WebWorld (2.6)

“Zara…”

“Nate…”

I was having some trouble getting my bearings here. We’d just crashed. The windshield was shattered, I could taste blood, and my neck was racked with pain. I glanced over at Zara with her head rested against her window. She looked dazed as fuck, but she was talking, even if it was in a sluggish tone, and she sounded as confused as I felt.

Wait. Ambush. Attack.

We’ve been run off the road.

We were still in danger. We were still in the worst of the danger. Of the vehicles that had attacked us, at least two of them were opening doors, and silhouetted figures were stepping out. There was music playing. Gang-style. This was like it was when bandits swarmed a car beneath our window back home, when it ended in stabbing and bullets, the gang took whatever they wanted off us, pumped us full of bullets and drove off again.

“Zara. Listen. They’re coming.”

She was probably – almost certainly – concussed. But she was listening – sort of. She reached for the knife in her belt.

“There’s at least four.”

“We’re dead, aren’t we?”

“Just stay down. Just stay low.”

Maybe if they didn’t see her, if they just saw me and I said I was alone. Sure, you can have the food, you can have everything. Just let me go. What precious little chance of that? But they might not see Zara, they might just drive away and leave me with a bullet in the middle of the head, but maybe, maybe, her still untouched. Well, I love you, I didn’t dare say it out loud. There were two figures approaching. I picked up the gun, wondering how many rounds it had – earlier than this, that would have been the time to check – and opened the door. I kept the door between these two opponents and myself – what little, if any, cover it was going to provide me. I slid half-way out, and pointed the weapon, tried for a voice that wasn’t actively shaking: “Okay guys, I think that’s far enough.”

I tried to take stuff in around me. Yeah, there’s two guys, one of them most definitely has a gun, he’s holding it in his hand. The other guy’s standing just a few feet behind him, there’s something in his hand that might be a gun as well. It’s a shadow really. And there’s more behind them, still in the vehicle, but poised to come join in the carnage.

Fight, that is. Join the fight.

I raised the gun just above the window. I could see the shape of at least two bodies lying out on the road, one not far from the overturned car, one a little bit away. Friends of yours, assholes? But I had a fairly sure feeling that they were my predecessors, just travelling along the road in that car until they’d run into the wrong crowd. And we were so damn close. I had to fight down that urge to break down sobbing. I would have been so happy, right then, just to drop down on the ground, with my hands wrapped around my head and my knees pulled up against my chest. Instead, I was standing there with an unfamiliar gun in my hands, saying, “Okay, guys, I think that’s far enough.”

The front guy levelled his gun – a chunky pistol – right at my head. That head was behind glass, but I was pretty confident the glass wouldn’t get in the way of his shot. He had a look on his face, somewhere between aggression and amusement; there was something sly and slimy about him, something that pretty much screamed psychopath, and most of my hopes about negotiating my way through this evaporated upon contact with his eyes.

“I’m not looking for a fight, okay? So, we can just go our separate ways, right?”

“’pends what you got in there.”

“A bit of food. I’m willing to share, if you don’t get greedy.” I had no idea if I was pulling this off or not.

“Oh, yeah, let’s take a look.”

“Stay back.”

He stepped forward anyway.

“I’m not fucking around here.”

“Me neither, pal.”

“So, step back, lower the weapon, I’ll toss out some food.”

“Let’s see what you got.”

“Stay put. I’ll toss some out. Share and share alike, we’re all out here, surviving.”

“Is that what you call it?” He was stepping closer. He had zero interest in my insistence on him staying where he was. And I either had to put some bullets where my mouth was, or I had to declare my bluff called. I didn’t know which way to go. And one of those bodies on the road, the face attached to it, was caught in a headlight; it looked pretty smashed up, it looked bloodied and broken.

“What else would you call it?”

“I’d call it a party. Some of us were made for this brave new world,” and he was peering into the car, he was close enough I could smell his breath; his eyes slanted and narrowed a bit, “Hey there, is that a girl you got in the front seat?”

I emptied the pistol into his face.

#

The world stopped. And at exactly the same time it sped up to an almost dizzying speed. Nothing that was happening, nothing that I was doing, was real, or even probable. I was somewhere outside myself observing the absurd fact that I was pulling the trigger on my gifted gun until it ran of ammo, metal was exploding out of the barrel and imploding into the soft, porridgy face of the man in front of me. Each bullet was a small eruption, it distorted his face, it was like pounding soft dough. The face became something inhuman; it became something like I’d never seen before. It became a screaming monster. And then it slid out of view, twisting away from me as the legs holding it up gave way beneath it. The air was electric, the night came to life, there was a buzzing everywhere, my skin tingled, and the darkness was moving all over; it was like an anthill, like a beehive – absence of light, saturation of movement.

And there. Right there. I’d just killed a person.

He wasn’t my first, of course. Not by now. But I was still counting on my first hand. This was probably only the second.

I freaked. Of course. An hysterical wail trickled through the back of my mind, it twisted its way down into my spine and through my stomach. I was dizzy and nauseous. But all the while, the other part of me was turning its attention on number three. He was going to have to be number three, because if he wasn’t number three, I was going to have to be his probably one-hundred and something. He was already charging me down. I had just enough time to see him draw that shadowy object, and just enough time to see that it was a knife rather than a gun. It’s probably a fact that saved my life. A fact amongst facts. The lack of a spray of bullets… At the time though, there was just him and me. I’d fired into his friend until there was nothing left to fire, so I ran at this other guy, striking him with the butt of the pistol in the seconds before he’d have thrust the knife into my guts. It was enough to get him stumbling, and that falter in his step was enough to halt the momentum of what should have been a fatal stab wound. I followed up with another whack from the gun-as-club, then punched him in the face with my other hand. He went down. I kicked him hard. I stomped: once on his gut, once on his neck. Only then, seeing him still, I crouched to pick up the knife. His hand was limp, there was no fight in the grip, nothing to stop me sliding my own hands around the hilt. I wondered idly – mildly curious, emotionless – if I’d killed this one too.

Then I heard a car door open. Zara, standing at the door, blade in hand.

I didn’t think there’d be words in my mouth, but: “get the gun.”

She must have had some situational awareness, because she knew I meant the one that’d been pointed at my head a few seconds ago. Seconds can change a world. Mine felt changed. I felt charged and sickened, confused and yet high on clarity. I didn’t want Zara to see the face I’d made over there, but there were two more vehicles, there were more guys. None of this was over.

As Zara reached the gun, she let out a scream.

I spun around.

“Nate!”

It was the two vehicles. Both of them revving up engines. Both of them surging forward. “Get in the car,” I called to her.

“Nate!”

It might not protect her. But if I kept them focused on me… And it seemed like they were. Both vehicles were hurtling at me. There were only a few seconds between them and me, but it’s astonishing how much can go through a person’s head in that time. I had already imagined myself leaping onto the bonnet of one car, kicking in the window and kicking in the face of the driver, vaulting onto the roof before the bullets could hit me and then smashing through the passenger side window, kicking this guy and his stunned companion onto the road. A quick slide into the driver’s seat and I was ready to charge that other car in a game of chicken where neither one backed down, we both hit hard, the grittiest of us stumbled out of the car to fill the other two with bullets from a stranger’s gun.

That was, of course, not going to happen. The only thing I’d had on my side so far had been luck, and that was running out at a few thousand miles per hour. But the terrain behind me was rough and rocky, full of shrubs and little boulders – at least, I thought it was. There was probably God-knows-what in there, but it was the best of the mess of options I was going to have. So – in a fit of heroism – I turned around and ran like hell.

I crashed into scratchy branches and stumbled over uneven ground, I could hear the cars racing after me and I could see the headlights swimming up from behind overtaking me, swamping me. I could see the car from the corner of my eye, and I threw myself to the side. I didn’t know if I was going be throwing myself right into the path of the other one, and I wrapped myself into something tight and dark, eyes squeezed closed, as the engines roared past me, as they blossomed and closed, and the silence slowly seeped in over the noise.

I’m not going to say I knew how long I was lying there. It was probably only seconds. They were stretched to feel like minutes, but as I started standing, I could see the retreating lights and still hear the engines. My legs were shaking, but I seemed to be unhurt. Or at least no further hurt. And Zara. Zara back at the car. Waiting for me? While our attackers circled back to get whatever I’d abandoned.

I stumbled back onto the highway to find Zara stepping gingerly towards a body. It was one of the two that had been on the road when we first hit the scene. It was the face I’d seen battered and murdered, ugly, bloody. I didn’t want her to see that, but I knew it was too late to spare her. I ran at full tilt, arriving at the same moment she did. In front of our feet was a young man, younger than either of us, not much more than a kid, maybe just having slipped over time’s edge to turn twenty. No older. And he was never going to get any older. It looked as if half his face had been blown away, his jaw gone, his cheek ruptured and hollow. One eye staring, the other obliterated.

“God...” I couldn’t keep the sound down.

Zara caught my arm, “Are you hurt?”

I shook my head.

“Don’t lie. Please don’t lie. Did they run you down?”

“No. I… I jumped out the way. I’m okay.”

“Why didn’t they shoot you?”

“I…” great, I needed that thought, “I… really don’t know.”

“Where are they?”

I made myself focus. “They could be coming back. Get in the car.”

“Okay. Come on.”

But I had to check that other body. I couldn’t just leave them. I mean… what if…?

I approached the figure with a mixture of caution and heavy-breathing urgency. Up close, I could see this was a woman… no, a girl, a teenager… and I could hear a faint moaning coming from her. She was bloody, splayed, and her skirt was still bunched around her knees. I couldn’t help myself, I had to turn my head for a moment.

Then I steeled myself, I pulled myself together as best I could. I knelt down over her. “Hey. Hey, can you hear me?”

Her head turned. A kid. Yeah, just a kid. A teenage girl.

“Can you hear me? Can you talk?”

She murmured something.

“Look, those guys. Those assholes. They’re going to come back. You need to come with us, okay?”

She mumbled. I couldn’t tell if she understood.

“Can you stand up. Can you walk if I help you?”

She made a sound. It sounded like a name. Maybe Derek… Darren…? That half-face lying on the road.

I saw lights. A strip of white-yellow across the horizon.

“Nate!” Zara screamed at me.

I didn’t know if I might end up hurting her, but there wasn’t any time not to do it: I scooped the girl up in my arms, finding her eerily weightless and ran back towards Zara’s voice. She saw me coming and she shoved the back door open. The backseat and the space between the back and front seats were all full of supplies. There was no time to rearrange. It felt wrong, insulting, to lay her across the array of groceries, lying awkward and uncomfortable, grunting in pain or confusion, but there was really nothing else for it.

Zara was wide-eyed, wordless.

I scrambled into the seat and turned the ignition. I put my foot down hard on the gas. This was no moment for the car to be damaged and useless, and there was that moment, between action and re-action, when I thought it might not start, and then every likelihood that we’d be dead after all, but then the engine kicking into life, as sharp of a turn as I could manage, and I pushed us down the highway, driving for our lives.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work