The Wake Up Call (part 1.21) Out of time
Chapter 1.21: Out of time
A dirty yellow taxi-pod grew larger with each step. No matter how small a step she took it still grew closer. The taxi driver snapped his arm forwards dragging his captive companion towards the taxi-pod like a ball and chain.
"Move it bitch!" he snorted, growing more impatient with each moment. The dirty, cold rain only served to make his mood even worse.
The heels on her scuffed shoes tapped out an S.O.S. for which no-one answered. She wanted to delay the inevitable moment when the pod door would be slammed behind her, locking her inside a small vehicle with a repulsive creep and taking her to... God knows where.
"I can't walk in these heels." came the poor excuse, she instantly regretted having said it.
"I don't care if you have to crawl on your hands and knees. You've wasted enough of my time already."
He pushed her under the taxi-pod's vertical door which hung over the stewardess like an ominous shadow, attempting to warn her of impending danger like the wings on a giant, metal vulture, ready to pounce down and devour its prey.
"Get in!"
"Please, I have credits. You can have them."
With a single sweep of the gun barrel the driver knocked the stewardess onto the floor of the taxi-pod, her face gave a bright red hue of pain and blood.
"You only open your fucking mouth when I say so bitch!"
The driver re-adjusted his trousers, twisted his belt from side to side and then slid the gun into it behind his back.
The group of thugs watched these events from a distance and threw the occasional insult in his direction, but none of them were brave enough to challenge this unprovoked attack. The rough, stubbled face, shiny desert eagle gun and attitude of this driver were enough to convince them that he would shoot.
"Yeah? and what the fuck are you bunch of pussies looking at?" He screamed at the small group who stood around the abandoned bike.
"Never seen a real man talk to his new bitch before?"
"Okay, okay. We can have some fun." she said, trembling like a cornered animal.
"You want piece of 'this'?" he threatened, holding his fist towards her.
She looked up and continued, "We can have more fun, if we take this armband off."
"NO!"
"Please, you said you could remove it. I can't get undressed with it on."
"You don't have to." He reached under the steering control panel and produced a knife whose blade was soon released with a click of the release button. The cold, metal blade cast reflections from the surrounding hazard signs, neon advertisement boards and the glimpse of a face.
"I'm gonna cut those whore's rags off you with this."
First the laces on her left shoe were cut, the right shoe laces then both shoes were pushed off with the knife's blade, then he turned his attention to her skirt.
A figure appeared behind the taxi driver who was just about to cut another hole in her clothes to torment her still further. The figure held up a large piece of paper which was heavily creased into big squares and already torn near the corner. The figure coughed to get the driver's attention.
"'xcuse me mister."
"Fuck off, I'm busy." he replied without bothering to turn round.
"I'm lost and need directions."
"I said, FUCK OFF!" he repeated, this time turning to see who the annoying individual was.
The paper map was pushed into his face followed by a violent kick between his legs and a punch to his lowered head. His nose behind the map exploded with bright, thick blood. A split-second of pain and confusion followed before the crazed driver ripped the paper from his bleeding face and tossed it to the street.
"You are fucking dead. I'm gonna rip you a ....." grunted the driver, who was still on his knees with both hands nursing his battered balls.
The figure pushed a gun barrel into the driver's mouth.
"...a new ass-hole?"
Hetch stood over the menacing slob with an air of confidence and anger. His finger itching to squeeze a couple of rounds into the pimp. The gun's hammer, trembling with tension, hovered for a nail-biting few seconds before Hetch eased the muscles in his finger.
"You okay?"
she nodded her head and searched for the shoes inside the taxi-pod.
"Looks like your luck has just run out. Those guys don't take kindly to being called 'pussies'." remarked Hetch looking at the approaching crowd.
The driver turned his body and slid his concealed arm behind his back and raised a gun in Hetch's direction. The stewardess pulled hard with both hands on the taxi handle sending the door plummeting down like a falling guillotine. Hetch turned back to see the gun pointing at his face and the closing taxi door. He ducked backwards onto a pile of street trash as the gun barrel flashed twice sending two bullets racing along the city street. Instantly a member of the crowd and the taxi driver dropped to the hard, rough concrete. One dead, one badly injured by the door. Hetch kicked out and knocked the gun into the middle of the street, away from the semi-conscious driver whose head and one arm bore deep cuts. With a frantic scramble around the taxi-pod he opened the other door and took the controls. Meanwhile one of the crowd had picked up the gun and walked towards the badly injured driver.
"Thanks."
"Now we're even. I owe you nothing."
"We'll talk about your debt later." said Hetch fighting with the controls.
The taxi-pod accelerated upwards and away from the ugly crowd scene below.
"No!"
He looked at her, she was holding her slashed clothes together with her small, gentle hands yet was able to provoke an air of dignity, of defiance and of courage.
"We have nothing to barter Mewco!"
she reached for his gun on the taxi-pod's dashboard, but withdrew her hand after a moment of thought.
"Do you want to live?"
"Not if it means..."
"Forget that creep down there."
Below them the crowd had formed a circle around the dazed driver and were taking turns in beating the shit out of him. It was a brutal scene. It was one in which the pair of them had helped to create but now left before witnessing the inevitable, murderous outcome.
"I can offer you a new start. Trust me."
She turned her back on him and looked out of the stained window dome.
The taxi wove a laboured course through the city streets, taking shortcuts through back alleys, dodging floating transporters and missing buildings with only centimetres to spare.
"What have you got to lose?"
There was a tear in her eye which she quickly brushed away without her fellow passenger seeing.
"I don't care about the case. Look."
He reached under the control panel and half revealed a dull, plastic case which looked like an emergency medical kit.
"Pull this out and open it up."
She did as he said. Inside was a collection of hi-tech gadgets together with a mixture of biological patches, implants and a few hundred credits.
"What is it?"
"That creep wasn't lying when he mentioned the armbands. Hang on!"
Hetch forced the controls violently up then down to avoid a bridge. The taxi-pod raced towards a narrow street littered with cheap, illegal communication dishes and heavily protected tower windows. Travelling through this densely populated section of the city was filled with danger, often someone simply opening a vent cover could cause a vehicle to crash and burn.
"Along with his obvious 'interpersonal skills' he must have been into other illegal pastimes like de-activating security tags, the type you normally get around escaped prisoners."
She looked up him. Her eyes outlined with smudged eye-liner and her face framed with long, wet hair. Her eyes darted across his face, seeking for a sign of sincerity or an uncontrolled expression of dishonesty.
"Do you trust me? We'll find a quiet place to crash this thing then we'll figure out a plan for our future."
He tapped the navigation touch-screen and brought up the entertainment sub-menu.
"Who are you?"
"Just someone trying to survive. VID: Channel 57-39 news."
She snatched the gun from the shelf and pointed it at the temple of her passenger.
The multi-purpose screen flashed with interference as it searched for the requested video station. Its speakers hissed with garbled voices and distorted channel intro music.
"Who are you?"
"What? Who do you think I am?"
"BEEP. Information channel feed. Global News station 57-39." announced the soft, computerised voice.
"You're not Mewco."
He gave a brief, side-glance at her and the gun.
"I can't believe I was fooled by you, for so long. Who are you?"
"I'll explain when we land."
"No. Now. Who are you working for? The McKaff's?"
"Myself."
"Bullshit."
"You already know who I am."
"Hi, this is Matt Hemlock, the one and only Global news reporter for you!" came the flickering image from the poor quality video unit in the taxi.
"Look, you've been through a lot. An ordeal. Let me..."
"Shut up!" she screamed.
"Enough of this bull-shit. I'm not going back to that life."
The taxi-pod swerved from left to right to avoid another slow moving vehicle before smashing into a small advertisement board. Sparks flew in all directions as the damaged pod broke through the other side. Crystal rods shattered against the window dome as coloured light projector units were up-rooted from their base and dragged along, behind the pod.
They both hit the front dashboard with tremendous force. Hetch's shoulder impacted with the door frame and the stewardess' body twisted on the seat, sending her leg into the central column. Her hand flew across the steering controls releasing the gun onto the floor by Hetch's feet. She cried out with a shriek of pain before holding her ankle and nursing the top of her leg.
The taxi-pod plummeted down towards a low roof-top covered in badly constructed satellite up-link masts and squalid-looking metal huts. Hetch braced himself for impact by pushing both legs hard into the floor controls and pulling the stewardess back onto the seat with his only free arm.
"Shit! Brace yourself!"
she screamed out in pain again, this time from being physically throw back into her seat by Hetch using her badly torn clothes like a make-shift seat-belt.
"Breaking news. Another explosion has been reported near The Destiny Bridge. No news about casualties at the present time. We will, of course, bring you, our loyal consumers, the very latest information as it happens. You are watching Global news 57-39. This is Matt Hemlock."
The pod's warning lights and sirens burst into life, indicating that the flight controls may have failed. The black and steel roof-top raced towards them like an elephant doing a belly-flop into a shallow swimming pool of scrap metal and flashing hazard lights.
"And now, a few words from our sponsors..."
The impact from the taxi-pod flattened the first grey, metal hut and ripped up a deep scar in the wrecked construction poles used to cover the deadly looking rooftop. The window dome shattered, covering the two, frightened passengers with slabs of 'anti-shatter' plexi-glass. Inside the stewardess and Hetch slowly crawled from between the multiple-point airbags which almost filled the entire interior like a collapsing air-ship. The gruesome mask of Mewco hung from Hetch's face in pieces. The blood from a few, small glass cuts speckled on the white, deflating airbag sacks. Smoke huffed its way from the impacted front of the taxi and drifted slowly upwards into the twilight city air to be dispelled from the occasional floating barge vessel.
"You still alive?" he asked, his head still spinning from the violent crash.
She gasped out for a few breaths before replying in a laboured tone. "Fine, apart from my leg."
The video unit cast a chaotic whine of white-noise and static light from deep inside the taxi's floor, its hard, metal case pulled away from the passengers by the automatic impact system.
"Thank God for that."
"What?" she said, in-between taking a deep breath and examining her leg.
"No more Matt 'the pratt' Hemlock."
They sat there for a few moments, waiting for their unpleasant surrounding and situation to return back into clear focus.
"We need to get moving. Can you walk okay on that leg?"
"Why?"
Hetch rummaged through the semi-deflated airbags and taxi-pod wreckage, searching for the dull, plastic container which was under the control panel. She watched this from the corner of her eye.
"You're wasting your time. Those credits could be anywhere."
His mind turned over. Was this how she thought of him, er, of Mewco? As a low-life who was more interested in a handful of credits than a human life?
She licked her dry, bruised lips and pulled her long, dark hair back from her face. Then she noticed the hole in Hetch's disguise. He couldn't tell whether the expression on her face was one of anger or relief. Her eyes darted backwards and forwards, attempting to take in the end of this long trail of deceit, of tricks, threats and lies. Hetch knelt down in front of her and applied some pain reliving drugs and anti-bacterial dressings from the medical kit to her leg.
Her hand trembled as it approached the disguise. Her fingers fumbled for a moment before her nails peeled back a larger section of exposed skin. Hetch's biggest lie was coming to an end. He picked at the corner of Mewco's mask before he managed to tear off this damaged second-skin which had became so much of a part of him that it felt like losing a life-giving lung, but there was no going back now.
"You!"
"Me."
Her face grew tort with confusion and amazement.
"You didn't think Mewco had returned from the grave."
She gasped for air.
"Did you?"
A hand slapped his sweaty, pale face.
"Bastard."
He rubbed his blood-shot cheek and regained his balance.
"I'm sorry. Would you have done what I said if you knew it was me? Do you think I liked playing this game?"
She finished applying the dressing to her leg and pulled herself up. Her eyes awash with angry tears.
"We can still both come out of this thing on top." he said, wiping the rain from his itchy face.
"Do you think I like wearing that damn thing? It was like having my face inside a corpse."
She stood by the roof edge, gazing out into the dark city atmosphere.
"Remember you took a 'wet behind the ears' punk into your apartment to be beaten up? and what for? some, shitty metal case!"
As he went back to searching the taxi-pod wreckage, this time looking for the other contents of the medical kit, she wrapped the long, leather biker's coat around her and stared into the fading daylight. So many, unexpected events had happened so quickly that she needed some time to think.
Hetch flipped over debris from the crash scene and punched the collapsing airbags. There are a mood of frustration in his search. His best, perhaps only, ace had been played out in that rushed hand of cards. From now on convincing his female partner to follow him would be an up-fill struggle. Her body may be bruised but her fighting spirit was still there, he could see it in her eyes. Those dark, brown eyes which could hide a myriad of sins. 'Ah! There she goes again', he thought, 'playing me like a cheap vid-sim, something which could be controlled, directed into another cheap trap'.
From in-between the crushed sliding seat rails and the buckled door he pulled the silver coloured gadget he had been looking for. Its soft, black hand grips showed a life-time of wear and tear. The display window was cracked, just like the casing, but overall it seemed to be in full working order.
"Come here and sit down."
She did what he asked, using the leather coat to protect her legs from the seeds of broken dome glass on the long seat. Hetch pulled four, flexible leads from the back of the gadget and attached two of them to his armband.
"When I say, hit that button and start entering the loop-back codes."
"Wait, wait. This is a bad idea. Lets find Splice or someone else who can do this."
"We can't. We're out of time."
"I can't do this."
"Sure you can. You've used a credit dispenser, right? You just need to remember a short sequence of codes as they appear on this screen." he said, smacking the flaky-looking gadget to re-sync the vid signal.
"and type them in on the keypad. It will be okay, it just took a little bump in the crash."
Hetch placed the third wire probe in his teeth then held the forth in his free hand. This was going to be tricky, his artificial arm was a crude device with limited sensors. This made fine, precision work almost impossible. His head and teeth pushed the probe into the armband lock while the stewardess sat nervously watching both him and the gadget's small display.
"Do you have a steady signal?"
"No." She shook her head.
"Lets try this one."
"Wait! No, sorry, thought I saw a pattern."
Hetch gulped down a lung-full of damp air.
"It's okay."
The next few moments stretched on forever. Minute movements of the probes and switching of the gadget's display modes followed. This felt like brain surgery. A slip of the probe or a wire shorting out one of the anti-tamper circuits and it would all be over. Hetch directed the stewardess who keyed in sequence after sequence of long complex numbers. Lines were probed and the resulting voltages double checked. After a while the decipher key was approximated. It would expire in a few seconds, but gave enough time to remove the armband and disable it.
"Almost there. 34 41 42 55 53 52 4F 55 54 45."
The rain slashed down with an increase of volume and power.
" CLICK "
The catch on the armband unlocked itself and shutdown. It was safe. They both let out a sigh of relief.
"One down, one to go."
Hetch shifted position, removed the wires from the dead, unfolded armband and helped the stewardess to remove the long coat then use it as a make-shift shelter from the wet, evening air. He took a deep breath and rolled his eyes, the flickering display was hard to read at the best of time, but a cracked one rapidly filling up with water would test his tired eyesight to the max.
"Ready?"
"Yes."
"Same idea, same gadget, just a different armband and loop-back code."
"What happens if you get it wrong this time?"
A brief look was all she received in return.
Hetch stopped the probe a few millimetres from her armband and look a closer look. His jaw dropped open.
"Damn! It's a different model."
"But you can still decode it, right?"
He rubbed the rain off his forehead. The pressure from his shaky fingers left white, blood-drained lines in place of polluted water.
The gadget let out a series of noise and random flashes across the display. No doubt the impact had taken its toll on the hardware.
"It's just a glitch. Hit the side."
She tapped the back. The screen faded to nothing and the sound of a water-logged device and sparking battery halted all hope of using this gadget again.
"Shit!"
Her face grew far more nervous, her eyes scanned his face looking for a sign of hope, some word of encouragement, some hint that he could replace a battery or turn a control knob and bring it back online.
His head slowly turned to face her, his eyes broke the bad news before his lips moved.
"I'm sorry."
Her eyes closed and head tilted downwards.
"It's totally fried. Either from the impact or this damn rain."
"It's okay."
His hand lifted her chin upwards.
"Trust me. We'll get this damn thing off."
He said that as much to reassure himself as to comfort his frightened passenger, but he had to say something. To be honest it was a dire situation, in a bleak, bad neighbourhood in which they are stuck on a rooftop with no immediate escape route. For that brief, passing moment he had thought the end, or rather, one ending was insight...
... but it was a cruel illusion, a stick in the shape of a carrot.
"Did you mean what you said back there?"
He stared at the crushed metal hut and the deep scars on the building. Those words now seemed a million miles away.
"Every letter."
"A way out of this mess?"
He nodded.
"You can trust Mewco, can't you?"
she smiled.
To be continued...