It was too similar to the events that had unfolded in Eli’s office just days before. They had burned themselves forever into the living pages of her personal history. There was no alternative, they were just there, ferocious images slapping her in the face every time she gave them an inch. Flashbacks were bad enough, but now she was literally reliving them again.
Another SUV appeared behind them. It completely blocked the right side of the tunnel. Cars driving by in the other lanes braked, gawking out their open windows. The ubiquitous suburban refugees slunk against the walls, unwilling bystanders, witnesses with no credibility.
One man approached Tanya with something that looked suspiciously like a blindfold. She tossed her head like a little girl throwing a tantrum, she wanted to see what was going on as long as possible. Michael and Luthor were next to her, blindfolds already on. Michael still fought with all his might, Luthor was resigned and docile. She noticed in the background another gelvar-clad man toting some sort of long cylinder over his shoulder. It had the look of a weapon. Then everything went dark as the blindfold was successfully secured over her face.
As she was shoved into the back of the SUV another explosion reverberated off the walls of the makeshift tunnel. They’d blown up another police car.
Chapter 14:
New York City, United States of the West
Dark thoughts filled Luthor’s mind, matching his blackened vision. His arms ached after being stuck behind his back. His only comfort was the familiar feel of Tanya’s shoulder at his side. None of them had dared to speak; they were in the custody of enough men to take over a small country.
At least Vika had managed to escape, he hoped she might be able to eventually get the word out about their imprisonment and maybe the power of 126. Or maybe Vika had planned to betray them from the start and she had been setting this ambush up for weeks. Luthor didn’t know and felt despair creeping into the edges of his mind trying to make him not care either.
Curiosity kept him from giving in. Who were these men? Who did they work for? Luthor had assumed he would be relatively safe in the States—at least from the Sabers. The Sabers were a European special forces unit, there was no way the Feds would have let this much foreign ordnance into the country. Did that mean there was another well-armed group trying to steal his synthesis method? Not a comforting thought, but there didn’t seem to be any other logical destinations for his current set of initial conditions.
They continued driving in silence. It was impossible to tell where they were going or how far. The only obvious fact Luthor could discern was that they were moving fast. How have they managed to avoid any other carps in pursuit? For once I would love to hear those damnable sirens! I suppose an RPG would effectively dissuade anyone from following you. Mental note: never chase someone who has a rocket launcher. Luthor abruptly lurched forward as they slammed on the brakes.
“Get out,” a gravelly voice said in a southern accent.
He filed the accent to the back of his mind. Definitely not European.
Rough hands shoved Luthor out of the vehicle and tore the blindfold from his face. He found himself in an ancient, dimly lit parking garage, strangely devoid of any suburban refugee camps he had seen in other parking garages. He concluded they must be in a basement parking structure that was possible to secure from the displaced masses.
“Go,” said the same gruff voice. Luthor debated about refusing to move just to see what they would do. Luthor’s only copy of the research had been engulfed in the fireball that destroyed the lead car, if they shot him now, they would never be able to duplicate it. Unless they had recovered a hard drive from his house. That was a sobering possibility. But then again, there was that phone call from Qwiz. He was indeed alive, Luthor could only hope he had been able to grab the research and that his phone call had not been a betrayal. Hope glimmered weakly below the blanket of despair. They probably didn’t have anything, besides him in chains, of course. That meant they couldn’t shoot him if they wanted to get his technology. He could just refuse to move and see what happened; it would be a good litmus test to see how much they knew. Luthor weighed it in his mind, deciding that death was not a good consolation prize if he were wrong. He stumbled forward in the direction they indicated. The tingle of 126 at his belt heightened his fear.
The man took off his mask. He was easily 10 centimeters taller than Luthor, and wore all black. His chest bulged with the telltale profile of a gelvar vest. He held a pistol at his side that looked like it could stop a tank.
“Luthor Tenrel.” It was an accusation.
Luthor felt his rage bubble up. No more calculating. It was time to roll the dice and see what happened. He didn’t want to give these bastards anything more than he had to. If they were going to shoot him anyway, what better time than now?
“Who the fuck are you?” Luthor spat.
A fist crushed the side of his face like a wrecking ball. Luthor spun sideways. Unable to catch himself with his hands still bound, he landed hard. Pain throbbed with every beat of his heart. Blood dripped into his left eye. Tanya babbled unintelligibly in the distance.
The big man leaned down, pressing his face inches from Luthor’s. His breath stank.
“All you need to know about me, Tenrel, is that if you want to live, do what I say,” he stood, then turned back and kicked Luthor hard in the ribs. “If you don’t, you will know me only as Pain.”
Luthor coughed against the cold concrete. His boot was inches from Luthor’s head.
It had a Saber’s emblem hand-stitched into the tongue.
Luthor might have a broken zygomatic process and some bruised ribs, but he had learned that there wasn’t a new force chasing them. The Sabers had chased them in force all the way to America.
#
After the man calling himself Pain reentered the SUV and made a phone call, they picked up Luthor and shoved him toward the side of the parking garage. They walked through an open, solid steel door into a disgusting alley. Garbage was piled a meter high against the walls. It smelled strongly of rotting eggs. The occupants of this quarter of the sky-high metropolis appeared to be less diligent about moving their trash to the local transfer stations. Luthor stepped over a pile of refuse blackened with mold and swarming with flies.
They prodded him along a winding trail through the garbage. Men in front and behind him all held sub-machine guns, a good choice for close-quarters, urban warfare. They stopped at a narrow ladder running up the side of the building. It looked to be about 10 stories high. Given the choice between the ladder and being stabbed by a rusty knife, Luthor would take the knife every time.
With a jiggle and a click they unlocked his cuffs. “Climb,” someone said with another jab of a gun. The standard fire escape had been cannibalized for scrap, replaced with this torturous, utilitarian monstrosity of a ladder. Pain and several others went first, climbing the sheer wall to the summit.
Just looking up made Luthor want to vomit.
He continued to stare up at the terrifying thing without moving. The temptation to stop and see if their pokes with guns changed to anything more serious multiplied exponentially. A little death can’t be all that bad, right? At least if I’m dead I won’t have to worry about 126 anymore. As a significant fringe benefit, I won’t have to climb this smogging ladder!
The prodding became a stabbing. “Move. Now!”
“Give the man a minute!” Tanya snapped. Luthor almost started climbing just from her tone—the one that commands male obedience. “He is terrified of heights.”
Luthor winced for more retaliation of some sort, but no gun shots came, no cries of pain. Nothing. Apparently, her voice worked on anyone. Tanya walked up to him and put a hand on his shoulder and another on his waist. “You will be fine,” she said, “just don’t look down.” She squeezed gently and returned to her captors. There was something about the way she said down…
Luthor took a deep breath and put his hand on the bar, then placed his foot on another. Hand
over hand he began the slow terrifying ascent up the side of the old building. His aches faded as fear overwhelmed them. Four steps up, it felt like the ground opened up into a bottomless chasm, trying to suck him in.
A tingling sensation swept through his shaking knees up through the crown of his skull as he climbed. It was like he was being pulled through his fear, inexorably to the top of the sheer ladder. He couldn’t stop. Luthor didn’t know if it was the fear of death, heights, Pain, or Tanya’s voice that compelled him to climb. But step after step he mounted ever higher. The butterflies in his stomach became a flock of seagulls. Still, he didn’t look down. How the hell did I ever jump out of airplanes? Luthor thought.
As if summoned from the past, his government sponsored therapist began speaking in his head in his soothing, if irritating, voice. “You needn’t be frustrated over your fear of heights, Luthor. It is a symptom of your PTSD. You have associated high places with parachuting, which in turn you associate with pain. It will probably take a long time, but you can conquer this too.” Luthor never had managed to kick his fear of heights or his flashbacks. But the association psycho-babble at least made sense. Every scarring, bloody memory from his past had come as a direct result of jumping out of an airplane. So naturally, he now hated and feared heights.
Minutes passed, but Luthor made the impossible climb to the top of the building. He didn’t know what the subtle pull had been to help him continue, but he was thankful for it. Maybe it was God, now feeling sorry for screwing him over in the first place. Luthor quickly rejected that idea, deciding it was the great flying spaghetti monster helping him instead.
He reached over the top rung of the building and stared straight down the barrel of another sub-machine gun. Three meters away from the edge, a black clad man in gelvar stood, indicating with his weapon, that Luthor should move toward the other soldiers. They stood in one corner of the roof. Pain walked around, talking on a phone, seemingly looking for something.
The roof itself was very strange. Not a single plant or fruit tree grew on the roof, nor were there any wind turbines mounted to harvest the high city winds. It was totally flat, paved only with the sturdy new solar panels that they had begun to slap on sidewalks. But that was the least efficient thing to do with a rooftop. All of those photovoltaic panels together wouldn’t approach the energy output of a single windmill, and a typical rooftop could support four. Not only that, wind turbines generated power day and night, while still allowing for space to grow food. Solar panels needed be equipped with expensive battery packs to last the night. The rest of the rooftops in the city were green with gardens and buzzing with the blades of windmills. It just didn’t make any sense why this building didn’t have either. It was so inefficient.
Luthor walked with his captors and noticed he still felt the strange pull upward hadn’t gone away. He put a hand on his shoulder where Tanya had touched him and felt the mushy stick of chewed gum. He pulled it from his shoulder and saw that it was actually two BOGs. She had put them there, altering gravity enough to help him climb more easily. His lower body had literally been pulled up the ladder. He replaced it on his belt with his others. There was another of Tanya’s BOGs on his waist where she had squeezed him. She had only carried three of them to start with. Why did she give all of her 126? If she was just trying to help me climb, she wouldn’t have needed to give me all three. Now I have seven.
Several neurons in Luthor’s brain grew a new connection. She thinks if I have more 126 then I can help us escape. Three or four might not do the trick, but if one of us had all of the 126 then maybe they could do something. Luthor didn’t have a clue what to do with it yet, but felt a determination swell that he couldn’t let her down.
The man Luthor thought of as Pain put down his phone and forced Luthor farther away from the ladder.
“You’ll never get away with this,” Luthor said, “I know you’re with the Sabers. Bringing foreign troops onto American soil is an act of war!”
He laughed, “you really don’t know the first smogging thing about the Sabers do you? These are American troops.”
Luthor had no idea what to make of that. The Sabers were European, but Pain was clearly American. It didn’t make any sense.
Michael finished his climb and was followed by three more guards. There were now nine on the roof. Luthor wanted to find a way to save them, but still didn’t know how on earth he was going to be able to dodge that many different guns. He looked around at different buildings near them, hoping for some escape idea to pop into his brain. The only thing of note was a larger building, opposite the ladder, that loomed another five stories above them. Yellowing corn and windmills covered its roof. Perhaps they could use the 126 to jump to it. He just needed to find an opening.
As Luthor studied the corn-stalks, a red flash hit his eye. He blinked, trying to get rid of it. A moment later another searing red flash blinded him. It took a moment before he found the light’s genesis; it came from the rooftop cornfield. Up there, hidden among the stalks, lay Vika.
She held a laser scope on a long rifle she used to flash him in the eye. The gun was mounted on the edge of the building pointing down at them. Luthor wanted to jump for joy, she hadn’t abandoned them! He shook his head slightly, telling her to wait. It wasn’t time yet. He still needed a plan once the bullets started flying. There were too many of them for her to kill before they were able to shoot back. The other guards had not put handcuffs back on them, but still had guns leveled. They appeared to be waiting for something.
A low, rhythmic thumping grew in the distance. The sound was familiar, but Luthor couldn’t place it. It gradually grew louder like an approaching machine gun, until it deafened them. Then he saw it.
A helicopter.
That was why there was nothing on the roof, this damn thing is a helipad. The helicopter flew in from across the street, blades rending the air. Its large black, military-style body looked like a bloated dragonfly, its stunted wings fitted with missiles and advanced auto-targeting MX-234 mini-guns.
If the Sabers really were chasing them, Europe was sparing no expense. First, they were stopped by gasoline-burning SUVs and now a helicopter. No one flew helicopters. Luthor couldn’t imagine what it would cost to fuel and operate one for a trip, but it was easily more money than he made in a decade.
The helicopter slowed as it prepared to land on the empty roof and Luthor suddenly knew what he needed to do. He had to act fast or it would be too late.
Grabbing all seven BOGs from his belt Luthor mashed them together in his hands. Instantly, the gravity around him increased exponentially. The forces compressed around him in a vice grip more powerful than he ever imagined. Holding the 126 at his waist, his legs buckled, tucking into his torso and he strained with every muscle to keep his head from crunching into his belt. The periphery of his vision blotched into blackness as the prelude to passing out. He struggled to even think. Mental note… seven is. Too many… Luthor palmed the bundle in one hand and chucked it toward the corner of the roof in the direction of the helicopter.
As soon as the 126 left his hand Luthor’s body followed it; the gravity field was so strong that even as it departed, it still had the strength to drag him. He lurched sideways along the ground for 5 meters before it was far enough away that friction with the roof was able to stop him. Everyone else on the roof fell to the ground as the 126 passed them, pulled toward its massive gravity dimple.
The helicopter cleared the edge of the roof and started dropping, hard. The pilot revved the massive motors, pushing them to their limit. But the helicopter couldn’t escape, it was tethered to the 126 as surely as if it were chained down by a steel cable. It tilted, tangent to the sphere of altered gravity. But all its straining and smoking couldn’t keep it aloft. It smashed against the corner of the roof, tail first. The stabilizer crumpled, hydraulic fluid sparking and bursting into flame. The body hit next, impaling the side of the building. Its massive gas tank exploded violently. The rotors kept spinning
, ripping up solar panels and splintering them into the air.
Several of the soldiers were caught between the altered gravity and the explosion, they weren’t getting back up. Others still lay dazed on the ground, the combination of changing elemental forces and their exploding ride, freezing them in place. One got up, swearing and swinging his gun around as if looking for a target. As he rose, a bullet tore through his head, splattering blood everywhere. His body crumpled, lifeless. As he hit the ground, his gelvar vest rippled outward, uselessly absorbing the impact of the fall. Seconds later, another soldier dropped, another round making a gruesome exit wound through the back of his skull.
The men realized they were getting picked off by a sniper and started shooting toward Vika’s roof, suppressing her enough that she couldn’t shoot back. Luthor realized this was his best chance. He dashed toward the burning helicopter, hoping to retrieve the invaluable element that had caused it to crash. Once inside the massive artificial gravity well, he started sliding toward it. It felt like slipping down a steep slide made of solar panels. The gravity was intense. He accelerated with frightening speed. With his hand outstretched he grabbed the 126, which sat innocently in front of the helicopter husk on a mangled solar panel. Doing his best to emulate Vika’s maneuver on the boat, Luthor turned his body as his momentum carried him into the side of the blasted-out cockpit. He managed to absorb the landing with his feet, somewhat surprised he hadn’t broken anything. Luthor’s dimming vision reminded him he still had the enormous wad of 126 in his hand. He managed to peel it apart before he passed out and returned the individual BOGs to their home around his belt. Gravity instantly returned to normal.
With a lurch, the helicopter shifted. No longer held securely to the side of the building by artificial gravity, the Earth resumed its dominance over all matter. With the crunching and squealing of steel on concrete, what was left of the helicopter slid off the crushed corner of the roof to the street below. Luthor imagined screaming pedestrians on the street as their pyrotechnics show turned into a plummeting knot of steel falling on them. He hoped no one was caught in it. Another explosion rattled the building as the helicopter impaled the sidewalk.
Scarcity Page 21