Man Behind the Wheel (The Next Half Century Book 1)

by Steve Rzasa

  Fine then.

  Rome secured his straps. “Everyone hold onto something.”

  Aldo moaned. “I hate it when he says that.”

  “Why?” Sara braced herself on the sides of the car.

  Rome held the Halcyon in Park, revving the motor until the speedometer numbers jumped wildly. The car trembled, begging to leap.

  He reached for reverse.

  A Rishi Panther—metallic blue with a broad, gold and black, checkered pattern along the running boards—bumped aside a pair of Famtracs. It filled the space directly behind the Security Halcyon. Rome noticed the same sparks from its front end.

  The EMP blast was bright as a bolt of lightning, and the crack it made in close quarters was as sharp as a snapping whip. There was no way for the Security car to avoid it. By the time the last bolt played over its body, the Halcyon veered off the left side of the road, crossing the wrong lane. Inertia carried it into the side of a passenger car.

  The Panther interposed itself between the dead Security vehicle and Rome’s Halcyon. He saw his expression—jaw slack and eyes wide—in the dark windows. The window rolled down, revealing a dour face.

  “’Sup, Enrique!” Aldo waved cheerily.

  Enrique flipped him off.

  “Such rudeness.” Thad was out his window, arm draped atop the roof. His grin was as brilliant as the EMP burst. “For all this mess, Roman, I should have held out for better pay.”

  “They’d drop your contract for this.”

  “Somehow I suspect that is the least of our worries. And no appreciation on Enrique’s finest endeavor.” Thad waved a hand at Condor 47. The aircraft continued its bizarre loops. “Is what Gabriela says true? This colonel, he has set up you and Aldo? Just as you said?”

  “Every word.”

  The FTZ Security men got out of their car—two tall, burly guys with the pale skin of indoor types. “Nobody moves! Stand down and…”

  Thad spazzed them both.

  “Help me get this wreck out of the way,” Rome ordered.

  Thad slipped back into his car. Together, the Panther and Halcyon shoved against the wrecked stealth truck. Rome knew his car was fire resistant. He hoped Thad’s was. It helped that a pair of fire drones appeared overhead, red lights flashing against scarlet bodies the size of old oil barrels. Their trio of turbofans blew smoke away as they draped the truck in white foam. It was pushed aside, clearing enough of a lane for Rome to drive around, followed by the Panther.

  Thad’s voice carried through the car’s communications. “Madre Dios. These thieves, they play rough.”

  “Thad, they’ve got my family, too.”

  The Panther’s speed surged. “Let us repay the pendejos. I will follow your tracks.”

  Rome kept his glare fixed on the road and punched the accelerator.

  ~

  Enrique’s handiwork kept Condor 47 in a helpless spin, but by now, every FTZ East branch—not to mention every law enforcement agency within fifty miles—was alerted to the presence of the two rogue pursuit cars.

  Upside—Aldo tracked the Ford Altair easily. “Not so easy when you can’t play ghost,” he muttered.

  “Casper.” Rome’s knuckles were white. He swept them along a row of four freighters. Everyone one of them shot off a distance warning, which Aldo’s comp panel digested.

  “Casper what?”

  “The ghost. He was friendly. It was a kid’s show.”

  “When, in ancient Rome?”

  “Hysterical. My grandfather watched it.”

  “This is how you’re doing stress?”

  “Better than shooting holes through traffic with the J20 until I hit our target.”

  “Ah. Good point.”

  Sara leaned from the back seat. “Get me in close enough and I can get aboard.”

  “Get aboard?” Aldo laughed a manic, desperate sound. “This isn’t a cruise hydrofoil. You’ll go splat on the road!”

  Sara slapped the back of his head. “You know how many times I jumped between moving vehicles while I was running with them?”

  “No. And, ow.”

  “I do. Get us close.”

  “That could be a problem.” Rome indicated the rear view.

  Thad tailed them, one lane to the left and a car’s length back. Beyond him, three FTZ East Security cars approached, lights flashing. One was a Halcyon, and two were big CM Obsidians—six-passenger vehicles, with six wheels apiece. They were surprisingly nimble to the average passenger. Each wheel operated independent of the other, allowing the Obsidians to change lanes with speed and precision even Rome was hard-pressed to match. By the way they caught up, Rome knew someone drove each one, albeit with AI assistance.

  “I explained as best I could the reason they all should steer clear of this pursuit,” Thad said through the signal. “They did not agree.”

  “I can see that. You have any ideas?”

  “Drive faster.”

  “Already doing it. I was thinking something more inconvenient to them.”

  Thad laughed. “I may have a handful of such inconveniences aboard. Allow Enrique a moment to prepare them.”

  Aldo kept the Altair bracketed in the car’s sensors. It stayed a red outline, visible through a dozen cars in front of them. Traffic unzipped, peeling off onto shoulders and medians. Automatons didn’t bother to put them back on the road, leaving Rome a clear route to the Altair.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” Rome asked.

  “I’m sure,” Sara said. “I owe Reno for the mess he’s made. I owe everyone else the same.”

  “There he goes!” Aldo flipped his palm through his holo displays.

  Thad’s Panther braked hard, allowing the FTZ Security vehicles to race by. Projectiles shot out from the front as tiny gray spheres. Rome didn’t see where they hit until one of the Obsidians braked and accelerated again and again. It shook so hard he thought it would lose a wheel, three of which tried to go in three different directions at once. Finally, it steered into the dip of the grassy green median. Men poured out of two side hatches.

  Thad got behind the FTZ Halcyon, but its driver was skilled enough to avoid being tailed. The two vehicles traded lanes. Each jockeyed for a clean shot with EMPs, even as they avoided other cars and the automated traffic cleared out the lanes.

  “I’m lined up for a burst,” Aldo said. “EMP is charged to 90 percent.”

  “No. Shut it down,” Rome said.

  “What? Hey, it’s the only way we’ll get it to slow down.”

  “The Altair could be hardened against it.”

  “And if it isn’t, we can stop them right now!”

  Rome swerved around a pair of freighters stuck in the center lane. Apparently their comps had decided the safest action was to huddle in the middle of the chaos at a plodding pace. “Dammit, Aldo, I’m not taking a potshot at the car containing my family!”

  Aldo stared through his holos. “Well, fine! So what’s your genius plan?”

  “Make sure they’re targeted, and transfer the triggers to my control.”

  Aldo muttered under his breath. His fingers stabbed through the displays as he set up the commands.

  “What is it?” Sara said. “Without the EMP, there’s no way to shut them down.”

  “There is a way to reel them in,” Rome said. “Are we ready?”

  “Grapples are up!” Aldo crowed. “Whenever you’re in range.”

  Green numbers popped up in the left corner of Rome’s windshield. They dwindled with each passing second.

  Meanwhile, a flash from behind broke his concentration. The Halcyon was wreathed in sparks. It spun down a steep embankment on the right side off the Ninety, its front end crunched between a pair of tree trunks.

  “Nice shooting, Thad.”

  “De nada. The last Obsidian’s proving more a nuisance. He’s coming up on your six. I’m too far back to catch him and… I have more pressing problems.”

  Proximity alerts chimed. “Condor’s back, and she brough
t her buddy!” Aldo announced.

  Condors 46 and 47 roared in from the southwest, bracketing the road with a pair of EMP flashes. They washed over the Panther like a wave, dousing Thad’s car completely. Rome saw the skid and its indicators died completely from Aldo’s displays. He heard the signal break off in static. The Panther shone iridescent blue under the pulses before it stuttered to a dead stop, smack in the middle of the Ninety.

  “Pretty decent of him to take one for us,” Aldo murmured.

  “Only if we catch our target,” Rome said. “Range to target, 300 yards.”

  They both moved so fast they caught up with the swarm of traffic ahead. It was everything Rome hated about driving—the herd of Famtracs, the long lines of freighters, the individual passenger cars grouped in threes and fours by comps seeking to conserve fuel with ground effect assist, all packed together by programmed intelligences seeking maximum efficiency and safety.

  It meant five miles of nearly wall-to-wall vehicles with nowhere to go when two human driven wild cards entered the mix.

  Suddenly the Halcyon swerved hard right. Rome corrected its course. His heart jumped. “Aldo, tell me I just felt a really big gust of wind.”

  “Sorry, no.” Aldo scowled through the displays. “Our buddies up in the Obsidian? They’re good. One of them’s good.”

  The Halcyon swerved gain. Rome was ready, though this time the steering fought with him for a few seconds before it came back under his control. Not good.

  “Yeah, they’re trying to override our nav.”

  “You want to stop them?”

  “Okay, what do you think I’ve been doing?” Aldo stabbed through a command line and swiped it over to a stream of data on the opposite side of his display.

  “It all looks like playing with light and air to me.” A third attack. This one turned into an all-out struggle. Rome strained against the steering column. He stomped on the accelerator, pushing the Halcyon as fast ahead as he could, which was hard to do when the car skittered and jumped like a rabbit on the run, straddling two lanes at a time. “Get in there and shut them down!”

  “Working on it!”

  Fasteners clacked. Wind rushed into the car. Sara’s window was open. She had a J20 propped out the window. “I’ve got them.”

  “Put it away!” Rome snapped. “You’ll get everyone killed.”

  “The safeties should automatically engage and force them off the road.”

  “That’s great. Experiment with the possibility when my family’s not stuck inside their ride.”

  “Ha! Got ’em!” Aldo double-punched through the holo.

  “You locked them out?” Rome grimaced as the steering column wrenched hard left. A Famtrac brushed by them near enough to set off a proximity warning. “Why the hell am I still having a wrestling match with controls?”

  “Still trying to get past their blocks. That’s not what I meant,” Aldo gestured forward.

  A string of six freighters ran in a single line in the right most lane. One by one they peeled off, starting with the front vehicle until they spread across both lanes. The next thing Rome knew, there was a wall of freighters three vehicles wide, running down two lanes. He didn’t think too much about how near they were to each other or how close their tires spun to the edge of the pavement.

  “Get through those,” Aldo muttered.

  The Altair braked no more than two feet from the fender of the closest freighter. Whatever Tacazon and Cuellar had planned, it wasn’t coming to them fast.

  Rome still fought for control of his car.

  The range for the magnetic grapples dwindled. If he could get a good, solid hit…

  “Coming up behind us!” Sara called.

  The other Obsidian was only a handful of car lengths back. It passed a Famtrac, then pushed up behind a solo freighter until the larger vehicle obediently moved aside.

  Ten feet from the Altair.

  EMP discharge rippled across the front of the Obsidian.

  “I’ve got a clean shot!” Sara was half out the window, her shouted words were torn to wisps by the wind that rushed by. “I can get them off the road.”

  “I can’t get past the blocks,” Aldo said. “They’ve got me locked out of their nav system.”

  Rome’s steering controls stopped fighting. The whole setup went slack in his hands. The column shuddered, then started to sink into the dash.

  “They’re putting us on full auto!”

  Range…? The readouts were dead. Solid black.

  Rome slapped the grapple trigger.

  The projectiles shot out.

  For an instant, Rome imagined they scraped pavement, falling short of their target.

  One did, and was torn free of its cable. The other slammed against the back of the Altair and stuck fast—the cable taut as a guitar string.

  The steering column disappeared completely under the dash. The accelerator and decelerators retreated with the gearshift. The Halcyon—fully controlled by Cuellar and Tacazon—altered its course toward the side of the road. Except now, it was latched to the rear of the Altair.

  “Reel them in,” Rome snapped.

  Aldo grinned and flicked a command.

  The cable shivered. Somewhere under the front of the Halcyon the winch whirred, shaking the whole car.

  Shots exploded.

  Sara.

  She fired on the Obsidian, but whoever the driver was had enough skill to maneuver in a fashion that caused even the tracker bullets a severe headache. The Obsidian closed its distance.

  The Halcyon pulled on the grapple. Since its navigation was no longer under Rome’s guidance, he couldn’t make it bring the Altair closer, but Cuellar and Tacazon had already taken care of the problem—they dragged themselves off the road. The Halcyon went sidelong, skidding and pulling on the Altair. Meanwhile, the distance closed to just a few feet.

  “I’m out.” Rome slipped his restraints and opened the window. Hot air blasted around him.

  “Rome! Don’t get killed!” Aldo gave him the spazzer and a thumbs-up.

  Rome squirmed out of the car. Sara was already crouched on the roof, J20 slung over her back. “If we’re going to do this…”

  Rome launched into a run down the windshield and over the hood of the Halcyon. He lost his footing at the edge, but managed to push off as hard as he could. For a split second, he was in the air. He knew what Gabriela must love about piloting. Him… well, he’d be happy with a private Condor right then.

  Rome banged onto the top of the Altair. His hands scrabbled for purchase on the slick sides. He plucked his knife from his pants, swung it up, and jabbed it into a slender seam were the windows began their curve. The blade held.

  The sudden stop sent a lightning bolt of pain through his right arm. He slapped his left atop the Altair.

  A thump.

  Sara was on the vehicle with him. She lay flat and grabbed his left wrist. With her grunts, pulls, and his pushes with both feet, they got on the roof without either slipping off or smearing the pavement.

  The Altair skidded madly to the left, pulling so hard the Halcyon’s cable twanged.

  The Obsidian was two car lengths back.

  “What happens to us up here when the EMP goes off?” Rome yelled.

  “I’m not waiting up here to find out!” Sara swung her feet over the left side with the grace of a gymnast. Both boots bashed through the window.

  The panel was made of a composite material that crumpled out of the way, rather than shattering shards everywhere. Rome was torn between elation at Sara having made it inside and fury at her endangerment of his family.

  Suddenly, the freighter accelerated, moving out of the phalanx Aldo had formed. True to safety protocols, their comps strung them to the left and the Altair went right, getting around them. The Halcyon’s back end bounced half on the road and half on the shoulder.

  The Obsidian fired.

  “No!” Rome scrambled for the broken window.

  The pulse flashed short
of the Altair. It hit the last of those six freighters and its systems died. There was nothing to stop it from colliding with the freighter ahead, which tried to break and steer sideways. The comp on the second freighter recognized that the Altair, the Halcyon, and Obsidian were all laden with human passengers. The calculation was simple. The sacrifice was easy.

  The second freighter banged against the dead one. They crunched hard, veering down the median into the slope. The collision took a third freighter… and a fourth, leaving the other two to rapidly change course. They surged ahead, running at full speed for the only gap in traffic available.

  When Rome caught his breath, he dove into the car in the same manner Sara had. The problem was his lack of agility. He banged the back of his neck on the open window frame, but the good part was he landed on something soft.

  A lap.

  “Rome!” Kelsey stared at him, face upside down, eyes red from crying. She looked as astonished and angry as Rome ever remembered seeing her.

  All he could do was lean up and kiss her.

  “Need some backup!” Sara was between the middle pair of seats. She grappled with Cuellar, who’s knife was poised over her neck. She had a grip on both his wrists, but Cuellar’s greater weight pushed her down between the seats.

  Rome was in the back row—a bench huddled against the broad cargo portion of the Altair’s rear section. Kelsey was on the left side, Vivian on the right.

  “Daddy! Daddy, help us!”

  That alone jolted Rome from his haze of pain.

  He got off Kelsey, pushed off the bench, and put his shoulder into Cuellar’s middle. The blow broke Sara’s grip on his wrists, splitting the pair apart. The knife was Rome’s problem now.

  Cuellar punched him in the low back near his kidneys. The strike stabbed through Rome’s abdomen. A second punched lanced across his face, stunning him. He gritted his teeth.

  Fine.

  Rome brought a knee around and was satisfied by the snap of a rib or two. Cuellar yelped and slashed with the knife. The blade caught Rome’s left shoulder, tearing the cloth and cutting a line of fire across his skin.