The back of Venom’s leather jacket was embellished with a beaded coral snake. Its eyes flashed ruby bright in the lantern light. Technically, those legless motherfuckers had black eyes, but artistic license took precedence in beadwork.
Nine
The poor snake was gonna lose its luster someday. Not much could fit in the cracks of threaded seed beads, but desert dust got into everything. In fact, Bite figured that—after seventeen runs—he and Venom probably had particles of the Mojave in their DNA.
Eight
Bite wore a beaded jacket, too. Silver and white wolf head. Golden eyes. The piece had taken weeks to finish. Weeks and a thousand drops of blood. Thimbles weren’t his jam.
Seven
Other riders in the village adorned their uniforms with grindstone-pointed metal spikes, neon hazard symbols and grinning skulls. Their fashion was a warning: don’t touch me; I bite. Anthropogenic aposematism.
Six
During his first few jobs with Venom, when inexperience heightened the danger of the road, Bite dressed to intimidate, too. But it felt like a betrayal.
Five
On their tenth job, a one-way escort mission guiding a motorcade of college kids to Los Angeles, Bite tore all the pointy bits and scary patches off his leather jacket. Even though he felt like a snail without its shell, the job was a success. Nobody gave them trouble.
Four
Twenty-five successful jobs later, he and Venom wore whatever the hell they wanted. With their reputation—almost fifty runs with no deaths—they didn’t have to be flashy.
Three
Bite never intended to make a career of this; he wanted experience on the road and figured escorting travelers through the desert a few times would suffice. But, well, love, you know? It changed plans, scrambled priorities, complicated matters. As if his life wasn’t complicated enough.
Two.
Should he say something before they left? Give Venom a clue that this job might be their last together for a long time?
One
No. That question had to wait. Just one second until the sky went black, and every millisecond mattered. They had less than four hours to reach Willowbee. Technically, their sportbikes could do the job with time to spare, but the roads were crap, only sporadically maintained in bursts of rushed labor under the shadow of the heaven shield. Plus, anything could happen out there. Robbery, blockades, road rage.
Plus, “might” was the key word. He shouldn’t rush life-changing decisions, as if everything under the sky was one massive, frenetic street race—
Go.
“Ready?” Venom shouted. His voice rose above the purr of two running motors. He and Bite idled side-by-side at the bottom of an exit ramp that shot directly from the violet village to the world above ground. The metal roll-up door at the end of the ramp rose in anticipation of their run, baring the pitch blackness outside. It was ten-thirteen PM, but the heaven shield blocked the almost-full moon and stars.
“Let’s go,” Bite said.
They accelerated, fighting the incline, the roar of their engines ricocheting off the rough-hewn stone walls and chasing them through the tunnel.
This was Bite’s favorite part of every ride: the ascent into the night.
They shot from the tunnel onto the access road to I-40 and merged onto the interstate. Several western-bound cars and bikes, other heaven shield riders, were already racing the clock. Venom and Bite hit the throttle, breaking away from the slower travelers, accelerating to eighty, ninety, one hundred, one hundred and ten miles per hour. Ahead, the road was empty and smooth, but that could change more suddenly than a lightning bolt. With his right hand, Bite signed to retain speed.
“Ten more,” Venom signed back. A question, not a demand. The logistics of runs—speed, scheduling, trajectory of the shield—were Bite’s domain.
“Five,” Bite compromised.
Their headlights cut a tunnel through the night, with vague shapes of barbed cholla and other desert plants flashing in Bite’s peripheral vision. He activated a motion detector on his bike; if something approached the road, the detector’s alarm would ensure they had a few extra seconds to react. Highway robberies were uncommon on I-40, since it was always busy when the shield passed, but desperate people both took risks and avoided risks for the same reason: survival. How many desert-dwelling scavengers would exploit or cause a wreck on the interstate? And how many travelers would drive past an accident because of the looming countdown until the clear sky?
It’s not that he blamed them. Once, the land was a home for wolves. Family packs that roamed from coast to coast. Then, death came for them in the form of hunters. Their extinction had been inevitable, Bite figured, but love sped up the process.
Love and leg traps.
A snare or steel box could catch a wolf by the leg and restrain her for days as she starved and suffered. All the while, members of the wolf’s pack would gather around her, unable to help but unwilling to leave, and fall prey to the trapper. Whole families were thus annihilated. Whole species.
Is that what’d happened to Bite’s mother during the war? When the feds dragged him to a camp, did she take the bait? It was useless to wonder, but that didn’t stop him.
He also wondered—bitterly, anxiously, and often—whether his plan to find one woman in a great big death trap of a country was a doomed wolf goal. Bite might have had success doing straightforward escort missions, but he wasn’t confident that he and Venom would fare well off the road. And that was assuming his partner even wanted to come along.
Bite brooded over the fate of wolves for half an hour. Then, with the fuel a quarter gone, heradioed Venom, “We’re five minutes from the trading post. Need anything?” It was the last safe haven before Willowbee.
“Oh, nah, I’m good,” he said, tapping his grips. “Thanks, though. You?”
“Good enough to continue.” Speedbikes weren’t exactly built for comfort, and Bite’s tailbone already hurt. He had to look into a more ergodynamic seat before the return trip with a third person. “Let’s get it done.”
With that, they continued the run. It was a quiet night. Monotonous. To Bite, driving through the desert was kinda like treading water. If the road bent into a giant loop, sending them in circles, would they even notice? Probably not. They’d drive around and around until their bikes broke down. That was a big drawback of the heaven shield. It protected people on Earth from the vaporizer satellites but also stole the stars, which were the easiest, earliest tools of navigation. Although Bite was only familiar with one star—the sun—he felt the absence of the cosmos at an instinctual level, uncomfortable driving under the blackness of a deep pit.
The alarm over his right ear beeped a couple seconds before he noticed the child running near the interstate. In the headlights, she was a flash of black, brown, pink, and white from the top of her head to her toes. Her eyes met his for the fraction of a second it took to pass. He didn’t need to signal to Venom; they both pulled over, stopping on the shoulder a quarter mile ahead of the girl.
“Don’t see that every night,” Venom said, shouting over their engines and the redshift low-to-high vroom of a passing car. “What now?”
With a frustrated grunt, Bite deployed his kickstand and turned off his bike. “She’s in trouble. I’ll keep track of time. You do the talking.”
Venom, who taught K-12 martial arts at the village, had a way with the youngest generation. In contrast, Bite had once made a toddler cry so hard, her nose started bleeding (he just said she had “nice pigtails”—how was he supposed to know that she hated pigs?) and had since avoided children.
A couple minutes later, Venom and Bite reached the girl. The hems of her white denim pants were stained yellowish brown by the grit of the Mojave, and her hands were chalky, as if she’d been digging. “Help,” she said. “We need help.”
Venom removed his helmet and crouched. His thick black hair stuck up in some places and was flat in others, but he somehow made helmet-head look fashionable. To be fair, it would be difficult to go wrong in the hairstyle department with Venom’s high cheekbones and sharp chin. His only facial scar was a fetching line running from brow to temple, the mark of a broken glass bottle that had bisected his thick black eyebrow during a fight. In contrast, Bite’s cheeks were spotted with chicken pox craters. As a kid, bored, feverish and grieving in an orphan camp, he’d scratched his blisters ‘til they bled. Lots of people in the violet village praised his rough skin, claiming the texture made him seem tough. But now when Bite looked at his reflection, he just saw a helpless boy stolen from a mother, who might have rubbed salve into his blistered arms and face instead of letting him bleed.
Bite left his helmet on.
“Who needs help?” Venom asked, offering the girl a flask of water. “Tell us what happened.”
“Me and Grandma were at home—” She pointed to the desert and drank deeply. “—alone, ‘cause Mom and Dad are working in the big city, and we got attacked by men in brown jackets. They kicked down the door and came in like they belonged. With knives. We escaped and hid for I don’t know how long. When the black sky came, Grandma told me to find help. I’ve been running…” She wiped her cheek. “I’ve been running alone. Grandma can’t move. Her leg—I think it’s rotting.”
“Christ,” Bite said. “Where is she?”
Again, the girl pointed to the desert.
“How did you find the road?” Venom asked. “Is there a path?”
“Directions.” The girl held out her left wrist. She wore a smart watch with solar cells in its thick wristband. The green-glowing screen projected a digital compass. “Grandma said to keep the needle on one-seven-zero.”
“We can retrace her steps,” Bite muttered. “The back-bearing is two-ninety from the point she reached the road. But…”
Venom stood and turned his back to the wide-eyed girl, whispering, “But what?”
“May be safer to drive the kid to WillowbeeASAP and return for her grandmother with the next heaven shield.”
“The old woman probably won’t survive that long,” Venom said.
They peered into the darkness, listening. Insects hummed; the girl breathed in fast, dry rasps; cars vroomed down the interstate. Nobody else stopped to help.
“Wait here with her,” Bite decided. “If I’m not back in forty minutes, leave without—”
“Nah. We stay together.” Venom crouched again, smiling at the girl. “What’s your name?”
“Alisa.”
“Alisa, you found the road, which means you’re our new navigator. Let’s get your grandma.”
“Pack of wolves,” Bite said, activating the night vision function of his visor. “That’s what we are.”
They crossed drought-cracked earth, playing hopscotch over scorpions. Alisa rode on Venom’s shoulders and continuously pointed in the direction of two-ninety degrees. She resembled a barrelgirl perched on a mast, her finger extended toward land or an overboard crewmember.
“There!” she shouted. “In that old building!”
Ahead, there was a long-abandoned gas station surrounded by a couple rusted-to-hell prewar cars and scarecrow-thin remnants of old pumps. The cars had been stripped to the frame and were partially buried by sand. Alisa wriggled off Venom’s shoulders and ran toward the dark building. She lit the way with a dim flashlight app on her watch.
“Hey!” Venom called. “Careful! Don’t step on a rattlesnake!”
“Go after her,” Bite said. “I’ll keep watch.”
He was worried that the men who attacked Alisa and her grandmother couldn’t afford to leave witnesses. If the pair hadn’t escaped, the invaders could have lived in their isolated home for weeks with impunity because neighbors were few and far between in the desert.
But the men in brown jackets had underestimated the child and Elder. Now, there was a chance that desert peacekeepers would be alerted. Would the men in brown jackets flee? Or would they try to find Alisa to silence her?
Bite increased the sensitivity of his helmet’s motion detector and crouched beside an old car; with a slow exhale, he closed his eyes and listened. There were two helmet hums, each decreasing in volume, behind him: Venom and Alisa. The nearly imperceptible hums swooping around and above his head were insects. Rhythmically spaced, low hums to the south: vehicles passing on the nearby interstate.
There was another sound to the left. It had the volume of an insect but the steadiness of something more deliberate. As this hum increased subtly in volume, Bite grit his teeth.
“We found Grandma,” Venom radioed. “Getting her ready to move.”
“Just in time. Somebody’s coming.”
“Friend or foe?”
“I wish I knew.” Bite isolated and amplified the troubling sound. His tech estimated that the unknown was approaching at a speed of fifteen miles per hour. It could be an off-road vehicle. If they remained at the gas station, it’d reach them in three minutes, give or take. The interstate was a quarter mile away. They couldn’t outrun the unknown with an injured woman. But a confrontation would be risky.
What now?
Closely followed by Alisa, Venom emerged from the gas station with a woman in his arms. The elder was bundled from her shoulders to her knees in a blue shawl. Worryingly, her calf was swollen and red. He couldn’t tell if it was a rattlesnake bite or infected wound.
“What happened to your leg, Ma’am?” Bite asked.
“A machete,” Alisa’s grandmother explained, her voice raspy. “Could have been worse.”
“The home invaders carried machetes?” Bite inferred, passing her his flask of water. “Did they have any guns?”
The woman drank deeply. In a clearer voice, she responded, “Yes, and I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Were they waving guns around?” he pressed.
“No,” she said. “Just the twelve-inch blades.”
“That means guns weren’t their primary weapons. Might give us an advantage.”
Why, though? Was it a matter of ammo scarcity? Of inexperience? Of personal preference? Hell if he knew. Maybe every other week was machete week for those assholes. It didn’t matter when they had less than two minutes to escape.
“What’s the plan?” Venom asked, calm. Always calm, that one. He turned, trying to see the approaching threat, and the beads across his back glinted in the light of Alisa’s wristwatch. Bite thought about snakes and rattles.
“Put fear in their hearts,” he said. “Stand back and cover your ears.” He unholstered his gun, aimed at a patch of dirt, and fired. Crack. The desert swallowed his warning. For good measure, he fired a second time, misting the air with dust and gun smoke, and then checked the movement of the friend or foe.
“They’ve stopped,” he said. “For now. Let’s go.”
Bite took the lead, using his visor nav system and night vision to keep them on track. Venom, still carrying the injured woman, followed at the rear, while Alisa stayed between the adults. Bite was alternating between navigation and idly thinking about elephants—specifically, how groups of adults protected calves by surrounding them—when he felt a hand on his arm. Alisa was running beside him, clinging to his sleeve for balance.
She’d been alone on the first race to the interstate, weaving through fanged plants and animals with nothing but a watch to light the way. What had it felt like to survive that terrible ordeal only to be ignored by car after car after car after car?
Without a word, Bite extended his hand. Alisa took it.
As they jogged, he remembered—so long ago—walking hand-in-hand with his mother through a garden of wild roses. It seemed obvious now: his decision, his future. He just had to survive the night.
The interstate and their bikes, thankfully untouched, were within sight when the friend-or-foe hum in Bite’s helmet started again. “Run!” he shouted. “They’re coming fast!”
During the final sprint, their pursuers gained so much ground, Bite swore that he heard the distant roar of their motor. He threw himself at his bike, unlatching its spare helmet and adjusting the size to small. “Try this, Alisa,” he said.
She quickly put on the helmet, snapping the chin strap into place. Hopefully, that efficiency meant she’d ridden as a passenger on a bike before because they didn’t have time for training. His helmet screamed: it’s close. Bite glanced at the desert, using his visor to zoom into the souped-up monster of an off-roader that was approaching with a tail of dust. Something small flew out of the passenger-side window.
“It’s an exploder!” he hollered. “Shoot it down!”
The drone had a single red light on its belly. Prettily, it zig-zagged as Venom and Bite fired, dodging their bullets with the grace of artificial intelligence.
“Let me!” the elder said, reaching for Venom’s gun.
He hesitated, asking, “You know how to use a—”
“How do you think we escaped those men the first time?” she demanded. “Yes, I can use a gun.”
“Twenty seconds ‘til impact!” Bite shouted. “Give it to her!”
Venom handed the elder his weapon, and she dropped to one knee, aiming, her face taut with pain. “Wolf guy,” she said, “on three, shoot at it.”
“Right,” Bite agreed.
“One.”
Bite steadied himself.
“Two.”
Aimed.
“Three!”
Two gunshots rang out; the drone dodged Bite’s shot and flew straight into the path of the elder’s bullet. Red light sputtering, trajectory chaotic, the exploder spun out of the sky and plopped in the desert between the interstate and the offroader, which first braked and then reversed.
“Bullseye,” Bite said, grinning behind his visor. “We better haul ass before it explodes. You’re a fine shot, ma’am.”
In response, she simply nodded and allowed Venom to help her to the passenger seat of his bike.
Bite counted the seconds as they embarked, pulled off the shoulder, and accelerated. On second ninety-two, a safe distance behind them, the exploder lived up to its reputation. For a fleeting moment, the night was bright, as if a star had burned through the heaven shield and landed in the Mojave.
“How are we for time?” Venom radioed.
“Cutting it tight,” Bite said, “but we’ll make it.”
He was right.
After reaching Willowbee, checking Alisa and her grandmother into the hospital, chatting with the peacekeepers and filing not one but five “roadside incident” reports—after all that,Venom and Bite hung up their jackets and slumped onto the sofa in their boarding room. They shared a pot of rabbit stew and a stack of tortillas that was still warm from the landlady’s stovetop.
“Hey, Venom,” Bite said.
“Yeah, wolf guy?”
He snorted. “Stop. I’m being serious.”
Venom put down his spoon and nodded. “Okay.”
“I think I’m ready to look for her now.”
A beat of silence. Then, “Your mother?”
He couldn’t meet Venom’s brown eyes, worried they’d chip away at the sense of determination he’d cultivated in that memory of the rose garden. “Yes. Last I saw her, Mom was in the deep south.”
“You think she’s still there after twenty years?”
“I’d still be there, if the situation was reversed.” Bite took a bite of tortilla, using the break in their conversation to steel himself. He didn’t want Venom to be swayed by guilt. So, in the most nonchalant tone he could muster, he asked, “Want to come with me?”
If the answer was “no,” Bite would shrug his shoulders, imitating the casual disappointment of a guy who’d just lost a hand of cards. He’d promise to return someday, as if one man, alone out there, could promise something like survival. At least he had a better chance than all the cowards in their cars who’d ignored Alissa’s pleas for help. Yeah. It would be all right, even if the answer was—
“Yes,” Venom said, slinging an arm across Bite’s shoulders. “I’d like to meet your mom.”
“Cool. Good. Great.” Oh, shit, what a freaking relief. Bite showed his gratitude with a kiss and poured two glasses of booze that had probably been brewed in the landlady’s spare bathtub. “To us,” he said. “And marking days by the gradual infiltration of our jackets by dust. May there be many others.”
“To us,” Venom agreed.