The skank, to Fatima’s immense annoyance, was actually pretty handy to have along. She knew how to hotwire a car. She spoke fluent Arabic, while Fatima only knew enough to read her Quran and the others had fragments and phrases. And she could actually keep Yuri quiet most of the time. Fatima would have been very grateful for all of that if she hadn’t been so very, very pissed to have her along in the first place. And at everything else that happened along the way.
A borrowed army jeep got them to Hama, thirty miles north of Homs, where they broke into an apartment complex sometime around midnight. They’d hoped to do it quiet, maybe grab a couple of hours’ sleep in the basement laundry room like bums, but the building had armed guards, and they took their job too seriously. Yuri ate three rounds to the chest, so Rus had to waste all one of the guards to fix him up—which set Nadia off on her usual prima donna bullshit, and that ate another half-hour they could have spent sleeping.
While they were doing that the local cops showed up, and by that point Yuri was so tired and butthurt that even his girl couldn’t keep him contained, and he torched the building across the street, which set the cops running and got the pretty slapped off his face by his hysterical sobbing sister as soon as the halo fell. Fatima hung back and watched her let it all out. So did the girlfriend. They shared her cigarettes, since Fatima was out. It was almost a bonding experience.
Long story short, they got to sleep around two in the morning in three different apartments, and nobody made a peep to wake them till seven-thirty, when the guy who owned the place came and begged the girlfriend to leave with her posse before the army got the nerve up to attack his building. The stone-cold bitch shrugged and hit him up for cash and food to “expedite their departure,” which was fine by Fatima, but Nadia refused to get in the jeep while it had extorted goods so they lost more time arguing and negotiating over precisely how much shit it was ethical to appropriate, so to speak, under their precise and particular circumstances.
They were still nickel-and-diming individual cans of chickpeas when the owner dude came up screaming about how his cousin in the army said they were starting the engines on their fucking artillery in the base across the river. That settled the argument, and they blew out with a mostly full load of groceries. Nadia tried to throw some of it out the window as they left, but stopped when a ten-pound bag of rice smashed open and scattered all over the pavement. Then she tried throwing money, until Fatima reached over and rolled up the window.
Looking back on it from a safe, sane distance, what followed would look like one hell of a moment: five unescorted teenagers of four different nationalities, doing sixty in stolen jeep down a mostly residential neighborhood while one of them threw a full on cat-five hissy-fit, screaming that they were all horrible and she should have stayed with Keisha and left them all to die alone.
Fatima had a bizarre moment, as they swerved around a corner on two wheels, horn blaring, Nadia screaming, pedestrians shouting and a rock pelting out of nowhere to web Nadia’s just-closed window, where she pictured this whole thing as a godawful road trip movie gone terribly wrong. That was the real issue here: the director was strung out on eight things, they had too many producers wanting to take the movie too many different directions, the writers quit over creative differences, and now they were just shooting whatever till the money ran out. That was it. It was the only sane explanation for this situation.
Then the wheels came down hard, and they were all thrown together in the backseat. Nadia stopped screeching for just a sec, long enough to hear the guns start up; they looked back and saw that some crazy bastard had got the brass balls to step to them in an old-school DIY battlewagon, a junky-ass pickup with something belt-fed bolted to the top and a gunner standing in the bed. Maria took a hard left at the next turn before they could do more than whump a couple of rounds into the back bumper.
“No familiar!” she shouted in English, and took the next right. “No familiar! I crash!”
“Then stop,” Fatima snapped back in Arabic. They were barreling down an alley now, just wide enough to clear the side mirrors. Somebody’d piled a bunch of old plastic crates and a broken chair there halfway down—it all went flying, some under the wheels, at least one crate and parts of the chair tumbling over the jeep’s roof. Maria barely slowed down, and took a left turn out of the far end of the alley.
They came out in bright sunlight, barreling down a good-sized road along the river, lined with palm trees and nice shops. Fatima caught a glimpse of a gigantic waterwheel stuck to the side of some ancient ruin in the river. It was actually running, spinning in the current, but Maria slammed on the accelerator and pretty soon they all had better things to worry about, like the part where the rest of the cars were moving in the other damn direction!
“Stop!” Fatima screamed it in Arabic; the others tried Russian or, in Ruslan’s case, just cowering with his hands over his face.
“They cannot follow here!” the whore snarled. She had a point. She was a good enough driver, and the traffic was light enough, that nobody quite hit them, but a few other people slammed into each other trying to avoid them, making a beautiful obstruction. Fatima decided to shut up, so as not to distract her, and murder the girl later, after the vehicle had come to a complete stop. Anyway, she took a hard right at the next opportunity, gunning it over a little bridge across the river. When they got to the other side they were driving the right direction again.
Yuri was the first to speak again, in English: “We’re going to need backup here, people. She’s driving stick. They’re going to have blockades somewhere, unless they’re a lot dumber than I think they are.”
“Obviously,” Nadia told him. “And we can’t use Shum-Shum at any speed. That leaves the three others. Whose is best?”
“We’ll be moving fast,” Fatima said. “Kinda rules out my boy.”
“Fine,” Nadia snipped back—she still seemed pretty pissed—and added something in Russian for Maria. The girl nodded, and pulled over into another alley long enough to ride out Nadia’s keystone. She took them out the other side at the same reckless speed, venting her frustration on the gas pedal. The rest of them didn’t have any option but to watch Ézarine keep pace along the rooftops, and hope she took out a few extra for them. This damn country—all they were trying to do was get through and out the other side! Why did it have to be so hard?
They almost made it out of the city before they hit the roadblock. A couple more trucks with guns, a few concrete barriers setting up a slalom to slow them down. Maria saw it coming and pulled off before they could get a proper bead on their truck, swerving into a side street then racing up a parallel road while Ézarine found the resonant frequency of concrete. Nadia gave them the word when she was done, and they switched back to find the checkpoint deserted.
They didn’t have to say anything; Maria braked alongside one of the trucks and everyone but Nadia got to work throwing food into the bed of the one with more gas in its tanks. Nadia sat in the back of the jeep with her arms crossed while her familiar copied the same posture on the nearest roof. They all cussed her out for being a petulant bitch, but it wasn’t like they couldn’t load the truck without her.
The guy with the gun, sitting by the window in a house fifty feet away, waited until everybody else was in the truck, and Nadia was getting out of the jeep, to pull the trigger. Pegged her right in the back. When she went down he shot out the back window of the pickup—the bullet kept going into the a/c on the dash. Fatima looked out the window, saw Nadia sprawled on the pavement, not moving. Opened her door to dash out and snag her, ducked back with a shriek when the next shot hit an inch from her hand. Maria chose that moment to hit the gas again, and they were off down the road with one door hanging open.
Fatima poked her head out to look back while Yuri shouted and Ruslan stammered. Nadia was still lying there, but Ézarine had slipped down to stand over her, blocking future shots. Still conscious, then—just not enough to do anything useful. Meanwhile her would-be sister-in-law was trying to dump the whole tank in the engine with her foot, ignoring everyone else.
Screw that. Fatima took half a breath and hopped out, hitting the ground at a roll. It hurt like hell, but she didn’t break anything important, and she was on her feet before the exhaust and dust had time to clear. She coughed, winced, and set off on a limping run. There were a bunch of guns going now, or else one guy with one hell of a trigger finger, and Fatima could see the bullets ding against the pavement all around Ézarine. They couldn’t shoot through an emissant, but if they got real lucky, they might hit Nadia again around her.
When she got to Nadia, Ézarine was wobbling on her feet, looking around like she’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and making weird little fussy noises you could hardly hear over the guns. Fatima took a second behind the jeep’s front bumper to hype herself up, then dashed in to grab Nadia under the arms and start dragging.
A couple of things happened at once. The first was that Nadia screamed. The second was that Ézarine flickered and disappeared. The third was that absolutely everybody in a quarter-mile radius went fuzzy from the halo dropping. Fatima didn’t recover especially quickly, but she had some idea what the hell had just happened. That gave her enough of an edge to grab Nadia and pull again, and get her most of the way behind the jeep before the bastards remembered why they were holding guns. Fatima heard the first shot just as it hit her, right below the rib cage on the right side.
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She didn’t notice much for a while after that. Her head whacked against the hood on the way down. When she came to again she was laughing—couldn’t have told you why, she was gut-shot and it hurt like a bitch—and Yuri was standing over her yelling. She lifted her head enough to see that both sides of the street were on fire, then fell back so she could black out again.
Then she felt herself moving, and opened her eyes to see Ruslan was picking her up to carry her. She jabbed him in the ribs, and he yelped and let go. “What are you doing, fool? I can walk.”
He didn’t say anything, only gawked down at her. His eyes were a little bit red, but then there was plenty of smoke in the air—Fatima could smell it. And see it, too: thick black columns rising up in rows into the clear blue sky. She sat up, scooted back on her rump to get some distance, and looked around. Yep, Shum-Shum had been here. But that was in the past. For the present, she backhanded Rus, gently, in the stomach. “Tch! Get under cover, boy! If they hit you, we’re down a medic. Do I have to do all the thinking?”
Rus still tried to go in for a hug; she didn’t quite dodge, only managed to slip out and shove him away before he could start off on a crying jag. Nadia at least wasn’t bothering to chew out her brother over his latest act of urban renewal—the whole street was done for—only shaking her head and walking back to the pickup. For a miracle, he kept his mouth shut too.
The truck had an extended cab, but Fatima elected to stand in the bed, her hands on the gun, ear pro hanging around her neck. Nadia, after a second’s hesitation, got in beside her, curling up next to the wheel well where she couldn’t rattle around too much. That left Yuri riding shotgun and Ruslan lying down in the skimpy back seat.
Maria didn’t drive so fast now, with the two of them unsecure in the bed—considerate of her. Fatima hoped she wouldn’t have to speed up, and that she wouldn’t have to use the decrepit-ass Soviet surplus NSV in her hands, and that if she did the thing would be well-maintained and not blow up in her face. But she hadn’t been getting a lot of her wishes granted lately.
There were a couple of other weapons in the bed, an equally ancient RPG-7 and some kind of Kalashnikov, both left behind when Ézarine rushed the blockade. Nadia leaned down to pick up the rifle, checking the magazine and chamber. Something about the sight of it was just pathetic—if she actually fired the damn thing, the recoil would knock her over, she was so skinny—and put Fatima in mind of the kid back in the Tatvan hotel, screaming in Fatima’s face about her dead dad. A lot of things had been reminding her of that lately. Kind of a pain.
“What is that, a -47?” she asked as they rounded the next corner, just to make conversation.
Nadia looked it over. “A -74, I think. Does it matter?” She looked over her shoulder, scanning the street for threats. It was a pretty place, all trees and little houses and an old mosque on one corner. Hama was actually relatively intact, or had been. Yuri had only been toasting some of its suburbs. “We are still less than a hundred kilometers from Homs, and four of us have sustained serious injury in less than twelve hours. If anybody hits Ruslan, or shoots one of us in the brain or heart, that is it. I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“I don’t know about that,” Fatima said. “I think they might have learned their lesson, after this. They know we only want to leave this hellhole, and they don’t have endless people to kill off just because they’re pissed at Yuri for ditching. But speaking of Ruslan … ” She ducked her head down next to the giant hole in the cab’s rear window. “Yo! Rus! We could use some aerial recon here!”
She caught a glimpse of Nadia’s face as she straightened back up; she looked like she would have objected, if she’d only had the energy. They were all tired. It’d be better once they’d got a chance to sleep. Especially if they were back in the Emir’s turf.
The truck pulled over again, and further thoughts were cut off by Kizil Khan’s usual morbid crap. Dead kid in tent, blah blah blah. She put her head down against the roof to wait it out while the bloody eagle took to the air to scope out the opposition. It didn’t take long, and the only interesting thing was some moron trying to take him out with some kind of SAM. It missed, naturally.
“Tanks on the move,” Ruslan said, when the halo faded and the truck got moving again, “but not toward us. Moving east, in a column.”
“What, so we’re not a big deal anymore? I’m hurt!”
Nadia wasn’t having it. “Shut up, Yuri. Is the way north clear?”
Ruslan nodded. “It’s fine. I could see where they had more roadblocks set up in our way, but they’re moving them already.”
Fatima punched Nadia’s arm. “See? What’d I tell you?”
Nadia shook her head as she settled back down into her cubby with her AK. “And when we get to Turkey? The Americans know everything about our operation, and Yefimov has had almost a week to undermine us. We just left the country to run from him; now we are running back to him so we can hide from somebody else!”
“Damn, you’re a downer.” Fatima laughed. “Girl, there’s four of us. I survived a year in Afghanistan all on my own, when I was nine. I cannot even describe how much better off we are now.”
Nadia didn’t try to argue back, and they settled in for the long haul. An hour passed on the road; they left Hama far behind, and the town after that, and the town after that. She switched places with Nadia to give her legs a rest; inside the truck, Ruslan snored and Yuri had long talks with his bitch that made Fatima glad she barely spoke any Russian. Around the two-hour mark they stopped to fill the tank and Nadia gave up on standing on alert by the gun.
Yuri was filling up the tank while the skank ran in to use the bathroom; she came back out in a hurry, waving her phone in the air. Fatima tensed up, ready to haul ass and leave her behind if need be, but it wasn’t even about them.
“Happy?” Ruslan’s voice squeaked as they crowded around the little screen. “They brought Happy here?”
“Who else would do that?” Yuri said. “Anyway, Maria says they had it on the TV in there.”
Fatima backed away as soon as she heard the name. She didn’t want to see that damn screen. Every Happy attack looked the same: deformed dead bodies in hospital beds, all stretched out of proportion, heads bigger than their chests, long arms like noodles. All dead within seconds once the halo went down and their bodies had to try and make the jacked-up anatomy work in the real world. “Where?” was all she asked.
“Somewhere near Aleppo,” Ruslan said, looking at the screen. “Al Bab. It’s east of the city. We shouldn’t have to go anywhere near it to cross the border.”
“No way I’m going near fucking Happy,” Yuri said. “I’ll take my chances with the Jews, and the Americans, and the Arabs, all together, before I get within fifty miles of that crazy son of a bitch.”
“None of us wants to be near Happy! Why did they bring him here, though?” Nadia said. “They were leaving the country alone before.”
“Yeah,” Fatima said. “Because Yuri was here messing the place up for them. Maybe they’re trying to send a message, or take over the country direct?”
Maria said something to Yuri in Russian. “Yeah,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “That’s true.”
“What?” Ruslan tore his attention away from whatever nastiness he’d been flipping through on the phone. “What’d she say?”
“That it’s a perfect diversion, whatever he’s here for. I mean, not gonna lie, my boy Shum is a threat, but I’m not gonna try to measure up to motherfucking Happy for freakout factor. Guess where they were moving the tanks?”
That was a good question too. Fatima whipped out her own phone, found it was dead, and plugged it into the charger in the truck. Yuri came up and nudged her. “Hey, that’s my seat.”
“Take a turn in the back, little boy. Keep your sister company. Maria said she drives better without you trying to feel her up.” She didn’t listen to whatever lame retort he came up with, and didn’t notice when he gave up and left. Soon they were on the road again, barely breaking the speed limit, and the phone had enough juice to run. “What the hell?”
“What is it?” Nadia leaned forward from the backseat.
“I’m getting like a thousand messages from some dude named Şakir.”
“That’s Kemal,” Nadia said at once. “Why didn’t he—oh.” She pulled out her phone, and saw it had a badly cracked screen. “Maybe he did. What does he want?”
“Hold on. Dude’s Arabic isn’t as good as he thinks it is.” She scrolled up and down, frowning, before tapping on a link to a website. She couldn’t figure what it was all about. Then, all at once, it hit her. “Aw, hell!”