Ntshona

by Matthew A Robinson

  “Sorry Lon, answering your questions now would complicate things much more. Be patient and trust your brother”.

  “Trust Chris? This wasn’t his plan”.

  “Just stop, Lon,” Cat demanded. “Make sure Eve is okay”.

  He suspired in frustration before attending to Eve, who remained peaceful lying across the back seat. “Eve,” he said softly, “how are you feeling?”

  The response he elicited was minimal. Eve’s eyelids flickered and she tiredly groaned something like “I’m okay… I’ll wake up just now”.

  “I think she just needs sleep,” Lon informed Cat, as he lightly caressed Eve’s face.

  Chapter 14

  The course Lin plotted through the city avoided all encounters with roadblocks hindering the long-awaited finale of their escape, except for one, the roadblock farthest north.

  The car sat in the backlog of traffic waiting at the police checkpoint. They were still on the highway, and voiding the safety barriers at each side of the road, should such a thing be possible, would end in a likely deathly plummet for an unknown distance. This time the authoritative presence was heavy; another high-speed escape attempt would likely end gravely.

  “I doubt you’ll be able to pull a gun out like you did last time Lon,” said Cat.

  He leant forwards between the two front seats for a better look through the windscreen at the legion of officers, police vehicles and equipment barricading the highway. His heart thumped with some force the inside of his ribcage. “What do you suggest? We’re both wearing lab coats, and she’s severely injured. It’s too suspicious”. He stretched his arm towards the rifle Lin left by her seat and withdrew into the back with him. He quickly shoved it, along with the remaining briefcase gun, into the drawer beneath the rear seat.

  The car slowly rolled forwards.

  “We need a cover story”.

  “What kind of cover story wouldn’t be too farfetched?” asked Lon.

  Cat turned in her seat to examine Eve. “Her clothes and the inside of her coat are covered in blood, and she does have a real neck injury. It looks like a bad accident to me”.

  “But what kind of accident? Won’t our lab coats make it obvious what we were doing?”

  There came a tap on the driver’s window.

  “Shit, look worried Lon”.

  “I am worried!” he said before Cat wound down her window.

  On the other side was a stern, critical face. Before the officer could get in an introductory word, Cat was already heading full steam into a barrage of pleas.

  “Sir, you have to let us through quickly!”

  The man was quite shocked.

  “My friend, I need to get her to a hospital!”

  There was little urgency in the policeman’s reaction. He lowered his head into the open window for a look into the back.

  Lon caught him with a beseeching look. “She’s injured, she needs treatment soon!”

  The man was curious.

  “What you got over there?” called over a colleague.

  “We’re looking for one White and two Chinese, aren’t we?” he asked.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Have you got a full house there?” he joined his co-worker by Cat’s window.

  “Nah, two Whites and just one Chinese”.

  “I’m not fucking Chinese,” Eve moaned.

  “What did she say?” bit the first officer.

  “She’s not making sense, she’s delirious with the pain!” justified Lon.

  “My word!” exclaimed the additional officer upon examining the stuporous passenger, “What the hell happened to her?!”

  “Can’t you see we need to get to a hospital quickly?! You have to let us through!” demanded Cat. Her acting was convincing enough to provoke contemplation in the second policeman.

  “Can’t we let them through?” he asked.

  “No, under such suspicious circumstances we can not. God knows what she was up to to get into that state,” said the stern-faced officer.

  “Please?!” said Cat, “She could be dying!”

  “Come on man, she clearly needs treatment,” said the second officer.

  “Then we’ll call an ambulance and have her treated here”.

  “There’s no time for that!” yelled Lon. “She’s bleeding and can barely move! She needs a doctor now!”

  The second officer sighed and swiftly surveyed his surroundings. No way was an ambulance or a medic likely to get to their positions quickly. “Ag, man! I’ll go with them,” he said to the stern-faced one, “call it in, I’ll take responsibility for them”.

  The first policeman once again examined the body in the back, thought for a moment and said “Alright. Tygerberg hospital is the closest to this location. Contact me the moment you get there”.

  This unheralded response caught Cat off guard. “Oh…! Thank you so much!” she thanked the men in falsely realistic gratitude.

  “Cheers man, you’re doing the right thing” said the second officer to the first as he walked around the car and climbed into the front passenger seat.

  “Keep a close eye on them”. The stern-faced policeman made several gestures towards his other colleagues to remove the barriers blockading the road.

  Counterpoint to Eve’s apparent dozy calmness, Lon was frightened; even though the policeman was veritably concerned for the wellbeing of the injured girl on the backseat, he was still their enemy.

  Cat carefully pushed the car through several still-standing vehicles to the front, and pressed on, allegedly towards Tygerberg hospital.

  The presence of the officer in the car was far from comfortable; their safe little bubble had been penetrated. Lon’s concentration on his performance began to slip, especially when the man started to pry regarding the circumstances surrounding Eve’s injuries.

  “So what happened to her?”

  “A lab accident,” said Cat.

  “What kind of lab accident?”

  “A chemical explosion”.

  “The force knocked her down, and I think it broke her neck,” said Lon adding to the lie, “she also has small pieces of receptacle embedded in her abdomen,” the grief in his voice was not part of the act.

  “Man, what kind of experiments were you guys doing?”

  “Testing the resilience to corrosion from certain chemicals in under-development materials,” was the first thing that came to Lon’s mind.

  “Eish, man! That sounds dangerous!” said the officer.

  “It clearly was!”

  “What kinds of materials were you guys testing?”

  Lon paused to think, but dubiously took too long to respond. “We can’t tell you, it’s top secret”. He turned back to face Eve and tried his hardest to appear wholly concerned for her health, and not too the future of all three of them if he were to err in his utterances.

  “Might I remind you that I am an officer of the law? You must not keep secrets from me!”

  “Of course, of course!” Cat cut in. “We were testing the effects of caustic chemicals on certain nanomaterials. He’s just concerned about the privacy of company’s products; it is a competitive industry, you know?”

  “No, I don’t know. But that isn’t my line of work”.

  “Of course not”.

  By now the car was far from the attention of the police checkpoint. The traffic thinned as the expansive suburbs came more into proximity and the roads diverged more often into areas far less busy than in the centre of the city.

  “What’s the name of your company?” asked the officer.

  “Old Vine Chateau,” said Cat after a moment.

  “Old Vine Chateau?” repeated the man. “Why would a chateau be producing nanomaterials?”

  “My colleague did make it clear that our productions are very secretive”.

  “A lot of crazy things go on in this city…” said the policeman, “to be honest, I’ve come across crazier things in my time”.

  “What like?” she inquired with an air of
intrigue.

  “Oh, many things I can’t remember right now, but I tell you, those fat cats at the top are really strange people, you know? I’m always suspicious of what they’re up to. You know, actually there was something recently, the other day… the kid of that billionaire, Winters was it? Do you know about that?”

  “Yeah, I saw a couple of news reports, he killed himself right?” said Cat.

  “Something about that incident was a little strange, man. And the weirdest thing, there was no coroner at the scene”.

  The veins in Lon’s neck pumped fiercely. This policeman seemed to be on to something important, something that could help Eve’s and Lon’s case.

  “I mentioned it to the guys at the station, but most of them don’t think much of it”.

  Lon tried hard to conceive a non-suspicious question to prise out more information from the policeman, however was beaten to it by Cat.

  “Officer, can you please tell me your name?”

  “Constable Mathema”.

  The car slowed.

  “Constable Mathema, do you have a family?”

  “Yes, a wife and three kids. Why do you ask?”

  The front passenger door opened, letting in powerful gusts of wind.

  “What are you doing?!” shouted the alarmed policeman glancing at the door. When he turned back towards Cat, her body had already reorientated on its seat.

  “Don’t get involved,” she said, and thrust a stamp kick into the side of his head, knocking him out instantly. She detached his seatbelt and shoved him out of the still-moving car before closing the door and realigning herself to face the road.

  “You didn’t have to do that so violently!” Lon shouted at her.

  “He’ll be fine, we weren’t travelling fast enough to do any real damage. This way we’ll have some time to escape”.

  “But why didn’t you talk to him for longer? What he was saying about that Winters guy… he might have been able to help us!”

  “Lon, do you really think a policeman with a family would do anything to endanger his position?”

  “Well… no, but you could’ve tried to get more information out of him first”.

  “Lon, we’ve got more important things to think about right now”. And with that she once again masked the identity of her car, and sped away into the north, far from any hospitals.

  The car had come to a stop atop a natural lookout point nearby the old farming region to their west as they faced the city from where they had recently escaped.

  The Atlantic estate to their east was benefiting from regenerative development; the frames of several mega-high-rise buildings were being set in place, their shapes manipulated high in the air by huge extension-actuating machinery, semi-silhouetted against the pre-twilight sun. Seal Island, too, was ever prominent in loosely the same direction.

  Not all of the ground here was false as it began to level out from the heart of the city, yet from this non-synthetic vantage point it was clear that every instance of land-sea contact in this region was occluded by some structure or other, usually large walls.

  Cat stood apart from the car, discoursing with Tan the details of the day’s events via her palm screen.

  Lon sat by an open car door talking to Eve while she lay, nearly unmoving, in an almost-awake state.

  “I’ve been thinking… why were they trying to kill us when we were in the Science Centre? Surely they should have taken us captive to interrogate us,” said Lon.

  Eve deliberated for a moment. “How do you know they were trying to kill us?”

  “Well, they killed several innocent scientists… in case they were the suspects, I assume”.

  “Or maybe they were killed because they witnessed our ‘extreme dissent’ and the government don’t want word of it to get out. Imagine the implications of that ever happening. Do you think… do you think people would begin to make a stand if they knew we, or anybody, were… you know, trying to make things right?” she said.

  “I’d like to think so,” said Lon.

  Cat ended her call and rejoined the other two. “Right guys. Tan and Chris are up-to-date now. Our next course of action is to return to the city when it’s safe and get the two of you to the hospital where we were on Saturday. Tan has already made arrangements for when we arrive. As long as you don’t move your neck, Eve, you should be fine for a while”.

  “Did he not say anything about our mission being a failure?” asked Lon.

  Cat drew in a long breath. “He said not to worry”.

  “Why?” asked Eve. “Wasn’t the reason we tried to get all that government data because it was the only way to… well, fuck them over?”

  Cat pursed her lips and tried to exhale the tension she felt. “The good news is, there’s another backup”.

  “Really?!” Lon shot to his feet in excitement, although he remained somewhat wary of danger.

  “Yeah…” she looked around and then into the distant sky beyond the city, finding difficulty in formulating her words. “It’s in Taiwan”.

  End of Book One.

  ***

  About the Author

  Matthew was born in Carlisle, Cumbria, UK, in 1988, and spent most of his childhood in Maryport on the Solway Firth, and some time in South Wales. After studying a degree in Chester, UK, he moved to South Africa, where he learnt to appreciate life among other peoples and environments. A little over two years later he again relocated to East Asia, spending a lot of time in Taiwan and Japan.

  Having lived in five countries on three continents, and visited many others, Matthew has taken the opportunity to learn from the peoples, cultures, and politics of the places where he has been, and integrates his experiences not only into his outlook on the world and the people within it, but also into his writing, fiction or otherwise.