Interesting Places (Interesting Times #2) (12 page)

“I thought we’d steal an ambulance,”
Maria said. She stopped at a set of double doors. “Through here.”

Oliver wasn’t entirely surprised to
find the ambulance bay unoccupied. The cyborgs had no need to guard a fleet of
vehicles they had no use for. Maria chose an ambulance near the exit. “Now how
do these open?” she asked, examining the closed garage doors.

“Maybe with this,” Oliver pressed a
switch next to the orange doors, which began to retract into the ceiling. He
only had a brief moment to feel pleased with himself, though, before an alarm
began blaring through the building. The carnage Maria had left in her wake
hadn’t gone unnoticed.

“Damn it,” the vampire said. “I
needed two more minutes. We should probably leave now.”

Oliver wasn’t about to argue. He
climbed into the passenger side of the ambulance as Maria took the wheel. “I
don’t see the keys,” he noted.

Maria ripped a panel off from under
the steering column and began fiddling with the wires there. “You know how to
hotwire a car?” Oliver asked.

“I’ve been a vampire for almost two
hundred years. I know lots of things,” Maria said. The ambulance’s engine
sputtered once and then roared to life. “See?”

“I opened the garage,” Oliver said
just a bit defensively.

“I’m so proud of you.” Maria examined
the instrument panel. “Half a tank of gas. That’s more than enough.” She put
the ambulance into gear and started forward.

Two armed cyborgs appeared at the
garage door and raised their weapons. Maria gunned the ambulance and ran them
over. Oliver winced at the thudding noises as the bodies passed underneath the
vehicle’s tires. “We may be in some trouble,” Maria said. “I didn’t think
they’d find us that fast.”

“How much trouble?”

They turned onto Divisadero Street
and started north toward Filbert. “About that much,” she said, nodding at
something outside the windshield.

Oliver looked. The area they were
passing through had been cleared of cars, but he suspected the cyborgs had done
that to make it easier for their tanks to pass through the narrow streets. He
was fairly certain of this because he saw two of the tanks now, springing into
action ahead of them. One of them fired a shell at them but missed, exploding a
nearby tree. “How far do we have to go?”

“Too far.” Maria hit the gas pedal
and the ambulance’s tires screeched. Several cyborgs appeared behind the tanks,
weapons trained on them.

“We’re going
through
them?”

“Unless you have a better idea?”

The cyborgs opened fire with their
energy weapons. One shot hit a front tire and the ambulance lurched to the
left. Maria managed to recover and aimed for a spot between the tanks.
Unfortunately for the cyborgs, this put them directly in her path. Two of them
found themselves run down, while a third was knocked onto their hood as they
sped past the tanks. He began crawling toward them, seeming to mean to come
through the windshield to get at them. Maria slammed on the brakes and sent the
cyborg hurtling forward, rolling down the street like a bowling ball. She hit
the gas again but the ambulance was hit by energy weapons fire several more
times. Oliver could see electricity arcing all around them and a smell like
burning metal began to filter through his nostrils.

Filbert Street was only a few blocks
up Divisadero. Maria managed to make the turn at the right intersection, but
the ambulance chose that moment to die on them. She tried to restart the
vehicle once before giving up. “Out!”

Outside the ambulance, Oliver took a
look around. He could hear metal treads grinding on the pavement in the
distance; the tanks were coming after them. He was fairly certain he heard a
helicopter on its way, as well. “At least we’re on Filbert Street,” he said.

“Filbert is
long
,” Maria said.
“Your friends are monitoring their communications. With any luck they’ll be on
their way to pick us up.”

Oliver still didn’t know who his
“friends” were supposed to be, but that was about the least pressing thing on
his mind at the moment. Now he could hear the march of boots coming in their
direction. Cyborgs never ran anywhere. They didn’t need to. Like the zombies on
television shows, they somehow seemed to know that their prey couldn’t run away
forever.

“Up Filbert,” Maria said. “Let’s
move.”

They began running up Filbert Street,
Oliver wishing he had something on his feet besides hospital slippers. He was
almost grateful they didn’t have to worry about what they’d look like to anyone
passing by. Two people who looked like escapees from a mental hospital would
draw more than passing attention even on a normal day in San Francisco. But the
reality of the situation was worse. The fact that one of them was clearly still
human and the other could pass for one if the sun wasn’t burning her to cinders
would stand out like a sore thumb to any cyborg that spotted them. “How far are
we going?” Oliver panted.

“Russian Hill,” Maria said. Oliver’s
heart sank. The Russian Hill neighborhood was on the other side of Van Ness,
which itself was at least twelve blocks from their current position.

“We’ll never make it that far.”

“Hopefully we don’t need to.”

A spotlight beamed down on them from
overhead. Oliver looked up and saw that the helicopter he’d heard before had
found them. A moment later headlights swung around the corner at Baker Street
behind them and two black SUVs headed in their direction. The sound of marching
boots was louder now, and seemed to be coming from either side.

Maria stopped. “This would be a
really good time for your friends to show up,” she noted.

Oliver would have had to agree, even
without knowing who those friends were. This would be a good time for
anything
to happen that didn’t involve being captured or killed. Cyborgs never got
angry, so they wouldn’t just execute him out of spite, but they might well
calculate he simply wasn’t worth the trouble of keeping alive anymore.

The SUVs stopped a dozen feet away
and the cyborgs inside piled out, weapons pointing at Oliver and Maria. “Do not
attempt to resist,” one said. “Resistance is…”

“Futile?” Oliver asked.

The cyborg considered that. “I was
going to say
useless
, but you seem to have grasped the general idea.”

“Start running,” Maria said. “I’ll
deal with them and catch up with you.”

Oliver looked up Filbert Street. He
couldn’t imagine he’d ever make it to Russian Hill before the cyborgs cut him
off. But now he saw something coming
down
Filbert toward them. It was
difficult to see at first, but there was definitely…

“What the
hell
?” Oliver asked.

Maria followed his gaze up the
street. “Oh,” she said. “There’s that good timing I was hoping for.”

Oliver was having trouble believing
he wasn’t actually having some kind of very strange nightmare. Running directly
toward him was what at first glance appeared to be Chewbacca. The creature was
tall, covered with brown hair, and roaring at the top of its lungs. But its head
wasn’t that of a friendly Wookiee. It appeared to have the head of a
fierce-looking wolf.

“That’s it,” Oliver said. “I’m done.
I’m just done.”

“What do you mean?” Maria asked.

“That’s the goddamn Wolfman.”

“No,” Maria said. “The Wolfman isn’t
real. But it
is
a werewolf.”

The werewolf roared, giving Oliver a
chance to take in two rows of razor-sharp teeth. Three cyborgs coming up the
street to intercept them opened fire on it, but the werewolf shrugged off the
energy bolts, merely howling in pain rather than dropping to the ground in
paralyzed agony as Oliver would have done. All of Oliver’s instincts told him
to run away as the werewolf ran directly toward him, but his legs stayed firmly
rooted in the ground. Was there any chance he was really locked away in an
asylum somewhere, and that all of this was a crazy man’s fantasy?

The werewolf reached Oliver and
scooped him up in a fireman’s carry. “Hey!” Oliver shouted. He beat at the werewolf’s
back with his hands. “Put me down!”

Oliver could see more cyborgs
approaching; there had to be twenty or more on foot now and the tanks weren’t
far away. “Take him,” he heard Maria say. “I’ll keep them busy for as long as I
can.” The werewolf whined at her. “It’s okay,” she said. “Just
fix
this,
Tyler. Save the world.”

The werewolf turned back the way he’d
come and began running up Filbert with Oliver over his shoulder, loping his way
along with long strides that Oliver could never have matched. The SUVs could
have caught them easily enough, but from his position Oliver could see Maria
charging them, screaming like a banshee. She went to work on the cyborgs with
her hands and was quickly lost in a sea of bodies and flying body parts.

The werewolf kept running. Above
them, the helicopter’s searchlight caught them as they crossed Buchanan Street.
Oliver would have had to admit the werewolf was making good time to Russian
Hill. Had it also
run
all the way to meet them? It must have. Not
getting tired had its advantages.

A cyborg squad attempted to intercept
them at Van Ness, but the werewolf used its free arm to bat two of them away.
Another managed to catch him square in the chest with an energy bolt and the
werewolf roared, staggering for just a moment, then recovered and continued
running. Oliver’s body had gone numb from what little of the weapon’s energy
he’d been unfortunate enough to absorb in the blast. Things were going to take
a bad turn for him once the cyborgs stopped trying to capture them and set
their weapons to kill rather than stun.

Filbert Street turned into a long
hill after crossing Van Ness. It was far from the steepest incline in the city,
but Oliver knew walking the rest of the way to Russian Hill would have worn him
out in short order. In his defense he’d have pointed out that he hadn’t had any
real exercise in months, ever since the cyborgs had taken him prisoner. In all
honesty, though, he’d have had a rough time with it even before that. The
werewolf barely seemed to notice the incline, though. It didn’t even appear to
be breathing hard as they crossed Larkin Street. It occurred to Oliver that
riding by werewolf, as bizarre as it was, was probably still faster than taking
a taxi would have been in San Francisco in the days before the cyborgs had
come.

A second airborne searchlight joined
the first. Oliver doubted it would be long before the cyborgs had them
surrounded again, and it was unlikely they’d ask him to surrender before
opening fire this time. He was about to tell the werewolf they might try hiding
instead of running when it stopped suddenly and stepped into an empty lot.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Oliver wondered why there was an empty lot
on Filbert Street. For as long as he’d lived in the city, Oliver couldn’t remember
a lot east of Van Ness staying vacant for long. There was simply too little
real estate, and this was a prime area. He might have spent more time trying to
puzzle that out, but he was keenly aware that the werewolf was no longer
running. “Are we giving up?” he asked. He wasn’t sure how he was going to
explain this werewolf business to the cyborgs, provided they didn’t just shoot
him first.

The werewolf advanced a few steps
into the lot, then reached out one paw as if it were opening a door. Oddly
enough, Oliver could actually hear a door opening. Then the werewolf stepped
forward, and what had been an empty lot shimmered and became the interior of a
house. The werewolf turned and shut the door behind them.

Oliver attempted not to collapse in
shock as the werewolf put him down. There had been no house on this lot. He’d
seen it standing vacant when he’d been outside. But now here he was inside one.
It wasn’t a great deal to look at; he was in a sparsely decorated living room.
Edwardian chairs sat around a wooden table that had several old-looking books
on top of it. A teapot sat on a silver tray nearby, with several delicate cups
at the ready. A staircase along one wall led up to another level. As Oliver
looked around he didn’t see any family photos or other decorations that made
the place look as if somebody lived here. It looked like a model home more than
anything else.

“What the hell
is
this?”
Oliver asked.

A blonde girl of about ten years old
emerged from the kitchen carrying a muffin on a small square plate. She wore
jeans and a t-shirt with a
Pokémon
character on the front. She looked Oliver up and
down, then glanced at the werewolf. “I cannot help but notice that Maria is not
with you.”

The werewolf whined and shook its
head. Oliver didn’t know how sad a werewolf was capable of looking, but this
one certainly seemed unhappy.

The girl sighed. “A pity. We could
have used the help. Do not mourn her, Mr. Jacobsen. If we succeed in our
mission, she will be restored to life as if this never happened.” She frowned.
“Well, not
life
, precisely. She is a vampire, after all.” The werewolf
whined again and looked at the waiting teapot meaningfully. “You will not
handle my china until you have resumed your human form,” the girl said.