Route 666 Anthology Page 7

  When they came back they left Willy Quarto and his bike behind, and they had to carry the Kid into the Underground with a bullet in his leg. I guess he must have come within an inch of not making it back at all, and I figure one or two of the Numbers might have been better pleased if he hadn’t. Anyhow, while he was still lying unconscious on the floor Ace the Ace held a ten-second court martial, and wound up saying loud and clear that the Kid was out of the gang—that he was no longer a Low Number but a nothing: Kid Zero.

  That could have been the end of him, right there and then, because the Trapdoor Spiders sure as hell wouldn’t have been interested in recruiting a guy with a bum leg who’d just been thrown overboard by some two-bit bike gang, and any other team would have felt just the same.

  But Ace the Ace was no fool and he must have known that he wasn’t passing any death sentence. He knew that Snake Eyes would take the Kid in, and he knew that bouncing the Kid from the gang would free the Kid to be taken in. The Kid would never be a Low Number again, and that would mean that he didn’t have to keep his distance from Snake Eyes any more—though I guess you could say that she’d already brought him as much bad luck as anyone could be expected to handle, way out there on the interstate.

  Anyhow, Snake Eyes got a pork-butcher to take the bullet out of the Kid’s leg, and she laid him out in her bed until he healed. The Spiders didn’t interfere, so I guess he couldn’t have got in the way of business. Maybe she borrowed some other girl’s crib, or did it on the rug—who knows? She fed the Kid, nursed him, and gave him all the tender loving care she’d never had any use for before.

  She must have broken the news to him that he was out of the Low Numbers, but I don’t know when or how he took it. I guess she eventually got her dearest wish, too, and climbed into bed with him, but I don’t know how long it took or how much persuading he needed. All anyone knows for sure is that when the Kid began to come back into the bars and the arcades, and started working on his bike again, he certainly wasn’t giving Snake Eyes the freeze—he treated her just like she was his old lady. The Spiders were still running her, mind—he wasn’t on his way to becoming her pimp.

  The Low Numbers left the Kid pretty much alone. He was one of a pair, now—taboo. They didn’t talk to him and he didn’t try to make them. He didn’t try to get back in, and he never said a sour word about Ace the Ace or the decision to bounce him from the team. He polished his weapons regular, and though everyone knew that he could hit a target, he never looked as if he wanted to use them—not in the Underground, anyhow.

  The Kid wasn’t happy, though, and everyone knew it. He was living on someone else’s water and someone else’s food—and without a gang his chances of getting any of his own were slim. Two dozen armoured bikers can scare the hell out of most NoGo neighbourhoods, and can look pretty hairy on the open road; a lone Kid with two pistols looks like a stupe ripe for plucking. Being a successful bandit is ninety per cent image, and if you ain’t scary, you don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of making a reasonable living.

  Maybe things would have carried on as they were, though, if it hadn’t been for Snake Eyes getting sick. We could see that something was wrong with her a couple of days before she stopped cruising, because it was as if the scaly skin on her left cheek got brighter, and the patches on her legs began to grow. I heard one of the Spiders say: “Hey, Snake Eyes, you found out how to change at last?” and she said “Maybe I have,” but she didn’t say it like it was a joke, and I think she felt pretty bad about it.

  Well, this time it was the Kid’s turn to call in the pork-butcher, but he wasn’t even a real doc and he hadn’t a clue what was going on or how to stop it. He just said that whatever BioDiv had done to her to try and make her skin that way had got triggered again, and that they were the only people who might know what was going on. He suggested that the Kid call BioDiv and ask for help, but Snake Eyes didn’t want him to. I don’t think she was scared of GenTech—she was just scared they’d take her away from Kid Zero, and she’d never see him again.

  With Snake Eyes too sick to work, there was nothing the Kid could do but go out on the road. He didn’t bother to ask Ace if he could go out with the team—he just went and clipped his pistols to his bike, and set off along the road, heading toward Houston. A Spider bookie called odds of three to one that he’d never come back, but he shut up pretty quickly when Ace the Ace said he’d take it to a century.

  It turned out that Ace the Ace was no fool, either, because next morning he collected his three cees and Kid Zero made nearly as much trading packs of steroids to the Atlas Boys.

  One of the Spiders asked the Kid where he got the stuff, but the Kid just looked at him, and you could feel the frost. But he hadn’t scooped much more than that, because when he’d bought a fortnight’s food and water for two, ammo for the guns and a tankful of gas for the chopper, he only had loose change left. When he went out again, all on his own, the bookie offered evens to Ace the Ace, but the Ace wouldn’t take it.

  This time, the Kid was away nearly three days, and when he came back he was hollow-eyed and bloodstained, but he had a rifle and a lot of plastic to trade, and the hackers who bought the plastic milked it for some pretty heavy credit. All of a sudden, the Kid was getting popular. It’s not so hard to get a reputation out there, if you got a little style, and the Kid was so icy with everyone.

  Leastways, everyone except Snake Eyes.

  But Snake Eyes wasn’t getting any better. Nobody saw her but the Kid and a couple of the other girls. The girls passed the word along that the scaly patches were still growing, and were colouring so bright they seemed to be on fire. They said Snake Eyes was crazy most of the time, always muttering about curses and vampires, and that once or twice she had bitten the Kid while he was trying to keep her calm. The Kid said nothing, but we could see the teeth-marks on his hands, so we knew it was true. He didn’t die of it, though, so Snake Eyes was wrong about the change making her poisonous.

  When the time came that the Kid had to go out again, the Atlas Boys asked him if he’d care to ride along with them, with the biker escort they used to back up their heavy metal. It would have been a real freaky sight, with the Boys being so big and the Kid being so small, but he turned them down politely and said he’d rather be on his own. The Atlas Boys didn’t take offence, and when the bookie offered evens again they set up a pool and put five cees on the table.

  It was lucky for the shark that the vidraces are so crooked, because he sure as hell couldn’t have made a living backing Kid Zero to get killed. Next day, back comes the Kid, not a scratch on him, with plastic for the hackers and more steroids for the Boys, just like he’d been taking orders to go to the bar.

  When he came in, Ace the Ace clapped him on the shoulder, and said, “Way to go, Kid!” The Trip brothers, who were the ones who got him bounced from the Numbers, just looked the other way. There was a truck convoy in and a couple of the goons who were minding the drivers asked what was going on—I guess the girls beefed up the story a bit when they passed it on, and that was how the Kid first got to be notorious.

  Snake Eyes was in a pretty bad way by this time. According to the girls she couldn’t eat no more, and it was as plain as day that she was dying. They wanted to call GenTech, but they waited for the Kid’s okay, and when it came to the crunch he called them himself—he got the hackers to help him figure out who to talk to, and what to say to make them take notice.

  The BioDiv suits didn’t care about Snake Eyes, of course, but they were interested enough. When an experiment they’d written off turned out not to have been over after all they wanted to know why. They sent out a big bird just bristling with artillery, and a full squad of mercy men with enough fire power to take the whole Underground apart, but they just landed in the open well away from the trapdoors and waited for Kid Zero to bring her out. A couple of the Atlas Boys covered him with autocannons but no one had come for a party. The medics who took her off him didn’t pay any attention at all to Kid
Zero—no more than if he’d been a sandfly.

  The bird took Snake Eyes away. Nobody expected to see her again, but the Kid tried to call her, that night and every night. For a week he kept getting taped messages telling him there was no change, and after that they substituted another, saying that she was dead. The Kid didn’t seem surprised, and on the outside he didn’t even look as if he cared that much. Ice through and through. But we weren’t fooled, because by this time we knew the Kid, and we knew that he wasn’t a nothing.

  He came back to the Underground maybe three or four times more. After that, the place was too hot for him. The Underground is a friendly place, where Ops and teams don’t bother one another and the convoys come in and out real smooth. The Spiders like it that way, and no one wants to change it. When a guy gets a price on his head like the one Kid Zero has, keeping the peace becomes a problem. It wasn’t just him, see, because if anyone had gone for him you can bet your pecker that the Atlas Boys and Ace the Ace—and maybe even the last of the Trip brothers—would have done their best to take the bastards out, and the Spiders would have stood back and let them do it. It would have been the end of the Underground, and the Kid wouldn’t have liked to feel responsible for something like that, so he stayed away.

  I don’t know what his score is now. At least three wrappers, one big bird, who knows how many stiffs? GenTech, every single one. Mind you, he just blows the mothers up and plucks what he can from the wreckage. He’s not what you might call a delicate operator—not any more. But he ain’t in it for the profit, because he ain’t like the guys he’s out to get. With him, it’s a real vendetta.

  It isn’t that he thinks they killed Snake Eyes, you understand. He knows as well as anyone that they’d have kept her alive if they could. But he also knows that they made her what she was in the first place, and cursed her with that luckless number.

  If they’d been able to cure her when he turned her in, and make her back into a human being, it would have been different… but how do you think Kid Zero feels when he watches the vid and sees the ads offering rich freaks the chance to have any kind of skin they want, satisfaction guaranteed? BioDiv cracked the problems in the end, and worked out where they’d gone wrong-maybe getting Snake Eyes back helped them do it. The Kid just wants them to pay the proper price for the help they had, in his way of figuring. Snake Eyes was a whore, after all, and they shouldn’t have expected her to do the job for free.

  If you happen to run into the Kid someday you needn’t run scared. He’s got no quarrel with neutrals. But don’t be tempted by that bounty on his head, because when he shoots at a target, he doesn’t miss.

  And don’t you get too close to him, either—because that big pet rattier he calls his old lady ain’t anywhere near as discriminating as he is, and believe me, she is poison!

  Ghost Town

  by Neil Jones

  Through the windshield of his interceptor, Byron Shaw was looking down the arrow-straight expanse of the interstate highway. To either side, sandside desolation whipped past in a yellow-brown blur. And straight ahead, rising vertically into the sun-bleached sky, were three dark columns of smoke: three burning trucks out of a gutted Transcon convoy.

  Eating kilometres now. The green-and-gold Machete riding the highway as if evolution rather than engineering had designed it that way. Speedo reading a cool cruising eighty. The dash assured Byron that all the Machete’s systems were functioning normally. But most of all it was the sweet, steady hum of the engine sound in his ears, the feel of the car through the wheel gripped in his hands, that told him his Machete was running smooth and true.

  Only minutes away from combat. Byron released the safeties on his two wing-mounted 6mm machine guns.

  Rearview showed the two other interceptors cruising in his wake. Immediately behind was the coal-black outline of Erika Graf’s GM Cobra, and behind that Chet Kincaid’s rainbow-gaudy G-Mek. Three Sanctioned Operatives, strung out in a line as neat as three barbs on a length of steel wire.

  The corn-panel on the dash crackled into life. A hard, suspicious voice said, “Hey, you out there. Identify yourselves.”

  Reaching forward, Byron punched the transmit tab, wishing again that it had been Erika Graf who had drawn the high card for lead interceptor; Erika—with the cool easy line in words—who had to answer for them. “Name’s Blade. Willie Blade.”

  “Blade, huh. I never heard of you.”

  “No?” drawled Byron, nothing in his voice to show his life might depend on this conversation. The name was real enough, a Renegade they’d totalled earlier that day. But the Sand Sharks were a new force out sandside, a Renegade alliance that was growing every day. And the Ops were gambling that new recruits had been joining—and sometimes drifting away again—too fast to make it easy to keep track of names and vehicles.

  “No,” the Renegade said. “And my scan-screen shows three of you, Blade.”

  The turreted outline of the first of the monster trucks was just visible at the limit of vision, lying just off the road like a beached dinosaur of the oil age. Around it, sandside sunlight was glinting off the silver-grey paintwork of Sand Shark vehicles.

  The Sharks were all stationary. No sign yet that they were spooked.

  Byron said, “I got me two partners riding my tail. The three of us—we’re Sharks, same as you. Code of the day is Hammerhead. Say again, Hammerhead.”

  The code, like the name, had come out of a dawn dogfight with a pair of Sand Sharks who’d been loose-lipped on the com. It was what was making this run possible, three Ops driving head-on towards more than ten times that number of Renegades.

  “Heard you the first time, Blade.” The Renegade’s voice was still full of suspicion. “But—first you gotta pull in and let someone look you over.”

  “What the—”

  “Orders. From the Sand King.”

  Byron felt the sweat start out on his forehead. On the way here, responding to the emergency call from the convoy, fresh from their encounter with the late Willie Blade, it had looked a risk worth taking. There was no way the Sand Sharks would be expecting them. After all, how could any Ops get out here so quickly—so deep into sandside, as far from any Policed Zone as it was possible to be?

  The three of them had agreed—a head-on raid. If they caught the Sharks with their engines off, shot them to hell-and-gone before they could get their butts behind the wheel, then Transcon Corporation would owe them a bonus big enough to buy them each their own little corner of a PZ.

  The down side was that if the Sharks tumbled to what was coming in at them down the interstate, then all bets got slammed hard into reverse. The three Ops would find themselves driving straight into the next life.

  “Now listen up, turret-head. If you can’t handle this just haul your ass off the com and put the Sand King himself on. He knows me. Knows my name is good. Tell him it’s Willie Blade, hear?”

  “No way, Blade. He’s off down the other end of the line.”

  Byron swore. “Then go find someone else. Somebody with more than muscles in his skull. We’ve done some hard driving and some hard fighting. Want to relax. And we got our share to collect. Before those trucks get picked clean.”

  The first truck was clearly visible now. And another close behind it, rolled over onto its side.

  “I’m telling you, Blade—there ain’t nobody up this end of the line. You gotta pull up or—”

  “All right, all right,” Byron said, putting disgust into his voice. “We’re braking. See?” He gave the Machete full throttle, felt it surge forward. The V–12 engine thrummed.

  Wrecked trucks were strung out domino fashion on either side of the highway. Spread around them were groups of Renegades, arms around each other, beer cans raised to their mouths, grinning as if they were at the Transcon office party.

  Cars stood empty; bikes lay flat on the sand.

  “Blade! What the hell-”

  Byron switched frequencies, “Erika, Chet. Let’s wipe the sand with the sucke
rs.”

  Erika Graf’s Cobra slid into position to the left of the Machete and Chet Kincaid’s G-Mek took up the covering position.

  Faces turned as the three interceptors roared towards them. Grins froze as the Ops spread themselves across the highway. Byron had a instant-image of eyeballs about to come out on stalks, as realization set in and first amazement and then fear tried to find time enough to smear itself across grimy sun-burned faces.

  Ops. Three of them. Weapons primed, screaming straight towards them. Vengeance—a Transcon Corporation vengeance—suddenly crackling in the dry desert air like static on an dead corn-channel.

  Byron shifted the Machete right to put a Renegade car in his sights, thumbed the stud on his wing-mounted machine guns. Twin lines of bullets chewed across the Renegade’s side, found the open door and ripped the dash apart, then shredded the cabin as if it were made of cellophane.

  A shout from the com: “Got me a Sand Shark!” Chet Kincaid. Good behind a wheel; even better with weapons; and best of all at letting everyone around know it.

  Byron was filling his sights with another Renegade. This time he caught the gas tank; the vehicle went up in a cloud of flame as the Machete went past. So far the trade-off all three Ops had made—limiting the weapons their interceptors carried to gain extra speed and manoeuvrability—was working out fine.

  The Renegades were scattering, half of them desperately trying to get to their vehicles, the other half running for the desert. The three Ops went on down the highway, hitting one sitting target after another, the cameras synched with their weapons recording their kills. Chet called out happily, “Better’n Christmas.”

  All down the line, Byron was looking for the leader—the ex-loner with a reputation formidable enough to get the alliance started, the so-called Sand King. Get him and the Sand Sharks would fall apart—and the three Ops could head back to Denver PZ to collect from a grateful Transcon.