The Beauty of Destruction (50 page)

They shot underneath the San Diego Freeway. The houses were smaller, cheaper-looking on either side of the road now. Many of them had been burned out, badly damaged by small arms fire or explosives. There were few people on the street and even fewer on the road, and those were giving them a wide berth, though a few were taking opportunistic shots at the three remaining vehicles.

The Escalade started weaving across the road, trying to shake Grace out of it. Du Bois was wondering what she was trying to achieve here. If she killed the driver then she was out of the fight, even if she took his place. The best thing the driver could do was stop, but that put the Escalade out of play as well. Grace knelt down and pulled her N6 carbine around her body on its sling, gripping onto the pickup with one hand, reloading the weapon’s grenade launcher with the other. The .50 calibre HMG in the Cougar’s turret was still firing at the
ECV
. Alexia had taken to weaving their vehicle back and forth across the lanes of Santa Monica Boulevard, trying to avoid being caught in a constant hail of large calibre weapons fire. Du Bois and Beth had stopped bouncing rounds off the Cougar’s superior armour. Grace, kneeling down, brought the carbine to her shoulder and fired the grenade launcher. The grenade hit the remotely operated CROWS turret on the armoured truck, and the 40mm HEAP grenade exploded. Flame blossomed on top of the Cougar, whipped back by the speed of the vehicle. The HMG was just so much mangled metal now. The heat of the explosion cooked off the rounds, sending .50 calibre bullets flying off in every direction. The Escalade almost turned over trying to shake Grace off as she clung on for dear life.

There was movement in the smoke, on the roof of the Cougar. Du Bois sighted the M240 door gun. The squat, huge, two-headed, off-kilter shape of La Calavera appeared through the smoke and quickly knelt down. Du Bois started firing the door gun. Tracers rushed to meet the gangland warlord. His new second head was female and screaming. La Calavera was stripped to the waist, his impossibly muscled torso on display, all visible skin covered by the skeleton tattoo. He beckoned the Escalade technical closer. The door gun rounds were driving furrows through his flesh. They were joined by rounds from Beth’s
LMG
fired from up in the turret, but the wounds were closing almost immediately. Du Bois had never seen such efficient healing on anybody, regardless of how much S-tech they had running through their bodies. Grace quickly reloaded one of her Berettas, holstered it and grabbed the DShK, and started firing at the Cougar as the Escalade closed with it. The heavy machine gun put craters in the truck’s armour. La Calavera brought a squat, heavy-looking weapon to his shoulder. An Objective Individual Combat Weapon, a hybrid assault rifle and semi-automatic 25mm grenade launcher. He pointed the weapon down, and fired the overbarrel grenade launcher twice at the Escalade’s truck bed. He raised the weapon and fired the grenade launcher twice more at the
ECV
’s turret, and then he shifted it again and fired at du Bois. An explosion blossomed above the Escalade’s truck bed, and then another, engulfing Grace. La Calavera leapt off the back of the Cougar, powerful leg muscles carrying him high into the air.

Beth appeared in the back of the
ECV
’s cab, slamming the turret’s hatch closed as the air-bursting smart grenade exploded above the vehicle, the wave of force pushing it down on its suspension, flames rolling over the vehicle. The final two grenades exploded all but next to du Bois. Force battered him back into the
ECV
, only the seatbelt stopping him from flying into Alexia. The overpressure hit his augmented – but still mostly liquid – body. Waves coursed through his frame, hydrostatic shock breaking bones, rupturing organs. His body shielded Alexia from the worst of it, but the cab’s armoured frame guided the shockwave, bouncing her and Beth around. Flame filled the cab for a moment. Everything went black.

Du Bois came to screaming and in pain. His overtaxed internal medical systems were desperately trying to return him to something resembling functional, using his body’s fat reserves so quickly he was practically deflating. Alexia was unconscious. Beth had leant in between brother and sister to steer the
ECV
. She was blackened, and had a compound fracture of the cheekbone, but seemed the best off of the three of them. As he lolled about in the passenger seat, feeling like a sack of water filled with broken twigs, he could see Beth’s cheekbone sucked back through her skin, and the wound close.

They were speeding towards the Cougar and the smoking Escalade. The DShK was now just so much mangled wreckage. Grace was hanging off the Escalade’s tailgate, being dragged behind the pickup. She was firing one of her Berettas, short burst after short burst, at La Calavera as he clambered over the pickup’s cab towards her. These wounds weren’t closing as quickly. She had reloaded her pistol with a magazine of nanite-tipped rounds. How she had the presence of mind to keep firing as she was dragged along, du Bois had no idea. He supposed her armoured bike leathers helped, and she hadn’t been caught in an enclosed area by the explosions, but he wasn’t sure he could have done the same.

Du Bois found himself able to speak again. ‘Alexia!’
Brilliant,
du Bois thought,
nothing brings round
the unconscious like shouting
, but his sister was stirring. Suddenly she sat bolt upright and screamed, flailing around in her seat. Beth nearly lost control of the
ECV
. It shot across the road, and was heading towards a surf shop. Du Bois managed to move and drag the wheel towards him so sharply he thought for a minute the vehicle might turn over.

‘We need to get Grace!’ Beth shouted, trying to restrain Alexia as du Bois steered badly. La Calavera reached through the gunfire and grabbed Grace, one hugely muscled arm lifting her, easily, up off the road. She fired the last of her pistol’s rounds into him at point-blank range. Du Bois could see the nanites doing their work. It looked like parts of his flesh were being eaten from within.

‘I’ve got it!’ Alexia shouted. She had calmed down and had the steering wheel again. The
ECV
was accelerating towards the back of the Escalade.

With her free hand Grace drew one of her knuckleduster-hilted fighting knives. Du Bois was able to move enough to reload the SA58 carbine with the magazine of nanite-tipped bullets. La Calavera punched Grace in the face hard enough to make her whole body shake. She looked dazed but she managed to hold on to her weapons. She rammed the fighting knife into his mouth, yanked it out, and then stabbed him in the throat. The
ECV
was catching up. Grace pulled the blade out of his throat, and then rammed it up into his arm and started sawing. He let go of her. She landed on the truck bed, tore her blade free, bent her legs and threw herself backwards into a somersault. Alexia dropped a gear, and the
ECV
’s engine screamed as she accelerated, the patrol vehicle surging forwards. La Calavera swung his OICW up to his shoulder. Du Bois leaned out of the
ECV
, sighting past the mangled remains of the door gun. The
ECV
was under Grace now. La Calavera fired the OICW’s underslung assault rifle. Rounds impacted into Grace. Du Bois fired a three-round burst. The bullets hit La Calavera’s central mass. The huge two-headed figure stumbled back. Grace landed on her back, hard, on the
ECV
’s bonnet. Du Bois fired another three-round burst. La Calavera sat down in the truck bed. Grace started to slip off the bonnet. Du Bois dropped his carbine into the footwell onto the other discarded weapons, and grabbed for her. Outstretched fingers got the neck of her leather jacket. Then he screamed as the road caught her, and she was yanked back. Du Bois’s arm was all but pulled out of its socket. He found himself looking down at her. She was looking up. Hate gone. Replaced by fear, and something else. He was aware of movement inside the
ECV
, then the sound of Beth firing her Model 0
LMG
from the turret. The armoured patrol vehicle was dragging Grace along now. Du Bois knew she could survive if he let go, but somehow that felt like a betrayal. She was kicking out with leather-armoured legs, trying to stop herself from going under the rear wheel. Du Bois screamed out again as, at an awkward angle, he pulled her close to him. She grabbed the edge of the doorway, and he helped her into the cab until she was practically sat in his lap.

‘Get your fuckin’ hands off me!’ she screamed, and clambered off him, seething, into the back of the
ECV
. Du Bois turned back to focus on the vehicles ahead. La Calavera, his flesh being eaten from within, was clambering over the Escalade’s cab and onto its bonnet. His back was blossoming in little plumes of blood which closed a moment later, as Beth put round after useless round into his rotting body from the turret above. He leapt from the Escalade as Alexia drew level with the vehicle. Beth started firing at the pickup truck’s engine block. La Calavera caught the rungs on the ladder on the back of the Cougar. Du Bois had his carbine in his hands again. He leaned out of the
ECV
, the asphalt shooting past underneath him. In the distance he could see the ocean. It looked wrong, much darker than it should be for the clear blue skies above it. Alexia sideswiped the Escalade, pushing it across four lanes and into the edge of a building. La Calavera had reached the top of the ladder. Du Bois put another nanite-tipped round into his back, aimed, and did the same again. La Calavera sprawled face-first on the roof of the truck, but then managed to pull himself out of view.

It was just a chase now. They had nothing that could go through the Cougar’s armour, and the Cougar’s HMG was out of action. All the weight was on the side of the 6
×
6 armoured truck, so they couldn’t try forcing it off the road either. Du Bois picked the various weapons out of the footwell, cleaned and sheathed the knives, checked and reloaded the pistols, returning his sister’s Beretta to the holster riding her hip.

There were hotels on either side of them. One hotel had all its windows open, curtains billowing in the wind coming off the Pacific. Another had bloody smears down its whitewashed walls, multiple bungee cords hanging from the roof. The road snaked through a park, people wandering through it in a daze, a number of them looking like they had been the victims of something horrific. The road dipped under Ocean Avenue, where hanged bodies scraped across the roof of their vehicles, swastikas painted in blood on the tunnel walls along with the words ‘surfing is for whites’. Out of the tunnel and into the bright sunlight, then they were on the beachfront running parallel with the ocean.

It seemed quiet, all they could hear were the odd gunshots and a few screams over their engines. Behind them was Santa Monica Pier. The big wheel was burning, but still going round; bodies hung off it in a way that reminded du Bois of a child’s mobile.

The Cougar cut across the car park, its armoured bulk knocking vehicles out of the way. Du Bois had reloaded his carbine with normal rounds, but put a magazine of nanite-tipped .45 calibre rounds into his pistol. Beth had done something similar. Grace was ready with her weapon. Alexia just looked pale and sick.

Surfboards stood up in the sand like gravestones as far as they could see, all along the beach, bodies strapped to them, swastikas carved into their flesh. There was a moderate swell in the water. A lot of surfers were sitting out on their boards looking to the east. Du Bois thought he could hear chanting. The water still didn’t look right, too dark.

The Cougar had stopped dead down by the water. Du Bois could see the strange demon-headed member of the
DAYP
, the one called Inflictor Doorstep for some odd reason. He had on a wetsuit and he was jumping down from the back of the armoured truck. A number of aggressively blond and tanned surfer types with swastika, SS, and death’s head tattoos were running towards him. One of them had on a spiked World War One German helmet. Du Bois guessed that they were surf Nazis, surfing-regionalism taken to a ridiculous degree. The apocalypse seemed a little literal in Los Angeles. The surf Nazis skidded to a halt when they got a good look at Inflictor as he pulled a surfboard out of the back of the Cougar. He walked to the water, and started paddling out as Alexia brought the
ECV
to a halt next to the Cougar, just in the water line.

‘Get the fuck off our beach!’ the surf Nazi with the helmet snapped. Du Bois glanced at them as he climbed out of the vehicle. They were both armed but weren’t bringing their weapons up.

‘Alexia!’ du Bois called. His sister climbed out of the
ECV
and levelled her ARX-170 rifle at them. Du Bois, Grace and Beth – with the Benelli shotgun, rather than her
LMG
, he noticed – made straight for the Cougar. Inflictor was paddling out to sea.

Inflictor had left the side door to the armoured truck open. The back was filled with all sorts of detritus. La Calavera, still clutching the OICW, lay among the detritus, rotting away. Grace covered as Beth climbed into the rear of the vehicle. A shotgun blast put La Calavera’s most recent victim, his second head, out of her misery. Then Grace drew her pistol, and put two nanite-tipped rounds into La Calavera’s actual head. Du Bois, carbine at the ready, moved to the truck’s cab. The door was unlocked. He yanked it open. It was empty. No Dracimus, no King Jeremy.

‘Is the nuke in the back?’ du Bois demanded, but he knew the answer before Beth told him.

‘Where was the Mustang that left with them?’ Grace asked.

‘Fuck!’ du Bois screamed. He stalked back to the
ECV
.

‘This was for fucking nothing?’ Alexia sounded broken.

‘Get out of here!’ du Bois ordered the two surf Nazis.

‘This is our beach, motherf—’

Du Bois shot them both. He glared out at Inflictor lying on his board, paddling out into the swell. He needed to eat soon. Replace some mass. He was emaciated, and it felt like his body was about to cave in on itself. Beth had followed him round to his side of the
ECV
.