by Reed King
Go.
I launched myself to my feet and dove behind another shipping container as a cross-exam of bullet rounds stuttered the air. I was all movement, all instinct and reflex—like I was back in WorldBurn: Apocalypse, Level 2, following a target, seeing it on my portal screen, the bright-white Clue button that helped you navigate levels as a beginner, showing you exactly where to go. Dodging, rolling, ducking, I worked toward the runway, sometimes easing off, sometimes charging forward, trying to keep them guessing.
Then a tufted snout poked out from behind a dumpster and bared its teeth at me.
“While sympathetic to the mathematical limitation of your legs”—Barnaby’s voice reached me even over the deafening thresh of weaponized sound waves—“I wish you would move a little faster.”
My throat was burning, whether from the urge to cry or the chemical mist the planes were loosing, I didn’t know. I really had been following a white spot: all along, Barnaby had been dancing ahead of me, leaping and climbing and rolling as only a goat could.
I threw my hands above my head and ran. The shots came this time from everywhere—it was a free-for-all kill spree now. I saw a brilliant flash of green and blue and was shocked to realize how close we were to the bay, how near Barnaby had wound us to escape. About fifty yards still separated me from the runway, and the single plane standing there, proud and beautiful, just begging to take off.
“Barnaby.” I threw myself on him and hugged his furry neck, inhaling the warmth of his smell. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought I told you to run.”
“I’m a goat, not a trained rat,” he snapped. “Besides, when I heard what Tiny Tim was planning…”
Tiny Tim. The guilt nearly suffocated me. All along, I’d been a walking beacon for Rafikov’s military, and we’d left Tim without a word. “You saw Tiny Tim? Is he okay?”
“He’s fine,” Barnaby said. “He tracked me down quite easily. I’ve been shedding more than usual—the stress, you know—and he simply followed the fur.” Then: “I’m beginning to think he’s not quite as stupid as he pretends.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
Barnaby’s narrow eyes swept me up and down. “You, on the other hand, might be quite a bit more stupid,” he snapped. “Where do you think he is?”
Before I could answer, an enormous explosion dropped us both. A funnel of colored flame scorched the night sky, downing two planes and flinging an arm of trash and metal half a mile in every direction. I pinned Barnaby to me and threw my hands over my head again as a rain of glass and shrapnel pelted us, hard. Rafikov must of blown up the chemical storage: an eerie green cloud made every breath feel like sucking a gas pipe, and my eyes were stinging.
“Listen, Truckee,” Barnaby said. “You need to get onto that plane. It’s fueled up and ready to go, and it’s your only chance.”
“My only chance?” I said.
“Our only chance,” he said quickly. “I think if you run for it, you’ll be okay.”
“We won’t make it,” I said. “There’s a hundred yards and not a spot of cover. And there’s guards posted there who’ll crack me before I make it half the distance.”
“There’s one guard,” Barnaby said. “I’ll take care of him.”
“How?” I asked him, even as yet more shots rattled the metal walls around us. It was like taking cover behind a tonsil while an opera singer reached for the high notes.
“By asking him to teach me the samba,” Barnaby snapped. “How do you think? I’ll distract him.”
“But how?” I insisted. The next round was close enough to send a bullet ricocheting directly above my head, only a few inches from my left ear.
“Mon dieu, l’impossible!” Barnaby shoved his snout directly in my face, pinning me backward. “Listen, Truckee. Although in general I try and encourage intellectual curiosity and the desire for personal betterment, now is not the time to explain the diversionary tactics of the great Ardant du Picq, nor would you understand them even if I did.” His nostrils were trembling with fury. He actually looked terrifying—great and powerful and terrifying. I could understand, in that moment, why the Devils had welcomed him as the incarnation of Satan. I half-expected smoke to blow from his nostrils. “I have a plan, and my plan is for you to get to that plane and let me worry about the rest. Now move.”
And before I could say anything else, he burst into the open, flashing quickly out of view as a storm of gunfire threshed the air into sound and smoke.
I didn’t think. I just ran. I threw myself into the open like I was leaping off a cliff; I kept my eyes on the plane, shadowy behind the mist of smoke, and ran as fast as I could, throat burning, eyes leaking tears, not a body but a heartbeat, a huge heartbeat bursting to live, live, live. I heard, “This way! This way!” and a constant explosion of gunfire and someone, a guard, screaming, but I was too afraid to look, too afraid that if I even turned my head I’d see a bullet about to cleave my brain in two.
Fifty feet left, then forty, then thirty … and still I was alive, my muscles were beneath my bones and my blood was beneath my muscles. I was almost there.
Finally, as the shadow of the wings spread over me, I turned around to make sure Barnaby was behind me.
Just in time to watch a bullet crack one of Barnaby’s horns in two. For a second, he disappeared.
And when I saw him again, I realized with a horrible, plunging feeling that he was running in the wrong direction.
He was leading them away from the plane.
Leading them away from me.
And the guard had a perfect shot.
“No!” I shouted before I could stop myself. I was sprinting toward him, waving my hands, weaponless and not even caring. “No! Barnaby! Don’t! Don’t!”
He turned. His eyes were alive with something like fear, and then anger. And in that second the guard spotted me and swung his gun in my direction, and I watched the recoil shudder through his body as he pulled the trigger.
At the same time, Barnaby leapt.
He leapt straight into the air, and for a second he seemed to me frozen there, pinned against the sky. Then I saw the impact of the bullet shock his body, saw his face tighten with pain and his mouth open as though to say Oh.
And he dropped.
And I was screaming.
I was screaming so loudly I could hear nothing above the scream. Something came toward me, spinning across the asphalt, and I barely noticed it was a gun before it was in my hand.
Before the guard could take aim I was firing at him, one, two, three, four, five times, blowing him backward and screaming my throat raw, so angry I couldn’t even see.
I had Barnaby in my arms and I was still firing, even though the guards were nowhere: they had taken cover or crawled away to die and I didn’t care which.
“Truckee.” Barnaby’s eyes were closed. I could feel his heartbeat, fragile and wild, against mine. I could feel his blood seeping into my shirt. “You shouldn’t have done that.”
“You’re okay now,” I said. “You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”
He sighed. His breath was warm against my arm. “I’m dying,” he said, and even then a cough shuddered through him and blood bubbled from his nose.
“Jesus, Barnaby.” We’d reached the shadow of the plane and I ducked beneath the safety of its undercarriage and gently set him down. His fur was already matted with blood, and when I pressed my hand to the wound to try to stop the bleeding, I could feel the pulse of his life flowing through my fingers. “They hit you bad. But you’re going to be okay. We’re going to get you out of here.” I was choking on my own snot, trying hard not to cry.
He closed his eyes. For a long time he said nothing, and I felt the pulse begin to stutter.
“Barnaby,” I said, giving him a little shake. “Barnaby, stay with me. Come on, Barnaby.”
A little sigh worked through him. “You see? I wasn’t afraid after all. I wasn’t afraid to die. Not when it mattered.”
“You’re not going to die, buddy,” I said, but my voice broke and I couldn’t stop the tears. “Not on my watch.”
Barnaby’s ears twitched. He was quiet again. “I never told you about the end of my memoir,” he said finally, in a vague, sleepy voice.
“That’s right, you didn’t.” I wanted to take my shirt off, to make a tourniquet, but was afraid to remove my hand even for an instant. Whenever I did, the blood overwhelmed me. So I stayed there, pressing my friend’s blood back into his body, trying to hold his breath inside him, trying from the force of my fingertips to keep his soul, his brave soul, bound in his fragile body.
“Chapter ten,” Barnaby said without opening his eyes. “Chapter ten is where it all comes together…” But he lapsed into silence.
“Tell me.” He didn’t respond, and I found myself shaking him. “Tell me, goddammit.”
A flicker of his eyelids. “Chapter ten … there was some danger of a strictly commercial read, of course, but I am an essential optimist.…”
His voice was fading. I bent my head to the scruff of his neck. “Please,” I said. “Stay with me.”
He opened his eyes slowly, as if it was a great effort. “Hope, Truckee. The essential factor. The missing link.” He coughed and more blood stained his teeth and came out his nose. I wiped it for him, crying freely now, not even bothering to hide it. “As I say in chapter ten of my memoir, If there’s still a sky to stand above us and ground laid down beneath our feet; if there is wind to touch your face and the sweetness of a brand-new tin can to sample; we must fight for it.” Suddenly his eyes widened and his whole body went very stiff. His voice, so quiet, suddenly crested to a shout. “It is worth the fight. It’s worth the sky. It’s worth—”
A spasm rocked his whole body, contracted him from muzzle to tail, and for a split second he was choking on that word, seized and strangled by it, as if it had exploded something inside of him. A strange noise worked its way up from his throat, and a final pulse sent his warm blood up between my fingers.
Then it was gone. The spasm left him. The blood slowed, the echo of his final words carried by the wind scattered somewhere high above us.
53
There’s lots of danger on the road. Lots of ugly, lots of hardship. You’ll meet hucksters, roadslicks, thieves, and rat-men; organ sellers, flesh peddlers, arms dealers, rock sniffers. You’ll see flu towns and starve towns and fire towns and ghost towns. If you meet anybody at all, half of ’em will be trying to kill you and the other half trying to take your wallet.
Yeah, the life of a grifter is full of rot spots. But there’s lots of sweet too.
You just need to know how to look.
—from The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA
I placed Barnaby’s body in the shadow of a dumpster. I thought he would of liked that. He’d always spoken so highly of dumpsters. I even found a tin can and nestled it between his forelegs.
But I knew that wherever he was going, he’d have all the tin he could ever want.
In the distance I could see security storming its way toward the runway through a blur of exhaust. It was time to go.
I sprinted back to the plane, darting up the narrow rolling staircase toward the cockpit. But even as I reached for the door, the plane began to move. I just managed to throw myself inside of it before the plane rolled away from the stairs and sent me tumbling—facedown onto the pilot’s crotch.
“You know, Truckee, if I want a blow job, I’ll just go ahead and ask you,” Tiny Tim said. My legs were still hanging out of the plane even as it picked up speed, and for a second I was clinging there desperately to his crotch.
Finally he reached over, grabbed me by the back of the shirt, and hauled me full into my seat, veering wildly over the runway as we hurtled toward the concrete perimeter. I managed to swing the door closed just before the gathering wind would have scraped it off. We were tearing down the runway so fast it bounced the teeth in my head.
I knocked my head against the window and watched as the first shots pinged off one of our wings. We hit a rut and I flew out of my seat, cracking my head on the ceiling.
“Complications,” Tiny Tim muttered. A bullet pinged off the left wing even as we caught our first pocket of air and then crashed to the ground again. “There’s never a plan without someone to try and pooch it up. You mind giving me my gun back?”
The handgun. He’d lobbed it to me so that I could defend myself. As soon as I returned it, he leaned out the window to fire off a few rounds and shake the soldiers from our tail. He wasn’t even sweating. And maybe it was a trick of the wash of cabin light, but he looked different. He looked sharper. His smile was gone, and so was the fog of confusion.
“You came back for me,” I said. “I left you, and you came back.”
He barely glanced over at me. “I came for what I came for,” he said. “You were just the bonus.”
For the first time I noticed all the metal crates rattling the hold: all of them hermetically sealed and temperature controlled, and labeled with a language of words I couldn’t read—Clematis vitalba, Malus pumila, Daucus carota. But it didn’t matter. I could guess what they were anyway.
“Seeds,” I said. My stomach dropped as we yanked into the sky, screaming through elevations while bullets continued to rattle our wings. “You found the seed store.”
“That I did, my friend.” He even sounded different. The drawl was still there, but not the loops that circled his words back into meaninglessness. “My greatest haul yet. And that’s saying something.”
An idea was scratching the back of my mind—a crazy idea, even crazier than a giant brain suspended in fetal fluid. “How did you get inside the complex?”
“Fart tunnels,” he said. That explained the reek on Barnaby’s fur. “The city’s got miles of underground ventilation to pump the stink from so many shut-ins out over the ocean. Ain’t too pleasant for travel, but I’ve done worse.” He grinned. “Gives new meaning to ‘gas pipeline,’ huh?”
And suddenly, I knew. “It was you,” I said. Tiny Tim had known about the seed haul. Tiny Tim could quote directly from the book. He must of been the greatest grifter in the world. “You wrote The Grifter’s Guide to the Territories FKA USA.”
He glanced side-eyed at me. “Little project of mine. Been doing this a long time. Like I told you, I’ve grifted all corners of this continent more times than you’ve pawed your own knob.”
I doubted it, but it wasn’t worth squabbling over the details. “You’re not a Straw Man, are you?” I said finally. “You were just pretending.”
He gave me a ragged smile I’d never seen before. “Sorry about that. But stupid comes in handy like you wouldn’t believe. Besides,” he added in a different voice, “the ladies love it. They know I won’t try and talk over them, see.”
I looked out at the ocean as it fell away beneath us, remembering the vision I’d had of blasting off of the earth and seeing it from a vast distance, how I’d wanted to reach for it and hold it together, the way I’d tried to hold Barnaby to keep him from breaking. The sun was nothing but a bloodstain on the ocean. The stars wheeled beneath our wings.
“Barnaby’s dead,” I said. “He’s dead because of me.”
“It was his choice,” Tiny Tim said simply. And I knew then that Barnaby had told Tim what he thought he would have to do.
“I have Rafikov’s computer code,” I said. “I have it inside me. She’s going to track me down for it.”
Tiny Tim shrugged. “Like I said, complications. But no point looking for the storm before the storm looks for you.”
He was right. I wasn’t done with Rafikov. I wasn’t done with the war. The war was only just getting started. But as my great friend, the philosopher and writer Barnaby the goat, once said: as long as the sky is still up and the ground is still down and the whole world hasn’t started coming apart at the seams, buckling like a flimsy umbrella in the middle of a hurricane; as long as the rules of the universe are still intact an
d we’re intact with them, we had to fight.
We had to try, at least.
Of course, I’m paraphrasing. He also said something about tin cans.
Tiny Tim reached over and gave me a thump that shuddered my whole body. “So, Truckee Wallace. Where to?”
I leaned back in my seat. I watched the revolution of stars, glowing like glorious fungal spores in the thick mud-dark of the night sky.
“New Los Angeles,” I said. It was just after midnight. I’d missed Evaline’s birthday. But maybe, if I hurried, I could still take her dancing.
APPENDIX A
WHAT IS A HUMAN?
In the mid-2040s, researchers at MIT’s newly formed military division were commissioned by the president of the Commonwealth to generate a standard set of identifying physical, behavioral, and mental characteristics that would help differentiate “real” humans from their manufactured counterparts, both technological (androids) and genetic (clones). This was, he felt, necessary to restore logic and rationality to a growing panic increasingly dominated by hysteria and violence; the newly formed Commonwealth, which contained some of the loudest “Birther” voices and also some of the continent’s most pioneering android and replicant technologies, was determined to apply the scientific process to the thorny question of how to identify humanity and mete out—or withhold—associated rights.
But immediately, the team of researchers—assembled from fields as diverse as genetics and neural philosophy—encountered difficulty. The attempt to determine a minimum percentage of “biological” materials necessary to the definition of personhood was, of course, immediately intractable, given both the existence of replicated humans (clones) meant to be excluded from that definition and the enormous percentages of silicone-and Plasticine-remodeling-obsessed women, particularly in the Real Friends© of the North, some of whom wound up with smaller ratios of biological matter than their android counterparts.
Similarly, any regulatory attempt to highlight the nature of an individual’s birth was out of the question; clones were regularly carried by paid surrogates, whereas huge quantities of high-net-worth individuals chose increasingly to implant genetically vetted embryos in artificial-womb clinics under the monitoring care of various biologists and physicians.
