Zero history

48. SHOTGUN

You’re shotgun,” Heidi said to Milgrim as they neared the truck. Milgrim saw the pink Mossberg-Taser collaboration in Bigend’s gloved hands, in the office at Blue Ant, and almost said that he didn’t have one. “Hollis and I need a talk,” she said, clarifying things. He’d be in front with Aldous, his accustomed seat.

Aldous, alerted to their exit, had the motor running. Locks clunked open for them. Milgrim and Heidi hauled their respective doors open. He scrambled up while Heidi helped Hollis. He managed to close his door before Heidi had closed hers. The locks clunked solidly into place. Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. These were too narrow for the insertion of any pry bar, he’d said, too narrow even for “the jaws of life,” an expression Milgrim was unfamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

He fastened his seat belt, a bulky, complicated thing, and sat back, taking stock. Where, exactly, was he now, vis a vis the snapping jaws of life? Bigend had seemed to have virtually no reaction at all to the news of Milgrim having a federal agent in his life, or for that matter to Winnie’s alert regarding Gracie. Milgrim’s panic attack, only his second in recovery, not counting his initial reaction to having been photographed by Winnie in the Caffe Nero, had been for naught. As indeed had been every other panic attack he’d ever suffered, his therapist had repeatedly pointed out. His limbic mind was grooved by irrational fear, a sort of permanent roller coaster, always ready for a ride. “Don’t tell yourself that you’re afraid,” she’d advised him, “but that you have fear. Otherwise, you believe that you are fear.”

“You didn’t quit,” said Heidi, behind him.

“No,” said Hollis. “It wasn’t the right time.”

“You’ve got to try those balloons. They fucking rock.”

They were rolling now, the run-flats juddering over City tarmac, not so much old as recently resurfaced, piecemeal, in the course of much building.

Milgrim sighed reflexively and let himself settle forward, slightly, into the seat belt harness. Let go of the tension, he told himself. Be, as his therapist said, in the moment.

In the moment, a shiny black car, coming in the opposite direction, swerved diagonally into their path. Aldous instantly swinging right, into a much narrower street, the City equivalent of an alley, dark windowless walls of stone or concrete. Behind them, tires squealed. Milgrim glanced back, saw headlights plunging after them. “Look sharp,” advised Aldous, speeding up. Threads burst in the straps across Milgrim’s lap and chest, black shapes birthing instantly, a conjurer’s trick, hauling him upright.

“Motherfuck,” observed Heidi, from the back seat, as Aldous continued to accelerate.

And Milgrim fell, amazed and unthinking, into his mysterious joy at the Hanger Lane Gyratory, lost in the basso howl of the Hilux’s supercharger.

Constrained by the inflated crash-harness, he struggled to look back. Saw headlights. The black car.

Aldous stamped on the brakes, momentum whipping Milgrim around. A second set of headlights, ahead of them, approaching.

“Well, then,” said Aldous, his teeth very white in the beams of the approaching vehicle.

Milgrim looked to the side, seeing a blank and ancient wall, perhaps two feet away.

“Aldous,” said Hollis.

“Moment, please, Miss Henry,” said Aldous.

The car in front of them was only a few feet away now. Squinting against the glare of the other’s lights, Milgrim saw, through the car’s windshield, two men. One, the driver, masked in a black balaclava. The other was masked in white, though weirdly and only partially. And was holding something up to the windshield in front of him. For Milgrim to see.

Milgrim’s Neo.

Foley, his short-billed cap low over his bandaged head, fixed Milgrim with the one eye Milgrim could see, raised his other hand, and slowly shook an admonitory finger, his expression changing abruptly as Aldous floored the truck, popped the clutch, and crashed into the car, still accelerating. Foley’s car began to move backward as its masked driver twisted the wheel, a few sparks popping as if off a grindstone, and still Aldous accelerated, the truck’s unnatural mass and abnormal power, Milgrim now realized, being central to that cartel-readiness of which Aldous was so proud. Milgrim saw the other driver abandon the wheel, actually cover his eyes. The car struck the opposite wall, producing more sparks, and suddenly they were in the street at the far end, back in the world. Foley’s car, patches of paintwork scoured to raw plastic, grille shattered, sat in the street, at a diagonal, its driver struggling, around an inflated airbag, with the wheel.

Aldous backed up slightly, then drove carefully, at an angle and at speed, into Foley’s car. Then calmly and neatly reversed, backing up until the bed of the truck blocked the passage. Milgrim heard brakes behind them, and turned to see the black car reversing, its headlights receding. He heard it scrape the wall.

“Fiona will take you home, Miss Henry,” said Aldous, as Milgrim turned to see him rapidly thumbing the screen of his iPhone.

“Fiona,” said Milgrim, hopefully.

“You must all leave now, quickly,” said Aldous. “The police are coming. Please go with Mr. Milgrim, Miss Hyde.” He touched something on the dash, causing their inflated harnesses to simultaneously unlatch. Milgrim looked down at the thing that lay across his chest, like a rubber bat, a goth party favor. He heard the doors unlatch.

“Let’s roll,” said Heidi.

“Ouch,” said Hollis. “Don’t hit me!”

“Move!”

Milgrim did as told, shoving the door open and jumping down, managing to bite the corner of his tongue in the process. He tasted blood, metallic and scary, then knew, in some new way, that he was simply here, alive for the moment, and that that was that. He blinked.

And saw Foley lunge around the back of his ruined car, his fists balled, headed straight for him. While simultaneously, it seemed, the narrow space between them was bisected by the arrival of Fiona’s duct-taped cowling, like an intrusion from another dimension, impossible but there it was. Foley seems to vanish as Fiona, in her yellow helmet, somehow slewed the big bike around in an amazingly tight circle, motor revving. Heidi stepped forward then, driving Hollis before her, then suddenly picked her up and sat her on the back of the bike, like someone putting a child on a pony. Milgrim saw Fiona toss Heidi the spare helmet, and hallucinated hairspray as Heidi popped it on Hollis’s head, giving Fiona’s yellow helmet a rap with her knuckles. He saw Fiona make a thumbs-up gesture without taking her hand off the throttle, and then she roared away, Hollis throwing her arms around her.

“Where’s Foley?” Milgrim asked, trying to look in every direction at once.

“That way,” said Heidi, pointing down the street. “His driver grabbed him. We’re this way. Move.” She pointed past the truck, into the passage.

“My laptop,” Milgrim said, remembering. He ran around the back of the truck, reached into the cab, hauling his bag out.

“Hang tough,” said Heidi to Aldous, who was lighting a cigarette now, with an elegant silver lighter. She fist-bumped his black-suited shoulder as she passed.

And for the first time, Milgrim heard the sirens, foreign, British, and so many.

As quickly as he could, he followed Heidi’s tall, straight back.