by Mike Leon
Sid turns back to check on the Altima. The car makes it through the intersection and continues to gain on him. It is a problem easily remedied. He reaches back with the P90 and shoots out the Taurus’s rear window. He then takes aim through the holographic display and fires a single shot into the Altima driver’s face. The car immediately slows and begins to curve into a trajectory away from him.
The cell phone in the passenger’s seat rings. Sid picks it up and glances at the screen, which displays a phone number he doesn’t recognize. He pushes the bright red answer bar.
“Clever,” the disguised robo voice says.
“I wasn’t sure you could zoom in close enough to see the screen,” Sid says.
“It wasn’t a problem not with this equipment.”
“The one in the monster truck had an iPad. They’re watching me with a satellite?”
“That is an understatement this thing is Phillip K. Dick’s worst nightmare 800 trillion megapixel picture-in-picture digital zoom and a rewind feature.”
“And that means?”
“The camera is so powerful they can see back in time it’s how they found you.”
“And you’re watching me with this thing too?”
“Yes.”
“And you are?”
“You do not have to worry about that.”
“Worry is for the weak. A warrior has no worries.”
“Wow esoteric T.S. Eliot?”
“It means worrying is a waste of time. You don’t worry. You plan for contingencies. You stay ahead. You kill your problems early.”
“Yes I got it the first time this robot voice does not do sarcasm well hold on.”
Sid waits.
“Test,” the voice communicates. It sounds different now. “Test. Testing.” Still different. It is masculine, unusually deep, with a slight rasp and some sort of mechanical echo, as if it is filtered through a box fan. “Testing. Autobots, roll out! You like this better?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Optimus Prime.”
“Who are you really?”
“Why is it so important to you?”
“Because I don’t like mystery allies with answers they won’t share. They always have some crooked endgame.”
“If I weren’t here you would be buried under GameStop right now.”
“You only helped me because you want something.”
“We’ll talk about that when this situation has been resolved.”
“Any idea what to do about that by-the-way? I can’t tell targets from friendlies out here. Every fucking car I see might be a land torpedo.”
“Uh, where are you going?”
“Back to my apartment to get guns.”
“I wouldn’t do that. They parked two bomb vans right next to the building.”
“How did they find out where I live?”
“The satellite, remember? They’ve been watching you for a while.”
“So if everybody’s been watching me for so long, how come you didn’t call me about this sooner?”
“I just figured it out a few hours ago! You know how hard you are to get ahold of? You’re the only teenager in the country without a fucking cell phone!”
“So what now?”
“I’m working on something.”
“Care to fill me in?”
“The Lincoln didn’t explode when it ran into that technical back there, which means they’re probably using a stable military compound. Something that doesn’t go boom when it takes a hit.”
“It’s RDX. I smelled it when they blew up GameStop.”
“It means they must have detonators. And they might have wired cell phones to the detonators in case of operator failure. It’s the easiest way to make sure your suicide bomber doesn’t get cold feet and bail. And that means…”
“You can trace the cell phone signals.”
“No! That many phones? In real time? You watch too much TV.”
“I hardly watch TV.”
“They probably got a bunch of burners at a local cell phone shop within the last week. You go there, wave a gun at the clerk until he gives you the numbers for the phones they sold, then we call them all.”
“And blow them all up with their own bombs.”
“You got it.”
“But there must be a hundred cell phone stores within fifty miles.”
“It’s more like a hundred and fifty, but that doesn’t matter. I have the ultimate rewind button. Remember? I’m going through the footage now.”
“So what do I call you? Optimus Prime?”
“No. Just call me...The Player.”
“That’s a stupid name.”
“Your mom has a stupid name.”
Then he sees her. Enveloped in black. Arms extended in prayer. Her robes hang like wings both angelic and demonic as she stands in his path one hundred meters ahead.
“This is different,” Sid remarks, squinting to inspect this new enemy. To her credit, she got ahead of him, but standing in his way while he has a fully automatic weapon is no act of tactical genius. “Just stand right there, bitch.”
He removes his hand from the gear selector and wraps it around the grip of the P90 strapped to his chest. As he raises the PDW to fire, the woman in the black burqa drops her arms. The wings descend to reveal a wooden pallet stacked with forty eight cubic feet of plastic explosive.
“Fuck!” Sid barks.
He cuts the wheel sharply to the left, letting go of the P90 to steer with both hands. The car shifts violently away from the huge bomb in the middle of the road, but it is too late to turn around. The blast engulfs the black cloaked figure and blows out all the glass on the right side of the Taurus as it lifts the car up off of its wheels. The car tumbles over and over, spraying shards of glass and shedding sparks as it scrapes against the street.
INT. KAYLA’S HOUSE - DAY
“Can I smoke in here?” Lily asks, smacking a pack of Marlboro Gold cigarettes against the flat of her palm.
“I thought you quit smoking,” Kayla whines as she pulls up the window next to her bed. Her bedroom is a palatial suite compared to Lily’s. Her bed is a four-poster and her expensive French Colonial furniture, despite being abundant, occupies less than a quarter of the floor space. She has a sixty-four inch flat screen mounted on the cream colored wall.
“I did until last night.” Lily grumbles.
“Just try and fan it out the window. What movie did you bring?”
“I have…” Lily reaches into her purse for a boxy plastic case. “...the nineteen-eighty-four Arnold Schwarzenegger classic, The Terminator, on VHS.”
“Aw, come on. How come you never want to watch anything that has a prayer of passing a Bechdel test?”
“What’s a Bechdel test?” Lily sits against the open window sill.
“It’s a test to see if a movie is like, part of the patriarchy. I heard about it on Tumblr.” Kayla flops onto the bed and reaches for a heavy pillow. “It has to have at least two women in it, and they have to talk to each other, and about something other than a man.”
“That’s stupid.” Lily strikes her cheap Bic lighter to ignite the cigarette held in her lips. “It rules out like, all the best movies. And the big studios will just start writing scenes in specifically to beat the test. They know about all that trendy crap before anybody.”
“They’re not going to write pointless scenes into things just to pass the Bechdel test. What kind of insane person would do that?”
“Movie producers. Nothing is beneath them.”
“Well, I don’t have a VCR, because it’s not 1989 anymore, so I’m pretty sure Ahhnold is out of the picture.”
“That’s why I also brought Red Sonja on DVD.”
“Nope. You’re being overruled.”
“Damn it.”
“Let’s watch Dear John.” Kayla flicks on the big TV across the room via the remote on the bed next to her.
“A Nicholas Sparks movie? I’ll save you two hours. Hot coup
le can never be together. Somebody gets cancer. Somebody reconciles with an estranged parent. Somebody writes fucking letters through the fucking postal service, as if anybody, anywhere, still does that. Does he not know about email?”
“It has Channing Tatum…”
“Now I’m listening.” Lily’s interest is piqued.
The chatter of the TV cuts into their conversation as the LCD screen comes to life. “...still don’t have any video to show you but there are reports of several large explosions in central Morston. We should have a live feed a few minutes.”
Kayla switches the TV to input2 and the screen turns to black.
“What was that?” Lily says. “Go back.”
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
Sid growls angrily inside the ball of compressed metal that once was a Ford Taurus. The car is upside down and filled with acrid black fumes. He searches for sunlight in the steel prison around him. The driver’s side window is crunched into half its original height, but he thinks he might be able to squeeze through.
He pulls the P90 strap over his head and places the gun on the ceiling under the passenger’s seat. Then he wrenches his feet from under the demolished dashboard and plants his elbows on the ceiling. He pokes his head through the window and sees a hundred feet of dry grass separating him from the street. The car rolled so many times even he lost track. He appears to be about seventy meters from the center of the blast, now a column of smoke and cinders in the street. Sid reaches through the window with his left arm and finds that the window isn’t quite big enough for his shoulders. He plants a hand on the outside of the car and roars as he pushes himself through the frame. Broken glass tears at his skin. He kicks against the passenger’s seat and pushes harder. He manages to wedge himself into the window like a cork, with one arm free and the other still stuck in the car.
And then something moves in the dust. It is the shape and size of a human, but it can’t be human. There’s no way any human could have survived that explosion.
Or is there?
Sid knows all about explosions. He’s blown up buildings, cars, people, and other monsters with a multitude of different compounds including C4, ANFO, Semtex, TNT and even H6. The blast by itself typically only produces minor injuries like concussions and hearing damage. Most of the fatalities are due to debris, shrapnel, falling glass, collapsing structures—a bunch of things that weren’t there in the middle of the street.
It seems like a ridiculous assertion. There must have been at least two thousand pounds of C4 stacked on that pallet. That’s a bunker buster’s worth of explosive. It was enough to vaporize any flesh and blood creature at the center of the blast.
Still, it comes.
It comes from the cloud, wrapped in smoke and embers. It brushes bright orange flakes from its head and sheds the tattered and burning black burqa like an old skin. It is a short thing, only the height of a petite woman. Its limbs are withered and emaciated. Its body is little more than a ribcage with translucent flesh stretched over it. Scars abound on its arms and legs. A finger is missing from the left hand, broken off at the first knuckle. What little hair it has grows in short clumps on its cranium. It has genitals which are not identifiable, but the lumps of scar tissue where its breasts were excised imply that it is female. So does the word carved over her face in letters that each stretch from her forehead to her chin. SLUT.
The skeletal thing smiles at him as it limps forward. Many of its teeth are missing, or chopped down to pointy shards.
“Do not look upon me,” she says. “The beauty of Muslim women is not for the unbelievers.”
Sid cringes at her. “And we’re okay with that.”
“I remember a time when you thought I was beautiful.”
“I think you have me mistaken for some other infidel.”
“No. I know you, Beast. I see you in my nightmares. I see you in my prayers. I see your brother with his crooked knife. I see the quiet abeed. I see the one with no face of his own. I see the man who laughs. Do you know what he says?”
“There’s no way…” Sid remembers. The memory she describes is one even Sid wishes he could forget, but it should be his alone. Of all those present that night, only he still lives.
“The enemy is the enemy,” she says. “Ain’t nothing more.”
“This is a trick. Some kind of illusion,” Sid says. “They killed her.”
“They did many things to me, but they could not kill me. Nor could my family when they stoned me and left me in a ditch. I laid there for six days before he came to me calling my name. Fatimah, Fatimah, he said, don’t you know you cannot die? You cannot die until you have served His plan. And he was right. I tried again and again to give my life sending the kuffar to the flames, but that was not His plan. No. His plan has brought me to you—you who left me this way.”
“I tried to help you.”
“Liar! You did NOTHING! You ran like a frightened child when they raped me, cut me, butchered me!”
Looming just out of Sid’s reach, she leans in and scowls at him. The horrific splatter pattern of burns upon burns that covers most of her flesh is more evident than ever.
“I will die killing you, Sid Hansen,” she hisses. “It is the will of Allah, may He be glorified and exalted.”
“I should have let the dogs have you,” Sid says.
“You did.”
She turns her back and begins to limp away.
“Where are you going?” Sid shouts. “You should come over here and finish me off.”
“You offer only death, and I cannot die,” Fatimah says without turning back to him. “A foolish exchange.”
“I just want to give you a hug,” Sid says.
She stops now and looks back at him with blazing hatred in her eyes. “You are despicable. You are godless. Your people are godless. And you will die.” Then she continues her trek away from him and the car.
This is bad. She’ll probably be back with a machine gun, maybe something worse, and he’s stuck crammed into a window frame roughly the size of a shoebox.
Sid tries again to pry his way through the window, but he isn’t getting anywhere that way. He grabs hold of the steering wheel with his right hand and pulls himself back into the car, a painful feat, as it drags his shoulders back through the pointed glass spear tips surrounding the window again.
The smoke from the explosion has thinned a bit and Sid can see more of the inside of the car. He checks the other windows. The passenger windows are both filled in with the grassy incline of the ditch the car landed in. The rear driver’s side window is crunched down just as badly as the front.
He shuffles along the ceiling in a prone position, barely squeezing under the tops of the seatbacks as he crawls into the back seat. He finds the cell phone back there, its enormous touch screen cracked into a hundred separate segments. It is amazing it didn’t go through a window while the car was flipping down the street a dozen times. He slides the phone into his pants pocket as he reaches back into the front of the car for the P90.
He pulls on the back seats, but they don’t budge. It looks like they are supposed to fold over to allow access to the trunk, but the tops of the seats are jammed up against the ceiling so they won’t move. If he can’t go over them, he’ll have to go through them.
Sid puts the P90 up against the cushion of the rear passenger’s seat and holds down the trigger to blast at the padding. The gun chugs away as he guides it smoothly across the seatback in a diagonal line, chopping through the foam to sever just enough of the corner to pull away and crawl through. He runs the magazine dry before his perforation reaches the top of the seatback.
He grabs the corner and pulls, but it isn’t coming loose. Sid jams the last magazine into the P90 and continues to chop away at the corner of the seat. He expends most of his ammunition blowing a basketball sized hole through the seat through which he can see clear through to the trunk. He tosses the gun through the hole and then pushes himself in head-first, squeezing through the seat fo
am like a hard and angry shit. He falls against the trunk door and is immediately confronted with the problem of the locking mechanism. He doesn’t have time to play with it, so he blasts it with the last of the 5.7 rounds and the trunk pops halfway open, stopping when the door smacks the ground beneath it. Daylight floods in through the cracked open door.
He scrapes through the opening and flops out into the grass snarling like a dog. He has dozens of glass bits stuck in his arms and shoulders. Blood runs down his face and brown soot covers most of him.
“The gates of Firdaws are open to me!” Fatimah screams. She hobbles toward him on her flimsy legs, her naked body weighed down by the heaviest explosive vest Sid has ever seen. It looks like it has a hundred pounds of explosive banded around it. Simply her ability to carry the thing in her condition lends credence to her claim of divine assistance. “Allahu akbar!”
The P90 is all out of chop and there’s no way to get close to the bitch without getting blown up. Behind her, Sid can see the first police cars approaching. It’s time to make a tactical withdrawal.
He turns and sprints full speed away from Fatimah as she limps after him. She would have no hope of catching him even if she weren’t weighed down by all those explosives. He’s way too fast.
She howls like an angry banshee as Sid puts more distance between them. The flashing lights of the police grow larger and larger. The sound of the sirens overtakes her screeching. One car passes Fatimah and makes its way toward him. Two others stop behind Fatimah. Police begin to get out.
Sid keeps running as he hears the police ordering her to put her hands up. Instead, she detonates the vest. She takes some cops and a two of their cruisers with her. The car chasing him squeals to a stop and the cop at the wheel turns to gawk at the explosion. He’s a small man wearing wire glasses. Sid halts and looks at the police car. It’s not a normal cruiser. The body reminds him of Lily’s Challenger. It’s a pursuit car—a fast car. Sid wants it. He doubles back. The cop starts to exit the vehicle, but Sid shoves the driver door back at him, pinning him hard between the door and its frame. Sid takes his gun away and then bashes the poor dope in the chin with his glass studded elbow.