by S. L. Huang
Simon came and stood next to me. We watched McCabe’s lips re-form the same word over and over as he adjusted his intonation, and then yell at a staff member who came up to talk to him.
“Please don’t do this,” Simon said suddenly. “Don’t make me.”
I caught the edges of emotion, empathized with his agony at crossing the moral lines he’d told himself he never would, not since he’d destroyed me. I rode it out. I was getting better at teasing out the foreignness of him pressing at me. “You’re really bad at control,” I said, instead of answering him.
“No,” he said, “I’m not. Have you ever felt an ordinary person walk into a room in a bad mood? This is the same thing, only … I can’t turn off the strength of it. Not unless I consciously influence you not to feel it.”
“No wonder you’re such a fucked-up person.”
“Yes,” he said, without irony.
One of the assistants came for Simon, led him into the glass-walled booth, and handed him one of the pairs of headphones. He looked back at me, and I caught a blast of anguish and guilt.
It’s the right thing, I told myself firmly. Or, if not the right thing, the only thing.
Someone shouted out radio lingo, and a bell went off. A red light lit up above me. Across from me, Mama Lorenzo straightened, listening.
“Good morning, my fellow Americans,” McCabe began into his microphone. The words played radio-loud from an intercom over our heads. “I’m here today with a very special report on the situation we’ve been following in Los Angeles. As you know…”
He went on for a few minutes, editorializing about the effects, about the mainstream news, about the conviction of the militia leaders who wanted to defend us. “And I’m very pleased to tell you, nation—you are going to hear it here first. Now, I can’t reveal everything yet, but I am in the midst of a very delicate operation to bring Los Angeles back to its citizens, and you will be the first to know the truth of exactly what’s been going on. The truth, ladies and gentlemen—my fellow Americans. The truth.”
He glanced over at Simon, who was breathing shallowly, his eyes unfocused. McCabe frowned up at me, through the glass, and I gestured sharply at him to continue.
Simon would do his fucking job. He had to.
“Now, nation, a part of our current situation I know you are very concerned about—as am I—are the shootings breaking out in answer to the oppression being levied against us here. As we all know, as our Founding Fathers declared, ‘rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,’ but God is with the man who can expose corruption and lance the boil on the face of this country without spilling the blood of his innocent countrymen. And that’s why I’m going to take a very unusual step, nation, and on today’s show, I’m going to counsel everyone listening to have patience and wait. Because tomorrow morning, when you listen to my program, I will reveal it all, and the perpetrators will be forced out of the shadows to face justice for what they have done.
“But today, we must ensure those perpetrators do not start the race and class wars they so desperately want. They will be exposed, nation, I promise you. I promise you as a man, and as an American.”
I was impressed. McCabe was doing a good job of building his show up around the mood of Simon’s message. He’d drop Simon into a perfectly primed audience and let him talk. And afterward, everyone would put down their weapons, convinced they were doing so because they trusted Reuben McCabe.
“And now that brings me to our very special guest for the hour. As you all know, nation, in this unique situation we’ve had a lot of people who are rightfully, and righteously, apprehensive about giving us their legal government names. So I’ll let our guest make his own introductions, and then he’ll talk to you about our situation in this greatest of cities in this greatest of nations. Listen to him, my fellow Americans, and I promise you by this time tomorrow, all will be revealed by yours truly. Now please welcome our honored guest to the one place where you will always get the unvarnished reality of our country.”
He turned toward Simon and held out a hand, an invitation for him to begin talking.
Simon’s mouth hung open slightly. He wet his lips and leaned in toward the mic. Wet his lips again.
Hesitated.
Alarm bells sounded in the back of my head.
“Our guest,” McCabe vamped, “is himself a fierce advocate of the truth, as I know you, McCabe listeners, would expect nothing less.”
Simon shut his mouth, took off the headphones, and stood up. Ignoring McCabe’s frantic gestures, he turned and pushed his way out through the glass door of the booth.
Directly into me.
“What the hell are you doing!” I hissed, trying to muscle him back inside.
“I can’t do it.” His face was wrinkled with tension and flushing red. “I can’t. It’s exactly what I swore I’d never— I can’t be this person, Cas. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I hope you’ll still let me—”
“Fuck you.” I wanted to rail at him about all the lives he was wasting, all the people he was killing, and had a sudden, visceral flashback to Dawna shouting those same words at me back when I stopped her. After all my protests, my rationalizations, my insistence that what I was doing was so different—bile and guilt filled my throat.
“Los Angeles is not going to go down in flames,” I spat at Simon. “I’m not going to let it.”
“Cas, what are you—”
I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I shoved past him and stormed into the booth myself, to the mic he had vacated. The PS90 banged my hip as I took over Simon’s seat and jammed the headphones onto my ears.
McCabe, who had been elocuting about patriotism to fill the time, looked up without pausing his diatribe. He made an angry motion at me.
I made one right back.
“Well, it looks like our guest has returned,” he segued smoothly, while giving me a fierce frown that I interpreted to mean, I sure hope you know what you’re doing. “Now we’re going to get that real truth I promised you, folks, right now, about exactly what is happening in this town.” Barbs spiked his last words, and he jerked his chin at me.
“Hi,” I said, leaning into the mic. My voice echoed with me through the sound system.
I didn’t know what to say to stop this. I didn’t know what anyone could say, except Simon. But I’d been willing to give myself up to save the city, and that worked in more ways than one.
“The conspiracies are real.” My consonants hit the microphone like popping hailstones. “There’s technology all over Los Angeles emitting frequencies for the express purpose of screwing with your brains. I know because I put it there.”
I paused for a moment. McCabe was staring at me, open-mouthed. Behind him, through the glass, Mama Lorenzo had snapped toward me in fury. Meanwhile, to the side, Simon shook his head frantically, slashing one hand across his throat repeatedly.
I fleetingly wondered if he was right, dismissed that as overflow psychic influence from him, and continued.
“I’m not with the government. I’m working alone. There’s no need to storm the military or the police or the CIA. Or each other—whoever you think’s been attacking you, you’ve been misled. It’s my responsibility and no one else’s. Now, I’d go and disable it all for you, but I doubt you’d trust me, so instead I’m going to go to 697 Norman Street out in Pottersfield right now, in person, and I’m going to give anyone who comes there the information you’ll need to start putting a stop to it. Then, if you want a bad guy, you can come after me right there.”
I pulled off the headphones and dove to the floor just as Mama Lorenzo fired her .32 through the glass.
The panes making up the wall of the booth shattered and rained to the floor. Arthur drew at the same time every single one of the security guards raised their weapons. McCabe yelled and burrowed under his desk, his headset cord taking chunks of equipment crashing down with him.
I aimed at the ceiling and pulled the trigger on my own PS90, targeting eve
ry single fluorescent light illuminating the place. They all burst and blinked out to darkness at once. The studio room had been built nestled inside layers of soundproofed walls, and had no windows—it went almost pitch black.
I moved before anyone could react. Shouts and flurried movement followed me as I grabbed Arthur’s elbow and flew through the side door of the studio. Someone fired after us as the sliver of light appeared, but only once.
We fled out the back, into a parking lot.
“Wait!” someone cried behind us.
My feet stumbled of their own accord. I never stumbled.
Fucking Simon. I didn’t know how he’d beaten everyone else out.
I regained my balance and kept up with Arthur, racing toward the nearest line of cars behind a hedge.
“What’s your plan?” Simon called after us desperately. “Stop! Cassandra! You don’t need to sacrifice yourself!”
I did, because of him. And I didn’t have a plan. LA could take out its anger on the brain entrainment and on me, and maybe that would release the pressure valve for the rest of the city.
I jacked into the first sedan we reached, and Arthur slid in alongside me.
“Duck,” I said, flooring the car into reverse, and he hunched down immediately. The clap of more gunfire peppered the parking lot, and one of the back passenger windows went.
I peeled away, jumped the curb and a bed of landscaped flowers, and plopped myself down directly into rush hour. Horns sounded as I cut across an intersection on the tail end of a red light, and I veered in front of a bus and through a gas station.
A siren wailed behind me, and then away. Called away from a reckless driver to a shootout at McCabe’s radio station, doubtless.
“You’re not going to sacrifice yourself, are you?” Arthur said.
“Of course not,” I said. “I’m going to make them fight me.”
“Russell!”
I wasn’t sure if he didn’t believe my bravado or he just thought it was a bad plan. “They need a bad guy to blame,” I said. “That bad guy should be me. Is me.”
A Park & Ride sign caught my eye, and I spun the wheel and swung in. Every time I’d been in one of these lots they’d had a section up front for motorcycle parking … Yes! I slammed on the brake next to the bikes, and our velocity skidded to zero.
An old Hispanic woman yelled an obscenity and flipped the bird at my driving as she crossed in front of us.
I jumped out. Arthur started to follow me.
“No,” I said.
“Russell, you can’t—”
“In this kind of fight, you’ll just be a liability. I can’t be protecting you,” I said, as harshly as I knew how. It wasn’t true, but if I did only one good thing today, not getting Arthur killed would be it. “If this goes south … tell Checker it’s up to him.”
“What now?”
“He’ll have to find a way of propagating a … I don’t know, a virus, or a patch, that will neutralize what we did.” Without being able to locate and disable our original signal hacks, it would be maddening work, especially considering he wouldn’t have my optimization calculations for the new deployment. He’d just have to figure it out … however long it took.
Arthur tried to shout after me, but the open-choked roar of the bike I’d just jacked drowned him out.
Two cops tried to pull me over on my helmetless, speed-demon journey, but I cut between lanes of stopped cars and lost them both.
The address I’d given on the radio was a deserted factory complex, one run-down and abandoned enough that I’d accidentally blown up part of a building there a few months before without attracting any local cops. I wasn’t sure if the LAPD would get McCabe’s show sorted enough to go to the location I’d specified, but it was outside the city jurisdiction, so I was betting the bad guys would get there first.
For better or for worse.
I hit the right neighborhood—it was more decrepit than the last time I’d been here—and took the bike into a slide in front of the main gate of the factory. I dropped it completely as I punched the engine cutoff, jumping to clear it. I’d scale the gate and find a vantage point as quickly as possible.
I only had the one firearm. I did a quick count in my head—eighteen rounds left. First priority here would be re-arming myself from the first wave.…
“Cas,” Rio called.
Holy fuck.
Already inside the complex, he strode toward the gate from a banged-up SUV, enough firearms slung around himself over his duster to qualify as a small arsenal.
He’d been listening to McCabe’s show.
A rush of gratitude and relief flooded me. My boots gobbled the chain link of the gate, and I rocketed over to hit the ground in front of him.
By the time I landed, he was holding out weapons. “I have more in the vehicle.”
Wow. I might live through this after all.
thirty-five
RIO AND I stood back to back on a catwalk above a vast factory floor, one filled by stacks of old cut sheet metal with edges that would slice any careless flesh. We had the cover of several large pillars and chunks of defunct machinery and enough armaments to give us a fighting chance, depending on how many people showed up to kill me. We’d also both geared up with body armor, thanks to Rio’s ridiculous-but-welcome mobile supply cache. It was only soft armor that wouldn’t stop rifle rounds—other than maybe ricochets—but at least we’d have protection from handgun fire.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
“I am glad you altered your actions,” Rio said, “however brash this plan is. The Lord be with you, Cas.”
God help me, he thought I had engaged in confession with all of McCabe’s audience.
I glanced through our supply of weapons, taking note of them one more time, organizing them in my head like an ordinal number system. I had a rifle ready to go in each hand, and Rio’s presence was firm and solid at my back.
Even if we died today, if we took out most of the people angry about this, mopped up those most likely to jump to violence, Arthur and Checker and Pilar could reverse the brain entrainment without much more consequence than going back to where we started. The status quo didn’t feel like something to be triumphant about, but at this point, I would take it.
The morning sun gleamed through the factory’s high windows. The first shouts echoed from outside. They had found us.
“I miss this,” I said to Rio. “Fighting on the same side.”
“It is my preference as well, Cas,” he answered.
And then there was no more time for conversation, because the doors on the south side of the building blasted in.
* * *
RIO WAS good in a gunfight.
I was even better.
The loyal members of Los Angeles’s criminal underground along with members of three self-appointed militias burst in on us in waves, with shouts and war cries and overwhelming bursts of automatic fire. But we had the high ground, a lot of ammo, and damn near perfect accuracy.
Through the endless hammering of the gunfire, the smoke, the fire and shouts, I recognized people from almost every faction Yamamoto had gathered. Not the leaders, but their most loyal henchmen and henchwomen, the people who did all the dirty work for their bosses and had been too wedded to the life for my brain entrainment to remove their unwavering allegiance.
Or maybe, in a twist of irony, they were the only people with any kind of integrity. And we killed them for it.
In a gunfight, ten minutes are an eternity, but ten minutes passed, and then another ten. My hands dropped and reloaded, raised and fired, over and over, the world narrowing to metal and thunder and each target only until I’d squeezed a trigger, because by then I was moving to the next one. The mathematical lines of sight and windows of danger spiderwebbed out, saturating the space, each barrel clicking into place in a predetermined probabilistic window.
The roar of the fight was deafening, and the air clogged with the smell of gunpowder. My hands ached
and my muscles protested. We kept going.
Then I raised one of the rifles to snap the sights into collinear alignment with the next attacker, and I recognized Torvald.
Mama Lorenzo and her private security had arrived. Delayed—perhaps by traffic, perhaps by the police, but they were here to kill me for betraying their boss, for the attack on the estate, for Malcolm. More of the Lorenzos had to be on their way, too—their whole family. And I was about to wipe them out for the crime of wanting justice.
My finger hesitated on the trigger, and Torvald fired, a three-round burst that flashed against my retinas in slow motion even as I fell out of his aim vector. I grabbed at Rio’s duster behind me as I went down, but I wasn’t fast enough.
The second and third bullet tore through the air right by my ear and slammed into Rio’s back.
He staggered. We fell together.
“Rio! Oh, Jesus—” I knew I yelled the words, but I couldn’t hear myself. I tumbled up into a crouch over him and fired blindly behind me. “Rio, talk to me—” My left hand groped, searching for how to help—I didn’t see blood yet, but the layers of fiber and unfurling kinetic energy in the body armor flashed through my brain. The armor wouldn’t have protected him. It was mathematically impossible.
Oh, God.
Rio grunted. His hand twitched to close around his weapon again.
I’d dropped my left-hand rifle as we went down. Still trying to cover us with my right, I pulled out a knife with my free hand and ripped the blade down the length of Rio’s coat. The slugs had mangled his armor just below the shoulder blade. Red bubbled up, as if it had only been waiting for me to be witness.
I smashed a folded layer of his duster against the wounds and got my knee on top of it to apply pressure. I split my attention between the proper vector diagram for keeping Rio’s blood inside his body and grabbing for another magazine to reload.
Rio tried to move again, disrupting the equal and opposite forces. “Stay still!” I screamed at him, but through the deafening battle I wasn’t sure he heard.
