Chapter 50 The Goliath #2
Anca clutched her book in her lap, her tote bag between her ankles. She hadn’t said much. Evan figured she was talked out.
Her eyes darted back and forth, and her hands made fluttering motions at her sides.
“How it feels,” she said. “I can’t shake it.”
“You don’t shake hypervigilance,” Evan said. “You use it.”
“Then what? You stop seeing threats lurking everywhere?”
“You still see them,” he said. “Clearly enough to meet them properly.”
Wind sucked beneath the undercarriage, a bestial howl.
She glanced nervously out her window. “This weather. What time will we get back?”
Evan checked the GPS. “Around three. Why?”
“I have my rapid HIV scheduled. So I have to go back to the hospital, Our Lady of the Holy Spirit and the Rending of Garments and the Gnashing of Teeth.”
Evan looked over at her. Her pug nose gave her a puckish quality.
“Is that a joke, Ms. Dumitrescu?”
She nodded pertly. “Yes. I love Catholics. They are so … charismatic.”
On either side of them, elephant grass thrashed ecstatically, and then the rutted road tailed west toward the boiling, infected bay. They carved between the wall of reeds and the noxious beach, that upended tree coming into view, its snarled roots blocking two-thirds of the road.
A flash of color on the ground before it caught his eye.
A man in a yellow raincoat, sprawled facedown. To his side, a felled mountain bike.
Everything slowed down.
The road wasn’t wide enough for a banked turn or a three-point; he’d have to reverse rapidly if an ambush sprang.
“He fell,” Anca said. “He needs help.”
“No,” Evan said. “Do not get out.”
He couldn’t brake too hard without skidding. Even so, he felt the tires churning up fins of mud. The slide put them closer to the man, maybe ten meters out. Against the muddy earth shades and the dark slate waters, the yellow raincoat stood out vibrantly.
The man rolled over, features coming clear, and Evan saw it wasn’t a man at all but a large boy. Broad nose flecked with pustular acne, cheeks padded with baby fat, soft jawline. Maybe twelve years old and nearly six feet tall.
The boy reached out a hand toward them for help. His face was wet either from tears or the rain.
“A boy,” Anca said. “He’s just a boy.”
Evan said, “Don’t—”
But she was out of the car.
He jabbed the end of the gear-shift lever—park—and shot out after her, his boots mashing divots through the mud.
He scanned the ground by the boy, the ruts dappled with rainfall, hard to read.
A recent-looking double swoop of tires led around the fallen tree.
And the reeds at his side looked beaten back, a few of the stalks snapped low by the base, tilting irregularly.
“Help!” the kid cried. “My leg, I think I broke it.”
Anca was a few strides ahead but Evan caught her easily, arm around her waist. “Back in the car. Now.”
“But the boy, he’s—”
“Go.”
He flung her back, using the momentum to propel himself the other way, checking the reeds—still clear—as he spun toward the kid sprawled at his feet.
The boy rolled over.
And slammed a hypodermic needle through Evan’s cargo pants, right into the center of his thigh.
He jerked back before the plunger could fully depress, the syringe dangling loosely, needle still jabbed deep. Evan ripped it free, thoughts spinning—fentanyl—as awareness spiked.
In a single snapshot, his mind grabbed the calculation.
The plunger had sunk about eighty percent.
Eight milliliters of a ten-mil syringe would be around four hundred micrograms. An intramuscular jab gave him slightly longer onset time than intravenous, which meant he had four minutes, four and a half tops, before going out.
He set his internal metronome ticking, slid it to a back burner of his mind.
Intramuscular was slower to come on but slower to fade, too.
At a minimum he’d be unconscious twenty minutes, and that was only if adrenaline burned it through his system at two-thirds speed.
Already he felt the heat in his veins, fuzz edging into his peripheral vision.
The boy scrambled to get up but Evan kicked out his arm and he plopped face-first in the mud.
Evan ripped out a ring of flex-cuffs he kept curled in the secondary pouch inside the left top thigh pocket of his cargo pants.
They sprang loose, scattering in the mud, but one spun just in front of his hand and he snatched it, dropped to a knee, cinched it tight around the boy’s ankles.
He plucked up a handful, got a second one secured around the boy’s wrists.
The fuzziness tickled at his skin now, and he drew from his appendix holster as he rose, checking Anca’s unsteady progress back to the car.
Wheeling to the reeds, he lifted the gun just as an enormous man bulled through the thicket, beard sprouting densely from the massive shelf of his mandible, a berserking lumberjack.
The grove shuddered at either side of him, yielding two more men, mere giants dwarfed by the colossus.
Evan had time to register a single instant of suspended terror before the Goliath lunged onto the road at him, roaring, his lessers exploding from the reeds in his wake.