“Come on!” Alex yells. I scrabble onto the motorcycle behind him, wrapping my arms tightly around his waist.
The first bullet ricochets off the fence directly to our right. The second one pings off the sidewalk.
“Go!” I scream, and Alex guns it just as a third bullet whips by us, so close I can feel the air vibrating in its wake.
We jet forward to the end of the alley. Alex cuts the wheel, hard, to the right, so we spin out onto the street, tipping over so far my hair grazes the pavement. My stomach does a huge somersault and I think, It’s over, but miraculously the motorcycle rights itself and then we’re speeding forward down the dark street, while the sounds of shouting and the explosions of gunfire recede behind us.
The quiet doesn’t last, though. As we turn onto Congress, I hear the wail of sirens, growing louder and louder, a scream. I want to tell Alex to go faster, but my heart is pounding so hard I can’t speak the words. Besides, my voice would only be lost in the furious whipping of the wind around us, and I know he’s going as fast as he can. The buildings on either side of us are a blur, gray and shapeless, like a mass of melted metal. Never has the city looked so foreign to me, so awful and deformed. The sirens are so loud that the noise is like a thin blade, vibrating furiously through me. Lights begin to flicker on in the buildings around us as people are roused from sleep. The horizon is touched with red: The sun is rising, a rusty color, the color of old blood, and I’m so filled with fear it is an agony, a shredding feeling, worse than any nightmare I’ve ever had.
Then, out of nowhere, two squad cars materialize at the end of the street, blocking our progress. Regulators and police—dozens of them, all heads and arms and screaming mouths—pour out onto the street. Voices boom, amplified, distorted through radios and bullhorns.
“Freeze! Freeze! Freeze or we shoot!”
“Hold on!” Alex yells, and I can feel his muscles tensing underneath me. At the last second he jerks the bars to the left and we skid sideways into another narrow alley, clipping the brick wall. I scream as my right leg gets crushed against the wall. Skin grates off my shin as we slide for several seconds along the exterior of the building before Alex once again gets control of the bike and we shoot forward. As soon as we burst out the other end of the alley there are two more patrol cars swerving behind us.
We’re going so fast my arms are shaking as I try to hold on, and right then I have a momentary flash of calm and clarity and I realize that we’ll never make it. Both of us will die today, gunned down or smashed up or exploded in some terrible moment of fire and twisted metal, and when they go to bury us we’ll be so melted together and entwined they won’t be able to separate the bodies; pieces of him will go with me, and pieces of me will go with him. Weirdly, the thought doesn’t even upset me. I’m almost ready to give in and give up, ready to draw my last breath while pressed up to his back, feeling his ribs and lungs and chest move with mine for the last time.
But Alex obviously isn’t ready to give up. He cuts down the narrowest alley he can find, and two of the cars following us come to a skidding halt, smashing each other as they try to follow and blocking the entrance so the other cars are forced to stop as well. Horns blare. The sharp stink of smoke and burning rubber makes my eyes water for a second, but then we’re out again, bursting forward onto Franklin Arterial.
More sirens now, from a distance: reinforcements are on their way.
But the cove appears ahead of us, unfolding—calm and flat and gray, like glass or metal. The sky smolders at its edges, a growing fire of pinks and yellows. Alex turns onto Marginal Way, and my teeth clatter together as we bump over the old pitted pavement, my stomach yo-yoing every time we jolt over another pothole. We’re getting close. The sirens whine louder, like a drove of hornets. If we can just get to the border before more squad cars arrive . . . If we can somehow make it past the guards, if we can scale the fence . . .
Then, like an enormous insect taking flight, a helicopter wings up ahead of us, lights zigzagging along the darkened road, the whirring of its propeller deafening, beating the air to waves, to shreds.
A voice cannons out: “I order you, in the name of the government of the United States of America, to freeze and surrender!”
Tufts of long, sun-bleached grass appear on our right: We’ve made it to the cove. Alex yanks the bike off the road and onto the grass, and we go, half gunning, half sliding, down into the marshes, cutting a diagonal toward the border. Mud splatters up into my mouth and eyes, choking me, and I cough into Alex’s back, feeling him heave against me. The sun is a half circle now, like an eyelid partially opened.
Tukey’s Bridge looms to our right, black, skeletal in the half darkness. Ahead of us, the lights in the guard huts are still illuminated. Even from this distance they look so peaceful, just like hanging paper lanterns, like something fragile and easily dismantled. Beyond them are the fence; the fringe of trees; safety. So close. If we only had time . . . Time . . .
Something pops; an explosion in the darkness; the mud jumps upward in an arc. They’re shooting again, from the helicopter.
“Freeze, dismount, and put your hands on your head!”
The patrol cars have arrived on the road that encircles the cove. More and more cars screech to a halt, and police begin to pour down the grass toward the marshland—hundreds of them, more than I’ve ever seen at one time, dark and inhuman-looking, like a swarm of cockroaches.
We’re up again now, in the short strip of grass that separates the water from the old torn-up road and the guard huts, weaving around a tangle of bushes so quickly, the branches sting as they slap against my skin.
And then, just like that, Alex stops. I slam up against him, biting down hard on my tongue, taste blood in my mouth. Above us the light from the helicopter wavers a little, trying to locate us, then fixes us in its beam. Alex raises his arms above his head and climbs off the motorcycle, turning to face me. In the solid white light his expression is unreadable, as though he’s been transformed, in that second, to stone.
“What are you doing?” I scream, over the noise of the propellers and the shouting and the sirens and beneath it all, the constant, everlasting groaning of the water as the tide slurps back into the cove—always there, always sweeping everything away, wearing everything to dust. “We can still make it!”
“Listen to me.” He doesn’t seem to be shouting, but somehow I can still hear him. It’s like he’s speaking directly into my ear even though he’s still standing there, arms raised. “When I tell you to go, you’re going to go. You’ve got to drive this thing, okay?”
“What? I can’t—”
“Citizen 914-238-619-3216. Dismount and put your hands above your head. If you do not dismount immediately, we will be forced to shoot.”
“Lena.” The way he says my name makes me shut up. “They’ve electrified the fence. It’s powered on.”
“How do you know?”
“Just listen to me.” Desperation and terror creep into Alex’s voice. “When I say go, you drive. And when I say jump, you jump. You’ll be able to get over the fence, but you’ll have thirty seconds before the power comes back online, a minute, tops. You have to climb as fast as you can. And then you run, okay?”