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= META 4 CITY =

a DarkSF Novel

by John Argo

Page 13.

Chapter 8

The gravel parking lot of the high park overlooking the city filled with small white police cars. Hedrock backed the van up, put it in gear, and made the van jump forward. As he did so, instinct told him it was going to be a rough ride. He tugged his seatbelts tight.

Everything seemed blurry. On his left, he saw the city, and a flashing white streak as a patrol car cut him off. On his right, he saw Moira struggling to jump from the van. He reached over, grabbed a handful of her hair, and violently yanked her toward him. As he did so, he gunned the van and rammed between two police cars to try and escape. Meanwhile, Moira was struggling, clawing, crying, punching. He held her hair and slammed her head down on the steel floor. She sat stunned and bleeding on all fours. He held the wheel in both hands as he did bumper-cars among the police cars, which were all lighter and smaller than the van. Shots rang out. The windshield shattered. Cops were jumping from cars with drawn guns.

Alton Hedrock reached up under the ceiling, pulled down the assault rifle, crouched half-upright, and sprayed the parking lot. As the assault rifle chattered, he saw legs and shoes in the air. He knew he must not let them overwhelm him like this. What to do?

Throwing the assault rifle aside, he gunned the car again. The engine roared mightily as the clutch let out. Moira was just starting to put one hand up on her seat to get up. He ignored her, holding the wheel with both hands as he crashed through the low stone wall. The van lurched upward like a missile. Bits and blocks of stone and mortar as well as weeds grown in cracks exploded outward. For a second, the van looked like a bread loaf spinning in empty air. No more shots hit it—the cops must be stunned.

Moira screamed briefly and then fell silent as she clutched the seat. She couldn't get a grasp, and her hands slipped. He saw how white her desperate fingers looked. Her eyes, too, looked white and scared. She regarded him with sheer terror written in her gritted teeth, her frozen scream, her beautiful eyes.

All he could do now was hang on.

Somewhere below were streets, neighborhoods, escape routes if his luck held.

The van impacted in a tree crown and slowed. Amy still writhed, trying to gain a grip on the slippery, dirty old leather of the seat. The van slowed, then started moving again.

Branches cracked, snapped, exploded, and yielded. The van started sliding fast again.

Branches slammed into the cab.

Hedrock managed to duck down and cover his head. The last he saw of Moira was her legs as she was pulled from the shattered passenger window, impaled on a branch.

Already, her legs made death twitches, in just that second before the van tore loose and sailed down into the houses below.

Hedrock lay back in the seat, crossed his arms over his chest and face, squeezed his knees together, and thought of the rising sun flag of East Gotha. He had never imagined that would be his last thought as he faced death. He liked it. It seemed patriotic. It validated all that he had achieved. If this was the end, it was a decent way to go.

No time for more thoughts as the van dropped through the air.

The van landed on a slate rooftop, which braked its fall.

Slate crackled and shattered in thin layered plates all around him.

The van's chassis buckled and twisted but the vehicle held together. Roof timbers cracked, groaned, cracked, and then snapped.

The van dropped down into a bedroom, onto an empty bed whose owners had luckily gone to work or whatever. The van came to rest on the bed like a lion draped over its kill.

Bleeding from the mouth and ears, Hedrock unsnapped himself from the harness. He laboriously kicked the bent door open enough to let himself slither down the side and onto a splintered wooden floor that groaned dangerously. Glancing up, he saw cops yelling and shouting about 300 feet overhead. They looked tiny and didn't dare shoot. People in the house were beginning to scream.

Hedrock managed to distance himself from the van and get through a door into a hallway.

As he made the final leap to safety, the floor buckled and the entire room crashed down, van and all, into the next story, which then collapsed and sailed down through the next story, and so on down six or seven floors.

Hedrock heard one or two brief screams, and then silence as he lowered himself down the broken piles of rock floor by floor. He saw a few places soaked with purple blood and macerated body parts.

Main thing, he was still mobile and moving fast now. He'd ache later. He'd find a place to lair down and hide until his bruises healed. Maybe he had broken bones. Right now, with adrenaline pumping through his system, he didn't know or care. He felt nothing, except the exhilaration of chase and escape. He'd managed to survive yet another close call.

Climbing out through a rear kitchen window, he hobbled away through someone's vegetable garden, through a back gate, and down a rear alley, even as only the faintest distant keening of sirens became audible.

He'd live to fight these bastards another day.

More important than that, he must find his wife and promise that now everything would be different.

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