I flexed the fingers of my left hand. They worked. So did the other muscles of that arm, which I tensed gingerly without making any suspicious motion. The paralyzing agent seemed to have almost worn off.
Right. Wait for the moment.
Slower. Slower.
Now.
Black Leather was holding a flameless electric lighter to his smoke. I slammed a roundhouse left hook into his face, singeing my knuckles on the glowing cigarette tip as I drove it and the red-hot lighter against his mouth.
He let out a hideous cry and clawed at me like a madman. I slammed his head down onto the console and flicked the lock switch. In the front seat, Brown Fleece whirled around, gabbling in Haluk. He was too far away to reach me. I tore open my door, dropped outside onto the road shoulder, picked myself up, and stumbled toward the inner guardrail.
Fleece was opening his own door as I vaulted over the barrier onto the median safety catwalk that separated the eastbound highroad lanes from the westbound. It was very cold. Traffic was now nearly at a standstill on our side, and vapor from melting pavement ice swirled amidst the driving sleet. Crouching low, I raced back the way we’d come, forgetting that I would be silhouetted against the headlights of oncoming cars. I still wore my Anonyme anorak. With the hood off I was half blinded by the torrent of stinging sleet pellets. They hissed against the vehicle surfaces like a nest of rattlesnakes, almost drowning out the roar of turbo engines powering the automobiles of more fortunate motorists in the open westbound lanes.
Solid ground lay thirty meters below the catwalk grating, hidden by mist and the purple glow of the powerful antigravity reticulum that buoyed up the ribbon of reinforced pavement. The AG field was generated by machinery housed in huge pylons situated every 500 meters along the highroad. The only emergency exits for pedestrians were inside those pylons. Under normal conditions, auto breakdown service and ambulance evacuation for accident victims were accomplished by Highroad Authority hoppercraft. The police used hoppers, too.
Over the noise of the westbound traffic and the storm I heard ominous sharp pinging sounds. A volley of stun-darts zipped around me, striking the ceramalloy stanchions and railings.
Running flat-out along the catwalk, I managed to pull up my armored anorak hood an instant before one of the darts struck the back of my skull and bounced off. The impact caused me to see stars momentarily and stagger with pain.
I recovered my senses, belatedly realized that the unimpeded stretch of catwalk was a perfect shooting gallery, and flung myself back over the railing onto the shoulder. Bobbing and swerving, I darted like a cockroach into the six lanes of crawling cars, now spaced precisely three meters apart by the traffic-control computer. A few startled drivers honked and flashed their headlights frantically. Most of them ignored me.
Brown Fleece was galloping along the shoulder, showing no inclination to follow me out among the moving cars. Darts loaded with sleepy-juice flew through the sleet-streaked headlight beams like supercharged fireflies, missed me, and ricocheted off the vehicles.
Nobody opened a car door and invited me inside to safety. My bruised head hurt like hell. The sleet was changing to heavy flakes of wet snow and visibility was terrible.
Another dart hit me in the back of my armored jacket. I thanked God that my vulnerable legs were shielded by the surrounding cars. All I could do was continue to zigzag through the traffic jam, taking small comfort from the realization that Brown Fleece certainly had orders to take me alive. His weapon was probably an Ivanov stun-pistol that typically fired small missiles with a limited range. It would be virtually impossible for the Haluk demiclone to use the gun’s none-too-reliable autotargeter system while taking snap shots in a storm.
I was moving faster than Fleece, but for a time he nearly kept pace with me, not having to lose ground by dodging. Two more darts hit my right arm and upper body, painful but not incapacitating. There was a lull in firing when he might have replaced the magazine, then the pops came faster and more furiously. All of the darts missed. I had pulled well ahead of him.
Less than a hundred meters away was one of the massive pylon structures, barely visible in the thickening snow. If I reached it I could escape down the emergency stairway that spiraled through its interior. Perhaps the alien wouldn’t follow. Some of the motorists might have reported the running gun battle to the police by now, if only because of superficial damage done to their expensive vehicles by the fusillade of stun-darts.
I heard a distant shout in the Haluk language and understood only one word: coming.
I didn’t dare look over my shoulder, but I had a bad feeling that Black Leather had pulled his scorched shit together and joined the chase. Slush was beginning to accumulate underfoot in spite of the deicing grid.
Run, Helly, run! It’s not far now. Don’t slow down …
But I was. Residual chemicals circulating in my bloodstream had diminished my stamina. My lungs were on fire, my vision was going blurry and weird, and my leg muscles were seizing up.
Rats.
The two Haluk behind me were shouting back and forth to each other. No one in the soundproofed vehicles would hear them, much less catch the alien intonation. Brown Fleece had once again stopped shooting at me with the Ivanov. Maybe he was out of ammo.
I quit jinking among the cars and did a straight sprint, tearing along the line of glowing little eyes that divided lane five from lane four, squinting into the misty headlight glare. Snow pelted my face. My mind was empty of all thought except attaining the shelter of the massive pylon that arched above the road ahead of me, floodlit and crowned with ruby aircraft-warning lights.
I was only forty meters away when I skidded on a slippery patch, lost my footing, and crashed to the slushy pavement right in front of a slow-moving Volvo taxi. I rolled aside just in time to avoid being crushed, then heard a sudden loud noise followed by shrill female screaming.
My fall had apparently saved me. I hauled myself up and saw that the safety-glass windshield of the Acura sedan next in line had been holed and spiderwebbed by a missile. The hysterical woman behind the wheel cowered away from the empty front passenger seat, where a slim black object with a distinctive shape was embedded in the headrest. It was a magnum stun-fléchette from an Allenby SM-440 or some other high-powered carbine. Black Leather had brought in heavy artillery.
“Lady, get down!” I yelled. She dropped out of sight, still wailing, as her car moved on. A second fléchette barely missed my head and soared over the traffic into the darkness beyond lane one.
I took a dive myself, scrambling along on hands and knees, hugging the shelter of the slow-rolling automobiles. Then Black Leather changed his tactics. Big darts began to whiz beneath the vehicles, clanging occasionally against their undercarriages and wheels. The fléchettes were no danger to the cars’ self-sealing tires or sturdy chassis, but I wasn’t at all sure that the thin armor of my anorak would protect me from them.
Was Leather using a warm-body scope or a light magnifier to spot me? The capability of either one would have been stretched to the limit in a snowstorm, with the target skittering among closely packed moving cars whose engines radiated infrared, on a heated pavement swirling with vapor. Maybe he wasn’t trying to hit me at all, but hoping to flush me out of the traffic so his buddy could shoot me on the side of the road.
I went into a crouch and duckwalked ludicrously between the lanes, splashing through icy slop, doing my best to shield my legs under the skirts of the anorak. God only knows what the passing motorists thought about the wacky spectacle. Not a one had attempted to intervene personally. In their place I’d have opted for noninvolvement, too.
The firing stopped. So did I, a few minutes later.
I’d made it—sort of.
I was beneath the gargantuan pylon structure at last, shuddering with cold, squatting between creeping streams of traffic in lane five and the express lane. All I had to do now was cross the exposed shoulder, pass through an opening in the inner guardrail, and cl
imb three steps onto a small platform where there was a door in the pylon wall. The illuminated sign above it said:
EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY
USE PHONE TO SUMMON ASSISTANCE
If only! The phone was on the wall right beside the door. As I contemplated the useless instrument in bemusement, a single small Ivanov stun-dart smacked into it and rattled onto the platform.
Wonderful. Brown Fleece was back in the game, probably shooting from the median catwalk, daring me to make a run for it.
What an idiot. If he hadn’t given himself away, I might have dashed right across his field of fire. I tried without success to spot him in the blowing snow and steam clouds outside the pylon archway, but I figured that the dumb xeno couldn’t be very far away. And his pal—
A magnum flechétte hummed past my head like a wasp. Its trajectory indicated that Black Leather was firing from the same lane divider I was parked on. A sudden gust of wind tore the mist and I saw him, his body eerily illuminated by the lights of cars passing on either side. He was no more than twenty-five meters away, with his carbine stock against his cheek.
I was a sitting duck.
“The next dart will take you down, Frost!” he shouted. “Get up! On your feet! Now!”
Why didn’t he just nail me where I was?
… Because he was afraid that I’d convulse as the magnum load of toxin hit me, fall under the wheels of a car and be injured or killed. The earlier wild firing had been a panic response. Leather definitely intended to herd me onto the road shoulder, where Brown Fleece would drop me safely with the Ivanov.
An idea.
I turned away from Black Leather, ignoring his shouts, and studied the oncoming traffic in the express lane. A Volkswagen Lady Bug trundled past, followed by one of those ass-dragger Maseratis—scant shelter for a cowering fugitive. Behind the Italian car came an enormous black Dodge Bighorn sport utility vehicle with chrome rollbars and noseguards and great deep-tread balloon tires. It was the kind of transport that intrepid wilderness travelers favor for jaunts to Hudson Bay or the Canadian tundra. Silly role-players used them for city commuting.
“Stand up, Frost!” Black Leather yelled. He sent another fléchette over my head, missing me by a whisker. “On your feet, dammit!”
Instead, I began to squirm and moan as though I’d been nicked, crumpling onto the wet pavement. The Maserati passed by. As the lumbering SUV drew even with me, I rolled sideways beneath it, caught hold of an ice-encrusted shock absorber inside the monstrous right front wheel, hooked one leg over a transmission bracket and hoisted myself off the ground.
Screamed my lungs out. Then shut up abruptly.
I could hear the two Haluk demiclones bellowing incomprehensibly at each other in their own language. Would the ruse work? Only if Fleece, over on the catwalk and hopefully closer to me than Leather, took the bait.
Someone came running, splashing through snow saturated with meltwater. Legs clad in sodden suit trousers trotted along the shoulder, close beside the slow-moving juggernaut. Brown Fleece shouted: “One does not see him! Perhaps he is beneath, being dragged by the blah!”
Oh, yeah! I let go and fell unharmed between the four great wheels. Lay still a moment, then rolled quickly onto the shoulder as the big black SUV moved on. It was no trick at all avoiding the Toyota estate wagon creeping along behind it. Brown Fleece hadn’t seen me. He was still scuttling along, Ivanov in hand, trying to peer under the chassis of the Dodge behemoth.
Black Leather did spot me and yelled a sharp warning to his buddy.
Too late. I tackled Fleece. We both went down hard, less than half a meter from the stream of traffic. The stun-pistol flew from his hand and disappeared among the cars. We wrestled on the shoulder pavement for a few moment before he managed to slither out of my grasp. He bounced to his feet, leaving me sprawled in the slush, and fetched me a nasty kick in the head. When he tried to stomp my face I seized his foot in midair with both hands, twisted viciously, and felt a satisfying crackle of anklebones. He howled and fell.
Fleece rolled in the direction of the guardrail, trying to rise in spite of his injured ankle, roaring with pain and rage. I lay much closer to the express lane traffic. I was having trouble standing myself. I’d bashed both knees badly during the tackle, and the kick in the head had rattled my neurons.
Fleece made a flying leap, knocked me onto my back, straddled my body, pinned my right arm, and began to batter my face with both fists. Spiking him in the kidney with my left mid-knuckle didn’t do him much harm; the fleece jacket was excellent padding. I bucked up my hips, throwing him unexpectedly forward and forcing him to brace himself against falling by extending his arms. Then I caught him in the crotch and squeezed his genitals with all my strength. He screamed and writhed sideways into the express lane, clutching himself, just as a big Daimler towncar cruised sedately by.
Both left wheels went over his neck. The towncar deviated not a millimeter from its computerized vector. Its cocooned occupants might not even have seen what had happened. They would have felt only a minimal double bump.
In the stormy sky to the southwest a small constellation of fuzzy blue lights was intermittently visible, flying at a low altitude.
Chapter 5
I was dazed, hurting, soaked, and half frozen. My face was one huge bruise, my hands were flayed, and the rest of me felt like it’d been stomped by Cape buffalo.
With difficulty, I pulled Brown Fleece back onto the shoulder and crouched beside him. Blood leaked from his mouth. His head was impossibly twisted to one side, the jaw dislocated and the windpipe crushed. The pupils of his eyes were totally dilated, and a growing stench indicated that his sphincters had relaxed. When I thought to check his mangled throat for a pulse, I couldn’t find any. The alien spirit that had animated his humanoid flesh had fled.
… But the unknown man whose DNA had been stolen to disguise Fleece was probably still alive, floating comatose in a dystasis tank on an exotic world, forced to share his genes again and again in order to create more perfidious replicas of himself.
I felt no sense of triumph at Brown Fleece’s demise. Instead, there was a flashback. To the last time I’d killed Haluk who masqueraded as human beings.
On the planet Dagasatt, I’d found hundreds of demiclone subjects in paired tanks in a secret laboratory. Many of the Haluk floaters were already transformed into perfect human replicas, while the pathetic human templates had partially morphed into Haluk form, a side effect of the genen procedure that precluded rejection of their DNA by the alien receptors.
I shot each demiclone in the head. It was not a part of my life I was proud of, but I had no regrets, either.
Before I could rescue the captive human templates on Dagasatt, alien gunships arrived and leveled the facility with heavy blasters. I escaped the holocaust; but I still walked through that damned laboratory in my nightmares, staring in disbelief at the paired tanks with their Halukoid humans and humanoid Haluk …
Enough. It was time to deal with the nightmare at hand.
For the first time, I realized that the alien I had nicknamed Black Leather was no longer shooting at me. The reason why was sporadically visible up in the snowy air. The blue pulsing lights were mounted on a squadron of cop-hoppers coming out from the Highroad Authority barracks in Pickering. My surviving assailant now had other things on his mind besides the capture of Asahel Frost. He was probably hotfooting it back along the median catwalk to his limousine. If he had any brains at all, he’d already disposed of his Allenby stun-carbine through one of the drainage openings in the road shoulder.
The eastbound lanes of cars were finally beginning to accelerate slightly. Their dark-tinted side windows hid the occupants from my sight. Were the riders gaping at the scene beside the road as they glided by? Or had they done the sensible thing and activated their windows’ projection option, substituting images of some pleasant landscape for the tedious reality of a creeping mass of vehicles bogged down on a stormy night?
; The fuzzy blue lights in the sky came closer.
The cops were going to nab me.
Black Leather would reach his limo safely, escape the traffic jam, and vanish into the unmonitored maze of country lanes around the Kawartha Lakes. Meanwhile, the Highroad Authority would haul me off to the nearest Justice Center. A media circus would strike up the band as I attempted to explain my abduction, my great escape, and my subsequent lethal brawl with a well-dressed individual—undoubtedly possessed of impeccable credentials—whose true nature and motivation I didn’t dare reveal.
Perhaps the police would believe I had acted in self-defense. Or they might just charge me with manslaughter.
I waited numbly for spotlights to stab down from the hoppers. Nothing happened. Four aircraft sailed over the pylon and continued moving in the direction of the distant accident scene.
I couldn’t believe my luck. If the woman with the shattered windshield or any of the other motorists had reported shooting on the highroad, the news apparently had not yet been passed on by dispatchers to the cops in the air.
Time to hit the trail, buckaroo.
Adrenaline generated during the fight still kept me warm, but every bone in my body seemed to be aching, particularly my skull. I got up and started for the pylon platform, only to stop short as I realized what I was leaving behind: the only existing tangible evidence of a Haluk masquerading as a human being, evidence that had eluded me and my investigators for over three years. If I abandoned the demiclone corpse, it would almost certainly be taken to the closest county morgue. Brown Fleece’s alien confederates would retrieve his remains with laughable ease.
That wasn’t going to happen if I could prevent it.
I unzipped my anorak and fumbled for my pocket phone. Punched up the code that would connect me to the computer of my private hopper. I could program it to come and get me once I got down off the highroad. Even a few hundred meters away from the pylon the airspace would be unrestricted.