Crimson (4 page)

“Wake up, wake up.”

Cara is shaking me roughly as she sits up next to me. We must have fallen asleep.

“We’ve got to leave. We’ve got to leave now!” her voice shaking.

“What’s going on? What’s wrong Cara?” I ask sleepily.

“I’m sorry for bringing you here. They’re coming. They’ll be here any minute.  We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go now.”

“Who’s coming?” I’m wide awake now. “Cara you’re scaring me.”

“This place is supposed to be safe from them. They’re coming,” she says, her eyes wide open in panic.

They? Government troops? Templars? The realisation turns a switch on in my head. “Are they here?” I ask her.

“Soon. They’re close.”

“How do you know they’re coming?” I ask.

She stops and gives me blank look. “I know.”

“Ok, ok.” I say.  “What’s the best way out of here?”

“Come on, we need to get downstairs.”

We step out of the studio together. Cara turns back sadly. Her face says we won’t be coming back.

I gently take her arm. “Come on, we need to warn everyone.”

She nods slowly, building resolve. We run down the hall way, yelling for people to get out, banging on doors. We hit the stairs running, two at a time.

We hit the bottom of the stairs in time to see the front door of the dance floor go flying across the room. Smoke floods through the doorway. Through the smoke come soldiers with guns raised. Cara is half pulling, half dragging me across the room. Guns start firing. Shit.

The exit is only a few short steps from the stairs. To the right are the toilets, forwards through a short hallway is an exit door. Just as I place my hand against the door to push it open, Cara grabs my arm and pulls me into the toilets.

Bang. Just outside the toilets an explosion goes off. Cara motions to me to be quiet. Steps race into the building. Her head nods in rhythm to the beat of boots outside, counting the troops passing by.

“Go. Go now. Outside. Run,” she whispers to me.

We burst through the door and aim for the exit. A man behind us shouts. I have no intention of looking back.

Outside the street, only an alley really, is dark; the night not yet complete. At the end of the alley soldiers mill beside a pair of large black vehicles. The white bands on their arms identify them even in this darkness. One of them shouts out, raising the alarm. In a mad rush they all reach for their weapons, unprepared for our presence. I grab Cara’s wrist and start running down the alley. Just as we reach the end, she shoves my head down roughly. A fraction of a second later the men are firing on us, bullets flying just inches above where my head used to be. We turn the corner of the alley and are out of their sight. Too close.

We keep on running, running blindly, running scared.

Out of breath we stop finally, finding ourselves in a small park, heavily overgrown with trees. Dawn is breaking over the city. The tree cover offers a decent place to hide for a moment.

“Are you ok? Are you hurt?” I ask Cara.

She shakes her head between deep breaths in.

“Do you know where we are?”

She nods this time.

“Is it safe here?”

“As safe as anywhere I suppose,” she says, composing herself.

“We will need to be a little cautious on these streets, this is deep into government friendly territory, but there’s a safe house nearby we can head to,” she says. “Do you think anybody else got out?”

“Maybe,” I shake my head, unsure.

“I should have been faster.”

“Faster?”

“If I was better,” she breaks, “more talented, more practiced, I don’t know, I might have gotten that precog earlier. We could have gotten everyone out sooner.”

“You don’t know that. You got me out. You got out. Who else could have done better?”

Her look tells me she’s not convinced.

“You don’t know.” I hug her. “How far is it to this safe house?”

“From here? Maybe a 20 minute walk,” she says.

“Let’s head that way then. You can tell me while we walk how it is that yesterday your friends managed to be outside of that building yesterday to pick me up.”

We walk out the trees with a little trepidation, still not sure whether we successfully evaded the soldiers. Between the tree line and the street is a small field of green grass bordered by fence of wooden posts. A flock of crows has set up in the grass catching bugs in the morning dew. As we cross the broken fence line something catches my eye. On a wooden post not 50 metres away sits a crow looking directly at me. It’s the blackest bird I’ve ever seen. Cara must have noticed me stop because she asks me what I’m looking at.

“I swear that there’s a crow over there watching us,” I say.

She looks over in the direction I was facing. “What crow?”

“That one over…” I don’t get to finish the sentence. The bird is gone.

“I guess I’m just over paranoid at the moment,” I say.

“Don’t blame you,” she says with a sigh. “Don’t blame you at all.”

We walk together in silence for a while. Cara leads me through a number of narrow city streets. I’m totally lost. The warmth of the new dawn’s light fights this cold concrete maze as best it can. The feeling of panic from the earlier escape has been replaced with weariness.

Cara breaks the silence. “Uri came to us, maybe a week ago and told us what had happened to you. He’s old resistance, just like he said, but has been out of the game for a while. He said that he’d been watching out for you. Then he told us who you were. Your parents are pretty legendary among the new resistance.

“We brought in Alex to locate you. And he did. And he told us where you were. And we really struggled to think about how we were going to be able to help him, help you. That place you came out of, that ‘hospital’, is filled with the worse of government types. Hell, we didn’t believe you’d still be alive. That morning though I had a precog of you. I saw you running out of the hospital. And I knew we had to find you. Once I explained the precog to them, it was pretty easy to convince them that somebody should wait around the front of the building for you. I’m glad they hung around waiting for you. I’m not sure how long I could have lasted waiting in front of a government building like that. And then yeah, here we are.”

She stops suddenly, her eyes inquiring. “How did you get out of there, anyway?”

“I’m still not sure… I had help I guess. Someone, something helped get me out. I don’t know how to explain it. It was like this entity, this ghost, stepped out of the shadows and freed me. It was… violent.” The question brings back memories. They seem distant, strange; though it was only yesterday, it seems like it was years ago.

My answer gives Cara a worried look, but she says nothing further. We keep wandering, in silence.

There is a lot more activity in this part of the city on these streets than I’m used to. Cara says, “We need to be careful what we say from this point forward, none of these people will be sympathetic. They’ve all been trained for years by the government to hand us over if there’s the slightest suspicion against us.”

“Couldn’t they just have other talented people going around looking for people like us?” I ask.

“The Templars have always been absolutely anti-talent. They’d never trust a talented person for something like that,” she responds.

“There was one with them when I was taken.”

“You sure?”

I nod. “Absolutely. I think she was there to identify what switch we were, kind of like what Simon was trying to do.”

“A construct programmer then?”

“I guess.”

She shrugs. “Hey, are you hungry?” she asks.

My stomach rumbles its response loudly. My last meal was the scraps I was fed while captured.

“Hah, thought so,” Cara says.

“I, ah, don’t have any way of getting food,” I say, embarrassed.

“I’ve got you covered,” She laughs as she tries to assure me with a gentle touch on my arm. Instead it’s like a lightning bolt through me. I’m hyperaware of the sensation of her fingertips against my skin. “It’s not a problem.”

She pulls me into the nearest food place, a café of sorts with seating on the street.

“Order whatever you want,” she says.

Breakfast is a simple bacon and egg roll. It’s quite frankly the best thing I’ve ever tasted. Such foods are a luxury we never got much of in the abandoned parts of the city.

“They don’t have stuff as good as this where I’m from. The people selling food there are pretty terrible.” I laugh.

A few stray looks from strangers suggests this was an unusual thing to say. I drop it.

“How old you Cara?” I ask.

“Twenty, you?”

“Something like that.”

“Why?”

I shrug, “Just wondering.”

“Everyone seems so young, why’s that?”

Her eyes go wide. She leans over to whispers to me. “Not here.” She leans back from a moment, then swears under her breath. “Shit. Cops.”

We both put on our best look of innocence. The next moments are spent nervously. The police both just smile at us and move on. Not an issue in the end. We watch them, perhaps a little too attentively, as they cross the street.

“Perhaps it’s time to get out of here?” she suggests.

“Good idea,” I say.

“Come on then, the place we’re heading isn’t far from here.”

I follow Cara out of the café. We pause a moment as Cara battles with unruly item of clothing, her loose shirt and belt buckle locked in mortal combat. Across the street from us the cops have stopped in place, in intense discussion. He turns in our direction and points.

I grab Cara’s wrist. “Time to be somewhere else.”

She looks up to see what I’m talking about.

“Shit,” she swears, nailing the sentiment.

This is becoming a habit. We both bolt. Thankfully the street is still reasonably quiet this early in the morning. Nobody seems willing to get in our way. Mostly they stand and stare at us; all wearing the same shallow, stupefied expression. Have they never seen somebody run from the police before?

“Left! Left!” Cara yells about 100 metres down from the cafe. We take the left up a short set of stairs, jump onto a concrete garden edge, over a small garden and through the middle of a small section of green space.

Beyond that, a concrete wall confronts us, as tall as I am. I flash Cara an uncertain look as we cut through the grass field. I don’t know if we can make this. She doesn’t stop. We hit it side by side, hands grasping the ledge; the concrete is rough, painfully so, under my hands. Scrapped elbows provide the necessary leverage.

 A hand grabs at my left ankle as I lean over the top. That earns my pursuer a sharp kick with the heel of my boot before I roll rather ungracefully over the top. Really need to stop with these close calls.

We land together into a narrow alley. The drop on the other side is further than implied by the climb and I land awkwardly, pain shooting up through my left knee. Cara takes my arm and steadies me as I stumble away from the wall. A quick look behind as we reach the end of the alley shows that we haven’t seemed to be followed over the wall. Not willing to wait around to find out.

“It’s not far from here,” Cara says as we take off again.

We take another few turns before Cara directs me down a narrow side alley. On the other side it opens out into a dark street, itself not much wider than the alley. The sun hasn’t visited this street for a long while, the air icy cold. The street itself is lined with rubbish skips and heavy security doors. No wall remains untouched by graffiti.

Past two buildings, Cara leads the way down into an underground car park. Strip lighting offer little illumination. Everything is a monotone grey turned ever-so green, walls free of the graffiti that decorates the street above. The area is larger than expected with at least twenty available car parks. Towards the rear is a thick steel door next to which three dark navy delivery vans are parked in parallel. Each is unmarked. Each tinted beyond visibility. I’m less than convinced that this place is as safe as the term safe-house presumably is meant to imply. The rest of the car park is empty; with nothing to absorb the sound our footsteps echo loudly.

“I should warn you,” Cara says, “we might not be entirely welcome here.”

Because that’s really what I wanted to hear.

“This is a kine safe-house. They’ll give us sanctuary, no issue. At least, long enough to let the heat die down a little,” She continues, “but, kines tend to keep to their own kind, they’re distrustful of others. They tend to be, aggressive. A little too pushy, hot-headed. The shoot first, ask questions later types, you know?” Cara looks at me to see if I’m following.

“At least we keep out of other people’s business.” The short and sharp inflection comes from a man waiting in the doorway.

He is dressed with military simplicity. A plain tight fitting shirt, navy blue, covers a muscular frame, with matching cargo pants and black military boots completing the picture. If it wasn’t for the fact his blonde hair is too long, he would fit in well with any of the other soldiers already met.

“Erik.” Cara’s tone reflects both recognition and contempt.

“Cara.” Erik succeeds in outdoing her contempt.

It would appear that these two are thrilled to see each other.

“Word of what happened at the bar is spreading quickly. Still, of all the places you could take her, you brought her here?” he says shaking his head.

He looks towards me. He doesn’t look impressed.

“You’d both better come in,” he says. To Cara he whispers rather unsubtly, “You shouldn’t have brought her here.”

We’re lead up a flight of stairs. The building inside is modern hotelesque; clean white walls and cheap forgettable paintings. Down a twisting hallway we come to a man doing his best impression of a statue, standing in front of an otherwise random door.

We step into a war room. Around the room are more people with clothes matching Erik’s; a mixture of men and women, twelve in total. Each of them shares his stoic expression. Each occupies a position around a long boardroom table. Three large black sports bags sit on the table in front of them, spilling out a large number of automatic weapons.

“What’s going on?” Cara asks with a worried look on her face.

“As far as we know, there are still government soldiers at the Resistance bar.  We also believe they’re still holding everyone there, presumably while they work out what to do with them. We intend to hit back quickly. Clean up the mess you’ve left as best we can,” Erik says.

As if to re-enforce just how they intend to do that, he takes a submachine gun from a bag and loudly works the cocking handle. The motion is less than subtle.

He continues, “Stay out of our way while we prepare. In the next room are some others who made it out, along with some food and drink if you want it.”

His attention turns back to his preparation.