Chapter No. 29 The Snatching Away

A dim awareness seeps into Eric's brain, a basal feeling deep in the recesses of his subconscious. Something's wrong. His eyes dart underneath lids, back and forth, up and down. Faces. Bodies. Upside down. Screams.

He wakes up in a start, sitting up like a hinged lid attached to a spring, his eyes wide open, sweat dripping from his face, giving him a chill when the salty fluid drips on his chest. And then he falls back to his soaked pillow. Faint moonlight invades the bedroom through an open window. Gentle breezes caress filaments of fabric. A dream-like scene.
But this is no dream.

"What's the matter?" his wife asked, turning over and raising her head up a few inches.

Eric rubbed his sweaty brow. "Nothing. I just had a bad dream."

"You shouldn't have eaten that pizza so late. You know how it gives you heartburn."

He paused to wipe sweat from his face before he answered her. "You're probably right. Maybe I should take an antacid."

"Please do, dear. Then we both can get some sleep."

Eric rolled out of bed and shuffled in the darkness to the bathroom. The light switch was silent, but the blazing brightness of the fluorescent lamps flanking the medicine cabinet was not. They buzzed annoyingly, but his image in the mirror annoyed him more.

Good grief, look at me. My hair's thinning, and just look at this gray in my beard. I look like an old grizzly. Maybe I should shave it off. I don't know. Margaret always liked my beard. She never looks like she ages a day, and here I am falling apart day by day. I not only feel like shit, I look like it.

Damn.

He fumbled in the medicine cabinet for a few minutes before finding the antacid tablets. He chewed and swallowed two before he plodded back to the bedroom.

"Feel any better, dear?"

"I'll be fine, Love. Go to sleep."

She turned over.

He lay there, not able to go back to sleep, trying to purge his age dilemma, allowing the night noises to invade his mind. There were many familiar noises to savor: sea lion grunts, whale blows, dolphin splashes, and screeches.

Screeches?

"What is that?" Margaret yelled, jumping out of bed when she saw her husband running to the patio door.

"Something's wrong . . . Oh, my God!"

"What's going on?" she asked, her eyes widening with fear. "Why are they screeching like that?"

"Get dressed," Eric ordered her. "Someone's trying to steal one of the creatures."

Margaret ran over to the patio door and was about to open it.

"Don't!" Eric shouted, wildly waving his arms around. "Don't open that door!"

She came to a halt and turned around, her face etched in both confusion and rage.

Trying to pull on his pants, Eric hopped on one leg over to her. "There's something stuck to the outside of the door. See." He pointed at a rectangular black box about the size of a book. A blinking red light reflected through the glass door with a hazy blur.

"What is that?" she asked, straining on her tiptoes to look at it.

He looked into her eyes with eyes that reflected fear. "I think it's a bomb. Let's get the hell out of here."

After quickly grabbing what clothing they could, Eric and his wife made a hasty retreat from their apartment. They exited through a back door and hurried over to a fence that overlooked the south side of the holding tank. As she tried to put on the rest of her clothes, Margaret watched three men pull a screaming creature entrapped in a net through a hole cut into the outside fence.

"That's the juvenile, Eric!"

"See if you can make out the license on that panel truck."

"I can't it's . . .it's taped over."

"Come on," he said. "We're going after them."

He didn't need to coax her. She ran after him to the Blazer as if she were escaping a fire. Eric unlocked the passenger door, hit the door button, and he and his wife climbed in. He turned the key, gunned the engine, and pulled out, spinning wheels and laying rubber.

They were a hundred feet away when a horrendous explosion lit up the sky behind them. The concussion wave smacked into the Blazer, pitching it into a shuddering yaw. Fire and rising smoke soon occupied the space that once was their apartment. Flaming pieces of wood and roofing flew into the air and began raining down, some thumping on the roof of their vehicle.

Margaret looked back at the conflagration and gasped. Heat from the fire warmed her face and fried her nerves.

Eric didn't look. He sped down the access road, ground to a stop at the gate, ran the window down, flashed his security card through the console, and then peeled out as soon as the gate swung up.

"Get on your cell phone, Love. Alert the police and then get hold of Willis."

Margaret punched buttons as fast as she could and started talking as soon as she made contact. "This is Dr. Margaret Hauptman from the Pacific Institute of Oceanography. Three men armed with automatic weapons have just stolen one of our animals. We're chasing them on Alameda. They're traveling east near Solsa. It's a dirty gray van. I think it's a Ford. I'm not sure. The license number is obscured."

"They just turned on Chelsa," Eric said. "Hang on."

He turned the corner at Chelsa with a vengeance. The Blazer slid around bouncing and pitching violently.

"They're on Chelsa," Margaret yelled into her cell phone, hanging on to the dash and trying desperately not to lean into her husband. "They're going south."

She pointed at a car up ahead. "Look out! That car!"

"I see it, Love."

He tugged at the wheel, swerving to miss a yellow Lexus pulling out of a driveway, the Blazer approaching the tipping point.

Margaret screamed. The memory of the first time they had flipped clearly invaded her mind's eye like a nightmare.

When the vehicle stabilized, Eric floored it. "They're not going to outrun us in that big ol' van."

No sooner had he said that than the van slashed over a curb and took off through an empty lot, bouncing and spitting dirt and debris before it smashed through a wooden fence at the back of the lot.

Eric chased after the van, not really knowing where he was going.

He quickly found out. After flying through the hole in the fence, the Blazer careened down an embankment and bounced onto a street, throwing sparks from the front bumper and nearly spinning out.

Both occupants felt spun out.

Eric wasted no time in mashing the gas pedal. He soon had the Blazer roaring down Sosolita over a hundred miles an hour.

"They're going east on Sosolita," Margaret told the police dispatcher.

Eric tightened his jaw and cursed. "If those bastards hurt her, I'm going to kill them with my bare hands."

He sounded the horn with desperate pumping hits as he swerved to miss parked cars and traffic approaching at intersections. Fortunately, the speeding van was clearing the way.

The wailing of sirens signaled that police cruisers had joined in the pursuit of the van. One nearly pulled into Eric, causing him to jam on his breaks. The Blazer screeched and tilted throwing both Eric and Margaret hard into seatbelts.

He quickly rejoined the chase by following the speeding patrol car. Additional cruisers joined the procession, swaying and sliding on the pavement in a symphony of warbling sirens, screeching tires, and whining motors. Eric prayed that the police would stop the escaping van before something terrible happened.

The van careened around a corner onto a side street. Eric followed two police cruisers into a narrow alley that snaked through the warehouse district.

The speeding van smashed into large garbage cans and stacks of pallets. The bouncing debris caused one of the patrol cars to crash into a loading dock, collecting the second. Eric just barely missed the second spinning patrol car, but he scraped against a loading dock in a spray of sparks when he swerved to avoid the wreck. More patrol cars appeared behind him, but he now had the point position in the chase.

A wailing sound caused a shudder to run up Eric's back. He knew what was going to happen but he was powerless to do anything about it. A train approached the crossing ahead and the van was not about to slow for it. Eric could imagine the next few seconds in his mind--a vision that played like a video game sequence. The van crashed through the signal barriers, spewing jagged wood and metal into the air directly in front of him. Debris smacked violently into the hood despite Eric's efforts to avoid it.

He had a terrible choice to make. He and the train were approaching the crossing as if locked in an inevitable destiny of mutual destruction. If he stopped, he would never catch up to the van. If he was too late . . . well, he didn't want to think of that. What to do? To be or not to be?

What the hell. Go for it.

Eric smashed the accelerator to the floor.

His wife was too numb to scream. She uttered a guttural sound that resembled someone about to be executed. The Blazer hit the tracks at warp speed, crashing over the uneven rails as if shot out of a cannon. The train's whistle sent a muscle-numbing shock through both Eric's and Margaret's bodies. All they could see was a huge machine about to smash the daylights out of them.

Eric accelerated and caught up to the van, but he was powerless to bring it to a halt. The van fishtailed wildly, preventing him from wedging the Blazer alongside in the narrow alley. Back and forth they danced, jabbing and sparing, trying desperately to out fox the other, hitting against garbage cans, pallets, old tires, anything that got in the way.

A sudden opportunity appeared. When the van had to jerk to the right to miss a stack of wood, Eric inserted the Blazer into a flanking position. The two vehicles sped down the narrow alley behind warehouses and factories, side-by-side, bumping into each other, each trying desperately to wreck the other. Sparks flew. Pieces of vehicle ablated off. Tires scuffed. But Eric was determined.

His persistence paid off. The van ran out of luck when a dumpster blocked its path. The van's driver made one last valiant attempt to smash into the Blazer, but time ran out and the van crashed into the obstacle, spinning around, nearly tipping over.

Eric spun into a screeching stop. The Blazer was a total wreck but it had done the job.

But now Eric and his wife faced another peril. Two men jumped from the van and began firing automatic weapons at them. The bullets tore into the Blazer, smashing windows out in explosive showers of glass, spewing hot metal fragments over the interior, and bleeding battery acid and cooling fluids over the ground. Eric and Margaret got down as low as they could, but the rate of fire was merciless. Keeping as low as possible, Eric opened the door on the side away from the gunman and he and his wife fell out and hugged the pavement.

Fortunately, the police began returning fire with their own automatic weapons. The war zone erupted with a horrendous firefight.

Margaret ran to the lead police cruisers as bullets flew all around her. Impervious to the danger, she ran through the madness on pure adrenaline. Her husband yelled at her to stay down, but she paid no attention to him.

"Don't shoot at the van!" she yelled at the police, running wildly toward the nearest police cruiser.

A burly Sergeant with a bushy mustache crouching behind his patrol car watched her insane approach. "Lady! Get down or you'll get hit."

Eric crouched down and crawled to her, pulling her down to the pavement just as bullets whizzed by where her head would have been.

The battle didn't last long. More police joined the fray and the men were killed. Their bullet-riddled bodies lay crumpled on the dusty, but now blood covered, pavement.

Eric and his wife ran to the van, pulled the bullet-riddled door open, and peered into the darkened, smoke-filled interior expecting to see carnage. To their amazement, they found a metal container the size of a coffin strapped to the floor. The sides of the cylindrical box had several dents, but no bullet had penetrated its strong sides.

Eric jumped up into the van and cautiously approached the box. He unlatched what he assumed was a lid. Margaret came to his side, and for an instant they held their breaths before Eric opened the lid. The juvenile creature was just under the water that filled the container. She was shaking, her eyes wide with fear.

"Oh, Eric! She's in shock."

"Maybe not, Love. She's just scared out of her wits. Who wouldn't be after what she's been through."

The creature's face came out of the water, her arms raised up to Margaret and she cried in high-pitched vocalizations that sounded like those made by an alarmed dolphin.

Margaret allowed the frightened child to grasp her. "Here, here, poor baby. Come to mama." She took it into her arms and human and creature hugged.

Two policemen peered into the van. Surprise quickly made an appearance on both faces.
"Is that one of them mermaids?" The burly Sergeant asked.

Eric turned to him. "Yes it is."

The other officer, a taller man with short hair, carefully examined the creature in Margaret's arms. "Kinda small, isn't it?"

"This is a young child," Eric explained.

"Oh," he said, looking at him and then back at the creature.

"Is it Ok?" the Sargent asked.

"As far as we can tell, it's unharmed," Eric said. "Just frightened, that's all."

"Are you two Ok?"

Eric flashed a brief look of disgust. "Well, let's see. These idiots blew our apartment up. We lost everything except the clothes on our backs." He pointed at the Blazer. "Our truck is more than likely totaled. We'll be lucky if our insurance company doesn't cancel us. Otherwise, everything is wonderful."

"Who are those men?" Margaret asked the Sergeant.

We don't know. None of them had any ID. We'll have to run their prints."

"How about the van?" Eric asked.

"Probably stolen. The VIN number has been etched away. I wouldn't give finding the van's origin much of a chance."

Eric lowered his eyes. "Figures."

His reaction surprised the Sergeant, enough so to offer additional explanation. "Most crimes are committed with a stolen vehicle. We run into it all the time."

"I believe that you'll never determine the identification of those men. They're probably government agents working for the CIA."

"Or," the Sargent said, "They're just thieves figuring that a mermaid would be worth big bucks."

Eric conceded with a nod. He didn't feel like arguing, especially after what he had just been through.

"What are we going to do now?" his wife asked him. "We have to get this one back to the Institute as soon as possible."

"Can you give us a lift back to the Institute?" Eric asked.

The Sargent nodded.