Amped

Traffic started bogging down a few blocks away from Jim’s work site. I saw a lot of people gathered and it was a bad sign, so I skirted around on a side street. Crunched Lyle’s old pickup to a halt in a weedy ditch.

  The rattling truck is finally stopped, but my body still tingles with phantom vibrations. My hands don’t want to relax their grip on the plastic steering wheel. I put my forearm across it and rest my sweaty forehead, feeling my injured palm throb in time to my heartbeat.

  Try to think.

  The reports on the radio are chaotic. I don’t know what to believe. Timed detonations in cities around the country. Buildings falling. Hundreds dead, maybe thousands. Astra claiming responsibility for the start of a new war. Lyle must have thousands of amps ready to fight. A whole rank structure. Training and upgrades. He’s building a new world and I was too late to stop him.

  It is chaos in the parking lot out in front of the site. Full to overflowing with screaming demonstrators. More than just the guys who lost their jobs. Priders are here from everywhere. I wonder what Lyle is planning to do to them.

  The double-wide chain-link gate is closed and locked today. Just inside, I spot a familiar hulking figure. The Brain, unmistakable, flanked by dozens more of Lyle’s gang from Eden. They stand behind the flimsy metal links, staring out. Taunting the demonstrators with smiles and crossed arms.

  Lyle wasn’t fucking around.

  I haul myself out of the truck. Scale the back fence and hop over, keeping a lot of room between me and the Brain. The work site is about half as full as normal. Mostly just the old men, heads down. Still doing their jobs while the angry crowd outside builds and builds.

  I scour the site for Jim until a worker points upward.

  Four stories up, I exit the wooden scaffolding to find the old man unloading bundles of rebar off the crane and stowing them in long lines for the rod busters to drop into concrete. Jim is working relentlessly, drops of sweat hanging off his chin, the putter of his exoskeleton motor cutting through the quiet air up here. The way he is moving is thoughtful and automatic at the same time. Calm compared to the madness unfolding downstairs.

  “Hey,” I call out.

  Jim turns to me, looks me up and down without saying anything. His eyes settle on the weeping improvised bandage wrapped around my hand. With a sigh, he sets down a piece of shivery rebar.

  “Let me look at that hand,” he says.

  The first-aid box is at the base of the building. Jim signals the crane operator that the load is finished. Then he leads me down the creaking scaffolding to the ground floor. The subbasement for the parking garage isn’t complete yet, and the three-story drop still tickles the pit of my stomach. In the cool cement interior of the half-completed structure, Jim pops open the rusty first-aid box and sets out the antiseptic, cotton balls, antibiotics, gauze.

  In here, the rumble of the people outside sounds like distant traffic, punctuated by an occasional angry shriek. Other old men are standing outside the building, smoking and trying to look calm.

  “You save that Zenith?” asks Jim.

  “I … no,” I say.

  “Jim—” I start to speak and then stop. I can’t think of the right way to say this because there isn’t one. Sometimes you’ve just got to blurt it out. “Lyle is the one killing Zeniths. Astra isn’t defending us. It never was. Lyle’s trying to start a chain reaction …”

  I trail off when I see the look on Jim’s face.

  “I’m too late,” I say.

  Jim pauses from wiping dirt off my hand with a cotton ball.

  “Shit’s hit the fan. After the tri-city attacks, Priders are rioting and looting amp neighborhoods all over the country. They got Joe Vaughn himself rallying up the road,” says Jim, turning my hand and examining the wound. “He’s outside the old post office, a mile from here, whipping these people into a goddamn frenzy.

  “I don’t know how we’re gonna—” he is saying, wrapping my hand in gauze, but his voice is swallowed as the dull roar of the demonstrators rises an octave. The front fence starts ringing like a bell. Sounds like it’s being tossed around by a tornado.

  “Priders are coming in,” I say, looking around and seeing no easy way out of the site. “We can make it out if we run now.”

  “I didn’t want this to happen. But that doesn’t mean I can skip it.”

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  Jim gives me back my hand. Surveys the work site—taking in the worried faces of his elderly coworkers. His face is grim when he turns back to me. A saw blade slides out from under the forearm of his exoskeleton.

  “We fight,” he says.

  In the winking shadows of the half-finished building, the old men stand side by side, dirty jeans and flannel work shirts wrapped in titanium exoskeletons. Scowls on wrinkled faces. Their blades and saws are out, whirring like cicadas under the biting heat.

  Jim and I join them as a wave of Priders pushes down the rest of the fence. They’re trampling into the site, grabbing improvised weapons off the ground. Pipes, boards, and pocketknives. Lyle’s people are fighting back. Not the erratic, robotically efficient fighting of a Zenith but old-school brawling. Sharpened reflexes fueled by real anger.

  The police officers who were patrolling outside are coming in, too. Stepper-wearing riot cops, pushing forward in a line with plastic shields up. Batons out and guns holstered, for now. Obsidian statues crashing into a line of amps, just a bunch of kids with heads full of government cheese. The kids aren’t trained as well as soldiers, but they strike fast and bounce out of harm’s way quicker than fleas.

  The Priders are surging in around the cops, pushing one another forward in a faceless crush of human limbs. It’s a tidal wave that pushes the line of old men back. Makes fighting nearly impossible.

  Jim shrugs off a tubby guy with a tough-guy mustache, arms swinging. Another guy gets hold of me, and Jim accidentally runs his blurring saw blade over the man’s forearm. The guy gapes at the red slash and it gapes right back at him. The crowd eats him up and he stumbles away clutching his arm.

  The horizon rushes in until it’s a wall of stinking sweat and body heat and shouting faces. Jim and I retreat slowly, side by side, shoving violent demonstrators away from us. Punching only when we have to. Jim’s saw blade spews bluish smoke as he waves it at Priders dumb enough to get close.

  Then rocks and chunks of gravel start falling in on us. Priders out beyond the fence are throwing them from a safe distance. The stone rain adds to the confusion, hitting amps and Priders alike. A jagged hunk of concrete cartwheels past Jim’s leg, a tangle of wire barely missing his calf.

  We keep backing away until we can’t.

  At the scaffolding alongside the base of the building, we run out of ground. Behind us, stripes of warning tape crisscrossing a three-story drop to the subbasement. In front, a boiling wall of anger advances. Regular people gone insane, buttressed by stepper-wearing cops in body armor.

  The sharp shoulder of Jim’s exoskeleton digs into my arm. The world is closing in around us. Not even a Zenith could save me now.

  “I’m sorry, Jim,” I say. “I guess I was never meant to protect Eden.”

  “All a man can do is fight,” says Jim. “You fought.”

  A flash.

  It’s so bright and vicious that at first I think it came from inside my own head. My ears ring and my skull thrums with it, vibrating like fine crystal. I mash my palms against a concrete wall and brace myself against sudden vertigo.

  I gag, then vomit.

  Screams. I think I can hear screams through the ringing in my ears. Shoulder muscles knotted, I drag my face away from the wall. Lift a numb forearm and wipe drool from my mouth.

  “Jim?” I ask, leaning against the wall, letting the gritty surface anchor me to reality. I can barely hear my own voice. The atmosphere seems leaden, too thick to transmit sound. I smell fire.

  Blinking away dust, I’m able to focus on the ground.

  A Rorschach blob of yellowish vomit stains a p
iece of dirty plywood at my feet. I watch a glistening drop of blood heave itself from my face, dropping toward the center of the earth. A tacky wetness creeps down my cheek, a slug trail from temple to jawline.

  “Jim?”

  I turn to Jim and there is no Jim. The warning tape is gone.

  The reality of what this means settles coldly over my shoulders. My head bobs idiotically as a surge of grief claws its way out of my chest. “No,” I say, and I can’t hear the word, only feel the fluttering vibration of it in my throat.

  On my knees, I clamber to the edge and look into the subbasement. Another drop of my blood leaves my temple and escapes into the world, pulled away in a shining arc. I see only dust falling down the shaft in a silent waterfall. Down, down, down. My retinal brightens the image. There’s Jim at the bottom of the shaft, lying on his side in fetal position. One arm is outstretched, still reaching for balance. His body is coated in chalky dust from head to toe, a bas-relief.

  There is no blood. It looks like he fell asleep down there.

  For some reason I think about his trailer. Two miles away. Sitting empty and still, hot water heater ticking to itself in the closet. Sunlight groping through the blinds, doggedly starching the pages of old magazines on the coffee table. Cards still laid out in an unfinished game of solitaire. Empty now, empty forever.

  I stand up and swallow a cough and look out on the site.

  At the front gate, a plume of smoke swirls madly upward. The crane’s latest bundle of rebar oscillates over my head, buoyed by the upswell of dusty wind. In the haze, elderly men lie sprawled like fallen mannequins, exoskeletons frozen in whatever position they were in at the moment of detonation. Inside each exoskeleton, an old man struggles. Mice caught in particularly complicated traps. The machines have stopped working, frozen, but the men inside are alive.

  Some of the Priders are crouched for cover. Others are getting in kicks and punches while they have the chance. Amps are holding their heads, moving sluggishly. Even the cops are struggling to get out of their steppers.

  A bomb. The Priders must have let off a bomb, the kind that makes an electromagnetic pulse. The EMP passed through us all like the ghost of an explosion. But where the pulse finds electronics, it generates a surge of current that can freeze a motor or make an implant so hot it burns your skin.

  I smear blood and dust across my face trying to wipe it clean. My hands won’t stop trembling, but I’m still alive. Whatever they set off wasn’t strong enough. But I imagine the next time this happens, they’ll do the job right.

  Only one person stands.

  Lyle Crosby moves across the parking lot like a ghost, sidestepping fallen bodies and swinging Priders. That plume of dirty smoke sprouts behind him as he strides toward me. The laughing cowboy is shielding his eyes with one hand and advancing fast and confident. In his right hand, he has a pistol out and swinging. The explosion must have gotten his attention.

  He spots me through the dust.

  I throw myself forward, staggering, running for the fence. But somehow my feet are tangled together and my palms are out and skinned as I fall headfirst. Sliding through the dirt, I’m already climbing onto my knees.

  “Jim fell,” I say. “Jim’s hurt—”

  Crouched, I turn and see Lyle standing over me.

  Three, two—

  Lyle’s knife-handed strike catches me in the side of the neck before my trigger can go off. I land on my stomach in the dirt, diaphragm muscles seizing, head buzzing with pain. He casually walks past me, leans over the gap, and peers into the subbasement.

  “Damn,” he says.

  Hands on his hips, Lyle surveys the work site.

  “EMP, huh? Them Priders are crafty. But it didn’t have to be this way,” he says. “I did everything I could. Coddled you like a goddamn baby. You wouldn’t fight to save your own life. And now look at you. Look at Jim. Eden was never going to last, Gray.”

  I choke out the word. “Lucy.”

  “Jesus Christ. I sent Lucy your way. How blind are you? I saw that dopey look on your face the night I kicked that deputy out of Eden. Wanted to know more and she told me all about you. Thought I could get you on my side, fangs out. But Daley was right, you ain’t got any fangs.”

  Flashes of memory. Lucy dropping by to talk with Jim, staying to talk with me. Squeezing my hand in Jim’s trailer. My piss-stained shirt, cleaned and pressed and waiting for me on the arm of her couch. Our kiss.

  “What?” I ask.

  Lyle is pacing. Manic. He wheels on me then stalks away, again, speaking all the time. “Wuh-wuh-what? Why you think she came over to your place? So friendly? How do you think I found out you were a Zenith? You think I showed up at your trailer that day and saved you by accident? You got a head full of rocks. And that’s sad, too, because, man, you had some serious fucking potential.”

  He taps his temple with a finger, presses it in hard enough to make his fingertip go white.

  “Did you know I qualified for Echo Squad out of two thousand two hundred and twelve Army Rangers from all three goddamn battalions? And I’m Zenith class, but, Jesus Christ, the shit you got ain’t even military grade. It’s better than military grade. They don’t make ’em like that anymore because they never made ’em like that. I don’t know what your daddy was smoking, or whether he saw the end of the world coming or what, but that man was not fucking around the day he put that shit in your head.”

  I gave you something extra, is how my father put it.

  I’m a means to an end. A soldier in Lyle’s make-believe army. My breath is back now, passing ragged through a bruised larynx. I’m leaning against a piece of plywood. Watching Lyle pace.

  “You used me.”

  “Correction. I tried to use you.”

  I lean forward, grunting to get up. He raises a lanky leg and drops a boot onto my chest, crushing the air out of me.

  “Sit down, hero,” he says. “I don’t have time for this shit. These people think they’re fighting now, but I haven’t even got started yet. I’ve got a goddamn ace up my sleeve that’s been waiting there for ten years. Since the birth of Pure Pride. Wait until I show them what I got, Gray. Then they’ll know war.”

  That gun glints darkly in his hand. Curses and shouting come in a steady torrent from the front gate. Lyle glances over his shoulder and licks his lips. His chest is rising and falling like he just ran a marathon.

  Pinned, I struggle to wriggle out from under the boot. I don’t want to die here, groveling in the dirt.

  Lyle lifts his foot, looks at me like I’m a carpet stain. “I’m not gonna kill you, Gray. There’s something better planned for you.”

  He saunters ten feet away, then turns.

  “When you get arrested, don’t resist,” he says. “Try to have some dignity when the feds lock you up for the rest of your life. After all, you’re the leader of Astra.”

  * * *

  Violence Plagues Nation in Wake of Attack

  HOUSTON—Anger over the tri-city amp attacks on Chicago, Houston, and Detroit has quickly erupted into escalating acts of violence nationwide.

  The Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates that over 120 incidents of violence against implanted individuals have occurred since the attacks were perpetrated.

  Reports of harassment and assault are pouring in from all over the country but are concentrated in the cities directly affected by the attacks.

  Instances continue to pile up: In Chicago, a man on an anti-implantee rampage fatally shot an implanted panhandler at a gas station. In Detroit, a Molotov cocktail was thrown Tuesday at a community center run by the Free Body Liberty Group. Three were injured and the downtown building was severely damaged. Possibly the worst incident occurred in Houston, where a mob of 500 people surrounded the home of a local implantee. The man was beaten severely and left in critical condition and his home partially burned before the group was dispersed by police.

  So far, the government has been unable to quell the violence. FBI Director
Greg Wright has repeatedly told the press that “vigilante attacks and threats against implantees or their loved ones will not be tolerated.”

  Lyle stalks away, head lowered. His right hand is out, fingers extended. Three, then two. One. He makes a tight fist.

  The laughing cowboy trots and then breaks into a run. Skips across the dust-smeared work site too fast, movements birdlike and stomach-turning. Ducking between Priders and amps alike. The Zenith is clearly whispering in his ear.

  Got a new world to build, he said and I know immediately where he is going.

  A mile from here, the Pure Human Citizen’s Council is staging a rally that’s brimming with good, upstanding reggie citizens. Joseph Vaughn has got politicians and speakers and reformed doctors on a stage raised to the eyes of the world. The cowboy is going to continue his fight.

  Lyle laughs hoarsely as he dodges through the crowd of dazed Priders. He calls out commands to the other amps. The plume of smoke still rises over broken exoskeletons and police-issued steppers. A half dozen of Lyle’s gang jump up to follow him, grinning and panting. I hear his boots slapping the empty street erratically, skipping in unnaturally long strides. Then he’s around the corner, out of sight, gone with his trained seals into the industrial neighborhood that wraps around the construction site.

  I wrench myself up and stagger after him. My legs are swinging heavy and stiff in bloodstained jeans. But the grime on my face is dried up and whatever electrical surge happened to my amp is over now.

  On my own I’m too slow to catch Lyle.

  Taking a deep breath, I try to hold out my fingers. Still wrapped, my hand will barely obey. So instead, I visualize my hand. Curl my imaginary pinky and slide the ball of my thumb over it. As I perform the mental countdown, I take a perverse pleasure in it. Try to think good thoughts as I oh so carefully engage the Zenith. Gentle, like you’d tap a hot water faucet in a crummy shower. Level three and that’s it, Jack. I’m not going any deeper than I have to.

  Three, two, one, zero. And when my eyes open, the Zenith shows me more.