“Okay, Hunters. Try to get close as you can without being seen and get ready for her to bail,” Earl warned. “We’re dealing with a pro. I bet you she’s got another vehicle stashed, or she’s got some other escape route planned.”
Trip told Hertzfeldt, “Keep gaining but try not to look like you’re chasing her.”
She went several more blocks and crossed over the freeway. I was glad she didn’t get on it. If she decided to open that bike up on there, I really didn’t know if our little drone could keep up.
“Oh, hell I forgot,” Boone said. “It’s Labor Day weekend. Can you guys grab her now?”
“Negative,” Trip responded. “She’s too far ahead.”
“Get closer or you’ll lose her in the crowds.”
But before I could ask what crowds, Trip pointed through the windshield. “I see her again.”
I was holding onto the back of his seat so Hertzfeldt wouldn’t break my neck. I spotted her too, a couple hundred yards ahead, and she was still wearing that big red backpack. If it was empty, and the Ward Stone was back with Stricken getting busted by the MCB, I was going to feel really stupid. “This is Z, we’ve got visual on the bike. She’s half a block ahead. Looks like she’s got the Ward.”
She was checking her mirrors, but we were driving normal now, and there were lots of unremarkable work vans like this in the city. But I was still getting a bad vibe. This was a busy part of town with a bunch of gigantic hotels. Which meant lots of parking garages and big crowded buildings to duck into. “What if she bails and goes into something Skippy can’t follow?”
“Grab that bag if you can but be extremely careful. Whatever she is, she’s dangerous.”
She was fast enough to beat up a bunch of goons and Feds and jump out a third-story window after brazenly robbing a former spy and some underground lizard monsters, so yeah, my money would be on very dangerous. I had Abomination in my gear bag, but a full-auto shotgun and grenade launcher might stick out a bit if I needed to hop out and follow her on foot. Abomination wasn’t exactly low key.
“She’s heading south again,” Trip said.
Milo confirmed that a moment later with some more street names, one of which, I kid you not, was Peachtree Center Avenue Northeast. But I was zoomed in, focused like a laser beam, watching that bike, because my gut was telling me something was about to go down. We were in the shade of a bunch of tall buildings. Traffic had gotten really snarled up. We were barely moving at all now. The sidewalks were absolutely packed with pedestrians.
“Crap. I know where we are,” Trip said.
“What?” As we crept closer, I realized there was a ton of people here. I’m talking thousands upon thousands of people packing the sidewalks. And most of them were in costume. Superheroes, GI Joes, anime characters, etc. “What the hell is this?”
“I was so focused on catching the reptoids I forgot to warn you guys about DragonCon,” Boone said.
“I should have thought of it myself,” Trip said apologetically. “I went last year. I took Polyphemus to thank him for helping us with the siege. I was kind of hoping we’d wrap this mission up fast enough I could go again since we’re in town anyway.”
“Is that the big party thing where you played dress-up?”
“It’s not dress up. It’s cosplay,” Trip corrected. “Poly needed a disguise to go out in public and you’ve got to admit my Witcher was amazing.”
The glamor shots he’d taken had been pretty badass. That’s what happens when an extremely physically fit geek also has crazy amounts of disposable income. Only, Trip’s fake yet high quality movie poster he’d framed and put up in the office didn’t change the fact we were now screwed. If we tried anything here, there would be a thousand eyeballs on us, and unlike the MCB, we couldn’t just flash fake badges and talk our way out of anything.
“Never been myself, but DragonCon is nerd Mardi Gras,” said Hertzfeldt. “It’s a hundred thousand people packed into a few blocks. If she disappears into that mob we’ll never find her.”
Sure enough, the rider pulled her bike over to the curb, in a place where parking clearly wasn’t allowed, and put the kickstand down.
“She’s bailing,” I transmitted. “Trip and I will follow on foot.”
“What do you want me to do?” our driver asked.
“Follow as best as you can I guess.” But it was already obvious that it would be totally impossible for him to keep up.
Hertzfeldt hadn’t actually stopped, but the flow of traffic had slowed to such a crawl that it didn’t matter. I left my shotgun behind and made sure my pistol was concealed beneath my untucked shirt. I slid the door open, hopped out, and then closed it behind me. Trip got out the front. We both started walking fast. The rider was about a hundred yards ahead of us.
And when she took off her helmet, she wasn’t a dark-haired Asian, but rather a white girl with short, brightly dyed, pink hair.
“We’ve been had!” Trip keyed his radio. “It’s a different rider. We were following a decoy.”
“This is Milo. No way, I could see you and her both the whole time. That’s the same bike; it had this neat little white box around it on the computer and everything. It never left my sight, I swear.”
I looked to Trip. “You got a better idea?” He shrugged. We were committed now either way, so we kept walking fast, trying to get closer. It was hard because the sidewalk and several feet of road were filled with bodies, and they were going both directions. I bumped into a shirtless man in a loincloth who I think was supposed to be Conan the Barbarian. “Excuse me.” Then I collided with a fat dude who
