Gun Machine

“Move,” Tallow said, and broke into a run. He was authentically terrified. He tried to count off imaginary time. He trusted that Fuck You Robot’s motion sensor had lit off the explosive caps behind the dye-filled paintballs, and that the one gunshot was an instinctive squeeze of the trigger as the things hit his man. He would have quickly worked out that Tallow wasn’t in the apartment and would be heading down. Tallow attempted calculations: How fast could someone run down that narrow stairway? Would his man have tried the elevator? Not while he was covered in fluorescent orange paint, probably, but if he made it into the elevator before anyone came out to see what the noise was—but it was a gunshot, and people tended not to come out from behind their doors to look for actively firing guns…

Tallow got to the rear exit, lit by a single overhead lamp and surrounded on two sides by cheap mesh fencing. Someone exiting that door could come only one way—right now, that was straight toward Tallow. He flattened his back against the wall next to the door, drew his Glock, and waited.

He counted off a minute. He was straining his hearing listening for the sound of another egress being used, but his own pulse in his ears was drowning out all other noise.

Tallow was jerked around by a double gunshot and a crash of glass.

“Oh no,” he breathed, and then he ran. He was certain that the sound had come from the apartment building’s front.

Tallow felt like he was moving through molasses, like he was in one of those nightmares where you could barely move even though something terrible was happening. By the time he got around the front corner of the building, Scarly was already at the smashed main entrance, and Bat was on his back with two seared holes in his shirt.

Tallow looked around. Someone was running down the street away from him, past his own car. As the man passed under a streetlight, Tallow could discern a thin cloud of orange powder around his head.

Scarly was tearing Bat’s shirt open. “You stupid bastard,” she was saying. “You stupid bastard.”

Both rounds were buried in the Kevlar vest under Bat’s shirt, one of the ones Tallow had insisted they retrieve from Scarly’s car trunk earlier.

Bat coughed blood and then groaned. The groan made him convulse. Tallow guessed he had some broken bones. Scarly took out her phone. “I’m calling it in. Go and kill that fucker, John.”

Tallow took off after the hunter. Reaching his car, he looked down the street to see where his man was running. Tallow then unlocked and got into his car, jammed his phone into the dash and launched Ambient Security, and twisted the ignition. He made the car sweep around in a wide circle, tilting with the anger of its turn, and then Tallow rammed the accelerator down.

Thirty-Six

THE HUNTER didn’t know what was happening. He knew only that he had to hide.

He ran down the middle of the street, zigzagging when he approached traffic lights since he knew of old that they often meant security cameras were close by. He could tell traffic lights by their three eyes, vertically arranged, and their long black bodies poised to strike, like cobras. One step was on blacktop, the next on dirt. Everything was wrong.

He knew where he was going.

There were still people on the street, and they were staring at him. The paint was everywhere, all over him, penetrating his clothes, gumming his eyelids together. He perceived a tiny flash, a red light, at the edge of his peripheral vision, and put his gun on it. There was no one there: the space between two trees resolved in his eyes into a storefront. He approached it. The red light flashed again. A box with black glass in it—a computer, he told himself—and an eye atop it. As he moved in front of it, the red light went off again, under the eye.

The hunter ran. Three stores down, he saw another light blink on and off.

There were eyes in every window.

He was trapped in the future, and everyone was watching him.

The hunter made the crosswalk. A bison, giant and dark and its fur slick with pond water, rushed him across the trail. On the run, he shot it between the eyes. It swerved unnaturally and struck a broad black maple on the corner, wrapping around its trunk and smoking as it came to rest. The hunter was already gone.

Tallow punched Ambient Security into Forward mode. The system started gathering motion-triggered webcam shots from the streets ahead. There was an arresting shot of a man demented by terror and covered in orange paint staring into the camera and realizing he was caught. It was three blocks in front of him. You’re a fast bastard, aren’t you, Tallow thought, and was glad he had taken the car. There was no way he could have kept up on foot, and frankly, he wasn’t doing so well in the car. He matched the picture’s location to the map, judged the traffic system, and made a turn, hoping to hell that he was guessing right.

He saw a car embedded in a lamppost, its windshield shot out.