Eternal Life Inc. (4 page)

7

A Core Sample of the Dark Side

Over a dozen grav-cars were lined up in the parking lot beside the country club that night. The club was built in the cup of a shallow bay. Its white, sandy beach extended all the way up to the end of the lot where the cars floated a couple of inches off the ground with their grav-coils whining in anticipation and their drivers tense with excitement, waiting for the start signal.

Harry let his gaze slide over the newest models, the low sleek sports cars, the coupes and cabriolets with their clean aerodynamic lines that had about as much character as the computers that designed them.

This being New Hollywood though, there was also an eclectic collection of cars modeled on the behemoths of the Golden Age. There was a cream colored nineteen fifty-nine Cadillac Eldorado convertible, mounting dual, chrome plated, .50-caliber Gatling guns like an ostentatious hood ornament. Another Cadillac parked beside it was a pink, Elvis knockoff driven by three giggling young starlets, posing for the grav-cams and dressed mostly in undress. A heavily armored Godfather, Crown Chia limousine pulled up behind them. It was as black as Darth Vader with dark tinted windows and oversized grav-coils that thrummed intimidation.

Harry shook his head and wondered how they expected to maneuver those dinosaurs through the narrow, twisting waterways of collapsing, overgrown debris that defined the Sinks. They’d either get jammed up or have to pull up and quit early.

A beautiful copy of the original James Bond, Aston Martin DB5 slotted in beside him. He recognized the driver, a young, upcoming, action star. Harry eyed the car and nodded appreciatively
at the subtle way weapons systems and grav-drives had been integrated without spoiling the classic lines of the car. He gave it a thumbs-up, and the young star grinned as if he’d just received a Christmas present.

A balding New Hollywood director, dressed in an immaculate white tuxedo, strode drunkenly up to the starting line, waving a woman’s red, silk panties. He raised them and paused dramatically as the grav-cars revved their engines. The whine of the grav-coils rose to a tearing screech, and the vehicles bounced impatiently up and down on their grav-fields.

Unlike the others, Harry ran his grav-coils up slowly; and his sleek, midnight blue convertible seemed to hunch down like a lion getting ready to spring. The car was modeled on a classic Steve McQueen, nineteen sixty-seven Ford Mustang but had been heavily customized to accommodate powerful grav drives and state-of-the-art weapons systems.

The old wheel wells were covered front and back with sleek teardrop-shaped weapons blisters, each housing a pair of mini-guns that could be rotated three hundred and sixty degrees while spitting out a constant stream of .45-caliber explosive slugs.

In the front fenders beneath the headlights, he’d mounted a pair of high-impact rail-guns. If push came to shove in the Sinks, the magnetic coils lining their barrels would kick a half inch ball bearing up towards light speed in nanoseconds. At those speeds a half-inch of steel massed enough destructive power to bring down a battlewagon or blow a man-sized hole through a half a block of concrete walls. If you were looking to make a fashion statement with overkill status, R-guns couldn’t be beat.

For close encounters he kept a pulse rifle clamped to the inside of the driver’s door and an original, antique, snub-nosed .38 Police Special in a shoulder holster beneath his tuxedo. The Police Special was worth a small fortune and was more a status symbol than a serious weapon, although at close quarters it could still kill.

There was nothing exceptional about this arsenal. Personal weapons were de rigueur for all citizens of the Empire. They strapped them on as casually as slipping on a pair of shoes. A citizen’s limitless right to bear arms was a cornerstone of New Hollywood’s constitution, backed up by history, tradition, and sheer necessity.

The Slaver Empire was never really defeated. Instead, it retreated into the ruins of the Los Angeles Sinks and the vast labyrinth of islands and mangrove swamps that made up the Skeleton Keys. From there it carried on low-level guerrilla warfare that lasted more than a hundred years as it gradually devolved into squabbling gangs of thieves, pirates, and murderers, that still carried the old Slaver banner when they rode out, attacking any target of opportunity from long-haul merchantmen to solitary travelers, or isolated island communities.

Even after the advent of the Danzig spin-generators, New Hollywood never had the resources to police over a hundred thousand islands scattered from the Sacramento Palisades down past the Mexican Break, and most of its citizens were left to fight off Slaver attacks on their own. It forged a kind of survivor mentality, an individualistic, Wild West self-reliance where each person was responsible, not only for his own defense, but ultimately for his own life, for the decisions he made, the actions he took, and the consequences that resulted. There was no court of appeal for, “I didn’t know what I was doing”, “I didn’t mean to do it”, or “I was forced to do it”. You punched the ticket, it was yours and you paid the penalty, which was often swift and deadly.

For over a hundred and fifty years, this loose federation of individuals that grandly called itself, The New Hollywood Empire, went about its business expanding, consolidating, growing richer, and every once in a while fighting off Slavers.

Then about eighty years ago The Tong Relegate, which had
ruled New Hollywood from the beginning, was ripped apart by rebellion. In a way, it was inevitable. The old fault lines that ran through the Relegate between the Tong Emperor and the growing democratic demands of parliament finally split wide open. The Tongs themselves were split, one side favored the absolute power of the Emperor, the other a parliamentary democracy. When the dust settled, the rebellion was crushed, the Emperor became a figurehead, and his Tong renegades fled into the Sinks and drove the Slavers north into the Skeleton Keys. Once they gained control of the Sinks, the renegades established The Second Tong Relegate, which was nothing but an excuse to join in pillaging the wealth of New Hollywood, which they proceeded to do with bloodthirsty gusto. And once again individual citizens had to take up the slack and fight off yet another enemy.

As New Hollywood grew in wealth and power, it began expanding eastward over the Dire Straits and across the southern coast of the continent where radiation scars and genetic plagues were gradually burning themselves out. At first, its traders and caravans brought back only distant rumors of troubles in the East, but as the Empire continued to expand, it began running into swarms of panic-stricken, plague-scarred mutants, fleeing the outriders of something called the Seraphim Jihad. These holy warriors of the Caliphate of the Blessed spread a witch’s brew of old time religion, racial purity, and holocaust cleansing, all mixed up in the end-of-days revelations of their mad Caliph.

The Seraphim were disciplined fanatics, spreading their brand of hell with guns and fire all along the underbelly of the continent. You were either with them or against them; there was no middle ground. You either converted or died. You were either pure-blood human or died.

All across the Caliphate from the shattered eastern seaboard and across the shores of the Mexican Break, the ovens burned, consuming all those with unclean, plague-scarred genes or infidel beliefs. The Seraphim called them all, “Muties”, nonhuman
abominations in the eyes of their god, who called upon his righteous to cleanse the earth of them.

When the two empires met, war was inevitable. The Caliphate War was short, brutal, and a foregone conclusion. New Hollywood had the Danzig Spin-generator, the Caliphate Empire didn’t. It was as simple as that. The Caliphate was a steam-powered behemoth, condemned to crawl across the ground and the surface of the sea and be cut to pieces from the air by New Hollywood gunboats.

In a final desperate attempt to salvage victory from defeat, the greatest war fleet of the Caliphate Empire made an end-run through the treacherous waters of the Mexican Break to attack New Hollywood from the rear. They might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for a monster storm blowing out of the Pacific that smashed their proud war fleet against the ruins, reefs, and shoals of the Sinks.

Out of over twenty thousand holy warriors, only a thousand survived the wreck of the Seraphim fleet and were stranded in the Sinks. Within a year these disciplined, well trained fanatics quickly took over the ruined city, driving the disorganized bands of Tongs and Slavers into the ruined northern suburbs and the mango groves of the Skelton Keys. With the end of the Caliphate War, New Hollywood inherited a continent spanning empire, and an enemy host camped in its own backyard.

Although the Seraphim were now the titular rulers of the Sinks, the situation remained fluid. Borders were nonexistent and turf wars a constant. Pockets of Slavers and Tongs could be found throughout the Sinks while Seraphim holy warriors made deep incursions into the Keys and southwards into the Slaver islands of the Mexican Break. There was also a steady trickle of disaffected, New Hollywood outcasts and fortune hunters, forming small infected pockets throughout the Sinks.

The only thing they had in common was a hatred of New Hollywood and a desire to plunder its wealth. They rode out of
the Sinks and Keys on patchwork fleets of stolen grav-cars, Banshee grav-bikes, and armored gunboats, cobbled together from scrap metal and stolen grav-units, while the citizens of New Hollywood fortified homes, armored grav-cars, and fought back with everything from heavy Gatling guns to the latest plasma cannons.

After nearly three hundred years, the Sinks and Keys had become a kind of core sample of the dark side of New Hollywood’s history, and it was into this dark side that Harry and his cronies were riding with drugs, alcohol, machismo, and the arrogance of money fueling an illusion of invulnerability.

8

Cannonball Run

Susan had no illusions about what they were riding into, but she loved Harry too much to let him go alone. At the last moment, she jumped into the open convertible with him. If she couldn’t stop him, she could at least be there if he needed her.

Harry looked over at her and winked owlishly. “Through thick and thin, right, Sue?”

“Yes, Harry.” She smiled tiredly. “Through thick and thin.” At that moment, the director swung the panties down with a theatrical flourish, and Susan was thrown back in her seat as the car reared up and leapt into the night with grav-coils screaming.

Harry took the lead as they shot off across the bay and out into the oily blackness of the sea. Even though the grav-car floated effortlessly over the earth it was still essentially a ground effect vehicle, incapable of climbing higher than three hundred and fifty feet. Speed and altitude were in an inverse relationship. The closer you stayed to the earth, the more speed you could get out of the coils, and Harry kept the car skimming the waves, inches above the sea.

He’d also chopped his spin-dampers, filing them down to a razor thin safety margin. The dampers were there to prevent a runaway coil explosion. In case of a major systems failure, they instantly shut down the coils. They also prevented the coils from exceeding their spin safety parameters.

Old racing drivers like Harry knew these parameters had a safety margin of their own and routinely filed their dampers down to a hair trigger, pushing the coils deep into the red, balancing on the edge, and getting the last fraction of speed out of their engines. A few, with a death wish and an addiction to winning, even removed the dampers altogether.

With his dampers chopped, Harry was already pushing his engines to the limit. At that speed and altitude there was no margin for error. Any sudden obstacle in their path could rip out the bottom of the car and send them pin wheeling to their death, but Harry was determined to secure his lead before they got into the twisted maze of the sunken city. Besides, he had the latest navigation radar, grav-wave detectors, and infrared sensors to help him and could even keep the car on autopilot and let it steer itself, but he knew from experience that the built-in safety parameters would never allow him the kind of speed and maneuverability he needed to win the race. Instead, he disengaged the autopilot and took control himself. Even though he had raced grav-cars professionally, he had to admit that racing through the LA Sinks at night was in a league all by itself.

The lights of New Hollywood quickly faded to a misty glow behind them. The night was still and the sky sparkled with stars as they sped effortlessly across the shimmering surface. Harry drove the sports convertible with the top down and the slipstream gently ruffling his hair. He breathed deeply of the night air and felt intensely alive, filled with a wild exhilaration that embraced the universe and laughed at death.

He glanced over at Susan sitting beside him. She gave him a concerned, loving smile, and Harry threw back his head and laughed with pure joy. What more could a man ask for than to have the woman he loved beside him, speeding through the night in a two million dollar car, with the whole world at their feet. “God, I love you,” he said and reached over and squeezed her hand. “And I love our life together.”

By the time they entered the twisted, broken outskirts of old LA, the moon was up. It was fat and creamy and almost full and lay on the horizon like a big, slightly deflated beach ball. It cast long, jagged shadows through the overgrown ruins like haunted memories of past madness. The headlights on Harry’s car picked out collapsed walls of rotting concrete sticking out of the
scummy water. The navigation computer had plotted their course through the center of the city. It wasn’t necessarily the safest way but it was by far the fastest. Random pulsed, snapshot radar-sonar, infrared, and gravity detectors cast their ghostly computer-enhanced montage of the city on screens mounted on the dashboard.

Outside, the ruined city closed in around them, and they rode through saw grass and reed choked chasms, lined with collapsed buildings, draped in a mad profusion of tropical growth. Lianas crawled up the sides of broken walls that were covered with a ragged skin of fat, glistening leaves and extravagant night blossoms as big as dinner plates and as pale as death. Palm trees burst like raggedy umbrellas through caved-in roofs and tattered drapes of Spanish moss hung from blind windows. In places the vegetation took over completely, burying whole city blocks in thick mounds of rampant, jungle growth.

They were in no-man’s-land now, a place even the imperial police hesitated to enter. So far, Harry had managed to maintain his lead through a combination of alcohol daring, blind luck, and professional skill. Now, even he was forced to slow down and keep a wary eye on the detector screens as he wove through the wreckage of a collapsed building and veered around a rusted steel girder sticking out of the middle of the channel. In the rear view mirror he could see the headlights of the other cars strung out behind him.

Suddenly, one of the pursuing cars broke from the pack and began accelerating just when everyone else, like Harry, was slowing down. The driver came on like a maniac, tearing around blind corners and scrapping over piles of rubble, his undercarriage trailing a screaming plume of sparks. He seemed totally oblivious to danger as he bore down on Harry’s taillights with the suicidal determination of a Kamikaze pilot.

Harry watched the headlights grow in his rear-view mirror and smiled. Who the hell did this joker think he was playing
with? Maybe it was time Harry showed him. And once again he pushed the accelerator into the floorboards, pushing himself and his machine further and further out onto a razor’s edge of control, where the odds grew slimmer by the moment. A part of him knew what he was doing was crazy, irresponsible, suicidal stupidity, but he couldn’t stop. He was in the grip of an ecstatic madness, riding an alcohol induced, adrenaline-fired rush that filled him with a godlike sense of power and an absolute certainty that he would win this race and that nothing could stop him.

Susan, on the other hand, was terrified. “Harry, please slow down!” she cried and put a hand on his knee. “Do you hear me, Harry!” She leaned over and shouted in his ear, “Let him pass! It’s not worth it!”

Harry remained hunched over the steering wheel, his eyes jumping from the windshield to the dash screens, his hands flicking the wheel gently, his foot steady on the accelerator. “Harry, listen to me,” Susan shouted, her voice hysterical with fear. “Harry!” she screamed again, and when he did not respond, panic took hold, and she grabbed his arm to get his attention. Irritably, he tried to shake her off and for a fraction of a second lost control.

At the speed they were going, there was absolutely no margin for error. The car veered wildly, careening against the wall of a building in a screeching crash of sparks and torn strips of carbon fiber. The driver’s side rose with almost majestic slowness as the car started to tip over. The grav-coils screamed as Harry fought desperately to pull the car back down. They were inches away from flipping over and going into an uncontrollable anti-gravity driven spin that no one ever walked away from. For an eternal moment, they balanced between life and death. Harry sat perfectly still. He knew there was nothing more he could do. Finally, the car started to settle back down and with a sigh of relief, Harry retook control.

“Harry, please!” Susan screamed and this time he heard her, heard the pain and terror and pleading in her voice. He glanced over and saw her face, bruised with fear, the look of a hunted, wounded animal in her eyes. “Please, Harry, slow down!” she begged. “It’s not worth it.”

Sanity came crashing back. The ecstatic madness, the trance-like tunnel vision of speed and danger collapsed, and all that was left was he and Susan alone at night in a speeding car with an abyss of pain and terror between them. “You’re right,” he said, “It’s not worth it. Nothing is worth this.”

Suddenly, he was stone sober. His foot eased up on the accelerator. How could he have put Susan through this? He had risked her life, their love, everything, and for what? Just to prove that he was a better man than anyone else, that he was king of the hill? What kind of an egotistical asshole did something like that?

The “BLAT! BLAT!” of a trucker’s powerful Dumbo air horn slapped the night as the pursuing car flicked up its high beams, pinning Harry and Susan in their blue-white halogen glare. The channel had widened here and the driver blatted his air horn again as he swung out to pass. Up ahead a large section of concrete wall had collapsed into the channel, leaving only a narrow gap that was hardly wide enough for one car, let alone two. Harry picked it up on his radar screen and immediately pulled over to let the other car pass.

As it swept up beside him, Harry glanced over at the low, cream colored, Cadillac convertible with its decorative pair of chrome Gatling guns mounted on the hood. A busty, blonde starlet sat in the passenger seat. Beside her sat a well-known, silver-haired producer hunched over the steering wheel. As they started to pull ahead, he turned and looked at Harry.

The producer’s eyes were large and bulging, the pupils dilated to pinpricks of wired lightning, his face flushed and glistening with sweat. His whole body was jittering to sharp amphetamine rhythms that were pushing him faster and faster.
Suddenly, he threw back his head and laughed, howling like a madman. Then he jerked his steering wheel and deliberately rammed Harry’s car forcing it in towards the ruined wall of a building.

Harry fought the wheel and stepped on the brakes reversing the polarity of the grav-coils and sending the car into a steep climb. As the other car shot past, the silver haired producer yelled, “Pussy!” and gave Harry the finger. The blond starlet laughed stridently, her lips a red smear in the night. Then they were past, their taillights accelerating towards the narrow gap between the collapsed wall and a relatively intact, overgrown, five-story building on the other side.

Harry’s car was still braking, climbing at a steep angle away from the wall on his right with his headlights slashing across the distant building bordering the gap. Just then, he caught a glimpse of movement on the roof. He tried to keep the headlights steady on the building as something was pushed over the edge and started to fall. For a second he couldn’t believe his eyes. It looked like an ancient freezer that had been chained shut.

He watched in helpless horror as the calculus of death unfolded before his eyes. Whoever pushed the freezer over the edge had calculated perfectly. The trajectories of the speeding car and the falling freezer intersected just as the Cadillac entered the gap. The freezer crashed right through the front seat, and the car folded up around it. The goddamned freezer must have been filled with concrete, Harry thought.

He felt a wave of pity for the man and his passenger. They never knew what hit them. A moment later, the crumpled up car flared into white hot incandescence, and he realized the asshole producer had chopped out the spin-dampers on his engines and the containment fields were collapsing as the coils spun up uncontrollably. Steam boiled up around the slowly settling wreck. Then, the munitions stores blew. Extreme G-forces from the madly spinning coils drove the explosion away from the core
housing, accelerating the initial blast exponentially.

Harry had been braking before the attack and so was some distance back and slightly above the explosion. Instinctively, he drove the brakes into the floorboards and fed power to the forward grav-units tipping the car up on its tail and letting the heavily armored undercarriage take the brunt of the blast. The car bucked and rocked and Susan screamed as a raging front of carbon-fiber and metal shrapnel tore into the undercarriage.

A second later the coils on the other car went critical and the grav-field, expanding at trans-light speed, tore a nano-second hole through space-time, releasing a near-infinite burst of Planck energy. It ripped apart what was left of the wrecked car, stripping it right down to its sub atomic components in a plasma shock wave that instantly blew away the front of the five story building and torched the rest.

The shock wave hit the battered undercarriage of Harry’s car like the burning fist of God. It flicked the car up and over its tail as easily as you’d flick a crumb off the sleeve of your coat. Harry managed to cut his grav-units before the crash harnesses came down and immobilized him. A moment later, the on-board computers registered an imminent stage-three disaster, and Harry was engulfed in a foam crash-cocoon.

The car was knocked, pin-wheeling sideways, back across the channel at well over two hundred miles an hour when the passenger side hit a concrete wall and collapsed like an old aluminum beer can. Years later, Harry would wake up at night bathed in a cold sweat with the memory of that crash still fresh in his mind. He would hear the tortured, screeching scream of the car as it ground its way up the concrete wall, sloughing off clouds of broken glass, strips of carbon fiber, splinters of titanium alloy, and chunks of crash-cushion foam.

After that, he must have blacked out, because the next thing he remembered was cold, black water filling the car as it slowly settled into the channel. The foam crash-cocoon had dissolved
minutes after doing its job and the padded restraints sprang away as soon as he began moving.

Miraculously, he came through the crash without a scratch, but Susan remained motionless beside him, slumped over in her padded restraints. When he managed to release her, she fell limply into his arms. Blood ran out of her eyes and nose, and the right side of her head looked as if a giant sculptor had stuck his thumb into the wet clay of her head, leaving a deep, bloody depression.

Harry’s memory of what happened after that was like a broken mirror, full of cracked, sharp-edged, cutting pieces, with big black holes of nothing in between. He remembered crying and screaming in panic as he fought to get Susan loose from the sinking car; then later, supporting her dead weight in the black water, kissing her lifeless face, crying her name, begging her to be all right.