That one was empty. He could take that one out.
John drifted his car slowly forward, coasting to a stop at the light, with the fancy new Audi just to his right. His left index finger lifted up on the switch and the passenger window slid silently down. Cross traffic passed in front of him, heavy for this time of day. But no one was looking. What would they see, anyway?
He clasped the smooth wood handle, hefted it, and cocked his arm back. With a practiced flick, he sent the checker-faced framing hammer sailing through the open window. It crashed through the delicate electronic array mounted on the Audi and carried the whole apparatus off to the edge of the road. The Audi's internal brain, bereft of key sensory input, did the only sensible thing. It shut off the engine and turned on the hazard lights, sitting there like a ghost ship, adrift with no driver. No human to give it life.
The light turned. John hummed a simple tune by Rage Against the Machine and rolled forward toward Santorini's airport.
"We've never had problems like this before," Giovanni said. "I don't understand it."
"Someone doesn't like self-driving cars, is all. It's nothing we haven't seen before." Janos clacked away on his keyboard, recalibrating the electronic array on the golden car in the repair bay.
"Self-driving cars have revolutionized the world. We've saved millions of man-hours a year just in the EU. It's the biggest boost to productivity since...since the wheel."
Janos nodded at the screen. "This one's ready again. Where did they find her?"
"West side, stopped at a light. Everything just snapped off."
"Same as the others?"
Giovanni lifted up a hammer, pinched between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were vermin. "Our saboteur has upgraded to a better type of missile. This has to be costing him a fortune."
"Fingerprints?"
"Same ones. Still not in the database."
Janos rubbed his chin. "We'll think of something."
John coasted into the airport pickup area and got out of his cab, a wide smile pasted on tight. "Sir! You need a taxi?" he called over the roof.
The white-clad man on the curb let a faint smile show, then shook his head, and wheeled his luggage to the car behind John's. To an Audi. With no driver.
Just like in Torino. And in Athens. Santorini was supposed to have been safe. "No one will be able to get a driverless car to navigate those tiny, dangerous streets," they said, and for two years they had been right. But if they were taking over here, they'd take over everywhere. Already had taken over. There were no more drivers.
The big camions of Europe were all self-driven, now. His brother Johann's firm, collapsed. Bankrupt. All the drivers out of work. Then the taxis lost the battle, in Paris, Budapest, all the big capitals. The smaller cities weren't far behind.
So many lives.
He was the last of his kind. Standing tall in the harsh Aegean sun against the might of the automaton.
He popped the hatch on his trunk and strolled back. From the cooler dark of the trunk space, he selected a hammer.
"Two more today? This has to be some kind of record!" Giovanni flopped into his chair like a sack falling from a barn loft.
"Not close. We had ten times this many in Torino, remember that?"
"No. I choose not to remember that."
Janos picked up a box and tossed it onto Giovanni's lap. "I'm not even going to remind you about Athens, then."
Giovanni opened his eyes and stared at the thing on his midsection. "What's this?"
"Secret weapon. I have an idea how we catch this guy."
"We thought of this," Giovanni said. "It won't work. There isn't enough bandwidth."
"That's a new model. Sends a compressed stream. I think I can embed it in the data packets without losing our comm to the vehicle."
Giovanni held up the tiny device, no bigger than his thumb. Thin wires dangled from it like a spider with a broken web. "Won't he see it?"
Janos smiled. "Not if we're careful."
"We would have video."
Janos's smile increased in intensity, and beamed beatifically down on his friend. "We would have video."
"How many of these do we have?" Giovanni said.
John's aging Opel ticked and tinged, cooling in the shade of his carport.
Once, when he pulled into his home driveway, the door would have boiled open from a shrieking child exploding outward, arms open to take him in. But he had gone by, too tired to fight. When had he called last?
Dragging his hand through his thinning hair, John opened the driver's door and creakily unfolded himself onto his side porch. The screen door sagged as if too tired to hold itself upright, and John caressed it like an old friend. He stepped inside and dug through his pockets for the precious Euros he'd collected. Two fares today. Better than most. There seemed to be fewer of the infernal machines to compete with, the last few days.
Maybe they'd give up. The thought made him laugh suddenly, hysterically, until a racking cough ripped through him, doubling him over. It took a minute, two, leaning on the counter, to get control of himself again. The worst ever. Someday he'd have to go to the doctor. Later. When he was prosperous again.
He really ought to stop leaving the hammers behind, though. No telling how much it would save if he re-used them.
The hammer--a slim balpeen, this time--sailed with deadly accuracy out the gray-green Opel's open window and clipped the comm package off the Audi like an eagle plucking a perch from the surface of a lake. Instead of driving off, though, the Opel disgorged a rail-thin, deeply tanned man with thinning hair. He unlimbered himself like an ancient hinged yardstick and shambled over to the far side of the now-derelict auto-mobile, rooted in the debris there for a moment, and headed back to his car.
"He's stealing the gear," Giovanni said, eyes glued to the screen and the figure it displayed.
"No," Janos said, pointing. "He's taking his hammer."
"He must be about out of money. Look at him."
Janos looked.
"Smart thinking, embedding the camera in the rearview. He'd never think to check that." Giovanni stood and stretched. "Finally! The carabinieri will be able to ID him for sure. Then we can get back to normal."
Janos swiveled the cam, tracking the aging knight as he mounted his decrepit steed and jerked forward through the intersection. He could probably isolate the license plate number. And Jose down at Central owed him a favor.
Banging woke him. He thought it was one of the kids, pounding nails into a loose board. He called out, "Joao! Stop that!" but the banging went on, more insistent. He dragged himself from slumber like a deep-sea crabber hauls up a weed-laden cage, dripping and unkempt.
"John! I know you're in there! Open up!"
John willed himself to come fully awake, but he was no longer young, could not manage it. He staggered from bed and drank from his dusty glass at the end table. They had come. He knew they would, eventually.
"I'm coming, you bastards!" he bellowed. No sense having them bust the door down. Maybe he could cable Joao in Lisbon and tell him the Santorini house was his. Maybe Joao would care, if there was property in it. Bare-chested, he shuffled to the door and flung it open. Dark night flooded in, and carabinieri, badges glittering.
No. Not carabinieri. The glitter was...one of those blasted phones. And there was somehow just one man.
"John Kalapacs?" the man said. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"
"So you're talking already." John stepped backward from the door and the man crowded in. Young. In a tie. Smelled like office.
The man held up a his infernal device. A picture of John's faithful Rocinante, with the license plate standing out like neon on a whorehouse. When the man saw that John understood the picture, he changed it to one of John himself. I'm old, John thought suddenly, as if seeing a picture of someone else. But I still walk with my head in the sun.
"I know what you've been doing," the man said.
"You know nothing." John spat on the floor.
The man held up a hammer.
As if it had struck him, John sagged and scratched at his chin. He gazed blearily at the graying walls, the gathering dust. The yellowed picture in the once-shiny frame. "I'm not afraid of jail any more."
"I'm not here to take you to jail. I was hoping we could have a different conversation."
John blinked twice and said nothing.
"Your methods are...unorthodox...but your resourcefulness is impressive. Apparently you used to live in Torino."
John said nothing again.
"And in Athens."
John's mouth twitched and threatened to turn upward. His eyes cleared. It was easier to think, now that the cool night breeze was on his face.
"And you've successfully sabotaged forty-one of our latest-model cars on Santorini with nothing more than this," the man said, waving about one of John's favorite split-backed claw hammers. "That has got my attention."
"Good. You killed all the rest. You come to kill me as well?"
"No, I came to offer you a job."
John roared with laughter. Then the cough surged up and took him like a wave and he staggered. The man caught him, lowered him to a chair, held him steady while the fit passed. It left him spent, wrung. But his eyes glittered. "I won't help you."
"You can't win. You must know there are none of you left, and never will be again. But you want to drive. I'll let you drive. You want to kill my cars. I'll let you do that, too, by any means you can."
John's chin came up. "You let me break the machine?"
Janos nodded. "As often as you can get away with it. Show me what I can't see. Try to outwit me."
"A game?"
"A game."
John shook his head. He was too old for games. But the man still stood with his hand on his back. When had he felt that the last time?
"I don't do it for nothing. You pay me...a thousand euros," John said, naming an outrageous sum.
Janos smiled. "I'll pay you that much every time you break a car and I don't catch you. A thousand a week, at least, if your past performance is any indication."
Janos tried to process that sum of money and failed. "I must have new car?" he said, the words sour in his mouth.
"Not unless you want one. But we can fix the one you have, like new again. And I have one more condition."
Always the one more. John scowled. "I do nothing else for you."
The man held up his blasted device. On the screen were some numbers, a long string. They meant nothing. He said, "I understand that you haven't spoken to your son in quite some time. I'm going to dial a number now, and you're going to talk. When you're finished, we'll see if we can work together."
The man took the phone and made it sing a tuneless melody. Then a voice. "Papi?"
The man held it out to John, who took it as a starving man takes a slice of bread he cannot believe is real. He held it to his ear. "Joao?" he said.
This story comes from @steemfluencer and his excellent series of creative challenges. I've had to do most of them on the road, in hotel rooms, sitting on the bank of the Danube, and this one in the Frankfurt airport. But they've helped me write better stories, and this is one of my favorite. I don't have time to edit it, they're calling my plane.
The five prompts in the title come from a matrix posted for challenge number 8. I chose them with a random-number generator. All five are in the story, and all of them are, I think, relatively prominent. Gotta fly.
~Cristof
P.S. Also, there's an Easter Egg in the story, something I'm amused by. If you think you know what it is, leave me a comment. If you're the first one to get it, I'll upvote you my dime.
P.P.S. Since no one got the Easter Egg, I'll tell you. There are four named characters in the story--John, Giovanni, Janos, and Joao. All of those are the same name. I thought, since I was only given one name to use, I should stick to it.