Vox Mentis

use the gun, blow out the tyres on the cop car

>Shoot the cop car's tires, that should do the trick.

There's no time to lower the window, so you plant your feet on the side door, aim the shotgun down your legs in the general direction of the cop's tires, and squeeze the trigger. The window blows out. The cop car jerks as if stung, its engine jumping half a dozen octaves, and falls out of view. You lean out the shattered window into the blast furnace of air. There's two cops in the squad car, their faces pinched with anxiety. It veers off the road, tires smoking. You crawl back inside. “They don't want to get shot.”

“Not compromised,” says Eliot. “Good.”

When you reach your own seat, the lights ahead have resolved into two shining squad cars, one in each lane, barreling toward you. “They’re not... kamikaze, are they?” Eliot doesn’t answer. You grope for your seat belt but can’t find it. Surely Eliot is about to swerve off the road. The cars balloon in the windshield, low-slung and powerful. “Eliot! Eliot!”

One squad car drops behind the other. They fly past Eliot’s window, their sirens dopplering. You breathe.

“Load that gun,” Eliot says.

You dig around the footwell for shells, break open the shotgun.

“They’re coming around. Keep them back.”

“I know.”

“Don’t talk about it. Do it.”

“I’m doing it! I just shot a cop car, did you notice?”

“Next time, shoot the driver.”

“Fuck!” you say. “What’s the difference?”

“You shoot the driver, no cop comes within five hundred feet of us, that’s the fucking difference! You shoot the car-”

“Okay! Okay!” You get your elbow out the passenger window and lever yourself up. The wind tears at you. Way back, a column of white smoke rises from the car you shot, stark against the blue sky. Closer, the two new squad cars are eating up the distance between you. You steady the shotgun. You'd hunted, once. You'd cleared land like this of rabbits and roos. When was that? You can't remember. But this feeling, the shotgun nestled in your shoulder, an endless landscape of pressed dirt spread before you, is familiar. You wait. The cops will surely see you and stay back. You don't want to shoot anyone.

The Valiant coughs. The car shivers, lurches. You clutch at the window frame to avoid falling out of it, almost dropping the gun. “Hey!” you shout. “What the fuck?”

“Gas! Becoming an issue!”

“Why are you shaking the car?”

“To extract gas from the tank!”

“I nearly fell out!”

Eliot says something you can't hear over the roar of the wind.

You lean inside. “What?”

“I said it’s important to keep moving!”

“I know that! Just give me five seconds of driving in a straight line!” You push yourself out the window. The squad cars are closer than you'd like. At this range, you can pierce the windshield. They can see that, right? They can see you have a shotgun. You wait for them to back off.

“Shoot!” Eliot yells.

Then it'll just go right into you. You need to shoot the engine

You aim at the car on the left and squeeze the trigger. Shot spatters across its hood. Its windshield cracks. Both cars’ noses dipped to the blacktop. Smoke bursts from their tires. You watch until there's a good couple hundred yards of road between you. Then you wriggle back inside. “They’re backed off.”

“Good.”

Eliot doesn’t ask why you fired at the hood. Maybe he doesn’t realize. He probably assumes you're a terrible shot. He doesn’t know that you've hunted. Well, that you remember hunting.

>Try to draw attention to the medical emergency you have going on, if he doesn't respond properly to that then he might be compromised.

“We seriously need to get you to a hospital.”

“And how does that work,” says Eliot. “How exactly do we get me to a hospital, in this situation.”

“I don’t know. But you can’t fucking die, okay? It’s not good for anyone if you die.”

“Hold on,” says Eliot. You see a turnoff rushing toward you, a dusty blacktop guarded by red and black and yellow signs promising NO ENTRY, ROAD CLOSED, QUARANTINE AREA. As you lean around the corner, the car coughs explosively. You feel a softness enter your momentum. The engine gargles. The Valiant lurches back onto the straight and mutters angrily.

“That’s not good.”

“No.”

You glance behind. The squad cars have slipped into a single file. They follow at a distance, taking the turnoff with ease. “They’re going to just sit back there until we run out of gas.”

“They’re not.”

“Let me float something,” you say. “We stop, they arrest us, we get you some medical attention.” Eliot doesn’t say anything. “Then you talk us out. With the word voodoo.” You lean forward, searching the sky for choppers. “Don’t you think the priority here is you being okay?”

“The bareword is the priority.”

“Right. The bareword.” You peer ahead. “There’s something on the road.” A chain-link fence stretches away from either side of the road, but whatever lies between is lost in the heat haze. “Is that a gate?”

“Just loose wire.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Are you really sure?” you say, but by the time you get the words out, the answer is clear. It's a solid red and yellow barrier. The Valiant plows through it and a yellow block flies at your face and ricochets off the windshield with a light boonk.

You look out the rear window. Colorful blocks roll slowly across the road.
“Plastic,” says Eliot.

“You said it was wire.”

“Last time I was here, it was.”

The police cars are shrinking. “Hey. They’ve stopped.”

“That’s because they believe what they’ve been told about Broken Hill. They don’t want to die.”

“So no one will follow us in here? We’re safe?”

“Regular people won’t. Proses will.”

“Oh, yeah,” you say, dismayed. “Proses.”

“Also EQPs,” says Eliot. “You haven’t seen those yet. When they show up, we’ll need the word.” He glances in the rearview mirror. “I’m going to pull over and let you drive for a while.”

The car coasts to a halt. You run around the vehicle, hunkering down in case of cops with sniper rifles, or helicopters, or whatever. You don't know. It could be anything. The engine stutters and you think, Please don’t die, you dick. You pull open the driver’s side door. Eliot is sitting in the passenger seat like he’s been dropped there. One hand rests on his abdomen. His face is made of paper. The driver’s seat is wet with blood. “Holy crap,” you say.

“Get in.”

Your butt presses into the wet seat. The smell is rich and loamy, like a vegetable garden after rain. “This is seriously bad, Eliot.” You pull the door closed and start the car moving before it can capitulate. “Is there a hospital in Broken Hill? A clinic, at least?” You glance at him, abruptly fearful that he’s died in the past five seconds. But Eliot is still there. “Maybe we can do something for you there.” Maybe Eliot has medical knowledge. Maybe Eliot can dig a bullet out of his body and administer the correct doses of expired medicines. He stuck a needle into your eyeball; he must know something. The engine coughs three times. A structure rises in the distance: something old and industrial. “Are you listening?”

“Yes. It’s a good plan.”

“Is it?” But Eliot’s expression suggests otherwise. “Fuck! Then what?”

“We get the word.”

“And?” Eliot says nothing. “What...” you begin, and force yourself to stop peppering Eliot with questions. You should let Eliot concentrate on holding in his kidneys. A house comes up on the right, a squat thing with sun-blistered paint, but you've seen more run-down places in Portland. It doesn’t look abandoned. It's the windows, you realize: They're intact. And there's no weeds, no overgrowth. The sun sterilized everything. You spot gray-white clumps scattered here and there and think, Anthills? One's on the road, more distinct. You swerve. “Fuck!”

Eliot grunts.

“Skeletons,” you say. Of course there are skeletons. But still. Skeletons. On the road. A lone gas station comes into view. A skeleton hangs halfway out of a burned-out station wagon. You glance at Eliot, to see if Eliot is getting this and is at least a fraction as freaked out as you are, but Eliot’s eyes are closed. “Eliot.”

His eyes open. He begins to shift himself up the seat like he's arranging something heavy. “Don’t. Let me. Close my eyes.”

“That’s why I said something.” You slow. There are more skeletons here and you don't want to drive over them. You don't want to hear the noise. The industrial structure you saw earlier is identifiable as a refinery, looming above the town like a wrecked spaceship. Like it had descended to Earth and murdered everybody. That you can believe. A death ray. A creeping light that spreads through the town, disintegrating people. You can understand how something like that could wipe out a town. Not a word. “Eliot!”

Eliot opens his eyes.

“We’re almost there.” The street signs shone, wind-scrubbed. SULPHIDE STREET. OPEN CUT MINE #3. It's like they wanted to be the site of a toxic catastrophe. Except that hadn’t happened. That's just the story. Something tugs at you, inside your mind. Some memory. “Where’s your word?”

“Hospital,” Eliot says.

You glance at him. “You want the hospital, now?”

“Word. Is in hospital. Emergency room.”

“How do you know that?”

“Just do,” Eliot says.

You slow further, because the road is littered with bones now; there's really no option, and you drive over a gray lump with a sound like splintering tree branches and wince. You see a library with its steps converted to a ramp by a year and a half of windblown sand. It's hard to believe the skeletons are people. You know but don't. You peer ahead for signs to a hospital. On the right, a fire truck sits embedded in a storefront. Whatever happened out here didn’t happen quickly. People had time to flee. Or try. You roll the car up and down blocks. Some of the skeletons have things. You don’t want to notice this but it’s unavoidable. Flesh rots but things don’t. You catch glints of light from rings on finger bones, and belt buckles, and gold hoops, bracelets, earrings. You see a skull on the sidewalk, a small one. You don’t want to be here. The feeling rises very suddenly, from somewhere primal.

You see a café and a real estate office, both of which feel familiar in a far-off, muddied way. You convince yourself to stop avoiding Oxide Street and roll the Valiant over a thicket of bone. What if a femur splinters and gashes the tires? It probably doesn’t matter. The car is near death. Like Eliot. Like yourself. You're all very fucking close to death at the moment. It's on all sides.

You see a blue sign with a white cross. “Eliot! I found it. Stay with me.” The street is a snarl of vehicles, which you thread the Valiant through. The damage here is worse, every window broken, the bones like snow. Whatever kind of building had been across the road from the hospital is a charred ruin, and this is increasingly the case farther down the street; maybe half of the little business district had burned. “You say the word is in the emergency room, right?” You are. You don't need Eliot to tell you that. You're just trying to keep talking. You see a sign for EMERGENCY and squeeze the Valiant between two burned-out pickups. A white paramedic van lies splayed across the curb, its rear doors open. Beyond it, you can see wide glass double doors and a red sign. You yank on the hand brake. Before you can euthanize the car, it burbles and dies.

You contemplate the best course of action.