I heard someone say, through thick static:
'Yeah. Roj that. Got him.'
And then the sniper shitbag on the roof above, the third Gull, who'd been waiting like an angler poised over bait, waiting for the dumb psycho to try and turn the tables, opened fire and blew my fucking ear off.
Things rushed past without shape. Everything seemed to throb; the whole world bulging in time to the pain inside my head.
It hurt like a bitch, and I hadn't even had the time to poke and prod at it yet; to see how bad it was. In the mean time I was letting myself get good and freaked, imagining the worst.
I think I could still hear okay, though frankly nothing much came through except the throbbing and the engines. Always the engines. It felt like they'd been chasing me forever, though I guess it was more like an hour. Maybe more. I'd stop and look at my watch, if stopping wasn't tantamount to getting dead quickly.
The me doing the thinking – the instinctive snarling primate bastard I was taught to let out in situations like this – howled and yelped at the pain, fighting to scratch at the torrent pouring down my neck.
The me inside – rational, detached, cold, keeping the monkey-man in control… He loved it.
Such focus!
Such sensation!
Don't you fucking give up, soldier!
I ran like a steam train. Like a bloody Duracell bunny, with an amphetamine volcano up its furry arse. Like an animator's run-cycle stuck on a fast-forward loop. The same movements over and over, with a background cyclorama tumbling by and nothing but the throb, throb, throb to accompany the slapping of my feet. Puddles. Cracked tarmac. Weed-strewn sidewalks.
What I'm getting at is, I ran like a robot. Never tiring, never feeling. I ran until I was sure my heart would pop, and smiled through frothing teeth and kept going.
Fuck it, I kept thinking. Fuck it all.
Down tight alleyways. Over dumpsters, through drifts of shitty litter. Sharp corners. Over wire fences and down labyrinthine passages. The vehicle-roar came and went, bashing and smashing at intersections, voices raised in curses.
Hot breath, burning my lungs.
The AV couldn't keep up. It kept trying to double-round, to sneak ahead; headlights blazing then jerking off on some random course. They might have had some luck, if I hadn't been a contrary bastard. If I hadn't been changing my mind about what direction to run every five minutes.
The third man had a bike. Some suped-up Japanese travesty, whining like a prepubescent dragonfly, and he had no trouble sticking to me; negotiating alleys too tight for the four-wheeler. I took him down circuitous switchbacks and wide avenues, letting the skittish scavs confuse him, hiding behind dark corners and doubling-back every time he scorched past. Earning ten minute respites here and there, curled-up in dark rooms with terrified squatters moaning beneath soiled sleeping-bags. But he was good. Give him his due; he turned on a penny and came straight back the instant the sniffer-freak on the AV caught the scent, headlight tracking like a laser-sight, rubber squealing.
It would be fair to say – in fact it would be a royal bloody understatement – that I got fed up with him. The bike was enclosed like a sleek little turtle with riot-shields and bullet-proof plex; caroming off angled walls that should have unseated him, slipping through the oil drum fires I pulled-down in my wake like a galleon through fog. And yeah, maybe he couldn't shoot me through the balustrades of shielding; but it worked both ways, and every time I found some perilous vantage point – dangling from a low-hanging escape ladder, peering like Oscar the Grouch out of a scav-nest dumpster – to open up with the Uzis and riddle him with lead, all it achieved was to let him know where I was.
He was trying to make road kill. Exhaust me, flush me out in the open. Re-curved scythe-blades on the bike's front mudguard, ankle-breakers poking like twisted spokes from both wheels.
He was running me down, and he was fucking good at it.
So eventually what I did was: I stopped running.
Stood in full view.
Waited.
(Took a moment to glance at my watch. 23:13hrs, yank-time. Not out of the woods yet, boyo.)
He came round the corner like a flaming bullet, and pulled-up with unnecessary flashiness, propping himself on the far leg so I couldn't even blast open his knees.
Cautious little cocksucker.
I willed him to get on with it before the AV caught us up.
He laughed behind his dusty shield and shouted:
'Getting tired, little limey?'
I opened fire. For all the good it did.
He gunned the whiny engine like every mosquito in the universe shouting in unison, blurring tyres snagging at the floor with a smoky blast of inertia, and came for me.
Bullets punching worthless craters in the glass.
Laughing.
Closing the gap.
Scythe-blades looming.
It was all deeply melodramatic. I rolled my eyes, took three steps backwards – down the flight of stairs lurking in the moonless shadows directly behind me – and lay down.
He didn't see that one coming.
'The fu-?'
The stupid little prick went hurtling over my head, angled in mid-air, hit the wall of the subway stairwell, and just sort of…
Came apart.
No flashy fireballs or smoke-drenched detonations. Just a noise like a big cockroach, cracking under a swat, and a lot of debris.
He was gurgling nastily when I walked away – like maybe he'd broken his back or something – and I should probably have put him out of his misery.
Paint me bothered.
The AV found me fifteen minutes later. The scrawny little freak doped-up on whatever military-grade tracking drugs Scrim had dished-out – clung to the roof like a surfer, rapping on the glass and snarling inarticulately, directing the Klan boss's crazed steering. Again with the sodding circling-round, slipping along too-tight alleyways. It felt good to begin with. Rushing past their clumsy attempts to get ahead, disappearing into the shadows to clamber up on this or that fire-escape, pausing to catch my bearings, trying to head back towards the park. It was time to begin the home-run.
It took me a fair old while to realise they were herding me. They were smarter than I thought.
I came upon an office block – nothing special; redbrick and shattered windows – with a door hanging open on a narrow stairwell. Sick and tired of the growl of engines, I rabbitted up the first few flights without any trouble, pausing to vomit discreetly before pushing myself onwards. Somewhere near floor five – or maybe six – a particularly large scav wearing Gull colours tried to axe me in the head, yelling for me to get the hell away from his wife.
There was an inflatable sex-doll on the floor next to him, but it didn't seem like the right time to point this out. I shoved the Uzi up his nostril until he got the message and backed off, then carried on upwards towards the roof whilst he noisily comforted his wife' below.
On the roof, I puked again. The throbbing in my ear was jacking about with my sense of direction, and it didn't help when the moonlit city put itself together bit-by-bit inside my topsy-turvy bearings.
I was so far west of the park I could see the tiny fishing punts on the Hudson, beyond the tangle of docks and quays spread out below me. Taller buildings rose to my left and right – faint lights glimmering inside where innocent scavs struggled to get by with some semblance of a life.
It was actually sort of beautiful. If it hadn't been about a mile in the wrong direction I might have paused to appreciate it.
