The shell burst like a firework, engulfing him in a brief sheet of flame, shrapnel shredding his shoulder, all but tearing his left arm out of its socket. He continued to spin, the blast throwing him to the ground.
He hit hard, rifle clattering from his hand, some twenty feet away. Rather than scrambling toward it to pick it up, he slithered quickly back across the piles of windblown glass, back through the doors, and into the thick shadows of the mall. He wasn’t going to risk me firing a second shot before trying to get off one of his own.
The buggy engine hummed to life. With the flick of a wrist I jerked the roughhouser forward, pulling the trigger, popping it open on its single hinge. Then I picked up a shell from a bandolier on the seat beside me, loaded it quickly into the breech, and pointed the roughhouser back at the doors.
“How you doing in there?” I called out.
“Better than you, I imagine. At least my batteries are still intact.”
“I could always fix that for you.”
“You can’t just steal my buggy, Britt. It ain’t right to leave me here like this.”
“You should have thought about what was right an hour or two back, Mercer. You can’t pull morality out of your ass once someone has you dead to rights.”
“You got me dead to nothin’. All you got is my buggy.”
“And all you’ve got is a long walk ahead of you. If you make it that far.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You just winged me. I was thinking of getting a new arm, anyhow. How’s yours?”
“It’s great. It’s got a roughhouser in it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I probably should have taken that with me. Say, how much juice you suppose you’ve got in that backup battery? From the looks of it, it’s the only thing you’ve got left.”
“It’ll get me to Greenville.” I was lying. I was already running low on juice, the first warning buzzing in the back of my head. I was going to have to be extremely conservative just to get to the nearest town.
“You weren’t headed to Greenville.”
“Well, I am now,” I lied. “That’s where you’ll find what’s left of your buggy.”
“Don’t leave me here like this,” said Mercer.
Mercer and I must have different definitions of winging. “Then step out of the dark. I’ll make it quick, I promise.”
There was a moment of quiet, a pregnant pause between us.
Then his disappointed voice barked from the darkness. “Rust in Hell, Britt.”
The alarms in the back of my head were getting louder. I had two choices. Go in after him, hope to maintain the upper hand, and pry his battery out of his cold, limp shell. Or floor it and pray I made it to the nearest city. I hated both choices.
“Rust in Hell, Mercer,” I said. I punched the accelerator and the buggy lurched forward, its electric engine giving off only the slightest hum, the bulk of the sound coming from the crunch of the pebbles beneath its tires.
I rested the roughhouser on my shoulder, calculating my speed and elevation, then pulled the trigger, sending a shell arcing toward Mercer’s rifle. The shell popped with an explosive crack behind me, the sound of showering plastic and metal parts signaling that my aim was true. I was going too fast for Mercer to catch up.
He was no longer my biggest concern.
The sunlight was fading on the horizon and the twilight was growing thick. There wasn’t enough light left for my solar cells to recharge the backup battery.
I was fucked. Fucked for real this time. The closest safe city was NIKE 14, and that was half a night’s drive away as the crow flies. Playing it safe, away from obvious ambush sites and choke points, made it a whole night’s drive.
My backup battery wasn’t going to last that long. In truth, I wasn’t even sure how long it had left. They were notoriously unreliable when it came to the end of a charge. Maybe I had two hours; maybe I had three minutes. I just didn’t know.
So I was going to have to leave my own buggy behind and hope for the best. I set the coordinates for NIKE 14 into Mercer’s buggy, switched it over from manual to autopilot, loaded another shell into the roughhouser, and settled in for the long drive, fully aware that I might not see it through. My battery was going to die before I saw the end of it. The question was, what was going to happen after it did? If I could make it to morning, if I could make it to NIKE 14, then there wa . . .
Chapter 1000
Genesis 6:7
The First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life was a small, loud, angry lot from southern Florida, just outside the initial flooding zone, a hair north of where Lake Okeechobee used to be before it was swallowed whole by the rising seas. Famous the world over for their fiery rhetoric and flamboyant acts of vandalism, they were surprisingly only sixty-four strong, their congregation composed mostly of four different extended families—seven husbands, seven wives, and several dozen children, most of whom were betrothed to one another—as well as a handful of stragglers drawn less by the Lifer cause than by the bombastic sermons of its pastor. Their church wasn’t as much stained glass and steeples as it was concrete bunkers and rifle towers. And it took less than two minutes from the moment the bomb went off in Isaactown for them to claim responsibility for it.
Millions—both human and AI—had been watching the celebration streamed live, and there were dozens of angles instantly playing over and over on the news, the analysis beginning the moment the initial shock wore off. But when the First Baptist Church of the Eternal Life posted their claims, it was with video from a feed no one else had seen. It took almost an hour before anyone took them seriously but only fifteen minutes more for their video to spread like wildfire.
It was footage of the rally, looped over and over again, just seconds before the bomb went off, while the congregation stomped and clapped and sang live over it, their voices joyous, celebratory, elated. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME RELIGION, THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME.
While the footage was on a loop, the song wasn’t. In the background you could hear members screaming HALLELUJAH! and PRAISE GOD! Then the loop stopped and the feed went live to the Florida church, the congregation still singing, their pastor, William Preston Lynch, standing triumphantly before a plywood pulpit, a beaming smile on his face as the screen behind him still played bomb footage from a dozen different news feeds.
“Is the axe to boast itself over the one who chops with it?” he asked of the congregation.
“No!” they cried out.
“Is the saw to exalt itself over the one who wields it?”