by Mike Leon
The siren atop the vehicle continues to wail as he pulls the cop away from the car and jumps into the driver’s seat. A placard on the dashboard identifies the car as a Dodge Charger. Charger, Dasher, Runner—Sid doesn’t care what they call it. The car has a radio, which is alive with heavy breathing and loud chatter. There’s a computer system, common in these cars, but valueless unless searching for information on common thieves and thugs—not international super terrorists. He’d like to turn the damn siren off, but he doesn’t have time to figure out how. He puts his foot to the gas and goes.
He can still hear the banshee scream over the sirens as he drives away.
EXT. FREEWAY - DAY
Fatimah walks away from two burning police cars while patting out the fire that has engulfed her left shoulder. The burns are nothing. Her destroyed flesh is mostly numb already, and nothing could compare to the pain of being denied entrance to Jannah every day.
She approaches a white utility van with the rear doors left open from her last visit. The walls of the van are lined with satchel charges, and more vests like the one she just detonated. Sitting on the floor of the van is a radio which transmits the fuzzy voices of her compatriots. She picks it up and pushes the talk button.
“He is going West in a police car,” she says.
“We are watching,” Sayyid’s voice comes through. “He will not escape us.”
His response is punctuated by the roaring engines of twenty vehicles as they zip past along the road on their way to intercept the enemy. A collection of police cars trails behind them with their sirens blaring.
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
Sayyid watches the convoy through the eyes of the satellite using the iPad in his lap. He occupies the passenger’s seat of the monster truck still. A new driver replaced the dead man and he steers the truck while leaning out the rolled down driver’s side window to see. Sid Hansen will shoot him dead in a heartbeat if he gets close again, but Sayyid has no intention to warn the driver about that.
Ahead of him, most of his little army speeds onward in pursuit of their enemy. Behind him, the lights of a dozen police cars flash red and blue. Sirens wail at him. This is unwanted attention and must be eliminated.
“Muhammad!” Sayyid shouts into the radio.
No less than four men all reply at the same time in a garbled jumble of acknowledgments. One of them is his driver.
“Muhammad in the van,” Sayyid says.
That narrows it down to three.
“Muhammad in the black conversion van right here in front of me,” Sayyid clarifies even further.
“Yes?” A single voice crackles from the radio now.
“The police cars following us are a problem. It is time.”
“Allah is most merciful.”
“May he reward you with virgins as fine as pearls.”
Sayyid looks on as the black van steers away from the front of his truck and reduces speed to fall behind the rest of the convoy. The huge truck overtakes it quickly and the van falls in with the police cars behind them. The police shout at them over a loudspeaker in garbled echoing tones Sayyid knows are commands to pull over, even though he cannot understand them through all the noise.
He takes the cheap bar phone he bought yesterday from its place in a nylon holster on his belt. Its tiny screen illuminates as he pushes the down arrow just below it and he scrolls through a list of numbers programmed into the phone’s contact list. He glances back once at the van to check the number printed on the license plate affixed to the vehicle’s front bumper. He moves the cursor down to a matching number in the contact list.
“Be tranquil, my friend,” Sayyid says. “The time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.”
Sayyid thumbs the enter key.
The blast is immense. That van carried over five thousand pounds of RDX. It disintegrates in an outburst of gas and debris that engulfs the highway and all the police cruisers behind them. The earth ripples like an ocean wave, and for a split second, the truck seems to surf forward on it.
“All of you,” Sayyid calls into the radio. “Stay on him. Run him down. Destroy him!”
“Sayyid.” A single voice responds to him. It’s Fatimah. “We must disperse.”
“Do not defy me, woman.”
“These police are no threat to us, but they will escalate. How long until they bring tanks? Gunships?”
“She has point,” says Muhammad the driver. “Is like Grand Theft Auto, the video game. You like video games?”
Sayyid does not like video games. He speaks back into the radio. “Those things do not worry me. God is with us.”
“Then I will follow him alone,” Fatimah says. “It is my destiny.”
Sayyid snorts with vexation. The girl makes a good argument, but she will be unable to catch up to the Beast by herself. His car is too fast. “Fine. Bikers, go with her. Shoot out his tires. Slow him.”
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
The mushroom cloud from that last explosion still looms behind him as Sid cruises away from the convoy and downtown. Outside the centralized shopping district there won’t be any traffic for the bombers to hide in.
Out here there isn’t much to see but trees. The highway is flanked by heavy forestation on both sides. The road curves and slopes through the mountainous terrain. There are houses scattered in the woods, but they’re all far back off the road, at the end of long private driveways. Traffic is light in the mid-day too.
The cracked cell phone rings and Sid looks to see who is calling. Lily’s phone number flashes across the gigantic screen underneath the broken glass. He touches the answer option.
“Hi,” he yells over the sound of the pursuit car’s howling siren.
“Are you sitting on a police siren?” Lily yells back.
“No,” Sid says. He fumbles with a knob on the black box mounted to the right of the steering wheel, but it only changes the frequency of the squealing.
“How come I just got a warning about a terrorist attack on my iPhone like ten minutes after you called me asking weird questions from a strange phone number?” Lily asks.
“I have no idea.”
An increasing volume of high pitched buzzing draws his eyes to the rearview, where he sees five motorcycles quickly gaining on him. The Kawasaki motorcycles are too fast to outrun, and will be a nuisance unless he does something about them.
“Yeah?” Lily says. “And they just happened to blow up the GameStop where you work because of what? Gamergate?”
“I’ll call you back in a minute,” Sid says. Then he pushes the button on the side of the phone and drops it on the passenger’s seat.
KLAK! KLAK! KLAK! Bullets clap against the body of the car. They’re shooting at him with subguns. More of them strike the back bumper. A number of them skid along the street to his left. They’re trying to shoot out the… POP!...tires.
He grips the wheel with both hands to hold it straight as the Charger tries to sway left. The right rear tire explodes only a few seconds after the left, and that at least evens the steering out, but the car now thumps down the road at reduced speed and the bikes are gaining on him faster.
Sid rolls down the front windows and waits for the first of the bikes to catch up to him. He drops the cop’s gun, a Glock 22, in the empty seat next to him and watches as a biker pulls up along the left side of the Charger and levels an old Uzi at his face. Sid swerves into the bike and pulls the biker’s outstretched Uzi hand into the Charger. The biker immediately panics and loses control of the crotch rocket, which tumbles to the street and skids behind the Charger. The man flails his legs wildly as the road palpates beneath his feet at sixty miles an hour.
Another biker throttles into Sid’s blind spot, attempting to be sneaky. Sid taps the brakes and jams his finger into the Uzi’s trigger guard, mashing the trigger down. The Uzi blazes in front of him, dumping a collection of .45 ACP shell casings over his shoulder as he forces the man hanging on his car to shoot the biker on his right
. Blood sprays from the biker’s body as he veers off the road and vanishes into a mess of thick vegetation.
“I think I might have a flat,” Sid yells at the squealing man half stuck in the window next to him. “Can you take a look?”
Sid then flicks the steering wheel right, drops the man, and flicks the wheel left. He hears the familiar crunch of human bones under the blown out rear tire. The Uzi remains in his hands.
More subgun bullets crash through the rear windshield. Some of them smack into the partition between the front and rear seats. The other three bikers are shooting more subguns at him from behind. Sid swerves to align the Charger with the biker in the middle, the one with the least room to maneuver. He slows the car slightly and waits as the bike closes in. With only feet between the bike’s front wheel and the car’s back bumper the biker lifts a hand to fire a Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol. Sid takes advantage and hits the brakes hard. The screech of tires fills his ears and the smell of burning rubber fills his nose. The biker can’t stop in time. The bike thumps against the Charger’s trunk and the rider goes through the shattered rear windshield. He slams against the partition at Sid’s back and slumps against the floor in the rear of the car. The remaining two bikers zip past him on both sides.
Sid floors it. The biker to his left brakes hard and skids to a stop with a hundred yards between them. He fires a MAC-10 at the Charger’s grill as the car accelerates directly toward him. Sid ducks behind the dashboard as he rockets toward his enemy. Bullets punch through the grill and steam rises over the hood, billowing into the windshield, but the car powers onward. The front bumper bashes into the bike and the rider cracks the glass in front of the steering wheel before going over the top of the car.
The car continues forward, pushing the bent motorcycle. Sparks fly like burning raindrops in every direction. Sid hits the brakes and halts the vehicle. He shifts to reverse and cuts the wheel left, pulling away from the bike and turning the car to a horizontal position across two lanes of westbound highway. The nose of the vehicle points at a guard rail which separates the road from a thin row of trees and a hundred foot drop into more wooded terrain.
“Hey!” screams the man in the back of the car. He pounds on the partition over Sid’s shoulder with his clenched fists. “Hey motherfucker! Motherfucker! Motherfucker!”
The last biker skids to a stop, turning to start another pass at the Charger. Sid points the Uzi through the driver’s side window and shoots him dead in the middle of the street. His bike falls hard on the blacktop and the body flops off of it onto the pavement.
Sid picks up the cell phone and opens the driver door next to him. He guns the engine hard. It roars and spits fire like a dragon. He drops the clutch and the car lurches forward. He dives from the vehicle before it leaves the road and watches it smash through the guard rail. The man inside screams all the way down to the dirt below. The car, pulled down by the front load of its engine, slams into the ground grill-first, then tips forward to land upside down. The siren finally quiets as it is crushed under the weight of the vehicle.
“Now that’s what I call a rough ride,” Sid says.
He presses the button on the side of the cell phone to light up the screen again and finds that a call is already in progress. The timer on the screen ticks away at 02:12. Apparently, the side button does not hang up. He winces and holds the phone up to his ear.
“Hi?” he says, approaching the fallen motorcycle in the street ahead of him.
“I heard all of that,” Lily’s voice sizzles back at him from the little phone speaker.
“It’s not what you think.” The biker on the asphalt in front of him coughs, still alive even though he bleeds from five bullet wounds. He reaches out for some intangible object in his frenzied death throws. Sid fires a .45 into his brain.
“You’re totally killing guys!” Lily screeches.
“I just killed a couple of guys,” Sid says. “It’s not a big deal.”
“So you can blow up half of town but you can’t knock off a handful of mobsters for me?”
“Wait a minute.” Sid picks up the fallen motorcycle from the center of the street. “You’re not angry that I’m killing guys? You’re angry that I’m killing these guys instead of the guys you wanted me to kill?”
“Yes! What the fuck is your deal? What are you doing this for?”
“It’s complicated. I did some stuff with Graveyard a while back. There’s this girl—”
“A girl?! Is she prettier than me? I bet she has big tits.”
“No.” Sid grimaces. “Not at all.”
“Is she a better lay? Is that it?”
“No. She wants to kill me.”
“Oh.”
“They came out of nowhere. They’ve got machine guns, plastic explosives, improvised fighting vehicles and a spy satellite. These ragheads are serious.”
“Don’t say raghead! That’s racist!”
“They’re trying to run over me with suicide bomb cars! What do you want me to call them?!”
“I don’t know. Islamic extremists...”
“Takes too long.”
“It’s probably going to turn out some old white guy in a business suit is really pulling the strings anyway. That’s how these things always go.”
The hum of an approaching engine sounds through the trees and Sid looks back the way he came, expecting to see the flashes of a dozen differently colored cars making their way toward him. Instead, he sees one white utility van with no other vehicles to accompany it.
Fatimah glares at him over the steering wheel as she comes around the bend. He can’t stay and fight her. He can’t get close to that van. It’s probably packed with enough explosives to take out the Pentagon.
Sid has a better idea. He revs up the crotch rocket and takes it into the woods.
EXT. HIGHWAY - DAY
Fatimah stops her van as she watches her enemy disappear into the dense forestation on a tiny motorcycle. The bike wasn’t designed for that kind of ground, but it makes no difference. Even if he were on foot she would never be able to catch him in there. She growls with rage and punches the steering wheel. The car horn sounds loudly as she bashes it.
“I do not like what I see, Fatimah,” Sayyid calls over the radio. Fatimah leans to her right and examines the video feed displayed on the tablet lying face up on her passenger’s seat. It shows nothing but leafy green vegetation.
“He’s gone in the trees,” she responds. “I’ll never catch him in there.”
“If we lose him in the woods again, you can be sure you will feel the wrath of Allah.”
“Not this time,” Samir cuts in on the conversation. “I learned a new trick.” In an instant, the video feed changes from a blanket of green to a sea of blues and yellows and reds. “Thermal imaging. See?”
Even as nothing but a bright orange blob, Fatimah recognizes the object of her hate.
“Figure out where he’s going,” Sayyid says. “Everyone spread out. Stay quiet. Be ready to close in.”
INT. WALK-IN FREEZER – DAY
“So cold,” Melissa whispers. Even her breath is hardly warm anymore.
Stephen lies stacked on top of her, both of them wedged into the crook where the floor meets the wall. Their blanket is a pile of garbage collected from the inside of the freezer: emptied out and collapsed cardboard boxes, plastic bags, the strips of transparent plastic curtain that used to veil the door. They used anything they could find that wasn’t frozen solid to cover themselves. Whether it is working or not is highly debatable, but Stephen likes to think positively.
“Try not to think about it.”
“I can’t. I don’t want to die in here.”
“Just don’t think like that.”
“I can’t feel my feet. So tired.”
“Tell me about something.”
“Something? Like what?”
“Like anything. What do you do?”
“I work in this place. You already know that.”
; “I mean what you really do. What do you want to do?”
“I’m in school to be an accountant.”
“You like math?”
“Nobody likes math.”
“Somebody has to like it.”
“I don’t think we should keep talking. We’ll use up all the air.”
“Can that actually happen? I thought that was vaults.”
“I don’t know. I saw it on a TV show.”
“I don’t think you should believe everything you see on TV.”
“I think it’s true. I just… I just need to sleep.”
“You’re definitely not supposed to go to sleep.”
“Why not?”
“You’re just not supposed to if something happens.”
“That’s for concussions.”
“No, I remember for sure. I was reading about people freezing to death on Everest. It was research for a song I wrote. They fall asleep there and they just never wake up. Nobody can carry them down, so they just leave the frozen bodies there for years, like warnings to other climbers.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. People don’t leave dead bodies laying around.”
“They do. It’s too hard to carry them out.”
“No. That’s just a stupid story people tell. Listen to me, okay. I’m the adult here.”
“You’re not much older than me.”
“I’m twenty two. You’re like twelve.”
“I’m fifteen.”
“Blech. Middle school.”
“I’m in high school.”
“Whatever. I pay bills.”
“Okay. Fall asleep then.”
“Well... now I don’t want to after you said that all that shit about dead bodies.”
“It’s weird. I used to think that story was so metal. Now I just don’t want to think about it.”
“I take it you’re in a metal band?”