The Skill Conspiracy Page 19

  “Yeah?” she replied.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Good,” I said. “Come around this side.”

  Now that I was up on my feet, I could see what I was looking at. At the same moment we were just about to enter the parking garage, this guy was driving his big fat Mag SUV down the ramp and was just about to mesh up with the street magnets when I wedged myself beneath him.

  “Take his PCD,” I said to Annie. Then, looking at the man, I said, “PCD,” and made some sort of gesture, indicating that I wanted him to take it out of his pocket and hand it to Annie.

  “Blah blah blah blah,” he replied, looking at his car.

  “I think he’s saying it’s in the car,” Annie replied.

  “Good,” I replied. “Check it out.”

  I kept the gun trained on the man as Annie used the open door of our car to stand up and reach up to the Mag SUV, which was still wedged on top of our vehicle. With some difficulty, she climbed up, opened the passenger side door of the Mag vehicle, and heaved herself in.

  “Yeah, it’s right here,” she called down to me, holding the little PCD out the window with one hand as proof.

  “Down on the ground!” I shouted at the man, gesturing for him to get down.

  All of this had only taken about a minute or so, but the sirens were pretty much right on top of us now.

  “Down!” I yelled and shot the gun once into the air.

  Honestly, I really hadn’t even meant to do that, but I was very near to being in a panic, and it just kind of happened.

  The man fell to his knees, then went prostrate, blabbering some stuff I obviously couldn’t understand. Annie stuck her head out of the Mag SUV’s window to see what was going on.

  “It was me,” I said up to her, trying to explain the gunshot. “It was an accident.”

  I kept the weapon leveled at the man on the ground, then awkwardly climbed up into the Mag SUV the same way Annie had gone a moment earlier.

  “Look out,” I said to her as I clambered over her, sticking my ass right in her face and landing on the driver’s seat.

  The vehicle was still running, but I actually had no idea how to operate one of these things. Thankfully, it all looked pretty much the same as a regular car. I got myself situated then put it in reverse, backing the big beast off of our ruined little car. The man I’d left lying on the ground had gotten up and was screaming at us like a lunatic, until I put the Mag SUV in drive and kind of demolition-derby-style knocked the little crap-box we’d been driving out of the way.

  “Shi—” I started to say but had to swallow the word as my stomach lurched down toward my feet. We’d apparently moved out far enough into the street for the magnets in the road to engage with the vehicle, and we shot about fifteen feet right up into the air.

  BANG, BANG, BANG.

  Man, I was getting tired of hearing gunfire.

  “Alden!” Annie yelled.

  I slammed on the accelerator, not knowing for sure if that would make us go, or just make the wheels spin in midair.

  It made us go, fast.

  “Ohhhhphf,” was the closest approximation I can come up with for the sound that came out of my mouth. When I hit the accelerator, we literally just shot from standing still to some sort of ridiculous speed that I never knew was possible. There was no friction and no resistance besides the wind for our acceleration, so the sirens and gunshots that had literally just been right on top of us were now barely a faint set of pops and whines way off in the distance.

  “I had . . . no idea these things were this fast,” I said to Annie as I let off the pedal a little bit and let my stomach connect with the rest of my body.

  Back in New York, and all over the US in fact, there was no speed limit for Mag vehicles, but rarely did you ever see people just zooming around in them at full speed. I had always kind of wondered about the reasoning behind that and only now realized that the very real possibility of barfing in your own lap probably wasn’t worth the couple extra minutes you’d save on the trip.

  “Where are you going?” Annie asked.

  I looked over to make momentary eye contact with her and noticed for the first time that her face seemed to be littered with a bunch of tiny little cuts.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she replied, seeming slightly annoyed that I kept asking that. “Where are you going?” she repeated.

  I literally had no idea. I had let up on the pedal a little bit, but the buildings were still whizzing past us at a speed that made everything just look like a big blur.

  “I think we need to ditch this car as soon as we can,” I said.

  She nodded, knowing just as well as I did that Mag tracks were pretty ubiquitous within major metropolitan areas, but when traveling from city to city or, in this case, province to province, there was usually just one road with a single Mag track on it, and traveling that route, no matter how fast, would make it pretty easy for the authorities to find us and track us down.

  I’d been going in a straight line for quite some time now and finally decided to make a turn. I slowed until I saw a cross-street and began to turn the wheel, but nothing happened. My confusion only lasted a moment, though, as the Mag SUV quickly made the left turn down the street without my having to spin the wheel any farther than I’d already done.

  “Cool,” I said out loud.

  Annie gave me one of those “What?” looks.

  “You don’t actually have to steer the thing. You just spin the wheel either left or right, and once you get to the next perpendicular Mag track, the car executes the turn for you . . . I think.”

  “Cool,” Annie said as she nodded her acknowledgment. “But where are you going?” she asked yet again, her frustration evident this time.

  I was about to answer when I heard a very loud and disturbing noise that seemed to be coming from right behind us.

  “What the—” I started to ask as I looked in the rearview mirror and saw, of all things, a police helicopter no more than fifty yards behind us. From my brief glance, I could see that the thing seemed to be outfitted with some sort of guns, and while I was pretty sure that they’d want a really good shot at us before opening fire in the middle of a crowded city, I didn’t want to stick around to test that theory out.

  I pinned the pedal, and the copter quickly turned to a little speck in my mirror.

  “Shit,” Annie said.

  I nodded my commiseration, then slowed and looked for another turn to take. We found one, but within just a few seconds we’d regained our whirly bird tail.

  I turned our vehicle again, and this time watched the copter rise skyward, obviously waiting to see which direction I went.

  “It’s cat and mouse,” Annie said.

  “And there’s nowhere to go,” I added.

  Within this city, we were stuck in a grid, just like it was when we were back in that little town. It was worse now, though, because we were stuck in normal two-dimensional travel, while our pursuer had the ability to travel in three dimensions, allowing them to take a shortcut to anywhere we wanted to go. At this point, I realized we had three options. Keep playing this game, risk finding the one Mag road out of town, get on that and hope for the best, or, come up with something else.

  “Buckle up,” I said to Annie, as “something else” punched me in the brain.

  “Oh no,” she said, but didn’t ask for any more info.

  I didn’t know if the Mag SUV could do a one-eighty, or if, in order to reverse your direction on a road, you had to go around an entire block. Before, when I had been turning, I only spun the wheel a little bit, maybe fifteen or twenty degrees. To test out my full turning capabilities, I let off the pedal and spun the wheel hard counterclockwise. Sure enough, we spun a full one hundred eighty degrees, floated backwards for just a moment, then reengaged in a forward direction.

  “Cool,” I said.

  Annie looked . . . nervous.

  I’d go
tten my bearings within this city a little bit over the past couple of minutes and started to make my way back to what seemed like the biggest and busiest road. I was on the lookout for another Mag Car. Even in a major city like New York, they weren’t super common, and I hadn’t seen a single one here yet, but I really needed to find one.

  “Do I even want to know?” Annie asked as I let our vehicle come to a complete stop before getting ready to turn onto the main road.

  “Probably not,” I replied.

  It seemed like an eternity, during which time I heard, and then saw, the copter coming up right behind us, but finally, I saw another Mag Car coming from my left. It was going fast, but before it got too close, I cut the wheel right, hit the accelerator, and turned out onto the main road right in front of it. I looked in my rearview to see the copter ascending skyward and preparing to loop around to take up position behind us as soon as it could.

  I gunned it, putting as much distance between us and the car I’d cut off as possible. Then, I let off the accelerator, hit the brake, and spun the wheel counterclockwise as fast as I could. Just as before, we executed a full one-eighty.

  Annie was still wearing that “oh shit” look but did nothing more than re-check that her seat belt was still on.

  The copter had indeed realigned itself onto our path and would have been chasing us down from behind had I not just spun us around. Now, it was coming right at us. Also coming right at us, was the other Mag Car I’d cut off and left in the dust a number of blocks back.

  “Hold on,” I said to Annie as I depressed the pedal almost all the way to the floor.

  I was going to have to time this out perfectly.

  29

  I waited a moment, then hit the pedal hard. The driver of the car directly in front of me wouldn’t be worried in the slightest about a collision because they knew that the car with priority would simply leap frog the other car, and then be deposited right back on the Mag track as soon as the car below was cleared.

  “Wait . . . shit,” I said out loud.

  “What!” Annie asked with a fair amount of panic in her voice.

  “I don’t actually know which car gets priority,” is all I had time to say before it was too late.

  I had been expecting to get launched into the air. I was timing it out just right, so that I’d leapfrog the car below just in time to clip the nose of the helicopter and send it spinning out of the sky. It was a really good plan, and I had timed it out with precision. Only thing was, my car was apparently the one that had priority, so instead of launching into the air, much to the surprise of the men in the oncoming helicopter, Annie and I stayed right where we were and watched in shock as the car in front of us attempted to launch itself into the air.

  I say “attempt” because there just so happened to be a big police helicopter right above it at the moment the other car was trying to execute its leapfrog. From what I could tell as I quickly looked through our sunroof, their car bounced right off the bottom of the copter and came down hard somewhere near the back of our vehicle. The resulting collision forced us right off the Mag track and down to the street below.

  “Oh shiiiiiiii—” I yelled as we landed hard on our front two wheels but still with enough forward momentum to keep going straight down the street, the back half of our big SUV bouncing twice before all four wheels were contacting the ground for long enough that I could hit the brakes. As the car skidded out, bringing us closer and closer to the glass-fronted entrance of a large shopping plaza, the last thing I saw before we crashed through it was the car that had leapfrogged us lying on its side off to the edge of the road and the blades of the helicopter slamming into the side of a steel building as it rapidly lost altitude, plummeting toward the ground.

  I never saw the copter hit the ground because, instead of being able to watch that catastrophe happen in my rearview, I found myself staring directly into some sort of a women’s clothing store.

  “Holy shit!” Annie yelled.

  Neither of us apparently had much else to say about this gigantic fiasco because I had said the same thing at the same time.

  I took a moment to catch my breath, then asked her, “You good?”

  She didn’t reply, but from what I could see, she looked to be okay.

  I unbuckled my seat belt and hopped down out of the car. People were running everywhere. We had apparently just smashed through the front of a trendy shopping plaza and were now staring at a big neon sign that said Bonitas.

  I walked around to the passenger side and helped Annie down out of the SUV. I grabbed hold of her hand and started running the same direction everyone else was going—away from the big Mag SUV that had just crashed into the place.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping quickly.

  About three stores down from Bonitas was a trendy eyeglass store. It occurred to me that both Annie and I had lost our Shadez, probably during the incident with the police on The Runner, and now that we were back amongst civilization and technology, obfuscating our identities from Big Brother was going to be very important.

  “Excuse me,” I said to a woman inside the store, who was half torn between just wanting to run and taking a moment to pull down the security gate.

  “Como?” she said.

  What did she call me?

  I gently pushed past her and grabbed the first two pair of Shadez I saw sitting atop one of the display counters.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the woman, who, while taking a moment to give me a very dirty look, decided it was more important to become a part of the fleeing mass of people than to try and stop the dumb American thief.

  “I really am sorry,” I called after her, then put on a pair of the stolen glasses and handed the other ones to Annie.

  “Where to now?” she asked.

  “Same place everyone else is going,” I said, grasping her hand again and running back out into the main hallway of the mall.

  The more people were running, the more people wanted to join in. Really, it was probably only about forty or fifty people who had seen me and Annie crash through the front entrance of the mall. Those forty or fifty had started running immediately, and like a herd of deer running from a lion, the pack grew, and no one wanted to be left behind to see what everyone was running from.

  “This is good,” I said out loud, but mostly to myself.

  “What is?” Annie asked, having apparently heard me.

  “The crowd. Being part of this crowd is good.”

  Then, the news got even better.

  Thank God. I could really use some good luck right about now.

  Up ahead, I saw what looked to be a map with a whole bunch of colored lines on it that were pointing in all directions, and next to that, was a set of stairs leading down.

  “A subway,” I said.

  A lot of people were running down those stairs, but not so many that it was completely jammed up. Holding tight onto Annie’s hand, we got shoulder to shoulder and pushed our way down two, then three sets of stairs, until we found ourselves standing on the lower level of the subway. There were turnstiles up ahead, and I had a moment of panic, not being able to remember if the identity currently locked to my PCD was one the police knew of or not. I was just about to risk it and swipe the device across the payment band when the man beside me simply hopped the turnstile in front of him and continued out onto the subway platform.

  “Oh,” I said. Letting go of Annie’s hand to follow suit, I hopped the turnstile, then reached back to help Annie up and over.

  The platform was packed, and more and more people kept coming. Everyone was speaking in panicked tones, even though I was pretty sure none of them knew what they were afraid of, save the scattering mob itself. The flight instinct had definitely taken over, and people just wanted to get as far away from here as possible.

  After only a half-minute or so, I heard a train coming from a short distance away. It pulled up to the platform, and even though Annie and I were amongst the third row of people nearest
the track, we managed to push our way onto the train, where we were instantly joined by as many other hot, sweaty people as the laws of physics would allow to occupy this single space at the same time.

  A chime dinged, the doors closed, and I let out a sigh of relief. The relief was replaced by a different emotion as I immediately regretted needing to suck in so much air from this stinky train compartment.

  30

  I remember this old 2D film from before the turn of the millennium called Planes, Trains and Automobiles. In it, a couple of comedians turned actors played characters who really wanted to get home for the holidays and, as you could probably tell from the title, had to use a lot of different modes of transportation to accomplish the task. At a certain point in the movie, the two main characters were driving down the highway, and a man and a woman came racing up alongside them in another car and started screaming out their window, “You’re going the wrong way!” In point of fact, the two helpful motorists were trying to tell the two comedians that they were actually driving the wrong way on the highway, meaning, they were literally in the wrong lane going against oncoming traffic. The two comedians laughed at the two helpful Samaritans. They made motions asking if maybe they were drinking or drunk. One of the comedians then turned to the other and said, “How would he know where we’re going?” Moments later, two big rig trucks appeared out of the darkness of the night, coming right at the two comedians, and only by the skin of their teeth did they survive by squeezing their car between the two huge trucks, sheering off the sides of their car in the process.

  That’s almost exactly how I felt as Annie and I walked around this giant, endless building, looking for the bus terminal, when Annie finally found an English-speaking attendant and asked him which way we should be heading.

  “Oh,” he said. “You’re going the wrong way.” Then, he pointed us back the way we had just come and said it was, “Just up there on the right.”

  Yeah, I felt just like those guys from the movie. Not only were we going the wrong way, but I literally had no idea what kind of danger was up ahead that we were headed right toward.