Irontown Blues

Fourteen

At the beginning of the Irontown raid, I did not know the pregnant woman I saw at the ice-cream parlor was Hildy Johnson, the reporter who later wrote a best-selling account of the Big Glitch. It was only later, reading her book, that I was shocked to see that I had been a part of her story. Our paths crossed for only seconds, and I doubt she remembers much about me at all. But there is no way I will ever forget it.

I understand it is common to lose memory of events leading up to a terrible event. In my case I didn’t lose much, but the memories are all filed at random. It’s as if the various scenes were printed out on cards, which were then tossed in the air, picked up, and stacked by a chimp. Every time I try to think of it (which is as seldom as possible) things seem to be happening in a different sequence.

I see myself firing while the reporter and her friend are spooning up their hot fudge or pistachio, or whatever, and at the same time I see Winston, the mutt, taking a big chunk out of the female cop’s leg.

For a time after firing into the apartment with my laser, I just concentrated on keeping my head down. I cursed the goddamn sergeants, Ugly and Uglier and Ugliest and Even Uglier Than That and Unbelievably Ugly, for not providing me with a projectile weapon, like most of the rest of the company had. I felt naked, exposed, with nothing to fight back with if someone came at me with deadly intent, except something that could ignite half the mall.

I almost left the laser behind when I made my break for better shelter. If I had, things would have been very different.

We can all point into our pasts and find moments like that, to be sure, but there are not many that are so clearly life-changing.

What I had chosen was a space beneath a steel structure off to one side of the open area. There was no one else there, and it looked solid enough to stop most bullets. It was a platform with thirteen steps leading up to it. There was no railing up there, just a steel framework: two upright I-beams and another beam spanning between them.

This was the Irontown gallows. Heinleiners believed in capital punishment and also felt strongly that if someone really needed killing by the community, it should be done in full view of that community, not hidden away in a prison.

If I had known it was a gallows, would I have chosen it as a place to hide? Damn straight I would. It looked like the most solid structure I could reach without a long, long run. I’m not superstitious.

So I crossed my fingers, spit on the ground, recited the few words of the Hail Mary that I could remember from films, and started running.

I hadn’t gone more than five long steps before a bullet hit me in the vest. It was bullet-resistant, but trust me, it’s not something you want to experience. It stopped me in my tracks, and I fell backward. I could literally hear two more bullets pass above me.

So I crawled.

I could hear firing, but I didn’t want to raise my head to see where it was coming from. Trust me again, in a situation like that you want to make yourself as small as possible.

But it was taking too long. I decided getting to cover was more important than staying low. The longer I was out there, the better chance someone would notice me crawling. I would have to rely on the vest to stop the flying metal. Aware all the time, of course, that my head was not the least bit bulletproof.

Two more bullets hit me almost at once, but I managed to stay on my feet and stagger forward.

I don’t know at what point I was hit in the arm. I don’t recall feeling it. I think I didn’t even know I had been hit until I crouched under the gallows. Then I felt warm liquid flowing down my right bicep, looked down, saw the bullet hole in my tunic, and almost passed out.

But I stuck a finger in the hole in the cloth and tore it open. I saw it was more of a graze than a through-and-through, though there was a small, blackened flap of flesh dangling from the wound. It wasn’t bleeding too badly. No need for a tourniquet.

For a while it didn’t even hurt. Then all at once it burned like fire.

Here is where my recollections and the story told by Hildy Johnson part company. Now, I’m not about to call her a liar. She has stated that she changed certain details in her account to protect people who did not wish their names to be used. It may well be that she also altered some events for reasons of her own, again possibly having to do with secrets of the Heinleiners they do not wish to have exposed.

All I know for sure is that things could not have happened as she described them, or I would not be here to tell about it. So I was briefly a character in her story, and she was a character in mine. She would continue to be one for just a little while longer, and we would part never having known who the other was.

Not only was the platform of the gallows a nice grade of steel, someone had stowed some crates beneath it. They were not steel, just high-grade packing plastic, and I had no idea what was in them, but whatever it was, it seemed to be enough. I heard bullets whang off the gallows above me, and heard the softer whump when something hit one of the crates, but nothing was coming through. I was prepared to sit there barricaded behind a crate listening to whangs and whumps until the sun burned out, if need be. I couldn’t imagine what would bring me out into the open again.

Then she stumbled into my view, all four-foot-six and seventy pounds of her, looking totally lost and utterly terrified.

I guessed she was about ten. She had rather tangled long blond hair and wore the sort of blue jumpsuit common among the Heinleiners who had null-field suits implanted in their bodies. She seemed disoriented, stumbling around the field of fire like a zombie.

No one really knows just how much starch they have in them until they are faced with a situation where something dangerous must be done. That’s when you find out; you really can’t know until that moment.

Will you run, or will you go in harm’s way?

I’ll tell you this. I really wanted to run. I admit it. But I was still a cop. One definition of a cop is that he or she is the person who, when there is gunfire or an explosion, runs toward the disturbance, not away. If I stayed there, I’d no longer be able to think of myself as a cop. Or as a worthwhile human being, for that matter.

I didn’t think about it for more than a couple of seconds. I shoved one of the crates aside and sprinted toward the lost little girl.

It was at least partly luck. For a few seconds, the sounds of the fight were not so loud, the sound of bullets flying by not so frequent.

That’s when I really tried to ditch the laser. It was too bulky and heavy to be carrying around, especially if I didn’t intend to use it. That’s when I found out it had snagged on my vest. There it was, flopping around, getting in my way, and I just didn’t have the time to find out which of the many attachments of my combat uniform it had hung up on. Cursing, I got hold of it with my weakened right hand.

I was thumping along as gracefully as any three-legged camel. I was a few feet away from her when a spray of bullets landed all around her, spanging off the concrete floor. Until that moment, I would have told you that the old standby scene in action movies — you know the one, where Our Hero is bracketed by little explosive squibs that are meant to represent bullets but remains unharmed — was flatly impossible. Yet at least twenty bullets impacted before her, behind her, to each side of her, and possibly even went between her legs… and not a one of them hit her.

If we survived this, I thought, I’m taking her to the racetrack. She had to be the luckiest person who ever lived.

Not totally lucky, though. Though all the flying metal missed her, most of them left their mark on the concrete floor. And though this never happens in action movies, hundreds of particles of concrete grit, large and small, flew up into the air.

The smaller ones were stopped by her coverall, but she was hit by a dozen of the larger ones. None of them were big enough to make a terrible wound, but they certainly stung like hell, and she yipped and jumped into the air. I could see little spots of blood blooming on her legs and arms and one on her forehead.

She yipped even louder when I tackled her. She started hitting me with her little fists. I yelled that I was trying to help her, dammit, but the battle was too loud for her to hear me. Her fists were the least of my worries, anyway. The tempo of the gunfire was picking up again, and I saw at least two laser beams sizzling overhead.

I managed to keep on my feet as I executed a turn that was probably even worse than a three-legged camel, and headed back toward the gallows.

That’s when a finger of laser light probed into the gallows and the crates underneath exploded in flames.

Some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed, does it?

With my struggling burden under one arm and my ridiculous Flash Gordon Photonic Ray-gun hanging from my other, I turned away from the flames and looked around for other shelter.

There wasn’t much. The most promising seemed to be a line of mobile food carts about a hundred feet away from us, in the direction of the ice-cream parlor, which was now in flames, too. The girl was shouting at me now.

“Put me down, you big ape!”

“Shut up, or I will put you down and you can look out for yourself!”

“I’ll kill you, so help me, I’ll kill you! What are you guys doing? Why are you killing us?”

I didn’t have time to think about that then. At least she had stopped struggling.

We were blessed by another lull in the fighting, and I made it to the line of trucks. I could see bullet holes here and there, but it didn’t look like there had been concentrated fire on them. Pick one, Chris. Voodoo donuts? Sergei’s bronto tacos? Atomic Fission Chips?

On the side of one truck it said “The Quackin’ Wok, featuring sizzling duck stir-fry!” It looked substantial, with the service door slammed down tight and the access door at the back standing open. It had the added advantage that it was the closest portable ptomaine palace to us.

I hurried to the door and tossed the girl inside before I had had a chance to look in there myself. It wasn’t until she screamed that I saw that the proprietor was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. A good bit of his head was missing.

It was the scream that got the attention of Hildy Johnson and her Hound from Hell.

The kid launched herself out of the wagon like her ass was on fire and collided with me. She was bloody all over. She was still screaming.

“Hey, put her down!”

The command came from behind me. I turned and faced Johnson. The bulldog was standing beside her, and he looked horrible. He was bleeding badly, and seemed dazed. Johnson was pointing a rifle at me.

The girl chose that moment to finally wriggle free. She darted off, away from us both.

“And drop that weapon,” Johnson added.

“You put your gun down,” I said.

“What the hell is that? A laser?”

“Put your gun down,” I repeated. “You’re under arrest.”

“What are you, a cop?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Put that rifle down, or I’ll shoot.” I had no intention of shooting even though the Uglies had told us that if someone pointed a gun at us, it would be stupid to wait for them to fire the first shot. I could see the logic in that. But I was carrying a drilling laser.

And here once again our stories don’t exactly jibe. This is where my blurry recollections become positively chaotic. But in the next second or two these things happened, though not necessarily in this order:

Winston the bulldog came flying up from the floor, headed right for my leg. It was an image right out of a horror movie.

I took a step back.

I pointed my laser at Winston. Johnson says I pointed it at her.

I heard the click of the trigger as Johnson fired her rifle. How I heard it over the din of battle I can’t explain, but I’m sure I heard it.

The rifle didn’t fire. The ammunition clip was empty.

My finger twitched on the laser’s trigger. Maybe it was a voluntary twitch, maybe it was a reflex twitch. For whatever reason, my finger twitched.

The laser fired.

My world exploded.

Here’s what happened:

Hildy Johnson had recently had a nullsuit installed. No one outside of Irontown had ever seen or heard of this device. You still can’t get one, even if you are a multibillionaire. They are not for sale.

What happens is, instantaneously a null field forms around your body. You become like one of those silver statues on top of baseball or tennis trophies, though without the bat or racket.

This second skin is perfectly reflective, and impermeable. It can be switched on manually, or it can turn itself on when it senses that its user is in a vacuum. Suddenly, it is a perfect space suit, though with a limited supply of oxygen. I don’t know how much, though I know it’s less than a regular space suit’s air supply.

It also turns on automatically if something… say, a high-velocity bullet… intrudes into the field. In that case, the field freezes temporarily. All that kinetic energy has to go somewhere, and it seems that it bleeds off on both sides of the field. Which means that the person inside the nullsuit can get uncomfortably hot. In fact, if the suit is hit by sustained gunfire, the person inside can pretty much parboil. That happened to a few Heinleiners during the pitched battle.

But that doesn’t concern me here. What is a problem is that one of the things the suit field will stop is high-powered lasers.

The worst thing you can do with a powerful laser is to fire it at a mirror. And if I had shot mine at a flat mirror, I wouldn’t be here to tell you this story. They would still be picking blackened bits of me out of the pavement of Irontown. But the mirror my beam hit was one that perfectly followed the bumps and hollows of Hildy Johnson’s body. The beam reflected all over the place. That meant it was weakened some.

But being weakened some was not enough. Not nearly enough.

Once more, words just don’t seem adequate to describe the confusion of the moments immediately following.

I don’t remember falling down. I remember lying there, looking up at the ceiling. I smelled something burning. It was me.

I tried to lift myself up but only one arm was working at all, and that one wasn’t doing too well. But I got my head up and looked down at myself.

When I say I was on fire I don’t mean that my clothes were just smoldering. There were flames erupting from at least three areas on my body.

There was a long furrow gashed obliquely across both of my legs. I could easily have bled to death from either leg, but the burning beam had cauterized the wounds. There was no blood spurting. There was another black gash across my belly. The clothes around that area were burning, too. The third wound was across my left arm. More flames, and this time a little blood was flowing. I managed to shift myself a bit, and noticed with a strange, calm detachment that most of that arm didn’t move with me. It was entirely severed just below the elbow.

It didn’t even hurt very badly. At first.

The real fun came later. Then there are no words to describe the pain. That was still down the road a bit, but not all that far away.

I managed to roll over on my side, on the left side where the severed arm was still attached by some threads of my clothes. That smothered some of the fire. I slapped at the fire on my belly. I suppose I was actually fanning the flames without meaning to. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I kept trying to beat them out with my one good arm.

There came a point where I simply gave up and waited to die.

But I didn’t die.

Still burning, I looked over to the general area where Johnson had been. She wasn’t there, but her dog was. He had been finished off by my laser bouncing off Johnson. It was probably for the best.

I was finally able, mercifully, to pass out. But it didn’t last for long, and when I came to again the flames were still burning. I think that’s when I began screaming.

Suddenly I was inundated in ice cream.

Actually it was mostly cold water and ice, but there were chunks of dark brown chocolate and red strawberry mixed in with it. Oh, good. Someone had decided that what I needed most was a Neapolitan sundae.

I sputtered. Even in your death throes, I discovered, having a bucket of ice water splashed in your face was a bit of a shock. I looked up and saw that the person who had doused me was the girl I had tried to pull out of the line of fire.

I might as well tell something I learned only later. Her name was Gretel. I will also admit that Gretel is not her real name. I know what her real name is, but just as Hildy Johnson did in her account, I’ll use pseudonyms when referring to Irontown residents.

“Oh, man, you are hurt bad,” she breathed, leaning over and looking at me. She was amazingly calm, considering that the battle was still raging. Her jumpsuit had scorch marks on it where it had been set afire, but her nullsuit seemed to have protected her from major harm.

“Get away,” I choked out. “You’re going to get killed.”

“Shut up,” she said, not unkindly. Then she grabbed the back of my collar and started to drag me. I passed out.

It was pain that brought me around again.

The first thing I noticed was that my arm was gone. The strip of cloth that had kept it attached had torn completely while she was dragging me. Well, I’d just have to buy a new one. It was the least of my worries. The arm stump didn’t hurt much, but the rest… it was getting worse by the minute.

I must have groaned.

“Hush!” Gretel hissed. “There’s a group of cops coming this way.”

She had dragged me into a recessed cubbyhole of some kind. We were not perfectly concealed, but it was tons better than where I had been.

I couldn’t see much at all except her face from below. I saw her tense, then relax slightly. There was a loud explosion. I heard a whistling sound. That sound, and all other sounds, quickly diminished. There was a sharp pain in my ears. Air rushed out of my lungs.

I looked up and saw that Gretel had become a silver trophy figure. The mirror face moved, looking down at me.

There had been a blowout. We were in vacuum.

At that moment, I accepted that I was about to die. Oddly enough, I wasn’t too bothered about it all, except for the awful feeling of not being able to catch my breath.

At least it would stop hurting, I figured.