Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) Page 9

  It was four panel trucks we offloaded him to. When the work was done I waved Kate over. “You got the time to take us for a little ride?” I asked her. She looked at me, smiling.

  Since we’d fought back-to-back through the last hour of Alien Hunger, Kate and I were like brother and sister. She’d been a Panoply assistant director working for Margolian who had been demoted to payrafter for her reservations about Live Action just before we met. I’d tried to kill her partner when he refused to pay me for a kill, but accidently killed their raft instead. I’d helped her stay alive through the rest of that shoot, and Japh had helped too.

  “A little ride? I bet I know where. Hop aboard.”

  Yesterday there’d been a news release from Panoply. The studio had donated nine anti-grav rafts to Sunrise “… to aid them in the struggle which it is Panoply’s tragic duty to inflict on them.”

  It was a real PR coup for Panoply. And a box-office tickler: let everyone know that in this shoot there’d be an air battle to spice up the carnage. So now we could flaunt our little anti-grav fleet anywhere.

  “Could it be south you wanna fly?” she asked as I strapped in. “Mr. L.A.?”

  “L.A., you got that much right. But it’s not that I miss the damn place. It’s just that I’m used to seeing it.”

  “Right. I love it here, but I guess I miss its ugliness.” She hit cruise altitude and set us at five hundred clicks.

  “There’s just one thing that interests me there. One person—my mom. Wherever she went when she left me, she’s back in the Zoo, I’m sure of it.”

  “You miss your mom. I understand. Who wouldn’t?”

  “How could I miss her? I never even met her. I’m just curious.”

  She smiled understandingly. “Yeah. I miss my mom too.”

  And I had to laugh.

  At five hundred it didn’t take long. I’d never seen L.A. from above before. Just the beaches alone were a linear city, a snake-shaped camptown of tents and sand forty miles long. And then, the Basin! A colossal bristling blanket, wired with freeways, asphalt tentacles branching everywhere through the immensity of the Zoo.

  From my ’Rise north of the Ten, I’d had wide views, but this was another order of awe. Not only the sprawl of it. From here you could really see how the Zoo’s poverty had greened it, compared to photos from a couple generations back. Truck gardens, uncontrolled weed growth and tree-spread made it gorgeous as deep forest in places. A forest with a pumping, humming, internally combusting city threaded all the way through it.

  Though I knew little else of my mom, I was sure she would be in a big city. She was a seeker. But would she have come to rest in this particular city?

  I couldn’t help thinking so. She’d left to find some way to come back with something to offer me. All my life Auntie Drew had sworn so, and I’d always believed it. And now, if I survived, I had a life to give her.

  Somehow, seeing the impossible scope of the task decided me: If I survived this shoot, I’d come back here to find her; would sure as death come back here for something else too.

  “Let’s scoot east for a look at the enemy,” I said.

  Panoply, the walled colossus, big as a city itself, lay backed up against the hills above Burbank.

  “It’s easy enough,” I said, “for that giant to attack a little mountain town. How the hell could a mountain town attack it?”

  “I think our strategy is obvious,” said Kate with a little dreamy, evil smile. “The very first step would be to put out an extra-call in the Zoo. Instead of kill-bonuses, we pay them in plunder.”

  “Whoa!” I said, with a tingle going up my spine. “I like that!”

  XIV

  ARMAMENTS AND HAIL

  The tension on the morning of Day Four made the air almost crackle. The 8:00 A.M. tactical meeting filled the theater and overflowed out in the street, where speakers broadcast Sandy Devlin’s voice. Hundreds of natives here, men and women who’d lived with guns all their lives, listened devoutly. Whatever kind of action they’d seen, they’d never faced carnivorous man-made monsters from the maw of Hollywood.

  “First, about the air battle: the sector boat packs explosive cannon, but carries a limited amount of ammo. The eight fast-rafts have machine guns fore and aft. We’re going to use those primarily against APPs, but we’ll do what we can against the shoot-fleet.

  “It’s not likely any of Panoply’s shoot-rafts will be flying down within effective range of your guns, and in any case they’ll have magnetic deflector-shields round their gunnels, and armored bottoms. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t shoot at ’em if they happen to drop down in range. But make sure you do not fire on one of ours. Each of ours are going to have a placard on their bottom of a rising sun. We’re passing it around and you people outside will get it shortly.”

  What soon came out was a big half-sun in Day-Glo orange.

  “Armaments. Everyone fighting on foot will have two twelve-gauge pumps cut to eighteen inches, cross-holstered down their backs. Also, semi-auto forty-five caliber pistols for everyone and a belt-pack of clips. Anyone has any questions, needs any arms, your neighbors wearing these just-made Sunrise armbands can get you supplied. All you machine gunners already have your assigned emplacements—including almost every viable rooftop in town. Supervised practice ranges for all weapons are up in the Big Draw a quarter mile out Doug Fir Road.

  “Now,” Sandy said, “if any of you want to ask or to tell this meeting anything, let me call on you, one at a time.” She looked up and saw a hand. “Jool.”

  Jool—already stationed down near the dais—mounted it. “I gotta say a few words.”

  She stood facing them all—a tight, athletic figure whose baby was beginning to show. Most of those present had seen—on screen—Jool’s gift for battle in Alien Hunger, where much of her footage survived the final edit. And two days ago everyone present had heard her intuitions about what Val Margolian had hidden in the cinnabar mine.

  “I wanna share with you all a feeling I’ve got. I’m not whacking out on you here, folks. I’m not starting to hear voices from the Great Beyond. But this one’s really talkin to me. Panoply’s got us all on dangle with this up-to-seven-days shit. It’s meant to wrong-foot us by making us jumpier.

  “But if you can see this, you’re gonna agree that it’s obvious, what day they’re gonna open the ball. The first engagement—I love that word—the first engagement of Studio and Sunrise runs from sunup to midnight, right? Just picture it with me.

  “The fight starts at literal sunrise, ol’ Sol painting us all in gold, an’ then the fight rages an’ rages, with one intermission, hot an’ heavy through the long day. And then there’s the second intermission, as the sun starts sinking.

  “The whole town’s all drenched in red light and the sun’s down. Then, just after the sun is set, the full moon rises above the mountains. It floods the town in moonlight.

  “An’ the Third Act opens, the fight comes alive again an’ rages—oh so cinematically—till midnight, with the full moon at the zenith like a huge white eye looking straight down on Sunrise, and bleaching it white as a corpse.”

  A silence followed—in the theater, out on the street—all those people silently seeing themselves in that grim, gorgeous horror flick Jool had just described.

  Out of that silence, Devlin said, “That sounds exactly like Val Margolian to me. And that means the shoot is the day after tomorrow. So people, let’s make the most of the time we’ve got left.”

  * * *

  Kate and Japh were having a later dinner at his house by the draw. It was their first night together in two weeks. Kate was back from the acres of flowers she’d bought near the coast below Santa Cruz, where Ivy lived, her partner in the flowers. A woman most dear to Kate.

  When she and Japh first became lovers, Kate was self-conscious of being the elder, being herself still young enough to think six years quite a span. She hadn’t realized what a point she’d made of mating in the dark till one night J
aph said, as she reached for the switch, “Wait, sweet-cake. Why don’t we just put a bag over my head, put a couple holes in it so I can see, and leave the lights on? I mean I know I’m no pinup, but I haven’t seen you naked for a week now.”

  “It hasn’t been a week.”

  “The last four times!”

  “You fool. It’s not you.” She lay back, brought up her knees, and hooked her elbows over them, spreading herself. “Is that naked enough?”

  “Oh, Katie, you are a peach.”

  “Do I look bony enough for you?”

  “I’m the one gettin bony here.”

  They’d always laughed when they made love, and in the light they laughed more—as if with recurring amazement at how wonderfully they fit together. Tonight, as her eyes got fiercer with his thrusting, he flashed on the first time he’d seen her, sliding down the steep pitch of a toppled building.

  Though still a hundred feet above him, her face in its terror was indelibly clear—a long-limbed, black-haired woman with the eyes of a frightened angel. He pushed himself, pushed himself to reach her, to touch her heart, ease it, make her know she was safe, was home with him. Home.

  As they lay resting, holding each other, a noise of light hail came rattling down on the house.

  “Hail in midsummer?” Kate drowsily asked. “What’s going on here, country boy?”—teasing as usual his birth in a ’Rise in L.A.

  “Wull Mayum, ya getcher midsummer hayulls up hurr now’n then. Why I ’member one in ought six—”

  Tickling, then tickle-wrestling ensued. Almost, they made love again, but for the toll of their long days’ work on Sunrise’s defense. Wrestling became cuddling, and sleep won them over.

  But stepping out into the slant light of early morning, they saw a subtle glitter on everything. Walls, roof, deck, yard, trees—all glinted here and there. Japh opened his Buck and selected one glint from the porch column, digging it out of the redwood’s soft grain.

  It proved to be a minute gem. Kate, ex-assistant director, understood it at once: a lens, a micro-cam.

  As his house was rigged, so the whole town proved to be, and all the homesteads around it.

  With one day’s preparation left, a general consensus developed: start digging them out, and there’d be no end to it. People returned to installing gun emplacements and barricades, to drilling mobile troops fighting from pickup beds or small trailers pulled by three-wheelers.

  Kate got to work practicing fast crosstown manuevers with the raft squadron, skimming rooftops, dipping into the streets and out again. But she never stopped feeling the glint of those micro-cams feeding on the town’s every movement.

  It felt like an ant swarm nibbling her skin. She understood the “texture” this would give Val’s final cut, the myriad close-ups of chaos and carnage. The whole town toiled inside one huge insect eye.… She thought when the shoot-fleet arrived she might fly straight up to Val and to his face call him the monster he was, scream it out for his whole crew to hear. But she knew how his eyes would mock her, mock the moral outrage of a former ex-assistant director.

  Japh received a com from Cap. At the hardware store, he found Chops and Gillian already with him, helping unload heavy crates from a panel truck.

  “Hefty,” grunted Japh. “What’s in ’em?”

  “Machetes.” Cap left that hanging, like a man expecting surprise.

  Chops set his crate on the stack. “OK. Why machetes?”

  “Close fightin. Something to pull if you lose your piece.”

  Chops set his crate on the stack. “Good idea for close work.”

  “Right.”

  He was talking about a moment in Alien Hunger.

  “That’s it.” Cap grinned, his gold tooth flashing—and then he casually gave the finger to the street at large. It was nothing personal. People were doing the same everywhere as they worked—flipping off the micro-cams sparkling around them.

  “Fangs and legs,” Japh echoed. “You think it’ll be another kind of bug this time?”

  “Naw. Last I heard, Big Val doesn’t repeat himself. Now when we get these opened, I got another little project back at the sawmill. Cause if these choppers are sorta like swords, then what about shields?”

  * * *

  “The bow is drawn, my man,” Razz said to Mark. They sat over coffee in Argosy Studio’s canteen, at a corner table. “And I have to tell you,” he grinned, “I feel like an arrowhead, poised to slice into the flesh of the beast.”

  “Me too. I know what you mean. And it is a big beast, a live-action shoot. But I see what we’re doing more as dropping a net on the beast.”

  “OK. Netting it, and then slicing its flesh.”

  “Razz, old friend, let’s face it. You’re a hot dog.”

  Razz grinned, “Nawww.”

  “Seriously. We mess with them only up to a point. Haranguing their rafts, you were right about that. Great footage there of cam-crews’ faces. Their anger, their mockery, their secret shame. But we’re staying out of the action, not joining it.”

  “Hey. How not? I mean what do you think I’ve got in mind?”

  “I don’t know.” Mark had to laugh.

  “So whaddya say, is it time to join our fleet?”

  * * *

  Curtis and Ricky Dawes were laying a small-plank machine-gun platform on the roof of the Pioneer Hotel. The hotel, mostly converted to rentals for older people, was flanked by lower buildings, giving its roof a good field of fire. Below them, the streets were loud with burly three-wheelers. Some pulled trailer-beds of arms or materials or barrels of gas. Others towed little railed platforms for two shotgunners or one machine-gunner. These battle chariots were making the most noise, practicing maneuvers.

  Curtis said, “Look west there, near the horizon.”

  “… I don’t see anything.”

  “Those little dots there.”

  Ricky saw them: a faint freckling low in the sky. And as he watched, they grew slightly bigger, and rose higher above the horizon. Word of them had begun to spread along the other rooftops.

  It was a formation, wide and slender, like an oncoming blade.

  They came with a calm and stately sweep, each dot enlarging to an elegant little shape, tapered and bright: polished chips of obsidian, red and black. Two hundred … more than two hundred anti-gravs. A grand, brilliant armada, peacefully sailing, as if come only to share with Sunrise the beauty of this mountain morning.

  A roar of voices was rising from the streets. The town’s fleet left off maneuvers and deployed at hover along the length of town, Trek and Lance tilting the big raft thirty degrees up from horizontal, their cannon at ready. Sandy Devlin and Sharon Harms brought their boats to hang near the roof of the hotel. Their silence, the calm of their maneuver, communicated itself to the street below them.

  Sharon looked like a corn-belt farm girl and was as dangerous as a dagger. She looked down at Ricky and grinned.

  “Hey, sweet thing.”

  Ricky, gaunt ox though he was, reddened, and had to clear his throat. “Hi Shar’n. What’s happenin here?”

  “Not to worry, honey bun. I believe this is just the signing.”

  XV

  THE SIGNING

  Val almost wished Mark and Razz had already deployed their pirate fleet above him now. This scene he was part of was a gorgeous opener: his formation hanging a hundred-fifty meters up, its arc as wide as the town, the day a flawless blue, the light pure gold, all the townspeople in the streets or on the rooftops, gazing skyward at his blade of rafts come to harvest their lives.

  Scene One: “The Scythe Over Sunrise.”

  His own director’s raft—grander, more blade-shaped than the rest—he dropped down to hang at thirty meters, tilting his bow down enough to display himself in his chair of power, his console of bright screens before him, his magnetic shield shimmering faintly all around the gunwales of the craft.

  A two-raft delegation hung just above rooftop level below him—expecting him, apparently
, to descend a bit nearer. His smile declined the invitation. Mellowly, his amped voice filled the town. “Hello, Sandy. Sharon. How delightful to see you again. It’s talents like yours that have made Panoply what it is today.”

  He let this echo away, gazing down at them. The two pilots stared up at him, stony-eyed.

  “Citizens of Sunrise, I salute you all. I’m Val Margolian. I’ve come to consumate the contract which we—Panoply Studios and Sunrise Incorporated—have been forced to enter into.

  “I won’t dishonor you with euphemisms or pretty words. Tomorrow, and the next day, in the gladiatorial spectacle we are all about to create, many of you will die. But every one of our Anti-Personnel Properties you destroy will enrich Sunrise for generations to come.

  “It is Panoply Studio’s melancholy honor, our sad privilege, to engage your community as both the set and the cast of its next feature, Assault on Sunrise. For the next two days, in the period between the sun’s rise and the moon’s attainment of its zenith, we will shoot three acts per day, interrupted by two substantial rest periods for Sunrise’s recuperation and the repair of its defenses. I repeat that we are compelled to decry and denounce the injustice of the capital sentence we are to serve on you. But alas, in the end, the law is the law.

  “Panoply expresses both its admiration for you, and its regret, with an unprecedented augmentation of payouts for each Anti-Personnel Property you destroy. Each of your kills of an APP will be recompensed with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash.”

  He marked a pause here—an ironic hint that they might applaud this bounty if they chose. A low murmur spread through the town, sounding more like unease than anything. People wondering, perhaps, just how hard these APPs were going to be to kill. “These payments,” he resumed, “will not be made in the course of the shoot—a practice which might distract and endanger you. You will receive them in full at the shoot’s end.

  “Ms. Devlin, I’d be honored if you were the one to signify your new allies’ acceptance of this contract with Panoply Studios. Just place your hand on this palm-printer.”