Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“Maybe,” Jara said. “Or maybe I could go with you guys? I feel like I have a lot to learn from you two. And I’m not sure I’m ready to explain what happened to the other acolytes.”

“Sure. How do you feel about helping to open a restaurant? Do you know how to make a tableclot?” Kango threw the Spicy Meatball headlong into an escape course before anybody could try to blame them for all the property damage. Behind them, the ruins of Salubrious IV sparkled with the dying light of countless fires as the tributary ships of The Vastness began, hesitantly and confusedly, to make planetfall.

Palm Strike’s costume has never been comfortable, but lately it’s pinching his shoulders and chafing in the groin area. Sweat pools in the boots. The Tensilon-reinforced helmet gives him a blinding headache after two hours, and the chestplate is slightly too loose, which causes it to move around and rub the skin off his stomach and collarbone.

The thing that keeps Palm Strike running past water tower after water tower along the cracked rooftops of Argus City, the thing that keeps him breaking heads after taking three bullets that night, is the knowledge that there are still innocents out there whose lives haven’t yet been ruined.

Kids who still have hope and joy, the way Palm Strike’s own son did before Dark Shard got him. When the bruised ribs and punctured lung start to slow him down and the forty-pound costume has him dancing in chains, he pictures his son. Rene. It never fails—he feels a weight in his stomach, like a chunk of concrete studded with rocks, and it fills him with rage, which he turns into purpose.

Argus City is full of disintegrating Frank Lloyd Wright knock-offs and people who have nothing to lose but someone else’s innocence. This was a great city, once, just like America was a great country and Earth was a great planet.

Palm Strike catches a trio of Shardlings selling dreamflies in Grand Park, under the bronze statue of a war hero piloting a drone. The drone casts deep shadows, and that’s where they hunker in a three-point parabolic formation. They’re well trained, maybe even ex-Special Forces, and decently armed, including one customized 1911 with a tight-bore barrel. Dark Shard must be getting desperate.

Once they’re down, Palm Strike feeds them their own drugs, baggie by baggie.

“You know my rule,” he growls. The process is not unlike making foie gras. One of these men is so terrified, he blurts out the location of Dark Shard’s secret lair, the Pleasuresplinter.

Ambulance called. These men will be fine. Eventually. Palm Strike’s already far away before the sirens come. Losing himself in the filthy obstacle course of broken walls and shattered vestibules in the old financial district. Leaping over prone bodies. He doglegs into the old French Quarter. All of the bistros are shuttered, but a few subterranean bars give off a tallowy glare, along with the sound of blues musicians who refuse to quit for the night. Cleansing acrid smoke pours around his feet.

Turns out Dark Shard’s Pleasuresplinter is hidden right under City Hall. But service tunnels from the river go all the way, almost. Catacombs, filthy and crawling with vermin. Palm Strike’s boots get soaked, both inside and out. Men and women stand guard at intervals, but none of them sees Palm Strike coming. Palm Strike’s main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies. He sets charges as he goes, something to be a beacon for first responders, firefighters and EMTs. And police. But don’t trust the police, never trust the police.

Palm Strike crashes through the dense mahogany door just as all the charges he set in the tunnels go off. Smoke billows up out of the fractured street behind him. The door explodes inwards, into a beautiful marble space—a mausoleum—with a recessed floor like a sauna, and a dozen little dark alcoves and nooks. Red drapes. Gray-suited men sporting expensive guns and obvious body armor with the trademark broken-glass masks.

In one of those nooks, just on the far side of the room, he spots the children: all in their teens, some of them barely pubescent. Their faces wide open, like they are in the middle of something that will never leave them, no matter what else they see or do.

Everyone over eighteen is shooting at Palm Strike. Lung definitely collapsed. Healing mojo has crapped out.

First priority: get the children out. Second priority: bring this den of foulness down on these men’s heads. Third priority: find Dark Shard.

Children first, though.

One of the bullets goes right through Palm Strike’s thigh, in spite of the ablative fibers. Femoral artery? No time to check. This place probably smells like candy floss and cheap perfume most of the time, but now it’s laced with vomit, blood and sewage. Clear a path to the exit for the children. Drive the armed men into cover, in the far alcoves. Be a constantly moving whirl of anger, all weapon and no target. Unleash the throwing-claws and smart-javelins. Find one brave child, who can be a leader, who will guide the rest to safety. That one, with the upturned nose and dark eyes, who looks like Rene only with lighter, straighter hair. “Get them out,” Palm Strike says, and the kid understands. Throwing claws have taken out most of the ordnance. Children run past Palm Strike, stumbling but not stopping, into the tunnel.

Palm Strike blacks out. Just for an instant. He snaps awake to see the boy he’d appointed leader in the hands of one of the top Shardlings—you can tell from the mask’s shatter pattern. Stupid. Busting in here, with no plan. Dumb crazy old fool. The kid squirms in the man’s grasp, but his little face is calm. Palm Strike has one throwing-claw left. He hears the first responders in the tunnels behind him, and they’ve found the children who got away.

Palm Strike’s throwing-claw hits the pinstripe-suited thug in the neck, and slashes at him on its way to find a weapon to disable. An angry insect, made of Tensilon, stainless steel, and certain proprietary polymers, scuttles down the man’s neck. The man pulls the trigger—just as the throwing claw’s razor talons slice the gun in two. The recoil takes half the man’s hand, and then the boy is running for the exit. Palm Strike wants to stay and force-feed this man every drug he can find here. But he’s lost a lot of blood and can’t breathe, and the shouts are getting close.

Palm Strike barely makes it out of there before the place swarms with uniforms.

The Strike-copter is where he left it, concealed between the decaying awnings of the Grand Opera House. He manages to set the autopilot before passing out again. Healing mojo works for crap nowadays. After only three years of this, he’s played out. He regains and loses consciousness as his limp body weaves over the barbed silhouette of downtown, and then the squat brick tops of abandoned factories. At last, the Strike-copter carries him up the river, to a secluded mansion near Mercy Bay.

Josiah, his personal assistant, releases him from the copter’s harness, with practiced care. Josiah’s young, too young, with curly red hair and a wide face that looks constantly startled. As usual, he wears an apron over a suit and skinny tie. “You really did it this time,” Josiah says, prepping the gurney to roll Palm Strike through the hidden doorway in one of the granite blocks of the mansion’s outer walls. Josiah removes the headpiece, but before he can attach the oxygen mask, Palm Strike says: “The children.”

“They got out okay,” Josiah responds. “Ten of them. You did good. Now rest.”

Some time later, a day maybe, Palm Strike wakes with tubes in his arms and screens beeping ostentatiously around him. The healing mojo has finally kicked in. He still feels like hell but he’s not dying any more. He sits up, slowly. Josiah tries to keep him bedridden, but they both know it’s a lost cause.