Looking back, I see the SUV now several hundred yards down the shoulder.
The speedometer is at sixty and climbing.
“How far are we from our exit?” Amanda asks.
“A mile or two.”
“There’s a bunch of them coming.”
“I see them.”
“Jason, if they catch us—”
“I know.”
I’m doing a little over ninety now, the engine straining to maintain speed, the RPMs inching into the red.
We blow past a sign giving notice that our exit is a quarter mile ahead on the right.
At this speed, we reach it in a matter of seconds.
I hit the exit at seventy-five and brake hard.
Neither of us are buckled in.
The inertia slams Amanda into the glove box and shoves me forward into the steering wheel.
At the end of the ramp, I take a brutal left turn through a stop sign—tires squealing, rubber burning. It slings Amanda against her door and nearly sends me flying into her seat.
As I drive across the overpass, I count five sets of flashing lights on the interstate, the closest SUV now speeding onto the exit ramp with two Humvees in tow.
We tear through the vacated streets of South Chicago.
Amanda leans forward, stares out the windshield.
“What is it?” I ask.
She’s looking at the sky.
“I see lights up there.”
“Like a helicopter?”
“Exactly.”
I scream through empty intersections, past the shuttered El station, and then we’re clear of the ghetto, speeding alongside abandoned warehouses and train yards.
In the boondocks of the city.
“They’re getting close,” Amanda says.
A round thunks into the trunk of the car.
Followed by three more in fast succession, like someone taking a hammer to metal.
She says, “That’s a machine gun.”
“Get down on the floorboard.”
I can hear the anthem of sirens drawing near.
This antiquated sedan is no match for what’s coming.
Two more rounds pierce the back window and the windshield.
One rips through the middle of Amanda’s seat.
Through the bullet-riddled glass, I see the lake straight ahead.
I say, “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
I make a hard right onto Pulaski Drive, and as a trio of bullets peppers the rear passenger door, I cut the lights.
The first few seconds of driving without headlights feels like we’re flying through total darkness.
Then my eyes begin to adjust.
I can see the pavement ahead, the black silhouettes of structures all around us.
It’s as dark as the countryside out here.
I take my foot off the gas, but I don’t touch the brake.
Glancing back, I see two SUVs make aggressive turns onto Pulaski.
Up ahead, I can just make out the pair of familiar smokestacks spearing the starlit sky.
Our speed is under twenty miles per hour, and though the SUVs are gaining fast, I don’t think their high beams have touched us yet.
I see the fence.
Our speed keeps dropping.
I steer across the road, and the grille smashes into the locked gate, splitting the doors apart.
We roll slowly into the parking lot, and as I maneuver around the toppled light poles, I look back toward the road.
The sirens are getting louder.
Three SUVs streak past the gate, trailed by two Humvees with machine-gun turrets mounted to their roofs.
I kill the engine.
In the new silence, I listen to the sirens fading away.
Amanda climbs up from the floorboard as I grab our pack from the backseat.
The slams of our doors bounce off the brick building straight ahead.
We move toward the crumbling structure and all that’s left of the original signage: CAGO POWER.
A helicopter buzzes overhead, a brilliant spotlight scraping across the parking lot.
Now I hear a revving engine.
A black SUV skids sideways across Pulaski.
Headlights blind us.
As we run toward the building, a man’s voice through a megaphone orders us to stop.
I step through the hole in the brick façade, give Amanda a hand inside.
It’s pitch-black.
Ripping open the pack, I quickly dig out the lantern.
The light reveals the destroyed front office, and the sight of this place in the dark takes me back to that night with Jason2, when he walked me naked and at gunpoint into another version of this old building.
We move out of the first room, the lantern piercing the darkness.
Down a hallway.
Faster and faster.
Our footsteps pounding the rotten floor.
Sweat runs down my face, stings my eyes.
My heart beats so hard it rattles my chest.
I’m gasping for breath.
Voices call after us.
I look back, see lasers cutting through the black and splotches of green from what I assume are night-vision goggles.
I hear the noise of radios and whispered voices and the rotors of the helicopter bleeding through the walls.
A torrent of gunfire fills the hallway, and we flatten ourselves against the ground until the shooting stops.
Struggling back onto our feet, we push on with even more urgency.
At a junction, I take us down a different hall, mostly sure it’s the right way though it’s impossible to be certain in the dark.
We finally emerge onto the metal platform at the top of the open stairs that lead down into the generator room.
We descend.
Our pursuers are so close I can pick out three distinct voices reverberating through the last hallway.
Two men, one woman.
I move off the last step, Amanda right on my heels as heavy footfalls clang on the stairs above us.
Two red dots crisscross my path.
I sidestep and keep running, straight into the darkness ahead, where I know the box has to be.
Gunshots ring out above us as two figures in full biohazard gear launch off the bottom of the stairs, hurtling toward us.
The box stands fifty feet ahead, the door open and the metallic surface gently diffusing the light of our incoming lantern.
Gunshot.
I feel something zip by my right ear like a passing hornet.
A bullet strikes the door with a spark of fire.
My ear burns.
A man behind us screams, “There’s nowhere to go!”
Amanda is first into the box.
Then I cross the threshold, turn, dig my shoulder into the door.
The soldiers are twenty feet away, so close I can hear them panting through their gas masks.
They open fire, and the blinding muzzle flashes and the bullets chinking into the metal of the box are the last I see and hear of that nightmare world.
—
We shoot up immediately and start walking down the corridor.
After a while, Amanda wants to stop, but I can’t.
I need to keep moving.
I walk for a full hour.
Through an entire cycle of the drug.
My ear bleeding all over my clothes.
Until the corridor collapses back into a single box.
I throw off the pack.
Cold.
Coated in dried sweat.
Amanda is standing in the center of the box, her skirt dirty and ripped, sweater torn off completely from our run through the abandoned power plant.
As she sets the lantern on the floor, something inside of me releases.
The strength, the tension, the anger, the fear.
Everything flooding out at once in a stream of tears and uncontrollable sobbing.