Route 666 Anthology

by David Pringle

  “Damn!” he said. “Stray bullet must have hit a fuel line.”

  In spite of his attempts to nurse her along, the Civic was coming to a halt, right in the middle of Skulls’ territory.

  “Oh great,” he said, patching himself into the cellnet. “Estevez, this is Travis. The car’s been taken out. I’ll have to abandon it and proceed on foot. Make sure you have an interceptor at rendezvous point.”

  “Check! Good luck, Jake!” He didn’t sound too hopeful. Travis looked out onto the moonlit streets. The only illumination came from the trashfires around which huddled derelicts and the giant hologram of Christ over Our Lady of Mercy Charity Hospital And Organ Bank. He took a deep breath. I’ve been in worse situations, he told himself. Try as he might he couldn’t remember any.

  He got out, went around to the girl’s side and let her out. He would have cuffed himself to her but he needed his hands free to work the shotgun. Instead he cuffed her hands behind her back.

  “Come on, sweetheart. We’re taking a little stroll,” he told her.

  “You crazy, fatman? This is Skull turf.”

  “Right,” he told her. “You just stay here then and wait for your pal Mary. I’m sure she’ll be along real soon now. Say hello for me.”

  He turned and marched off down the street. He heard her scampering footsteps as she swiftly ran to catch up.

  Thin men watched them with malevolent eyes as they passed the trashfires. Travis could see that they were burning cardboard and roasting unwholesome looking meat. The men and women were alike, clad in soiled clothing, covered in filth. Of all the people in NoGo they had fallen the furthest. They didn’t even have a roof over their heads. The same thing could happen to me, thought Travis, if Julie and Linda’s lawyers make me sell the flat to pay for my back alimony. Travis shuddered.

  He had seen it happen. The first step on the long slide to NoGo was an easy one. These streets were full of folk who thought it could never happen to them. He kicked aside a bio-computer box that showed the logo of Grunentek GMBH. He heard footsteps behind him and he wheeled, bringing up the shotgun.

  A crowd of ragged men and women advanced towards him and the girl. They halted only at the sight of his gun.

  “He’s the one,” Travis heard an evil-looking toothless old woman hiss. She clutched a wine bottle menacingly.

  “Yes,” said a boy barely in his teens. “See, the girl is wearing Ripper colours. Mask’ll give five grammes of Candy Z to whoever gets them.”

  The leader, a tall stick insect of a man in a soiled knee-length coat, looked them over. Travis saw he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses on whose left eye-piece a small green LED glowed.

  “If Mask will give that, what will the Mantis Lady give?”

  “I hate to interrupt your financial speculation,” said Travis calmly. “But I’ve got a shotgun and I’ll blow the first person who makes a move to kingdom come.”

  “He can’t get us all,” said the old woman, pushing the boy forward. The boy wriggled out of her grasp and squirmed behind her. Travis held the shotgun in his claw and reached into his pocket. He pulled out a micro-grenade.

  “Know what this is?” he asked. “It’s a US army military issue anti-personnel grenade. It’ll reduce the whole crowd of you to jelly if you take one step further.”

  Travis hoped they didn’t notice how much he was shaking.

  “It’s a bluff,” said the old woman, backing away as far as the press of bodies would let her.

  “Want to find out?” Travis made as if to lob the grenade and the whole crowd flinched. Travis smiled nastily. “Go away. Let me get on with my business.”

  There was a long tense silence, then the man in the horn rimmed glasses spoke. “Sure.”

  The crowd began to disperse. Cautiously Travis backed away, scanning the streets to make sure no-one was going to blindside him.

  They halted in front of the boarded-up front of an old Savings and Loan office. Travis allowed himself to let his breath out in a long rush. He turned to the girl. “Come on, we’d better move. It won’t take those derelicts long to tell your playmates or their sparring partners where we are.”

  He saw that Debbie Gruber was gazing at him with a look that held a mixture of admiration and disappointment.

  “You should have fragged them, fatman. Would have been real intense.”

  Travis looked down at the micro-grenade and smiled shakily. “That would have been hard. This is a smoke bomb.”

  Snipers, thought Travis. You have to watch out for snipers. NoGo’s full of weirdos with maximum firepower and minimum marbles. He thought about what he was doing and included himself in that group.

  He checked out the fire-escapes and rooftops looking for telltale lights; the reflection from a sight, the muted red blink of the LED on a laserscope. He could see nothing. It was getting cold and his breath was starting to come out in frosty clouds. Overhead the stars blinked in a clear crystal sky. One good thing about NoGo, he thought, you can still see the sky. They haven’t roofed it over with a bubble geodesic.

  Keep it up, Travis, you’ll soon be homesick for the old area. He laughed quietly. At least the geodesic kept out the toxic rain.

  “What you laughing at, fatman?” Debbie Gruber asked.

  “Nothing. Just thinking about old times.”

  “You’re weird.”

  “Coming from you that’s a compliment.”

  The girl lapsed into sullen silence. Travis tried to figure out how the daughter of a certifiable grade A genius like Daniel Gruber could turn out like her. It was hard to believe that one of the founders of bio-computing was her father. He turned it over and over in his head.

  He thought about himself when he had been her age, a petty crook about to join the army because it was the only way out of what had been a slum even then. At least the army gave me discipline, he thought. That’s what this kid and her kind lack.

  Spoiled rotten, he thought. Too much money too young. Turned her bad. Is that what happened to the whole country?

  The whole city is rotten. He looked at the buildings whose fronts had been corroded by acid rain, smelled the sewage stink in the air, thought about the derelicts. Christ, it was bad then but it’s a hundred times worse now.

  He thought about the last time he had been here, fifteen years ago. At least then there had been open shops and cops on the street corners. He had walked here, this very street, after he had left his old man coughing his lungs out in the wards of Our Lady Of Mercy. He had sworn he’d never be back.

  He looked at the sky, at the giant hologram. For the first time in a long time he crossed himself.

  “Stop daydreaming, fatman. We’ve gotta get out of Skull turf.” In the distance Travis could hear the roar of automatic fire. He looked at the girl.

  “At a guess I would say your boyfriend and his playmates just ran into the Skulls. Either that or the fourth of July is late this year.”

  He heard a distinctive rushing sound and the crump of an explosion. He hadn’t heard its like since his days of guerrilla warfare in Central America.

  “What was that?” Debbie asked, licking her lips.

  “M–47 Dragon ATGM,” he said, then noticed her bafflement. “Friggin anti-tank rocket. Things must be getting real intense back there.”

  “Could we go back and watch?” asked the girl. There was a strange hunger in her eyes.

  Travis hustled her on down the street.

  Nearly there, thought Travis, looking at the abandoned warehouses that fronted the river. Across that bridge and we’re back in the PZ. Never thought I would be so glad to see a Policed Zone in my life.

  Across the dark serpent of water he could see the giant megastack arcologies and the huge floating bubble geodesies. He couldn’t help but contrast it with the rubble and the squalid shanty towns of NoGo.

  From somewhere off in the distance he could hear the blaring sound of Industrial Metal. The hard guitar riffs sounded lonely and lost in the night.

 
“Jig club,” said Debbie Gruber. “Probably Romana’s. It’s where the Skulls sometimes hang easy.”

  “I’ll put it in my favourite nightspots listing,” sneered Travis. “Next to the Beirut Hilton.”

  “Hey, man, lighten up. Just tryin’ to be friendly.”

  “Sure,” said Travis, noticing the lights of an approaching car. He pushed her back into the shadows as a distinctive black interceptor with chrome trim glided by.

  “Don’t think he saw us,” said Travis.

  “Who is that?”

  “It ain’t Rod Casey.”

  “Well, who is it?”

  “Voorman. He’s a poacher. Before you ask, that’s someone who steals kills and credits from other Ops. He’s probably been waitin’ for me to bring you out so he could steal you. He’s done this to me before.”

  Travis worked the action of the shotgun. “Well, he ain’t gonna do it tonight.”

  Travis watched warily as the long sleek car cruised into the night. He felt a nervous fluttering in the pit of his stomach which didn’t vanish when the car did.

  I wonder if he’s got someone watching the bridge, thought Travis. He considered swimming the river but the water would be freezing and full of industrial-strength toxic pollutants. He wondered if the girl could swim. Probably not, he decided. Anyway Travis doubted if he could get past the twenty-foot high electric fence and the armed guard towers on the other side.

  No. It was the bridge or nothing. Travis fervently hoped it wasn’t nothing.

  They nearly made it. They were passing the final stretch of wasteground before the bridge. Travis watched the rusting hulk of a coal barge drift by on the river. It was floodlit and the sounds of Neurobeat mingled with the laughter of the decktop party-goers.

  It had just vanished round the bend when Travis noticed their followers. There was about half-a-dozen Rippers piled into the back of a very battered looking Renegade. The driver was a huge man in a leather mask. The armour was dented and the weapons systems looked non-functional. It raced across the rubble of the wasteground on huge under-inflated looking off-road tyres. The figures in the back carried automatic weapons.

  Travis measured the distance to the bridge and knew he would never make it. Too old, too fat. Who am I kidding, he thought, even when I was fit I couldn’t outrun that car. A few bursts of fire lit the night. Tracer whizzed past him. He heard concrete chip. He grabbed Debbie Gruber and ran for the door of the nearest warehouse.

  The shooting stopped. He heard a choked squeal. Travis risked a look back. He saw that one of the Rippers had been punched off the back of the Renegade by the masked man. Well, that’s one way of stopping him shooting the girlfriend, he thought.

  The entrance to the warehouse was a rolled steel door big enough to drive a truck through. It had a small man-size entrance in it that was sufficient to run through.

  At the doorway Debbie Gruber turned and smiled her sick smile. “That’s the Mask,” she said adoringly. “Now things are going to get intense.”

  Travis dragged her into the fusty darkness. “Can’t wait,” he told her, nearly tripping over the tramp who lay within.

  Inside the warehouse smelled of old hemp sacking and grain long gone to seed. Some light filtered in from the skylight and Travis could see fusty sacks piled to the ceiling on plastic pallets. An abandoned electric forklift lay on its side nearby. It had long since been stripped of any useful parts by passing vagrants.

  Travis kept his eyes slitted, hoping to adjust them to the dark.

  Slowly his night sight improved. He fumbled around, wondering if there was a back or a side exit. He heard the sound of an approaching motor, then the door was blasted from its hinges. Travis was dazzled by the glare. Their rocket launcher was still working, he told himself.

  He shook his head, trying to clear his vision. He heard a whimpering sound come from the doorway. He could make out a vague humanoid outline, rising from the ground. A burst of submachine-gun fire cut the whimpering short.

  “Was tha’ him?” he heard Steelteeth’s voice ask.

  “Naw, just some old wino. I got her. That puts me two up this week.” The voice belonged to Red-eye.

  “Well, I got four Skull scalps.”

  There was a sound of whooping laughter. “What a rumble that was! What a bodycount! We’ll be lookin’ for some new brothers soon.”

  Travis saw the Renegade easing into the loading bay. He tried to count the number on board but his dazzled eyes weren’t up to the task. Screw it, he thought, and lobbed a micro-grenade into the back of the open-topped car. He heard a few screams and saw a frantic scramble from the car as the Rippers bailed out. Travis charged forward, trying to keep to the cover of the stacks of sacks.

  The micro-grenade detonated. Travis felt the rush of air from the blast. He heard screams. He looked up. He could see flames licking from the Renegade’s shell. He rushed forward and pumped shotgun bullets into the writhing figures. The blast sent them cartwheeling into the flames.

  And that settles that, he thought, surprised it was all over so quickly.

  He was shaking from reaction so much that he almost didn’t hear the light footfalls behind him. He twisted and barely had time to react before the baseball bat crashed into his shotgun and sent it flying. Travis felt his fleshy shoulder twist and bit back a scream of pain.

  He was staring at a giant of a man, over seven feet tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds of solid muscle. The giant’s face was hidden by a leather mask and he wore a leather waistcoat with a devil’s grinning head on the left breast. On the right was a holstered auto-pistol. Must have snuck round the side entrance, thought Travis, fumbling for his forty-five. Another swing of the bat sent it skittering from his fingers.

  This guy is good, Travis was forced to admit.

  “I want you alive,” said the Mask in a strange guttural voice. “You’ve caused me a lot of grief.”

  “Kill him, Mask,” yelled Debbie Gruber. “Kill him slowly.”

  Travis could see that she had that strange loopy grin on her face again. Mask advanced. Travis watched his eyes. They glittered cold and blue in the black leather face. Travis crouched, reaching for his boot knife.

  Mask nodded. “Good, struggle a little, I like it when they do that,” he said, bringing the bat down in a blurring arc. Mask seemed to have no trouble seeing in the dark and was inhumanly fast. Travis barely managed to lumber aside. Maybe he’s one of those spliced-DNA hybrids the media was always screaming about. He tried to ignore the numbing pain in his shoulder.

  “You sure you’re an Op, man? You’re old, fat and slow.”

  Travis grinned at him nastily. “I was going to let you live till you said that.”

  Mask laughed. Travis was panting. Man, I gotta lose some weight, he told himself. We’ve only been fighting thirty seconds and I’m out of steam. He had a stitch in his side. Mask was advancing confidently, like a great panther. He passed the bat from hand to hand playfully.

  I’ll have to make this quick, Travis thought, and threw the knife. Mask moved to dodge it easily. It spun over his shoulder into the dark.

  “Is that the best..?” said Mask and stopped in shock. Travis had followed the knife in, grabbing the hand that held the bat with his claw. He squeezed and bone splintered. Mask howled in agony and dropped to his knees. His good hand jabbed out and knocked Travis spinning wildly. Ignoring the silver stars that danced before his eyes, Travis lashed out a kick that put Mask on his back.

  The big man struggled to rise, drawing the pistol clumsily with his left hand. Travis threw himself flat and rolled over to his own pistol. He grabbed it and turned just as he saw Mask bringing his magnum to bear. Travis squeezed off a shot. Mask flew back. His pistol fired, blowing a hole in the roof. Travis fired again and again until the giant lay still.

  Debbie Gruber looked at him with adoring eyes. “Fatman, that was mean. You are a grox.” Travis shook his head and fought back tears of pain.

  Outside, Voorman was
waiting. “Nice fireworks display,” said the digitized voice from the car’s loud-hailer. “Led me right to you.”

  Travis stared at the muzzle of the chaingun that protruded from the interceptor’s cowling. He felt sick at heart. Armed with a forty-five he couldn’t even put a dent in the interceptor’s armour.

  “Get lost, Voorman,” he said wearily.

  “I will, buddy. Once you’ve given me the girl.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “If need be, Travis. Loth as I am to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

  For a moment Travis considered letting rip with the pistol anyway. He could just picture Voorman’s skeletal face laughing at him from behind that tinted window. For a moment he was so full of rage that he would have attacked the car with his bare hands. It wasn’t fair.

  Then he laughed and holstered the gun. Life isn’t fair, he told himself, but there’ll be other days. I’ll see Voorman again. And at least I’ll be rid of Debbie Gruber. He didn’t like the creepy, worshipful looks she had been giving him.

  The passenger door of the interceptor opened. Travis gestured to the girl and with a last, lingering look she climbed in.

  “I knew you were a reasonable man, Travis,” said Voorman’s digitized voice as the car reversed away.

  With a squeal of tyres, it suddenly turned and raced away into the dark. Travis trudged wearily towards the bridge.

  Estevez entered the office lounge and squinted at Travis sullenly through his swollen eyes.

  “Good news, Travis,” he said. Travis glared at him. His body felt like it had been used as a punchbag by a gymnasium full of contenders. He just wanted rest.

  “The Gruber girl told her father what happened. He’s agreed to pay you fifty G’s as a token of his esteem.”

  Suddenly Travis’ aches didn’t feel so bad. He looked around the seedy lounge and it took on a whole new homey atmosphere.

  “Good old Debbie,” said Travis. “I knew the friggin’ kid would come through for me.”