Under Dark Sky Law

by Tamara Boyens

  Bending back into a pose that was agonizing with the knife still wedged beneath her ribs, she turned and fired a shot into the side of the skeleton’s neck. She must have made a bad shot or hit a strong point in the armor because its head didn’t explode, and it didn’t immediately stop moving. She didn’t have the right leverage to pierce its Calaca suit with her knife, and then she remembered her last ditch defense.

  More blood flowed out of the knife wound in her side as she flexed forward even farther, grabbed the skeleton by the head, and pulled it towards her face. It’s lips were exposed through the face mask, and she planted a big smooch right on his mouth. Within seconds he was gagging and choking. The paralysis wasn’t instant, but it was quick enough for her to use the last of her strength to push him out of the car.

  She looked back to her left, and found Sanchez bleeding profusely and passed out in the passenger seat. “Motherfucker!” she cursed. There was no time to even close the doors or move Sanchez. In the rearview mirror she saw more skeletons advancing on the vehicle. The car surged forward through the piles of sand as she did her best to stomp on the gas and steer the damned thing from the passenger seat.

  They were far from safe—they were flying through the desert in a stolen vehicle with both doors open and both occupants bleeding from serious wounds. She wasn’t even sure if Sanchez was still alive. The sound of small explosions pitter pattered the sand behind her, and she didn’t have the energy to waste wondering if they were getting shot at with lasers, traditional gunfire, or small grenades. She kept the gas pedal floored and tried to keep them from flipping over when they rolled across steep sandbanks.

  Her vision was starting to get blurry, and she knew she had lost far too much blood from the stab wound to be safe. When she had gained a small amount of distance on the skeleton crew, she ripped off chunks of her blouse and tried to make a shitty pressure bandage around the knife. There was no way she could pull it out—the knife itself was likely keeping pressure on some of the veins and arteries it had sliced through on its journey through her abdomen, and pulling it out would almost certainly mean death.

  But she refused to give in to the darkness tugging at the sides of her vision. It was still hot out, but a desperate chill was traveling through her body. Not good. She didn’t have time for shock or unconsciousness. She was lucky that she probably had significant desert driving experience on their pursuers, as she was able to maintain her lead on the skeletons. With a loud scream, she managed to get both doors closed, which cut down on their wind resistance and increased their speed.

  Now she was driving in nothing but her blood-soaked bra and panties, and she was out of any extra fabric to try and help out Sanchez. A quick feel for a pulse revealed that he was still alive. Using one of her knives and the one hand she was able to take off the steering wheel, she haphazardly tore off a chunk of his own shirt and made another shitty attempt at creating a bandage and a weak tourniquet around the area that seemed to have been hit by the laser shot. She still couldn’t tell exactly where it had hit or how bad it was beneath the tangled mess of charred shirt, flesh, and blood. The taste of singed hair and blood was in her mouth so strongly she didn’t know if she’d ever be able to get it out. She’d be tasting death for a month.

  It was an eternity, but she had finally gained enough distance on the skeletons that she could no longer see them in the vehicle’s rearview mirror, and on the horizon in front of them she saw the first blip of the Phoenix dome. They were almost there. They just might make it. Sanchez hadn’t heard any reply from HQ over his communicator, but the thing had been damaged in the crash, and it was possible that the message had been received, but that they weren’t able to hear any reply. At least that’s what the hopeful voice in her head was saying. If that wasn’t true, then she’d have to make it all the way to the dome proper before they got any back up.

  Minutes passed and the dome got closer and closer, but she was having more and more trouble keeping her hands steady on the wheel. The pain in her abdomen was fading, but she actually didn’t want it to. Going numb was just another sign that she was drifting farther into shock. If she couldn’t make it at least far enough to trigger the dome sensors that there was an unauthorized vehicle approaching, then they stood very little chance of surviving. Even if the skeletons had given up and gone home, they would both die without some kind of medical intervention in the very near future.

  There was a period where she felt a second wind coming, and thought that she just might make it, but then it became clear that it was just her body’s last ditch effort before giving up completely.

  “Damn it,” she swore quietly. Her head made a soft smack against Sanchez’s chest before she finally passed out.

  CHAPTER 7

  One inhale and she knew that she was somewhere within the dome. Ironically, she was so used to huffing the toxic slew of the air out in the pits that the purified and oxygenated air inside the domes always burned her nostrils for awhile until she acclimated to the atmospheric differences. For some, the shock of moving between the two environments was too much, and some pits residents had died trying to get into a dome the first time. As a runner, she could easily transition between the different environments with little more to worry about than a few stray coughs and some irritation.

  The pleasant euphoria settling through her body told her that she was in some kind of a medical facility, hopped up on all kinds of good stuff. Normally she would have been pissed—she could hardly ever afford to risk that kind of fogginess, regardless of the kind of kind of pain she was in. However, remembering the size of the knife shoved up to the hilt in her gullet, she wasn’t really all that sorry for the drugs.

  She was going to need the drugs to deal with the dome drones anyway. Putting up with the normal officials already took an overt effort on her part. Typically the military bitches like Sanchez were at least tolerable—they spoke her language of no nonsense. Putting up with the white collars, the stiffs, they were a true headache to do business with, but the one place that was worse were the hospitals. There was so many rules, and so little warmth and even basic common sense at times. Decades upon decades of working with a system bogged down with pointless policies designed to avoid lawsuits had created a real monster. She had nearly firebombed a clinic or two in her day—anger and excess napalm made for a dangerous combination.

  Before opening her eyes she raised an arm and wiggled it around a bit. Plastic cording whipped against her wrist and pulled at her hand. IV lines. Yeah, she was definitely in a hospital. At least that meant she truly hadn’t been shot up with Acromorphine and dumped in a holding cell to be picked apart by rogue skeleton goons. She rubbed the palms of her hands against her eyelids and opened them.

  She was surrounded by the clean white and shiny chrome furnishings of what was probably the main hospital in the Phoenix dome. Spared no expense. Even if they didn’t figure out who she was from the convoy they’d been attached to, a quick retinal scan would reveal who she was. At least they knew the value of a top runner, and she knew they wouldn’t just let her die. She moved billions of dollars in cargo every year.

  Despite the pristine cleanliness of the shiny room that squeaked and squawked with a variety of machine churning and pumping to keep her alive and well, there were so many chemicals at play that over the raw sting of excessively filtered dome air, it smelled faintly like the river running through the flats. At the first sign of movement a nurse seemed to magically appear to poke at the machines and check her vital signs. The woman was scribbling furiously on an electronic tablet, a tight brown bun bouncing on the back of her head as she dragged a pen across the glass surface.

  “How are you feeling,” she said to Xero without moving her eyes from the tablet.

  Xero coughed and knew that she’d been intubated at some point. Her throat was raw even over the drugs. “I feel like I was stabbed, left to die, and then pumped full of drugs,” she said.

  The nurse nodded. “That summarizes
the situation,” she said. “You were treated for a fully penetrated stab wound with associated blood loss and shock trauma. Surgery was performed to explore damage to the abdominal cavity and to clean and close the wound. Your gallbladder and several inches of intestine were removed due to injury, but fortunately no other major organs were catastrophically damaged. You received two transfusions to replace lost blood volume. There was some trauma to your liver and lung that will continue to cause you some discomfort. IV pain medications will be administered to manage pain. You suffered other minor bruises and contusions, but no significant head trauma was detected.”

  Xero whistled. “Well, that about sums it up. Thanks for the update,” she said. “But the really important question is when can I get out of here.”

  The nurse finally looked at her with small round brown eyes. “Now that your mental status has been assessed you will likely be sedated for rapid healing protocols,” she said.

  Of course. They didn’t want any dirty pits people stinking up their pretty hospital any longer than necessary. She reached a hand up and felt the prickly sides of her shaved head. They had taken the liberty of removing her wig, so anyone walking by would immediately know she wasn’t supposed to be there. Non-regulation haircuts were highly discouraged, especially in the big metropolitan domes. Can’t go around encouraging people to incite anarchy or anything like that, and everyone knows that colored hair means an instant government takedown.

  Shaking aside her animosity towards the system, she took a moment to be grateful that she was still alive and not feeling any pain for the moment.

  “Your cancer status remains low,” she added, her eyes returning to the tablet. “Signs point towards being a good rapid healing candidate. Your recovery should be swift and with minimal repercussions.”

  At least she had that going for her. All signs from her repeated dome inspections indicated that she would stay clear of the big C for a good long while—it was worth their while to keep investing in her as a runner that would be viable for a long time.

  She adjusted herself in the hospital bed and winced when her abdomen moved too much. “Can you tell me what became of Commander Raul Sanchez?” Xero asked.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t divulge that information,” the nurse said without lifting her gaze.

  She had learned to be a decent politician, and she usually did an okay job of holding her tongue, but in this circumstance she was having a hard time keeping her natural personality in check. Sanchez was a decent man to work with, something that was especially hard to find in the world of the dome squares. She would be pissed if retarded policies had led to his death. And there would be consequences.

  With great effort she kept a feisty jab to herself. “Can you tell me where my appointed business partner is?” she asked, knowing it was futile.

  The nurse gave one curt head shake and raised her eyes to meet Xero’s gaze. “I don’t have that information,” she said, and Xero believed her.

  “I see,” Xero replied, proud of herself for showing restraint. She was getting better at this. The last time she’d been drugged up and injured in front of dome assholes it had not gone well. Sometimes there were not enough sedatives in the world to deal with people.

  “Get some rest,” she said. “You’ll be sedated later this afternoon.”

  Xero refrained from asking why she needed to get some rest if they were just going to sedate her anyway, but didn’t think the sarcasm would penetrate the robotic nurse’s strictly maintained façade. An actual cyborg would have had more warmth, but those had been outlawed long ago.

  “Hey, bring a military commander in here—I have important intelligence information I need to discuss,” she said as the nurse attempted to leave, but her request was totally ignored.

  She sighed and threw up her hands. Figured. Too married to policy to give a shit about a potentially lethal threat. The dome citizens were so cushioned and sheltered from the world outside their shiny plastic lives, most of them couldn’t even conceive of what life was like on the outside. At some point they deemed it too stressful to broadcast that kind of information, so images of the flats or the pits were not illegal to be shown on mainstream media. That’s not to say that people didn’t find ways to get that kind of information. They trafficked all kinds of goods across the black market, and recently she was seeing a spike in the illegal information trade. Those types of runs always made her happy—she got to make an easy buck and while fucking the dome agenda at the same time. She almost would have been willing to traffic that kind of goods without any sort of fee, but she had a policy about giving away any services. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if that lunch consisted of freedom and vengeance.

  The nurse closed the door, and a locking mechanism whirred a moment later. At least they didn’t have her physically restrained against the bed. Either she had finally bought some karma with her business partners, or Sanchez’s buddies had pulled some strings. She pulled back the thin white and blue hatched hospital covers to check out the damage. She must have crashed or rolled the vehicle again when she passed out because there were extra cuts and bruises painting her arms and legs that she didn’t remember getting in the first wave of the skirmish. Not that she gave a fuck—her body was covered in a life’s worth of scars from too many fights to count. The worrisome part was the network of bandages tightly wrapping her from her collarbone down to her waist. At least they were going to bump her up to a rapid healing protocol. From the looks of it, she would have been out for months trying to heal that shit naturally, and with Trina down for the count they just couldn’t afford to let the territory go for that long. Not with things as unstable as they had been.

  That was the bigger question. What had become of Argon? Did he know what had happened to her? Had he been attacked too? As much of a hard time as she gave him, he really was a competent fighter when his brain wasn’t stuck between his legs, and she had confidence that he could hold his own in an attack. But then again, Sanchez was one of the better fighters she’d ever worked with, and they had been overtaken by skeleton’s despite being paired with her. That was embarrassing to be sure—whether they were working with imbeciles or not, one of them should have kept a better handle on that situation, and they’d paid the price for sure. She must have been a sight for the dome patrols to pick up—half naked and covered in blood. At least her wig glue had held fast prior to the hospital staff taking it off.

  She would have killed for a communicator and some privacy. She needed to figure out whether or not Argon was still alive, and she needed to have a serious sit down with Calavera. She wasn’t sure what was worse—Calavera losing control of her goons, or just outright turning against her. From the sounds of it, whoever was behind everything was stirring up trouble on a bigger scale than the typical drug wars. Shit was going down, and she wasn’t one to just sit on the sidelines and let things burn around her. Either she was going to take a fire extinguisher and put out the blaze, or she was throwing gas on the flames.

  She wasn’t going to get the chance to get all the answers she wanted right now, but there was a bright side. At some point they’d changed their policies. For far too long they had disseminated the patient information on a digital basis only—meaning there was no chart left behind in the room for anyone to look at if they didn’t have their own tablet to access it. This had caused her great inconvenience on certain missions, and she imagined it had also likely caused a good deal of medical malpractice, as it relied on medical personnel actually taking the time to ID their patients before looking up their chart information. Looked like they had solved it by just leaving a tablet behind in every patient’s room, which was just fine and dandy for her.

  Only thing that would have made it better would have been to put it closer to her bedside. The tablet was docked at the foot of the bed. Thinking of her skewered organs and the wide swath of bandages across her abdomen, this wasn’t going to be comfortable by any stretch of the imagination. Fuck it. She sa
t up in bed and bit her tongue to stifle any excess screams from the pain that cut through the drugs. If anyone was looking at the security cameras they’d see her getting up to no good, but making undue noise would just draw their attention sooner.

  With one swift exhale, she jerked forward and snagged the tablet from the end of the hospital bed. Perhaps she was imagining it, but she could have sworn she felt and heard something go crunch in her abdomen. Her head thumped against the hard pillows, and she spent a minute breathing heavily through the painful throb in her gut. There were some red spots leaking through the pristine white of her bandages. Probably ripped some stitches. Crap, she would get into trouble in for that later for sure, but it’s not like it was anything that they couldn’t patch up. They would have to deal with it. If they were more transparent with their policies and information she wouldn’t have to go to such extreme measures anyway.

  Once she had the pain under control she set to work on the tablet. She wasn’t a computers expert, but she’d spent enough time out on the black market to have picked up a thing or two from the less than scrupulous hackers out there. It took a few minutes of noodling, but she broke out in a huge grin when the mainframe opened to the tap of her fingertips. She was in. A quick glance at her own chart confirmed that the nurse had been straight with her about her diagnosis and what had happened in surgery. She read a note about her wig being removed to check for head injuries, which made sense. Truth be told, she was surprised they even noticed it was a wig—the Grease Weasels took disguise seriously, and they usually found some pretty quality costuming materials on the black market. Perhaps it had actually been partially torn off in the second crash. She made a mental note to look into doing some more adhesives testing when she got back to the pits.