Chapter 47 - The Boston Blackout Grid
Kowalski stomped the accelerator, the sedan’s winter tires throwing frozen gravel as the vehicle roared down the narrow cemetery access road, blowing past the locked maintenance gates into the streets of Cambridge.
Behind them, three black armored SUVs with high-intensity spotlights swerved out from the main cemetery entrance, their engines screaming in pursuit.
"They're on us!" Marcus yelled, checking the side mirror, watching the lead SUV close the distance to fifty yards.
"Not for long," Kowalski grunted, reaching down to a small, modified military transmitter wired into the sedan’s dashboard. "When your father’s old friends found out Eleanor took over the board, they didn't just sit on their hands. They put a back door into the city’s municipal power grid."
Kowalski flipped a covered toggle switch on the console.
Two miles ahead, the substation at the Charles River exploded in a massive blue electrical arc.
Like dominoes falling in the dark, the streetlights across three districts of western Boston went completely black. Traffic signals snapped off. The automated highway surveillance cameras died instantly. The entire avenue plunged into pitch darkness, illuminated only by the frantic sweep of vehicle headlights.
Kowalski cut his own headlights, navigating by memory through the darkened streets of Cambridge, cutting hard through an industrial alleyway behind an abandoned brick warehouse.
The three pursuing SUVs, blinded by the sudden blackout and speeding at seventy miles an hour, blew straight down the main boulevard, their sirens blaring uselessly into the void.
Marcus slumped back against the headrest, his vision narrowing to a tunnel of gray fog. The loss of blood from his shoulder was catching up to him.
"Marcus! Stay with me!" Kowalski barked, slapping Marcus’s uninjured arm. "We’ve got a trauma team waiting at a safe house in Maine. Sarah’s family. The ones Eleanor paid off twenty years ago—they know the truth now. They’re waiting."
Marcus turned his head weakly toward the back seat.
The two girls were huddled together beneath the thick wool blanket. The original Chloe had her arms wrapped tightly around the duplicate, their foreheads pressed together, whisper-singing a lullaby Sarah used to sing before she got sick.
A ghost of a smile crossed Marcus’s blood-drained lips.
"They're safe," Marcus whispered.
"Yeah, they're safe," Kowalski said. "Now you shut your eyes and stay alive for them, you hear me?"
May you like
Marcus closed his eyes as the sedan sped north into the freezing, starless darkness of the New England interstate.
***
