The Subway ; The Debt ; Catastrophic

by Dustin Stevens

  “Freeway or Lakeshore?” Hinkley asked, cutting around a taxi idling on the curb before pushing them back into the outside lane and leaning hard on the gas.

  “I don’t give a damn,” Dawson replied, the disgust he felt obvious in his tone. “Just get us there.”

  Extracting his Sig Sauer from the shoulder holster he’d been wearing beneath his windbreaker, he checked the magazine and made sure a round was loaded into the chamber, an unnecessary exercise since he never believed in carrying a weapon that wasn’t ready to fire.

  Nervous energy, the kind of thing the years still had not managed to file away.

  Keeping the weapon gripped in his right hand, Dawson left it lying across his lap, his leg beginning to bob up and down.

  They had to get there in time. The men he had sent that way were the short timers, guys that checked out, but still had the least amount of experience with this kind of work.

  If he had to bet, them against Wynn and Sommers, he would still wager on his team, but it would be much closer than he liked.

  “Faster, faster,” he muttered as Hinkley opted for Lakeshore Drive, pushing north, the cityscape on their left, Lake Michigan on their right.

  Beside him Hinkley said nothing, his mouth drawn into a tight line as he pushed the speedometer a bit higher, moving well above the speed limit, practically begging law enforcement to take notice.

  Considering the mood he was in, Dawson almost dared somebody to try and pull them over.

  Releasing his grip on the Sig, he flexed both hands in front of him, nerves on edge, when the sound of his phone erupted on his hip, all three men jerking toward the sound.

  “Yeah?” Dawson snapped, expecting to hear the voice of Myles Henry on the line, calling to tell him they had everybody secured and needed an evacuation.

  Instead he heard the last damn voice on the planet he wanted to.

  “Where the hell are you?” Celek asked. “Our warning system is going bat shit over here. Grant has accessed one of the satellites!”

  “We know,” Dawson said, setting his jaw and pushing the words out through gritted teeth. “We’re en route now.”

  “You’re en route now?!” Celek yelled.

  Jamming his eyes closed shut for a moment, Dawson pushed out a heavy breath, his nostrils flaring.

  “Yes. They bypassed UC and went to Northwestern. Our guys spotted Wynn and Sommers, are moving on them as we speak.”

  There was a moment of pause, Dawson waiting as Celek processed what he was told.

  “And the girl?”

  “I don’t know,” Dawson said, his voice still bearing the same steely cadence as a moment before. “We’re en route now.”

  Again there was a pause, this time including the faint sound of muffled voices, Celek relaying the conversation to someone, most likely Jacoby.

  After a moment he returned, saying simply, “Okay, keep us posted.”

  Without a word, Dawson ended the call, flipping the phone up onto the dash.

  Above them, signs for Evanston began to appear, telling them they had just another mile and a half until their destination.

  “Faster,” he muttered again, speaking to nobody in particular. “Must go faster.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “Faster. Faster!”

  I kept my voice to a minimum, spewing the words over my shoulder, willing Skye to keep pace behind me.

  Rae had been the first one down, taking the stairwell she had originally ascended. Neither of us wanted to be trapped in an elevator, waiting for it to rise to the top and then again to travel back to the bottom, every floor presenting a possible stop with people getting on and off.

  Instead the unspoken decision was to opt for the stairs, neither of us having seen anybody on our way up, having not heard any alarms yet to indicate our previous encounters had been discovered.

  With all three of us pounding downward, gravity added to the reverberations of our feet, making us sound like a herd of elephants as we moved. Sweat caused my shirt to cling to the small of my back, my breath coming in short bursts as we went.

  “Faster!”

  Halfway down we encountered the man that had been using the cell phone on the quad, the source of the blood on Rae’s jeans obvious, his nose twisted at an odd angle across his face. A thick layer of blood and mucus covered most of his lips and chin, already starting to crust into place.

  The rest of him looked like he had been folded into a tight package and stowed in the corner, enough space left that we slid past without breaking stride.

  Behind me, I heard Skye gasp at the sight of him, no words escaping her, the sound of feet slapping continuing to be the only sound.

  The clock we had set out for ourselves originally was gone. We were now chewing quickly into the secondary time we had allotted, the seconds seeming to tick down loudly in my head. With each flight of stairs they seemed to press forward until they were sitting at the forefront of my thoughts, spurring me on.

  Two floors below us, I heard the pressure latch on the door release, a puff of sound finding its way up. A moment later the sound fell away, Rae having slipped out, leaving us to catch up as she assessed the situation.

  Thirty seconds later I hit the bottom floor, stopping just inside the door, waiting for Skye.

  She arrived a moment later, panting, bending in half at the waist to catch her breath.

  “Stand upright,” I said. “Draw in air through your nose, don’t do anything to draw attention. Nobody is out there right now or Rae would have warned us, but we have to move fast.”

  With an overstated nod, Skye drew herself up tall and fell in beside me, so tight I could feel her body pressed against my forearm.

  “Be natural,” I said, stepping through the door, careful to put some space between us. With only a quick glance into the main of the building I assessed and dismissed, seeing nothing out of the ordinary, before turning toward the exit.

  “Come on,” I hissed, moving through and out, the brisk spring air again hitting me square as I stepped from the building.

  Fifty yards ahead I could see Rae, her jacket back in place, both hands tucked away, the .45s both no doubt stowed inside. With her long braid splayed down her back, I could see her making tiny shifts of her head from one side to another, scanning our surroundings.

  Given her semi-relaxed stance, there was nobody around.

  That did little to keep me from scanning and inventorying every face we passed just the same.

  “What’s the plan now?” Skye said, increasing her pace to come up alongside me, her voice lowered and a bit distorted, as if she were talking out the side of her mouth.

  Earlier that morning, we had outlined how the entire thing would play out, though I don’t think any of us actually believed things would go off so simply. Both Rae and I had driven home the point to Skye that things could and often did go awry, her accepting the information without a word of opposition.

  “Same,” I said. “Get to the car, get out of town. Figure out exactly what you got and what to do with it.”

  Sitting firmly in the timeframe between classes, the quad was clear, only a few handfuls of students moving about.

  Despite our odd appearance, and the increased pace, none of them seemed to give us a second thought.

  The SUV Skye had pilfered the day before was parked in a visitor’s pay lot two hundred yards past the geological building. Once past the quad, the pathway narrowed, buildings closing in on both sides.

  Dark shadows shrouded most of it, the midday sun blocked from view by the buildings and the thick layer of cloud cover over the city.

  With my attention sweeping from side to side, I noticed as Rae tensed slightly as she approached the stretch before veering off to the side, disappearing between two smaller structures and heading toward the left.

  “What’s she doing?” Skye asked, a bit of fear present in her voice. “Where’s she going?”

  We hadn’t talked about the move beforehand, but
I recognized it instantly. She’d never been one for enclosed spaces, avoiding even the middle row of our barn if she could help it.

  “Spreading us out,” I said, picking up my pace a half step, glancing over to make sure Skye did the same. “Too dangerous to have us all bottled up.”

  I have found that people react to high stress encounters one of two ways. The first was for everything else to fade away, to become background noise, the mind blotting it out, focusing on the singular task at hand.

  For me, the opposite had always been true, a heightened sense of awareness setting in. With each step forward, seeing the lot just up ahead, moving out of the light and into shadow, every aspect of the world around me came into sharper relief.

  The scent of hotdogs from the vendor on the corner. The sound of a janitor sweeping up debris from the front steps of a nearby building. The sudden drop in ambient temperature.

  Every single thing about the scene flooded in, all processed in real time and with total clarity, as my focus stayed on the lot ahead. With my right hand I tapped at the keys in my pocket, wrapping my fingertips around them and pulling them out, parsing out the one for the ignition, preparing to insert it and kick the SUV to life the moment we got there.

  Trying my best to peg the amount of elapsed time in my head, I wished for a moment that I had Rae’s uncanny ability to watch the clock, figuring that we had to be working on eighteen minutes or more. Even at that, I couldn’t help but feel that maybe we’d done it, the lot just forty yards away, the SUV in sight sitting three rows deep.

  The thought was short lived, shattered by the sound of squealing tires and a pair of gunshots.

  The instant the sounds caught my ear, I knew what had happened, even without seeing a thing. Reaching out, I grasped Skye’s hand and jerked her forward, snapping her upper body toward me as I took off at a dead sprint.

  “Go! Now!”

  The sounds of gunfire had the exact effect that it was supposed to, the few people that were around immediately falling into a crouch, some covering their heads, others crying out. Of everybody, we were the only ones rushing forward, abandoning any notion of pretense, not caring who saw us.

  With my left hand wrapped around Skye’s, I kept the keys clutched in my right, knowing they were far more valuable in a firefight than the hawksbill would ever be.

  Bounding forward as hard and as fast as possible, we covered the last small stretch of the makeshift tunnel, the thought of slowing or veering off never once entering my mind.

  For certain Dawson would have more men than us, would be better prepared the longer things drew out. Compounding matters was the fact that at least a dozen people had now seen Skye and I sprinting forward, and that the two men and the guard in the computer science building would all be waking soon.

  We could not stay on campus. Our only choice was to get to the SUV and get away.

  Lungs fighting for air, heart beat racing, we emerged from between the buildings, darting across a small brick expanse and right into the parking lot. Twenty yards to our left Rae was already nudging up to the edge of it, both .45s out, each extended from her shoulder.

  Her back was twisted so it was facing us, a black SUV matching the one we had seen at the stadium on the far end of the lot, parked in the middle of the lane meant for drop-offs, both front doors spread out wide.

  “Get her out of here!” Rae yelled, shifting just slightly to be heard over her shoulder.

  For just an instant I hesitated, side-stepping once as I passed over the curb.

  “Rae! Come on, we got this!”

  Matching my side-step pace, she started to move across the lot, firing twice into the front of Dawson’s SUV before turning to sprint. Seeing her move, I took off as well, arms pumping, keys still gripped in my hand.

  Behind us I heard only a single shot, Rae putting down suppression fire, coming right after me.

  The last ten seconds ticked by in slow motion as I tore between the rows of cars, reaching the SUV at the same time as Skye. Together we climbed into the front seats, me turning over the engine, both staring out the window in time to see my greatest fears coming to fruition.

  “Where is she?” Skye asked, leaning forward in her seat, putting both hands on the dash to get a better view.

  My own hands squeezed tight on the wheel as I saw three men come into view. None of them had much interest at all in us, their attention aimed on the stretch of asphalt we’d covered less than a minute before.

  Two of the men moved with weapons drawn, poised out in front of them. The man I assumed to be Dawson walked with a bit of a swagger that let the world know he was enjoying what had just transpired immensely.

  The shot I’d heard wasn’t from Rae. It had come from a handgun with a similar caliber, sounding nearly the same, so much so I had falsely assumed it was hers.

  A mix of emotions running the gamut from afraid to ashamed to pissed roiled through my system, every part of me wanting to slam the SUV into drive and go mow them down, consequences be damned.

  I couldn’t, though. I still had a task to perform, needed to get Skye away, see her off to someplace so we could make the most of the information we were now in possession of.

  “What are we going to do?” Skye whispered, still assuming the same post, watching wide-eyed through the front windshield.

  I remained silent, not answering as I watched the scene play out, the men having completely forgotten about us for the time being.

  Rae was alive, of that I had no doubt. She was a survivor, and she was an imposing foe, the only reason Dawson’s men were standing at the ready over her.

  If she was gone, they’d be ignoring her and coming our direction.

  As much as I hated to, as much as it burned me from within, tasted acrid on my tongue to even consider, there was only one thing we could do.

  Reaching out, I pulled the gear shift into drive and eased from the parking spot, turning out the opposite direction and driving away.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  The next half hour was a blur, my mind still back in that Northwestern parking lot, seeing Dawson’s men bear down on Rae with weapons drawn. Each time the scene repeated, the detail became a little more vivid, my brain filling in pieces that weren’t necessarily there.

  By the tenth or twelfth viewing, I was imagining a bloodied Rae staring at the sky, a circle of crimson expanding out around her.

  After the fifteenth, I shoved the thoughts away with a wicked shake of the head, each recollection only managing to raise the ire and the disgust that was passing through me.

  There was no doubt the images would fuel me until it was over or I was dead. In the meantime I had to maintain some semblance of a clear head, and could not do that if all I ever saw was Rae.

  No matter how twisted our relationship may seem, it was ours, and the thought of losing her would only push me into desperation, a place I could not afford to be.

  Nor could Skye or Rae afford for me to be.

  Once I cast the thoughts away, I spent every few seconds flicking my gaze between the rearview and side mirrors, my head moving in a steady four-part rhythm.

  Passenger side, rearview, driver’s side, front windshield, one after another, watching for any sign of one of Dawson’s black SUV’s or the flashing red and blues of a police cruiser.

  The entire time I was vaguely aware of Skye prattling on from her seat, arms waving, a look of shock and concern on her face as she turned in her seat to stare directly at me. Not one word penetrated the cocoon I was in, analyzing what I knew and what I needed moving forward.

  Not until we were miles away from Northwestern, crossing over the border into Wisconsin and heading on toward Kenosha, did I allow the fog to settle, the world starting to seep back in. One piece at a time, I allowed our surroundings to register, starting with the weak overhead light, moving on into the thin afternoon traffic that maintained a steady flow on either side of us.

  The very last thing I allowed to filter in was Skye,
having consciously put her at bay until I was as close to neutral as conceivably possible, given the circumstances.

  “I mean, how can you be so calm?” she almost exclaimed, again waving her hands before her.

  The answer to her question was simple enough. I had been through war, had seen Rae do the same. I knew both of us were aware how to handle ourselves, knew that the only way we could possibly function at a high level in the meantime was by keeping our heads about us.

  There was just no way I was going to try and answer all that right now, not to a young girl on the verge of hysterics that had never seen a fraction of what I had.

  If one gunshot was enough to set her off, she could never possibly understand what a night in a self-dug ditch steadily filling with rain, mortar rounds exploding all around, was possibly like.

  “How did you subdue the guard?” I asked, my first words since we drove off.

  I delivered them without even glancing over, though the question still seemed to surprise her, her features falling flat for a moment. After that she appeared confused, trying to register what I’d asked.

  Finally, in order, just as I’d expected, was anger.

  “What?! How the hell can you be asking about that right now? Did you not see what happened back there? Don’t you care?!”

  My reaction was complete and instantaneous, my right hand releasing the wheel and punching the black leather covering the center of it in a single quick movement. Leaving my knuckles pressed against it, the horn sounded out in one long drone, the car bellowing out in a way that I wanted to but couldn’t.

  “Of course I saw what happened back there,” I said, peeling my lips back over gritted teeth, letting her know that this was as far as the conversation was going to go.

  “And you bet your ass I care, more than a kid like you could ever understand. That woman is my best friend, and the only person in the world I trust my life to.”

  Glancing over to her, I said, “I’m not saying that as a grand gesture either. She has literally saved my life, and I will do the same for her or I will die trying.”