Chapter Thirty Eight

Five

From behind her, Five hears Gerald shout “Stop NOW” right before a couple bullets ricochet off the wall at the height of her head. She can’t be getting shot in the head. That won’t be any good. She immediately stops, puts her hands on the back of her head, and drops to her knees. When the sound of Valerie’s truck fades around another distant corner, the heavy sound of Cris’s boots catch up to her. As hard as she’s ever been hit in her life, he boots her in the middle of the back, sending her sprawling face down across the gritty pavement. The second she tries to spin around on him, he stomps on her ankle, nearly breaking it, and keeping her from being able to get up.

Like a wild brown bear, he manhandles her, drops his entire weight down on her back hard with his knees, and then wrestles her arms behind her back. It takes her back to the time she was strung up by Paul. Cris is a big man, and her small frame doesn’t have a chance against him. She can feel him getting the drugs all over himself while she struggles. They’re all slippery on her skin with the stuff. If he weren’t completely crushing her, she’d be laughing.

“Gah, what the hell is this shit?” Thought you’d goop up to get out of the cuffs? Nice try.” He grabs her hair and cranks her head back, trying to force her to look at him.

She can’t even say anything back with him on top of her. Only a grunty murmur comes out, and not by her choice. He ratchets a hand cuffs down real tight on her wrists, hard enough to lock around her bones, so it can’t spin at all. He loops the other one underneath the heavy leather belt on her waist, and tightens it down on her other wrist. When he rolls her over to look at her, he scrapes the sweat off his forehead with the palm of his hand and wipes it on his pants. She shakes her head with a smile, knowing he’s gotten the stuff on his face now, making it worse. It runs down with more sweat in his eyebrows, stinging his eyes.

“Son of a bitch.” He wipes his face on his sleeves and tries to use them to rub at his eyes. “Come on, get the hell up.”

He yanks her up by her wrists behind her back, nearly lifting her completely off the ground. The steel cuffs cut in and hurt like hell. As he marches her back down the Alley to the street, she keeps a close watch on him. He tries to get ahold of Gerald on the radio, but Gerald has his own problems to deal with. Valerie is pounding the ground with a thousand horsepower and he can’t catch her. She hopes he does, so Valerie can show Gerald what a standard rifle is all about.

Cris has no intentions of calling another officer to pick the two of them up before Gerald gets back. She is his prize ticket, and he surely has less than noble plans for her. While they wait in the darkness at the edge of the alley, the scopolamine cocktail she gave him starts kicking in. Cris is already shaking his head and starting to look around. She gives it a few more minutes to make sure he’s good and cooked on the stuff before making any moves.

“Why did we go down here? We’re at the wrong end of the alley.”

He about hits her for simply talking, but then looks around and then down to the other end of the dark alley. “Shit.”

“Gerald is waiting for us down there, can’t you see the car?”

He jerks at her wrists. “I said shut up.” He looks around again, and then shoves her along back down the same way he first chased her.

She smiles, but then takes a deep breath. She still has to figure out how to get at him. She figured she’d get handcuffed, but not like this. As they walk under the dim light over a rear door entrance, she notices a security camera above it. She stops and looks up at it with as scared of a face as she can, making sure it gets a good look of her. When he stops too, he snatches her wrists and aggressively hauls her back away from it. She’s getting a little pissed about him continuing to yank her around like this. It’s starting to hurt quite a bit.

“It’s too late Cris. The camera saw us. Everyone’s gonna know what you did to me.”

He stops and grabs her hard by the front of her throat. “Yeah they are. That’s the point, stupid. We’re not cops, and we’re not here to uphold the law. We’re here to wipe you little fuckers out, once and for all.” He shoves her away hard while kicking her feet out from under her, making her fall to the ground on her back.

She watches him shake his head again and peer up at the light over the door for a moment. He grabs his rifle by the end of the barre and takes a swing at it. It’s pretty high up there and he can’t reach it. When he tries jumping up and swinging a couple times, he doesn’t come even close. He’s all over the place, clearly swatting at something imaginary, and moving. While he’s occupied, she squirms against her cuffs, rolls over onto her hip, and gets up on her knees.

She sneers at Cris and mocks him while he’s clearly starting to lose his wits. “Oh, looks like you dropped it, ya dumb turd. Better get it before it crawls away!”

Cris tosses his rifle aside and drops down on all fours, swiping his hands all over the pavement as if he dropped a small screw or something. He looks so pathetic. The light from the overhead lamp shining off the back of his shiny head makes her want to kick it. With such disdain for him, she lunges at him with two long strides, putting all the strength and speed she has into it.

The last thing she wanted was to see his eyes look up at her. The moment her pointed bone end of her knee strikes his skull like a sledgehammer, he looks up at her like a child playing in the dirt. It almost makes her falter, but it’s too late. She’s at full momentum. Both his neck and skull snap and crush under the force of the blow. Without so much as a grunt, his limp body flops over onto its side. Cris’s arms are pointed out straight in front of himself, and his knees are bent, like a dog dead on the side of the road.

Her mouth drops, and shudders with the sudden shock of it. It’s over. When a flood of guilt that she’s never felt before, crashes down on her from out of nowhere, she leaps into a dead run through the darkness. She has killed before, but it wasn’t like this. She wasn’t scared, and she had done it with such ill will. No matter how far she runs, it feels like Cris is still right there behind her, sprawled out on the ground underneath the dim light. She can’t look back.

After running as far and as hard as she can, she starts to feel the warning signs of overheating, and voltage drop from her battery. She didn’t charge yesterday when she was supposed to. Nauseous from it, she falters and stumbles over against the wall of a building, with no idea where she’s gone. Her wrists are burning, but she feels like she deserves it.

Cris couldn’t really have hurt her, or even killed her, but she still took his one and only life from him because she simply hated his guts. She remembers that he had tried to save her life once, all of their lives. She could have maybe just hurt him, to make him understand that it’s time to back off, but she didn’t. Her heavy breathing picks up even more while she spirals into al full panic.

A few miles away, Valerie’s heart is pounding hard as hell. She’s got Sy on her com link but she can hardly talk. She ditched Gerald around a few hard turns in the dark and killed her truck amongst a bunch of other cars in a covered parking lot. Gerald has been circling around the area he lost her in. He knows she blacked her lights out on him somewhere close. He’s shining his cruiser’s spotlight all around the block. If he keeps it up, it’s only a matter of time before he finds her.

Sy is watching her over the video feed from her wrist. From the angle, all he can see is her wide eyes darting about. With the engine off, he can hear how hard she’s breathing.

“Ok, Valerie, this is what we’re gonna do. Grab one of the rifles, get out of the truck, and wait for him from somewhere else under cover.”

“Ha, fuck that! You know I can’t shoot that thing worth a damn! I wouldn’t have a chance!” She starts to break down. “They got Five!”

“Hey, hey, Five’s gonna be fine. It’s just her body, k, remember that.” He pulls his hand down the front of his face at seeing the tears pouring down her face. “Now listen, you are not a robot, ok, so I need you to listen to me so I can keep you alive. At least get the automatic out of your glovebox.”

She takes a deep breath and wipes her face off. “OK.” She reaches over as far as she can, but she can’t quite reach it while she’s strapped in so tight. “I can’t get it.”

When she sits back up to loosen her harness, a bright light flashes across her face. It’s Gerald. He just slammed on the brakes right down the lane of cars from her. She can see him undoing his seatbelt and leaning over for something in the passenger seat.

“SHIT!”

She flips the start toggle switch on the center console. She’s already got the gas pedal on the floor, and the clutch on its way out when the engine screams to full RPM. The truck lurches forward hard. Orange light flickers off the side windows of the cars next to her as fire explodes out of the exhaust pipes. The cab is filled with light as the front of the truck starts lifting off the ground.

With his jaw dropped, Gerald pulls his car in reverse when he sees her coming at him full-bore. He tries to veer out of the way, but she’s on him in a mere second. Her truck careens into his door, gouges its front-end drift bars down the front fender, slings his cruiser sideways, and throws him into the passenger seat.

With her foot still in it, her truck bounces off the cruiser and skids all the way around to a stop up against another parked car in a cloud of smoke. Corner of her hood is rumpled up a little, and she can tell the frame might be bent a little, but the truck seems to still be pretty square. She slams it in reverse and reels the truck back in reverse, making a hell of a lot more smoke.

Through the clearing smoke in front of her, she can see Gerald climbing across the front seats in his car. He’s got a rifle, and he’s trying to get out the passenger side with it. If he gets out, she’s done for. She knows what she has to do. With all the power in the world at her call, and a hulking drivetrain to back it up, she rolls on the power again, ramming Gerald’s cruiser again. Like a bulldozer, she pushes it sideways down the remaining length of the aisle as fast as she can get it to go.

At about twenty miles an hour, his car slams against the end curb of the lot, throwing him and his rifle against the roof of the cab and into the back seats. The headlights of the car spiral across the sides of the nearby buildings as it flips over upside down into the grass ditch alongside the street.

She has no intentions of sticking around to see if Gerald has been crushed or not, and barrels the truck around the next aisle, laying rubber down all the way back out onto the street. Around the last corner at the light, both her rear and front windows explode around her. In her rear view mirror, she catches Gerald’s silhouette against all the illuminated white smoke she left behind. There are multiple thumping sounds in her truck as he unloads the rest of his magazine at her.

The rest of the way back to base, she isn’t hauling ass like she should be, and is hardly going over the speed limit. Her eyes are permanently peeled wide open, and her knuckles are hurting from grabbing onto the steering wheel so hard. Her poor truck is starting to overheat and steam out of the hood, but all she can think of are the gunshots that came from the alley. She knows Five can always be brought back, but it’s still so awful. She left her best friend with a killer, and let her get gunned down like she meant nothing.

When she gets back to base. The hanger door is wide open for her. Both Alexis and Sy are there with a medic. The look on Alexis’s face, when she notices that Five isn’t with her, makes her immediately break down into uncontrollable sobs. She can’t believe she let Five get out of the truck at all. She doesn’t know what she was thinking. Sy is going to be so mad at her. It’s going to cost three times as much to bring her back this time, and now the investigators have one of their frames to show the world.

After she parks her truck in its dark spot in the back, next to the tow truck, she doesn’t get out. She hangs off the steering wheel, absolutely hysterical. Outside, she watches Alexis face, lit up in the light from her battle com, as she yells into it for Five.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Five’s wrist communicator light up on the passenger side floor. It’s curled up in the corner, where it’s been getting launched around down the road. Someone else calls out to her on it too. It sounds like her sister, Clarice.

“Five, this is control. Are you there Five? I can’t see anything on your feed.”

She holds back a sob and lets it all out. “It’s just me Clarice. They shot Five. They’ve got her.” Her own com lights up, with Clarice’s face showing on screen.

“What?” There’s a pause on her end. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’ve got you in the hanger, and Five halfway between here and downtown. Alexis says Five didn’t come back with you. What’s going on?”

“Five took her com off and left it in the truck when she got out. Cris and Gerald found us and pulled us over. She didn’t want to get arrested with it on. She was going to do something. She had this… stuff on her arms. I don’t know. She ran, and then they shot her Clarice.”

“If her com’s with you, then how am I tracking her across town? And why is her tracker blinking?”

“Wha… what? It’s blinking!” “She wipes her tears off on her arms and climbs out of the truck as fast as she can. “Oh my god. She said she would make it blink if she was ok.”

She hustles across the hanger floor as fast as she can, calling out to Alexis. “Get the runners! Send one of the runners to Five. Now!”

Like it were a shepherd on guard at her side, Alexis calls out to her machine. “Monster! Here, now!” She points to the floor at her feet and the mechanical beast rushes out from across the floor from whatever shadow it was hiding in, skidding to a stop in front of her. When it crouches down, she leaps up on the thing, tucks her rifle in under her arm, and bolts out through the bay door, ready to take on anything that dares move.