Daylight Runner (18 page)

“You're supposed to
protect
us!” she screamed.

“You're supposed to protect
us
!”

The baton came down hard on her skull, crashing into her consciousness in an explosion of pain. Light burst in front of her eyes. Her head felt as if it would shatter. Through blurring vision, she saw the man raise his baton again, and then there was only the shock of impact, fading into nothingness.

E
ITHER IT WAS A
hallucination or a feverish dream, or it was real; Ana wasn't sure which. She was lying stretched out on a grassy slope under an empty blue sky. Soft bundles of cloud drifted over a higgledy-piggledy patchwork of farmland below, but not up here. If she could have smelled the clouds, she knew she would have got a definite hint of onion, or perhaps pepper, off them.

Sol and Cleo sat a short distance away, wearing flesh-colored gas masks and wide-brimmed straw hats. Ana tried to get up and move closer to them, but she found she couldn't. That was all right; she was happy right where she was. God, it was so good to finally get out of the city for a while! From somewhere nearby, she could hear a dull ringing that was quite irritating, but it wasn't
so loud that she couldn't hear what her two students were saying.

“So how did you get her out?” Sol was asking.

“When the cops waded in and started bludgeoning everybody, they left gaps,” Cleo replied, her voice rubbery behind her mask, and quite hoarse. “I could barely see, and I was choking so badly…but somebody helped me drag her clear. The doctor said she's got something called a compression. The skull, or the blood, or something's pressing in on the brain. They have to operate, but there's so many people hurt. That asshole hit her really hard…
three times
. Doc says she's lucky to be alive. They don't know if she's going to have brain damage or what. Jesus, it was horrible….”

I'm fine, Ana called to them, when she realized they were talking about her. Hunky-dory, really. There's no need to worry. They didn't seem to hear her.

“You should have waited to talk to me,” Sol said sullenly. “We could have done something more productive. Maslow said it was a waste of time the moment he saw you come out. He said even if you guys didn't start it off, they'd plant agitators….”

Who's Maslow? Ana inquired, but they didn't reply.

“They had a right to know!” Cleo snapped. “Those were their homes that burned down, not yours. And anyway, you were off playing Spanish Inquisition with Ragnarsson. And what did you find out? Zilch. What
would you have done if I'd gone to you? Paid a ‘visit' to Schaeffer too?”

What does she mean, Sol? Ana frowned.

“I wouldn't have got hundreds of people teargassed, that's for sure,” Sol snarled back, the valves of his gas mask fluttering. “If Schaeffer's running the Clockworkers, then he's the one I want.”

Birds appeared in the sky overhead; peacocks with impossibly long tails, arcing over like slow, languid missiles. Ana felt as if she were pressed against a pane of glass, as if she were watching Sol and Cleo through a window; she felt short of breath, her chest constricted.

“So you going to set your hit man on Schaeffer now? The two of you going to knock him around a bit? Kill him, maybe? That'll solve a lot, won't it?”

Cleo's voice was starting to break with emotion. Ana sympathized—it had been a hard day for all of them. She couldn't quite remember why.

“If I have to,” Sol replied. “What choice have I got? I can't…I can't think of what else to do. They've wrecked everything. There are people who want me dead. I don't know what they look like, or how many of them there are…. They can go anywhere. They could be anyone. It's like having ghosts after you.”

That's why you need all the help you can get, Sol! Ana exclaimed wheezily.

“That's why we need all the help we can get,” Cleo
argued. “The police can't all be in on it. Most of them are normal slobs like us. We just need as many people involved as possible, if we could somehow let everybody know what's going on—”

Exactly, Ana affirmed. Listen to her, Sol.

“The riot didn't even make the
news
,” Sol hissed. “It's this city—it's—It just uses you up and spits you out. You can't change the whole system, and they'll kill you for trying. We're cogs; we don't count for squat—all you can do is look out for yourself.”

“Then you might as well just kill yourself now, if that's what you think.” Cleo grunted hoarsely when her voice wavered. “'Cos what hope have you got? You're as bad as those goddamned DDF. As long as we let the Clockworkers run this city, they'll get you eventually. But they can't stop all of us. 'Cos
yes
, we're cogs in a machine, but it's
our
machine. It won't work without us. All those grits sneaking around wrecking things, all the small-minded giants in their swanky offices…they
need
us—more than we need them.”

Damn straight! Ana shouted, punching the air. Don't fight with each other! Get out there! Raise some hell!

“Did you just see her fingers move?” Sol said, looking over.

“I think so…. Do you think she can hear us?” Cleo's face was unreadable under the gas mask.

“My coach always told us that hearing's the last sense you lose when you're knocked out.”

“Did he get knocked out a lot?”

“He's a better coach than he was a boxer.”

“We should tell somebody she's here,” Cleo mused.

“Doesn't she have a boyfriend?”

“Yeah, Jude or something,” Sol muttered.

Julio. Ana laughed. Julio. You'll love him, Cleo; he's a sweetie. I wish he were here. Would you call him for me?

Another man suddenly appeared on the hillside. “Sol? We need to go.”

Who's this? Ana asked.

He looked like that detective, Mercier. Except he was more rugged, less like a paper shuffler.

“I'll walk up to the roof with you,” Cleo said. “I need some air; my throat's still killing me.”

And then they were gone. The hillside was very empty without them, and Ana felt herself sliding down the hill, as if the grass were steep and wet, sliding down into the onion-smelling clouds, and she was terribly lonely….

 

Leaving their comatose teacher with the four other patients in the cramped hospital room, Sol and Cleo walked out into the corridor. Maslow was already striding toward the stairwell. Cleo cast a lingering glance back at Ana lying motionless in the bed. An Asian woman dressed in doctor's scrubs crossed the hallway from one of the other rooms, intent on the medical palmtop in her
hand. She gave them a perfunctory smile and brushed past into the room.

Cleo watched her check Ana's chart and then gauge her pupil response with a penlight. The doctor shook her head gently and took out a syringe. Cleo saw the set expression on the woman's pale face and found little hope there. Turning away, she hurried to catch up with Sol and Maslow. She had a nagging feeling that she knew the doctor from somewhere, but she couldn't place where.

Sol and Cleo followed Maslow toward the stairwell. He opened the door and froze. Carefully closing the door, he motioned them toward the elevators.

“Someone's coming up the stairs. Three people, in a hurry.”

He had his hand in his jacket pocket, and Cleo glanced at Sol to see he had done the same. Did they spend their whole day expecting a gunfight? How could anybody live like this? As if they could be shot dead at any moment.

And then Cleo remembered where she had seen the doctor's face before. It was on the day she had gone to the Filipino District to buy some guitar strings from Cortez, when she had seen the three people disposing of a body in the sewage-treatment works. The pale-faced Asian woman had been the one in charge.

“Sol, wait!” she cried, pulling on his sleeve.

“We can't wait,” he said. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

The elevators were at the T-junction at the other end of the magnolia-colored corridor: two sets of doors, flanked by fake giant rubber plants. As they reached them, Sol pressed the up button and watched the displays to see which was going to be first to arrive. Maslow had his eyes trained on the door to the stairs.

“No, listen!” Cleo insisted frantically. “We have to go back. That doctor's a goddamned Clockworker! Sol!” She started to drag him back. “She was doing something to Ana!”

Sol's face dropped. He hesitated, frozen by indecision. The left elevator opened with a chiming sound, just as the door to the stairs swung open. Maslow's gun was out of his pocket, coming level as the first person out of the stairwell saw him and started to raise his own gun.

Maslow's silenced shot took the man in the shoulder, and he fell back against the woman behind him. Cleo let out a shrieking gasp and swiveled to leap into the elevator for cover. She stopped short when she saw the face of the white-haired man in front of her, an instant of recognition between them. It was the man who had chased her in the sub-levels after she had seen them dumping the body. One of the Clockworkers. For one absurd moment she felt relief that he was alive, but that was erased by fright.

Sol, his hands stuck in the pockets of his jacket, saw the expression on her face and turned in time to face a punch curling toward his head. With no time to block it,
he met the fist with his forehead, the pale man's knuckles cracking against it with a satisfying crunch. Sol's reflexes took over; pulling his hands free, he laid into the man with two hooks and a cross, sending the Clockworker crashing back into the elevator. The other two men in there were drawing their weapons. Sol's right hand was back in his pocket, but as he pulled out the gun, one of the other men grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the elevator. Sol squeezed off a shot, but it went straight into the wall. The gun was knocked from his hand, and a fist hit him across the face. But the small space put him at an advantage: they couldn't all get at him. He ducked his head and spun up with a barrage of jabs, elbows, and knees. It gave him the split second he needed to get back out through the door, slapping the close button on his way out.

Cleo seized Sol's fallen gun and fired three shots into the ceiling of the elevator, flinching with each report. It was enough to keep the Clockworkers' heads down. Maslow put four more bullets through the stairs door, which was jammed open on the fallen man's body. Then he spun and fired two more into the elevator before the doors slid closed.

“Get out of here!” he bellowed as he took up a position on the corner of the corridor, gun aimed at the stairs door.

Grabbing Cleo's arm, Sol sprinted away from the stairs along the perpendicular hallway.

“We have to help Ana!” Cleo cried.

He didn't reply, but his face was set in stony resolve.

“Sol!”

“We can't!” he said with despair. “Don't you think I want to? They'll kill us if we go back.”

They turned another corner, slamming through a set of double doors. “Where's the fire escape?” he barked at her. He and Maslow had come in from the roof.

“Over…the other side,” she said, panting. “Left, and left.”

Barging past an orderly pushing a trolley of laundry, they heard more muffled shots behind them. The corridor branched off to the left, and they careered down it, Sol still holding on to Cleo's arm. Racing past a row of recycling chutes, they dodged a wheeled medical apparatus left standing in the hallway and took another left. The corridor ended in a solid wall. Cleo stared at it in disbelief.

“I came out from a different floor.” She wheezed. “I thought they were all the same….”

Sol swore under his breath, looking around for another way out. They didn't dare go back the way they'd come. Stepping out cautiously into the previous corridor, he quickly checked one door after another. Rooms without windows; dialysis machines, ultrasound scanners. Surprised patients looking up from their beds, nurses asking his business, windows with no fire escapes. His gun was back in his pocket, his palm sweaty against the grip.

“Sol.” Cleo put a hand on his arm. “We can use this.”

She was indicating the six recycling chutes in the corridor wall. “The one for fabric, it's big enough.”

“It's a long drop into a locked bin.” He shook his head, his eyes warily watching the end of the corridor. They heard the dull thumps of five more shots.

“Not to go down. To go up,” she prompted him.

She went first. The chute was less than a meter square, but by climbing in backward, she was able to stand on the lip of the hatch, push her back against the far wall, and wedge her hands and then her feet against the opposite corners. Jammed in like this, she worked her way up the vertical shaft, her body straining with the tension. She had once been a keen gymnast, but she'd quit a couple of years back—she was too busy being cool to be competitive—and Cleo wondered if she'd bitten off more than she could chew here. She guessed it must be at least three meters up to the next hatch…assuming the floor above had one.

Sol climbed in behind her, and as he took his feet off the lip, the hatch swung shut, cutting off the light. But Sol had anticipated this, and strapped to his head was a bright but tiny flashlight. Cleo was reminded of the man who had come after her along the ventilation duct in the sub-levels—the man who had just shown up in the elevator. He had used exactly the same kind of light. Sol had started to act like a Clockworker, and now it seemed he was
equipped like one too. She wondered where the transformation would stop.

She was careful not to look down. There was just enough of the chute visible below her to send her heart into her throat, and Sol's light dazzled her eyes. Instead, she edged her way slowly upward, conscious that if she relaxed her hold, it was a long fall, and she would take Sol with her. They could only hope that they didn't get hit by a bundle of bedsheets or a load of soiled underwear on its way down to the laundry room. Her breathing was loud in the plastex chute, and she imagined the Clockworkers passing the hatches and hearing their breathing, the scraping of their hands and feet against the corridor wall. Her calves started to cramp, and her shoulders and neck ached with tension.