Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “Michael, I gotta go. I can’t do this to you.”

  He inhaled sharply one time.

  “I should never have come,” I said, resignation descending. “I . . .” I was about to say something about how regretful I was, but stopped, as a new thought seemed to appeared out of the gloom. Since they thought it was Michael, maybe I could still hide in his parents’ room until they’d taken him away. They wouldn’t find any more evidence against him. And once I was gone I could just make sure they knew it was someone else. For a few moments the idea was heartening, and I went so far as to think I could maybe still go home tonight, but even under the best of circumstances it would be traumatizing for someone like Michael, who had unexplained stress-related seizures. Worse, given the bike and what the neighbor said, they’d still think he was an accomplice anyway.

  Pushing the temptation back, I started toward the door. No one was in the hallway, but I could hear officers talking in Michael’s father’s study. My feet had left the ledge and I was falling. The railing above was a distant memory. I drifted down the steps and heard more voices as I took the last one, but no one was immediately within my view of the kitchen. There was only one thing left to do and I started toward the murmurs with my hands on my head but, just as I was about to turn the corner, I stopped.

  A set of keys was sitting on the kitchen counter. I quickly scanned the room. Empty. No one had actually seen my face yet—not here, nor outside. And if I were to turn myself in right now, they’d know Michael had helped me, no matter what I said to the contrary. Besides, he had helped me with the drone; there would be evidence of it on his computer.

  “Your dad’s new car has insurance, right?” I asked, before I even knew what I was doing.

  Michael didn’t respond.

  “Michael. The police need to think this was random, so you’re not caught up in it,” I said, slipping into the garage and pacing over to Mr. Monroe’s brand new Alcon Firelight.

  One sharp breath.

  As quietly as I could, I opened the door and eased into the seat. After looking around for a few seconds I found the window tint dial and turned it up to maximum, feeling confident in the opacity given that I’d barely been able to see in when it’d been at half that. In the glove compartment there was an insurance card effective five days ago.

  Another sharp breath.

  Almost immediately after I turned the ignition officers emerged in the doorway shouting, their guns drawn. “Stop the car! Don’t move!”

  I reached to shift, but my hand went limp. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. None of it was supposed to happen like this.

  “Get out of the car with your hands in the air!”

  As they circled, reaching for the door, I felt my hand finally slide the stick into reverse and I let my foot touch down on the pedal. The garage door screeched, torn from its hinges as I slammed backward into a police car in the driveway, dusk spilling red onto the dashboard. There was shouting, but the words ran together, reaching my ears as only a smear. I jammed the car into drive and peeled out across the driveway into the front yard.

  Police cars had wreathed the house, however there were gaps in between them and I rocketed through the largest. Gunshots ricocheted off the wheel wells, but the pressure lights retained their green glow as I skittered onto a side street, away from their scopes. A clump of neighbors and their dogs watched in dumbstruck awe as I passed them.

  “Get out of the way,” I murmured, trying to hold back the adrenaline, which ebbed only slightly as I steadied the wheel. I felt like a balloon escaping from someone’s grasp, fragile, floating into the stratosphere, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to come down again. A police car barreled down the road opposite, slowing as I approached, looking like it wanted to make a sharp turn and block the street, but I was going too fast and it had to back out of the maneuver.

  A couple blocks later the side street expelled me onto Nile Boulevard, where it was straight enough to pick up some real speed. My foot pressed harder and harder on the pedal, until it was flat against the floor mat. Fortunately, there were so few other cars on the road, and the autonomous ones were programmed to drive so defensively, that I didn’t have to decelerate to weave in between them.

  I heard a soft beeping in my ear and then Michael’s voice. “Did you make it?”

  “So far.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Sorry about the car, Michael, but this is the only way out.” I jolted over a rise and my stomach slammed back to earth.

  “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know.” The words hung in the air for a few seconds. I wanted to cry. “Keep going, I guess. I’m well past a felony and no one would ever hire me with that on my record.”

  “Me neither.”

  I glanced at the rearview mirror and saw lights appearing over a hill. “You’re fine. You can tell them you didn’t know anyone had snuck inside.”

  He managed a weak snort. “They won’t believe me. I’ve already lied to them and they know it. And when they find the mask in my room or when they figure out that you’re my friend they’ll—”

  “Just tell them that you were confused. That’s true, right? And . . . and tell them that someone threatened you.”

  “But that isn’t true.”

  “It doesn’t fucking matter. Do you deserve to be in trouble? No. That’s what matters.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Where are you now? Can they see that you’re talking?”

  “Most of ’em chased after you and the ones still here are with my mom in the next room.”

  “Okay, good. Listen, Michael, I need to hang up in a moment—there’s some serious traffic up ahead.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away.”

  “But there’ll be spike strips and helicopters. They’re going to get you. You should just—”

  “At least they don’t have drones.”

  “The Feds will. And you can bet they’ll send them in if you keep going.”

  “Listen, Michael. I’m sorry, I really am, but before I hang up I need to ask you to do one more thing,” I said as I swerved in between cars. “Don’t answer any call you get from Chris.”

  “Chris? Why Chris? Don’t bring him into this, Dor. Don’t, please, it wouldn’t be—”

  “I’ve got to hang up now,” I repeated.

  “Hold on for a—”

  I cut the connection and as soon as the line went dead, I said, “Dial Chris.” A few seconds later his voice was in my ear. “Dorian, what do you want?”

  “Michael’s not feeling well, man. I think he might be about to have a seizure,” I said, trying to sound as panicked as I could.

  “What? Where are you? Where is he?”

  “Lying on the couch—you gotta freakin’ get over here!”

  “Doesn’t he have his meds?”

  I took a sharp turn and my voice got shakier. “No, I went and got ’em from a pharmacy, but now my car’s not starting!”

  “Then call 911!”

  “He hasn’t had a seizure yet or anything and the ambulance isn’t going to have the meds, they’ll just take him to the hospital. We can get them faster. You gotta fucking help, man!” I screamed, not wanting to give him time to think or ask any questions.

  “Okay, okay where?”

  “At the Squaw Valley parking garage, by the pharmacy. Where are you?”

  “Uh, Patricia Davis’ house at a midterm study group.”

  “You gotta leave now.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense, though. I don’t understand why you—”

  “Stop talking and move. I’ll meet you halfway up P1 on the right, okay?”

  “Alright, Jesus, I got it—don’t be such a prick.” He paused. “What’s with those sirens in the background? I thought you said you hadn’t called an ambulance?”

  “There’s just some fire truck outside the parking garage. Quit . . . quit wasting time and get going!”

>   I cut the line. There was no point in not risking everything now, so I pushed still further on the pedal and lowered the sun visor as I turned a corner and headed into a wake of stoplights.

  “Dial Michael.”

  Michael sounded despondent. “Are you okay, Dorian?”

  “Are they still talking to your mom?”

  “Yeah, so I’m good if I face away and whisper. But Dorian, even if you slip through now . . . they’ll eventually . . . there’s nowhere to go.”

  I brought my hand to my forehead to block the sunlight. “Let me worry about that. What I need you to do is sneak downstairs, wipe up that blood, and put the mask away with your ski stuff.”

  “Wipe it up?”

  “Yeah. It might be in a few places so really look carefully.” The idea of him getting downstairs again seemed like a reach leaving my mouth, but my Revised brain with Schliffen and Manstein had conjured up the thought, so it was probably possible. And it was probably my only option. Everything was everything now.

  “What? I . . . I, I don’t think I can . . . they keep glancing over at me. And besides—”

  “It’s the only way! If they think it’s just some random guy who broke into your house, they’re not going to accuse you of anything!”

  “Dorian, they’re right there. I can’t.”

  The car engine whined as I went under an overpass. “Say you’re going to the bathroom and then go out that window—”

  “No, no, they won’t just let me do that.”

  “You’re going to have . . . okay, okay, fine. Just run downstairs and lock the door, then. And just clean it up really quick.”

  “I can’t, Dor. They’ll know—”

  “You have to. You fucking have to!”

  Three pairs of lights twinkled ahead of me and I swerved off the boulevard onto another street.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “Michael, you’re my best friend.”

  “I can’t do it, Dor.”

  “Yes, you can. I know you can. It’s like in Hearts when you have to shoot the moon.” The speedometer ticked past one hundred ten as I flew through a stop sign.

  “I . . . they’re gonna . . . I . . . I just can’t.”

  I lifted off the road as I veered onto a larger thoroughfare, the celerity making it harder and harder to control. I swerved to avoid another car and the Alcon rocked wildly, as if scooped up by the cement and brought back down again.

  “Please . . .” said Michael, his voice barely a whisper.

  “It takes speed to shoot the moon, Michael. Otherwise, you run out of air.”

  I tried to keep my voice steady. More cars loomed ahead, and I eased the wheel to the right in advance of them, yet was moving so fast that I still lost contact with my left tires. “I’m going to hang up now and you’re going to go do it, okay?”

  “Dorian . . . it’s over.”

  “It will be if you don’t clean up that blood,” I said, and killed the line.

  I swerved south at an intersection even though it was in the wrong direction, knowing I still had a few more miles before I’d be parallel with the garage. I had no delusions of eluding the helicopter—it had its eyes locked on me; but I was worried that the ground units would set a spike strip down before I broke north, and my path needed to be erratic enough not to telegraph my intentions.

  The light for Lockhart Road turned yellow three hundred yards away and I swapped the pedal for the brake, but I was going eighty and the car skidded in hops and spurts like a hose under too much pressure. The light turned red. There was a gap between the three cars in the turning lane and the two on the far right, and I pointed toward it.

  The Alcon slipped past the first right-turning car, shaving off its side mirror, time falling away as its wheels lost contact with the road again. There was a soundtrack of screams and horns and I closed my eyes, envisioning my windshield exploding and raining down like knives, the car’s steel frame crumpling inward. But when I opened them everything was still intact. Traffic was sputtering and gasping from both directions and I joined the right side like a late student slipping into his seat.

  I was dumbstruck. I should’ve died. Horns blared, triggered by self-driving cars’ honking algorithms, and my eyes traveled back to the road’s surface. There were sirens singing in the distance, but I didn’t glimpse any lights in my rearview mirror.

  I rounded a bend and found a convoy of police cars waiting for me at the base of a depression, filling the road with a sea of light. How could they have known I was coming north? I braked and then braked harder. Gunshots slapped the chrome wheels and I felt the front tire under me sigh and jerk, and then a second time, more wild, when it was forced over the median in a tight, winding turn.

  More bullets pelted the undercarriage and wheel wells. Nozzles sprayed. Batteries cracked. I was moving away from the gunfire now, zagging in and out of their gunsights like I’d seen in the movies. But another two cars rounded the corner ahead, their lights staring at me. Panic seized first my hand and then the wheel, forcing the car down an embankment in a sweeping, jagged line.

  I was still in motion when I landed, the frame bending and snarling, hoses snapping and engine fluid splattering the pavement like blood from a skewered reptile. My eyes darted back to the freshly splintered rearview mirror to see the cruisers pausing at the top of the embankment, high enough up that they would’ve probably rolled if they’d followed. Even though the sports car was mortally wounded, they would have to go around to 7th Street to catch up to me.

  “Get out of the fucking way!” I screamed as I shot the gap between a handful of self-driving cars whose hazard thresholds must’ve been breached and were all politely trying to pull over to the side of the road. “Move! Move it, goddammit!”

  The Alcon was making loud noises, but as soon as I made it through the crosswalk, I was advancing north again, well past where the blockade had been three blocks over. It was going to be close. Buildings passed by in wisps and fragments, marking speed as the last rays of sunlight staggered through the skyline. If just one cruiser caught my tail in the next thirty seconds it was over, but the seconds ticked by and I threaded through the traffic, thickening to sap as I moved closer in. Twenty-five seconds. Twenty seconds. Fifteen seconds. I still had a chance.

  I spied the parking garage ahead, a 1970s-style mass of concrete, hulking over its younger, sleeker neighbors across the street.

  Running a red light, I thought about calling Michael to see if he’d dealt with the stains, but there wasn’t any time. Sirens sounded everywhere. I was only a block away. Police lights flashed again in my rearview mirror, though they had to be about seven or eight blocks down. I dialed Chris as I slammed through the flimsy barrier into the garage and asked, “Are you here? Halfway up P1, right?”

  “Yeah, by the stairwell.”

  I dodged a van that was in the middle of backing out and whipped into the space next to Chris’s Camry. I shut my door and pulled opened his, sliding into the seat next to him. “Let’s go, man!”

  “Shit, what the hell happened to Mr. Monroe’s car?” Chris asked, scrunching up his face in disbelief.

  “Just a scratch.”

  “That’s not just a scratch.”

  “Chris, just fucking drive!”

  “Alright, but where’s Michael?” Chris asked as he turned the ignition.

  “At his NASA Juniors class at the library.”

  He backed out of the parking spot and began heading down the ramp.

  “Where’s your ticket?” I asked.

  “It’s above the mirror.”

  I grabbed it. There was one car ahead of us and a beleaguered-looking man inside was fumbling with his own. “Honk at him,” I urged.

  Chris scowled. “That’s not going to help.”

  Most garages just pinged your account, but these things made you put the ticket into a reading machine. Even though I’d chosen it specifically because it was too worn down to have cameras or license sensors, it took e
verything I had to keep from screaming.

  “Dude, just give it a second.”

  The sirens were almost upon us, though. My heart throbbed. My hand was on the door handle and I was about to get out and shove the ticket inside for the fool ahead of us when the crossing barrier lifted and the man’s brake lights flashed off.

  “What’s with those sirens? Is the building on fire or something?”

  Chris pushed in our ticket and we turned right, into the street. A few seconds later police cars turned the corner and skidded up next to the parking garage’s exit.

  I watched Chris eying the cops through his rear-view mirror. “I guess it’s not a fire,” he muttered. “Must be some heavy shit . . . like a big stamp bust or something.”

  He paused for a second and I held my breath, hoping he wasn’t linking Mr. Monroe’s wounded car and my demeanor to the sudden appearance of the police, but he just said, “Good thing you were being such a dick or we might’ve gotten stuck.”

  “Yeah,” I said weakly.

  We pulled up to a light and Chris looked over at me. “Are you doing okay? You’re white as a sheet.”

  I tried to steady my breath. “I’m just worried about Michael.”

  “Yeah, me too,” said Chris. “What happened to that car though? I thought you said it wouldn’t start . . . and I thought you said you were already at the pharmacy.”

  “I said it had a flat and I was at the pharmacy—I just forgot where I’d parked.”

  “I could’ve sworn you said that—”

  “God, what’s with all the freaking questions?” I hissed, glancing over my shoulder to see if there were any police cars behind us. “We just have to get to Michael.”

  His gaze was waiting for me when I turned back. “That really was a lot of cops, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  My breath was short. I wanted to just slump down, but I didn’t want to give Chris any more clues, so I changed the subject. “It’s a shame Michael’s parents won’t just Revise him already, so he doesn’t have to worry about always having to take pills. It’s so easy to forget or run out. I mean . . . at least they could get his seizures fixed.”

  “He’s never run out before.”