Human++

by Dima Zales

  As I take it all in, I realize my allies have a big problem.

  Unlike me, they don’t know who the bad guys are, and they have to rely on visual cues, such as people holding guns and looking threatening. However, a few assailants are trying to blend in with the crowd, with only their red haloes giving them away.

  I form a quick plan to deal with this problem and decide to shut down the music so my allies can hear me share my superior knowledge with them.

  Taking out my gun, I approach the dumbfounded DJ.

  “Take that off,” I shout over the noise and wave my gun (with the safety still on) at the cosmonaut helmet in an up-and-down motion. In the curved, reflective surface of the visor, my face looks like a frightened caricature.

  The DJ reaches for the headgear, but it suddenly explodes, shards of glass and plastic flying everywhere. A piece of glass nicks my earlobe, but the pain barely registers. Instead, I watch in horrified shock as the DJ’s dead body crumples in front of me.

  “Duck!” Mitya screams. “That bullet was meant for you.”

  My legs fold under me as if of their own accord. Finding myself on the floor, I start pulling cables out of the DJ’s laptop, figuring one of them will cut the music. Thanks to Murphy’s Law, the cable I need is the last one I pull, and the music stops, the sudden silence amplifying the terrified screams and the gunfire.

  I sneak a peek at the mayhem and spot a red-haloed dude within a couple of feet of my cousin. Grabbing the DJ’s microphone, I yell, “Joe, behind you!”

  My voice booms across the dance floor, and Joe begins to turn. At the same time, the man pulls out his concealed weapon.

  It’s clear my cousin won’t make it.

  “Joe!” I scream, and then I hear the rat-tat-tat of the Uzi.

  The man behind Joe falls. While I was dealing with the music, Nadejda exited the safety of the podium and got close enough to the action to put her Uzi to use.

  Joe gives Nadejda the barest nod as thanks and runs toward the main exit, where the crowd is thicker and will provide him with good cover.

  For the next minute, I use the mic to warn Joe and the others where the less obvious red-haloed guys are.

  My gaze falls on Nadejda. A red-haloed man must’ve crept up behind her, because he has her in a headlock. I think I see Nadejda turning purple, though it’s hard to tell from this distance and especially with these lights.

  “Joe, Gogi, help Nadejda,” I yell into the mic, but they have their own problems. Gogi is exchanging fire with three men, and my cousin is dealing with two assailants.

  “You should shoot that guy yourself,” Mitya suggests urgently. “Use the aiming app.”

  Something inside me snaps, and I don’t even notice how I start up the gun-assist app. My weapon just suddenly has the aiming line. Just as automatically, I take the safety off the gun and use the assist app to line up the barrel with the leg of the guy behind Nadejda.

  “If your hand shakes,” Ada says, “or if the app doesn’t work the way we hoped, you could hit Nadejda.”

  “If he doesn’t shoot, she’ll die anyway,” Mitya retorts.

  I wish I had time to think this through, but I don’t. Going off my instincts, I squeeze the trigger.

  The bullet bites off a chunk of the big man’s thigh.

  To my utter amazement, he doesn’t let go of his victim’s neck. Still, the wound weakens him enough to give Nadejda her chance. In what must be a wrestling maneuver, she rips free from the guy’s grasp, and in a continuous motion, she lifts the wounded man into the air. To my eyes, he seems to hover over her head for a moment before his back lands over Nadejda’s knee. I can almost hear his spine cracking from all the way behind the podium.

  A bullet whines past my ear, and I switch focus from Nadejda to the bullet’s origin.

  The shooter is a blond guy, and he’s still aiming at me.

  I touch his right shoulder with my aim-assist line and pull the trigger.

  The guy falls. He’s twitching on the floor, so I assume he’s alive.

  “Stop shooting to maim,” Mitya yells at me. “Shoot to kill.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Ada retorts.

  “Don’t speak to me right now,” I type into the chat. “I’ll do what I have to.”

  What I don’t say is that I’m siding more with Ada’s viewpoint. I can’t picture myself killing anyone, even though these people deserve it, both for trying to shoot us and because they’re working with whoever kidnapped Mom. I’m not sure if it’s the bios provided by the face recognition app or something ingrained in me, but I stick to shooting arms and legs, figuring I can analyze my reluctance to kill at a more opportune time. On the plus side—assuming it’s a pro and not a con to be cold-blooded—I have zero qualms about the wounds I inflict.

  I shoot the arm of a long-haired man aiming at Gogi while a speaker to my right shatters into small bits of metal and plastic.

  Unperturbed, I hit the shoulder of a bald guy who was about to get Joe.

  An odd sense of flow overcomes me, and I spend the next couple of minutes in a blur of aiming my Glock, pulling the trigger, rinsing and repeating, over and over again.

  When my gun clicks empty, the concentration leaves me, and I take a look at the blood-soaked dance floor. Thanks to our joint efforts, the number of red-haloed men left standing is reduced to just a few individuals.

  Since my extra magazines are in Alex’s SUV, along with duffel bags full of other tools of war, I decide to leave the rest of our enemies to my cousin and his crew. It’s time to get Muhomor and Alex and tell them we have to get as far away from this place as possible. It doesn’t take a brain boost to realize a shootout in a popular nightclub means half of Moscow’s police department is on their way. Dealing with the cops could easily turn deadly, and even in the best case, it could lead to a huge delay in rescuing Mom.

  I turn and instantly get hit with the most intense fight-or-flight response of the last two days—a feat I wouldn’t have thought possible until that very moment.

  There’s a guy behind me.

  A guy with a halo and a comic book balloon with his bio above his head.

  His gun looks like a medieval cannon, and its massive barrel is pointed squarely at my head.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Operating on pure adrenaline, I drop my gun and raise my hands. “Don’t shoot! I give up.”

  My reaction seems to confuse my attacker for a moment, but then his face calcifies.

  He’s about to pull the trigger.

  Suddenly, there’s a whirl of motion.

  The shooter grabs his head, and his gun flies into the air, landing two feet away from me.

  Muhomor is standing behind the guy. Despite the sunglasses, I can make out the terror on the hacker’s face. As I take in his tight grip on the briefcase-like laptop, I understand what happened.

  Muhomor used his computer to club my attacker on the head.

  The red-haloed man recovers and punches Muhomor in the stomach.

  Muhomor doubles over, his sunglasses flying to the side.

  I dive for the gun and bring it up, but there’s no time to enter the gun’s information into the aim assist app.

  I have to shoot now, without hitting Muhomor.

  Fortunately, I’m only a few feet away. Unfortunately, you could run a small town on the adrenaline in my veins.

  “Shoot!” Mitya and Ada yell together.

  The red-haloed guy sees my dilemma and pounces on Muhomor.

  In a second, they’ll be too intertwined for me to shoot safely, so I pull the trigger.

  The gunshot reverberates through every cell in my eardrums, and the recoil makes my hands jerk.

  A red stain on the man’s leg proves I hit my target.

  The pain must be bad, because the guy starts screaming, bends over, and clutches his leg.

  Muhomor uses this moment to kick our opponent in the face. Blood sprays from the guy’s nose, and he falls to the ground with a muffled grunt.
Muhomor kicks the body a few more times, then looks at me, eyes wild. “What? Who? How?”

  “No time,” I say. Into the DJ’s mic, I add, “We have to get out of here.”

  Muhomor closes the distance between us and unhooks the DJ’s laptop. “It has a network card,” he says.

  I shrug and hobble away. Even with the adrenaline-induced numbness spreading through my mind and body, I feel a zillion aches and pains.

  Joe meets us at the bottom of the podium. He’s dragging Alex by the back of his shirt. The shootout must’ve been too much for Alex, because he has the composure of a ragdoll cat.

  As we cross the dance floor, I focus on looking where I step and fighting my gag reflex.

  “Is there another way out of here?” Gogi asks Muhomor. “Not through the casino?”

  “Yes,” the thin man replies. “The banya. Follow me.”

  He starts running, and we all follow as fast as possible without slipping on all the blood.

  We exit the slaughterhouse of the dance floor through the southern door.

  The once pearl-white tiles of the spa are covered in crimson footprints thanks to the mob that preceded us. We follow the grisly markers to a staircase on the opposite side of the large pool.

  I move almost mechanically, occasionally fighting strange urges, like a desire to clean the blood from my shoes in the hot tub we pass.

  A swift sprint later, we reach the stairs, and just as quickly, we find ourselves outside.

  Muhomor clearly knew where he was going, because we’re in a nearly empty parking lot.

  When we reach the Land Rover, Joe says, “Alex, get in the back. Gogi, you drive.”

  Since I wasn’t instructed where to go, I get into the middle seat, and Muhomor joins me. He puts his military suitcase on his lap and stacks the DJ’s laptop on top. He then pulls out a sealed smartphone and unwraps it. He must be creating a hotspot for the DJ’s laptop so he can get online, not unlike how I’ve been staying online all this time. I don’t mention I have my own hotspot already available. The last thing I want is a hacker anywhere near a connection hooked up to my Brainocytes.

  Gogi floors the gas pedal, and our tires violently screech as we surge forward.

  As we approach the parking lot’s exit, I make out the sound of police sirens.

  “The cops are almost here.” Muhomor confirms my guess about the hotspot by typing on the laptop in front of him. “And that includes OMON.”

  OMON is the Russian version of SWAT, so if they’re here and see us as a threat, we’re toast.

  Muhomor opens a terminal session using Putty—a tool I’m familiar with from my programming days. I watch his bony fingers dance across the keyboard, and after a moment, he grins. “This should distract them,” he says and presses the Enter key. Alarms suddenly blast from the Dazdraperma club.

  Unfortunately, when we hit the street, only some of the cops are looking at the noisy building, and at least two heavily armored OMON officers are blocking our way, their assault rifles pointed at us.

  “Over them,” my cousin says, though I don’t think Gogi needed urging given how confidently the SUV is torpedoing forward.

  The officers in our way fly apart, and automatic gunfire rains down on our SUV from every direction.

  I duck, but not before I see two police cars blocking the road ahead of us in a makeshift blockade.

  Glass shards, bits of plastic, and metal fly all around me. Bullets whoosh by, and the only reason I don’t tuck my head between my legs is my morbid curiosity over our possible cause of death. There are so many options.

  We hit the fronts of the two cars with a world-shattering clang.

  My head jerks back, and I wish I had tucked my head between my legs after all. It feels like my whiplash from the Zapo accident just got its own case of whiplash.

  Straining to breathe, I realize my left nostril is bleeding again. I ignore it and check on how the others are doing. Gogi’s knuckles are white on the wheel as our car surges forward. Alex is whimpering something unintelligible from the back. Muhomor’s laptops are on the floor, and he’s hugging himself and shaking like a frightened five-year-old. Nadejda split her shaved head on the dashboard. For whatever reason, she didn’t buckle up when we left the parking lot.

  Nadejda’s reason for not buckling up soon becomes apparent. Oblivious to the blood trickling from the nasty cut on her forehead, she opens the window, leans out, and shoots at something behind us.

  Muhomor calms down enough to execute my earlier idea for dealing with the surrounding violence; he tucks his head between his knees. Then he comes back up with both laptops, sets them up like before, and, to my amazement, begins typing again.

  I chance a look back. The rear window is gone, allowing Joe to shoot at the swiftly approaching police cars. As I expected from the whimpering, Alex is on the floor in a fetal position.

  The strange concentration I felt back in the club overcomes me again, making me wonder if adrenaline stimulates the brain boost in some positive way. With calm, methodical determination, I locate a magazine for my Glock and load it in with a click. I then turn all the way around so my knees are on the seat and my elbows are resting on the headrest. I aim the gun, and the Augmented Reality sight line appears. As I move the gun around, the AU assist continues uninterrupted, even when I point the barrel at faraway targets, like the nearest pursuing car half a block away.

  I struggle to hold the line on the tire. Gogi must’ve just dodged another car or a pedestrian, because the car jerks and I lose my target.

  “Can you drive smoothly for one second?” I say without turning.

  Gogi grunts and we stop zigzagging, so I guess he’s trying to accommodate my request.

  I hold my breath, place the line on the tire again, and gently squeeze the trigger.

  The cop car swerves off the road and crashes through the glass of a storefront.

  Now that the lead car is gone, I see an even bigger vehicle behind it, and this one belongs to OMON, who are shooting at us with automatic weapons.

  “Wow,” I hear Mitya say as though from a distance. “I wonder if his shooting skills improved from the brain boost or just the aim app? Hand-eye coordination is—”

  I don’t hear any more of Mitya’s musings, or even the gunfire erupting all around me, because my attention zeroes in on my gun and this bigger car’s tire. The state I’m in is amazing. With the absence of all other stimuli, I realize how many distractions were around me. My wrists are no longer aching from the recoil, and I’ve stopped gagging from the smell of gunpowder. And though the smoothness of the ride is gone, I don’t really notice it.

  I intuitively raise my elbows off the headrest, adjusting to the back-and-forth motion of the car.

  My finger waits for the right moment.

  I don’t know how I know it’s time to take the shot, but when I fire, the faraway tire explodes and the OMON car violently veers off the road.

  I keep the gun steady, ready to shoot more tires if I have to, but the road behind us is clear. Still, the sound of sirens is close, so I don’t let myself relax. I do, however, pat my jacket pocket and confirm that Mr. Spock is within it.

  “Are we safe?” Alex croaks, his voice so small it’s barely recognizable.

  “No,” Muhomor says. “But I’m in their network.” He raises the DJ’s laptop from his lap. “Anyone without a line of sight on us will have a hard time keeping up. Still, we must switch cars as soon as possible.”

  “Great,” Gogi says. “I’ll just find the nearest car dealership.”

  “No need for sarcasm,” Muhomor says after another few seconds of frantic typing. “Everything’s been arranged. Take a left on Youth Street. There should be a Gastronom parking lot there.”

  I realize I’m still in a shooting position, and Joe is looking at me with what must be curiosity on his austere face, though it could just as easily be disapproval. Then he gives me a faint nod that seems to say, “Good shooting. Thanks, Mike.”

&
nbsp; I face forward again and buckle up, and it’s a good thing I do. Gogi must’ve spotted the necessary street at the last second, because we nearly flip over on the turn.

  With no reduction in speed, we fly into the parking lot of a big supermarket, and I reflect on how tragically ironic it would be if we got killed in a car crash right after escaping a war zone.

  “Over there,” Muhomor says. “The white minivan.”

  We screech to a tire-smoking halt next to the minivan, and I spot the familiar face of Lyuba, the girl from the puzzle, behind the wheel.

  As our crew moves our stuff into the minivan, I calm down enough to pay attention to Mitya and Ada’s conversation, and I overhear him say, “That’s a Ford Windstar. It’s clever using something like that. The back windows are tinted, and the car is so dorky the cops will think it’s just a rich soccer mom behind the wheel.”

  As though to confirm his idea, Muhomor says, “Mike, as the least threatening-looking person, you should sit in the front.”

  I could argue that my bruises make me look tougher than his skinny ass, but I get into the front seat anyway. My hope is that a family car like this might have a passenger side airbag, a handy device in case Lyuba drives as dangerously as Gogi.

  My cousin practically drags Alex into the back of the minivan and stays with him as Gogi, Muhomor, and Nadejda sit in the middle. I buckle up before Lyuba starts driving, but I quickly see I won’t need that airbag. If anything, Lyuba drives annoyingly slow.

  Her strategy pays off; the couple of police cars we pass simply drive by.

  “The Gadyukino hideout,” Muhomor says from his middle seat.

  “On it,” Lyuba says and makes a signaled, super-careful, almost slow-motion right turn.

  Once I no longer hear sirens, I let myself breathe normally and reach into my pocket to check on Mr. Spock again.

  When I take him out, the poor creature’s mental aura is black. According to my notes, that means he’s tense, nervous, or harassed. This time, I don’t even need Ada’s app to tell me he’s frightened. His general haggard appearance is surprisingly telling.