For a while, it was just torture there. Strapped into the two benches in the back of the van opposite Saga, AEGIS and Karu in the front. Tearing down the empty stretch of two-lane highway at an irresponsible speed in the dead of night, with nothing but bodies behind us and danger in front.
AEGIS tried some rationalizing, which got Karu philosophizing, which shut everyone up because nobody wanted to hear about how nothing we did mattered and so we’re empowered to do whatever the fuck we wanted without concern for morals. Saga tried to lighten the mood by joking a bit, but as her jokes all generally revolved around either the creation or desecration of bodies, it was a bit too topical to be funny.
But even all of that was better than the silence which followed, where I could only imagine new and horrible ways that Lia would meet a terrible end. I’d tried calling her a dozen times now, unable to connect. Same with Rito. Same with Jack and Tower and Cosette and everyone else. I’d even considered dialing the senator, just to hear a voice, just to confirm my mobile wasn’t broken.
And in a moment of absolute madness, I did. Unable to connect.
“Are you messing with your mobile?” AEGIS asked, glancing back at me in the mirrors. “Because we’re being jammed from satellite. I can’t get on the ‘net either.”
“That would have been good to know before I had a heart attack that they’d already gotten to her,” I mumbled, putting the useless thing away. She gave me a sympathetic smile over her shoulder, and I saw she was death-gripping the door strap and her eyes kept snapping back to the vehicle’s dashboard.
I didn’t care how fast we were going as long as it was fast. Karu could tear this vehicle apart for all it mattered. The faster we went, the sooner we’d get there, and the quicker this torture would end.
But after first contact with the XPCA, I began to miss the torture of the quiet.
The wind roared through the twisted, broken-off remains of the vehicle’s back doors. Warping and burns scarred the inside but especially the outside. My shield strobed with constant gunfire, and the plated walls of the van echoed with it as we were hammered constantly from the darkness.
I was leaning out the back, one arm threaded through the roof straps to keep myself from falling out, the other arm pointed and ready, thick bulbs of lightning between my fingers, throbbing with the need to be let loose and to explode.
The now-familiar sound of a foomp and a fwish, a rocket tube deploying and a booster rocket engaging echoed from the dark. I strained my eyes through the flashes of my shield to find the one spot of light that didn’t flicker like the guns or bounce like the headlights of the caravan in pursuit.
There. The screaming warhead looked like a circle wreathed in fire from my perspective, the perspective of a head-on rocket.
I threw my fistful of lightning and then another. One of them clipped it and detonated, lightning tendrils snaking down the rocket’s body, making it twist in the air, wobbling and shaking and then overcorrecting into the ground with a blast I could feel from here, even at these speeds.
For one second, the blast lit up the whole scene and I could see everything as we all drove away, away from the explosion and fading into darkness.
At least a hundred cars, at least a dozen VTOLs, chasing us like a swarm of hornets. Very few of them followed us on the road itself, instead tearing across the flat, red dirt, bouncing over cacti and bushes and rocks like they were nothing. Maybe half were XPCA-black, but many were military, or even police. Top-mounted machine guns whirred as they pounded us with thousands of rounds, VTOLs zigged and zagged as they angled to put their big guns in line to shoot me down or add another crater or scorch mark to the inside of the van.
Thanks to Saga, nobody could get close, though. Early on, a few had tried, and she’d wasted no time in turning the passengers homicidal against the rest of the fleet, unloading whatever arms they had in all directions before ending with a flaming kamikaze.
“Another blockade, five-hundred meters,” AEGIS muttered at Karu over the roar.
“I see it,” Karu nodded, her visor bobbing in the strobing dark as she veered us into the desert, my knuckles turning white as the strap kept me from whipping into the night.
Another rocket truck pulled up and I took a deep breath. Like a normal truck, a cabin and huge wheels, but instead of a freight trailer, it had a huge grid of what looked like stacked pipes, each one a rocket tube which could unload autonomously.
I saw the rack rise and level, auto-gyros keeping it perfectly balanced in our direction even as the vehicle under it bounced over rocks. These were always a nightmare, dumping a few dozen rockets out in the course of a couple seconds.
“Rocket truck, Karu,” I warned. It was both a request to keep her driving sane while I employed both arms on defense, and a call to action, to keep me between the rockets and the van. Karu floored it, and we lurched with sudden acceleration, putting the rocket truck further on our six.
“You are clear,” she said. “You have perhaps fifteen seconds before we turn back for the road. I will notify you.”
I didn’t have time to reply before the rocket truck unloaded on us before it fell too far behind. It was positioned slightly on our flank, and that made shooting down all the incoming, flaming, screaming death a lot harder, because they were aiming at the side of the van, not at me.
I let go of my strap, filled both hands with energy, and loosed it.
An arc of energy tore down the entire length of the leading rocket, sending it wobbling in the air. The starburst of crackling electricity seemed to drift backwards, ensnaring and cascading into two others, while the leading rocket stumbled sideways into one of the trailing ones, creating a blast that sent yet more off-course.
But while I could handle a few rockets with one shot, there were still dozens more coming up on us, the angle changing as the truck’s position to ours changed. Again and again, I took careful aim and threw my tightly-clustered barrages.
If I were in a different state of mind, I might have wondered if anyone other than a former quarterback could have managed this. To say nothing of how exhausting it was to keep throwing even weightless energy for minutes at a stretch. I really only had a few seconds for each rocket. I had to make every shot count.
But I wasn’t in a different state of mind. This was just something I had to do. I threw, or we all died, and Lia died. There was no need to think about anything, just to do.
“Turning,” Karu said, and I gripped the strap, just a moment before the vehicle lurched under me. I threw out a few more handfuls of lightning at the rest of the rockets lighting up the desert.
“Strafing VTOL coming in from zero-one-one,” AEGIS warned.
“Got it,” Karu said, handing a detached gun in her lap over to the passenger. AEGIS seemed to take several breaths before opening her door, keeping it propped open against the wind with her leg, even as bullets pinged off of it. She jammed the gun out the crack, widening it slightly as she awkwardly levelled the rifle in her arms without a stock, and then fired.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I didn’t see what she hit, but she was apparently satisfied, yanking her leg and gun back in as the wind slammed the door for her, and throwing the gun back into Karu’s lap.
“Pavement,” Karu mentioned, and again I held on as the vehicle skipped up with a bounce more jarring than the others, and then swerved to stay on it.
“Next time can we jack a van with padded seats?” Saga asked, rubbing her backside.
“Hah, you believe there will be a next time? Look around, little Exhuman,” Karu scoffed.
“I dunno. We seem to be doing okay,” Saga shrugged.
“Strafing VTOL, bearing two-seven-nine,” AEGIS said. This time it was Karu’s turn to stick a gun out the door while AEGIS held the wheel. The vehicle lurched a little as Karu worked the pedals and door and gun all at once, but only until she fired three or four bursts that rung inside the vehicle over the rest of the mayhem.
“We may be doing okay,” Karu said, as the door slammed “but that is temporary at best. Assuming that nothing unfortunate occurs and we become defenseless by pure attrition, at some point, we will have to enter environs easier to barricade, or will be forced to stop, at which point their numerical advantage will come into full effect.”
“Strafing VOTL, bearing nine-zero-three,” AEGIS muttered, reaching for the gun.
“I got this one,” Saga said. “Bunch of yahoos drove into range.”
I saw as the vehicle nearest us suddenly roared forwards and past us, a hail of gunfire suddenly pouring out away from us instead of into us. A VTOL, lit up in the dark like a ghost appearing, shimmered as hundreds of rounds suddenly slammed into it, and seemed to topple in slow motion, smoke belching from one of its rotors.
It screamed overhead and smashed into the ground behind us, the wreckage a bouncing razor blade that sliced into the side of another van, which flipped and careened, sending exosuited bodies flying in the moment before the dark took them all.
“This must be what it is like,” Karu said, her voice dark. “To be one of them.”
“Exhuman?” Saga replied. “Pretty much. Tons of people hate you, and the only reason they aren’t dead is because they’re not worth killing. Until they are.”
“Guys, stop,” AEGIS said. “Let’s focus on saving people. We’re not doing this because they’re inconvenient or we’re sick of them, or that they’re pushing us even.” She frowned as she spoke, and picked up the gun from Karu’s lap again, bracing her foot against the door. “We’re doing this to save people we care about.”
“Speak for yourself,” Karu replied. “I have my own reasons.”
“Yeah, this is actually crazy fun. Can we do this every weekend?” Saga grinned.
“It isn’t fun,” AEGIS warned, before opening the door and shooting someone or something. “We’re just doing what we have to.” She threw the gun back at Karu with something like disgust.
“I was deluded once,” Karu said mockingly. “I advise you to reconsider your moral standpoint. The good of men is a ridiculous notion. There are only flawed people and the garbage they create, and God, and am no God.”
“I think you mean, there are only different perspectives,” AEGIS said. “Saga, there’s a truck coming in a little hot on our left. Karu can you swing that way and we can pick it up?”
“Eh, different perspectives,” Saga replied, as I white-knuckled the strap when the van suddenly lurched into range of the truck. “I’ll tell you something, you’ve been inside one human’s mind, you’ve been inside them all. Karu’s not half-wrong, all humans are selfish, shitty, and flawed, and you shouldn’t feel bad about killing any of them.”
“Then why the hell are we even doing this?” AEGIS barked back. “Racing over there to save a human, at the expense of all these other perfectly-disposable ones in our way?”
“Told ya. Cuz it’s fun. Ever been bowling?”
“No, when would I have had time to go bowling?” AEGIS asked.
Saga frowned as the truck she’d hijacked came swerving into view ahead of us, careening into a rocket truck and sending both up in a bouncing pillar of fire.
“Steeeeee-rike,” Saga whooped. “Man, it’s great when they explode. I actually had one dude jump out before the blast so there’d be exactly ten pinheads. Mine is an understated art.”
“You just pocked the desert with a fifty foot-tall mushroom cloud. There is nothing subtle about your art. And all I was saying was that Athan doesn’t need an existential crisis on top of everything else going on,” AEGIS said. “We all have our own reasons for being with him and that’s fine. But can’t you all see how selfish and shitty it is to push your reasons on him when he’s worried about his friends and family and…body count?”
The others fell silent, relative to the roaring of the engine and constant gunfire and crackle of electricity, and I took the moment of comparative peace to close my eyes and focused on the whirling air caught in the wake of the vehicle. All the tiny charges being caught and bouncing around as the miniscule hurricane-force winds slammed into each other and curled and sheared off ions into a static mess.
I gave it a push and trapped and charged more energy until it was aglow, sending waves of ball lightning drifting behind the van like a net in the ocean.
“Athan we want them right behind us,” AEGIS said with a frown.
“I know,” I said, and took aim at the drifting rectangle of spheres slowly falling away from us. I took aim and threw a single bulb in the center.
The bulb impacted right in the middle, rupturing the nearby orbs with a set of vacuous bangs. The others went flying away, with the geometric perfection of points on some homework assignment, spreading out as mathematically evenly distributed as possible, a wide fan everywhere except right behind the van. AEGIS had time to give me a thumbs-up before giving out another warning to Karu.
It’s not that I didn’t appreciate her looking out for my moral well-being. And it was less obnoxious than the others taking advantage of me having to kill people to point at their own shitty doctrines and saying see? Join our club! But at the same time, I wished she didn’t feel like she had to worry.
I wasn’t worrying. I was focusing. Worrying could come later, when I wasn’t blocking a doorway full of bullets. When I wasn’t knocking rockets out of the air or hanging on for dear life with the van swerving wildly under my feet.
In short, I didn’t have a philosophy right now to adhere to or care about or argue over. I wasn’t thinking at all. I had to act, and that was it.
“Athan we just ran over something, and I’m going to take it for a sign,” AEGIS shouted back at me.”
“What was it?” Saga asked.
“Well…it was a sign. A literal sign for a rest stop in a few miles.”
“Is that what that was?” Karu asked. “I thought it a strange cactus.”
“The fact that you are driving does not fill me with confidence,” AEGIS glowered. “But…Athan I have to ask you, what your priorities are right now? Like…what are you trying to achieve with this insane roadshow?”
“To save Lia,” I told her.
“And that’s it?”
“Yes. Whatever it takes. If she’s in danger, I’m not stopping.”
She frowned at me and pulled at her hair. “If…if that’s true, I might have a really…really stupid plan. It’s…it’s incredibly dangerous. Puts us in a lot of peril, but it’s the fastest way to get her to safety.”
“Then let’s do it.”
“You’re not even going to listen to how stupid this plan is?” she asked.
I shook my head and shot another rocket out of the air. “Don’t have to. Do what you need to.”
She turned to our driver. “Do you have any problems with doing something incredibly stupid right now?”
“As far as I see it, we are already doing that. Given our combat capabilities, so long as we are not increasing our exposure or reducing our defenses, I am amenable to new plans.”
“And you?” She turned in her seat to face Saga.
“Like I care,” she grinned. “It’s actually getting kinda boring back here. Never thought I’d get so tired of getting shot at, but at this point it’s like I know, your guns are huge, you don’t need to keep showing off.”
AEGIS gave a wan smile as she shook her head at the scrawny maniac, who blew an exaggerated kiss in response.
“Okay then,” AEGIS said, sighing like it was costing her everything. “Time to do something amazingly, incredibly stupid then.”
“Do we just wait or…?” I asked. “I’d like to save Lia like…now. Sooner, if possible.”
“Yeah. Well. I’ll handle everything that needs to get handled. You guys just keep up what you’re doing. And Karu?”
“Yeah?”
“You see that yellow light on the horizon there? The rest stop?”
“I certainly do.”
“Past the fuel pumps, there’s a fast-food chain, the sign we ran over said so.”
“I do not see it yet, but I am familiar with these types of locales. What of it?”
“Well, when we get close, the XPCA is probably going to try to use the choke to box us in a little bit. So you’ll need to steer diligently. Fortunately our plan has the benefit of being–if I haven’t stressed this enough, really, incredibly, impressively stupid. So they won’t be ready for it.”
“Might you educate us on this plan? Or do you merely intend to purvey it as the most foolish action ever not-taken?”
“Right.” She tugged her hair a bit more frantically, and I realized, she wasn’t at all a fan of this plan. Considering this was AEGIS and we were currently flying on no plan, that said a lot.
“So the fast-food building. On the far side of the gas pumps.”
“…yes?”
“Can you crash this car into the side of it?”
Karu gave AEGIS half a glance, which was still enough to make the vehicle lurch. And then she smiled.
“I can certainly try.”