Data Runner (21 page)

With the sky turning an early shade of blue, the entire town smells of smoke. Not the pleasant kind that rises out of chimneys in the dead of winter—this smoke smells dirty. It is the smell of things that were never meant to be burned. If not people's lives then surely their livelihoods.

As I ride Pace's dirt bike through the drenched remains of Brentwood, it is clear that entire wings of the hospital and high school have been lost. But they are the lucky ones because they were essential enough to get the first response. Not as lucky are the two grocery stores that have burned to the ground, not to mention all three churches. Gone.

People tried to fight the blaze. You could see them still huddled around the smoldering remains. The residents of Brentwood did whatever they could. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough. The fire spared nothing. Not everything was completely destroyed; some buildings were reduced to ash while others were left standing with little more than smoke scars, but there was no rhyme or reason to any of it. Some things burned a little, some burned a lot. But in one way or another, everything burned.

Everything burned, just like they wanted it to.

It is now, finally, as I make my way through town, that my stomach twists into a knot and my quivering hands begin to shake the dirt bike. A feeling of numbness wraps around me like a suffocating blanket. It is now, finally, that it hits me. Pace is gone. Killed in the fire helping me escape. He could have easily made it out, but he chose not to leave me hanging at the tip of Ito's sword. Pace was a Dragon to his very last breath, and this is something I will never forget. And now, through the trembling in my hands, I feel something else break through the numbness. Something raw. Something primal. Something visceral.

Pace is gone. And all that is left in the wake of his passing is anger. Pure, unadulterated anger.

Finding Snake, Red Tail, and Dexter is as easy as riding straight toward the vortex chopper circling near them.

“Where's Martin?” I ask.

“Taking care of your house. Where's Pace?” Dexter asks.

It's one of those times when I don't even need a mirror, I can feel the look on my face. Dex understands immediately. I don't even have to tell him the circumstances. He seems to get that too. There's a little thing we say whenever a Dragon has to leave. Since I've been one, we've only had to say it once. But I say it now, for Pace. “Dragon once…”

Dexter joins in, “Dragon forever.”

Snake's hands are full. Literally. He's got soot all over his face and an elderly woman wrapped in a blanket in his arms. They've gotten everyone out of the nursing home. Now they're moving those who need medical attention to triage, and since there aren't enough gurneys to go around, it's a job for the biggest and the strongest—Snake and Dex among others.

“This is bad,” says Red Tail who has been coordinating logistics with others around town. “Everything went up at once. The water spread the flames like napalm.”

“All the old buildings on Main Street are gone.”

“There wasn't enough manpower,” says Dexter.

“We couldn't fight the whole blaze,” says Red Tail. “We had to let some of it go.”

“Just let it all burn…”

Red Tail purses her lips like I don't appreciate the difficulty of her task. “Not all,” she says, “but we couldn't save condemned buildings when hospitals and schools were on fire.”

It's not that I don't understand that, and I do appreciate all of their efforts. I'm just extraordinarily pissed that even one building went up in smoke because none of them had to. Mr. Chupick didn't have to lose his barn. And even more importantly, we didn't have to lose Pace.

It was all Blackburn's fault. And as the vortex chopper flies over us, I make eye contact with the person responsible. It was Bigsby who dropped the grenade into the mains to start the fire. Bigsby and no one else. Whatever the orders, it was his hand that did it. And I know he wasn't just following orders, he was happy to do it. He told me so himself. Bigsby has been gunning for me since the moment we first met. For him, setting my hometown on fire wasn't about Blackburn's plan, it was one more way for him to come after me. And now that Brentwood has burned, and I am smoked out, he knows there is nowhere left for me to go. And that is exactly what I am counting on.

“Where was the drop supposed to be?” I ask Red Tail.

“The mischief plant. Why?”

The mischief plant. How fitting. The vortex chopper circles around and doubles back. “He'll be on my tail the whole way.”

“Why?” asks Red Tail. “There's no drop to make. You're not loaded up anymore.”

“Yes, but Bigsby doesn't know that, and he'll want to finish this.”

Red Tail pulls up a map. “It's twenty miles away on straight roads. He'll be on top of you before you even make it out of town.”

I turn the handlebars and rap the gas tank with my knuckles. “Not if I cut through the woods.”

“Whatever you're going to do, do it quick,” says Dex as he tracks the vortex chopper. “Snake's intel says there's more on the way.”

“What are you going to do?” Red Tail asks.

“I'm going to put that rat where he belongs.”

Suddenly Red Tail's eyes light up.

“What are you doing?” I ask as she rips off my backpack and digs through it until she finds what she's looking for.

“Here,” she says and pulls out the rodent repeller.

“What do you want me to do with that?”

Red Tail turns the box onto its side and digs her thumbnail into the switch that inverts the signal. Flips it. “I think it's time to test this thing out.”

“I don't even know if it's going to work.”

“It will,” she says. “It'll work because you built it.”

The vortex chopper comes screaming over us. The bay door flies open, and the blonde kid who burned my town hooks onto a rope to drop down.

Red Tail backs away from the bike. “You just have to get it on him somehow.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You'll figure it out.”

“Go, Jack!” screams Dex. “Move!”

I kickstart the bike with a huge turn of the throttle. Dig my heel into the dirt. Slam the shifter down and kick up a rooster tail of dirt as I turn the bike and head for the woods.

Clutch. Toe the shifter into third.

Clutch. Up to fourth.

I try to use a long stretch to get up to fifth, but before I know it the terrain forces me to let up on the throttle.

Clutch. Stamp it twice down to second.

In the full light of morning it isn't hard for the vortex chopper to track me through the woods. Obviously I can't see it when it's directly on top of me, but every so often when it gets ahead of me, I catch a glimpse of Bigsby leaning out of it. He must be thinking that he has me; that I've started on a road with a limited amount of fuel in my tank, and all he has to do is wait me out.

What he doesn't know is, I know exactly where I'm going.

And I'm just about halfway there.

There's a reason why so many people who grow up in the squatter settlements don't eat red meat, why Dexter and Red Tail won't even go near the stuff. There is a reason, and it has nothing to do with ethics.

I grew up in the Free City, where the markets were reliable and you could trust any package that was certified 100% Grade A Bovine. Or at least I thought I could trust it. Then I came out to Brentwood. It was no secret that the North American Agriculture Collective was entirely funded by the very producers they were tasked with inspecting, and for that reason the labels on lesser grades of meat were always a little fudged. But if you listened to the people in Brentwood who actually worked at the mischief factory, they had a different story to tell. According to the folks around town, all of it had mischief. And if that was the case, if the meat that was supposed to be mischief-free had even the smallest amount of mischief mixed in, then you had to wonder about everything the NAAC endorsed. And if you couldn't trust the food you were putting into your mouth, what could you trust?

The mischief plant is located about ten miles outside of Brentwood, and I lead the vortex chopper all the way there. Since most of the plant workers are residents of Brentwood and most of them are otherwise occupied this morning, the place is barely in operation.

The dirt bike putters like it's almost out of gas when I slide to a halt in the back lot separating the processing plant from the mischief pit. I kill the engine and lower the kickstand. Pull the signal emitter out of my bag and get ready. The vortex chopper that's been on my tail the entire way swoops over me. A rappelling line hits the ground a few feet away and down comes Bigsby.

That's my cue. I don't even wait for his feet to touch down; I leap off the bike and grab him while he's still on the rope. Raise my elbow and drive it straight into the wound on the side of his face. Follow it with a punch that disorients him just long enough for me to shove the signal emitter into his vest pocket undetected, then I release. He hits the ground just after I do, but the extra seconds he takes to clear the rope is all I need to get a jump on him.

I run.

He chases.

No matter. I'm just half the distance away from the mischief pit, and there is nothing in between but playground, and I know I've got this. All Bigsby has to do now is catch me. And he will catch me, exactly when I want him to. Because this is my run, and I'm the one making the rules.

I'm not sure how or why, but something had changed. This isn't like all those other runs when I was tracing to get away. This time there are no
E
s. I am not running to evade, elude, escape. For the first time ever, since my very first job as a data runner, I don't feel like I'm trying to get away from the person on my tail. Just the opposite. I want him to catch me.

Up ahead is a very large dividing wall. I leap. Wall run up the concrete. Arm grab the top and muscle up.

Ask a hundred different traceurs what they love most about parkour and you'll get a hundred different answers. But if you distill those answers down to their essence, you will find the same idea at the heart of each and every one. Freedom. The freedom to be, without limits, to the very best of your ability. The freedom to move without fear or reticence and live your life one leap at a time. The freedom to unbind yourself from all those paths that have been constructed for you by society and find your own way through the obstacles. The freedom to write your own physics, accepting nobody's rules of gravity and space but your own. The freedom, finally, to unshackle your human spirit from the tyranny of grounded steps and let it fly. Freedom—in all its form and function, all its beauty and art, all its magic and allure—parkour is all about freedom.

Even the freedom to stop running if the time ever comes. Stop thinking about all those half-distances and just enjoy the view standing still. Sometime maybe, but not right now, not for a while.

Bigsby doesn't follow me up the wall because he sees the fence fifty yards away, and the giant sign indicating rats, and he just assumes I'm going to come down on his side of it. It's the wrong assumption. Running along the top of the wall, I let him close the distance between us until he can keep up on his own, and the chase becomes a footrace to the pit. And the closer we get to the pit, the more we start to see the random escapees. On the ground, along the top of the wall, they scurry everywhere.

Rats. Oversized rats. Farmed for consumption. Harvested for their meat. I nearly gag.

Bigsby goes for his gun.

“Go ahead and shoot,” I yell before it's even out of his vest. “You can't beat me any other way. You never could and you never will. You will
never
be half the runner I am.”

Bigsby growls like a mad dog as he releases the gun and raises his hands like claws to attack the approaching fence. I get there first. Leap off the crest of the wall. Throw a midair 360 as I soar over the top of the fence. Land and roll out. It's not that hard of a landing but it feels that way without any body armor. Getting used to wearing body armor was easy. Getting used to not wearing it again, that's harder.

The mischief pit is just that. A giant pit full of large rodents kept at bay by electronic fencing until they are ready to be processed. Thousands of them. Scrapping around in a pool of dark hair accented by long and leathery tails and the pinks of their feet. A shiver runs up my spine. I hate rats. That's why I built the repeller in the first place, so I wouldn't even have to see them. But now it's like I'm making up for all the rats I've avoided at once. I feel them at my feet. Feel their beady little eyes watching me as I run along the embankment, waiting for me to slip. Ready to pounce. It's nearly enough to make me second-guess my lane, but then I remind myself that I have to do it. I commit, because it's the only way.

Dexter could go a different way. He could do it without ever leaving the embankment. He could flip that mental switch from flight to fight and in one instant hit the brakes to take on Bigsby mano-a-mano. Dexter could get Bigsby into the pit without ever having to set foot in it himself. Unfortunately, Dexter's wheelhouse is not my own, so I have to go another way. I have to go through. There is no way I can wrestle Bigsby into the pit without him breaking my neck first, so I have to run him through it. I have to go through.

Easy
, I remind myself.
It's just like any other obstacle. There is nothing stopping you. These rats are not limits. They're just a plateau
…

I leap, escaping Bigsby's fingers by a knuckle as they reach for my back. And now he has no choice. There is enough gravity and momentum between us to pull him forward with me before he even has a chance to think about it—because I'm sure if he did have a chance to think about it, he would never follow me in. But he does. I launch into the pit with all the grace of a bird in flight while he stumbles in after me like a drunken ostrich.

It is without question the strangest landing I have ever made. Everything moves. Everything squeals. The squirm of the pack makes me stumble, but I manage to stay on my feet as the rats come rushing past me like a raging river. One on top of the other, running like every one of them is clawing for the last piece of cheese in the maze. That's the work of the signal in Bigsby's vest. It isn't just attracting them, it's inciting them to attack. That wasn't my intent, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it was a happy accident.

Bigsby screams in horror. It's like nothing I have ever heard before. I'm sure a soldier like Bigsby who's been inside the Caliphate has heard it many times, but never like this, never from his own lips. I mean he really screams in horror.

As hordes of rodents continue to wash past my ankles, I turn in time to see him fire his gun wildly into the air. And when a trio of rats dig their claws and teeth into his hand and wrist, the gun goes off again. The empty shell casing arcs out of the ejection port in a drift of smoke and lands in the mischief of rats. Disappears. A rat digs its teeth into the soft web of his thumb and forces him to drop the gun. That too disappears.

Rats. Claw past Bigsby's waist and up his torso.

Rats. Up his arms and across his shoulders.

Rats upon rats. Climb across each other when there is no more surface on Bigsby to climb, when even his face is covered and all that is left of him is a mound of vermin that takes two steps in no particular direction and drops. And somewhere in that mound of vermin, through the din of squeals echoing across the concrete walls of the pit, I swear I hear him scream one last time.