by Nick Thacker
Carl and Tony didn’t look much better. There was blood caked over their faces and arms. Tony had one arm dangling to his side, and was holding his rifle in his left hand, as if it were a pistol.
“Get out,” Carl said, his voice hard.
“Carl!” Adam shouted through the window. “Get in! They can’t be far behind!”
“Get out!” Carl said again, and this time punctuated his command by firing a round directly over the Hummer.
“What is he doing!” Jocelyn shouted, a note of panic in her voice.
Adam knew.
He climbed out of the Hummer with his hands in sight. The .45 was still sitting in the passenger seat. No chance to grab it now.
Jocelyn and Milton followed suit and also exited the Hummer, hands in the air.
Carl and Tony hobbled forward with Lisa between them. Tony kept his weapon trained on them the whole time. Carl rested Lisa in the back seat of the Hummer, then bent forward and grabbed Adam’s .45. He actually smiled a little as he stuck it in his belt. He knew it was the only weapon Adam had.
“What are you going to do with us, Carl?” Adam asked. “You planning to shoot us?”
Carl shook his head. “Not unless you give us any problems. The question is, did the squints here figure out how to undo all of this?” He turned to Jocelyn and Milton. “Did either of you find a cure for this? Something you’re holding on to for later?”
They both shook their heads.
“Would you even tell me if you did?” Carl asked, smiling in a way that was more chilling than comforting. “Move over there,” he said, waving his rifle toward an abandoned pickup. “Backs against the truck.”
They moved, pressing their backs against the pickup. They were able to put their hands down at least.
Adam leaned back, then immediately put his hands behind him.
He felt the bag with the syringes.
He fumbled with it a bit, and got both syringes out. He crammed the bag back in his pocket, to make sure Carl never saw it. And then, when their captors were busy pulling bits of fencing and wooden plans from the grill of the Hummer, Adam handed one of the syringes to Jocelyn.
She looked at him, surprised, but then nodded.
Adam uncapped his syringe.
“We’re going to leave you three here, alive. Though I don’t know if that’s merciful, exactly,” Carl said. “But Anna gave us pretty strict orders about you, Bolland. If Miss Wu there found a cure for this, we were supposed to bring her back alive. You, not so much.”
“Any particular reason you decided to rescue me only to leave me for dead out here?” Adam asked.
“You’re an unknown, Bolland. And we’ve watched you. Seems like you’d eventually cause some trouble. Anna’s pretty good at reading people, and she figured you’d never toe the line.”
“They may not even be alive you know,” Adam said. “Those helicopters—“
“Maybe, maybe not,” Carl said, raising the rifle slightly. “But Anna’s gotten us this far.”
Adam said nothing.
Tony stepped in beside Carl. “We’re good to go,” he said.
Carl turned to respond, and it was in that moment that Adam rushed forward. He jabbed the syringe into Carl’s neck and pushed the plunger.
Jocelyn did the same, but Tony turned and had his gun raised before she could get to him.
Adam slammed into the young man as he fired, and Jocelyn managed to pounce, plunging the syringe into the young man’s neck.
The two Lucid soldiers lay unconscious on the ground. Adam helped Jocelyn to her feet. “Good work,” he said.
Jocelyn nodded, huffing.
They heard a groan from behind them, and turned to see Professor Milton laying slack against the truck. He was holding his stomach, and blood was gushing from a gunshot wound.
He dropped to the ground, even before Adam and Jocelyn could rush to him.
“Professor!” Jocelyn said.
Milton was leaning against the side of the truck, his legs splayed on the ground, and blood soaking his shirt until a rivulet began oozing to the asphalt.
He said nothing, but breathed heavy.
Adam crouched beside him, putting a hand on his, pressing the wound. Milton winced, and looked up at them.
“This … is not how I … pictured it,” he said.
Adam was going to respond, to make some sort of wisecrack, to assure Milton that everything was going to be ok. But there was no time for that. Milton was looking at Jocelyn when his eyes glazed over, and his head drooped.
He was gone.
It was then that they heard the whup-whup-whup of helicopters nearby.
Adam shook his head, then slammed his palm into the side of the truck as he stood. “We have to go,” he told Jocelyn.
She was still staring at Milton, unmoving.
“Jocelyn, we have to go!”
She shook herself, then stood. She appeared to be in shock, but she followed Adam back to the Hummer. They spotted Lisa in the backseat, as they arrived.
“What about her?” Jocelyn asked, as if she were half afraid of Adam’s answer.
“Can you do anything for her? While I drive?” he asked.
She nodded, seeming relieved, then quickly climbed into the Hummer.
Adam stopped just long enough to recover the rifles, spare clips, and anything else that Carl and Tony had on them. Then he leapt into the driver’s seat and raced them away from the scene.
The helicopter sounds were close, but they seemed to be moving in some sort of pattern. It took Adam a moment to realize they were running a grid. Without actual human intelligence to guide them, they were falling back on a machine pattern. They were likely working with security and traffic cameras, as well as local UVFs, to try and spot the Hummer.
That gave Adam an idea.
He stopped looking for parking garages, and instead pulled the Hummer onto a sidewalk and under a large awning in front of a hotel. He climbed out, telling Jocelyn to stay put with Lisa for the moment.
On the street he found an SUV that had been abandoned with its keys still in the ignition. He tried it, and after a couple of weak starts it kicked over. The battery had held out just enough to get it running. The only problem was fuel. The gauge was past the ‘E’ mark.
They’d have to find gas.
He sped to the Hummer, and quickly helped Jocelyn get Lisa into the back seat of the SUV. Then he put the Hummer in drive, and let it roll unmanned down the sidewalk and out into the street. He hoped it would get noticed before it slammed into something and stopped.
Adam leapt back into the SUV, and they raced away now. This time, with a new plan.
Adam saw signs for the hospital, and started navigating his way there.
“There won’t be anyone there to help her,” Jocelyn said, picking up on what he was doing.
“No, there won’t,” he said.
“Based on David’s plan to rebuild the infrastructure, there may even be Suppressed there waiting for us.”
“Probably,” Adam said.
“So you do have a plan, then?” Jocelyn asked.
“I have … an idea,” he said.
“Good enough for me,” she replied.
They rounded a corner and came to a stop. There were two UVFs down the street, though neither made any attempt to drive toward them. Between the UVFs and Adam, though, was the hospital. And just up the way a bit, to his right, was exactly what he was looking for.
Adam raced across the street and stopped the SUV in the drop-off of the hospital. He turned and faced Jocelyn. “That’s what we’re going for,” he said, nodding to something outside of the vehicle.
She looked, then nodded. “Perfect,” she said.
“I’ll hop out, and I think I can pick up Lisa and carry her. But I can’t carry her and the rifles. Can you grab those? And race ahead? Get those doors open?”
Jocelyn nodded. “Let’s do it.”
Adam spend his door as Jocelyn opened hers, and they
both pulled Lisa’s limp form from the back seat. Adam picked her up, and Jocelyn slung one rifle over her shoulder while picking up and gripping the other.
They raced now toward the parked ambulance, just a few feet away.
Jocelyn opend the back door, and helped Adam to lift Lisa up and into the interior of the ambulance. They all climbed inside, closing the doors behind them.
Adam lifted Lisa onto a stretcher, where he strapped her in. Jocelyn rummaged through the cabinets and kits of the ambulance, finding what she needed. “Drive!” she said to Adam.
“Yes ma’am,” he replied, then squeezed into the cab of the ambulance, started the engine, and sped away. He resisted the urge to hit the siren—a long-held childhood dream, but likely to be a fatal mistake at the moment.
The UVFs suddenly sprang to life, alerted by the motion of the ambulance, perhaps.
There was an emergency radio in the dash of the ambulance, and Adam turned this on, tuning it to the frequency used by the police. There was an automated report of a suspect fleeing, along with the current location of the ambulance.
They might not have much time before more UVFs and SWAT helicopters showed up.
Adam raced the ambulance up to top speed then, dodging parked cars and other obstacles in the street. He squealed around a couple of turns, heading for the edge of Denver. They needed to get away from the grid of the city, where the UVFs and the programmed Suppressed would have the biggest advantage.
“This is very difficult when I’m being jostled about!” Jocelyn protested.
“Not much choice!” Adam said, once again yanking the steering wheel to take a side street.
They came to a bridge, and Adam checked the side mirrors. “Hold on!” he shouted, then slammed on the brakes.
He got the speed down enough to make his next move safer, and then prayed it would work.
Instead of crossing the bridge, Adam turned and jumped the concrete curb, driving out onto the grass of the sloped hill. The bridge crossed a large drainage ditch, and Adam was able to drive down to the concrete walkway that ran beside it. This was a local exercise trail—one of those park projects that helped utilize extra space within the city, giving citizens a place to relax or exercise. Right now it was going to give Adam and Jocelyn and Lisa their only shot.
He pulled under the bridge, and waited.
In a moment, the storm of noise from the UVFs and helicopters came crashing in around them. They heard sirens, and the sounds of helicopter blades chopping the air. And all of it passed directly over them—and kept moving.
Adam’s heart was pounding. He was sweating profusely, despite a blast of cold air coming from the vents of the ambulance.
He turned and saw Jocelyn busily working to stitch a wound in Lisa’s shoulder.
“Will she be ok?” he asked.
Jocelyn shook her head. “I think I have her stable, and I’m tending her wounds. She has multiple gunshots. I can’t tell if there’s any real internal damage, but she seems to be holding out at the moment. This isn’t quite my field, so I’m doing the best I can.”
Adam nodded.
They were both doing the best they could. It wasn’t quite enough, though, was it?
They waited there under the bridge for a couple of hours. Jocelyn had monitors hooked up to Lisa, and an oxygen mask was placed over Lisa’s nose and mouth.
“What now?” Jocelyn asked.
“We’ll have to find a place to lay low. I don’t know what our next move should be, exactly. I do know that we’re not going back to Garden of the Gods.”
Jocelyn shook her head. “I just can’t believe this is the world now,” she said.
Adam knew what she meant. “I can’t believe that out of all of this, David Priseman may be the only one with a plan that might actually do some good.”
“Except for the part where he’s enslaving humanity to his will,” Jocelyn said, bitter.
“Yeah,” Adam agreed. “Except for that.”
“So do you have anything in mind?”
Adam thought for a moment. “Did you find anything when you studied Sara’s blood? And the Suppressed?”
Jocelyn nodded. “Yes. A start, anyway. All of our data is gone now, but I could reconstruct much of it. And before you ask, no I don’t have a cure. But I may be able to find one, with time.”
“So you’d need a facility? You’d need some place to do the work and the research?”
She peered at him. “Do you have some place in mind?”
Adam shook his head. “I’m not sure. But I do know that the facility where I was being held captive wasn’t the only place David Priseman had been doing his work.”
“Where else?” Jocelyn asked.
“There were labs set up at the water treatment facility, where I worked. At this point, I don’t know if anyone would be there or not. But I tend to doubt it.”
“Not exactly a bio lab,” Jocelyn said.
“But it could be, with the right materials. Plus it would put us closer to Priseman. I’m hoping he’ll keep looking for us everywhere but Colorado Springs.”
“So you want to go back there? Back to the heart of it?” Jocelyn asked, incredulous.
“It’s home,” Adam said. “And it’s the only place I can think of right now.”
Jocelyn nodded. “Ok. Why not? You’ve gotten me this far. You’ve kept me alive thus far. I trust you. Whatever your plan, I support it.”
“Not much of a plan,” Adam said. “If Priseman is reestablishing the infrastructure of Colorado Springs, he may have already dealt with the water treatment facility. But the labs weren’t really necessary to infrastructure. I think it may actually be the safest place we can go and still have access to what you need.”
They chatted further about the plan, about their route, about Lisa’s condition. There were many unknowns, and many dangers. But for the moment, it seemed to be their only course.
They agreed on a route, using a Colorado State road map that had been wedged into the glovebox of the ambulance. And once Jocelyn verified that Lisa was stable enough for travel, they got on their way.
In the streets, many Suppressed were now moving with a sort of muted purpose, going to their assigned posts, doing their pre-programmed tasks.
The ambulance slid by them like a whale passing through a school of krill.
Adam, Jocelyn, and Lisa were on their way home. And where things went from there was anyone’s guess.
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Nick Thacker, The Lucid: Episode Three
