Judgment

by Sean Platt

  Ten minutes, unless Ember Flats is just as bad inside as it it outside.

  Ten minutes … unless we’re all dead in five.

  She went on, framing the talismanic clock like a seasoned leader. It was a battlefield commander telling a gutted soldier he’d be just fine, but even Christopher felt himself calming by degrees as the seconds ticked in peace. This isn’t so hard, just nine minutes and forty seconds left to go. Then movement caught his eye, and he looked through the slats, again at the road sign.

  Now Lila was standing there, with an enormous dark red stain on the front of her shirt, intestines sliding out of her abdomen with the languor of cold syrup.

  Christopher rubbed his face.

  And then it was Clara, equally dead.

  His hand found Lila’s. He squeezed it, and Lila — the real Lila — looked over at him. The bus was rolling forward as Jeanine’s pep talk concluded, and as he glanced back, the road sign and the macabre figures waiting beside it like zombies at a bus stop fell out of sight.

  “I thought of something,” Christopher said. “The Pall. The Pall is still out there, and it will help us.”

  Lila seemed to take heart. She actually brightened.

  No reason she shouldn’t. Lila hadn’t seen what their puzzling companion had shown him, and wouldn’t wonder how those particular visions implied assistance rather than amusement from its place on the impartial sidelines.

  CHAPTER 16

  They came like locusts.

  Aubrey, behind the wheel, put the hammer all the way down. Peers must have done something to the engine, or else buses in this part of the world had greatly improved their speed since Cameron had last taken one with his father. He felt the titanic thing rattle, shimmy, then finally find a sweet spot in resonance where everything stopped shaking as it if it might fall apart. Cameron held tight to one of the side-mounted guns, using the weapon as much for stability as defense. There was some sort of hopefully impenetrable glass above the gun’s point of rotation, giving Cameron a fairly clean view of whatever he intended to kill. It was tinted slightly blue, and if they weren’t being surrounded by hotrods covered in spikes and painted skulls, he would have asked: So, Peers, is this an Astral windshield? Do you prefer it to human acrylics or polycarbonate?

  But there was a convertible thing that was probably once a Jeep ramming into their side, cutting the air with the screech of squealing metal. The innovative clan of red-painted bald men had done in life what James Bond movies had been doing in film forever and dressed their wheels with footlong spikes. The bus tires were shielded, so the spikes could only rake the metal, just as the spiked once-a-Jeep scratched long, warbling notes of protest into the armor plate along the sides.

  Cameron swung the gun to fire, but the driver hit the accelerator. The car jolted forward as if from a shot of nitrous, easily dodging its swing radius. Then, with practiced precision, the red men were effortlessly jockeying into position, grabbing the bus’s sides and climbing aboard.

  Shots fired from above. Singles, probably a pistol. A red blur fell past Cameron’s blue-tint windshield, and the bus gave a great lurch as if over a human-sized speed bump. A woman screamed, and then there were more shots. Cameron turned, but Kindred was right behind him, glaring.

  “Don’t leave your station. Don’t you fucking dare.”

  “They need help!”

  He looked up, but there were still three sets of legs visible beneath the open pop-ups as the bus lurched and veered. Cameron could see the black modified seat belts, tethering them to the platforms as the bus jumped. The front set of legs belonged to Christopher. The rear — the most important position, to handle the pursuit — was Jeanine. Charlie sat in the middle. The position was supposed to be Lila’s, but she was inside, tasked with handling a mounted weapon. She’d been shaking too hard when the bus began rolling, and despite the side gun’s vital importance and Lila’s less-than-ideal experience handling anything like it, Jeanine had swapped on the grounds that given an unmounted weapon, she’d kill half their group in friendly fire. Charlie — similarly inexperienced but methodical to the point of sterility — had taken her place.

  “We’ll shift you if you need shifting!” Then, “The lance, Cameron!”

  But the long lance protruding through the slats — the one Cameron had been clearly instructed on using to knock boarders from his gun in the event he couldn’t shoot them off — had already been yanked through the slats. The cannibal who’d grabbed it — painted green, his face covered beneath the paint in jet black tattoos — was climbing topside, toward Jeanine. There was the chatter of an automatic weapon from above, and the man, with Cameron’s lance, struck the dirt.

  “Goddammit.” Then, with an air of great impatience, Kindred reached for the trigger of Cameron’s weapon and pulled. The thing chugged like clearing its throat, and the man who’d made the poor decision to try and wrench it free by hanging on its end went in two directions at once.

  “Leave concerns about the others to — !”

  Meyer was beside Kindred, turning him away. The pair’s connection to the Astral collective would do no good out here in this swarm of humanity, but they were monitoring the situation from the peepholes around the bus, on the monitor, and from above using video from the drone Aubrey had launched once they were rolling. Knowing he was chancing being yelled at, Cameron sneaked a glance at the drone monitor. The clock was above it, showing that only thirty seconds had passed. The monitor painted a grimmer picture. Apparently fresh meat in cannibal territory had called out the clans in force. Cameron saw all the colors of the rainbow and dozens of armored vehicles swarming the bus from above, closing around it like clotting blood. Men were on the bus like dust on a staticky balloon.

  “Everyone on your pads!” Peers shouted from the front, beside Aubrey.

  “No, wait!” Meyer broke from Kindred and ran forward. He said something to Peers, but Cameron didn’t hear it because a 1970s-era Lincoln Town Car — souped up with a blower through the hood and ornaments pocking the car’s cut-away profile like grotesque art — had pulled within range. They must not have seen the big gun on the bus’s side or were simply pinned in by the four other vehicles of different-color clans in close proximity because they lined themselves up nicely right in the sweet spot. By the time those in the target car were raising their weapons, Cameron was getting a satisfying look from their faces as they stared down his barrel.

  Adrenaline soaring, Cameron held the handles and pulled the trigger. The car’s riders burst like piñatas, spilling confetti guts into the screaming wind. The gray behemoth, suddenly driverless, slowed as it drifted sidelong into the vehicle beside it. A man hanging onto the next vehicle was speared on an adornment, and his battle-cry face became a mask of agony.

  Cameron glanced back to watch Meyer converse rapid fire with Peers, whose hand was on a huge homemade knife switch like something from a Frankenstein flick. The hand kept twitching as if time were running out and Meyer was costing them minutes and lives.

  “They’re all over us!” Aubrey shouted. “Don’t you bloody say he shouldn’t — !”

  Peers glared at Meyer. Kindred ran forward, bringing a small tablet with him. It must be the dual Meyer-Kindred logical mastermind attempting to digest all that was happening and plot the logical scenarios forward, adjusting as seconds melted, their dual brain following each action inevitably forward, trying to find consequence loopholes their group could squeeze through.

  “On your pads!” Peers screamed.

  Jeanine, Christopher, and Charlie shuffled their bodies away from the metal frame, leaning back in their harnesses. Their feet were already on rubber pads, but as Cameron’s eyes flashed around he saw Clara scramble onto hers, knees to chest, youth bleeding through her usually cool, precocious facade.

  “Not yet!”

  To the others, ignoring the Meyers: “Do it! Now! All of you!”

  And Kindred, to Peers: “Wait! Just another second!”

  “Now,�
� Meyer said.

  “Now!”

  Cameron barely pulled his hands from the mounted gun in time. Supposedly the mounts were mostly nonconductive, but Peers had warned him to take his hands away when they hit the pulse just the same, in case it arced. Which it might. The generator used to electrify the bus’s skin was Astral technology, after all, like most things from the Den.

  Every hair on Cameron’s head seemed to stand on end. There was a low hum, a buzz, and a flash scent like burning meat. All the limbs he’d seen climbing the bus vanished at once, the Permaflate tires bounced across a scree of bodies, and the drone footage showed the bus swept clean as if by a powerful breeze.

  But then the other thing happened, as Peers had warned it might when running so much electricity through the vehicle’s frame from a mostly untested generator.

  The back of the bus, near all those extra gas tanks, had caught on fire.

  CHAPTER 17

  Piper forgot all about her pistol when she smelled the smoke and felt the fire’s heat. What had caught fire, anyway? Weren’t busses supposed to be made of plastics and metals and other things that didn’t catch fire?

  But the acrid black smoke filling the rear told her something far beyond normal had happened, and that it wasn’t just flammables burning. It was plastic, too. The device had knocked all the clawing cannibals off their sides — a good thing because she’d seen Christopher fall and knew he’d been sliced or shot, though not enough to keep him from springing back up. Jeanine had been grabbed several times, but she had a knife and was somehow juggling firearm and blade well enough to hold her ground.

  Without electrifying the bus they’d have been overtaken. But now they would burn.

  Meyer shot past her. He must have been ready to grab the extinguisher because he was wielding it now, spraying a thick white cloud of carbon dioxide at the rear, chilling Piper’s exposed skin with its proximity.

  “Shit.”

  Kindred, coming closer: “What?”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  Peers, arriving, glancing at Piper as she gawked atop her rubber mat, seeming to consider a reprimand for her for no longer aiming through the metal slats.

  “Where is that smoke coming from?” Peers was holding a fire extinguisher, too, but didn’t seem to know where he should aim. The visible fire had gone out immediately, but smoke was still belching from somewhere far back, licking the ceiling and making a cloud.

  “Something’s still on fire back there.”

  “Where?”

  “Behind the tanks. Is there insulation? Batting? Anything that could be lit on fire?”

  “There’s—”

  Meyer cut Peers off. “You had to put the tanks inside the shell. Couldn’t carry gas?”

  A blue-painted hand reached through a broken slat and gripped Piper’s chest as the bus trembled with speed. Wind whipped her hair, confused her distorted hearing. She reacted on impulse and fortuitously planted a slug between a pair of goggled eyes. Blood back spattered Piper’s arm, and the dead body hung on for a few seconds longer before gravity raked it back and gouged its arm open on the slat’s sharp edge, falling eventually away.

  “Are you really going to measure dicks right now?” Piper shouted, near panic. “Fucking fix it!”

  Piper’s shrill voice must have shocked the usually unflappable Meyers because they glared back at her for a minute before Peers firmed his lip and kicked the side-rear door open to climb the armored exterior with only a fire extinguisher for protection.

  “Jeanine!” Piper shouted up at the nearest legs, rearmost in the top-hatch line of three. “Peers is — !”

  “I see him!”

  Something at Jeanine’s waist jostled. She’d taken Lila’s carbine and must have somehow holstered her smaller weapon in its favor because a jarring rattle trickled down from above as Jeanine worked the rear of their ride, presumably clearing the way.

  Piper couldn’t keep her eyes from the clock. Impossibly, only two and a half minutes had passed. She watched until another sixty seconds was gone, hearing gunshots from all around, flinching every time the cannibals outside returned fire or rammed their accelerating sides. Peers had mostly bulletproofed the bus, but there were openings for guns — and, it turned out, for blue-armed men to reach inside. Something screamed past Piper’s face and made a metal box in one of the luggage racks jump. It felt like being dive bombed by a horsefly, but the box, when she looked back, had a hole the size of a large grape.

  After a long minute, Meyer went to the door on an unseen signal, pulled it open, and yanked Peers back inside, whole and seemingly unharmed. The door wouldn’t close. Men with masks full of teeth and yellow eyes were halfway through until something came at them screaming, swinging at the limbs and heads with a machete, leaving dripping red marks. It took Piper a few shocked seconds to realize it was Lila, whose already-large eyes were now saucer sized once the portal was finally forced shut.

  Four minutes gone.

  Four and a half.

  Piper watched Jeanine’s pacifying clock as if it were a real thing. It meant nothing. But she looked toward the windshield and saw that Ember Flat’s massive gates were much closer. They’d been an almost-invisible speck, but now she could almost see detail. Enough to think the gates were open. Wide open, and never mind the barbarians behind them.

  Five minutes. Half their time in hell was gone, and Piper told herself it meant something.

  “Peeeers?”

  Aubrey’s warning shout, drawing the man’s name out, still jockeying the bus’s huge horizontal wheel. And beyond the Astral glass windshield, where seconds earlier she’d seen only the end of their long and horrible rainbow, Piper now saw something new.

  More cars, hideously modified into instruments of doom, swarming from the front in addition to those already crowding their sides and rear.

  Reinforcements.

  They were trapped.

  CHAPTER 18

  Peers rushed forward, almost colliding with the console in his clumsy dash. Staying upright as the bus stormed forward was difficult enough, but he hadn’t anticipated how much worse panic would make it.

  “What do I do?” Aubrey asked.

  “I—”

  “What the hell I do, Peers?”

  Meyer arrived at Peers’s side. But no, it was Kindred. Meyer arrived on the other, same except for his beard and eyes — quieter than Meyer Dempsey was supposed to be, even now. Perhaps Zen, maybe worried. But it was Kindred, with that partial connection to the Astral mind that seemed so like computing power in the old world’s cloud. Yin and yang when working together. Good cop and bad. Heads and tails on the same exact coin.

  “What should he do?”

  But Kindred and Meyer were both thinking, looking around, consulting monitors and the view from the drone above.

  “What do I do, Peers? I’m almost up their asses!”

  “Stop the bus, Aubrey,” Peers said.

  “Don’t stop the bus,” Kindred argued.

  “Don’t stop?”

  “Don’t stop the bus,” Kindred repeated.

  “Goddammit, where do I — ?”

  “Floor it. Right at that one in the middle. See it there?” Kindred pointed. “With the purple clan.”

  Peers followed Kindred’s finger, but his words didn’t make any sense. In its previous life, the thing had once been a pickup, but like all of the clan vehicles it had been heavily modified with — so it seemed — whatever the clans found lying around. This one had an ancient cow catcher like from a locomotive’s front and skulls lined along a bar mounted above the headlights. The men in the bed and on the truck’s roof looked like berserk metal fans who’d stumbled into KISS’s wardrobe, wearing black armor and shoulder pads with gleaming silver spikes, their faces covered with war paint.

  Peers saw it all because the truck was barreling toward them as rapidly as they were racing forward. They’d meet in the middle in a quarter minute at most, right into the thick
of killer oncoming traffic.

  Across the wall of vehicles, weapons were raised by shouting men.

  “They want us to stop,” Peers said.

  “Don’t stop.”

  “They’ve got guns! They’ll cut us in half!”

  “They won’t shoot.”

  “Of course they’ll shoot!”

  “They want us alive.”

  “Why do they give a fuck if we’re—”

  Kindred cut him off. “They want Jeanine.”

  Peers looked up as if he could see through the roof. Jeanine, up top with her femininity in plain view.

  “Aubrey,” Peers said, “stop the bus.”

  “Don’t stop the bus, Aubrey.”

  The gap closed.

  Closer.

  Closer.

  “There’s no possible way to get through that cluster of—”

  At that moment, what looked like a large black bird slammed into the windshield of the truck where Kindred had focused Aubrey’s aim. But it wasn’t a bird. It was the drone, which Meyer was piloting with his tablet.

  The glass turned white with spiderweb cracks, the large plane knocking the folding windshield off its adhesive seal and in toward the cab’s occupants. The truck screeched hard sideways and rolled forward like tumbling dice. The others tried to compensate in both directions at once, and metal screamed as a chain reaction of crashes made its way down the spine of closely grouped vehicles.

  “Floor it!”

  Aubrey saw the gap made by the crashed vehicle and rammed the bus down its throat. The armored sides, supercharged engine, and Permaflate tires all did their jobs as the heavy bus widened the gap. Sparks flew along the bus’s length, and Cameron gasped as his mounted weapon was ripped free, leaving an undefended hole. Feet hit the floor as the three snipers up top jumped inside.

  For a few seconds there was only noise and darkness and fury. Then Peers felt a fresh draft at the driver’s window and saw two brutes of different paint colors clamoring to climb in at the same time, both armed with pistols.