Disposable fiends

  The ride got dead silent again. They flew down the highway, then they exited and flew down the access road. Whisper got out a pair of ballistigsses and put them on. Daytona shot him a look, which he ignored and handed Luke a pair. Backdraft unloaded the tube on his shockwave and loaded it with something else. Hamstar made a lot of noise in the backseat, and when Luke looked back, he had his Glock strapped down to the seat o him with the seat belt and was doing a brass che a Mini UZI.

  Luke checked the chamber on his MP5K, and brass winked back at him. A few seds ter, they were pulling into the right turn yield the end of an overpass. There was a wide grass lot between them and the bank to their right, and ahead of them, far out beyond the ft highway-slidscape, downtown loomed on the horizon.

  Daytona brought the SUV to a stop.

  “It’s fug yield. You’re clear,” Backdraft said while looking to the left past Daytona.

  “Holy shit, Dead ahead,” Daytona said at almost a whisper. Backdraft cocked his head and froze. Luke followed their gaze, a his stomach turn.

  There in the far right ne of the interseg street, dead across from them, waiting iuro the access road, was a gold Camry.

  “Get him! He’s boxed in!” Backdraft hissed.

  Daytona looked up and dowreet.

  “Where’s his—”

  The Camry whipped around the tru front of it, drove up on to the triangle-shaped median, and floored it onto the access road.

  “Fug go!” Backdraft yelled, and Daytona did. Luke grabbed onto the overhead hah both hands as they flew over two medians to the sounds of horns and squealing brakes and their own r motor and followed the Camry down the access road towards the highway.

  The access road stretched for half a mile before blending into the highway. It dipped down to ejee side street into a warehouse district then rose up again to meet the high its 40ft elevation, whi this ndscape might as well have been a mountain. The Camry matched every bit of speed they gained, and it felt like they weren’t as much heading for something with i and purpose as pleting an arc of kiiergy, like a thing thrown, rising and falling without trol.

  Backdraft yelled at Daytona the eime, cursing him, the vehicle, the road, and everything else for their apparent inability to gain on the fug target. Luke’s adrenaline had skyrocketed, but wavered at the top of its own ard he felt that if they kept fifty feet away from the car for much longer, he would crash and fall asleep.

  He never got the ce. As the Camry merged onto the highway, Hamstar started screaming.

  "Hey! Hey! God dammit, they’re right—”

  Luke turned around, and it felt like it took ages. First, the highway traffic, then the backseat, and Hamstar raising his Uzi at the driver’s side window, still screaming. Luke even had time to notice that the barrell wasn’t quite pointing at the window, but, for some reason, wasn’t able to get the words out. He just stared as Hamstar unloaded half the mag into the fibergss cupholders before the vertical recoil brought his barrel up to the gss.

  Luke's right ear stopped w instantly and a ringing domihe other. Shell gs struck the back of his seat, then, as the gun came up, flew past his fad bounced off his sungsses. As Hamstar fired the st rounds through the dissolving, whitening window, one lone g caught Luke right in the forehead a a tiny burn that he only felt in a distant, intangible way.

  It took about one sed for Hamstar to empty his mag, and as he sat there, shaking the empty gun with its open smoking bolt out the window, Luke finally saw what he had been shooting at.

  It was a white sedan. Chevy Impa. Cowcatcher on the front. Like an aued police surplus. Bck tint. And Luke realized, at the st moment, that the front bumper was lined up just behind their rear tire.

  The words pit maneuver formed in his mind, but never found air. The instant, the world inning like an old metal merry-go-round that his cousin had deviously spun as fast as he could.

  “Rex!” Daytona shouted, muffled, as they were airborne, sunlight zipping across the car like someone was moving a fshlight. Down there Luke assumed Daytona was in shock or something, but higher-up Luke k was standard procedure. Going limp in a crash was the best way to avoid injury. Not that it would matter much this time.

  The crash was the loudest thing Luke had ever heard, even givetered state of his ear drums after Hamstar’s mag dump. Gss flew everywhere like some truckload of it had dropped from the sky. The way Daytona and Backdraft flopped around, dead weight, twisted Luke’s stomach worse than the crash, whi his adrenaline ged state, felt like a dista with no e to him at all, like watg a bag blown in the wind.

  Whisper, however, had apparently taken his seat belt off at some point, and while they had been spinning before the crash, had thumped around in the with sounds that no human body should be able to gee by impact alone, until the barrier wall stopped them and he smmed so fast into the door that he seemed to teleport, one moment floating behind the passenger seat, the just a crumpled quasi human thing melded into the door, hanging halfway out the shattered angled window, calm blue sky behind him.

  Iillness after the crash, the sudden ungodly silence, after somehow refleg on his luck at having a mother who drilled seatbelt etiquette into his head at a young age, Luke tried to get a handle on their situation.

  The 4Runner had spun twice across the ramp then slid through a metal guardrail until a single se of t barrier had stopped it cold. The front of the car came to a stop fag the highway, which merged with their ne just a few yards away, and the rear wheels had dropped off the road and down the grass slope, snting the upwards.

  Daytona and Backdraft stirred and fought with the airbags. Cars whooshed on the highway, a very suburban sound that reminded Luke of being stu the side of the road with a ft, and he suddenly panicked about beio or pletely absent from work. Out the broken windshield, a thin cloud rolled by across the blue. Hamstar was pletely silent for the first time iire fug ride, no shifting in his seat or humming or ice rattling in his drink, and it was all very peaceful.

  Until Luke looked out his window, and saw the car that had pit maneuvered them rog to a stop just ten yards down the ramp. Despite Hamstar's burst, there wasn’t a scrat it.

  “Fug—” was all Backdraft got out. He had mao get his shotgun up out of his p, but the airbag was still draped over it. Daytona made a hat might have been “shit” and Luke had time to squeeze his fists in a reflex, and thus be reminded he still had the MP5 in his hands, before something fshed over the roof of the other car.

  The rounds went through Daytona and Backdraft first. Somethiruck Luke's fad they flinched and jumped in his peripherals, then something made a sound like a drink spilling, but he kept his eyes on the fsh, two Lukes now screaming internally in unison, as he raised the MP5 and pulled the trigger.

  The crash must have rocked him more than he realized. What had felt like a swift strong movement of his arms t the MP5 up to the window, had really only been a soft g of his shoulders, so his first ten rounds went out from between his knees, shredded the door, and sparked off the t a few yards ahead of him. He never found out where the rest of the rounds went. The moment, he was floating out in the bck.

  It was a strange sensation. For a brief moment, up there Luke was alone, as if the extractor had slipped its grasp of him, and then there was that other him again, but his thoughts were frayed at the edges, missing their tinuity, and he realized that the eime before, evehe extractor had sped over parts, he had been able to follow the stream of thoughts in unbroken procession, where as now, suddenly, aire cluster of memory was missing pletely. His death, and whatever secrets the experience may have held, were untouchable by extractor, scraper, or Spirit.

  “Imagine a door,” a harsh voice said to him, from inside his head. Down there Luke looked around.

  “Stop looking around and do as I tell you. Imagine a door.”

  Down there Luke tried to push the question of where this voice was watg from out of his head, and do what he was told, but it took him a minute. Later he would find, to his frustration at the obviousness of it, that the voice had been watg him from inside his own mind, or at least from the filmy barely there surface yer of it, the same thin quasi-material membrahat allowed his Spirit to interface with the vibration of the Other.

  The door was simple, like the ohat had brought him to his not-apartment hours before. He reached for the knob.

  “Stop. You must uand that oher side of this door, you will find the hallway in which you ehe apartment plex which led you to the box a little while ago. Do you uand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go inside.”

  Inside, he found the hallway, and the memories of his st time their cshed with others, still ging to him, of a time when this had all seemed a dream.

  “e here.” The voice was no longer in his head, but down the hall, and a bright green light dinged on above a door.

  Drudge was waiting for him at his desk, in an office that looked like a repurposed boiler room, pipes and exposed beams and all. He looked him in the eyes, with his flowing goggles, looking like something out of a Halloween store or cybergoth music video.

  “Where did you wake up this m?”

  And at that, the memory poured out, and a few moments ter he was leaving again, with more mem than he had ever had iher, trying and failing to remember what the hell had happened in there beyond a few hazy images and the rough summary provided in the bead of mem Drudge had handed him.

  Eventually, as he flew toward the ball, he gave up.

  He had more pressing matters, namely, a bright ball of light with his name hidden somewhere i.

  Luke's first time in the Hardworlds doesn't seem to have ged him much... so far. ime, Luke slides ly ily where they want him. But who are they? episode, Debt and Bance.