by Patrick Lee
Travis thought of the falling bomb—clear of the plane before the first Patriot hit. Not just clear. Dropped. The bomb had arced and landed precisely as the pilot wanted it to. Not straight into the elevator shaft—the logical bull’s-eye if the goal was to level the entire building—because dropping it there would’ve damaged the Breach’s chamber, or at least buried it.
Holt had deliberately avoided doing that. He’d settled for taking out half the complex and hoping the shockwave would kill everyone inside.
But he wouldn’t rest on that hope. Not for a minute. Which meant there was more trouble coming, and probably soon.
Travis considered that as he strained for the sound he knew he’d hear—would probably already hear if his ears weren’t ringing. He turned his head and held his breath, and finally picked it up: the crying and calling of survivors among the intact north-side floors. The sounds all came from the top five or six residence levels. It made sense: much deeper and the shockwave would’ve been unsurvivable. Even the backup lighting was sparser below that point—the air compression of the blast had destroyed most of the bulbs. Travis tried to gauge the number of voices he was hearing. Maybe a dozen. That too made sense, given that most of Border Town’s population would’ve been down in the labs at this hour. Only a few would’ve been up in the living quarters.
He twisted and looked at Paige, crouched just behind him. She could see past his head well enough to understand the situation. She could hear the cries too. So could Bethany and the half dozen others in the hall behind her—the whole crowd from Defense Control.
“Is the stairwell still there?” Paige said.
Travis nodded. He kept his eyes on hers and saw them narrow.
“There’ll be kill squads on their way here,” she said. “Won’t there?”
“Staged and ready to chopper in as soon as the bomb hit,” Travis said. “From just outside our radar field. Which is what—forty-five miles?”
“About that.”
“Figure Black Hawks. What’s their top speed?”
“About a hundred eighty miles per hour,” Paige said. “Three miles a minute. So fifteen minutes’ flight time. And the defenses up top are all dead—they run on building power.”
Travis withdrew from the hole and stood. He faced the small crowd.
Evelyn pawed tear-soaked concrete dust from beneath her eyes, her gaze sliding back and forth between Travis and Paige, the question too obvious to need voicing: Why the fuck is this happening?
Travis didn’t answer. His mind was running the crucial math. There were six electric Jeeps up in the pole barn, fully charged. Straight-line over the desert, they could reach Casper, and they could do sixty with no trouble. The Jeeps were sandy brown, the same color as the ground, and Travis had never seen them kick up dust on the hardpan around this place. They didn’t even leave tire tracks. All of which meant they could avoid being spotted by the arriving choppers—but only with a serious head start. Travis’s gut said ten miles was the minimum safe distance; his head could do no better.
Evelyn was still waiting for an answer. So were all the others.
Travis looked at Bethany and indicated the tablet computer she was still holding. He could see its connection icon in the lower corner, red with a diagonal slash through it—Border Town’s wireless system had died with the power grid.
“From up on the surface,” Travis said, “you can get a signal from cell towers on I–25, right?”
Bethany nodded.
“Can you find out if there are spy satellites in visual range of this place?”
She nodded. “It’s not likely. One in four chance, any given hour or so.”
“Can you go up right now and find out?” Travis said. “And while you’re there, move the Jeeps outside, then scatter random clutter over where they were parked.”
She nodded again and didn’t say another word. She stepped past the hole and ran for the stairwell.
Travis turned to the others. “Look at your watches or your phones. Fix on a point in time exactly five minutes from right now.” He continued speaking as they did it. “You’re going to save who you can downstairs, but at the five-minute mark, you’re going to be sitting in the Jeeps up top, ready to go. All six Jeeps are leaving at that moment, together. Even one straggler a few minutes behind would get everyone else killed. Be there or you’re staying here.”
He didn’t wait to see what they thought of that plan. It didn’t matter what they thought. It was simply the only plan that didn’t end with everyone in the building dead. He turned and ran for the stairwell, and heard their footsteps following right behind him.
When they were two levels down Travis slowed and pulled Paige aside on a landing. He let the crowd pass.
“I have to go back up to B4 and do something,” he said. “We can’t leave that level intact for Holt’s people to find. They’ll see Defense Control and realize that’s where we would’ve watched the plane coming in. With that room still in place—and empty—they’ll know there were survivors who made it out.”
Paige’s eyes narrowed as she took his point. “If Defense Control were destroyed … they’d think they got us all.”
“They’d be sure of it. It wouldn’t occur to them that we left in Jeeps—that we even had Jeeps, forty miles from the nearest road. The charging station in the pole barn, all by itself, won’t tip them off; it could be used for a hundred different kinds of equipment.”
Paige nodded. Then fear crept into her expression. She looked upward, as if through the wall of the stairwell, toward B4.
“What are you planning to do?” she said.
“Nothing just yet. I’ll need a few minutes to get it ready. Come up with the last of the crowd, and call out into B4 when everyone’s above that level.”
“Travis, what are you—”
“No time. I’ll be fine. I’ll be up top right behind you.” Before she could say more, he continued. “I need you to do something too.”
“I’m already on it,” she said. “I’ll do it and then help with the survivors.”
“I know what you’re planning,” he said. “What I need is for you to not do it, if it looks too risky.”
“I have to try—”
“No you don’t. Not if it jeopardizes your life. If it’s too dangerous, just skip it and go right to the wounded.”
She started to protest, but he spoke over her again. “Promise.”
A second passed. She looked frustrated—but understanding.
“I promise.”
Then she was gone, down the stairs after the others.
Travis turned and sprinted up the flight they’d just come down.
He passed the hole the bunker buster had punched in the floor, and entered Defense Control, its workstations and its wall of screens dark and dead. He turned to the flat wall, with its row of giant, semi-portable mainframe computers—eight in all.
They were on wheels. Big industrial swivel casters the diameter of salad plates, with brake levers that could be locked or unlocked by stepping on them. Travis saw to his relief that only the front casters of each mainframe had been locked. He ran along the row, slamming his heel down on each lever and freeing each wheel. When he’d finished he ran back to the first mainframe in the line, the one nearest the door. He got a hand on its back corner, braced the other against the wall, and pulled.
For a second the thing didn’t budge. It had to weigh five hundred pounds. Then one of its casters pivoted and the whole unit lurched outward, exposing its power cord and data cable. Travis ripped both from their sockets, got hold of the mainframe once more and heaved it farther out. It protested again, clinging to its inertia even on the room’s slanted floor, but once it’d traveled even a few inches, all four casters fell in line with its direction of travel. It rolled smoothly, gaining momentum as Travis pushed it toward the wide-open door.
He eased it into the hallway and slipped past it, positioning himself on its downhill side. For the moment the huge machine,
its wheels still cocked sideways, held still where it’d come to rest. Travis, facing it, turned and looked over his shoulder at the hallway dipping sickeningly behind him. Forty feet away, the low point. The weak point.
How weak, exactly?
Travis doubted the sudden addition of five hundred pounds would make a difference.
Maybe four thousand would.
If it didn’t, he and all the others would probably be dead within a few hours, hunted down and captured after Holt’s people connected the dots here.
Travis stepped backward—down the slope—and pulled the mainframe gently toward him. The moment its wheels realigned, the thing came at him like a brawler. He dropped his shoulder against it and dug his shoes into the carpet and stopped it, then carefully walked it down the slope, one foot at a time. When he’d gone what he judged to be fifteen feet he stopped again, and keeping one heel braced on the floor, used the other to step on both caster brakes on the unit’s lower end.
He let go of it.
It stayed put.
He looked at his phone. Three and a half minutes left before the deadline he’d imposed.
He stepped around the mainframe and sprinted back to the door into Defense Control.
Paige’s first glance at the residence twisted her stomach. It’d been her home for over a decade. She’d shared it with Travis for more than a year now. The best year of her life, by an absurd margin, and almost everything that’d made it good had happened here on B16 in this little sanctuary.
Which had now been sliced in two.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, rocked by what lay beyond it. To her left was half of the living room. To her right was nothing at all. Just darkness and churning dust. The wall that’d held the LCD screen was gone, along with ten feet of floor space that’d extended from it. The couch was right on the brink, facing out into the void like some image out of a surreal magazine ad. Behind and to the couch’s left was the short hall that led to the bedroom, just out of sight from where she stood.
She stepped out of the doorway, crossed the room to the hall, and stopped at the bedroom’s threshold. The same ten feet had been lopped off here as in the living room. The bed was gone. The doorway to the closet was half gone—it’d perfectly straddled the cutoff. The closet itself lay mostly to one side, beyond the door, and had largely remained intact. Even from where she stood, Paige could see its back wall, and the built-in safe that now held the Tap.
She looked at the closet’s doorway again, and focused on the floor that passed through it—what little was left. While half the doorway itself remained, there was hardly anything to stand on beneath it. A two-inch ledge at one side. To get beyond, to the intact closet floor, would require holding onto the trim at the doorway’s remaining edge and swinging her body past it. Her center of gravity would be out over the emptiness during the bulk of that maneuver.
She moved forward across the room, slowing as she neared the closet’s doorway and the edge. There was no telling how strong the floor might be along the drop-off—or here where she was standing, for that matter. The carpet hid any cracks that might’ve been visible in the concrete beneath her, but she assumed they were there; the wall was spiderwebbed with them, surrounding the closet doorway and leading away from it in all directions.
The doorway’s trim was three feet from her outstretched hand now. She took another step. Leaned forward. Put her fingertips to the fluted wood and tested its strength by pushing outward on it, toward the chasm.
The cracked wall around the doorway disintegrated almost at a touch. The trim and three inches of concrete around it simply broke free and pitched out into the darkness and fell away.
Paige flinched and stumbled back, sprawling on her ass on the carpet. She stared at the ragged opening where the doorway had been.
She might still make it through into the closet. Where she’d planned to hold onto the trim, she could press the fractured wall between both hands and swing her body over the drop as planned.
Promise, Travis had said.
She stared at the opening and the wall safe ten feet beyond. Stared at the dust-filled abyss below.
From the levels above she heard the voices of the others, calling out and locating the injured.
She got to her feet, turned, crossed out of the bedroom, and sprinted for the corridor.
Travis pushed the last of the eight mainframes into the hallway and eased it into position with the others: they formed a single line extending down the slope, each butted up against the next, the whole mass held back by the first unit Travis had put in place. That one alone had its brakes on.
He watched the formation shudder and slip downward an inch as number eight settled into line.
Footsteps pounded past up the stairwell. Not the first he’d heard in the last minute. He looked at his phone again: thirty seconds left.
More footsteps, some running, some struggling. He turned toward the door and saw it draw open. Paige leaned through.
“Eleven survivors,” she said. “All but two can walk.” She frowned, her forehead creasing. “I couldn’t get it.”
“We’ll be okay,” Travis said.
Paige took in the mainframes for the first time. She saw the idea. Her eyes widened a little.
“Everyone’s above us?” Travis said.
Paige nodded slowly, most of her attention on the computers.
Travis ran to the low end of the line. He studied the two brakes, then stepped forward and jammed his foot hard onto the pedal nearest the wall. As it released the wheel, the entire formation groaned and moved six inches, then halted again.
Travis looked up at Paige in the doorway.
“Do I need to say it?” she said.
“Run your ass off?” He managed a smile. “No.”
Paige’s own smile was very weak, no match for the fear beneath it.
Travis stomped on the last brake lever and yanked his foot away, coming within a tenth of a second of having it crushed by the caster. He turned and sprinted up the slope, while the array of mainframes bumped and skittered and picked up momentum going the other way. He’d expected them to gather speed quickly, but he saw within the first second that he’d underestimated how quickly. Before he’d covered half the distance to the Defense Control doorway, and maybe a quarter of the distance to Paige at the stairwell door, all of the huge units had lumbered past him, thundering down toward the low point faster than a person could run. The whole corridor vibrated with their passage. It seemed to shudder and, though Travis hoped he was imagining it, to tilt even more steeply toward the low point far behind him.
He passed the Defense Control doorway, covered the short distance to the hole in the floor and vaulted right over it. Ten feet from Paige now. Maybe three steps to go. He’d taken only one of them when her body went rigid and her eyes widened all the way, looking past him now instead of at him.
Two steps remained, but in that instant Travis knew there was no time for them. His leading foot touched down. He let the leg bend more than usual, let his weight drop squarely onto it. Then he launched upward and forward, his momentum carrying him airborne toward the doorway.
He was five feet from it when the floor dropped out from beneath him. It ruptured along a line six inches shy of the stairwell, the concrete giving way like it was piecrust. Travis felt air rushing backward around him, pulled down through the stair shaft by the collapsing mass of B4. Paige threw herself aside, out of his way, and he passed across the threshold and crashed down on the landing. He stopped just short of toppling down the flight directly in front of him.
They missed the deadline by twenty seconds, but the Jeeps hadn’t left without them. There were still a few survivors making their way up the last ten feet to the pole barn: the hardest ten feet, since the stairwell didn’t go all the way to the surface. The final transit required a climb up the elevator shaft’s inset ladder. Travis and another man helped the two who couldn’t stand—they were at least able to grip the rungs.
<
br /> “No satellites,” Bethany said. She was standing in the barn when Travis emerged with the last survivor. “We’re free and clear for the next hour and then some.”
Travis nodded and passed the victim off to a man standing near Bethany, then stepped back onto the ladder and descended again to B2. He closed the shaft doors there, returned to the surface, swung out and closed those doors as well. The barn was empty now; the others had all gone to the Jeeps. Travis looked at the random equipment Bethany had piled and leaned around the charging station. The stuff looked like it’d been there for years. Perfect. He turned and ran out after the others.
They were twelve miles out when they saw the choppers: tiny black dots coming in low over the desert far to the east. They made straight for Border Town, which Travis could still see by the black smoke from the wrecked bomber. A minute later the choppers reached it, formed a stationary cluster, and descended.
Paige, Travis, and Bethany had a Jeep to themselves. The other Jeeps held three or four occupants each, the groupings based on country of origin. Bethany was already contacting the proper authorities within each government, sending them cell phone numbers for the survivors. Their respective intelligence agencies would need to get involved, and help them stay hidden until they could be extracted. Certainly no authorities here—local, state or federal—would be of help. Holt ultimately held sway over all of those.
The Jeeps would split up once they reached Casper. None would have the power to continue on to a different town, but within Casper itself the survivors would be safe enough, even on their own. No one would be looking for them, after all.
Travis already knew where he and Paige and Bethany would go, within the city. What they would do at that point was still undetermined, though he had a solid guess about it.
He looked at his phone.
9:20 A.M.
Ten hours and twenty-five minutes to the end of the road. Without the Tap in their arsenal, that span of time seemed agonizingly shortened, like the moment required for a guillotine to drop.
Chapter Twenty-Two