After Days (The After Days Trilogy) (18 page)

             
As Ben hurried off I pulled out my revolver and made sure it was fully loaded before slipping it back into my belt. I then picked up a Chinese assault rifle that was standing against the wall and began walking to the Academy’s front door. I attempted to stay out of view from the street by ducking down as I passed any windows.

The building’s front door was much like those of many schools I had been to, solid double doors with windows of obscured, reinforced glass taking up the top half. The doors had push bars on the inside, and handles for pulling on the outside but they were currently locked and chained. The banging sounded on the doors again as I approached silently with the rifle’s safety off. I flattened myself against the wall, out of sight and to the right of the doors.

              “I know you’re in there Sonny, you and your gang of little virus proof kids. Come on out, we just want to talk, I got some questions for you,” one of the men outside the door shouted. It was Chen, the leader, I recognized his voice immediately.

“Jack got shot down… you remember Jack don’t you
Sonny? My little brother! And then when I tracked down the murdering bastards that killed him, a couple more of my boys get wasted and those murdering dogs get away in a truck. And guess what? One of the guys we killed was wearing your colors! I know you have the laowai that killed Jack in there. Just hand him over and we can put all this behind us!”

I waited for him to finish his rant and then addressed the door calmly.

“Sonny isn’t available right now,” I called. “I’ll be happy to relay your message and concerns.”

             
“What! You think this is some kind of fucking joke! You tell Sonny to get out here now, I don’t care if he walked away from us four years ago; once you’re a Red Tiger you’re a Tiger for life!”

So that was how Sonny knew so much about them.

              “Again, I’ll pass it along.” I saw Luke and John come into the hallway and waved them back out of sight. Leaving my position by the door, I stealthily made my way to them.

“We could have a problem here, guys,” I said quietly. “Go check the truck in the alley, very carefully, to see if they’re watching it. If it’s clear get everybody loaded up as quick as possible, grab my stuff if you can. Are all the bombs done?”

              “We still got, like, three to do,” Luke said.

             
“Alright, make sure some of them are packed up in the cab. Luke, you ride up front with me,” I said. “You can finish the last few on the road.”

             
“What are you going to do?” John asked.

             
“Stay and watch the door, of course,” I replied. “Come straight back if it’s being watched, otherwise get everybody loaded ASAP and send someone back to get me.”

             
“Okay, we’re on it,” John said. I watched as he and Luke turned and scampered back down the hall. Turning back to the door, I brought the Chinese assault rifle up to my shoulder and waited.

             
Only a couple of minutes passed before the banging started on the door again. I could hear more shouting too, but couldn’t make out any of the actual words from this distance, although I got the impression that Chen was quickly running out of patience.

Then I heard the s
ound of breaking glass, and door’s safety glass bowed inwards. It held for two more hard blows and on the fourth blow, glass and wire flew into the hall. The end of an aluminum baseball bat was thrust through the window and ran around the edges to knock off any remaining shards of glass. An arm came through, reaching down for the push bar to open the door. I squeezed the trigger.

             
My selector was set correctly this time, and my aim was better as the assault rifle fired three quick bursts. All three warning shots hit the wall beside the door. The arm disappeared immediately and a second later I ducked back around the corner as a barrage of small arms fire came through the doors. I had been shooting at the doors from an angle, so none of the return fire came anywhere near my position.

             
“They coming in?” Luke said, as he came jogging up to the corner.

             
“Soon, I think.” I looked back around the corner. There was no movement.

“Is everybody loaded and ready?”

              “Yeah,” Luke said.

He pulled a toner cartridge from his pocket and I could see that it had one of the blasting caps taped to it, about a foot of fuse coming from the top of the cap.

“I say we light this bad boy and slide it down the hall,” Luke said. “I bet it’ll give them a hell of a surprise.”

I
saw another shadow at the window, they obviously assumed that whoever had been on the other side was dead or had run off. The arm came through the window again, scrabbling blindly for the bar that would open it.

“Do it and let’s beat feet,” I said.

I watched as he lit the fuse with a lighter and slid the toner cartridge down the hall toward the door; it came to rest against the wall just a few feet shy of it, the fuse still sputtering.

“Come on,” I said, and we ran down the hall. Luke was right on my heels and we were about half way when we heard the ink bomb go off behind us. We had no way of knowing if it had hurt, or even slowed down, any of the Tigers but the sound of the explosion gave my heart a quick jolt of excitement. I felt a strange elation and suddenly understood the term ‘adrenalin junkie’.

15

The cloying fog still lay thickly about the alley as Luke and I hurried to the truck. We checked the back to make sure everybody was inside and ready. They had done a good job of packing – boxes of gear had been stacked up and strapped against the side walls. They would offer little protection in the event of an all-out attack, but might protect against a stray bullet here and there.

Someone had the good sense to hang ropes from the metal meshing that lined the roof of the cargo bay, and Sonny was directing everybody to wrap the ropes around their wrists and grip them to offer some stability against the movement of the truck. I gave him the thumbs up before we pulled down the door and secured it.

Luke and I rushed to the cab where Indigo was already waiting for us. Being a local, she had volunteered to navigate us out of the city in place of the injured Sonny. She moved to the middle and Luke and I climbed in on either side of her. She looked nervous, gripping the revolver I had given her tightly, as if she was ready to use it at any second.

“I haven’t spotted anyone,” she said, indicating the end of the alleyway in the distance. “But you better hurry.”

“Good idea,” I said.

I started the truck with the intention of letting it warm up for a few minutes, but my hand was forced when a figure appeared briefly at the end of the foggy alley. He took one look and then ran out of sight, presumably to go and tell Chen of our impending escape.

I gunned the engine and the truck lurched forward. I’m embarrassed to say that I took out a
few garbage bins along the way and at one point the wing mirror on the passenger side scraped along the brick wall as we barreled down the alley.

I didn’t know whether there would be Tigers waiting for us at the end of the alley or not, but I knew I wouldn’t be stopping if they were stupid enough to try and block our escape by standing in the way. I slowed only slightly as we approached the mouth of the alley.

“Turning right is the quickest way to get to a freeway,” Indigo said. Her voice was high pitched with tension.

“I know, but that’ll take us right past the front door,” I replied. “They’ll shoot at us for sure, and from that range they won’t miss.”

“Left, then, and around the block,” she suggested. I nodded and took my foot off the brake pedal.

The truck was speeding up again when a figure appeared out of the fog to the right. It was Chen. His right hand and the sleeve of his jacket were covered in black ink. I didn’t have time to gloat because that same ink covered hand was holding a handgun, which he was calmly raising towards us. My eyes met his and I saw him bare his teeth as he began firing at the
truck. I flinched and we all ducked.

He was either a bad shot, or he wasn’t aiming directly at us and was trying to disable the truck. The passenger side window was shattered by one of the rounds, and the others thudded into the door. I steered the truck straight at him and he jumped out of the way as Luke stuck his crossbow out of the shattered window and fired off one shot.

The truck lurched as I turned left and accelerated down the street and away from the leader of the Tigers. I don’t know if Luke’s shot was true or not, by the time I checked the rearview mirror Chen was lost in the fog behind us.

“Everybody up here alright?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Luke said, brushing broken glass off his shoulder and legs to the floor. “Looks like the printer paper armor worked a treat.”

“Indigo?”

“Yes, I am alright,” she said, her voice solemn. “Without a window this is going to be a cold ride, I’m afraid.”

“Turn the heat up
, it might help some. Luke, keep a watch behind us, I’m going to drive around randomly for a while in case we are being chased.”

“No problem, man,” Luke said, his eyes glued on the passenger side mirror. He reached out and adjusted it so that he could see out of it better, although it made it just about useless to me as a driving aid.

We hurtled through the fog, although perhaps the term hurtled is a little ambitious. On a brumous day like that one, doing thirty miles an hour was pushing it. Brumous? Oh yeah, that’s one of my favorite words. It’s one I learned when I was reading dictionaries and thesauruses for fun back when I was a kid. Nerdy huh? Well blame my Mom, she was an English teacher. Anyway it means ‘of gray skies and winter days; filled with heavy clouds or fog’ – cold sunless weather, in other words.

Throw in the snow and ice and the day we left the academy sure fits that definition; in fact, it could well be the most brumous of all the brumous days that I have ever experienced.

After making random rights and lefts for ten or twelve blocks, there were still no signs of pursuit and I was becoming thoroughly lost. The truck’s CB had sputtered a few times, but it appeared that the Chinese were not talking too much that morning either, probably waiting for the fog to burn off, I guessed. Finally, I stopped the truck at an intersection.

“I think that’s enough weaving to throw them off the scent. Which way from here, Indigo?”

She took a few moments to take in our surroundings. “Um, if you do a U-turn and go back to the last intersection, turn left there and it’ll put you on Park Avenue. That should take us all the way north out of the city before it meets up with I-190.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, putting the truck in drive and pulling forward and to the right.
A U-turn was impossible, so I stopped again and put it in reverse, doing a three point turn in the middle of the intersection. “Let’s get this party started.”

To be honest I was glad Indigo was the one that had
sat in front to give directions. Just having her sitting near me up in the cab made me feel good inside, sort of warm and fuzzy, even though it was damn cold with Luke’s window busted out. I was surprised that I could even be thinking about girls considering how much danger we were in.

We found Park Avenue easily enough, exactly where Indigo said it would be, and I turned in the direction she indicated. The further north we went, the thicker the fog became, to the point where I could barely make out the buildings along the street. I had to slow down considerably just in case we came across any abandoned cars in the road ahead. With the visibility so poor, I wouldn’t be able to stop in time, even going as slow as twenty-five.

While we kept our eyes peeled for any movement or signs of pursuit, we chatted as the truck crawled northward on Park. My earlier assessment of Indigo was only reinforced by our conversation, she was easily the most amazing person I had ever met. I must admit to being a bit jealous on that day though, because it became apparent that Indigo understood a lot more of Luke’s video game references than I did. It was also the first time that I recall Luke talking about his sister Rose.

When his parents had divorced four years before, Rose had been five, and the courts had split custody… Luke had stayed with his father, while Rose had gone with their mother to Chicago. Luke even mentioned going to Chicago to find Rose, talking about it like some sort of grand quest in his future. I personally had my doubts about the feasibility of such an undertaking, but could totally understand his urge to try. Talking about her made me think of my family again, and I quickly buried the painful emotions that came with their memory.

It was lucky I had decided to take the way out of the city at a crawl. Three separate times in the first six or eight blocks of travel along Park Avenue, we had to weave around abandoned vehicles in the road. If we had tried to leave at high speed in that thick fog we would almost certainly have collided with one of them.

I thought about the highway turned parking lot back at Fort Carter and I wondered if we would encounter a similar m
ess when we finally found the freeway entrance here in Worcester. I didn’t think so; the Chinese appeared to be much more active in this state and would almost certainly have begun clearing the freeways for their own purposes…just as they had been clearing the bodies from Warwick using American children as slave labor.

The silence and the emptiness of the drive through the city was surreal, and I say this as a person for whom everything since Christmas had been surreal. I was finally beginning to feel a little bit better about the prospects of us getting out of there, when we heard them coming through the fog behind us. It was the muffled roar of several motorcycles that
echoed eerily through the mist filled streets.

“I think the Tigers are on our tail again,” Indigo said.

“An Asian street gang that rides motorcycles?” Luke said, his voice incredulous. “Can you get much more stereotypical?”

“Stereotypical or not, we could be in trouble,” I
said, looking into my side mirror to see if I could make out any shapes in the thick fog behind us. I knew it was useless, they’d be almost on top of us before we would be able to make them out. “I’m worried about the guys in the back if they come up behind us.”

Most of the supplies we were bringing with us had been packed along the outer walls, providing some protection for those inside against shots coming from the sides of the truck. But for obvious reasons, there was nothing against the back door of the truck; all that stood between the passengers and potential bullets coming from behind was a rolling door that had not been designed to stop them.

“You could pull off at the next intersection and we could wait for them to pass,” Luke said. “There is no guarantee that it’s the Tiger’s anyway… how could they realistically be tracking us down in this fog? Either they are following a likely escape route and hoping to get lucky, or the motorbikes are just somebody else trying to get the hell out of Dodge under the cover of fog.”

“It’s them and I think you know it is,” I said. He didn’t argue. “I don’t want to be a sitting duck on the side of the road when they find us. The least we can do is give them a moving target.”

“I think Luke is right.,” Indigo interjected. “Not about it being someone else, it’s the Tigers for sure, but I think we should take a side street and let them pass. We shouldn’t wait too long though. The fog will hide us for a while, but I think it would be a good idea if we were well out of the city by the time it burns off.”

I turned right at the next intersection and drove a block before pulling the truck to the side of the street. “Should I shut the truck off?” I asked. I was afraid that the rumbling of the engine would carry in the fog just as the roar of the motorcycles did.

“Can you see the street sign at the corner?” Indigo asked.

“Just barely but I can’t make out the street names,” Luke
said. “Why don’t you go ahead and shut it down for a few minutes, Isaac, I’m going to hop out and find out what intersection we are at.”

“Okay, but be careful
.”

Luke hopped out of the truck and jogged up to the sign post. A couple of minutes later he was back at the passenger side door. Behind us I could hear the sound of the motorcycles passing the intersection where we had turned. They had only been about a minute and a half behind us. I was glad I had gone with the majority
and let them pass. Luke climbed back into the cab.

“Foster Street.”

“Okay good. I thought that we were here, but was a bit disoriented because of the fog,” Indigo said. “If we go another block and then turn left we should be on a street that leads back onto Park.”

“An alternate route, I like it
man,” Luke said. “We don’t have to sit here and wait that long after all, we can get moving again right away.”

“That’s the sort of enthusiasm I like to hear,” I said, managing to crack a smile.

“Enthusiasm nothing,” Indigo giggled, “I think Luke just realized that the heater doesn’t work when the truck’s not running.”

“Well, there is that too,” Luke said
with a grin.

The street we were traveling on now ran parallel to Park Avenue, finally converging with it where it curved around to the northeast. Indigo said that we would be going about a mile and a half to two miles on this road, which didn’t seem very far until we factored in the fog and the slow driving speed. At least we didn’t have to share this road with any motorcycles.

“This kind of reminds me of the set up for an old PC game,” Luke said, his eyes straining against the thick fog around us. “By old, I mean old… I found it in a box of my dad’s old games and had to run this emulator thing to get it to work on our computer. It started out with a group of people getting lost in a thick fog like this, and getting transported to a magical world.”
             

“We should be so lucky,” I said, while steering around a minivan sitting directly in the middle of the street.

“I don’t know, man,” Luke replied. “That magical world was full of dragons and vampires and other nasty shit. I don’t know how long we’d last there.”

“That’s a tough choice,” Indigo said. “Dragons and vampires or Tigers and Chinese soldiers. They sound just as bad as each other if you ask me.”

“Yeah, I’d probably take a vampire over Chen, he kind of looks like he wants to rip my throat out anyway,” I said.

“You’re probably right,
maybe he’s just in the fog waiting to jump on the truck, and pull you out through the window.”