by Jack Quaid
The truck was theirs.
Shelby holstered the shotgun. “That wasn’t so bad.”
She spoke too soon. With nobody behind the wheel, the truck was starting to veer dangerously off the road, and it was headed straight up the sidewalk and was about to careen into a bunch of buildings.
She called out for Knox, but he was already on it and running his way over to the driver’s seat. He yanked the dead battle droid out, put his ass in the seat and slammed down on those brakes.
The massive truck skidded across the road and finally, after a hell of a lot of screeching, came to a stop just moments before slamming into the building.
For a couple of moments, Shelby and Knox didn’t say or breathe a word. Then a smile grew across Shelby’s face. “We made it.”
But had they?
There was a beeping sound coming from the back of the truck. It was long and consistent, and they both had a fair idea of what it meant.
Shelby looked over her shoulder, back through the cabin and to the cargo area at the H2O bomb. “Get out of town.”
She ran down to the massive bomb and found the display screen on the side of the thing.
00:01:28
00:01:27
00:01:26
“Ah, Knox. We’ve got a problem back here. This thing is armed!”
“We’ve got another problem up here,” Knox called back.
“How can this get any worse?” Shelby said as she ran her way up to the front of the truck, but when she saw the monitor Knox was pointing at and saw the six battle droids on bikes speeding up to the rear of the truck, she found out how it could get worse.
“These guys suck!”
“This is probably a good time to get the hell out of here,” Knox said as he slipped the truck into gear and pulled it back out onto the road.
“I’ll see if I can do anything about this bomb.”
Within seconds Shelby was back down the other end of the truck, looking at the bomb, the display screen, and it was right then in that moment that she realized that she knew absolutely zero about defusing bombs.
She looked at the timer.
00:00:38
00:00:37
00:00:36
Then an idea struck her as if she’d had some sort of revelation, and she pulled the radio from her belt and pushed it to her lips. “Sue… are you out there… come in.”
Sue was half a country away, but he’d worked out a communication system where he could bounce a signal off some old Russian satellite. It wasn’t the most reliable, but it was all they had. “Sue… come in… It’s real important.”
Shelby waited for a couple of really long seconds and heard nothing but silence. Just when she was about to think Sue wasn’t there, she heard his voice.
“Shelby!”
“Oh, thank God.”
“Hey, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me. You know how I love Vanilla Coke, and I was worried that there would be just like none left anywhere in the—“
“Sue!”
“What?”
“I can’t hear your Vanilla Coke story right now. I’m on a speeding truck with an H2O bomb that’s going to explode in 30 seconds.”
Gunfire blasted through the side of the truck, punching in shards of orange haze.
Shelby jumped to the ground and flattened out like a pancake as bullets whizzed by just past her head.
“Is that gunfire?!” Sue asked.
“Yes! I’m dealing with some very heavy shit here,” Shelby yelled as she climbed to her feet. The gunfire had stopped—at least for the time being. “I need you to talk me through disarming this bomb.”
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay. What you looking at there?”
“I have no idea!”
“Alright, alright. Just try to stay calm.”
“I don’t have time for calm, Sue! How do I stop this thing from exploding?”
“What’s the serial number on the system?”
“Where’s that?”
“Right next to the screen.”
Shelby found the seven-digit serial number and read it out to him. “XD-737366G.”
“I can disarm that! I can disarm that. It’ll take about three minutes.”
Shelby froze with her eyes fixed on the countdown timer.
00:00:58
00:00:57
00:00:56
“Shelby… Shelby, are you there?”
“I’m going to have to call you back, Sue.”
She walked back to the front of the truck in a half daze, half zombie-type shuffle as the weight of everything was starting to hit her.
The battle droids were still all over the truck, and Knox was struggling to keep the big beast still on the road. “How’d you go with that bomb?”
She was just about to tell him the god-awful truth when she saw a sign to the Hudson River. “Turn here.”
“What?”
“Do it!”
Knox yanked the wheel at the very last minute and pulled the massive truck around the corner hard and fast. It sideswiped a couple of old parked auto-cars, but Knox was able to keep his foot on the gas and the truck on the road.
“What are we doing down here?”
“I can’t detonate the bomb. It’s going to take three minutes, and we don’t have three minutes.”
“How long do we have?”
“Less than a minute.”
“Well, that’s a son of a bitch.”
Shelby pointed to the Hudson River that was right up ahead. “Put us in the river.”
“What?”
“We’re riding an H2O bomb that’s meant to suck up every drop of moisture in a twenty-mile radius, yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“If we dump it in the river, it’ll suck up all that water and nothing much else.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“No,” Shelby said. “But what other choice do we have?”
“Fair enough.”
He buried the pedal to the floor of the truck and watched the needle on the digital readout rise as the truck sped up. “How long?”
Shelby leaned back and got an angle on the H2O screen. “Twenty seconds.”
The truck smashed through what was left of a fallen helicopter sending it flying out of the way.
They were a block away.
Shelby could see water.
“This is it!” she yelled. “We’re going to make it! We’re going to make it!”
What she didn’t know was at that very moment a battle droid cruised up alongside the truck, transformed its arm into a machine gun and blasted away at the rear tire until it exploded. The wheel hit the ground and sent sparks flying out every which way.
Knox struggled with the wheel. “Damn it!”
“Give it everything you’ve got!” Shelby snapped. “I’ll get rid of these bastards.” And she ran as fast as she could down the inside of the truck. Straight past the H2O bomb and the timer on the screen.
00:00:10
00:00:09
00:00:08
Shelby climbed up the ladder and onto the roof of the speeding truck.
She looked down and saw the four battle droids speeding alongside them with the machine guns blasting away at the truck and the tires.
“Hey!” Shelby called out.
They all looked up, and in Shelby’s hand she was holding an EMP grenade.
She tossed it down.
Although all the battle droids tried to get the hell out of its blast radius, there wasn’t a chance in hell, and when it detonated they were all hit with the blast and glitched out within seconds and crashed into storefronts and taxi-cabs.
Shelby looked over her shoulder just in time to see the front of the truck ram through a concrete barrier, and it was at that point that she figured it was probably time to get the hell out of there. Shelby ran as fast as she could to the end of the truck, and just as it went over the edge she jumped off and landed hard down on the road.
Knox swung open the cabin
and rolled on out.
In a glorious stunt, the truck flew through the air for a couple of seconds before slamming down onto the surface of the Hudson.
Shelby climbed to her feet and took a couple of painful steps toward the edge.
Knox did the same, and they both watched as the truck disappeared under the water.
They waited. And waited. And waited.
Nothing happened.
“Told you there was no such thing as an H2O bomb,” Knox said.
Then they heard the explosion, and within seconds, all the water in the Hudson river evaporated and exposed hundreds of years of junk and debris on the floor of the riverbed.
Then as quickly as all the water evaporated, it filled back up, and a couple of moments after that it was as if nothing at all had happened.
Knox scratched the back of his head. “Well, maybe there is such a thing as an H2O bomb.”
Thirty-Eight
30 minutes. That was all the time they had to get their asses over to the Meatpacking District to meet the pilot, Happy, and get themselves up to the World Trade Center and find Isaac. 30 minutes wasn’t a hell of a long time… especially on foot.
Out of breath, Shelby looked up at an apartment building on North Moore Street in the Meatpacking District. “Is this it?” she asked.
Knox glanced at the crude map that Happy had drawn as part of his directions. “This map’s bloody awful.”
Shelby snatched it out of his hand and tried to make sense of it herself. For the past 30 minutes, Happy’s directions—which read like a riddle—had given them the run around lower Manhattan. They’d hidden from a droid patrol in a deli in Tribeca, had a run-in with a gang that looked like they were straight out of The Warriors but with the toughness of West Side Story, and now they were in the Meatpacking District with thirty minutes to go before lift off.
“I think this is it,” Shelby said, looking from the map to the building and back again. “It says to go down into the basement, where we’ll find a boat?”
“This is bullshit,” Knox said. “It sounds like a trap.”
“If he wanted to set a trap, he could have done it hours ago.”
“So he’s just mad?”
“He’d have to be to want to land a chopper on the tallest building in New York City during a robot uprising,” Shelby said, folding up the directions and sliding them into the pocket of her leather jacket. “Let’s go find out.”
The lobby of 367 North Moore Street was like the lobby of most apartment buildings in NYC. There were a couple of lounge chairs for guests and a desk for the automated super, who was nowhere in sight.
Shelby and Knox made their way down the corridor and paused at the basement door. Shelby pulled out a flashlight, and Knox pulled up his MP80 and took aim. They both knew there could be absolutely anything on the other side of the door. Shelby wrapped her fingers around the knob and slowly turned it, then nodded to Knox. He nodded back, and she swung the door open and flashed some light inside.
The light only reached so far until it faded out and darkness took over.
“See,” Shelby said with a lump in her throat. “Nothing to worry about. Looks perfectly aboveboard.”
“You go first then.”
Shelby took quiet steps forward and paused to take each corner carefully. A flight of stairs later, they reached what Shelby assumed was the last step, and when she took it, she stepped into water up to her ankle. She panned the flashlight down and saw the rest of the steps were underwater.
“Flash some light here,” Knox said.
Shelby aimed at the wall. Spray painted onto the concrete was: TURN ME ON. And an arrow to a light switch.
“If that’s what it says.” Shelby flicked the switch.
One by one, rows of fluorescent lights flickered on, revealing a flooded, underground parking lot. There was an ebb and flow to the water, as if it was coming from outside somewhere. Out-of-commission auto-cars bobbed along, and rubbish and debris stuck to the support columns that held up the ceiling.
“I think we’re meant to get in that,” Knox said.
Shelby didn’t see it before, but there was a small rowboat tied to a railing. They climbed in, and Shelby untied the boat from the staircase railing and pushed it off the wall. Another rope led out of the parking lot, which Knox used to pull the boat along with.
Water slapping against the concrete walls was the only sound in the parking lot. Shelby pulled out the Remington and laid it across her lap just in case the shit hit the fan. Cold air brushed against her face, and she zipped up her jacket to keep warm. Knox pulled the boat around the corner and paused, letting it cruise along with its own momentum as they both took in the sight of what had caused the parking lot to flood. There was a hole in the wall the size of a truck, and water from the Hudson River was flowing freely into the structure.
“I guess we’re going through there,” Shelby said.
“I guess we are.”
He pulled the boat along and followed the rope out into the river. A layer of fog hovered over the surface of the water. Neither one of them could see a thing. It was as if there was a wall of white surrounding them, and no matter how deep into it they moved, it wouldn’t let up. Shelby thought they were almost going to make it to New Jersey when out of nowhere a barge appeared in the fog. They climbed off the rowboat and up onto it. It was forty feet square and completely empty except for Happy and his chopper.
Happy looked at his watch. “You’re late.”
“We would have been here earlier,” Shelby said, “but we had to save the city.” She took a step closer to look at the helicopter. “Is this it?”
There was no skin on the Vietnam-era Huey. All the mechanics and electrics were exposed as if it was a real-life diagram from a “how machines work” type of kids’ book.
“Where’s the rest of it?” Shelby asked.
“It may not look like much, but it’ll get you there.”
“I have my doubts,” she said.
“You don’t have to go up,” Happy said.
Shelby looked at Knox. They were out of choices. Then she looked at Happy. “Let’s go.”
Shelby rode shotgun, Knox was in the back and Happy took the pilot’s seat. He flicked some switches, and as soon as the engine started to warm up and the rotors turned, absolutely everything on the chopper began to rattle and shake. Shelby fastened her seatbelt, but she didn’t think it would matter all that much in the event of an emergency.
“I’ll take you on the scenic tour,” Happy yelled over the swooping of the rotors as he pulled back on the stick and the chopper rose into the sky. For what felt like a long time, all Shelby could see was the whiteness of the fog—it wrapped around the chopper and seemed to have no end to it. The chopper swayed and shook with some rough wind, and eventually they rose out of the fog and Shelby saw the island of Manhattan. Smoke drifted into the night from small pockets of fire that burned in office buildings and apartments. Huge chunks had been ripped from some buildings, exposing the office floors inside—with papers blowing in the wind and desks sitting precariously on the edge—while other buildings looked as pristine as they had before the uprising. Shelby searched the skyline and realized something was missing. The Empire State Building was no longer there.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Happy said with his deadpan face. “Emotional stuff.”
Shelby gave a slight nod; it was all she could pull together. She’d seen part of the New Year’s Eve battle on television, but it didn’t even come close to seeing the aftermath in real life.
Happy kept the chopper low and navigated through the streets just under the skyline so they wouldn’t attract the attention of the drones. As soon as they reached downtown, Happy started to bring the chopper higher into the sky, and when they came to the South Tower of the World Trade Center he came to a complete stop for a moment before ascending vertically alongside it.
“It looks untouched,” Knox said through the headphones.
&
nbsp; “This whole area got off lightly,” Happy said. “A lot of it looks just the same as it always did.”
The chopper cleared the building, and Happy did two passes of the roof to make sure there weren’t any droids.
Once Happy touched down, Shelby was glad to be out of the helicopter and on solid ground. She glanced at her watch. The signal was stronger than it had ever been. All she wanted to do was hold Isaac tight and never let go. She was so close she thought she could almost smell him.
When the rotors of the chopper stopped spinning, Happy flicked a whole bunch of switches on the control panel and climbed out. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
“We paid you for thirty,” Shelby said.
“I didn’t like the look of those droids I saw at the base of this building,” Happy said. “So now you’ve paid me for fifteen.”
Knox grabbed him by the front of his shirt, dragged him over to the edge of the building and dangled him over. The only thing stopping Happy from taking the fast way down was Knox’s arm.
“How about I help you leave now,” Knox said through gritted teeth.
Happy didn’t even blink. “Then who’s going to fly you off this roof?”
“I don’t plan that far ahead.”
“Let him go,” Shelby called out. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
Knox looked disappointed but pulled Happy away from the edge anyway and tossed him to the ground. One swift kick was all it took for Knox to bust through the fire exit door. The building was running off some sort of emergency power source, and the stairwell was lit with dim lights that ran along the steps and under the handrails.
Shelby looked at her watch. “He’s three hundred feet away. That probably puts him somewhere around the 83rd floor.” She drew her shotgun and stepped into the stairwell.
After a couple of flights they began to relax. If there was anything in the stairwell, they’d hear it long before they’d see anything. Shelby holstered the shotgun and walked faster.
“What are you going to do after you find him?” Knox asked.