Two.
The cops came at him now with their MP4s raised to eye-level, keeping him in their sights the whole time. If he was going to have to do this, he was only going to get one chance.
They’d found Carlton in his usual haunt, a dive bar on the east side of town. Nathan had already explained to Freeson what he wanted him to do, and Freeson, holding his tire iron like Excalibur, had waited around the corner as Nathan went into the bar, found Carlton, and whispered in his ear that he was a “lousy, good for nothing piece of crap,” and that if he wanted to step outside, Nathan would explain exactly how crappy he thought he was. Without waiting for an answer, Nathan had walked out of the bar, asking Carlton over his shoulder if the “sissy boy” was coming or not.
One.
His one word—Carlton—would have sent the message to Freeson about what he was planning in that moment. The look of recognition in Freeson’s face had told him as much—message received. This might work with tire irons and fists. But MP4s? Only one way to find out.
Zero.
Carlton had followed Nathan, lumbering and rolling up his sleeves like Bluto in a Popeye cartoon. As they’d come from the bar, and then taken ten paces to the corner of the building, Nathan both times, back then and right, in this moment screamed “Now!” and bent double.
The beating they’d given Carlton that day had been severe and, with hindsight, overly zealous, but Nathan hadn’t been able to help himself, and Freeson, not yet a widower, had piled in hard, too. When Carlton had lain on the floor, bleeding and spitting out teeth, Nathan had told the cowardly bully that he would be leaving town that afternoon and never coming back, or that he, Carlton—big, stupid Carlton—could expect the same sort of beating every Friday on the dot. And Nathan had had more than enough friends in Glens Falls to carry it out if he’d needed them to.
Carlton had left town that afternoon, and Ingrid had never seen him again.
On Nathan’s command, and as Freeson had done that Friday at lunchtime so long ago, Freeson and Syd came forward, seemingly out of nowhere from the cops’ points of view, and fired. The cops dove to the ground as the bullets whistled past them and stung the walls. Nathan leapt towards them, pulling his knife from his belt as he did so. The nearest cop was trying to bring his MP4 up to bear, but Nathan kicked at the muzzle, landing with his knees on the cop’s chest and putting his knife against the exposed throat. Nathan looked at the other cop then, who was attempting to decide who to shoot.
The element of surprise had worked, leaving Nathan thankful that Freeson and Syd weren’t the type to run away, but instead good for meeting a threat head-on.
The other cop was moving his gun from Freeson to Nathan, back and forth. His eyes were wide with indecision.
“Don’t make us shoot you,” Nathan said to the cop with the MP4 in his hands. “And don’t make me fillet your friend here.”
Nathan pushed the knife harder against the cop’s throat beneath him.
“Just put the weapon down and I swear you won’t be harmed.”
“Do it, Gray!” the cop with the knife against his throat spat. “He’s gonna slice me!”
There was rabid panic in his voice—these men were soft and complacent. They weren’t used to any kind of resistance from the people they came up against. It’s what Nathan had bet on. These guys were door-kickers; women-slapping, point-guns-at-children types who, back in WWII, would have been happy to pull on a snazzy black uniform, a swastika armband, and pile Jews into cattle trucks. They might have just been following orders, but these were the kind of guys who would have enjoyed them. The first sign of any real resistance from people armed to the same level as them, and they fell apart. They didn’t appreciate it if their own lives were threatened. They could only cope with threatening others. It was safer that way.
Cowards. Carlton. These cops. All the same.
MP4 Cop took Knife Cop’s advice and laid his MP4 on the ground in front of him, and then put up his hands.
Freeson covered him while Syd took handcuffs from the belts of both men and Nathan helped her secure them.
Nathan next reached into his equipment bag and pulled out a roll of gaffer tape and sealed both their mouths, then secured their ankles.
When the cops were sitting against the walls, taped to a utility pipe so they couldn’t move, and when their guns, stun grenades, TASERS, and shoulder radios had been removed, Nathan allowed himself the luxury of clapping Freeson and Syd on their shoulders. “Thanks for remembering, dude. Hot damn, that felt good.”
“ESP man. ES freakin’ P.” Freeson grinned back at him, and they walked on towards the exit.
Nathan pulled the walky-talky from his belt and turned it on. His watch said 11:03. Would Stryker still be available, or for the first time in his life—the time when Nathan might not want him to—would he have followed orders?
“Stry, you there? Come back?”
A hiss of static, a mumble, and a whispered response, “Shut up. Shut up. Wait.”
There was a crackle, and then the sound of a door opening and then closing. As they reached the exit gate at the end of the tunnel, Stryker came back on. “Yes, I’ve found out where they are, and Harmsworth is leaving with his men in ten minutes. What happened? Why are you late with the call?”
“Stuff we had to do. Where are our people?”
“Lucy and Donie are locked in a room in the residential block on Michigan Avenue.” He gave them an address, and then added, “Two guards. They’re pretty damn angry about being locked up.”
“And Cyndi?”
“She’s at the hospital with Tony.”
Nathan’s heart crashed in his chest. “What, what’s happened?”
“Don’t panic. He had a bad asthma episode, so they’ve got him in for observation. Cyndi and Brandon are with him; I’ve just come from there, and they’re going to be fine. It’s just getting them out that will be problematic.”
“Why?”
“Danny’s gang is using the bottom floor of the hospital as their base of operations. They’re all over the place like a rash. No easy way to tell you, man, but I can’t see you getting them out of there without one hell of a fight.”
Syd raised her gun and put a round in the chamber, ready. “Then fight, we will.”
This was not how Nathan had wanted it to go, but as he already knew and had articulated, no battle plan survived the first engagement.
“Okay, Stryker. Stand by. You’ll see what happens when we do it. We’ll meet you at the main entrance on the way out.”
“You’re still going ahead with this? Are you crazy?”
“Little bit,” Nathan said, and with that he killed the link. He reached up, threw the bolt on the grate, pulled it open, and walked into the next patch of darkness.
The plant room was humming with power. The Industrial Transformers that fed power from the wind turbines to the whole Greenhouse area, now that they had been taken off the city’s defunct main power grid, were ranked along a wall in a cavernous room in the basement section of Chase Tower.
Syd and Freeson watched the door for security as Nathan laid the charges. Rose had supplied them with detonators, batteries, and copper wire. Nathan had made four firebombs from gunpowder reclaimed from cartridges, all of them packed with gasoline-soaked wadding and shot. These had been packed into soup cans and drilled through the base to give access by copper wire to the embedded detonators. It would have been easier to use a block of C4 plastic explosives, but as Rose had said, “None o’dat in Trash Town, pretty boy; whatedder man got t’trade.”
Nathan worked quickly as he could to maintain his safety, gaffer-taping the innards of each of the four transformers as indicated by Dave on the schematics. He jimmied the doors open with a crash, and it made Freeson and Syd whip around from the door, guns raised.
“It’s okay. Watch the corridor!”
Once the four charges were in place, Nathan trailed the wire from the bases of the four cans to a plastic spur, screwing t
hem in with his sweat-slicked fingers slipping on the handle of his screwdriver. Once fixed, he trailed the now single trigger wire out into the corridor and closed the door. Freeson and Syd moved to either side of him. Nathan held the two ends of the stripped wire in one hand and a nine-volt battery in the other.
“Tell him.”
Freeson operated the walky-talky. “Stryker, we’re about to go. You ready?”
“Yes. Ready,” came the crackled reply.
Nathan made contact. The boom from the plant room was much louder than he’d been expecting and the door was pushed out a couple of inches, hitting him painfully in the shoulder.
A second later, all of the lights went out. If he’d done his job correctly, that situation would have been replicated all over the Greenhouse.
He looked into the plant room. Through the haze of smoke and a gutter of flames, he could see that the transformers were all but destroyed. They wouldn’t be getting the power on from here any time soon. And with any luck, this blast wouldn’t just have taken out the Greenhouse’s lights and power, but also their ability to call back Harmsworth from his fool’s errand.
The cops they’d tied up in the corridor had had Maglites on the barrels of their MP4s, and Nathan and Freeson had appropriated them. Now, Nathan took point, with Syd slightly behind them with her flashlight.
They emerged from the service area onto what had been the main entrance concourse beneath Chase Tower. Two floors above was where Nathan had met with Brant on a fool’s errand of his own.
Nathan pulled out his map and spoke quickly. “Syd and Free, you go to the accommodations block here and see what you can do about springing Lucy and Donie. I’ll go get Cyndi and the kids from upstairs here. If you’re not on the walky-talky to Stryker in ten minutes, and I’m in a position to, I’ll come for you. Okay?”
Freeson and Syd nodded, and then they were gone.
Nathan turned off his flashlight and let his eyes get accustomed to the near dark. There were figures he could see moving through the frosted windows that faced the pedestrianized areas and hydroponics bays outside the building. He needed to clear this area soon because someone was bound to come down and check on the plant room before long if the outage didn’t look like it was going to fix itself.
He headed for the stairs he’d been taken up when he’d visited before and as he did so, a woman appeared out of a door just in front of him. Nathan didn’t hesitate to hit her in the face with the butt of his gun, saying “Sorry” as he lowered her unconscious body to the floor. To make him feel extra shamed, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform. He tried to map a horrific Nurse Ratched persona onto the memory of her prone form as he started up the stairs, but it didn’t quite work.
Stryker had indicated the third floor, so Nathan pounded upward as best he could in the dark. There was just enough light to see where he was, and there were luminescent strips along each stair’s edge to mitigate against the situation he now found himself in.
Hurrah for health and safety.
The third-floor landing door was swinging open as Nathan crested the steps. He took the MP4 by the muzzle and prepared to club whoever was coming out to greet him, swinging just far enough to make Stryker raise his hands with thinking he was about to have his brains dashed out.
“Geez, Nate! Enough with hitting me in the head!”
“Shut up. Where are they?”
“This way.” Stryker led Nathan back into the corridor from which he’d just emerged. They passed several doors with frosty windows behind which flashlights were flickering.
“How many people up here?”
“Not many patients, and even less staff, but there is one small problem,” Stryker whispered as they reached an intersection. “Look.”
Nathan peered around the wall. In the gloom running down the corridor, he could see that three cops were in positions outside one door. One was trying his radio. One of the others was turning on his flashlight and waving it around, while the third was covering the corridor with his machine pistol.
“They arrived just after lights went out. Must be standing orders for the situation. Guess they figured you’d try to spring them.”
“Dammit. Is there another way in?”
“Nope, this is it.”
Nathan looked at his watch. All the time was running out on them and he was no nearer to his objective.
Nathan looked down at his black boots, black combat pants, vest, and cop MP4. Could the plan formulating in his mind work? Could he get close enough to them in the dark before they realized we wasn’t a cop?
There was only one way to find out.
He turned on the MP4’s Maglite, held the gun out in front of him, and for the second time in half an hour, he elected to bluff it out with the enemy. Only this time there was no Carlton maneuver to fall back on. This was pure Nathan Desperation.
“Hey! New orders, ladies. Radio’s been taken out with the power. I’ve just come from Brant; intruders in the Greenhouse. I saw them running to the accommodation block on Michigan—he wants us over there now.”
The three cops turned and were momentarily blinded by Nathan’s gun light, each one holding their hands up to their eyes.
“What about the Tolley woman and her brats? Orders were to secure this corridor if there was an attack. Why would Brant change his own orders?”
It was the space taken up with asking Nathan the question that gave him the opportunity he needed, and the blinding light from his gun that put them on the back foot.
In the confined space of the corridor, the MP4 spat bullets with the sound of a jackhammer busting old paving slabs. The bullets tore along the floor deliberately—Nathan didn’t want to kill unless he had to—and all three cops’ boots, shins, and knees exploded with a fury of bone and blood.
“I ain’t gonna kill ya, but I will if you touch your guns, boys. I just want my wife and my kids. What’s it to be?”
All three cops were groaning, moaning, and bleeding now, but they threw their guns away. “Roll onto your fronts, boys, and assume the position. Stryker! Cuff ’em now.”
Stryker jogged past Nathan and cuffed the cops in turn, his feet slipping in the blood as Nathan covered them. “You’re in the hospital, boys. If I see a doc, I’ll send him your way.”
Nathan pushed through the door into the four-bedded bay they’d guarded. A nurse was standing in front of the bed with her hands spread wide, protecting Tony.
“Dad?” the boy asked.
Nonplussed, the nurse dropped her hands as Nathan spoke up. “Men outside need first aid, ma’am; please go help them.”
The nurse nodded and dashed beyond him into the corridor as Stryker came in, still trying to wipe the cops’ blood from his shoes.
Cyndi had been behind a curtain, but now she walked out into the beam of Nathan’s gun light. She was holding Brandon in her arms.
There didn’t need to be words, and she came to Nathan and put an arm around him. They kissed deeply, everything else forgotten—however briefly.
“Love’s young dream,” said Stryker bitterly.
“What happened? Brant said you’d been taken by a protection gang and he was trying to negotiate your release.”
“Brant lies. Come on. We gotta get out of here before they find a way to turn the lights back on, or Harmsworth comes back with his men.”
Tony climbed off the bed and grabbed a robe. “I don’t have a jacket, Dad. I can’t go outside without one.”
Nathan patted his equipment bag. “It’s okay, son. We got this all figured out, but let’s get going. We have to meet Freeson and the others outside.”
“Others?” Cyndi asked, picking her coat up from the back of a chair and, after passing Brandon to Tony, putting it on as they walked.
“Lucy and Donie. Brant took them. There’s a lot to catch you up on; just get onto the notion that this isn’t just your last night in the Greenhouse… it’s your last night in Detroit.”
Nathan gave Cyndi the edited highl
ights of the last week as they want past the injured cops and the nurse tending to them, down the corridor and on to the stairs.
Cyndi just listened, not asking questions, and all the responses Nathan got were sighs and incredulous gasps. She only said two words in the time spent between Tony’s bed and the ground floor. “Dog sleds?”
They sped up going across the concourse and headed for the doors that led to the pedestrianized zone. Nathan took the lead with the MP4 and light. He passed pistols to both Stryker and Cyndi as they went through the doors and out into the glass-covered street. They felt no appreciable change in temperature, but the shiver that the raging storm outside the glass sent through Nathan’s body froze him to the core. Everything was working out exactly as he’d planned for the most part, but the storm was going to screw with their getaway in a big way.
He crouched down by a hydroponics unit and passed a winter jacket from the bag to Tony, along with an extra blanket for Brandon to Cyndi. At last, everything that he had brought in the bag had been used, so he discarded it. He turned on the walky-talky. “Free, you there? Come back?”
“We’re here. Waiting by the door for you and the keycards.”
“Okay, buddy, see you in two.” He stood up. “We’re heading for the doors, and Stryker has keycards that are going to get us out. When we do get out, it’s a full-on blizzard, and we need to move fast but stick together. I’ll go first. Tony, you watch my back and you do not let me get away from you. Okay?”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Cyndi, you follow Tony, and Stryker, you’re at the back. Freeson and Syd will lead Lucy and Donie; we’re heading for the sleds, and then the Humvee. We’re getting out of here and we’re getting out of here now.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 39