They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (31 page)

I
got the guy's attention and
pointed out of town. "De police," I told him, coughing for air and rusty French.
"S'il vous plait, uh, intrei, fucking, uh, hep-hepberg? Hepberger?"

The French fuck slammed the door on me, then yelled at me some more because I had destroyed his lock.

A bunch of the fliers were s
tuck in mid-air, unable to move, grabbed and frozen in place by t
elekinetics
.
The
ones
that could still move had to dodge heavy-caliber machine gun fire that sent tracer bullets streaking up through the gray sky.
Cops
that
could
flew down the
fliers
that got outsi
de of the perimeter of gunfire while the Kevlar circus pulled into town.

"Shit. Lee, man, are you there?" I asked again as I picked myself up. God, my chest hurt. Fucking Frenchman. I hoped the nanites would repair it like they had my ribs.

An apartment building down the street
came apart piece-by-piece like the parts diagram in a lawn mower manual
with a wrenching, splintering noise as the brick, wood and metal twisted and came undone.
Everybody
inside
was
held in place by telekinetics so they couldn't run or put up a fight. The cops
weren't fucking around.

A
fucking speeder jetted by me,
threw my ass to the ground
in his wake
and
kept running.
He had a cop speeder in black body armor on his ass, a cop who stopped running long enough to sit me up and put a pair of fucking plastic zip-strips on my wrists.
He told me with a heavy accent to stay on the ground, and he was out of sight in an eye blink. As soon as he was,
I softened the plastic cuffs enough to break them and got running toward the edge of town
, toward the tent city
.
I had to get to Tracey, and Lee said she was there.
I just had to stay out of custody
long enough to get to her
.

Fliers were still shooting across the sky in every direction, and mean-ass Apache helicopters
loaded with rockets and guns
hovered everywhere
while other buildings got the take-apart treatment. Bull horns blared in
every language to cooperate.
I saw a troop carrier full of Mexican soldiers in it pass on the next street over.
Agents
branded with initials from
law enforcement
agencies
all over the world swarmed Pyramiden
,
cover
ing as much ground
as th
ey could as fast as they could
before everybody woke up and got their shit in gear
.

A crowd of Posters ran by me, and a
young guy who was a
lambchop
sideburn enthusiast slapped my shoulder
and told me to go with them.
"We go to tents.
When raid come. They tell us."

Shit. The three assholes had
specifically
told everybody
what to do when a raid happened. The
y
the cops would hit the place an
d had prepared everyone for it. And the whole fucking herd was going the same fucking direction I was. Fuck.

I followed after the crowd
, hanging back behind them
. A Hummer full of soldiers jumped a ditch and landed hard to cut off their route, and Lambchop graphically killed a cop with some kind of acid
shit dripping from his pores
.
Him and his people
stripped the cop's body and went after the other three guys in the Hummer
, taking their body armor and guns for themselves
.
I decided to take my own route.

I
snuck over to the next street, ducking every time I
heard gunfire,
and
ran toward the edge of town.
Up on a rooftop, some half-naked guy with 'F-BOMB' tattooed in three rows of giant print that filled his
whole
torso cupped his hands around his mouth. It
was
like a train car full of plastic explosives
had
detonated when he shouted, '
Fuuuuuuuuucccccckkkk yyyyyyyooooooouuuuuuu piiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigggggss!
'

Up in the air, the side of an Apache caved in from the shockwave. It went into a smoking spin and clipped a building on its way to the street. Windows shattered everywhere. I barely had time to get my hands over my ears when F-Bomb started firing on ground personnel and trucks with a machine gun "
fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck
" that cracked Kevlar
, broke bones and
hammered vehicles mercilessly.

But F-Bomb didn't have brain enough to move his ass instead of standing out in the open, so he got telekinetically
yanked down in a four-storey
beeline that bounced his ass off the street to a waiting
group
of black SUVs, armor-plated eighteen wheelers and military transports. He talked a few guys off their feet and bloodied noses, but agents closed ranks around him. I got back to running and didn't stay to watch him get his ass beat.

I made it five steps and
got yanked off my feet
again
and put back on my a
ss with a new set of zip-strips
.

"I told you to stay down,
"
the cop said before he was gone again.

I melted through the fucking cuffs and stood back up. "Leave me the fuck alone, man!"
I shouted after him.
Goddamn speeder.

Then everything in town went from
mostly
apeshit to completely apeshit.

People, trucks and buildings
started teleporting at random
like a kid swapping around pieces of a puzzle. Body parts were severed from people standing in the wrong place
at the wrong time; guys lost limbs
in a hiss of air. Cops, Posters, trucks, soldiers, brick,
street, dirt
and
mortar fell out of the sky when
they re-appeared.
Buildings collapsed when they lost parts of foundation.
In the confusion, somebody used their power to take control of the
cops' heavy machine-guns
and turned them around. While Pyramiden
got
rearranged, hot
gunfire
from eight anti-aircraft guns
massacred vehicles and
went through Kevlar before somebody with the cops disassembled the guns the same way they had the buildings. Half a goddamn helicopter appeared on the ground in the middle of the cluster of vehicles, its blades spinning,
and just butchered
people.

I ran for cover in
what turned out to be
a
small
grocery store
. I needed a second to think and to catch my breath. A
nd staying in one spot seemed like the best way to not wander into one of Tracey
'
s teleport zones.
Inside the stor
e
, s
helves were toppled over, cans and boxes of food were all over the floor.
Somebody had looted the place looking for food but it had all gone bad years ago. Then the store got used
as a toilet
;
it smell
ed like piss and cooked spoons.

Swear to God, I hadn't even gotten a chance to catch my breath when
the floor bucked in a wave that went from one end of the foundation to the other, then back. Shelves jumped up and fell on me, burying me in boxes of old cereal and potato flak
es. Rafters snappe
d
above
, walls
cracked
almost to collapse
, the whole store ju
st got thoroughly fucked.
I had two shelf units on top of me.

Then came voices a
nd a couple of guys movi
ng through
all
the
fallen
crap.

"The fuck is he?" somebody said.

Shit, were they talking about me?
I couldn't see a damn thing,
and
I didn't move.

Cans were kicked out of the way and rolled and crashed into other shit. I hid in my fort of
expired, shitty foreign cereal.

"Silvy, make him squeal," one of them
guys said in a gravelly growl.

Fuck.

All of a sudden, my mouth shouted "right here" without me telling it to. That fucker Lee hadn't turned my nanites on, and Psycho Silvy had full access
to my head
.

The footsteps changed direction and came right
at
me.

I ignited a
wall
of fire a yard thick around me while I
tried to push the shelf units off and
dig myself out. The floor bucked again and
kicked
me upward, slamming my head hard into a shelf unit and spilling boxes in a snow of instant powdered potatoes
. The flakes briefly caught fire then
died as my flames went out
. Hitting my head shot my concentration to shit
.

The first thing I saw through the fog of head injury was a shaved gorilla with a goatee. His SCEIA-issue gray jumpsuit was peeled down and tied around his waist with the sleeves. Just like the old guard had told me. Ja-Rilla.

A fat, Old English
W.C.S.C.
had been tattooed across his chest. "'Sup, bitch?" he snarled at me down the barrel of an AK-47 in a voice that sounded exactly like what it would sound like if someone had taught a gorilla to speak. "
You want some sedatives 'fore I blow your ass away?
This is what you get for fuckin' with the--"

It only took me a second to super-heat his AK, blow the rounds in the clip and melt the skin on his hands to the gun. The round already in the chamber fire
d and nearly took my head off, and, b
ehind me, a long shelf dislodged from its unit
,
wound around me tight and took my feet out from under me. I landed hard on the floor.
More head injuries. Fantastic.

Some white kid with a mohawk, a
W.C.S.C.
on his neck and a Seahawks jersey pointed a handgun at me like an idiot, his finger on the trigger. "Ja-Rilla, you all right?" he shouted
at the cursing gorilla
.

"
Fuckin' shoot 'im
,"
Rilla roared as he ripped his right hand off the AK metal in a bloody mess.

Again, stupid-ass kids wasting time with talking and pointing guns at a goddamn pyrokinetic. Seahawks fan lost his hand when I blew the clip in
his
gun. Did they even fucking teach science in school anymore?

I set his jersey on fire next, and in my head, a voice like glass on steel screeched, "YoU cAn'T mOvE nOw," and
all my muscles stopped working
.

Ja-Rilla got his other hand torn
off the AK and came at me, but, fuck him, because
I didn't have to move a damn thing to set his face on fire while I hummed 'Ice, Ice, Baby'
some more
to distract Silvy.
The fire
slowed
Rilla
down, but he was cranked on adrenaline and didn't
stop
. S
ilvy took the fire away from me
, but fuck her
too
, because I froze Rilla's bare foot to a can of peaches, and that tripped him up enough to put him
on the floor
, just screaming and
still
trying to put his face out.

"StOp SiNgInG nOw," Silvy ordered right before I couldn't do cold anymore. I had nothing left. Ja-Rilla stopped yelling
like a switch had been turned off
and
stood up calmly, even with
his face looking like burnt bacon.
Silvy had
the guy in her control
.

She
shouted in my brain, "BuRn ThE sToRe ArOuNd YoU wHiLe He StRaNgLeS yOu,"
and I could feel her anger and joy in the whole thing,
but
then she
faded away out of my thoughts. And a shotgun blast dropped Ja-Rilla for good.

The Rasta set a smoking shotgun on the floor and knelt down next to me. He had his Adidas shorts on with a fluorescent pink tank top with the arms holes cut down to the waist. I couldn't really hear much after he fired that damn shot, but I kind of read his lips. "She gone now. You stay close to me." He tapped the side of his head with a smile. Something, something, "not getting through."