Jon Evans - Swarm

If anything I had underestimated the destructive capacity of ten kilograms of military-grade high explosive. I was a good fifty metres away, and in the building’s blast shadow, but I felt like I had been knocked over by a giant bowling ball. My ears rang and spots flickered in my eyes as I climbed back to bipedality. Near me the guard staggered to his feet. He had felt the full force of the blast, and was far too dazed and rattled to think of me as he stared dumbfounded at the field of devastation below. When I shoved him off the edge of the building he didn’t even scream.

I wondered if I had just killed a man. It was only three stories, I reassured myself frantically, still somewhat in shock myself. Enough to break a few bones but probably not kill him. And even if I had, he was one of Ortega’s drug thugs, why should I care? I had bigger things to worry about.

I tried to run for the stairs but had to settle for a kind of dazed halting stagger that felt like wading through mud. Lights were coming on all around the compound. I stumbled downstairs and found commotion everywhere. Two more guards raced past, ignoring me. I realized they were no more ready for this than I was. Even if they had heard the drones launch, they probably hadn’t connected them to the explosion, I doubted the thugs even knew they had bombs on board. They probably thought a rival drug cartel or the Mexican military was attacking from outside.

When I reached the courtyard I halted in amazement. I had hoped the blast might punch a hole into the sliding metal gate. Instead it had been blown entirely free of the fence. Mangled fragments of various size lay still red-hot and smoking on the asphalt. The place where the gate had stood was a pulverized crater several inches deep surrounded by radial lines etched into the ground like a child’s drawing of the sun. Broken glass was everywhere. The heat was intense, like standing next to a fire.

A dozen armed men were busy assembling outside this breach in the walls, awaiting a wave of attackers, while others rushed to vantage points and shouted to each other, searching the darkness for the nonexistent invaders. Nobody even looked my way as I liberated the keys to a Cadillac Escalade. Its hood was dented and blistered from the explosion, its windshield was a Jackson Pollock painting of spiderwebbed cracks pockmarked with open holes, but when I turned the key its engine roared to life.

I offered a brief prayer of thanks to Young Drivers of Canada for teaching me how to drive a stick shift, and another to Lady Luck for allowing one headlight to survive. I hoped the men with guns would be too surprised to shoot at me. I hoped this Escalade was bulletproof, and its tires solid rubber. I hoped the drones didn’t mistake it for a target.

“If ‘twere done when ‘twere done, then ‘twere well ‘twere done now ,” I muttered, and put the Cadillac in gear.

When I shifted into second it shuddered, nearly stalled, but didn’t quite. I rattled across the courtyard and over the crater, swerving around the searing shards of twisted metal, squinting through the windshield’s abstract art as I went offroad around the largest chunk of debris, remembering Zavier, trying to ape his cool control as I bumped my way back onto the scarred asphalt and changed into third gear.

The physical mechanics of the escape took all of my attention, it was like being immersed in a video game. It wasn’t until I was in fourth gear and I glanced up to see the compound dwindling in the rearview mirror, cubist through the cracked glass, that I realized its guards hadn’t fired a single shot.

In fifth gear the engine made a horrible grinding sound and I quickly shifted back to fourth. Something important must have been jarred loose by the explosion.

I hoped for a few minutes that they might not even pursue me. But that dream was quickly dashed.

In the rearview mirror I saw two sets of headlights coming up behind me, moving fast. Trapped in fourth gear all I could do was watch, my throat clogged with helpless fear, as they closed. Strobelike lights began to flicker from both pursuing cars. It wasn’t until the bullets began to thwack dully into the Escalade that I realized it was gunfire.

I started with the realization, crouched down as far as I could. The wheels slewed off the road and only a reflex twist of my hands brought me back before I went into the boulders and cacti. I had to straighten up to see the road. I felt like I was sticking my head out of a foxhole during an artillery assault, but I did it. Then I realized that the bullets weren’t penetrating. Stealing an escape vehicle from a drug lord’s fleet had been smarter than I knew; it was indeed bulletproof.

The most important thing was to keep my pursuers from overtaking me. With no fifth gear there was only one possible way. I took a deep breath, steeled my neck muscles against whiplash, and stomped on the brake.

The vehicle right behind me was too slow to react and slammed into the back of the Escalade at about twenty miles an hour. The whole car rocked violently. Tires screeched. I forced myself to ignore my sudden nausea and kicked the Escalade back into gear, standing on the accelerator, upshifting as fast as I could. As I had hoped, the driver behind me took a little while to recover, and a few seconds passed before it began to close in again.

It got to within about fifty feet before a drone slammed into it from above and lit up the night. I had programmed them to destroy any pursuing vehicles.

That second shockwave lifted my back tires right off the road for a second and tore the back window away. I didn’t see what happened to the third car, but I was confident it wouldn’t be following anything anytime soon. Ahead of me I saw the distant lights of the second gatehouse. Instead of tensing up, I grinned crazily. My heart pounded not with fear but with giddy triumph. I was beginning to comprehend the astonishing power and precision of the force at my command, and I suddenly felt more like an avatar of Shiva the Destroyer than a captive fleeing for his life.

Four streaks fell from the sky as I neared the gatehouse, and bloomed into huge blossoms of flame, razing both gate and buildings. I drove straight through that field of shattered devastation, reached the public road that cut through the dark desert, and raced along it as fast as I could.

The night air was cold and dry. The road seemed endless, and the desert infinite, lit only by the shining moon; my sole headlight had died with the second drone. The Escalade’s engine soon developed a worrying clopping sound. The windscreen was so thoroughly shattered it was almost opaque, and I had to stick my head out of the blasted-out window to navigate.

A faint glow began to illuminate the eastern horizon. The clopping sound grew, and was joined by a whining; the alignment had fallen out of balance. My sense of glorious victory slowly curdled into rediscovered fear. A posse with unlimited resources was doubtless already girding up to pursue me from all directions to the ends of the earth, and I was still in the middle of Mexican nowhere, in a half-shredded vehicle that wouldn’t last much longer, with no more deadly weapons at my disposal, and only a vague idea where I was.

I passed a big green sign that looked familiar. I couldn’t make out the words, and even if I had, I couldn’t have understood them; but there was something about its semiotics, its shape and structure. And the line of light ahead of me in the distance, angled across the road, seemed also somehow familiar…

A highway overpass. Its appearance was so sudden and welcome it was like a mirage in the night. I steered the groaning Escalade up the on-ramp and onto a freshly painted, lightly trafficked, modern four-lane freeway.