Distraction - Bruce Sterling [132]
There was more banging and scraping. Suddenly one of the back doors broke open, and fell flat against the earth.
A crew-cut young man in overalls looked in, a crowbar in one hand. “Hey,” he said. “You’re alive!”
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“Hey, nobody! I mean, uhm … Dewey.”
Oscar sat up. “What’s going on, Dewey?”
“I dunno, but you’re some lucky guy to be alive in there. What’s with this lady? Is she okay?”
Greta was dangling limply by her wrists with her head flung back and her eyes showing rims of white. “Help us,” Oscar said, and coughed. “Help us, Dewey. I can really make it worth your while.”
“Sure,” Dewey said. “I mean, whatever you say. C’mon out of there!”
Oscar crawled out of the back of the ambulance. Dewey caught his arm and helped him to his feet. Oscar felt a spasm of nauseated dizziness, but then his pumping heart jumped on a gout of adrenaline. The world became painfully clear.
The shattered ambulance was lying on a dirt road next to a swampy, sluggish river. It was early morning, chill and foggy.
The air stank of burned upholstery. The ambulance had taken a direct hit from some kind of explosive—maybe a mortar round. The concussion had blasted it entirely from the road, and it had tumbled onto its side in red Texas mud. The engine was a blackened mess of shredded metal and molten plastic. The cab had been sheared in half, revealing the thick, dented armor of the interior prison vault.
“What happened?” Oscar blurted.
Dewey shrugged, bright-eyed and cheery. “Hey, mister—you tell me! Somebody sure shot the hell out of somebody’s ass last night. I reckon that’s all I can say.” Dewey was very young, maybe seventeen. He had a single-shot hunting rifle strapped across his back. An ancient, rusty pickup truck sat nearby, with Texas plates. It had a smashed motorcycle in the back.
“Is that your truck?” Oscar said.
“Yup!”
“Do you have a tool chest in there? Anything that can cut through handcuffs?”
“I got me a power saw. I got bolt cutters. I got a towing chain. Hey, back at the farm, my dad’s got welding equipment!”
“You’re a good man to know, Dewey. I wonder if I might borrow your tools for a moment, and saw my friend loose.”
Dewey looked at him with puzzled concern. “You sure you’re okay, mister? Your ear’s bleeding pretty bad.”
Oscar coughed. “A little water. Water would be good.” Oscar touched his cheek, felt a viscous mass of clotted blood, and gazed down at the riverbank. It would feel lovely to wash his head in cold water. This was a brilliant idea. It was totally necessary, it was his new top priority.
He stumbled through thick brown reeds, sinking ankle-deep in cold mud. He found a clear patch in the algae-scummed water and bathed his head with his cupped hands. Blood cascaded from his hair. He had a large, gashed bruise above his right ear, which announced itself with a searing pang and a series of sickening throbs. He risked a few mouthfuls of the river water, crouching there doubled over, until the shock passed. Then he stood up.
Twenty meters away, he spotted another wreck, bobbing slowly in the river. Oscar took it for a half-submerged tanker truck at first, and then realized, to his profound astonishment, that it was a midget submarine. The black craft had been peppered from stern to bow with thumb-sized machine-gun holes. It was beached in the mud in a spreading rainbow scum of oil.
Oscar clambered back up the riverbank, spattered with mud to his kneecaps. On his way to the ambulance he noted that the cab’s windshield had exploded, and that many of the fragments were liberally splashed with dried blood. There was no sign of anyone at all. The rain-damp dirt road was furiously torn with motorcycle tracks.
The muffled sound of Dewey’s power saw echoed from inside the smashed ambulance. Oscar trudged to the back and looked inside. Dewey had given up on his attempt to saw through the handcuffs, and was sawing through the slotted metal stanchion of the stretcher frame. He bent the metal frame and slipped the cuffs through.
Oscar helped