The Moreau Quartet, Volume 2

  The windshield in front of them shattered as another shot tore through the length of the car. Kris screamed. Snow began slicing in through the window, burning Evi’s cheeks. She didn’t want to look at the speedometer.

  “We’re going to die,” Kris was saying now, “it’s New Year’s Eve and we’re going to die—”

  “We’re not going to die—”

  Kris somehow managed to slam the Jaguar through an invisible gap in the traffic on Broadway, scraping at least four cars on the way through the intersection. A bullet hit the hood of the Jaguar, and the engine began to make ominous grinding noises.

  “Get under some cover. They’re in an aircar.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Look at the road!”

  Kris snapped her head around. The Jaguar had drifted into the wrong lane again. A van was headed right toward them, horn blaring.

  Kris pulled a cornering move that shouldn’t have been possible. From inside the car it felt like the ninety-degree turn the car did had a point on the corner. The van scraped by the rear of the Jaguar, and Evi heard its windshield shatter as the sniper let loose another shot.

  The Jaguar streaked through an alley, plowing boxes and garbage in front of it. Evi maneuvered around in the seat to look out the rear window. She could finally make out the aircar through the snow. It was a faint shadow lurking in the crack of sky between the buildings.

  Evi braced the Mishkov on the back of her seat and aimed. The shot was as difficult as it could be, hitting a barely visible high-speed moving target from a moving platform. She gave herself one chance in ten.

  She fired the Mishkov and Kris screamed. The sound was a deafening explosion in the enclosed space, even over the roar of the wind through the broken windows.

  The aircar looked undisturbed.

  Evi took another bead on the flyer as a bullet plowed into the trunk, about a foot away from her. Before Evi fired, the Jaguar pulled a shuddering left turn back into the open to the blare of a dozen horns.

  The aircar could be anywhere now. Evi had lost it in the glare of the streetlights. The Jaguar passed a restaurant window, which shattered as another shot missed them.

  Evi looked ahead of the car. The Jaguar shot through a crosswalk, clipping the front of a cab, and Evi got a look at a street sign—

  How the hell did they get north on Hudson? There must have been a turn or two Evi had missed. However, that explained the traffic. Their car was shooting by dozens of vehicles.

  “Get off of Hudson!”

  Kris took a hard left across another crosswalk, crashing through a sign directing people to the Holland Tunnel. A bullet shattered what was left of the driver’s side window. Kris was screaming to be heard over the wind. “Damn it! Who are you?”

  Kris was crying. Her tears were diagonal streaks in the wind.

  She jumped another curb and sideswiped another cab getting onto Canal Street. They were heading straight for the Hudson.

  Evi kept watch behind them, looking for the aircar. It was still lost in the glare of the streetlights. She thought she saw a muzzle flash, but since the gun was silenced and nothing hit their vehicle that time, she couldn’t be sure. “Kris, I’m sorry—”

  “You’re sorry?”

  “I should have pushed you out of the car.”

  “I’m soooo happy.” Another shot plowed into the hood of the car, and the engine’s grinding became an ominous rumble.

  Up ahead Evi saw a giant orange detour sign. Kris ignored it.

  They passed another sign, unlit, which read, “New West Side Expressway, Southbound.” Under it was another sign, blackened with old grime, “CLOSED.” They hit an entrance ramp and slammed through a rusty chain-link fence.

  The road immediately began to shake the car’s suspension apart. The rattling under the car’s hood took on an urgent tone.

  They passed a third sign, “NY Urban Infrastructure Renewal Project. New West Side Expressway opens May 2048. Your tax dollars at work.” The old sign sprouted a bullet hole as she read it.

  The Jaguar bumped through a gigantic chuckhole as they passed a last sign, “Expressway condemned. No Trespassing. Enter at own risk.”

  Now we’re going to die, she thought.

  Abdel gave her a mental slap for getting fatalistic in combat. Think that way and you will die.

  She tried to ignore it when Kris pulled a shaky U-turn to avoid a hole that crossed all four lanes and fell straight through to the ground, twenty meters or so. Instead, she tried to get another bead on the aircar. Fortunately, on the abandoned expressway there were no active streetlights and Evi could pick out a flying shadow banking low over the Hudson to follow them. There was a point, at the end of Kris’ turn, when the aircar seemed to hover for a split-second, almost stationary.

  Evi aimed at the brightest infrared source and fired.

  Kris screamed, “Shit,” at the sound of the gunshot and the Jaguar swerved and sideswiped a guardrail, knocking a chunk into the darkness. But Evi thought she saw the flying shadow sprout a spark near its mid-section. She’d hit it . . .

  Unfortunately, the aircar showed no signs of slowing down or stopping.

  Smoke began to emerge from the Jaguar’s hood, carrying the taint of ozone and burning insulation. Red lights began to blink on the dash. The inductor was overheating, the superconductor was losing charge, and the rattle was turning into a scraping whine.

  Kris was pumping the accelerator, and they were still losing speed.

  Evi looked up ahead, and they were aiming right for a thirty-meter gap in the expressway.

  The sniper in the aircar fired again, and this time Evi heard the shot. It wasn’t the gun she heard. It was the right front tire of the Jaguar blowing out and shredding.

  “Hang on!” Kris yelled over the screech of the brakes.

  Evi could tell when they hit the hole in the road, because the screech of the brakes stopped and the bottom fell out of her stomach.

  The Jaguar spent a full second in free-fall, its nose arcing downward. It seemed to Evi that the second washed the night clear of sound. The Jaguar tumbled and she saw, briefly, the crumbling concrete support pillars rush by the front of the car. Then she was looking straight at a pile of rubble that sloped up under the condemned expressway.

  There was a bone-jarring crunch, and then all she could see was an airbag. She’d been turning to face forward under the seatbelt. The shoulder belt dug into her left shoulder, and she felt a burning wrench. The car had stopped moving, and for a moment it felt as if the car were going to stay here, vertical, nose-end into the ground. Then, as the airbag began to deflate, she felt the car tip backward.

  The Jaguar slammed its wheels into the rubble. She heard the inductor explode under the car, releasing the smell of melting ceramics and burning insulation. She wrestled the airbag out of her face as the Jaguar slid down the grade.

  The hole was receding above them as the car slid backward and stopped.

  “Kris?”

  Evi looked to her left when no answer came. Kris was leaning back in the driver’s seat, eyes wide open. A trickle of blood was running from her mouth, and her head was leaning much too far to the right.

  “Shit, no,” Evi whispered.

  There was no airbag draped over Kris’ lap. The cover that housed it had popped off the steering wheel, and perfectly centered on the cover was a bullet hole. The bag had never inflated.

  “No! She’s a damn civilian.”

  She popped her seatbelt and felt for a pulse in Kris’ neck. “Please, I don’t want to be responsible for this. Everything else, but not this, too.”

  As the plastic fenders on the rear of the Jaguar started burning from the heat of the melted inductor, she placed her right fist between Kris’ breasts and began pumping. She ignored the shivers of agony that it drove into her shoulder. F
ive pumps, then she pinched Kris’ nose shut and breathed into her mouth. It was like blowing into a hot water bottle, tasted of blood.

  No pulse.

  Five more, breathe.

  No pulse, no reaction.

  Five more, breathe.

  Nothing.

  “Don’t die!”

  Five more, breathe.

  She heard an engine above her.

  “Damn it! Not now!” She was shouting now, it felt like someone was driving a hot poker into her guts. Damn them, whoever they were. Didn’t they care who got in the way? She bent over and pulled the Mishkov out of the footwell, where she had dropped it.

  Evi could see the aircar clearly now. It was silhouetted through the hole, against the night sky. She clutched her injured arm to her chest and braced the Mishkov against the dashboard and aimed at one of the forward fans.

  “BASTARDS!” Evi fired.

  There was a grinding whine from above her. A shower of sparks erupted from the front of the aircar as a blade from one of the forward fans sheared through its housing. The aircar’s nose dipped and its tail began rising. The car became terminally unbalanced. It fell out of the sky, the fans giving it a lateral acceleration toward the river. The nose of the aircar skipped along the side of the slope of rubble and caught on a chunk of concrete. The car flipped on its back, fans still going, and started rolling. It rolled past the Jaguar and plowed into a concrete retaining wall.

  Evi lowered the Mishkov and started shaking, watching the aircar.

  The aircar’s power plant exploded in a flower of sparks, orange flame, and toxic smoke.

  The smell of burning plastic finally got bad enough to make her turn around. The Jaguar’s trunk was burning now. She unhooked Kris’ seatbelt and, gingerly, dragged her away from the car. Once Kris was clear of the wreck, she tried CPR again, not caring if a survivor from the aircar decided to shoot her, or about the agony in her shoulder, or if Kris’ blood could be tainted . . .

  And she knew it was hopeless five minutes before she stopped.

  For a while, she just looked at Kris. Kris had been blonde, attractive, nineteen.

  “Damn it, what else could I do?” She asked no one in particular.

  You can’t get soft-hearted in your line of work.

  “Maybe I’m in the wrong line of work, Abdel,” Evi whispered.

  You were drafted, too.

  There was a distant sound of popping, and at first she thought it was gunfire. Then car horns began sounding, along with foghorns from the river, and she realized that the popping was the sound of fireworks.

  She reached down and closed Kris’ eyes.

  “Happy New Year.”

  Chapter 9

  It hurt to holster her gun, so Evi put it into her pack as she gathered all her spilled equipment. Then she hung the back – pack over her right shoulder. She limped up to the remains of the aircar, but within ten meters she could tell that examination was hopeless. The power plant had only smoldered briefly after the explosion, but the cab was crushed against the concrete retaining wall. The only way she’d get to examine her assailants would be to move the whole wreck.

  She had been here too long. The aircar would have had to have been in radio contact with someone. Someone who would be on their way now. Even if, for some reason, there wasn’t any backup for the aircar, there would eventually be cops, ambulances and firemen to take care of the crash.

  She stepped on something and heard cracking plastic.

  She looked down and saw her sunglasses. They must have flown off during the Jaguar’s descent. She picked them up with her good arm. Most of the lenses stayed on the ground.

  There just went most of her protective coloration.

  She spared Kris a last look and then limped through a gap in the eastern retaining wall, opposite the aircar. She limped away from the graffiti-emblazoned wall, left arm clutched to her stomach, realizing just how little time she had left. She was hearing sirens, and with the sirens would come more unmarked aircars.

  She stumbled through an intersection and saw she had crashed into Greenwich Village.

  She pushed through an obliviously drunk crowd of mixed moreaus and humans and nearly passed out when one of them brushed her shoulder. She fell into a doorway after that, breathing heavily and sweating.

  Her shoulder had dislocated, and she had to do something to fix it.

  The medkit in her bag had some painkiller, but the airhypo had broken in the crash. She tossed the hypo to the ground in disgust. “Just gets worse and worse . . .”

  She saw a police aircar fly over her, flashers going. She fell back farther into the darkness the doorway provided. She backed until she was stopped by the door itself, a metal security job with bulletproof glass. She tried the latch with her right hand. It was locked.

  A very bad idea crossed her mind. She didn’t want to do this herself, but she had to do something about her shoulder.

  The handle on the door seemed to be high enough off the ground.

  The hall beyond the bulletproof glass was dimly lit. She didn’t see anyone in the building. She hoped it would stay that way. It would be very bad for someone to try the door while she did what she was considering.

  She put her back flat to the door and unbent her left arm. It felt as though someone had spiked her shoulder with ground glass. She took deep breaths as she locked her elbow. She had to breathe through her nose because her jaw was clenched shut.

  With her arm straight at her side, she unlatched the strap from her pack and wrapped it around the door’s latch and her left hand.

  She wiped the sweat from her forehead and whispered to another passing police car, “So much for the preliminaries . . .”

  She took a deep breath, gritted her teeth, and started bending her knees.

  The pain was a white-hot shuddering rush that originated somewhere in her left shoulder socket, raced down her back, and pulsed through her head to spike between her eyes. As she continued to lower her torso and rotate her arm up and back, the fire in her shoulder planted a hot coal in her guts that shriveled her stomach into a small vibrating ember. Somehow she managed to keep her elbow locked as the pain whited out her vision with dancing sparks . . .

  There was a grinding pop in her left shoulder and Evi threw up.

  She stayed there, on her knees in the snow, for a few seconds as the world returned to normal. Her left shoulder still hurt like hell, but it was an endurable hurt. She slowly untangled her left hand from the door latch and staggered to her feet.

  She stood there a moment, slowly bending her left elbow, rocking the arm fractionally back and forth and wincing. Her shoulder seemed to have regained some semblance of mobility. Her engineered metabolism was supposed to take damage like that well.

  She didn’t want to see it take something badly.

  At least it wasn’t broken.

  No more police cars screamed by. It’d be safe on the street for a moment or two. But she needed to get inside, preferably within the next five minutes.

  A pair of people passed close by her door: a black human and a drunk fox. The man had his arm around the fox and was doing his best to keep his moreau friend from weaving. Even in the beginning of a snowstorm, the fox was wearing as little clothing as he could get away with legally. The human was wearing a shredded denim jacket that was covered by hand-lettered slogans: “Fuck the PTB,” “Blow the foundations,” “Support your local police—from a rope.”

  She wouldn’t be surprised if the guy had the seminal “Off the Pink” on the jacket somewhere, even if he was human.

  What caught Evi’s attention was the shades the human wore.

  Why not? He certainly wasn’t Agency material.

  Evi stepped out of the doorway, in front of the pair. The two stopped short. Other groups of humans and moreaus began passing around them. She mad
e sure the streetlight was behind her, so her eyes were in shadow.

  From the expression on the human, she must have looked like hell.

  “How much for the sunglasses?”

  “What?” said the human.

  The fox reached up and grabbed the glasses, “She wants your shades—” The fox turned and addressed Evi in a slurred brogue, “Fifty he wants, lass, for this prim—premi—quality eyewear.”

  “Damn it, Ross. Give those back.” The human reached for the shades, but the fox had longer arms.

  The fox shook his head. “Quiet, Ross is negotiating.”

  During the exchange, Evi had the opportunity to liberate three twenties from the roll in her pocket. “I’ll give you sixty.”

  The pair turned to face her. The fox lowered his arm and made as if to chew the end of the glasses in thought. “Now, Ross will have to think about—”

  The human grabbed the sunglasses and yanked them away from the fox. “They’re my glasses, you Irish furball.” He looked at Evi, still disbelieving. “You serious?”

  She flashed the three twenties.

  The guy tossed her the sunglasses and the fox took the money. Then they rushed around her as if they were afraid she’d change her mind. As they receded she could hear the guy say, “Give me the money, they’re my glasses.”

  “Ross should get some. He did all the haggling.”

  She put on the sunglasses. These were much darker than her own, not only did they cut out the UV and a lot of the human-visible spectrum, but they chopped out the IR as well. She’d have to make do.

  As much as the contacts irritated her, she wished she had them right now.

  Another mix of drunk and half-drunk moreaus and humans passed by. They came from a bar two doors down. She guarded her shoulder as the patrons passed. The humans were four males, heavy on the jewelry, leather jackets with more anti-authoritarian slogans. Evi read a button on one that said, “The only thing of value to pass through a politician’s mind is a bullet.” The moreaus consisted of two female rabbits, a male rat, and another male fox. Like the previous fox, these wore as little as possible. The moreau females even went topless. But then, moreaus didn’t have prominent breasts.