by D. J. Molles
He could hear the small concussions of all those explosive-tipped rounds shredding wood, stone, metal, and flesh. He could hear them even with the windows up.
They could not see the streets where the gunships circled, but they could see the glow of the fires. They could not see the details of the destruction, but backlit against those glowing fires, they could see the columns of oily smoke spewing into the sky from a dozen points.
Half of the Town Center lay in darkness, the power gone out.
In the other half, it seemed that every single light was on.
Here and there, one of the brownstone buildings was blazing.
“We’re going into that,” Virgil stated, thickly.
Ahead of them, the light had turned green.
Virgil accelerated. He started rolling windows down. “Everybody get a gun in a window.”
There was no point in subterfuge at this point, Walter realized. They were the only civilian car that would be driving into that shit. And in the Town Center, in the middle of the purge of District 89, Walter knew that the CoAx troops would not show restraint.
Guns in or guns out, they were going to get shot on sight.
They crossed the intersection.
Walter’s window came down and the night wind rushed in. It smelled of diesel fumes and burning rubber, and spent munitions. A drift of low-hanging smoke huddled in the center of the intersection and it stank like death, like smoke should not, and it chilled Walter to the bone and made him start sweating all at once.
The engine thrummed. Almost timidly.
The tires hummed, and they too sounded cautious.
Walter shifted his hips in the seat, facing himself to his door, and his open window. He propped the battlerifle up in the window, looked over the sights. The little reticle hovered in the air, glowing mutely red, adjusting itself to the darkness. Mindlessly it assisted him in killing more efficiently.
For a moment, he wished that he was any other place in the world.
His thoughts were tethered dogs barking and yapping and wanting to run in a million different directions at one time.
He could not afford it.
He pulled them back.
He yanked them violently. His mind. His rabid thoughts. He kicked them into submission.
Live, he told himself. Fight. Survive. Get out of this alive.
The truck slowed, approaching a road on their left that would lead them into the heart of things. When Walter breathed, he felt the air tremble in his throat.
“Let’s be heads up,” Virgil said. And then he made the left hand turn.
Walter watched the darkened, smoke-filled world spool by in a great panorama as the vehicle swung wide. Several hundred yards further up Union Road, a group of people scrambled across the nighttime blacktop, lit in the ghostly light of a streetlamp. A family, it looked like. And then another. And then a steady stream of them. Running away.
They straightened out onto the new street—Fraternity Street, so it was dubbed. About a half mile down, he could see roaring fires, and he could see more people trying to get away from the fighting.
Except that some of them were fighting back.
He could see that. He could see them bolting between cover, between stoops of apartment buildings, hunkering behind blown-out cars, firing blindly over their shoulders with weapons that likely stood no chance against the armored dreadnaughts of the New Breeds.
Walter couldn’t see the New Breeds they were shooting at. But he watched the return fire—something bigger and more powerful than just the battlerifles, maybe a Lancer—and it hit one of those hopeless rebels as he or she sprinted across the street, and Walter watched the legs of that person come off and tumble across the roadway, and then the torso split, spraying its contents wide, and Walter was glad that he was far away from that sight.
Another fighter fell to the ground and curled up into the fetal position and then was chewed to pieces by a flurry of tracer rounds.
Walter felt his heart thundering as he watched this.
“Oh, shit, shit, shit,” Tria uttered.
Virgil accelerated. His eyes looked hooded and dark.
Tria gaped at him. “Don’t go straight into that!” she barked. “Go around it!”
“I’m gonna go around it!” he said.
A side street loomed up quickly in the firelit dimness.
Virgil slapped the steering wheel rapidly to the right. The truck shook and shuddered and the tires chirped desperately as he took the turn. A street sign that Walter couldn’t read whizzed by outside and nicked the back fender with a sharp metallic BANG.
Another row of apartment buildings.
People were pouring out of them. Shuffling children out of the doors, the fathers and mothers hauling armloads of precious belongings that would be dropped when their arms tired and they realized that those belongings were not worth their lives.
Virgil skidded almost to a halt while a man and a woman scrambled across the road. The man held a child, a little girl. They barely paused, less than a half-second, to regard the truck that was bearing down on them. Walter looked at the man carrying his daughter, and it seemed that he looked back, and then they were across.
Virgil swore at them, accelerated passed.
Walter looked out his window, watching them as they roared by.
The man frowned at him, and that single look caught Walter off guard. He’d somehow expected those people to see him, to see his gun, and to perhaps be confused, but to feel something akin to relief, relief that someone was out fighting for them.
But the look was just a pragmatic mystification. It said, who do you think you are, idiot? You think you’re gonna make a difference? You should be running like the rest of us. Run, while you still have a chance.
And then the little family dropped out of sight.
Virgil turned left again.
“Uh…” was all Virgil said.
The truck decelerated rapidly.
Walter was jostled in his window, bumped against the back of Tria’s seat.
“I got two,” Tria said, her voice suddenly high and stressed. “Three! Four!”
Walter pushed away from the window, looked out the windshield.
He could see their shapes, fifty yards down the road.
The shapes were big. Heavy. Thick. Armored.
New Breeds.
Two on the stoop of an apartment, guns addressed to the door.
Two on the sidewalk.
One was looking at them.
“Virgil,” Tria leaned into her window, brought her rifle up. “Virgil! Reverse!”
The truck was still rolling.
The dark, hulking figure of the New Breed raised his own weapon at them.
“Hit ‘em,” Getty said quietly from his seat.
“Ayuh,” Virgil grunted.
The truck engine roared.
The acceleration slammed Walter back into his seat.
Tria shouted something that Walter couldn’t hear. There was a burst of flame, and abruptly the sound of gunfire was not a distant thing, it was hammering their heads in the enclosed cab, as Tria leaned out the window and her rifle spat metal in a steady stream.
“Duck down!” Virgil shouted. He’d hunkered down behind the engine block, but his hands were still on the wheels, aiming the vehicle at the soldiers in the road.
Walter ducked. He smashed his face into the seat cushion beside him, but not before he saw a tongue of flame leap out from one of the New Breed’s weapon, and he didn’t hear the report of the rifle, but he damn well heard the SMACK as the rounds hit the engine block, and then stitched holes across the windshield, rapidly tracking towards Tria.
Tria screamed, still firing.
She tried to pull herself in, tried to pull herself down.
Out of the corner of Walter’s eye, he watched her jerk, hard.
She gasped.
Jerked again.
The rifle tumbled out of her hand but caught on the retention strap.
“Tria!” Walter shouted, reached up for her, got a hand on her shoulder..
She curled into a ball.
They were still accelerating.
The windshield disintegrated into nothingness.
Walter’s mouth was open, sucking in air.
He felt pieces of glass and little bits of plastic dashboard pepper his face, his eyes, his open mouth.
BOOM
The truck lurched
Swerved
Jumped
The distinct thu-THUMP of something rolling under the tires.
The roaring, ripping sound of automatic weapons.
And then
CRUNCH
They came to a sudden halt.
Chapter 22
Walter was on the floorboard.
They were being shot at.
He could hear the rounds hitting the car still.
He was struggling hard. Struggling to move. Like being eight years old, caught in the couch cushions, pinned there by Roy who was laughing uproariously, and Walter was panicking, needing to get out, but couldn’t move, restricted movement only making him panic even harder.
He was staring at dark, dirty carpet.
Pieces of glass and plastic tumbled around like sand in a harsh current.
Everyone was shouting, and so Walter couldn’t really hear what one person was saying.
His ears were ringing, adding to the cacophony of confusion.
Someone grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and it was like the physical contact focused the dial of his hearing. He looked up, saw Getty’s lips moving, and suddenly could hear again.
“Out! Out! Out!”
Getty’s wounded leg was dangling semi-uselessly out of the open side door, his good leg was braced against the floor and pressing him backwards, and he was holding his rifle in one hand, and holding onto Walter with the other, hauling him backwards out of the car.
Dimly, Walter perceived that out of the door was the safe side of the car.
The bullets were coming from his side, and a little to the rear.
They must have gotten turned when they crashed.
“OUT!” Getty screamed.
Walter plunged forward, almost like diving through water, and suddenly inertia was gone, and he and Getty were both flying out of the car. He watched Getty’s face turn to surprise, and then scrunch into a cringe, and he watched black concrete coming up at them as they tumbled out.
Getty hit first.
Walter on top of him.
A bullet skipped off the pavement with a horrible, seeking, whining sound, and it skimmed across the surface of Walter’s back, and at first it felt like a slap, but then it felt like a cat had clawed its way across his skin.
“AAGH!” he shouted in Getty’s face.
Getty shoved him off, leaned up into a half-sitting position, but still low enough to fire underneath the clearance of the truck, and he let out a burst of rounds, three rounds, six rounds, directed at something, and then a haphazard dozen that he intentionally splattered along the concrete, like skipping rocks over the surface of water.
Those rounds pinged and whined and moaned through the air.
But Walter noted that the return fire had ceased for a brief moment.
Walter thought about saying that he was hit, but then thought, Now’s not the time. I need to get out of here. Just get out. GET OUT!
Walter struggled to his feet. He felt clumsy and unwieldy. In his mind he wanted to flow like wind, lithe like an animal, with some innate, athletic, predatory grace. But his muscles were overtaxed, and his movements were drunk and desperate and nightmare-slow.
Getty had propped himself up and was reaching a hand for Walter, needing help.
Walter grabbed him up, didn’t waste time trying to yoke him, but simply held tight to the man’s forearm and started dragging his ass away, away from the vehicle.
Virgil had Tria at the front tire well. She was on her side, legs so horribly exposed, hanging limply out of the relative cover of the tire. But her eyes were open. And her chest was moving. Shot. She got shot. She took one through the chest.
Virgil was crouched by her, maneuvering to get her arm around his shoulders so he could move her away from the vehicle. Her mouth gaped, eyes rolling. Were her lips turning blue? Or was it just the light?
“Go for the stoop!” Getty said as Walter dragged him along, his voice shaking with their tumbling footsteps.
Walter was already going for the stoop. He didn’t need to be told. The gunfire had come from behind them, and directly ahead of them was a set of stairs with a neat little inlet, a little concrete alcove, and Walter couldn’t think of what the hell that was for—it was actually for trash cans—but he knew it looked safe.
Walter hesitated as they passed Virgil and Tria.
Getty tumbled into him. “We’ll cover ‘em from the stoop! Go!”
A new crash of gunshots struck at them.
Walter hauled for the stoop. Almost there.
He glanced behind them. Bullet holes were sprouting out of the truck, those hard, heavy rounds from the New Breed’s battlerifles punching cleanly through, the thin metal and plastic and vinyl guts of the car not offering much resistance. One of the tires let out a pop and a squeak and went abruptly flat. Virgil and Tria huddled like two people caught in a sandstorm.
Walter told his body to move faster and it did not comply.
Rounds chipped gouges across the face of the stoop, made it seem momentarily less safe.
But forward momentum was a bitch. And changing their decisions now would surely get them killed.
Walter put his head down. Went for it. Like running into a driving rain, hoping not to get to wet, hoping to run so fast that the raindrops don’t hit you…
He slid. Intentionally. Feet first.
His knees hit the ground, then the sides of his legs. He felt the rough concrete simply remove the sides of his pants like they weren’t there, and when the concrete had chewed through the pants in that single instant, it got started on his flesh, but it didn’t matter, because roadrash seemed a welcome thing when compared to a hole in the head.
Walter hit the wall.
Getty came tumbling after him, collapsing flat and holding his hands over his head while a flurry of intense gunfire hit the stoop and threatened to chip it away to nothing.
The fire abated just a bit over their head, the rain of grit and concrete shards died.
Walter could already feel sticky wetness growing on his right pants leg where he’d slid. The raw sensitivity of excavated sub-dermal layers.
He thrust himself up. For the briefest of moments, the thought, Am I about to catch a round? Did I choose the right time to raise myself out of cover?
He slammed his rifle flat on the top of the stoop and started firing and screaming, “Virgil! Tria! Move!”
His rifle roared.
Bursts, he told himself. Bursts because you don’t have much ammo.
Someone far ahead of him, some dark, hulking shape on the other side of the truck fired back, and the rounds hit close, and Walter felt the rock sting his face, embed into his cheek, but it didn’t get in his eye, and he could take the pain, so he just kept firing back and screaming.
Virgil and Tria were moving.
Slow. Too slow.
Actually, Tria wasn’t moving. Virgil was dragging her.
Burst. Burst. Burst.
From out in the darkness beyond the truck, there came a thu-PUNK sound, and then a hiss, and then the truck lit up like someone had set a strobe in it.
Walter watched with eerie fascination as the vehicle lifted into the air, fully off of its tires, and a thick cloud of gray-white smoke suddenly billowed up from it.
The shockwave hit them.
Walter could feel himself being lifted up and backward, roughly, and the air being scooped out of his lungs while at the same time his chest compressed, stomach compressed, and weird, hot pressure rippled across his skin.
He didn’t hear a
thing, though.
Felt a pain in his eardrum, in his sinuses, in his brain. But it was dull.
He tumbled. Painlessly, and he had the conscious thought that it should have hurt, you’re tumbling over pavement, this should definitely hurt, but his limbs were just insensate rubber at that moment.
I’ve stopped.
I’ve stopped.
Eyes open.
Night sky.
His body moved. Was being tugged.
Have I given up?
Am I dying?
Getty’s face loomed over him. Screaming at him, but his voice was on mute.
Walter frowned at him. Mystified. He should have learned how to mute people’s voices a long time ago, it would have in handy—oh, shit, there’s my hearing—
“Run motherfucker! Run!” Getty was pulling him savagely, then slapped him hard across the face. “Let’s go let’s go let’s go!”
thu-PUNK-ssssssSSSSHHHH
Getty heard it. So did Walter.
Getty shrouded Walter’s body with his own.
Hunkered down over him, and Walter could only think, I can’t believe he’s doing that for me.
Walter could see over Getty’s shoulder. Watched a comet with a bright phosphorescent tail slam into the apartment building fifteen feet above them. Smoke billowed. An avalanche of rocks plumed out, arced down, tumbled.
Walter watched a hefty chunk of blown-apart cement bounce off of Getty’s head. Walter looked at Getty, saw the hair parted and the pale skin underneath for a half-second, and then blood welled up out of it with a peculiar suddenness and immediately began dripping.
“Getty?” Walter shook him. “Getty, you okay? You alive?”
Getty twitched on top of him, then righted himself woozily, his eyes crossed for a moment. He blinked rapidly, then managed to focus on Walter. “Lezgo,” he mumbled.
Chattering gunfire. Walter couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from.
He rolled Getty off of him and the man found his hands and knees, and then his feet, with some effort, everything seeming to take glacially long while the rest of the world spun rapidly out of control around them. At the same pace, Walter found his own feet.
Idiotically, he stood up in the middle of everything.
Bees buzzed around him, angry, very angry, like he’d disturbed their hive.
