Stephen Burns: Bug Trap

Reflections from neon and LEDon lights washed across the rain-soaked night streets like smears of wet paint. They looked like they might be scribing out encrypted messages in obscure calligraphies, useful information there for the deciphering. Maybe even directions out of my present difficulties.

There was no time to stop and study such phenomena. A box was closing around me, iron sides grinding inexorably closer.

I knew this part of the city pretty well, most of the secret places and hidden sanctuaries. But so did those who were on my ass and after my head. The NYPD had exerted varying degrees of control over this patch of turf since the days of horse-drawn paddy wagons, and their badge-bearing minions knew it the way a hunter knows the patch of woods just outside his back door. The Chrome Lords lacked the law’s sweeping history, but easily matched the cops in street-nav, numbers of troops, and weapons. Two sides, polar opposites, closing in with the same objective: to find and crush what was trapped between them.

That would be me: Giorgio Lennon Phale. Posto handle: Glyph. Age: twenty-seven. Employment record: spotty. Legal history: problematic. Prospects: not to be envied.

Does the anvil cooperate with the hammer?

That was a question worth a wordup in any number of places, but I didn’t have time to put it out. My career as a posto would have to stay on hold until the time—if I lived to see it—that I wasn’t caught between the hammer of the Chrome Lords and the anvil of the police.

As a posto I’m an enthusiastic malcontent who mixes street art, graffiti, sloganeering, muckraking, ad-jacking, and the politics of outrage as a vocation. In other words, a dedicated semi-pro troublemaker. I’d made myself a whole pile of it this time. My mentor, old Slippery Jone, Mistress of the Subversive Koan, always said that if they’re not trying to find you to buy you off or work you over, then you’re not trying hard enough. Pride points for success, except that I’d managed to piss off both sides of an issue badly enough that both wanted me bagged and slabbed.

If this was success, then receding back into relative obscurity was beginning to have a nice ring to it.

I was crouched low, peering around the corner of a building and down a cross street, wishing I had Deacon Recon out and scouting for me. A spotter of his caliber might have helped make surviving the night undamaged something more than a vaguely theoretical possibility. But the cops had twanged and tanked my phone, so calls for help—other than pointless screaming—were not an option.

I’d crammed myself into a lovely bit of shadow. Being brownish of skin and inclined toward nightside sartorial style helped me blend in instead of standing out like an albino dressed in sequins, and being not particularly tall or wide meant I made a smaller target.

Around the corner, half a block ahead, two street beasts styled up in enough studded leather to wrap a cab stood picket, gleaming chromed clubs in hard, tattooed fists. The idle palm-slap of metal against flesh was intimidating in its suggestion of ready violence, but actually kind of helpful in the way it broadcast their location.

I dug into one particular pocket of the vest under my soggy coat. A familiar, sweetly illegal shape filled my hand: my dummystick. I pulled it out and found the controls I wanted by touch alone. Once it was set, I pointed it around the corner and fingered the trigger.

An invisible beam of sonic and electromagnetic waves leapt out to tickle and override the spielbox in front of a used clothing store. Instead of calling out to past and potential customers passing by, the dummied spielbox blared out a purposefully snotty cry of, “Hey! Copsucker!”

The shaven heads of the streetbeasts rotated like turrets, tracking the jibe. I swung the dummystick toward another storefront, prodding that one’s spielbox to blare, “Over here, copsucker!” Shrill, mocking laughter followed that taunt.

A diversion is a terrible thing to waste. I was already on the move, the sound of my sneakers splashing through the puddles masked by the dummied store. I was halfway across the street and thinking I was going to make it when an NYPD street spook suddenly materialized from a dark doorway. The cop’s form seemed to shimmer into existence as his—no, check that—her bulletproof nanocamo changed into uniform blue. It was when her hood went transparent, revealing an unsmiling woman with black skin and spiked yellow hair, that I nailed down her gender, and recognized her as the same cop who’d already popped up twice before on the edge of my search for safety.

Her regulation stunwand was pointed in my direction. That wand is related to my dummystick the same way a Glock is related to a Nerf pistol; mine could tickle, hers could deliver a knockout punch that would leave me pants-peed and drooling.

I jinked left and low, aware of a third element entering the equation: a delivery truck rumbling up the street toward me, and maybe offering a ticket out of my situational roach motel.

The copette let out a cry of “Halt!” in a voice cranked up to ear-bleed level by her comm unit. The official rule was warn first, shoot second, and what a jackpot, this finestette was actually following it.

Halting was the least appetizing option in a gutter-sludge assortment. The order to halt caught the attention of the Chrome Lords. Shaved heads turned. Dull eyes fixed on me, brightening at the sight of prey. They started toward me, the steel cleats of their boots clacking on the wet asphalt.

They didn’t seem aware of the cop, probably because their small, drug-addled reptile brains were unable to process more than one input at a time. But I saw the cop take notice of them, forcing her to split her attention.

The truck was almost on top of me then, a long blast of its horn proclaiming the driver’s warning that there would be no slowing or swerving for anything, least of all some scraggle-ass human speed bump. Not with cargojacking a very popular career path in the big bad city.

I stepped back like an experienced taxiodor, the blunt steel bumper of the truck bulling through the space I’d occupied just a second before. Then, calling on my inner ninja monkey, planted my feet and leapt, grabbing hold of the side of the truck body.

Although not going that fast, it was still trucking along at a sufficient clip to make it all I could do to hang on. But desperation can be an almost magical magnetic force, and I kept my ride.

The truck left the cop behind and swept past the two Chrome Lords. I loosened one hand long enough to give them a proper one-fingered wave good-bye.

My feeling of triumph proved to have the lifespan of a single crystal flake in a hot crack pipe. The truck’s horn let out an angry blat. I looked forward, meeting the driver’s gaze in the rear-view mirror.

The driver showed me a dough-faced, stubble-jowled scowl, making a motion that was easily enough translated: Get the fuck offa my truck!

I beamed him my most winning smile, loosening a hand to hold up five fingers, the biggest number I could manage. Five miles. Five minutes. Five blocks. Five fill in the blanks, that’s all I ask.

For just a moment it seemed like my winning ways and obvious charm had won out. The man did smile.

The bad news was his smile was a prelude to reaching for the big red gitback button on the truck’s dash.

I’d spent enough teenage time boardhiking to know what the gitback was for and what it would do. The driver held his hand poised over it, grin widening crazily.

Please don’t, I begged, shaking my head.

The hand inched closer, and when it was just the thickness of a buck soyburger—sans bun—over the button, I knew I was going to have to jump.