Gridlock: A Cybershock Story

by Nathalie Gray

  Because she didn’t know if there were any other responders nearby—or what the hell she was getting into now—she kicked her boots off and padded on silent feet to the end of the corridor. She’d learned early to not make a sound when sneaking into someone else’s territory. Only one door broke the concrete expanse of the corridor. It was made of clear thermoplastic opening out onto a room filled with screens, a dirty desk and a grubby-looking chair. Steel snuck in, sat and took a look. Another door she hadn’t initially noticed led to stairs going down. Her heart beat so hard, she thought she’d gag from the strain.

  Steel was reaching the concrete landing when a man rounded the corner. They both froze at each end of the empty room. Judging from his impeccable dress and age, she wouldn’t be seducing her way out of this one.

  “This is a restricted area, miss.” A hint of accent lifted the last few words. He could have been someone’s kindly old grandpa. Except for the eyes, like those of a killer.

  Steel didn’t wait to see if he really was one and leveled the responder’s gun at him. She needed him alive. Time was slowing for no one. Already she’d lost too much of it. “Take me to him.”

  “Take you to whom, child?” He smiled. Only his mouth did. Those lifeless pale orbs were devoid of any warmth.

  “The man you took tonight, the one who’d escaped.”

  His smile crystallized. “You were misinformed.”

  “Don’t. I know he’s here.”

  “Perhaps we can—”

  Steel fired a half charge at his legs. The blue whip of light snapped at the man’s thigh. He howled, lurching forward. She was there before he hit the floor, kicking him back against the wall and pinning him there with both barrels in the chest. “Take me to him. Now.”

  “You will not come out of here alive,” he snarled.

  “Maybe not, but neither will you. This place has minutes left.”

  He whimpered when she jabbed him, hard, in the ribs. “What do you mean?”

  Steel only jammed the muzzle of her gun deeper into his side. Maybe he’d get the drift and move.

  With the older man leading the way, Steel entered deeper into the bunker, turned left and right and crossed halls and landing bays, and after awhile, began to wonder if she’d be able to find her way out again. Soon, they neared a pair of thick clear doors held open by a hydraulic system that could have powered a hovercraft’s tail hatch. A comms relay blinked on. Steel spotted it too late.

  “Stand down. Prepare for apprehension.”

  A tiny bot zoomed a few meters in front of her, its little red eye scanning both the man and her. When it obviously didn’t find her implant or its ID number, the thing seemed momentarily confused. She ended its puzzlement by firing Leech’s gun at it. She only managed to catch one of the mechanical wings, but it still sent the thing into a tailspin.

  Shoving the man in front of her, Steel finished the thing with another shot that made a small crater where the robot used to be. Soon there’d be another then another. Just as she was about to check behind her for pursuers, an alarm wailed rhythmically.

  She had to yell to be heard. “Hurry!”

  The old man took her through a giant doorway that widened into a circular room filled with screens and all sorts of machines.

  “Where is he?”

  He must have heard the panic in her voice because he smiled disdainfully. “There.” He pointed behind her.

  She whirled around to see a series of glass panels. Beyond, a room brightly lit in fluorescents. A gurney had been set by the wall, and countless pieces of expensive-looking medical gear littered a white table. In fact, everything was white. Except for one thing. In the middle of the room stood a sort of upright tube of glass filled with what looked like liquid. A sort of tank. In it was a naked man connected by half a dozen wires down his back. Dante.

  Her stomach twisted painfully. She feared being sick right then and there. Her eyes welled. She glanced sideways at the old man. “You did this?”

  “I did.”

  “Is he alive in there?”

  The old man sucked his teeth. “Of course he is. This specimen is my greatest accomplishment, a scientific triumph.”

  “He’s not a specimen,” Steel retorted. “He’s a person.”

  “Biologically, perhaps, but he is so much more.” The demented old jerk seemed proud. Proud!

  Anger bubbled up. To see Dante stuck in a tank like some thing on a collector’s shelf. She was barely conscious of her actions amidst the deafening siren. Leech’s gun in her hand, the subtle kickback of the twin shots she fired, the smell of charred flesh, the life seeping out of the man’s eyes. She searched him, finding another key. This one opened the lab. Steel approached the tank, right up to Dante’s face. His eyes were closed. She couldn’t fire at the thing for fear of harming him.

  She grabbed one of the medical implements, the largest she could find, and tapped on the glass gently, to see if she could wake him. Dante’s eyes fluttered, but he didn’t open them. Voices rose behind her. She had to act. A small crack near the tank lid was perfect. She brought the metal tool high above her head, aimed for the tiny flaw and struck.

  A tiny sound reminded her of pebbles landing on concrete. The glass turned foggy. She didn’t have time to get out of the way. The tank disintegrated, disgorging its foul-smelling liquid. As best she could, Steel grabbed Date’s inert form and more or less guided him to the floor. He looked so pale. Machines inside the room beeped demandingly. She didn’t know what else to do so she unplugged him, gently pulling out each cable from the data ports along his spine. When the last wire was out of him, he stirred slightly and opened his eyes.

  “Dante,” she snarled urgently. Security was bound to arrive any second now. “Dante, can you walk? We have to get out of here.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Steel turned to find a young woman standing, slack-jawed, in the doorway. The bottle of water on the tray she held shook.

  “We’re getting out of here, okay? If you try to stop me, I’ll shoot you too.”

  The young woman backpedaled as Steel, Dante’s arm around her shoulders, floundered to her feet and out of the room.

  “This way!” the young woman yelled above the alarm. She dropped the tray. Steel barely heard the clatter.

  She didn’t have any choice but to follow the young woman. They shuffled down the rest of the corridor. A landing bay with rock walls instead of bricks gaped beyond a rusted hatch.

  “We can get out through there.” The young woman tore her white lab coat off.

  “Put it on him,” Steel yelled. Shit, that alarm would make her deaf. “Hurry, this place is going to blow up.”

  Shock—and relief—washed over the woman’s countenance. Steel noticed a dark bruise over her nose. She helped drape the too-small lab coat on Dante’s shoulders and buttoned only one button in the middle so the thing wouldn’t fly off.

  A cold wind that cut at the ankles greeted them as they spilled into the landing bay. No craft waited. Shit.

  “Come! This way!”

  Steel followed the young woman. Dante was getting really heavy. She huffed and puffed. He walked, but barely. The sound of guns preceded small eruptions in the rock wall by Steel’s elbow. She managed to aim more or less back and let it rip. Leech’s gun was warm by the time she took her finger off the trigger. Returning gunshot announced she hadn’t been one hundred percent in her aim.

  The three rushed along the wall, down the gentle slope, and finally made it out of the landing bay. Icy rain still fell like tiny razorblades. She recognized the area where she’d snuck in earlier, but one story above. Narrow stairs hewn into the rock proper nearly stopped her heart as Dante and she slowly climbed down to ground level. Behind them, voices and guns made sure to keep her on her toes.

  Steel checked above their heads. Glistening like a giant black snake in the sky, the monorail was still there, shrouded in shadows, waiting to blow them all to hell. They had to get far away from
there. And quickly.

  “You see that thing above us, the old monorail?”

  The young woman craned her neck then nodded.

  “It’s going to explode in a few minutes. So you better find us a way to get down fast.”

  “My shuttle, it’s down there with those of other employees.”

  It didn’t even cross Steel’s mind to distrust her benefactor. She didn’t have time, first of all, and Dante hung on to her looking like shit and probably cold to the bones. She couldn’t afford to be distrustful. But it did occur to her she’d killed three people that night. She expected remorse, guilt, shame. After all, it was her fault. Six had outed Dante because of her. Nothing came. Only wariness beyond words. She just wanted out of there.

  Like a cross between a bottle cap and a turtle, the shuttle turned out to be tiny, rusty and the best thing she’d ever seen. Steel pushed Dante onto the passenger seat, squeezed in herself and waited with both guns out of the chipped window as the young woman powered the engine and lifted off. Just as they veered southward, Steel spotted security responders spilling out of the landing bay’s giant door. Her gut reaction was to squeeze both triggers and never let go, but she didn’t because she feared they’d see the shuttle’s ID by the muzzle flash of her guns. Not out of wholly altruistic motives either. If they found the young woman, she might give Steel up, or pass on her description or whatever. She couldn’t risk that. She had to play smart.

  “Where do you want to go?” The young woman sat hunched over the controls. Steel spotted tears running down her cheeks. She sniffled but didn’t seem sorry to leave.

  “You know that place down at the foot of the mount, where there used to be a park and big trees? There.”

  A nod confirmed her pilot knew of the spot. It was close enough to Dante’s home without giving away its exact location.

  The short flight proved a bumpy, zigzag-filled affair. The woman couldn’t pilot shit, but she was smart enough to zoom right up to the newer layer of city overhead and get lost in the heavy, chaotic flow of other shuttles and every other kind of flying craft out there. When they had flown close enough to where Steel wanted to land, she nudged her pilot and pointed down with her gun. Horns blared as their tiny shuttle dropped from the official corridors, dipping to the right to circle into a heart-pumping descent. The woman landed—more like semi-crashed—her shuttle in the middle of the park Steel had indicated. Steel jumped out and reached to grab Dante but stopped. She pulled the gun she’d taken from the man at the security fence and placed it on the passenger seat.

  “Here,” she said to her impromptu pilot. “Something tells me you’ll need that.”

  Tears flowed down the woman’s face. “Tell him, if, you know, when he wakes, tell him I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry. It wasn’t what I’d signed up for, okay?” She looked down at the inside of her wrist. “I’ll have to find someone to take it out now.”

  “By the bridge, there’s a cookshop.” Steel checked left and right. “They’ll remove your implant for about four hundred credits.”

  She pulled Dante out of the shuttle and didn’t turn to watch as the craft lifted off then sped south in the direction of the older part of town and the bridge. Steel hadn’t asked the woman’s name, hadn’t given hers. She didn’t care about anything else right now. Only him. She had to get him indoors, get him warmed, fed, cleaned up from this awful goop from the tank.

  “You’ll be fine, Dante, okay?”

  He turned vacant eyes to her before letting his head loll on his chest once more. By the time she reached his old home and dropped him as carefully as she could on his bed—which was covered in debris from the explosion but better than nothing—Steel was ready to collapse herself.

  Just as she was about to take a break, a low rumble preceded a tremor that shook the entire building. The monorail. She should go outside and watch the light show, if only to make sure the explosion had reached the bunker or if, because she’d stopped the train a little bit before the station, she’d messed everything up. With any luck, if the explosion hadn’t taken care of the bunker proper, the resulting rain of train and rail bits would temporarily take care of things. But she wasn’t about to leave his side to go check.

  “Screw them.” Her own voice shocked her. Low and not much more than a rumble.

  Another explosion made the floor quiver. This one felt much more powerful. Dust floated down from the cracked ceiling. Things rattled inside his dresser. A series of muffled thumps indicated stuff was falling all around her in other rooms. She didn’t dare leave him to go investigate. Later, maybe, after she’d taken care of him, later she’d go check.

  For once in her life, someone needed her and she’d be there for him. She’d be there for Dante. Steel lay on top of him with her arms crossed over his face to protect him from falling rubble. His heat seeped through her clothes, warming her skin. Everything shook. She squeezed her eyes shut and waited. For the end or for the beginning of something new, Steel didn’t know.

  How had he ended up in this dark alley? Dante remembered nothing. Overhead, shuttles and hovercraft flew by, heat vortices distorting the air. Snow fell in lazy, fat flakes. He had never seen such white snow. Some landed on his hand when he brought it palm up. The white color reminded him of something. Someone. A tiny buzzing sound caught his attention. He turned just in time to spot an insect, long and slender, hovering not far behind him. How could the thing fly in this weather? How could it live? This, too, brought memories to the surface. The more he sought to grasp the images in his mind, the quicker they faded.

  He approached the insect. A dragonfly. As soon as he drew near, it took off, zigzagged, swerved up over him and flew deeper into the dark alley. He did not know why, but he followed it. He had to, somehow. Its long wings created a soothing rustle. Snow parted in front of it, as if to make room, and Dante found he had to quicken his pace to keep up.

  “Wait.” His voice sounded flat, lifeless, as though the word fell to the ground before it had a chance to fly. He cleared his throat. “Wait.”

  It did not.

  He followed it down the alley, which was rank-smelling and filled with detritus he could not identify—nor did he want to—and across a deserted street, along a park he thought he remembered. Tree stumps, calcified by pollution and old age, resembled broken teeth. The dragonfly slalomed between trunks. Dante had to run after it to catch up. He could not lose it.

  “Please! Wait!”

  He must have run for hours, or what seemed like it. An old bridge, its metal framework twisted and bent, rose in front of him with the ruined splendor of a defeated titan. Dante had to go by sound because he had lost sight of the insect.

  There! He spotted it several paces ahead when it flew around a rusted pillar and created a contrast with its black body. Dante took off after it. To his shock, the bridge ended abruptly right over the river, still and menacing, three hundred meters below his feet. He had not realized he had reached the middle. Things did not add up. Dante turned toward the city. Maybe to remind him it was still there, the dragonfly zoomed in front of his face, almost touching his cheek.

  “I don’t know what you want.”

  It hovered for a moment before flying backward, slowly, as if on a purpose only it knew. Dante took a few steps closer to the edge. Wind whistled between metal I-beams. Groans alerted his senses. He should get off this dangerous bridge, it could collapse any second. But still the dragonfly backed, farther from him, and stopped over the void. Did it want him to…?

  Dante’s feet were a step away from the brink. The insect zoomed to him, then again slowly backed away.

  Obviously, he had a choice to make. Turn his back on the strange dragonfly and its mysterious dance or follow it. Over the edge. And why did it remind him of something so strongly? Of someone. It made no sense.

  He turned his back to the void, had taken a few steps, when the insect caught up with him, buzzing close enough to actually touch him with a graze of its slender wings.
When it did, a tiny spark of electricity arced from the dragonfly to him. Energy raced through him as though he had received a charge from an electroshock weapon. Images flashed in his mind, ghost sounds filling his ears, his hands tingling with sensations that could not exist without contact and yet did anyway. He knew. He understood, and more importantly, he remembered. Everything.

  When the dragonfly backed to the edge again, Dante followed it without hesitation. One step took him to the edge of the bridge’s demolished deck. The next brought his body forward with the start of the long fall that awaited him. He let himself go.

  Air whistled in his ears. Snow billowed in crazy swirls. The river spun round and round as he plummeted. Through it all, the insect stayed close to his head. Dante closed his eyes and waited for the water to swallow him.

  His body jolted, like one waking suddenly from a dream. He opened his eyes. Around him, a room he remembered. His own in the abandoned university. It was different, with obvious repairs and patches of mismatched paint. His furniture had been placed to hide the larger holes in the walls. He lay in bed with a blanket he did not remember neatly tucked around him. By his side, a young woman covered in piercings and tattoos read aloud from an ages-old book he knew well, The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

  She sat cross-legged on a pouffy chair that had seen better days, and commented on the fly about one of the main characters’ many flaws and how she would have gotten rid of him “because obviously he could not use that sword-thing whatever it was called.” A tattoo of a large dragonfly graced her slender arm. The old book looked so incongruous in the hand of a young woman clad in black from head to toe and with white hair that stood up in some places, as though a dark sun followed her like a halo yet not really warm or life-giving. Quite the contrary. Misery had pared her down to a fine edge, ready to cut at the slightest contact. He wondered what had made her this way, or if she had been born angry.