XOM-B (21 page)

Mohr chuckles. “You’ve changed so much in the last twenty-four hours.” Then his smile fades. “Wait here.” Not answering my question, or perhaps avoiding it, he walks to a chest and taps a code into the keypad on its side. The top separates and opens. Three rows of black weaponry fill the space. He fiddles with the contents of the case for a moment, then stands up holding two holstered guns on belts. He carries the weapons to us and holds one up. “Toggle this switch to power up the weapon. Then just pull the trigger. These work just like the railguns, but on a smaller scale and with slightly less velocity than the others you’ve seen.”

“So they won’t punch holes through the city?” I ask.

“Well, not all the way through, but you should handle them with great care.” He hands one belt to me and the other to Luscious, who looks surprised. “They go around your waist.”

As Luscious and I wrap the belts around our waists, Mohr taps on one of ten hard square pouches on the outside of the belt. “Each of these contains a magazine of ammunition, one hundred rounds in each, small but powerful. You have eleven hundred rounds total, which sounds like a lot, but in the right circumstances, won’t last long. Use them sparingly. To replace a magazine, depress the button on the back of the handle. The spent magazine will eject and you can insert the new one. Understand?”

I nod and fasten the belt in place. “What about you?” I ask Heap.

He pats his armored leg where his gun remains hidden until it’s needed. “I’m already armed.” He starts his HoverCycle and gives the repulse engines a good rev. “Check your armament gauges,” he says to me, pointing to two glowing vertical bars on his dash display. I look down and find the bars. They’re lit green to the top.

“Green and full,” I say.

He moves his finger across the dash to a circular display. “Charge?”

I find the display. A needle points to the right of a notched circle, landing on a capital F. “F for full,” I say, and Heap nods. “Anything else I need to know?”

“If anything else lights up, ignore it. If it starts blinking, make sure you’re near the ground and start thinking about an alternate mode of transport.”

“You know,” I say, “I really enjoy these longer conversations we’re having now.”

Heap turns to Mohr. “He has a sense of humor now, too.” He pulls forward toward the outside edge of the hangar, and stops. I pull up next to him. Mohr lags behind. I turn back to him.

“Will you be okay?” I ask.

“Sir will protect me,” Mohr says with a shrug. “If he doesn’t shoot me for letting you leave.” When I look worried, Mohr waves his hand dismissively. “We’ll see each other again. Of that, I have little doubt. Now go. Take care of yourself, and each other.”

“We will,” I promise.

“You remember how to slow a fall?” Heap asks.

“Of course,” I say.

“Hold onto him,” Heap says to Luscious. “Tight.”

Luscious wraps her arms around my waist and despite the circumstances, I must admit to feeling a deeply pleasant surge of emotions as a result. When she leans her head on my back, the surge is calmed. It’s like she has some kind of control over me, and despite the fact that control over another human was forbidden by the Grind Abolition Act, I find myself a willing participant in relinquishing myself to her.

“Freeman,” Heap says, snapping me out of my reverie. “I’m working on my sense of humor, too.”

“What?” I ask, trying to recall if Heap ever made an attempt at humor.

He pushes a button on the dash of his cycle.

The floor beneath the cycles falls open, revealing a quarter mile of open space between us and the city floor. In the time it takes my shout of surprise to rise from my mouth, we’ve already fallen a hundred feet.

26.

Despite the ridiculous height, knowing that the HoverCycle will slow our fall and stop us gently, three feet from the ground, keeps me from feeling any real fear. A thousand feet or thirty thousand feet, I don’t think it would matter. Terminal velocity is the maximum speed a falling object can reach as gravity pulls it downward while drag slows it down. Were I to jump and free-fall in a dive, I might reach two hundred miles per hour. And while the HoverCycle is heavy, its large size, two hover discs and lots of air-catching nooks create considerable drag. I quickly count the time it takes for us to pass ten floors and calculate our speed at one hundred miles per hour. The HoverCycle travels faster horizontally.

I flash a grin at Heap, who is falling atop his cycle below and to my left, to let him know I appreciate his humor. He responds with a nod, though I’m not sure if he’s acknowledging me or something else. Nods are funny that way. They can mean any number of things. He could be expressing acknowledgment, pride or even indifference. It’s hard to tell with Heap’s armored expression. Filtering the gesture through what I know of my big blue guardian, it’s most likely that he’s feeling a mixture of pride, relief and maybe even happiness that I’ve managed to not panic all the way to the ground. Or perhaps he’s simply just glad that I found humor in his joke, which I have to say, is more of a prank than a joke. I have no experience with pranks. I have never performed one or been on the receiving end of one before now, but I suspect dropping someone from a thousand-foot-plus height is on the extreme end.

Heap raises his thick arm and points to the horizon. I turn forward and see the black, glowing towers of Liberty. But beyond the city is the lush green of the natural world. That’s where he’s pointing. We’re not just leaving the Spire, we’re leaving the city.

Suddenly, Heap’s direction changes. He’s no longer falling straight down, he’s rocketing forward as well. I’d assumed we would drop to the streets below and then drive our way through the city. This new route strikes me as risky. He’s moving into the congested airspace around the Spire, where HoverTracks twist about and carry speeding vehicles whose passengers are seeking refuge from the mobs of undead tearing through the streets.

A quick glance down reveals his logic. A battle is being waged in the streets surrounding the Spire. Huge robot soldiers, tanks and lines of men fire an endless barrage into rushing hordes of undead. The sounds of gunfire and explosions are muted by the rushing wind, but the sight of it is enough to convince me it’s not the ideal landing spot.

“Hang on!” I shout to Luscious over the wind.

“I am!” she shouts back.

“Tighter!” I lean forward slightly, tipping the cycle’s nose downward. This alone delivers some forward momentum, but we really start moving when I press the accelerator pedal. I spot Heap ahead of us and do my best to fall in line behind him. The cycles aren’t made for flight, or even gliding, but through a combination of leaning side to side, forward and backward, I manage to bring us up behind Heap.

He looks back, sees us and gives a nod.
Approval this time,
I think.

The problem with being behind Heap is that his thick body blocks a good portion of my view. I won’t see what’s coming until it’s too late to do anything about it, so I’m trusting him to guide us safely to the ground.

“Whoa!” I shout as Heap ducks down, revealing the bottom of a freeway track. The cars atop it are stopped and burning. Being far smaller than the man leading me downward, I don’t need to duck, but I’m still unnerved by the track’s proximity to my head, not to mention Heap’s. A gust of wind or an updraft could have slammed him into the track.

We’re just three hundred feet from the ground now, but the closeness to our descent’s end provides little comfort. If something were going to go wrong, it would be now.

Heap leans hard to the left, bringing his HoverCycle into a full spin.

I lean to the side, attempting to duplicate his maneuver, but lack the girth. “Lean!” I shout.

Luscious’s grip tightens and she lends her weight to mine, but I fear it’s too little too late. Heap, now upside down, uses his repulse engines to push himself away from the underside of a wide, multilane freeway. When I attempt the same maneuver, Luscious and I come far closer to the bottom of the track and the repulse engines shove us hard toward the ground.

We drop a hundred feet in a second. I shout as the spiraling HoverCycle continues around. When we’re upright again, I lean the other way, leveling us out and controlling our mad descent once again. But we’re now a hundred feet below Heap. While I can see what’s coming, I no longer have a skilled driver ahead of me to emulate.

I look ahead, taking note of four intersecting HoverTracks between us and the street. Two hold multiple lanes of fast-moving vehicles. Two are single-lane speedways, one of which is congested by piled-up ruined vehicles … and bodies, either dead or soon to be. Or not. It’s hard to tell.

I zoom in and scan the street below, realizing that I hadn’t thought to check the functionality of this particular ocular upgrade. The living and dead mingle amidst a chaotic mash of cars. Soldiers stand among them, some shooting, some biting. I look ahead, searching as far as I can, and see the same, block after block. Our return to the ground will not be a happy occasion.

My vision snaps back to normal and I see our path like a roadmap. Without thought, my body works in tandem with the cycle, leaning, pitching, speeding up and slowing down. Nothing as fancy as Heap’s sideways flip, but I seem to have a full mastery of the vehicle now.

As we momentarily skip over an empty freeway, Luscious asks, “How are you doing this?”

I shrug, focusing on my path, which is almost complete. After that, no amount of forethought can generate a clear path through the bedlam below.

Thirty feet from the ground, I feel the repulse engines slow our descent. We’re nearly there.

Heap suddenly appears ahead of us, dropping down until his repulse engines begin slowing his descent as well. Without looking back, he points two fingers forward. We’re already moving quite fast, so it only takes me a moment to figure out what he wants to do. He shifts to the right, and then in a flash, he’s propelled forward by the cycle’s turbofan jet. A moment later, we’re rocketing up behind him, accelerating to speeds that dwarf our free fall.

The sounds of battle come and go in strange bursts. Bits of screams flash past. Gunfire rattles. Doppler explosions come and go. The only things that remain constant are the hum of the repulse engines, the rushing wind and the moaning of the dead, each carrying on the tune of the zombies passed a moment before.

Heap’s cycle lowers to the point where I can see the repulse discs pushing down on the people below it. He must feel it, too, because he’s swerving back and forth above the heads of the people below, following a path directly above undead and only undead, sparing the living. I do my best to follow his lead, but any maneuver at this speed takes intense focus, so intense that I nearly miss what happens to Heap.

He cuts off the turbofan jet and turbines, cranks the cycle hard to the left and uses the repulse engines as brakes, but all of this, which happens in just two seconds, isn’t enough to avoid colliding with—what? I can’t see. But the effect is impossible to miss.

The HoverCycle stops suddenly and Heap is flung into the air. He topples head over heels, performing five rapid flips before crashing to the street. He rolls through the horde, crushing bodies beneath his girth. His armor clanging against the hard metal street.

A thick, black chain snaps up in front of my HoverCycle. I nearly try to stop, just as Heap did, but I correct his mistake by shoving the repulse engine pedal to the floor and gaining a few extra feet. I glide cleanly over the chain, cut the repulse engine and drop toward the road. Before we crash, I kick on the repulse engines, turn hard to the left and lean, just as Heap had. The HoverCycle comes to a sudden stop, launching the undead unfortunate enough to be standing in front of the tilted repulse engines. They arc away like projectiles, crashing into their nonliving comrades and pulling a lot of attention in our direction.

“What are you doing?” Luscious asks. “Don’t stop!”

“I’m not going to leave him behind,” I say, stepping off the cycle.

“Well,” she says, “what should I do?”

I point to the weapon Mohr gave her. “Use it.”

The swath of street where I landed has been cleared of the dead, dying and fleeing. I look to where I expect to find Heap, but see only a mound of undead, clawing and biting at some unseen form.
Heap,
I realize.

“Get off of him!” I aim my weapon and run toward Heap, but don’t get a chance to fire. The pile rises from the street and then explodes outward. Heap spins, punching, breaking and kicking in a spiral of violence. He takes the last of the undead clinging to his armor and simply throws him away. When he turns to me, I see that his chest armor has been dented inward from the impact of his crash.

“What are you doing?” he shouts at me. “Get out of here!”

I stop in my tracks.
Perhaps Luscious was right? Maybe we should leave?

I turn back and see her firing her weapon again and again, standing her ground, but losing it at the same time. She won’t be able to hold them off much longer. I’m about to run to her aid when the
clack, clack, clack
of a chain being withdrawn pulls my attention back toward Heap.

He’s not looking at me anymore. He’s looking up.

A shadow falls over the street. The chain’s owner has arrived.

“Freeman,” Heap says. “Run.”

I draw my weapon. “Not without you. Not this time.”

I hear a grunt of frustration, but it’s quickly replaced by the words, “Then fight!”

27.

Heap’s gun appears in his hand, but he doesn’t aim up at the approaching giant, he aims toward me. I feel the warmth of the fired projectiles as they pass by my face and strike the two undead shambling up behind me. His focus is so entirely on protecting me that he forgets himself.

I, however, don’t. “Get down!” I shout, as the clanking of a loud chain reverberates through the street. I dive forward, catch Heap by his large feet and pull his legs out from under him. A large, black steel ball sweeps over us, all but disintegrating a mass of zombies and punching a hole in a nearby building.