by Sean Platt
Val blinked.
“But I’m not a coward, Val.” Nicolai reached down and twisted the knife in the man’s hand. Val exhaled hard, trying to scream. His eyes watered. “I’m not, and I’m very, very good with this crossbow.” Nicolai shrugged to rattle the bow on his back. “Maybe you remember the time Greggie thought it’d be funny to base my audition for his crew on shooting an apple off of your head. It’s a fun memory we’ll cherish forever. Do you remember, Val?”
Val nodded. Nicolai released the knife handle.
“Maybe you remember how you didn’t flush me out when I met your crew. Maybe you remember how I walked right up to all of you while you were eating lunch. I’d been following you for weeks, trying to decide if you would suit my needs as I made my way north. Do you get the picture, Val?”
Val nodded again.
“I’ll be out the door before you can get your hand unpinned. It wouldn’t be smart to chase me. Get free then announce your kill however you’d like. If you want to cover your story and not make yourself look like a liar, wrap your hand first and tell the others that Greggie got in a stab before dying. When everyone’s awake, tell them you’re taking the crew south, out of the city. Amsterdam was a bust. You’re heading into Germany. You will not wait. You will not go on your errand tomorrow morning, as discussed around tonight’s fire. If you decide to ignore my advice and go on your little raping party as planned, I will be watching. You will not see me, but my sights will be trained on you. Not Will, not Perry. You. If you have any question about whether or not I can put a bolt through your eye before you see it coming, I’ll prove your doubt unfounded. Are we on the same page?”
Val nodded again. Nicolai looked toward the door, toward the forest of sleeping men, then toward their leader’s body, a knife hilt visible at the back of his neck. Val was sensible, not brave. He’d do as Nicolai said. There were other stores to raid, other women to rape. In time, Will or one of the other alphas might see the ruse and take the reins from Val, but dust took time to settle. Until then, they’d do as their new leader said.
Nicolai looked toward the knife pinning Val’s hand to the floor. In one swift motion, he slammed it hard with his palm, embedding it another half inch into the wood. Val tried to scream, but the socks in his mouth ate what the room’s loud snores didn’t.
“I’ll be watching,” said Nicolai. Then he turned and ran, quietly, choosing his steps like an animal, and was out the door in seconds.
He wouldn’t be watching, but Val would think that he might be and would follow his orders.
As for Nicolai, he had places to go.
Nicolai left Amsterdam on foot, feeling the target on his back. His old crew was far from the only one in the city. Before the last of the networks had died, the RadioFi bulletins had been alive with rumors that Amsterdam’s airstrip was still active and ferrying motivated groups not just out of the area, but possibly out of the country. Like most rumors in desperate times, that one had turned out to be a total fabrication, but dozens of groups had homed in on its scent anyway. As they’d arrived, Amsterdam had become a perilous game of King of the Hill, with hoards of men killing for their chance at the brass ring.
Fortunately, the few groups Nicolai passed on his way out (hiding and seeking, staying low) were distracted enough by their pursuits that he was able to stay out of their way. Traveling alone, if he was caught, was extremely dangerous. The Netherlands, like pretty much every area Nicolai had caught wind of on the old network (and today through the rumor mill) hadn’t produced new supplies for at least five years, maybe more. There were no factories building automobiles or baking bread. There were no running sewage treatment plants or functioning city water lines. Much of Europe still ran on hybrid engines, but the gasoline had mostly gone bad. Batteries of all sizes, for use in all of the appliances no longer being built, were like gold. Crews had developed a predictable reaction to wandering singletons: they saw them as mobile refueling depots, rich with desperately needed provisions, and they never hesitated to take what they felt providence had offered.
Nicolai was carrying decent supplies in his pack, but his crossbow was the grand prize that greedy comers would want. Guns were as rare as batteries, and bullets were even rarer. That made a projectile weapon with reusable ammo immeasurably better than gold. So Nicolai hid, knowing that despite his boasts to Val, he could never take on a crew. Sure, he could pick people off from a distance one at a time but never quickly and never in numbers greater than a few. If a crew saw him and came running, he’d be sunk.
But once he made it out of the city, things became easier. Without buildings in his way, Nicolai could see farther around him. He moved slowly, watching for approaching groups and vehicles, staying out of obvious sight. He had a tough journey ahead, yes, but he’d made it this far. He could make the English Channel — and if not, he could die trying. Nicolai was tired of this life. The world’s barbarians had adapted to it, but he never truly had. He’d been a chameleon, adopting their behavior and speech in pursuit of the trust, support, and protection required for survival, but deep down he’d never really stopped being the quiet, thoughtful boy in a classroom from a forever before the chaos, eyes and hair dark, giving life to the stereotype of the brooding individualist. The artist. The man who’d grow up tall, dark, and handsome. The kind of man that people would whisper about, wondering what gave breath to his soul. The kind of man about whom people would say, “Still waters run deep.”
Nicolai was tired of killing. He was tired of being afraid then hiding his fear. He was tired of setting morality aside for survival. This latest wasn’t the first rape raid he’d ruined, and he didn’t have a perfect record of stopping bad things from happening by a long shot. He’d seen plenty, and he’d done plenty. The blood on his hands would, he thought, haunt him forever. He couldn’t take much more. If he was taken down by a Rake Squad on his way to the Channel, so be it. If he had to starve, so be it. He wasn’t meant to be a barbarian. He was meant to be something else. Something more.
He found a car that looked like it might be able to take him a few hundred miles if he could find gas or power (highly unlikely, but he’d been lucky before) and crouched behind it to fish his battered Doodad from his pack. He’d found the thing over two years ago. At first, he’d assumed it was dead (there was no way anymore to charge them, after all), but it had sparked to life the moment he’d touched the power button. A full year later, the device still worked. Nicolai tried to conserve its power because it couldn’t last forever, but although he only used it for seconds at a time, it should still have died long ago. And yet it hadn’t.
The screen lit, and Nicolai exhaled. Looking down, he said, “Thank God, you magic little box, you.”
Even before the descent of chaos, maps had been hard to find. Who needed maps when everyone had a handheld? Nowadays, maps were nearly extinct, carried away by the stores’ first raiders seven or eight years before. For the past two years, stored maps inside his should-be-dead Doodad had acted as Nicolai’s compass. He wasn’t even sure how it was possible (satellites were surely still up in space, but didn’t the device need to communicate with repeaters on the ground that no longer had power?), but all that mattered was that it somehow worked. The maps told him what roads lay ahead, along with his own position on them. Some of the Doodad’s other geolocation features worked, too. There were no weather reports to speak of, but Cloudview, from the moon’s scopes, still worked fine. When views from above (Moon? Satellites?) were decent, Nicolai was even able to see camps belonging to various crews on his path ahead. Before meeting Greggie’s gang, the Doodad had shown him which areas to avoid, which roads were snarled with dead traffic, and the rare areas that had somehow wrangled generators or fuel cells to power a few lights scattered through rudimentary settlements.
After getting his bearings, Nicolai slipped into the car. The tires, new enough to be Permaflate, were full and fat. The frame and panels must have been partially steel because they were somewhat rust
ed, but the engine was really all that mattered. The keys were in the ignition, and that made sense, too. In the first waves, many people had fled in cars. They’d driven them dry until they ran out of gas (for hybrids) or battery (for NextGen electric). With barbarian hoards converging on the stalled, useless vehicles to claim what the stranded motorists carried with them, few people took time to pocket their keys.
The presence of keys in this one, then, meant the car’s tank or battery was drained.
Still, superstitiously, Nicolai turned the key. Shockingly, the engine tried to turn. He’d seen this before and had always attributed it to a dormant charge “re-accumulating” after being given a rest. It wasn’t scientific, and Nicolai had no idea if that’s what was happening, but he did know that most of the cars he tried would at least sputter and cough. Few were truly dead. But maybe he’d gotten lucky. Stranger things had certainly happened.
He turned the key again.
Crank.
Crank.
A bang, a cough, then nothing.
Nicolai took his hand off the key. He wished he knew something — anything — about engines. Did this model run on hybrid fuel? Was it electric? In Amalfi, where everyone was rich, he’d seen quite a few of the new solar jobs before the Fall, but he thought even those used electric on cloudy days.
“Come on, you piece of shit,” Nicolai whispered. By cranking the engine, he’d played his hand. If there were any crews in the area, the noise had raised a white flag to summon them. No one tried to start stalled cars. Crews often had their own vehicles, rigged and maintained, but the roads’ hulks were generally worthless. The engine noises that had just come from Amsterdam’s outskirts were ringing a dinner bell, urging those with bigger numbers and better weapons to come ‘n’ get it.
Sure enough, Nicolai saw movement in the rearview. He instinctively reached toward his crossbow on the passenger seat, but there was no point. When he turned his head to look properly around, he saw at least a dozen men emerging from a quiet little house across a field. They weren’t meandering slowly; they were in full-out sprints. His crossbow had six bolts, and Nicolai could only fire so fast. He could run, but there was nowhere to go.
And…there was something else in the background. He paused and listened, his heart in his throat. Yes. He could hear a gyro’s hum. Looking back as he tried again to key the engine, he could even see it. The apocalypse had made people resourceful. For years before the collapse, scientists had been talking about using gyroscopes to power vehicles, but it never worked out. Once the gas had gone bad and the world’s fuel cells and batteries had emptied, the smartest of the crews had figured it out. And now here they came — not just one, but two. Moving fast and low like ancient go-karts.
He had thirty seconds, no more.
“Come on…”
Nicolai turned the key. The engine tried to fire and stuttered. Everyone knew a dead car wouldn’t start. There was a reason it had stalled, with the keys in the ignition. If the car had failed its previous owner, why would it work for the man about to be massacred by a raiding party?
“Come on, you whore!”
There was nothing to power the vehicle. No batteries. No good fuel. Nothing. There was none of that left in the world; that’s why the crews built gyros. Just like how there were no working handhelds or Doodads or satellite maps.
One of the low, tube-frame gyro carts skidded in front of Nicolai’s car as the running men gained from behind. Nicolai no longer even felt his fingers on the key; he’d forgotten that particular futile sensation. He barely noticed when the dashboard lit and the stereo blared in the middle of the music file it had paused on seven years earlier. He barely felt it as the engine roared to life, chugging stale gasoline and firing dead fuel cells. When he did feel it, the sudden illumination and noise shocked him so much that his arm hit the gearshift, and the car began to roll forward. From his perspective, the gyro in front of the vehicle moved lower and out of sight. But that wasn’t what was happening. The car was rolling forward. The last thing Nicolai saw on the driver’s face as it vanished below his windshield was shock. There was a crunch, and the forward momentum stopped as the wheels wedged against something.
A fusillade of blows struck the car’s trunk. Nicolai’s head swiveled, still shocked. It was the hoard, with clubs and machetes, coming up to the car’s doors.
Nicolai slammed his foot onto the gas. At first, he didn’t understand why the running engine didn’t move him forward, but then he heard the screaming from beneath his wheels and remembered. The car, on its Permaflate tires, was surprisingly agile and powerful. He felt bones crack through the frame, felt the gyro’s tube frame flatten and crumple. Then the car was free, rolling forward, the mob behind gathered around an object of fused metal and flesh, mouths agape.
Nicolai’s foot found the floor. His hands held the wheel, steering the impervious tires over long-unused roads. He remembered the long-forgotten habit of driving. It had been a while. He hadn’t been behind the wheel for three years, since the last time he’d managed to start a dead vehicle.
Once clear, he turned on his Doodad. There was even a mobile charger in the car, so Nicolai plugged it in to give his immortal device some needed juice. Feeling as if it were still 2027 with his hands clinging to the wheel of a ghost, Nicolai lost himself and spoke his command aloud, forgetting that the network required to process the command was offline and that the Doodad, while functional, was now a self-contained brick that for some reason could still speak to GPS satellites.
“Navigate to English Channel,” he said.
Then he stopped, embarrassed, realizing his gaffe.
But in the silence, the Doodad’s soft, computerized voice began to speak.
“Three hundred and forty-eight kilometers to destination,” it told him. “Continue southwest on Oudezijds Achterburgwal toward Grimburgwal.”
The door opened. Micah looked into Nicolai’s eyes and immediately decided that his brother’s former speechwriter looked guilty, nervous, or both.
“What’s up, Nicolai?” he said.
“Hi, Micah.”
Micah pushed his way past Nicolai and into the apartment without invitation. The place was large and open. Ignoring Nicolai, Micah took his time to look it over slowly, absorbing the details. Expansive wood floor with a few fine rugs, wide sill along the windows at the top of two steps running the wall’s length, a black grand piano with its top propped open. A stylish apartment. Micah approved. It had the kind of look that Isaac would try and fail to create for himself. Isaac understood luxury’s props, but had no intuitive feel for any of them. Isaac was the kind of man who’d pay 5,000 credits for a fine sweater and then wear it backward. Nicolai’s taste looked like it had been born from wealth. Which, of course, it had been.
“I wasn’t greeting you,” said Micah. “I was asking what was up.”
Nicolai looked up.
Micah watched him then slowly shook his head. “Now I’m wondering what you’re hiding.”
“Nothing.”
Nicolai had denied it, but his eyes had flicked toward his bedroom’s mostly closed door.
Micah followed his eyes. “You have a girl here?”
“No.”
“A guy?”
Nicolai didn’t answer.
“Look, whatever,” said Micah. “Can we have a chat?”
Again, Nicolai’s eyes flicked toward the bedroom. “It’s not really a good time.”
“Because your canvas is out?”
“What?”
“But of course, it’s not out,” said Micah, looking around. “It’s off. The front door worked fine, but I couldn’t ping up. I tried to reach you on my ride over, and it showed you as offline. It’s all very interesting to me. Not many people don’t want to be connected 24/7.”
Nicolai looked decidedly uncomfortable. He muttered something that Micah didn’t catch.
Micah settled into a large, squarish, black leather chair in the lower part of Nicolai’s living
room. He crossed one leg over another then picked at a piece of lint on his pant leg. That was the problem with wealth these days. Suits made of natural fibers didn’t repel dust, and the hoity-toity fashion people claimed that nano sprays like EverClean ruined them. Micah thought it sounded like bullshit, but picking lint off of a pant leg had its appeal. It was a unique way of saying, “Fuck you. I’m making myself comfortable; deal with it.”
Nicolai tried on an awkward smile. He made no motion to settle in and join Micah in sitting. His body language suggested that Micah wouldn’t be staying long. Fortunately, Micah’s own body didn’t give a shit what Nicolai’s body had to say.
“Isolation and quiet is underappreciated,” said Nicolai.
“Indeed.” Micah picked off another piece of lint then looked up with his brown-silver eyes. “So, Nicolai. What are you hiding from?”
“Sorry?”
With the single word, Nicolai voiced the slightest of stammers. Micah wished the apartment’s connectivity was still on. If it was, he could cue his worm without alerting Nicolai, thus getting Beam AI to parse the data streaming through his intuitive sensors. It would give him a built-in lie detector. The add-on stimulated Micah’s brain into comfort when the AI intuited that the other party was being truthful and created discomfort when something was being concealed. It had taken Micah time to get used to the add-on and differentiate its signals from his own native feelings, but in time he’d seen that the add-on’s inputs felt counterfeit enough to be discernible. Even with emotions, a trained mind could tell the real thing from a forgery.
“You turned off your canvas,” said Micah. “It’s a building system. I don’t even know how you’d go about turning it off. It would require an excellent workaround. My building is wired the same way. They sold it as a feature. If my canvas glitches, the larger system knows. And on the other hand, here’s your canvas: off in the middle of a perfectly functional building. You’re in an isolated, dead-air capsule surrounded by soundproofed walls. If I were hiding from something — or perhaps hiding something — I might employ a hack like this.”
