Fighting for bits of colored ribbon
He had the operations radio in one ear and police scanner in the other. Even together, their was a big fucking puzzle piece missing. He was restricted from the Assault team comms, whatever they were, so he had to find the place where the cops and dispatch were indirectly pointing to.
“Stay clear of the rave factory.”
“Say again? Confirm? We’re scraping downtown.”
It was the other crash team, audibly angry that dispatch was telling them to stay away from the rave factory, whatever the fuck that was.
“Then get loud south of the belt.”
“Roger, god dammit.”
The belt was code for I-30, which was to the south of downtown, which meant the rave factory wasn’t. He checked google maps, and his memory, for something that looked like the cheesy fucks at dispatch might call it the rave factory.
He found it. North side of the river, across from downtown, the old abandoned electric plant. Red brick and busted out windows. He could hear the 90s techno just looking at it.
He took an indirect route but couldn’t stop himself from speeding. He made rough plans on the way and chose the simplest of them. He stopped at the emptiest drive thru in a cluster of fast food restaurants, ordered a number one without looking at anything, ditched his Ace Tactical issued phone in the trash and dropped his Team-Lead-only radio in a faraday bag.
Ten bubbling, melting minutes later, he was parked next to overgrown bushes covering the curb alongside a concrete building the color of soiled sand, a solar warehouse. A vent sticking out of the side reminded him of the entrance to Dr.X’s shop. Across the street was a line of red brick and plywood windowed buildings he would have thought abandoned if not for all the cars parked around.
Down the street, past a half-built parking garage and its surrounding sandlot with chainlink fences and dumpsters and work trucks, the old electric building glowered, looking like a dead animal that had got caught in a terrarium formed by a revitalization initiative. He sat and took sips of the drink, ignoring the burger, and waited for something to happen.
After a while, he was sure he’d fucked up. He shrugged, sighed, set down his drink and got out his drop out bag.
Then something happened. A subtle movement, up on top of the electric building. Someone crawling, then coming down the side on a repel line. An instant later, an engine revved behind him. The noise bounced off the brick walls and sliced through the fenced in lots and sheet metal sheds. A V8 SUV. In his rear view it turned onto the street and sped away from him, then took the first turn. He didn’t move, didn’t breath, until it was out of sight, then threw the drink on the passenger seat and flipped the fastest bitch of his life.
He followed the SUV without any plan, beyond not to be seen. It winded down streets, and for a moment he was sure he had lost it, until another engine roared from up on the raised bridge that brought the wide avenue from downtown onto the peninsula. Another car, speeding away from something. The SUV revved again, just on the other side of a building, and he turned into an alley.
Guided by the engines, he found himself coming out from behind a white brick warehouse onto the widest expanse of bare cement this side of the AT&T stadium. Two massive dead empty parkinglots where some ancient dance halls or something had been demolished four decades ago, and only scattered shrubtrees stood to break up the roar of motors that shot over the landscape, like the chase was a show put on just for him.
The SUV cut across one of the parking lots and bounced over the curb onto the clean empty lanes of 287. Luke followed on the streets, then pulled behind them. It was 2 pm on a Wednesday, and there wasn’t a single car in the half-mile between him and the shrinking SUV.
He let go of any thoughts of not being seen, and floored it. He took his radio out of the bag and switched it on.
“- route. Verify path.”
“Elis. Repeat, Ellis.”
“Confirm Ellis.”
“Ping defence.”
“Mercedes, sedan, Grey, 100 meters ahead. Confirmed lead. Jeep, forest green, alongside, suspect. Camry, white, alongside, suspect. Four Runner SUV, black, fifty meters behind team, suspect tail."
It took Luke a second to realize the last vehicle was his own, which meant they thought he might be part of the defense team. Didn’t they recognize their own vehicles? Wasn’t there a GPS tracker in the car itself? It dawned on him that throwing the phone out but driving around in his Ace issued vehicle would have been a stupid move, if they had been more thorough.
He thought about telling dispatch who he was, but decided against it. Fuck em. He was gonna see how the hit went down, and that was worth taking a bullet, fuck a reprimand.
And the way it went down, was fucked. Once the target hit Northside, the main assault team went all out, but even going over 100 mph, they didn’t catch them until the bridge. Luke watched from a quarter-mile away, downtown rising in flashing orange over the river on the horizon like a reclining priestly king observing a sacrificial dance, waiting for the obsidian and the beating heart.
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Guns flashed and glass and crumpled car bodies caught the sunlight and the adrenaline spiking sounds skipping down the bridge and bouncing up from the river, changed on their way to his ears, like a story of murder given magical elements in the retelling.
The vehicle’s speeds dropped by half after the first impact, and Luke gained on them until he was close enough to see the SUV darting, expertly, between the cars and trucks that fell at it like meteors magnetized to its frame, bristling with guns firing as fast as they fucking could. A stray bullet skipped off and struck Luke’s windshield. Others cracked next to him. Something thumped on the seat behind him, and the wind was suddenly inside at his side, but he hardly noticed.
They made it, somehow, half a mile past the bridge, where the evening light cast long shadows on an intersection between brick industrial buildings, before the SUV made contact at last with the target sedan. Luke breathed a sigh of relief like he was right there in the seats with them. A heartbeat later the defense vehicles joined in the clusterfuck, and a machine gun opened up from the back of a box truck that had swerved into a lot ahead of them. Luke had no idea if they were with the defense or Ace Tactical, but they seemed to rain death indiscriminately.
He pulled over next to a telephone pole to watch and the gunfire reached a peak, like it was all just one big fireworks show, then went silent. two other cars had swooped in without Luke noticing and gunned down the SUV crew and tossed a few grenades under the box truck, which had been with Ace after all.
After a moment of silence and a reshuffling of the gunmen into the two fresh cars, the target sedan took off, its armored windows white as snow, with a car full of killers on either side.
Luke put it in drive and rolled back onto the street like he had pulled over to have a smoke. He was watching the three-car caravan merge onto 35 just ahead of him when a voice came over his radio.
“Shows over crash cuck. Fuck off.”
Luke tossed the radio back into the faraday bag and turned under the bridge toward the highway.
The car radio clicked on and the voice came out of the speakers.
“Listen here you fucking Ass Tactical crash cart retard, back the fuck off or your boss is gonna have you sucking ass at the hiring kiosk seven days a week.”
Luke had thought, briefly, that this was some kind of ploy by the defense team to get him to back off, but then rationality caught up with him. Why would they do that instead of just shoot him? Why would they have access to his supposedly encrypted radio channel and his cars system? Why would they threaten him with his boss—
Two cars appeared seemingly from nowhere and shot by him up the ramp. A sedan and a small rounded SUV. The vehicles screamed housewife grocery trip, but the driving said seasoned street racers.
“Goodbye,” the voice said. While Luke was gawking at the other cars, a third came along side his rear bumper and executed the cleanest pit maneuver he had ever seen.
His 4 Runner rolled sideways, tumbled through the air, and the burning gold skyline whipped over itself in the windshield like some hidden god was throwing planet earth in a perfect spiral pass toward some unimaginable end zone with whatever team Luke had found himself opposite’s name emblazoned on the astroturf.
As he floated in the air, Luke sensed something amiss, and it wasn’t just the shift in gravity.
The SUV came to a crunching stop half hanging over the barrier. Luke shook off the airbag facepunch, undid the seatbelt, and crawled around in the glass drenched sideways cab until he found the drop out kit. Somewhere along the way, his hand radio slipped out of the faraday bag and started screaming at him.
“Get the fuck out now! Report immediately to your super—”
I’m on it bro, he thought.
He fell away into the black as the sounds of rushing cars blended into that distinctive Dreamworld hum, and a few minutes later Drudge was scowling at him.
After the yelling, and the slow, measured explanation of his write up, with Car-Crash standing by, shaking his head, and holding his elbow with one hand in a way that Luke had come to know meant he was holding back a laugh, Luke asked to purchase the mem of the job, which started the yelling up again with gusto.
But, in the end, probably due to some Union or corporate or unwritten rule or some shit, he was able to purchase the mem, though they promised it would be heavily edited.
But it wasn’t. At least not any more edited than any of his other Hardworld mem. And Luke had gotten the hang of spotting the Ace Tactical director’s cuts and replacing them with his own mem the moment he got back to his realm, since his return trips through the Dreamworlds had preserved his Hardworld mem in a slightly more stable form, at least long enough for him to patch the holes.
It was during this process of reviewing the mem that he realized the ramifications of what had happened on the inside.
There had been two attack teams on the job. Ace tactical, and whoever had tried to roll him off the overpass. It would have been no big deal, sometimes teams went halfsies on a job, especially franchisees of Constellation, but their aggressive reaction to his presence, Tenpound’s excessively violent grilling, even for him, and the way Drudge had paused his scrape to make a call the moment he realized what Luke had been up to after his team had dropped out, told him there was something else going on.
The second playthrough of the mem got him the rest of the way, and a quick chat with Car-Crash confirmed it.
“Yep. You cracked the code. Ace Tactical is a certified dyed in the wool runner up. A crash team on steroids. But to be fair, that’s by design.”
They were in Car-Crash’s realm, or at least a wing of it, like a giant had gotten a handful of Indonesian resort jungle and slapped it on the side of a gothic revival mansion. It was the first time Luke had ever been in someone else’s Realm, and he could feel that someone near him, looking out from every object, talking in every sound, and he realized that someone was the real Car-Crash.
It should have been flattering, but all he could think about was that not once had Rory ever even mentioned her realm. He tried to distract himself.
“But why?”
“Fodder makes a job easier, if you can afford it. And the other teams are usually Constellation’s rising stars, so everyone walks away happy.”
“Besides the working stiffs at A.T..”
“Oh, they make out ok. Usually rejects who couldn’t get a job with an actual team.”
Car-Crash winked at Luke and passed him a drink.
Luke looked out at the jungle mist dissolving into the black, and his mind wandered back to Rory.
“So, then, how does anyone get blooded?”
“What?”
“If they never hit targets,--”
“Oh shit,” Car-Crash laughed and shook his head, swirling candy flavored Hookah smoke everywhere.
“You don’t have to kill the target to get a name. They just kill someone who’s blooded. Usually by ramming a car into them.” He chuckled.
So, all the named guys Luke had rode with, all the ones he had looked up to and envied at the start, had probably never killed an actual target. Which meant,
“So is everyone pissed at me for killing a live mark?”
“You could say that.”
“But they gave me a fucking promotion the first time!”
“Yeah, because that was unexpected, and they figured that was the best way to lock you down. Figured you were just an addict gunning for a bigger payout. But if you make a habit of it, you’ll get a target on your back.”
“I guess I should stop then huh?”
They looked at each other for a full second before both broke out into laughter.