by Jackie May
“Okay…” Not getting it.
“Which is one of the things I saw that first night, when I found Ben’s gold rims.”
“Dario had a police light bar?”
“It was on his get-me list.” All coming together now. “Part of the package, with the bomb materials. The shooters took it from his apartment that night. They put it on the white Ford.”
“But didn’t bother wiring it up. It’s just for show.” Brenner stares at the dummy police cruiser.
“What do I do?”
“Stay put,” he says, and starts into an explanation to central dispatch.
“Tell them to check the inventory from Dario’s place.”
But there’s no more time for checking or guessing. We’ve arrived at Campus Martius Park, an enormous roundabout circling a central park area with a rink and the famous Soldiers and Sailors Monument. Pedestrians crowd the sidewalks to watch the parade. Children cover their ears against the screeching sirens. And now several of the cop cars are blaring PA systems, shouting at the public to back away from the street, head for the middle of the park, take cover. It’s a circus.
The van slows down, but doesn’t take the first two exits from the roundabout. Police have got to be relieved—it appears the van will not continue south toward the most populated areas of downtown.
But my heart is hammering. The dummy police car doesn’t follow the pack. It peels away at the first exit, continuing south on Woodward.
“Brenner—”
“Shit—”
“Tell them!”
It won’t matter. All the other police cars have passed the exit, following the van around the circle.
I need one more second to talk myself into it. “It’s not the van. The van’s a decoy!” Go, I decide, and we take the exit.
The moment I do, the dummy cruiser speeds away. I chase after it, but there’s a reason why police use Ford Interceptors. They’re quick. It takes two full blocks for us to catch up. I want to shout at Brenner to warn dispatch about the dummy car, that this is the real threat, not the van, but we’re both too busy clutching at the inside of the car, trying to keep from being thrown around. I swerve to miss other cars, bumping up on curbs, scraping side mirrors.
“Shayne!” Brenner points.
Just past the next intersection is a forty-foot marble monolith that every citizen of Detroit recognizes. It’s the entrance to the city’s municipal center. A famous bronze figure, The Spirit of Detroit, the symbol of my city, sits at the foot of the monolith, with several police cars and a black police SUV parked in front of it. In the roundabout a large assembly of people, seeing our car chase approaching, stampedes in a panic toward the municipal center’s front doors.
There’s no question now. The dummy cruiser rockets across the intersection, straight for the crowd. I’m driving in his blind spot, and the only thing I can think to do is try and “turn” him, which is Nascar speak for a bump from behind. If you do it right, the car in front will spin out. At these speeds, it only takes a touch…
We both slam over the roundabout curb. I can hear screams from the crowd. Now or never. I whip the wheel, closing the gap between us and—clang!—I clip the bumper. The cruiser spins two tight donuts before launching into a barrel roll, and in midair the bomb detonates from the trunk. A thundering blast destroys the convoy of police vehicles in the roundabout and shatters windows halfway up the twenty-story municipal tower. The cruiser’s wreckage crashes against the monolith like a wrecking ball. The towering marble slab teeters, then topples sideways, pounding to the earth with a bone-shaking aftershock.
I’m completely disoriented. We’re away from the municipal center, surrounded by manicured shrubbery in a center divider in the middle of Woodward Ave. My Crap-pile, miraculously, is still running, the stick shift in neutral. My feet are pressed down against the brake and clutch. Slowly, I ease off of both.
Brenner twists in his seat to look out the back window at ground zero. “That SUV…” He opens his door. “That’s the chief of police.”
Of course it is. Because Arael Moaz is not subtle. His entire plan lays before my mind’s eye now, and it’s no more sophisticated than walking up to a police officer and punching him in the mouth.
“Don’t get out. We have to go. This isn’t the thing.” Idling forward, off the center divider, I drive through black smoke, slowly at first, then gaining speed as we leave the wreck behind. “This is only the start of the thing.”
“What thing?”
“Arael’s war.”
Ten minutes later, halfway to East Side, our ears are still ringing.
The sun has gone down. I’m doing my best to navigate through dark urban prairie without my headlights on. No streetlights out here by the train yards. No moon yet, either. Sometimes I don’t see a tree until I’m about to hit it, and I have to slam on the brakes.
Brenner ends his call, and though I can’t see his face, I feel him looking at me. “No casualties at the municipal center. Some hurt from glass, but the big monument blocked most of the explosion.” He pauses to let that sink in. “If you hadn’t been there, Shayne—”
“Okay, but the Chief of Police?”
“He’s fine.”
“No, I know, but the reason he was there? It was about getting rid of East Side neighborhoods?”
“Yes. He’d just gotten out of the meeting with the Public Health and Safety Committee. The bombing couldn’t have been more obvious.”
“It’s an invitation, is what it is. It’s a challenge to meet behind the bleachers after school, and it’s low risk, like, it didn’t even matter if they got to the police chief or not. Even though they missed their target, the message is still clear. I’m guessing the white van led police all the way back to Grandy district?”
“Every agency in the state is headed there now. County police, state police, FBI, ATF.”
“It won’t matter how many agencies they throw at this thing, Brenner. Months, maybe years in the making? The entire neighborhood is armed. We already know they’ve got automatic weapons, and who knows what else. All that maze of narrow streets and dead ends. It’s a death trap.”
“DPD has guarantees that they get to be first through the gate. They want blood.”
“They’ll get plenty of it, trust me. And Arael Moaz gets a dying man’s wish, one last rush. Everybody’s happy.”
We bump over a series of train tracks.
“Here we go,” I say quietly. We’re so close to Grandy district, I feel like even our voices might give us away. “Here’s the canal.”
Slowing to a crawl, we bump and slide down the eroded slope of an old canal system that runs along the south border of East Side. Going down here is risky—we might not find a way out again—but it’s the only route that gets us into the neighborhood without being seen. Arael’s abandoned auto plant sits just north of here. If we weren’t surrounded by the canal’s twenty-foot concrete walls, we could probably see the place right now. “What about a chopper?”
“I called it in,” Brenner answers. “Told them what you said, that we’re holed up in a parking garage at the far end of East Side. DPD has spotters circling the area already, but they don’t want one going in until we’re two minutes out. I give them a text, and they swoop in.”
“Two minutes?”
“Is that enough?”
I don’t answer, because we both know the answer: it will have to be enough.
Brenner points at a section of the canal wall that has caved in beneath an avalanche of dirt and rocks. The incline is steep, but I’ll take it.
“It’s going to be loud. I don’t want to get stuck, so I’ll need to gun it all the way.”
I lean into the gas as we start up the incline, and with the first bump of my tire against a large rock, I open the floodgates. My Crap-pile claws at the incline—so steep it feels like we’re driving straight up a wall—and after several teeth-grinding thunks of boulders against the underside, we pitch forward over the top of
the canal, slide down an embankment, and roll onto a street littered with potholes.
“There it is.” The abandoned auto plant is a tall, black shape against a dark blue sky. Probably three blocks from us, is my guess. The closer we get, the more activity we see. People running in the shadows, whistling across the street to each other. At first I’m sure they’ve made us, they’re surrounding us, passing signals to attack. But they disappear behind skeletonized buildings and mounds of rubble.
Headlights overtake us. A jeep packed with East Side men and automatic rifles. One guy hugs what looks like a rocket launcher to his chest. They slow beside us to stare in. My hands tighten on the wheel. Foot poised to slam the gas. But on the far-off horizon a bright flash appears, then a pillar of fire, then a delayed boom. The men holler and bang on the outside of the doors and roof. The jeep tears off in the direction of the explosion. I hear helicopters in the distance.
Practically attached to the auto plant, separated only by a few feet, is a parking garage. Or what used to be a parking garage. Driving through it is like driving through a rib cage. Only the bones are here—no walls, just pillars and floors connected by ramps. Driving slowly across the second level, I watch the wall of windows from the auto plant slide by.
“Can you see?” Brenner asks.
I can see. Not great, but enough. The mosaic of square glass panes are a muddy brown, punctuated here and there by pure black shapes where the glass is missing or broken. It takes me three passes to be sure I’ve found the right set of windows. Steering to point my Crap-pile directly at them, I back us up all the way to the far end of the garage. I shake the gear shift into neutral and turn to Brenner. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, we’ve been driving for twenty minutes now, we’re in the middle of a war zone, and you haven’t asked me what we’re doing here.”
“We’re doing your thing. You’ve got a plan.”
I do have a plan. But I’m now petrified at the thought of going into that building to find a pair of harpy wings waiting for me. “Would it crush your heroic image of me if I told you I’m trying not to pee my pants?” Yep, I’m definitely scared, because the truth is flowing way too easily right now. “Okay, full disclosure. The only reason I’m doing this is to prove Hillerman wrong about me, which, actually, is probably what she knew I’d do, so she still wins. Me and you should kiss, right? In case we both die? No! Once I start, I won’t be able to stop, and there’s no time for that. We need to go now, before my hands are numb. But what if Arael Moaz isn’t even in there? What if this isn’t the right window? Look at them, they all look the same.” Not true. This is the right set of windows, I know that much. The missing panes match the ones I saw when we were inside. But Brenner doesn’t know that.
He checks the magazine on his gun. “Then…I don’t know, Shayne. It is the right window, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But you don’t know that.”
“But you do. So…just tell me what to do.”
My pulse rages. Once again, it’s obvious by the earnest look in his eyes that he’s absolutely 100 percent serious about his absurd confidence in me. By now I’m not all that surprised, but I am taken aback by the effect it has on me. I feel like laughing out loud. I feel like smashing our lips together, then slapping him in the face. I feel reckless and invincible. I’m strong enough, and I’m smart enough, and I’m fast enough. Right now I have the best hand at the table. My entire body is buzzing with pent-up energy. “Ferro’s wrong about you, Brenner. You don’t want to be Batman. You’re just fine being Robin, aren’t you?”
He gives me that complex look of his.
I rub my hands together. “Okay, call me Shayne again.”
“That’s your name, right?”
“I know, but it sounds different when you say it.”
“Shayne.”
My skin tingles. Brenner looks at me expectantly. I suppose it’s time, then. “Get Arael,” I instruct. “If he goes away, his influence goes away, and we’ve captured the flag. Like Hillerman’s Navy SEAL team, right? In and out before they even know what hit them. Once we spot Arael, I want you to get him and get to the roof. Don’t even think about anything else, no matter what happens to me.”
“You got it. It’s done.”
I absolutely believe him. “Send for the chopper. Two minutes.”
“Two minutes,” he repeats, tapping at his phone. My Crap-pile purrs calmly. The leather of the steering wheel gives a little creak as my fingers tighten around it. With a final tap, Brenner says, “Okay,” and that word is like the shot at the start of a race.
I take off with the practiced timing from years of street racing. No slipping of tires, just maximum thrust punching us back into our seats with each shift into a higher gear. Columns race past in a blur. The edge of the parking garage is yanked out from under us. There’s half a second of a high-pitched whine as the tires spin, we’re soaring through a black void between buildings, then punching through the window wall in a storm of glass. The front bumper digs into the concrete floor, sending sparks sailing back over the hood. My face slams into the steering wheel, my seat belt digs at my neck. With a final punctuating jolt, my Crap-pile rams into Arael Moaz’s tree stump throne.
Brenner is out before me. He fires twice, and I see a guy fall backward over a railing to the factory floor below. Arael is there, in full military uniform, clutching to the side of a table covered with maps. Our surprise has sent him into a fit of coughing. Across the table, the black-haired glamour girl and the hairy bear man react—she runs into a nearby hallway, and he, spotting me, screams with rage and shifts into that enormous silverback wolf. He takes two large bounds at me before I fire three times—boom-boom-boom. He face-plants, good night. Again.
Brenner has already wrestled Arael onto a catwalk spanning across the factory floor. Arael resists fiercely, so every few steps Brenner whips him in the face with his gun. Blood pours from Arael’s nose and mouth. I go to help Brenner, but as soon as I step on the catwalk, I’m overshadowed by a twenty-foot wingspan. Enormous talons slam into my chest, pinning me against the catwalk railing. I twist away just as the harpy’s razor-sharp beak whistles past my face. My gun drops into darkness below. My hands spasm, claws extending, and I thrust a swift jab at the harpy’s throat. My fingers sink through flesh and thread between cords of muscle. Screeching wildly, the harpy pulls back with so much force that she topples backward over the railing, nearly pulling me down with her. I jerk my hand out of her neck and brace myself against the bars.
Brenner’s reached the other side of the factory. He pushes Arael through a door to an outside stairwell. Great, more fire escapes. Arael screams with rage. From somewhere on the factory floor below, the harpy responds with a flurry of wings. I see its hideous, dark shape eclipsing candlelight from the sea of junk cars. A terrifying silhouette rises up against the windows. Crunch! The harpy kicks at them, spewing glass but not quite breaking through the frames.
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse a mob of shadow figures rushing at me, and with them my crippling anxiety returns. I know that if I look at them, they’ll vanish, but I’m too scared to move, even just my eyes. They surround me, and my mind is crowded with thoughts, like whispers. Leave him. Let Brenner handle this. There’s nothing more you can do. You don’t want to see what will happen to him, anyway. It’s your fault he’s going to die.
I try to fight back with thoughts of my own. My inner voice sounds weak and insecure. I won’t leave Brenner. He trusts me. I’m going out there.
When I take a step toward the fire escape, the whispers intensify. You’re killing yourself! She’ll open your skin!
I cower back, eyeing the harpy as, shrieking with rage, she slams the windows. Glass rains down. One more rush and she’ll break through.
Too late! the shadows taunt.
It’s not too late, I counter. It’s do or die.
The final voice to haunt me is Hillerman’s: When it�
�s do or die…you’ll cut and run.
And that does it.
I sprint across the catwalk as the harpy prepares for another strike at the windows. Crashing through the fire escape door, I leap onto the outside railing and throw myself out into inky blackness at the same moment that the windows shatter below me. The demon crow rushes out. I land on her back and immediately dig my claws into her shoulder blades. After a momentary, panicked drop, we surge upward.
Brenner forces Arael up the fire escape. They’ve scaled two floors by the time the harpy dives at them. I rake my claws along her ribs, forcing her left wing to drop. We twist, smash into the stairs nearly on top of Brenner, and there’s a crazy melee of limbs and feathers and claws. Brenner is trying to fend off the harpy’s talons, while keeping Arael from leaping down the stairs. The harpy snaps at me with its beak, flapping her wings, stomping at Brenner. I scratch at her face and eyes.
Suddenly she launches upward, thrusting like a swimmer pushing off the bottom of a pool. One floor, two floors—I can barely hold on. My claws are pulling out—the roof shoots past. The harpy makes her move, throwing herself into a savage corkscrew that swings my legs out and pulls my hands free. One of her talons snatches my ankle, and in the next moment we drop—slam!—to the rooftop. Red and white dots explode in my vision. I feel several of my ribs break. My feet are on fire, and the pointless thought occurs to me that I’m not even wearing shoes. What on earth possessed me to go into a fight without shoes?
I feel myself being lifted off the ground, only to be slammed again, and all the wind is forced from my lungs with a painful clap. There’s a moment in which I’m sure I’ll die. I can’t see anything, I’m paralyzed, I can’t breathe, and the harpy’s beak will pierce my skull in the next instant. But then, as if with a snap of fingers, my body rebounds, sucking in air, filling my lungs. I lash upward with a clawed hand, stabbing into a fleshy calf muscle above my chest. The leg pulls away, but I only dig deeper through the muscle, until my fingertips close around a thick bone.
