Warren Ellis - Gun Machine

Tallow got to the rear exit, lit by a single overhead lamp and surrounded on two sides by cheap mesh fencing. Someone exiting that door could come only one way—right now, that was straight toward Tallow. He flattened his back against the wall next to the door, drew his Glock, and waited.

He counted off a minute. He was straining his hearing listening for the sound of another egress being used, but his own pulse in his ears was drowning out all other noise.

Tallow was jerked around by a double gunshot and a crash of glass.

“Oh no,” he breathed, and then he ran. He was certain that the sound had come from the apartment building’s front.

Tallow felt like he was moving through molasses, like he was in one of those nightmares where you could barely move even though something terrible was happening. By the time he got around the front corner of the building, Scarly was already at the smashed main entrance, and Bat was on his back with two seared holes in his shirt.

Tallow looked around. Someone was running down the street away from him, past his own car. As the man passed under a streetlight, Tallow could discern a thin cloud of orange powder around his head.

Scarly was tearing Bat’s shirt open. “You stupid bastard,” she was saying. “You stupid bastard.”

Both rounds were buried in the Kevlar vest under Bat’s shirt, one of the ones Tallow had insisted they retrieve from Scarly’s car trunk earlier.

Bat coughed blood and then groaned. The groan made him convulse. Tallow guessed he had some broken bones. Scarly took out her phone. “I’m calling it in. Go and kill that fucker, John.”

Tallow took off after the hunter. Reaching his car, he looked down the street to see where his man was running. Tallow then unlocked and got into his car, jammed his phone into the dash and launched Ambient Security, and twisted the ignition. He made the car sweep around in a wide circle, tilting with the anger of its turn, and then Tallow rammed the accelerator down.

THE HUNTER didn’t know what was happening. He knew only that he had to hide.

He ran down the middle of the street, zigzagging when he approached traffic lights since he knew of old that they often meant security cameras were close by. He could tell traffic lights by their three eyes, vertically arranged, and their long black bodies poised to strike, like cobras. One step was on blacktop, the next on dirt. Everything was wrong.

He knew where he was going.

There were still people on the street, and they were staring at him. The paint was everywhere, all over him, penetrating his clothes, gumming his eyelids together. He perceived a tiny flash, a red light, at the edge of his peripheral vision, and put his gun on it. There was no one there: the space between two trees resolved in his eyes into a storefront. He approached it. The red light flashed again. A box with black glass in it—a computer, he told himself—and an eye atop it. As he moved in front of it, the red light went off again, under the eye.

The hunter ran. Three stores down, he saw another light blink on and off.

There were eyes in every window.

He was trapped in the future, and everyone was watching him.

The hunter made the crosswalk. A bison, giant and dark and its fur slick with pond water, rushed him across the trail. On the run, he shot it between the eyes. It swerved unnaturally and struck a broad black maple on the corner, wrapping around its trunk and smoking as it came to rest. The hunter was already gone.

Tallow punched Ambient Security into Forward mode. The system started gathering motion-triggered webcam shots from the streets ahead. There was an arresting shot of a man demented by terror and covered in orange paint staring into the camera and realizing he was caught. It was three blocks in front of him. You’re a fast bastard, aren’t you, Tallow thought, and was glad he had taken the car. There was no way he could have kept up on foot, and frankly, he wasn’t doing so well in the car. He matched the picture’s location to the map, judged the traffic system, and made a turn, hoping to hell that he was guessing right.

He saw a car embedded in a lamppost, its windshield shot out.

A lynx tore past the hunter, making a noise like a riverfront storm. It had a human rider with a flat glass face.

The hunter was frantically trying to match landmarks to memory, but everything was shifting. He got a street sign to resolve through the twisting chaos of his vision, found his orientation, and sprinted down a conduit alley.

Tallow saw a blurred snap on his phone, flicked his eyes to the map, and knew where the hunter was going. He knew that alley, he knew where it came out, and he was now certain of the hunter’s intended destination. Tallow figured that his man, in fact, was entirely too close to it.

The hunter emerged from the alley to see a pack of dogs come around the street corner to his left with a horrific squeal. The hunter shook his head, gripping his gun harder. The pack coalesced into a motor vehicle, one he knew.

The car mounted the sidewalk. The hunter could not stand and fight. He snapped off a shot at the car, turned, and ran for his life.

It was a good shot, and a good reminder for Tallow that the paint-spattered lunatic on the street was the most prolific and efficient killer he’d ever heard of. The windshield crazed, and the right corner of his seat exploded in shredded cheap vinyl and yellow foam. He was blind and had no choice but to stamp on the brake. His right shoulder burned, just at the top. He glanced at it swiftly and saw a neat notch seared at the shoulder of his suit jacket. Not important. Tallow elbowed out a hole in the windshield glass and tried to convince the car to move forward again. The car wasn’t interested and made a sound like a sick dog gnawing on a branch.

The hunter had gone twenty or thirty steps before he realized he couldn’t hear the car running. It was stopped, half on the sidewalk.

The hunter knew he should keep going. Half a minute of sprinting would put him entirely out of Tallow’s sight. But the car wasn’t moving. Perhaps he’d wounded Tallow. Perhaps he’d done some paralyzing violence to the vehicle’s workings. He should run. But Tallow was there to be killed. He wanted to kill Tallow so much. A hunter didn’t just leave prey sitting there. It would have been tasteless to walk away.

The hunter started walking back to the car, quickly.

The damned engine wouldn’t turn over. Tallow didn’t know why. Tallow wasn’t good with cars.

Jim Rosato had always said Tallow wasn’t good with cars. That’s why he drove. Jim Rosato had always said Tallow wasn’t a street cop like him, and that’s why he went first in a street situation.

“Jim Rosato’s dead,” said Tallow as he wrenched the ignition and stamped on the pedals. The car leaped forward like an animal, spitting out a hubcap as it gained the street.

The hunter took a shot. He didn’t trust his vision enough for a headshot, so he went for the biggest mass he could focus on.

The bullet slammed into Tallow’s vest, right over his heart. It was like having the wind knocked out of his lungs by a baseball bat. His heart skipped six beats and the world went black and red around the edges. The car weaved, bumped up the opposite sidewalk, and took out a newspaper vending box before Tallow got it and himself back under control.

Another shot screamed across the hood. Flecks of hot tin torn up by the bullet’s passage flew into the car and across Tallow’s face. A sound like a roar came out of him as he aimed the car down the street with murder.

The hunter had no choice but to turn and run.

Tallow tried to keep the nose of the car on the hunter, but the bastard was threading between streetlights and mailboxes and any other damn thing he could put between himself and the car while running like a gazelle. Tallow swung the car out wide, making a guess. He was getting bright little spikes of pain across his chest whenever he tried to breathe.