Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

Fred is gone.

CHAPTER 41

The roof of this war machine goes great with your jeans. What am I?

I wrench the hammer off the wall and use my teeth to wrap the duct tape around my fist, holding it in place, just like the trick Fred showed me with the glove. I kick the rear doors open. The van is still on its side, so the top door flops right back down, almost hitting me in the face. But the bottom door crashes onto the blacktop and stays. I duck under the top door and stumble out onto the road.

Fred has to die. That’s the only way this ends. I should have put this hammer through his head the moment I met him.

My crunching footsteps echo around the empty street. The van has crashed into a steel gate which blocks off a trash-filled alley between two apartment buildings. I try to work out if Fred could have climbed that gate and decide that he couldn’t. There are spikes at the top and it’s impossibly tall—or maybe it just seems that way because I’m concussed.

I can hear the riot we passed earlier, but I can’t see it. Fred will head that way, hoping to blend in before Donnie recovers and comes after him, or Zara.

Where is Zara? I look back. No sign of her near the van. It doesn’t matter. I shake my head like a dog, trying to get rid of the ringing in my ears and recover my sense of direction.

No need. The crowd comes to me. The first few runners emerge from a side street, drawn by the sound of the crash. All three wear dark clothes, baseball caps and sunglasses, and their mouths are covered by bandanas. I have no clue which angry mob they represent. The ones who think Goldstein was a racist cop? The ones who think he was a child molester?

They slow down as they approach the crashed van and see me, one-armed, shirtless and limping.

‘Hey, man, you need help?’ one of them asks. Then she sees the hammer and backs off.

I ignore her and stumble past them towards the street they came from. If that’s where the rest of the crowd is, it’s where Fred will be headed. Somewhere he can blend in, and hide from Donnie.

More people are jogging up the alley towards me. Some are wearing polo shirts, no logos but still with the feel of a uniform. Others are carrying assault rifles. A teenage girl with a cross around her neck is carrying a sign that says EVERY LIFE COUNTS. A young man with curly hair is wearing a sweater that says, THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE. A woman with a headscarf has a sheet of cardboard with BEHEAD THOSE WHO INSULT THE PROPHET in magic marker. These people aren’t fighting each other, just running. Maybe they’ve realised Goldstein doesn’t exist. Maybe the riot got too much for them and they’re heading away from the action. Or maybe they’re looking for more.

The crowd gets thicker. I walk against the flow. It’s easy. People shrink back when they see me. With my swollen face, bleeding arm-stump and red-rimmed eyes, I probably look like a leper.

I can hear sirens now, whistles, screams, bottles exploding against riot shields, nightsticks cracking on skulls. Shouted slogans, all smearing over the top of one another. No gunfire yet, but it won’t take long. One shot is all it will take to turn this into a bloodbath. Bullets beget bullets. I remember my dream: lying in the gutter as a river of blood flows past.

The side street opens out onto the chaos of a main road. Smashed windows. Burning trash cans. Stranded cars with slashed tyres. Thousands of people clumped together in their various factions, screaming abuse, tearing at each other’s clothes. Throwing rocks and bottles and punches. Brandishing weapons. In the absence of Emmanuel Goldstein, it looks like the protesters have turned on one another. A smoke bomb sails overhead, spilling toxic fog. This is what hell will look like, when I get there.

The crowd is like a living thing, and the deep bass roar of angry voices uncoils something in my chest. A feeling both genetic and ancient. The sense that Godzilla is coming, or that the ship I’m on just hit an iceberg.

The cops fight to keep everyone separate. Both the FBI and the local police department are here in huge numbers—I don’t know how they mobilised so quickly, or why they’re here rather than at the courthouse where Goldstein was supposedly being released, or why the FBI showed up at all for what should be a local case. But it doesn’t look like they’re calming anybody down.

And some of them don’t want to. A white cop with a can of pepper spray is advancing on a masked Black anarchist, apparently unarmed and looking the other way. Seeing this, a woman with a pro-choice banner hurls a water bottle at the cop. It misses him and instead hits a guy wearing goggles and army surplus gear. He draws a handgun and turns, trying to work out where the bottle came from. The cop spots him, and sprays him instead. He screams and drops the gun.

I spin around and around in the throng, scanning hundreds of faces, searching for Fred. The smoke and blood and anger blurs everything. Everyone looks the same.

In the end, I only spot Fred because he spots me. Even in a crowd of thousands, I somehow sense that I’m being watched. Among the jigsaw puzzle of screaming faces, about fifty feet away, there’s a piece of stillness—a slice of Fred, his eyes widening and mouth falling open as he recognises me. Then he turns and disappears into the chaos.

I doubt he’s scared of me.