The roof was pretty standard looking. Brick retaining walls keeping people from falling, either off the roof entirely, or onto the varied levels between the library towers. HVAC equipment was scattered about, humming quietly. I got my next assignment from a chalk scrawl on a brick wall: “44.568N 87.8795W.”
I was plugging it into my phone’s GPS before I was even off the roof. Wequiock Falls, and not too far from here. The digital clock said I had twenty minutes to go. Roughly ten on the road, that gave me way less to get out of here. I figured I could save some of the travel time; I did have a racecar after all.
I sprinted the narrow cross aisle of the library, checking for opponents. None were in evidence, so I booked it to the elevator. It’s hard to really feel like you’re running when your shoes make no noise as they sink into thick beige carpet.
I fidgeted as the elevator descended. I’d pushed the ground floor button, but that was no guarantee of where I got off. Where would it let me out? I felt like I couldn’t stay still – the clock was ticking.
The elevator took me below ground level. Basement level? Covered tunnels for moving between buildings during the winter? I’d heard UWGB was famous for trees, toilets, and tunnels…
The doors opened and I dashed out into a funhouse of reflective glass. Cubicles. The student credit union. I picked my way through the deserted bank, heading for the light shining through the front doors far ahead. Several times I ran smack into glass cubicle walls.
At the front doors, I peered out at the encircling concrete walls. I was the fish at the bottom of the proverbial barrel. I checked the pumps on the Triple Shot and Pulse Master and pushed through the doors.
Someone had clearly been expecting company through those doors, because water splattered off the glass as soon as I exited. I raised the Pulse Master, angling it and shooting towards the top of the “bowl.” My car was just a few dozen feet away…
I leapt a bench, vaulted a planter the size of a dumpster, and decided to hell with the shooting back. I let the soaker swing at my side and flat out ran. Back in the inferno-ish heat, a full-on sprint was not fun.
Water dropped to the grass and sidewalk around me, and I saw the dark, unpainted metal of the RX-7 up ahead. I pulled the Pulse Master in close and jumped, sliding across the hood of the car behind mine on the seat of my jeans. Glad I wasn’t wearing shorts, the heat soaked through the denim in an instant. Covering behind my idling Mazda, I yanked a set of keys out of my satchel and unlocked the door. Water sprayed into evaporating mist against the windows and metal, and I ducked into the car, pulling the door shut behind me.
My hands were shaking and my breath came in gasps. Not fun. I ripped the shifter back to “D” and cranked the wheel left, exited the parallel park with scant inches to spare, and accelerated.
I took the main drive of the college at forty miles per hour, banged down the hill onto the road, and headed north at a cool seventy five. Green flew by on the winding drive, rich houses on the driver’s side, and before long I’d left the forest behind for farmland. Corn and rolling fields of dirt zipped past on the right, and through the backyards of the upscale ranches to my left I could occasionally get glimpses the Bay of Green . Traffic was nonexistent, and I punched the car even further into traffic ticket territory. At one twenty five, the front of the Mazda felt like it would lift up, and I dropped it back to an ecstatic eighty five simply because I didn’t feel like pinwheeling around the next turn.
I felt free. Independent. Alive in a way I’d not felt alive in 3 months. The thought that at least I felt alive was sobering, but I pushed it out of my mind.
Right off of Nicolet Drive onto Van Lanen, and I buried the pedal in the floor mat. The directions I’d been given indicated it was now a straight shot to Wequiock. Time to see how fast this car would go.
I was glad for the soft seats, because after I got over the “going airborne” feeling at one twenty five, I was pushed firmly back into the driver’s seat. My stomach flipflopped as the speedometer climbed, and I smiled. If a cop saw this, they’d dispense with the ticket and just throw me right in jail…
The RX-7 maxed out at one eighty five and I hadn’t even hit the nitrous yet. While a distinct advantage of not valuing your life very much is a willingness to take risks, the thought of hitting that particular button at top speed nauseated me just a little.
I slowed down to a modest seventy-five again, and nearly cruised right past the park. I braked as I pulled the car onto Bay Settlement road, and at the end of that short, poorly-maintained street, I pulled a near-one-eighty onto the driveway into the parking lot. Five cars here already. That was…not good.
The car stereo gave the time as six fifty one. Past time to hurry. The Pulse Master banged against my stomach as I sprinted for the blue barrels next to the little roofed sign in the middle of the freshly mowed field. I filled both, fidgeting anxiously. I hadn’t yet learned to take my time in a hurry, as Jeff Cooper had said. Or was it Clint Smith. It was one of Dad’s icons.
Wequiock Falls looked like a small limestone quarry or a large ravine, circled by trees and a knee high wire fence. The edge overhung the sides a little bit, probably weak ground, probably the reason the fence was so far back from the edge. The falls itself was an anemic curtain of water somewhere between a stream and a trick. Both of my guns cranked out better velocity than the falls had.
I skirted the pit, angling for the dirt path peeking out of the fringe of forest just before the bridge I’d crossed to get here. Mosquitoes whined in the humid air, undeterred by the weak warm breeze. The sun caught the trees at an angle, turning the green to gold and highlighting every blade of grass on the field with bright light and stark shadow. Faintly the falls rushed over the edge, dropping thirty feet to the rocks below. Such a beautiful scene, I felt like a trespasser. An astronaut landing on an alien world.
Then I shot two people and the feeling passed.
They were coming up the trail just as I got there, emerging from the wall of greenery without warning. They also had powder blue water guns held low and loose, and I clicked through the trigger on the Pulse Master, hitting both of them with a storm of water. The blasts polka-dotted their shirts with dark wet patches, and the guy in the lead, tall, thin, and bald decades early said ‘We were out already.”
“Now I know that,” I replied equably.
The path was steep. Really steep. The smooth, soft dirt was like walking on thick grease. It didn’t help. I grabbed at trees to keep from pitching headfirst down the grade. At the bottom, the creekbed was shallow, only inches deep and scattered with broken concrete and chucks of limestone. A quick glance around the walls of the ravine yielded no clues. I couldn’t even be sure if this was the last stop for the hour or if I had to jump through three more hoops.
A massive culvert – probably eight feet across – was set into the side of the hill to drain the creek, and I picked my way across the rocks and water, my boots “donging” on the corrugated metal. The ravine beyond was steeper and deeper, with tall, almost vertical walls of rough, piled rock. Further down, tall trees jutted out from the sides, shading the stream which sliced through the ground much deeper than the wide, shallow creek farther back. The culvert dropped water ten feet to a wide deep pool below.
A young blond woman and a man stood below, apparently not together. The man was further down the ravine, clicking away with an ancient thirty-five millimeter camera at the treetops. The woman was climbing the rock to the left, a water gun slung on her back. I smiled and angled the Pulse Master up to nearly forty-five degrees. I walked a rain of water down onto her back as she climbed. She swore and the sudden shower must’ve broken her concentration, because she slid back down the grade on her belly, dust and pebbles trailing her.
Another small smile, and I peered out of the cover of the culvert. Some type of man-made object rested at the top of the slope she’d been climbing. That’d be fun.
I didn’t feel like taking a dive into the pool below, so I grabbed the side of the culvert and jumped, swinging out onto the steep grade along side it. I slid a dozen feet on my butt, and the man shouted “Above you!”
Instinctively I rolled to my right, extending the Pulse Master so it didn’t get trapped under me. A tall college-aged guy wearing a sports jersey sat on top of the culvert, and the watergun in his hand hit me with a refreshing mist as water landed where I’d fallen.
I held down the trigger, angling the gun up and around to get the full spread from the nozzle. I striped him across the face and chest and rocked to my feet. “Damn campers” I muttered as I started climbing the incline towards the package at the top. I had to go nearly parallel to the ground as I dragged myself up the rocks. The grade was painfully close to vertical, and none of the stones were anything close to stable. Twice I slide back five feet or so. My hands were quickly roughed up and covered in dust from climbing, and I stopped just inside arms reach of the package. A small box wrapped in orange mylar.
I tucked it into my satchel and contemplated the way down. I couldn’t very well walk down, but this wasn’t a Slip ‘N Slide where I could push myself down either. I stood unsteadily, and the incline and gravity beckoned to my torso, nearly tipping me over. I pinwheeled my arms and started running, high-kicking like a chorus girl all the way down. It’s a decent, if undignified way of running down a steep hill.
It sucks for stopping though, and the guy who’d warned me of the camper caught my hand as I nearly did a digger into the stream. “Whoa, steady there.”
I righted myself and stepped back. “Thanks.”
He was younger than he’d originally looked. At first I’d put his age at thirties to forties, but that was just the beard. He looked like a college student – football player probably, judging from the muscles in his forearms – trying to impersonate Obi-Wan Kenobi, Attack of The Clones era. Thick hiking shoes, tan cargo pants, and a gray t-shirt added to the look of wandering professor. He had flat gray eyes, long brown hair pushed back, and a thin beard, which was why I’d initially gauged his age at twenty years older.
“Anything I can do to help,” he said mildly. “You’re from that game, aren’t you?”
I snickered. “However did you guess?”
“Not that difficult really. I…took part in a game a while back. Quite fun.”
“Yeah, it is,” I replied, already anxious to get back.
“You should probably get going,” he told me. Must’ve been a mind-reader. “It’s nearly seven I think.”
I took that as an invitation to scram, and sprinted for the culvert, pulling the phone out of my bag as I ran. The clock flicked to seven as I watched.
