Amped (30 page)

Hundreds of Pure Priders mill across the road, watching the under-bridge.

Beyond the bridge, a crumbling warehouse the length of a football field squats on a vast paved expanse. Coils of barbed wire have been thrown haphazardly over the cracked cement in a wide ring around the building. The area inside swarms with men and women and children. I make out a game of baseball; they’re using torn cardboard for bases. The massive warehouse doors gape open. Thousands of people shuffle in and out.

This must be the safety zone. And where I’m standing is the processing station. Amps are coming here voluntarily, just to escape the wrath of angry Priders.

A ragged column of amps wait in line to enter. Men and women, each with a maintenance nub, holding sleeping bags and backpacks and garbage bags stuffed with clothes. Dragging suitcases and trunks ahead a foot at a time as the line sluggishly creeps forward.

A guardhouse at the front gate processes the families. Just beyond the processing station, beyond the fence, ragtag shops are set up, built out of plywood. Newcomers are buying and trading for food and first aid kits and blankets.

The people on this side of the fence are either bargaining with one another or in line. Dozens of kids mill around. Some stay near their parents. Others travel in packs, carrying sticks and shepherded by stray dogs. The kids are dressed okay: clean clothes, new shoes. And now that I think of it, most of the dogs aren’t
strays. A golden retriever with tags pads by me, bushy tail slapping against my legs.

As I stop to take it in, Perry shuffles nervously.

“How long has this been happening, Perry?”

“The recall order went in three weeks’ past. After the attack. Locomotives materialized here more than a week ago. Spilled the bulk of the amps.”

“Are there other camps like this?”

“Another half dozen, at least. They say Central Park accommodates over twenty thousand. Corralled the Daytona speedway entirely. Probably only ten thousand here at the under-bridge. These personages are the stragglers,” says Perry. “Tried to stay out and learned the hard way what’s best for them.”

“How long are they keeping people here?” I ask Perry.

“Why, until they’re safe,” he replies, nodding at the street where Priders roam. “Now come along with me. I want to introduce you to someone.”

I take a deep breath of the musty air and feel the vibration of the bridge traffic overhead rattle through my chest. To my left, I notice a man peeing against the wall, wobbly kneed and singing. The soldiers watch impassively. Barbed wire glints in the light of the setting sun.

Lyle’s plan is stalling. The amps aren’t fighting. They’re obeying.

“Come along now,” says Perry. He eyes the guard station desperately. Then his face darkens. He focuses on something just over my right shoulder. He speaks without looking at me: “Come, sir, let’s absquatulate,” he says. “Right quick.”

Perry jabs a thumb into the air to motion me to follow and I see that his hands are shaking. I glance over my shoulder and spot a small misshapen head attached to a crooked torso moving toward us, balanced on what look like black stilts. Emaciated black arms hang menacingly from the torso’s sides.

It’s the wire man. The nightmare shape that nearly killed me in Detroit.

People scatter before the lurching gait of the man thing. I watch a father usher his two children away, losing his place in line without a thought.

Perry grabs my arm and tries to tug me away. “Let’s motivate,” he whispers. “That’s Mr. Cordwainer and he’ll busticate us for a lark, sir. You’d best give your full credence to that fact.”

The wire man’s head lolls in our direction. A pink stripe crosses his brow, a gash that’s healing slow. I make eye contact, and there is an instantaneous shock of recognition between us. Perry whimpers and stops walking.

“Too late now,” he whispers as the monster staggers toward us. “Cordwainer is quicker than a jumping spider. If he has to give chase, it’ll go worse. He’s an angry man. Word is he used to peregrinate via skateboard until Uncle Sam granted him new legs. But he didn’t stop there, did he? Got the arms amputated, too.”

The wire man stops before us and twists his body off-kilter to aim his shrunken, crippled head at me. “Hello, thirteen,” it says, lisping toothlessly over the words. “Thought you might come through here. Been waiting for you.”

“Cordwainer?” I ask.

The creature’s eyes slide over to Perry. “Yes, that’s my name,” it says. “I see you’ve made a convenient friend.”

“Simply, uh, simply, took him on as a parergon,” sputters Perry. “Escorting my companion and his personalia safely through the willowwacks—”

“I didn’t know about Lyle,” I say, trying to focus on Cordwainer’s face, to ignore the rest of that horrible mess. “I didn’t realize what was happening …”

But Cordwainer is staring at Perry.

“What’s in the pocket, Perry?” he asks.

Perry pulls his coat on tighter.

“I would have saved Valentine if I could,” I say.

I glance sidelong at the soldiers, but they stare right through us.

“Empty your pockets,” slurs Cordwainer.

Perry just gapes at him, his floating blue eyes wide and round with terror.

“No?” asks Cordwainer. Then, smooth and fast as a riptide, the wire man lunges and grabs Perry with one spider arm. His other arm flies forward and back three times. One, two, three punches and then the celery-stick crunch of Perry’s cheekbone caving in. Jams his claws into Perry’s pockets and rips out the contents in a swirl of papers. He drops Perry wailing onto the cement.

Perry begins to crawl away.

Reaction time. It’s defined as the length of time between sensing a stimulus and responding to it. I caught Perry’s ruler quicker than a snake strike. That was fast. This is faster.

I ball my left hand into a fist and hurl all my weight into a short, vicious left hook. Cordwainer is already dancing back, but the punch connects in his solar plexus, in the precise spot where a bundle of wires plunges beneath his skin to interface with the motor nerves embedded in the muscles of his belly.

Cordwainer’s legs drop out from under him like somebody flipped a switch. He falls forward and wraps his coat-hanger arms around me. “Stop,” he hisses, hanging from me, his legs twitching like half-squashed bugs. “Stop and look.”

A crumpled piece of paper lies at my feet, rocking slightly in the phantom breezes from unseen cars and trucks whining across the bridge overhead. My own face stares up at me in black and white, a crude photocopy.

IF YOU SEE THIS MAN
 … it reads.

I let Cordwainer steady his feet.

“You’re faster than last time,” he says.

A few dozen people shake their heads at us, muttering. Kids whisper to each other and point, pantomiming the fight. Perry continues to crawl away.

“He was leading you to them,” says Cordwainer, pointing at the guardhouse at the front of the line. “Your photo is in there. Twenty more yards and these soldiers would have taken you. If you want inside, sneak in.”

“About Valentine—”

 Cordwainer stops me with a wave. “Val is gone, but those of us who are left can still try to keep the peace. Lyle was right that there will be a new world. Just not the one that he wants.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“Be careful,” says Cordwainer. “The reggies are massing and they are angry. Soon, they may be angry enough to strike. And then everyone in this place will die.”

Since the sun dropped over the horizon, the tower spotlights have been strafing every twenty seconds or so. Plenty of time. You’d think the guards would be focused on keeping amps from sneaking out. Instead, they’re watching for the Priders who threaten to flood inside.

I’m crouched on the weedy bank of a hill overlooking the west Pittsburgh Federal Safety Zone. Sweating and mosquito bitten, I’m too far away to feel the breeze that sweeps in off the Allegheny River. I can see the wind, though, in the harmonized flapping of drying laundry that hangs on a twanging confusion of nylon cords. Inside the massive, softly glowing warehouse, the murmur of thousands of people sighs out across the cooling cement plaza. The sound
washes over my face like warm breath.

Lucy and Nick are somewhere in there, compliments of my friend Vaughn.

A milling throng of amps spills from the hangar doors and crowds the pavement. They ignore the glazed stares of military police. The amps move slowly, talk in hushed tones. They seem oddly quiet and solemn, victims turned into judges.

On the crumbling street a hundred yards farther up this hill, through the gaps in trees, I see a line of several hundred human gawkers. Some are curious kids on bikes, staring down with wide eyes. Others’ eyes are narrow, swimming with vile intentions. I
wonder how many guns have been quietly loaded and now swing heavily in pockets above.

It’s not clear to me whether the warehouse down there is a prison or a fortress.

A shiny new coil of barbed wire meanders around the perimeter of the facility, only five feet away from where the cement turns to brush. Three hastily constructed wooden towers rise, spaced out behind the razor-sharp wire and linked by high fences. I can make out the dark silhouettes of military police. The slender barrel of a rifle and the wink of its scope. On the ground, a few widely spread military policemen saunter along.

I take a deep breath and do what Lyle taught me to do. Focus on my goal up front. To get past the sharp fence uninjured. To avoid the men and lights and guns. Most of all, to
not
hurt
anyone
. Lucy told me I’m a good guy. But each time I turn on the Zenith, there is always the chance I’ll surface with blood on my hands.

Three, two, one.
Zero.

I fall backward into the blackness behind my own eyelids. Surrender control to the implant. Whole hog.

I am still, even as the world and all its data shimmer around me.

Hidden paths and tiny objects and environmental information starburst into colors and light. Retinal and cochlear and Autofocus blend together into a symphony. The heat differential on the pavement. Density of the barbed-wire coils. Even the sweep of the spotlight collapses out of time and falls into a visible pattern. I can see where the light is. I can see where it will be.

And then my legs are moving. The muddy hillside slides away under my feet. I hear the gentle ticking of my shoes on the pavement. The knee-high coil of barbed wire jerkily approaches. It’s clearly been unwound from a spool and hastily thrown off the back
of a truck. One spiky loop is snarled up, uncoiled; it gleams at me like a tunnel of light.

A bare instant after the spotlight glances overhead, the serpentine blades loom up at me. I’m leaping that flat spot in the wire, sliding across the weedy pavement on the other side.

I vault onto the chain-link fence and climb. The metal bites into my fingers and then I’m catapulting myself over the razor wire on top. The pavement rolls with me when I touch down on the other side.

Five seconds later, I reach the back of a tar paper shack at a dead sprint. I’m running on my toes for silence and sacrificing control. I hit the side of the flimsy building with a smack and lean against it, gasping for breath. Sweaty palms pressed hard against rough wood.

Okay, turn it off now,
I’m thinking to myself and it’s starting to work. Take control from the amp. Turn it off.
Off, off, off.

The colors have gone dull and faded when this young soldier walks around the corner of the shack. He whips his flashlight up. Aims it at my head. The beam of light hits the surface of my face and I swear I can feel the individual photons bouncing off me, bouncing back into his retinas and triggering a shudder of surprise.