The Impact

Chapter 11 of the science fiction crime thriller Freak

Freak

Chapter Eleven

The Impact

Abram tried the downtown number again, and again got the canned voice rerouting him to the other canned voice. And again the other canned voice informed him his call could not be put through. He took a sip and glanced at his watch. Nelson Prentis should have dismissed the press long ago. He should be home by now, or at least be on the short drive down Wilshire. He tried Prentis’s cell phone and got nowhere. Abram looked around dully. All the stores on Cadillac and Robertson were closed. Traffic was dead. He dropped in two more quarters and again punched Prentis’s home number. And again the DA’s voice came in, the familiar recorded message explaining that he was presently unavailable, and wondering if the caller could please leave a message after the tone.

Abram cringed at the beep. “Pick up, Nelson, pick up! It’s Larry. I’m at a pay phone. Cadillac and Robertson. I got sick of sitting inside staring at the tube, watching this city go to hell. Nellie...why can’t you keep your liquor cabinet stocked? I looked inside and found nothing but ghosts. So I called a cab and went out for a pint, just so’s I wouldn’t have to be totally alone. And when I left the store the cab was history.” He closed an eye and appraised the area. “All of a sudden the streets are practically dead. Our boy is on his way, and he’s pissed. I can feel it. So just listen, Nelson, I...I brought Pearl with me. I know you told me to never take her down, but this is an emergency, and I figured just this once.” He blew into the phone. “Buddy, I need a ride out. You’re probably more aware of what’s going on than anybody other than the Chief, but I just got some fresh gumbo over the store owner’s CB: Nelson, stampeding idiots have blocked every freeway! It’s like Godzilla’s on the horizon. And I can see the smoke of fires...one, two, three...six of ’em. Now pick up, Nelson, pick up!”

The air went dead at the closing tone, but Abram kept right on sputtering into the mouthpiece. “Listen, Nelson, I’m stuck here! Okay, buddy? But I don’t want to go back to your place. I need transportation for the family and myself out of the city, and I need it quick.” He tucked the receiver between his shoulder and jaw, massaging his forehead with one hand while repeatedly clenching the other. His voice rose and fell, lachrymose and begging. “Oh, buddy,” he whined, “I’ve already seen some looting, and I just watched a bunch of tourists being stomped for nothing over on National! And there wasn’t a damned thing a scared-shitless cabbie and lawyer could do about it. There’s just so much anger and hatred in the air, man. You can feel it. Now I need transportation out of here, Nellie! Surely you can get somebody to me! Please!”

Abram dropped the receiver and let it dangle, pulled the half-consumed pint of rum from under his arm and took another slug. The liquor went down like lava. He opened his briefcase and replaced the bottle. Nestled in a clean folded shirt was Prentis’s beloved pearl handled derringer. It was a prized heirloom, kept loaded in a polished walnut saddle on Prentis’s mantel, but for show only. He ran his finger along the barrel, covered the gun back up and snapped shut his briefcase.

Lawrence Abram started across Robertson determinedly, obsessed with getting inside a building to privately access his pocket organizer. A lot of people owed him favors.

Halfway across the street he grew aware of whipping lights rounding Beverlywood onto Robertson. Abram almost sagged with relief. His buddy, God bless him, had come through.

Right away he was struck by the ridiculousness of this drunken notion. Abram froze in the police car’s headlights, every thought and impulse crunched in a cerebral logjam.

The car hit Abram so hard the attorney was hurled fifteen yards up Robertson. The driver slammed on the brakes, threw the car in reverse and ran over the body, hammered into drive and ran over it again.

The door flew open and a wild-eyed cop almost fell out, his expression a strange blend of frenzy and horror. He whipped out his handgun and emptied it into the mangled corpse, then continued to work the trigger while his head rocked back and forth. Finally his eyes fell on the briefcase and its scattered contents. He staggered to the derringer, shoved the barrel in his mouth, and desperately pulled the trigger.

* * *

Although his recovering mind was urgently focused on the road, Vilenov still managed to keep an eye peeled and an ear pegged. The speeding car was filled with a near-continuous stream of police chatter, and by latching onto familiar street names he was able to glean that not far ahead the 10-110 exchange was in gridlock, and that every available police unit was being dispatched to hold the area against him. As he veered onto the south offramp at National Boulevard the chain of helicopters swung right along behind.

At first glance National appeared deserted. But the moment he rolled off the ramp a single police unit maybe half a mile ahead came to life and raced along with siren blaring and lights burning, clearing the way. The tactic was lost on Vilenov, yet this single glimpse of foreshadowing authority sent him out of his mind with anger. The manifestations of this anger, radiating in all directions, caused rows of shop windows to pop like firecrackers. The incessant radio chatter only ratcheted up his passion. He was just reaching to kill it when a voice sounded so clearly the speaker might have been sitting right beside him in the hurtling car.

“Nicolas Vilenov.”

Vilenov took the corner at Venice Boulevard on two wheels, siding smack into the front end of a parked UPS truck. The impact crushed the driver’s door and just missed taking off his leg.

“Nicolas Vilenov!”

He gave the car gas, over and over, but the door was solidly impaled on the truck’s fender. Only by continuously jerking in forward and reverse was he able to wrench the door from its hinges, and by that time a crowd was all over him. Vilenov cussed them out collectively and shot down Venice. Half a mile ahead, a different black-and-white came to life and sped away, all flashing lights and siren. Vilenov screamed at it, continuing to accelerate while repeatedly kicking his brake foot on the floorboard. To his left a high brick wall collapsed like a house of cards.

“Nicolas Vilenov, this is the Los Angeles Chief of Police speaking. You are ordered to pull over your vehicle, and to surrender at once. All avenues out of the city are blocked; your situation is entirely hopeless. Be advised that troops of the National Guard have been deployed, and will not hesitate to use military weapons.”

Vilenov put his fist into the car’s padded roof and stomped his feet up and down like a man playing double bass drums. Go on, he thought, residential windows blowing out around him, keep talking. Hog the radio. Don’t let anybody else communicate.

One of the pursuing helicopters, an AH-64 Apache, veered well clear of the chain and emitted a short 30mm burst that disintegrated a billboard just ahead.

Vilenov hit the brakes hard, spun out, and jumped right back on the gas. That was a total bluff--no way would they chance on blowing away civilians. But the spinout threw him south on Centinela; he was now moving away from the beach on a course with few wide-open outlets. The avenue was dead: shops closed, sidewalks clear, streetlamps coming up gold in the setting sun. As he burned through Culver City, Vilenov rediscovered his old cocky self. He drove with his waving left arm thrust out the open driver’s side, giving the finger to the patient line of copters. One of rock’s great anthems blew through his mind, the lyrics contorting his lips. “I’m getting closer,” he sang, “to my home.”

Another burst from the Apache’s turret demolished a chain link fence dangerously near the clattering cruiser. Vilenov leaned right out of the car as he drove, bawling profanities at the closing copter. The Apache, after bouncing and swaying perilously, veered to the east and hovered at a hundred feet in a southwesterly pitch. In less than a minute it was back on him with an attitude. Vilenov flew across Culver Boulevard while a screaming hail ripped up the road around him. To avoid a very certain and very messy death, he was forced to make a hard right at the dry concrete basin of Ballona Creek.

An inland bike path runs alongside this basin, accessible from north-south roads only by lifting a bike’s wheels over a removable locking foot-high steel barrier designed to prevent access to general traffic. Vilenov hit this barrier at almost forty miles an hour, miraculously sparing the tires but warping the front tie rod, crushing the oil pan, and tearing up the transmission. He landed on the rear wheels. Leaving a dozen weaving red and black trails in a miscellany of broken parts, he sped recklessly along the bike path for a hundred yards before taking out the first row of picnic tables.

Half of southern Culver City must have turned out to cheer on Vilenov on this lovely mild summer afternoon. Ballona’s bike path was a natural and popular place to congregate, free of cars and commerce. People could hang. Portable televisions and boom boxes were everywhere; folks with binoculars had been excitedly following the line of helicopters while trading observations with friends and families glued to TVs. But, riveted as they were by the cruiser’s televised proximity, no one was prepared for the steaming, screeching steel monster that came at them like a bat out of Hell. Chairs and bodies were pummeled by the cruiser’s smashed grille, children and portable barbecues flew in through the windshield’s frame, battering Vilenov’s face and shoulders so that he could only swerve wildly through the thrashing crowd, colliding with some, running over others. He yanked the wheel left and went over the path’s lip, twenty feet down the cement grade to the basin’s dry narrow floor, screams of unimaginable horror swirling behind him like a haunted wind.

At this point the Apache dipped its nose and came on hard, firing continuously. Vilenov could only run the car up and down the basin’s opposing slopes in a temporary evasive maneuver, the accelerator to the floor. This went on for less than a minute; the cruiser was coming up on Lincoln, where hundreds of spectators were lining the basin and hanging from the overpass. The Apache pulled up sharply as Vilenov hammered up the grade through dozens of scattering bystanders.

He lurched to a stop at Lincoln Boulevard’s bike path entrance, barely in time to glimpse a sheriff’s car streaking away. The foot-high barrier had just been removed; Vilenov was free to drive straight onto Lincoln. Even as he perched casually with one leg and one arm outside the car, pondering this gambit, he was approached by phalanxes of loud intrepid fools, some calling out threats, some shouting congratulations. Vilenov darkly stepped halfway out of the car, narrowly controlling his passion. One by one the rowdies stepped back. When his path was cleared he sat back down just as meaningfully and slowly motored through the entrance onto Lincoln. He braked instantly--a pair of Army tanks to his left were swinging their cannons his way. Vilenov peeled out to his right and floored the car north, only to find every intersection barricaded by highway patrol cars, by SWAT vans, by a variety of trucks and trailers. He automatically hit the side streets, his wrath popping glass, setting off motion detectors, bringing to full throat every dog in the vicinity. And the farther he drove, the angrier he grew: homeowners, refusing to evacuate their beloved neighborhoods, had erected barriers of cars, RVs, trash cans and mattresses, leaving only confidential routes for their personal ingress and egress. These blocked-off city streets were now silent roads to nowhere. Marina del Rey had effectively become a labyrinth.

But Nicolas Vilenov was back, and he knew this area better than anybody. He shot across vacant lots and down alleys, zigzagged over sidewalks and lawns, swerved to take advantage of every inch of tree cover; always trying to lose the big eye in the sky. By this method he eventually worked his way clear to Washington Boulevard, his lifeline to the beach and Venice Canals. But as he burst clattering and clanging from an alley he was greeted by an unexpected crescent of cars and motorcycles; everything from SMPD to CHP to LAPD. Vilenov didn’t even slow. He tore straight into a shocked wedge of motorcycle cops, then, in a bloody rain of flesh and metal, smashed into a cruiser, instantly corrected, and barreled west down Washington. The entire force came after him like savages after a covered wagon. At Lincoln additional knots of official vehicles broke into his wake, quickly joined by motorcycles tearing out of drives and underground garages. The line of helicopters veered, closed, and jumped right on his rocking rear end. He punched on his lights and siren. Vilenov’s fuming car became a howling, flashing comet with a growing law enforcement tail.

Then, for no apparent reason, the entire cavalcade backed off, and he found himself screaming toward the beach alone. The mystery was solved when he hit Admiralty Way. An explosion on his car near the grille, and a hundred fragments of his right headlight sparkled, blew outward, and vanished. Before he realized what was happening, police marksmen behind bushes and on corner rooftops were letting go with a volley that tore the cruiser’s roof and passenger side to ribbons. Vilenov swerved hard to his left and sped wildly up Admiralty, swiping signs and flowerbeds as he went. The car’s hood flew open, slammed against the roof, and blew off its hinges in a cloud of steam.

Admiralty was cut off between Sweet Harbor and the Park by sheriff’s cars parked bumper to bumper, reinforced by an antique fire truck from the Admiralty station. Crouched behind those cars, and stretched out on their hoods, officers were watching Vilenov come on through their rifles’ sights.

At the sound of gunfire he yanked the wheel left, slamming into the curb and blowing the left front tire off its rim. He plowed across the grass onto the bike path, the exposed rim throwing a low plume of sparks all along the asphalt and back onto Admiralty Way. Every car roared to life and tore around the fire truck. Vilenov clung to the rocking wheel, staring straight ahead with his jaws clenched. At least a dozen howling black-and-whites were turning onto Admiralty from Fiji Way, cutting him off completely. His eyes narrowed...were those Humvees pulling up behind them...and now, turning off of Fiji, could those possibly be the camouflaged bodies of troop transports? He peered into his side-view mirror. That Apache was no bluff. The goddamned governor had called out the goddamned Army.

His car slammed and hissed to a halt at the corner of Admiralty and Mindanao. To his left, Lincoln Boulevard’s Mindanao access was fully obstructed by used automobiles off Lincoln Ford’s adjacent lot. Marina Market’s parking was blocked by a broad semi-circle of volunteered private vehicles. Vilenov could either stay put or turn right down the short road to the cul-de-sac of Burton Chace Park. For the first time he was honestly appreciating his enemy. He’d been arrogant enough to pretend he was leading them on a merry chase, rather than being pressed into an evacuated verdant corner. Squinting, he peered down Mindanao and shook his head admiringly.

So this is where they’d orchestrated his demise; a lovely hidden arena, all grass and trees, surrounded by the ever-lapping sea. Very appropriate. Almost considerate. The ranks came to a halt before him, sirens cut. Just behind, the sheriffs’ cars were also at rest, idling in line with their roof lights spinning. But soundless. They wanted him to calm down. Now there was nothing to be heard other than the complex thrumming of eight helicopters aligned in a long ascendant tail over Admiralty. As Vilenov watched, a news copter broke rank to swing over Chace.

He yanked the steering wheel to the right. There’ll be hell to pay for that move, he thought, and gave the car gas. With a groan of tortured springs the cruiser wobbled around the corner and went grinding down the road.

The line of helicopters proceeded along Admiralty until their median copter, the Apache, was hovering directly over the Admiralty-Mindanao intersection and pointing straight at the laboring patrol car. The copter began tailing Vilenov with a progress that was almost imperceptible. In a slow motion aerial ballet, the remaining copters produced a formation like geese on the wing and gradually moved west in the Apache’s wake.

Vilenov fought his crippled cruiser to the parking area. He was trying to turn in on the hot rim when a rocket launched from the Apache took out the passenger side and sent the car flying.

The pulse of the situation instantly jumped from tranquil to frantic. In a heartbeat the Apache was hovering right over the mangled car, the air was alive with sirens, and dozens of vehicles were racing down Mindanao.

Vilenov picked himself out of the shrubbery, a mass of cuts and bruises. But very much alive. He was very much alive because he hadn’t been wearing a seat belt in a car without a driver’s-side door. He’d been flung like a doll in one direction, and the heavy, fiery mass of the cruiser in another. The car had landed on its roof in a tree-lined tiled plaza marking the park’s entrance.

He shrank back into the shrubs, blinking rapidly, deliberating...law enforcement’s complete attention was focused on the spewing corpse of the upended police car...the Apache was hovering not twenty feet above, its tremendous searchlight fixed on the wreckage...the whole smashed gushing mess was circled by lawmen--in uniforms, in shirts and ties, in jumpsuits and in civvies--their apparel whipping in the rotors’ wind. They were approaching with extreme caution, rifles and shotguns extended like men feeling out a cobra’s nest. Vilenov took a deep breath and, his nose almost to the ground, ran tiptoeing through the park.

Chace isn’t a particularly large park, just ten beautifully landscaped acres tucked between the lazy blue tines of Basins G and H in Marina Channel. There’s a community center, a trio of peaked barbecue enclosures, a central courtyard, and a quaint wooden bridge spanning soft green knolls. Vilenov flitted from one bit of cover to the next, a black roving wraith at the far reach of headlight beams. He knew it wouldn’t be long before someone in charge sent in the Marines, but he had a plan. While running he studied the sleepy silhouettes of yachts and dinghies, inboards and outboards; all gently rocking side by side in their slips. Only a narrow bike path and short fence separated these boats from the trees and grass. Once he’d pirated a vessel it would be a simple matter of five minutes’ silent running and he’d be on the north side of Basin G, slipping away through a new maze of innocent craft. He knew it would take time for his enemies to scour the park; they’d be thorough as hell, and approaching with great care. There were already a number of boats, outsiders attracted or repulsed by all the noise in the air and on the ground, passing back and forth in a quiet, dreamy drift. One more ghost would go unnoticed. He was just stepping over the fence when there came two sharp blats of an air horn. The news copter pulled up from low over Basin H and beat in an arc above the park, capturing Vilenov in its searchlight as he straddled the fence. The chopper came on until well over the waters of Basin G. There it hovered, its dazzling light directed at an angle exposing the park’s entire tip.

But the moment Vilenov looked up the helicopter was buffeted as though by a great wind. Its tail dipped, and the huge machine dropped like a bomb into the basin. There were shouts in the distance, quickly followed by the bright points of headlights tearing through the park. Half a minute later Guardsmen were leaping from a transport, their silhouettes flashing through the beams as they ran to line the bridge from both ends. The Apache rose above the trees like a great angry dragonfly, its searchlight’s blinding column quickly fixing on the ragged little man dragging his leg back over the fence.

Vilenov turned slowly to face a small army of marksmen, his eyes burning in the white-hot glare. He raised his arms high, but didn’t halt in the classic pose of surrender, lowering them gradually to the ten-and two o’clock position while turning the palms inward. Every man facing him recognized the street challenge, and all eyes were instinctively drawn to his. In this way Vilenov visually embraced the whole mass of his enemy: the dozens of police with handguns poised, the line of National Guardsmen with rifles leveled, the pilot and gunner of the huge green chopper now tilting down its nose with guns and rockets ready. His ugly gray eyes swept side to side and he smiled like a winner, like a man who has done it all. There was a pause; a few excruciating seconds when everyone involved appeared frozen in place.

Nicolas Vilenov made a sudden move as if going for a weapon, and the combined firepower of lawmen, Guardsmen, and attack helicopter blew his vile black soul straight back to Hell.