Ntshona (28 page)

As the car’s engine again quietly whirred towards the speed limit on this new road, a mess of groans emitted from the back of the car.

“Are you okay guys?” Cat inquired as she observed closely the still-empty carriageway behind them.

“Ow
… something smacked me in the nose,” said Lon as he winced from wiping blood from his upper lip.

A sudden, sharp cough took him and Lin by surprise, then a longer bout of sputtering.

“Patient’s pulse is regular. Further shock is not required”.

“What happened?” asked Eve weakly as she laboured to take in air.

Lon pushed himself towards her and gently swept back the hair from across her face as he sat on the edge of the seat. “You need to be careful, you might have an injured neck”.

“Take off the electrodes Lon,” instructed Lin, “we don’t need an accidental shock right now”. She helped him straighten Eve’s body again.

With care he removed the electrode from the suffering girl’s side and handed it to Lin, and with even more caution he peeled off the one attached to her breast.

“Why..” Eve was breathless and stupefied, “why are you
… touching me… there?”

“Don’t worry, I’m helping-”

“Hold on!” interrupted Cat obstreperously, jerking the car once more from its linear direction as their surroundings were bombarded with explosive shells. The procession was once more closing in.

Yet again the passengers took a beating from the unannounced motions, especially Eve who cried out as her neck once more was flexed.

Cat was constrained; all she could do to avoid them being obliterated was to cut across the adjacent carriageway and pavement and through a gap in the line of trees into a sizeable park. Unfortunately, the oncoming passenger vehicle met a fiery end, and discharged fragments across the paving, some of which rained down onto Cat’s car as it departed from view.

“Fucking hell!” exclaimed Lon as he readjusted his posture, “they just blew up innocent people!”

“I thought you’d already realised how brutal they are,” expressed Lin with a hint of disgust in her voice. She leant over Eve and realigned her body on the back seat with Lon’s help, trying hard not to affect her upper spine.

Their vehicle raced over the preponderantly open land that was populated by hundreds of people leisurely taking in the moderate early evening weather. Numerous citizenry were encouraged to remove themselves from the course of the car when Cat sounded its horn frantically, whose presence caused a major disturbance in the pedestrianised area. Shortly after, their chasers elevated the level of panic within the park with their resumed ballistics and utter disregard for the safety of the onlookers entangled in the situation.

Cat was making ground when a tiny yellow light on the dashboard began to flicker.

“Lin, is there anything above us?” she shouted into the back.

Lin glanced through the back window but saw nothing far above ground level, so she opened the closest passenger window to take a better look. Between the swathes of hair vehemently lapping in the wind around her face, she spotted a small aerial robot following almost immediately above them. “It’s a drone”.

“Do me a favour will you?” her eyes adhered intently to her path, “shoot the thing down; we don’t know what it can do”.

“Got it,” Lin jumped back into the front passenger seat, reclaimed her rifle, opened the window and set herself up for some target practise. She steadied herself as best she could, took aim, but could not manage a clear view due to her flailing hair, so she pulled herself back into the car and rapidly tied it up into a ponytail, following which she reassumed her position, ready to fire.

The first round missed by a considerable spread thanks to the car jarring from its path in order to dodge another human obstacle. The second was a direct hit, yet the machine was barely noticeably impaired. The third and fourth caused a drop in its altitude, and soon it hit the ground at high speed, gouging out tracks as it skidded across the grassy plain behind the escaping vehicle.

“It didn’t have much armour,” said Lin once she pulled her upper body and weapon back into the car.

“It was probably built for speed then,” posited cat.

“A tracker?”

“Likely”.

Cat persevered at increasing the car’s speed as she directed it towards the western perimeter of the park; hopefully there would be enough space between the trees to manage through in the same way they had entered. The pursuers, however, had already modified formation and each vehicle was spread across quite a range so as to cut down the possibility of escape, encouraging Cat to sharpen the degree at which she was heading towards the park’s outer edge to escape the area more quickly, hopefully out onto a busy road where she could camouflage her still rainbow-esque car. Her hope was that on the pavement beyond the trees there would be no pedestrians, and that she would be able to cut directly across the first encountered lanes into one of the adjacent ones flowing parallel to them without a collision. As luck would have it, she managed it without too many sharp turns, thanks in part to the as yet staunched flow of traffic from the locked-down Science Centre far behind them.

“Lin, reset the car’s plates and colour!” commanded Cat.

She complied by pressing a few buttons on the dashboard, which changed the car’s colour to black and gave the number plates a new code, and Cat relaxed her foot on the accelerator pedal to conform to the speed limit and to help deviate attention away from them.

As a small measure of tension dissipated in the subsequent several seconds, the sudden arrival of a pursuing vehicle bursting through a sizable gap between two trees at a latitude analogous to their own incited a new bout of panic, which was, nevertheless, cut short when the chasing vehicle was taken out in a violent collision with another oncoming one the moment its wheels touched the tarmac.

“Jesus, that was lucky!” said Lin, suspiring relief.

“Lucky?” repeated Lon, “It certainly wasn’t lucky for the people in the oncoming car!”

“He’s right,” said Cat in semi-agreement, “I wouldn’t call it luck that they seemed to know where we were”.

“Probably just a fluke,” said Lin with her usual
insouciance.

“Could’ve been, but we still must be extremely careful”.

The traffic was increasingly dense the closer they got to the city’s economic centre. Surely an explosive encounter here would go far from unnoticed, however, their previous
night-time speed chase had made its way onto the news and had subsequently publicly assigned to them the tag “terrorists”. Would that happen again? Although the vehicles in pursuit were not visibly of law enforcement, who could say what would happen in such an event? The Science Centre was a place of power and, more and more evidently, ruthless control.

Concealed in their now inconspicuously plain transport, and almost interlocked in traffic, Lin, Cat, Lon and, still in a state of stupor, Eve, began again to lose some tension. For now they felt safe in the increasingly crowded urban area.

“Eve, how do you feel?” Lon asked softly as he leant over and gently replaced her lifted shirt to cover her exposed top half. It was lightly coloured in the red of blood transferred from the inside of her lab coat when it was still fresh. He sat back and unfastened his own coat to evaluate the severity of staining on his inner clothing, as he had endured a more serious wave of sanguine. He was displeased at the state of his discoloured garments, and refastened his coat.

“What… happened?” Eve said in a slow, hushed voice, her lips hardly moving.

“You hav
e a neck injury, so you must lie still,” he informed.

Eve struggled a deep sigh, “How
… the fuck… did I… manage… that?”

“You were hit in the neck with the baton the guy on the bike was using. Apparently they don’t just give out shock. Oh yeah, you were electrified too; you had a heart attack”.

She closed her eyes and sighed again slowly. “You… resu… resus… citated me?”

“Yeah, Lin and I did”.

“That must… be why… I’m stru… struggling… to breath”.

“Yeah
…”

“And why
… my back… hurts”.

“Your back?”

“Yeah… the clasps… on my… bra… They’re metal”.

“Oh shit! I didn’t think of that!”.

She smiled. “It’s o… okay. My neck is… is the… problem… here”.

“Don’t worry about it too much,” said Cat, “we’ll get you to a hospital soon, just try not to move, hey”.

“Thank… you”. She tried to move her neck to assess the location and severity of the break, but quickly had second thoughts. “Lon… how’s your shoulder?”

He had, in fact, forgotten about it completely, only now, after being reminded of it, did the gunshot wound begin to burn.

“Maybe you should stop talking for a while and get your breath back,” Lon advised.

She smiled again and went silent.

The traffic flow slowed to a near stop.

“What’s the plan now?” Lin inquired of Cat.

“The same as it always was; nothing’s actually changed
…” something unnerved her mid-sentence; a police cycle rolled slowly down the far side of the adjacent right lane. She continued anyhow, “…except for needing to take…”

“Cat,” she interrupted, “he’s coming back”.

The police cycle had turned and switched lanes to the one in which they were close to a standstill.

“Coincidence?” she opined with a great deal of uncertainty.

Yet what caught Lin’s attention to their left side wavered their collective sense of security. Another police cycle scanned the road in their close by area, searching.

“There’s another one coming up from behind!” vociferated Lon alarmedly.

“We need to get off this road,” declared Cat, and in what seemed like a fortunate response to her wishes, the traffic began to pick up speed. At the first risky opportunity she veered the car into lane to the left, ready to take the next junction.

The police cycles experienced more difficulty moving through the stream of vehicles in each lane, however, they persevered to change lanes.

“Are they following us?” asked Lon, who watched them intently.

“It sure as hell seems that way,” said Cat. “We must get out of here unnoticed. Pay attention to their movements”. She took the left turn, and the motorcycles disappeared, masked by the corner of the new street, but after twenty or so metres they re-emerged among the tailing vehicle assemblage.

“Something’s not right here,” said Lon as he noted the police’s quick reappearance.

“Definitely not,” added Lin. She leant forwards for a better view of the narrow strip of sky contained
within the tops of the buildings on either side of the road. “I’m quite certain that’s another drone up there,” she pointed to what was clearly an aircraft, likely on patrol.

“Sod this!” Cat jammed the steering wheel to the left and slammed her foot onto the accelerator, promptly forcing the car to mount the pedestrian walkway. At the same time she held down the car horn to warn all pedestrians out of the way.

“Jesus Cat, what are you doing?!” Lin asked in uncharacteristic alarm.

“They’ve got a bug on us”.

“How do you know that?!” asked Lon.

“Because we shouldn’t exist to those policemen, yet they’re clearly trying to follow us”. Cat’s reckless driving caused panic outside, and many civilians were almost injured. The commotion piqued the attention of the police cycles, and their sirens began to roar.

“Lin, I need a map of this area now!” Cat demanded, and so Lin tapped a few buttons on the dashboard to bring up on the centre-windscreen display a detailed ground-level map of the nearby area, with a small, red circle at the centre to represent their location.

Cat turned the car fiercely at the next left junction after roughly fifty metres, minutely avoiding skidding back onto the road and into adjacent vehicles, and again held heavy pressure on the throttle. The map reorientated itself to suit their new direction, and at the first instance of displaying a gap between the buildings on the left, Cat violently hit the brakes again, jouncing the passengers, and shifted the car forwards into the alleyway before coming to a final halt.

Lin forced open her door, sprang out and began to search the vehicle for unwanted machinery. She dashed to the back, where she found a small, white electronic device. She gripped its circumference with her fingertips and yanked at it, yet it did not relinquish its hold. She tried to force her fingernails underneath, but still it made no departure, then tried bashing its side with heel of her palm, but still no use. “Those sneaky bastards”. She returned to the open car door and yelled “I need the AED!”

Lon hurriedly grabbed it from the footwell where it had fallen earlier, and tossed it to Lin. “What’s it for?”

She allowed herself no time to respond and returned to the menacing contraption affixed to the back of the car. To it she attached the two electrodes.

“Electrodes placed incorrectly,” sounded the defibrillator. “Check electr-”