The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  This is apparently not a place he wants gunfire inside. The outside must have been armored, as he hadn’t worried about using the trailer as a lure for an initial attack. But inside . . .

  “Drop them and kick them over,” Miko shouts.

  They do so, and walk out, leaving the three of you alone.

  All along the walls leading to the engine are storage lockers.

  You recognize the glint of precious metals piled in plastic bins. So does Miko. He’s laughing happily, kicking the cage doors open and shaking the bins. “Fucking mother lode,” he says. No one in the countryside gives a shit about gold and diamonds. Gold doesn’t give you power from the sun, doesn’t feed you, doesn’t crack out the pollutants from the air. But the traders like Armand in the cities are always looking for it. In exchange they’ll give out solar panels or batteries, even food.

  Miko stops in front of cage with old, yellowing paintings. “What’s this? These fat-faced people in black clothes.”

  “Nothing,” Armand says from between clenched teeth.

  “No.” You recognize one of the stacked paintings. “That’s a Rembrandt.”

  Miko takes a closer look at the yellow and black hues. “This is bunker shit.” He turns back to you and Armand. “You have contact with bunkers?”

  The greed makes Miko’s face twitch. Dome folk, they know they need perimeter security. Bunker folk tend to get lazy. Think that being underground and hidden makes them safe. Ready for runaway atmosphere with their scrubbers and technology.

  But even now they’re already having to trade for essentials. Turns out trying to build a balanced ecosystem is a bitch in close quarters.

  “I can’t give away client locations,” Armand mutters.

  “Oh, but you will. Eventually,” Miko says with a small hint of glee in his voice. The clusters are going to be fat with spoils, and he can taste a new, bountiful future. One that isn’t scraps from the old roads.

  “You can be much richer, much better off, than that,” Armand says to you, almost begs of you. “Think smarter. I told you where we are. He’s still thinking of what is important to your world.”

  Sure, you think. But if this stuff wasn’t important to these worlds, why is Armand taking it from yours? The paintings must be valuable. The gold.

  “Whoa,” Miko says, and Armand’s shoulders slump slightly. “What do we have here?”

  The last two lockers before the complicated engine and wiring contain people. Two women and a man, shackled together to the wall and wearing gags. They’re out cold, small plastic tubes running from their arms up to a device in the wall.

  “Slaves,” you say bitterly. “You’re running slaves.”

  It’s a fate you avoided by joining Cheetah cluster. Why you fight hard. Because things can go grim out in the dust. The country you lived in was born on the blood of slaves so many hundred years ago before the golden age. After the Collapse, it had turned, ever so easily you think, right back to it.

  “These are famous people in the other timelines,” Armand says quickly. “People pay a literal fortune to have a personal servant who is also the president. Only the mega-rich can afford it. These are not slaves, they’ll be given more than they can imagine. They’ll come around. They always do, when they see the higher RCP worlds. Better to be a servant in paradise than a ruler in a hell like yours.”

  “What are you talking about? What’s an RCP?” Miko shouts back at you. He’s standing in front of the bulk of the machinery, gun in hand, not sure what to make of all the wires and readouts. He’s fixed a lot of engines in his time, but this is like showing an electric motor in the wheel-hubs of his pickup to a monkey.

  “Was that going to be my fate?” you ask. You aren’t able to take your eyes off the bodies behind the doors.

  Armand’s eyes widen. “No, I swear it.”

  He’s holding something back. You can smell it. Armand twists away from you and you sneer at him. “Is that what it is? Am I someone famous on the other side?”

  “It’s more complicated than that,” he whimpers, seeing the rage take light in your eyes. You can’t hold it back; you want to gut him and watch him bleed out.

  Miko senses this; he’s been on the blunt end of your anger before. He grins and slides up behind Armand, his dirty leathers a brown-stained contrast to Armand’s tailored black suit and shiny shoes. “I’ll kill him slow for you,” Miko whispers.

  He’s just messing with Armand. Miko will fight, but only fair. He’s a soldier, not a murderer. But he’s ridden with you long enough, commanded you long enough, that he can read you. In that brief moment, your long list of ways Miko can annoy you fades: the innuendo, the grabby hands, the little gifts after raids. You know he wants you, over any of the other warren-girls who would throw themselves at a commander. He thinks it would be hot to fuck the gunner, and he’s been obsessed with that for nearly three months.

  “You’re a genius,” Armand babbles. “You’re a genius.”

  Miko makes a face. You think he’s being a little bit of an asshole. But you essentially agree. You’re a good gunner, but you’re no genius.

  But you feel like, thanks to Miko being a bit murdery, that something may have been dislodged from Armand’s slimy mouth. “A genius?”

  “On one of the other sides, a little further down the line,” Armand says. “I don’t just transport servants. Or priceless art, cultural artifacts. I also move priceless minds. Think about it: there are minds that are brilliant but trapped by the circumstances of their timelines. They’re handicapped from the moment of birth, no matter how great they become in one of the stronger worlds, because somewhere like yours they’re fighting just to breathe. They don’t have time for their greatest inventions, or to achieve their great works. So we rescue them to bring them over.”

  “Yo, commander, we got problems,” one of the Cheetah cluster outriders shouted from the ramp. You squint. It’s Binni. “They got cars with lights on them pulling up and they got guns.”

  Armand looked past my shoulder to the outrider. “Don’t shoot back!”

  “Don’t worry trader, we got it. We’ll push them back.” Binni grins.

  “That isn’t . . . they have resources here,” Armand grits out.

  The familiar crack of gunfire fills the air outside. Everyone crouches and moves to the doors. It’s there you see the cars, like something from old glossy pages. Smartly painted vehicles, livery matching the official black uniforms the enforcers are wearing.

  These are . . . police. Like internal security, but for keeping law and order on a scale that seemed like a fairy-tale when you read about them.

  They’re not hardened soldiers but civilian peacekeepers, crouched behind their vehicles as Cheetah keeps them at bay. Binni is right. “Those uniforms can’t match Cheetah,” you say to Miko as you jump down and get Armand to shut the doors.

  “Yeah.” Miko agrees, but he’s looking more and more pained. All of the things that don’t make sense are starting to get to him, you can see. “Who the fuck are they?”

  “They’re called police,” you tell him.

  Miko’s looking around, more now than before.

  Armand all but tries to shove the two of you up toward the cab. “We can’t stay. It won’t be safe. There are rules to all this.”

  “Shut up.” Miko cracks the side of Armand’s head with the back of his metal-studded leather gloves.

  Armand staggers, blood dripping down onto his immaculate suit.

  “Look,” you say to Miko, pointing at the sky.

  An aircraft is banking over the farmland toward the road. The blades blur through the air and a distinct whump reaches you.

  Miko’s attention is fixated on the helicopter, as is yours.

  No one has had the spare fuel to launch aircraft in your memory. Batteries don’t keep them up for long enough.

  Then a second and third helicopter join in.

  Further above, you suddenly realize the long stringy lines of clouds are aircra
ft, jets high up in the sky, and you can’t help but stare.

  Armand slams the door to the cab shut.

  “Shit.” You and Miko jump onto the side of the cab. Miko puts his gun up to the glass of the cab. “Open the fuck up or I start shooting.”

  Armand ignores you both, tapping at his screens. The trailer hums as the massive device buried in its front half kicks on. Miko steps back and fires. The glass doesn’t crack, and pieces of the bullet ricochet, clipping him on the shoulder.

  You ignore all the shouting from further back. “Miko, don’t get off the truck.”

  He glances over at you. “What?”

  You lean back to shout the same warning at Cheetahs scattered around the trailer and road, along with their Shäd prisoners and dead.

  Before the words are even formed, the world turns inside out.

  • • • •

  You know to expect the sick feeling in the pit of your stomach that causes you to lean away from your grip on the door handle and think about vomiting. But you hold it in. You have to.

  But now that you’ve handled that, a searing stinging in your eyes blears your vision. You didn’t expect the crawling pain on your exposed skin, and the thick muddy clouds all around you. Wind whips murky clouds around overhead.

  The world around you is hell. From the choking heat to swirling, searing moisture.

  And you can’t inhale the air. You realize that the moment you’re exposed. You’re holding that last breath of sweet air from the other world, or universe, as Miko stares at you in complete and utter horror. He’s choking.

  You take a moment to orient yourself, squinting and blinking, then scuttle along the side of the cab. All Armand has to do is wrench the steering wheel to slew the truck about and you’ll fly off the side. You dig your shoes into the lip under the doors and reach for any purchase on the side.

  Then you swing around behind the extended area of the cab and fall onto the dead Shäd wedged in the hoses between the trailer and cab. You rip the facemask from the body and take a deep breath. Miko’s boots strike metal behind you.

  You take a last deep huff of bottled air and pass the mask over.

  Vomit streams from Miko’s chin and he fumbles for the mask, unable to see anything with reddened eyes. He breathes from the mask as you wait for your turn.

  When you get it, the sour smell triggers a second round of stomach clenching.

  You pass the mask back and forth as the truck grinds its way over a dirt road for an hour. Sometimes you think you see structures, tall and lurking in the distance. But their edges are shattered, and many of them are slumping over. You might be passing through the edges of a city. In your world there isn’t anything here for another couple hours, but this is a dramatically different reality.

  The storm you were dropped into subsides. Maybe it’s the buildings blocking the wind, or maybe it blew itself out. You’re no longer getting pelted with small pebbles. The ochre clouds overhead still scud by impossibly fast.

  Miko’s eyes are wide. You’re not going to be able to explain science fiction ideas about variant universes overlapping each other while passing a mask back and forth. He looks weak. He inhaled too much of this soupy shit. And the heat is going to drop both of you soon.

  This, you think, is a high RCP world. This is what your world will look like at some point. Hothouse runaway, the heat-trapping clouds overhead creating more heat as the whole ecosystem cycled toward something sinister and hellish. Only here they got to it sooner. They burned more fossil fuel and burned it faster, dumped heat into the atmosphere faster. Got here well before you.

  And in the other world you were just in, they didn’t. Their ancestors somehow restrained themselves.

  What did that look like? That restraint?

  Could you have done it? Miko? No. He only thought about his next meal, his next fuck, his next raid.

  Miko retches hard, his eyes bugging as he cries tears of blood. You give him the mask, even though you’re faint yourself. There’s dark blood all over his shoulders from the bullet fragments rebounding when he shot the armored glass.

  How long will it take for Armand to get to the next jump? He seems to be driving with purpose, trying to find a distinct spot.

  Will Miko even make it?

  You rummage around the Shäd’s body, looking for the bottle of air the mask is connected to. It’s dangling by his hip. The gauge is at half.

  If the man had a full tank when you jumped, and had enough air to be safe during a transit, then you and Miko are going to suck through it before you’re halfway across this side. Right?

  Miko shoves the mask at you and tries to lean closer. “I’m sorry,” he rasps.

  “Save your damn breath,” you tell him.

  “I shouldn’t have let you go with him,” Miko struggles to say, trying to push the mask back at you and turning his face away from it when you give it back to him. He takes a shuddering gasp of the hellish, hot air.

  “No!” You try to force the mask over his face and he weakly grabs at your forearm to try and stop you.

  The truck and trailer judder to a sudden stop.

  You snap your head around, then take a few deep hits from the mask and move around Miko to look down the length of the cab.

  There are shadowy forms lurking in the brown mist. Armand hits the lights, and you see a crowd of a hundred or so people in the middle of the dirt road. They are on the other side of barriers made of pitted concrete and rusted rebar.

  They’re all wearing tattered rubber ponchos, faces obscured by gas masks. Many of them are carrying crude guns, others are holding spears or bottles of fluid with rags hanging from the tops.

  Armand must not have any Shäd in the cab to drive, as he spends a long set of moments lurching the trailer and truck into reverse and trying to correct the trailer from sliding to the side. But he stops again, and you see that barriers have been rolled across the road. Sharp rebar is pounded into the ground to hem the truck in.

  You recognize the tactic. You’ve been the one pushing barriers across a road before.

  Miko has slumped over and pushed the mask away. You take a few pulls from it, and try to get it back on his face. But he’s not responding.

  Figures surround the truck, surging through the muck floating over the ground. You’re trying to pull Miko down when they grab you and pull you forward. The large crowd parts as a figure walks confidently to the front of the truck with a massive rocket launcher over one shoulder.

  The person stops and pulls their mask away from their face to shout up at the driver’s side window.

  “Armand: get the fuck out of the truck or I’ll fire this right at the window.”

  You stare.

  The face. There’s a long scar across the cheek to the nose. The hair is shaved down except for a slight tuft near the front. It looks older, more weathered.

  But damn it, it’s your face.

  “Hello sister,” the woman holding the rocket launcher says, never taking her eyes off the truck. “I’ll talk to you in a few. I’m in the middle of something with that rat-bastard up behind the wheel.”

  You open your mouth to talk, but one of the poncho-wearing warriors to your side jams a mask over your face. You breathe the clean air in deeply and gratefully, then let them lead you around to the back of the truck.

  There’s a gun pointed at you, and they force you to sit near Miko. He’s not moving, but they’ve pulled the Shäd mask on over his face so he can breathe. If he’s still alive.

  Four peel off and pull out what look like jury-rigged explosives that they start taping onto the doors.

  You peel the borrowed mask away. “Hey! You don’t have to do that.”

  They pause and stare back at you, bug-eyed in the gas masks and startled at the interruption.

  “I know the code,” you tell them.

  They look at each other, then shrug. Four guns are trained on you as you stand up and slowly walk over. You punch in the combination you memorize
d when watching Armand, and the door slides down to become a ramp once again.

  They swarm in, weapons up, to secure the back.

  You hold onto Miko and watch them break open the cages. Miko would be devastated: all that loot’s going to end up in the hands of these raiders.

  Raiders run by someone with your face.

  Another universe. High RCP, you tell yourself. You’re in something like shock. Is it the air?

  Your self-labeled “sister” arrives, pushing Armand in front of her. He’s holding his breath, eyes wide and blood running down his temple. You’re not sure who’s having a worse day: you or him.

  You get waved up the ramp, along with Armand. Someone helps you pull Miko up into the trailer, and the door shuts behind you. Air pumps run for a second, and then everyone starts removing their masks.

  This other version of you, clearly the leader here, clearly in control of this strange situation, looks you up and down and doesn’t seem to come to any sort of conclusion one way or another. “I call myself Che. It’s a little bit of a joke, if you read history.”

  “I’m Chenra. Full Chenra.”

  “Good for you.” She is unimpressed. “Armand explain the smuggling he does?”

  “Some of my people rode the trailer, ended up in another world, tried to take the truck,” you tell her, not answering her question but trying to explain who you are. And why Armand is your enemy. Can you make friends with yourself if you both hate Armand? “We didn’t really understand what was happening, and he took the moment to jump us over here. We didn’t have bottled air.”

  Your doppelgänger looks down at Miko and nods, a riddle solved. “He’s in a bad way. How long did he inhale the soup?”

  “Long enough. Has something in his shoulder from trying to shoot the window.” You nod at the art and valuables being dragged out toward the back of the trailer. “That all yours now? I’m not trying to lay claim to it or get in your way.”

  “What do you think, Armand? Should I keep all this shit?” Che kicks your captor, who is lying on the floor, spitting bile. He wipes his chin with a dirty suit sleeve and glares at her. “He tell you how special you were?”