Assault or Attrition (11 page)

It took just a
second. A heartbeat passed, and the buildings, cars, and
pedestrians were simply gone, culminating with deafening silence.
What remained was a crater, impossibly deep, filling from the
newly-formed waterfall that flowed in from the Hudson.

While a series
of smaller windows across the top of the holo-screen showed replays
of the implosion from different angles, the live simulcast feed
continued below. First responders were on-hand, but seemed
directionless. They were there to put out fires and save lives, but
there was nothing left to do but bear witness. There were a few
casualties around the perimeter of the crater, where people were
lucky enough to have been standing just outside of the blast
radius. Everything else had vanished.

The remaining
boroughs of New York City were shut down, and the police, which
suddenly looked more like the military, took over. The last
terrorist attack in the city was fifteen years ago, when a small
dirty bomb killed three tourists in the northern half of Manhattan.
That was all it took. The massive over-correction in security
protocols unleashed an entirely new level of police presence, and
the technology followed. As soon as the superhuman detonated,
everything changed: eight-wheeled armor tanks rolled through the
streets, batons collided with skulls, and boots buried in stomachs.
Any onlookers who came within arm’s reach of an officer were doused
with an experimental new liquid, shocking their nervous system to
the point of convulsions.

As I stood
perfectly still, staring into the floating screens with horror, my
wrist-com chimed. It was an alert from an old website I’d signed up
for years ago. ‘Hyve Mynd’ was the hottest social media tool in
2038 – a place where hipsters could share their thoughts on movies
no one had ever heard of, and fashion accessories no one wore. Of
course as soon as it went mainstream the core audience abandoned
their accounts. My own account, which I’d created for the sole
purpose of sending old-school text messages to Gavin and Peyton,
had long been abandoned as well – they were the only two followers
in my ‘colony’. When the novelty wore off they stopped using the
service, and I’d forgotten it existed.

I accessed my
Private Hive to find a single message blinking, awaiting my
response.

Login:
TheRealMox
Password:
*********

Welcome back,
TheRealMox! You have ... one ... new message in your Private
Hive.

P!nkM0nst3r:
I’m OK.

TheRealMox:
holy crap Peyton i nearly had a heart attack
when i saw the simulcast, just found out about this 30 seconds
ago

P!nkM0nst3r:
You should see it here, it’s chaos. The looting
and riots have already started. I’m hiding out in a friend’s
apartment.

TheRealMox:
DO NOT tell me where you are yet in case this is
being traced

P!nkM0nst3r:
Thought so. It’s why I didn’t use my wrist-com.
At least this can’t be geo located.

TheRealMox:
stay put, i’ll come pick up you and Gav in the
jet

P!nkM0nst3r:
Gavin is missing. I haven’t seen him in days. I
just hope he wasn’t in the blast zone.

TheRealMox:
WTF?! could he be hiding out somewhere too??

P!nkM0nst3r:
Hopefully he’s in The Dark Zone. He’s been
spending a lot of time there since Excelsior burnt down.

TheRealMox:
shit

P!nkM0nst3r:
I know.

TheRealMox:
he’s a tough bastard, if anyone survived this
it’s Gav

P!nkM0nst3r:
I would just feel better if I heard from
him.

TheRealMox:
me too but he’ll turn up soon i know it. just
lay low and stay inside, don’t go near the windows

P!nkM0nst3r:
How are you going to pick me up? The streets
are filled with cops and looters.

TheRealMox:
can you get to the roof of the building you’re
in?

P!nkM0nst3r:
I think so.

TheRealMox:
good, i’m getting my pilot and some security, be
ready and we’ll be there in 90 mins

P!nkM0nst3r:
Please hurry <3

Seeing the
text-based emoticon at the end of her message made me smile, just
for a moment. It had no reason to, but Peyton’s signature
‘less-than sign followed by a three’ heart was a small reminder of
how things were before I left. Life’s little wrinkles that made me
nostalgic for the time before the Red Army wanted my head on a
pike, and before I competed inside The Arena. Barely six months had
passed, and looking back it seemed like a lifetime.

Mac was nowhere
to be found, so I sent Chandler to search for him and pass along a
message. We were heading for New York, and wheels needed to be up
in ten.

Valentina
didn’t answer her wrist-com either, and she wasn’t in her room. I
scoured the fortress. Time was ticking away, and searching her most
likely hiding places was taking longer than I’d hoped. I passed the
chef while running through the main corridor, who said he’d spotted
Valentina heading towards the hangar around an hour ago.

I sprinted down
the length of the hangar, past the fleet of aircraft and through
the open blast doors. A few flakes of snow drifted in through the
opening as I approached, and as I stepped into the morning sunlight
I saw her near the end of the runway.

Valentina was
in full winter camouflage, dressed head-to-toe in white thermal
hunting gear, complete with yellow-tinted shooting glasses. She was
peering through the scope of a sniper rifle into the forest below.
I jogged towards the end of the runway and shouted as I approached.
“Sorry to interrupt your caribou hunting, but we have a
problem.”

“I’m not
shooting caribou,” she mumbled without looking away from the
eyepiece. “I’m shooting campers.”

“What?” I
stared out into the distance and saw a small hunting party warming
themselves by a fire. From what I could tell there were at least
three of them in the camp; they’d pitched a small tent next to an
all-terrain vehicle. “Are you out of your fucking mind? You can’t
just shoot people for fun!”

She turned to
me and held up the rifle, cocking an eyebrow. “You don’t recognize
the piece?”

I squinted at
the military-style weapon. I’d never seen it before.

“It’s one of
your
sniper rifles, Moxon. The ones you printed last week?
It only fires marshmallows, remember? And not even that far, either
– I’ve been shooting at those dicks for an hour and haven’t come
close to pegging one.”

I couldn’t
believe I’d forgotten. It was time to up my meds, because my
short-term memory loss wasn’t showing any signs of improvement.
“Right, right. Well sorry to interrupt your long-distance food
fight, but half of The Fringe just disappeared thanks to a
superhuman suicide bomber. New York City is on lockdown.”

“I guess the
NYPD has their hands full,” she said with a half-hearted shrug,
reaching into her pocket in search of additional ammunition. She
popped a marshmallow into her mouth before feeding a new one into
the chamber. “Not our problem,” she mumbled as she chewed.

“I have friends
in the city,” I said, raising my voice, “so it’s a pretty goddamned
huge problem for me. I need you to come with me and Mac, we’re
picking them up.”

“All right,
take it easy,” she replied calmly, adjusting the gun’s strap before
flinging it over her shoulder. “I’m in. A security op beats
standing around here firing confectionery at endangered birds.”

Great. So in
addition to answering for numerous crimes that I wasn’t responsible
for, I was probably going to start getting angry calls from the
Canadian wildlife preservation society.

“But,” she
added, poking a gloved finger into my chest, “...
you’re
not
coming along for the ride.”

“Why the hell
not?” I asked sharply.

“You
know
why the hell not,” she fired back. “We
both
know
why this happened. It doesn’t matter whether this was Red Army or
an independent act of aggression: New York is going to pin the
blame on someone, and since the bomber died it’s going to be
your
stupid ass. You pay me to be your bodyguard, and this
is me, guarding your body. Stay here, lay low and keep out of
trouble – we’ll be back with your girlfriend in a couple
hours.”

“But—“

“But nothing,”
she insisted. “You’re
not
a superhuman, and you never will
be. Acting like one will just get you killed.”

She stomped
down the runway and into the hangar, already screaming into her
wrist-com at Mac to hurry up.

Valentina was
blunt, but she was right. The group of suicide bombers parked their
van directly across the street from my old apartment, which wasn’t
far from Excelsior Retro Comics. They knew exactly what they were
doing, and there were no other explanations for their attack; The
Fringe wasn’t a military target, and had no political or social
significance outside of the fact that it was my neighborhood. If
they weren’t there with a plan to vaporize me, then the target they
selected was a pretty big coincidence.

Staying behind
made sense. There wasn’t much I could do to help, and this was a
two-person operation. With Valentina as security and Mac piloting,
I would just be dead weight. And if they got stopped and searched,
however slim the chance, having me on-board could make matters
considerably worse. When there is a tragedy of this scale, politics
dictate that someone has to shoulder the blame. Logically the Red
Army should have the finger pointed in their direction, but in
times of crisis, rational thought is rarely the first reaction.

***

The
following hour was torture.
Even though I knew the operation
was a routine pick-up, waiting for Peyton to arrive drove me into a
chest-tightening panic. Mac suggested that he could send me
real-time updates, or hook me into the jet’s in-cabin video feed so
I could be in constant contact. It was a nice thought, though I
didn’t think it would allay my anxieties. I needed someone real to
talk to, and I needed a distraction.

After quickly
explaining the situation to Brynja, she did her best to keep me
occupied. She suggested popcorn and a movie to keep my mind off of
current events. I reluctantly agreed, but twenty minutes in I was
fidgeting in my seat, unable to maintain my focus. I wanted to
continually check the news feeds, and scour simulcasts in search of
any tidbit of information – no matter how small – that New York
might be improving. Something that would indicate that Peyton’s
situation wasn’t as grave as I’d feared.

Unable to sit
still, I excused myself and left the media center, retreating to my
room. I paced the long row of windows that lined the entire length
of my chamber, staring out into the mountain range. That’s when I
detected some unusual movement.

In the
distance, down in the forest clearing was a newly erected camp
site. More elaborate than the previous one that Valentina had
spotted from the runway, this site was large enough to accommodate
a hunting party of twenty, possibly more. Several ATVs were parked
around the perimeter, as well as a pair of small hover jets. Since
I’d been here I hadn’t seen a single person anywhere near the
fortress, and the staff had always noted that over the course of
the last year, there hadn’t been anyone in the vicinity – not a
single camper, hunter or tourist. This was the second group to set
up camp on the edge of my property in less than twenty-four hours,
and the timing was suspicious.

Gazing out the
window, I was startled by a series of raps at my bedroom door. It
was Chandler, accompanied by London floating close behind.

I forced a
smile and gestured for him to enter. “Did you notice the campers
outside?” I asked, motioning towards the forest clearing.

“I did,” he
replied, peering out the window. “But not those ones. I mean, I can
see
them, obviously – I’m not blind. But there are
more...the other ones. They’re here. Knocking.”

I raised an
eyebrow. “Even for you, that was a
really
weird
sentence.”

Chandler’s pale
cheeks glowed a bright shade of crimson. “I’m
so
sorry
Mister Moxon, sir. I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” I
reassured him. “Just relax. What’s going on?”

He asked London
to give us a look at Fortress 23’s main runway, accessing the
micro-cams outside of the hangar’s blast doors.

“
Absolutely,”
London replied cheerfully.
“Serving the
handsome and talented Matthew Moxon is my genuine
pleasure.”

“What was that
about?” I laughed.

“Remember when
you asked me to stop London...you know, with the Frost compliments?
How she...
it
always talked about him? Well I
tried
,
but since you’re the default owner of the fortress now, it...well,
I screwed up.”