Eternal Life Inc.

by James Burkard

  The lights of New Hollywood quickly faded to a misty glow behind them. The night was still and the sky sparkled with stars as they sped effortlessly across the shimmering surface. Harry drove the sports convertible with the top down and the slipstream gently ruffling his hair. He breathed deeply of the night air and felt intensely alive, filled with a wild exhilaration that embraced the universe and laughed at death.

  He glanced over at Susan sitting beside him. She gave him a concerned, loving smile, and Harry threw back his head and laughed with pure joy. What more could a man ask for than to have the woman he loved beside him, speeding through the night in a two million dollar car, with the whole world at their feet. “God, I love you,” he said and reached over and squeezed her hand. “And I love our life together.”

  By the time they entered the twisted, broken outskirts of old LA, the moon was up. It was fat and creamy and almost full and lay on the horizon like a big, slightly deflated beach ball. It cast long, jagged shadows through the overgrown ruins like haunted memories of past madness. The headlights on Harry’s car picked out collapsed walls of rotting concrete sticking out of the scummy water. The navigation computer had plotted their course through the center of the city. It wasn’t necessarily the safest way but it was by far the fastest. Random pulsed, snapshot radar-sonar, infrared, and gravity detectors cast their ghostly computer-enhanced montage of the city on screens mounted on the dashboard.

  Outside, the ruined city closed in around them, and they rode through saw grass and reed choked chasms, lined with collapsed buildings, draped in a mad profusion of tropical growth. Lianas crawled up the sides of broken walls that were covered with a ragged skin of fat, glistening leaves and extravagant night blossoms as big as dinner plates and as pale as death. Palm trees burst like raggedy umbrellas through caved-in roofs and tattered drapes of Spanish moss hung from blind windows. In places the vegetation took over completely, burying whole city blocks in thick mounds of rampant, jungle growth.

  They were in no-man’s-land now, a place even the imperial police hesitated to enter. So far, Harry had managed to maintain his lead through a combination of alcohol daring, blind luck, and professional skill. Now, even he was forced to slow down and keep a wary eye on the detector screens as he wove through the wreckage of a collapsed building and veered around a rusted steel girder sticking out of the middle of the channel. In the rear view mirror he could see the headlights of the other cars strung out behind him.

  Suddenly, one of the pursuing cars broke from the pack and began accelerating just when everyone else, like Harry, was slowing down. The driver came on like a maniac, tearing around blind corners and scrapping over piles of rubble, his undercarriage trailing a screaming plume of sparks. He seemed totally oblivious to danger as he bore down on Harry’s taillights with the suicidal determination of a Kamikaze pilot.

  Harry watched the headlights grow in his rear-view mirror and smiled. Who the hell did this joker think he was playing with? Maybe it was time Harry showed him. And once again he pushed the accelerator into the floorboards, pushing himself and his machine further and further out onto a razor’s edge of control, where the odds grew slimmer by the moment. A part of him knew what he was doing was crazy, irresponsible, suicidal stupidity, but he couldn’t stop. He was in the grip of an ecstatic madness, riding an alcohol induced, adrenaline-fired rush that filled him with a godlike sense of power and an absolute certainty that he would win this race and that nothing could stop him.

  Susan, on the other hand, was terrified. “Harry, please slow down!” she cried and put a hand on his knee. “Do you hear me, Harry!” She leaned over and shouted in his ear, “Let him pass! It’s not worth it!”

  Harry remained hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes jumping from the windshield to the dash screens, his hands flicking the wheel gently, his foot steady on the accelerator. “Harry, listen to me,” Susan shouted, her voice hysterical with fear. “Harry!” she screamed again, and when he did not respond, panic took hold, and she grabbed his arm to get his attention. Irritably, he tried to shake her off and for a fraction of a second lost control.

  At the speed they were going, there was absolutely no margin for error. The car veered wildly, careening against the wall of a building in a screeching crash of sparks and torn strips of carbon fiber. The driver’s side rose with almost majestic slowness as the car started to tip over. The grav-coils screamed as Harry fought desperately to pull the car back down. They were inches away from flipping over and going into an uncontrollable anti-gravity driven spin that no one ever walked away from. For an eternal moment, they balanced between life and death. Harry sat perfectly still. He knew there was nothing more he could do. Finally, the car started to settle back down and with a sigh of relief, Harry retook control.

  “Harry, please!” Susan screamed and this time he heard her, heard the pain and terror and pleading in her voice. He glanced over and saw her face, bruised with fear, the look of a hunted, wounded animal in her eyes. “Please, Harry, slow down!” she begged. “It’s not worth it.”

  Sanity came crashing back. The ecstatic madness, the trance-like tunnel vision of speed and danger collapsed, and all that was left was he and Susan alone at night in a speeding car with an abyss of pain and terror between them. “You’re right,” he said, “It’s not worth it. Nothing is worth this.”

  Suddenly, he was stone sober. His foot eased up on the accelerator. How could he have put Susan through this? He had risked her life, their love, everything, and for what? Just to prove that he was a better man than anyone else, that he was king of the hill? What kind of an egotistical asshole did something like that?

  The “BLAT! BLAT!” of a trucker’s powerful Dumbo air horn slapped the night as the pursuing car flicked up its high beams, pinning Harry and Susan in their blue-white halogen glare. The channel had widened here and the driver blatted his air horn again as he swung out to pass. Up ahead a large section of concrete wall had collapsed into the channel, leaving only a narrow gap that was hardly wide enough for one car, let alone two. Harry picked it up on his radar screen and immediately pulled over to let the other car pass.

  As it swept up beside him, Harry glanced over at the low, cream colored, Cadillac convertible with its decorative pair of chrome Gatling guns mounted on the hood. A busty, blonde starlet sat in the passenger seat. Beside her sat a well-known, silver-haired producer hunched over the steering wheel. As they started to pull ahead, he turned and looked at Harry.

  The producer’s eyes were large and bulging, the pupils dilated to pinpricks of wired lightning, his face flushed and glistening with sweat. His whole body was jittering to sharp amphetamine rhythms that were pushing him faster and faster. Suddenly, he threw back his head and laughed, howling like a madman. Then he jerked his steering wheel and deliberately rammed Harry’s car forcing it in towards the ruined wall of a building.

  Harry fought the wheel and stepped on the brakes reversing the polarity of the grav-coils and sending the car into a steep climb. As the other car shot past, the silver haired producer yelled, “Pussy!” and gave Harry the finger. The blond starlet laughed stridently, her lips a red smear in the night. Then they were past, their taillights accelerating towards the narrow gap between the collapsed wall and a relatively intact, overgrown, five-story building on the other side.

  Harry’s car was still braking, climbing at a steep angle away from the wall on his right with his headlights slashing across the distant building bordering the gap. Just then, he caught a glimpse of movement on the roof. He tried to keep the headlights steady on the building as something was pushed over the edge and started to fall. For a second he couldn’t believe his eyes. It looked like an ancient freezer that had been chained shut.

  He watched in helpless horror as the calculus of death unfolded before his eyes. Whoever pushed the freezer over the edge had calculated perfectly. The trajectories of the speeding car and the falling freezer intersected just as the Cadillac entered the gap. The freezer c
rashed right through the front seat, and the car folded up around it. The goddamned freezer must have been filled with concrete, Harry thought.

  He felt a wave of pity for the man and his passenger. They never knew what hit them. A moment later, the crumpled up car flared into white hot incandescence, and he realized the asshole producer had chopped out the spin-dampers on his engines and the containment fields were collapsing as the coils spun up uncontrollably. Steam boiled up around the slowly settling wreck. Then, the munitions stores blew. Extreme G-forces from the madly spinning coils drove the explosion away from the core housing, accelerating the initial blast exponentially.

  Harry had been braking before the attack and so was some distance back and slightly above the explosion. Instinctively, he drove the brakes into the floorboards and fed power to the forward grav-units tipping the car up on its tail and letting the heavily armored undercarriage take the brunt of the blast. The car bucked and rocked and Susan screamed as a raging front of carbon-fiber and metal shrapnel tore into the undercarriage.

  A second later the coils on the other car went critical and the grav-field, expanding at trans-light speed, tore a nano-second hole through space-time, releasing a near-infinite burst of Planck energy. It ripped apart what was left of the wrecked car, stripping it right down to its sub atomic components in a plasma shock wave that instantly blew away the front of the five story building and torched the rest.

  The shock wave hit the battered undercarriage of Harry’s car like the burning fist of God. It flicked the car up and over its tail as easily as you’d flick a crumb off the sleeve of your coat. Harry managed to cut his grav-units before the crash harnesses came down and immobilized him. A moment later, the on-board computers registered an imminent stage-three disaster, and Harry was engulfed in a foam crash-cocoon.

  The car was knocked, pin-wheeling sideways, back across the channel at well over two hundred miles an hour when the passenger side hit a concrete wall and collapsed like an old aluminum beer can. Years later, Harry would wake up at night bathed in a cold sweat with the memory of that crash still fresh in his mind. He would hear the tortured, screeching scream of the car as it ground its way up the concrete wall, sloughing off clouds of broken glass, strips of carbon fiber, splinters of titanium alloy, and chunks of crash-cushion foam.

  After that, he must have blacked out, because the next thing he remembered was cold, black water filling the car as it slowly settled into the channel. The foam crash-cocoon had dissolved minutes after doing its job and the padded restraints sprang away as soon as he began moving.

  Miraculously, he came through the crash without a scratch, but Susan remained motionless beside him, slumped over in her padded restraints. When he managed to release her, she fell limply into his arms. Blood ran out of her eyes and nose, and the right side of her head looked as if a giant sculptor had stuck his thumb into the wet clay of her head, leaving a deep, bloody depression.

  Harry’s memory of what happened after that was like a broken mirror, full of cracked, sharp-edged, cutting pieces, with big black holes of nothing in between. He remembered crying and screaming in panic as he fought to get Susan loose from the sinking car; then later, supporting her dead weight in the black water, kissing her lifeless face, crying her name, begging her to be all right.

  The moon was still low in the sky casting long, smashed shadows across the channel. Then, he saw the headlights of the other grav-cars led by the black Crown Vic, nosing carefully up the channel. They hadn’t abandoned him, he thought and tears of gratitude ran down his cheeks.

  Without warning, an ancient .50-caliber machine gun began hammering at the on-coming cars from a shadowy pile of overgrown rubble in the middle of the channel. In the coughing back-light of the muzzle flash, Harry could just make out the silhouette of an old military grav-car and the figure of a man hunched over the machine gun mounted on its hood.

  When the shooting finally stopped, Harry could hear the distant screams and shouts of his friends down the channel. He was afraid that they would turn tail and leave, and he wouldn’t have blamed them if they did.

  A few had, but most of the others just backed off except for the James Bond, Aston Martin and the Crown Vic. The Aston Martin was hugging the far side of the channel and easing slowly down towards Harry. The Crown Vic hadn’t moved. The .50-caliber slugs had knocked out one headlight, starred its diamond glass windshield, and scratched the paint on its armor plating but aside from that had done no real damage.

  Now, as he watched, the front end of the Crown Vic’s hood split open and a squat, snub-nosed canon rose into sight. It rested on a gimbaled gun carriage and had what looked like a tightly wound stainless steel spring wrapped around a stubby barrel that ended in a funnel-shaped, blunderbuss muzzle. The butt end of the barrel fit into a brass drum at least eighteen inches across and a foot thick. Two large copper nodes stuck out of the top of the drum with thick electrical cables and glass insulators attached. The cables snaked back into the grav-core.

  Suddenly, a pencil thin beam lanced out from the barrel, and Harry recognized the distinctive mewling hiss of a gigawatt plasma canon as the beam grew as thick across as his own wrist. The crazy son of a bitch had come loaded for bear, he thought, his hopes rising as the bright, neon-purple particle beam walked up the channel towards the machine gun nest, leaving exploding geysers of superheated steam and torn atoms in its wake.

  The machine gun began firing blindly into the curtain of steam in a panic-stricken attempt to knock out the plasma canon before it zeroed in.

  Then, down the channel behind the Crown Vic, Harry saw the flare of a rocket launch. It burned down from the top of a huge, jungle covered mountain of debris that might have once been a minor skyscraper. The rocket cut a flat arc through the night sky and zeroed in on the limousine. There was the sharp slap of an explosion and a gigantic flashbulb seemed to go off behind the curtain of steam that the plasma canon had kicked up. The particle beam instantly cut off as if someone just pulled its plug. The machine gun kept up its mad chatter for a while longer and finally coughed into silence.

  The veil of steam blew apart into long misty tendrils, and Harry saw what was left of the limousine settling nose first into the water. Slowly, its rear end lifted straight up like the sinking of the Titanic. The car slid down, hit the shallow bottom of the channel, and stopped with a sudden jolt. Only its rear end still stuck out of the water like a surreal black tombstone. Ghostly white clumps of crash-foam floated on the oil slick water.

  Mother of Gods! Harry thought. That had to be a Seraphim Stinger to do that much damage! He’d heard of them but had never seen one in action. There weren’t many weapons that were against the law, but a Stinger brought down an automatic death penalty.

  The Seraphim didn’t care. Like the freezer, the Stinger was a low-tech weapon of opportunity, cheap and easy to build. It was basically just a miniature grav-coil, no bigger than a small stack of old DVDs, wired to a rocket and a cell phone running a simple targeting program. The coil had only a rudimentary containment field and was spun into the red when the rocket fired. When it hit its target, the impact breached the containment field, the coil went critical, blew a hole in the fabric of space time, and released a nanosecond blast of pure Planck energy. Simple coil physics and “Presto!” No more car problems! Harry thought.

  He noticed that the Aston Martin that had been sneaking towards him had turned around. It was badly battered by the shock wave from the blast, and its containment field must have been breached because it was leaking gravity waves and weaving and hopscotching drunkenly back up the channel, chasing the dwindling taillights of the other cars.

  Harry watched in despair as they fled. “No! Don’t leave us!” he sobbed. “Please don’t leave us!”

  As the taillights dwindled to pinpricks in the distance, Harry heard shouts and cheers from the ruined buildings. A searchlight punched down from a roof across the channel. It probed the wreckage of Harry’s car that was half-submerged, re
sting on a concrete slab under the water. Frantically, he pulled Susan behind a broken section of overgrown wall.

  He could feel his strength ebbing as the adrenaline rush that had sustained him for so long gradually burned itself out. Even the effort of trying to keep both their heads above water was becoming too much. He tried to find a handhold in the darkness, but the back of the wall was slick with a jelly-like scum that gave no purchase. He clawed blindly at the concrete until, at last, his desperate fingers found a rusting reinforcing rod sticking out of the wall and he grabbed it and held them both above water.

  The searchlight played back and forth across the channel. In its flickering backlight, Harry could see his own hand, pale and claw-like, grasping the twisted steel rod. He noticed that he was still wearing his wrist phone. He had forgotten all about it. With a surge of hope, he hit the emergency-call button. Nothing happened. The phone was dead. The intense electro-magnetic pulse from the grav-core blast had fried its circuits. With a sob of despair, he ripped it off his wrist and threw it away.

  Time lost all meaning after that. He vaguely remembered holding Susan close, brushing wet strands of hair away from her face, and whispering in her ear, telling her that it was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right, just wait and see, help was on the way, he lied.

  Later, he heard the whine of a grav-car slowly coming towards them and his heart leapt with hope. He pulled himself up and looked over the edge of the wall. He was about to scream “Here! Here we are! Save us!” when he saw the armed men standing in the grav-car, silhouetted against the glare of the searchlight from across the channel. One of them wore a hooded robe. When he shifted position, the searchlights picked out a large, silver medallion that hung from a rawhide thong around his neck. Harry recognized the medallion instantly. It was the Seraphim, scimitar crucifix with the gun-sight circle centered where the swords crossed.