The leaning towers of New Orleans climbed steadily on the horizon until they were spears of concrete and steel stuck deep in the bleeding sky. Shards of glass jutted out from shattered window frames. Rubble and ash choked the downtown streets so tight that the 4×4 only squeezed through by scraping its mirrors. However, even these vast piles of debris didn’t stop the bitter cold breeze moaning through the streets, and Gina shuddered in her hazard suit.
The holographic Thunder Tours logo on her chest spun its monster-truck tires. It sent up a spray of brown mud and scraggly vegetation behind it, but that was wrong. The city around her didn’t look like that. The ground wasn’t brown from exposed earth, or even yellow with dead grass. It was grey. Grey asphalt covered by pallid bayou sludge. Bare steel stripped of all marking or colour. A sky that smothered and starved the light. Everything was made vague and unreal through a haze of swirling dust, thrown up by the directionless gusts of wind.
Evidently some people still visited the dead city, going by the narrow but well-worn track through the devastation, but nobody seemed to be around at the moment.
“Lotta radiation out there today, chief,” said the driver. “Wind’s stirring up all the fallout. You sure you wanna go?”
“We gotta,” Bomber replied with characteristic steadfastness.
“Alright, you’re the customer.” He shrugged as if to wash his hands of the whole thing. Then, rummaging around in his car door, he pulled out a handheld games console in anticipation of a couple hours’ free time. “I’ll warm up the Dekes for when you get back.”
Bomber failed to find the remark amusing. The 4×4 came with a sophisticated suite of decontamination bots, but it took them a while to get all the radioactive crap off. Neither Bomber nor Gina felt much like spending all night deking in their suits.
The rear doors swung open and Bomber climbed down into a large transparent parachute, loose plastic flapping like mad in the wind. It kept an airtight seal around the 4×4 while they disembarked. Didn’t make it any less of a pain in the ass, though. Gina held the rampaging plastic back with her hands and hopped down to join Bomber on the ground of Radiation Alley. The doors immediately closed behind her. Having finished its job, the parachute ripped free of the 4×4 and flew off into the sky, never to be seen again.
She got her first close-up and personal look of New Orleans in that moment. Dry, brittle, dead. Nothing green, nothing alive or moving with a purpose. The sheer desolation of it struck her harder than watching out a window ever could. She’d never realised how much she missed the extrasensory white noise of a couple thousand minds around her, even just animals.
Skeletal skyscrapers towered over her, one even swaying visibly in the wind. Many had whole chunks taken out of them by the explosion, their spires and top few floors lying in ruin some distance away. She swallowed a wave of vertigo and nausea at the sight. It was all too reminiscent of the images from Gabriel’s head.
Very little had survived in between the dead landmarks. Just a blasted urban landscape of piled bricks, broken glass and other refuse, where even the ground had gone black. Only stone and metal still stood in recognisable shapes. The thermal pulse of the nuke had turned every timber building in New Orleans to ash in an instant.
Nothing could be weirder than the constant force of the wind trying to knock her down, but not being able to feel the air flowing over her skin. There was no air flow inside her man-shaped shell of plastic and metal, ’cause this was a proper heavy-duty hazard suit, a far cry from the piddly UV-sleeves worn by people in Austin. Gina appreciated the protection, but still longed for a taste of air that hadn’t been filtered a thousand times over.
“We’re pretty close to the address, just a short walk,” said Bomber. “Keep an eye on your Geiger counter.”
“Yeah, thanks.” Gina checked the counter on her arm. It was definitely twitching, with leftover fallout in the air and ground zero only a mile or two away. She took Bomber’s gloved hand and they walked side by side into the ruins.
Despite the dismal surroundings, their morale climbed steadily with a growing sense of adventure and anticipation. Even Bomber let himself get dragged into some idle banter. When Gina looked back the 4×4 was lost in the haze, but she could just make out the flashing of the massive strobe light mounted on its roof. Still there.
“Kind of romantic, don’t you think?” Bomber asked her, the corner of his mouth curling up into a half-smile. “Ain’t no place in the world more private than this. No people, no bugs, no radio. I could get used to it.”
“In a morbid sort of way,” she chuckled. “I feel like a fuckin’ Martian in this spacesuit.”
He grinned. “If only you had your explosive space modulator with you.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Take a left here.” He squeezed her hand more tightly, leading her through a half-collapsed alleyway. They had to climb over the piles of broken glass and wood. Everything was charred around the edges, but sometimes you could still recognise an item — a desk, a kettle, an old office printer. Bomber paused at the top of the pile and glanced upwards at the dust-shrouded edges of the square tower up ahead. “Now, if my sources are any good, the lab should be in the sub-basement of this big one up ahead. It was a converted fallout bunker, so it should still be standing.”
Without another word they climbed into the twisted steel skeleton of a building, searching for the elevator going down. It didn’t take them long to find it.
“This brings back memories,” Gina said wryly as they clambered down the enclosed elevator shaft. It was a lot like creeping and crawling through the Fed building, although somewhat less intimidating without the Feds and the gunfire. The rusted-over elevator carriage sat on its emergency brakes about halfway up the tunnel, immovable, its cable snapped long ago. Fortunately the designers had left a vacancy for the emergency ladder and average-sized climber, just big enough for Gina and Bomber to squeeze through.
“You should’ve watched the news before we left,” he answered. “Not a whisper about us. Any of us. The Feds are keepin’ it real quiet.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Could go either way. It does mean we haven’t got a pack of full constables with hunter-killers up our asses just yet, though, and I consider that pretty encouraging.”
He jumped down onto the shaft floor, surprisingly clear of debris, and sized up the service entrance as he took the hydraulic prybar from his tool belt. It proved more than a match for the rusted steel door. With a snap and a moan of tearing metal it broke free of its hinges and crashed to the floor.
“After you, madam,” invited Bomber. Gina mimed a curtsey and went on inside, head held high.
She slowed her pace to admire the pitch-black vastness on the other side. Her footsteps echoed against the concrete floor like drops of water falling into an underground lake. Bit by bit she pieced together the scenery by the light of her suit torch. It was an underground warehouse, cavernous in its proportions, and equipped with every imaginable piece of kit. Pallets of mysterious goods, forklift walkers, magnetic sleds for heavy equipment. The cracked roof seemed to be held up solely by rows of heavy-duty racking. An avalanche of rubble had spewed out from the main stairwell, firmly blocking off that direction. At the far end of the room a massive military freight elevator sat ready to collect more cargo from the surface.
“Jesus Christ,” she whispered. “I thought this place was a fallout shelter?”
“Well, there’s fallout shelters and there’s fallout shelters,” said Bomber. “This hasn’t been one for a while. Plus, New Orleans took a big hit. Walk a couple hundred yards towards ground zero and all you’ll see is crater.”
“Okay, so how the hell do we get up there?” She pointed at the ruined ceiling to indicate the futility of their situation. It had all but separated into individual chunks of concrete, leaving cracks big enough to drive a truck through.
“You just answered your own question.” Bomber placed one foot on the racking to test it for stability, then started to haul himself up one shelf at a time. He grinned down at her. “Obviously you were never in the Army.”
“Wiseass,” she growled and followed after.
Sweat poured from Gina’s forehead by the time she made it over the top. It ran into her eyes and stung like a bitch, but she couldn’t wipe it away. She muttered curses and imprecations at everything while Bomber helped her up.
The lab could’ve passed for a set from any old science-fiction film. Beakers, burners, computers and other electronics littered everywhere. Fallen file cabinets created impromptu bridges across the gaps in the floor, and a few upturned office chairs brightened the whole scene up a bit. Gina turned to take in the rest of the room, and found herself face to face with a grinning human skull. She shrieked and jumped back into Bomber’s arms. The skull didn’t move. Underneath it, she realised, was a skeleton dressed in a tattered white coat, slumped deep in its plush office chair. A large hole in the side of its head explained a lot about what had killed it.
“That,” she panted through gritted teeth, blood pumping cold through her veins, “is going to give me nightmares for the rest of my fucking life.”
Bomber put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged him off. He said, “Come on, easy does it. We knew we were gonna see this.”
“You knew, maybe,” she snapped. Then, with an effort of will, she forced herself to calm down and took a deep breath. Adrenaline still thundered through her veins, but now she could control it. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I’ve just never seen a skeleton before.”
“It’s not somethin’ I’d recommend.” He gently turned the chair around until it was facing away from them. “We don’t disturb him, he doesn’t disturb us, yeah?” Gina nodded, and they got back to business.
Bomber carefully waved around a gadget from his tool belt, like an old mobile phone, then stared at the flashing screen. After several endless seconds of silence, he deigned to inform Gina. “I’m pickin’ up trace bots in the air, but they don’t look like the ones we’re after. Let’s check the other rooms.”
Picking their way through the devastation, they found remnants of computers and shredded sheets of hardcopy, but nothing that would explain the lab’s projects or operations. In the corner they came across another skeleton half-buried under a fallen chunk of concrete, and Gina hurried to get away from it, almost falling over herself to get into the next room.
She stopped dead in her tracks at the doorway. After several speechless seconds, she said, “Bomber, come look at this.”
Bomber arrived at her shoulder a second later and scanned the room beyond. It hadn’t exactly been repaired, but somebody had obviously cleaned up a bit after the blast. Much of the debris had been cleared, and the cracks covered with salvaged boards and wire mesh stapled into the floor. A pile of lab coats had been arranged in one corner to create a makeshift cot, then surrounded with a curtain of rad-resistant plastic. A single ratty office chair sat decaying in the centre of the room, in front of a dust-covered counter with an old laptop computer on top of it.
“Was it him?” he asked her.
“Let’s find out,” she whispered back and folded open the laptop lid.
The screen flickered to life with an accompanying orchestra of whirring and grinding noises. Tiny lasers cut through the thick layers of dust, accessing data that had lain dormant for ten years. A small unmarked optical disc ejected out the side of the machine, scratched and battered but possibly still viable. The screen flashed a message that the laptop’s optical drive was not responding, and that Gina and Bomber should contact the manufacturer as soon as possible with their warranty information.
Bomber pocketed the disc and eased himself into the rickety chair to better reach the keyboard. “With any luck . . .” he said, crossing his fingers and waiting for the laptop’s operating system to start up.
“Looks like it still works,” Gina said expectantly.
“It’s a model like what landscape surveyors used to use, out in the real boonies. Antarctica and all that. Tough machinery.”
Little motes of dust played through the air in front of the screen. Breath heavy with anticipation, Gina felt the cold suit weighing on her chest. Finally the laptop’s software lurched over its final hurdle and became responsive to the controls. Bomber made a noise and immediately went for the only icon Gina didn’t recognise.
The screen popped up a thorough cross-section of a complex nanobot, exactly the same as the ones from Gabriel’s container. That’s when she knew it had to have been him. He’d been here, ten years ago, tapping away in secret in the heart of Radiation Alley. Nothing, no one else knowing he was there.
“He was analysin’ these bots,” Bomber whispered to himself. “Tryin’ to learn more about them. Why? Where are they from?”
Gina had another question on her mind, scratching the back of her helmet. “How the hell did he survive here?”
Bomber didn’t respond. He was totally engrossed, absorbing every available piece of data from the screen, until a momentary vibration came up through the floor. He sat bolt upright in his chair, silent as if trying to decide whether or not what he’d felt was real.
A second tremor broke his indecision. A cloud of plaster dust drifted down from the ceiling to clog up their visors, and he leapt to his feet.
“We’d better get out of here,” he said. He took Gina’s arm and started to drag her with him back the way they’d come in.
“What about the computer?” she protested.
“No time! This whole goddamn building could come down on our heads!” And indeed, the moment he finished his sentence, a third tremor rocked through the building, shaking piles of debris that hadn’t moved since the nuke. Whole islands of matter shifted clattering and banging down the cracks in the floor, and landed with a series of unholy crashes louder than a machine gun. Gina and Bomber scrambled up a lab counter to escape the avalanche and hurried across the devastation to their climbing slope.
They clambered down as fast as they could, small bits and pieces continually falling on their heads and threatening to knock loose their precarious hold on the metal racking. Ominous creaks and groans reverberated through the whole building. At one point Gina heard a shifting sound, deeper and larger than anything she’d ever experienced, and saw the remains of the concrete ceiling cracking bit by bit while she watched.
Hitting the floor at a run, they sped towards the elevator shaft through which they’d come in. They’d nearly reached it when a pile of stone and metal came crashing to the bottom of the shaft with enough force to throw Gina and Bomber onto their backs like upended turtles. Bomber seemed momentarily stunned, but Gina was already moving again, fuelled by survival instincts kicking into overdrive. She rolled onto her side, pushed herself back upright, and bolted for the freight elevator.
“Hey, wait up!” Bomber called after her. She never heard him. Her hands were on the control box, pressing frantically, but the elevator refused to rise. Barely thinking she followed the wires from the control box to the wall. There she found a pair of large switches, one marked ‘mains power’, the other ‘generator’. She flipped the ‘generator’ switch and staggered back, blinded by a sudden blaze of light. Every surviving lamp in the warehouse came on at once. The freight elevator, too, started to go — she ran for it and scrambled on just in time.
Bomber, however, was too late. He limped towards her waving and calling her name, but she couldn’t figure out how to stop the elevator. She went flat on her belly and extended her arm over the edge, shouting, “Hurry, jump!”
He hurried, and he jumped, reaching for her hand. Missed by inches. Dropped to the floor with a heavy thump. Disappeared out of sight as the elevator rose up through the shaft, open sky above it.
Her fists pounded uselessly against the cold metal floor. It only echoed each hit back to her, added to the rumbling and shaking of the elevator and the whole building itself. “Gina to Bomber!” she shouted into the radio. Her heart thumped close to panic. Her breath came in frustrated gasps, steaming up her helmet visor. “Bomber! Answer me, damnit!” Still no response. She screamed in wordless fury, then flipped open the radio controls on her wrist and tried to remember the brief bit of training she’d had about using it.
“Gina to base, Gina to base, come in base,” she repeated. “Emergency! Come in, base!”
Nothing but static on the other side.
Another tremor rumbled through the foundations. Gina could feel it shake the elevator platform like a toy despite the massive suspension blocks underneath. She grabbed hold of a railing and held on for dear life, praying for the elevator to keep going, to make it to the surface. Not until she saw daylight on her closed eyelids did she release her death grip, and she scrambled off the elevator platform just before it reached its apex.
She found herself in a long-abandoned warehouse, utterly ravaged by time and nuclear fire. Only the walls were left standing; Gina had to clamber over the remains of the ceiling to get anywhere. It was a long, difficult trek to the nearest exit, and with a rising sense of hopelessness she realised that she couldn’t tell where they’d left the 4×4.
Dispirited, she set her overworked body down on a piece of concrete and drank from her suit’s water pouch. It was flat and tasteless but refreshing nonetheless. She was just putting the drinking tube away when she felt another tremor, this one much closer and more powerful than before. A faint flash of yellow light penetrated the fog. It confirmed her dreadful suspicion that this was no mere earthquake.
Somewhere behind her, the building above the lab lurched and started to topple. It crashed into the ground like a hammer-blow, the very earth shaking under Gina’s feet, and sent up a huge plume of dust and sand to choke any remaining visibility out of the air. The walls snapped like playing cards bent in half. A hail of concrete shards rained down around Gina, but she never bothered to take cover. To her overloaded senses everything seemed to move in slow motion, detached from her reality. She watched transfixed while the nightmare unfolded.
Their 4×4 shot out of the mist and raced past her at full speed, jumping metres into the air wherever it met an obstacle, only to land heavily on its tires and continue accelerating. It got less than a hundred yards before a missile streaked out of the haze and hit dead-on. She could feel the heat of the explosion washing over her through all the thick layers of insulation. A large black helicopter roared into view overhead, appearing out of nowhere like a vengeful ghost, and turned around its axis above the wreckage.
The smouldering 4×4 was now only one of hundreds of dead hulks littering the once-busy street. Powerful spotlights searched it for any remaining sign of life, and when they didn’t find anything they started a careful sweep of the surrounding area in case anyone still survived.
The whole thing seemed too surreal to be true as she stood there. In a few seconds she’d be seen, said a voice in the back of her head, but that didn’t seem to matter very much now. What mattered was that she was truly, utterly alone.
Then something tackled her from behind and dragged her out of sight behind a tumbledown concrete wall.
“Stay down!” cried Bomber’s voice, very faint as if coming from a great distance. “Whatever you do, don’t move!” The weight on top of her was almost unbearable, but she kept still even when she felt a hand fumbling around on her back, followed by a ripping sensation as the radio was torn out of her suit. Moments later, she watched two lashed-together radio units sailing through the air, crashing against the rubble on the other side of the street.
The helicopter’s side doors whipped open. Several men abseiled through the whirlwind of dust and sand, wearing active camouflage suits and carrying automatic rifles. The active camouflage was the same colour as the desert around it, constantly shifting to adapt to the wind and surroundings. As soon as they hit the ground they were practically invisible. Then, to Gina’s amazement, they rushed straight towards the pair of smashed-up radios on the far end of the road.
Gentle hands rolled Gina over onto her back, and Bomber’s face appeared above her. She immediately grabbed him and tried to kiss him, but only succeeded at slamming her helmet into his. He laughed without sound, then touched his helmet to hers.
“Radios are about to get blowed up, so we have to touch helmets to talk,” he explained in a breathless voice. “Stay close. We need to get some distance between us and them.”
“Who the fuck are they?” she asked, the most pressing question out of the hundreds spinning around in her head.
“Most likely our friend Gabriel sussed out what we were up to.” Bomber glanced over his shoulder at the men, mere shadows flitting through the dust storm. “They’re bad news. I could take down three, maybe four, but they’d get me in the end. And now we’ve got no wheels.”
Gina’s throat tightened. The matter-of-fact way in which Bomber talked of his own death was chilling. She husked, “What do we do?”
“When I find out, I’ll let you know,” he said and pulled Gina along in a tiger crawl through the wreckage of the city. They moved from cover to cover at a knee-breaking pace, and quickly lost sight of the soldiers hunting them.
Once they reached a slightly safer hiding place, something with four walls and a blackened piece of corrugated aluminium for a roof. As soon as they were covered, they touched helmets and Gina immediately blurted out a stream of questions without pausing for breath.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said, “one at a time, please!”
She insisted, “How? How are you alive?”
“I nearly wasn’t. Had to climb.” He smiled at her expression, as if he’d just claimed he grew broccoli from his armpits. “Never mind. Look, we need to focus on getting out of here, yeah? The getting out’s not a big problem, but staying alive long enough to make it back to Jericho, that’s a challenge.”
Gina eventually snapped out of her shock and remarked, “It’s the challenges that make life interesting, right?”
“You got it,” he said, and led her to the next building.
They flitted through the city like ghosts, only ever half-seen in the mist, fast and elusive. They crossed paths with the camouflaged men only once, when they had to backtrack around a dead end. Bomber managed to spot them before they saw him and left a misleading trail for them to follow.
Once they were sure they’d left their new friends behind, they started plundering the long-abandoned car parks of New Orleans for a set of wheels that could see them through to Jericho. They didn’t have much luck. The only four wheel drives they found were all smashed up by falling debris, slagged by the thermal pulse, or just fried from EMP to the point of refusing to start.
“All choked up, too much dust,” said Bomber, closing the bonnet on another specimen that had looked okay on the outside. “We need an older model, they don’t get clogged so bad.” Then he shrugged his shoulders and headed for the next one. He always kept going, even in the face of impossible odds, without surrendering to despair even for a moment. Gina watched him start work on another engine and decided she admired that about him. Things like that took a special kind of courage, above and beyond just keeping your head when you’re in trouble. ‘Intestinal fortitude’, her father used to call it.
Gina was acting as a sort of lookout while he fiddled about with the cars, trying to home in on the distant flickers of thought that reached her on the wind, and trying not to reflect on the fact that she could do that without Spice now. Still, she couldn’t help but wonder what her life would’ve been like if she’d never met Gabriel. He’d changed something inside her. Something weird and scary and darkly wonderful. Was it an accident, just some freak of nature, or a gift?
Lost in thought, she didn’t notice Bomber jumping about behind her until she glanced over her shoulder to check he was still there. Gina watched flabbergasted, wondering what could make Bomber leap and frolic and flail his arms about like a madman. Then she noticed the black smoke pouring out the exhaust of the old Suzuki SUV in front of him, the dust stirring up around its trembling wheels. “You didn’t!” she exclaimed. He couldn’t hear her, of course, so she ran down the slope onto the dust-covered tarmac of the car park and grabbed him.
“You didn’t,” she repeated. Her stomach was going giddy with elation.
“She’s running!” Bomber laughed. “She’s got gas, and she’s running!”
Gina squealed and clapped her hands. With childlike eagerness she pulled open the driver-side door and tumbled inside, waving at Bomber to hurry up and join her. He leaped into the passenger seat and fastened his seatbelt just in time. Gina slammed her foot down and rocketed off.
“Do you know how to drive a car?” Bomber asked her, struggling to keep their helmets together.
“No!” she said and drove straight through the rusty wrought-iron gate guarding the car park. The gate went flying and Gina swerved freely through the broken streets of New Orleans.
They soon pulled over, just short of crashing into a lamp post, and switched drivers. Gina grinned sheepishly at Bomber as he got the SUV moving again. “I’d never actually driven before. Never needed to. Wanted to give it a try, y’know, in case I wouldn’t get another chance.”
“You’ll give a guy a heart attack,” muttered Bomber. He gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. “There ain’t a lot of things in this world can scare me, but your drivin’ . . .”
“What, worse than the people with the chopper and the guns?”
“Worse than them.”
Gina thought for a second. “Worse than Gabriel?”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were blank, focusing only on the road. Then, “About as much as getting left behind in a collapsing building.” The silence after that was deafening. Even the ancient, sputtering engine didn’t seem to make any noise. Bomber took a deep breath and continued, “There’s some things you don’t know about me, Gina. Stuff you’re probably better off not knowin’. How I got out of that place . . .” He hesitated. “Look, I don’t blame you for panickin’ back there. I might’ve done the same in your shoes. I just need you to understand. You probably already guessed some ways back that I’m boosted up to the gills. That ain’t the whole truth, though. It doesn’t go far enough.”
She let him speak, and after a long pause he picked up again. “I got more implants in me than most people have shirts. Some show up on scanners, others . . . don’t. A couple only kick in when I’m driving or flying something. I couldn’t tell you what they all do, I don’t know.” He took in another lungful of air. “You saw the Emperor in action. Even he was afraid of what I can do. Like surviving a punctured lung without medical attention, or climbing twenty metres up a smooth elevator shaft with my bare hands. If you looked, you’d find finger-holes in the wall. Solid concrete. Broke every bone in my hands, but I never felt a thing. They’ve already set themselves.”
“Jesus,” breathed Gina, staring at him in shock. Even she had never suspected Bomber’s mods went so far.
“Not quite,” he said, chuckling darkly. “But see, when I say that Gabriel frightens the living shit out of me, I want you to understand my full meaning.”
“Why?”
“Because of what you’ve told me. Because what he does ain’t subject to the same laws as us. It’s got no nice clear boundary lines like physics, E equals MC square. I don’t know where his power begins or where it stops, and I don’t know what he could do to me if he ever got the chance.”
The jeep seemed to swerve without Bomber touching the wheel. Gina sat straight up and blurted, “What was that?” Then she looked out the passenger window and saw the black helicopter half-hidden in a whirlwind of dust, circling around to get the car into its sights.
Her head smashed into the headrest as the car lurched forward, knocking the sense out of her, acceleration pinning her to her chair. She could only watch the copter fall into place behind them, swerving from left to right but never far behind. Sound like peas rattling around in a tin can. The already-cracked rear window shattered into a million pieces when a hail of bullets tore through it.
She tried to speak but failed to make any coherent sound. Then everything went black.
She remembered falling. Weightlessness, her body pulled in more than one direction. Impact. Arms dragging her through the dirt. Terrible winds buffeting them about, the helicopter only metres behind them.
Clarity returned slowly while she lay on the radioactive soil. Things had happened so quickly. Bomber had said something to her, then aimed the car at the dead husk of a nearby tree and piled on the acceleration. Pulled her out of the jeep moments before it crashed. All throughout, bullets rained down randomly around them, their bodies invisible in the whirling vortex of fallout dust. The helicopter’s own downdraft had blinded all its trillion-dollar cameras and electronics.
The gunmen in camouflage wasted no time. They didn’t even bother with rappels, they simply jumped the four metres from copter to ground, and landed with impeccable grace. The leader flashed some half-concealed hand signals. Four of the gunmen broke off to investigate the car wreck, the others set up a secure perimeter.
Gina stirred with fear, watching them, but Bomber held her down and made soothing noises. “Easy, girl. Just lie still and be quiet. Got a surprise for ’em, I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the blasted ground, covered with rocks and rubble and the remnants of abandoned cars that had tried to flee the nukes and failed. The gunmen moved like lightning, dust clouds rising wherever their feet touched ground, the only real trace of their movements. The four by the car approached cautiously, checking for survivors. They obviously didn’t expect what came next.
A fireball mushroomed high into the sky where the car had been. The helicopter swerved wildly out of its path, and the group sweeping the area all turned to look, gobsmacked. That’s when Bomber appeared from hiding and grabbed the nearest one.
The man’s head turned an impossible angle with a short sharp twist of Bomber’s wrists. His rifle was in Bomber’s hands before he even hit the floor, and before the others could turn around to see about the noise. Two more flew backwards, their bodies torn to pieces by automatic fire. Only the leader remained standing, and now he had Bomber in his sights.
In the span it took to pull the trigger, Bomber had already started moving again. Bullets ripped up the ground in his wake as he jumped and vanished back into the broken land. The leader wasted a few moments trying to reacquire his target, then turned back to check on his men caught in the explosion.
Gina couldn’t see where Bomber had gone. She just watched the rest of the proceedings in horrified fascination.
One of the remaining gunmen was dead, one wounded, but the other two joined their leader in the hunt for Bomber. Their bodies almost shook from their pumped-up metabolisms. They fired at every hint of movement, one taking the shot and the others watching the rest of the area for an ambush. Gina could tell they were heavily boosted by the way they moved, the more-than-human fluidity and grace in their steps, gliding across the battlefield. Then Gina spotted Bomber again, half-hidden behind a rock only a few metres away from the gunmen. They were headed straight for him.
Too late for her to do anything now. The gunmen circled round and closed the trap, Bomber caught in the middle of a perfect triangle. He could do nothing except stay absolutely still and hope they didn’t notice him. A futile hope. They already had, and were closing in on him.
Then suddenly another Bomber appeared from behind the leader, stark naked, and cut the man’s throat with his own combat knife. His weapon shot a long string of bullets uselessly into the sky as his dying body slumped to the ground. The other gunmen fell a heartbeat later, one bullet in the head, one in the heart.
Bomber’s eyes met Gina’s for a brief moment, and she saw nothing good there, no sense of victory or achievement. Carefully, almost sadly, he put his suit back on piece by piece. The helicopter meanwhile beat a hasty retreat without so much as an attempt to salvage the bodies.
At last Gina felt strong enough to stand, and she climbed unsteadily to her feet, staggering over to Bomber’s position in a daze. She sank to the ground next to him and touched her helmet to his.
“That was . . .” she began, but couldn’t find the words to express it.
“Necessary,” he finished for her. “One of ’em is still alive. What do you say we go and interrogate him?”
Gina nodded. Bomber helped her to her feet, and the two of them walked towards the wounded man, twitching and bleeding on the ground. He had a large chunk of car lodged in his stomach, quite fatal without immediate medical attention. Bomber went down on his knee and pulled him up in a crushing choke hold, keeping both the man’s arms pinned under his knees, then touched helmets to speak with him. Gina leaned in so she could hear as well. She was greeted by the sick, breathless moaning of the wounded gunman.
“Time to talk, boy,” Bomber spat at him. “Who’re you workin’ for?”
The man wheezed, and Gina couldn’t help but look when one of his arms spasmed. The hand at the end of it held a small grenade hidden from Bomber’s view, fingers working weakly at the pin. She jerked backwards and shouted a warning at Bomber — then realised he couldn’t hear her. The struggling fingers finally found a purchase on the pin and started to pull, and there was nothing she could do in time to affect the outcome.
Suddenly the man’s chest erupted in blood. A jagged line of bullet holes punched into his body in quick succession, shaking him like a rag doll.
Bomber leaped away from the already-dead body in a panic. The power of his emotions exploded into Gina without warning. She didn’t know why, but she could feel his heart pounding in his throat, could see through his eyes and hear through his ears, his liberated gun searching for targets.
Short, single tap of a rifle muzzle pressed against his helmet. Out of nowhere a voice said, “Hands up, soldier. No sudden movements.”
Bomber obviously considered disregarding that suggestion, but changed his mind when he saw other armed ghosts in camouflage appearing out of the air. Instead he calmly raised his arms to the sky. They didn’t look like the same people to Gina; their equipment was different from the gunmen, shinier and more advanced, like Fed technology.
“Don’t move a muscle unless I tell you,” said the voice, definitely a woman, soft-spoken but with an iron sense of command. “Put your weapons down on the ground one by one.”
“Look, lady, you don’t know what you’re dealin’ with–“
“We know exactly who you are, Grendel. Do what you’re told before I have to end you right here.”
The name ‘Grendel’ was like an electric shock to Bomber’s body. He twitched, every muscle clenched at once, and froze in place. Then he pulled out the pistol from his suit pocket and placed it on the ground next to his liberated assault rifle.
“Is that it?” the woman asked.
“Yeah,” said Bomber.
“Just two? Hard to believe,” she moved around a bit to study his face, “but I think you’re actually telling me the truth.” She gestured at two of her men, who moved forward to grab Bomber’s arms. They twisted his hands behind his back and slapped a heavy pair of cuffs on his wrists. Pulled him to his feet. Another one helped Gina up, and the woman motioned for them to start walking.
