by Mike Leon
“Do sidekicks get plot armor?” Nick worriedly asks.
“Usually, but I wouldn’t count on it. Whoa!” Lily shifts instantly to an angry tone. “Does he sidekick better than I do?”
“No. He whines even more,” Sid says. “And he doesn’t do blowjobs.”
“And I never will.” Nick shakes his head.
“Look, Lily, it’s been nice chatting but I have to go.” Sid snatches the phone from Nick’s hand with very little difficulty, though Nick ogles back at him as though the action was somehow superhuman.
“But I need you to—” Lily manages before Sid hangs up on her. He doesn’t care to fight with the phone’s menu. These expensive toys are always overly complicated. He just dials the Player’s number from memory.
It rings once before the Player picks up.
“Sid?” inquires the Player, not waiting for a response. “I found Stephen!”
“Where is he?” Nick blurts.
“He’s at a gas station on Fruitridge, but you have a big problem coming your way.”
“I know,” Sid says. It’s the monster truck. He can hear it coming from a mile away—quite literally. “I’m gonna fuck it up this time.”
“No. It’s worse now.”
“The two-forty can get through their windshield.”
“It’s not that. It’s—”
Suddenly the street explodes in front of them. Sid jerks the steering wheel hard and the Blazer swerves left, narrowly avoiding the burning pit punched in the street by some kind of ordnance.
“Lame,” Sid grumbles.
“What was that?” Nick shrieks.
“It’s what I was trying to tell you! They have a Hatchet mortar system on the truck.”
“How the fuck are they aiming it?”
“They’re watching you from space! Remember?”
“That’s just great.”
“The satellite isn’t equipped with a range finder for that kind of weapon system, but it would be easy enough to code an application to extrapolate the data based on the coordinates of a fixed point. It’s not optimal, but that works in our favor.”
The street explodes again, this time to the left of the Blazer, sending the truck’s driver’s side wheels flying up off the ground. Sid tears the steering wheel to the right, angrily pushing the wheels back down, but also careening onto the sidewalk. The Blazer bashes into a fire hydrant and uproots the heavy yellow mechanism from its connection to the water supply. The truck rattles with the tinny sound of an angry jet of city water into its guts for a brief second before they are beyond it and Sid sees the geyser in the rear-view.
“It’s optimal enough!” Sid yells. “I’m killing that fucking truck!”
He whips the Blazer around to the opposite side of the street and takes off in the other direction. The truck’s muffler shakes loose and clanks against the pavement. The Blazer growls like a tank now as it speeds down the street toward Sid’s giant armored enemy.
“This is a bad idea,” Player says.
“What are they gonna do? They’re already shooting artillery at me.” Sid snickers.
Sid peels around a corner in the Blazer and sees the monster truck—surrounded by fifteen police cars. The huge host of black and white vehicles charges toward him like a herd of stampeding wildebeests, engines roaring and sirens blaring.
“What the fuck?!” Sid barks. “The cops are all over him!”
“He’s driving through a metropolitan area in a homebrew APC shooting a mortar!” the Player shouts. “Did you think the police wouldn’t be interested in that?”
The mortar system is hidden in the armored shell around the back of the monster truck, but Sid has a good enough idea what it looks like. The Soltam Systems Cardom 120mm Recoil Mortar System is a pipe nearly the height of a grown man which is mounted on a mechanical swivel so it can be aimed by a computerized targeting system. It requires at least two men to operate.
“That must be the whole police department right there!” Nick says. Sid knows that to be an exaggeration from his observations of the Morston police, but it is an impressive force.
“Hold on,” Sid yells. He turns to avoid the police cars, hopping up the curb as he goes. He spins the Blazer again as the police swarm passes him and he joins the pursuit.
The black monster truck is a behemoth engulfed by tiny harrying predators, but it is not such easy prey. A heavy machine gun blazes from a fire slot in the rear of the truck, chewing away the front end of a car several rows ahead of the Blazer. Tires shred, glass shatters, smoke and fire billow from the engine compartment as the vehicle jerks to the side and hits another cruiser, then flips into the air and comes down on the car behind it. Sid swerves away from the pack to avoid the wrecked police cars just as another car slams into them.
Bullets and buckshot slam into the side of the monster truck from a dozen different cars. Police lean out of passenger windows with shotguns, rifles, and even a few pistols, firing everything they have at the mechanized monstrosity. None of it will punch through that armor, and even the glass offers good protection against those guns.
Sid reaches over the seat to grab hold of the bulky 240 lying behind him. He yanks the gun into the front of the car and shoves it into the priest’s hands with the belt of shimmering brass cartridges streaming behind it.
“Here,” he says. “Shoot at the truck!”
“I’m not shooting anyone!” Nick hollers back. “You shoot at the truck!”
“I’m driving! You shoot! That’s how it works!” Sid fingers the button on the door panel to lower the passenger’s side window, but the window jams only an inch of the way down.
“That’s not how it works! I don’t even know how to use this thing!”
“Don’t be a pussy!” Sid yells. He turns the 240 sideways and bashes the stock through the passenger window angrily. Glass spews out the side of the car and tumbles down the door into Nick’s lap.
“I won’t do it! I don’t kill people!”
“Figures,” Player chimes in. “You people were fine with it during the crusades, but now that it’s actually necessary you’re useless.”
“That was the Catholics!” Nick yells. “It’s a completely different church!”
“Fuck it!” Sid grunts. “I’ll just do it myself!”
Steering with one hand and holding the 240 in the other, he props the muzzle of the machine gun on the passenger window frame and squeezes down on the trigger. Nick covers his ears as the gun sprays lead death over the rooves of ten police cars and pelts the armored hull of the monster truck. Hot brass cylinders pile up at his feet.
The Islamists in the monster truck adapt quickly and return fire over the police fleet from a slot on their driver’s side. Sid taps the brakes and avoids an onslaught of heavy machine gun rounds. He swerves to the right, moving behind the motorcade and out of the heavy gun’s firing arc.
The monster truck spits fire into the air from the mortar mounted in the truck bed. The shockwave is a miniscule bustle on the other side of all these police cars.
“What are they shooting at?” Nick ponders aloud. “We’re right here.”
Sid pulls the 240 back into the car and stabs it through a fist sized hole in the windshield. It is easier to aim in this position than firing out the side of the car. He pulls the trigger and blasts away at the fire slot on the back of the truck. The 7.62 puts some good dents in the plating welded to the body of the truck, but they don’t seem to do much more. Sid releases the trigger and lines up a single shot with more precision.
WHAM! The Blazer jolts wildly as a police car slams alongside it.
“Pull over!” a cop shouts over the echoing loudspeaker of the car smacking into their passenger’s side.
“Fuck that guy!” Sid grunts. He swings the 240 around to the passenger window again to take aim at the driver of the police car. Nick grabs the muzzle of the machine gun.
“No!” Nick shouts. “You’re not shooting the police!”
“You�
��re getting in my way a lot, and it’s starting to piss me off!” Sid shouts back.
“Killing terrorists is a grey area! Killing cops is wrong!”
Sid snarls and drops the machine gun across the center console. He clasps the steering wheel in both hands and taps the brake to give the police car a slight lead. Then he cranks the wheel viciously to the right and sideswipes the police car, smashing the heavy front end of the Blazer against the light rear end of the cruiser and forcing it into a spin. The police car squeals in a circle as the rest of the pack moves on without it.
“There!” Sid says. “I didn’t shoot any cops!”
Ahead of them, a police car explodes into a fiery shower of glass and steel. A malfunctioning rack of flashing lights cracks against the Blazer’s broken windshield and emits its last pathetic fade-out.
“What was that?!” Nick shouts.
“They’re firing the mortar straight up in the air!” Sid says.
“That’s insane!” He’s right. It’s dangerous and stupid and just the kind of thing that would seem perfectly sensible to a bunch of idiot rags. The sight only makes Sid more determined to put a stop to this retardation immediately.
“Hand me that grenade!” Sid yells.
“There’s a grenade in the car?” Nick says.
“On the back seat!” Sid points to a single M67 fragmentation grenade which is lodged between the back seat and the rear passenger’s side door. Some loose bullets and a curved AK-47 magazine lie on the seat nearby, all of the equipment having been thrown around the truck during the jumps down from the building earlier.
“I’m not picking that up,” Nick says, looking fearfully at the grenade.
“Hand me the fucking grenade, you cunt!” Sid says. He is scarier than the grenade.
Nick climbs over the back seat and reaches for the explosive. He plucks it up and jumps back down into the passenger’s seat, dropping the frag grenade in Sid’s lap as if it was burning his fingers.
Sid holds the grenade out the window and winds up to throw it over two police cars and into the open top of the monster truck. He whips his hand forward and releases the grenade with superhuman precision. He watches it sail over the first car, then the second, and then arc ever-so-perfectly downward toward the top of the monster truck.
It smacks into a low flying pigeon just before it goes in the truck. The bird flaps wildly as it topples from the air, the grenade falling beside it. Both go under a police cruiser, which jumps up from the street a second later, spitting smoke and flame.
“Seriously?” Sid says.
“It would have been pretty anti-climactic if you just blew up the truck like that,” Nick says.
“What does that mean?”
“I— I just think your girlfriend might be onto something.”
Sid stomps down on the gas and kicks the Blazer forward. He pulls up alongside a cruiser near the edge of the pack and opens the car door. “Take the wheel!” he yells to Nick as he grabs the KA-BAR from the floor.
“What? The what?” Nick says.
“Where’s he going?” the Player says.
Sid bites down on the knife and leaps from the Blazer, catching hold of the rack of flashing lights atop the police cruiser. The Blazer slows and careens away as Nick scrambles to switch seats. He’ll figure it out. Sid doesn’t have time to worry about that.
An angry looking cop yells at him through the cruiser’s passenger window. Sid keeps moving. He climbs up onto the roof, moves down to the hood, then jumps to the back of another cruiser. He’s hopping cars on his way to the truck. He’s seeing red and he’s growling through the carbon blade between his teeth. He stomps over the cab of this cruiser and leaps to the next one.
The last cruiser disintegrates behind him, hit by a mortar shell. The car turns to a pillar of flame that singes Sid’s shoulders. He charges on over the next car and comes head to head with the huge black truck. It towers over him. Even atop the hood of the police cruiser he cannot see over the armored hull that protects the mortar crew. He does see Sayyid glaring at him from the passenger window.
The truck veers right sharply as Sid bounds off the top of the police car. He catches hold of the truck’s passenger door and sticks to the side of the vehicle as it runs over the police car he came from, bouncing up and down, crumpling steel like paper under its enormous wheels. Sayyid angrily punches at the ballistic glass in front of Sid’s face.
“I’m back, motherfucker!” Sid says. He pulls himself up onto the top of the truck and looks down into the cut-away roof. He sees three men surrounding the mortar system inside the rear of the truck. Heavy 120mm shells litter the floor. Two men attempt to load a shell into the mortar as a third looks up at Sid in terror.
Sid jumps down into the rear of the truck and drives the KA-BAR blade into the screaming mouth of the man who saw him first. The blade erupts from the base of his skull. The loader turns up from the mortar just in time to catch all four of Sid’s fingers in his eyes. Sid’s wriggles his fingers in eyeball Jell-O as he wraps his thumb around the upper jaw and picks his enemy up from the floor like a crying bowling ball. He takes the shell the blind bastard was holding and throws him over the side of the truck to meet death under those giant tires. The shell becomes a nifty club, which Sid uses to bash in the cranium of the last of the mortar team.
“I kill you!” Sayyid screams, leaping over the seat from the front of the cab, fists flying at Sid with snarling rage.
Sid bobs around Sayyid’s punches, then hits him in the testicles with the mortar shell. The Islamist leader yelps and backs away. Sid advances, gloating at his enemy.
“I told you I would take my time,” he says. “Now I’m taking it.”
Sayyid stands up straight, to his credit, and attacks again, punching and kicking with all his rage. He is an elite fighter by normal standards, and even almost hits Sid once. Almost. He hammers Sayyid in the sack again. The Islamist howls. It is impressive that he can still stand, but Sid never thought he lacked dedication. Sid hits him in the balls again and he finally falls over.
“Samir!” Sayyid coughs as Sid presses him against the floor under his boot. “Dakkadakka wazdakka waghdakka!” Sid doesn’t understand that last bit, but he doesn’t care much as he loosens the mortar from its mechanical swivel and hoists up the huge weapon, brandishing it over the Islamist mastermind.
“I’m not finished with you yet,” Sid says.
“You will die, infide—”
The last of his epithet is cut short as Sid drops the mortar shell down the barrel of the soft recoil weapon and it discharges into the air, kicking back and ramming Sayyid’s crotch with its steel butt, crushing his testicles and all of his frontal pelvic bones. Sayyid screams and his eyes bulge almost out of his head.
The driver opens his door and leaps yowling from the vehicle. In a fraction of a second, Sid sees the reason why. Fifty meters out, a rusted VW bus rockets head-on at the monster truck, barreling along the wrong side of the street. Fatimah is at the wheel.
Sid looks down at the hundreds of pounds of high explosive mortar shells piled along the sides of the truck bed around him, then back at Fatimah.
“Uh oh,” he says.
EXT. DOWNTOWN STREET - DAY
The explosive detonation of the monster truck becomes a veil of flame that fills the Blazer’s windshield and engulfs half the police pursuers. Nick hits the brakes out of sheer instinctive terror and the Blazer skids to a screeching stop on the roadway a few hundred feet behind a dozen squealing police cars. One of them makes the same mistake he did and slides into the back end of the car in front of it with a thump that is practically a whisper amongst all the other noise.
“Oh God,” Nick says. “They blew him up.”
“I saw,” the Player says. “You have to keep going. Find Stephen. Get the numbers.”
“But… It’s over.”
“It’s not over. What do you think they’re going to do with all those car bombs now that their job is done?”
An irrational conflict plays out in Nick’s mind. He wants to disagree. He wants to deduce some reason why this can all end here. He tries aloud.
“I— I don’t know,” Nick says. He knows. He just doesn’t want to know.
“These people are fanatics. They already said goodbye to everyone they care about. They spent months moving millions of dollars of weapons and hundreds of thousands of pounds of explosives into the country for a suicide mission. They bought one-way tickets, Nick. They’re not going back.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that! It’s what they do! You need the headlines? One hundred seventeen days ago. Bombing in Tel Aviv. Forty-three dead. Mossad has Sayyid al-Dhafiri in the city. Ninety six days ago. Bombing at a Dubai fashion show. Fourteen dead. Witnesses described a disfigured woman as the bomber, though no unidentified female remains were at the scene. Sixty-seven days ago. Bombing at a French nursery school. Thirty-five dead. Almost all of them under age six. Interpol has Sayyid on a traffic cam dropping off a woman in a full burqa in front of the school. Do I need to keep going? They will—unless you stop them right now.”
“Hey!” yells a uniformed cop exiting one of the cruisers ahead. He points accusingly at Nick through the Blazer’s broken windshield and draws his handgun as he creeps forward. “You! Get out of the car!”
“Whatever you do, you have to do it now,” Player says.
“I can’t—” Nick says. “I’ll tell the police.”
“Sure. You’re in a car full of machine guns in the middle of a terrorist attack. It looks great. I’m sure they’ll believe everything you say and swiftly jump into action arresting all the perpetrators.”
“Get out of the vehicle!” the cop yells. His face is a twisted frown filled with rage. His eyes flick from left to right, as if seeking something invisible to Nick, something so far removed from his worldview that it seems mythical. “Hands up! Hands up!”
Nick puts his hands up.
“They’re gonna put you away for a long time, Nick,” the Player says. “The guns in that truck alone put you in federal lockup for at least ten years.”
