away, the one who’d been working on the drone now reached over and grabbed the backpack – my delivery package – by one of its straps. Just as I piled on the van’s brakes, the rear tires skidding and smoking, he finished fastening the backpack to the hooks on the drone’s underside. He jumped back as the other guy punched buttons on the metal box in his hands.
Against the noise of the freeway traffic streaming beside us, the whir of the drone’s rotor blades went louder and higher in pitch. The guy with the remote control was using the joystick in the box’s center now – the drone rocked back and forth on its short metal legs, then lifted away from the ground and wobbled into the air.
I had a stroke of luck as I pushed my way past the paramedics van’s front seats and ran, head lowered, toward the open rear doors. I spotted my .357 on the ground where I’d dropped it, when the mask hooked to the gas cylinder had been slapped on my face. As I jumped out of the van, I bent down and came up with the gun in my hand.
From the panicked looks on their faces, the two guys were obviously afraid that I was going to start firing on them. If they’d been smart, they wouldn’t have left the gun where I could grab it – but they’d been in a hurry, counting on the other guys in the van to knock me out of commission so they could just work on getting the drone ready to go.