Free E.N.D.A.Y.S. by Lee Isserow

minutes.” said a second voice, muffled, talking through a window in another compartment.
    Hayes's vision was obscured by the displays of scopes and meters, readings frozen and distorted. The lens wasn't responding to thought control. He tried to pull up nano functions. They were obviously working hard at healing his injuries, but he wanted a status update. The displays refused to obey his order. “Fucking thing...” he said, slamming his palm against his temple over and over, trying to regain control of the lens.
    “Restrain him!” said the voice above. Two sets of hands grabbed his arms and held them down.
    “Like fuck...” Hayes spat. Wrenching free of their grasp. He might not have been able to control the nanos, but had enough mods installed to give him greater strength than the mundanes that were attempting to keep him captive. He lifted himself from the surface they had laid him on, vertebrae cracking and clicking themselves into place one by one as he rolled his shoulders back, twisting at the waist to test that the spinal mods were doing their job.
    “You should really lie down...” one of his captors said, nervously.
    “You should really not try to keep a guy like me hostage...” Hayes shot back, throwing a fist at the blur of a man who stood beyond the displays hovering over his vision. The man crunched against metal, which flung open, his hazy body ricochetting off the tarmac, rolling and bouncing into the distance. A white blur of another vehicle swerved into the wrong lane to avoid the figure ricochetting off the road. There was a shunt, the vehicle holding Hayes stopped moving. He got to his feet as another blur grabbed him, and he threw his attacker into a wall with a reverberating clang. He stepped out from the transport in which he had been held hostage and inspected it. A light yellow vehicle, boxy, stripe of green and lemon checker-board running around the mid-section, 'AMBULANCE' emblazoned on the side.
    “Oops...” Hayes said, glancing between the unconscious EMT he had knocked out in the back, and his colleague that had kissed the road farther back. The driver came round the side of the vehicle to investigate, jaw dropping as he saw Hayes standing, having had a broken back only minutes earlier. “I'm really sorry about this...” Hayes said, as he threw a fist into the driver's face, knocking him against the side the the van into blissful unconsciousness.
    Hayes looked around. Tried to work out where he was, peering through the distractions of the readouts. “Kali, do you have my position?” He waited for a response, but none came. “Kali?” Are you there? Fucking answer me...” another pause as he tried to make out the buildings that lay beyond the lens display. They looked familiar, insomuch as they all looked the same, but he took that as a sign he had been there before, or at least been to a street that looked like the one he was standing in. He ripped the foam collar from his neck and dropped it to the floor, pivoting his head around, neck cracking as he did so.
    “Fucking mundy worlds...” he muttered. “Why don't they make the streets look fucking different?”
    His question wasn't to be answered, as he heard a squeal of tyres behind him, a thumping of footsteps and crackle of electricity charging through his side. The lens readout fucked up even more, glitches across his vision, as his legs gave in, and he fell to the ground. Hayes tried to look up at his attacker, and was rewarded with a fist to the face, andanother prod of voltage. His hands pulled behind his back, restrained with a strip of plastic that made a ziiiiip as the loose ends were locked in on themselves. Then a bag was thrown over his head, obscuring vision yet further.
    The abductors lifted him from the street. Hayes tried to woozily keep track of where he was being dragged, as he was thrown in the back of another vehicle. The one trailing the ambulance, he reckoned, there was no time for another one to pull