Dusk (33 page)

—
Ha, that’s funny, but I don’t get what it has to
do with me and Terry.

—
Well, what’s the moral of the story?

—
That toy stores should carry sweetbars and keep
out monkeys?

—
No, smarty pants. The moral is you shouldn’t
make a threat you’re not prepared to keep, or monkeys will take
advantage of you.

—
Isn’t a threat you can’t keep called a bluff?
Don’t people do it in poker all the time?

—
Sure they do, and lots of them lose when their
cards are called. Point is, a man should follow through with his
threats, or he should keep his mouth shut.

—
So you’re sayin’, when I see Terry I should pop
him?

—
No Dari, I’m saying there’s nothing worse than a
man who doesn’t do what he says he will, and he, and only he, has
to live with the misery that comes with being that man.

• • • • •

“Maybe we should have procured a more solid vehicle
than a parade float,” Uzziah said as he held the sights of his
assault rifle on the hovering tank lumbering after them.

“If you see a better vehicle, you’re welcome
to go get it!” Cyrus yelled over the wind coursing between them as
they sped down the ave over the heads of onlookers who seemed to
think it was an elaborate stunt. Jang handled the vehicle as if he
had been driving parade floats his entire life. And his instincts
were good, probably honed from more than one mishap involving the
Seoul municipal police. He kept the lev low, only a few meters
above the people on the ave, and he hugged the corners tightly,
taking a corner whenever the assault vehicle got too close. There
was no way the pilots of the assault-lev would risk using heavy
munitions in this environment, but as one of the nodes on the front
of the tank began to glow, Cyrus realized the pilots felt their
planetary lasers would only cause acceptable collateral damage.

“Get down!” Uzziah yelled, pressing himself
to the stucco deck of the float. Tanner and a dazed Davidson rode
in the cabin with Jang, while the others, on the back of what must
have originally been a flatbed lorry, flattened themselves into the
sculpting that had transformed the craft into an eastern dragon. A
line of orange light stretched from the node on the tank behind
them and sliced over the vehicle. Jang dipped closer to the crowd
as the razor of light clipped the tip of the craft’s tail. He swung
left around a turn as a second laser stretched over the right side
of the float.

Tanner stuck his head out of a hole in the
side of the dragon’s chest. “What now?” he yelled over the
wind.

“Get to the gate!” Uzziah yelled.

Tanner nodded as Cyrus looked around. He
noticed part of the molding that formed one of the dragon’s scales
looked like a seat, which led his eyes to a panel on the back of
the dragon’s neck. They sped over another cheering mob as the tank
rounded the corner behind them. The four large caliber guns of the
assault-lev’s artillery cannon followed them as the turret stood in
place; there was no way they would use them here, but as soon as
they got into the open…

Cyrus pressed one of the buttons and the
float shook as a roar sounded. He pressed the button next to it and
bluish flame erupted from the dragon’s mouth, eliciting another
round of cheers and plaudits from the crowd.

“Should we fire?” Milliken asked, keeping the
tank in his own sites as best he could.

“Don’t think it will do much good!” Uzziah
yelled back.

The lasers fired again, but Jang dipped the
dragon to the right and then pulled around another turn, leaving
the lasers crossing beneath the float. Toutopolus slipped, but
Torvald caught his shoulder before he could roll out of his
nook.

“Are you a marksman?” Cyrus asked, tapping
Uzziah on his shoulder.

“What? Yeah, best in class. Why?”

Cyrus lifted a tank marked ‘combustible’ and
pointed back to an open compartment in one of the rolls of the
dragon’s body. “Two more of these!” he yelled.

Cyrus left the canister in the cranny behind
Uzziah and crawled back to the front of the converted lorry. He
banged the flat of his hand against the body of the dragon where
Tanner had popped out his head. Tanner’s head craned out the little
window and Cyrus leaned forward. “Tell Jang to slow down!”

“What?” Tanner looked like he had heard, but
wasn’t sure of his own understanding.

“Take another turn and slow down!”

Cyrus grabbed the other two canisters from
the compartment and crawled back to where Uzziah sat. Milliken sat
on the opposite side of the dragon’s body. “Okay, after the next
turn get ready!”

The dragon accelerated, and just as the tank
loomed around the corner, Jang dipped left again and slowed. Cyrus
readied himself, grasping the handholds along the top of the
canister. Jang rose to a level halfway between ave levels as the
people beneath them looked on. For the first time Cyrus noticed all
the adboards, both large and small, displayed the same image. The
man they called the Knight of Swords was giving an impassioned
speech. A transcript ran beneath him in subtitles but there was no
time for reading. Cyrus hunkered down as he saw a hint of gunmetal
peek from around the corner. Then, as the tank began coming around
the corner, he stood and he heaved the gas canister at the tank.
The canister spun through the air, and just as the node of the tank
lit up again, Uzziah fired a burst from his rifle.

The canister exploded in a blue fireball in
front of the node rounding the corner. Jang hit the throttle again
and dove back to just above the lower ave as a laser stretched
across the street over them.

Tanner’s head poked from the window again,
“We can’t keep this up all day!”

“I know! I know!” Cyrus yelled back, losing
his balance as they rounded another corner. As they came around the
corner, they were met with another cheer. On a large adboard just
above them, the image of the Knight of Swords faded into an image
of Earth, solitary and frozen, gibbous in the rays of a sun Cyrus
would never feel the warmth of again.

“Move up! Move up to the base of the board!”
Cyrus yelled to the cabin. Torvald leaned over the left side and
relayed the message. The float rose and jinked to its left. Cyrus
leapt off the float onto the catwalk that supported the board. He
held the remaining canisters in each hand and placed one next to a
support of the board.

“Go goddamn it! There’s no time.” Cyrus
screamed over the wind and crowd, “Go to the edge of the block!
Fire as soon as I am clear!”

Jang pulled away slowly at first, until a
laser fired through the head of the dragon. The tank strafed
sideways into the large ave firing the second laser between the
adboard and the float as Jang pulled away. Cyrus ran to the
opposite end of the sign as the tank lurched forward. He set the
last canister at the end. He had noticed that the building behind
this one was terraced, but he had no time to gauge distance. He
hoped he had not made a mistake as he sprinted to the end of the
catwalk. As he approached the safety rail, he saw there was about
four meters between the two buildings, and the terrace was about
two meters below. He leapt up at the end, braced both feet on the
rail in a crouch, and extended his body with all the might in his
legs. As he stretched, pulling his legs beneath him, he heard the
report of automatic fire and then felt the shockwave of the
exploding canisters as the air around him warmed abruptly. As soon
as he hit the landing he rolled again, but his ankle and shoulder
cursed him for it. He stood with his legs already running beneath
him, but he stumbled. There was a horrible screeching and hissing
and the building shook beneath him as if some mythical beast had
been loosed by the gods themselves. Cyrus pedaled his feet to keep
from falling, but he staggered into the side of the building. His
shoulder kept him upright, but the contact sent a fog through his
body. He coughed and spat, letting the wave of fear that rushed
over him overwhelm the pain. The float was about six meters ahead
and ten meters to Cyrus’s left. Jang could turn pretty tightly, but
it would still take a second or two to make that turn…

…which meant Cyrus could make it, but he had to
hustle. He looked over his shoulder and saw the adboard come down
over the tank in a shower of sparks and metal. The ground rumbled
as the sign pushed the tank into a building at the head of the
block. Cyrus felt a burn in his chest and coughed up something that
was too thick to be phlegm. His legs burned, and his ankle
throbbed, but he dipped his head, rolled his shoulders forward, and
barreled to the end of the building just as Jang made the turn.
Cyrus flung his body into the air for what, hopefully, one way or
the other, would be the last time.

Uzziah had known exactly what Cyrus was up to
when he had jumped onto the adboard platform, but he was still
surprised when the supports that held the sign collapsed and it
teetered onto the advancing tank, pushing it into the building
behind it. This entire escape plan seemed like a colossal zoo fuck,
and yet, it was unfolding better than some missions he had seen
planned out in war rooms; and mostly due to the fact that the man
that had been at the reins threw
himself
at the toughest
problems and just brought anyone willing along. And now, struggling
to keep his feet beneath him, Cyrus dove and stretched out his
hands as the float turned. Uzziah and Toutopolus both lunged
forward and caught Cyrus’s shoulders, dragging him into the float
on top of them. Cyrus wailed as he landed, flopped like a dying
fish, and then he slowly rolled onto his butt, holding his left
shoulder as if he had been shot. “Thanks,” he huffed through a veil
of sweat as Jang piloted the float into a wide clearing at what
must have been the center of the city.

There was a large crowd amassed here, focused
on an ominous screen that had been erected on a stage in front of
some sort of monument. At each of the four corners of the monument
was what looked like the bow of an interplanetary attack ship.
Around the square, five other adboards showed identical images of a
lone earth against the desolate backdrop of space. There was a
countdown timer beneath the image and a white-outlined box in the
upper right corner that showed a zoomed image of where the earth
lay in the dome-darkened sky.

And then, as they passed slowly, Cyrus could
see it was not a monument at all but the nose of what at one time
had been an ominous warship. And then, as the timer ran to zero,
the screens flashed white except for the highlighted box, which
remained dark as a white aster formed at a point slightly off
center. There were no cheers, no gasps, no applause—only the rush
of the wind and the whirring of the float’s grav drive as Jang sped
through the square seemingly unnoticed.

Cyrus nursed his shoulder, trying with little
success to keep it in a position that did not hurt, but the chill
that came with the silence overwhelmed even that. When the flash
finally faded, the Earth was still there, but there was something
about it that was different. Something the orbital telescope’s
digital interpretations of six hundred year-old light waves
whispered to them as they passed.
The world you knew is gone—and
you can never, ever go back
.

They passed out of the center square into
deserted aves. Jang shuttled the float onto the central
thoroughfare with a maneuver that sent a jolt through Cyrus’s body.
Tanner leaned out to ask, “So how do we get the bulkhead open?” but
then something inside the passenger cabin averted his attention.
Something that sounded like, “What in the hell?” rose from the
opposite side of the cabin. They all faced forward, and as the
smoke in front of them spread, they saw the bulkhead had been
blasted through—from the outside.

Then a low hum behind them arrested the
attention of everyone on the dragon’s back, because they all knew
what that sound meant. The tank they had left behind, dented and
scraped from its collision with the sign and building, pulled into
the deserted ave behind them. The large assault guns trained on the
rear of the float as they were bathed in spotlights.

“Your little feist-run is finished. Power
down your vehicle and surrender!” echoed through the empty ave from
the tank.

“I can make it!” the same muffled,
disembodied voice reported.

“I dunno,” Cyrus mumbled to himself, but the
craft was already lurching forward.

“You will receive no other warning,” the high
pitched whine that meant they were powering the larger guns could
be heard as the threat echoed behind them.

And then the float stopped hard. Everyone
lurched forward. Cyrus protected his shoulder but his ankle was
caught in a crack in the plaster and felt as if something hot
stabbed into his Achilles tendon. They looked forward to see
another tank descending from behind a building at the end of the
ave.

And for a moment they were all frozen in
time. As improbable as their escape had been, it had never once
felt impossible—until now. The tank in front slowed its decent and
then stopped, half concealed by the building. They heard the whirr
of the gun turret on the tank behind them, and Uzziah said, “Wait a
minute.” Then the air crackled and split, as the heat from tracer
rounds sped over them like the tail of a scorpion.

For a moment, Cyrus thought he was dying.
Sound no longer existed and all he could feel was heat. Then
suddenly, it felt as if the ground itself rippled and rushed up
into the bottom of the float as the world shook behind them. Cyrus
turned, and saw the tank behind them explode in a shower of
scorched and burning metal as it flipped sideways, smacked into a
building, and slid down the façade into the ave.