At least Michael hadn’t fallen prey to the sleepwalk shuffle again, which kind of seemed like both a win and a slap in the face. A win because it added to the hope that the event in the ship the other night had been a fluke. A slap in the face because it made their non-negligible efforts to keep sleeping Michael separated from the group without arousing suspicion seem like a big, fat, and borderline risky waste of time.
Either way, Jarek counted his blessings that morning as the light of dawn arrived on the dilapidated outskirts of the Steel City. The warm and fuzzies tapered off quickly enough, though, when he reminded himself that, outside of a week-old and cut-off message about meeting near the old pigskin field where men were forged in steel, they had no real idea what to expect here.
At least they had a decent general area to start with.
Less encouraging was the fact that the first few bridges they passed were severely out of commission, to put it lightly. Luckily, it wasn’t the wide blue waters of the Monongahela River they needed to cross, but those of the Allegheny, still ahead of them to the west.
Still, the downed bridges weren’t a great sign.
“Kind of ironic for a place that’s also called the City of Bridges, isn’t it, sir?”
Al’s quiet joke in his ear wasn’t enough to cut through the apprehension that had been constricting steadily tighter around his lungs with each passing mile since dawn.
This was it.
She’d be here.
Or she wouldn’t.
“Perhaps the subtleties of irony still elude me, sir,” Al added.
They didn’t, and they both knew it. Al was just trying to alleviate some of the tension he could read in the tightness of Jarek’s body and the no-doubt-troubled swirling of his neural activity.
“I’m just a tad on edge here, buddy,” Jarek whispered behind his faceplate anyway, quietly enough to keep the comment between the two of them in the packed SUV.
“Right, sir. Apologies.”
Jarek said nothing, focusing on the road and on taming his rampant hopes.
The drive into the heart of the city, while plenty tense in their silent SUV, was mercifully uneventful. They passed a third downed bridge opposite a run-down campus that an equally run-down sign hailed as Duquesne University.
The sight of the next bridge intact marginally lightened the weight in Jarek’s stomach, only for the one after that to ruin it.
The bridge that Al indicated on his helmet display map as Fort Pitt Bridge, while mostly intact, had clearly seen some kind of action. The pale yellow girders on the eastern side of the bridge bulged out at one point as if something large and unforgiving had slammed into them. Jarek zoomed the view on his helmet display and saw that several more girders on the western side had been sheared clean through.
He was thinking about calling for a convoy halt to go have a closer look when Mosen’s voice crackled in his ear.
“Fort Duquesne Bridge is out up here. We’re going to have to skirt up the Allegheny to the next one.”
“Got it,” he replied. Then, to himself once the short-range channel was closed, “And to think I used to like bridges…”
“Shall I cross over with the ship and have a closer look while you try the next bridge, sir?”
It was more of a loaded question than it should have been.
The group had already spent an impressive amount of the past twenty-four hours arguing as to exactly how Operation Find the Needle in the Monster-Strewn Haystack was going to play out—“the group,” of course, largely coming down to Mosen and Jarek as it always seemed to in the end.
Unlike most of their past arguments, though, which had felt to Jarek more like Mosen’s abstract dick-measuring contests than necessary conversations, this one had been tricky by merit of the fact that they were all genuinely uncertain as to the best course of action.
They couldn’t help but think their going into the city at daylight felt like throwing caution to the wind and begging for a slap right in the giblets. Especially at the end of a long journey spent traveling cautiously at night. But if their allies were here—and most likely bunkered into a neat hidey-hole—what were the chances of finding them at night?
Similarly, entering the city with the entire convoy instead of sending in a small scouting force seemed like yet another bid for disaster. But after they’d all spent a few weeks on the road catastrophically failing to regroup with the allies they’d originally been driven away from, who could really feel like splitting up was the safe thing to do?
So they’d said cheers to getting caught with their pants down and decided to bite the bullet. And Jarek didn’t see any strong reason, aside from Mosen’s inevitable irritation, to depart from that mentality now that they were this far.
“Go for it, buddy. Just be careful.”
“Rich, sir, coming from you,” Al said as the ship gently accelerated into view overhead and glided quietly past the rest of the convoy and over the Allegheny River beside the thrice-cursed Fort Duquesne Bridge.
Jarek could almost see the cold rage frosting over Mosen’s face three vehicles ahead as he caught sight of the rogue ship breaking free from the pack. The fact that he maintained radio silence felt ominous, but Jarek was certain he’d hear exactly what Mosen thought about the maneuver once they were face to face.
He couldn’t bring himself to care much. The apprehension at what they might find ahead only grew in Jarek’s chest with each passing mile, ratcheting tighter with each unusable bridge they passed.
Finally, they found what they were looking for.
Veterans Bridge, declared the sign at the mouth of the blessedly intact stretch of concrete and steel.
“There’s another spot of irony for you, Mr. Robot,” Jarek murmured.
He waited, expecting Al to point out that the congruence was more coincidence or quirky happenstance than actual irony, but his friend was uncharacteristically silent.
He was about to start worrying when Al finally spoke.
“Sir…”
His tone was like a lump of lead in Jarek’s gut.
“What is it?”
“I think I found where they were hiding.”
“What the hell was your make-believe friend thinking, flying off like that?”
Despite the implied anger in his words, Mosen’s tone wasn’t nearly as venomous as usual as he stood beside Jarek, surveying the scene before them.
The old hotel lobby had been through hell.
Jarek could have said the same about the rest of the buildings in the city, of course. But not like this. This lobby, unless Jarek completely missed his mark, had been ravaged by a lot more than time and neglect.
The walls, smashed and riddled with bullet holes and smears of red and oddly orange blood in several sections, seemed to agree with him.
Rachel had been here.
He didn’t know how he knew it. Maybe it was a lingering scent in the air or some complex alignment of his surroundings he hadn’t even consciously registered.
Maybe it was just naïve, blind hope making a desperate push to convert desire into reality.
Whether or not he was deluding himself about Rachel, though, Jarek was at least pretty sure a furor horde had recently been through the area. That, or a fairly large and extremely pissed-off army.
Outside the lobby, past the van that had been violently overturned and likewise smeared with goopy orangish fluids, several bodies dotted the half-filled parking lot. The state of them—bloodied, emaciated, some only half-dressed—marked them fairly convincingly as fallen members of a passing horde. One that looked to have been marched long and hard.
It wasn’t hard to follow where they’d been headed from the hotel. A gruesome path of smeared blood, torn clothes, smashed cars, and spent casings trailed across the parking lot to the adjacent building, clear as a giant neon sign that read The Shit Went Down Right Here.
After an unproductive minute of poking around the lobby that seemed to have been ground zero, Jarek
and Michael set off for the building across the lot, trailed by a less-than-chipper Mosen.
“What are you thinking?” Michael asked quietly.
What Jarek was thinking was that he was about to lose his shit.
Each little bloody memento of the fight they’d missed chipped at the faint ember of hope in his chest, threatening to smother it completely.
What he was thinking was that, if he didn’t find something to alleviate the cold panic clawing its way around his heart, he was going to either start flipping cars or hit the pavement dead with his first cardiac event.
But none of that seemed very Jarek-ly, so he just kept his mouth shut and tried to keep his stomach steady as they approached the door that had clearly fallen victim to either a speeding semi-truck or a Kul.
Visions of Rachel’s trampled, bloody body pressed in at his mind’s eye from all directions, thinning the air in his lungs.
“Sir?”
He hadn’t meant to stop walking, but now that he had, he couldn’t seem to start again.
Jarek had seen carnage—had seen the worst and the ugliest of what post-Catastrophe humanity had to offer to one another. He’d hewn more violent men to equally violent endings than he could count.
None of it had ever hit him like this.
“Sir?”
He couldn’t breathe.
“Jarek?” Michael’s voice, concerned, uncertain.
Couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t—
“Sir!”
Al’s voice was like the crack of a starting pistol.
Jarek was running before he even knew it.
“Slater!” Mosen barked after him.
He kept running.
Through the demolished hole in the side of the building, following the path of orange ichor and gouged flooring. Two hops down an old escalator flight.
His heart leapt at the sight of the rail station and its partially collapsed tunnel. He couldn’t say why, couldn’t bother to think it through in that moment, could only give in to the desperate, frantic energy pushing his legs on.
“Slater!” Mosen’s call echoed down the tunnel.
He kept running, Fela’s optical sensors illuminating the way in the dark.
“Sir…” Al said. “Might I—”
“She came this way, Al,” was all he said. “I can feel it.”
Al didn’t question it, didn’t point out that neither one of them had any logical basis for that assumption. He just let Jarek run.
The tunnel might’ve been a mile long.
Jarek covered the distance in less than a minute.
Onto the platform. Up the stairs. Out the wrecked opening where the shattered glass doors had once stood. Onto the street.
Where?
Where next?
He spun around, scanning the surrounding area for something, anything, breathing with a heaviness that was only partly related to his frantic sprint.
“Oil marks, sir,” Al said. “Recent, from the look and smell. Perhaps they had vehicles waiting.”
Jarek followed the line of the road with his eyes until his gaze alighted on Fort Pitt Bridge in the distance, a clear shot from here with its oddly warped and severed girders.
Had they fled across that bridge?
Had the rakul followed them?
“Sir!” Al cried. “There, sir, the pillar at four o’clock.”
Jarek spun, the frantic fire roaring back to full blaze in his chest.
There, drawn in what looked unsettlingly like blood.
A glyph?
No, he realized with a sinking feeling as he drew closer. Not like any other he’d ever seen Rachel make, at least.
But what then?
The design was simple enough—a circle circumscribed within a triangle. And, at its center, a single hurried, bloody letter.
J.
He reached slowly for the bloody mark, breath held, heart thundering.
His fingers touched smooth concrete, and the symbol came alive with sound and light that made Jarek’s hand recoil out of surprise.
For a long second, he stared dumbly at the mark. The glyph, apparently.
Then he caught it. The faintest trace of a scent. Blood and fear and gunpowder, all swirling over the inexorable pull of something else—something a primal part of him recognized as belonging to Rachel.
Jarek plunged his palm against the glyph.
Noise erupted from the eerily glowing lines of blood, shouts and rumbling engines immersing him like surround sound. And the warmth…
He gasped, and for a second, he could have sworn it was not a concrete pillar that met his fingers, but Rachel’s own hand.
“Jarek?” she whispered, so real and present he couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t hallucinating. “Jarek… If you’re hearing this, go west on seventy. To Colombus. I’m with Nelken and Drogan and the Enochians and—”
A shriek split the air, shriveling Jarek’s insides.
“Shit,” she gasped. “I have to move. West, Jarek. Don’t stop. Don’t give up. Please.”
The glyph dimmed, Rachel’s warmth receding until nothing remained but cool concrete and the hollow silence of the abandoned street.
“No,” Jarek heard himself whisper. “No, no…”
He pulled his hand away from the glyph and pressed it again, waiting, praying for her to come back to him. Again, and again.
Nothing.
Just a benign, bloody mark on the concrete.
“No…”
He squeezed the sides of the column until his armored fingers dug into the concrete. He fell to his knees, pleading with the unforgiving pillar in a series of incoherent, sputtering starts and stops.
She’d been here. Right here.
He’d felt her, breathed her in as surely as if she’d been here in his arms.
He clung to the pillar, eyes closed, desperately trying to hold on to every facet of the memory before it could fade.
West.
Seventy to Colombus.
Rachel. Warm and strong and telling him to keep going, to not stop.
He played it all back in his head, over and over again, until—
“Slater!” Mosen’s unmistakable bark. “What the fuck was…”
It was only when Mosen paused that it really occurred to Jarek he was still on his knees, hugging a concrete column like it was his last tie to the world.
He probably looked bat-shit insane to the soldiers trickling out of the station after Mosen, like he was finally having himself the good ol’ fashioned mental breakdown half of them probably already thought he was due for.
“What is it?” Mosen asked, closer now, his voice slightly less acidic, if not quite worried.
“Jarek?” Michael’s voice this time from farther back, thick with concern.
Jarek was bracing himself to look up and meet them, to explain what had just happened—bracing himself to deal with Mosen’s inevitable, scornful disbelief—when a horrible fear whispered insidiously in his ear.
“Al…” he said quietly.
“I heard her, sir,” Al said softly. “Felt her, too. It was real.”
It was all Jarek needed to hear.
He rose, composing himself.
Rachel was still out there, fighting alongside their friends. He was sure of it—wouldn’t be swayed from the thought again.
And they were going to find her.
“What gives, Slater?” Mosen asked as he drew up to the column and leaned in to inspect the glyph. “You didn’t finally crack on us, did you?”
Jarek opened his faceplate with a thought and turned to face him and the rest of the approaching soldiers with dire seriousness.
“We have to go west.”
11
After twenty-four hours of scattered napping, Johnny’s emphatic assurances that this was “going to be awesome,” and the steady roiling of guilty apprehension in Rachel’s gut, Nelken announced they were drawing close to Cheyenne Mountain.
Rachel turned in time to see th
e faded road sign that corroborated his claim whiz by.
The drive hadn’t been a thrilling one. A few short episodes with blown tires. One longer stop to scavenge a couple functioning solar trucks to replace their larger diesel that had finally run dry. All inevitable facts of traveling anywhere by ground vehicles these days.
They’d driven non-stop, or as close as they could, swapping drivers from their ample pool of anxious passengers to keep everyone as fresh as could be expected, all things considered.
For the past twenty-four hours, the entire convoy had seemed to radiate a kind of weary but desperate eagerness to reach the promised safety of this Cheyenne Mountain bunker. It was as if they’d all been holding a collective breath since Pittsburgh, one they’d agreed couldn’t be let out until they were safely locked behind Johnny’s so-called “ridiculously thick” bunker door.
Now, though, as they turned onto Norad Road and began the final shallow climb toward their hopeful new haven, a new apprehension—one that spoke of failing at the finish line—seemed to take hold of everyone.
Everyone except Johnny, at least, who looked kind of like a kid on his way to an amusement park.
Dense clusters of stubby green bushes scattered the gradual slope of the arid mountainside, pushing in on the road and partially obscuring their view of what looked to be abandoned housing developments off to the right.
“Honestly,” Johnny broke the silence as if he’d been speaking all along, “I don’t know why you guys didn’t hole up here sooner. It’s gonna be perf…”
He trailed off and turned as they rounded a sweeping corner and Nelken began to slow the vehicle.
“Looks like someone else had similar thoughts about this place,” said Pryce, who’d come to join their vehicle during one of the convoy’s stops.
Following their gaze, Rachel saw what he meant.
Crop fields stretched out ahead to the left side of the road, clearly abandoned, but maybe not for more than a few years by Rachel’s admittedly inexperienced guess. They definitely hadn’t been sitting like that since the Catastrophe, though, which meant, at some point, someone had been here.
The Complete Harvesters Series Page 92