by Gary Gibson
She saw the tiniest glint of surprise as if she’d caught him red-handed. It wasn’t much, but for Dutch, it was enough. She took out the pistol she’d secreted within her jacket before getting out of the car and shot him at point-blank range.
Nat stumbled backwards, then fell onto his back, one hand clutching at his shoulder. Blood seeped out across his shirt under the jacket.
‘What the fuck?’ he shouted, staring up at her. ‘You shot me?’
She kept the gun trained on him. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s not a fatal wound. Not yet, anyway. Now tell me how long you’ve been working for Muto.’
His expression became incredulous. ‘What?’
‘I want to hear you say it.’ She fought to keep her aim steady. ‘I didn’t forget how you insisted we check the car a second time right after we landed on Teijouan. I figure you put a nick in that hose in case I got suspicious of you. You wanted me to think someone else was gunning for me.’
Nat licked his lips. ‘Listen, Dutch. This is the d-field, not you. We’ll get to the end of the race, and we’ll talk all this out over some beers. Okay? There’s no need to point that thing at me.’
‘I’ll make a deal,’ she said. ‘If you tell me right now you’re carrying one of Muto’s death notices, I’ll let you live as long as you show it to me. I’ll even let you ride back with me, although you’ll be bound and gagged the whole damn way. But lie to me…’
He didn’t answer, and she stepped towards him, pushing the pistol’s barrel against his temple.
‘Okay, okay!’ He shouted. ‘In one of my boots. The left one.’
Of course. She waited while he unlaced his boot and kicked it off, his face twisted up with pain from his shoulder wound. Dutch picked it up and found a crumpled red envelope inside.
‘I want to know how you wound up working for Muto,’ she asked him, holding the envelope up where he could see it.
He sighed. ‘It’s not that simple. Once he knew Wu had stolen the maps from him, Strugatsky blackmailed me into bringing the rods to him instead of Wu.’
‘Blackmail? What did he have over you?’
Nat made a sound that might have been a laugh or a grunt of pain—or maybe both. ‘I might have embezzled some of Wu’s money over the years.’
‘And killing me on Muto’s behalf was, what? A sideline?’
‘Not exactly.’ Nat’s skin had grown paler, his eyes unfocused. Shock from the bullet-wound, she figured. ‘I didn’t even know there was any kind of animosity between you and Muto until that asshole tried to kill you in Tokyo.’
‘I could see you recognised Muto’s name back then,’ said Dutch. ‘Very few people know about her. So how did you?’
‘Strugatsky hired Muto to find out who stole his maps.’
She nodded. ‘So Elektron was telling the truth.’
‘Sure. But I’d never met her before. After you killed the ninja and you mentioned Muto, I decided to go see her—’
‘When?’ Dutch demanded.
‘Right after you stole the car and drove us back to the hotel. I needed her to call off the dogs. We were both working for Strugatsky, so I figured she’d listen to me.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Dutch. ‘You told her you needed me alive long enough to get you to the Rift.’
‘Yes. Can I please have the first-aid kit?’
‘No.’ The temptation to just kill him then and there was nearly overwhelming. ‘So how does Elektron fit into all this?’
‘He doesn’t. Finding out he’d been hired by Muto took me by surprise just as much as you. I thought she’d agreed to hold off until after we located the missing expedition.’
It was all starting to make sense now the more she thought it through. ‘Here’s what I think happened,’ Dutch snarled. ‘Muto didn’t agree to call off the dogs, she offered to pay you to kill me instead as soon as I stopped being useful. Except that she didn’t trust you, so she also paid Elektron to kill both of us. She figured one of you would stay alive long enough to grab the superconductors and bring them back. But no way was she going to let either Wu or Strugatsky get hold of them.’
Nat stared at her. He looked paler now, his breaths more laboured. ‘You’re saying—?’
‘If I know Muto,’ said Dutch, ‘she was out to steal those superconductors for herself the moment she found out they existed.’ She peered at him. ‘The only thing I can’t figure out is how you were going to double-cross Wu if Harry had been my navigator.’
‘I knew I’d have to find a way to make sure I took Harry’s place,’ said Nat. ‘You fixed that for me just fine.’ He nodded at the gun in Dutch’s hand, his expression feverish. ‘So are you going to let me back up or not?’
Dutch fought back a rush of sour phlegm. ‘Damn you to hell.’ How long did you mean to wait before you killed me? She wondered. Until we were almost in sight of the Security Zone? Or before that?
Dutch pictured Nat dropping the death notice on her corpse and snapping a picture of it with the Polaroid as evidence for Muto, and felt her finger tighten on the trigger.
Then she saw Nat’s eyes grow wide, as if he’d caught sight of something behind her. A shadow fell across them, and Dutch turned to see a monstrous shape had risen from out of the Rift. The highway she’d glimpsed was gone, replaced by a hellish vision of unfamiliar stars above a barren and lifeless landscape.
The sun raced across the sky, day to night and back again in seconds, and by the time the sky had stopped strobing the Kaiju had crossed over. It reared up to its full height, the ground shaking as it took its first, tentative step into its new home.
She remembered about Nat too late. He threw himself on her, one arm tight under her chin and his free hand reaching for her eyes. She tried to twist away, panicking because she knew he meant to blind her.
The Kaiju let out a roar like a thousand years of thunder and death all compressed into one terrible moment. Rocks and gravel came tumbling down the slope of the hill above the road, almost hitting them and spraying them with gravel.
Dutch took the chance to twist free. Nat ran towards the Coupé, stumbling from side to side as he did so and leaving a crimson trail.
The Kaiju took another lumbering step towards them. Dutch chased after Nat, knowing she had at best moments before the beast killed them both.
She beat him to the Coupé, but he yanked the door open before she could reach for the ignition. She punched him hard, then slammed the door against him, sending him reeling like a drunkard. He took a faltering step backwards and collapsed.
Dutch pumped the gas hard with one foot until the ignition caught. She could see the Kaiju reaching down towards her, flame flickering deep within its gaping jaws…
The tyres span and caught the tarmac. She drove past the Kaiju, the night turning bright as flames came bursting from between its jaws. She urged the Coupé to go faster, leaning over the wheel like a jockey urging a horse towards its final hurdle.
From far behind, she thought she heard the sound of screaming.
The beast faded into the distance, but she didn’t slow down, taking hairpin turns at speeds that would have terrified her if she’d let herself think about it. She kept going until she saw the first glimmer of the sea off to the East, then pulled over onto the side of the road to lean her head against the wheel, deep sobs racking her until she felt drained of all fear. Then she reached over to the glove compartment and pulled out the navigator’s maps.
* * *
From there the road wound down towards the coast like a black tar snake, looping over hills and around small mountains until the terrain became more level. The d-field began to assert itself again, but not so much she couldn’t still navigate.
At one point she saw Nat standing beneath the shade of a banyan tree, lurching towards her with pain in his eyes and blood pouring from his shoulder wound. She floored the gas and caught a glimpse of the shapeshifter’s outline flowing and changing in the rearview mirror. Then she came to the coast and parked in the shade
of some trees, watching from a safe distance as a Spine-back lumbered through lush jungle, trees shaking and splintering as it brushed past them.
To her astonishment, she was the first to arrive at the second rendezvous. The supply crates were still tangled up in parachutes that billowed across a yellow sandy beach.
Right then, Dutch realised she could win the race. She stared out to sea for a minute, watching the waves roll up to the shore and letting the thought wash through her. Then she hunted around until she found a crowbar duct-taped to a crate, and before long she had spare fuel, more bottles of water and a box of protein bars.
* * *
The hours that followed passed in a blur. She kept the gas pedal low to the floor. A storm had raged across the eastern coast of Teijouan, sweeping smaller debris off the highways and leaving them clearer than usual. The terrain on the East Coast was less mountainous, and hence much easier to negotiate.
A Venomosaurus chased her for a while a hundred kilometres from the finishing line, and she lost a fender before she found a place to hide out deep in a maze of alleys. That lost her most of an hour, but she could feel in her bones that she remained in the lead.
Then, at long last, she saw the steel fence of the Security Zone up ahead, sunlight glinting from the lenses of news cameras peeking over the top. Deep gouges in the soil suggested some shelling had been necessary in order to dissuade an inquisitive Kaiju from coming any closer. The gate rolled up at her approach, and she crossed into the Security Zone, trailed by a fanfare of recorded trumpets and cheers.
She got out, tired and bloody and dusty, and raised both arms in triumph before turning to pat the Coupé’s hood, like an old and faithful dog. Technicians came running up, yanking open the boot and lifting out the canisters of film stored there. They also pulled the film from the Coupé’s rear and front-mounted cameras, hurrying down to the shore to where idling motorboats waited.
I’m not quite finished with you, she thought, her fingers stroking the Coupé’s steel flanks.
‘And it’s a fantastic end to this year’s Devil Run!’ Wayne Wilson bellowed into his microphone. ‘Coming first for the first time in her life, days after being released from prison, it’s Dutch McGuire in a sensational, record-breaking win! After she disappeared past Shinchiku, we all figured Dutch had gone to the great racecourse in the sky, right up until her miraculous reappearance several hundred kilometres further along the race route. I don’t know if anyone’s ever going to be able to beat a time like that!’
Dutch blinked as a galaxy of lights snapped and popped all around. Wilson appeared before her, his bleached hair arranged in a coif that balanced atop his head as if in defiance of gravity, a microphone gripped in one fist.
‘Dutch,’ he said, grabbing her hand and pumping it up and down, ‘congratulations! You’ve broken every record going, and you’re at least thirteen hours ahead of the other surviving competitors—the fastest time ever recorded in the Devil’s Run and one most people might even call impossible. You disappeared from the race for the longest time—what happened?’
He pushed the microphone toward her. She blinked at it, feeling dazed. ‘I found a shortcut.’
‘A—’ For a moment, Wilson appeared almost lost for words. ‘A shortcut? Am I hearing you right, Dutch—that there’s a way across the island, despite the Rift and the d-field?’
‘Yeah.’ She found it hard to think, with all the reporters shouting questions at her.
Then she remembered something.
‘One second,’ she said, leaning back into the car and snatching up the map. Then she opened the boot and lifted out the sack of grey superconductor rods, hoisting it over her shoulder. Finally she looked around until she could see Adam Figueroa and his fellow protestors and made her way over to them.
Wilson followed in her wake, trailed by cameramen. ‘How did you find this shortcut, Dutch?’ Wilson yelled into his microphone. ‘Isn’t this incredible, ladies and gentlemen? I never in a million years thought I’d see a day like this. Did you see the Rift? How did you survive the d-field? What did it—hey, Dutch!’
Figueroa stood behind a wooden barrier manned by several soldiers keeping him and the protestors at bay. He watched in amazement as Dutch skirted around the barrier before dropping the sack at his feet.
Figueroa stared at the sack, then at Dutch, a megaphone clutched in his hand. ‘What is this?’
‘Something that Strugatsky and Wu want very much,’ she said. ‘I’d look after it if I were you. I figure it’s worth a couple of billion dollars.’
Figueroa leaned down and opened the sack looking inside. ‘I don’t understand. What is this?’
‘All I know is Wu and Strugatsky think it’s worth killing for. Here.’ She pushed the map into his hands. ‘This tells you where to find more. It’s a safe route across the island.’
Figueroa’s expression shifted from confusion to something more subtle and cunning. ‘Why are you doing this, Miss McGuire?’
‘Someone’s got to look out for Teijouan, right?’
Then she turned on her heel without another word and walked back the way she’d come.
The reporters were still shouting questions at her, and cameras still snapped and clicked, but they were getting less vocal as they realised they weren’t going to get anything out of her. Wilson watched, perplexed, as she slid behind the wheel of the Coupé.
‘Where are you going, Dutch?’ Wilson demanded, pushing his microphone in the open window of her car. ‘The race is over!’
She reached out and snatched the microphone from his hand. ‘Listen up, assholes,’ she shouted, her own voice reverberating back at her, ‘some things are too important to leave in the hands of people whose sole defining quality is the size of their bank account. Like, I don’t know, the fate of the world, maybe, or something that could revolutionise science or, or…whatever. Anyway, I figure that kind of shit belongs to all of us.’
She dropped the microphone into the dirt at Wilson’s feet and it sent up a yowl of feedback. She reached out and adjusted her mirror until she could see Figueroa and his fellow protestors running down the beach to a waiting Zodiac, hauling the sack between them.
The engine caught on the first try, and she reached for the clutch. ‘Hey!’ yelled Wilson, snatching the microphone back up. ‘Where the hell are you going, Dutch?’
She flashed him a brilliant smile. ‘Home,’ she said, then took off back the way she’d come in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
By luck, they hadn’t got around to lowering the gate again.
* * *
A couple of hours later, heading north on the East Coast road, she passed the Countess, her car’s chassis torn as if it had been raked by huge claws. Dutch, while speeding past in the opposite direction, had a brief glimpse of König gaping open-mouthed. Not long after, she found her way back inland, the d-meter a steady safe blue the whole way.
Sometime in the early evening she at last saw the flickering lights of the Rift. She drove down into the valley, and watched as the shimmering light shifted and changed, once again becoming a long stretch of highway beneath a calm and moonlit night. Like it had been waiting for her.
Maybe it had, she thought. One way or the other, she’d find out. She kept driving towards where she’d seen the ruins of the facility, but by the time she got there it had vanished. So had Teijouan: the Coupé sat on a desert road, a tall sandstone butte visible in the distance. Somewhere beyond the horizon the lights of a city radiated a faint glow.
There’d be others following behind her. Of that, Dutch felt sure. Maybe some few of them might find their way to this very same road, the one out of all those millions the Rift had brought her to. She checked the fuel gauge: she still had a little gas. Not much, but she had faith that somewhere up ahead she’d find an open garage with tools and gas and maybe even a beer.
She wound down the window and drove towards the dawn, letting the breeze catch her hair.
About the Author
&
nbsp; Gary Gibson is one of the UK’s leading authors of hard science fiction with a career stretching over sixteen years and thirteen books, including STEALING LIGHT, FINAL DAYS and EXTINCTION GAME. His work has been translated and published around the world, including Russia, Brazil, Germany, and France.
For updates and notifications of new releases, visit his website at www.garygibson.net or follow him on Facebook or Twitter.
To get a free novelette, OUR LADY OF HOLY DEATH, available only to mailing list subscribers and set in the world of Devil’s Road, click here: https://eepurl.com/b1ma4L.
Standalone books:
ANGEL STATIONS (2004)
AGAINST GRAVITY (2005)
GHOST FREQUENCIES (2018)
DEVILS ROAD (2020)
Shoal Sequence:
STEALING LIGHT (2007)
NOVA WAR (2009)
EMPIRE OF LIGHT (2010)
MARAUDER (2013)
Final Days Duology:
FINAL DAYS (2011)
THE THOUSAND EMPERORS (2012)
Apocalypse Trilogy:
EXTINCTION GAME (2014)
SURVIVAL GAME (2016)
DOOMSDAY GAME (2019)
Story Collections:
Scienceville & Other Lost Worlds (2018)
Table of Contents
Jail Break
Death Notice
Signature Move
Island of Death
Guns, Cars and Kaiju
Sidekick Du Jour
To The Rift
Endless Highway
About the Author