Recap for Chapter 17
It was a dodge. I confessed to an old thing to set it right, instead of facing the scary, big, new thing. It was typically male, or, depending on local conditions, it was only human.
Pregnant. A stapler’s cartoon ker-punch sound effect. PregNANT. Permanent. Dad is a human antenna for interstellar broadcasts of eerie TV dolls, and he makes space drugs in his backbone connected to his headbone.
Wake up, Rich. You’re not good to drive.
“Then why wake me up?”
Methyl stirred from a doze in the passenger seat.
Rich, you haven’t given me the wheel. Where else could Xavier be than the Hacienda?
“You have it.”
I realized I’d seen Xavier at my home, and for so little time considering where I’d ended up.
“Where are we, Francesca?” Methyl said.
My nav is rebooting.
“And why is that,” I said.
I do not know.
“When did it start rebooting?”
When I queried it, Rich, Xavier’s location. Gabbyella was sharing. Now, it’s back online.
“Not at the Hacienda, I assume,” Methyl said.
Further out this way.
“I thought we were getting away from them,” I said.
We were approaching them slightly from the north.
“This isn’t a good feeling,” Methyl said.
“Right,” I said, “and I do want your lighter—”
I got the words out the moment a heavy, metal object struck my door hard enough to rock the car on her shocks and send a clap of thunder through the interior.
“What!” Methyl screamed.
Francesca killed all her lights and went into reverse with her power already up at least thirty percent. It was a full two seconds before Methyl or I could lean back, and by then enough lights were back for us to see a dark figure a couple hundred meters ahead of us running for a stand of trees.
“Fuck, I think we got bagged,” I said.
Can confirm.
“What!”
“Infrared cameras on and recording, please. Get us to Xavier now.”
I turned to Methyl. Her face had drained of all color. She’d only been on her own for a few months, and behind the Golden Apple, not outside the city like this.
“That was one, maybe at most two, of what people call no-jokers.”
Francesca spun a half circle and was headed back up the dirt road we’d taken hours earlier off a county road. There was nothing out here. This wasn’t territory. We were a target.
“A bag is literally a bag, but it’s full of magnets screwed to electronics designed to hack your vehicle. They run up, toss it, and run off. Can’t get it off very easily. I mean. At all.”
Attacks detected.
“Thank you, Francesca. Hold tight.”
“What? Pull over and take it off.”
“When we’re out of range, please Francesca, let’s humor her for a few precious seconds.”
Methyl plunged deep within her seat and crossed her arms.
“Lighter,” I said.
“Pull the hack off Francesca first.”
We stopped in the darkness of an overcast night, still on the dirt road but according to the nav, only a few minutes from the country road.
Methyl and I got out.
“Is it safe here?” she said.
“This isn’t territory. We were a random hit.”
I closed my door and put a light on the bag. A black gym bag, some gym’s logo with a rocket taking off as its main feature, hung sideways from my door, the twin loops of its handles drooping earthward. Methyl grabbed one handle and leaned her weight against the car. The bag held. She grabbed the other handle, braced a foot against Francesca and pulled for fifteen breathless seconds, then collapsed on her butt.
“Burn it off.”
“No bag left, but all the magnets and bad gear left behind.”
“Take the door off.”
“She won’t run with it removed. Safety first.”
“Fuck.”
“We drive now. We had this time. Now, we have time to get out of here. Let’s go.”
We slept again, once we came to the silence of the county road and the narcotic yellow lines licking under Francesca’s headlights. A dreamless cannabis sleep of temporary self-forgiveness and the absence of time.
The pothole sent pain and a tingle of adrenaline across my calves and up my chest into my jaw. Francesca’s lights showed the road had deteriorated significantly. The shoulder had fallen away. She’d dropped her speed by half.
“Are we?” Methyl said. She hadn’t yet opened her eyes.
We’d been asleep for ninety-seven minutes. It was pure dark beyond our lights.
“Francesca: location, heading, destination.”
Sì, I can’t read any of this. Only Gabbyella.
Our front left side plunged into a hole, throwing Methyl into my shoulder. She screamed.
“We’re on a rough road, but Francesca’s handling it, right?”
Sì.
“She doesn’t need me to take the wheel because there seems to be a bridge ahead, correct?”
“Where are we?” Methyl said. “Is it still tonight?”
Rich, I am trying. The bag.
“I have the wheel,” I said. I took the steering wheel. It was like grabbing the head of an angry bulldog. I eased off the power. The bridge became larger, silhouetted in city light glowing under the clouds.
“We’re coming up on something,” I said, to whom, I wasn’t sure. It felt a little prayer-like, a little coach-like.
“A bridge,” I said. “So, what? Maybe so what. Maybe something else, though. This is the way we need to go to get this bag off, or this bag does what it is designed to do, that’s so what.”
“Fran, what’s our fuel?”
Full.
“You carry fuel, holy shit,” Methyl said. “What even are you?”
I am plenty of after-market. What are you?
“Same.”
“Here we go,” I said.
I’d felt they weren’t quite getting it, but why did I need them to feel the same fear I did? It was waiting democratically for all of us here now, in the shape of this bridge over this sixty-meter river, buckled and jutting at harsh angles, yet appearing to have a path, not to be utterly destroyed.
We fell silent as I began an upward ascent of one section of bridge, past four cars burned out on the side of the section. Francesca’s tires spun then bit as we rolled over vehicle parts and debris and dipped in and out of holes. I lost track of Methyl and Francesca’s infrared and other screens. I was my hands on the wheel; I was my feet on the power; I was my eyes on the scene we were moving into of increasing destruction. We skittered as the planes of concrete angled too much, but there was ahead a section of level road, if only we could reach it around a band of stalled cars and a pile of tires.
It was the tires that had been hiding the explosive. The blast clipped Francesca’s back end and spun us three times around and across the level zone before I knew what had happened. By then, the bridge had pitched downward sharply, and we’d ended up flung against the opposite side and were accelerating down the bridge backwards, when Methyl screamed a death wail.
Francesca’s exterior was grinding against the safety railing and tossing a hurricane of sparks against the window glass and over the top of the car, landing on the windshield and the hood angry yellow-white sparks, some tiny hunks of metal that twirled and glowed in the air. Methyl was panicking unto death, her gaze locked through the window at the shower of sparks, her arms drawn up against her chest and her hands clasping one another. I had both my feet on the brake pedal as hard as they would go down, and with no idea how to help her I had my hands out to swat away any sparks if they jumped into the car when she turned to me and threw herself into my arms. I looked behind us and saw the blessed end of the bridge meeting sand at the edge of the river.
Rich, I have lost my left front tire and my right rear wheel.
“Okay, Francesca. You’re doing good. How long till we hit that beach?”
Seven seconds.
“Angle okay?”
We will survive that.
It was the sand. We punched into the beach and dug across twenty meters of it before we stopped parallel to the river. I checked Methyl. She’d been so glued to me, the rough landing hadn’t banged her up.
“No report just yet please.”
Okay, Rich. But.
“Yes.”
Infrared, Rich, please.
On the dash screen I saw, four hundred meters from the shore, about three hundred and fifty heat-making human bodies in various poses of stirring awake from tents and huts at the sound of a Honda crash-landing down their local demolished bridge and landing on their beach.
“This is territory. Call everyone. Police and Xavier. We’re stranded in territory.”
Done.
At the rattle of gunfire, Francesca killed our lights again.
To be continued