“I’m a little out of my depth,” Jase whispered into the microphone.

“What do you want, a cookie?” Rueben replied. Jase was still unaccustomed to the drawl. He’d already known him two days, but the man didn’t speak often enough for him to get used to it. “If I need to guess someone’s password, you’ll be the first to know. For now, I need your eyes and your face.”

Jase sighed and scanned the plaza with a rangefinder. “At least tell me what I’m looking for.”

“Anyone suspicious.”

“I don’t know what’s suspicious in this city.”

“I’m not asking you to build a damn rocket. If you see something weird, call it out.”

“There are kids with green and pink hair running around, give me something to work with.”

McCord groaned. “Fine.” He thought for a second. “Do you see a guy with a robot arm twice the size it should be?”

“No.”

“Do you see a tall guy with a real big sword, dressed up like a Japanese samurai?”

“What’s a samurai?”

“Never mind. You’d have seen him by now. How ‘bout a lady with paper white skin, eyes cold as ice, and a little, glowing metal can planted between two huge fuckin tits?”

“Think I’d notice that first.”

“Alright, alright.” He sighed and thought some more. “What about a big guy, real big, built like a jock, with a face like a semi-truck, and almost definitely wearing sunglasses.”

“That could be anyone slightly larger than… woah.” He spotted an immense figure, not just tall, but wide. Muscled up in leather with sunglasses despite the overcast. The buzz cut and drop-dead expression stunk of military, but he lacked any scars, sun wrinkles, laugh lines, anything denoting combat experience. Which might have meant he was new, or so good at his job he had yet to accumulate any. Either way, he was terrifying to look at, but not so much that he stuck out like a sore thumb. Ignoring his size, he was nondescript.

“What, you see him?”

“I see someone like him. Gees, he’s big.”

“Is he a stone-faced bastard who moves like he weighs a ton and a half?”

“Yeah. What do we do now? Are we pulling back?”

“Nope. We’re moving forward.”

“But I saw the guy,” Jase replied as he descended a maintenance ladder.

“If you hadn’t seen anyone, we would have pulled back. Lesson one: if you don’t see someone, it’s because someone saw you first.”

“Alright. Enforcers are getting antsy. I’m crossing the street.”

“Be ready, when it goes down, it’ll go down quick. Shut off your radio and don’t look suspicious!”

That was something Jase was prepared to do. He was dressed in clothes bought from a local store, counterfeited an ID chip on the flight, and had years of experience going unnoticed. Seamlessly merging into the crowd, he steadily drifted across the plaza. The enforcers attempting to gather unassumingly were unsettling but expected. Look like you have somewhere to be and nothing to hide and they won’t look at you twice, as long as you don’t give them a reason to bother you, you’re untouchable. The problem was the big guy.

Jase didn’t think too hard about why McCord cared more about him or any of the others he described, but as long as they went unnoticed, he was a nonissue. He cast an occasional glance to make sure the big guy was still lumbering around, then halfway across the plaza, ducked into a bathroom when he wasn’t looking.

He checked under the stalls for boots, finding only one civilian, Jase went into the furthest stall and pulled a pipe bomb from his backpack. It was made with rubber tubing instead of rigid piping, so it was oddly floppy. He carefully put it in the toilet, more worried about getting water on himself than setting it off, lit a magnesium fuse that burned even underwater, and flushed the toilet.

Jase hurried to compose himself once out of the restroom. The large man was nowhere to be seen, but he didn’t have time to mull over it and continued up the plaza where enforcers were thickest. Exactly forty-five seconds later, a muffled boom erupted from the pipes running under a distribution center across the plaza.

Jase made sure to show just as much shock as anyone standing nearby, though his reaction time was delayed by a split second. A call went out and the peacekeepers mobilized, completely ignoring the perpetrator. Jase allowed himself a brief moment of satisfaction which immediately fell flat when he saw the big guy standing motionless in the throng of panicking civilians, watching him.

He turned down an alley. Logic told him to keep moving, but he had to set up some spike traps first. He didn’t know the penalty if he was caught in the act in this city, but in the ICC it’s grounds to shoot first. His hands were shaky and inaccurate from rushing himself, which led to mistakes drawing him out longer. He outright dropped the thing partially deployed and whipped around, wide eyed, at the sound of someone’s voice.

It was the big guy. He was standing at the entrance to the alley and said in a cold, monotone voice, “Identify yourself.” Jase dropped his bag and ran. “Suspicious activity confirmed. Beginning pursuit.”

The big guy wasn’t so slow anymore. It took him a bit, but he picked up supernatural speed. Jase took a sharp turn, hoping to turn his momentum against him, but the guy plowed through the stone and polymer building like Styrofoam. It felt like he was hit by a truck. The next thing Jase knew, he was gasping under a him shaped dust smear on the opposite wall. He tried crawling a way, but the big guy lumbered over and lifted him in the air with one arm.

“Identify yourself.” His jaw flapped, but his lips didn’t move.

Jase punched him in the face and was treated to the sound his shattering knuckles running up his arm. The sunglasses were dislodged and Jase found himself staring into two bright red lenses set in metal sockets rimmed by artificial flesh.

It threw him clear down the alley like a sack of papers and the landing knocked the wind from his lungs. It didn’t help the trash landed on was full of metal and glass, a shard of which lodged between his ribs. The pain was short lived, since it became difficult to feel anything when the man-machine lifted him by the neck and squeezed. He nearly didn’t hear the shots ring out.

Metal exploded from its elbow and base of its neck. Its eyes flickered and its grip went slack as it staggered to the ground. Jase had to pry its hand away and he coughed up a fine red mist until his vision returned. Even then it didn’t return all the way.

“God dammit, I told you not to look suspicious!” Rueben shouted, putting three more bullets in the base of the machine’s skull, yet its eyes refused to go out for good.

“I didn’t,” Jase indignantly wheezed.

“You looked at it, didn’t you?! Never look directly at anything unless you’re shooting at it or it’s shooting at you!” He grabbed Jase by the collar and threw him to his feet. He wasn’t ready to stand, but McCord wasn’t about to let him recoup.

When they came out the other side, peacekeepers were already responding to the gunshots.

“What are you doing?! There’s a terror attack in progress!”

“Don’t go in there!” McCord shouted in feigned panic. “There’s a crazy guy with a gun!” The enforcers wordlessly ran into the alley while McCord kept his revolver behind him. They’d barely passed when he started reloading.

Way up the road, mayhem erupted as an armored truck added to the chaos caused by the perceived terror attack.

“It’s getting close!” Jase nervously informed.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t rush me,” McCord replied, taking aim up a perpendicular road rushing with recklessly endangered traffic.

Machinegun fire rang up the road. On closer inspection, the man in the armored truck’s passenger seat was shooting at something. Following from the rooftops was a woman dressed in what is best described as a tactical mourning gown and veil. The dress was split in the front and trailed behind her so she was not hindered as she ran, harnesses went up and down her torso and sleeves holding clips and grenades, but chief among her equipment was a silver gun like a space age sniper rifle built around a small cylindrical device emitting pink energy. The gun shot beams that left no marks and her heels were actually devices channeling that energy allowing her to keep up with the truck on foot. The light pink mist left behind in her wake coalesced reminiscent of flower petals blowing in the wind.

As attractive as she was even through the veil, she was cold and relentless. Every time the man in the truck’s passenger seat emerged to shoot at her, she’d pin him back in with a narrow miss of her rifle. When he wasn’t shooting at her, she withdrew a submachinegun from the folds of her dress and fruitlessly fired on the shielded tires.

Worrisome as it was, Jase’s fight or flight response went into overdrive when a commotion in the alley drew his attention to the big, metal guy, skin peeled back like rubber by new bullet marks to reveal a skeletal metal interior suggesting the blood splattered on its arms and face were not its own. The damage to its neck made its visual feed stutter, but it immediately recognized Jase.

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“McCord!” Jase cried.

“I know!” He spotted a truck barreling up the perpendicular road and shot the driver in the shoulder, then shot out the tires on its left side so it careened into the intersection. “Don’t fuck this up!”

The road blocked and stopping not an option, the armored truck took the only path available to it and plowed into the alley, ramming straight into the metal man. While it was screeching to make the turn, Jase and McCord scrambled to latch onto the tailgate.

The driver panicked, believing he hit someone, but that panic turned into sheer terror when the hit and run victim pried itself from the indent and clawed its way up the hood. The man in the passenger seat riddled it with lead until his clip went dry and barely left a dent. McCord had his hands full applying suppressing fire to the woman in the mourning gown without getting crushed against the alley wall while Jase was busy doing his best to not die.

Several pink beams peppered the truck and McCord called out, “Don’t let that hit you!”

“No shit!” Jase responded.

“It’s worse than a bullet, kid!” She was too nimble and her outfit was bulletproof, but McCord shot out the support strut on a beam she was about to land on, earning him time to vault onto the roof, freeing a hand to reload so he could fully excise the metal man’s arm before it smashed in the windshield. “Where are the spikes?!”

“I was interrupted!”

The metal man changed priorities and clambered onto the roof. Jase swallowed his cautionary sense and peered up the alley, spotting his pack holding two unrolled spike traps coming up quick. His arm nearly ripped from its socket when he snatched it up, then nearly lost his grip when their emergence into the plaza surprised him with a sudden vacuum pull. He tried to follow McCord’s suit, but between biting back the pain of his broken hand and habitually covering his face in the presence of cameras, he was lucky he held on at all.

Pink beams landed within inches of his hand, narrowly missed McCord, struck the metal man in the chest, and hit the passenger’s arm. No observable change came over the metal man as the energy coursed through it and dissipated, but a look of pure ecstasy came over the passenger and he dove from the truck.

Running down the staircase lining the plaza did not make staying on top of the truck easy, least of all for the metal man, but it didn’t stop McCord from shooting a flashbang on the woman’s grenade belt, setting it off. With her indisposed for the moment, he launched himself at the metal man, knocking them both over. However, McCord jammed a hunting knife into the truck for grip, and the metal man went over the edge alone.

Jase wasn’t having any luck, so he took a spike trap and threw it over the hood. It did its job and the truck peeled out, launching him and McCord across the road when it crashed. He could barely swear through the pain of the road rash. It wasn’t too bad, but it was his first and it hurt like a bitch.

“Walk it off,” McCord groaned. “We’ve got work to do and not long to do it.”

The first thing the driver saw when he came too was a revolver barrel.

“Hands where I can see them.” McCord had Jase search the man and the cabin, collecting two sidearms, a taser, a night stick, and a key ring, the last of which McCord took off his hands. “Go get the car before any of our ‘friends’ catch up.”

They were a long way away from where they expected to be, so Jase double timed it back to their getaway vehicle.

“P-Please, don’t kill me!” the driver pleaded.

“You’re a bigger problem dead.” McCord clubbed the man over the head with the butt of his revolver, knocking him out cold.

He thumbed through the keys as he went around back and opened up the armored compartment. Two enforcers lay strangled and bludgeoned on the floor.

“What the hell is going on out there–” A man with more scars on his face than hairs on his head froze and grinned when he saw who opened the door. “Reuben, you magnificent son of a bitch! Of all the people I never thought I’d see again!”

“Yeah. Sorry it had to be this way, Bobby.” Two gunshots splattered Bobby’s brains across the inside of the truck. McCord reloaded two rounds before the barrel stopped smoking. “No hard feelings.”

Jase threw open the door to the backseat and sprayed himself down with the contents of a first aid kit. The relief on his road rash and glass splinter wound was almost immediate, but his hand wouldn’t unbreak so easily. Approaching sirens cut his recoup short.

McCord was on the street before Jase came roaring up the road with enforcement vehicles hot on his tail. “Move over!”

They peeled out onto the main highway just as half a dozen cruisers screeched into view. In their wake, the metal man pulled itself out of a dent in the concrete and began picking up speed.

McCord adjusted the rearview mirror, then made some potshots over his shoulder, blowing out two cruiser’s tires and wounding another driver, making the rest swerve. “How’s the path looking?”

Jase, with a laptop open, growled his frustration with typing with only two good fingers on his right hand amidst McCord’s erratic driving and pressure from gunfire. “Channels are cluttered with chatter about the bombing. The only enforcers who know about us are on our tail.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic.” He pushed his revolver onto Jase. “Make yourself useful.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?!”

“Shoot!”

The gun was heavier than expected and pointing it in the right direction was made more difficult since he couldn’t use his dominant arm. The barrel danced around the windshield he intended to hit, jostled by every bump and jerk of the wheel, the whipping wind, flinching from the enforcers shooting at him, and his own ineptitude. When he eventually did pull the trigger, the kick was heavier than he anticipated. The bullet went wide, he lost his grip and had to watch the cold steel bounce off the highway.

McCord did a double take when he saw Jase empty handed. The look in his eye made Jase glad the gun was out of reach.

They were about to have bigger problems because the metal man caught up with the chase. The clothes and false skin around its joints wore away from the friction and burned in some places. The enforcers were caught off guard when that thing overtook them on foot. It was heavy enough to shrug off the bullets they put into it with little more than a flinch.

“Shit!” McCord spat, spotting it in the rearview mirror. “Under my seat!”

Jase clambered into the back, thoroughly annoying the cat sleeping in the footwell, and slid out a gun case. He got a gun into McCord’s hand and he emptied all six chambers on the pursuer, but it tracked the angle of the barrel and covered its delicate joints.

“Can’t you go any faster?!” Jase cried.

“These things weren’t designed to break the speed limit!”

Its pelvis was smoking when it got within arm’s reach and drove its fingers into the chassis. Only possessing one arm hindered its approach, holding on was all it could do between the evasive maneuvers and bullets McCord put into its fingers.

The metal man detected an unfamiliar signal emanating from the trunk, and during a reprieve while McCord reloaded, latched on with its feet and pried it open. Observing Jase’s trunk as the source of the signal, it changed priorities.

In a panic, Jase lowered the back seat as the metal man grabbed the trunk and let go of the car. Jase tried to save his trunk and was nearly dragged out.

“Drop the luggage!” McCord shouted as he tried to get an angle that wouldn’t perforate Jase.

His tendons were about to snap, but he wasn’t about to give up the case. Thinking quickly, he opened the trunk, removed the case inside, then let go. The metal man went under the wheels of a cruiser, wrecked one, and sent another off the road.

The outer gate was wide open, having just received a transit, but when the chase came into view, the guards hit the emergency shutdown. McCord wasn’t worried about beating the doors, slow as they were, but some fresh cruisers that recently joined the chase were threatening to run him off the road. Without any bullets in reach, their escape relied solely on a civilian grade commuter’s ability to outrun law enforcement cruisers.

Recovered from the flashbang and too far removed to rejoin the chase, the woman in the mourning gown found a vantage point from which she spotted the procession. She turned a dial on her rifle and took aim. After a brief charge up for each, pink beams struck the drivers of the cruisers one by one. Her crosshair lingered over McCord for a moment, then turned to Jase. Her breath caught when she saw the case. She twisted the dial, steadied her focus, and pulled the trigger just before the gate closed behind them.

Jase saw the flash. He didn’t have the reaction time to do more than move his arm, so he lifted the case into the beam’s path. It deflected into the roof, but residual energy coursed through the case into Jase.

He fell to the floor, not by going limp, it was as if he lost the will to hold himself up. Visions flickered over the roof of the car. He saw the woman in the mourning gown, but she wasn’t in a mourning gown, she was in a wedding dress. He saw her up close, close enough to touch, and she was beautiful. There was no way he should know what features framed the piercing blue eyes burning through that veil, but it was beautiful. Beautiful enough to make a man forget to breathe.

“Dammit, boy, stay with me!” McCord dug out the taser taken from the armored truck and shocked him in the neck.

The visions were already fleeting when he was jolted from his stupor as if waking from a dream. The blissful stupor was swept away by terror that he can and did lose his faculties, but also anger and longing that he had to regain them, which worried him more.

“You all there?” McCord asked.

“Yeah… Yeah. I’m… I’m fine.” McCord tazed him again. “What was that for?!”

They followed the crumbling highway in silence until the car’s battery died. McCord got out of the car and fired a shot into the air, then dumped the remaining bullets onto the ground and tossed the gun to Jase.

“What’s this?” Jase asked cautiously.

“A gun. You’re going to learn how to use it.”

“I don’t need a gun.”

“You’re about to, or something is going to get a real easy meal.”

Jase looked around in alarm. “If you’re still mad I dropped your gun, I am sorry!”

“I’m not mad about the gun. And you didn’t just drop the gun, by the way, you dropped five perfectly good bullets with it. I’m pissed because you nearly got both of us killed four different times back there!”

“We got out.”

“We got lucky. Luck’s probably the only reason you made it to me in the first place.”

“I never did anything I wasn’t prepared for.”

“You think I ever surfed an armored truck? You won’t survive if you spend all your time worrying about what will kill you. If you can’t wrap your head around that, you’re better off marching right back up to that city.” A pair of near skeletal dead shambled into view in search of the source of the shot. “Speak of the devil. You’d better learn fast.”

Jase looked at the corpses, then at the bullets strewn on the ground which doubled in number as McCord emptied his other gun. “My hand is broken!”

“I’ll break the other and feed it to the zombies if I have to take one step from this spot.”

Jase grimaced and rushed to the ammunition. Hands shaking for various reasons, the zombies were uncomfortably close when he finally closed the chamber.

Holding the gun with his left hand, he steadied with the broken one. He aimed at the nearest corpse’s head and took several seconds to stabilize before pulling the trigger. He overcompensated the recoil and hit the shoulder, staggering it and not much more. The second shot went wide.

“If you can’t hit the head, aim somewhere else,” McCord stated.

Jase sneered and aimed lower. The next shot landed in the dirt some distance behind the lead zombie.

“Knees are smaller than the head and move more. They can’t walk without a pelvis.”

Taking his advice sent the zombie to its stomach, which made the head a more reasonable target.

“Don’t fight the recoil. Keep both eyes open.”

The next shot downed the second zombie, but Jase realized he wasn’t counting when a click failed to relieve the dead man of its head. It was already closer than it ever should have gotten, so Jase only grabbed one bullet and delivered it at point blank range after pinning the groping hand under his foot.

“Good enough, for now,” McCord sardonically congratulated.

“What’s this ‘for now?’ I shot it, didn’t I?!”

“You shot a few rounds into walking compost. Doesn’t mean you can shoot for shit. Don’t get used to getting practice swings, the wasteland rarely offers the courtesy of a second chance, and she’s the most merciful bitch left in this godforsaken world. If you can’t survive on your own grit, I’m leaving you for the scavengers.”

McCord left Jase standing in the middle of the road to grab his things from the car, shooing away the silver cat watching them from the back seat.

Jase frantically put the rest of the bullets on the ground into his borrowed gun and followed suit.

A few dozen miles down the road, they passed an old gas station overgrown with foliage. McCord bade Jase to keep going and hurried in. There were a few shots, some animals ran out the back, and he soon emerged shoving several decades-old packets of cigarettes into his bag.

“Cigarettes will kill you,” Jase muttered as he relinquished the lighter.

“They can get in line.”