Imitation is flattery, Disney. Strike me not.
They found the Fountain of Youth. The year is now. The guns have never been more fun.
Welcome to Pirates of the Caribbean: Age of the Uzi.
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Fire away!
Rob hated Allen, and Allen hated Rob.
They were trapped together in a six foot box, with only the flitting fairy-lights of the roadside slat reflectors for company as they forged south toward San Francisco, only the whirr of the mildewed air conditioner and the hum of heavy tires to warm the sullen silence. Allen lounged in the passenger seat, his Kevlar vest stuffed behind him on a pile of food wrappers and pop bottles, his Glock in its holster tucked inside. Rob, glassy-eyed, was steering the armored truck with his knee.
Dozens of semi-trucks had passed them that night. Thousands in their careers. This one passed them, crossed back into their lane, then slowed, its rear safety lights glaring through their bullet-proof wind-shield. Rob glanced to the side and found another truck, trailer-free and fleet-footed, riding their left bumper. "Buddy, that's just rude," he grumbled.
"Whoa!" shouted Alan.
In front of them, the trailer's back hatch shuddered and popped, gaping at the top, held in place only by turbulent back-wind. The hatch hinged down suddenly, and telescoped into a huge slab of steel sparking over the freeway.
"Fifty feet," hissed the semi's driver's headset. He glanced left and right, watching the elephant-ear mirrors for any sign of the truck. Just a corner on the left side. He inched left, and the corner vanished, hidden by the trailer. "They're braking. Seventy—urk!" The semi nosed down, all its weight thrown forward as it slowed to match the truck. "Six feet left." They corrected, heading the truck off. "Fifty feet. Chaser's in position." Behind them, the trailerless semi had dropped back to ride up directly on the cash truck's tail. "Six feet right. Forty feet. Center. Thirty. Six left. Thirty. Center. Twenty, ramp at five. Five right. Center."
Rob swerved, throwing out a storm of curses, the semi trailer dancing in front of him, the truck behind them looming, closing, tapping their bumper. Suddenly the cash truck lurched onto the ramp, Rob braking frantically, Alan making braking motions with his foot. The front end rose. They were up—on—the road raced by below—then the featureless dark of the trailer. Their tires exploded and they sank to the rims. Behind them, the ramp whirred back up and latched them in.
"Nice knowing you," Rob hissed, struggling to find his gun in the pocket of the door.
"Bite me," snarled Alan. Twisted behind his back, his fingers slipped on his Kevlar. "Get up, get over here you effing sack of lead." A strap hooked on a seat lever. "I'll kill you!" he told the body armor. "Let go!"
Rob found his gun, patted his pocket for his phone, and tried to call for backup. There was no cellular reception inside the trailer.
Rob dropped his cell phone when a halogen lamp flicked on, blinding them from ten feet away, and they got their first and only look at their surroundings. The trailer walls were very close and tight. In front of them was a five-foot pile of dirt, presumably to stop the truck from driving forward. Behind that, in the last available space, was a plastic tent.
Like a survivor from a mutant apocalypse flick, a grubby man in an imposing full-face gas mask climbed to the top of the dirt pile and waved at them.
"REST YOUR HANDS IN FRONT OF YOU," boomed a voice. The man in the mask flinched at the noise, and Rob and Allen looked around for the source. Just overhead dangled a big black box, an amplifier. "CONSIDER THIS AS…FRIENDLY ADVICE. DROP YOUR PISTOLS OUTSIDE MY TRUCK."
"His truck?" asked Rob, meeting an equally bewildered road-kill-deer gaze from Alan.
"YE MAY FOLLOW THE PISTOLS WITH ANY AND ALL KEYS THAT OPEN MY TRUCK," continued the amplifier. The trailer jostled and slanted; the man on the dirt pile spread out his feet and surfed through the corner. The road grew bumpy, the truck leaned forward, and the trailer slowly stopped.
"CARLOS, GIVE OUR GUESTS A WAVE." Gas-mask-man waved again, and pointed to a big red air canister on a hand truck just outside the plastic tent. "THAT RED PIPE HOLDS FORTY POUNDS OF CHLORINE GAS," said the voice, with relish. "IF YE CAN'T PART WITH YER GUNS AND KEYS, CARLOS WILL FIRE UP HIS THERMAL LANCE AND TAKE 'EM OFF YOU IN TWENTY MINUTES."
"Twenty minutes?" asked Rob stupidly. "What's he mean twenty minutes?"
"YE SEE," said the voice, and here it laughed, a coarse mad laugh that jolted the hairs on their necks, "YE'LL BE EASIER TO SEARCH WHEN YER DEAD."
People are easier to threaten when they're alive. Rob and Alan had complied, crawled out of the truck, and found themselves hitchhiking to San Francisco in their underwear ten minutes later, with no leads to tell the police but some phony license plate numbers for two unmarked Mac trucks, and panicked memories of four men in gas masks and dungarees.
When the semis pulled over at their next stop, a tiny side road where the men had stashed a small fleet of getaway cars, when they'd stood clustered around the back of the trailer for the dramatic reveal and the old seadog Barbossa had unlocked and flung open the cash truck's hatch with a triumphant cry of "Feast yer eyes, gents!" then, once the lamp-lit frenzy of opening boxes of bills and defusing paint bombs had died down and settled into the steady tension of counting and adding, the band of robbers grew furious and wretched as the pair of victims.
The take was fairly pathetic.
All small bills—helpful—unmarked and non-serial—a godsend, the reason they'd picked this truck—but only just sufficient to pay for the cars, semis, and equipment, and to somewhat compensate them for the months of preparation and practice runs they'd spent on their leader's instruction. The string had been under the impression that they'd be set for life.
"Two grand," repeated Sikes.
"Two grand three, countin' the jewels in the caskets," Barbossa corrected him. He'd thought it appropriate to be the one with the calculator, to give the men the good news, but that was before they'd started counting.
"Two grand apiece for us. Four hundred for you, plus a thirty-thousand-dollar truck."
"That is the agreement." The six others had left the cash boxes and were closing in, backing Sikes. He was a big scarred man, ex-SEAL, dishonorably discharged, turned to the kidnap-and-ransom game in Mexico. Unfortunately for Barbossa, Charles Sikes had personally rounded up half the team.
Barbossa stood and spun round to put the halogen lamp at his back, his weathered face shadowed under his big fedora and the robbers squinting at him into the bright yellow glare. Sikes grinned, a knowing grin that Barbossa recognized from himself.
Out at the edge of the light, nothing but dead grass and lumpy dry trees. Between Barbossa and the cars, seven armed men, most of them killers.
"I know a guy," said Sikes. That was the problem with him; he always 'knew a guy.' "He'll give me ten grand for a five-ton truck, more for the semis. San Fran."
A change in plans this late in the heist was never a good sign. Neither was the semicircle the men advanced in. "So Charlie wants the truck. And ye expect him to share out the proceeds?" Barbossa demanded, stalking back and forth before the men, arms akimbo. "We're all disappointed—"
"You, no," said one of the Mexican contingent.
"Don't presume to know what's in me mind, boy!" Barbossa snarled.
Sikes stepped forward. "Don't get your briefs in a wad; I wanna hear what he says." He faced the speaker. "Go on."
The man swallowed and glanced around; his companions were tense, hostile—but not toward him. "You took the truck in your contract. You have American police angry with you, many many years in jail waiting for you. Sikes, we work with him, we have trust."
"Thanks, 'Nando," said Sikes. "We do have trust. We all got trust. But this guy—he's on the outside, lookin' for a way in. And that's no good."
Eyes flicking from Sikes' tense cat-smile to the cheated scowls of the bandits and American dissolutes who stood behind him, Barbossa saw a bullet in his future and decided to be the one holding the gun. His fingers whipped out his Colt and set it rock-steady in Sikes' face.
A shot roared. It wasn't his.
Not again, he couldn't help thinking, and in the instant after the shot, Sikes pulled out a nondescript 9-millimeter in his left hand and twisted the Colt away with his right. Barbossa looked left. Fast Hands, the phlegmatic American beanpole, stood slumped, a third gun dangling easily at his side.
He moved his arm, and felt a shred of his coat dragging out of a hole in the side of his chest. A hot stream followed; something fluttered in his brain, something blind and broken-winged, thrashing and clawing behind his eyes. The world started dancing.
The Latin mercenaries rounded on the shooter, snapping in Spanish, damning Fast Hands and his mother and his brother for keeping him alive. They were killers when the situation called for it, but murder was a hazard they hadn't planned for this job. Paul, the brother, grabbed on to Fast Hands' gun arm, dragging him backward. Hands allowed himself to be led, incurious as an old cow or an idiot. Crazy chit.
Barbossa would have laughed.
He stood rigidly, feet like iron weights, praying he wouldn't tip over, as the mercenaries shouted and Paul and Hands backed away toward the cars. His free hand darted for his Taurus.
Sikes got there faster, and grabbed that gun, too. Then he shoved Barbossa hard in the chest. He thudded to a seat, the wind rushing out of him, and when he tried to get the air back, it wouldn't come. He sat still, gasping shallowly.
There was a tingling in his legs, his face, the back of his throat. His heart stuttered. A breeze chilled him, lingered, began to sink into his skin. With his lungs collapsing, a deep and frustrating terror left him paralyzed as Sikes covered him with a gun, patted him down, and took his derringer, knives, and falchion.
Finally Sikes stood over him, shading him from the glaring lamp, watching the others with an affected resignation that made his obvious triumph nearly palatable. He glanced aside to watch the shouting match by the cars, gritting his jaw in annoyance. "Hey," he barked. "Yo! Muchachos! Ten-HUT!"
The mercenaries left off badgering the brothers, and trailed back over to check the stiff. They all made a watchful little ring, the three Mexicans and Sikes, the American shooters, and the odd man out, a rat-faced ex-civilian.
The Mexicans crossed themselves. They all saw there was nothing to be done; they'd made enough chest wounds to know.
Barbossa couldn't stop gasping. The hand on his wound was shivering and slick with blood. "Nice shooting, Hands," said Sikes. "Kinda wish you'd waited for my call, but it had to come to this eventually. It's nothin' we can't handle." The mercenaries looked skeptical, but Sikes shrugged them off. "He's not a contributor, y'know? Reminds me of my CO." They chuckled. "Just leave him here, Hands can scratch his gun so they don't match the bullet. We'll never hear of him again. Meet at the garage?"
Barbossa reached for an inner coat pocket with his free hand and was greeted by a volley of clicking hammers and a nest of handguns aimed at his head. Talking didn't seem to work anymore, so he turned his coat out to face them and revealed an engraved hip flask. His blood-slick right hand slid helplessly on the screw-cap.
Sikes frowned. "Now that's no fair." He gave the men a sad, sympathetic smile. "Can't deny a dying man his last drink," he said, and opened the flask with a sharp twist.
Barbossa seized it and clamped his teeth around the opening, then tipped it up, the world going hazy around him and blood bubbles plopping from his side. No time to worry about dosage. He could barely swallow.
"All right, that's enough," said Sikes, after allowing him a moment of choking and gulping, and knocked the flask to the dry grass where the last few tablespoons spilled in the dust. Barbossa smiled at him as he squeezed his hand back over his wound: a jovial grin wedded to a death glare in the eyes. He flipped Sikes the bird, and received a sharp kick in the jaw.
"Finish him?" asked Hands, cold as a dentist. His eyes were wide and dark.
"Nah," said Sikes. "He'll die. And I don't want to explain to a judge why a bullet was in his skull, ya know? Not that it'll pan out that way, but you got to leave yourself some room. Let's give him his privacy; he's earned it."
They split up, one man to a vehicle, and caravanned back to the highway, headed for a big chop-shop where they would dispose of the trucks and open the security boxes that they hadn't had the tools for. The stolen cash truck had to stay in the trailer, both for concealment's sake and because they'd gutted the dashboard in case it hid a GPS transmitter.
Dawn wasn't for another four hours. Barbossa lay on his injured side, gasping uncontrollably like a landed fish, like a kitten in a river. The lamp was gone and the cars rumbled away, and the night closed round like death.
He waited.
A half hour later, he took a deep breath in and out, stared up at the stars until they stopped fuzzing and dancing in his vision, and staggered to his feet.
The gang had stowed enough cars at the ranch for each man to ride back alone. With Barbossa down, one ratty Geo Metro was left over, waiting in the field, ready to run.
Barbossa popped the hood, hotwired it, and blazed south. He cranked up the heat, pressing one hand to the vent to beat off the chill in his core, and began to smile. His ribs ached and itched like they'd been rubbed in fiberglass, and a hacking cough dogged him down the highway, but he felt the mad laugh pulling at his throat. He'd survived the first ten minutes; by the time he reached San Fran he'd be good as new.
Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion! And please tell me what you thought.