Fear and Loathing on the Maryland Turnpike

An after-action report addendum by Doubloonseven. 

Agents IMOGEN and INDIGO have just concluded their surveillance of a departing flight at Smyrna Airport. Onboard, the Maryland Skoptsy’s delegation for a probable trade deal of occult artifacts in Colorado Springs. The two are taking a rental car down a rural highway, the surrounding woods and clearings draped in a thick layer of snow.

IMOGEN glances in the rear-view mirror. A pair of headlights behind them. INDIGO, her eyes ahead, spots something spooling out across the road before them, hard to make out against the infrequent lighting of orange street lamps. A garden hose, somehow dragging itself over the asphalt, stuck through all over with… nails?

IMOGEN swerves hard to the side, losing both tires on the driver’s side but evading total debilitation from the Skopt’s improvised spike strip. As they pass, a man steps into the light from behind a snowdrift. He’s dressed in a snow-white parka and ski pants, and raises a revolver with a bulky improvised silencer projecting from the barrel. 

His shots pop past the passenger-side window, which INDIGO is rolling down to return fire with her Glock. The rental’s top speed has been kneecapped, but IMOGEN has the pedal to the floor as the headlights behind them resolve into the shape of a tow truck. INDIGO, a hacker by trade, is an inexpert shot and her fires whiz by the swerving shape of the truck without effect.

The driver of the tow truck is rapidly closing. A man leaning out its passenger window fires once with a double-barrelled shotgun, blowing out the rear window of the agents’ car. As the truck pulls up to the side of the rental for the man to take another shot, IMOGEN steps off the accelerator and pulls the car’s e-brake. 

The unequal friction of the popped and intact tires puts the car into a spin as the pursuing tow truck blows far past them. IMOGEN is able to regain control, and begins to pick up speed again in the opposite direction from where the tow truck is attempting to pull a wide turn through the snowbanks on either side of the highway.

Back down the road, the car’s high-beams illuminate the figure of the man they just blew past. INDIGO is able to see the spike trip clear of the road, pulled over by a garage door opener the ambusher had rigged. The man raises his gun, but can’t fire before IMOGEN barrels into him. Cracks spiderweb across the windscreen, the man is shouting and cursing sprawled over the hood, but then his leg is caught by a length of nail-riddled hose still flapping from the tatters of the car’s right front tire. He goes under the wheels.

Ahead, another pair of headlights, coming dead-on down the median line. A moving van, coming right toward them. IMOGEN tries to swerve out of the way, but can’t maintain control as the car goes over the rumble strip and spins to a halt in the snowy field beyond. IMOGEN, the IRS investigator, draws her own sidearm as INDIGO tumbles out of the passenger side door and into the snow. She stumbles to her feet, grabbing something from the trunk as the moving van comes to a stop on the road ahead of them.

A man jumps out of the cab, holding a handgun. He raises it, fires. Shots bury themselves in the snow, the engine block. IMOGEN pops the door, aiming through the gap it makes with the bodywork. Fires, catching the man in the chest and then the top of his head. He stumbles, coming to fall in the middle of the road in a pose that looks horribly like prayer in the half-light.

With no-one visible, INDIGO dashes through the calf-high snow toward the near side of the moving truck. Movement on the other side, feet shuffling underneath. IMOGEN is reloading as she rounds the cab, ducking. The man on the other side holds a Skorpion submachine gun tucked tight against his shoulder, watching something ahead of him–the headlights of the tow truck, approaching through the night.

IMOGEN ducks in terror as a gunshot gives the final mercy to her rental’s battered windshield. The bullet sounded rifle-caliber, fired from the tow truck slowing to a stop. She tucks herself beneath the dash, clutching her pistol, beginning to recite catechism. A voice calls out, Russian-accented. 

“There can be no more bloodshed! Come quietly, or we get your family!” IMOGEN thinks of the children she left behind that morning, departing from Sunday mass. 

“You're already dead, you dickless fucks don't know who you're fucking with!” she screams.

INDIGO reaches for what she took out of the trunk: the scabbard holding the Black Sword of Dza-Ngar Phan. She draws it, steps forward into the light, and fluidly thrusts it through the gunman’s back. The heat-warped metal of the blade glistens with blood, protruding through the man’s stomach under his sternum. Then there is a bright flash that banishes night for a fraction of a second, and INDIGO is nowhere at all.

INDIGO sees the man she killed, moments from his expiration. She sees IMOGEN behind her. She sees two men in the truck ahead, one taking cover behind the driver’s-side door, the other aiming a scoped hunting rifle out the window. She sees these things through the fibrous electrical pathways of their nervous systems. She sees other things, too. The low-voltage power lines swaying above, the wiring in the cars…

She focuses on that, the car battery in the tow truck and everything it connects to. She is in the driver’s seat of the tow truck now. The man besides her in the passenger seat shouts in terror, tries to strike her with the butt of his rifle, like a club. She parries the strike to the side with the sword still in her hands, knocking it from his grasp. Pulls the blade back, cuts his throat.

The driver of the tow truck turns and tries to fire on INDIGO. Click. Jammed, stovepiped. He drops the gun, reaches for the shotgun in the back seat of the truck as the woman in the driver’s seat kills his fellow. Takes it, starts to flee. He fires back once, twice, both barrels missing in a panic as he trudges through the snow toward the woods beyond. INDIGO starts to push the body in the passenger seat aside, climbing over the center console.

IMOGEN hears the first shout of alarm, and puts her head out to see INDIGO in a melee in the tow truck. She leaves the car, now, running toward the broken praying-shape in the middle of the road. Stumbles in the snow and onto the riser of the roadway, catching herself, filling the barrel of her pistol with pea gravel. Runs forward, abandoning the gun, reaches for a submachine gun next to a smoking, charred corpse that looks as though it’s spent ten seconds in a cremation oven. Doesn’t notice the heat haze coming off the metal, and lets out her own scream of surprise and pain.

INDIGO pushes the body out of the tow truck, takes the hunting rifle dropped into the footwell. Raising it, her first shot shakes snow from the branches of a tree yards ahead but inches to the side of her target. Pulls back the bolt, aims. Catches him in the leg, and he tumbles onto his belly, sprawled in the snow. Twitching, tries to pull himself up and crawl for the treeline. INDIGO takes off his head.

When IMOGEN walks up, clutching her burned hand, INDIGO is resting the rifle in her lap beside the black sword, and tears are silently streaming down her cheeks.