Outrun Stories #34

“This is it then?” She turns to me with that smile, the cloudless, fiery orange sky behind her and that glow of blonde hair. What’s it been now since I first saw that smile? Five weeks? Five years? Who knows, we’ve been caught in a moment for so long now, the two of us, the road and the plan.

“Yeah, this has to be it.” I eventually break the silence taking her part of the heist out of the trunk of the Ferrari.

“Everything we’ve been through, everything that we’ve done to get this far and finally make the score and that’s it? You’re just going to walk away?”

“What else is there?” I lower my head and pull on my leather gloves and slide my aviators onto my nose, flicking their stream on at the same time. “Look, the feeds are coming in now, they’ve got our number, they’re closing in on us every second.”

“I don’t give a fuck about them. I give a fuck about us,” she walks over to me, pulling me into her, the scent on her neck, the warmth of her cheek against mine.

Got myself in too deep this time, this was supposed to be a simple job. Pick up the stims, ride them hard through the lateral plane, use her imbedded Krono-ballistics to take down the firewalls and bring the score up to the surface. Took longer than we might have expected, and we caught a shit load of heat during the trip, but we’re here now. Stood on the edge of the desert, the RAW-BLAK meta-material in the case and inside it, all the data our clients could ever need.

“Just drop it,” I say. “There’s no future here, we had a job, we both needed each other and our particular set of skills for it, but that’s it. We ride alone.”

She pulls herself into me even tighter. “Jack, we make a good team, sooner you accept that, sooner we can get on making money.”

“My whole career, I’ve been alone. Sure, there’s been a partnership here, a quick team there for a solid turn around, but I’ve always walked away, and that’s the way I like it. That’s my life, Sandra. There’s people who work in teams, and there’s people who work alone. I’m alone, that’s my choice.”

“You got no choice any more, Jack.” She pulls her head back, keeping her arms around my waist. “You think some cheap three-line explanation is just going to make me leave? You gotta face this one, you’re not alone any more, you don’t have to be alone any more. It’ll take time, but you’ll grow used to it.”

Shit, this woman. “One more job.” I say slowly.

“That’s right, Jack. Just one more job. Just one more job,” she smiles that smile at me, and there’s a flash of blue on the golden horizon, that heat we caught is getting close.

“Get in,” I motion to her as we both slide into the F40, I fire up its injector engine and hit the accelerator, hammering it into the desert, with a bit of luck we’ll make the client before sunset, then we’ll see what happens next.