Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero

by Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin, & Andrew McCoy

  Henty’s respite was brief. There were more syndicate men. And, as everybody knew from the Syndicate’s relentless vidivertisements, the Syndicate never gave up: “We always get our man, we always collect our dues.”

  They came at her regardless of injury and casualties, secure in the knowledge that the Syndicate would look after their families “ten times better than The Caring Society”. From her front and her back and her sides, dropping from the sky, they were on four sides of Henty, only the ground under her feet and the small space between her back and the thundering trucks being free of Syndicate button men. Over-zealous buttons were being splatted like religious fanatics in a jihad but there were more, always more.

  Henty scythed sideways with the Fist, through the hands and wrists of the men who held her in many places, then grabbed at the mirror stand of a truck whizzing by. The Fist closed on the sturdy steel pipe and Henty felt a wrench at her shoulder and thought her arm had been torn from her body and then she was flying, a button man hanging on her ankle.

  Henty looked down. The button man grinned up at her. Then he slipped from her ankle and was gone under the wheels of the monstrous truck, even as she reached out a hand to pull him up.

  The haulier was going so fast, Henty’s feet were streaming out behind her. The mirror stand was jerking around in the Fist. Henty ignored that and concentrated on getting her other hand onto some firm purchase as well. She flung her hand forward, over arm, and managed to grab the post. Now she concentrated on pulling herself forward against the airflow to get her feet on something firmer than rushing air.

  The truck jockey was mouthing obscenities and imprecations at her. She could hear nothing but his face was contorted and he was jiggling a lever on the console to jerk the mirror this way and that in an effort to dislodge Henty from his truck.

  CHAPTER 17

  Henty’s feet found purchase and she hunched her body and held on with all her might as the driver flung the truck into a series of swerves to rid himself of her. From all round came the sound of grating, tearing metal.

  A window whirred down an inch beside her head. “Gerroff my truck!” he screamed at her.

  “Please help me!” she shouted over the wind.

  “Gerroff!” He swung the wheel violently and Henty nearly lost her balance.

  She grabbed at the window with her right hand and involuntarily closed her other hand. The Fist squeezed right through the mirror-stand and now Henty was hanging on the window by one hand. The driver leaned over to swat at her knuckles with a length of sausage from his lunchbox.

  “Ouch! You maniac!” Henty reached out with her left hand, with the Fist to grab something — anything! — before her arm was torn from its socket or the wind tore her from her uncertain hold to be smashed on the blacktop and trudged into it by the speeding tonnage of the trucks. The Fist connected with the window and went right through and grasped the windowsill and Henty pulled herself through the window, scarcely conscious of the jagged shards of glass reaching out bloodthirstily towards her.

  The truck jockey kept shouting at her to get out of his truck. He also kept beating her about the head and shoulders with an eighteen-inch length of Polish sausage.

  “If it didn’t hurt so much, it would be funny,” Henty said to him as she settled herself in the passenger seat while simultaneously trying to ward off the blows raining on her head. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to steal your food. Stop!”

  That was when she flung the Fist up to protect her face because the other arm was smarting too much from the blows with the sausage.

  The truck driver didn’t so much see the Fist as take it into himself by reaching his eyeballs towards it. In that moment Henty saw the fatigue on his face.

  The driver swept some pills from the fascia into his mouth and in the same movement opened the door beside him and jumped. “Hey, there’s no need for you to go!” Henty said.

  But there was no time to worry about the driver. He was beyond her care or even that of The Caring Society inasmuch as they were never going to find enough of him to give him the free reconstitution to useful basic nitrates in one of the Society’s ovens which was the guaranteed right of every good citizen. She was in a juggernaut travelling hundredtwentyfive milesperhour high up on a roundy-round intersection with one juggernaut thirty feet in front and another thirty feet behind and juggernauts to the left and the right — only her juggernaut didn’t have a driver!

  Henty picked up the driver’s sausage and put it on the fascia, then jumped over the console to sit behind the wheel. It was like the cockpit of a jet but for a start there was a steering wheel. Steering wheels Henty knew. She grabbed it — too hard. The enormous power assistance twitched it to one side and she sideswiped the pantechnicon next to her. Turning away from the impact, she again applied too much force and sideswiped the one on the other side.

  “This is a lot more difficult than it looks,” Henty said. “You want to be careful, my girl.” She touched the brake tentatively but it was too much. The monster behind her crashed into her and her head jerked painfully. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw her trailer coming up fast beside her, bashing the juggernaut beside her. Henty pressed on the accelerator — hard. Too much again. The intercoolers hissed, the turbochargers whined, the monster under her jumped forward and banged into the one in front which promptly jack-knifed.

  Henty swung the wheel frantically to avoid the wreckage as the truck in front of her shot off into the dense inner-lane traffic. Her truck scraped the divider guardrail. There wasn’t space to get her whole truck through but she most certainly wasn’t going back into the carnage in the middle of the highway. Metal screeched and pieces flew as she bulled the big carrier between the guardrail and the hurtling disaster-in-the-making on the other side.

  The tail of a trailer flashed past the nose of her truck. Henty turned the wheel, smoothly she thought, and stepped on the brake, except it was the accelerator. The intercoolers hissed, the turbocharger second stage cut in like a hurricane and the big truck pushed the trailer from before it, a hurricane in a hurry.

  Henty watched the glass bend in front of her but didn’t lift her foot from the accelerator. Then the trailer was gone and the glass was whole and there was a road and a sign — INTERSTATE DEFENSE HIGHWAY 78 — and Henty spun the wheel and saw the trailer coming up beside her again and spun the wheel the other way and tried to tromp the loud pedal right though the floor. Suddenly she was heading down to 78.

  “Phew!” said Henty. And, “Defense against who?

  CHAPTER 18

  From high up in the Syndicate chopper, the massive pileup on the intersection, already spreading in all directions, looked like a bunch of toy trucks artistically arranged by an especially destructive child. Only the truck drivers who had survived the pile-up, who were now fighting a gun battle with the Syndicate button men and soldiers who had survived their assault on Henty, demonstrated that it was altogether to human scale.

  “That babe’s got a real talent for destruction,” the Capo said admiringly, “Mark me a thousand she makes it all the way.”

  “The Syndicate insures nine out of every ten trucks across the nation, ” the man from the Syndicate said primly. “That down there’s ninety per cent our damage. Millions.”

  “Yeah. It’s tough all round. You taking the bet?”

  “Sure. She’s so reckless, she’ll never make it out of New Jersey. That means we’ll lose a lot of money. Curse that woman!”

  “My wife reckons it’s wrong to make a woman Run the Gauntlet.” Another thought struck him. “Hey, you’re not going to take her out early just to spite my bet?”

  The Syndicate man shook his head. “No. But we gotta find a way of dealing with her, of making her see reason. She just gotta do things our way, that’s all.”

  By now Henty’s truck was just a pinprick in the hazy distance of that uncertain dawn as she streaked alone down the middle of that broad highway.

  CHAPTER 19

  �
�San Fran-cis-co, here I come!” Henty sang at the top of her voice as she streaked down the middle of that empty highway, heading West, to the Mint in San Francisco, to ten million dollars for Petey and free Presidential pardon directly from the White House for her.

  For breakfast she gnawed a large chunk of the sausage. The residue of the driver’s pills she threw out of the window. “Junk!” She sniffed his thermos carefully and then poured the contents out of the window too. “Doped coffee. Ugh!” Then she boiled up some water in the minimicrowave in the console and, after tasting his instant with the tip of her finger, decided to risk it. “Breakfast isn’t complete without Hickory’s Coffee'n'Chicory,” she read from the label.

  With the huge truck on autocruise, she looked around for something else to eat. There was nothing. The manifest papers told her she was hauling a truckload of Polish sausage to Chicago. So the driver had robbed a box or been given a sausage. Otherwise he seemed to have lived on pills and Hickory’s MoreChicoryThanCoffee.

  Henty turned on the radio and instantly sound surround hit her deafeningly. Hurriedly she turned it down. The music stopped and the deejay hit her with a message.

  “Fed up with an enforced twenty hour week, tired of subsistence wages? Want to find out about a job where there’s no limit to the overtime you can work, where men are men and some have gotten rich in as little as five years of hard work? Then call the Teamsters. Backed by the Syndicate, a part of The Caring Society, the Teamsters won’t limit your earning hours. Call the Teamsters today, drive a luxury truck tomorrow!”

  Henty punched in an MP3 chip to shut the man up. When she looked up, there was The Trouble.

  There was time only to reflect that she should have asked why that good broad highway was completely empty except for her own truck... She must have passed a checkpoint somewhere and the cops were too lazy to come after her once she was past them.

  She punched IS-78 on the console route finder and the warning message and beeps flashed her: NOGO WARZONE NOGO. There was also a skull and crossbones just in case she couldn’t read, together with a no-entry sign.

  Too late.

  She was already in the middle of the battle zone. Up ahead there were puffs above the ground as somebody exploded anti personnel shrapnel bombs for maximum killing effect. To her right she could see shaven-headed punks with pink or yellow socks showing below stovepipe trousers setting up a baby katusha that would fire twenty-one rockets from a ring of launchers — all at once. To her left a group of The Trouble were running through the field, bent low. But they were city hooligans, unused to the country and made a lot disturbance of the shrubbery and, anyway, most of them showed above it almost all the time. They were easy game for the state trooper behind the mortar in the spotter chopper.

  “Ouch!” said Henty when the mortar hit the little group of punks square-on. She looked away.

  The chopper spotted her and somebody blasted her on the civilian safety frequency that overrides the radio.

  “Hey, you in the truck! Turn back immediately! If you deliver arms to The Trouble we will shoot. Repeat, we will shoot! Now get the hell out of here.”

  Henty stomped on the brake and swung the wheel to turn that huge truck almost in its own length and—

  There was nowhere to go that way either. A tank clunked onto the highway. It was a huge thing and it was two hundred yards from her: wherever she steered the big truck, the tank would be in a position to blast her from so close even the shaven-headed punks controlling it couldn’t miss.

  Anyway, they couldn’t be that incompetent if they had taken the tank from the National Guard, whose insignia was roughly painted over in pink and yellow stripes.

  Henty swung her truck around again. Another tank was clanking onto the road in front of her. This one had one pink and one yellow sock tied to its aerial.

  “Aw hell,” Henty said as she brought her truck to a standstill with the windscreen only inches from the threatening nozzle. She swung the door open and jumped down, taking the rest of the sausage with her.

  “Hey, it’s another Sheila!”

  The tank commander in the turret was a female Trouble. They were worse than the males. Henty flashed into a run but a whole tribe of jeering faces arose ahead of her from the brush beside the road. She stopped.

  “What you got in that truck?” the girl in the tank turret wanted to know. “Guns?”

  “Food,” Henty said. “Polish.” She threw the half sausage she held in her hand to the girl.

  The female Trouble caught the sausage and took a bite from it. While she chewed— Henty stole a quick glance at the copperchopper hovering over the horizon. The thing could blast them with a mortar or a rocket any minute and it was sure to be calling up wholesale reinforcements. This was the end of her Run. She felt like crying. It was so stupid to be caught like this when, if she had paid attention, she could have turned the hell off 78 long before this.

  “We'll take the truck,” the Girl decided, “You Boys can have her.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The Boys from the scrub started closing on Henty. She backed up until she had one of the truck’s huge wheels - nearly as tall as she - behind her back.

  “I’m warning you, I’ll fight,” Henty said, hoping her voice didn’t shake too much.

  “She’s warning us!” one of the punks laughed and grabbed for Henty’s blouse. He was quick but Henty’s hand in the Fist was quicker.

  He screamed when she caught his wrist. She immediately let go and looked in horror at his limp wrist and hanging hand. “Ohmygod I’m sorry!”

  “She’s sorry! She’s sorry!” they jeered and made a concerted rush for her. “We gonna sorry you,” one snarled in her face. Henty fought like a wildcat but there were too many of them and she hesitated really to use the Fist because she didn’t want to kill any of the kids. In the end they pinned her.

  Suddenly there was a deafening blast. In the silence that always follows the discharge of a really big gun, even on a battlefield, the Sheila commanding the tank shouted.

  “Are you mothers blind? Can’t you see the Fist? She’s an outtie, just like us. Let her be!”

  “Oh yeah?” a boy jeered. “She’s meat and she’s ours.”

  The Sheila lazily raised her zipgun from her side and zapped him in the face. “I got plans for her,” she said.

  Henty sighed at the temporary reprieve and shrugged off the few obviously slightly-dumb male Troubles still clinging to her. She pulled her clothes straight.

  “Aren’t you boys ashamed of yourselves?” she asked.

  Some looked blank, some amazed, some outraged.

  “Shame is what you do in private,” the girl commanding the tank said. “When the Government Watcheyes see everything, you have no privacy and no need for shame.”

  Then Henty saw what two gnome-like Troubles were doing under the truck. “Hey” she grabbed one by the ankle and dragged him out. “That’s high pressure hydraulics, you idiot. You cut through it, it’ll blow you away.” He tried to stab at Henty with the knife still in his hand but she caught the blade in the Fist and wrenched the knife from him. She flung the knife down and he scurried away like a kicked dog.

  “You can have the food but do you mind if I keep the tractor?” Henty asked the dominant girl.

  The girl hesitated, then said. “Sure, why not. You’ll make a nice big target for the fuzz to shoot at.” She jumped down from the tank and marched around to the back of the trailer.

  “You’re fighting the wrong way,” Henty said. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “New York’s thataway.”

  “We changed our mind about New York,” the girl said. “We’re heading for California.”

  The doors were sealed and double locked. The Troubles shot the locks off without even bothering to try the handles to see if they would open. Many of them piled up into the trailer and started flinging out boxes of sausages.

  Just then the reinforcements Henty had thought the State Troopers were calling up arri
ved. Six National Guard choppers and four copperchoppers came hurtling down out of nowhere at the tempting concentrated target. The katusha ring went off like a double-barreled sneeze and the heat seeking rockets got all but three of the choppers. A rocket from one of the copperchoppers got the tank while the barrel was still elevating to meet the onslaught. The blast flung Henty to the ground.

  The only thought in her mind was to save her truck. She was in the middle of a battlefield and she needed the mobility even if the truck did make a big, tempting target. She was running for the cab before the concussion of the exploding rocket stopped ringing the metal of the truck and the trailer.

  The leader-Sheila scrambled up into the cab after Henty and clambered over her and the console, shouting, “Straight ahead!”

  “But—” Henty shut up when the zipgun jammed into her ear. She hit the starter and pushed the lever into AHEAD and stepped on the loud pedal. In the mirror she could see heavily armed Troubles scrambling into the trailer. The big combination rolled forward gently at first, its mass resisting acceleration. Then the engines came on the cam and the turbos screamed into their power band and suddenly the whole thing blistered forward with smoking tires. In the mirror Henty saw Troubles still trying to scramble aboard the trailer being flung in all directions by the force of the acceleration as the trailer snaked behind the tractor unit.

  Then they were away from the knot of Troubles on the road around the wrecked tank.

  A copperchopper was diving at them.

  Henty twitched the wheel but the pistol ground into her ear and she twitched it back, sending more Troubles flying out of the back of the trailer. The Troubles were throwing boxes of food onto the road and Henty could see other Troubles dashing onto the road to fetch the food and then dash back again. This was no isolated skirmish. She was in the middle of a full-scale battle which would start as soon as the opposing army of National Guardsmen and State Troopers finished lining up.

  The copperchopper fired its pair of rockets. Henty saw the puffs of smoke as they left the chopper. They fell lazily to only ten feet above the ground, then aimed themselves at the truck and accelerated blisteringly towards it.