This is the End 2(49)

“You are so hot,” the naked guy said.

“Thanks.” I tucked myself back inside my pants, then drew the curtain back. McGlade also had his hands in his pants, but I was pretty sure he wasn’t tucking himself in.

“A little privacy here,” he said.

“We’re leaving.” I sliced through his straps and carefully sheathed the Nife. “We need to—”

One of the women screamed. But it wasn’t the kind of scream I’d gotten used to hearing. This one was a scream of fear.

I spun around, just as four shots rang out and four naked people flopped to the floor, trailing Tesla lightning.

“Found ya, you fucker,” Teague said, pointing his Glock at my chest from only a few feet away.





TWENTY-EIGHT



I didn’t think. I reacted. Taser rounds would put me down, so I needed to get something between me and the gun.

Teague fired three times, each one hitting McGlade as I held him in front of me like a shield. With McGlade held rigid by the electricity, I took three quick steps and shoved him at Teague, toppling them both like hyperbowling pins and then running past.

Once through the door I expected to be greeted by the entire Chicago Peace Department. But the garden was empty, confirming my suspicions that Teague had played a part in setting me up. Why else wouldn’t he have called for backup?

I sprinted through Eden, hauling ass down the clover path, passing up two more naked women, one with blue hair and the other, incongruously, brunette. I’d never really considered the communist lifestyle, but it certainly had several points in its favor.

I reached the street level slightly winded. Teague’s car, like mine, was trashed. But there was a police biofuel scooter parked in front of the parking farm. Bad form on Teague’s part, leaving it in the open. I cut off the handlebars with one sweep of the Nife, then cautiously tucked it away again.

My next course of action was to lose Teague. I had too much stuff I needed to figure out, and I wouldn’t be able to do that with him sticking to my ass like dirty underwear. So I used my DT to find the nearest train.

Tracking a subject on foot with a TEV was time consuming, but relatively simple. You simply kept the lens on the subject and followed him. Tracking while on a vehicle was harder. Teague had tailed me to McGlade’s, but he also could have guessed I’d visit McGlade, since Teague had access to my complete background.

But tracking with a TEV was impossible on heliplanes, and very hard to do on trains. To tune in to the fabric of spacetime, a timecaster had to occupy the same space as the subject, and be moving at the same speed, or else he would overshoot or undershoot him. In the case of trains, unless Teague got on the exact same train I did, the space would be different. The speed might also be slightly different, if only by a few inches per second, which was enough to really mess up a trail. The TEV’s internal program compensated for rotation of the earth and the orbit around the sun because those were constants and were mathematically predictable. But with subjects in vehicles, a timecaster needed to constantly adjust the tuning and his own speed and location as the subject moved through spacetime, making it very hard to focus.

I couldn’t get on passenger trains, not without a chip. So I’d have to hobo a cargo train. I didn’t have appropriate hobo gear, but I figured I could throw something together. How hard could it be?

My DT led me to the nearest hardware store. I picked up a hundred meters of jelly rope, some molecular bond glue, goggles, a square foot sheet of heat-resistant aluminum, two iron stakes, a metal-shaft hammer, and gecko tape. Then I watched the four cashiers to see who was paying the least amount of attention. I picked a teenager whose lips were moving; he was on a headphone call.

I got into line; he rang up my items; I waved my wrist over the pay bar, then walked briskly away before he realized my chip hadn’t scanned. By the time he said, “Hey!” I was out the door just as it autolocked behind me, sprinting out into the street.

According to uffsee (thanks kindly, Aunt Zelda) the nearest southbound was the Baton Rouge line. Fifty cars, averaging eighty miles per hour, hauling corn. I jogged ten blocks to the track and checked my time. Four minutes until the Hawkeye arrived.

First I pounded the metal stakes into the ground, leaving three inches of each sticking out. I folded the sheet of aluminum in half, slipping it inside my belt. Then I wrapped the jelly rope around my shoulders and chest, bandolier-style. Knots in jelly rope were notoriously slippery, because they stretched, so I used the molly glue to fuse it closed.

The ground began to rumble. Train a-comin’. I wound the gecko tape around my knees and hands, making sure the setae were lined up the right way. Then I attached the handle of the hammer to the other end of the jelly rope, and soaked the entire hammer with glue.