Bomb Girl

I wrote this maybe eight years ago, kept it, fooled around with it, thought it was the start of something, and finally decided it wasn’t. So I’m letting it go, with a very light editing pass. Parts of it I still really like. - b

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Clover Road
International City #4
Tabuk Province

The house on Clover Road was a massive, Spanish Mission-style structure surrounded by immaculate grounds and a walled perimeter you needed a tank to breach. It was one of twenty similar homes in this enclave, one of a half dozen enclaves that comprised Angie Rios and Ben Casey’s security sector.

They pulled to a stop three houses down and got out. The air conditioning in the Yukon was working hard. The internal thermometer read seventy. Outside, it was a sweltering one hundred ten. Making that transition in full tactical gear was something the body never got used to. Angie leaned against the vehicle and took shallow breaths. Ben opened the hatchback and handed her a liter of water. She drank half and dumped the rest over her head. She’d be dry in thirty seconds.

The street was silent. The entire sector was deserted and had been for months. Angie and Ben had broken protocol a few times, wandering into a couple of the mansions, seeing what they could see, and pilfering what was left in the refrigerators after the residents evacuated the city.

The Brightburn Group held a contract with the entire city, one worth tens of millions per quarter, to police these wealthy neighborhoods while the residents fled to cooler climates, away from the dust storms and coastal flooding and temperatures hot enough to liquefy tarmac. The owners of Fifteen Clover were a family of nine, no doubt kicking back in their Banff ski chalet, comforted in the knowledge that highly trained military contractors were keeping an eye on things back home.

To what end, Angie had no idea. No one was coming back. The city was doomed. Two generations ago, there was nothing here but desert. Oil money and hubris conspired to construct a metropolis that flew in the face of geological and climate realities, one of the great three planned cities of the Kingdom. Now, scorching winds blew sand across highways and down streets, forming heavy drifts at intersections and pushing up against the sides of buildings. The grit found a way into homes, offices, retail spaces, and air-conditioning ductwork. People’s health suffered. Water grew scarce, then nearly nonexistent, as did the petrol supply.

The same thing was happening in hundreds of locations around the globe. The emergency climate accords signed by the G-8 dispatched humanitarian armies to help in the most critical areas to assist the most vulnerable populations in relocation. Those more fortunate hired Brightburn.

Angie and Ben walked the internal perimeter of Fifteen Clover, seeing nothing they didn’t see yesterday or last week.

-

They flew the bomb suit in for her the previous day, the sole passenger on a corporate drone. Angie Rios was starting to generate headlines back in the States, and images of her in their suit would be solid gold PR.

It was a Limited-Edition Tesla x Thales Advanced Shock Suit. It was beautiful, a miracle of engineering that probably cost more than Angie’s cop father had earned in his entire career. While the UN forces suffered heatstroke in the desert, the Brightburn operators lived in an entire floor of the Four Seasons. Angie dragged the case into her private suite and locked her door. As expensive as it was, it was still technically a production model, and required modification.

Outside, the temperature that day had hit a record 130°F, with winds steady at thirty miles per hour, gusting to seventy. The hotel air conditioning did its job. She sacrificed a night’s sleep to get the suit to where she needed it, and her timing was impeccable. At 5am the call came in - some asshole packed a bunch of Semtex into a plastic rolling suitcase and shut the entire airport down.

-

The Brightburn Group had been hired by a consortium of wealthy families determined to flee their homes in comfort. Within an hour of arrival in the city, Angie and her team secured the airport on behalf of their clients. During the three hours per day when weather permitted, re-purposed passenger jets loaded with furniture, vehicles, private art collections, and entire extended families lifted off to second, third, or fourth homes.

Had there still existed a central government or a functioning police force, Brightburn would never have attempted such a brazen takeover of a sovereign nation’s infrastructure. Nor could they have held it, had they met any sort of organized resistance. Angie Rios was one of forty-five operators working in shifts, guaranteed thirty-five thousand a month in high risk pay on top of their base yearly salary. Angie, as the sole bomb disposal technician in her unit, enjoyed a fifty-K bonus per pay cycle.

She’d originally signed with Brightburn with the expectation of being nothing more than a glorified security guard, a tiny cog in the vast machine of global conflict. It was a steady paycheck and a quick escape from her neighborhood and the pressures and expectations of a patriarchal family.

She was small and introverted, but she had some skills – she could run far and lift heavy, her heart rate stayed unnaturally low no matter what, and she was quick on the uptake. But it wasn’t until one day on patrol when she hopped out of her Humvee and stomach-crawled to an IED and cut the correct wire and saved Brightburn twenty million in hardware and training hours that they thought maybe they had someone special on their hands.

Well, at first, they thought she was just reckless, and only pure luck had saved the day. So, they put her inside a simulator, its A.I. generating models of random explosives ranging from DIY street devices to chemical to high-end digital WMDs. She didn’t know how or why, but she always understood what she was looking at and how to turn it off. She never broke a sweat, no matter what stresses they put her through.

They started to call her Bomb Girl. After she saved their lives a few more times, they stopped teasing her. She became a sort of talisman, a good luck charm. They protected her, they mothered her, they made allowances for her moods. As long as they were near her, they feared no IED.

Angie hated every bit of it.

-

She rolled up on the airport in her Tahoe, the bomb suit loaded in the back. The rest of the squad was already on site and set a perimeter. She knew they had drones in the air, and cellphone jammers were active, neutralizing any remote triggering of the bomb.

The city was already hot, besting yesterday’s high by three degrees and the sun had barely crested the horizon. Leaving the air-conditioned Tahoe was brutal. It stopped Angie in her tracks, and she was forced to take several moments to acclimate. The air seared her lungs, and she tasted grit on her tongue. Her partner Ben Casey handed her a liter bottle of water. It was roughly the same temperature as the air around them. She drank it down.

“There’s a 747 set to leave in twenty or be towed back into the hangar. The tarmac’s already getting a little squishy,” Ben said. The ideal window for outgoing jets was between 2am and 430am. Angie took a minute and studied the line of Mercedes piled up behind the perimeter. Their clients, the ones waiting to board. An extended family of minor local royalty headed to the relative safety of their British Columbia compound. There were close to three dozen of them, all irate.

“How’d a bomb get inside?” Angie asked.

Ben shrugged. “People sneak in all the time to pick through the suitcases and shit left on the carousels. Maybe they popped this one open, saw the bomb, and bugged out.”

A loud, sustained honk came from one of the Mercedes. It only stopped when a Brightburn operator brought his HK416 up and aimed it at the car. The driver of the car laughed harshly and shouted something in heavily accented English before laying on the horn a few more seconds. It sounded like “what are we paying you for?” which was a completely valid complaint, as far as Angie was concerned.

“Or maybe someone dropped it off fresh to keep these pricks on the ground,” Ben said.

If they did, it was working. “Watch my back,” she said, irritated. She did not hold the locals in contempt. Ben Casey, like most of the squad, was recruited straight out of the military, and that was the culture that shaped them. Angie was the only “civilian” hire in the squad and early on was pretty lonely. She tried to get close to Ben, because when he wasn’t around the others, he reverted back to the kid she imagined he was back home, in high school, maybe. He was quiet and kind, sometimes a little sweet.

But now, he heard the edge in her voice and gave it right back to her. “Hurry up,” he said, turning his attention back to the perimeter.

Angie stripped down to her underwear and climbed into the modified bomb suit. She’d taken the helmet, a transparent dome designed to give its wearer full use of her peripheral vision, and spray-painted it in matte black liquid Kevlar, leaving only a narrow front-facing slit to minimize distractions. She disabled the in-suit audio communications in favor of a text-only HUD, since she didn’t like to talk while working and anyway went into every job with death metal blasting through her earbuds.

She’d snipped the ends off her gloves for finer control, coating her fingertips in the same liquid Kevlar. She replaced her light tac boots with her personal pair of double-soled, steel-toe Doc Martens, laced tight. She put on a pair of shatter-proof steel-framed glasses and slipped a high impact custom mouthguard between her teeth. She turned the volume up, hefted her kit bag, and headed inside the terminal.

The music thundering into her ears was not to pump her up, but to negate the environment around her. That plus the muted comms turned the ABS X into a decent sensory deprivation chamber. She neither hurried nor hesitated. The job, a pink plastic rolling suitcase, was fifty meters ahead of her, and that was all she cared about.

U ON? flashed in red VR in front of her eyes. Ben checking the comms. She poked at the keypad on her left forearm: NMUU, short for No More Unless Urgent, and right now there was not much this side of an incoming nuclear strike that she would qualify as urgent. Bomb techs were allowed behavior that would get others fired, and Angie was no exception. She was guarded and tough. She demanded a lot from others while on the job and was only slightly friendlier off the clock. Ben shrugged off her dark moods and attitude and always had her back. He was the only one she was close to.

She left fresh prints in the drifting sand as she walked across the baggage claim. The roller was open, revealing a jumble of plastic explosive, ziplock bags of broken ceramic shrapnel, and a confusing tangle of wires. A vintage Motorola alphanumeric pager was feeding it power, keeping it active. It looked sloppy as hell, and her first step was to determine if that was what it actually was, or if there was hidden intelligence behind it. She wondered if the cell jammers would stop a pager signal. They had to, right?

She updated Ben with a C4 SHRAP MED YIELD text, attaching several quick photos for the database. If the bomb detonated and took her with it, at least they’d know what it looked like. She pulled a pair of wire cutters from her kit bag and started to prune away the obvious red herrings.

TRBL flashed on her heads-up. She set her cutters down and pivoted her torso towards the exterior wall and its floor-to-ceiling windows. The wealthy family was surging forward through the perimeter fence, challenging the Brightburn soldiers. A woman was screaming in Ben’s face, forcing him to take a couple steps back. She couldn’t remember ever seeing fear on his face before.

She picked up the wire cutters again and went back to work. Her job was the bomb and only the bomb. Her music thundered in her ears. She cut away more garbage wire. She was getting somewhere. Order was emerging from the chaos.

She risked another glance towards Ben and caught sight of a fine mist around his head. Not red, not blood spray, but a sickly yellow. It was mace. The matriarch of the family was macing Ben. He wheeled away, colliding with the plate glass of the exterior window. She saw muzzle flashes. The glass shattered. Several bodies fell. She couldn’t see Ben.

She turned back to the bomb. Trust her partner. Trust the team.

But everything had gone wrong. Her clarity was gone. She stared at the bomb, suddenly not sure what to do next. Her HUD stayed silent. She couldn’t think.

She pivoted around again. The wealthy family was now inside, running through the baggage claim area, desperate to get through and to the runway. They ran straight past Angie and the pink plastic rolling bomb without even a glance in her direction. She was invisible to them, she thought, just another of the hired help.

The current metal song came to an abrupt end, and in the two second pause between tracks she heard the trill of an incoming call. Thinking she mistakenly re-activated her comms, she hoped it was Ben. But she was still muted, and her HUD was inert. The call was coming in on the pager, wired to the bomb. She had fractions of a second, if that.

She picked a wire, closed her cutters around it, and squeezed hard.

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