Authors: Rob Ziegler
“You’re just all business, huh? All
pinche
badass and shit. You’re not like these other kids.” He spit tobacco juice, gave Brood a speculative look. “You seem reliable. You reliable, homie?” Brood didn’t answer. The sergeant nodded. “Want to show you something. Follow me.” He turned abruptly and strode away across the tarmac. Brood stayed put. The sergeant turned. “Come on. You’ll like it, I promise.”
….
“Something about you reminds me of my papi.” The sergeant spoke over a densely muscled shoulder as he led Brood through Riley’s hallways, every so often spitting a gummy black spot of juice onto the concrete floor. They came to a green-painted door marked AUTO BAY 3. The sergeant pushed it open, stepped through and hit a light switch. White fluorescents strobed overhead, then came fully on, revealing a long low room the size of a soccer field, filled with tarped vehicles.
“He ran guns to the
secessionistas
down in the jungles around Houston.” The sergeant moved from one vehicle to the next, lifting faded khaki tarps and peaking beneath. “You sound like you’re from Texas.”
“
Sí
,” Brood acknowledged. “San Antonio.”
The sergeant stepped around a behemoth vehicle. His diamond tooth flashed in the fluorescents as he grinned at Brood across the tarped hood.
“Me too. Dallas, originally.” He peeked under the tarp, then moved on to the next vehicle. “
Secessionistas
, they’d hide out on old oil platforms in the gulf. My papi’d paddle his ass out there in a rowboat, through all these mines and shit. If gov troops’d caught him, they’d have shot his ass.” He halted, leaned with a hand against a massive wheel protruding from beneath a tarp and stared at Brood. “He was a good man.
Muy confiable
. You got that same look to you. Like you’re going to do what you’re going to do, and nobody going to tell you shit about it.” He patted the vehicle. “This is it. My friend Lobo.” He gripped the tarp with both hands and whipped it free.
The vehicle looked like a massive black widow—if black widows were made from molded carbon fiber, ceramic, titanium armor plating, came with dual-barreled grenade launchers stacked on their backs and fat black tires on their feet. The sergeant sank down to the concrete floor and wriggled his way beneath the chassis.
“Scare me up a grease gun, homie.”
They checked all the seals, lubed the drive train, CV joints and transmission. When they’d finished the sergeant palmed the passenger door pad. The door seemed alive as it hissed open. The sergeant inclined his head.
“Hop in.”
There was no dust inside, just sleek-looking readouts, molded carbon fiber, ergonomic black plastic. The sergeant hit a red button beside the steering wheel. The nuke plant fired. Sounded for a moment like a prolonged explosion, then quieted to a powerful but stealthy throb. Readouts came alive with a soft red glow. The sergeant gunned the accelerator. The Lobo growled. Brood grinned. The sergeant laughed.
“Just like new.” He ran a rough hand along the dash as though the Lobo were a long lost pet. “They really cared about their soldiers when they made these things. Wanted us to be effective.” He sucked the bulge in his lip, seemed to lose himself for a moment in the readouts’ loom. “My boss…” he said after a moment. “I been through shit with her you wouldn’t believe. And she had my back every second of it. She’d give everything she got for how things used to be. But she don’t get it. Things ain’t that way no more. Never going to be.” He looked at Brood. His eyes narrowed, assessing, then he seemed to make up his mind. “I’ll get you to Denver, homie. Tonight. But you got to do me a favor in return.
Esta bien
?” Brood shrugged.
“Depends on the favor, you know?”
“
Claro
.” The sergeant smiled and laid out his plan. When he got to the part about explosives, his eyes shone and he grew eloquent. “Hornets,” he concluded, “they’re basically passive creatures. But when you stir them up, there’s nothing meaner in this world. I want to stir the shit out of that city.”
They sat silently for a moment. Brood eyed the cruel scars webbing the sergeant’s face. Decided he liked the man’s offer.
“Deal.” He extended his hand. The sergeant, grinning, shook it. Then he leaned over and fished around beneath the driver’s seat. Produced a thick binder. Big block letters across the front cover read: LOBO X-19 OPERATIONS MANUAL
“You know how to read?”
“
Sí
. My friend Hondo taught me growing up.”
“Good.” The sergeant placed the book on the carbon fiber console between them. “Time for school, homes.”
….
Brood hit the accelerator. Gs pushed him back into the molded driver’s seat as the Lobo heaved its way through the maw of AUTO BAY 3’s open cargo door, out into the burning dusk. He grabbed gears, whispered his fingertips at the wheel. The Lobo responded as though linked to his thoughts. Young soldiers scattered and gaped as he crossed the tarmac. Past the giant zep hangar, out the gate, held open by two of the sergeant’s Rangers. Down a rough path lined with migrant camps and crooked fields plush with spring crops. South along the ruins of an enormous airfield, then onto the double scar of corroded freeway, heading west into fading light.
He punched a button and the heads-up display spread red and green across the windscreen. Showed terrain in high-rez, superimposed with fluid LEDs. Speed. Proximity alerts.
Threat assessments scrolling under camera zooms of stunned migrants who gawked as the Lobo muscled past, octoprong suspension sucking up shattered concrete, turning it to glass. The kph hit 173 and stayed there. Brood laughed.
….
He reached Denver shortly after midnight. The sergeant had laid GPS coordinates into the Lobo’s computer. The sat indicator glowed green and Brood flipped on the autopilot.
The Lobo crept down ruined boulevards, past hollowed out shopping malls, quiet as tombstones. Past teetering warehouses and through the cul-de-sac ruins of twen-cen burbs, in whose windows Brood occasionally spied the dim flicker of firelight, and in front of which grew gardens, dense with scavenged Satori vegetables. Every so often one of the Lobo’s cameras zoomed in on the hungry and startled face of a migrant huddled in an alley or in the doorway of a sagging house. Haunted eyes watched the matte-black demon growl quietly through the predawn stillness. Inside, Brood smiled.
From one GPS tab to the next, the Lobo circled the city, patient as a spider weaving its web. At each tab it drew to a halt. The door hissed open and Brood emerged with one of the sergeant’s square packages. This he would hide under a hunk of corrugated metal or in the drainage opening of some crumbling, vestigial sidewalk.
He sensed Satori out there in the darkness, the dome looming, a slumbering animal. Could almost hear it breathe.
When he’d finished laying out the sergeant’s packages—thirteen in all—he steered the Lobo into the deep no man’s land of the southwest burbs. There, he pulled into a large culvert beneath a forgotten roadway and covered the Lobo with a tarp, bits of old siding, a heap of tumbleweed.
Dawn had come when he’d finished. He packed a Riley rucksack with canned sardines, corn, MREs and three bottles of clean water, along with two spare mags for the Mossberg the big sergeant had given him. It was a newer version of Hondo’s old shotgun, thicker and with a magazine slot instead of a loading tube. But Brood’s hand nestled comfortably against the same carbon-molded pistol grip, found the same semiauto action with a switch for full auto.
He cut a large square of tarp off the Lobo and used that to cover himself and his clean army clothes, then hooked the pig sticker inside his belt at the small of his back. Slapped the remaining fifty-round drum mag into the Mossberg, chambered a round and clambered from the culvert.
A long boulevard curved away from him. Old chain restaurants, convenience stores, glassed-in bio condos. Silent and empty as a forgotten dream in the grey morning light. To the west, Satori’s back shone red as a knife wound in the first rays of sunrise. Brood sucked his teeth, turned and spit. Then set off.
….
Thick beats pumped into the night from the ancient stone building across the street. In the silence between cuts Brood heard the unmistakable and sketchy hiss of a cannibalized nuke plant with questionable containment. Lights glowed in second-floor windows, before which naked girls sometimes crossed, boney and pale. Two big
Chupes
sentried the building’s empty doorframe. Migrants approached them. They offered the
Chupes
freshly harvested veggies, and the
Chupes
let them enter.
Brood sat wrapped in his canvas tarp on a lip of muddy curb at the edge of a small lot. A hollow where migrants squatted in the neighborhood of ancient brick and stone buildings, pissing distance from the silent marble dome of the old capitol. Close enough to Satori’s monolithic flesh that Brood detected the sharp stench of the dome’s sweat, even now in the cool darkness of deep night.
Two migrant men tossed what appeared to be the remnants of a sofa onto a fire that burned at the lot’s center. A cloud of sour hydrocarbon smoke rose into the night.
“Thanks, asshole,” another migrant barked. “Shit’s going to give me cancer.”
“Fuck, Barry,” said another. “You a blessed man, you live long enough to get cancer.”
Brood pulled the lip of his t-shirt over his mouth. A woman Hondo’s age rose shakily from the ground next to the fire and urgently duck walked to the wall near where Brood sat. She dropped her blanket, pulled aside a tear in her FEMAs and shat a hot, dysenteric stream. Brood heard her sob. He didn’t move.
He waited. He watched.
It was well past midnight when three
La Chupes
exited the building and roamed east, into the empty darkness of the old city. One of them was big. Brood checked the LED watch the sergeant had given him: 3:03 AM. He rose and followed.
They’d made six blocks when Brood closed with them. He hunkered beneath his tarp, shuffled up close, affecting a deep limp. He spoke vowels at them, a ruined, drunken migrant.
They turned. One
Chupe
stepped up. He sneered through the fuzz of a nascent beard. Brood recognized him: Bunny’s older brother. The one who’d shot Hondo.
“Fuck away from me, trash man,” the
Chupe
said. “You stink.” He raised a hand. A long knife flashed. The other two
Chupes
laughed.
Brood brought the Mossberg up from beneath the tarp. The
Chupe
’s eyes went wide. He started to say something. Brood didn’t wait to hear him out.
He fired. The night shattered.
The
Chupe
’s face, strobelit by muzzle flash, showed surprise as eight-gauge buckshot tore through him. He tumbled backwards. Brood fired again. A second
Chupe
flew apart.
The third
Chupe
, the big one, stood there gaping, frozen, as though waiting for the air around them to piece itself back together. Brood stepped forward, brought the Mossberg to his shoulder, in line with the boy’s face—a mottle of burn scars, high native cheek bones. Brood smiled down the barrel’s length.
“
Que pasa
, Richard?”
Richard frowned, his brow furrowing deep. Then his eyes lit with recognition, and fear. He fumbled for something inside his FEMAs. A weapon, something to bargain with…Brood reversed the Mossberg and smashed its butt into Richard’s face three times, hard and fast. The big
Chupe
stood there for a second, stunned and blinking. His hand slowly rose to touch his forehead, which already trickled blood.
“Shit, man.” He staggered, sank to his knees.
“That’s right,” Brood told him, and swung the gun one last time, snarling.
….
“You can wake up now, cuz.” Brood lit a second candle and placed it beside the first on a linoleum floor covered by rat droppings. Richard didn’t stir. Blood from his crushed nose poured across his cheeks. “You need a wash, homes.” Brood unbuttoned his fatigue pants, straddled Richard and pissed. Richard moaned and sputtered. “It’s 3:47,” Brood said, fastening his pants. “You be dead by four. Don’t want to sleep through the last fifteen minutes of your miserable ass life.” He drove his foot into Richard’s ribs. Richard moaned, curled onto his side, coughed. A rusted steel sink lay on the floor nearby. Brood sat on its edge, and winced at the stench.
“You shit yourself when I killed your homies,” he told Richard. “Badass.” He picked the shotgun up and settled it across his lap, aimed in the
Chupe
’s general direction.
Richard’s eyes fixed on it. He glanced wildly around the little room, what once had been a tiny kitchen. Nothing there now but the faded linoleum, an old gas stove, holes in the walls where plumbing had once run, the upended sink on which Brood sat. Richard pushed himself backwards until he came up against a broken plaster wall. He tried to do something with his hands, then held them up in front of his face. Seemed surprised to find them bound with thick wire.
“You recognize me?” Brood asked. He leaned forward in the candle light. “Think I be hard to forget.” He tapped a finger against his own ribs, mirroring the spot where, two months earlier, one of his arrows had pierced Richard’s chest. Richard nodded, looking like he tasted something sour.
“I know you.”
“That’s right, you do. Don’t think I be happy to see me, either, I was you.” He checked his watch, showed Richard his teeth. “3:51.”
“What’re you going to do?” Richard asked.
“Fuck you think I’m going to do?” Brood rose from the sink, leveled the shotgun one-handed at Richard’s nose. Richard scrunched his face up all tight and turned away. Then, as nothing happened, slowly opened his eyes and began to collect himself. With what seemed great effort, he assumed an expression of blank contempt that Brood found strangely noble. “Never liked killing,” Brood told him. “
Yo no quiero a personas que quieren
. Thought I’d like killing you, though. Thought a
lot
about it, homie.” He exhaled through clenched teeth. “Now I got you, I ain’t looking forward to it. Be just like scraping shit off my toes. Something I got to do.” He held the watch up for Richard to see. “Four o’clock on the dot, homes, I promise you, it gets done.” He lifted the Mossberg away from Richard’s face and laid it across his shoulder. “One thing you can tell me, might make me think twice. One thing.” He settled back to the sink. Seconds ticked past.