Bartel stood next to him, surveying the park under weak, diffuse moonlight. A moment later, a trim air car sped toward them from the south, barely clearing the rooftops of vacant or abandoned boutiques and hair salons on Bastille Street. Two figures stepped from the car as it settled noisily onto the ground, sending roiling clouds of dust into the hot, evening air. A slender woman dressed in an outfit more suited to cocktail parties than dispatching a contestant on a run for his life went quickly to Bartel, speaking through a cupped hand to be heard over the hiss of the car’s engines.
As a technician fitted Ricky with his camera and transmitter harness, the thin woman with close-cropped hair and a dour expression said, “We have a clean signal, so I can now tell you the completion goal for your Walk is the transmission complex north of the city—Broadridge, they call it.”
“I know where it is,” Ricky mumbled.
The official didn’t seem to notice.
“When you hear the tone in a few minutes, you can start. Do you have any questions?”
Ricky shook his head, and with that, the official and her technicians returned to the car and lifted quickly into the night sky. Bartel watched them go before turning at last to where Ricky stood, shadowed by Junkyard’s huge frame against the possibility of escape.
“You gonna start here, Slider, know what I mean?”
Ricky ignored him, focused instead on the route he would soon take to cross the field quickly. The old retail district could provide cover, he reasoned, and its maze of deserted, burned-out storefronts might hold up the chase units long enough for him to make the apartment blocks on the north side, but experience on the streets showed him something else. Ricky had been around long enough to recognize a trap when he saw one, turning instead toward the open expanse to the left. Junkyard understood and smiled at the idea of Ricky clearing an open field before a Chaser’s bullet cut him down, but Bartel moved close, pointing at the camera and transmitter array.
“They say you gotta leave them cameras where they are, Slider; if you try to pull them away, the deal’s off and that little jiggy under your skin will send out a nice, loud signal so’s the Chasers can find you quick, see?”
Ricky understood; touch the camera harness and any hope of protection for Helene and Litzi would be canceled for tampering, leaving them exposed to Boris’ retribution. Junkyard grinned stupidly and leaned close.
“You better run real fast, boy; they can get you easy through them nightscopes.”
Ricky said nothing, but Junkyard went further, determined to apply one last insult.
“Let’s see if that big mouth of yours is gonna help you now, with all them shooters waiting out there in the dark!”
Ricky refused to take the bait and Bartel moved suddenly in front of him.
“Don’t pay no attention to him, Slider; Junkyard, he’s just teasing, see?”
Ricky looked past the little Czech to where a pond once shimmered on bright, summer days. Dried up long before, the old reflecting pool made a wide, three-meter depression that ran nearly the length of the park. Within it, his best chance of getting across unseen and far better than the obvious set-up waiting for him in the shops, he decided. Bartel didn’t notice Ricky’s hands shaking uncontrollably at his side.
“If you make it through here, you got a chance, know what I mean? Run fast like Junkyard says and you could reach the other side without they seeing you. After that, well…”
Ricky heard Bartel’s words, but they were meaningless as the tension built. His heart raced with anticipation, but after ten minutes, Ricky’s eyes had adjusted to the low light. He saw his path; only the start signal remained before he could be off. A moment later, three clicking beeps sounded from deep inside his skull and Ricky bolted at once for the old fountain where it sat dormant in a stand of stunted beech trees. Bartel called after him, but Ricky didn’t hear as he made for the ancient, moss-covered stones on a dead run.
Alone at last, Ricky stumbled through ankle-high weeds as the ground fell suddenly away. He slowed to catch his breath, well below the dry shoreline of the old pond. With no way of knowing where the chase units were positioned in advance of the start, Ricky was running blind. It didn’t matter, but there was little doubt they were already moving to intercept. As he made his way cautiously between the bushes and small trees that grew from the fertile earth, Ricky felt instinctively along the back of his neck. Surgical tape still covered the incision where Doctor Cason placed the Zorich device, but after a moment, an irrational urge to tear open the wound and remove the thumb-sized chip had passed.
As he surveyed the hillside, Ricky decided to creep slowly and quietly in the hope he wouldn’t draw attention. If Boris’ words were true, it would take time for the closest chase teams to get their first position signal and begin to close the distance. Still, there were no guarantees the assurances of a fair start were genuine; they may well have placed teams across a wide swath of every sector beyond the beltway to form interdiction barriers he couldn’t avoid. And anyway, he thought silently, it was at least ten kilometers from the park to the tower at Broadridge; a distance he could never hope to cover at a full run. For the moment, he would have to keep the pace carefully measured.
Following the contours of the empty pond toward the north, Ricky made his way along the depression, stopping now and then simply to listen for a sign that might betray the Chasers, perhaps careless in their haste to run him down. In the oppressive heat, sweat poured from his face and he wondered if their infrared scopes would see his unmistakable signature. He knew Chasers were equipped with the gear they would need for the hunt, making it all the more important for him to reach the old habitat blocks quickly. Memories of empty, decaying units from the days when he roamed vacant apartments in his youth would help him better than a mad dash across an open field. Either way, Ricky knew, he had to press on.
Wandering along the border of the city’s dense population zones, habitat colonies swarmed with people, even late into the night. A sea of faces down on the streets once made excellent cover to mask a Walker’s movements as another among many, but the practice ebbed when errant gunfire from chase units resulted in bystander deaths. Organizers changed with the times by installing proximity sensors in every contestant’s Zorich device, along with a warning to stay clear of heavily populated zones or face execution by MPE officers patrolling the fringes. Ricky remembered Boris Konstantinou’s cautionary words in the last moments before his Walk.
Most viewers watching from their homes would recognize little in the darkness, but others might notice a familiar, local landmark through Ricky’s camera array and try their luck at finding and exposing him to the Chasers. The practice was discouraged, but some found the effort worthwhile for the temporary notoriety it could bring. Over the years, a few had paid dearly for their interference, strangled or beaten to death by desperate Walk contestants trying only to survive, and the word filtered out that civilian involvement would be made at the individual’s own risk.
Ricky looked toward the horizon to the north for a moment, gauging what lay ahead by only his memories. In the quiet, he knelt in tall grass to gather his thoughts and formulate a plan. It had been a long time since he was obliged to cross the beltway’s wide arc, but worse, he’d never done it at night. Ricky knew the landscape enough to know reaching the abandoned apartment blocks in the early moments was essential, if only for the heavy concrete walls that would operate to block his Zorich signal for short intervals and buy time to reposition before Chase team receivers re-acquired their target. Behind and to his right, the distant mega-towers did little to reassure him. On his own and isolated in the remnants of the Old City, there were no havens or opportune chances to enlist the help of others.
Ricky picked his way through the random growth until at last, the ground sloped gently upward; the edge of the park was near. As he cleared a sparse stand of sumac, the darkened silhouette of long-abandoned apartment blocks stood out against the haze. He forced himself to slo
w, fighting an overwhelming urge to simply run. Slowly and carefully up the rise until he crested a wide, concrete apron that once welcomed strollers and tourists having picnics near the pond. Ricky’s senses were alive, tingling and shooting adrenaline through his body in waves—a hundred yards to go and he would be in.
An expanse dividing the park from where the beltway began in earnest was a hilly, uneven field and across it, occasional foundations of old buildings. He walked carefully to avoid chunks of concrete and angular framework structures that once made homes for generations in a distant past. Lone pavers or cinder blocks hid in the grass to slow an already diminished pace and with each step, Ricky wondered when the snap of a rifle, or the chatter of an automatic machine gun would reach out from the darkness and end his life. It took longer than he expected, but the distance to the empty apartment blocks was closing and he hurried toward the blackened shapes.
As he slipped through twin doors that were once an entrance to the nearest building, Ricky stopped to rest. Pushed by fear alone, he made it across the park alive; only the sound of his labored breathing broke the silence when he stepped carefully around the clutter. It was deathly quiet, but the foul odor of mold and rotted carpet made his nose wrinkle as he navigated an obstacle course of rubbish left behind and long forgotten from the days when MPE patrols burned the squatters out like rats.
Ricky knew the Chasers’ electronic gear would zero in on a faint signal sent out by the Zorich device at irregular intervals—simply crawling into an unseen hole to wait them out was useless. Sooner or later, he knew, they would find him. He had to keep moving.
Through the gaping holes where windows had been, Ricky watched the faint moonlight filter in from above, casting strange, surreal shadows along peeled, decaying walls. As he slid silently through a covered breezeway and into the next building, Ricky’s skin tingled with fear and anxiety, unsure if the danger stalking him outside was worse than what he might stumble upon within. He fought to stifle the sensation of dread, but he’d seen more than his share of decomposing corpses in the tenements to be surprised when he tripped over the remains of a squatter who’d come to grief many months before.
Even in the pale light, the ghastly details were clear. Chewed by rodents, what remained of skin on the poor man’s arms and legs was dry and leathery, split into wide ovals to expose the bare bone beneath. His form had become more skeleton than body, sunken where his abdomen had been and clothed in moldering rags that seemed suited to a much larger man. His face wore a grimace of agony as tanned skin withdrew to reveal eyeless sockets and a grotesque, leering grin of exposed teeth—yawning as if from a final, silent scream. The dead man’s scalp showed patches of wispy, matted hair, still clinging to tattered, colorless tissue like unharvested wheat in a lonely winter field.
Turning away in disgust, Ricky’s fear was made worse by spent shell casings littering the floor around him as silent testimony the unfortunate and unknown man had been killed by point-blank gunfire. Had the Chasers misidentified him as a debtor making the Walk, or was he instead on the wrong side of a busted deal between thieves?
Ricky paused, holding his breath in a desperate hope to hear echoes of a chase team’s movement from somewhere in the ruins. Slowly and carefully, he continued onward through the block, slipping quietly from building to building until at last, he emerged from the complex. Beyond, a solitary grove of tall poplars stood motionless in the calm and Ricky remembered them from the times when he and Vinnie traded stolen goods with courageous Agros who dared to venture in through the wire. MPE cops were authorized by the Novum City Commission to shoot without warning any unauthorized Agro caught inside the city’s borders; concluding a five minute deal exchanging bottles of Topaz for fresh herd meat brought considerable danger, simply from being in the company of a border-jumping Agro.
After wading deliberately and carefully through tall grass surrounding the trees, Ricky felt better; if the Chasers knew he was there, an ambush would certainly have found him. Now, he thought silently, a straight run across barren fields would get him to the Canyons before midnight and from there, he reasoned, the inter-sector canals could be reached in only a few hours. Crossing them would be another matter, of course, but for the moment, he would enjoy the cover of the trees as he angled steadily toward the north. If he could find his way across the old crop fields undetected, the northern Industrial Zone and its maze of interconnected buildings, ventilation shafts and above-ground pipelines would degrade the Zorich signal and frustrate the Chasers’ efforts. Once there, his odds of survival went up considerably.
As he crested a gentle rise paralleling the first canal, Ricky could see the lights of the Zone in the distance casting a muted glow above the darkened buildings beyond. When he paused to search out the best path northward, he noticed at last a profound sense of thirst. It seemed odd somehow, but all through the blocks, his only thought had been avoiding the Chasers. Now, the sticky dryness in his mouth distracted and tormented him with each step. He stopped again, troubled by a pounding in his chest that hadn’t abated since he began the Walk, but there was more. Reaching with a sleeve instinctively to wipe away the sweat, Ricky looked and saw a three-hour march that would be unbearable without a drink of water.
The fields spreading out before him had been lush croplands in a distant past, once maintained in neat rows and pouring out a steady stream of grains and root vegetables that sustained the growing population until hydroponics bays and protein synthesizers augmented ever-growing trade with the far-flung Agros. In the decades since, most of the old fields had been abandoned, leaving a few parcels still cultivated and tended by workers from one or two of the surface cooperatives.
Compelled by his nagging thirst, Ricky remembered occasional, solitary irrigation pump houses from early forays with Vinnie when they were young. He halted the journey northward in favor of a search to find one and within, a long drink he so desperately needed. Panting noticeably in the suffocating heat, Ricky turned toward the south for a moment. Far beyond, like glittering needles alone on the horizon, the brightly lit mega-towers of Novum rose to dizzying heights, so massive in their place they seemed to dwarf the surrounding sprawl to insignificance. He thought of the Agros and Diggers who no doubt regarded similar vistas with each visit to sell or trade their wares, looking on in wonder from the hilltops twenty kilometers distant. But his mission to find water ended the distraction quickly as he looked for telltale rectangles of groomed fields and with them, the promise of water.
He scanned from left to right, but there were only isolated groves of trees and irregular shapes of wild, overgrown expanse. Ricky went quickly along a narrow ridgeline in the bright moonlight until at last, he found the sharp edges of a uniform rectangle, lighter in tone than the surrounding, weedy terrain—a field, recently plowed under and dusted with the white powder made by an application of chemical nutrients. By Ricky’s calculation, it would take less than twenty minutes to reach on a straight line from the hilltop, but the ever-present worry his Zorich device betrayed his position to the Chasers spurred him to action down a gentle slope and closer to his goal.
The heavy grass was rough and stiff, but he kept a steady pace as he went along the hillside to a stand of pines astride an undulating field in the darkness and from it, the unmistakable aroma of freshly turned earth. On its short boundary at the southern end, a small outbuilding sat on an angle to the furrowed rows and an elaborate manifold of pipes and fittings that fed the drip lines. There were no lights, but the moon’s faint glow showed the way along a narrow access road.
He wanted to bolt for drain valves suspended from a feed pipe, but the caution his constant fears had made held him motionless as he surveyed the land beyond. Like a gazelle nearing the banks of a watering hole somewhere on the Serengeti, Ricky felt the conflict rise as nature’s primal need for water collided with his instinct to survive. He waited and watched. After a moment, and satisfied he was indeed alone, Ricky went quickly for the tangle of pipes, feeli
ng each for the telltale chill he knew meant cool water within. A brass union with a simple wheel valve opened easily and Ricky stooped to let the blessed flood pour into his mouth.
After several purposeful gulps, his belly felt full and he knelt to let the spray gush over his head, soaking him to the waist in seconds. When he stood to position himself against the pumping station’s smooth, cement wall, he felt the rejuvenating effect surge through him. Dabbing his face with a sleeve, Ricky looked for a container to carry a supply he knew would be needed if he survived long enough to come within reach of the Broadridge complex, but there was only a plastic crate filled with half-empty solvent cans and pipe thread sealant. The pump house’s heavy door was locked, making it clear he would have to rely on another water source farther to the north. A last pull from the manifold’s valve might make a difference hours later, he decided, kneeling a last time. But as he straightened himself, an odd zipping sound was followed at once by a loud snap that startled him where he stood in confusion.
The second bullet streaked across the field on a gentle arc, exploding from a Chaser’s rifle where he crouched inside the tree line to the south, but Ricky’s sudden lurch found a hidden length of pipe, sending him to the ground in a clumsy fall. In other circumstances, it would’ve been embarrassing, but by an impossible moment of luck he could never calculate, the fall had pulled him from the high-speed round’s path. Instead of crashing into his brain, the bullet whizzed only inches from it, clanking loudly off the shed’s metal door.
At once, Ricky sprinted across a short distance to the tree line, diving head-first into a thicket. He hadn’t heard the first shot, which told him the sniper was still distant and a steady crawl through the undergrowth would get him to a narrow field quickly before they could aim and fire again. If, he reasoned, the adjacent stand of maple trees and ancient oaks could be reached, he would be past the access road and beyond the would-be killer’s view, but as he stood, a sharp pain finally overcame the distraction made by adrenaline and panic. He reached instinctively for the side of his head and found the bloody crease where a sharp chunk of concrete blasted from the pump house wall had grazed him, slicing neatly through the skin. He held a sleeve against the wound to stem the bleeding until it could clot, but he had to get across the road and back to the hill if he expected to elude a sniper team surely closing from behind.
When the River Ran Dry Page 12