by Evans, John
#
“You know we’re not on the duty roster until two o’clock,” Winter said to Nic as they sped toward the diner. “Quarles is gonna wonder what we’re doing in the field.”
“I can deal with Quarles.”
Winter checked the load on his Heckler & Koch. Still ready to rock.
“So what’s the plan? If you can occupy his attention, I’ll take him out before he knows what hit him.”
“We’ll find a position for you. If he’s not holding a gun on her, just put him down, first clean shot you get. Otherwise, hang back. Commandeer a vehicle and tail us. I’ll figure something out.”
“Copy that.”
#
Voskuil paused, indecisive, in the threshold. Lena saw the panic in his eyes (how could anyone miss it?) and felt a surge of her own.
“This guy’s up to something, bank on it,” the old man said, approaching the cops’ table. The other deputy rose as well, assessing Voskuil and reaching the obvious conclusion that Lena just had. His energy was all wrong. Nothing innocent about it.
“Why don’t we all step out for a moment, sort this out,” The first deputy said, coming around the table toward the door. He was in his early 20’s but didn’t seem wet behind the ears. His blue eyes were so pale they reminded Lena of robin’s eggs.
“Sure,” Voskuil said, agreeably enough, taking a few steps onto the sidewalk. Lena watched his gaze stutter between the cops and the old man as they all filed toward the door.
“He’s awfully jumpy. Why don’t you run his name through your database,” the chrome-domed retiree was saying.
“This gentleman has too much time on his hands, I think,” Lena said to the deputies as they left the diner.
“I think he’s gotten the wrong idea about us,” Voskuil chimed in, trying too hard to sound casual and bemused.
“Let’s start with your I.D., sir,” The first deputy said. They both had their hands on their holster-straps.
Voskuil withdrew his driver’s license from his wallet, handed it over.
“Yours too, ma’am,” the blue-eyed cop said to Lena. He took their cards back to the cruiser.
Meanwhile, the other officer, whose dark sheaf of hair was spotted with gray, watched Voskuil with wary interest. Getting the measure of him.
“We were just getting some goddamned breakfast,” Voskuil said, glaring at his elderly nemesis. “Don’t believe that’s illegal yet.”
“Oh yeah? Then why didn’t you eat anything?” the old man said, openly challenging Voskuil. With the cops here he was eager for confrontation.
“All right, we’ll take it from here, sir,” the deputy said. “Please go back inside and we’ll let you know if we need a statement.”
The senior citizen returned, reluctantly, to his spot at the counter. He stared resolutely out the window at them, unnerving even Lena.
Voskuil’s phone started ringing. He nervously clicked it off. Then Lena’s phone started ringing. She saw that it was the Center. She put it on silent. The deputy watched them curiously.
An eternity later (though it must have been two minutes or less), the first deputy returned. He kept a poker face until only a few feet away.
“You’re free to go,” he said.
“Thank you, officers,” Voskuil said. He looked expectantly at Lena. She hesitated, seeing the cops exchange private words. Why didn’t they catch her eye?! She didn’t want this to turn into a bloodbath, but if they could somehow be alerted…
Voskuil cleared his throat and she saw that his hand was in his pocket and something was pressed against the fabric, aimed in her direction.
Probably not a roll of breath mints.
Voskuil and Lena got into his Porsche.
“Christ, what was that fossil’s problem?” Voskuil said, thrumming with nervous energy.
“Let’s just go,” Lena said. She saw that she had three missed calls. All from the Center. The search was on, but it was just starting.
Voskuil pulled out of the lot and drove down the street. “We’ve got to find somewhere else to wait.”
Lena noticed the sheriff’s car following them. Her stomach twisted into knots.
“James. Stay calm.”
He followed her eyes, saw the cruiser in his rearview mirror. “Fuck!” he exploded.
“They’re just seeing where we’re going,” Lena said. “Let’s go to the post office or something. It’s only a little ways.”
“Yeah, fine,” Voskuil said. “Nothing’s fucking easy, you know that?”
“That I do.”
They pulled into the USPS branch parking lot. The deputies slowed, but kept going.
Lena got out of the car. Voskuil did the same. They started walking up the stairs to the door. Inside, a line of bored customers awaited service at the only open window.
“Thanks for keeping your cool,” Voskuil said. “I’m glad you didn’t make me kill you back there.”
“Staying alive is kind of important to me,” Lena said.
Voskuil chuckled despite himself. “That makes two of us.”
They spent a couple of minutes inside, Voskuil buying a roll of stamps from the machine for the sake of appearances. For a moment, it seemed as though everything would be all right. But when they walked out of the post office, a police car was pulling up behind the Porsche. The officers were looking at the car, not them.
#
“This way,” Voskuil hissed to Lena, walking in the other direction. Lena went with him and the twenty steps they took to the corner were the longest of her life.
But they turned that corner without incident. A red-headed, somewhat paunchy fellow was dismounting from his green Honda sport-bike right at the curb. As he goggled at them in surprise, Lena realized the gun was back in Voskuil’s hand.
“Keys!” Voskuil said, thrusting out his palm. The guy put the keys in his hand so quickly you’d think they were white-hot.
“Take it, man,” the guy said, almost wheedlingly, mincing away with baby-steps. Lena wouldn’t be surprised to see he was wetting his pants.
Voskuil forced Lena to hop onto the motorcycle. He leaned in to whisper, “I’ll drive five yards, and if you’re not right behind me, I’ll turn around and shoot you, that red-headed douche, and anyone else I can take down with me.”
She nodded with the faintest sneer of irrepressible contempt. Of course he would. She knew that now.
Voskuil leaped into the saddle and fired up the bike. It sprang from the curb as if rocket-propelled and they streaked down the street.
A siren chirped behind them and Lena risked a glance behind her. The police car was now in pursuit.
#
Nic had just pulled to the curb a block from the diner when the announcement came over the police band. A high-speed pursuit was in progress just three miles away. Suspects were Caucasian, male and female, ages 25 to 45, on a stolen motorcycle.
“Oh God,” Nic said, putting the Interceptor back in gear. “Oh God, oh God….”
“We’re gonna get her back,” Winter said. “I swear… We’ll get her back.”
What did he have to lose? If they failed, he might not be around to feel guilty about the broken promise. But somehow he knew they could not be stopped. Not Nic and Winter. No way, no how.
As if suddenly feeling it too, Nic seemed to gather herself. Her gaze through the windshield became laser-focused again. She was upping her internal threat level another notch.
Winter’s wasn’t exactly bottoming out, either. He gripped the doorframe tightly as Nic took a speed-bump at 30.
“Damn, girl,” he said after the painful jolt was over. “Easy. We’re not much use to her as street pizza. Or without a transmission.”
“I got it,” she said tightly. But for the first time in their partnership, Winter didn’t entirely believe her.
#
Voskuil tore through a curve in the road just as a Seattle Police Interceptor, this one a Corvette, reached the next intersection. He zipped right
past it but the Corvette turned sharply and was immediately hot on their heels, flashers igniting in a blaze of ferocious certainty.
“Fuck,” Voskuil whispered, losing another heap of hope. This was bad. He kicked the crotch-rocket into a higher gear. They sped through an industrial district, mostly warehouses and factories on either side. The streetlights flashed highly irregular pools of luminance on the grimy strip of pavement.
The Corvette was quickly joined by a Mustang. At the wheel, Nicolette Waters was driving like the proverbial winged Chiroptera exiting the land of damnation.
Voskuil saw this in his side mirror but didn’t give much thought to the Virus Control decal on the Mustang’s hood. He had stopped thinking minutes earlier and right now he was just trying to keep the bike on two wheels. They nearly wiped out on a hard right, missing a parked van by inches as the bike skidded and fishtailed through without dumping them.
Where they were lucky was Voskuil’s misspent youth. He had an old BMW cycle in his teens. Of course, his mother made him sell it when, at 20, his best friend Joel Fishman was killed on a Ducati.
That was one of the reasons Voskuil got into medicine. To save people like Joel. Of course, his path in life had taken some significant detours since then. Voskuil liked to think that if it weren’t for the whole zombie apocalypse thing, he would be a real humanitarian.
Oh well.
The Corvette lost it in the turn but the Mustang pivoted smoothly through without losing much speed. The Vette rattled into a fire hydrant, jumped the curb and went three-sixty in the front yard of a high school, tearing doughnuts in the sod.
Voskuil noted this in the side mirror with satisfaction. Unfortunately, when the car stopped, it was facing the right direction. The cop behind the wheel just put his foot down and they sped forward again.
Voskuil cursed silently and focused on the street ahead. He didn’t know where he was going and braked, trying to conjure a city map in his head. He couldn’t focus; driving at this speed required too much concentration. He glanced down at the bike, realizing it probably had an onboard GPS.
In that moment, the Interceptor pulled up alongside.
“Get in the car!” Nic yelled out the window.
Voskuil, uncertain, did not throttle down. He saw the Corvette gaining in his side mirror. A host of other flashing lights were many blocks back, for now, but growing larger.
The Interceptor dogged him but carefully kept a discreet distance. Voskuil knew he had Waters, so long as he had Lena. He slowed, looking for a good place to pull over. The Corvette whipped into range and an armored trooper leaned out the window with a weapon aimed at them.
“Bastard!” Voskuil screamed, and gunned it again. The cop in the Corvette opened fire.
#
Winter was stunned by what happened next. Nic cried out and rammed the Corvette in the rear left side, crumpling the bumper into the wheel-well. The crippled Corvette spun out, tire locked.
Contrary to the movies, at speed it took very little contact to stop another car dead in its tracks.
Winter turned to watch the Corvette flip three times in rapid succession. It was only halted when it slammed into a bus shelter and plowed the entire structure beneath its body.
“Damn Nic,” Winter said. “Those guys… They might be…”
“Fuck them,” Nic spat. “That’s not procedure. They knew he had a hostage. That was cold blooded.”
Winter wasn’t sure the cops knew Elena was a hostage, and he thought the firing officer might have been trying to disable the bike, but he didn’t want to argue the point. Not right now, anyway.
Nic followed Voskuil down the block. Winter’s second thoughts were temporarily banished by a glance in the rearview. Those distant lights had become a fleet of official cars, sirens howling like condemned souls. There was only one way out. Forward.
#
Voskuil saw the flotilla of cherry-tops gaining and simply accelerated again, hoping to somehow lose their pursuers. It was, after all, his only hope.
There would be no jail time here. No court process. Just a simple test. Which he would fail. He’d tested himself when he got home from the theater, but that was a formality. He had it. This was a textbook case, a no-brainer. In the eyes of the law, his sentence was summary euthanasia the moment that junkie’s teeth drew blood.
Voskuil vowed, if he somehow survived this, to never use the e-word again. Even if he lived to be 100.
It was then that the roadblock appeared before them. Ad hoc, ill-equipped, but effective. Two cars parked at a diagonal, headlights almost touching. Four armed cops positioned in firing angles at either bumper.
More than enough to stop two people on a motorcycle.
Braking hard, Voskuil desperately sought a sliver of proverbial daylight between the cars and the curbs. There was barely a foot on either side. He would have to jump the curb…
Voskuil had never tried such a stunt with his own bike, let alone with a curb this high. And certainly not with a passenger. No way.
But today he was going for it.
Voskuil gave the bike some gas and angled for the left curb. Meanwhile, the police opened fire.
Bullets seared the air around them. Voskuil leaned into the handlebars and focused on the rapidly approaching curb. It was upon them in an instant.
“UP!” he screamed, left to hope Gladden had common sense and quick reflexes. She did — their asses left the saddle at roughly the same time, weight pulling up the front wheel, and the bike hopped the curb. The tires landed on sidewalk and they were past the roadblock in an instant.
But Voskuil instinctively braked, facing an array of obstacles: a mailbox, parking meters, a café table.
The cops behind them kept shooting. A bullet grazed the Honda’s front tire, missing Voskuil’s hip by inches.
Voskuil played the handgrips like a musical instrument and managed to keep the bike from jack-knifing. It was a brilliant display of riding, inspired by sheer, animal desire for flight. They lost more speed, however.
The Interceptor suddenly spun ahead of them, fishtailing. One of the cars must have moved to let their fellow government officials through.
Voskuil was forced to stop at last. He cut into a controlled slide only yards away from Waters’ car.
“GO!” He shoved Lena toward it, ditching the bike on its side. Together they scrambled for the Mustang. So close…
Focused on the passenger doorhandle, Voskuil felt a surge of optimism. Two steps, one quick move and they’d be in the car with badass Nic on their side. She’d know where the closest freeway ramp was.
He’d made it.
Gunfire erupted behind them.
Against his will, Voskuil went from hopeful to blank in an instant. The end he had been desperately, cunningly avoiding had come, and come abruptly.
Voskuil never knew that it was a military-issue armor-piercing round that passed through the back of his skull and cleanly out the front.
Lena felt Voskuil reflexively seize her arm for support, and looked back to see him tottering along with a dazed expression. There was a large flapping wound in his forehead. It pulsed blood in rivulets down either side of his nose.
Already dead, Voskuil sprawled face-first on the pavement. The impact sent his front teeth rattling over the street.
CHAPTER NINE
BON VOYAGE
IF IT WAS possible, things seemed to happen even more quickly after that. Six patrol cars skidded to a halt in a loose ring around Voskuil’s body, the roadblockers and other pursuers.
Nic ushered Lena to the seat in the rear of the Interceptor Voskuil thought, seconds before, that he would be occupying. She wiped the infected man’s blood and brain matter off Lena’s face with her uniform sleeve.
“You need to spit?” Nic asked. Lena numbly shook her head. She was pretty sure nothing had gotten in her mouth.
Obviously, there was a threat of contagion if Lena ingested any of Voskuil’s infected blood. Though the virus was fully a
irborne and every person on Earth was exposed to it daily, that concentration was insufficient to thwart the human immune system. Only the recently dead, their bodies’ defenses in full shutdown, could be made hosts without a larger, more direct dose.
For the living, the threat came from a break in the skin, usually caused by a bite or scratch from a v-carrier. This was enough to directly introduce concentrated pathogens into the bloodstream. Once that happened, the virus inevitably chipped away the white blood-cell count and other indicators of a healthy immune system. There was some variance, of course, in the duration of individual declines. A healthy, fit person might survive the full 72 hours that was known to be possible. But the mortality rate with this plague was 100%.
If you were v-positive, you were as good as dead.
Winter prepared the tiny testing syringe. Lena stared at it in quiet dread. She glanced at her arm. Small half-moons, the shape of Voskuil’s fingernails, marred her pale skin. A wan trickle of blood seeped from one of them. Just a drop or two, really. The wound wouldn’t even require a Band-Aid.
That stupid, selfish son of a bitch.
She gazed at Winter with trepidation as he approached her with the needle.
“Won’t hurt a bit,” he said. “Just a quick pinprick and it’s over.”
She nodded. He seemed confident she was clean. Perhaps her blood and Voskuil’s hadn’t commingled….
What Lena didn’t know was that Winter was instinctively carrying out his well-drilled protocol. It was standard practice to take a reassuring attitude with citizens prior to testing. After all, who would willingly submit to a test that, if failed, meant the officer was to immediately shoot you? The properly trained officer’s demeanor suggested the v-test was just a formality. It was good psychology, and Winter knew firsthand that it worked.