Advanced to the Sweet Sixteen in the Autumn 2023 Short Story contest on WritingBattle.com.
The gloss-black Challenger with no plates and tinted windows sent a chill up Kip’s spine. He hoisted the sack of stinking garbage into the dumpster before leaning out for a closer look at the parked vehicle.
Definitely Strikers.
He rushed back through the alley into the kitchen of Joe’s Diner and peeked into the dining room. Moll stood beside booth six, tapping a pencil on her tablet. The two men in distinctive black turtlenecks smiled and chatted amiably with their server.
Doesn’t she realize?
The dismay in her eyes told him all he needed to know as she pushed into the kitchen, tearing off her apron, the swinging door flapping behind her.
She whispered, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Where do you think you’re going?” Joe, the owner and part-time cook, craned his neck away from the griddle as Kip and Moll tiptoed past. “Hey! We don’t close for another hour!”
His ensuing expletives fell silent as the alley door thumped shut behind them.
When Kip turned toward the street, Moll tugged his arm. “This way!”
“Hang on.” Kip winked. “I have an idea.”
He skulked through the streetlight shadows to the Challenger. Inside the diner, Joe’s rant had piqued the Strikers’ interest, putting them on high alert. With wide eyes, they bolted to their feet as Kip plunged his switchblade into the front driver’s-side tire. Compressed air whistled from the fissure as he pulled Moll onto a side-street.
They jogged a circuit through the village, casting furtive glances over their shoulders.
“Where to now?” asked Moll.
“We’ve got to get to Wyoming. Find Cutter.”
Moll stopped. “We don’t have that kind of money!”
“We’ll figure it out.” Kip put his arm around her shoulder.
The near-full moon sailed high overhead when Kip and Moll stood before the ticket booth at the bus depot, panting their request for the next bus to anywhere north. The reason for the clerk’s hesitation soon became obvious. On a monitor in the glassed enclosure, candid photos of Kip and Moll sat under the bold heading, “Wanted.” Looking between Kip and the screen, the clerk’s eyebrow raised, his hand drifting toward a telephone.
Strikers don’t waste time.
Kip and Moll resumed their flight through poorly lit roads, favoring moon shadows, until they faced an expansive cornfield, its stalks a dark forest under the sultry Colorado sky.
The plump ears of corn snagged Moll’s cardigan, so she slipped it off and tied it around her waist. The pneumatic musculature of her bare arm glimmered in the moonlight. Kip reflexively ran a hand along his own arm, shuddering at the scarred flesh.
“I’m down to fifteen percent,” Moll said. “All that running.”
Kip stood on his tiptoes, scanning above the waving sea of cornsilk tassels. “There’s a barn and farmhouse. Come on.” Moll flinched as he grasped her uncovered elbow, apparently still self-conscious after a decade. He gave a reassuring squeeze and smiled. What she found ugly, he found beautiful because of its story.
The dorm fire would have taken his life if not for her. She’d discovered him choked and breathless on the top floor before carrying him piggy-back down three flights of stairs. By the time they burst from the building, they’d both suffered blistering burns along their left arms. Back in those days, especially after the heroism, she could have gotten a new sleeve of dermis for free under the Alt HMO plan, but had declined.
“If you can’t get new skin, then I won’t either,” she’d insisted.
If only she hadn’t been so stubborn. He’d appreciated the gesture, but an unsheathed arm was far too visible and had been what first forced them underground. Since then, running was all they’d done—forever one step ahead of the Strikers.
They crouched behind a tractor wheel. The dark farmhouse windows invited their approach, its inhabitants surely asleep with the approach of midnight. At the edge of the stamped concrete patio, Kip popped open an exterior electrical outlet while Moll fished her charging cable from her beltline.
“See you at a hundred percent,” she said, winking.
“Sweet dreams.” He kissed her mouth. Her lips were cool.
Watching the serene Alt woman in sleep mode before him, it was hard to fathom how the gentle beings had fallen from favor. The New York Times had coined the term Berserker Bug to describe the chaotic and violent attacks that randomly overtook the synthetic humans’ typical tranquility.
There’d been dozens of deaths before a US Senator’s son numbered among them. Within a week, the President’s executive order created a new agency tasked with eradicating the country of the “Alt scourge.” Other countries soon followed suit. Even after the Alts isolated the bug, thus assuring the world of their safety, the collective fear was too deeply rooted. If the Alts could choose to suppress the bug, people argued, they might one day choose to unleash it.
Kip ran a finger along Moll’s thumb. I was never afraid.
His blood iced over when a light clicked on inside the farmhouse, illuminating the window above their heads.
Kip nudged Moll and patted her cheek, whispering in her ear, “Wake up.”
When her eyes popped open, he put his finger over her mouth.
With her charging cable safely retracted, Kip helped her to her feet. Hunched over, they crept away from the house. In her weakened condition, Moll’s foot snagged over the leg of a deck chair, scraping it along the concrete.
They froze, eyes locked on each other before intense security lights blinded them, the entire patio suddenly as bright as a cloudless noontime. When the latch clicked on the house’s sliding glass door, Kip and Moll bolted for the nearby woods. The farmer’s angry shouts drove them ever faster.
The cover of the forest both afforded and demanded a slower pace.
Moll leaned against a tree trunk. “I’m weak, Kip. Just leave me here. I’m nothing but a burden.”
“Stop that.” Kip enclosed both of her hands in his. “I’ll never leave you.”
“You’re crazy. Haven’t you ever wanted a normal life? If not for me, you could finally make something of yourself. All we do is skip from town to town, scraping by on shit jobs until things get too hot with the Strikers. And for what?”
“Because once you get rid of your RFI chip, we can both have normal lives?”
She scoffed. “As if that’s ever going to happen. Cutter wants ten thousand dollars!”
“We’ll make it work. Just think—once you get the operation, you’ll blend right in. Only a doctor could ever tell you apart from the rest of us. We’ll make Cutter a deal or something. Pay him back in favors. This is our dream, Moll. Don’t you remember? That little seaside town in Maine?”
A wistful smile rose on Moll’s lips. “We’d open a coffee shop on the boardwalk … and live in the apartment above it.”
“And we’d have a couple of pet cats.”
“And we’d have a Christmas tree every year.”
“And don’t forget the king size bed.” Kip waggled his eyebrows.
Moll blushed. “It’s a delightful dream.”
“But first, you have a date with Cutter.” Kip guided Moll to stand on a tree stump, then backed against her and pulled her arms over his shoulders, grasping both of her legs before resuming his forward march.
She chuckled. “You’re giving me a piggyback ride?”
“All the way to Wyoming!”
“You really are crazy, you know that?”
Kip plodded ahead, amassing miles behind them. His sweat-drenched clothes clung heavily, but Moll’s arms wrapped around his chest were a perpetual hug, energizing him. The setting moon had lightened the eastern sky to gunmetal gray as they approached the outskirts of another town.
“It’ll be getting light soon,” said Moll.
“Since it’s Saturday,” said Kip, “let’s look for a school. We can hide out all day while you charge.”
“Shh.” Moll tensed. “What’s that sound?”
The rhythmic thumping rose in volume, heralding the approach of a helicopter.
Kip scurried into an alley, scanning all around for somewhere to hide.
In the distance, a spotlight shone from above, moving over the neighborhood, inching ever closer. The pulses from the rotor blades beat on the ground, rattling the windows in the surrounding homes, sending the nearby dog population into fits of barking. Kip set Moll down as they pressed themselves flat under the eave of a shed.
“Leave me!” Moll shouted over the cacophony. “You can still save yourself.”
“Never!”
“Kip, I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.” As the spotlight beam edged still closer to their refuge, she turned to him, placing her hands on either side of his face, firmly kissing him. “It’s all over for me, but there’s still hope for you.”
With moments to spare before being doused in light, Kip wrestled with a horrible urge to agree with her. His self-preservation instinct screamed for him to flee. It was true—there was no hope for her, but that didn’t mean he’d exhausted all his options. Without her to slow him down, there was every possibility he’d make it to safety.
He shook away the intrusive thoughts as the folly they were, turning to face her desperate eyes, squeezing her hands in his.
“I’m with you—always.”
He bent forward and wrapped her over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry, stumbling away from the approaching menace from above as fast as his exhausted legs would move.
They hadn’t covered a city block when the cone of light found them, and Kip froze in the middle of a lawn.
On the roadside nearby, a black Challenger squealed to a stop, two shadowy occupants issuing forth with long pistols drawn.
“Put down the Mock and get on the ground!” one of them ordered.
“Better do as he says, Kip,” said Moll.
“I-I can’t!” Kip shook his head. “I won’t!”
“Do it, Kip! And then get away from me.”
A tremor rolled through Moll’s body. Her limbs twitched, the powerful sinews of her artificial muscles tensing.
“Moll?”
A guttural growl vibrated in Moll’s throat.
Kip eased her onto her feet and turned to see the trademark glowing red eyes of an Alt in the full throes of the Berserker Bug.
He leapt away from her as she launched herself at the closest Striker. Her adversaries opened fire, shredding her clothing and skin, but couldn’t connect to her center mass from her haphazard thrashing.
Kip’s stomach turned when she tore into the first of her victims with a savage flailing of metal infrastructure before rounding on the second, blood and viscera dripping from her fingertips.
She tackled the man. Locked in a mortal tussle, Moll grunted as a shot rang out. The Striker’s arterial bleed presaged his imminent demise, but his bullet had found its point-blank target, severing the primary control circuit in Moll’s spine.
She lay supine on the grass, inert as a mannequin.
Kip rushed to her side, his legs heavy. He pulled her head into his lap, smoothing her hair. The scowl on her face softened as a spark of recognition found its way into her eyes, once more a familiar blue. Her tinny and faded voice cracked as she spoke.
“I’m with you—always.” Her eyes fluttered closed.
No longer concerned for his own safety, he lifted Moll, cradling her tattered body in his arms like a child. Buffeted by the wash from the helicopter, he placed her gingerly in the passenger seat of the Challenger.
As he slid over the hood to the driver’s side, he glared at the motionless aircraft, daring those onboard to intervene, until—to his astonishment—it rose sharply upward and banked away to the southwest.
Had the Strikers taken mercy?
Had they not been Strikers at all?
Slipping behind the wheel of the dark muscle car, entwining his fingers with Moll’s, the road to Wyoming opened up before them. If they made it to Cutter, she might yet stand a chance.
“Here’s to our dream,” he said, flooring it.