Apocalypse Alley

by Don Allmon

  Buzz was tired of shouting over the wind. “We should link up.”

  “I ain’t letting you anywhere near my fucking head, and you ain’t touching my bike.”

  “I ain’t gonna shout the whole way.”

  “Good, then shut the fuck up.”

  “You know Valentine can hack this bike, right? The air pressure monitor in your tires is tied to your bike’s net by a short-range wireless connection with no security. She can lock our wheels with a thought, and we go flying. I could fix that.”

  “Short range. She’s gotta catch us first.”

  “You’re gonna risk our lives on ‘she’s gotta catch us first’?”

  Comet shook his head like he was arguing with himself, then handshakes, a connection, and that wide-open feeling in Buzz’s head like his sinuses had cleared up.

  —I’m watching you, Comet sent.

  —I bet you are. Buzz scanned the bike’s tiny network and checked config files and logs. These settings felt familiar. He’d seen all these mistakes and security gaps before somewhere. —This isn’t standard. Did you set this up?

  —Jason did. He made me this bike for my birthday.

  Yeah, that was where Buzz had seen all these mistakes. JT’s truck had used settings like this. —Jason built you this bike?

  —Jason gave me my life back.

  Jason had shown up at Duke’s place on Comet’s twenty-seventh birthday riding a custom-built bike based on a Kawasaki design. The bike’s carbon-fiber poly molding was red-shifting-to-yellow. Its carbon-steel frame was black. Its four thermos-sized batteries glowed orange. The orange told their remaining charge. It looked like a fireball. He made voilà hands and said it was Comet’s. Comet told Jason he didn’t ride anymore. He hadn’t ridden in over a year. How Jason had learned Comet had ever ridden at all, he didn’t know. He’d never mentioned it. It must have been Duke.

  “You don’t have to ride it, just sit on it. See if it fits,” Jason said, all wicked grin and brazen innuendo.

  “I know what you’re doing.”

  “It’s hardly a secret.”

  Comet shook his head. “Jason . . .”

  “You’ll do HALO drops into hot zones, and you won’t touch a bike.”

  “A HALO drop’s never killed me.”

  “It’s only a matter of time.”

  “You’ve never woken up and had someone tell you you’ve been dead.”

  “Just ride the damn bike!”

  “No!”

  Comet walked away fuming. Jason walked away fuming. The bike sat there in Duke’s driveway for three days.

  That first time Comet came back to it, he just stared at it awhile.

  The second time, he touched the seat.

  The third time, he ran his hands over it and thought to himself how beautiful it was and that Jason had built this for him. And for the rest of the day he’d thought to himself how poor a friend he had been for yelling at him over a birthday present.

  And the fourth time, he sat on it, linked up, started it up, and rode it nice and slow down the driveway, feet kicking along, tapping the dirt, saying all the way: Just to the end, only to the end. And the driveway turned into the road and the road turned into the dusty highway that ran past Jason’s place.

  And then he stood straddling the thing in Jason’s lot until Jason came out of the printer building wearing grease-covered overalls and cleaning his hands with a rag and some Goop, and Comet took him by the collar and broke the zipper and tore the seams apart he wanted him so bad—it didn’t matter that they were just friends now and not dating anymore—and Comet took Jason’s sweet ass right there over the bike Jason had built him.

  They’d fucked so crazy, the thing went over, and they sprawled over the top of it in a tangle of ankle-binding clothes and plastic and metal jamming into them, and Comet was afraid he’d scratched it all up, but Jason said he’d fix it, don’t stop. So Comet didn’t and probably that load was the biggest he’d ever shot. He remembered thinking he’d die from that nutting, killed twice by a fucking motorcycle.

  A motorcycle’s frame was too small for a maglev rig, so they hit the two-lane that ran alongside I-40, and Comet warned Buzz, —Accelerating. The pressure of it threatened to shove Buzz off the bike. He held tighter, leaned closer, and the speedometer in his head slid up to 320 KPH and pegged there. Buzz watched the road over Comet’s shoulder. It was night. They ran without lights. Comet didn’t need them. Buzz couldn’t see shit.

  And then BangBang came up alongside them on a 1960s-era Harley-Davidson. Buzz knew it was a Harley-Davidson because he’d finally caved and watched the damn movie. In the center of the handlebars sat Critter, a ferret with arms spread wide like he was on the bow of the Titanic (BangBang had made him watch that piece of shit too).

  Buzz was still blocking him, but the port range on the bike’s firewall that received transmissions was open. Buzz went to close them.

  BangBang held up a manila envelope, the universal symbol for data.

  Buzz sighed and left the ports alone.

  —I have information you want.

  —You tried to kill me.

  BangBang didn’t answer right away. The Harley roared ridiculously loud. Buzz didn’t know how anybody had ever stood the noise of it. —It was a medical coma. It wouldn’t have killed you.

  —It would have left me defenseless, and that crazy cyborg would have torn my nervous system out and hot-wired me up.

  —We wouldn’t have allowed that.

  No, 3djinn wouldn’t have, would they? They’d have burned him. They’d have shut him down and then released a virus that would have destroyed Buzz’s mind forever. —You were my friend.

  —I’m still your friend. It was just a little scare. We had to teach you an important lesson, Buzz. Every network’s weakest point is physical access. Your body is physical access.

  How much of this was BangBang talking and how much of it was the ferret? Buzz tried to believe it was all Critter’s fault. He’d never trusted that rodent.

  —I’ve been on my own for years and never had any trouble.

  —Because you stayed out of trouble!

  —I can take care of myself!

  —The way Roan took care of herself?

  And that stopped him short, and he went a bit cold because it sounded less like an argument than a threat. And it sounded less like Critter and more like BangBang. And the horrible thought bloomed: Roan had died during a theft gone bad; that was the story he’d heard on the streets. Austin, Roan’s brother, told a more paranoid version: he believed the job had been a setup to entrap them. Buzz sent, —You killed Roan. 3djinn killed Roan because she wouldn’t stay in High Castle.

  —Don’t be stupid. Roan was the one who showed us how vulnerable 3djinn was. She’s the reason we’re worried about you. We didn’t kill her.

  But Buzz wasn’t so sure. He didn’t know what to think.

  BangBang knew Buzz all too damn well. He tempted Buzz with info and waved the manila folder again. —Your boyfriend’s name is Noah Wu.

  —He’s not my fucking boyfriend. He’s a sociopath who keeps hitting and handcuffing me.

  —Boyfriend material, then. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you and your mercenary, you’re going to be some kind of team like Roan and the guys were. But Roan’s dead and your friend ain’t all that special. I know you want to be a hero, Buzz. But if you want to be the good guy, maybe you should ally yourself with good guys. Here. See for yourself.

  The manila folder waved impossibly gently in the simulated 320 KPH winds. Buzz took it and then blocked all the external sim ports, and the Harley and the beautiful dead flat-vid star who drove it abruptly disappeared. Illusion gone, the manila envelope became what it was, a compressed folder labeled Noah “Comet” Wu.

  Noah “Comet” Wu:

  The flat-vid showed the Cambodian dictator Chey Dara addressing the crowd in his 21 March speech six months before he’d been deposed and arrested on humanitarian charges.
Behind him stood his personal guard. Name tags read: DONNER, BLITZEN, COMET. Buzz hadn’t needed the name tags. He could have recognized Comet anywhere from the way the guy stood: arrogant as fuck, assault rifle across his chest at a perfect forty-five degrees. In the foreground, Chey Dara ranted on about the liberation of humanity. An English translation of the Khmer scrolled helpfully along. It was all the usual filth.

  The sudden and violent transformation of some humans into elves and orcs forty years ago had terrified people like nothing else ever had since the Black Death. And there were always people willing to use fear to their advantage. Chey Dara’s ranting—the anti-elf, anti-orc, demons-everywhere rhetoric—was stuff you still heard in the American unions. In that vid, Comet’s blue eyes didn’t show one hint of Jedi. They looked grim as hell.

  Noah Wu had been a ranger, 6th Reformed Ranger Battalion, Pacifica, for a few very short weeks. Three weeks after he’d earned his patch—Rangers lead the way!—his whole world fell apart. 18 January 2071: court-martial. Charge: conspiracy to murder Grandmaster Natalia Jen.

  BangBang hadn’t included the judgment on the case.

  Buzz knew what BangBang was doing: spinning Comet bad. BangBang wanted him to believe that Comet was a species-ist, murdering fuck, and that Buzz shouldn’t trust him.

  Had BangBang done the same thing to Comet? Sent Comet a cherry-picked dossier on Buzz—a laundry list of international incidents, leaked documents and video, and criminals who’d entered or fled countries on false IDs he’d created?

  No, he wouldn’t do that, would he? Too many threads would lead back to 3djinn. BangBang’s cowardice pissed Buzz off even more.

  Buzz wasn’t gonna be manipulated. Buzz knew these games. He’d spent every day of his life since Roan had brought him into the 3djinn fold telling these same kinds of lies, exposing these same kinds of conveniently spun truths, and he was better at it than any of the three. Creating people was what Buzz did. If BangBang was going through all this effort to prove Comet was a dick, then probably that was only half the story.

  He released VI crawlers into the web. Somewhere out there was the real Comet, the Comet BangBang didn’t want him to know.

  Comet piloted them across the Colorado River, though it was barely a river anymore, and through Las Vegas, population 10,462, which seemed oddly precise.

  Yeah, people still lived there, if you could believe it, burnt-out lights and quake-broken buildings somehow turned into a symbol of decadent frontierism. Vegas reinventing itself as the same old same-old: still crazy.

  He parked at the side of the road for a piss and one final attempt to hail Jason net-wise. It was pointless. Jason was running silent.

  Comet gave up and asked Shaggy, “Where to?”

  “Keep going north.”

  “Just tell me where we’re going. I’m not going to leave you behind, okay?”

  “Say you’re sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Sorry you held a gun to my head.”

  “No, I’m not sorry. You were an unknown in a potentially hostile situation. I needed you subdued and under my control.”

  “Well, that didn’t work out so good for you, did it?”

  “Just because it didn’t work out the way I wanted, doesn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing to do. A whole lot of things work out like that.”

  Shaggy glared. “It scared me.”

  “It was supposed to scare you.”

  “And you don’t feel even a little bit bad about that?”

  “No.” And Jesus what a fucking lie, but he told it very well the way he always did.

  Shaggy squinted at him, ran his hands through his hair.

  “No,” Comet said again.

  Shaggy’s hair fell back into his eyes. Shaggy’s eyes were huge and chocolate. No, shit brown, those are the words you want to use. (But that wasn’t what stuck.) And it wasn’t lost on Comet that even the name he thought of Buzz by—Shaggy—was the label he had given him on his smart gun. He hoped he never slipped and called him that aloud. He didn’t think Shaggy would like it very much.

  “Of course I feel bad. You think I like threatening people?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I do. Most times I don’t. What I feel doesn’t matter. It was the appropriate thing to do at the time, and given the same situation, I’d do it again.”

  Shaggy sighed. “The Boise Devastation. Take 93 North to the Boise Devastation. Austin’s grandfather is a druid. He’s there, one of the ones trying to heal the forest after the bomb. JT and Austin are taking Dante there to heal her.”

  Comet nodded and didn’t push for more. He’d won something just now. He didn’t know what, exactly, or how, but he’d won and he wasn’t going to push it. He threw a leg over the bike and said, “Okay. Highway 93. Boise.”

  You could barely tell the difference between pavement and the crumbling heat-blasted ground of the Mojave as they drove through. That and the silence between them, Comet and Shaggy could have been on the Moon.

  Buzz’s VIs returned with their loot. There wasn’t a lot.

  VI number one had found Comet’s family: academics, SF, not ten blocks from Buzz’s old place (a lot of California lived within ten blocks of Buzz’s old place). The Wu’s social media presence was family-and-friends-only and sensibly password protected. He tagged it no-hacking and waited for more.

  The desert was blue and nearly shone it was so bright. The horizon was black and gently jagged against midnight blue: hills or mountains or something. For all the tech in him—chips in his head and his humerus and artificial strands running the length of his spine—Buzz had never had his eyes modified. Adding pieces to himself was one thing. Removing pieces was another. So all Buzz had was the moon to see by, and the desert was beautiful.

  VI number two found Pacifica Army discharge dates, honorable. That conspiracy charge had gone nowhere, though given the discharge date only weeks after the acquittal, it seemed the accusation had been enough to ruin Comet’s career before it had ever started.

  They lost their cell tower connection for almost a half hour. There was no government or corporate money or reason to rebuild broken-down towers. Nothing lived here but the spiders, and they had their telepathy. They didn’t need wireless.

  Along the road ran ancient telephone poles. Or maybe they were telegraph, but hadn’t those run along railways? Buzz didn’t know ancient tech that well. They weren’t power lines, that much he knew. The posts were wooden with wooden crossbars and wires strung along them through ceramic knobs. The wires dipped and peaked, dipped and peaked, kilometer after kilometer.

  The bike was going fast. It made its weird UFO-whine, and the wind was constant static. It was like static, wasn’t it? That was nice, almost something you could sleep by. It had been so long since he’d slept. And Comet was warm under him.

  The bike connected to a working tower, and patiently waiting VI number three dropped its payload.

  Medevac onboard vid dated three years ago:

  It’s a bright sunny day. The ’copter’s rotors throw a blurred shadow over desert grass. There are EMTs everywhere. Two are hauling a cryo unit. It looks like a photon torpedo, and it’s still spilling vapor. In the background is the perfect black tarmac of a magway and the white of its side road. It’s somewhere north of Greentown; he can tell from the desert and the fact the EMTs are all orcs.

  Duke Mason is there. The camera positioning is strange: meant to show what’s happening outside the ’copter, not inside, so Duke’s only on half the screen, and he must be talking to the pilot inside? But he’s close enough to the camera/mic Buzz can hear everything he says:

  “You’re taking him to Lola Benavides at PUCSD.” He pronounces it: puck sid.

  “PUCSD isn’t part of our approved provider system. We’re taking him where our contract says to take him.”

  “Dr. Benavides, you fucking shit!”

  “Sir, step away from the—”

  Duke’s eyes shoot
sparks in a lightning-storm way Buzz has never seen before. Duke roars and those gold-inlaid tusks flare with sunlight and the white-blue from his own eyes. They flash the camera blind for a moment, and then Duke reaches past the camera with an arm big as a tree and plucks that hapless pilot right out of his seat and chucks him a good ten meters.

  EMTs scramble, shouting. The two with the cryo unit load it onto the ’copter as if nothing is amiss. Someone tasers Duke. Duke doesn’t notice. He hits the guy so hard his helmet flies off. They pile on him with stun batons, useless on a frenzied orc. Duke fights them all. He curses everyone. He weeps. The deep-wisdom valleys of his face catch tears and glitter in the sunlight. He shouts, “Comet! Comet!” the whole time.

  For just a moment, Buzz thought Duke was calling Comet for help.

  Buzz closed the file before the vid ended, not wanting to watch any more.

  Before he lost this tower, he gave his VIs a new quest: Dr. Lola Benavides, People’s University of California, San Diego.

  Their network connection cut in and out.

  Road signs Buzz couldn’t read, just saw the rectangle shapes of, flashed by.

  The wires on the poles running alongside the highway went a bit crazy. They split and arced down and back up and crossed everywhere like some old lady’s shawl, poorly knitted with too little yarn.

  —You see that? Buzz sent.

  —Old webbing, don’t worry.

  Silver broken strands hung from black wires.

  Buzz tried not to worry.

  Something on the network: faint, just a hint of traffic, maybe nothing, maybe not. Buzz accessed a rear camera, saw nothing. The network dropped. Then it came back, and the net was still as glass. He stayed linked to the camera and waited.

  There it was again, just a flicker.

  —There’s something behind us.

  —There’s nothing behind us.

  —Something on our same net.

  —Settlers or something.

  There were always people crazy enough to try to live somewhere people didn’t belong. —Maybe.

  —We’re pegged at 320. Nothing goes that fast except us.