They Tell Me I'm The Bad Guy (32 page)

Thank Jesus for Jamaican car thieves.

He hel
ped me get out of the shelf boa-
constricted around me
, and my hearing
started to come back. "Mistah Lee says this was the only way, I come find you. Dem three boss bastards watched the computers too much, and he had to tell 'em you came to him last night. They let dese boys have you after that. Was a retribution killin'. I been followin' 'em."

He pulled the shelf enough that
I managed to wriggle out of
it.
"Was that all of the Crew? Just two
guys
?"

"They was the only ones left, yeah." He pointed to the burning Seahawks jersey on the floor. "That boy left his shirt."

I dusted potato flakes off my clothes. "Good. Fuck 'im. He left some fingers, too. And I'm buying you a round when this i
s over.
Did Lee say if Tracey was still in tent city?"

"She is. Everybody goin' there. 'Cept Mistah Lee."

A Hummer drove by, and I ducked. "Why? What's L
ee doing?"

"He got picked up when the raid started after dose three bastards ripped the hardware out of 'im this mornin' and turned 'im out on the stre
et, bleedin'. Like an old dog."

I could see through a window that m
ore and more buildings were being
disassembled
on the other side of town, but it didn't look like anybody was coming toward the store yet. I told the Rasta "Stay close to me" and
scurried over to di
g in Ja-Rilla's pants.

"You
hear what I said?" he asked me.

"Huh?"
I glanced up; he had
stayed planted on his spot without following me
.
I snapped my fingers at him. "Get
the fuck
over here before Silvy make
s me kill you or something, man
."

He just stared at me, dead-eyed. "There was only cops
here
for Lee to turn 'imself in to by God's grace. He would have died relyin' on you and your fake cop bullshit. You got 'im killed."

Fuck, my hand grazed right over Ja-Rilla's giant gorilla cock. I didn't have time for an argument.
I told the Rasta,
"For fuck's sake, you're a car thief. You're gonna preach to me about lying? Now, in the middle
of all this?"

I finally found a little metal cylinder in the
waistband of Ja-Rilla's boxers, and i
t had exactly what I figured he would have stashed on him: psy-blockers. I choked three of them down. That many would give me the runs, but shitting my pants was probably gonna happen before the day was over anyway.

Right outside the store, grass, dirt and clay rose into two huge mounds that sucked
the earth
to
ward
them and tilted the foundation. The mounds
got larger, and rose up to form
into a pair of hands that lashed out and tore
a passing
armored
eighteen wheeler and its Hummer escort in half.
P
risoners escaped out of the back
of the truck while the hands laid into it
. Most of the escapees got about twenty feet away when their front halves teleported away from their back halves in a
bloody
hiss.
The back halves of the escapees fell forward on the grass and kept twitching.

That was it; my bullshit limit reached. Fuck. Everybody. I had to find Tracey.

I threw a box of old cereal at the Rasta and scrambled back to his side. "Did you see that? You really think Lee's not better off in custody? Jesus
Christ
.
You got a car?"

He
crossed himself, still fixated on the half bodies, and
pulled a set of keys out of his pocket. They had the Lamborghini logo on them. "One block over. A
nd you fucked Mistah Lee ovah. I want
you to admit it."

I rolled my eyes at him.
"Swear to
God, I will after this is over, okay?
Give me the keys."

He
clutched
them tightly. "
No.
I drive."

"Fine, then."
I heated up the keys and the metallic logo on
the fob until he dropped them.

"Fuck you do that for?" he shouted.

I cooled the keys
off, snatched them up and ran out of the store like a bandit. The psy-blockers would be kicking in
any second
and keeping Silvy out, and I couldn't have anybody slowing me down or trying to fucking argue with me
every step of the way.

"Go turn yourself in before you get killed," I
told
the Rasta over my shoulder.

Then I saw h
e was running right after me.

Shit. I pumped my legs faster.
"Goddammit, I'm just going to find Tracey. Go find a cop!"

"You not fuckin'
me
!"

Bursts of g
unfire echoed off buildings, making it nearly impossible to tell where
they
came from.
I kept ducking and flinching at nothing but sound while I ran.
The
y had made the
sun even dimmer and it
made it
harder for the eyes to focus, which had to be the point. Some lifter
spouted another language and
jumped clear over me going the opposite direction.

And behind me, the
fucking
Rasta was gaining.

Five blocks down the street, a blur of black body armor darted by, then came back around
the
corner and headed straight at me.

The speeder with a thousand zip cuffs hanging off him stumbled over
a
burning trip-line
I threw in the street ahead of him and
clipped me
hard enough to
knock
me down
flat
as he fell
really
fucking hard on the street. The sound of his body armor
cracking when it hit
was audible
.

Even the Rasta s
topped to watch until the guy skidded to a stop, which took a little while
.

"Hey," I called back to him,
huffing to catch
my breath. "Is that guy still alive? I don't need another one of those on my--aw,
shit
." The Rasta broke out into a run
after me
again. I pounded my feet straight toward the orange Lamborghini parked nearby,
hit the unlock on the keys to make sure it was the right one,
threw the door open, slammed it shut and locked it just as the Rasta got his fingers on the handle.

He banged on the window. "You bastard! You leave me here?"

The orange Lamborghini fired right up with ten cylinders' worth of horsepower.

I told him through the glass, "Go find a cop and turn yourself in. It's safer.
If you see Lee t
ell
him
I'm sorry
about what happened
."

He banged a fist one last time on the window with a "Fuck you!" as I floored it; the tires spun, and the back end wobbled until I got traction, and I took off and left him behind. I made a right toward the tent city and shifted gears.

Ahead of me, glowing blue letters spelled out 'STOP - SMYTHE'S LAW' ten-feet high in the road. I drove straight through
the blue light
warning like it wasn't there.
They weren't
raiding the tent city yet.
I just
had to
get out of town and find Tracey.

The
long gray shadows stretching across the stree
t started pulsing and rippling, and that shit wasn't a mirage.
I had seen
it on YouTube; i
t was one of the Shining Beacon guys, Ibn Meghar's group of Posters that
presidents,
armies and laws didn't usually
allow
outside of
the Third World. The cops wanted this place shut down badly if they called those fuckers in.
They called the
shadow
guy something that translated to like 'The Man Who Drinks From Three Thousand Shadow Cups in Hell,' which was the most baller-ass nickname I had ever heard.
I had to stay away from the shadows or it would be my ass.

Above me, DeltaBlue put a glowing tag that followed the car and advertised 'STOP VEHICLE' big and bright enough for every damn cop in Pyramiden to see.

I had to downshift and steer around a shadow that tried to reach out for me, then
had to make
a u-turn because the road ahead got swapped out with a field of rocks
in a
teleport.
I punched the gas with a "Fuck!" and swerved back around the corner,
cut
ting
too close to a shadow that sheared the passenger door clean off.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." I jammed the car back up into the next gear.

A flier with a badge dove out of the sky to play chicken
head-on
with me. I didn't move the car
an inch
, and he veered toward the passenger side. Then he punched his fucking hand through my windshield and ripped a gash the whole length of the car as he flew by. It lurched the car and spun it.

I lost control, and when I got it to a full stop from the slide, it came to rest right in a big fucking shadow.

"Aw, fuck me."

A
tentacle of solid shadow lunged at me through the broken windshield, but I hammered the gearshift into reverse and accelerated away. It came after me; I cut the wheel, skidded again, downshifted, nearly lost control of the damn
thing, wrenched the wheel back,
kicked the accelerator down to the floor
and shifted gears again
. I left the shadow in my rear view with the rear bumper, windsh
ield and engine bonnet. T
wo more turns and the street finally gave way to flat desert straightaway with the tent city dead ahead.

Then two Apache helicopters
came out of fucking nowhere and
flanked me.

Their rotary cannons
spun, ready to open fire, but t
hey had to get
a bead on me first
, and even in a broke-ass Lambo I covered the half-mile to the tents in well under half a minute, too fast for t
hem to keep me in their sights, especially with me popping fireballs in the pilots' faces as best I could
.

The Posters had thrown a
n earthworks barricade together around the tents; I hit the brakes as soon as
the car
made it past and dove out before it finished
rolling
to a stop, something I didn't realize I was way too fucking hurt to do until after I did it. Apache gunfire ripped into the sports car's thin skin like paper
as I rolled and clawed away from it
.
Most of the Posters scattered, but s
ome bald guy in the crowd wearing an 'Enormous Johnson' t-shirt took off like a bullet and plowed his whole body through both helicopters. They crashed to the desert in flames.

I
lied
on the red dirt, my chest heaving while people snapped cell phone pictures of the destroyed car
, the helicopters, and me
.

I checked my pocket.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost my fucking cigarettes.

And there had to be at least a
fifty-fifty
chance I had shit my pants.

Getting In and Getting Out

I was ready for the fight of my fucking life to work my way
int
o
the building at the heart of the tent city
, but it
took
almost
no effort
to get in
. At
all. I
just
scouted
the only door that wasn
'
t welded shut
for a little while to make sure nobody w
ent in or out,
fried two security cameras and cut the door
in half up and down
with heat
so I could
squeeze through without setting off the alarm on the knob. That was it. Literally,
nobody
hassled me about it.
They were all
too busy getting stoned, fucking
each other
or fighting
each other
for no goddamn reason, just waiting for the cops to storm the place.
Fucking Will could have broken in with no problem
, that
wa
s how easy it was
. It actually pissed me off.