Will Staeger - Public Enemy

He crab-walked his hostage up a stairwell to a door-a door leading, Cooper was sure, to the main body of the house.

“Open the door, King,” he said.

When Márquez did, Cooper whacked his forehead against the softer backside of the president’s skull-a head-butt he hoped would stun the man but not drop him. He heard an umph from behind the Ace bandage and felt Márquez go slightly limp.

Then he crab-dashed through the door.

He immediately clocked three security men in the room as he and Márquez, joined at the hip, flew into the library.

Then he went nuts.

“¡Lo tengo! Tranquilizate, no haga nada! Lo mato, lo juro que lo mato! Back the fuck off!”

He kept moving, picking out the archway at the other end of the room and heading there, Cooper and Márquez a four-hundred-pound exit-seeking bundle waddling its way outta town. As he crab-shuffled along, he tried to keep all three men in sight. Their weapons were drawn; two of them were soldiers, Cooper seeing AK-47s, while the other wore a suit and came armed with a pistol. The man in the suit started talking, trying to get his words in over Cooper’s screams-

“¡Tranquilo, tranquilo!”

Cooper hearing muffled grunts from behind the Ace bandage, knowing his precious few seconds of advantage were wasting away. Keep moving, you useless old hack-another twenty feet and you’ll be through that fucking archway…

Cooper ready to guarantee he’d find windows, and maybe even a door, when he reached the room beyond the arch. He saw a fountain there, heard the clack of approaching shoes on tile.

“¡Tengo una bomba para matarnos! You move too fast, I’ll kill this motherfucker!”

He crossed beneath the threshold of the arch in his slow waddle, picked a direction, and turned immediately out from under the arch, pressing his back against a wall, so that the wall blocked the library goons’ view of him. The clackers appeared around a corner-two soldiers and two suits-and then Cooper saw the tall windows behind them and, beyond, the driveway.

He swiveled the barrel of the MP5 to point it in the direction of the approaching guards, coming to a sorry realization as he did it. You turned the wrong way-you’ll need to cross the archway again to get to the window.

Too bad-carpe diem time.

He let loose with the MP5 on the four newcomers, none of the men more than twenty-five feet from the mouth of his gun. The automatic fire from the rifle sounded oddly silent, Cooper first thinking the gun had jammed, then understanding the silencer at the tip of the barrel was doing its thing, a function he no longer required but seemed to fortify his jump on the guards.

Releasing his grip on Márquez, he plowed a knee into his back and sent him sprawling across the tile. Regretting he’d never taken the chance to practice such things with video games, Cooper rotated the Browning to a normal trigger hold and put half a dozen rounds into the King of the Sleepers while he kept at the four soldiers with the MP5.

He couldn’t be sure he’d taken down Márquez with his half-ass pot-shots, but he doubted he’d gone worse than four-for-six. Cooper wasn’t sure it would make a difference anyway. The King of the Sleepers’ memorialized army was already doing its thing.

Maybe Laramie, the Stooges, and the Poobah would stop them; maybe not.

He lowered his head and started a sprint for the window, turning as he ran across the open archway to fire blindly into the darker library and the three guards within-guards he knew would now be lighting him up without hesitation.

A bullet punched into his right leg below the knee and he almost stumbled into a heap when he felt a wrecking ball bury itself in his shoulder, but then he was past the open archway and realized he was in for a hard collision with the window-and with the window coming up on him, he let loose with the MP5, feeling the clip go empty as he drained its shells into the thick pane of glass-

And then he lowered his good shoulder and smashed headlong into the heavy wall of glass. He felt and heard a dull crunch, experienced an odd, fraction-of-a-second delay, but then the resistance was gone, a crystalline symbol crash enveloped him, and he felt the unforgiving asphalt plant itself across his cheekbone and jaw before it dawned on him he’d broken through.

He rolled to his feet and started running again, hoping his forward momentum would go to battle against his new crop of injuries. The two-tone peal was blaring across the compound and the lights had flared on again as he hauled his battered body down the driveway; the clatter of automatic weapons fire echoed along the drive.

He turned sharply and ducked off the road.

Coming in, I had to do it the back way. But going out…

Past the trees that lined the drive, across a bed of bark chips and strip of sod-and then he reached the wall.

They’ll take me back down to the chamber of horrors if I let them catch me. They’ll put me in the fucking chair and strafe my balls-they’ll whip, knife, and pummel me, take me for a ride on the electric roller coaster with their fucking car battery-I’ll be left for dead in my cell, chewing on crusty tortillas-

Get a hold of yourself-you’ve been here before, and last time, you had fifty miles to go, or farther.

This time, you’ve only got one steep hill.

Clear it and vanish. Like a Mayan ducking the conquerors in a subterranean tunnel, like the Vietcong in the jungle. Get yourself over that hill, and you’re free.

Both of you-the guy you left here twenty years ago and the one who came after.

He tugged his sleeves out over his naked hands and hit the wall running, leaping from earth to stone and cranking his legs like a cyclist. He used his sleeves like gloves, Cooper grabbing the razor wire to pull his body the rest of the way up the wall, feeling the blades tear through to his skin, and then he’d reached the top of the wall and planted his good leg and pushed off-

The eight-foot drop hurt, but he managed to land mostly on the cushion of flesh provided by his aging ass, and then he thought-

I’ll be goddamned if anybody’s catching me now-

And Cooper, with his twenty-year MIA-POW soul in tow-blistered, cut, broken, bruised, and shot-hauled tail into the woods.

Laramie came into the Weston Reading Room-vacant, as before, save for the solitary, seated figure of Lou Ebbers. From out in the stacks, she’d caught wind of the same scent as before: it seemed he’d brought along another grande Starbucks and commissary-issue breakfast sandwich.

She took the seat that coincided with the placement of coffee and food.

Just like the first time around.

“Thanks for the coffee,” she said, “but I’m surprised: when we began this process you knew my every routine. A week ago I decided it was high time I broke my addiction. I’m working on shaking my java habit.”

“Nectar of the gods,” Ebbers said. “Your loss.”

Eyeing him head-on, Laramie decided Lou Ebbers looked fifteen years older than when she’d seen him at this table only a month ago. His skin appeared jaundiced, the man’s fatigue punctuated by deep, sorrowful bags beneath his eyes. This was probably better than she could say for herself, and much, much better, she considered, than the 11,246 victims, according to the latest Homeland Security press release, of the six filo-dispersal bombings successfully detonated to date.

Most of the credit, in limiting the casualties, was being given to the relentless, multijurisdictional quarantine efforts. Laramie knew there to have been sixty sleeper arrests; only ten of these had been publicized, the judgment having been made that the real number was too big for America’s public relations palate.

She knew the other basics too: in addition to issuing a ban on all television commercials, the federal government had temporarily restricted commercial air travel to cases of documented emergencies only. In affected cities, only essential services were being conducted, and numerous anti-infection measures were being carried out under the martial-law-type command of numerous federal and local agencies and law enforcement organizations, including the National Guard and multiple wings of the active military. Trading had been suspended “until further notice” in all major financial markets.