The Saffron Malformation (28 page)

             
Arnie nodded and checked his mirrors.

             
Dusty pulled himself up so he was sitting on the passenger’s side door and leaned over the roof with his rifle.

             
Reggie fired.  The report echoed through the trailer a number of times and the bullet missed its mark.  Nodding, Reggie took aim again, this time for the chest, and he fell into the rhythm of the jostling truck.  He saw the two lead bikers pull pistols and take aim.  He didn’t mind, even as they squeezed off rounds, because they did it like armatures.  They may have been okay shots on stable ground, with two hands on a gun and their eye down the sights, but not one of those circumstances was present now.  They were simply holding the weapons in front of them and squeezing the trigger.  Anything they hit was luck.  This time when Reggie fired the scruffy young man in front collapsed atop his bike and wobbled, then toppled to the ground.

             
The two Angels behind Reggie’s kill swerved, one right and the other left, to avoid their fallen comrade and the group as a whole fanned out and backed off.

             
Dusty squeezed off a shot that found only air and muttered, “Fuck.”  He squeezed off two more for a miss total of three.  “Fuck!” he growled.

             
The bikers rode five across, each with a pistol aimed ahead of them.  They opened fire.  One of the bullets passed close enough to Dusty that he could hear it so he ducked back inside and slammed the gun down to the floor near his feet.

             
“What’s wrong?” Arnie asked him.

             
“Can’t hit shit,” he replied.  “Might as well just throw the fucking bullets at them for all the good I’m doing.”

             
Arnie checked his mirrors and said, “Hold on.”  Dusty was about to ask, ‘what?’ but then the kid yanked the wheel hard to the right and slammed the breaks.  The car screeched as it stopped sideways across the two lanes.  The bikers, startled, did their best to adjust.  One of them raced past the trunk without so much as a slight change of course.  Two of them dropped their guns as their hands gripped the handlebars and steered around the car and two others crashed into the passenger’s side of the car.  One ran into the front end, stopping the bike instantly and sending the rider over the hood and rolling across the pavement.  The other smacked square into the middle of the side and cracked his skull on the edge of the roof.  He fell to the ground twitching.

             
Dusty glanced at Arnie with a look that said, ‘Fuck that was awesome,’ and Arnie shrugged before righting the car and starting after the others.

             
Reggie saw the car spin and the carnage it caused and laughed.  Three bikers left and only one with a gun.  Reggie squeezed off a shot and a bullet shattered a weathered young face in a brilliant spray of red and changed that stat to none with a gun.  “And then there were two,” Reggie said, taking aim again.

             
Arnie had his foot pressed hard on the accelerator but the dead stop had cost them serious ground, and had given the Brood’s cars time to catch up.  Four in all, he could see as he checked the rear view mirror, and a rig behind that.

             
The two remaining bikers exchanged a glance and a nod.  “Brood!” they shouted and torqued their throttles all the way open.  The bikes raced forward and as Reggie took aim he could see them reach into their saddle bags.  From the sacks each drew a grenade and the big man’s heart skipped.

             
“Shit,” he said.  There wasn’t time to take both of them out so he did what he could.  He killed the one on the left as the one on the right chucked his explosive.  Reggie watched the grenade clank against the floor of the truck and bounce slightly on its path past him.  Instinctually, the big man reached for it, as if it was a baseball and he was playing shortstop, of course he’d always been a left fielder and the grenade whizzed past him.

             
Reggie ran toward the door, reached down and gripped a lever on the back of the truck.  It was the ramp release and he pulled it up and sent a long piece of thick metal sliding from the back of the truck.  He climbed onto it and worked his way down toward the end where sparks shot up from the metal bouncing and scraping across the pavement.  Reggie held tight, his fingers lacing through a bit of mesh near the side of the ramp and tucked his head as best he could.

             
From the cab of the truck Quey saw little of what was happening behind him and he thought that was a good thing because if there was action in his mirrors that meant it was getting too close.  Then his sheet started to buzz and he had a message from Dusty across the screen.  “Stop!” it said.

             
A second might have ticked, but not two before the truck shook violently amidst a concussive boom.  Quey, sitting in his reinforced truck—the only thing that saved him was the extra plating—coughed violently from the force of the blast as he slammed on the breaks and the truck screeched to a stop.

             
The remaining biker backed off.  He pulled to the side of the road and stopped to wait for his buddies to come by.  He was going to warn them, whoever this moonshiner and his friends were it wasn’t going to be like chasing down common folk scampering for their lives driven by fear.  They had skills.  Five dead, just to stop the truck he could see smoldering up ahead.  Still they had stopped it, though he only had a few brief moment to feel good about himself and his aptly thrown grenade before the Once Men came out of the brush behind him.  Stalking him through the tall grass they were on him before he had a chance to look back.  Laughing, they dragged him screaming into the bushes.

             
Von and Cray waited beside their crumpled car until another happened along and scooped them up before pressing on.  They heard the explosion and saw the cloud of smoke rise up in a plume over the road ahead.  The Broodlings smiled satisfaction as they hurried to catch up with the pack of bikes.  Their smiles faded as they began to pass cycles lying on their sides with their drivers motionless nearby.  A good click up the road they spotted the bike standing alone near the shoulder and the flaming skeleton of the truck up ahead, thick smoke still rolling into the air above it.  They stopped near the bike and looked at it curiously for a set of ticks.  Cray’s eyes widened and his lips trembled slightly under his unkempt facial hair before he bolted frantically from the rear right seat.  The others looked, first to him, then out at what had stricken him.  In the thick grass just off the road Once Men emerged from their hiding places.  The two closest to the road stood side by side aiming shotguns and as the Broodlings’ eyes widened with understanding the savages opened fire.  Pellets tore through the vehicle and the Angels of the Brood sitting inside.

             
Von managed to get his door open and collapsed from the vehicle.  The man in the middle of the back seat was shouting frantically and fumbling for his gun.

             
“Ga ba!  Ga ba!” one of the Once Men shouted.  Von tried to crawl away but there were at least a dozen to either side of the road and more moving around in the bushes further back.  Von wasn’t sure why but he found it funny.  Even as they snatched him and hauled him away to be torn apart and eaten he was laughing.

             
The kid in the back seat—he was new and Von couldn’t remember his name—managed to get of a set of shots.  He must have hit one of them, judging by the savages wailing, and then they pumped clusters of pellets into him and the road was silent again.

             
Reggie’s head was ringing as he sat up on the rig’s ramp.  He was scraped up pretty bad and the left side of his body felt like someone had gone to work on it with a lead pipe, but he didn’t think anything was broken.  Arnie rolled the blue car to a stop beside him and jumped out.  “All right?” he asked. 

             
Reggie, his eyes still foggy, gave a thumb’s up and felt the stab through his wrist.  A light sprain maybe.

             
“What about Quey?” Dusty asked, hopping from the passenger’s side.

             
The big man looked over his shoulder at the massive blue flame roaring up from what used to be the Pickens and Zaul trailer and said nothing.  Something inside the wreckage beeped loudly and then the whirr of a motor came to life and Geo rolled from the flames and down the ramp.

             
Inside the cab of the truck Quey could feel the heat from the raging fire behind him and saw the blaze in his mirrors.  He sat back in his seat and sighed.  Then a thought occurred to him, ‘Reggie,’ and he opened the door with a trembling hand.

             
From the dashboard his screen beeped loudly and he snatched it on his way out.  Stumbling on shaky legs he moved around to the rear of the truck and met Reggie—limping—Dusty, and Arnie as they came to check on him.

             
“All right?” Dusty asked.

             
Quey nodded.  “You?”

             
“Been better,” Reggie replied, “But been worse too.”

             
Quey’s computer began sounding off again and this time he looked at it.  It was the Geo app.  He touched it and read the warning.  ‘Optimal operating temperatures exceeded, moving to new location.’

             
Quey saw the machine parked at the end of the truck’s bent ramp and nodded thoughtfully.  It saved itself.

             
“What now?” Arnie asked.

             
Up the road there were gunshots and all of them turned to look.  In the distance they could see a car parked beside the road.  A moment later they saw the men come out of the brush and swarm the vehicle.  Quey’s face gaped.  “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

             
“Come on,” Reggie barked.  “Move.”

             
The four men scrambled for the car.  Reggie took the passengers seat, Arnie returned to his place behind the wheel and Quey and Dusty shared the back, with Rachel between them, lying across Dusty’s lap.

             
To their right the brush rustled and a group of Once Men, ten at least, rushed toward the road.  Reggie spotted the rifle Dusty had been using propped on the floorboard beside him and brought it up to his shoulder.  He didn’t take but a tick to aim before firing a shot that took the lead savage down.  Some of the other Once Men raised revolvers as they made it to the shoulder of the road and fired as Arnie slammed his foot on the accelerator.  The car leapt forward with a screeching of tires and the hollow pings of bullets penetrating metal.

             
As the car raced away from the burning wreck that used to be Quey’s he accessed the Geo app on his sheet and started a study sequence.  Behind them the rest of the brood was catching up to the wreckage and finding themselves amidst a swarm of Once Men.

             
“Where to?” Arnie asked.

             
“Somewhere with a bank and a doctor,” Quey replied.

             
“A bank?” Reggie asked.

             
Quey nodded.  “Cal always taught me it never hurt to have a bit of fundage stowed away you could get at from anywhere.  Gunna need some for Rachel and some for a new truck.”

             
“You know brother, I think this shine run might be at an end,” Reggie told him.

             
“It’s not for shine,” Quey replied.  “We need to get that robot.”

             
“It’s really that important?” Arnie asked and Quey nodded.

             
“I don’t mean to be…” Dusty trailed off.  “I just mean… getting that thing back is going to be dangerous.  We know there’s Once Men, and what if the Angels-”

             
“One thing at a time,” Quey snapped.  “Right now that thing is find a town.”

             
Dusty nodded and the car rolled along in silence until Arnie spotted a sign up ahead.  There was a town, Bravett, coming up.  “We could be there in an hour,” he told them.

             
“Good,” Quey answered and no more words came until they pulled through the city limits.

Patched Up and Boxed In

             
If Fen Quada was a one horse town then Bravette didn’t even have a stable.  It was a fact Quey figured might actually play to their favor.  It was unlikely that the Angels of the Brood would know of it, which would buy them at least a little time.  Also playing into their hands was the existence of both a bank and a doctor in the small town.

             
Dr. Garland was examining Rachel in one of the two rooms of his private practice.  The whole of the offices weren’t much bigger than a two-bedroom apartment might be.  The floors were polished wood and the walls were a calming shade of light blue.  There was a woman behind a desk wearing scrubs covered with little chicks hatching from eggshells who’d gaped at them as they burst through the door and demanded the doc.

             
Garland had emerged from the back, tall and thin and somewhere in his late thirties, with a sheet device in his hand.  Though he didn’t like the looks of his new patrons, they promised payment in hard currency and it was plain the woman did need a doctor.  So he instructed them to bring her into the back.

             
Dusty had lain her gently on the bed before the doc set to looking her over.  A device about the size of a pen flashed in the doctor’s hand as he held it over Rachel’s forehead.  He tapped some buttons on a terminal attached to the side of the bed and looked over the images the holoscreen displayed.

             
“She really should get to a hospital,” he finally said, removing his glasses.

             
“Rather you just handled it yourself,” Quey insisted.

             
“The damage to her skull doesn’t seem to be too bad, a small crack, no pieces missing, which is good because if one of those gets lodged in the brain all manner of things can go wrong.”

             
“Anyone else smell a but coming?” Reggie asked.

             
“But,” the doctor went on as if he were admitting to something.  “I’ve scanned her brain and there seems to be a bit of swelling.  She needs a few days rest at least-”

             
“She’ll be fine then?” Dusty asked, his face as caked in worry as his voice.

             
“You have to understand,” the man began, “I can’t foresee every complication.  Brain injuries are delicate and require-”

             
“But as far as you can tell she’ll be fine,” Quey interrupted.

             
The doctor sighed and nodded as he folded his glasses and stuffed them into his breast pocket.  “Should be.”

             
Dusty went to her and took her hand.  “When will she wake up?”

             
The doc shrugged, “Few hours, though she might not really come around for a day or so.  I’ve done all I can with what I have here.  It’s in times hands now.”

             
Quey nodded.  “You’ll have your fee plus some for the kindness of keeping discrete.”

             
The doctor looked at him, his eyes suspicious.  “You’re criminals.”  His gaze shifted to Dusty.

             
“No,” Quey assured him.  “Just some people not looking to be found.”

             
The doc backed away from the bed Rachel was lying on.

             
Quey could tell he was getting cold feet so he stepped toward him.  “Listen, we’re not criminals, not a one of us.  I’m a roader and these are just folks I picked up along the way.”  Quey sighed as if he was conceding something and looked the doc in the eye.  “I shouldn’t tell you this,” he began.  It was an old street con’s trick, act like you’re bringing the mark into your circle of confidence and they’re more likely to trust you in return.  “Fen Quada’s been sacked by raiders.”

             
The doctor’s face shrunk and Quey nodded.

             
“Just a few hours ago.  Angels of the Brood rolled through and stripped it and we got caught in the carnage.  Now, we just want to get our friend patched and be on our merry without getting bogged down by security.  Like I said, I’m a roader,” Quey confessed, “and that means I’m off the grid.  They lived in Fen Quada which, as you must know from living in a town like this, means they’re on the edge as well.  We just want to keep it that way. We didn’t do nor do we mean any harm.  Copy?”

             
The doctor took a moment to look Quey, Dusty and the woman on his bed over, sizing them up and deciding on them.

             
Quey was betting on the idea that people who lived in small settlements on the outskirts did so, at least in part, to be away from the corporate governed restraints one tends to find in the larger settlements.  He could tell by the way the doctor was looking at Rachel and nodding, he’d been at least partially correct.

             
The Doc looked at him and nodded.  He looked over at the young woman lying on the bed with the bandage around her head and breathed long and deep.  “I’ll help her,” he said dryly.

             
Quey thanked the man with a nod and the doctor returned to his patient.

             
“I’ll be back,” Quey informed his crew and turned for the door.

             
“Wait!” Dusty scrambled around the bed and stopped in front of Quey.  “What are you doing, you can’t just go off on your own.  Arnie, Regg,” he said, “You two go with him.”

             
“No,” Quey answered.  He looked at his friend.  “We need them to get to the hotel and park the car somewhere curious eyes’ll have a tough time spotting it.”  He clapped Dusty on the shoulder and assured him, “I’ll be fine.”  He turned and looked to Reggie, standing near the door, and Arnie, who’d been like a ghost hovering quietly in the corner.  “You two good with that?”

             
“Sure,” Reggie replied, then he popped Arnie’s shoulder with the back of his hand and said, “We can get a room.  And after that I mean to see about setting my teeth on something.”

             
Quey nodded, “Not a bad idea.”

             
“What are you going to do?” Arnie asked.

             
“I gotta get a truck.”

             
“You really mean to go back for that thing?” Reggie asked.

             
He looked at the big man and answered, “I do at that.”

             
Dusty had been watching Rachel but he stopped long enough to say, “And we’ll help you.”  Reggie was all ready nodding.

             
Quey looked at Dusty and said, “You got a big enough plate of shit to eat already on account of me.  Make sure she knows you’re still here to wake up to, and then maybe we can come up with something to do about the rest.”

             
Dusty nodded solemnly and the others headed out the door.

             
Quey was sitting in the bank lobby, a simple room of wood and tile in a small building with only one person working, waiting for them to process his transaction and give him his twenty one thousand four hundred and eighty seven in hard currency.  He preferred the coins tradesmen often used but beggars couldn’t be picky about their scraps.  He leaned back in the dull brown chair with the strait back and fake wood armrests and accessed the contacts list on his computer.  He touched Ryla’s name and sighed.  He wasn’t sure how she was going to take him leaving one of her babies on the side of the road but he had to tell her things were going to shit.

             
Nerves mustered, he tapped her name again and the spiral appeared along with the word “Connecting.”  She answered before the first ring had time to finish and looked at him with all of her focus.  “What happened?”  She swallowed hard.

             
Quey shook his head.  “Got my dick in a shark’s mouth is all.”  Her brow furrowed and he chuckled.  “Bad things,” he clarified and she nodded.  “Ryla,” he began solemn, then finished, “I lost Geo.”

             
“Oh,” she said, sitting back slightly.

             
“They blew up my truck and,” he saw her eyes widen and he assured her, “don’t worry, its okay.  It managed to get out.”

             
“Oh.  Geo.  Sure.  Good,” she answered.

             
“I think I can get it back it’s just… it’s going to take a while.  I’m waiting to get some cash and a new truck.  I ran its program where I left him,” he added optimistically.  It isn’t really that far from the last place it ran but I didn’t know what else to do.”

             
Ryla nodded.  “Who blew up your truck?” she asked hollowly.

             
“A group called the Angels of the Brood.  Nasty bunch.”

             
“I’m aware of them.  Quey…” she trailed off and sat for a moment looking at him.

             
“What?” he finally asked.

             
“I don’t know,” she said, brow furrowed.  “Be careful, I guess.”

             
He nodded with a slight smile.  “Thanks.”  The bank teller signaled for him and he told her, “Time to go, but I’ll keep you informed.”

Ryla nodded and Quey ended the transmission before going to meet the teller. 
             

             
Hundreds of miles away, sitting on her bed on the third floor of her robotics compound, Ryla felt something she rarely experienced and never with this intensity.  She felt nervous.  Barefoot, wearing only her black nightdress that was thin in every way and gently hugged her body, she climbed off the bed and walked though her elaborately painted halls until she was standing in the room he’d slept in when he’d stayed with her for those two short days.  After a thoughtful sigh she laid down on the unmade bed, on the sheets she hadn’t bothered to have changed and stared up at the ceiling.

             
In the bank Quey checked his cash and, satisfied, walked out to the street and started for a used car lot they’d spotted near the edge of town on the way in.

             
Dusty was sitting beside Rachel, holding her hand tenderly.  “Guess I should just go ahead and tell you, I got us reservations at Viani’s for your birthday.”  His fingers danced over the back of her hand, caressing the skin softly.  “No point keeping it a secret I suppose as it’s most likely a smoldering mess just about now.”  He chuckled, “Hope the thought counts for something.”

             
“Could just be making it up,” she said and his eyes snapped to hers, open and looking at him.  He laughed heartily, perhaps with a touch of hysteria, and gripped her hand in both of his.

             
“Could be,” was all he could think to say before kissing the back of her hand.  Tears poured freely from his eyes releasing the swell of emotion his body could no longer contain.

             
“What happened?” she asked.

             
“You fell,” he replied.

             
She nodded slightly.  “Missed the jump…” she trailed off.

             
“I’m sorry baby,” he said gripping her hand and then caressing her arm.  “I shouldn’t have made you,” he couldn’t finish so he turned to another regret.  “I should have caught you.”

             
She was watching him and something in her eyes unnerved him, like maybe she was going to agree with him.  He realized then he’d been looking for absolution.  What she said took him off guard.  “Why did you have a gun?”

             
He looked at her, puzzled and asked, “What?”

             
“The gun.  Why did you have it?”

             
He shrugged.  “Because.  I don’t know.  In case.”

             
“In case of what?”

             
He sat back from her a bit, his eyes no longer leaking.  “In case a gang of raiders decided to attack the city.  What’s it matter, you’ve never said you hated guns or-”

             
“It’s not the gun I have a problem with.”  She chuckled lightly, “Hell I’m glad you had it.  Its why were alive.  I’m just curious why you didn’t tell me you had it.”

             
He shrugged.  “I’ve had it for years.  Stowed it away when I moved in and generally forgot about it till the raid.”

             
“Had it for years?  Since your days with Quey, you mean?”

             
Dusty nodded.  Then it occurred to him.  “Is that what this is about?”

             
“I saw you out there-”

             
He interrupted her this time, “I told you that part of my life is over.  Told you long ago.”