Ntshona (29 page)

“Just fucking zap it!” she shouted at the thing and punched the red button, and the device was issued with a shock and relaxed its electromagnetic force, causing it to drop to the floor with a quiet clink. She snapped it up, ripped away the electrodes, ran to the entrance of the alley and launched the horrible gadget into the road, landing on the roof of some other vehicle. Unlucky for them.

Into the car Lin returned with the AED. “Of course, you were right,” she said to Cat as she modified the car’s appearance another time using the dashboard controls. “But now it’s probably heading for the south. We should be fine after we leave this alley”. She sighed with relief.

The car swiftly arrived at the far end of the alleyway, however joined the northbound traffic at an unsuspicious speed.

Tension calmed as the group became removed from their previous danger. Heading north without any sign of pursual for quite some time was relatively somewhat relaxing. Of course, scepticism remained a strong feeling among the in-car assembly.

Cat set the car to autopilot and instructed it to “Call Tan”.

“Yo, everything alright over there?” he greeted after a few seconds of dial tone.

“Not really, the plan didn’t go as smoothly as we’d reckoned”. replied Cat.

“Are they all with you?”

“Yeah, they are, but Eve needs medical attention, and Lon was shot in the shoulder”.

“What the hell happened?! Chris will not be pleased about this!”

Lon butted into the conversation, “Tan, tell Chris I’m fine, Eve’s the one who’s in pain!”

“Well… how long can Eve hold out before getting her to a hospital?”

“Her neck might be broken,” said Lin, “as long as she doesn’t move so much for the time being, she’ll be fine”.

“Her neck is broken?!” Tan bellowed. “That seems to me like a big problem, for the time being!”

“Yes, Tan!” Said Cat. “That’s why I called you, we need help to get out of the city centre”.

“Of course,” his voice was more restrained, “how can I help you?”

“We were followed when we left the Science Centre, first by the Science Centre’s own security, then by the police. We managed to shake them off, but I’m absolutely sure there’ll be roadblocks to contend with”.

“Right,” he said, “in which direction are you headed?”

“We’re aiming for the Northern Suburbs”.

“Give me a minute”. The sound of heavy music could quietly be heard in the background while Tan hacked the police network. “Looks like you really pissed them off; not only do they have roadblocks all over the city, there are also airborne drones searching the whole southern region… a
lot
of them”.

“Why are they so desperate to catch us when we didn’t get away with any of their data?” said Lon.

“Because they see it as an act of terrorism,” Tan responded calmly, indifferent to Lon’s confession of failure.

“But they killed innocent people when they were after us!”

“Lon, I’ll listen to everything later when we debrief you, but for now you all have to focus on getting to a safe place outside the city centre until this calms down, then you and Eve need to get to a hospital. First things first though, Cat, I’m relaying the roadblock details to your car’s navigation system… sorry, I’ll have to leave it at that, I have other related issues to deal with. Call me back when you’re on the other side. Good luck,” and the call ended.

Lin checked the roadblocks on the map and calculated the best route to avoid them. Unfortunately there was the necessity to pass through one.

The car came to a stop at the side of a relatively quiet road.

Lin removed from the glove compartment a folded canvas bag, and pulled out from within it a fashionable summer blouse. She removed the one she was wearing and rolled it up into the bag, replacing it on her body with the fresh one. She also placed inside the bag her folded lab coat which she had left in the footwell. “Lon, can you pass me the empty briefcase gun?”

Lon did as she asked.

“Better keep yours, as well as my rifle, just in case you need to shoot someone,” she said as she transformed the gun into its camouflaged form.

“Are you leaving?” he asked.

“Yes dear, it’s safer this way”.

“Oh
… well… thank you for saving us”.

She looked him dead in the eye, smiled sympathetically, with a hint of condescension usually reserved for a sick pet, and said “I didn’t save you”.

Lon was unsure of what to say, so did not say a thing more.

Lin turned to Cat, reached over for a hug and said “Good luck honey,” opened her door and alighted with two briefcases and a canvas bag. She gave one last nod and jovially said, “Merry Christmas,” before walking away.

The door closed and the car began to move.

“Why was she at the Science Centre?” asked Lon.

“She was there to help you,” said Cat.

“To help us with what? Why weren’t we told beforehand about it? I thought no one else had the balls to do what we just did, that’s why we were the ones who had to do it!”

“Sorry Lon, answering your questions now would complicate things much more. Be patient and trust your brother”.

“Trust Chris? This wasn’t his plan”.

“Just stop, Lon,” Cat demanded. “Make sure Eve is okay”.

He suspired in frustration before attending
to Eve, who remained peaceful lying across the back seat. “Eve,” he said softly, “how are you feeling?”

The response he elicited was minimal. Eve’s eyelids flickered and she tiredly groaned something like “I’m okay
… I’ll wake up just now”.

“I think she just needs sleep,” Lon informed Cat, as he lightly caressed Eve’s face.

Chapter 14

The course Lin plotted through the city avoided all encounters with roadblocks hindering the long-awaited finale of their escape, except for one, the roadblock farthest north.

The car sat in the backlog of traffic waiting at the police checkpoint. They were still on the highway, and voiding the safety barriers at each side of the road, should such a thing be possible, would end in a likely deathly plummet for an unknown distance. This time the authoritative presence was heavy; another high-speed escape attempt would likely end gravely.

“I doubt you’ll be able to pull a gun out like you did last time Lon,” said Cat.

He leant forwards between the two front seats for a better look through the windscreen at the legion of officers, police vehicles and equipment barricading the highway. His heart thumped with some force the inside of his ribcage. “What do you suggest? We’re both wearing lab coats, and she’s severely injured. It’s too suspicious”. He stretched his arm towards the rifle Lin left by her seat and withdrew into the back with him. He quickly shoved it, along with the remaining briefcase gun, into the drawer beneath the rear seat.

The car slowly rolled forwards.

“We need a cover story”.

“What kind of cover story wouldn’t be too farfetched?” asked Lon.

Cat turned in her seat to examine Eve. “Her clothes and the inside of her coat are covered in blood, and she does have a real neck injury. It looks like a bad accident to me”.

“But what kind of accident? Won’t our lab coats make it obvious what we were doing?”

There came a tap on the driver’s window.

“Shit, look worried Lon”.

“I am worried!” he said before Cat wound down her window.

On the other side was a stern, critical face. Before the officer could get in an introductory word, Cat was already heading full steam into a barrage of pleas.

“Sir, you have to let us through quickly!”

The man was quite shocked.

“My friend, I need to get her to a hospital!”

There was little urgency in the policeman’s reaction. He lowered his head into the open window for a look into the back.

Lon caught him with a beseeching look. “She’s injured, she needs treatment soon!”

The man was curious.

“What you got over there?” called over a colleague.

“We’re looking for one White and two Chinese, aren’t we?” he asked.

“Yeah, that’s right. Have you got a full house there?” he joined his co-worker by Cat’s window.

“Nah, two Whites and just one Chinese”.

“I’m not fucking Chinese,” Eve moaned.

“What did she say?” bit the first officer.

“She’s not making sense, she’s delirious with the pain!” justified Lon.

“My word!” exclaimed the additional officer upon examining the stuporous passenger, “What the hell happened to her?!”

“Can’t you see we need to get to a hospital quickly?! You have to let us through!” demanded Cat. Her acting was convincing enough to provoke contemplation in the second policeman.

“Can’t we let them through?” he asked.

“No, under such suspicious circumstances we can not. God knows what she was up to to get into that state,” said the stern-faced officer.

“Please?!” said Cat, “She could be dying!”

“Come on man, she clearly needs treatment,” said the second officer.

“Then we’ll call an ambulance and have her treated here”.

“There’s no time for that!” yelled Lon. “She’s bleeding and can barely move! She needs a doctor now!”

The second officer sighed and swiftly surveyed his surroundings. No way was an ambulance or a medic likely to get to their positions quickly. “Ag, man! I’ll go with them,” he said to the stern-faced one, “call it in, I’ll take responsibility for them”.

The first policeman once again examined the body in the back, thought for a moment and said “Alright. Tygerberg hospital is the closest to this location. Contact me the moment you get there”.

This unheralded response caught Cat off guard. “Oh
…! Thank you so much!” she thanked the men in falsely realistic gratitude.

“Cheers man, you’re doing the right thing” said the second officer to the first as he walked around the car and climbed into the front passenger seat.

“Keep a close eye on them”. The stern-faced policeman made several gestures towards his other colleagues to remove the barriers blockading the road.

Counterpoint to Eve’s apparent dozy calmness, Lon was frightened; even though the policeman was veritably concerned for the wellbeing of the injured girl on the backseat, he was still their enemy.

Cat carefully pushed the car through several still-standing vehicles to the front, and pressed on, allegedly towards Tygerberg hospital.

The presence of the officer in the car was far from comfortable; their safe little bubble had been penetrated. Lon’s concentration on his performance began to slip, especially when the man started to pry regarding the circumstances surrounding Eve’s injuries.

“So what happened to her?”

“A lab accident,” said Cat.

“What kind of lab accident?”

“A chemical explosion”.

“The force knocked her down, and I think it broke her neck,” said Lon adding to the lie, “she also has small pieces of receptacle embedded in her abdomen,” the grief in his voice was not part of the act.

“Man, what kind of experiments were you guys doing?”

“Testing the resilience to corrosion from certain chemicals in under-development materials,” was the first thing that came to Lon’s mind.

“Eish, man! That sounds dangerous!” said the officer.

“It clearly was!”

“What kinds of materials were you guys testing?”

Lon paused to think, but dubiously took too long to respond. “We can’t tell you, it’s top secret”. He turned back to face Eve and tried his hardest to appear wholly concerned for her health, and not too the future of all three of them if he were to err in his utterances.

“Might I remind you that I am an officer of the law? You must not keep secrets from me!”

“Of course, of course!” Cat cut in. “We were testing the effects of caustic chemicals on certain nanomaterials. He’s just concerned about the privacy of company’s products; it is a competitive industry, you know?”

“No, I don’t know. But that isn’t my line of work”.

“Of course not”.

By now the car was far from the attention of the police checkpoint. The traffic thinned as the expansive suburbs came more into proximity and the roads diverged more often into areas far less busy than in the centre of the city.

“What’s the name of your company?” asked the officer.

“Old Vine Chateau,” said Cat after a moment.

“Old Vine Chateau?” repeated the man. “Why would a chateau be producing nanomaterials?”

“My colleague did make it clear that our productions are very secretive”.

“A lot of crazy things go on in this city
…” said the policeman, “to be honest, I’ve come across crazier things in my time”.

“What like?” she inquired with an air of intrigue.

“Oh, many things I can’t remember right now, but I tell you, those fat cats at the top are really strange people, you know? I’m always suspicious of what they’re up to. You know, actually there was something recently, the other day… the kid of that billionaire, Winters was it? Do you know about that?”

“Yeah, I saw a couple of news reports, he killed himself right?” said Cat.

“Something about that incident was a little strange, man. And the weirdest thing, there was no coroner at the scene”.

The veins in Lon’s neck pumped fiercely. This policeman seemed to be on to something important, something that could help Eve’s and Lon’s case.

“I mentioned it to the guys at the station, but most of them don’t think much of it”.

Lon tried hard to conceive a non-suspicious question to prise out more information from the policeman, however was beaten to it by Cat.

“Officer, can you please tell me your name?”

“Constable Mathema”.

The car slowed.

“Constable Mathema, do you have a family?”

“Yes, a wife and three kids. Why do you ask?”

The front passenger door opened, letting in powerful gusts of wind.

“What are you doing?!” shouted the alarmed policeman glancing at the door. When he turned back towards Cat, her body had already reorientated on its seat.

“Don’t get involved,” she said, and thrust a stamp kick into the side of his head, knocking him out instantly. She detached his seatbelt and shoved him out of the still-moving car before closing the door and realigning herself to face the road.

“You didn’t have to do that so violently!” Lon shouted at her.

“He’ll be fine, we weren’t travelling fast enough to do any real damage. This way we’ll have some time to escape”.

“But why didn’t you talk to him for longer? What he was saying about that Winters guy… he might have been able to help us!”

“Lon, do you really think a policeman
with a family
would do anything to endanger his position?”

“Well
… no, but you could’ve tried to get more information out of him first”.

“Lon, we’ve got more important things to think about right now”. And with that she once again masked the identity of her car, and sped away into the north, far from any hospitals.

The car had come to a stop atop a natural lookout point nearby the old farming region to their west as they faced the city from where they had recently escaped.

The Atlantic estate to their east was benefiting from regenerative development; the frames of several mega-high-rise buildings were being set in place, their shapes manipulated high in the air by huge extension-actuating machinery, semi-silhouetted against the pre-twilight sun. Seal Island, too, was ever prominent in loosely the same direction.

Not all of the ground here was false as it began to level out from the heart of the city, yet from this non-synthetic vantage point it was clear that every instance of land-sea contact in this region was occluded by some structure or other, usually large walls.

Cat stood apart from the car, discoursing with Tan the details of the day’s events via her palm screen.

Lon sat by an open car door talkin
g to Eve while she lay, nearly unmoving, in an almost-awake state.

“I’ve been thinking
… why were they trying to kill us when we were in the Science Centre? Surely they should have taken us captive to interrogate us,” said Lon.

Eve deliberated for a moment. “How do you know they were trying to kill us?”

“Well, they killed several innocent scientists… in case they were the suspects, I assume”.

“Or maybe they were killed because they witnessed our ‘extreme dissent’ and the government don’t want word of it to get out. Imagine the implications of that ever happening. Do you think
… do you think people would begin to make a stand if they knew we, or anybody, were… you know, trying to make things right?” she said.

“I’d like to think so,” said Lon.

Cat ended her call and rejoined the other two. “Right guys. Tan and Chris are up-to-date now. Our next course of action is to return to the city when it’s safe and get the two of you to the hospital where we were on Saturday. Tan has already made arrangements for when we arrive. As long as you don’t move your neck, Eve, you should be fine for a while”.

“Did he not say anything about our mission being a failure?” asked Lon.

Cat drew in a long breath. “He said not to worry”.

“Why?” asked Eve. “Wasn’t the reason we tried to get all that government data because it was the only way to
… well, fuck them over?”

Cat pursed her lips and tried to exhale the tension she felt. “The good news is, there’s another backup”.

“Really?!” Lon shot to his feet in excitement, although he remained somewhat wary of danger.

“Yeah
…” she looked around and then into the distant sky beyond the city, finding difficulty in formulating her words. “It’s in Taiwan”.

End of Book One.

***