Out of the Black - Lee Doty [93]
Ping laughed, "Hang on!"
The car slammed into the antique cedar plank fence at the side of the yard, halfway between two posts. The fence must have indeed been antique because it disintegrated on impact. The night air filled with flying wood. Ping and Rae pulled their heads down, but no flying planks entered the car. The impact jolted through the car, rattling teeth and dislodging chips of safety glass from their clothes.
The car leaped onto the pavement. It fishtailed as it turned right, away from the street that fronted Roy's property. A contrail of fallen leaves, splinters, and dirt settled behind the accelerating car.
Behind them, at the corner of the block, a woman with a sniper rifle burst from the back of a gray microvan where she had been in position to kill anything exiting through the front gate. Turning to the side-street, she leveled the weapon at the retreating car, but her hastily fired shots missed their mark and the fleeing car made a sliding turn left onto another side street.
Swearing, she lowered the weapon and pitched it into the rear of the microvan. She slammed the hatch and sprinted to the driver's door. Inside, she pulled the microvan away from the curb and down the side street after her prey. She activated the commlink in her ear, and informed the other hunters of their target's unexpected escape.
Seconds later, the others joined the pursuit.
***
Talia hated her job. She made her way carefully through the beds, checking for trouble. As she moved, she made extra sure not to give any of the patients a chance to grab at her. Her job was monotonous, but boredom wasn't even really boredom if it was surrounded by the constant threat of messy death.
Until this year, the security ward at the hospital had been a sweet assignment. There was time for reading while nominally watching over injured drunks and people hurt running from the police for misdemeanors. The clientele back then was mostly unconscious or disabled. Occasionally, they'd even get a high profile criminal that her kids would love to hear about.
Now though, it was Harms, Harms, and more Harms. It had gotten so bad that the hospital now had a medium security ward for criminals not currently under the influence of Harmony. Of course, Talia didn't have the seniority to get on that duty regularly. Others got to read novels and sip coffee while keeping one eye on the bad and broken. Talia got the terror and the body armor.
Yep, body armor... and not the cool kind, either. Not the kind that stops bullets and looks snappy so your kids brag about it at school. No, the armor she wore was a plastic low-friction slicker and gloves to help her stay ungrabbed and unbitten by her charges.
She was almost done with this job. She was starting to take the tension home to her kids. This was not okay. If it were a choice between putting food on the table and snapping at the kids for every little thing, then they'd go hungry. She'd been trying for months now to transfer to more bearable work, but it was getting to the point where she was going to have to quit. Yep, tonight after work she would dig through the classifieds... but she was always so tired at night after she got the girls down for bed. Ever since Jack died, she was the only source of income for herself and the girls. She needed a job, but perhaps she didn't need this particular one.
Silence.
No mumbling, gurgling, screaming, moaning or thrashing... it was one of those times. "Hey Jeff! Mothership's hovering again!"
"What's the time?" He called back from the desk.
"Four thirty-eight in the wee hours!" She said, checking her watch. For weeks now, she and Jeff had been trying to find a pattern or any other cause for these strange syncopated pauses. So far, they hadn't figured anything out. The pauses seemed to occur randomly, not governed by a fixed period or any environmental factors. They came several