Fiasco Heights

by Zack Archer

  Shuffling along with the others, I took in the sights, observing what looked like dinosaur pups, serpents, great bearded mini-dragons, and arachnids with faces that were eerily human.

  Beyond this were piles of Akash, several modified wave sleds on metal stands (in various states of disrepair), all kinds of gizmos, gadgets, and electronic innards. The more I saw, the more I began to think the place resembled a futuristic pawnshop on steroids.

  We wandered past everything, my eyes widening at the sight of the beasts trapped (thankfully!) in their cages. I stooped and peered in at a rhino-skinned creature resembling a triceratops dinosaur, but shorter, six feet at the shoulder. The thing fixed its gaze on me and hissed.

  A hand grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. I looked up to see Kree. “It’s best not to antagonize them,” she said.

  “What are they?”

  “Diablotops,” she replied. “I saw a few on Halja. They can spit molten metal when they get angry enough.”

  “Halja sounds like a lovely little place.”

  “You can’t even imagine how terrifying it was. The Diablotops were the least dangerous species on the planet.”

  I gulped. “How’d you survive?”

  “By doing things that I never thought myself capable of doing.”

  She hung her head, but before I could respond, Atlas whistled to us. We moved across the space to a red door, catching looks from the male and female figures who were busy stacking and sorting the goods.

  On the other side of the red door sat a corpulent bear of a man with a mop of unruly gray hair. He was stretched out (oozing might be a better word) on a chair, dressed in filthy dungarees and a torn work shirt, his cannonball belly kissing his knees.

  The man spotted us, and with extraordinary effort torqued himself up out of his chair. He tottered, belched, farted, then wobbled forward like an old horse, a cheroot fired up in the corner of his mouth. I assumed from the looks of things and the fact that he smelled like burned vegetables, that we were in the presence of the smuggler, the figure named the Lout.

  The Lout gave us a contemptuous toss of the head and rubbed greasy hands over his mildewed knickers and ratty shirt. His gaze then wandered to Atlas. “Nice outfits.”

  “That’s what we thought when we were borrowing them from a squad of Snouts,” Atlas replied.

  “Where are the former owners?”

  “Snoozing down under.”

  Lout did a double-take. “Dead?”

  “We went easy on ‘em,” Atlas answered.

  Atlas and the Lout shared a moment and then they embraced, not exactly the warmest of moments, but it appeared as if they were on good terms. It was the kind of greeting, for instance, you might give a friend you haven’t seen in some time.

  “I’m gonna state the obvious, Jackson,” the Lout said.

  “I’m not dead if that’s what you were gonna say,” Atlas replied.

  The Lout nodded. “Not yet you’re not. But you’ve got one foot in the clouds.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “What haven’t I heard. Some say you helped kill Greylock—”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Others say you helped spring Big Dread and her pack out of jail—”

  “That’s a black lie.”

  “Or helped steal the godsdamned Light Breaker.”

  “Yeah, okay, so that last part is true.”

  The Lout paled. “Gods, man, don’t you know they’re out looking for you? Not only the Snouts but every black hat in the fucking city. The Harbinger’s put a red notice out on all of your asses. The Morningstars, the gangs, they are hunting you down, brother.”

  “What can I say? I’m a popular guy.”

  The Lout looked from Atlas to the rest of us. “I’m risking my life just talking to you.”

  “We’ll be brief then.”

  “What do you all want?” the Lout asked.

  “We need your help,” I blurted out.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Night Fire,” I said.

  The Lout scratched his head. “What’s your greatest strength, kid?”

  “That I have no weaknesses.”

  The Lout considered this and then smirked while shaking his head. “Only someone your age could say something so incredibly fucking stupid.”

  “The kid tells true,” Atlas said. “We’re in dire straits.”

  The Lout slowly nodded. “Okay. Follow me.”

  55

  We followed after the Lout, who turned back to Atlas. “You’ve come at a bad time, Atlas,” he said. “The city’s like a tinderbox. The shadows are growing long and the good people are sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how things turn out.”

  “That’s some bullshit,” Atlas said.

  “So it’s some bullshit,” the Lout fired back.

  “Talk to me, Elihu,” Atlas replied, pressing him. “Tell true.”

  “That is the truth. Or put another way, the Harbinger is consolidating power and there’s nobody to stand up to him.”

  “Give it a little time,” Atlas replied with a wink.

  The Lout shouldered open another door that led to an inner sanctum. The room was circular and not at all what I expected. The walls were covered in a holographic mural, a pixel wall I heard Splinter say, that showed warm and fuzzy images of children playing in fields, small animals, and sunsets.

  “What the fuck is this?” Atlas asked.

  “This is what I traffic in now,” the Lout said.

  “Sunshine and rainbows?” Splinter asked.

  Atlas tapped his huge boot on the ground. “We don’t have time for this.”

  The Lout slammed the door shut, secured four locks, and then clapped his hands as the pixel wall rotated back to reveal a wall hidden behind it.

  This wall was shingled with metal peg-boards.

  A wide variety of weapons hung from the boards.

  Everything from pistols to what looked like grenades, assault rifles, and strangely-shaped, biomechanical rocket launchers that glistened and pulsed with life.

  “This is more like it,” Kaptain Khaos said.

  “Count yourself privileged, because few see inside this room,” the Lout said. “This is my lair, my holy of holies. I’ll bill you later. Take what you want.”

  Splinter and Liberty spotted some food on a table, what looked like fresh fruit, prepared food in pouches, and drinks, and handed them out. I grabbed the first pouch I saw and downed its contents. It had the consistency of room temperature liquified meat, but having not eaten in a very long time, it tasted glorious. I followed this up with a sugary drink that reminded me of fruit punch.

  “How about some information?” Atlas asked the Lout while munching on a fruit that resembled an apple.

  “Information’s gonna cost you more than weapons, Jackson,” the Lout replied.

  “Where’s Aurora?” Liberty asked.

  The Lout’s face fell. “Gods, you’re actually going there?”

  “Seemed like a good place to go,” Atlas replied.

  The Lout snorted. “Like I’d know.”

  “You know everything.”

  The Lout removed a pistol from a nearby table with a strange green coil wrapped around the barrel that looked like an old-school Flash Gordon-style weapon. “And if I did happen to know something? I’m thinking information like that has to be pretty valuable.”

  “The sides are warring against each other, Elihu,” Atlas said, using what I assumed was the Lout’s real name. “The light and the dark, the Shadow Catchers and the Morningstars.”

  “Tell me why I should care?”

  “Because you need to be counted. You have to choose a side because one will rise and the other will fall.”

  “The hell I do,” the Lout said. “I’ve gotten this far by never choosing sides. Ever. You know why? Because once you start choosing sides, eventually your luck runs out.”

  “Not if you go with us,” Atlas said.

 
; “Always bet on black, baby,” Kaptain Khaos commented.

  “We’re going to tear the system down,” Atlas said. “We’re going to change things.”

  “Do you know how many people have tried to do that and failed?”

  “I do,” Atlas replied. “But none of them were us.”

  There were a few seconds of silence then the Lout pursed his lips, peering at his boots. “She fucked up, Jackson. Your girl Aurora has gone and done it.”

  “She had the contents of the Light Breaker in a trap bottle,” Splinter said.

  The Lout looked up, weariness gripping his face.

  He clapped his hands and a spiral of light dropped down from a minute projector in the ceiling. The light expanded in the air between us, revealing images, what looked like shots taken from a surveillance camera or an overhead drone. Aurora was visible, piloting a wave sled down a main thoroughfare when there were a series of explosions and flashes of light. I grimaced, fighting not to look, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  The wave sled crashed to the ground and Aurora managed to flee from it before it went up in flames. She was surrounded on all sides as hidden guns suddenly erupted, but she didn’t go down without a fight. I watched her stride through a wave of smoke, balls of energy lancing out from her fingertips. She must’ve taken down a dozen or more Snouts and several mechanical fighting machines before an energy net dropped from the sky, pinning her to the ground.

  The Lout clapped his hands and the images vanished. “She was ambushed after coming out of the underground. The Harbinger’s people, a team of hired killers, took her down.”

  My stomach turned over. “Is she alive?”

  The Lout gave a half shrug. “All I know is that she was taken to the big man’s fortress.”

  “Then we need to go get her back.”

  The Lout barked a nasty laugh, pointed a finger at me, then looked to the others. “Is he new here?”

  “A little,” Splinter replied.

  “I figured,” the Lout said, favoring me with a look from his hooded eyes. “Because nobody, and I do mean nobody, attacks the Harbinger and lives to tell about it.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re gonna need to find a way in,” Lyric stated.

  The Lout shook his head. “You’ve all lost your minds. The only way into that place is through the top floor, so unless you’ve got wings, you’re out of luck.”

  “Then we’ll hit it head on,” Atlas said. “We’ve got no choice.”

  The Lout took this in and then a look of sorrow gripped his face. He chambered a round in his weapon, which began glowing green. “And I don’t have a choice either, Atlas.”

  The Lout aimed his weapon at Atlas’s chest.

  “What the fuck is going on, Elihu?”

  “What’s going on is what you said before. A big change is coming, but it’s not the one you think,” the Lout replied. “The old things are being cast aside and I don’t want to be one of them.”

  “So you’ve thrown in with them?”

  The Lout waved his weapon at all of us. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  That’s when we heard it.

  The sounds of shouts and screams echoing above.

  I knew at that moment that the Lout had indeed tipped the Snouts off.

  He’d betrayed us, and the bad guys were on the way to take us down.

  56

  What happened next was little more than a blur.

  Atlas reacted, wheeling to throw a punch when the Lout brought his gun up and I conjured up a wall of pure energy. The Lout fired and the round from his gun ricocheted off the energy wall I’d manufactured, striking the ceiling, bringing half of it down on us.

  We scrambled back, the nearby workers running for cover as the explosion shook the building. The Lout was a crafty old bastard. He might’ve weighed three hundred pounds, but he managed to slide through a hidden wall at the back of his weapons vault.

  “Grab what you can and get ready!” Atlas screamed.

  I scuttled sideways, shadowing Kree, who snatched up a pair of pistols off the wall. The moment she lifted them, they shifted and reconfigured around the contours of her hands.

  The Kaptain, Splinter, and the ladies snagged assault weapons and grenade launchers when the entrance to the space imploded, and metal lines rocketed into the remains of the roof. A team of Snouts appeared and grabbed the lines and rode them down to the ground.

  These Snouts moved with the practiced mannerisms of hired killers and took up positions before opening fire on us. If it weren’t for a barrier I created, Splinter and Atlas likely would have been gunned down.

  The air filled with energized rounds and metal darts from the Snouts’ weapons. I watched the smoky waves caused by the rounds as they shot forward, striking the barrier I’d engineered before ricocheting and lodging in the ceiling or the nearby walls.

  I waited until the Snouts needed to reload and then I lowered the protective barrier, which allowed Liberty and Lyric to riddle the cops with counterfire. The Snouts, human and synthetic, fell in bunches, but even more of them appeared, descending from above like spiders. In seconds, the area out in front of us was swarming with bad guys, and they were threatening to flank us.

  Atlas raised a hand and pointed at the rear wall. “We need to fall back!”

  “There’s no way out!” I yelled.

  The Kaptain brought his grenade launcher up to his shoulder. He squeezed off three shots from his launcher and blew a hole in the back wall big enough for us to run through. “There is now!” he said.

  The others charged into the hole while I stayed behind, covering our asses, keeping the energy barrier in place as more and more of the Snouts appeared.

  Backtracking slowly, I watched the Snouts fan out to the left and right, trying to gain an advantage, trying to find a way to shoot me down.

  I widened the energy field and was ten feet away from the hole in the rear wall when it happened.

  One of the Snouts fired a lucky shot that hammered into the energy field and flew wide. The round bounced off the wall and somehow zipped over the energy field, ricocheting a final time.

  The round ended up striking me in the wrist.

  My suit protected me, but the impact jarred my right arm. It cramped and tightened and I lost my concentration, which meant the energy field vanished.

  Just like that, I was exposed, facing off against twenty or thirty pissed-off cops.

  The closest Snout raised his weapon and I willed myself to engineer another energy shield when gunfire rang out.

  I ducked, covering my ear as the bodies of the Snouts were whipsawed back across the floor.

  Wheeling around, I saw Kree clutching her two pistols. She was advancing like an angel of death, cutting down the Snouts where they stood.

  With a series of expertly placed shots, she was able to beat the Snouts back, but her guns soon clicked on empty chambers.

  More Snouts appeared as Kree grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the hole in the wall.

  I slipped my helmet on as we plunged headlong into the semi-darkness that lay between the room and what I could see was the rear of the building.

  We ran raggedly outside and were immediately greeted by the sound of machines clattering overhead.

  My gaze ratcheted up and I spotted several law enforcement wave sleds dipping and dropping down over the alleyways and side streets.

  The readouts on my visor were blinking red and the heads-up display listed three law enforcement sleds overhead and twenty-seven Snouts nearby and closing in to surround us.

  I looked to the right and spotted Atlas and the others, but before we could move to them, a flash-bang grenade exploded.

  Then another round burst in front of us and two more quickly followed. They were being fired at us by Snouts perched on the backs of the sleds which began dropping toward the ground in the area that separated us and Atlas and the others.

  The explosions disoriented me for a few heartbeats. Even with my helmet on,
stars filled my eyes and my ears throbbed.

  Kree grabbed my hand and forced me back. I knew there was no way we’d be able to rendezvous with Atlas and the rest.

  The other wave sleds sliced down toward us and the Snouts began firing at us with non-lethal munitions, including a kind of rubber bullet that bounced off the ground, zipping between my legs.

  My body tensed at the sight of the wave sled that was strafing us.

  A round from one of the sleds walloped me in the head, spiderwebbing my visor. The impact caused my momentary wooziness to vanish instantly. I felt my body flood with renewed vigor and I harnessed the pain, the anger, dropping down into my zone.

  Kree was urging me to run, but I stood my ground.

  The air was raw with a metallic taste as two balls of pure energy materialized in the palms of my hands. I thrust them forward like shot-puts, and they exploded near the nose of the sled, causing it to break apart. The Snouts tumbled from the machine, which slammed through a nearby wall before vanishing in a greasy orange fireball. The heads-up display in my helmet reflected the carnage, the details showing that we'd reduced the attacking Snouts by half.

  Doubling back, Kree shrieked to run and I did, following her as we made our escape between a clutch of monolithic buildings, swinging left, then hauling ass to the right.

  I had no idea where we were running, but Kree apparently did.

  She sprinted out ahead of me, juking under a covered walkway that connected the building with the Lout’s shop to another structure, a sagging, multi-storied building covered in so much green vine that it resembled an emerald tapestry hanging from the exterior.

  “Do you know where you’re going?!”

  She turned, her eyes glowing. “I thought you did!”

  I spun and looked back. The area we’d just come from was swarming with law enforcement. One of them, a tall Snout with a black helmet, spotted us and blew a whistle.