by Ted Krever
Five
We plunged into the thick brush, the boots pounding out the back door and tearing through Fine’s yard, trampling all the neat greenery while voices barked orders from every direction. Max was running really hard—I was puffing just trying to keep up with him. I’d spent a year in the Everglades, where even tree branches get lazy. But the undergrowth was so thick here under the trees that it was dim as dusk at nine in the morning. In such a place, a couple yards might be enough for us to get away.
The footsteps behind were so close, I didn’t even dare look back at first. But we started to pull away and I realized that, as Max—Renn—approached bushes and trees, they were actually bending out of his way, like he was projecting some invisible shell ahead of him—and whipped back with a vengeance once we passed, which really helped gain us some space. I heard angry voices cursing and shouting behind my back. And then I was startled by a whooshing sound and turned to see, just a few feet away, a twister sprung right up out of the ground. It was a little one, not one of those Hollywood ones that swallow gymnasiums, but it was enough, sucking up the forest floor and whipping the whole mess—leaves, twigs, bark, branches, pine cones, berries, vines, dust and moss—into a smoky column skittering interference between us and them.
Renn’s voice said Follow me and he peeled off to the left. I obeyed and then realized he hadn’t said anything aloud—I’d heard his voice in my head. The whirlwind continued in our original direction, and I heard what sounded like fifteen sets of footsteps following. “Fan Out!” yelled a deep voice and I peeked through the trees at the leader, a bulky guy in a dark nylon jumpsuit pointing in the wrong direction. “Get around it!” The posse fought through the bracken and uproar into the distance while we sprinted, puffing hard, uphill—I could make out a cluster of houses ahead, somewhere beyond the construction cranes.
And then the hill came to a sudden end, dropping off abruptly to a sunken roadbed cleared to bare earth and huge piles of dirt and stone held back by thick-tied cable netting. Empty bulldozers and earthmovers completed the picture.
The long-finished houses we’d glimpsed over the treetops were just across the roadbed, on the other side of the piles. We slid down the incline and right into two men in dark blue nylon, coming up the other direction between an artificial hill and a high pile of encased stone. They greeted us immediately by pulling out their Glocks. Why did everyone but us have big guns?
“Stand still!” the taller, bearded one ordered Max. “You stay right where you are. You’re not touching me.” He touched his earpiece. “We’ve got ‘em.” He tried it a few times, then turned to the younger man next to him. “Contact them. Let them know.”
The younger man touched his earpiece several times. “I’m not getting anything,” he said.
“He’s jamming it,” Beardman said. He gestured with his gun. “Okay—cross your hands behind your backs and stand still. G here will wrap your wrists and put on your headpieces. Then we’ll go down and meet the others.”
The younger man pulled two black plastic bundles from his pocket. When he opened them, they turned out to be wrap-around goggles with prominent earpieces and blinking LCD’s at the temples. I had no idea what they were but they didn’t look friendly.
“Your bosses won’t promote you,” Renn told him coolly. “You’re too ambitious. They like employees who are grateful.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Beardman returned. “Try harder.”
As G came toward us, Max actually leaned forward and threw a punch. I was shocked—I’d never seen him react in a physical way to anything and, what with the guns and all, it didn’t even make sense. He wasn’t much good at it either—he completely missed, succeeding only at knocking the goggles out of G’s hands. Beardman kicked Max’s legs out from under him and, as soon as he hit the ground, shoved the Glock to his temple. “Okay, if that’s how you want it,” he said. “Tie him first,” he told the younger man, who put the ties around Max’s wrists and pulled them really tight. Then he lifted him up again and propped him against me while he turned to get another plastic tie for me off the ground.
I felt the vibrations coming off of Max as soon as he leaned against me. I could feel the hum sweeping from his shoulders and feet into the trunk of his body, intensifying and deepening until he somehow was a tone, a deep bass note that overwhelmed all other sound as long as he was touching me.
“Okay,” he called out as the vibration built—I could feel the effort it took for him to talk, “how about this? You’ve got a spot on your lung. Cancer. You need to have it looked at. It’s not big; if they act quickly—”
“Shut up!” Beardman shouted. “I need a diagnosis, I’ll call a doctor!” He turned to his companion. “What are you waiting for?”
“Are you going to hold his arms?” the kid asked, nervous, looking at me.
“I‘m busy pointing a gun at the dangerous one, okay? That one should be easy.” I guess it was kind of an insult at me, but I’d lost all interest by that point in anything anybody was saying.
Because I could see, all at once, what Renn was up to.
Behind Beardman and G stood the pile of stone—twelve or thirteen feet high, held in place by a web of steel cable. While they were talking, the threads of the cable were unraveling themselves. I could hear Renn humming next to me, his body radiating a tone so powerful, I couldn’t believe the Glock boys didn’t hear it. The steel threads were separating faster and faster, until all at once, as G grabbed the second plastic tie off the ground, the netting right behind him groaned and split fifty little fissures and then tore open in five or six places, sending twelve or thirteen feet of stone rushing suddenly down the incline at him—at all of us.
Because I saw it coming, I gained a few precious steps head start and that’s what saved us. At my first step, I felt Max slump, helpless, behind me—his eyes were open but he was lost in some kind of trance, pumping out his bass note. I grabbed him under the arms and dragged him up the slope in front of us. G was hit by the first couple stones that flew out of the pile—they knocked him down and he was buried in seconds. Beardman yelled after me, pointing his gun at my head but he was two seconds worth of indecisive pulling the trigger and that was one second more than he had. He was hit several times around the legs and feet and then a huge shard hit him full on the side of the head and he went down under the deluge. By the time we reached the rim, the entire trench was a dust-billowing pile of rock. I can’t account in any way for how we got out. I heard Max’s voice in my head saying Head for the house on the left and I dragged him in that direction.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Not this one—to the left,” he muttered. “I’ll be okay.” He was starting to use his own legs, still wobbly but beginning to support himself a bit while I steered.
I heard shouting down the hill—some of the stone had improvised its way down the roadbed to where it apparently met some of our other pursuers. As I headed for the house on the left, more blue jumpsuits appeared between the other houses on the block, staring down on the avalanche and calling into their earpieces for instructions. How the hell many people were after us?
We scrambled through the back yard, past a shed, several thick trees, lounge chairs and a portable bar. “Around the house,” Max ordered and I obeyed. He was limping and stumbling but at least he was talking normally now—I was ticking off milestones. I needed him full-strength—surely, we had a big fight just ahead. I could see a street just beyond the house but if they had that many guys, how far could we get before they caught us? If this was a movie, we’d hotwire a car but I had no clue how to do that and Max wasn’t in shape to do much of anything. Shouts from down below were being answered by others close by—they’d be on us in a minute. What if he needed a doctor?
“You’ll drive,” he told me. “Not fast, normal speed, don’t attract attention.”
“Drive what?” I asked. Shit, now he’s delirious. His car was sitting across the woods, in front of Miriam Fine’s house, unless it wa
s magical and could find us on its own.
As we reached the front of the house, I felt him lean into my shoulder, pushing me toward the driveway. Where a retirement-aged man stood favoring his paunch, holding open the door of a very pretty Audi coupe. “You drive,” Max repeated and detached himself from me. He stumbled to the passenger door and collapsed onto the seat. The car’s owner handed me the keys and said apologetically “It’s just half a tank.” I took the keys and stood staring at him.
“Say ‘thank you,’” Renn muttered, pulling on his seat belt.
“Thank you,” I mumbled.
“Now get in the car, dammit!”
I dropped into the driver’s seat. It was really beautiful, chrome and carbon-fiber and all that stuff they talk about in the car magazines. As I closed my door, a middle-aged woman came out of the house, locking up behind her. She had an overnight bag in hand.
“Time to go, Herb,” she called and they climbed into a Winnebago parked outside the garage.
“Don’t stare—move!” Renn gasped, smacking me on the shoulder. “That way!” He pointed to a sidestreet a few yards away. I pulled out of the driveway. As we made the turn, I saw the Winnebago head off in the opposite direction.
Max laid way back in his seat now and talked me down the long hill, panting little breaths as though he’d just carried someone up a hillside and around a house. We went nowhere and took the most complicated route to get there—right here, left there, his eyes closed the same as when we’d found Tauber and Miriam Fine’s house. This time, he was finding a way for us to get lost and stay that way. We kept turning and doubling back on ourselves as we moved progressively through the vast development. More than once I saw a black SUV turning onto a street we’d just turned off of or going down a one-way street we’d just passed.
This cat-and-mouse took more than fifteen minutes but at the end, we were all the way to the other end of the project, having never gotten near a main street. When we finally did turn onto one, we were a hundred yards from the highway entrance.
“There!” he pointed but I didn’t need prompting. We were on the ramp before I could ask a single question, before he could fail to answer even one.
