Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) (11 page)

“Fuck yes I’m gonna fight!” gaunt, rickety George Senior bellowed. He had a powerful voice, despite his skinniness. “They’re fuckin with my mountain! Some a your shit-storm’s bound to splatter us! This is my place here!”

“It’s my place too!” George Junior croaked (he was a heavy smoker). “I fuckin restored this place for ya! I fuckin drywalled an’ painted an’ porched an’ decked an’ re-floored an’ shingled an’ tiled an’ re-roofed it for ya!”

“
You
? You mean you an’ a buncha’ other know-naught goons—an endless horde of ’em gorgin on my bread an’ peanut butter an’ suckin up all my beer!”

And, they were off. Japh and I hung on tight until finally George Junior paused for breath and I shouted, “Please, come up and fight with us, for acres and citizenship! Tell your neighbors. Come up tonight!”

And then we literally bolted, and left them standing there, jaws open, frozen in mid-argument.

*   *   *

The sun was
half sunk, and the sky over Sunrise red now. The vehicles in the street had sprouted headlights. White sparks sprayed down from where they were welding ramps and barricades. Japh and Cap and I just stood in the street, watching it all. Jool commed me from up at Chops and Gillian’s. They were making her a padded leather cuirass. I tried for a joke. “Is that to cover your ass?”

“You’re the ass,” she laughed. She definitely wanted me to be snappy on this point—would stand for no “freaking out about the baby.” “He’s highly portable,” she had lectured me. “Mammal moms fight off predators when they’re this pregnant and a lot more so. Don’t give me any shit about it!” I worried more for her than for the baby, which was not yet as real to me as she was. But I knew it was not in her nature to back down.

George Junior’s com interrupted us. “Buncha people down here are comin up to talk to you all.”

We got Smalls on it. We needed a gathering space now, and decided on the big parking area behind Cap’s Hardware shared by the lumber yards and machine shops. Cap’s little concrete loading dock back of his store made a natural speaking platform with good acoustics.

Just as dark fell the Hangers came up fifty or sixty strong, and the Sunrisers gave them the center of the lot. They parked their pickups and ATVS and hogs at all different angles, got out and leaned or sat on their rides, or stood in little groups in the truckbeds. Stoically listening as hundreds of Sunrisers listened all around them.

George Junior was sitting on the roof of his deformed old pickup with his legs crossed on his windshield. His own and his whole delegation’s body language made it clear that he was their spokesperson.

The Hangers were a body of very opinionated and independent folks. Few of them were followers by nature, or even had much patience for views not their own. But George Junior could always just step up and spokesperson for the whole lot of them. Such was his long-ingrained paternal training in the sciences of dispute, naysaying, contradiction, and vituperation, that whenever he stood up and started proclaiming the truth about something—about anything—people just shut up and let him do it. It helped that most of his proclamations were sharp and to the point, at least when—as now—George Senior wasn’t there to embroil him in argument.

His voice was a smoky caw—sounded like a big crow. He addressed himself to Smalls on the loading dock. “We can bring at least fifty to the fight. Fuck detailed arithmetic for now, but that’s gonna mean about three hundred countin significant others that’s gettin property up here when the fight’s over, whether they wanna live full-time on it or not.”

“So basically fifty or sixty households,” said Smalls, talking quick to get it out before George Junior could contradict him. “You’ll get fifty acres for every household, wherever they wanna choose ’em from whatever’s not already taken. You join us an’ fight an’ you’re full Sunrisers.”

“What else would we be?” George squawked. “Fuckin-ay-straight full ’Risers! So first things first! Whatever kinda weapons you’re gettin together, we want you to share ’em!”

“The fuck did’ja think we were gonna do?” said Smalls, and then—amazingly for this dour man—he produced a crooked little grin. “How ’bout some thirty-cal machine guns on tripods, Alphonse?”

George Junior actually blinked. “If you’re not just blowin smoke up my ass,” he answered, “then you’re finally talkin somethin besides shit!”

The news had come to Smalls just half an hour before. Mazy’s sister Althea had a best friend named Sugi who was also close to Mazy, and had just commed her. Sugi was in Accounting at Panoply, and had just been laid off. “Listen, Maze,” she said. “Mark Millar’s sequel to
Somme—The Marne
—is in preproduction. They’re shipping some properties to the secondary set for the shoot. Properties’ll be trucked up the Five—a pretty big truck. A shipment of thirty-cals and live ammo. I mean like machine guns, belt fed!”

*   *   *

We decided the
takedown of the truck could be done with four bikes and four rafts. I rode shotgun behind Christy. Just past noon, with traffic on the six lanes sparse, we came up flanking the truck on the Five down in the Valley. It was a tractor-trailer. We pulled up, two beside the truck and two beside the trailer’s front wheels, hoping this would work. We didn’t want to hurt the driver, but weren’t sure of the physics of the situation with something this size doing ninety klicks.

We blasted the outer front wheels of the truck and the outer front wheels of the trailer. This crippled the speed of the front of the rig, and the trailer, unslowed, began to swing forward till it spanned three lanes, swinging so sharp it began to tip over.

Lance and Trek dropped their sector-boat’s bows to the trailer, put some counterthrust to the teetering mass, Kate in her raft helping at the cab’s tail end. It was a near thing, rubber smoking and shrieking, the big brute tilting, tilting, but then the sector-boat raft started to swing the slowing truck through a full one-eighty, till they brought it to rest in the breakdown lane aimed back the way it had come.

The driver was severely ticked, but got suddenly sociable on receiving our two hundred K. He gravely drew together his brow and said, “Yeah, I got a good look at ’em, Officer. Big Swedish-lookin bikers, Aryan tattoos. Had a rig like mine with ’em. Offloaded me with a little forklift, slick as snot!”

It was four panel trucks we offloaded him to. When the work was done I waved Kate over. “You got the time to take us for a little ride?” I asked her. She looked at me, smiling.

Since we’d fought back-to-back through the last hour of
Alien Hunger,
Kate and I were like brother and sister. She’d been a Panoply assistant director working for Margolian who had been demoted to payrafter for her reservations about Live Action just before we met. I’d tried to kill her partner when he refused to pay me for a kill, but accidently killed their raft instead. I’d helped her stay alive through the rest of that shoot, and Japh had helped too.

“A little ride? I bet I know where. Hop aboard.”

Yesterday there’d been a news release from Panoply. The studio had donated nine anti-grav rafts to Sunrise “… to aid them in the struggle which it is Panoply’s tragic duty to inflict on them.”

It was a real PR coup for Panoply. And a box-office tickler: let everyone know that in this shoot there’d be an air battle to spice up the carnage. So now we could flaunt our little anti-grav fleet anywhere.

“Could it be south you wanna fly?” she asked as I strapped in. “Mr. L.A.?”

“L.A., you got that much right. But it’s not that I miss the damn place. It’s just that I’m used to seeing it.”

“Right. I love it here, but I guess I miss its ugliness.” She hit cruise altitude and set us at five hundred clicks.

“There’s just one thing that interests me there. One person—my mom. Wherever she went when she left me, she’s back in the Zoo, I’m sure of it.”

“You miss your mom. I understand. Who wouldn’t?”

“How could I miss her? I never even met her. I’m just curious.”

She smiled understandingly. “Yeah. I miss my mom too.”

And I had to laugh.

At five hundred it didn’t take long. I’d never seen L.A. from above before. Just the beaches alone were a linear city, a snake-shaped camptown of tents and sand forty miles long. And then, the Basin! A colossal bristling blanket, wired with freeways, asphalt tentacles branching everywhere through the immensity of the Zoo.

From my ’Rise north of the Ten, I’d had wide views, but this was another order of awe. Not only the sprawl of it. From here you could really see how the Zoo’s poverty had greened it, compared to photos from a couple generations back. Truck gardens, uncontrolled weed growth and tree-spread made it gorgeous as deep forest in places. A forest with a pumping, humming, internally combusting city threaded all the way through it.

Though I knew little else of my mom, I was sure she would be in a big city. She was a seeker. But would she have come to rest in this particular city?

I couldn’t help thinking so. She’d left to find some way to come back with something to offer me. All my life Auntie Drew had sworn so, and I’d always believed it. And now, if I survived, I had a life to give her.

Somehow, seeing the impossible scope of the task decided me: If I survived this shoot, I’d come back here to find her; would sure as death come back here for something else too.

“Let’s scoot east for a look at the enemy,” I said.

Panoply, the walled colossus, big as a city itself, lay backed up against the hills above Burbank.

“It’s easy enough,” I said, “for that giant to attack a little mountain town. How the hell could a mountain town attack it?”

“I think our strategy is obvious,” said Kate with a little dreamy, evil smile. “The very first step would be to put out an extra-call in the Zoo. Instead of kill-bonuses, we pay them in plunder.”

“Whoa!” I said, with a tingle going up my spine. “I like that!”

XIV

ARMAMENTS AND HAIL

The tension on
the morning of Day Four made the air almost crackle. The 8:00
A.M.
tactical meeting filled the theater and overflowed out in the street, where speakers broadcast Sandy Devlin’s voice. Hundreds of natives here, men and women who’d lived with guns all their lives, listened devoutly. Whatever kind of action they’d seen, they’d never faced carnivorous man-made monsters from the maw of Hollywood.

“First, about the air battle: the sector boat packs explosive cannon, but carries a limited amount of ammo. The eight fast-rafts have machine guns fore and aft. We’re going to use those primarily against APPs, but we’ll do what we can against the shoot-fleet.

“It’s not likely any of Panoply’s shoot-rafts will be flying down within effective range of your guns, and in any case they’ll have magnetic deflector-shields round their gunnels, and armored bottoms. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shoot at ’em if they happen to drop down in range. But make sure you do not fire on one of ours. Each of ours are going to have a placard on their bottom of a rising sun. We’re passing it around and you people outside will get it shortly.”

What soon came out was a big half-sun in Day-Glo orange.

“Armaments. Everyone fighting on foot will have two twelve-gauge pumps cut to eighteen inches, cross-holstered down their backs. Also, semi-auto forty-five caliber pistols for everyone and a belt-pack of clips. Anyone has any questions, needs any arms, your neighbors wearing these just-made Sunrise armbands can get you supplied. All you machine gunners already have your assigned emplacements—including almost every viable rooftop in town. Supervised practice ranges for all weapons are up in the Big Draw a quarter mile out Doug Fir Road.

“Now,” Sandy said, “if any of you want to ask or to tell this meeting anything, let me call on you, one at a time.” She looked up and saw a hand. “Jool.”

Jool—already stationed down near the dais—mounted it. “I gotta say a few words.”

She stood facing them all—a tight, athletic figure whose baby was beginning to show. Most of those present had seen—on screen—Jool’s gift for battle in
Alien Hunger,
where much of her footage survived the final edit. And two days ago everyone present had heard her intuitions about what Val Margolian had hidden in the cinnabar mine.

“I wanna share with you all a feeling I’ve got. I’m not whacking out on you here, folks. I’m not starting to hear voices from the Great Beyond. But this one’s really talkin to me. Panoply’s got us all on dangle with this up-to-seven-days shit. It’s meant to wrong-foot us by making us jumpier.

“But if you can see this, you’re gonna agree that it’s obvious, what day they’re gonna open the ball. The first engagement—I love that word—the first engagement of Studio and Sunrise runs from sunup to midnight, right? Just picture it with me.

“The fight starts at literal sunrise, ol’ Sol painting us all in gold, an’ then the fight rages an’ rages, with one intermission, hot an’ heavy through the long day. And then there’s the second intermission, as the sun starts sinking.

“The whole town’s all drenched in red light and the sun’s down. Then, just after the sun is set, the full moon rises above the mountains. It floods the town in moonlight.

“An’ the Third Act opens, the fight comes alive again an’ rages—oh so cinematically—till midnight, with the full moon at the zenith like a huge white eye looking straight down on Sunrise, and bleaching it white as a corpse.”

A silence followed—in the theater, out on the street—all those people silently seeing themselves in that grim, gorgeous horror flick Jool had just described.

Out of that silence, Devlin said, “That sounds exactly like Val Margolian to me. And that means the shoot is the day after tomorrow. So people, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.”

*   *   *

Kate and Japh
were having a later dinner at his house by the draw. It was their first night together in two weeks. Kate was back from the acres of flowers she’d bought near the coast below Santa Cruz, where Ivy lived, her partner in the flowers. A woman most dear to Kate.