Run Just a Little Bit Faster - Amanda Underwood

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photo by Jan Roger Johannesen

Run Just a Little Bit Faster

by Amanda Underwood

The call came in just as we took our first bite of lunch. Coffee splashed as both Davis and I lunged to our feet and tripped towards the door. I made it through first and darted out so fast I almost knocked my skull against the edge of the mech sitting in wait mode by the door.

“Keyed in.” I heard him grunt from behind me.

I wasn’t about to wait for the information. It took forty-five seconds for the Pelican to cycle up, and we’d been squatting on pavement for almost three hours. Our bird was crouched at the far edge of vertpad twelve, bay doors open and waiting for us.

The Pelicans are just what they sound like: ungainly looking vertical take-off and landing planes driven entirely by maneuverable jets. A wide bottomed undercarriage held the medical bay and room enough for fifteen bodies at full load. We were at full load more often than not.

“Engines on-line. All systems green.” I told my partner as he closed the bay doors and I eased back on the joystick.

He wasn’t paying any attention to me as he ran through his own pre-flight checklist; cardiac monitors on stand-by, IV fluids in line and flowing, and plenty of coag warm in their bags. “I’m go.”

“Roger that.” The Pelican thrust her body up off the vertpad without any elegance. She looked more like a bird that should have become wingless, and in truth, she became airborne through sheer power. But she was the stanchion of an Ambulance Corps that couldn’t get through the gridlock of the Hub in standard four wheel ambulances. “Unit Fiver-Two in the air.” I broadcast to the tower.

“Roger that, Fiver-Two. Be advised, you are the only unit responding to this ten car.”

I frowned. We were three miles from the accident and heavy traffic was slowing despite mechs working to reroute vehicles through the overpasses. Every mile a vertpad jutted out from the concrete bypass like a red-flagged skin tag. The pads were reserved for our Pelicans, but more and more often they were standing empty, a victim of budget cuts even when the traffic kept getting worse.

At least the weather was nice. I don’t usually have a preference, but I’ll be the first to admit, at least to myself, that cold weather makes my prosthetic hand and leg ache something terrible.

I know it’s psychosomatic, but it still hurts. It hurts too when I see the remains of shuttle jumpers spread across one hundred feet of pavement, but I keep that to myself, the psychdocs don’t need the work.

It’s an effort to remind myself that not every accident is the result of a shuttle jumper. Once you’ve lived through one, it’s all you think of. Falls which are the exception, rather than the rule, in a sport that is our rebellion against traffic and the Hub. Youths outfitted with the same mag-grips that we wear in the Corps. They are designed to help medics crawl across mangled wreckage but they work equally well on those jumping from car to shuttle. Unless you miss, then nothing but luck and pavement hold your future.

I can feel my eyes start to pinch from the memories, and I look back over the traffic, now completely stalled.

Davis is on it immediately. “Central, this is Fiver-Two. Traffic is slowing into the Core. Additional two car collision at Artery Alpha One.”

“Copy.” The dry voice echoes through both our headsets. “We’ll send a mech to check. Continue to the main accident.”

“Jumpers?” Davis asked as he saw the tense set of my shoulders and came to the logical conclusion.

“Negative. Some idiot blew a tire.”

Davis looks back at me, and I don’t need any psychic tendencies to peel away the layers. He’s as glad as I am that there aren’t any shuttle jumpers on this run. I can always hide my reaction until we get back to our small apartment just off the Hub, but it’s hard.

Ten years ago I was spread across the pavement. The only reason I didn’t die was that friction cauterized everything worth saving.

I’ve paid my dues to the concrete god, and I shouldn’t owe these dying wounded anything. But it dredges up things from the bottom of my mind, regrets I’ve sworn I don’t have.

A flick of my fingertips raps out a sharp stattaco beat just once before I catch myself. Bom-badda-badda-bom.

“There it is.” I’m too shrill as I try to cover my slip.

The Pelican arcs toward the jam, but the ten-car estimate was too low. I can see almost twenty vehicles crumpled in the inner lanes. The mechs are already working, levering off doors and giving basic first aid, but a machine can only do so much.

“Get the kits.” I shout to him as I bring the Pelican down. We touchdown, I slam the standby switch as Davis, and I head out the door simultaneously.

The Hub is a two hundred mile highway around the Core but that doesn’t do it justice. Interchanges, arches, and overpasses weave in and out of the main flow in a surprisingly complex knot work of concrete highways. It’s the only thing that can handle twenty-four hour rush hours as the three hundred million Hub-born commute to work. The politicians talk about installing a public transportation system based on the Core’s perfect city without cars. It never gets very far because it costs more to build than the inconvenience is worth. After all, only Hub-born use the Hub. I guess the Core thinks it’s our problem, and in a sense, they’re right. No one forced us here, we walked willingly into the trap.

At the rear of the snarl, mechs shuttle traffic onto alternate routes all the way around the grid. In the midst of it, Davis and I work as fast as the mechs can cut drivers and passengers free. They slice through steel in seconds, and we’re right behind them in triage.

We always start at the back of a lane because the likelihood for survivors is higher. We’ve carted up twelve LOA civilians for transport to All Saints and I secure them onboard the Pelican as Davis tries to help a man that we’ve triaged as non-salvageable. It’s useless; he’ll go with the rest of the DOAs on the mechs.

“One minute.” I key him in to lift-off.

“On my way.”

I run through the abbreviated pre-flight even though my head hurts. I wouldn’t be doing this job except that I have no choice. There’s nothing else I can do. And I realize that my hand is doing it again. Bom-badda-badda-bom. Bom-badda-badda-bom.

God, I hate when it aches like that.

I know this is a dream but I can’t stop it.

The Hub has twelve lanes of driving traffic and three lanes of mass transit shuttles. The shuttles fly by at just over one hundred and twenty miles an hour. If you’re on the roof of a car or van you hear the slight buzz as they come up and then overtake you. At those speeds you’d think it would look faster but it doesn’t.

Every jump is the same. It happens in stop time. One second you’re waiting. And then you jump.

There’s no time for prayer.

There’s no time for contemplation.

There’s no time to think.

You either land – or you don’t.

I’ve known what awaits me since I was five years old; vocational training in the medical profession. I was gene-typed at birth for aptitude, and that diagnosis is one that won’t change. Everyone around me is the same. No matter what we think, our futures are set. It works better for the Core to have a certain supply of workers, because that’s our purpose, to serve them.

So why did some crazy kid dream up shuttle jumping? Uncertainty, chance, choice – take your pick.

I’m in position for this jump. And if we land it we’ll make the news from the Fields to the Core. How much more notoriety can you ask for?

It was my fault since the idea was mine, but Rack, as my jumping partner of three years, had egged me on to try the impossible. One base jump from car to shuttle. Then lunging across five feet of shuttle roof and jumping to the next shuttle. Another roof run and that last jump. We’re playing the odds which are completely against us. No one has ever jumped more than two.

When you’re young, you believe in the impossible. I’ve heard kids say that if they work hard enough they’ll make it into the Core, but later you realize the Core exists in isolation; Hub-born don’t belong there any more than we’d accept Field-born into our inner suburban circles.

This is how I know it is a dream. That day I didn’t think like this. That day I was alive with possibilities. A jump we trained five months for. If it was possible, we were the ones who’d do it.

I dialed down the mag-grips on my sneakers, too much would slow me down but not enough and I’d slide right off. Bom-badda-badda-bom. Bom-badda-badda-bom. The shuttles were coming. My counting beat was not Rack’s, he used a weird I-have-to-if-I-want-to-and-there’s-no-coming-back. The words always distracted me. Beats were what gave me wings.

The shuttle was there. I jumped. Two seconds. Bom-bom. And skittered and slid as I landed.

Badda-badda-bom. Bom-bom- Jump!!!

I made the second shuttle milliseconds ahead of Rack.

There are three feet of clearance between every shuttle. But each shuttle is different. You have to know how to judge them. You have to hope that one errant rock won’t slip from beneath your shuttle and throw you off. You always need extra clearance and the only way to get it is to run faster, jump harder, and stretch out every single inch of your body. That’s why the beats help. You’d better be psyched since there are no prizes for second best in this race. You jump your best until you’re done.

Third jump. I lost the beat.

But I made it – hanging with one shoe on the roof and both hands clinging to wind-blown metal. The mag-grips in my gloves screaming as I tried to dial them up with will-power alone. It doesn’t matter. Even in my dream the shuttle goes bouncing over that single stone.

Stop time clarifies everything but even in my dream I turn away from the memories.

In the end I’m not upset that I missed the jump. It’s the beat that I lost to the darkness that made me angry. A flat silence that sucked the life right out of me.

I, at least, woke up. Rack never did. He’d been hit by the group of shuttles that followed our own before he was bounced into traffic. At his funeral I stood outside but didn’t go in. It’s bad luck to look at road-kill. It could have been me.

“Last load in.” The shift manager patted me on the back as I stepped past him with a load of empty gurneys, equipped with hover power, they are as integral as the Pelicans. We’d never survive if we had to haul every body off the Hub. Between one and two hundred accidents a day wears out the toughest medic.

“You want to get a beer?”

“That’s okay.” Davis grabbed me by the hand before I could agree. “We have plans.”

The shift manager cocked one eyebrow at us. The grey hairs woven through the black did a little dance of disbelief. He’d always thought that we were a poor match.

“What are we doing?” I asked him as he pulled me out of the station.

“Come on.”

Davis is a good partner. We passed our medical exams in the same class and worked well together. It was natural that we partner together in our professional and personal lives. Neither of us questioned it. But there were times that I wished he understood what I’d lost.

He wouldn’t talk to me, not through the nine o’clock rush hour traffic. After flying the Pelicans it was hard to get back onto the Hub. The traffic grated on us and every little jerk of another car made both of us twitch like the accident was already happening. They say that medics are the best drivers on the Hub. Makes you wonder if every citizen shouldn’t do a stint in the Ambulance Corps.

He still hadn’t answered me as we changed clothes in our apartment. There isn’t a lot of room for quiet in a four hundred square foot apartment but he found the space for it. I gave up after twenty minutes and stretched out with my false foot propped on a sofa while he finished in the bathroom.

The leg looks pretty good just like my hand does. It’s built of a plastic composite that looks natural except where it reflects the light. I can’t argue. During rehabilitation they showed me pictures of old fashioned prosthetics made of steel and non-linked electronics. They always showed those pictures on the worst days when I wished I’d rolled under the wheels of the shuttle instead of just fell from one.

I can still run although I limp where the prosthetic chafes against the nub I’ve got left. I rarely go to the track though. Ten years have passed, yet every year that I can handle the accident a little bit better, green envy takes a firmer hold of my heart. The things I used to be able to do beat at me and eat away the edges of my patience. I used to be the best, and it burns so much that I’m relegated to a has-been with lots of war stories and yet no glory to carry around with me.

***

“Seela?” I hear his voice as he steps back out of the bathroom.

I don’t want to answer. There’s a beat bumping in the back of my head and I want to draw it out to its logical conclusion. Maybe I wasn’t ever a shuttle jumper for the adrenaline of the jump but because I’m addicted to the rhythms in my head. In another life I might have been a musician until my genes betrayed me.

“What?” I respond peckishly.

“I’m ready.”

“Oh.” I lurch upwards and place my prosthetic foot on the floor. He’s watching me with worried eyes, and I want to tell him that things are coming to a head now. The dreams are a new thing, but maybe he already knows. Davis always did understand me better than anyone except Rack.

***

In hindsight, it should have been clearer. Motives drive all of us. They drove us into the Metroplexes, for safety and security when nothing on the outside would protect us. We built the Cores, and the rich crawled into them. The Hubs grew up around the Cores as employees needed places to eat, live and shit that was close - but not too close - to the wealthy inner circle. And as we solidified into suburban strongholds we exiled the only ones we could, those even lower than us, out to the dangerous Fields.

I’ve never been to the Fields; no one I know has. Life out there is worse than the Hub. Here your greatest chance of dying occurs during the daily commute. Out there diseases strip the DNA right out of your cells and life expectancy hovers at thirty-five. Sure they provide us with agricultural commodities but the common consensus is always that we’d be better off without them.

We’d be better off without the Hub too, but no one is voting to fire bomb it.

Motives drive the world. My motives were somewhat dingy and tarnished by life. I wanted to work and flying the Pelican was the closest thing to a future I could envision. I’d fly that bird until she fell out of the sky and hope they gave me another one. No grander visions assailed me. I didn’t want to worry about not attaining them.

So Davis’ question during dinner didn’t just shock me. It was so far out of the question that I couldn’t even answer him. A baby?

After my own youth inside the Hub did I really want to bring another life into that endless cycle? Round and round, just like a spin around the Hub. Have a baby, raise it up to live the exact same life you’ve led, one with a future already delineated. No moving forward or back once you were on the route. Just around, and around, and around. A swishing falsetto beat that I don’t like. Beats should be straightforward, bass with a little bit of snare to drive the tempo.

He didn’t like my answer, and I found myself sleeping at the station for the first time since we partnered together. I traded my dress for something more comfortable but I could still feel my prosthetic. A solid haunting from my past.

I’d once had a dream that was something different than a 9-to-5 supporting the Core. But what made that a bad dream? I worried that over and over in my head. What made it a bad dream?

“Seela!!” A voice broke my reverie.

I hear it before she says anything else, the tiny drone that precedes every alarm. This one is going off all across the station. Every team, off-duty or not, turns toward the com as the data is keyed in to those of us listening.

A big accident during the four a.m. rush – really big. At least eight shuttle jumpers confirmed dead and mechs were unable to catalog the extent of it. Every lane was compromised. I didn’t hesitate as I ran for my Pelican.

I have enough bad dreams.

I slip as I climb over the crumpled hoods of seven vehicles smashed together, and pause to dial up the mag-grips on my sneakers. Falling onto the mass below me will add another injured to the hundreds we’re evac’ing out.

Concrete and twisted steel have macerated the occupants of the cars between them. Even the fail-safe electrical systems in the hybrids have failed, and I can smell gasoline burning as ozone sparks under the charge. Underneath the charcoaled odor are the screams of those conscious enough to feel pain. Cacophony doesn’t cover the chaos around us, and chaos doesn’t do it justice. This accident drips and bleeds with surreal abundance.

The collision has compacted this lane, and I try to reduce everything to clinical precision as I lurch over the smashed remnant of a body impaled upward. You can’t think about it any other way or the psychdocs will have you drugged so far out that you think you’re the next Messiah. A little bit of distance is the only saving grace in the Hub. I check for life, but when you can see the piece of metal that severed the aortic artery still protruding, it’s a measure of futility.

This accident is the worst I’ve ever seen. Pelicans on every vertpad for eight miles. Every Medical Center in the Hub is on alert and we’re loading up patients as fast as stand-by pilots can fly them out. There have been rumors over the open frequency that we’ll have to use mechs for LOAs unless we can get more teams in to help.

I’m slapping flatline decals on almost every car. The accident didn’t spare anyone. And the futility of it hammers into me. There’s nothing here to save.

It takes a bit of work to make it to the shuttle lanes. This is where we ferry the wounded, and there are teams everywhere trailing their sad baggage. A paramedic runs past me, and her last patient is so bad that blood is spilling off the gurney in fat arterial chunks. I turn to tell her, but she already knows.

I jog toward the front of the chaos, and it’s here, almost two hundred feet back when I see the smear that freezes the breath in my throat.

For a minute I forget where I am and remember the first time I saw a jumper die. A girl named Tweak when we were all just thirteen and I was still new to jumping. She’d missed her landing and cracked her skull against the shuttle as it passed her. Her only saving mercy was that she was dead before she hit the pavement.

I saw her die and still jumped because it was the only unknown left to us. The only dream we were allowed.

This accident is worse than Tweak’s death. They aren’t even comparable when Pelicans fly so close that their jets spray hair across my face. The sky is full of them and I hope to god that Air Traffic Control is on top of their game. The last thing we need is burning planes dropping from the sky.

The second shuttle ran into the one just ahead of it for reasons you can’t tell from looking at the twisted wreckage. Maybe the driver saw the jumper in his mirror and tried to use a burst of speed to get away; it had happened before. Maybe the jumper surprised him so much that he lost control. I’d never be able to ask him as there was a huge flatline decal stamped across what was left.

There were a few medics clustered around one of the bodies on the pavement. Four of us who saw a young first-timer trying to patch the body of a jumper who might as well be dead.

It only took a few seconds for the others to drift back into the frenetic flow of the accident while I stayed with her.

“Bag him while I stop the bleeding.” She pleaded.

I looked down. My medical training saw the corded muscle of his only limb where the road had flayed his clothes and skin right off of him. What was left was the body of a jumper, finely corded muscular fibers, now burnt black by friction. The other limbs were gone with pressure tourniquets bound in their place.

But that wasn’t what she was seeing. This wasn’t just another patient, but a young man with the remnants of a pink Mohawk above what used to be his face. He hadn’t been as lucky as me. Friction and sheering had deprived him of his limbs but hadn’t stopped the bleeding. He was dying.

His left eye had been obliterated but the other rolled toward me, and I was amazed that he was still conscious. Amazed and awed. Either he had phenomenal self-control or the pain was so great that his mind simply shut it down. I hoped for the latter.

I crouched down beside him so that he wouldn’t have to fight to focus.

“If you jump, you jump just a little bit farther. If you stretch, you stretch just a little bit longer.” I said softly to him as the medic cursed me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he would appreciate this more than saving him.

Tears welled up in that good eye and mixed with blood before they lost their battle to gravity and cascaded down his cheek.

My hand was on his chest, the prosthetic one, and I gently rapped out the beat that had guided me so long ago. Not fast like I was waiting for a shuttle, but a slow dirge waiting for the end. Booom-baaa-da-baaa-da-booom. Booom-baaa-da-baaa-da-booom. These were the things that he understood.

It was only chance that had brought me here, but I was glad it had happened. Booom-ba--booom--baaa---boooo… His heartbeat faded under mechanical fingertips.

“If you run,” I told him. “Run just a little bit faster.”

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