Authors: SL Huang
Someone was talking, saying words, too many words, too many questions—
shut them out shut them out shut them out
—
My breath wheezed in and out with too much force, my hands flexing and grasping against the floor. I clutched tighter into myself, curled up on my side.
Where am I?…what am I?
Sense returned in slow intervals.
It was night, and the room was still. The math shimmered around me, a comforting background hum. Dawna Polk and her troops and her helicopter were all gone.
So was Rio.
Arthur’s face swam into focus above me. His expression was wrinkled with concern, though his eyes still weren’t quite focusing properly. Concussion. That’s right.
What had Dawna done to me?
I tried to cast my mind back, to put it together, but my memories of the past few minutes had jumbled into confusion, strange images that slid around until they gave me motion sickness, and the harder I tried to pin anything down, the more the images tumbled apart and dwindled away. I grabbed futilely for the connections, the shreds of recollection, vertigo shooting through me as I lost my bearings—
“Russell?” Someone was talking to me. I couldn’t remember who. “Russell? Hey, Russell, you all right?”
“Arthur,” I mumbled, his name coming back to me again even as some other thought slid away.
“The very same. You hurt?”
It took me a while to muddle out what he was asking. I had to concentrate, figure it out. “No.” Was that the right answer?
I heard him take a quiet breath, a sigh that sounded like relief.
“What happened?” I mumbled.
“Checker did it,” said Arthur. “Sounds like whatever you two was on about, it worked. Knocked Pithica off their game something good, from their reaction here.” His voice faltered, as if he didn’t know whether we’d done right or not.
I didn’t know either.
I tried to sort through my disjointed memories of the fight. “Dawna got away,” I dredged up finally.
Arthur chuckled dryly. “Think it’d be more accurate to say
we
got away, sweetheart. Ain’t like we had the upper hand here.”
“Rio,” I remembered. Sudden fright spiked through me. Where was he? I sat up so quickly that my brain crashed and melted inside my head, the room spasming. I would have fallen over again if Arthur hadn’t caught me.
“Whoa, whoa there. I gotcha. Just breathe.”
“Rio,” I repeated urgently. “Where is—what did they—?”
“Hey, sweetheart. Relax. It’s okay. They didn’t get him. He—saved us.” His voice sounded queer on the last words, as if they didn’t fit into his mouth correctly.
“How?” I blinked urgently, trying to clear my fuzzy vision. The room was as intact as it had been before Dawna had arrived. No additional bodies. But no Rio.
“Made a deal,” said Arthur.
“What kind of a deal?” Why wasn’t he here? What had he given Dawna?
“Hey. Hey, relax. It’s okay.” Arthur was still holding my shoulders so I didn’t fall over, and his grip was strong and comforting. “He offered them immunity.”
“He
what?”
I cried.
“Said he promised not to come after them. To stop working against them. Long as Dawna agreed to let us go and not come after us, either.” He swallowed. “Well. You and ‘anybody you’re working with,’ I believe were his exact words.”
“I don’t understand. Why would he do that?” My breathing hitched raggedly, despairingly. None of this made any sense.
“He saved our lives, Russell.”
“But…” But that wasn’t what Rio
did.
He might rearrange his goals to save more innocent people, sure, but not at the expense of fighting a greater evil. He was the only person in the world with the ability to fight Pithica effectively, and he had just given them a free pass. Forever.
To save Arthur and me. No—to save me.
“You up to moving?” said Arthur. “We should probably hoof it before the authorities get here.”
Right. I attempted an upward direction and didn’t even make it off the ground. Arthur helped me shift so I could lean up against the wall. “I need a minute,” I admitted.
He settled next to me. “A minute it is. Could use one myself.”
I took a better look at him and winced guiltily—even in the dim light, the side effects of the recent TKO were obvious. “Sorry about that.”
“Well, I was threatening to kill you, so I think we’re good.”
“So they all just left?” I asked.
“Yeah. Your friend made her dismiss the army, and then he insisted on walking her out—said something about not giving them a chance to bomb the building. He made her stop whatever mojo she’d been doing to you first, though.” He cleared his throat. “You sure you’re okay? What she hit you with?”
Remember.
“I don’t know.”
“Psychic attack or something?”
“Or something.” Red tiles, and people in white coats. A jungle and a submarine and a Dragunov sniper rifle on a mountaintop against the setting sun, a thin black girl and an Asian boy and a windswept rooftop under a starry sky. I blinked. I couldn’t recall what I had just been thinking about.
“Gotta tell you…” Arthur’s voice had turned grave and reluctant. “He let her do something else to us, before they went. Part of the deal. Wasn’t real with it myself at the time, but I think…I think he let her tell us not to come after her either, her or Pithica.”
I vaguely remembered Dawna’s face, hovering over me between the flashes of color and light and chaos. Her telling us never to come after Pithica again meant we never would. “Why would he do that?” I whispered. “Why would he let her?”
“I don’t know,” said Arthur. “Like I said, wasn’t real lucid my own self. But I’m betting it’s an enforced détente, of sorts. They don’t come after us, we don’t come after them.”
“That’s stupid,” I said.
Arthur chuckled. “Well, I’ll take it over being dead.”
I supposed I would, too, though I didn’t have to like it.
The world was starting to stabilize around me. I braced a hand against the wall to stagger upright. Arthur clambered up as well and helped me. He wasn’t moving altogether steadily himself, but we leaned on each other.
I shook myself, trying to remember why I felt so drained.
Dawna had done something to me. Right.
What had she…?
The memory of her attack collapsed in on itself further and further until it became a multicolored tangle, fading away and melting together as if I were recalling it from a distance of decades.
Arthur and I helped each other down the stairs and back out the broken door. My vandalism seemed an age ago. The cool night air kissed us; it anchored me, braced me in the world. The base was silent now, the activity at the far end gone. I wondered if that was Pithica’s work.
“Where to?” asked Arthur.
“I’ve got a bolt hole in the Valley,” I said.
“The Valley,” Arthur mused. “Long haul from here, shape we’re in.”
“I’m feeling better,” I said, and I was. I straightened a bit, let Arthur lean more of his weight on me. I thought back again to Dawna’s psychic attack—or whatever it had been—but the more I tried to reach for it, the more the memory slipped. I remembered her saying something to me…and then a blur…and then I had woken up to Arthur’s face—
“Sirens,” said Arthur.
I forced myself back to the present. He was right; the high wail rose and fell in the near distance, coming closer. I did a quick Doppler calculation—less than a kilometer away.
“Might not be coming for us,” Arthur said.
“Let’s not find out,” I answered. “Think you can cling to the back of a motorcycle?”
“I’m game to try.” He leaned heavily on my shoulder and we started a semi-coordinated hobble across the pavement.
As we limped away, my brain itched uncomfortably, as if I were forgetting something important. My mind reached, searched, trying to recall…
Eh, I’d remember it eventually, whatever it was.
Chapter 37
It took
forty-eight hours for most vital services to get restored in Southern California, and almost two weeks for Los Angeles to approach something akin to normal. Twenty-nine people died and hundreds were injured during the rioting; the number of people who died from the EMP knocking out medical devices was several times that. Whatever numbers game Pithica thought they were playing, they had a lot to do to make up for this one.
And they wouldn’t be able to. At least not for a good while. We’d made sure of that.
I still wasn’t sure whether we should be proud of what we’d done or not. I tried not to think about it too hard, and to remind myself every so often of what Pithica had done to people like Reginald and Leena Kingsley. And to Courtney Polk, the client I hadn’t been able to rescue in the end.
I also tried to remind myself of how much I liked winning. I’m not going to lie; that helped.
We didn’t manage to contact Checker for several days, since Arthur refused to let me steal a working satellite phone from the aid workers rebuilding the infrastructure. It turned out that Dawna, never having met Checker, had completely misjudged what he would do and probably never would have found him anyway. After Rio had dropped him off at his car, Checker had driven non-stop; as soon as he had hit a town where the lights were still on, he had gone, not to break into an electronics store in the middle of the night, but instead to a well-groomed residential neighborhood…where he had knocked on a reasonably pleasant-looking door, asked if they knew what was happening in Southern California, and told them that he needed emergency access to a computer with a network connection. Then he had offered all the cash we’d sent him off with up in payment for the use of said computer. The very nice, middle-class family who lived in the house had been impressed by his earnestness (and the offer of so much money), had felt he was reasonably nonthreatening, and had invited him to set up in the living room with one of the parents’ work laptops. I gathered that they’d even made him pancakes and bacon for breakfast and offered for him to stay in their spare room until LA was sorted out.
Checker, not sure whether Pithica was still after him, politely declined the offer (although he did admit to accepting their college-aged daughter’s number on the sly, which might have made her parents less inclined to trust him, had they known), and then sold his car to a chop shop for some quick capital and set himself up with a fake ID and some temp work in small-town Arizona while he waited for us to contact him. It turned out he was a remarkably street-savvy guy.
“What were you going to do if you never heard anything?” I asked, curious.
“Cry my eyes out that Cas Russell apparently met an ignominious and gruesome death at the hands of her
very stupid plan,”
he answered.
I laughed and then told him about Rio’s deal. Despite what we had done, we would be safe enough from Pithica in the future. Checker said he’d be on a bus back to LA as soon as he could find a line that was running. “And now that it’s safe for me to use a credit card again, I’m going to fill a suitcase with laptops to bring back with me.”
“Leave it to you to black-market circuit boards during this time of crisis,” I said.
“Cas Russell, what do you think of me? I need to repair the Hole. A suitcase full of laptops is barely a start.”
I didn’t mention that by meeting up with some old clients at some old haunts, I’d taken five jobs in getting people black market electronics in the past three days. Disaster was good for business.
The official explanation for the EMP hit the airwaves during the week after the event, and was some hand-waving about a solar storm. I wondered what Pithica had done to pull that off. It kind of impressed me that they had done it, considering the dire straits they had to be in after what we’d pulled. But they were about helping humanity to the very end, and apparently that included cleaning up their own mess to some degree, which to them meant at least making sure nobody started bandying around the word “terrorists” or could point to a nuclear attack as an excuse to start a war with someone. The country ran fundraisers and Red Cross drives to help the poor Angelenos struck by such a freaky natural disaster, but world politics as a whole suffered no more than it had from the last bad hurricane.
Arthur was severely concussed enough that he stayed with me for a few days in my apartment in the Valley. Since the concussion was my fault, I didn’t mind waking him up in the middle of the night to ask him how many fingers and who was president. In return, he tried to nag me about taking it easy until my chest wound healed completely—something about adrenaline not being a substitute for proper convalescence—but I mostly ignored him. When he felt well enough, he took advantage of the massive chaos in the city to go in and report at a police station that he’d woken up in an alley with short-term amnesia and realized he was the victim of a crime. He filled out a police report on what had happened to his office while claiming not to remember any of it and was supported in all ways by his obvious recent head wound. The LAPD, swamped with a devastated and fracturing city, quickly filed the case away under unsolved gang-related violence.
By then a horrifically tortured man had shown up in a hospital and been identified as the sole survivor of the office massacre on Wilshire. Considering that he couldn’t stop gibbering madly about an Asian devil, and that no bodies had ever been recovered from the Griffith Park shooting despite the wildly conflicting witness reports of the violence there, Arthur’s and my composites got shuffled off the “most wanted” boards. I wondered if the surviving Pithica man had any inkling that he probably owed his life to Rio magnanimously getting the police off my trail.
As for Rio himself, I tracked him down a little over a week after the EMP disaster. We met in an empty subway station—the trains still weren’t up and running, and the station was deserted, though someone had stopped by with copious amounts of spray paint and already graffitied over every surface. Gotta love LA.
Instead of coming down from street level, Rio walked casually into the station on the track, emerging out of the yawning darkness of the tunnel with his duster swirling around him and wearing a broad-brimmed felt hat that only enhanced the cowboy image.