Текст книги "Amped"

Автор книги: Daniel H. Wilson

Соавторы: Daniel H. Wilson
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

Now I’m between him and the senator.

Lyle smiles, dead eyed. He’s given himself up to the implant. Gone all the way into his deep place and put himself on autopilot.

“Whole fuckin’ hog, Gray. Level five. World opens up to you in ways you can’t imagine.”

Lyle throws himself at me like a predator. Like something that our ancestors might have drawn on cave walls by firelight. My body is trying to move, trying to save my life, but I’m tangled up in Vaughn. The politician has grabbed my arms from behind. I twist around to look at him, and he stares back at me with this look on his face like I just shit my pants in church.

“Moron,” he says.

Then I’m on the ground. Lyle is on me like a barbed-wire blanket. The pavement gobbles up chunks of my skin as I struggle. But Lyle is too fast, each move part of a series. The cowboy torques a bony elbow across my jaw, and for a moment my mouth doesn’t close quite like it should anymore.

Lyle’s got me pinned and he’s dropping fists on me mechanically. My bruised forearms are up, fending off the bombardment with equally mechanical precision.

“We coulda gone to the stars,” he says. “You could have been my brother.”

As I start to lose consciousness I catch his face in glimpses, twisted with hate.

“Stop!” shouts Vaughn. “Stop it, Lyle.”

It’s like shouting at a locomotive. Lyle stops punching and digs his thumbs into my windpipe. Now my arms are so much useless rubber. I’m retreating back to my inside room whether I want to or not. My eyes rolling up, and now I’m looking at the inside of my own skull.

“…  dammit, you animal …”

“…  need him …”

“…  the fucking plan …”

Silence.

I feel something like ants on my face. Stinging and tickling, running around in a blind confusion. It’s the blood returning. My vision blooms from tiny pinpricks, expands until I see the buildings looming over me, wavering and dancing.

I’m lying on my back, head bouncing as I cough uncontrollably. Specks of white foam arc away from my lips into the sunlight. The pavement is cool and gritty on my head. Level four is gone, not even a memory. I feel like I’ve been out for days, but it was just seconds.

Lyle sits a few feet away, arms on his knees. He picks a dandelion from a crack in the cement and twirls it, fingernails rimmed in my blood. He smiles at the flower, considers it. Like nothing happened. But I can still feel his phantom grasp around my throat.

Vaughn isn’t calm, though.

The politician wheels around and screams at the cowboy. Walks over to the car and leans on it, catching his breath. Somehow, the sounds don’t register in my ears. All I hear is the sluggish pounding of my heart, the crinkled-plastic rasp of my lungs.

“How could you do it?” I croak to Lyle.

He wipes his nose with one swollen fist. Sniffs. “What do you want me to say? Everything’s part of a plan,” he says. “This is happening all over the country. Right now, today. You could have owned it. But it’s all over for you. For me, it’s just beginning.”

“Why?” I ask, voice breaking.

The pain and hurt I feel are embedded in the question like a needle. Lyle winces at the sting of it, says nothing.

Vaughn kicks an empty can, sends it rattling down the alley. “Get this amp on his way. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Lyle’s eyes never leave mine. “Whatever you say, boss,” he says.

The laughing cowboy drags me onto my feet. I try to swallow through a half-collapsed throat and choke on it. I’m seeing the world through gauze as Lyle shoves me out of the alley. I stand there, swaying on my feet.

“You’re letting me go?” I ask, incredulous.

The tang of far-off smoke stings my nostrils.

“Sorta,” says Lyle, shrugging. He opens the car door and gets in. Slams it shut on my disbelief.

“You smell that?” Vaughn asks, leaning over the hood of the car. His voice seems to come from far away. “You better run home, my friend. Eden is burning.”

The White House Office of the Press Secretary

United States Capitol, Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, I come to this house of the people to speak to you and all Americans at a defining moment—as the impact of a volatile new technology rends at our union and tears at the bonds of human kinship—as our nation stands on the very precipice of civil war.

Yesterday, a coalition of extremists known as Astra, their bodies implanted with advanced technology, launched a series of coordinated, premeditated attacks on three American cities.

The attack yesterday posed a direct challenge to the constitutional rights of Americans to assemble and freely express their beliefs. Many innocent lives were lost to fanaticism. By choosing to reject rational discourse and to take the lives of their fellow citizens, these extremists have abandoned everything except for the will to power, and they have therefore abandoned their own cause.

I want to speak tonight directly to the hundreds of thousands of implanted individuals who are peaceful and who bear no ill will toward our union. We respect your decision to undergo medical implantation. We understand that over the last tumultuous months, tensions have run high between implanted and nonimplanted citizens. Debates have raged in our courts, our halls of Congress, and in our churches and homes. We ask that you be patient. Peace will come in time.

Tonight, however, we must seek to maintain the compact of our union that was sealed in the flames of a catastrophic civil war that took place more than a century and a half ago.

As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have directed that all measures be taken for the defense of the American people from the extremists who are in our midst. We will use every resource to hunt these extremists down, turn them against one another, and drive them from safe shelter and into the arms of the law. Likewise, we will not hesitate to use any means necessary to protect innocent individuals with implants.

A great task awaits us—a rectification of human nature itself. The continued existence of our union depends upon our success in this endeavor.

We must seek the unity of natural man with the artificial world that he has built—with the technology that can save or destroy him, with new capabilities that can bring about great good or great harm, and with the technological devices that can nourish or starve his spirit.

We must seek and find an ultimate harmony between body and machine, a common ground from which every citizen is free to contribute toward improving the quality of our entire civilization.

This is the search that we begin tonight.

Smoke is rising from Eden—thin black ribbons braiding themselves in the sky. I stumble and try to run harder. I’m sucking air in ragged breaths, my throat and ribs and fingers bruised and hurting. The breeze carries the sharp chemical smell of a whole lot of unnatural, man-made shit burning up fast.

Cancer on the wind.

The war has really started now. Jim told me it was coming. They’re just waiting for an excuse, he said. Maybe my dad even saw a twinkle of it on the horizon fifteen years ago when he healed me and gave me something extra while he was at it. Deep down, they must have feared that one day it would come to this: the new against the old.

Even Samantha saw it.

In my imagination, I envisioned a heroic battle. Guns and guts and glory. Instead, I’m sneaking into a burning trailer park to find a goofy kid and a woman who may have pretended to like me as a favor to her psychopath brother.

I hesitate a moment at the tree line, watching the glint of sun off Eden’s unwanted chain-link fence. No movement. Then I sprint across the muddied field, keeping my eyes on the swivel. The spotlighter brawl has left its mark here: wadded-up shirts that got ripped from Priders’ backs; glinting debris from smashed-up folding chairs; and that rusted, bullet-riddled generator slumped over like bloated roadkill.

But clear so far.

I climb over the rattling chain-link fence and stop on the other side, leaning against it. At least one trailer is burning for real. I don’t remember who lives there. But an honest-to-God blaze is going, with feral tongues of fire roaring up the sides of the yellowed old box. Waves of ash-specked wind surge off the flames, oven hot, tossing the branches of the pecan trees around. The plastic is withering, softening and falling in on itself.

I notice the paint blackening and curling away on the outside of the boxes next door. These trailers are too damn close to each other. At this rate, the whole trailer park will go up.

And there are no police. I don’t see or hear any fire trucks. Nobody is around. The authorities must be busy with the riots. The amps must have all run away.

Someone hoots loudly. A familiar-sounding “yee-haw.” I curl my fingers into the fence behind me, tense up, and freeze in place.

Three men stomp together through an intersection between trailers. The one in front has a gasoline can and a cap pulled low over his eyes. The other two follow, slouching along with sunken chests and shotguns low and leveled. All their faces are red and sweaty as if sunburned. But it’s from the fire. These men have gotten too close to the blaze, and it sure hasn’t bothered them any. I can see their feverish grins as they pass by.

They cross the intersection and are gone. An answering hoot echoes from somewhere on the other side of the trailer park. Glass shatters, followed by peals of drunken laughter.

Lucy’s trailer is too close to the spreading flame. I unwrap my fingers from the fence. Try to estimate where the Priders are from their catcalls.

I double over and scramble down the main path toward Lucy’s trailer. Glancing left and right, I notice lots of half-open doors. I step over clothing and kitchen utensils and kids’ toys. Dropped and left behind in the dirt after whatever mass exodus must have just happened.

Maybe Lucy and Nick made it out already. This attack is no surprise; it’s been coming for a long time.

I hear a scratching sound behind me and spin around so fast I nearly fall. Instead of the barrel of a shotgun, I see a flowery window covering fall back into place behind a rust-kissed screen. My breath eases out in a hiss. There are still people here in the burning trailer park.

Amps hiding from Priders.

I trot over to the occupied trailer. Knock lightly on the window. “Fire’s coming,” I whisper. “You’ve gotta run for it.”

Nobody answers.

Someone laughs loudly nearby. I turn to see the round lid of a cement birdbath pinwheeling through the nearest intersection. It crunches into the porch across the street. I press myself flat against the trailer. As the voices grow louder, I count down in my head. Visualizing my fingers. Already going back, eager for the taste of the Zenith in my mind.

Three, two, one, zero—level four and the world becomes bright and crisp as newly fallen snow.

Two men stride around the corner, joking with each other. They see me and pause. I nonchalantly raise a hand and wave at a scowling, bearded guy holding a shotgun. He’s wearing a sling around his right arm from the last time we met.

Collarbones can take such a long time to heal.

“Hey, Billy,” I say. “Long time no see.”

The shotgun blast tears a messy hole in the siding of the trailer behind me, but I’m already moving. Head down, allowing the Zenith’s tendrils of control to flicker into my limbs. I’m off the ground, on a porch, then beyond it. Running, scrambling on all fours, climbing, and leaping. Sights rush past in fits, fast and slow, playing out on a broken projector.

I hear a woman screaming from the trailer I left behind. That shotgun slug wasn’t harmless after all. It must have torn through metal siding and insulation and flesh.

Guttural shouts ring out behind me, met by more hooting coming from somewhere in front. Now I’m on Lucy’s porch and headed for the flimsy door, reaching, fingers outstretched.

And then, somehow, I’m on my knees.

The world’s gone bright as a solar flare. Overexposed. I’m seeing angels dance, white spots brighter than heaven. I hear the sputtering boom of an explosion in the distance, echoes racing each other between the trailers.

Blinking at the light, I cover my ears and watch. Two doors down, a cylindrical propane tank the size of a doghouse has detonated. It jets a sputtering plume of blue-purple flame, rolling loose over the dirt. The blistering clouds of flame push the tank, swiveling it toward me in vicious inching pirouettes.

I shove myself up and grab the handle of Lucy’s front door. The stuttering eruption grows louder. With numb fingers I claw at the door handle. A sudden surge of heat rolls over my back and the world boils as I stumble into the cool trailer.

Before my eyes can adjust, sharp fingers grab my shirt and yank me off-balance. A pair of thin pale arms twists me in a circle and throws me. I bounce off the wall and collapse onto my stomach. Instantly, a knee drops into my back and pins me. A barrage of punches cascade across my shoulder blades. I twist to get free.

“Quit struggling,” says a familiar voice. “You’re on fire, for Chrissake. Let me put you out.”

These are pats, I realize. Not punches.

I roll over and look up into Lucy’s face. Her eyes are red. She’s been crying recently, but she isn’t now. At this moment, she looks sad and afraid and relieved. I want to lay into her, question her about everything Lyle said. I want to give her a hug and kiss her cheeks. I want to curl up into a ball and grieve for Jim.

I do none of those things.

“Where’s Nick?” I ask.

The boy crawls out from behind the couch. Puts his arms around my neck. Hugs me awkwardly. He steps back, and I take him by the shoulders and inspect him. The kid’s got soot around his nostrils, sweat beading on his cheeks, but he’s fine. There is a Band-Aid over his temple.

“Sharks came,” he says, simply.

“I know, Nicky,” I respond. “You were right.”

“We were waiting for Jim,” says Lucy. “Got trapped.”

I work hard to keep my face empty. My sight hums from the Zenith.

Boom. A hole explodes in the front door. It sounds like the tire of an 18-wheeler blowing out. A shotgun slug moves past my face and keeps going through the far wall. Daylight shines in through both gaps, illuminating fast-moving smoke outside.

“Door’s on fire,” says Billy, faintly from outside. “Y’all go around. They’ll be out the back. I guarantee it.”

Smoke is pouring into the trailer. The propane tank must have ignited the siding. Billy throwing gasoline on it probably hasn’t helped, either.

No thinking. No time. I wrap my arms around Lucy and Nick, hustle them toward the back hallway of the trailer. We lean together and crawl, coughing through the acrid black smoke already gathering at the ceiling.

Flames are consuming the trailer from the outside in. The sound has changed from a wind-fueled whoosh to a meaty chuckle. I can hear Billy outside, yelling at me over the din of the blaze: “Where you gonna go now, amp?”

I cringe as another fist-sized hole punches through the wood paneling, spraying me with laminated splinters. As Billy reloads, I urge Lucy and Nick forward until we reach the end of the hallway. We crouch together. On my right is the door to the bathroom. On my left is the back door that leads outside.

“Don’t go outside until I say it’s okay,” I say.

I don’t have to look out there. I know that on the other side, two men with shotguns are waiting for Billy to flush us out like rabbits from the brush. Lucy tries to say something and I shake my head. I wrap her hands around Nick’s grimy little hands. I push them both down until they are lying flat on the floor. Raise a finger—wait here one second.

A shout comes from outside: “Thought you beat Gunnin’ Billy?”

Gently I push open the hollow bathroom door. Billy’s voice rings loud and clear through frosted plastic window slats. Cheap snowflake-patterned laminate curls up around the edges of the bathroom window, turning yellow from the heat outside. Fake plastic tiles line the floor and walls, blooming with mildew around the shower. A gray cinder block holds up the sink.

I gently drag the block of concrete out, hoist it to chest level. Feel the gravelly bite of it on my chest. I step back into the molded plastic shower stall. Take a deep breath and clear my mind. Let the Zenith speak and listen close because it’s important.

Levelfour. Gun schematics and evasion routes and room-clearing techniques flood into my mind’s eye, even teasing the edges of my vision. I stop my trigger finger from curling around an imaginary weapon.

I’ve got one shot at this and I need to know where my target is standing.

“There’s women and children in here, Billy,” I shout.

Six inches from my abdomen, the bathroom wall disintegrates and a hunk of solid metal thumps through the siding. Before the slug hits the far wall, I’m pivoting, pulling my arms in tight and powerful like coiled springs—then, I shot-put the cinder block through the cracked window, channeling all my strength and will to survive out into the smoky unknown. The block sails toward that shotgun, the voice behind it, the threat.

Crunch.

Now I hear flames eating and nothing else. There is a piercing crack as the living room roof falls in. Doubling over, I cough into the crook of my arm. Smoke is pouring out of the broken bathroom window, too much for me to see anything outside. In the hallway, two pairs of wide eyes stare up at me.

“Let’s go,” I say. “Now or never.”

Diaphragm spasming and eyes watering, I place a palm flat against the back door. I nudge it open a crack. Any second, I expect the shotgun slugs to come pouring through. But they don’t.

Nobody is out back.

The three of us scuttle out the door. Hop down three rotten steps to the sweet, cool ground. We cough into our hands, cheeks billowing, trying to stay silent.

“Ah fuck,” says somebody from around front. “Gunnin’?”

Nick hears and cranes his neck, but I plant a hand on his shoulder. Push him forward and keep an eye on the back of his head to make sure he doesn’t try to look back. Once you see something, you can’t unsee it.

As Lucy and Nick scurry safely away, I drop to my hands and knees in the dirt.

It’s just a split-second peek under the burning trailer. Through writhing waves of flame, I see heat shadows roil like ghosts playing. The sight hits me like a camera flash. Gunnin’ Billy on his back, laid out on the ground with his arms out, chest heaving. Shotgun dropped and forgotten. There’s a soot-stained cinder block lying next to his ruined face. Looks like he caught the corner of it in his mouth. Tried to swallow it. His blue eyes are wide and scared and looking right through me. But he’s alive. Two pairs of boots stand around him, placed just outside an expanding puddle of frothy red mud.

“Well shit,” says somebody. “Let’s get him to the hospital.”

Then I’m back on my feet, the heat of the burning trailer curling the hairs on the back of my neck. I wipe dusty handprints on my jeans and run to catch up to Lucy and Nick. Pretend I didn’t just see that.

Lucy must see the flat look in my eyes. She grabs me by the shoulders. Pulls me in and stops me next to a trailer.

“Come up, Owen,” she says. “It’s over.”

She massages my shoulders and urges me, rhythmically repeating the words over and over. My eyes close for an instant. When they open, the world is smaller. I feel less alive, all alone without the Zenith to whisper secrets to me. I’m back.

“How’d you do that?” I ask.

“Practice,” she says, pulling me forward.

Twisting between trailers, we bang on walls and doors. Shout warnings to empty trailers and to the occasional full one. Faces peek through cloudy windows.

In one slick minute, we clear the trailers and hit the field. Breathing ragged, Lucy pushes me to keep running. Exhausted, Nick climbs onto my back. All three of us hustle for the tree line.

“Jim is gone,” I say, and I can’t meet her eye.

Lucy misses a step, stumbles, and I steady her. A breeze blows her hair in damp stripes across her forehead. Soot and sweat streak her face, but she keeps breathing through flared nostrils and trotting ahead.

“And Lyle started this. Astra wants a war. He let me go to come get you,” I say.

Lucy stops running. Looks at me with wide, honest eyes. She’s not the girl I thought I knew, but she looks just the same.

“He let you go?” she asks.

“That’s not good,” says Nick in my ear.

“I’m going to disagree,” I say.

“He means Lyle wouldn’t let you go unless he had a good reason,” says Lucy.

“Does it matter—”

A gunshot rings out before I can finish the sentence.

At the tree line, four federal agents wearing Kevlar vests over business suits step out of the brush. Guns out.

“Afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. You, sir, are under arrest for being part of the terrorist organization known as Astra. On your knees!”

And so it ends in the middle of this field. I could reactivate the Zenith and make my move, but the guns are out and I can’t risk Nick and Lucy.

So Lucy and I drop to our knees, eyes locked. I thought this woman loved me and she doesn’t. I thought we respected each other, but Lyle assigned her to me. Ever since he said those words, the betrayal has been eating me up.

“Lyle wasn’t always this way,” Lucy says. “The amp did this to him. He wasn’t good enough for it.”

This is probably the last minute I’ll have with Lucy and I don’t want to ruin it but I can’t help the way I feel. The anger bubbles up from inside. And so I blurt it out.

“Don’t pretend to care. I know Lyle gave you to me. Like a birthday present.”

Lucy doesn’t break her gaze. She considers. Blinks once.

“Lyle told me to talk to you. And I went over to Jim’s house because I was afraid of what Lyle would do to me. And to Nick. But I liked you.”

The four agents are here now. Two of them stay back, Velcroed holsters open, pistol butts peeking out. The other two agents spread out and approach, one behind each of us.

“Am I supposed to believe that?” I ask.

The closest agent steps around me. I feel cold handcuffs slide over my wrists. I’m lifted off my knees with a rough tug on my hands.

“Do you know why I liked you?” asks Lucy.

The other agent helps Lucy up, but he doesn’t cuff her. He takes Nick by the wrist. Holds him friendly but tight.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because you stood up for Nick in that field. You stood up for Eden. And none of it worked out and Eden is burned, but it doesn’t matter. You tried. You’re … good. You’re a good man.”

I try to shrug it off, but her words are warm inside me.

Lucy smiles at me through tears, and I can see traces of Lyle in her features. A glimpse of the person he might have been in a saner world. “And because you’re sort of cute,” she says.

“Because I’m cute?” I ask.

“Sort of cute,” she replies, smiling.

“This doesn’t count as our date,” I call, as my agent shoves me in the lower back. He nudges me toward an unmarked black van. Pushes me against it.

“Let me ride with them,” I say.

“You’re going to a different place than them, buddy.”

“Yeah? Where’s that?” I ask.

The voice behind me chuckles. “Elysium.”

“Lucy?” I ask, panic infecting my voice.

“Don’t worry about us,” says Lucy. “Worry about Lyle.”

The distance between us is growing. The other agent is leading them toward a car. Its black doors gape open.

“I’ll come and find you,” I say, craning to look over my shoulder.

“Owen,” shouts Nick. “Owen, wait!” The kid tries and fails to wriggle out of the agent’s grasp, twists violently, hangs by one arm with his legs sprawled out.

“Use it,” he says.

The agent lifts Nicky and tucks him under his arm. He pushes the kid inside the car. As I’m shoved into the van, I can still hear the kid’s muffled voice: “Use all of it!”