Staring after the three Suits as they walked into the warehouse office, Meira struggled to master herself, to fight down the panic. She didn't notice that, after the first two Suits disappeared into office, the third Suit stopped in the doorway. She didn't notice him turn so that he was half facing the torn open SUV, nor did she see him draw that long, snubnosed pistol. She did take notice, however, when three shots barked out and punctured the front grille of the vehicle. A tiny shriek escaped her lips, and she clapped both hands over her mouth, fearful that she would draw the Suit's attention. Fat lot of good that does me, she thought, scolding herself as she planted her hands back on the pavement. Talk about locking the garage after someone already stole your car. The Suit didn't seem to hear her; he fired twice more, each bullet bursting a tire. Something hissed merrily from the SUV's engine block. Meira was no mechanic, but she was sure the truck was going to be nobody's getaway vehicle today. The third Suit stepped into the darkness of the warehouse office.
After the Suit closed the door behind him, she edged herself backwards as slowly as she could. Fighting back the panic attack from having seen and inexplicably recognized that one particular Suit out of the dozens she'd seen over the last year was far from easy. And it wasn't that she just recognized that Suit, but that the recognition seemed so intimate, and that he bore an uncanny resemblance to the Suit in her recurring dreams. No, that's not an uncanny resemblance. That's the guy. But why is he in that dream? What does it have to do with that riot and my . . . episode? She kneeled there in the dust and tried to recall exactly what happened to her that summer day. The riot didn't even make it to the news -- it was like everybody forgot it ever happened. The doctors told her she had been injured in a hit and run, and that whatever she imagined to be a riot and violence and gunshots were likely a result of shock.
Meira sneered a little, remembering the pity in the doctors' eyes. She was glad she never told them the part of her (hallucination? dream?) where she was chasing someone down, moving with incredible speed and grace; glad she never said a thing about pulling a gun from seemingly nowhere and shooting, shooting, shooting until a bullet finally found its mark at the small of the woman's back; relieved that she said nothing about nudging the fallen woman over onto her back, watching with grim satisfaction as her feet drummed a nerve damage-induced tattoo on the ground, straddling her ruined, bloody abdomen and choking the life out of her with a forearm. Meira knew she would never see the light of day again if she told them about seeing that horrifying reflection in the poor woman's sunglasses.
She stood up, tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and dusted off her jeans and leather jacket. Her hand came across a small, finger-width tear in her sleeve, and noted that part of the leather was charred. A chill ran through her that had nothing to do with the cool summer night as she realized that she was barely kissed by a piece of shrapnel from the rocket grenade.
Though Meira generally had no great use for the criminals, she felt obligated to check on the one who had manned the machine gun; the other one, crumpled up next to the SUV, wouldn't need checking on at all. She hurried over to the man, and as she kneeled down, she heard muffled gunshots from inside the warehouse -- sometimes the heavy, booming reports of the Suits' pistols, sometimes the lighter snaps of smaller caliber arms, or the rapid, mechanical stutter of an automatic weapon. The man's pulse was thready and weak, and he was barely breathing. A quick inspection told her that the criminal's pharynx had collapsed, his jaw broken, his skull fractured at the temples, his ears both bleeding, one eye swollen shut and leaking a sickly dark fluid . . . he would surely die unless he got to a hospital, and she knew there wasn't one for miles around. She fought down nausea, and was barely winning.
There was a fluttering buzz, like that of a large winged insect, coming from the unlucky criminal's parka. Meira could hear a faint burbling noise as the man breathed a little faster, opened his good eye, and looked from Meira to his pocket and back again. He moved as if to retrieve his phone, but the painfully irregular angle of his elbow prevented any sort of movement like that. An anguished moan escaped his lips as his eye rolled in agony. He looked at Meira again, pleadingly. Gingerly, she took the phone from the broken man's pocket and answered.
"H-hello?"
A pause on the other end, and then a sharp sounding male voice answered, "Who is this?" Meira started to answer, but the voice interrupted her. "Never mind. Look, I don't know how you're not one of them right now, Miss Blue Pill, but you've got to help my friend here."
"He . . . he's injured, badly. He needs an ambulance--"
"That's not going to happen. This is what you need to do. I need you to take him into the warehouse. There's a phone in there."
"What?" she cried out, incredulously. The insanity of the situation caught up with her, and she was shy no more. "You must be outside your god damned mind. There's a war happening in there! The Suits are probably shooting everyone, and I don't think they're going to care that I'm not a terrorist."
Muffled voices on the other end, and then, "Oh, shit. The hardline. They've cut the--"
But Meira stopped listening. This was getting to be a little too ridiculously dangerous, and more than a little absurd, even for her. Blue Pills? Hard lines? Getting a mortally injured man to a phone when there was a phone right in her hand? She didn't need this, not one little bit. She stood up abruptly, but the man's good arm lashed out and he grabbed her by the calf with astonishing strength. Startled, she looked back down at the dying man. Something unintelligible burbled from his lips; his jaw was broken, but he was straining to communicate something to her. She knelt down again, the phone still to her ear.
"Oh, Jesus, don't talk, are you crazy?"
The words were barely a whisper, and more than a little difficult to understand. "Please . . . unplug . . . me . . . please . . ." A tear squeezed from his good eye.
She repeated the words aloud to herself and, incidentally, over the phone. "Please unplug me? I don't understand. Look, you shouldn't--"
A despairing voice replaced the sharpness from before. "Did he just ask that? To unplug him?"
"Wh-what?"
The volatile voice became angry again. "God dammit, Betty McBattery, I didn't stutter! Did he just ask to be unplugged?"
Not knowing what to make of it, she replied, "Yes. That's what he said."
The other voice cursed, paused, and then said mournfully, "Look. His name is Yorick, okay? Tell him we're going to unplug him. Tell him exactly that. And that . . . and that I'm sorry."
Meira didn't know what he was about to do, but he sounded miserable. She said, "What's your name?" After he didn't answer for a moment, she continued, "He'll need to know who said . . ."
A sharp inhalation and a deep sigh, then, "Never mind that. Just tell him the Operator said so. He'll know."
The gunfire inside the warehouse became less intense; only a few shots rang out here and there. Meira knew, despite the danger she was still in, that she was going to be the last face Yorick ever saw. He deserved nothing less than compassion. Carefully, so as to not aggravate his wounds, Meira stroked his blood-matted hair and smiled at him. He had probably been a handsome man at one point. "Yorick? Can you hear me?" The man seemed to stir at the sound of his name. "The Operator, he . . . he said he was going to unplug you, and that he's sorry."
A pained smile creased the man's face, and then his body relaxed all at once, just as someone does from a fainting spell. She studied his broken face for a moment, and marveled at how peaceful he looked. She must have said as much out loud, for the other voice said, "Yes. It's finished." A click, and Meira knew she had been disconnected from the Operator, whoever he was. A quick check of a pulse told her that Yorick wasn't in pain anymore, either.
Numbly, she pocketed the phone and rolled Yorick onto his back, and something metallic clattered to the pavement. After closing his one empty-staring eye, her eyes found the pistol that had fallen from Yorick's shoulder holster. Facts sprang into her mind in an alien, unnatural way, and suddenly she knew things about the particular pistol she never needed to know before. Pistol, semiautomatic, double action, ten millimeter parabellum, 10 round capacity, 740 grams, muzzle velocity 375 meters per second, effective range 80 meters. She blinked at the sudden burst of information, tried to shake it loose from her head as one does an unexpected bumblebee.
Meira picked up the pistol gingerly -- in the year she had been following the criminals and watching the Suits, she had never taken a gun with her, but then again, she had never done a lot of things before today's insanity. What was one more? She moved the slide back a fraction, confirmed the presence of a bullet, ejected the magazine, saw that there were nine rounds present, and reinserted it. She did all this gracefully, in three smooth motions, as if she had handled pistols before. As if she had done it for years.
But I haven't, she thought frantically. I don't know how to do this. She looked at the pistol in her hand as if it was something from another world and said, "What the hell?" Despite her internal protestations, her hands seemed to know what to do, and now they were retrieving two spare magazines from poor Yorick's shoulder holster.
Still bewildered, Meira stood up in time to see the warehouse's office door burst open. A slight young man wearing a designer-cut blazer that was just a little too big, a black t-shirt bearing a silk-screened phosphorescent skull, and ovoid sunglasses came running gracelessly from the building. He was talking frantically into a cell phone with one hand and clutching his side with the other. Meira trotted to her car, keeping an eye on the young man the whole while.
She heard only a snatch of what the boy was saying into the phone; his voice cracked as he shouted something about ". . . an exit, right now!" The boy seemed so frightened, as any reasonable person should be -- it was inconceivable that this gawky youth could be a hardened criminal. On the other hand, he did have some sort of submachine gun slung over his shoulder. On the third hand, she knew for certain now that whatever these criminals were, they weren't the sort you'd find in the movies. She rested a hand casually on the handle of the car door, and let the pistol hang heavily from her other hand.
The boy finally noticed her and skidded to a halt, some three meters away from Meira. She wanted to laugh at how comically frightened he was, but then remembered that he, too, was armed. He looked at her with wide eyes as if he expected her to become a monster at any moment, and stuttered something into his phone. Against all reason or sanity, she made her decision.
"Well, come on, then. The Suits will be out here any minute."
"Su . . . Suits. Shit. Uh, what do I do?" This was into his phone, but she answered him anyway.
"You get in the car, is what you do. I don't know what the hell your people are up to, but I just watched Yorick get unplugged, which means he's dead now." The boy nodded at her, seeming to know as a fact of life that whatever "unplugging" was, it meant death for them. "Way I figure it, you all didn't run out of there as soon as the Suits showed up, so it must have been important. And now all of you are dead, except for you, right?"
The boy shook his head dumbly. "No. Some got out. Then they cut the hardline. I need an exit." His voice sounded ghostly, sad, frightened, and absurdly youthful. This kid can't be older than eighteen, she realized. His face had a pleasant, boyishly handsome oval shape, and had likely never seen a razor. No time for this, she thought viciously.
Meira shook her head did her best to sigh heavily, like a teacher might. "I'm not going to pretend to know what you're talking about, kiddo, but you had better get in this car if you want out of here. Maybe we can find your exit somewhere else, where there are fewer Suits." She opened the driver side door and shot the boy a look.
The boy trotted around the car when a low, heavy bark echoed from the office door. The boy cried out and clutched at his right calf. Cursing, Meira crouched low and fired a few shots at the warehouse while the boy hobbled himself around to the passenger side. The sound was astonishing, and the recoil surprised her -- she had never fired a pistol before, but it felt as natural to her as breathing. She couldn't see the Suit who had shot at them, but she didn't expect to hit him anyway. This is crazy, shooting at them. I'm going to be on their shit list for sure, now.
The passenger side door opened and closed behind her, and the boy wheezed out, "Get in, drive! I'll cover." She ducked in and saw the boy seated in the passenger seat, his face streaming with sweat and contorted in pain, his right hand thrust up and over the roof and firing blindly. The steady crackling of the submachine gun echoed loudly inside the sedan. Meira crouched over the steering wheel as she turned the keys in the ignition. This would be the perfect time for this damn thing to not start.
But for a wonder, the engine turned over on the first attempt, and she sped out of the parking lot. She couldn't spare any attention for the rearview, and the boy was slouched low in his seat, trying to apply pressure to his calf. Her tires squealed and screeched as she made hairpin zigzagging movements, the better to confuse the Suits' fire. Previously, she wouldn't have known to do that either.
She didn't have time to think about it, however; the Suits' communication flitted through her mind: they have escaped. A second voice inquired: anomalous readings. query anomaly aided rebel program? The third, familiar voice replied bluntly: yes. She shivered involuntarily at that voice. After a moment, the first Suit observed: no functioning means of transportation for pursuit. It almost sounded reproachful, and directed at that third Suit who had disabled the SUV. The third Suit replied: irrelevant. we will establish a search pattern to locate possible egress points, load into neutral templates where available and proceed with debugging. The bizarre communication the Suits shared faded from Meira's perception. That communication, whatever it was, always seemed cold to her, but now it seemed downright inhuman.
When Meira could no longer perceive the Suits, she turned her attention to the boy, who had applied a crude pressure bandage constructed from the sling of his submachine gun and a section of bloodied fabric from the cuff of his pants. She admired his presence of mind -- few boys his age would have thought to do that. As a matter of fact, most people she knew, regardless of age, would have just passed out from the shock. His right hand, slicked with blood, gripped the handle of his weapon tightly; his left was tucked inside his jacket.
"How's that leg?"
"Could be worse. It went right through -- didn't get the bone. Sucks, but I'll live. I might even walk."
She marveled at his youthful bravado. The wound looked to be pretty bad. "Broken ribs too, huh?" she inquired, shifting her eyes back to the road.
"Uh, yeah. It hurts. Agent Jackass back there drop-kicked me one." He chuckled morbidly and leaned back into the headrest. "Heh, I need to get my phone, call Tank, get an exit. But I dropped it back there."
"I don't think tanks are going to help us, but I don't doubt you can get your hands on some."
The boy laughed again, but a little too hard this time; his face dissolved into agony and a pained coughing fit. "Oh, man, I'm so screwed."
The words belonged to an eighteen-year-old who stayed out too late or dented his dad's car, but the voice belonged to someone else entirely. "Who are you, anyway?"
The boy looked at her askance, then smiled sheepishly. Blood polluted the whiteness of his teeth. "Oh, heh, sorry. My name's Mouse."
That wasn't what she meant, but that would do for now.