Taking the Highway

TALIC WAS IN MOTION when he heard the first crash. He’d already stashed his weapon and had started to give chase when the sickening crunch of metal hitting metal made him stop and look. A kiddie-hauler side-swiped a sedan, sending both cars into the median. The chain reaction was swift and horrible. The vehicles behind couldn’t stop in time to avoid head-on collisions, and the ones to either side never swerved away from the wreckage. He watched, open-mouthed. Steer, damn it! Cars had manual overrides for a reason. He watched a hot pink Octave clip the corner of a truck, fish-tailing and spinning into traffic, only to be hit broadside. What the hell was wrong with everyone?

Talic ducked around a cell pole and continued running. His face felt tight, as if all the nerves of his head had contracted at once. He pumped his arms and increased his speed. They would not get away with this. Not if he could help it. He hoped, when he caught up to Andre LaCroix, that he could maintain enough self-control not to kill him on the spot. Whose f*cking side was that shit-kicker on, anyway? He never thought he’d live to see the day when a cop got between a bullet and a terrorist.

Behind him, the screech of brakes. Finally, somebody was stopping. Ahead of the crashes, nothing but eerily quiet blacktop. He headed in that direction, planning to cross six empty lanes.

He’d just stepped in front of the first car when an ominous hiss made him shy away. He ducked and rolled moments before the car in front of him exploded, its hydrogen tank bursting, sending metal shrapnel in all directions. He listened for the sounds of more explosions, but all he heard were sirens. A wave of heat rolled toward him, carrying the smell of melting plastic and charred meat.

He stood, his heart pounding. Where was LaCroix? Too many cars, too many people. He stood in the empty road, looking back at dead cars ten or fifteen deep. Not just dead cars. Dead people. Citizens, just trying to get to work and live their day.

He’d failed them.

He was an officer of the law, sworn to serve and protect. He hadn’t served his city and he sure as hell hadn’t protected it. Why had he hesitated? One shot and this could have been all over. One f*cking shot, one dead terrorist, one happy mayor. Or at least, city manager. Madison always implied that she was doing Mayor Smith’s bidding, but he never knew for sure. It didn’t matter. When you were doing the right thing, it didn’t matter who gave the orders.

He turned away from the sickening sight, bent at the waist, and closed his eyes, swallowing back a throat full of bile. Too late. He was too late.

Something bumped into the back of his legs. He turned to see a woman on hands and knees. She must have crawled from one of the cars. She was young, maybe twenty, one of those plump girls who made themselves perfect blond hairstyles to compensate for their weight. Blood streamed over her ear from a gash at her temple, dripping into her hair, ruining it. He squatted down in front of her and took her by the shoulders. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re going to be fine. I’m a police officer. Let me help you.”

“My—” She coughed, swallowed, tried again. She pointed at the nearest wreck. “My friends. They’re hurt.”

“A lot of people are hurt. Ambulances are coming.”

“I don’t—” She sat down hard on the pavement and began to cry. “I don’t think Marie is going to make it. She looked so bad, and she wasn’t moving and she wasn’t breathing and oh, God.”

“Hey, hey, now.” Talic sat down beside her. He patted his pockets, hoping for a stray tissue, but all he had was his datapad. Like that would staunch any wounds. Next to them, two cars were consummating a marriage, one practically inside the other. Through the windows, he could see bloodied, lifeless forms slumped in awkward positions. “What’s your name?” he asked the woman.

“Janae.”

“You’ve got a cut on your head, Janae. Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“I don’t think so.” She breathed in sharply, sat rigid for a second, then turned and puked her breakfast onto the pavement.

Talic scooted backward and got to his feet, breathing through his mouth to avoid the acrid stench and waited until she was done. “Janae, can you can walk with me?”

She pulled her sleeve over her wrist and pressed it to her head wound. “My friends, I . . .”

“It’s really important that you walk with me.” He stood, blocking her view of the wreckage. “Come on, I’ll take you to the perimeter and we’ll get you some medical attention for your head. I’ll send somebody back for your friends.”

He got Janae up and moving in the right direction. Ahead, fire trucks and paramedics nosed their vehicles as far into the wreckage as they could. He would hand Janae off to them, then help with triage on others.

Another explosion, this one far behind them. Talic turned and had an irrational moment of gladness when he saw it wasn’t Janae’s car.

“It just stopped working,” she whispered. “One second my car was driving and the next it wasn’t. No siren, no lights. Where were my warning lights? By the time I realized I had to steer my car . . .”

Talic kept walking.

“Why is this happening?”

Talic put his arm on her back, nudging her forward. “It shouldn’t be.” Damn it, it shouldn’t. Goddamn terrorists. He couldn’t think of a single thing worse for the city than to attack the Overdrive system. If people couldn’t get around, they couldn’t live here. Cities needed to move.

They were closer to the perimeter of the crash zone now, and more people milled around minor damage. He steered Janae past a Lexus which had hit a BMW which had hit an Octave. Luxury cars built elsewhere and imported here because Detroiters could afford it.

Did these people even realize how tenuously they were holding their prosperity? Everyone felt secure—in the city, in the suburbs—but anything could tip the balance. Freeze up transportation and it would hit restaurants, refuelers, tourism, spiraling up the line until it hit manufacturing and construction. Even a goddamn plumber wouldn’t have a job. The next thing they knew, they’d be right back to the turn of the century, when the entire city felt like God took a crap on it.

They rounded a fire truck and Talic flagged down a paramedic. “Where’s triage?”

The paramedic pointed to an area roped off with yellow tape. Talic brought Janae under the tape and introduced her to an EMT. “She vomited a few minutes ago,” he said. “It’s probably a concussion.”

“Got it.” The EMT sat Janae down and held a towel to her head. Talic wanted nothing more than to stay by her side, give her a blanket and ice and a comforting shoulder. But that path lead only to death. The army had taught him a great deal, and this above all: do not let care for your soldiers get in the way of the mission. He couldn’t help Janae. Compassion would not come before duty.

She grabbed his hand as he turned away. “You’ll help my friends?”

Talic pulled his head forward in one quick nod. “I’ll help your friends.” He squeezed her hand before releasing it. “I’ll help everyone.”

Word had got around and now the injured streamed toward the triage point, some on their own power, some helped by others, many with phones at their ears or datapads in their hands, heedless of social disapproval in a time of crisis. Talic moved upstream past them, jostling his way through the mass. He did not see their faces or their injuries. They weren’t individuals anymore. They were a crowd, a multitude. They were his city. And he had a job to do.

Talic doubled back to where he’d parked his car near the highway berm. He retrieved a line-of-sight flasher from inside it. Across the highway, again. Two more cars and a van had exploded. He ignored the wreckage.

When he reached the spot he’d last seen LaCroix, Talic hooked the line-of-sight flasher to his datapad. He expected at most one or two security cameras, but the flasher spotted three cameras that might have gotten footage of the incident. The first was halfway up a cell pole, pointing at the telecom’s valuable equipment rather than the road. The second was at a private charging station, near enough to the highway to cover that as well, but too far to get any resolution.

The third was gold. A standard-issue roadcam, it was the work of half a minute to stick a data cube in it and download its entire day’s worth of video. Disabling the roadcam was even quicker.

Talic patted the cube in his pocket. Maybe he should have destroyed all evidence instead of keeping a copy. It was a risk, letting it live. But if it were to live at all, better it lived with him.





“LACROIX . . . LACROIX!”

Andre could hear them shouting, but the voices seemed muted, like something he’d hear underwater. The sounds of landing and circling helicopters, the moans of the injured and dying, the murmurs and cries from the growing swell of barely-restrained onlookers roared into his ears.

The orange rescue vest he’d snapped up billowed against him in the backwash from an overhead pass by a copter, but he didn’t flinch away. He moved to the next car. It was a purple Lexus, brand new, with nobody inside it. All the occupants must have moved to safer ground. The next car had a single body in the passenger seat, a young male nestled among the air bags and netting as if he were in a sleeping bag. But he wasn’t sleeping.

Andre fumbled with the GPS unit, found the button he was looking for, and pushed it, marking the victim as dead.

The next was alive—a woman, her features masked in blood, but her mouth still opening and closing. He keyed in and marked her for medics. He knew some first aid, but the words of the watch commander had been loud and clear to all non-med personnel. “You’re more useful as a spotter. Get everyone marked and positioned. The faster that’s done, the more live ones we can save. Mark each one alive or dead and move on.”

The next one was bad. A little girl, nine, maybe ten years old and Andre wasn’t sure about her. He knelt and reached to touch her neck and she twitched, her eyes opened and focused, looked at him. “H-hurts . . .” she whispered.

With a shaking hand he aimed the spotter and keyed her in. Priority. With a tongue that felt like sandpaper and a throat full of broken glass, he whispered back, “I know, honey. Someone’s coming.” He moved on, feeling like a monster. He told himself that trauma victims edited these times of horror from their memories. He needed that to be true.

He followed the directions on his spotter, guided in a gradual curve up the hill on his assigned track, grateful for his task. Hating it. Living. Living. Dead. Living. Living.

His path took him at last to the crest of the hill and he made the mistake of looking back down the slope.

The landscape below was a wound into hell.

A few small brushfires had started from torn batteries, but even though they’d been quickly extinguished, the acrid smoke blown back and forth by the downwash of the copters was ripe with new death and a sulfurous chemical reek. The red-orange figures picking through the litter of torn humanity were only missing pitchforks.

The next spotter over—a woman with an expression sick with despair—waved at him. Her mouth moved, but he couldn’t hear a word. Still her message was clear. Keep going. Don’t look. Keep going.

“There he is!” shouted a voice from behind him.

Andre turned, expecting a paramedic, only to have a minicam shoved at him. He stared stupidly at the most famous name in Detroit spindom. Ugly Ben was dressed in white and his facial tattoos seemed to jump out of his pale face. “Officer LaCroix, can you explain what happened here?”

He blinked and turned around, only to be met with the fill-in light of another camera, this one wielded by an overweight man in a dark brown bodysuit the exact shade of his skin. “Was this a bomb? We heard Overdrive was bombed.”

Andre squinted in the glare from the spotlights. Naked Jay and Ugly Ben hated one another. They couldn’t both be here, calling him by name, both demanding answers that he wasn’t able to give. Second units flanked both men, angling around to include both the spinner’s face and Andre’s reaction in each shot.

“Can you tell us who did this?”

“Do you know who’s responsible?”

“How unsafe is Overdrive?”

Andre tried to move away from them. Nothing made sense—the spotter in his hands, the destruction all around him, these men and their questions.

“No one has yet claimed responsibility for this,” Naked Jay said. “Who did this?”

Andre stared down at the highway, feeling his breath catch and wheeze. “I did.” If I hadn’t come here, this never would have happened.

“How did you plant the bomb?”

“What do you hope to gain?”

“What do you have against Overdrive?”

Andre moved in a slow circle, pointing a finger in all directions. “This is my fault.” He moved away from the spinners. They did not follow.

My fault. This death, this destruction. I did this. I should have stopped Topher Price-Powell. I should have arrested Nikhil. I should have helped Elway.

Elway. Was he all right? He wasn’t answering any calls, official or otherwise. Andre struggled up the embankment, trying to retrace his steps, to get to the place where he’d last seen him. He needed Elway to make sense of this, to tell him what had happened, how to fix it.

At the service drive he blinked and turned around, sure that he was seeing double. There were just as many wrecked and crackling cars up here as there were on the highway below. It made no sense. There was no Overdrive up here, nothing to disable. A service drive was an ordinary surface street with cars controlled by humans. There shouldn’t be any crashes up here.

He wove between cars until he found a patrolman and tapped him on the shoulder. The patrolman waved him away. “Not now, buddy.”

Andre tapped him again and showed his shield. “I’m looking for my friend.”

“You and everyone else.” He gestured to the mangled cars. “Rubberneckers, every single one. Forgot how to drive. I heard someone plowed right into a crowd of pedestrians a few minutes ago. But do you think an ambulance can get in here? They’ll have to nose in from the cross street, if they can make it at all.”

Andre passed the spotter from one hand to the other and back again. No. It couldn’t be. He tried to swallow past an aching throat. “Where?”

“Where, what?”

Andre couldn’t answer. He staggered to the alley where he’d last seen Elway. There, a gathered knot of people. He pushed his way to the center. No Elway. He moved to the next, and the next.

Something, surely not conscious realization, for he’d stopped seeing faces, but something in his subconscious must still have been recording and reviewing because he stopped, retraced his steps, and knelt beside Jordan Elway.

Elway was surrounded by people, good Samaritans, all talking at once. A pretty Asian girl stroked his hair. A young mother pressed her hands into a wound at his shoulder while a toddler stood nearby, sucking her thumb. A man was on his pad, talking in a language that Andre didn’t speak. Elway was pale. So pale.

The blood was everywhere.

Andre felt wetness spattering across his hands as he keyed living, priority into his spotter. Was it raining? Then he heard his own voice saying Elway’s name and realized he was crying. At least, tears were leaking down out of eyes that felt like they couldn’t blink across cheeks that were numb, freezing and burning at once. He wasn’t supposed to stay there and take Elway’s hand. He was supposed to keep moving, spotting. He was supposed to finish his soul-scraping walk through the highway of the dead to save other lives. He had no business squeezing that hand and screaming aloud for the medics to hurry the f*ck up when he felt it squeeze back.

He let go of the hand when a team of white-shirts jogged up with a basket-stretcher and pried Elway away from him. An eddy of smoke and a blast of wind from above as another helicopter stooped low over the scene. Elway and the men bearing him vanished.

Andre stared stupidly around him, wondering what had happened. Had he really just found Elway? Was he really alive? He shook his head, unsure. He checked the device in his hands. It indicated a priority victim here and recorded that victim as in transit. Had it really been Elway? He thought so. He hoped so. The spotter flashed at him and spurred him back on his pathway. He went, marking as he did so.

“LaCroix.” A hand on his arm. More spinners already? He shrugged it off and kept moving. Spotting the living and the dead with an invisible dot of infrared energy. The hand clutched at him again. He spun around and looked into the face of a living man. A standing man with no red-orange vest. Dark suit and specs. Someone from IA. He even knew the man’s name. Or should. It just wouldn’t come. Andre turned back to his task, grateful again for something else to think about. He moved along his way, spotting.

Voices behind him again. “I think he’s in shock.”

“Yeah. Even so, we need to bring him.”

“Bring him? Jesus, Dubnar, I think we should grab orangies and help him.”

Yes, Andre thought. Help me. Grab a vest. Grab a spotter. Fix this. Make this not my fault. Help me.

Help me.