Manny's van was still where they had parked it less than an hour ago. It cut diagonally across three parking spaces and was surrounded by a flock of dark-blue
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Haviers. One of the Haviers' doors hung open. The agents from it must have rounded the building to see Hassan's splat.
Manny had never bothered to hide the van's combination from Nohar. Nohar punched it in, opened the door, and got in the driver's seat. The feed ripped out as he floored the van out of the Metro lot.
He could still taste Hassan's blood and it didn't do a damn bit of good. Manny was dead, pointlessly.
"WHY?"
MLI was finished. It was all blown open. Why?
Nohar smelled Manny off the driver's seat and he wished the Indian techs had made his strain able to cry.
He was already pushing the van at one-twenty klicks an hour when he hit the 1-90 on-ramp. He was dodging slower-moving cars when he remembered this van had a siren. He found the switch and turned it on. He stopped dodging. The other cars were pulling to the side.
He maxed it out at one-fifty as he shot through the exit on to the Midtown Corridor.
Even blowing down the Corridor, going twice the speed limit, gave him time to think, time he didn't want. He didn't want to know Manny was dead. He wanted
The Beast to handle it. That's what it was for, damnit.
However, invoking his bioengineered combat-mode didn't help him a bit when it came to dealing with the death of the closest thing to a father he had ever had.
He needed to hit Mayfield, and fuck the barriers. He put on the seat belt.
He shot past the city end of Mayfield and took a right toward the Triangle parking garage. Between the bridge over Mayfield and the one over the driveway, there was a small hill that sloped toward the tracks. Nohar left the driveway and shot the van over the mostly dead lawn, up the hill, and over the dead tracks. A Dodge Electroline wasn't intended to take that kind
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of grade, but the velocity carried it over. The van started spilling over the other side of the hill, only going seventy now, headed for the side of an apartment building.
Siren still going, Nohar skidded the van to the right. The rear left corner clipped the building as he bumped on to the crumbling Moreytown section of Mayfield. The van rolled to a near stop, scattering the nocturnal population off of the street.
Nohar floored it again, feeling the uneven road in his kidneys.
After the first block, he was going eighty.
He passed the abandoned bus going a hundred.
Third block, he was going one-twenty—
Three concrete pylons blocked the road ahead of him, each three meters tall. The hulk of the dead Subaru was still wrapped around the center pillar.
He pulled the van all the way to the left, on to the sidewalk. On one side was now a concrete wall to Lakeview, and, coming up on the right, one of the pylons. Nohar hoped the gap was big enough.
The front end screeched and the van bucked forward with a crunch-He was through.
He'd made it. There was now a wobble on the front left tire, and he'd left both front fenders behind him. But now he was shooting east down Mayfield.
He was back to going one-fifty when he passed by Coventry. The cop on the riot watch only took three seconds to decide to give chase. Good for him. Nohar saw the first 322 marker when he passed the minumum-security prison. So far, the cop was the only shadow.
As long as the cop didn't try to stop him.
The vibration from the front wheel was getting worse, but he didn't slow.
Malls and suburbia shot by him, a ghostly gray blur under the streetlights.
His headlights had been taken out by his squeeze through the barrier. He drove by his night-vision and the infrequent streetlights.
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Some shithead going through an intersection didn't get out of the way. Nohar wove a tight arc around the vehicle without hitting the brakes, and raked the side of the van across the rear end of the new BMW. It spun out and hit a light pole.
Suburbia vanished in a wave of trees. The Cleveland cop was still the only shadow, and they were now three suburbs out of his jurisdiction. The streetlights vanished with the malls and the split-levels. The only light now was the van's red flashers, turning the world ahead into a surrealistic image in pulsing-red monochrome.
He hit the county line and could see the blurred lights of the motel coming up on his right. Bobby had chosen a fifty-year-old relic to stash the girls—all tarnished chrome and flickering neon. Nohar saw the lights when he was about a klick away from the hotel and cut the siren as he slowed the van.
When he passed the entrance, he spun the van into the parking lot. The van was going seventy. The first thing he saw in the parking lot was a Ziphead with a submachine gun. The rat was standing guard outside a familiar-looking remote van. Nohar aimed his vehicle at him.
The ratboy's reaction time was just too slow. He jumped to the side too late to avoid being hit. Nohar heard a burst of ineffective gunfire as the wobbly front tire bumped up over the rat.
The front end of Manny's van plowed into the side of the remote. The remote tumbled forward like it had been jerked on a cable, the sudden deceleration throwing Nohar against the seat belt.
There was the sound of shattering glass. Then more gunfire. He felt a wave of shots strafe the rear of the van. He heard more gunfire, not aimed at the van. Where the hell was his Vind?
Nohar felt the bottom fell out of his world when he realized he had lost it somewhere in the fight with Hassan.
Something inside him smelled the rat-blood under
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the van and told him it didn't matter. He was the hunter, they were prey—
And Stephie was in there.
He loosed a subliminal growl as he popped the seat belt and tumbled out the driver's side door, away from the motel. When he hit the ground he shuddered in pain. He was beginning to feel his knee again. He let the pain jack up the adrenaline.
He took cover behind the van—most of the shots were coming from the hotel. He looked at where the shots seemed to be going and saw the Cleveland cop car.
The cop was huddling down behind the front fender. The flashers were going, but a bullet had taken out the plastic covering them—the flashers were now giving off a stark white searchlight glare. The cop looked like he had taken a hit or two. Nohar recognized him. He was the pink cop who had looked so scared when he and Manny had passed him—the night all this shit started.
The whelp had better've called backup.
The ratboy who'd guarded the remote was a smear on the pavement. When he looked at the corpse, he could feel his time sense telescoping. The rest of the Zips were holed up in the motel. The Zips weren't paying attention to him yet. The cop musfve rounded into the parking lot just after he had plowed in. The wreck of the remote offered him some more cover. Nohar hunkered down and ran along the side of the wreck on all fours, right leg barely touching the ground.
The motel was simply a line of rooms facing the parking lot. The nose of the remote was only a meter in front of a door—the room next to the Zips. Nohar tackled the door, and the cheap molding splintered. He kept going, tumbling onto a twin bed. The legs on the bed snapped off and spilled Nohar onto a synthetic rug that smelled of mothballs, rug shampoo, and old cigarette smoke. The room was empty.
Nohar could hear the gunfire and the Zip's chit ten ng FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
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Spanish through the thin dry wall. He stood up and looked for a weapon.