by Joe Ollinger
The door at the far end of the lobby opens, and one of the guards from the security vault leans out cautiously, holding one of the assault rifles from the weapons rack. I put a couple of shots through the doorway to make him think twice, but he fires back a burst from cover, and the other guard from the vault runs past him, stops, and sets, lining up a shot with a thick, bulky tagger rifle. But I’ve got him lined up already, and before he can even get a shot off, I put one right into his chest. He staggers but doesn’t go down, probably armored under his black suit, so I hit him again, just a bit higher, piercing him through the neck. Blood bursts out both front and back as he drops his gun, his hands grabbing desperately at his throat as he falls.
The other one sprays a few more blind flurries from behind the doorway. He’s not rushing out here, but eventually he’ll hit me. I’ve got to move.
I lean out again from the pillar, and a shot nicks the stone. The guard on the opposite side is trying to flank me, so I sidestep behind cover. The exits are far, but there are no more guards in the way, and this may be my last chance. I run for it.
Through the broad view-glass facade, I see that a barricade is already being set up outside. Heavily armed police emerge from trucks establishing a perimeter. I’m stuck.
Another shot rings out, and I’m hammered in my shoulder. I let myself go down, knowing that another is coming. It whizzes above me as I hit the ground. The dark cloth of my uniform is stretched and torn just under my shoulder blade, but the thin layer of armor sewn into the lining has stopped the bullet. A sting shoots through the spot where it hit, but a few centimeters higher and it might have broken my collarbone.
I snap off a quick round at the guard, missing wide. He aims for a kill shot, but I roll aside, and the bullet cracks into the bare stone, sending shards and dust into the air. On my back, I line up my sights just as he does, and I fire first by a microsecond.
He lets out a scream as his left knee folds under him. Dropping to the ground, he lets go of his pistol so that he can clutch at his ruined leg. “Bitch!” he cries. “Aaaaagggghhh!”
I scramble clumsily up to my feet, spinning. Where did the last guard go?
Two bullets punch the center of my back, throwing me off balance. I struggle to keep my footing, but another cracks into my left tricep, knocking me down again. My knees hit the floor hard. I turn, but the guard bearing down on me is setting for the kill shot, and I can’t adjust, don’t have time to dodge. This is it.
A sudden blur of gray slams into the guard from his side, tackling him to the ground. His pistol blasts a wild bullet into the ceiling high above, sending a delicate shower of dust wafting down. The man who tackled him grabs for the gun, and the guard loses his grip on it as he wrestles for control. Ducking low to keep the police outside from getting an angle on me through the view-glass, I rush over to get control of the situation, aiming my gun at the two men.
“Separate!” I order. “Off!”
The two split off, both of them raising their hands in surrender, and I see my rescuer’s face.
“Brady?” He’s too out of breath to say anything. “Kick his gun over here,” I tell him.
Clumsily he climbs to his feet and kicks the pistol across the floor. All armed threats in the lobby neutralized, I crouch behind a stone bench and survey the room. Dozens of people still lie on the ground, terrified. Outside, the police are still rushing to fortify their perimeter. Shock troops armored in heavy mech armor and saddled with an arsenal of overpowered hi-tech weapons stand in formation, taking orders from a gray-haired police captain. Collections is here, too, with a small squad of heavies forming up. They must know who I am.
I’m done. There’s no escaping this.
“Dammit,” I whisper aloud.
Overwhelmed, I look around me, searching for some kind of answer as my heart thumps hard in my chest. I’ve got all these bank customers on the ground, but what use can I make of them? This is not a hostage situation.
Maybe the police are expecting it to be.
“Brady,” I say, “give me your jacket.”
“What?”
“Give me your jacket,” I repeat. “Now.”
Confused, he removes it and tosses it to me. It’s surprisingly big. Deciding it’s not enough, I take the tie out of my hair and shake my head, letting the dark locks settle loose around my ears and shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Brady asks, fearful.
Ignoring him, I fire a warning shot into the ceiling and scream at the top of my lungs, “Everyone up! On your fucking feet! Together!”
They hesitate, but I fire off another shot into the ceiling, and as the delicate dust wafts down, they hurry to stand, terrified and trembling.
“Taryn,” Brady says as though he has some idea what I’m about to do. He smartly holds a hand up to cover his mouth as he speaks. “I’ll be waiting tonight, if you still want to show up. Or need to.”
It takes me a second to realize what he’s talking about. I still don’t see what good it will do me, but I nod in thanks.
“Hey,” he says, hand still cupped over his mouth, “make it look good.”
Again, it takes me a second to realize what he’s telling me, but I get it. I put my bad guy face back on and turn back to the crowd of customers. “Listen to me, you sons of bitches,” I shout. “When I say go, you’re gonna run out of here, and you’re gonna rush the police line. Every last one of you, you hear me?”
No response comes. Turning back to Brady, who stands awkwardly with his hands out at his sides, I take a swing at him, cracking the butt of my gun into the side of his head.
My hostages cringe in fear at the sight of him toppling to the floor, and I ask again, “Do you hear me, dammit?” Some timid yeses come back, some nod their heads. Just to be sure they get it, I add, “Last one out that door gets a bullet in the kneecap.” I’m losing my patience with these people. If they screw this up, I swear I will shoot at least one of them out of spite before I get taken down. “I said are you ready, you bunch of assholes?”
They give louder, if more frightened responses. Some are crying now, distraught as I step in among them, near the back. I can’t afford to be as scared as they are. Taking a deep breath, I steel myself. It’s do or die now. If I don’t do, I die.
“Ready?” I call out. “Go! Go! Go!” I fire from the hip, into the air, and they rush forward in a terrified panic. “Go!” I scream. “Go!”
They hit the doors and flood through them, pushing, shoving, crying out. None of them seem to be watching what I’m doing. Good.
I holster my sidearm, hiding under Brady’s jacket. Moving with the panicked mass of people, I toss my hair over my face, keeping my arms up and my head low as I rush outside, into the bright, hot sunlight. The police react frantically, unprepared for the crush of the crowd. One of them barks commands through a megaphone, but the civilians ignore him, running through gaps in the barricade. I take an angle with a few others past the police shock troops, knowing that they’ll be the least mobile, least ready to act, and the least likely to know my face. Some cops try to get in our way, but there aren’t enough of them. I brush through with the others, past the parked police vehicles, into the parking lot of the SCAPE Bank with its broad, arched entrance.
I’m out of breath suddenly, maybe from terror, maybe from physical exertion, but I know I need to push on, so I force myself to keep running.
“Miss!” a voice calls behind me. I don’t stop but glance over my shoulder to see a policeman pursuing me. “Miss, stop!”
I can’t. I don’t.
“I need help here!” he calls out, “I’ve got a runner!”
Dammit. I lean into my stride, sprinting as hard and fast as I can for the street, my thighs and calves burning. A siren squawks behind me, and over the noise of the bedlam I’ve just run from, I hear an engine—or maybe two—rev and start.
I hit the sidewalk and keep going, even as I glance behind me again see
a couple of police quickbikes screeching out of the parking lot, turning hard onto Safelydown and coming after me. There’s no way I’ll outrun them. In a denser part of the city I might be able to duck down a back alley or underground, but here, in the SCAPE part of town with its monolithic structures and broad streets, I’ve got nowhere to hide.
I hear the bikes close ground fast. Without looking back, I stop short and turn. Setting my feet, I lean in toward the first bike as it speeds by, throwing all of my weight into the side of the driver.
The impact jars me. Off balance, I stumble backward, shuffling my feet to keep from falling down. But the driver flies off his seat and hits the pavement hard, bouncing and rolling clumsily as his bike drives a few more meters before automatically powering down.
The other bike’s tires screech, and it slides to a stop just a few steps away. Its rider dismounts fast, drawing his sidearm and aiming at me. “Hands in the air!”
He’s got the advantage—if I go for my sidearm, he’ll shoot. I force myself to act quickly. Leaping forward, I barrel roll toward the cop. He fires off a shot, missing. I spring into a tackle, ramming my sore right shoulder into his stomach, knocking him back. He shoves me off and keeps his feet, raising his gun from waist level for a close-range kill shot.
I swipe my hands across each other, catching him across both sides of the forearm. His grip releases and the gun clatters to the pavement. Stunned, he reaches after it, but I grab him by the sleeves of his uniform and knee him hard in the gut, doubling him over. “Nothing personal,” I tell him, throwing him to the street.
I step on his pistol and draw my own gun. The other officer, the one I knocked off his bike, is struggling to his feet and bravely drawing his weapon even though it looks like one of his legs is broken. I take aim at him. “No,” I say simply, taking control. He freezes, uncertain. “Throw it,” I tell him, motioning with my head, “Over there.”
Reluctantly he obeys, chucking his gun across the street. A few civilian cars go by, avoiding us.
“Phones,” I order. “Both of you.”
They each pull their phones from their pockets and grudgingly toss them at my feet. I stomp down hard on each with the heel of my boot, smashing them to dust and shards. I mount the closer quickbike. Knowing I won’t be able to drive it, I brandish my gun. “Now. Start this ride up.”
One of the cops steps forward reluctantly, presses his thumb to the lock, and starts the ignition.
“You’re going to take that other bike and ride as far and as fast as you can.” I motion with my gun. “That way. You got it?” They only glare at me in anger, so I say it louder. “You got it?” They both nod weakly. “Good. Go. Hurry.”
I fire a shot at the ground, and it cracks and zips off the asphalt. They mount the other bike in a hurry and cruise off.
Knowing I won’t have much time until they contact the station and get this vehicle shut off remotely, I crank the engine hard, speeding away from the scene of my crimes. I toss my gun, knowing it can be tracked, then take a couple of turns into the city, trying to lose myself. I don’t hear any sirens pursuing.
When I get to the Dust Pit, I get off and crash the quickbike into one of those big piles of trash that tend to form in neighborhoods like this. Someone will probably be stripping it for parts within minutes. I set off running again, taking a few turns and putting some distance between myself and the bike and its tracking beacon, searching for a passable place to lay low. After seven or eight blocks I’m winded, but I’ve made it to a denser part of the neighborhood with rows of vertical shale brick tenements packed close together, their shadows sheltering groups of homeless people with patchy, purple-blotched skin from the harsh red burn of the sun. There is a pattern of gouges in the street and scuff marks on a utility panel mark where scrappers tried to steal the underground utilities and fiber optics. A few obvious criminals eye me with hatred, recognizing that I don’t belong. People here don’t cooperate with the authorities, and even though I’m still wearing Brady’s loose-fitting jacket, my Collections uniform is visible underneath it.
I make my way around to the front of a beat-up apartment tower with a crumbling facade. Most of the windows are boarded up, and the glass window of the lobby is smashed and open, telltale bricks missing where someone removed the security bars to sell the metal for scrap. These places all look pretty much alike, but I know this one.
As I survey the building for a way in, a stringy, pockmarked, hypocalcemic junky with thin, ratty hair and a wispy little mustache is swaggering up toward me. His clothes are dirty and stained and riddled with holes but have the triangular seams and tapered shape that were in fashion a few years ago. He’s sick but not in the process of dying right now; probably the king of this neighborhood, probably a drug dealer. “What’chu doin’ here, lady?”
“Get lost.”
“What you lookin’ for?” he asks, apparently not worried by the Collections Agent uniform. “I got it.”
“Get lost.”
He says nothing further but stares me down with glazed yet cold eyes as he comes at me, determined. I don’t have time for this, but I can’t afford to ignore him, either, so I stand my ground.
As he gets up in my face, before he can even lift an arm up, I jam the edge of my hand hard into his throat. He clutches at it, choking. Concerned that he might recover and come after me, I grab his right hand, almost gently, and bend the first two fingers backward until I hear a twin pair of snaps. He tries to scream, but the breath’s not there. With a hard shove I put him to the ground, then walk away.
The broken front window of the tenement building is easy enough to climb through after I clear some of the glass shards away. The lobby is a small room with a floor of peeling plastic lining and a rack of mostly broken mailboxes on one of the cracked, chewed-through walls. The elevator shaft sits open and empty, but beside it is an open door into the stairwell. I go in and climb up to the seventh of thirty floors where I enter the hallway, which is even more run-down than the lobby, with torn carpets and mold stains all over the walls, all lit under a sickly blue hi-efficiency LED tube light running along the ceiling.
I go to one of the doors and knock. To my surprise, a thin, tired-looking woman answers, holding a sleeping baby swaddled in cheap cloth.
“Hi . . . ” She sees my uniform and is frightened.
Do I have the right place? “I’m looking for Ali.”
Before she can answer, Ali Silva peeks into the doorway. He’s surprised to see me. “Agent Dare.”
“Let me in,” I tell him, pushing into the apartment and pulling the door quietly shut behind me. The place is a single room, furnished only with a mattress, a crib, and a small viewscreen on the wall. It’s clean enough, except for the dings and dents and wear and tear scuffing the walls and the kitchen block. “I need a favor.”
“What kind of favor?” Silva asks.
“I need to lay low here for a few hours.”
Anyone can see that my sidearm is not in its holster. I’m relying on trust here, on gratitude. Outside, sirens are moving at some indeterminate distance, sweeping the city. The manhunt is on. Silva and his mother or older girlfriend or whatever she is look scared and confused, but after a moment weighing his options, he responds, “Whatever you need.”
15
After several tense hours, I can no longer hear the sirens. Silva has said little. He told me he didn’t end up getting fired from the restaurant, that he had to pay everything he had to his buyer, but that he hoped to be able to get out from his debt and back on his feet. I told him that the buyer’s days are numbered, which I hope is true. As for the woman, she has said nothing. Silva says she’s his mother. I’ve watched her struggle to bottle-feed the baby a few times. It just keeps crying.
But the busboy has held up his end of the deal. Neither he nor his mom have made any move to rat me out. I’ve even borrowed some clothing––a pair of checkered leggings, a faded blue long-sleeved v-cut shirt,
and a gray cap with an extendable rim. I feel like my appearance is different enough that someone would have to look closely to recognize me.
I’ve been thinking hard about where to go and what to do, and I have no good answers. I am a fugitive from the law with nowhere to run. I’ve heard of criminals fleeing the city, stripping tracking devices from cars and driving out into the expanse, crossing the mountains on foot into the bleak, jagged wilderness beyond society’s current reach, but I doubt anyone who has done that has survived more than a few days. Water and edible food are scarce, and the weather and native wildlife can be deadly. I’ve heard of hermits living on houseboats, roaming the Great Sea, but that’s on the other side of the planet, and I don’t know where I’d get a boat. I’d be easy enough to track down on the open water anyway.
All of this is probably beside the point. I may have killed some people back at SCAPE Bank, and I’m not sure they deserved it. I acted on impulse, on instinct, on suspicion, but I don’t think I can justify my actions if I give up now. I’ve been hunted down. Someone has expended significant resources trying to kill me or frame me because of what I might find.
In the dim, dark misery of this one-room slum apartment, I rise to my feet, my legs sore and stiff. I rifle through the hip pouches on my Collections uniform, remove my test kit and a set of plastic slap-cuffs, and pack them under the extendable rim of my cap, just in case I need them. I’m as ready as I’m going to get.
“I owe you one, Ali.”
“You’re not going to tell me what’s going on?” he asks, his voice hushed.
“You’re better off not knowing.” It’s the truth. “Take care.”
He seems to buy that. I exit through the door, into the dim, narrow hallway, and I can see his eyes watching me as he closes the door. The lock clicks faintly. The kid has plenty of problems, but I won’t be one of them anymore.