Still crouched, Amadeus pushed the metal bar and flung the back door open. A klaxon siren screamed. More gunshots and crashing glass. They scuttled into the alley. A dumpster overflowed with bags of trash.
They ran.
Rounding a corner, they nearly smashed into a man in a grey suit. The man held a rifle. Amadeus let out a little cry and started to backpedal.
“No, I’m a friend,” the man said. “Get behind me.” After he spoke, Amadeus recognized him: the man from the dining car who talked about gravity. His wrinkles didn’t look so deep in the rain. The man raised his rifle, his motions fluid and practiced, and fired three shots toward the bakery door. He backed up, pushed them down into a puddle of trashwater behind another dumpster, and ducked down with them. “Cover here, don’t move.”
Automatic rifle fire pinged against the dumpster. Bits of brick splashed into the water around them. Gravity reloaded, leaned around the dumpster, and fired another burst.
“Ahh!” Grassal cried and grabbed his leg. Blood seeped through his jeans and from between his fingers. He began to shake like he was having a seizure. Amadeus looked away, choosing instead to watch Gravity reload his rifle and fire off several more bursts.
The minutes felt like hours. Amadeus’ ears rang. In the distance, a police siren screamed.
“Be ready to get your buddy on his feet,” Gravity said. From the inside pocket of his jacket, he pulled something that looked like a pack of cigarettes. He pressed down on something with his thumb, tossed it, and crouched down. “Cover your ears,” he said. They did. Boom! Gravity stood up then, leaned out, removed the unused rounds from his rifle, and then tossed the rifle into the dumpster.
“Seizure grenade. He’s down for now. Can you walk?” Gravity asked Grassal, who rocked back and forth, holding his leg, tears streaming down his cheeks. Grassal managed a nod.
“We’ll help you,” Amadeus said. “Grassal, buddy, come on now. On your feet.”
“He shot me. He shot me,” Grassal said.
“It’ll be okay, I promise,” Gravity said, kneeling and putting his hand on Grassal’s shoulder. Amadeus was surprised by this sudden show of tenderness. “But right now, you need to get your shit together. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay,” Grassal said, looking at Gravity with soggy red eyes.
“Wait, hold on there, Gravity, on the train, I told you my name was Mankowski. How did you know my real name?”
“Later,” Gravity said. “We go that way. I have a car waiting for us.” He pointed in the direction they had come from. They helped Grassal to his foot and threw his arm around both their shoulders. They moved fast, carried him rather than helped him. They passed the bakery door. The man Gravity shot lay on the ground. His leg twitched a little. Blood was splattered inside the clear plastic mask. His eyes were open, and through the mask they seemed to be entirely black.
“My god,” Amadeus said. He recognized the mask, the gear, the build. The same as the men who came to his house and killed his father. Amadeus cried out then and kicked the man in the ribs. He enjoyed that. “I’m going to kill him!” He kicked again. Gravity pulled him back by his shirt.
“No, Amadeus, don’t. Back off. It’s done.”
“But this is one of them.”
“It won’t do you any good.”
“You were shooting at him.”
“I didn’t kill him. I don’t like to kill, not anymore, not if I can help it. I know you’re angry, but right now we have another objective.”
“Fuck it, fine.”
They crossed through the pedestrian area before they reached the car. The streets had emptied. Two people were sprawled out by the Center Street fountain, bleeding. One was the balloon man. Amadeus looked up. The man’s rainbow bundle of balloons floated up into the rainy Colorado sky.
11
The car was a roomy sedan with tinted windows. Together they laid Grassal onto the backseat. As they drove out of town, they passed several police cars going the opposite direction. Amadeus slouched down in his seat. After the police cars passed, he looked out and watched as tall buildings transitioned to smaller apartment blocks. Digital billboards along the elevated freeway advertised geothermal heating modifications and underground housing developments. “Bunker City,” one read, “the Pinnacle of Security.”
“So you know my father,” Amadeus said, not asking.
“We were in the same unit in Afghanistan.”
Amadeus nodded. On the rare occasions when his father had mentioned his time in the service, he only talked about the food, never about the fighting. “He’s never told me much about that.”
“I doubt he would.”
“And Jones?”
“I’ve know about him for some time, mostly because of your father.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Claudius Owens, but nobody calls me that. It’s Gravity.”
“But why Gravity? That’s not really a name. It’s a force of nature.”
“I know. People have called me Gravity for almost thirty years. Besides, if your name was Claudius, wouldn’t you want a nickname too?”
“I suppose it does have more weight,” Amadeus said. Gravity laughed.
“You serious? You just come out of a firefight where you and your friend nearly died and you’re making puns on my name?”
“Oh, you know, at this point, getting shot at is just another part of my daily routine,” Amadeus said. “Maybe I’m just really relieved, you know, happy to be alive. So, thank you for your help.”
In the back, Grassal moaned as he held his foot. “Hospital,” he said between breaths. “I want to go to a hospital.” A torrent of rain swept over the car. Gravity reached into a leather attaché case, removed a small orange container and a bottle of water and handed them to Amadeus. Pills. Amadeus pulled out three and passed them back to Grassal. Grassal swallowed the pills without water.
“Sorry, no hospital for you,” Gravity said. “You wouldn’t last a night. You’ll have to settle for pain pills. We take you to the hospital and I promise you somebody would slip into your room and cut your throat.”
“Even though he has nothing to do with this?”
“But he does have something to do with this. We all do now.”
“And who are they, anyway? I mean, it’s one thing to steal my father’s research, I can understand that, but everything else…”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Whatever their instructions are, whoever it is that hired them, and they are hired guns, they are going to be relentless, brutal. They’ll kill almost everyone who sees them, even if they couldn’t identify them in a lineup. But you’ll never see those guys in a lineup. Those people we saw back by the fountain, I guarantee you they made one simple mistake: looking right at them, trying to see their eyes. It’s such a human thing to do, but these people are barely human. Ruthless. Fucking. Killers,” Gravity said.
“Which leads me to my next question: just who are you? Don’t misunderstand me, I am fully aware that you saved our lives back there, but here we are, just picking up a package,” Amadeus looked down, surprised to see he still had it, “and then you show up out of nowhere and start shooting the bad guys.”
“You sound like your father. Your speech patterns and inflections.”
“Meeting you on the train was no coincidence?”
“That’s right. Your thumb drive has a transmitter in it, like a distress signal. I was in Washington when the distress signal went out. I caught up with you in Pennsylvania then caught the same train as you. Selling the bike, that was clever. You and Grassal didn’t mean to, but you did a pretty good job of not being predictable. I’m still not sure how the police guessed you were on the train, or how you managed not to get dragged out in handcuffs, but good work.”
“Thanks. We had help.”
Grassal moaned.
“How was it that only you could pick up the GPS signal?”
“The signal coming off the transmitter,” Gravity said,
“is encrypted. Most scanners, even advanced ones, can’t read it; it just looks like a single encrypted signal, floating around in the ether. There are billions of those frequencies out there, but if you don’t have the encryption key, they just look like gibberish.”
“Are you a scientist?” Amadeus asked. Gravity laughed and shook his head. “What are you then?”
“Call me a man with a sincere interest in the mechanical and scientific arts. Your father was working on something with huge potential but there were… complications.” Out the window, the terrain had changed from flat suburban tracts to rolling, pine-covered mountains. The houses grew smaller, more squat, most covered with late-model solar panels.
“What complications?” Amadeus asked.
“Internal strife.Disagreements with his partners-slash-investors.”
“What kind of research? What partners? What kinds of disagreements? This seems like vitally important information to know. This could explain why all these people are trying to kill us.”
“Unfortunately, I wasn’t privy to all of the information. Your father tried to keep his work as quiet as possible. I know that, as a pet project, he was dabbling in teleportation, but that’s it.”
“Jesus. What else do you know?” Amadeus said. The words sounded rough and haggard, like his voice had been dragged over dead coral and left in the sun to dry. The cold air coming from the vents chilled him. Gravity drove fast but not erratic. The long black sedan rode as smooth as a boat.
“That’s about everything,” Gravity said. “Since I met him in Afghanistan, I knew he would do amazing stuff. I’ve followed his work as best I could. Read him when he was published. Watched some lectures. I even managed to keep up a loose correspondence with him while I was overseas. He was always good about answering my questions.”
From the back, Grassal murmured and cursed in a mix of Spanish and English. “Um, I can’t move my toes. I’m dizzy. This isn’t normal.” He had stopped hissing through his teeth but he still rocked back and forth.
“Getting shot isn’t normal,” Gravity said. “Lay down, put your foot up, elevate it. Should’ve told you sooner. Sorry. We’ll get you patched up at Jones’, don’t worry.”
“I’ll never walk again,” Grassal said.
“No, no, you’ll be fine, just stay cool, okay?” Gravity said. He looked at Amadeus and whispered. “His name is Grassal, right?” Amadeus nodded.
“Grassal,” Amadeus said, “he knows what he’s talking about. Just relax. You’ll be fine.”
“That’s easy for you to say, you’re not bleeding to death.”
“You’re not going to bleed to death,” Amadeus said. He thought it strange their roles were reversed; usually Grassal was the one telling Amadeus everything would be fine. To Gravity, Amadeus said “I guess you’ve seen worse.”
Gravity nodded a little, looked over, and held Amadeus’ gaze. “Worse than you can ever imagine. You have Jones’ phone number?” Amadeus handed Gravity the slip of paper. Gravity dialed the number on his phone.
“Yeah, this is Gravity. I’m a friend of Tommy’s. Amadeus and his friend are with me. His friend was shot. No, no, he’ll be fine. Okay. Right. We’re almost in Leadville. Yeah. Yeah. I guess you heard about Denver. Rattled, understandably. The Matchless Mine? Fine. We’ll meet you there.”
They drove into the tiny town of Leadville, Colorado, passed a school, post office, and a small hospital. Here the rain had stopped. Somehow every traffic light turned green for them. Amadeus glanced over at the speedometer; they were moving at about eighty kilometers per hour. Fortunately, the roads were straight and empty and the police remained unseen.
“There was a hospital,” Grassal said, “just stop and drop me off. I can walk.”
“You’re not walking anywhere,” Amadeus said.
“Thanks for the encouragement, asshole.”
“Those pills might make him mean,” Gravity said.
“He’s always like this. Grassal, we’ve already told you, you go to a hospital and you die.”
“I’m going to die anyway, Amadeus. And what’s this ‘we’ bullshit? Who is this he, anyway? Amadeus, how do you know he’s not one of them?”
“We don’t. But he’s not trying to kill us. He’s helping us.” To Gravity, Amadeus said, “why are you helping us, anyway?”
“Last year, your father contacted me and told me there was trouble brewing and that said if anything were to happen to him, I was to make sure you were safe. He paid me a handsome retainer. But that’s not important right now. What is important is your friend. He’s losing too much blood. Amadeus, crawl back there and put pressure on the wound.” Gravity pulled the car over, and Amadeus got into the back seat. Amadeus held Grassal’s foot on his lap. Blood seeped through the cloth. They left Leadville and followed the sign to the Matchless Mine. Amadeus pulled his shirt off and placed it over the wound. This seemed to help. Grassal had given up on speaking and just hummed a steady tone.
“Is this normal?” Amadeus said.
“How many pills did you give him?” Gravity said. Amadeus said three. “Then yeah, that’s normal. One would’ve worked. We’ll be there soon.” Gravity turned off the paved road onto a dirt track that wound up the mountain. They came into a clearing littered with rusting machinery. Gravity pulled off the road and killed the engine.
“This used to be a big silver mine. No more, though.”
“You know where you’re going?” Amadeus asked.
“Sort of. He said he’d meet us. His compound is out here somewhere.”
“He said it was an estate.”
“Most estates aren’t found in abandoned underground government bunkers,” Gravity said.
“He wanted us to take the bus and meet his daughter at the post office in Leadville.”
“The bus, that’s funny. When was the last time you saw him?”
“Wow, probably almost twelve or thirteen years ago.”
“What do you know about him?”
“I know he makes experimental aircraft and that he has a medical condition. I don’t really remember much.”
“That’s about right. I forget the name of the disease, but it’s got him in a wheelchair and he can’t even leave his compound. Has to use something like a dialysis machine, but that’s not quite it. His aircraft, though, are something else. I can’t talk much about it, but he developed a craft that made Predator drones obsolete. He and your father kind of came from the same circle of people. You know his nickname used to be Jumpin Jones?”
“Ramona called him that before she gave me that package. Seems kind of cruel.”
“He used to be a hell of a basketball player, he could’ve gone pro, but he decided to pursue a career in science. Either way, he was destined to be filthy rich. A couple generations back, his family used to own some steel mills back east. Apparently, one of his great-great-something grandfathers once controlled a majority of the American steel industry. That was back before my time, back when America still made things.”
After twenty minutes, an old Jeep bounced down a path hidden by trees. The Jeep had come from a part of the mountain with no visible road, only rough, brushy terrain. Gravity started the engine. The Jeep came closer and finally pulled up beside their car. A young woman with a thin face and wide nose hopped out. Bright red hair stuck out from beneath the blue-and-green plaid scarf she had wrapped around her head. Amadeus recognized the grownup version of the girl from his childhood, the girl who used to mock him, Lilly Jones. Gravity rolled down his window, but Amadeus stepped out of the car. He held his arms out to hug her. She narrowed her bright green eyes and took a step back.
“Ramona’s really dead?” Lilly said.
“I’m sorry, it’s, I mean, we where there, we had no idea. It’s awful. This is my fault. They were after me; she had nothing to do with this.”
“This is your fault,” Lilly said. “Ramona never hurt anyone. She didn’t deserve this. Amadeus, let me make myself clear. This isn’t a good time
for us. My father and I, we had other plans. But I, I guess I’m glad you’re okay. And look at you, you’re all grown up.” Amadeus looked her up and down and arched an eyebrow.
“I’m not the only one,” he said. Amadeus realized he was undressing her with her eyes. Lilly either ignored or pretended not to notice this.
“I know you’ve heard this a lot, but I wanted to tell you I’m sorry about your father. I can’t imagine how you feel.”
“Angry, mostly. I’d trade, god, I’d trade almost anything to have things go back the way they were.”
“Hey,” Gravity said, “this reunion is sweet, but we need to get our boy here some basic fucking medical care.”
“Can your car handle a Jeep trail?” Lilly asked. Gravity smiled.
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