“That’s Washington’s problem. I look out for my own.”
“You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you know,” Chris persisted.
“You wanna bet on it?”
Defeated, Chris shook his head.
“I’m hungry,” Henty said and, spying a candy bar in the top pocket of one of Jimmy Twoshoes’ bullyboys, extracted it, peeled the wrapper and starter munching it.
“That’s stealing!” said Jimmy Twoshoes.
“Look who’s talking,” Henty retorted around a mouthful of candy.
“You can take one of the bounty hunters’ cars,” Jimmy Twoshoes told Henty. “They won’t be needing them again.”
Henty went up to the glass. “It’ll be okay,” she said to Petey, who again signaled thumbs up.
“Lissen, you wanna take more care,” Jimmy Twoshoes said at her elbow. “That bunch of amateurs in Penn nearly got you and it was stupid to stay on the train so long after everybody knew where to find you.”
“I wanted to have a chat with you,” Henty said.
He looked at her calculatingly but said nothing.
With a wave to Petey and the surgeon, Henty trotted away to where the bounty hunters had parked their transport.
CHAPTER 37
The sun set as she reached Des Moines. She drove a Cadillac, which she chose because it possessed really dark smoked windows. Her foresight paid off when a number of times choppers carrying red-faced men waving armament came down low beside her to inspect the car: she could see them but they couldn’t see her. Of course, if any of them had a receiver on the Fist wavelength, she would be a sitting target... It was a calculated risk: she calculated all the professionals would have been at the wrecking of the train and the bridge. These were the johnny-come-latelies.
She was already nearing downtown Des Moines when the sinister young man from the Chaser Bank caught up with her.
Henty wasn’t worried about the bounty hunters here: her concern was the unpredictable actions of local people turned into heroes by the sight of the Fist and the promise of ten million dollars, so it was all the more to her credit that she reacted so quickly to the unexpected threat. One moment Henty was driving along peacefully, the next a chopper dropped out of the sky between the high buildings (well, Henty, a Texas country girl, though of them as high) and settled in the road right in front of her car. Henty was about to brake sharply — a natural reflex action when she saw the intertwined crosses of the Chaser Bank on the chopper’s doors. Instead, she stepped right smartly on the accelerator and crashed the car into the chopper’s side at a good 15 milesperhour, which may not sound like much but was enough to damage the lightly built chopper quite extensively.
Henty jumped out of her car and started running. The man from the Chaser jerked at the hatch but couldn’t open it because the frames were bent and the car was right up against them. He clambered up to the roof hatch and aimed his rifle at Henty’s running back in the twilight.
The other commuters were also more than a little irritated at the chutzpah of this man in putting his chopper down in their way home. They took their cue from Henty and crashed their cars into the chopper. When the first car hit the chopper, the young professional killer had already fired his first shot and missed because Henty just then ducked around a parcel laden woman coming out of a store.
The woman. a born-again Christian, went to join her Maker.
Henty stopped to help her up, then saw the blood. She turned and ran towards the immobilized chopper. She didn’t know what she was going to do against a professional killer holding a rifle on her, but she was so angry, she didn’t think at all. “You can’t even shoot straight,” she shouted at the man again aiming the rifle at her, “you stupid— you— you— murderer!”
People on the pavements were giving way before her angry charge. The the man from the Chaser saw a clean shot and was about to bag her there and then — when the first commuter expressed his dissatisfaction with the holdup by ramming the chopper.
The organ chaser was thrown off balance and his shot killed another innocent bystander twelve feet to Henty’s right. Then his body jerked every which way as more enraged commuters crashed their cars into his chopper.
Henty was brought up short against a solid wall of automobile metal. Realizing for the first time the stupidity of going empty-handed against a man with a rifle, she turned and trotted away into the sunset. Behind her, the man from the Chaser turned his rifle on his tormentors and soon what had started as a traffic jam was a massacre. But Henty didn’t know any of this.
Nobody seemed to find it odd that Henty was running. In fact, many other people were either walking very briskly, or running themselves.
After a while, in which the streets suddenly emptied as it became dark much quicker than it would in Texas, Henty asked one of the few people still on the street. “Hey, why is everybody running?”
“It’s the garbos,” the woman said, and sprinted away at a rate of knots.
“Oh,” Henty said, though she was none the wiser. And, “Thanks,” even though the woman was already out of earshot. Henty kept heading west: the Mint in SF was thataway and that was the way she was going, for Petey’s sake.
Then, also for Petey’s sake, Henty had an idea when she saw a phone booth. She went in and stuck her card in the slot and then looked around uncertainly: she had never placed a bet before. But one number was written on the walls more than any other number and rather than call the operator — a member of The Caring Society to whom she would have to give her name before receiving service — Henty tried this popular number.
“Ryan’s Malted Milk and Candy Shop,” said a rasping voice.
“What’s the odds on the runner making it all the way to San Francisco?” Henty asked.
·Ten thousand to one,” came the prompt reply. “What’re you, some kind of a long-shot freak? Or a woman’s libber?”
“A liberated woman,” Henty said. “Can you bill me for a bet?”
“Sure. Just tell me your Medicare number and it’ll be automatically billed to your bank. How many credits?”
Henty still had a couple of thousand in the bank. It wasn’t enough to do Petey any good and the bank would grab it an anyway once she was gone. But the Syndicate always collected... and always paid. “Two thousand that she makes it to San Francisco. Not the Mint, just SF.”
“Sure. Two thousand she makes it to SF. You get twenty mill if she makes it. I’m holding thumbs for you, lover. If she makes it. You’ll be a celeb.”
“I guess I’m one already.”
He wasn’t impressed. “The vidi makes a new celeb every week. Now just put the thumb and four fingers of your right hand on the light pads to validate the credit transaction.”
Henty put her thumb and fingers on the pads, knowing that by the time the computer threw up her name and the bureaucracy decided what to do, she'd be several miles away, but grateful all the same that the Fist was on her other hand.
“Okay, you got two grand on the Runner to make SF. Cheers, sucker!”
Henty called Linda to tell her Chris was okay and was about to leave the phone booth when she found out about the garbos.
CHAPTER 38
She turned to a bloodcurdling scream. A man in a business suit was in the grip of two large overalled men while a third ripped off his watch and extracted his wallet with practiced ease.
“A mugging,” Henty said to herself. “Even Middle-America isn’t safe.” Then she gasped.
Instead of letting the man go, the muggers picked him up bodily and threw him into the back of the big garbage truck next to them which gulped the poor man in and crunched him and then was silent.
Henty’s mouth opened but no sound came out. She just couldn’t believe it.
The men swung aboard their truck and it moved on. Henty looked frantically upwards but the light globe was smashed and the only light inside the phone booth came from a nearby streetlamp which would also cause reflections on the
armaglaze sides; she was quite safe. All the same, she shivered fearfully until they were well past. Then she crept out of her phone booth and ran down the street the other way. Far off she heard another unfortunate late stroller scream as the clanking machine ate him.
Henty crossed over several blocks, then turned doggedly West again. She wondered what the police were doing while citizens were fed to garbage trucks. She saw one or two funny square cut silhouettes race by on otherwise deserted streets and realized what they were when she ran past an open lot. “Pre-loved Personnel Carriers, Gently Used Tanks and HalfTracks”, said the sign, but even they were closed for business. Henty broke her stride to look yearningly at the armored personnel carriers but she didn’t want to steal anything and maybe the things needed special skills to drive.
A couple of blocks further on, Henty heard the screams and clanks of the garbos going about their business heading her way. She immediately turned a corner but they had already seen her. There was a shout and they rolled straight up the street at her even as she turned off.
Henty ran full-tilt into a blind man leaning on his white stick and staring intently East.
“So sorry!” She helped him to his feet and immediately he stared East again.
“The garbos are coming!” Henty said urgently. “Come along!” She tugged at his elbow.
He shrugged her off irritably. “Such a lovely sunrise, he said dreamily.
“It’s sunset and you’re looking East not West,” Henty said. “Come on!”
“Sunrise over Europe,” the blind man said. “Lovely radioactive hi-count over Europe. It’s the only thing I can see, every day this time.”
“My husband died in that war,” Henty said. “THE GARBOS ARE COMING!” Once more she grabbed his elbow and tried to drag him along but he stood his ground and then the garbos were upon them, big men with brutal hands. The blind man fought like a tiger and Henty too put up a spirited defense, cracking a couple of heads, before they were overcome and pinned from behind. Their wallets and watches were ripped out of their pockets and from their wrists and then they were flung into the gaping maw of the munching machine by the garbos who simply swung them by their arms and legs and let fly...
They threw the blind man in first and he screamed. Then Henty, and she screamed. She also tried to grab the blind man back from the cruel teeth of the machine even as the automatic safety lid swung to behind them, leaving them in absolute darkness.
Henty missed the blind man but in grabbing for him stuck the Fist between the teeth just as they closed. In a blind panic in the darkness, right up against the crunching machinery, hardly knowing what she was doing, Henty used the enormous power of the Fist to twist two of the teeth into hooks and hook them around each other. There was a growl and a flash of an electric short and then the machinery ground to a halt, though not to silence as the garbos were returning the truck to the depot before taking their colleagues hurt by the stick of the blind man and Henty’s Fist for medical attention.
The cops were waiting for them at the depot.
“Where were you when we needed you?” the foreman of the garbos asked as he handed over half the night’s take.
“They fightin’ back are they?”
“Yeah. Can you lead us with the siren. Bill’s arm is broken real bad.”
“Sure thing.”
That was when Henty, enraged at this clear evidence of police complicity, smashed the Fist into the steel side of the garbage truck.
“Bloody truck’s overdue for service,” the foreman said.
Henty, seeing — much to her surprise — a glint of light where she had hit the steel plate. hit it again, harder this time. It tore and she came through the gap like the avenging angel, Fist first. It hit the garbo foreman in the face as she was still coming out of the hole and she swung the Fist up into the policeman’s ribs as her feet touched. The other garbos were too far for her to reach and they were already running, so with her next step Henty was at the police car and then she was in it and away, switching the siren on just for the hell of it, swinging the wheel hard at the doors to the depot to turn West, towards the Old US Mint in San Francisco. West!
CHAPTER 39
Henty was perhaps a little naive but she wasn’t stupid: she learned from her mistakes. She ate all the food in the policeman’s box immediately to make sure she didn’t have to leave any of it behind. And, before crossing the Missouri into Nebraska, she abandoned the distinctive police car.
All the same, the Humble and Poor Hunt was waiting for her.
CHAPTER 40
When the posse rides out, or the good man guns down the villain, the justification is always the same: extra-legal violence is the only protector of true justice in a world where authority has gone to seed and savagery is close at hand. — Michael Davie
The Humble & Poor Hunt originated, as the name suggests, in the institutions of Wall Street. But, as the New York megapolis spread, so the foxes retreated until there was not one to be found in Connecticut, Massachusetts, southern New York State, New Jersey, Vermont or New Hampshire. Or that is what the Master of the Fox Hounds of the Humble & Poor claimed. In fact, they had killed all the foxes long before urban sprawl became a danger to the descendants of tomarctus. When Abercrombie & Fitch moved to Los Angeles, the Humble & Poor recognized that the times had changed but they had no intention of going anywhere near that Sodom and Gomorrah. Instead, they moved to Nebraska, soon annihilated its foxes (and incidentally the rest of its never-abundant wildlife) and switched from hunting foxes to what one MFH described with a straight face as “the socially responsible duty of every properly constituted citizen to hunt the Gauntlet Runner”. Soon after, he was jailed for tax fraud.
Many members of the Humble & Poor were legal or financial advisers to one or more tentacles of the Syndicate. One of them was an actuarial consultant to the Syndicate’s betting arm and had told them that one Runner in about seven or eight would reach Nebraska; his friends in the Syndicate usually gave the Humble & Poor advance warning when a Runner would reach that far.
Of the Runners who made it to Nevada, only one in twenty survived the Humble & Poor Hunt to cross the border into Colorado or Wyoming. If a Runner tried to escape the Humble & Poor by going north or south, around Nebraska, the Humble & Poor would spare neither effort nor cost to punish him for his impertinence. They paid a permanent secretary to make all the arrangements. Of course, the Hunt was registered as a charitable institution to make its costs tax deductible for airlifting horses, hounds and hunters north to the Dakotas or south to Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. If the Runner made it across the Western borders of these states, the Humble & Poor would sportingly let him go. They were, however, negotiating with the State Legislatures of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to hunt across their territories as well.
Henty knew nothing about the Humble & Poor Hunt. She was not addicted to the vidi, the violence on Gauntlet Runner sickened her, and now that Petey was growing up, she switched the vidi off promptly when it came on to protect him from it as much as possible.
So she was quite unprepared when the Humble & Poor MFH shouted, “There she goes. Tallyho!” and blew his horn until he was red in the face and at the same time gestured to the handlers to take the muzzles off the dogs...
CHAPTER 41
The Des Moines coppercar carried RAM in its route finder only to cover the streets of the city and the main roads of the State as far as its borders. It showed Henty that Interstate 80 runs into Interstate 29 near the Nebraska border, that she would have to travel south along 29 briefly before turning west again on 80. What the map didn’t show was that she could also have turned north on 29 for a little way before heading west again on US-30 which would then swing southwest to rejoin IS-80 at Grand Island, a route not significantly longer but a great deal less obvious than the direct one along IS-80, on which the Humble & Poor Hunt was waiting for her.
Henty’s second mistake was also made out of ignorance: if she had known men o
n horseback, aided by dogs, would hunt her, she would never have abandoned the car before crossing the Missouri into Nebraska and the hunters would first be forced to separate her from her transport.
It was just before dawn when Henty trotted up to the bridge and started walking briskly across it. She had found a first aid kit in the glove box and bandaged the Fist with the gauze while in the other hand she carried a plastic lunchbox; it was empty but it might mislead the unobservant or naive into thinking she was on her way to work.
Out on those open spans Henty had to resist the apprehensive urge not to look around furtively, like some frightened animal, to keep up the appearance that she normally, routinely, daily crossed the bridge. On the far side elation took her and she broke into a trot again to get as far from the bridge as possible.
Henty had just seen the shimmer of Omaha’s lights when, the Humble & Poor Hunt having established themselves between her and the bridge she had just left, the MFH gave the traditional cry:
“There she goes. Tallyho!” He blew his horn until he was red in the face and at the same time gestured to the handlers to take the muzzles off the dogs.
Henty, not for a moment dreaming that the cry was intended for her, turned to watch the Hunt’s horses and riders and dogs and handlers muster near the road not far from the bridgehead. The horses were the finest that she had ever seen and the dogs were all Doberman Pinchers but this did not surprise Henty, who knew nothing about fox hunting hounds and anyway was vaguely aware that Americans own more Doberman Pinchers than all the rest of the world put together.
After a moment, Henty reluctantly turned away and started trotting westwards, into Nebraska. She was not to remain innocent long. No more than fifteen seconds later the Doberman growled behind her just once, quite softly and very briefly but Henty was so startled she swung around and, as she swung, her arms went wide. The Doberman sunk his teeth into the Fist — or tried to. Teeth broke and come spraying out of the dog’s mouth. It howled pitifully and slunk away from her. But Henty was no longer looking.
Gauntlet Run: Birth of a Superhero Page 10
