The cats on the dash soared out the windows. The rest of the cats followed, yellow, gray, and black smears of speed.
Cupcake said something, her mouth moving, any sound lost beneath the concussive barrage. Opening her door, she jumped out. I deduced she had said, “Cover me.” Cupcake landed as light as one of the cats.
“Roger that.” I slid through and sat on the window ledge, engaging the sensors, swinging the Para Gen slowly from side to side. Watching for anything that moved.
Cupcake carried her weapon low, a two-hand grip, near her thigh. She crab-walked fast to the protection of the car. Cleared it. Cleared the far side of the rusted vehicle. Behind the car, she studied the underbrush. I had never asked, but it seemed Cupcake had weapons training. Or she had Berger-chipped the info and training, which meant she had some understanding and skill sets, but no muscle memory and no experience. I was going with the Berger.
Spy tried to get my attention. It was an intense spiraling sensation, part vertigo, part layers of green. Spy was in a tree, looking down on two men. The men who had run when Cupcake and I killed their pals. They were talking on old-fashioned walkie-talkies. The talkies had a limited but unknown range. My Berger implant supplied:The range of coverage for long-range walkie-talkies increases with power. A two-watt radio can cover fourteen kilometers. A four-watt radio can reach up to forty-eight kilometers. All on flat terrain.
Spy heard when the man spoke, and oddly, I heard too. “ETA twenty.” Then, “Copy that. We’ll be ready.”
They had backup coming.
“Area is clear,” I shouted to Cupcake, not caring if the men heard. “We have twenty minutes before reinforcements arrive.”
Cupcake looked at me like I was nuts, scowled, and her face cleared, her mouth moving. “The cats. Right.”
Through the earbud I barely heard Mateo, back at the junkyard, say, “Get off me you damn cats.”
Cupcake placed her weapon on the hood of the car and pulled a knife I hadn’t noticed. Deftly she cut the women free. They were Caucasian, a little older than me, and they were babbling. From body language and hand gestures, I deduced that they had been stopped and their bodyguard killed. They had been robbed and were about to be raped when our diesel approached. They babbled while Cupcake raided the dead men’s pockets and found their keys, some cash, and several flasks of what was probably homemade hooch. She gave each woman a handgun taken from the dead men, ammo, and half of the cash, before helping them load their guard’s body into the back seat of their car. The women took off, the fifty-year-old Ford spitting black exhaust. Even over my deafness, which would take several minutes to go away completely, it sounded as if it had consumption. It dog-tracked down the road on slick tires, but it was still running.
I checked my weapon, popped my ears, and draped ear protectors and goggles around my neck. My arms were pocked with faint burn marks to go along with the claw marks on my back. Sweat burned all of them.
Crawling into the sleeping compartment, I opened the box of ammo marked5.56-by-45 millimeters.On top of the packed rounds were ammo belts. I pulled out my replacements—one pre-loaded hundred-round ammo belt and two twenty-round belts—and made my way back up front. Removing my nearly empty belt (I had seven rounds left in it), I loaded one new belt and hooked the other belts into the secure loops on the passenger side floor. One hundred forty-seven rounds. That should do it.
“What’s the plan? We gonna wait for them and take them down?” Cupcake shouted to me as she tried to drag a body out of the way. “I don’t see a chainsaw. The rig isn’t getting over that tree without some serious damage to the undercarriage.”
“Can the diesel push it out of the way?”
She studied the tree and where it hit on the cab’s grill. “I can try, but if it gets stuck, we’re screwed.”
“Try. Slowly.”
“I don’t like it. But I’ll do it. The bodies?”
“Leave ’em.”
“That’s gonna squish.” But Cupcake got back in the cab.
With a steady hand on the Para Gen and a firm grip on the truck’s safety handle, I retook my place, sitting in the open window. I secured the weapon before I returned my attention to Spy. She was moving fast, and the contact was iffy. Without being head-to-head, I didn’t know if it would work, but I sent her a picture vision of her hunting for the reinforcements and from which direction they would come. I got a hint of something dizzying which might have been Spy replying. Or not.
Then I lost contact.
Cupcake shifted into the lowest gear, a basso thrum that vibrated through my butt. The truck eased forward, and the bottom edge of the bumper connected, catching against the upper curve of the downed tree as she bumped it forward. It shifted but didn’t roll. She reversed, stopped, and bumped it forward again. The tree, a long-dead native fir, shifted and rolled an inch. Cupcake repeated the process, getting a feel for the speed and force needed. Brittle branches snapped and broke, the dead tree moving in time with the truck bumps. The tree’s own tapering shape allowed her to adjust the angle and speed of the bump as the tree began to roll in an arc, away from the road. Cupcake was right. The truck squished the bodies still in the road. We were making progress, but it was taking too long.
Spy concentrated on a house on a low mountain ahead, and sent me an urgent, vertigo-inducing vision of an armored log-cabin mansion with what looked like at least one cannon poking from its walls. There were four trucks, six motorbikes, and what might have been a Gov. car parked out front. It was a nice, secure hidey-hole.
In an upper window a naked woman leaned into the glass, arms up and braced. Even with long-distance cat eyes I couldn’t see her expression, but I had a feeling of devastation. Behind her, another woman danced, clinging to a pole. She also wore an expression of dread.
“I’ll be back,” I said to the women, although I knew they couldn’t hear me. “I’ll get you free.”
“What?” Cupcake shouted.
“Nothing,” I shouted back. “A battle for another day.”
From a garage-type door at the side of the house rolled two mini armored tanks, men riding on the outside. The mini-tanks careened down the hill toward Spy. There were weapons mounted on the mini-tanks, big weapons. I tried to focus in—
The vertigo worsened. The contact with Spy abruptly stopped.
