Stephanie Steele

It was early morning but you couldn’t tell. The street lights cast an eerie sodium glow across the tall buildings and parked cruisers. The pollution was thick and choking so the tops of the buildings were obscured. Some people were wearing face masks to filter it out as they went to work, but most people didn’t bother. They’d grown up used to it. Mortality rates had risen because of it but it was considered normal now. Had been for many decades.

Freddy didn’t think the day was unusual as he landed his cruiser in the street, except it had an air of electricity about it. The hairs on his arms and back stood on end as he stepped from the vehicle, fearing what awaited him. He’d found his cruiser outside the Cyber Corp building when Steele had failed to return.

He stood watching the crowd scurrying to and fro, their lives secret from him. He took in a slim girl with her nose in her personal reader and wondered if she had any problems in her life that kept her awake at night, wondered if the man with the expensive business suit worried about anything except how much money he was going to earn this month. He wondered if any of them had to make the kind of decision he had to make today. He wondered if any of them gave a thought to how their day would pan out and how it might affect the rest of their lives.

Today was that kind of day for Freddy. He’d made a decision the night before. The tracker he’d installed in Steele had told him she was at the police station. It hadn’t moved in the last two days, so he knew she had been arrested. His first thought was to run. He had the means to hide his identity. He’d done it for so many people in the past, it was easy.

He’d told Nixon what had happened and she was upset as much as he was. Between them they’d thrown around various ideas and discussed the best way forward. None of them appealed to him at all. Together they’d agreed what he should do. Now he just had to carry it through.

All the different parts of his brain were telling him not to do this, just to run, to get out of the city and never look back, get himself a new identity like she had planned. But something else had told him not to. He’d helped her in the past and in another life when she was at her lowest point and she’d repaid that a thousand fold. They had history together and that counted for something. It was that small part of him which had led to this decision and him standing outside the police station.

This could go one of two ways. The first way would see him arrested for multiple child rapes and murders and spending the rest of his life in a small room where he’d either be visited on a nightly basis by a stream of men and preyed upon himself, or he’d end up with a blade in his guts at the first opportunity. Child rapists and murderers were considered the lowest of the low and were even hated by hardened criminals. Or the second way wouldn’t.

“Damn you Steele!” He said quietly, drew a deep breath and moved towards the front door of the station, hoping for the second way.