Hurricane Fever

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Rhodes?” Roo jogged down the hallway.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Rhodes snapped. “You went offline when you saw Katrina Prideaux. We have a few men inside as waiters, but they couldn’t find you.”

  “I’m okay. Listen…” As he moved down the stairs over the party Roo summarized everything, talking silently into his sleeve, shoving past guests who made disgusted faces at his lack of manners as he moved toward the main doors.

  Rhodes was quiet for a second. “A virus that targets…” He swore. “I’ll mobilize. Barbadian police and soldiers will work with us. Caribbean Special Forces are in Trinidad; they won’t be able to fly out.”

  Roo stopped at the door and looked at one of the screens. “You have forty minutes,” he said.

  “Forty?”

  “The Verne Plus launch is counting down live in here. Forty minutes. I’m not sure what Katrina is planning, but she’s fifteen minutes ahead of us.”

  He turned from the screen to leave. But not before he spotted Beauchamp’s familiar face. The man was holding a flute of champagne and smiling … until he saw Roo.

  The shock on his face gave Roo a thrill of satisfaction, but then Beauchamp began to move through the crowd at him.

  Roo kept walking. The massive doors he’d come through earlier had been shut and barred, but a side door now allowed guests in and out through an airlock-like system of sliding steel doors.

  He was struck by the wind the moment he stepped outside. His locks fluttered and flapped, and he had to brace his feet carefully and lean forward. The rain stung: needle sharp and painful.

  “Oh thank God,” a man in a suit with a woman thirty years his junior stumbling next to him shouted at Roo, hurrying past. “Here are the keys, make sure you get it in the garage right away! It’s a vintage, original Tesla Roadster, I waited far too long to get here.”

  “I told you,” the woman shouted. “I said to you not to delay, but you had to call…”

  They were cut off by the sliding doors.

  Roo looked down at his tuxedo, his mouth open to say something. Then he looked at the key fob, and at the Tesla sitting in the lashing rain.

  Forty minutes.

  He slid into the vehicle, set the mirror, and looked up to see Beauchamp step out of the doors. Roo almost got back out of the car. Right here, right now, Beauchamp was just fifty feet away.

  But there was a Verne Plus launch to stop.

  Roo hit the accelerator and peeled out of the drive, heading for the massive gates of the estate. Beauchamp shouted into a phone and one of the massive tornado-proof Humvees moved to the door to pick him up.

  23

  The Roadster kicked and skidded on the wet road. There was no one else out, it didn’t matter that he spent the first few seconds sliding sideways over asphalt. Like any given electric car with a good motor, all the torque was available to the driver. No waiting for the gas to explode and slowly transmit its power down through an axle.

  On a dry day it meant getting from zero to sixty at what used to be considered supercar levels of acceleration.

  The wipers could barely keep up with the rain as Roo sped along the highway, hydroplaning through patches of wet road where the ocean spilled over the beach, up over retaining walls, and onto the road.

  “Roo. What are you doing?” Rhodes asked.

  “Going after her,” Roo said.

  He leaned forward to plug in the location of the Verne Plus into the large screen, tapping it out with his fingers. He missed seeing the dark object in the rain gaining on him in the mirror.

  “Don’t do that,” Rhodes ordered. “Stay put. Let us get in there.”

  The armored Humvee struck the back of the Tesla, almost riding up onto the trunk. Roo instinctively floored the accelerator. The back of the car wiggled, struggled to keep to the road, and then broke free of the thick metal bars on the front of the monster behind him.

  With so much water on the ground the tires slipped and spat, failing to find traction. But Roo managed to pull away from the constant lumbering of the Humvee.

  Where was the highway going? As long as he followed the coast, he was going to struggle in the puddles the Humvee powered through.

  Roo yanked the wheel right and headed inland.

  “Do you hear me, Roo?” Rhodes asked. “Because I can still see you driving away. We put a tracker on you.”

  In the rearview mirror Roo watched the Humvee just barely make the turn, taking out a street sign as it hopped a curb to follow him.

  “Okay, Beauchamp,” Roo muttered. “Let’s see what we can…” He abruptly shut up and hit the brakes. They stuttered, adjusting to the wet road. A large section of a galvanized steel roof bounced down the road at them, a lethal wobbly tumbleweed whipped before the storm winds, ripped off some unlucky person’s house.

  Roo slalomed left to dodge it, slamming a concrete retaining wall and scraping the side of the car. It whipped past, rattling and clanking, and struck the Humvee.

  The armored car obliterated the roof and kept coming. A single sheet of galvanized steel caught in one of the window ports flapped about in the wind, until it too broke free and flew away.

  “Shit,” Roo said.

  “Roo!” Rhodes shouted. “What the fuck is going over there?”

  “Rhodes, you wanted a response from Beauchamp? I’ve got it. He’s going to kill me, or I’m going to delay him from getting out to the Verne…”

  “Damn it, Roo.” Rhodes sounded halfhearted as he swore, though.

  Glancing at the map to make sure the road wasn’t a dead end, Roo veered right in a spray of water, the back end of the car finding purchase in some gravel along the road.

  The car bottomed out as the road plunged down. Roo fought to keep speed and control. He smiled as he saw the Humvee miss the turn and try to come to a stop.

  Another turn to throw Beauchamp off his tail.

  Roo slowed down. The Roadster became more amenable to turning. The gusts of wind, now pushing seventy miles an hour, slapped the sides of the car. But it was sporty, low to the ground, and didn’t flip.

  He kept his hands on the wheel, compensating for the wind, wincing as debris struck the sides, loud as gunshots.

  “You have people headed over there yet?” Roo asked Rhodes.

  “Gearing up.”

  Roo took another turn to route himself back toward Barbados’s east coast, where the island faced the Atlantic’s fury with high cliffs. The Roadster followed the hills as they climbed up higher into the heart of the island, the wind growing more and more furious as he faced the true brunt of the growing storm.

  And it was only getting started.

  He didn’t have a weapon. Maybe he should have led Beauchamp back toward Bridgetown, close to the CIG office. Because if he was unprepared for the man back at the labs, he was vastly less prepared for him now.

  Or maybe he just needed to keep the man busy, now, instead of worrying about Kit. Or getting to the Verne complex.

  Roo slowed and stopped. A tiny chattel house had blown across the road. Only twenty feet wide, it was a small, cottage-like wooden structure that had been sitting on a rock foundation near the road. The bright green and pink paint looked recently shellacked, so someone had done restoration work on it.

  Remarkably, the whole thing remained intact, so Roo slowly crept toward it. It had been blown down the road into a protected spot by a berm.

  He didn’t want to hurt the house. They had survived since the days of slavery. Tiny, often made without nails so that they could be disassembled quickly and moved from one estate to another with its occupants, there were fewer and fewer of them each year due to the hurricanes. Hurricanes that hadn’t been a major part of the island’s past.

  Despite the lack of nails, this one was so well made it had lasted this long, and defied hurricane after hurricane. It had remained mobile up to the end.

  Roo had the Roadster half off the road as he slipped past.

  He didn’t see
the Humvee; he heard it over the howl of the wind. A distant grumbling sound that suddenly roared into full rage as Beauchamp threw the vehicle out of the dark.

  Roo gunned the Roadster and heard traction control struggle with the slicked mud caked on his tires as he moved back onto the wet road.

  He glanced in the mirror just in time to see the Humvee blast through the middle of the chattel house. Brightly painted planks of wood exploded, driven apart by the sharp angles of steel plating on the front of the Humvee. Roo gritted his teeth.

  “Rhodes,” Roo shouted. “I think I’m in trouble.” The Roadster slid out as he struggled to accelerate away.

  The Humvee sluiced through the water on the road, ignoring the wind, and powered into the Roadster’s side. The world spun in a screeching whirlwind of shattered glass and scraping as the Roadster flipped up, then over. The impact knocked the wind out of Roo and left him dazed.

  Upside down, still being pushing along the road, Roo fought the boiling mass of water being shoved into the sports car while trying to get out of his seat belt.

  The Humvee braked hard. The Roadster scraped along the road ahead of it, still upside down, until it screeched to a stop.

  “You seeing this, Rhodes?” Roo struggled to scramble out. “I told you I needed a gun, man.”

  There was no reply. Maybe the earpiece had been knocked out.

  Roo staggered to his feet, barely able to handle the wind punching him around.

  Beauchamp fumbled his way out of the Humvee with two of his familiar neo-Nazi bodyguards. Neither of them had guns. They’d all been at the party.

  It would probably make little difference, Roo thought, shielding his eyes from the stinging rain. Three of them against just him, and Roo’s head was throbbing hard enough that he could barely focus in the wind. It sounded and felt like they were all standing behind a jet engine right now.

  The three men spread out around him, and Roo got ready.

  One of the guards stepped in. But as he did so, Roo saw the remains of the chattel house moving. More pieces broke apart as the rest of the small house gave up.

  Debris flew down the road at them. Roo crouched, shoving against the wind to get in front of the Humvee to shelter. The nearest neo-Nazi turned to see what Roo had run from just in time to have his head cut clean off by a sheet of galvanized roofing.

  The body stood, leaning back against the wind for a moment as blood fountained up into a cloud of red mist that whipped off along with spray from the road.

  His corpse tumbled to the ground.

  The other guard scrambled to get back into the Humvee but was struck by a beam. Roo heard the crunch and saw him stumble in the wind. Then he slumped to the ground.

  Beauchamp dove back into the Humvee.

  “Get out here you coward,” Roo shouted, running around the front of the vehicle. He pushed against the wind and crawled up onto the vehicle, grabbing the door handle and yanking it open.

  A chunk of wood fluttered through the dark and struck him in the temple. Roo started to fall back, but a strong pair of hands yanked him in inward.

  The door closed with a solid thunk, and Roo rolled into a space between the seats.

  24

  Roo cracked an eyelid and groaned. He tried to move his hand, but realized he couldn’t. Bright lights overhead dazzled his vision. He squinted. He was inside a large, concrete-block building that looked like a warehouse. But with racks of capsules and equipment behind heavy-duty plastic shields to keep them airtight. Lots of cables in the ceiling.

  The room had been built around the back end of a very, very large breech. The Verne cannon. It looked like a metal tunnel, headed for the sky, poking through the warehouse. Behind and along the barrel, pneumatic pistons the size of houses held it in place and presumably absorbed the shock of firing. The middle of the warehouse was a giant pit, with metal walkways leading up to the breech so that it could be loaded or reached by workers.

  “Mr. Jones, welcome back to the land of the living. For now.” Beauchamp leaned over him, blocking the light.

  “Where am I?”

  “The Verne Plus is twenty inches wide,” Beauchamp said. “We don’t load a shell in it, but something more like a cruise missile. We fire it out, and at the apex of its natural curve, it fires and heads for orbit. Only, we’re not sending anything to orbit this time. We’re putting an explosive aerosol in it. And, of course, you.”

  Roo struggled, but he’d been strapped in securely. He looked around the metal tube’s interior. “You know I wasn’t sent in alone,” he said, looking back up.

  “By the time any of your ‘colleagues’ get here, Roo, you’ll have been fired off down the barrel. You’ll be accelerated so fast every bone in your body will break. The blood will be drained out of your head in a split second. If you manage to survive that you might, if you’re lucky, return to consciousness at the very top of the parabola. You’ll get to experience the magic of weightlessness.”

  “You couldn’t just put a bullet up in my head, no? You want me to suffer.”

  “I want you to see what I’ve done. After the apex of your parabola, you’ll descend to the heart of a hurricane forming off the edge of Africa. The fairing will jettison, so you will be able to experience this if you are still alive. It’s there that the payload will separate and disperse.”

  “The plague,” Roo said.

  Beauchamp looked pained. “I got the idea when I experienced what you are about to experience. I paid to go on a trip to space. And when I was there, in orbit, I spent an entire day doing nothing but staring out of a porthole down at our world.”

  Roo jerked his head back as Beauchamp leaned in closer.

  “I could see it in all its beauty, Mr. Jones. The wisps of clouds hovering just above the great patchworked land below. I could see the impact we had made. Forests being cut into by the orderly geometry of development. I could see the runoff from great rivers spilling out into the oceans. I could see the dead spots. The constant queue of storms in the Atlantic. Dust storms. Floods. And at night … I could see humanity clustered on the surface like bacteria, our wasted energy blazing out to the universe.”

  “You should have stayed up there and out of everyone’s business,” Roo said.

  “It gave me the perspective to see what needed to be done,” Beauchamp said. “It will be the perfect storm. Like selectively cutting a forest so the fires don’t destroy all the trees, this culling will cleanse continents. It will ease resource use, lower population. It will prevent the clash of civilizations. People will stay in their own natural countries, because there will be enough for all.”

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. That’s some racist bullshit.” Roo kicked at his restraints, and pulled a muscle somewhere in his left thigh, the one still sore from the healing bone.

  Rhodes, Roo thought, I really hope the location tracker you put on me is still working.

  “Racist?” Beauchamp yelled. “You look at me and you think that, don’t you? But don’t you dare call me that. The men who kidnapped me, they were racists. Racist against Westerners. They tortured us. Raped my wife. No, you are the racist, Jones, throwing that card out the moment you hear something you don’t like.”

  “What, the first person who says it dealt it? That shit hasn’t been true since kindergarten,” Roo said.

  “No. The things I believe are facts. I hate no single person. But no one will face the fact that world is overburdened. Failing.”

  “Bullshit. A person in the third world uses a tenth the material and resources of someone like you, Beauchamp. If you’re serious about what you believe, you’re targeting the wrong group.”

  Beauchamp snarled. He grabbed the fairing to shut Roo in. “Do you have any last words, Mr. Jones?”

  Roo thought about it. One always knew people like this walked around. He’d encountered epithets, people who stared at him a little too long. Everyone had seen old video of people goose-stepping in black and white.

  Bu
t staring at a crazy-assed dude like Beauchamp left the mind a bit scattered with a cross section of just simple rage, and not a little bit of bewilderment.

  What the hell did you say to a Hitler 2.0 wannabe?

  “Fuck. You,” Roo said calmly.

  “Good-bye, Prudence Jones,” Beauchamp said.

  “It’s Roo, motherfucker!” The inside of the capsule faded to dark with a bang and then the sound of latches locking him in.

  * * *

  When he was a kid, in a cinder-block home with a distant relative, he’d seen a show about a magician who could escape from any restraints.

  The trick was dislocating the thumb.

  With the capsule closed, there wasn’t going to be too much time before launch. Roo felt himself being moved around. Heard muffled voices outside the capsule as Beauchamp gave orders.

  Roo pulled on his right hand. Yanked against the rope restraints until he felt skin beginning to scrape off against the rope as he strained with everything he could manage.

  The capsule trundled about some more, headed for the walkways over the pit so it could be loaded into the barrel of the Verne cannon.

  Roo arched his back and yanked until he felt tendons stretch. The pain made his eyes water, but he didn’t let up. Not until the faint popping sensation of the thumb forced him to scream.

  He pulled his hand free.

  Now for the other.

  Roo began to pull, and looked up in surprise as the capsule opened. He hadn’t heard the fairing being unfastened. Too much focus, too much pain. Kit leaned in, her blond hair dangling down. “Roo? Are you okay?”

  He stared at her, nodded, then raised his right hand, the thumb dangling uselessly. “Knife?” he hissed. The hurricane was in the background. Always. Like the sound of a large jet airliner landing overhead, but on constant repeat.

  She was already cutting his other arm free, close enough to him that she didn’t have to yell. “I see you’ve met my father again. A pleasant man, yes? Do you still want to have that drink on the shore together you promised me back in Dominica?”