The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [15]
The finger coiled round the trigger, slowed down as if falling down gravity slopes. Mativi winced.
The gun clunked and did nothing.
Ngoyi stared at his uncooperative weapon tearfully.
"I must warn you," lied Mativi, "that I led my university karate team."
"You should leave," said Ngoyi. "I think I recognized the municipal sanitation inspector's car following the bus I took down here. He had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his parcel shelf."
The road surface rose and fell under the Hyundai like a brown ocean swell, testing its suspension to the limit. Mativi heard things grounding that probably ought not to.
"Can I drop you off anywhere?" He braked gently as the traffic hit the blast craters around the freeway/railway junction, which had been a prime military target. Robot repair units were still working on it, and their operators did not pay much attention to cars that weighed one tenth what a mine clearance tractor did. The streetlights seemed to be out on this stretch of road, and the only illumination came from car headlights bouncing up and down like disco strobes. The robot tractors did not need visible light to see.
"The stadium will do fine. I can catch a bus out to Ndjili from there."
"You live that far out of town?"
"We don't all live on Geneva salaries, you know." Ngoyi's face blanched suddenly as he stared into the evening traffic. "Stop the car! Handbrake turn! Handbrake turn!"
Mativi stared into the traffic. "Why?"
"Four secret police cars, dead ahead!"
It was true, and Mativi cursed himself for not having seen it. The SUVs stood out like aluminium islands in the sea of polyurea AfriCars. Each one of them would have cost ten times an ordinary Kinshasan's annual salary.
"It's not a roadblock," said Mativi.
"So I should care? They're out looking for you!"
"... looks like an escort. They're not even coming down this road. They're turning on to the freeway to Djelo-
Binza. They're escorting that big, heavy launch tractor ... one of the ones designed to carry clutches of heavy ballistic missiles out to the pads at Malebo." He peered out of the driver-side window. "The one whose suspension is scraping the ground —"
He did a handbrake turn and left the road in the direction of Djelo-Binza. The suspension hardly noticed the difference. The only reason people drove on roads any more in Kinshasa was because the road was slightly more likely to have been checked for explosives.
There was only desultory hooting when he rejoined the road. Leaving the road and rejoining it after a four-wheel-drive shortcut was common. The four-by-fours were clearly visible now, crammed with whatever men the police chiefs had been able to get their hands on at short notice - some in military uniform, some in T-shirts, some with government-issue sidearms, some with war-era AKM's, yawning, pulled out of bed in the early hours.
The crawler was taking up three lanes of traffic, drawing a horde of honking AfriCars behind it like a bridal train. Despite the horns, the crawler was probably not moving much slower than the cars would have done - the expressway was still a mass of blast craters.
"I can't believe this," said Mativi, hugely affronted. "How can they think they can haul a million-tonne object across town without me noticing?"
Ngoyi stared. "You think that thing's got - things on it?"
Mativi nodded. "One of the things is on board - one of the containers. They're taking it across town because they can't bear to lose it ... I wonder why." He winked at Ngoyi. "Maybe they're in the pay of the office of sanitation?" The car plunged into yet another black void unilluminated by its headlights. "JESUS, I wish those streetlights were working." He blinked as the car bonnet surged up again into the light.
Then he realized. Not only were there no streetlights, there were also no lights in the city around the road.
"That's it, isn't it?"
"What?"
"They're going to the power company. You dumb fucks have been plugging power into it as well. Haven't you?"
Ngoyi hesitated,