Disposable fiends

The ride got dead silent again. They flew down the highway, then they exited and flew down the access road. Whisper got out a pair of ballistic sunglasses and put them on. Daytona shot him a look, which he ignored and handed Luke a pair. Backdraft unloaded the tube on his shockwave and loaded it with something else. Hamstar made a lot of noise in the backseat, and when Luke looked back, he had his Glock strapped down to the seat next to him with the seat belt and was doing a brass check on a Mini UZI.

Luke checked the chamber on his MP5K, and brass winked back at him. A few seconds later, they were pulling into the right turn yield lane at the end of an overpass. There was a wide grass lot between them and the bank to their right, and ahead of them, far out beyond the flat highway-sliced landscape, downtown loomed on the horizon.

Daytona brought the SUV to a stop.

“It’s fucking yield. You’re clear,” Backdraft said while looking to the left past Daytona.

“Holy shit, Dead ahead,” Daytona said at almost a whisper. Backdraft cocked his head and froze. Luke followed their gaze, and felt his stomach turn.

There in the far right lane of the intersecting street, dead across from them, waiting in the turn lane onto the access road, was a gold Camry.

“Get him! He’s boxed in!” Backdraft hissed.

Daytona looked up and down the street.

“Where’s his—”

The Camry whipped around the truck in front of it, drove up on to the triangle-shaped median, and floored it onto the access road.

“Fucking go!” Backdraft yelled, and Daytona did. Luke grabbed onto the overhead handle with both hands as they flew over two medians to the sounds of horns and squealing brakes and their own roaring motor and followed the Camry down the access road towards the highway.

The access road stretched for half a mile before blending into the highway. It dipped down to eject some side street into a warehouse district then rose up again to meet the highway atop its 40ft elevation, which in this landscape might as well have been a mountain. The Camry matched every bit of speed they gained, and it felt like they weren’t as much heading for something with intent and purpose as completing an arc of kinetic energy, like a thing thrown, rising and falling without control.

Backdraft yelled at Daytona the entire time, cursing him, the vehicle, the road, and everything else for their apparent inability to gain on the fucking target. Luke’s adrenaline had skyrocketed, but wavered at the top of its own arc, and he felt that if they kept fifty feet away from the car for much longer, he would crash and fall asleep.

He never got the chance. As the Camry merged onto the highway, Hamstar started screaming.

"Hey! Hey! God dammit, they’re right—”

Luke turned around, and it felt like it took ages. First, the highway traffic, then the backseat, and Hamstar raising his Uzi at the driver’s side window, still screaming. Luke even had time to notice that the barrell wasn’t quite pointing at the window, but, for some reason, wasn’t able to get the words out. He just stared as Hamstar unloaded half the mag into the fiberglass cupholders before the vertical recoil brought his barrel up to the glass.

Luke's right ear stopped working instantly and a ringing dominated the other. Shell casings struck the back of his seat, then, as the gun came up, flew past his face and bounced off his sunglasses. As Hamstar fired the last rounds through the dissolving, whitening window, one lone casing caught Luke right in the forehead and left a tiny burn that he only felt in a distant, intangible way.

It took about one second for Hamstar to empty his mag, and as he sat there, shaking the empty gun with its open smoking bolt out the window, Luke finally saw what he had been shooting at.

It was a white sedan. Chevy Impala. Cowcatcher on the front. Like an auctioned police surplus. Black tint. And Luke realized, at the last moment, that the front bumper was lined up just behind their rear tire.

The words pit maneuver formed in his mind, but never found air. The next instant, the world was spinning like an old metal merry-go-round that his cousin had deviously spun as fast as he could.

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“Relax!” Daytona shouted, muffled, as they were airborne, sunlight zipping across the car like someone was moving a flashlight. Down there Luke assumed Daytona was in shock or something, but higher-up Luke knew it was standard procedure. Going limp in a crash was the best way to avoid injury. Not that it would matter much this time.

The crash was the loudest thing Luke had ever heard, even given the battered state of his ear drums after Hamstar’s mag dump. Glass flew everywhere like some truckload of it had dropped from the sky. The way Daytona and Backdraft flopped around, dead weight, twisted Luke’s stomach worse than the crash, which in his adrenaline gorged state, felt like a distant event with no connection to him at all, like watching a bag blown in the wind.

Whisper, however, had apparently taken his seat belt off at some point, and while they had been spinning before the crash, had thumped around in the cabin with sounds that no human body should be able to generate by impact alone, until the barrier wall stopped them and he slammed so fast into the door that he seemed to teleport, one moment floating behind the passenger seat, the next just a crumpled quasi human thing melded into the door, hanging halfway out the shattered angled window, calm blue sky behind him.

In the stillness after the crash, the sudden ungodly silence, after somehow reflecting on his luck at having a mother who drilled seatbelt etiquette into his head at a young age, Luke tried to get a handle on their situation.

The 4Runner had spun twice across the ramp then slid through a metal guardrail until a single section of cement barrier had stopped it cold. The front of the car came to a stop facing the highway, which merged with their lane just a few yards away, and the rear wheels had dropped off the road and down the grass slope, slanting the cabin upwards.

Daytona and Backdraft stirred and fought with the airbags. Cars whooshed on the highway, a very suburban sound that reminded Luke of being stuck on the side of the road with a flat, and he suddenly panicked about being late to or completely absent from work. Out the broken windshield, a thin cloud rolled by across the blue. Hamstar was completely silent for the first time in the entire fucking ride, no shifting in his seat or humming or ice rattling in his drink, and it was all very peaceful.

Until Luke looked out his window, and saw the car that had pit maneuvered them rocking to a stop just ten yards down the ramp. Despite Hamstar's burst, there wasn’t a scratch on it.

“Fucking—” was all Backdraft got out. He had managed to get his shotgun up out of his lap, but the airbag was still draped over it. Daytona made a noise that might have been “shit” and Luke had time to squeeze his fists in a reflex, and thus be reminded he still had the MP5 in his hands, before something flashed over the roof of the other car.

The rounds went through Daytona and Backdraft first. Something wet struck Luke's face and they flinched and jumped in his peripherals, then something made a sound like a drink spilling, but he kept his eyes on the flash, two Lukes now screaming internally in unison, as he raised the MP5 and pulled the trigger.

The crash must have rocked him more than he realized. What had felt like a swift strong movement of his arms to bring the MP5 up to the window, had really only been a soft clenching of his shoulders, so his first ten rounds went out from between his knees, shredded the door, and sparked off the cement a few yards ahead of him. He never found out where the rest of the rounds went. The next moment, he was floating out in the black.

It was a strange sensation. For a brief moment, up there Luke was alone, as if the extractor had slipped its grasp of him, and then there was that other him again, but his thoughts were frayed at the edges, missing their continuity, and he realized that the entire time before, even when the extractor had sped over parts, he had been able to follow the stream of thoughts in unbroken procession, where as now, suddenly, an entire cluster of memory was missing completely. His death, and whatever secrets the experience may have held, were untouchable by extractor, scraper, or Spirit.

“Imagine a door,” a harsh voice said to him, from inside his head. Down there Luke looked around.

“Stop looking around and do as I tell you. Imagine a door.”

Down there Luke tried to push the question of where this voice was watching from out of his head, and do what he was told, but it took him a minute. Later he would find, to his frustration at the obviousness of it, that the voice had been watching him from inside his own mind, or at least from the filmy barely there surface layer of it, the same thin quasi-material membrane that allowed his Spirit to interface with the vibration of the Other.

The door was simple, like the one that had brought him to his not-apartment hours before. He reached for the knob.

“Stop. You must understand that on the other side of this door, you will find the hallway in which you entered the apartment complex which led you to the box a little while ago. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Go inside.”

Inside, he found the hallway, and the memories of his last time their clashed with others, still clinging to him, of a time when this had all seemed a dream.

“Come here.” The voice was no longer in his head, but down the hall, and a bright green light dinged on above a door.

Drudge was waiting for him at his desk, in an office that looked like a repurposed boiler room, pipes and exposed beams and all. He looked him in the eyes, with his forge glowing goggles, looking like something out of a Halloween store or cybergoth music video.

“Where did you wake up this morning?”

And at that, the memory poured out, and a few moments later he was leaving again, with more mem than he had ever had in the Other, trying and failing to remember what the hell had happened in there beyond a few hazy images and the rough summary provided in the bead of mem Drudge had handed him.

Eventually, as he flew toward the ball, he gave up.

He had more pressing matters, namely, a bright ball of light with his name hidden somewhere inside it.