Cyberpunk

betrayal he would not gladly embrace—if only, please God, he was given the chance.
    “Shut the kid up!”
    Cambridge yelled back indignantly. “Are you kidding? How are we going to do that? She’s terrified!”
    Her courage was like a lifeline. He dropped into character . . . “Look, I don’t know what’s wrong, we weren’t doing anything wrong, we wanted to be private, kind of get to know each other. Would we be doing anything dirty with the kid there?” He babbled, injecting innocent panic into the real thing. He hunched himself forward, arms and head between Bella and the guns. She could feel that he was back in control—throat-chokingly, fearfully sweet the way she suddenly obeyed his shushing and went silent: her small hands clutching his collar, her wet face against his neck . . .
    Donny-Gustave looked around with a bitter scowl.
    “You and Cams was just holding hands? What about all that stuff ? Looked like some kind of heroin still to me.”
    The tow truck bucketed, its mean yellow lights barely cutting the darkness. Cambridge ducked her head and made herself small between the men, fists burrowed in her jacket pockets, letting them fight it out. Johnny couldn’t remember his next line. Gustave was going to crash the damn truck. He thought he was going to pass out, the situation was so consummately awful—when slam , the shotgun muzzle behind his ear suddenly dealt a numbing, stinging blow to the corner of his jaw.
    He yelled, sure he was dying. There was another explosion, unbelievably close. The truck slewed. Bella whimpered. Cold outdoor air belched into the cab. Johnny lifted his ringing head. A mess of dark movement resolved itself into Cambridge, hanging onto the wheel and wrestling with something flailing and heavy at the flown-open door.
    “Take the wheel!” she screamed.
    Johnny grabbed, and shoved Bella—dead silent—in her carrier into the well in front of the bench.
    “Keep your head down, baby.”
    She ducked. The top of her dark head was all his eyes could see. He grappled blindly—the dumb-animal feel of the ancient machine piling in with the heavy scuffle going on beside him, a blur of confusion. Donny’s body fell out into the night. Cambridge hauled the door shut. Johnny slid over. She drove the truck. The road was dark and empty, no sign of the second biker.
    “Who shot him?”
    “Who d’you think?”
    He looked over his shoulder. The second of Micane’s guys was a slumped heap.
    “God. Who shot him ?”
    “I didn’t go out to the plant with you alone, what did you think? Donny drove into an ambush. Don’t look so fucking shocked, eejay. Why didn’t the stupid bastard frisk me, if he wanted to stay alive?”
    “Is he dead? Are they dead?”
    “I hope so.” Her teeth were chattering.
    A mile or so down the road she pulled in. There were no lights, no houses visible in a strange outdoor darkness, faintly tinged with starlight. The three of them got down. Johnny at last could tug Bella out of the sling and hug her properly. Her eyes were huge and black in her dim face. A little child sometimes seems like a machine. Switch off, switch on: no memory, each event fresh and untainted. She leaned back and stared.
    “Stars!”
    He hadn’t known she knew what that word meant, not clearly enough to apply it out here.
    The man on the back of the truck made no sound. Somewhere on the road another two human beings lay: Gustave and Samuel. Johnny wanted to go to the man on the flatbed, but the silence of that huddled thing was intimidating. Johnny’s responses were from another planet. He didn’t know what Cambridge was thinking. Maybe simply breathing, standing there and breathing. She’d shot someone. How could Johnny imagine the afterburn of that?
    He thought of the desk clerk’s life, and how her spunky intelligence had won her a place with the boys, but only on condition she played by their rules. And only till she got pregnant, or fell in love. Then she’d be one of those gap-toothed, horny-skinned women, “married” to some junior male: property to be abused. She’d have a string of sickly kids, her whole life the struggle to keep one or two of them alive to adulthood. The bad clothes looked ethnic and interesting on the others. On Cambridge they were shameful. She was a real human person. She shouldn’t be here, she should have a future.
    “I hope . . .” The clerk shuddered. “I hope Donny’s . . . I didn’t shoot to kill. Look, don’t blame