Allie's War Episodes 1-4(45)

“It’s okay,” I told him.
He shook his head. “No. It’s not. Only talk to me like this. Promise me...”
I stared at his face, worried. He didn’t look good.
“Can you swim?” I said.
He looked back over his shoulder, towards shore, still holding my arm, only now it felt like he was using me as a flotation device. I felt him hesitate, as if thinking about my question.
When I started swimming towards land, though, he followed.



We reached the rocky shoreline, stopping at each set of cement pillars to let him rest. As if by mutual assent, we didn’t get out of the water right away but traveled south, sliding from one private dock and mooring to the next in a slow procession down the shoreline.
The morning sun disappeared behind cloud cover, which helped turn everything gray when police boats skimmed the water on their way towards the bridge.
I heard the thwup, thwup, thwup of rotary blades, and couldn’t help but follow them with my eyes. Some of the helicopters looked military. I wondered if they were Sweeps, anti-terrorist from our own government, or just navy from down the coast in Tacoma.
We hid under one dock and then the next until our teeth chattered, waiting for them to circle and pass. We didn’t speak, and I tried not to worry as Revik’s breathing grew ragged. Just as the activity really exploded around the bridge and the submerged GTX, we climbed out into a public park, wading over and through thick vegetation that surrounded the last bit of water before it dumped us out on a wide, manicured grass lawn.
I helped him into the trees.
I was likely more conspicuous with my tattered waitressing uniform and bare legs, but he looked worse than me, and not only because of the blood still running down one side of his face. I could only hope no one saw us until we entered the forested park, where the trees made us at least as inconspicuous as your average homeless person. Once we were well out of sight of the shore, I helped him lean against a tree, then slide down to sit.
He was shivering by then, so pale he looked dead.
I looked around for something I might cover him with, then decided speed mattered more. At the moment, the cops were focusing on the car itself. Once they saw no one in it, I knew that would change, and fast.
The adjoining neighborhood didn’t look rich enough to have a grid along the entire coast. If it did, we were screwed already, since our presence would have been recorded and sent automatically to SCARB and local law enforcement. Even so, I had to assume regular, mid-grade upper-middle class suburban security, which meant towers on the streets that took timed images...maybe flyers at night, depending on how paranoid the neighbors were.
Still thinking about this, I squatted next to his legs.
“Revik.” I grasped his arm, tighter, until his eyes opened. “Don’t go to sleep. You can’t sleep, okay? I need to know I can trust you if I leave.”
“There is a safe house—”
“You told me,” I said patiently. “But we’re not going to make it like this. You said it’s downtown, right? And you can’t do anything in the Barrier. So we need to do it the human way. I need to get us clothes. And at least one local ident card, to get us past the gate.”
I saw him look at the wet uniform clinging to my body, my blood-matted hair. He nodded.
“Okay.”
“Okay,” I said. “Don’t fall asleep.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise, Allie.”#p#分页标题#e#



I slid through a row of bushes, trying to avoid the road while staying on the edge of park that backed up against the nearest street full of wealthy homes, all of which lined the coast of Lake Washington. I looked for signs of burglar alarms, avoiding houses with cars in the driveway or where I could hear voices or feed stations blaring off screens through the windows.
Thank god, Seattle was nothing like San Francisco.
I found an open back door with no external cameras I could see at about the fourth or fifth house I checked. From a slight rise overlooking a set of backyards that formed a gentle curve around that part of the lake, I spotted the clothesline first and stopped. My fingers clutched the trunk of a tree as I looked for people in the windows and adjacent yards.
Men’s clothing hung from the sagging cotton rope between two maple trees. I saw sheets on another line that went to the other side of the Craftsman-style house. Women’s clothes hung there also in a more colorful line of blues and purples, and what looked like a child’s, but that line was much closer to the back of the house. It was the men’s clothes that drew my eyes. I found myself hoping they were dry, even as I measured the length of the pant legs with my eyes, wondering if they would be remotely close enough to fit him.