by Mike Leon
“You want it, cocksucker?” Sid screams. “You got it!”
Sid squeezes the trigger and puts three bullets into the bike rider’s face before he gets off a shot. The body slumps backward and the bike, a matte black Kawasaki Ninja, tips and falls on its side. The sight of it is as refreshing as a cold drink of water in a hot desert. The feelings of frustration which have dogged him for so many hours recede and in this moment he has only one wonderful and unrepressed inclination: KILL!
Another two bikes appear from around the corner. Sid puts a single shot through the throat and spine of the first one, killing him instantly. The second one almost gets to fire his weapon before Sid shoots it out of his hand.
“Get ready for what Gamespot calls the most realistic shooter ever!” Sid screams as he shoots the biker in both kneecaps. “Real ragdoll physics!”
Sid fires three shots into the biker’s guts as the bike buzzes forward at him like a missile and slams into the side of the dumpster. The rider’s body catapults over the handlebars and bashes head first into the steel paneling.
Beyond the dumpster is a hundred yard stretch of even more gravel, then a small roadway, then a copse of trees that separates the plaza from a residential district.
“Hoof it! Go for the trees!” Sid yells at Bruce and Jordan as he backpedals for the dumpster. The other two run ahead of him. If these rags have any sense then he knows what’s coming next.
He’s right. He barely makes it around the corner of the dumpster before GameStop explodes. The blast tips the 6000 lbs dumpster, which comes smashing down at his heels as he dives for the gravel. Its contents, scraps of rotting food, broken display fixtures, unwanted receipts, tied plastic trash bags, broken folding chairs and thousands of gallons of other unidentified garbage comes cascading out across the ground like a tidal wave behind him.
Sid hops up from the pavement and turns back toward the store. The air stinks of RDX, a common military grade explosive used in C4. It’s almost impossible to see through the giant cloud of soot that surrounds him. He finds Bruce and Jordan a few yards ahead, only a little beaten up. He picks them up from the ground and points toward the trees, which none of them can see anymore.
“The trees are that way. Go!” he says. Jordan wastes no time fleeing and bawling like a small frightened girl. Bruce nods back at Sid and then goes as well.
Another bike rumbles through the debris, doubtlessly unaware of Sid’s position, blindly searching for him. There are others in the cloud, but this one is closest. Sid plucks a broken Playstation controller from the sea of litter at his feet and charges forward. He wraps the controller cord around the bike rider’s neck, cutting off any chance the man might scream, and then pulls his enemy off the back of the bike. He keeps the cord taut as he wraps the other end around the handlebars and gasses the motorcycle. He peels out, tearing through the dust cloud while spraying exhaust into the face of the strangling man at the end of his makeshift noose.
Sid exits the fog of destruction doing fifty on the bike and turns onto Leland Ave, in front of the plaza, going the wrong direction through traffic. He takes a quick glance back to verify that the explosion took out a whole third of the building, demolishing not just GameStop, but the consignment shop next door, the Footlocker next to that, a small Chinese restaurant and a Pier 1 Imports. He snaps his attention forward again and views his enemies as a whole for the first time.
It is worse than the voice on the phone warned: a pack of cars fills the three lane street. The vehicles are sedans, vans, coupes and even some trucks. There’s no uniformity—no way to tell which of them are trying to kill him and which are simply bystanders caught up in the flow of the convoy. The only hint of anything sinister at all is the unusual prevalence of pickup trucks with identical bulging blue tarps obviously covering mounted heavy machine guns. Two faces light up with fright in the car dead ahead of him as he zips by, riding the broken white line between oncoming cars. It’s a tight squeeze and he’s going ninety by the end of it. His hangman slams against the sides of some vehicles and almost makes it to the end, but wedges under one of the last van’s tires. Sid just feels a bump and then sees a severed head trebuchet over his shoulder into the windshield of an oncoming school bus. As he zooms past the bus he hears the shrill screaming of children from its open windows.
It was a dangerous gamble, but it paid off. He bet the men in the vans wouldn’t be quick enough to recognize him and detonate their explosives in the two seconds it took to zip through their column. Now they have to turn all those vehicles around in traffic while he roars down the street on this crotch rocket putting almost two miles between them every minute. The only thing maneuverable enough that he might still have to contend with them are the other bikes. He swerves into the center of the street and rides the center line between traffic going both ways.
Then he sees the most unusual thing he has encountered all day. Ahead of him, behind a small green sedan in the center oncoming lane, is a truck—not just any truck, but a roving fortress. Its rugged wheels are eight feet in diameter. The black cabin is covered in crudely welded steel plates and the truck bed behind it is surrounded by an armored shell with three thin gun ports on the side he can see. The muzzles of three M2 Browning machine guns turn toward him from the fire points.
One of these things is not like the others.
Sid shifts left and cuts across the path of the green sedan as the enormous monster truck rolls over it, crushing the car and the woman with three children who occupied it into a morbid pancake of oozing blood and compressed steel. The guns on the other side of the truck aren’t ready for him, which means they have only three gunners in the back, switching sides as necessary. He squeezes down on the P90’s trigger as he makes his pass. At this speed even he can’t shoot with much accuracy, and most of the bullets splatter against the armored broadside of the truck bed, but one makes it through a gun port.
One of the guns opens fire as he speeds away, leaving the truck behind him. Shots sail over his head and smack against the roadway. One clatters against the bumper of a little VW Bug. Then he feels the bike rattle as one of the M2 rounds slams into it.
“Fuck!” Sid curses as shreds of rubber explode outward from the bursting rear tire and the bike wobbles out of control.
EXT. THE HIGHWAY - DAY
“What happened?” Sayyid shouts into his radio. He sits in the passenger’s seat of the roaring diesel monster truck. The truck leaps up and down, with only Sayyid’s seatbelt keeping him in place as they run over smaller cars while turning to follow the infidel dog.
He gets a response he does not appreciate at all.
“I think we got him,” Hamid relays back from the front of the convoy.
Sayyid bellows with frustration. “You did not get him! He just passed us! He killed Muhammad!”
“Muhammad is with me,” calls another driver on the radio. “He is alive.”
“The other Muhammad!” Sayyid screams. “He took his motorcycle! Everyone turn around! Everyone! He is going East on Leland now!”
“He killed Muhammad!” shouts Ahmed, one of the three gunners, through the window in the partition between the cabin and the truck bed.
“I just said that!” Sayyid says.
“No! This Muhammad!” Ahmed points over his shoulder at a man lying dead in the rear corner of the truck bed. His body flops up and down as the truck bounces and blood gushes from his forehead. “He killed two Muhammads!”
EXT. FAMILY DOLLAR - DAY
Sid drops the ruined motorcycle in the street and looks back at the monster truck coming his way. Traffic isn’t very dense, and the cars that are out are too busy screeching away from the crushing wrath of that monstrous truck to slow down for him. He sprints for the nearest parking lot. He might be able to circle around a building and hotwire something before they catch up to him.
He pounds over the blacktop lot in front of a Family Dollar discount superstore. He can see the monster truck rumbling toward him as he da
shes into a grid of parked cars. Running down the middle of the grid between the face-to-face bumpers, he sees brief glimpses of the truck getting closer and closer. It spits a black plume of diesel exhaust from the smokestacks over the cabin and surges directly toward him. Sid kicks off the hood of a boxy looking old Lincoln and doubles back as the truck slams into the parking grid ahead of him.
The front end of the monster truck lurches into the air like the upper jaw of some great beast opening its mouth to chomp down on the cars in front of Sid. He raises the P90 and takes aim at the side of the truck as it crunches down on the old Lincoln and another small coupe. Now that he isn’t steering a crotch rocket a hundred miles an hour into oncoming traffic he is able to aim with his usual superhuman precision. He squeezes the trigger and fires a dozen shots through one of the gun ports. The first few bullets perforate the face of a gunner who was about to fire at him. The rest of them bounce around the inside of the bulletproof compartment like balls in a bingo hopper. The truck stops.
Sid watches the vehicle cautiously for a moment, then he climbs up the back of a white cable company van nearby and jumps over to the hood of the monster truck to have a look inside. He confirms what he suspected already, that there are no explosives in this truck. The driver is dead, killed by one of the bouncing 5.7 rounds, and a brown skinned bald man in the passenger’s seat jostles his arm frantically as Sid leans against the windshield to look more closely. He can see into the pickup bed through a small window behind the front seats. Two of the gunners are already dead and the other hopelessly and desperately applies pressure to a sucking chest wound. Sid knocks on the windshield to confirm that it is ballistic glass, but he is uncertain of the rating. Then he looks for any joints or unsecured openings he might be able to exploit. The passenger screams at him angrily through the glass.
“You will pay for your crimes, monster!” he screams. But Sid doesn’t care much. He’s looking at the thing balanced on the man’s lap. It’s an iPad, an expensive toy for most people, but this one displays something alarming. Sid sees himself on the screen. More specifically, he sees himself right now, from a viewpoint somewhere high in the sky.
“That’s a neat toy,” he says. The mystery caller wasn’t lying. They have eyes on him from space.
“Know this face!” The passenger leans forward over the dashboard. “And when you burn in Jahannam, know that it was Sayyid al-Dhafiri who sent you there!”
Sid pokes the muzzle of the P90 against the windshield and then draws it back only a few inches. He fires at the passenger’s face. The glass catches the 5.7 in a spiderweb of foggy white fragments the size of a baseball.
Sayyid chants loudly through the glass in neither of Sid’s languages.
فَلْيُقَاتِلْ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ الَّذِينَ يَشْرُونَ الْحَيَاةَ الدُّنْيَا بِالْآخِرَةِ
Sid fires at the very center of the spiderweb again, adding an inch to its diameter. Bulletproof glass is never truly bulletproof. The strongest stuff will stop high powered rifle rounds in moderate groupings, but even a .22 will eventually drill through it if the exact same spot is hammered enough times. The 5.7 packs a lot more punch than a .22, but it’s no artillery shell. This could take a while. Sid continues firing while Sayyid yells at him.
وَمَن يُقَاتِلْ فِي سَبِيلِ اللَّهِ
Sid keeps on plugging at the windshield. This idiot is fanning the flames of his bloodlust.
فَيُقْتَلْ أَوْ يَغْلِبْ
Sid pops the fucking thing a few more times and then the P90 runs dry. He ejects the mag and rips away one of the extras taped to the gun. The glass has bubbled inward. It is impossible to see through a third of the windshield now.
فَسَوْفَ نُؤْتِيهِ أَجْرًا عَظِيمًا
He can see cars down the street coming his direction faster than they should be. It’s the pack. They’ll be on him in less than half a minute, even if they don’t run over anybody to get here.
“I’m gonna spend extra time with you,” Sid says, slapping his middle finger against the windshield. “Later.”
He leaps down to the blacktop and dashes for the nearest running automobile he sees. It’s a blue Ford Taurus standing right up against the sidewalk in front of the main entrance to Family Dollar, probably waiting to pick someone up from inside the store.
Sid rips the driver’s side door open and snatches hold of a heavyset black man smoking a skinny brown cigar with a fluted plastic filter on the end. He pulls the man from the car.
“Hey motherfucker!” the driver protests. “Get the fuck off me!”
Sid points the P90 at his face. The driver’s eyes bulge with terror.
“Give me your phone,” Sid says.
“Yeah, man. Whatever.” The driver hands Sid a black touch screen cell phone which is big enough that it might also serve as a lunch tray or surfboard. This is good. He couldn’t have picked a better phone for his purposes. He snatches the cell phone and tosses it into the passenger seat of the car.
“What’s the number?” Sid yells.
“I don’t know!”
“How do you not know your own number?!”
“Look man, it changes a lot. I ain’t always got minutes. It be complicated an’ shit.”
“Fuck!” Sid kicks the man to the blacktop and drops down into the seat of the car. Bass blasts him in the face as soon as he sits down.
It’s a repetitious composition that seems to only loop a request to do the stanky leg and break one’s legs. Very strange.
Music is a thing that eludes Sid. He doesn’t bother with any of it. He simply can’t relate to anything he hears. Most of it appeals to feelings of love or heartache, which are emotions he does not have, and the rest of it is so filled with pop-cultural jargon that it just sounds like gibberish to him. He mashes the stereo’s power button as he peels out in the Taurus.
He picks up the huge cell phone as he hops the car up a curb and drives over the freshly mowed lawn beside the Family Dollar parking lot. He dials Lily Hoffman’s number and looks in the rear view to check the proximity of the convoy. Three sedans roar through the parking lot, one of them clipping an onlooker who was gawking at the destruction caused by the monster truck. Others follow him in the street, or so he suspects from the unusual volume of traffic.
After four rings Lily picks up.
“Who is this?” she says
“It’s me,” Sid grumbles.
“Sid? Are you in a car? Did you get a cell phone? You hate cell phones.”
“I need you to tell me what this number is!”
“What? Why?”
“Just look at your caller ID and read it back to me!”
“Okay, it’s um, five-three-oh-nine-one-six-two-four-seven-eight. What’s going on?”
“I’ll tell you about it later.”
Sid hangs up and immediately begins dialing the number Lily read back to him. He punches in all ten digits, but stops short of actually pushing the call button. The numbers are displayed on the huge touch screen. He rolls down the window and holds the phone up to face the sky as he looks again for suspicious vehicles.
He spies a brown Nissan Altima occupied by two assholes wearing black headbands with bright white Arabic script across them about fifty meters behind him. Beside it is a Lincoln Navigator, also occupied by two dickholes that appear to have come straight out of an ISIL beheading video.
To Sid’s right, he sees a little girl peeking at him over the edge of the open rear driver’s side window of a Ford Fiesta. Far ahead of them, a battered Dodge Ram enters a four-way intersection from the right and stops. An angry looking olive skinned man peers at Sid through the driver’s side window. The rear of the vehicle is covered in a blue polyethylene tarp.
Sid drops the cell phone back on the passenger’s seat and jerks the steering wheel to the right. The Taurus swerves that direction and slams up against the Fiesta. Sid points the P90
at the driver of the car, a pudgy woman wearing too much makeup.
“Get the fuck off the road!” he yells.
The Fiesta driver screams and turns violently, veering off the road. In the intersection ahead, two men emerge from beneath the blue tarp, tearing it away from the truck bed and revealing an M2 Browning attached to an arched crossbar over the truck bed. It’s what soldiers refer to as a technical—a civilian vehicle modified to carry a mounted weapon.
Sid props the P90 on the dashboard and fires. The 5.7 rounds blast through the tempered glass like it’s made from paper and the windshield explodes into hundreds of tiny crystalline fragments. The M2 gunner catches a couple bullets in the chest as he squeezes down on the trigger and the gun blazes wildly out of control.
.50 BMG rounds slam into the street, chipping away pieces of asphalt around the Taurus before the muzzle of the gun jerks upward to blast at a red traffic light over the intersection. The light, decimated by machine gun fire in seconds, breaks free of its place on a steel cable between two utility poles and falls toward the street.
Sid mashes down on the gas and narrowly clears the falling stop light. He swerves in front of the technical and reaches out to fire the P90 through the Taurus’s passenger’s side window one-handed. He peppers the driver with bullets as he drives by.
The Navigator, zooming to catch up with him, swerves sharply to avoid the stop light and careens wildly toward the technical. The Navigator tires screech as the driver slams on the brakes only feet from impact, but he is too late. The crash sends both passengers flying through the windshield. One of them makes it over the technical and is crushed by a semi crossing through the intersection. The other ends up across the lap of the dead technical driver.
