Mac Cole took off running before the radio speaker stopped buzzing.
His heavy dockworker boots pounded against the cracked granite of Dockside Avenue. Salt spray and diesel exhaust burned the back of his throat, but Mac didn’t slow his stride.
Twelve minutes to Old Ferry Road, Mac thought, his jaw clenched tight around his dead tobacco plug. If Sammy Chen drops that register key and gives in to those black-coat vultures, Store #04 is done. I’m not letting an eighteen-year-old kid take the fall while I’ve got diesel in my tanks.
Behind him, thirty-nine longshoremen ran in a tight pack.
Julian, Elena, Clara, Lin Mei, Dr. Corvo, and Dr. Hahn kept pace along the dry sidewalk.
Two blocks north, tucked beneath the rusted corrugated iron roof of the old municipal icehouse, sat Mac’s pride and joy.
The Route 04 Night Bus was a heavily modified 1994 Gillig Phantom transit coach, reinforced with quarter-inch boiler plate along the wheel wells. Heavy expanded-metal steel grilles guarded every window. The front bumper was a solid eight-inch steel I-beam welded directly to the frame horns, painted municipal olive-drab and faded city blue.
To an ordinary mechanic, it was twenty tons of surplus iron. To Mac, it was a rolling fortress with a heavy-duty Cummins turbo-diesel engine that could chew through a roadblock without dropping a gear.
