Free Broken Quill [2] by Joe Ducie

enough to force the air from my lungs.
    “Good god...” she breathed, hot
against my ear. “What are we chasing?”
    “Hold on!”
    The two lanes merged into one as I
kicked off the center strip and back onto the road. I ducked through an amber
light and cut off a police car. Sirens whirled to life behind us. A third horse
entered the race.
    Gliding above the road on his clouds
of dark light, Emissary cut the corner over the coast road and took a hard left
down toward the Indian Ocean. From our vantage point as we descended downhill
toward the water, I could see a whole suburb of houses and a string of streetlights
along the coast leading to Hillarys Boat Harbor about two kilometers away.
    Emissary made for that brightly lit
harbor. I’d only been down that way a few times in the last five years of my
exile, but it was well-used. A boardwalk encircled the bay, broken by a
seawall, full of tourist shops, bars, and restaurants. Given free rein in
there, the monster would get his thousand dead before midnight all too easily.
    Annie’s comrades were still hot on
our tail, weaving in and out of traffic. Red and blue sirens followed in our
wake. I had to downshift as we took the bend onto the coast road, but it was a
straight line to the harbor now, and we gained on Emissary.
    Or he’s letting us catch up...
    Annie rested her forearm on my
shoulder alongside my head and pointed her gun up toward the swirling mass of
shadow. She took aim, thought about deafening me, and lowered her arm with a
growl. Above, Emissary laughed—his voice a dull roar not unlike crackling
flame.
    A minute later, we entered the car
park of the harbor, a thousand lights from the jetty and boardwalk twinkling
orange and white against the night. Emissary landed on the rooftops about a
hundred meters away and disappeared from sight, just as a three-car cadre of
police screeched to a halt behind my idling bike.
    “Don’t move! Switch off the bike,
mate!” shouted one of the officers. He held a hand on his gun, and his partner
pointed a taser at my face.
    Annie jumped off the bike and
flashed her badge.
    “Officer...?”
    “Murie. Gary Murie, Detective.”
    “Officer Murie, there’s a man here
that just killed at least a dozen people in Joondalup. I’ve called in back-up
and tac support, so you’re with me now. We’re going to take him down.”
    “Who’s he?” Murie asked, slinging a
thumb my way.
    Annie stared at me, her gaze hot and
lips pursed. “He’s... a consultant. This is Declan Hale.”
    “Now that we’re all friends,” I
said. “Don’t get in my way.”
    I shifted down a gear and spun the
back wheel of the bike, forcing Annie to jump aside, and then took off across
the car park alone toward the boardwalk. I heard the detective and her officers
calling after me, but I didn’t stop. They had no idea what they were dealing
with and would just get in my way.
    Crowds scattered and dived for cover
as I drove down a small flight of limestone steps, onto a grassy barbeque area,
and out onto a bridge spanning the water over the harbor. I used a convenient
wheelchair ramp to avoid a set of wooden steps that led up onto the boardwalk
and gunned the bike along a strip of restaurants and bars, wide-eyed patrons
gawking at me as I zipped past.
    Where are you?
    The boardwalk split the harbor in
half. On one side were the docks and boats, on the other a strip of beach and a
small fairground. If I kept following the boardwalk around, I’d end up back at the
start in the car park where I’d abandoned Annie. So I stopped and listened for
the screams.
    They started soon enough, away to my
right, toward the boats.
    I could feel the vibrations of a
hundred pairs of feet running and clamoring against the boardwalk, and
something else—dull explosions, rattling the support pillars and shaking years
of dust down from the corrugated roof panels.
    My engine rumbling close to idle, I
drove slowly through a maze of shops, passed Subway and Gloria