James Decker - Fallout

Vamp and I were thrown across the cab in an explosion of safety glass as the world through the windshield flipped end over end. I couldn’t tell up from down as we rolled, spinning at the same time. Glass rained down the seat as the crumpled passenger door flipped up over my head, and I slid down, both legs shooting out the empty window to dangle in the air before I grabbed the control stick.

The A.I. kicked in and struggled to right the vehicle. Vamp, who had one hand clutching what remained of the door handle, reached down to pull me back as the car righted itself. Smoke drifted through the air between us as I struggled to see through the spiderweb cracks that covered the windshield.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Someone hit us.”

I crawled over him and looked out the broken window. The other aircar, a heavier vehicle with a flatbed, had fared better than we had. Its grille had crumpled, and both headlights were smashed out, but the body and the emitters all looked intact.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “They rammed us.”

The other aircar took off like a shot, accelerating as it closed in again.

“Shit!”

I grabbed the control stick and pulled back on it, stomping on the accelerator. We lurched up, but not quite high enough before the vehicle reached us. It hit near the undercarriage, flipping us and sending us crashing over its hood. The A.I. righted us again, and we glided to a stop in a wake of smoke. Something had begun to burn, I could smell it.

“Get us out of here,” Vamp yelled.

I spun us around, sending more glass tumbling through the cab, but I couldn’t see anything through the wrecked windshield. Vamp leaned back in his seat and stomped on it with both feet until it popped free and went sailing down toward the streets below.

As the air came rushing in, I saw the other vehicle approach again and pulled the control stick but nothing happened. We didn’t move.

“The emitters are overheating,” Vamp said. “They must have damaged the casing.”

That meant we were going down, one way or the other. The A.I. would keep us airborne as long as it could, but the altimeter showed we were already in a controlled descent. With the steering shot, we were sitting ducks.

“Shit…” I gasped, cringing in my seat as the vehicle closed in a third time.

It didn’t hit us, though. Instead it slowed, and then stopped with our vehicles nose to nose. They matched our slow descent, still floating over the sprawl below, and the vehicle’s doors popped open.

Vamp shielded his face against the wind blowing into the cab, trying to see. “What the hell are they doing?”

I spotted a woman I didn’t recognize behind the wheel. She had three men with her, one in the passenger’s seat and two in the back. All three began to climb out of the car. The first one out jumped onto the crumpled hood of their vehicle and began making his way toward us. As he did, something flickered, and I caught a glimpse of something black and wet begin to uncoil along one side of him, which then disappeared. “Vamp, they aren’t human!” I yelled as the man approached, wind rippling through his clothing and hair. Vamp’s butterfly knife flashed, and he held it out ready in front of him.

Qian, I thought. She’s learning to make contact with others of her kind. They know, and they’re coming to stop us. How did she know? How did she know where we’d be? How did she always manage to be one step ahead of me?

I dug out my pistol as the second man made it onto the hood.

The first guy lunged at Vamp but he managed to duck away and then stab him in the side of the neck. As he jerked the blade free, blood sprayed out, carried on the wind in a red mist. The man staggered back, but not for long before he recovered. He pulled his hand away from the wound, and I saw the dark hole there close up.

I shot the intruder twice, and he fell back. Half of him rolled out of the cab and the weight caused him to flip end over end, out into the open air where he fell like a stone.

One of the emitters on the driver’s side failed, and the car tipped, dropping us into a forty-five-degree angle. The two haanyo ng on the hood tumbled, one falling off and the last managing to catch himself.

Another emitter failed, and the car dropped a full ninety degrees. I fell, and collided with the driver’s side door, which popped open. I dropped through, clawing at the seat and grabbing on to the seat belt to stop myself before I could tumble out into the open sky. My legs dangled high above the city below, as my pistol dropped away spinning end over end.

Vamp had braced himself above me, one heel dug into the seat and the other wedged against the control stick. The city swayed beneath us as the car rocked.

We aren’t going to make it. What can we do? What can we…

One of the haanyo ng landed on top of the passenger door above Vamp’s head, and I saw him reach down.

No time, I thought. No more time.

I did the only thing I could think to do. I took the gate remote from my pocket, and used the controls to connect to the safe house endpoint.

“Vamp, look out!” I yelled.

He looked up as the man above him went to grab him and slashed his forearm with the knife. The haanyo ng pulled away, then hammered his fist down on Vamp’s chest. The force of it knocked Vamp loose. His foot slipped, and he fell, crashing into me as he went.

The seat belt slipped from my hand and we both dropped out through the open door and into the air.

For a moment we both fell, high above Hangfei with nothing but the rush of wind in our ears. It didn’t feel like falling, more like floating, with the city’s approach feeling very slow, but just as certain. Then I aimed the remote below us, opened the portal wide, and pushed the button. The white point of light appeared, dilating open as it rushed toward us.

We plunged through, and the roar of the wind and aircar engines flattened into silence.

The momentum of the fall sent me flying through the air of the factory ruins in a horizontal cannonball, until I dropped and rolled across the grimy concrete with Vamp right on top of me. I picked myself up, wincing at the pain from where my hip had struck the floor.

I turned and saw the last haanyo ng looking down over the side of the aircar at me. He jumped, dropping straight for the gate.

The second he reached it, I closed the gate. The portal shrank to a pinprick of white light, closing on the man’s ankle. The foot, severed clean, tumbled away into the darkness while the rest of him, I assumed, continued his fall toward the streets below. A beat later, the foot vanished with a sharp bang.

“Sam, are you okay?” Vamp called.

“Yeah. Where are Nix and Shuang?”

“I don’t know.”

A faint light blinked on as Vamp lit up the screen of his phone. I looked around, but didn’t see either one of them.

“We missed him,” I said. “We missed our chance to get Alexei back.”

“We can still go back,” Vamp said.

“How?”

“We can still go back to Xinzhongzi.”

“How, Vamp? How the hell will we get in now?”

“Another car. We’ll take my car.”

I took out my phone, and called Dao-Ming. She picked up on the first ring.

“Sam,” she said. “Is Alexei with you?”

“No,” I told her. “Security picked him up on camera heading away from your place; where are you?”

“At Dragan’s. I’d brought him here, but he left. He didn’t say anything he just left—”

“Dao-Ming, listen up. Alexei went to your place, and then he went to Xinzhongzi.”

That made her pause. The surprise in her voice sounded genuine.