by Andy Remic
‘I have really become death,’ Sonia misquoted.
The abuse started to filter through her EARMIC and she removed the tiny glittering ball and tossed it onto the settee. She moved towards the doors. Outside, the London heavens had opened; ice-filled rain was pounding the dark grey streets.
Sonia J was talking to Baze as he drove, but she suddenly realised that he wasn’t listening. From her position on the cool leather of the BMW’s back seat she could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror—focused on something behind them.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked.
‘We’re being followed.’
‘You sure?’
‘Oh yes,’ growled Baze, pressing his size 14 boot hard on the accelerator. The BMW surged forward, bonnet rising under massive acceleration. To either side, buildings slid past, water hissing under tyres and rattling in accompaniment on the car’s roof.
Sonia looked over her shoulder. Behind them, five large GMC trucks powered along, matching them for speed. Huge tyres thundered across buckled tarmac, huge black bumpers cannoned into chunks of stone, hammering a clear path. Five grilles jostled for position in Sonia’s vision and she felt her throat constrict with sudden fear: they had found her.
It hadn’t just been the Nex following on foot after the interview with Alexandra; this was a proper tag—the pursuers did not care that the victim had spotted them.
What worried Sonia most about her pursuers was that the Nex no longer felt the need to hide. It was as if she was a spy who had blown her cover.
‘You want me to lose them?’ growled Baze.
‘Lose them,’ said Sonia dryly.
Again, the BMW accelerated. Around Baze’s bulk, Sonia saw the needle dance up to 150 m.p.h. This was insanely fast for the narrow rubble-strewn streets of London—especially if one didn’t want to attract the merciless attention of the JT8s and the Nex.
Suddenly, the lead GMC truck surged ahead and accelerated towards them. There was a massive crunch as the bumper hammered into the boot of the BMW, forcing the car to one side; wheels thumped up onto buckled pavements and for a horrifying moment Sonia thought Baze had lost control...
The BMW veered, rolling to the left and sending a shower of sparks along the face of an old run-down building.
The GMC truck had dropped back, but it soon leapt forward again. It connected with a squeal of twisting steel, and the BMW’s rear bumper was torn free, falling under the GMC’s front wheels which compressed it into a crushed mass and discarded it with the ease of a tossed paper ball.
‘You’re gonna have to get off the main road,’ snapped Sonia.
Even as she spoke, Baze slammed the BMW right into a narrow alleyway. They crashed at a hundred miles an hour through several bins, one of which sent a web of cracks across the windscreen before it bounced off.
Sonia’s head snapped back to the rear window—and she yelped as the GMC’s grille appeared once more, slamming yet again into the BMW’s boot. This time the shock was so great that Baze’s hands were torn briefly from the BMW’s steering wheel and the vehicle lurched to the right, careering from a wall which tore free the front right wing.
The BMW veered left now, thundering across rubble to smash down a low wall as Baze’s hands slipped and slid on the steering wheel and he finally managed to get a grip, wrenching the lurching high-speed car into some semblance of stability.
‘We’ve got to lose them!’ Sonia breathed huskily.
‘Don’t you understand, Sonia?’ growled Baze, glancing over his shoulder with a wild look in his eyes. ‘We can’t lose them—their trucks are faster than this hunk of shit.’
Once more, the GMC thundered into the BMW SmutCar. And then there came a fusillade of machine-gun bullets ...
‘We can’t take this any more,’ snapped Sonia. ‘We’re going to have to use force ...’
‘But what if it’s a ruse?’ said Baze softly, his gaze meeting—for a fleeting instant—with Sonia’s. ‘It could blow our cover wide open.’
‘Better to shoot the Nex and go into hiding than end up dead. If our cover is blown—then so be it, it’s blown, and we’ll have to readjust our game plan. If we can’t outrun these bastards ...’
Baze passed Sonia a weapon from the front of the car. An M24 carbine. She flicked off the safety and stared down at the matt black gun in her trembling hands.
There came a roar from the following GMC. It lurched towards them, the grille appearing out of the dark ice-rain like teeth.
‘Well,’ smiled Sonia, her face etched with fear, eyes wide and pale in the gloom of the BMW’s cabin. ‘It looks like we’re going to have to fight.’ She cocked the weapon, and sighted through the rear window at the fast-approaching GMC truck ...
ADVERTISING FEATURE
The TV-ProjU sparkled into life with a digital buzz of humming phosphorescence. Images spun and leapt, dissolving and then reanimating into the mercury logo of HIVE Media Productions ...
Audio/Vid mix: fast-paced rock music. Thundering drums. Shaky camera following black-clad JT8 police squad unit through city ruins, amid smoke, fire, panicked civilians; live audio feed: panting sounds and shouts, crackles of machine-gun fire.
—Ever wanted to RUN with the pack?
—Ever wanted to FIRE a throbbing Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol?
—Ever wanted a well-paid CAREER?
—Ever wanted to PROTECT your CHILDREN?
Scene [slow pan R > L]: the JT8s corner a REB unit in a wide stone yard. They pose heroically for the camera, looking tall and fine and heroic in their smart black (well-ironed) uniforms, polished black (gleaming!) boots and sporting many shining silver and gold medals. As a unit, the JT8s lift square chins to the sky, steely eyes looking down at the cowering, bedraggled, filth-encrusted REBS who wave antiquated sub-machine guns in their mire of obvious weakness and filth.
—THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPONS AND YOU WILL LIVE! DEFY THE JT8 POLICE SQUADS AND YOU WILL DIE! DO THE HONOURABLE THING! DO NOT PROVOKE US TO A FIREFIGHT! WE REPEAT, THROW DOWN YOUR WEAPONS! WE DO NOT REQUIRE AN INCIDENT!
Scene zooms in on: the REBS growling incomprehensible curses, remainders of blackened stubby teeth bared in disease-ridden bearded faces. They curse and spit like rabid cornered animals. They lift their weapons and begin to fire at the clean-shaven honourable JT8 police ...
Scene pans/pull back then zoom in: as one, the JT8s lower their eyes in sadness, mouths grim red lines of compressed flesh as they SIGH, big sighs indicating their despair at this terrible waste of life and this position that they have been forced into. They unleash a perfectly aimed hail of bullets, which topple the ten dirty stinking bearded REBS; bodies flip and fall, to lie at crooked twisted angles. A little blood trickles from the corner of one REB’s mouth.
Scene: camera sweeps slowly across the carnage, and the JT8s move forward and look down with obvious sadness and great empathy. One even reaches up and wipes away a single tear with a pink-frilled perfectly white handkerchief [close-up: embroidery: I love you daddy—hurt them bad men].
Screen fades to half screen (horizontal slash) image over sobbing JT8; TEXT [scrolling L > R/silver lettering FONT LUCIDA SANS]: REBS court DEATH! REBS flout the LAW! REBS are the SCOURGE of the modern world. JOIN THE JT8s—SEE THE WORLD—EARN GOOD MONEY—SHOOT A MACHINE GUN—GREAT HOLIDAYS—WALK OUTSIDE THE HATE RESTRICTIONS ... AND GET TO KILL BAD REBS!!!
SCENE DISSOLVES TO SILVER
CHAPTER 6
IGNITION
Carter fell through the ice and snow, attached to the swaying cable, dropping like a stone through the buffeting wind and swirling flakes. The cable rocked and snapped above him, the Parasite squealing softly against the rough steel-fibre twists. He could smell burning, the scent of hot oil and metal shavings, and feel the intense cold of a suddenly frozen city. Bullets howled at him from out of the blinding blizzard, and from behind came the distant barking flashes of gun muzzles as emotionless copper-eyed stares fixed on him.
I am going to die, he thought. I am
a sitting duck. The bastards cannot miss ... They just cannot miss ... He flexed his freezing fingers and, operating on pure animal survival instinct alone, he initiated the quick release of the Parasite. He suddenly disengaged from the Skimmer and the swaying cable. Gravity picked Carter up and tossed him towards the ground ...
Carter fell, curling into a ball. Bullets stuttered far behind, lost in the storm. Then came a deafening crunch which echoed through Carter’s ears and brain. The world slammed into him and he was blind, smashed, unable to breathe. Pain crashed in waves over him. Opening his eyes he found himself confused by the sight of a wall of corrugated buckled white metal with flaking chipped paint—and then he remembered the Nex, and the bullets. He pushed his hands beneath himself and levered his tortured body up from the small hollow that he had hammered into the top of a tall white Mercedes van. Looking down, he realised that his impact had made a Carter-shaped dent in the metal roof.
Coughing, he rolled over and gazed up, focusing past the spinning snowflakes and towards the dark-clad soldiers beyond. ‘Shit. Shit!’ He rolled from the roof and landed in a crouch on the pavement. Bullets followed him, shattering the windscreens of a whole snake-line of stationary and abandoned SmutCars, rusting and discarded.
Carter sprinted for the alley, his body racked with agony, his breath coming in short, winded gasps. He slammed against the wall—then groaned, whirling out into the gloom of the narrow street. Bullets chipped the corner of the building in tiny spurts of powdered stone and Carter heard the distant thump of boots on tarmac. Lots of boots. Which, unfortunately, meant lots of Nex . ...
Carter ran, slipping his Browning into its holster at the small of his back. He stopped suddenly beside an open doorway where he’d recently left his hoarded stash. With quivering fingers he dragged free his pack and M24 carbine. He checked the weapon quickly as he sprinted, hugging the wall of the derelict fire-ravaged building to his right. How many HPGs have I got? Shit. Not enough, he realised.
He halted, dropping to a crouch beside an old twisted set of iron railings next to steps which fell away to a flooded stagnant basement which stank with an unholy mixed aroma of piss and rats. He pulled free one of his few remaining grenades, set it to ‘prox.mine’ and tossed it into the falling snow. It blipped and the blue acknowledgement light quickly disappeared. Within seconds snow masked the weapon. Taking a deep, pain-rattling breath, Carter stumbled on with the battered M24 in his gloved hands.
Carter sprinted left now, cutting along another narrow back street. This one was lived in. Huge bins overflowed with rotting refuse and split bags lay scattered untidily across the narrow roadway, spilling old rotting foodstuffs and debris and filling his lungs with a mouldy, decaying aroma, tinged again with the sickly-sweet stench of the ever-present rats. Several of the vermin skittered away from Carter’s pounding boots and he crouched down once more, this time behind a huge yellow overflowing container. He heard the soft hissing crack of the grenade and the sickening slap of bodies tossed violently against stone.
Carter lowered his gaze. A rat was squatting directly in front of him, staring at him fearlessly. It was sleek, and so dark a brown that it was nearly black; its whiskers quivered as it watched him.
‘You brave little son of a bitch!’ Their gazes met. The rat looked defiant. As if to say, ‘Yeah, fucker, you’re damned right I am!’
Carter laughed, shaking his head and then scowling immediately at the pain from the fall.
The rat did not move, and Carter suddenly realised the intrinsic humour of the situation; this reversal of fortunes. The rat was in charge of the city of London. Ironically, the humans were now the underdogs, forced down and kept under by their new masters—the Nex. The humans were trapped, beaten, smashed down by the brutality of the Nex regime ... ensnared and enslaved. Yeah, he thought: the Nex have made slaves of us. Everything was geared towards control—TV, the HATE biological virus, threats of further nuclear catastrophe ... violence, starvation, oppression ... but the rat retained the one thing that humanity craved so desperately. Freedom.
Carter stood, body protesting, and sprinted further down the narrow street. The rat watched him go, then turned slowly as a stream of balaclava-clad Nex flowed across the narrow roadway. The rat scuttled under a large bin and peered out with narrowed eyes as the Nex sprinted past, several of them splattered with strips of torn flesh—all that remained of their HPG-detonated comrades.
Finally, the roar of an engine broke through the snowy stillness as a heavily armoured ZSU5 Shilka, heavy tracks grinding pavements to dust, turned along the narrow street, guns and missiles bristling across its hull and antennas waving. The vehicle was almost too wide for the alley but it pushed stubbornly forward, engine roaring, tracks crushing everything in its path and sending a cascade of rats scuttling for the protective safety of the Underground ...
Carter halted, panting, sweat dripping from his brow. All his clothing was soaked with sweat, clinging clammily to his skin. Steam rose from him as his shaved head cooled rapidly in the chill.
‘They ‘re still following.‘
‘You think I don’t know that?’
‘There are ten of them..’
‘I know. ‘
‘You can’t possibly kill ten of them.’
‘I know, Kade. Shut the fuck up and let me think!’
Carter was perhaps only a kilometre from the battered Range Rover. But he had tried several times to cut a path across the London streets to the vehicle—and several times he had been turned back: twice by Nex patrols with chain-leashed snarling Sleeper Nex, and once by a building collapse which had filled the streets with huge jagged sections of rubble and was in the process of being cleared by bulldozers and other heavy-tracked quarry machinery.
Carter considered his options: Run. Hide. Kill.
‘Kill’ was the most obvious, but he was outnumbered, outgunned, and he could hear the distant roar of the closing Shilka—which meant he was out-missiled, too. Hide. Hiding wouldn’t get him any closer to the act of escape; hiding wouldn’t reunite him with his boy Joseph. Carter was in Nex country now. The Nex patrolled constantly, and hiding wouldn’t make that simple fact go away.
Run? Carter grinned malevolently through his sheen of sweat. He was fast running out of stamina and strength. A man couldn’t run for ever. And when cornered? He’d be forced to fight...
‘Fuck it. Fight I must.’
And then an idea struck Carter. He whirled, staring back down the street to the inverted V of collapsed rubble blocking his path to the Range Rover—and freedom beyond. There were four JCB K5 bulldozers—huge industrial vehicles, crosses between diggers and dozers, working on heavy hydraulics and with 10.5-litre turbo-cooled engines running refined LVA as they charged about. Carter’s eyes narrowed as he watched them, huge hydraulic arms lifting fifty-tonne lumps of collapsed stone and dropping the mammoth chunks into FreightTruks which bobbed on their suspension over eight sets of twin-bubble tyres.
Carter jogged down the rubble-strewn street, past a small huddled group of workmen who were all standing and staring, down into a hole. What is it with workmen and holes? Carter wondered idly. All his life, whenever he’d watched any form of construction job there’d always been a group of workmen huddled around a hole.
‘Perhaps they find them particularly holy?’ quipped Kade.
‘Yeah, ha and ha,’ snapped Carter. Then he stopped beside the teetering remains of a towering wall. The deafening sounds of the JCB K5 bulldozers filled his ears. Carter studied the JCBs, then pushed away from the wall, ducking a little as rubble from above pattered like shrapnel against his head.
He approached one of the vehicles—each wheel that drove the tracks was twice as tall as Carter himself. To the rear of the machine was a narrow recessed ladder leading up to the cabin.
Carter caught a glimpse of movement. The Nex had found him.
He sprinted forward, then threw himself to the left, rolling past the grinding steel tracks which crunched mere inches
from his prone frail flesh. He came up into a crouch. There was a moment’s pause, then Carter leapt and caught the vehicle as it edged forward. His hands grasped snow-slick yellow steel and he clambered up, hands slipping against the metal until he reached the entrance to the cab. Inside, the driver—an unmasked JT8—was wearing earmuffs that blocked out the sounds of the thundering engine and hydraulics. Screens flickered in front of him: he gripped a control stick in one fist and operated touch screen controls with his other hand.
Carter opened the hatch, noticing the warning flicker of orange. As the JT8 whirled—allowing the massive bulldozer to suddenly lurch forward out of control—Carter smashed his fist into the man’s face repeatedly. Then a third powerful blow broke the JT8’s nose and left him drooling blood as he sagged unconscious against his safety harness.
Carter reached forward and pulled back on the stick. The bulldozer shuddered to a halt and Carter withdrew the knife from his boot—a long black blade—and sliced through the harness. He turned, hoisting the unconscious man up and dropping him from the rear of the industrial dozer. Then Carter leapt into the seat, turned and locked the hatch behind him.
Below, he felt the JCB shuddering with the vibration of its huge engines. He took control of the stick with his gloved hands and scanned the screens. The Nex were moving slowly, heads swaying from left to right as they came forward. They stepped neatly over blocks of scattered stone and hugged the walls as snow settled on their body-hugging uniforms and balaclavas.
Then Carter saw it—the weaving triangular head of a Sleeper Nex.
No wonder I couldn’t lose them, he thought. They are hunting me ... scenting me.
He found the pedals, revved the bulldozer’s mighty 10,500cc engine and heard the whine of quad-turbos. He twisted the stick, flicked a control on the screen and the huge scoop at the front of the vehicle bucked on its hydraulics, and then transformed into a bulldozer’s flat blade. On the screen there were eight shapes to play with—different configurations of bucket or blade, using the latest in steel-fan polymorphing technology.