Kameron Hurley - God's War

The dark bakkie kept just within her rearview mirror range. They knew they’d been seen. Either they didn’t know where she was going and wanted to pin her there, or they were waiting for a good turn in the road to take her out.

She sped up. They sped up.

She watched the image of the black bakkie grow larger in the mirror.

She fucked with the clutch. It made a nasty grinding sound. The bakkie wheezed.

“Come on, you fucker,” she said.

It clicked.

She switched pedals. The bakkie shuddered. The speedometer climbed. She saw a turnoff on her left that went up into the hills. Nyx did a neat brake, twisted the wheel, and hit the speed as she came out of the turn.

The bakkie screamed under her. She caught the smell of burning bugs, death on the road. She glanced back and saw smoke and dead beetles roiling out from the exhaust. The way was narrow and twisted, and as she climbed, the grasslands turned to a forest of oak hybrids. She took the turns too fast.

Nyx kept checking the mirror. She spent a moment too long looking and nearly lost herself on a narrow turn. She’d seen the other bakkie.

They were still behind her.

She kept a sharp eye out for turns off this road. She didn’t want gravel tracks or logging roads. The bakkie would get stuck, and she’d be for shit.

The black bakkie was right behind her. She could just see their faces now. The big woman in the driver’s seat was definitely Dahab. Not a doubt in her mind. Dahab had a new team with her—and not bel dames from the look of them.

And she had a real good feeling they weren’t with Rasheeda. That threw a whole other contagion into the mess.

Nyx twisted around another curve. Raine had taught her to drive when she was nineteen. It was the first thing he taught every member of his crew. She knew how to pedal her way out of a tight spot.

Nyx heard a shot, and ducked. Checked the mirror again. The woman riding shotgun with Dahab was doing what people riding shotgun did.

Nyx dared not take her hands off the wheel. Even if she could clip off a couple shots with her pistol, the odds of her hitting anything in or around that bakkie were slim.

She reached a crossroads. Right would take her further up into the hills. Left was down into the coastal valley. Down meant she would have to put a lot of faith in her repair of the brake line.

Fuck it.

She veered left and barreled down the hill. She disengaged the clutch.

Heard another shot.

Something exploded against her back window.

That wasn’t good. Organics. A fever burst? Something worse?

She grabbed at one of the bursts on the seat next to her and lobbed it out the window. Heard a satisfying pop as it exploded on the road.

The bakkie squeezed around another narrow turn. The cover of the woods was thinning out. She saw a house set back away from the road. If she couldn’t lose them, she had to fight them.

Fight Dahab.

Nyx ignored the house and kept on the road.

She came down a long stretch and turned. The road abruptly changed from pavement to gravel. Logging road.

The bakkie skidded on the sudden raw stretch. Nyx hit the far left and far right pedals, and all four wheels twisted sharply, giving her some traction.

She looked back. Missed a turn. She spun the wheel and tried to recover, but she was trying to recover on gravel.

The bakkie slid clean off the road.

For a long, hopeful moment, she thought she’d be all right. But as she braked and twisted the wheel, she saw she wasn’t going to avoid the big tree in front of her.

The bakkie smashed into the oak hybrid with a loud, wet crunch: a giant crushed melon. Bugs exploded from the hood. A rain of leaves dropped onto the windshield. Nyx’s torso thumped into the steering wheel, knocking the breath from her.

The sound of hissing beetles and spitting fluid filled her ears.

Adrenaline flooded her body. Nyx pushed at the door but couldn’t find the handle for some reason. She leaned over and reached for one of the bursts on the floor.

The barrel of a very large gun pointed in at her through the passenger side window.

“Don’t fucking move,” Dahab said.

Nyx didn’t move. She was still trying to get her breath. Her fingers clutched empty air.

Dahab’s two squirts were opening up the driver’s side door.

“Let her out,” Dahab said. “Watch her hands.”

Dahab was an imposing woman—not just tall, but broad and fat. She could bench about a hundred twenty kilos, if Nyx remembered right. She’d lost an arm at the front, so her right arm was a lighter color than the left, courtesy of some dead foreigner. She had a wide flat-cheeked face and piercing eyes. Her teeth were stained red.

Dahab gestured with the gun. “Out, Nyx.”

The squirts each took one of Nyx’s arms and hauled her out of the cab. The council had moved a lot faster than Nyx anticipated, but she didn’t know yet what the decision was. Dahab hadn’t blasted her face off in the cab, so they probably wanted her alive. But there was a lot you could do to a woman and keep her breathing.

And she still wasn’t sure where Rasheeda fit.

Nyx’s chest hurt—a dull, throbbing ache. She hadn’t heard anything break, but what would she have heard above the crunch of the bakkie?

She loved that fucking bakkie.

Beetles crawled over her feet.

While the women held Nyx, Dahab reached into the cab and pulled out Nyx’s pack. Nyx hadn’t brought anything with her relating to the off-worlder, but then, Dahab likely knew more than she did about Nikodem Jordan.

“Rasheeda and Luce told you to fuck off, Nyx,” Dahab said.

Nyx sized up the women next to her. One was a stocky battle-scarred runt who looked like she’d just come off the front. The other one was a pretty half-breed woman who could have sold blood to bel dames. What was she doing collecting notes? She could have been a radio star.

Something buzzed at Dahab’s hip. She grabbed at it, shook it, and put the transceiver to her ear. “Yeah,” she said. “Uh-huh. We’ll be there.” She put it away,

said, “Put her in the trunk of the bakkie. We’re late for a meeting.”

“Leave her here?” the pretty one said.

“You’re staying with her. Suha and I will meet up with you in an hour. I can’t have her going where we’re going. They’ll check our rig. Get her weapons off first.”

The women took off Nyx’s pistols, took her extra ammunition, took her whip, found the dagger and pistol strapped to either thigh.

Then they dragged her to the trunk and popped it open.

Nyx thought about trying an escape. Instead, she looked down the barrel of Dahab’s rifle and got in.

It was a tight fit. Nyx lay curled up on one side. They shut the trunk. It all went dark except for a rusted-out patch in the floor near her head. She pulled at the blanket covering the rest of the hole and peered through. She couldn’t see anything but the churned soil around her bakkie’s tires.

A sharp edge dug into her shoulder from behind. She twisted around so that she faced the rear of the trunk. She pulled back the blankets and kicked the toolkits down around her feet. Sometimes Anneke’s manic obsession for collecting guns did more than empty Nyx’s bank account.

Nyx felt a jabbing pain in her sternum and stopped and took a deep breath.

Dahab had known Nyx when she was a skinny little bel dame without any idea of how to arm herself. Dahab had cleared her of the obvious weapons, the sort of stuff some young kid would carry, but Nyx had learned a thing or two since then.

Nyx brought her heels up behind her and reached her hands back. She worked one of the razor blades out of the sole of her sandal and used it to cut open the package.