Mapmakers Online Story
Run!
Whatcom County / British Columbia · Thursday, September 28, 2045
Derek Bouchard had blood on his hands.
Not his.
Most of it had dried already, dark in the creases around his knuckles and tacky where two fingers met his palm.
Sirens were getting closer.
Derek twisted the key.
The old diesel caught hard.
He threw the F-250 into gear and pulled away.
The gauges settled in front of him.
Fuel sat below a quarter tank.
Not empty.
Enough.
He had more important problems.
The sirens were for the house.
For him.
For what that asshole had made happen.
Derek squeezed the steering wheel and felt dried blood pull against his skin.
It was his fault.
He had gotten between Derek and the love of his life. Filled her head with shit. Convinced her Derek was dangerous. Convinced her she needed somebody else.
Then he’d stood there in her house like Derek was the one who didn’t belong.
The rock was still back there somewhere.
Derek had found it outside.
That was where it stayed.
He didn’t have a weapon now.
Didn’t need one.
He needed distance.
Another siren rose ahead.
Derek’s chest tightened.
Red and blue light appeared around a bend.
Sheriff.
Another set followed it.
Two units.
Coming toward him.
For half a second Derek thought about stopping.
Not surrendering.
Just stopping somewhere. Getting out. Running into the dark.
Too late.
The first Sheriff’s vehicle was already on him.
Derek held the truck straight.
His heart hammered.
The deputy passed.
Nothing happened.
The second unit came behind it.
Derek could see the driver.
The deputy looked toward the F-250.
Derek felt it.
Then the Sheriff vehicle passed too.
He checked the mirror.
Red and blue lights shrank behind him.
Neither one turned.
Derek stared.
Then laughed once.
They had passed him.
Both of them.
They didn’t know yet.
Of course they didn’t know.
She was back there talking. Her boyfriend was bleeding. Everybody saying different things. Deputies arriving in the middle of it.
Information took time.
Derek had time.
That meant he could still fix this.
Not everything.
Enough.
Custer.
He knew somebody out that way who might let him park behind the house and disappear for a while.
Or Sumas.
Farther, but maybe farther was better.
Get indoors.
Shut the phone off.
Leave the truck somewhere nobody could see it.
Sleep.
Then figure out what came next after his head stopped running this fast.
The truck continued east.
His mouth was dry.
His hands felt too hot.
His thoughts kept arriving before the previous ones had finished.
Custer.
Sumas.
Get fuel first.
No.
Get away first.
Then fuel.
Lights from Silver Reef spread ahead.
The casino.
Parking lots.
The station near Haxton.
Diesel.
Derek glanced at the fuel gauge again.
Still below a quarter.
He could pull in.
Three minutes.
Maybe five.
Enough fuel to stop thinking about it.
Then he saw how bright the station was.
Canopy lights.
Parking lot.
Cameras.
People awake at an hour when almost nobody else was.
And the deputies he had passed were behind him somewhere.
By now maybe they knew.
Maybe they had his name.
Maybe they had the truck.
White lifted F-250.
Twin stacks.
Not exactly anonymous.
Derek kept going.
“Later.”
First get away from the heat.
Then stop.
The road remained dark around him.
An approaching car appeared ahead.
White.
Low.
Derek watched it close.
The headlights swept across his truck.
For one instant the side markings became visible.
Washington State Patrol.
Derek looked into the mirror as soon as they passed.
The Charger’s brake lights came on.
“No.”
The car slowed.
Then turned around.
“No. No no no.”
Derek mashed the accelerator.
The diesel surged.
Black smoke poured from both stacks.
The Charger finished its turn.
Maybe coincidence.
Maybe the trooper had missed an exit.
Maybe he hadn’t even looked at Derek.
The white car started gaining.
Fast.
Derek pushed harder.
The Charger kept coming.
Then red and blue lights came alive.
A quick siren blast followed.
Derek’s stomach dropped.
They knew.
Custer vanished.
Sumas vanished.
Every friend’s house vanished.
He couldn’t lead a State Patrol car into somebody’s driveway and call that hiding.
Just run.
The interchange began taking shape ahead.
A green guide sign appeared in the headlights.
Vancouver.
Derek barely registered the word.
He wasn’t going to Canada.
He wasn’t going anywhere yet.
He just needed the interstate.
Wide.
Straight.
Fast.
The roundabout rushed toward him.
Too fast.
Derek knew it immediately.
He braked.
Not enough.
The truck leaned.
Derek cranked the wheel.
The raised truck apron filled the headlights.
He cut across it.
The suspension unloaded.
For a fraction of a second the F-250 seemed to float.
Then it came down crooked.
The back end stepped sideways.
Derek fought the wheel.
One tire screamed against pavement.
The seat belt caught him hard across the chest.
The truck straightened.
“Fuck.”
His hands were shaking now.
The Charger had opened space behind him.
Good.
Maybe he’d scared the trooper.
Maybe the guy didn’t want to get close.
Derek found the northbound ramp.
Interstate.
His truck had power.
Power was useful here.
He put his foot down.
Ninety.
More.
The diesel settled into a sustained roar.
Behind him, the Charger stayed visible but farther back than before.
Not close enough to touch him.
Not gone either.
Derek stared ahead.
Just run.
That was the plan.
The only plan.
Ferndale came toward him.
A green exit sign reflected his headlights and the flashes behind him.
Then Derek saw the police car.
A Ferndale cruiser.
Lights on.
Sitting up at the exit.
Waiting.
The ramp itself looked open.
Derek didn’t care.
Open didn’t mean safe.
That cop was sitting there for him.
Probably spikes too.
They wouldn’t leave the ramp open if they didn’t have something waiting.
Derek stayed on I-5.
The Ferndale unit remained where it was.
He blew past.
For another minute there was nothing in his head except pavement, speed and the red-blue pulse in his mirror.
Then Ferndale was behind him.
The interstate opened again.
Derek started looking at the exits differently.
Not the cities.
The little ones.
County roads.
Maybe that was it.
Get off I-5.
Turn.
Turn again.
Break line of sight.
Get somewhere dark.
The Charger couldn’t chase what it couldn’t see.
Then Derek remembered the roundabout.
His truck had almost folded itself around one corner.
The State Patrol Charger was low and planted and built for exactly that kind of driving.
Derek had horsepower.
The trooper had brakes.
Steering.
Grip.
Every turn Derek added would give the cop another chance to close.
No.
The interstate was where the F-250 had something going for it.
Stay fast.
Stay straight.
Another sign came out of the dark.
Derek looked toward the exit.
County road.
Dark country beyond it.
For a moment he considered it again.
Then dismissed it.
Too many corners.
The Charger would stay right on him.
He passed Grandview.
The fields fell behind.
A few minutes later Blaine began appearing ahead.
Another cruiser.
Lights flashing near the first covered exit.
Derek stared at it.
Then something clicked.
Not county roads.
Fields.
“Fuck.”
He should have gotten off back there.
Grandview.
Custer.
He didn’t have to beat the Charger through twenty miles of corners.
Just get far enough off the interstate to reach a field.
A hay field.
A farm track.
Mud.
Uneven ground.
Something.
The F-250 had clearance.
Four-wheel drive.
Big tires.
The Charger didn’t.
Back near Grandview there had only been one car actually chasing him.
He could have left pavement.
Maybe the trooper followed.
Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe Derek disappeared across a field before anybody else got there.
That had been the move.
And he had driven right past it.
The Blaine cruiser flashed ahead.
Too late.
Then the big green border diagram came out of the darkness first.
The line between countries was drawn right across the sign.
A little farther on came the next guide sign.
The ramp was technically open.
Derek saw a police car sitting there.
That was enough.
Maybe spikes.
Maybe another car farther down.
Maybe both.
He wasn’t going to find out by driving directly toward them.
Derek stayed on I-5.
Another set of police lights appeared farther ahead.
Exit 276.
Covered too.
The sign flashed past.
He had missed the fields.
The local roads were closing.
The fuel gauge was lower than before.
The Charger still existed behind him.
Canada was ahead.
Derek hadn’t planned Canada.
He hadn’t planned any of this.
Canada was just the least shitty thing left.
Different country.
Different cops.
Different rules.
The Washington trooper couldn’t just keep chasing him across an international border.
Probably.
Derek didn’t actually know.
But there had to be a line somewhere.
That was what borders were for.
He kept north.
Peace Arch came into view.
The border infrastructure was mostly open roadway now, nothing like the old pictures with lanes of booths and inspection queues.
Tonight the road itself was not open.
Canadian police lights waited beyond the line.
Something dark stretched across part of the pavement.
Spikes.
“Oh, fuck you.”
Derek slammed the brakes.
The F-250 pitched hard.
Speed fell.
Ninety.
Seventy.
Lower.
The border rushed toward him.
He could stop.
He knew he could stop.
The truck was almost giving him the decision for free.
Stop.
Hands up.
Jail.
Court.
Her.
Him.
Blood dried into his hands.
No.
Derek looked left.
Grass.
A small concrete monument.
Room around it.
The brake came off.
He turned.
The F-250 left the pavement.
The truck hammered across the lawn.
The big white Peace Arch was just a few dozen feet up on his left.
The suspension worked violently beneath him.
The concrete monument came at the windshield and slid away as Derek curved around it.
The tire spikes stayed on the road.
Derek aimed back toward pavement.
The truck hit hard.
He accelerated.
Canada.
A Canadian siren rose immediately behind him.
No victory.
No pause.
The Mountie was already moving.
Another police car followed.
Then another.
Derek checked the mirror.
Red and blue filled it.
Canadian.
The Washington trooper was gone.
He looked again anyway.
Nothing but the road dropping away behind him, the park already disappearing out of sight, and Canadian police climbing after him.
Derek sucked in a breath.
The trooper hadn’t followed.
He’d been right about that much.
Different country.
Different cops.
The change north of the line felt almost immediate.
Whatcom County had been dark farmland broken by towns.
Here the road began accumulating things.
More lighting.
More lanes.
Concrete barriers.
Interchanges.
Commercial development.
Signals on connecting roads.
Windows.
Traffic infrastructure.
The edge of Metro Vancouver spreading around him.
And police.
Lots of police.
The first three or four cars stayed with him.
Others began appearing ahead.
Some joined.
Some waited at ramps.
Some moved on parallel roads and disappeared.
Different markings.
Mounties.
Then something else.
Surrey.
Derek caught the name when one cruiser came close enough for the side lettering to flash through his peripheral vision.
His mouth was bone dry.
The meth had stopped feeling good a long time ago.
What remained was speed inside his body.
Every light meant something.
Every car looked like it might move.
Every gap seemed temporary.
He knew one thing about Canadian cops.
They had more rules.
Everybody knew that.
Rules about force.
Rules about chasing.
Rules about what they could do when somebody got dangerous.
Fine.
Then get dangerous.
If he made the pursuit worse than letting him go, maybe somebody would call it.
Derek drove harder.
Changed lanes sharply.
Closed distance on slower cars until they moved.
Used the whole width available whenever he thought a police car was trying to come alongside.
The police backed away when they had to.
Good.
That was the trick.
Make them choose.
His theory seemed to work for almost two minutes.
Then traffic tightened.
A civilian vehicle ahead slowed hard.
Derek came off the accelerator.
Thirty.
Twenty.
Ten.
Then little more than a crawl.
Police cars began moving around him.
One ahead.
One creeping up beside him.
Another tight behind.
The open road around the F-250 was disappearing.
They were trying to close him in.
“No.”
The Surrey car beside him edged closer.
Derek turned toward it.
Not much.
Enough.
The other driver gave him room.
The space opened.
Derek punched through the gap and accelerated.
The Surrey cruiser dropped behind.
“Coward.”
Derek grinned.
There.
They didn’t want it badly enough.
They were scared to wreck.
Scared to hurt somebody.
Scared to get hurt.
So make them scared.
That should have made the pursuit smaller.
Instead it grew.
Three or four cars became more.
Then more again.
Red and blue lights appeared at every level of the mirror.
Some close.
Some far back.
Some joining from ramps.
Others already ahead.
Derek lost track.
By the time the route carried him deeper into the Lower Mainland, it looked like half the cops working that night had decided Derek Bouchard was their personal project.
He laughed.
“What the fuck?”
His attempt to make them quit had somehow made them call everybody.
The road kept changing around him.
More infrastructure.
More intersections.
More chances for another cruiser to appear.
He had escaped rural Whatcom County and driven straight into a metropolitan police system.
Brilliant.
Fuel.
Derek checked.
Lower.
Not dead yet.
Closer than he wanted.
Canada hadn’t worked.
Going fast hadn’t worked.
Scaring them hadn’t worked.
He needed somewhere to go.
Not just away.
Somewhere.
Derek grabbed his phone.
The screen lit his bloody fingers.
He opened Maps.
Road.
Screen.
Road.
The truck wandered slightly in the lane.
He corrected.
The map filled with Greater Vancouver.
Surrey.
Delta.
Richmond.
Water.
Roads.
He dragged it south and west.
Something below him caught his eye.
POINT ROBERTS
Derek looked again.
Point Roberts.
Right.
That weird little piece of Washington.
Everybody around Whatcom County knew about it in the vague way people knew about geographic oddities close enough to mention but inconvenient enough not to visit.
A little American chunk hanging below Canada.
Basically an island, except it wasn’t.
You had to go through Canada to reach it by road.
Derek stared at the map.
Tiny.
What could possibly be down there?
Border people.
Fire department.
Maybe.
Cops?
At four in the morning?
Probably not.
How many cops could a place that size even have?
The phone offered the route.
Derek looked into the mirror.
Canada had filled it with police.
Then he looked back at Point Roberts.
The State Patrol trooper had disappeared at the first border.
Maybe these cops had to stop at the second.
That was enough.
Derek set the phone down.
For the first time since the Washington trooper turned around on Slater, Derek had a destination.
He followed the route west.
The police followed him.
Different cars cycled into view.
Some disappeared.
Others took their place.
Derek stopped trying to identify them.
Red and blue meant police.
Everything else was trivia.
Highway 17.
The route stretched west.
His phone wanted 56 Street.
Then an overhead sign appeared ahead in the darkness.
There.
The road itself agreed with the phone.
Point Roberts existed.
Derek kept going.
The pursuit turned south.
Fifty-six Street.
The police lights behind him had become almost continuous now.
Red.
Blue.
White headlights.
Reflections running across storefront glass and road signs.
He could see them stacked behind one another whenever the road straightened.
This had started with one State Patrol car.
Now Canada seemed to be throwing an entire city at him.
Point Roberts was ahead.
Derek expected another trap.
Spikes.
Cars.
Something.
The line came closer.
Nothing waited on the American side.
No cruiser.
No barricade.
No wall.
The Canadians stayed behind him.
Derek crossed.
The old inspection lanes had been removed years ago.
In their place, beside the road, stood a small official green sign.
Derek looked in the mirror.
The first Canadian police car slowed.
Then stopped.
The next stopped behind it.
Then another.
And another.
The wall of emergency lights collected north of the line.
None crossed.
Derek continued south on Tyee Drive.
He looked again.
Still stopped.
He slowed.
Not much at first.
Then more.
The lights behind him became smaller.
No sirens ahead.
No cruiser waiting around the bend.
Nothing.
The noise fell away.
That was what finally made it real.
The engine no longer had sirens layered over it.
No screaming tires.
No police radio he couldn’t hear but could imagine.
Just diesel.
Wind.
His own breathing.
Point Roberts was dark.
Trees.
Houses.
Closed businesses.
A little American community asleep at the bottom of Canada.
Derek looked back one more time.
The Canadians were gone behind the darkness.
He had done it.
Actually done it.
The Washington trooper had disappeared at Canada.
The Canadians had stopped at Washington.
Cops stopped at borders.
He had crossed two of them.
And now nobody was behind him.
Derek eased down farther.
His hands were shaking enough that he noticed.
The fuel gauge was getting uncomfortably close to empty.
“Yeah.”
That problem.
A bright canopy appeared ahead.
Gas station.
Derek almost laughed.
Perfect.
He pulled in.
One small crossover sat at another pump.
Nothing else.
No police.
He parked beside the diesel pump and shut off the F-250.
The silence was enormous.
For several seconds Derek stayed in the driver’s seat.
His heart did not understand that the chase was over.
It kept running.
His jaw hurt.
He realized he had been clenching it.
Derek opened the door.
Cool air hit the sweat beneath his shirt.
He got out.
The truck ticked quietly as metal cooled.
His hands looked worse under the canopy lighting.
Dark blood around the knuckles.
Under the nails.
The asshole’s blood.
Derek looked at it and felt the anger rise again.
His fault.
Still his fault.
Derek opened the fuel door.
He started the pump.
Diesel began flowing.
The numbers climbed.
Derek watched them.
For the first time all night, one of his problems was shrinking instead of multiplying.
He let out a long breath.
Didn’t need a full tank.
Just enough to move.
The truck was finished anyway.
Every cop in Washington and British Columbia knew it now.
White lifted F-250.
Stacks behind the cab.
Plate.
He couldn’t hide in it.
He only needed it for the next step.
Derek took out his phone.
Point Roberts filled the map.
Small.
Very small.
He moved around it.
Airfield.
Derek stared.
Could steal an airplane.
The thought lasted perhaps two seconds.
“No.”
He couldn’t fly.
Not even a little.
He knew enough to know that turning on an airplane was not the same thing as knowing what to do after that.
Forget it.
His thumb moved again.
Marina.
Derek stopped.
That was different.
He had driven boats.
Friends’ boats.
Fishing.
Summer weekends.
Nothing impressive.
Enough.
Steering.
Throttle.
Water.
He didn’t need to cross an ocean.
He needed to get away from shore.
The marina opened onto the Strait of Georgia.
That was open water.
Before daylight.
The thought settled.
Fuel the truck.
Drive to the marina.
Leave the Ford.
Get onto a boat.
Get away from the dock.
Then figure out the rest.
Land somewhere else later.
Run again if he had to.
That could work.
Not forever.
Enough.
Every plan tonight only needed to work long enough to reach the next one.
Derek looked at the time.
Still dark for hours.
Good.
The diesel pump continued counting.
He felt almost calm.
He had escaped the deputies at Sandy Point.
Escaped the State Patrol trooper at Canada.
Survived whatever Canada had thrown behind him.
Escaped all of them at Point Roberts.
Now he had fuel.
He had a marina.
He had another move.
A white car turned into the station.
Derek looked up.
For a moment he did nothing.
White Dodge Charger.
His brain saw the shape before it understood the meaning.
The car moved behind the F-250.
Stopped.
Red and blue light exploded across the truck.
Across the pump.
Across the underside of the canopy.
Derek stared.
The same Charger.
Slater Road.
The trooper he’d thought he had left behind when he crossed into Canada.
How the fuck did he get here?
The driver’s door opened.
A trooper got out.
Blue uniform.
Crisp.
Everything on him where it was supposed to be.
No hurry.
No scrambling.
The trooper reached back toward something inside the car, stopped, then drew a pistol.
“Derek Bouchard!”
His name.
Derek froze with one hand still on the nozzle.
“Do not move.”
The pistol came up.
Run.
Derek’s eyes moved.
Truck.
No.
Road.
No.
Store.
No.
Darkness.
No.
The trooper stood there like he had been waiting for this part all night.
This guy had his shit together.
Derek’s brain stopped producing clever answers.
If he ran again, this cop was going to kick his ass.
Or kill him.
Maybe those were the choices now.
Run where?
Nothing came back.
His body still wanted to move.
Derek stayed where he was.
“Take your hand off the truck. Slowly.”
Derek let go.
“Put the nozzle back in the pump.”
He lifted it out of the filler neck carefully. The fuel stopped flowing.
The holder seemed ridiculously small from where he stood. Derek put the nozzle back.
“Step away from the truck.”
Derek stepped away.
There was nowhere behind the Ford that became an escape route. No opening in the station. No sudden idea waiting for him. Just the trooper and the pistol and the red-blue light washing over everything.
“Hands up where I can see them.”
He brought his hands up.