Getting Lucky, Part Three

by

T.William Smith

After I told Jorge to have Spooty give up and return to base where we could meet him, I drove east toward Silver Lake away from the rioting. I hoped I could skirt any trouble, thinking the cops would have enough to keep them busy, they wouldn’t feel the need to stop a black Pontiack with a corpse propped up primly in the front seat. In the middle of the day. Not a cloud in the sky.

“You know, Nake, if there’s no justice, there’s no injustice. No crime, or truth, mercy. It’s all just us making up words, imposing patterns on chaos,” Parker said.

I tried to ignore him.

Pretty soon that became very easy. Stake trucks were rumbling down Hollywood Boulevard toward us. They were loaded with people.

“What the hell?” Parker asked.

“Reinforcements.”
“How’s that?”

“This was no spontaneous riot. The protest was planned.”

“I suppose Marx is one of the things they don’t have here?” Parker asked.

“No Marx. Not that they really need him. They have Edwin Chadwick and it hasn’t seemed to faze them any.”

“Who’s Edwin Chadwick?”

“The father of the London sewer. He believed poor people had a right to clean water. He changed our whole conception of the purpose of civil government. Put to bed once and for all the libertarians.”
“How’s that?”

“After Chadwick, modern infrastructure was simply too expensive and too sophisticated to justify anyone rationally being a libertarian.”

“The operative word being ‘rationally,’ ” Parker said.

“Right. And this Earth has no TR let alone an FDR. Not that it makes any sense. You know what you call a libertarian road?”

He didn’t.

“A field.”

When we got to where Hollywood turns into Sunset we saw three more trucks filled with protestors. As soon as they got past us, the last truck lagging twice as far behind the others, there was an explosion behind us. I slammed on the breaks, jumped the curb and came to a stop over the broken up sidewalk.

Parker turned all the way around in the back seat and looked out the rear window.

“Did a plane just bomb that truck?”

I looked ahead and saw a small plane pulling up. I could hear its engine now as it throttled up. I realized I had heard its approach too, but thought little of it.

Stunned, I sat gripping the steering wheel, looking out at my left-side mirror. There was a wall of smoke and fire. After I don’t know how long, survivors began to stumble out of the fire. Parker may have said something to me. I opened my door and stepped out. I wasn’t connecting thoughts too well.

This was union busting at a whole new level.

Out of the dowdy gray storefronts a few people emerged to gawk and point. No one was too eager to offer help. Some were pointing at the sky in the direction the plane had gone. It was only a one-seater, single prop. I doubted it had another bomb. Would it come back to strafe? The people from the shops were probably asking themselves the same question.

A warzone – that’s what this was now.

I heard sirens. Some were close and some more distant. A black-and-white rushed past us and skidded on the gravel road to a stop. There were two uniforms in the car. They both got out. The one had a Tommy gun. He immediately chambered a round and opened up on the survivors of the bombed stake truck. I jerked at the sound of the gunshots. Then I started running. Parker jumped out and yelled something at me. I told him to stay put and lock the doors.

The people from the truck were unarmed. I saw the bullets rip into them. Most of them appeared to be women. They were dressed in worn out clothes. One with no shoes on twisted around as she was hit, the big caliber bullets splashing out blood from the exit wounds.

I had this feeling like I might never take another breath when she hit the ground.

I took out the Bren Ten from under my arm, flicked the safety off and aimed at the cop with the Tommy gun. He was about twenty five yards from me. I stopped and aimed. The supersonic round hit him in the ear and puked his brains all over his partner, who noticed me then. He had been firing rounds off survivors too. I’m not sure if he had hit any. Now he was turning to get me in his sights. It didn’t matter. I shot him in the face before he could close his left eye. The 10mm liquefied his head as well.
I must have holstered my gun but I don’t remember doing it. The next thing I knew I was staggering through the rubble looking for anyone who might still be alive.

Parker was standing near me.

I got smart.

“Jorge!” I shouted into my watch.

“I read you and I have your present location.”

For once I was relieved the silly AI had been spying on me.

“Can you read for life signs from any of the satellites – the orbitals?”

“Si. Turn to your left. Ten more degrees. Now ahead of you, two metric yards.”

Ordinarily, Jorge refused to use the metric system. I have never figured out why. Mainly I think it’s to piss off Spooty. He might have thought that right now was a good time to for simplicity. In my head I still had to translate that to about the length of a body. There were several bodies in that area. There were also pieces of bombed truck. The smoke was terribly acrid and making my eyes tear up. Parker was trying to breathe through his shirt. Even so he was having a coughing fit. I got down on my hands and knees and crawled over to the fallen protesters, knowing that only one of them was alive.

“We gotta go!” Parker shouted. Sirens were getting louder. “More cops.”

I had found a pulse. It was slender girl. Probably not older than in her teens. Three others were practically on top of her. A man and two middle aged women, I think. Two of them had no pulse and one seemed to be missing the larger part of three limbs.

I carried the girl to the car and told Parker on the way to drive us to Spooty’s compound.

Just as we got the car started a cop car pulled up. Cops jumped out and gave us dirty looks. One of them shouted at us to stop. I told Parker to gun it. Our tires threw up dirt and a cop with a Tommy gun opened fire us. Bullets bounced off the back of us like popcorn.

“What the hell!”
“Oh. I did I forget to tell you that Spooty retrofitted this car with bullet proof everything?”
“That would have been nice to know.”

“I doubt we’d be able to take one of those bombs, though.”

“Anyone ever tell you you know just what to say to give a guy comfort, Nake?”

“Not that I recall.”

“There’s probably a reason for that.”

I could tell you about dropping the girl off at Spooty’s, about how he his surgical robots to patch her up, about how he took the corpse of Lucky Parnell off our hands. The girl made a full recovery. If I remember right, Spooty got her set up in Prague. He spirited her away to somewhere in Eastern Europe, anyway. She’s doing well. Yada. But the plight of the poor and immigrants the ACR was never the point of this tale.

No matter how I may have been haunted by killing those two cops – and the way I did. The dispatch and celerity, the athletic precision. There was no way that muscle memory could not have been a part of taking those men’s lives. It’s no exaggeration that I couldn’t get the image out of my mind of the rushing bullet, the destruction of the skull, the blood. In an instant I had taken two lives. I’d become a killer. Again. I’d killed before. It had never been so automatic before. It wasn’t that those cops didn’t deserve it. If you open up on unarmed civilians, you’ve called on karma. You’ve taunted Nemesis. She’s an unforgiving deity. Clemency is unknown to her. She can appear in person or send the Furies to rip apart the sinner.

That’s the story we tell anyway. The sinners don’t always suffer. Many are even cossetted in the sweetness of their success.

Those cops were dirty, working in a dirty town. It’s like Parker said, we’re caught in a war. Leben ist Krieg, Spooty is fond of saying.

Back in my office I cracked open the bourbon. It was perfectly rancid. Just like my guilty mood. My cat Pang was none too pleased with me. He cursed my absence. He cursed his empty bowl. He cursed my beverage. Pang is cat of great imprecation.

“Were you gonna share that bottle?” Parker asked.

He got up and got himself a glass and poured himself two fingers. I didn’t begrudge him the booze. It was the company I could’ve done without.

Parker took a quick quaff and said, “You sure have changed since college, Nake.”

“Yeah, for starters I’m green.”

“I know it’s been twenty years. . .”

I swirled my bourbon in the tumbler. “Has it? Because that’s the problem – for me it never happened.”

“You still don’t remember any of it?”

“Nah. Wish I did. Wish I remembered a lot of stuff.”

Parker wasn’t looking at me and I doubt he was listening to me. He was lost on his own trail of thought. “I don’t think you liked me too much at first.”

“No?” I poured myself another drink. And him one too. Maybe out of some sense that I should have some sympathy, though I felt none. I just wanted him to leave. I knew I shouldn’t blame him because the Cat had summoned him here. It wasn’t Parker’s fault.

“No. Your roommate didn’t like me. I know that. That Robert character. Of course, I don’t think Robert liked anyone. Especially anybody that looked like competition.”

“Was Robert the hairy one?”

“You remember him? They were all hairy. Hairy Matt is the one you’re thinking of. Robert and that Sikh. At least he had a religious excuse to be so hirsute. Your shower must’ve always been clogged.”
“I don’t remember any of it except for you telling me stories, trying to get me to remember. I appreciate the effort, but I don’t recall any of it.”

“So you don’t remember when we first met?”

“Nope.”

“Well, you had come to one of those philosophy symposiums the department had. That was because Robert dragged you there, I guess.  Philosophy wasn’t your major. So you heard me talk about arguments for the existence of God. And then it was after that. Maybe a few weeks. Maybe a month. I remember because it rained the day I gave my talk. Some of my papers got soaked in my bag on the bike ride there. I don’t remember you in the group, to be honest. But you told me later you had heard it. Then we walked the bar. Something nautical. The Eagle’s Landing or something.”
“That’s not nautical.”

“Anyway. We were there. It was snowy. Practically had the place to ourselves. You, me. I don’t remember who – other than Robert.”

“Naturlich.”

“He was giving me hell. About whatever. He liked to give everyone hell. It was my turn. That was when you slammed your hand on the table and said he should shut it since I was one of the smartest people you’d ever met. You said I had established that the universe had to be infinite, that I had provided reason evidence of this. Oh, and that I had independently reproduced Zeno’s most famous paradox at the age of nineteen.”
“I did? Is that true? Zeno’s paradox? Which one?”

“I hadn’t really ever thought about it until you said that. But I had mentioned some of my ideas about the infinite that I had after high school. Maybe you overstated the case. I was grateful. Robert was always lord over others the fact that he could read so fast and had a photographic memory.”

“He does?”

Parker shrugged. “He used to claim that. I think he just skimmed a lot and faked it.”

“What about the infinity stuff – did you have some kind of proof?”

“Oh, what was my argument about that. Let me see…” He sucked on his drink and stared at the ceiling as if the answer was written up there. “Oh, right. The universe has to be infinite because all of this had a start. The big bang. But what was before that? Let’s say that there was nothing before that. Within that nothing was the potential for all of this. And it was an eternal potential. Let’s say this universe burns itself out or has a big crunch and we go back to nothing. What then? Well, all of that could sit forever and nothing more. Or at any point it could spring back into life. And this is an eternal potential. It has to be. We’re here.”

“Interesting but it feels like there’s a flaw. Though the neo-Taoists would appreciate being coming out of non-being. I do admit though that if the bang only happened the once, it would be very weird. Nothing explodes into something, and in all of eternity it can only do it once. Why? The mind recoils from a finite universe.”
I looked at him hard.

“Almost as much as the mind recoils from the guilt of killing another human being.”

“I gave that gun to Spooty. I’m sure he won’t find my finger prints on the trigger. And he has very sensitive equipment. I’m sure he could tell if any of my epithelials were ever on it. Any of my sweat or anything – even if I tried to wipe it off. You know how amazing Spooty’s lab is.”

“Right.”

There was nothing after that until I woke up chained to the floor.