Adelaide was distracted as she drove through the city in the Humvee that was starting to feel more like home than either the Capitol or the Dog Park.
She'd told her brother that she was going to explain herself, her situation, her son today, but the day had turned itself upside down and she hadn't been able to get away - not until the sun was already starting to set. They had been gradually orbiting toward this revelation since they came back together, but it felt to Adelaide as she drove toward the Dog Park that things had been conspiring all day long to keep her away. She reached for her phone and started to call her brother, to give him the word that she was on her way.
The rumble of engines had her slowing the vehicle while the phone rang on Bluetooth, half forgotten in the background. Scanning across the streets in front of her, where a handful of fast-moving vehicles kicked up dust and sped straight toward her, Adelaide reached across to the dash to pull out the Colt .45 she kept there.
On the second ring, she winced as the first vehicle, a giant armored van - one of those cash vans she'd always seen down at the Wal-Mart when Rodeo took her to Lafayette - did a movie-worthy spinning drift thing right in front of her and she slammed the brakes and cursed just as Rodeo picked up the phone.
A second later a bloodied man and a dog came ejecting from the van and gunshots started up like a twenty-one goddamn gun salute. Adelaide wasted no time in hurling herself to the floor of the truck, though the van stood between her and the oncoming barrage. While bullets pinged against the armored van, she could hear Rodeo on the line, shouting through the car's speakerphone.
"Shortcake? What the fuck's goin' on?"
"Holy shit," she yelped toward the phone, and then covered her head as the windshield of the Humvee spiderwebbed. "It's like a goddamn Die Hard movie downtown!"
"Fuck, goddamn-- where? Tell me where you are--"
Then the explosion came and it knocked the breath from her body. She didn't stop, didn't wait. She didn't know what was exploding, had no way of knowing from her vantage point on the truck's floor, but she didn't want to sit around and let it be her next. Drawing her gun and shoving her phone into her boot she finally had to open the vehicle's door.
The bloodied man with the dark hair was moving fast away from the van behind the cover of the explosion, and from the steady determined look in his eyes and the fact that he wasn't the one shooting in her direction, Adelaide wanted to be wherever he was going. She had no idea if it was a stupid call or not, but she pushed open her door fully and while the sounds of exploding still rang in her ears she bolted after the man and his dog.
He was clearly injured and it wasn't too hard to catch up, so that when the bullets started to rain on the mouth of the alley Adelaide wasn't too far behind. She was so far unnoticed amid everything else, and she skidded to crouch behind a traffic barrier on the opposite side of the street that the injured man had gone. She could hear the raiders pressing in, and realized that they were about to walk a path that would reveal her, and so she crabwalked, phone still in her boot, gun in her hand, toward the alley.
The raiders' attention was fixed on the doorway that Knight Rider had disappeared into, and Adelaide made her progress swiftly, staying against the wall when she reached the alley. She knew whoever was in there was armed, but at least they weren't that raider crew, and that was all she had to go on at the moment. "Don't shoot," she hissed, when the echoing crashes from the shop could cover her some. "Innocent goddamn bystander."