Authors: Rob Ziegler
It drew hungry eyes. Migrants crouched on stoops along the block of once well-to-do old Philly brownstones. They peered down the street through the acrid smoke of laminate scrap cook fires, over which they’d spitted rats and skinny dogs. None moved forward, but Agent Sienna Doss felt them watching.
She stood in the armored crook of the Lobo’s driver’s side door, arms crossed, right hand thrust not-so-subtly inside her Kevlar-weave blazer, palm on the carbon fiber Ingram slung beneath her arm.
“Tick tock, Emerson,” she whispered, her vocal chords massaging the tiny mic collared around her neck. The Lobo idled at the stoop of the cleanest brownstone on the block, before which three barefoot boys stood guard:
La Chupacabra
. They wore red scarves tied over their heads. AKs dangled too casually from their fingers. Doss gave the rifles a less than even chance of firing, even if the
Chupes
had, by some miracle, scrounged bullets.
“Roger.” Emerson’s voice came back tinny in her left ear. “Boss man’s gotta put on makeup before he goes to the dance.”
Doss’ teeth ground. She had taken four Go Pills an hour earlier. They’d already spiked, then mellowed to a steady, vigilant hum at the base of her skull. Great for focus, bad for patience. She seethed, checked her watch. Three minutes, thirty-eight seconds doing nothing but scratching her ass and waiting for bullets to find her.
“Bitch ain’t the queen of England. Kick his ass out the door.”
“Roger.”
Sewage flowed in rivulets along the buckled sidewalk. It reminded her of Siberia. She’d spent six months in a frozen prison pit there, where the snow had fallen in an ephemeral column through a grated hole in the ceiling. Where dysentery had been as pervasive as frostbite. She found its reek almost comforting now.
What rankled, however, was that the shit had smeared her boots and the cuff of her slacks.
Real
,
machine
-
tailored
cotton slacks
. The US government’s notion of civilian dress: slacks that fit snug at the hips and hung stiff and neat at the ankles. Like they were made for her. White cotton blouse. Grey Kevlar-weave blazer and matching Kevlar scarf tied over her head. Like something a character would’ve worn in the flex vids Doss and her sister had watched as children. She felt civilized, even as the Go Pills punched at her heart.
She scanned windows for rifle barrels, for muzzle flashes. Windmills, cut from cloth and heavy PVC, churned on fire escapes up and down the block—but only on the upper stories. Proof of a siege mentality among the
Chupes
. Doss had seen the Chinese do the same thing in Dubai. Hole themselves up in the top half of those cartoonishly massive skyscrapers, blockading all the elevator shafts and all but one stairway. It had worked, too, until the Americans had decided to ratfuck their policy of limited damage to civilian property. With apologies to the UAE, they had fired in barrage after barrage of cruise missiles. Doss had watched from a cot set up in the middle of empty square miles of flat desert as the missiles screamed in from the night, their explosions imprinting afterimage novas on her retinas. When dawn came, a single Dubai Tower rose like a tongue of flame over the rubble—all that remained of that strange theme park of a city. The Chinese had pulled out the next day. Two weeks later the UAE had admitted that its oil supplies had run dry, and within months had ceased to exist. All those missiles for a scrap of empty desert that was useless to anyone but the Bedouins.
La Chupacabra
’s rivals didn’t have cruise missiles. But they did have AKs, and worse.
“Ass in gear, Emerson.” She set her jaw, waited for bullets.
“Good to go.” Emerson appeared at the brownstone’s door.
Like Doss, he wore civilian garb, a trim dark suit with a blue tie that made him look like an old-time American businessman. Like he should carry a briefcase, hail a cab with a thrust of his chin, oblivious to the deep ambient thrum folding over him, because he was an integral part of it—a city alive with elevators, revolving doors that breathed air-conditioning out onto the street. A city raucous with thousands of ethanol engines, blaring horns, the murmur of a million pedestrians, all sucking the teat of impossibly complex supply chains.
He looked good.
Doss bit her lip, forced herself to stay On Task. Emerson stepped out into shit smell rising from the gutters, into the oppressive silence of the brownstones’ vacancy, an Ingram propped ready against his shoulder. His eyes, hard and alert, scanned the block as he crossed to the Lobo.
Their assignment followed close behind. A white man with a thick neck. Burly shoulders protruded from a sleeveless robe—ostentatiously opulent leather,
La Chupe
red. He clutched Emerson’s blazer and peered furtively over the agent’s shoulder. Emerson ushered him through the Lobo’s rear passenger door, slammed that shut, got in front and slapped the dash three times hard with his palm.
“We’re good!”
Doss got in, slammed her door. She loved the Lobo. It was EMP proof, which meant no superfluous electronics and thus no computer-assisted pumps for brakes or power steering. And best of all, no pantywaist electric motor.
She punched the accelerator. The reactor roared. The Lobo twisted perceptibly under the force of its own torque, oblivious to the massive tonnage of its titanium armor plating as Doss threw it into gear and muscled out into the street.
She leaned into analogue steering with all her Go-Pill strength, wove around cook fires and detritus under the indifferent eyes of vacant-looking migrants. She aimed the Lobo south, out of the Flourtown squat, down empty and crumbling Stenton Avenue, onto Broad Street. Pulled heavy Gs up the ramp onto the Roosevelt Expressway, 1200 horses howling as they surged east towards New D.C., Kevlar run flats chewing pavement like breakfast.
“You drive well, Agent.” Doss glanced up to see the assignment watching her in the rearview with unblinking grey eyes. He held his wide jaw at an angle that exuded self-satisfaction. Perfectly shaven skin, offensively healthy glow. Doss said nothing. She kept her face professional, impenetrable. “I find tall, black women very compelling,” the assignment said. His voice had an irritating nasal quality. “What’s your name?”
“None of your fucking business,” Emerson snapped. “That’s her name.”
“I see.” The assignment gazed out the window, where the skyscrapers of old downtown Philly reached out of upper Delaware Bay. Titanic steel and concrete fingers glowing orange in the late February sun. Windmills and old reclaimed PV squares hung precariously from open windows high up. Small boats floated on water brown with early runoff, trailing nets and fishing lines through glass canyons that had once been streets.
“It’s like Venice,” the assignment mused. “Or it could be, if you covered one eye. I wonder what it’s like living there year-round. How do they survive the winters? I’ve heard the temperature tops out at twenty below in December and January. And those are the highs. And how do they fight off malaria in the summers?” He sank back thoughtfully in the seat, then looked from Emerson to Doss. “So you two are together.”
Doss and Emerson exchanged a glance. Emerson turned and glared. The assignment’s thin lips turned up, a knowing smile.
“On task,” Doss snapped. Emerson turned back around, letting his glare linger for a few seconds on Doss. Doss pushed the Lobo up to 150 kph. The empty expressway, cleared of detritus by the US Gov, unfurled like a lucid concrete dream.
“That’s alright. It makes sense. Partners should be close.” The assignment paused. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
“No offense,” Emerson said. The assignment blinked placidly.
“Yet it’s your job to step in front of a bullet for me, should the need arise. How can you take a bullet for someone you don’t like or respect?”
Doss thought of her sister and father, living in climate-controlled Gov housing in New D.C. Her sister studied biomechanics at school. Her father walked without a limp on a titanium hip, and never lacked for malaria meds. All because Doss had never Fucked Up.
That had been the secret to her success. Up through the army, through Rangers and Spec Ops, and now with Sec Serv: Don’t Fuck Up. A simple, perfectly linear road, navigating the landscape of incompetence that defined every military operation she’d ever witnessed. Everybody fucked up, usually always. Just not her.
“Not you I’d be taking it for,” she told the assignment.
“Ah, she speaks. Good. So for whom would you be taking it?” Doss said nothing. The assignment smiled. “What’s your name, Agent?”
“Doss.”
“I am Tsol. My people call me El Sol. Pleasure to meet you.” He patted Doss on the shoulder with a beefy hand.
“Back in your seat,” Emerson growled.
“Your name’s Richard Davenport,” Doss objected.
“My given name, yes. My chosen name, and therefore my
real
name, is Tsol. It’s Aztec. It means…” He smiled again. “Soul. Also, sun. As in, El Sol. I am the soul and the sol of my people.” Emerson snorted. The assignment ignored him. “Do you believe in fate, Agent Doss?” he asked. In the mirror, a wild crescent of white shone over the tops of his irises. Doss had once seen a man with eyes like that in Siberia. Alyosha had been his name. He’d convinced three other prisoners that the certainty of transcendence lay in discorporation. He’d facilitated it by strangling them, one by one. They’d lined up for him. One of them had been Doss’ lieutenant. Afterwards Alyosha had chewed the flesh off his own hands.
“Our ideas feed us,” he’d told Doss, and showed her teeth black with his own blood. “And we feed them.” Infection had killed him. The bodies had lain for more than a week at the pit’s center, going rigid in the pool of frozen northern light that fell through the ceiling grate.
Doss had lost things over the course of those days. God was the first thing to go. Then her country. Even her own name had slipped away from her. She’d known her fate then. She would die, but only after her soul disappeared, like Alyosha’s body under a dusting of snow.
“I don’t either,” Tsol said, interpreting Doss’ silence as an answer. “At least not for most people. Most people, they live, they die. That’s it. They breed, get diseases, carve out some crops, beg, starve, whatever. The wind blows, the wind doesn’t blow. It’s all the same to them. There’s no difference between living and dying. But some of us…
We
are the wind.” His eyes filled the rearview. “I am fated.”
“You’re a pissant gangster,” Doss told him. “A deluded one.”
“Roger that,” Emerson agreed. Tsol leaned forward in his seat.
“Gangsters sit by the roadside and rob people of their precious corn seed. I
provide
seed to forty thousand people. I lead those people south every autumn and north into the Midwest every spring. During the summer, the entire Midwest is
mine
.”
“You keep your people hungry.” Doss kept her eyes flat on the road, face expressionless as she spoke. “You force them into line and make them come to you for seed. You’re a thug.”
“Maybe.” Tsol gave her a diamond-hard smile in the rearview. “But the difference between me and your President Logan is merely one of scale. Have you read your Hobbes, Agent Doss? No? Well, Logan has, you can be sure. He prefers to have forty thousand hungry refugees whipped into line by a thug like me than to have them descend on New D.C.”
Doss aimed them east down the 202. Philly’s deserted burbs spread out around them like crumbling termite colonies. They crested a rise and Doss saw the burned frames of two twen-cen cargo trucks draped across the road half a klick ahead.
“Could be company,” she told Emerson.
“You. Down.” Emerson reached back and shoved Tsol down behind the seat. The professional calm in his voice set Doss on edge. Adrenaline spiked her chest. For an instant her brain froze, then years of training took over. She let out a long breath through her nose. Adrenaline ebbed, flowed to her extremities. Her fingertips tingled.
Things slowed down, details stood out. Late afternoon sunlight gilding the skin of two zeppelins that hung like fat maggots ten klicks out over New D.C. A crack in the concrete freeway barrier as they whipped by at 150 kph. The way the truck frames overlapped, creating a solid, obviously intentional blockade. The boy in FEMAs, maybe ten years old, kneeling behind the concrete barrier beside the trucks. The AK he brought level with his shoulder—
“Definitely company!” Emerson bit the words out of the air.
“Yep.” Doss saw another refugee to the left. He held what looked like a long piece of pipe on his shoulder. It flashed. Doss saw a cloud of smoke and fire blazing towards them, a black dot at its center.
“RPG left!”
“Yep.” She stomped on the breaks with both feet. Run flats shrieked against the pavement. The missile hissed over the Lobo’s nose, inches from the windshield. A cry issued from the back as Tsol crashed into the back of the driver’s seat. Doss saw the young migrant fire his AK spastically in their direction. Two other migrants stood beside him now. One fired a pistol and the other merely waited, a cinder block dangling from his hand. A sound like hard rain on pavement came as bullets disintegrated against the Lobo’s armor. Doss glanced left, saw the RPG shooter reloading. Another stood beside him, taking aim. She checked the rearview. Migrants flooded the freeway behind them. She noted at least three RPGs. “Shit.” Tsol peaked over the top of the seat.
“
These
would be gangsters, Agent,” he said. Doss was pretty sure she heard him laugh.
She let the Lobo coast, down now to 110 kph. She considered her options—simple on this narrow band of freeway: reverse, or forward.
Do not fuck up
. The familiar mantra focused her in a way Go Pills never could.
“Now’s the time.” Emerson’s voice had gone ultra calm. “Left!” The RPG flashed. Doss grabbed a gear. The Lobo heaved forward. The rocket came in off center, clipping the vehicle’s back corner and—
Blackness. She was back in Siberia. Naked, bent over a saw horse, her face submerged in a barrel of freezing water. A red flash as the Spetz officer struck the back of her head with his palm.