Assault on Sunrise (The Extra Trilogy) by Michael Shea Page B

Engine Repair’s big-vaulted garage was a small, crowded machine shop. Devlin bade everyone in. Mazy, Lance, and Radner were already there. Shutting the door, she sealed them all in the cold oily smell of machinery. It was somehow the right scent, a smell of mustered weapons, of danger and urgent defenses.
    “Mazy?” Devlin prompted.
    Mazy’s eyes always had a merry squint to them, like she was wondering if you’d understand a joke she wanted to tell you. She looked at the bikers—a little smile for Ming—and cleared her throat. “We need you to bring something up from the Valley. What we need you to bring us … is a sample of what’s gonna start killing us when the shoot starts. We just got word of it. Sandy dangled a mil of her own clacks, and we hooked a studio tech.” She broke out in a grin. “What we have here is gift-of-god luck. The guy will be in Outer Redding at a bar at sunup.
    “The thing is, we do not dare the air. Any of our rafts will draw sharp eyes, not to mention they’re stolen and could draw the heat. But bikers, well, they’re thick as fleas down in the valley.”
    “Hey!” protested Abel.
    “Will you guys do this?” Mazy asked with a winning smile—which Ming in her heart had to admit that she still found pretty damn winning. They hadn’t spoken since she’d joined the bikers. “If you bring it back, we might be able to find out how to kill this fucking shit that’s gonna be killing us.”
    Abel: “Would we do this? Does Howdy Doody have little wooden balls?”
    Cherokee: “Is the bear Catholic?”
    Christy: “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
    The Wheel Rights answered themselves in a chorus of damn-straights and fuckin-ayes. Sandy Devlin offered a money belt to Abel, and then noting his girth, switched it to Cherokee. “Meeting’s set for early tomorrow—it’s the safest time to get there. Buckle this five mil on under your leathers. The guy’s name is Dukes. He’ll be in Outer Redding at the Pink Elephant and he’s got a sample of what the APPs on this flick are going to be made of. Nano-gel.”
    Abel spoke. “You’re puttin a shitload of faith in us. We won’t fuck it up.”
    “Famous last words,” piped Christy, an automatic comeback of his to any of Abel’s more solemn utterances.
    *   *   *
    So just before midnight the bikers roared down through the mountains headed for the Five. The three men liked to ride gaudy when they took their bikes down to the Valley. Christy’d had his Hanger ’kick tanner cure him a road-killed skunk’s pelt, and the kid had made this a plume curving over his helmet crest. The open jaws frontal just above his eyes. Portly Abel liked buckskins with major fringes. These roared like soft brown flames off his bulk as he ran at full throttle. Cherokee wore his own totem helmet. He’d found a big red-tail, dead of starvation up in the mountains during a drought year. Her wings—half unfolded—he’d lovingly polyurethaned and mounted, and they swept back from the temples of his WWII infantry helmet. All three had hair enough to banner out from the fringes of their warlike headgear.
    Ming scorned Panoply and panache. She wore only big silver reflecting goggles like bug’s eyes, above which her short ragged ’do flashed silver as the sun came up. Plain black leather wrapped the rest of her.
    The Five was pouring under their wheels as the east grew pale, and Redding hove in sight just after sunup. It sat on low ridges to either side of the freeway. Outer Redding littered some slightly higher hills to the east of the healthy part of town. Up there, tattered trailers perched on bulldozed niches in the slope, and along the Z of bad road climbing that slope larger shapes stood here and there—of cinder block or corrugated metal or rain-bleached carpentry with shingled roofs. Outer Redding. Warren of drug kitchens. Haven of highwaymen. Home to numerous wheeled bandits of the breed who’d attacked Curtis and Jool a year before