A bald guy bursts from behind a van and charges Judd, his expression hostile. Legs pumping, Bald Guy closes fast, extends his hands to grab the astronaut—
Judd pulls his pistol and points it directly between Bald Guy’s eyes. ‘Fuck off!’ Bald Guy throws up his hands and stops running, watches the bike speed away, clearly pissed off at the missed opportunity.
Judd ups his pace, pushes the pistol back into his belt line. ‘Christ.’ That’s how valuable bikes are now. They’re the only viable transport in town. Bicycles rule LA. In a city built for automobiles, the car capital of the world no less, who’d have imagined that would ever happen?
He sees a Caltex service station to the right. It is, unsurprisingly, not only deserted, but filled with the smoking hulks of burned-out vehicles. Judd mounts the kerb, rides into the station and pulls up beside the only gas pump that hasn’t been destroyed by an explosion or melted by fire. The chainsaw still lies across the handle bars. He quickly fills its gas tank then rides on.
He takes a quick left then sees it in the distance: Moreno High School. It is dominated by a single piece of architecture that towers fifty metres above everything else. The soaring edifice, like a boxy, unsophisticated rocket ship, or a very thin ziggurat, is clad in soundproof panels painted with swirling flowers to conceal its true identity. The paint job isn’t fooling anyone. Everyone knows it’s an oil derrick.
Yes, an oil derrick. Only in LA would an oil-drilling island be built inside a school. Judd remembers he was covered in a fine spray of ‘black gold’ during the games he played there. He didn’t recall the details, but the school pretty much had every facility it needed because of those oil wells. The company that operated the drilling island paid a generous stipend for every barrel of oil they produced a year — and they produced a lot, around five hundred a day.
Thump, thump, thump. Judd glances up as a helicopter thunders overhead. For a moment he thinks it must be LAPD, then he gets a better look and realises it’s one of those giant, water-bombing Air-Cranes. Didn’t he see one earlier today? His next thought is that it must be on loan to the fire brigade—
Wait a second! How is that thing even flying? Why hasn’t it exploded?
The answer is in his jacket pocket. He unconsciously touches the canister of counteragent. That chopper must be using it. How else is it flying? He watches it slow, bank to the right, then descend — directly towards the school.
Judd increases his pace and sets a course for the oil derrick.
The oil derrick towers above Judd, fifty metres to his right.
He turns into a narrow alleyway that runs adjacent to the oil drilling island. An eight-foot chain-link gate blocks his path. He dismounts the bike, throws it over, then, chainsaw in hand, scales the fence. He drops to the other side and moves along the alleyway, the drilling island’s cinderblock wall to the left, open ground to the right.
He can hear the Air-Crane’s turbines howl though he can’t see the chopper. It’s so loud he knows it must be close, guesses it’s parked on the baseball diamond that sits behind the oil drilling island.
Ka-boom! An explosion shakes the air. Judd looks right. A fireball rolls into the sky directly above the drilling island. A moment later, a shower of white-hot metal shards rains down. He takes cover against the wall as they clink and thud onto the road. ‘What the hell is that?’
He props the bike against the cinderblock wall, steps onto its seat, levers himself up and looks over. He can’t see much except a tangle of pipes and reservoir tanks. He pulls himself over, drops into the drilling island and draws the 9mm pistol from his jacket, does it almost nonchalantly. A year ago he’d never held a gun in his hand but now he’s well practised with a weapon. He doesn’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing but it certainly feels like a necessary thing because he’s making this up as he goes along. He doesn’t have a plan because he doesn’t know what to plan for.
His eyes flick from the pistol in his right hand to the chainsaw in his left — he’s sure it will come in handy for something, but what, exactly, he does not know. He moves deeper into the facility, navigates those pipes and tanks, searches for what he does not know. The sound of the Air-Crane is even louder in here, the shriek of its turbines magnified as it bounces and echoes off the hard surfaces.
He rounds a three-metre-tall reservoir tank and sees a man in the distance. He studies the remains of a destroyed wellhead. On the ground in front of him a stream of oil flows out of a five-inch-wide pipe. He turns, kneels and from a long grey bag pulls out what looks like an aluminium baseball bat, but is in fact a three-foot-long, three-inch-wide cylinder with a two-inch-wide propeller at one end. He works his iPhone’s screen and the propeller spins up. He then slides the cylinder down the pipe and it disappears.
The man consults his iPhone for a moment, grins, then zips up the long bag, slings it over this shoulder and turns to leave—
Judd stands in front of him, points the pistol at his chest. ‘What are you doing?’
The man stops. He is, Judd realises, movie-star handsome. He is also surprised but not unhappy to see the astronaut. ‘Well, well, Judd Bell from the Atlantis 4. I heard you’d been gumming up the works today.’
Judd steps forward, aims the pistol at his chest. ‘I said, what are you doing?’
‘You’ll know very soon.’
Click. A pistol is cocked. Judd glances left, sees Ponytail aim a 9mm pistol directly at his temple. ‘Drop it.’
Judd takes a moment — then reluctantly complies.
Handsome Guy steps forward and studies Judd, surprised. ‘Wow, you’re terrible at this.’
Bunsen takes in the astronaut with a keen interest. ‘I was expecting you to be taller.’
Judd glares at him. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Do what?’
‘Release the Swarm.’
‘So Alvy told you what it’s called?’
‘Is he the guy — ?’
‘Husky fella. Frizzy hair. Multiple bullet wounds. You met him in the ambulance.’
Judd nods. ‘Yeah.’
‘The short answer is that I did it for motivation. To jump start the use of renewable energy so mankind no longer chokes this planet to death with greenhouse gas. That’s also the long answer.’
It’s not what Judd expected to hear. ‘That’s crazy.’
‘I don’t know about that. It’s better than your idea. I saw you on TV a while back, I think it was Nightline. What did you say?’ Bunsen tries to remember. ‘Something about colonising Mars because, once Earth is uninhabitable, we’ll need to go somewhere else and start again.’ He looks at Judd. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
Judd just stares at him.
‘I’ll take your blank gaze as a yes. So we agree on the problem. We just differ on the solution. I think mine’s better than yours, though. At least I want to save the planet. You just want to abandon it. And that, to me, is crazy.’
‘What you did today is not a solution.’
‘Actually, it is, and it’s a pretty good one, even if I do say so myself.’ Bunsen moves toward Judd, pushes a hand into his jacket pocket and pulls out the canister of counteragent. ‘There it is.’ He shows it to Kilroy with a smile. ‘Wasn’t so hard to find after all. Now all we have to do is locate the Australian.’ Bunsen turns to Judd. ‘Any idea where he might be?’