Another power cut.
She didn’t get to see her father’s face when he saw the picture of that trout she caught the day before. That was the main thing she was excited about when they called. Why no video chat? No internet, her mother had explained; it had shut off again. Not having the internet felt like one of Ellarose’s arms had been cut off.
“Ellarose,” her mother said.
Momma only used her full name when she was mad.
“Yes, Susan?”
“Ella—”
“Okay, okay.” She leaned forward and turned off the PS4. The TV screen went blank. No cable television either. The satellites were all gone. Ellarose knew that much.
“Now, go on. It’s a beautiful day.” Her mother had Bonham in her arms.
Her little brother was being a pain in the ass today. That’s what her dad would say. Her little brother was only four, still a baby, and Ellarose needed to be an adult and help out. She was seven. Almost seven. In two months, she would be. Her birthday was right before Thanksgiving.
“I’ll go out to finish the bridge, okay?” That was her new project. A dam and bridge over the stream out by the driveway on the way in.
“And please, don’t call me Susan,” her mom said and turned away.
“I’m sorry, Momma. I’m being funny.”
“Your dad teaches you to be funny too much.”
Ellarose knew better than to poke the bear. She smiled and got up off the couch. That was another of her dad’s ways of talking about her mom. The bear. Susie. That was what her mom liked to be called, but mostly she liked just being called mom.
But never Susan.
Everyone called her dad Chuck.
His name was Charles. She liked Charles better. Chucky was the name of the mean doll in a movie her cousin Luke got her to watch. Charles was the name of a prince, and she was his princess, he always said. Charles Mumford. That was her dad’s full name. Like the band, he liked to joke, except it was Mumford and Son and Daughter.
Ellarose skipped to the door of the cabin and opened it, then pushed back the screen door. It was chilly outside, so she stopped and took her North Face from the hook. Only 4 p.m., but the sun set early behind the Blue Ridge mountaintops to the west of the cabin. In September it was still hot as heck back in Nashville, but up here in the mountains the leaves had already started to fall from the trees.
Every thousand feet of altitude, the temperature dropped four degrees, her dad had explained to her. The climate up there was like the northern states, so the trees were different than in Nashville, even the animals. Bobcats and black bears up here, he said.
The two black Escalades were still in the gravel driveway—one her family and the Mitchells had driven in from Farmer Joe’s in Kentucky, and one the two men that were sent to help out came up here in. That’s what her mom said. Help out. They had guns. They weren’t helping clean, Ellarose knew.
“Thomas!” her mother yelled through the door. “Could you keep an eye on Ellarose?”
The black-clad man was at the end of the driveway. He waved and nodded and began walking back toward the house. Morty, the other one, wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Ellarose liked talking to them.
They were cool. Like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction cool. She liked her movies. Was a movie buff, just like her dad.
She grabbed her walking stick from beside the door and skipped across the gravel, her mind still on that last campaign in Call of Duty. Was Urzikstan a real country? She liked to play on the Hardened settings, which meant she died more but never got stuck.
Ellarose whistled out a birdsong, the trilling whistle of a grasshopper sparrow. She and her dad played games all the time, imitating the birds out here. They even used them when playing Call of Duty, using different bird calls to signal different moves.
She said hello to Thomas, who smiled and gave her a high-five, and she explained she was just going down to the stream. He nodded and said not to go too far.
At the end of the driveway, where the fir trees began, she took a right turn onto the path that led down to the stream. That’s where she caught the trout the day before. Farther down from there was where Tony was buried. She was too young to remember all that, but her dad had told her Tony had saved their lives one day after the CyberStorm. He had died to save them, he said. She didn’t like the idea of dying, but her dad said it was natural.
He said that death was a part of life.
Ellarose reached the stream and considered the rushing water. The branches she had put down the day before had been washed away already. Maybe she should put down a stone or two in the—
“Hey there,” someone called out.
Ellarose thought it was Thomas, but that was a woman’s voice.
“Hello?” She couldn’t see anyone.
“Ellarose,” said the voice. A woman appeared twenty feet back along the path. “How are you?”
It took her a second to recognize the lady, and Ellarose relaxed. Long black hair. Pretty face and brown eyes. It was Irena. She was the lady they drove up here with. She had volunteered to go down to the beach to help find Luke’s mother. She was brave. And she loved dogs.
Ellarose liked Irena.
Then she got excited. “Did you drive up with my dad?”
Irena came closer. She smiled that beautiful smile that Ellarose loved so much. “No, I did not come here with your dad. Did anyone else come up?”
“Not so far.”
“Do you know where your uncle Mike is?”
Ellarose frowned. Irena had a carbine strapped to a vest. Guns were the norm in her family, but that wasn’t a hunting weapon. And then she thought, wait, wasn’t Irena doing something bad? She and Terek had done something awful, but her mom said she would explain more later, when her dad got here tomorrow.
Something about Irena’s smile changed as she neared, Ellarose thought. The grin became a smirk and reminded Ellarose of an animal she had seen at the zoo. What was it called? A hyena? Ellarose took a step back.
Irena swung the muzzle of the carbine around. “Ellarose, don’t move.”
Chapter 10
“MIKE, DO NOT move,” my wife Lauren said.
Twenty red dots hung suspended in a cloud above us. Halted in space, as if God had pressed pause.
The boat engine whined to a stop behind us. After slamming into the mud-and-grass shoreline of the eddy pool below the rapids, the boat had rocketed through the bushes and small trees at the water’s edge and slid fifty feet into the forest until jamming between larger trunks.
A kind of silence descended.
Just the hissing white noise of the rapids and pattering of rain against leaves overhead. And if I listened hard, the humming whir of the bug-drones’ motors holding them preternaturally still in the gusting wind.
Those things weren’t dead. God hadn’t pressed pause on them.
They were resting.
Or something.
One of the vicious machines hovered a few feet above the senator, who cowered below it in the ankle-deep water sluicing past his feet. He wasn’t cringing, I realized. He was bent over, cradling my little girl below him, his back to the drone-bot on its final attack.
“Uncle Leo,” Lauren said, “come over this way. Slowly.”
She had her weapon up and pointed directly at the bug-bot over the senator’s head.
I said, “Damon, what the hell is going on?”
“I think they’ve been reset.”
“Luke, you okay, buddy?”
“I’m fine, dad,” my son said. “Are you?”
“I’m good.”
That wasn’t exactly the truth. My left leg almost buckled as the adrenaline spike subsided. Air came in and out of my lungs in heaving gasps. I trembled like one of the leaves rustling overhead. My eyes located the gun in the thick grass by the water’s edge, but I wasn’t sure if I should move. I stood stock-still, like I was caught in a game of Simon Says.
“Damon, what do you mean, reset?” I ask
ed. “What happened to them?”
The senator stepped slowly and carefully through the mud and onto the grassy bank, still holding my sobbing daughter below him. He glanced above and behind at the red dot of the bug-bot that had stopped just short of him.
“I got it,” Lauren said to him. “If it budges an inch, I’ll kill it. Keep coming to me.”
Damon said, “I’m not sure.”
“But you said reset? Can we shoot them?”
“I wouldn’t do anything to threaten them. Might switch back their programming. These things are in an automated kill mode, which seems to have been flipped off, but I’m sure they have a self-preservation routine.”
“So no target practice?”
Those things were little kamikaze dive bombers. Hovering still like this, I could see what I thought had to be the explosive charges hanging below the spindly metal necks and beating wings. This close and holding motionless, even I might be able to pick off a few.
“I would not advise it,” said a voice.
The accent was vaguely German, but clearly American.
Lauren swung her weapon around and scanned for the speaker.
“Damon,” said the voice, “are these your friends?”
“Yeah, they are.”
“Can you ask them to put down their weapons?”
“Damon,” I said, “who is that?” I remained motionless.
“Ma’am, can you please not point that at me?”
Inching my head slowly to my left, I moved my eyes far enough to see a lanky, black-clad silhouette emerge from the bushes next to the boat. The light was dim, but I saw it was a man with blond hair. He had his hands up but held a square gray metal box in one of them.
“We need to hurry,” the man said. “You can move. They won’t target you if you don’t threaten them. At least, until their signal is reset. I don’t know how much time we have.”
Lauren kept her weapon aimed at the man’s chest. She raised her focus an inch when he emerged fully. He wore a ballistic vest. My wife had to be calculating that a head shot had a better chance of lethality.
“Did you stop those things?” she asked.
“I did,” the man replied.
“You were the one waving at us?”
“I was.”
“Are you controlling the drones?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I mean, I’m not in control of them. I was only able to stop them.”
“Damon, who is this guy?” I asked again. He looked very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. Had we met before? At a meeting?
And why wasn’t Damon answering me?
Lauren asked the man, “Is there anyone else with you?”
“There is nobody else with him,” answered a gruff voice. “I scouted the perimeter and followed him in.”
Lauren swung her weapon around at the new threat. Another silhouette emerged from the shadows. It was Archer, stepping forward without a sound, his weapon trained on the man.
I said, “Is Chuck with you?”
“He’s fine. He’s two hundred yards back, waiting for us. Mrs. Mitchell, can you aim somewhere else?”
My wife took her eye from sighting down the barrel, put it back in a moment of indecision, but then lowered her weapon. She slung the strap over her shoulder, then took two steps to her right and took Olivia from Leo. The senator was dripping wet.
“Archer,” the senator said, “do we have any backup? Is there anyone—”
“I’m sure the cavalry is on the way.” He sidestepped toward me without looking my way, his eyes and gun on the mystery man. “You okay, Mr. Mitchell?” He stole a quick glance at me, decided I didn’t have any gaping wounds, and then advanced toward the senator.
Lauren asked the blond man, “If you’re not controlling those things, then who is?”
The man answered, “I think we know the answer to that.”
“You’ll probably be less clever with both kneecaps gone,” Archer said. “Try again. One kneecap per answer I don’t like.”
“The Chechens.”
“You know this?”
“I surmise it.”
“That’s bordering on clever, my friend.” Archer lowered his weapon to point at the man’s legs. “You know where they are?”
“I have an idea. Close enough.”
“To what?”
“To us. We need to move, Mr. Archer. Those drones are going to come back to life any moment.”
Archer quick-checked the senator, then my wife and the kids. He gently separated Luke from Damon and whispered for him to go to his dad. Luke ran over and jumped into my arms. I almost fell backward.
Archer asked, “How much time do we have?”
“Seconds. I assure you, I have no desire to die here either.” He kept his hands up.
“And how did you disable them?”
“With th—”
Footsteps thudded on the wet path behind me. One person? Two? More? Shielding Luke, I turned away and crouched. A man burst through the bushes.
“Mike, Lauren, holy God I’m happy to see you. Those things, the drones, they’ve been disabled. Maybe something scrambled them? Somebody’s jamming them, I thin—”
Chuck windmilled to a stop.
“I thought I told you to wait,” Archer said.
“Who is that?” Chuck blurted as he scanned the faces and pointed.
The mystery man held forward the gray metal box in one hand toward Archer. “As I prize my kneecaps, Mr. Archer, I will finish answering. This is an EMP device.”
“Like a nuclear bomb?” Chuck said. “You can’t be seri—”
“They also produce EMPs, but this one is more like a giant capacitor. Electromagnetic pulse. Not powerful enough to fry electronics, but ample to disrupt at short distances. I had to wait until all of the attacking drones were in a tight enough radius to—”
“So where are the Chechens?” Archer demanded. He moved his aim from the man’s kneecaps to his face. “Only one try at answering the bonus question.”
“That way,” the man pointed back toward the growing conflagration of the house, now clearly visible between the trees. The rain had stopped.
“At the house?”
“My guess is in the mountains. I triangulated the control signal. We need to move from here.” He checked his wristwatch. “It’s been seventy-two seconds since I disabled them. Their diagnostics will reset any moment.”
Chuck frowned. “What do you mean, in the mountains?”
“The frequency is VHF. Line of sight. To get a reliable signal here, they need to narrowcast from as high a point as possible. My guess is—”
“The mountaintops over Shenandoah?” Chuck’s face went a pallid shade of sick.
“That’s right. Whether you shoot me or not won’t matter, as we will be dead in half a minute if we don’t hurry. This device was a one-shot tool until we recharge it. I have a truck we can all fit in.”
“There aren’t any vehicles near us,” Archer said. “I scouted the area. Didn’t see anything.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“You realize I don’t need to kill you to hurt y—”
“Can we play biggest dick later?” Lauren hurried past Archer and shoved the muzzle of his weapon aside. “Where?” she asked the mystery man.
“This way.” He pointed behind himself, past the boat.
Archer glanced up at the hovering red dots of the drones. He lowered his weapon and slung it over his back. “Let’s move.”
We didn’t even know who this guy was, but we were going to follow him? Did everyone else know something I didn’t? We’d just escaped from a trap; how did we know this wasn’t another one? But there wasn’t time to debate.
I followed Archer as he broke into a jog and motioned for the man to lead us. We hustled along a path toward the center of the nature preserve’s forest. I held Luke in my already burning arms.
Damon jogged beside me.
“Who is that guy?” I asked him. “He clearly knows you, why didn’t you—”
“Tyrell Jakob.”
“Tyrell?”
“Jakob.”
It took me a second to process.
Of course. That’s who he was. I knew his face, but my stressed-out brain hadn’t been able to dredge it up.
So, it wasn’t God that had pressed pause on those drones, but someone close. The billionaire who owned—had owned, I corrected myself—the SatCom constellation and rocket facilities that the Chechen terrorists had hijacked. What on God’s green Earth was he doing hiding in the bushes around the corner from Senator Seymour’s house? Right when we were attacked? Had he sent in these killer drones?
Why would he do that?
We didn’t have time to discuss options.
He said the Chechens were in the mountains behind us. How did he know? He triangulated a signal? Was that even a thing? It sounded like something a ship captain on a clipper might do.
But the look on Chuck’s face when Tyrell had said those words had sent creeping fear jangling through my arm hairs and down into my fingertips and gut. Tyrell said those terrorists were in the Shenandoah mountains, at a high altitude.
And there was only one place that could mean.
Chapter 11
“ELLAROSE?” SUSIE CALLED out through the kitchen window she’d just opened.
Fresh mountain air swept in. The dogwoods were blooming again, just like six years before.
Bonham wriggled from her grip and slithered between her arms to the floor. Arms windmilling and laughing, he ran as fast as he could away from her. Her four-year-old was being a rascal today, as he often did when daddy wasn’t around. When he heard Chuck was coming home tomorrow, Bonham’s energy levels went to full nuclear mode.
She couldn’t wait for her husband to get back, either.
Susie looked again out the window of their log cabin and scanned for her daughter. Ellarose had to be down at the stream, building her bridge, which was fine, except she had been gone for an hour. It was getting dark. Cooling off.
The seasons came fast at this altitude.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 7