The other said, “No shit.” He was smaller, with a face so narrow it could have passed for the triangular blade of a butcher knife. His sunglasses hung around his neck from a neoprene strap, no doubt necessary so the glasses wouldn’t just slip right off the slim hatchet of a nose. “What gets me is why the fuck would anybody choose to be homeless in Chicago. I been here in the winter. It’s fucking cold, man! You’re homeless, why don’t you just leave, you know? Head down to Florida or someplace warm.”
Qween stomped into the light. “You dog dicks having fun?”
It scared them. They definitely weren’t expecting to see anyone on the streets, much less a pissed-off homeless woman. Buck-teeth dropped the rags and went for his assault rifle. The rags hit the ground and split open, spilling yellowed envelopes. Most were full of handwritten letters, but one envelope contained a stack of twenty or thirty black and white photographs.
“Fuck’s your problem, bitch?” he said.
The other one, the one that looked like the obstetrician had been a little too enthusiastic with the forceps during his birth, slipped his own machine gun off his shoulder. “Where’d you come from?” His eyes flickered to the darkness of Adams behind Qween.
“Y’all having fun with my stuff?” She glared at them.
They actually took a step backwards. Two armed men, and this old woman made them take a step back. It shook them, and once the fear had dissipated, once they realized there was no one behind her, their own anger took center stage.
Buck-teeth took three steps forward, as if to make up for his involuntary step backward. “My partner asked you a question, you dumb bitch. Where’d you come from?”
“Nobody’s supposed to be left downtown,” his partner said.
“That’s mine,” Qween said simply, hands on her hips.
“What? This pile of shit?” Buck-teeth ground his boot into the photographs.
Qween couldn’t help herself. She stepped towards the soldier, reaching out in helpless despair to her photos. The soldier with the blade-like face stepped around behind her, brought the butt of his rifle around and drove it into the base of her skull. Qween went down to her knees.
“Teach you to scare me, you stupid cunt,” he said.
“This is a fucking quarantine zone!” Buck-teeth yelled.
Qween struggled to stay erect, even on her knees. She knew that if she fell on her side, stomach, or back, these soldiers would stomp her to death. Their fear would demand nothing less. She forced her hands to grip the front of her thighs, anything to hold her upright.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” Buck-teeth said. “This is a restricted area. You know what that means? Huh? It means we can shoot you on sight, if we want to.”
Qween exhaled, trying to clear her spinning head. “You got the balls, asswipe, then go ahead.” Later, she would admit that probably wasn’t the smartest thing to say, but at the time, she was too pissed off to think straight.
“Fuck you say?” Buck-teeth demanded, jamming the barrel of his assault rifle into her temple, driving her head over to her left shoulder.
“I said”—Qween eye’s found his face—“that your big, flapping, wet pussy puts mine to shame.”
For a second, Buck-teeth wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly. His eyes met his partner’s face, and those eyes, sunk into that blade-like face, looked everywhere but back at him. Buck-teeth finally realized the depth of the insult. His finger tightened on the trigger. “You think you’re funny, bitch?”
“You fellas catch this prisoner all on your own?” came a voice behind him.
Two hazmat suits walked out of the darkness of Adams. One was skinny, but the second looked way too chubby to be some kind of hard-ass mercenary. Both carried assault rifles. Unlike Buck-teeth and his buddy, these two wore their helmets. It was impossible to see their faces.
Buck-teeth blinked uncertainly and smiled. It was a fearsome sight. Those teeth looked like they might just escape at any moment and go rampaging through the streets. “No problem here. Just interrogating a prisoner that got left behind.”
“Yeah,” his partner said. “She came outta nowhere.”
“I see.” The heavyset hazmat figure stopped ten feet away. “So you two thought it was okay to beat up some old woman.”
“Hey.” Buck-teeth shrugged. “She was asking for it. Stupid bitch must’ve been hiding.”
“Well, shit.” The thin hazmat figure strode forward, unslinging his own assault rifle. “Why didn’t you say so?”
He settled his sights on the back of Qween’s head, and without any warning, slid the barrel over and shot Buck-teeth in the throat in a short burst of gunfire. Before Buck-teeth’s partner, could move, protest, anything, the thin figure shot him at point-blank range in the chest with another quick four-or-five-round eruption.
Sam pulled off his helmet and admired his assault rifle. “Goddamn. I’m gonna get me one of these.”
The bodies of Buck-teeth and his partner folded in half, collapsing into the street.
Qween risked a look. She recognized the voices.
Sam looked up. “Hiya, Qween.”
Ed shook his head, then slipped off his own helmet. He looked at the dead mercenaries and asked Qween, “You always go out of your way to piss people off?”
CHAPTER 68
8:43 PM
August 14
Tommy’s first instinct was to bolt from the ambulance and simply run, just pump his arms and legs and haul ass in any direction. He knew that wouldn’t work, but maybe he could drop down by the shore, maybe slip into the water and try to escape that way. The urge to run was so strong he had the back door open and one bare foot on the ground before he realized he’d been spending so much time just trying to escape, he hadn’t considered what he would do if he actually got loose.
He couldn’t just run and hide. How would he find Grace?
He needed a plan. Fighting against every instinct shrieking inside of him, Tommy pulled his foot back and closed the door behind him. The first thing he checked was the ignition. Of course, the keys were gone. He still wasn’t sure exactly how he was going to find Grace, but an idea was starting to sprout in the back of his mind. He tore through the inside of the ambulance, looking for anything he could use as a weapon.
The only thing halfway sharp he found was a basic scalpel. The blade wasn’t more than an inch long. Tommy shook his head. It figured. The one time he needed something big, something with a bit of range where he could defend himself, and he managed to dig up one of the more useless blades for getting out of here. Just his luck that he would find the one thing that could have made it easier to cut his way out of the leather straps after he had already gotten out of the wheelchair. Instead, he’d put himself through the equivalent of a car crash.
Tommy told himself to stop being such a pussy.
He was loose and he had a blade. It would be enough.
He wrapped the IV tubes around his fist, tucked the scalpel into the front pocket of his hospital gown, and opened the back door again, slower this time. He leaned out and watched through the windows, but nobody was around.
He stepped out and shut the back door softly behind him. He couldn’t escape the feeling that the warship not three hundred yards away was watching him. He tried to move slow and bored, acting like there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, like he was merely a doctor, or at the very least, a paramedic keeping an eye on the ambulance. The goddamn hospital gown tended to spoil the effect. No matter how tight he tried to pull it around his shoulders, it somehow still flopped open, leaving his ass hanging out in the wind.