Winston took two quick steps back from the tree and raised Little e, tubes flexing and arcs blazing. Only a second later, Agent Parker also stepped into sight, but he had his gun drawn and leveled at Winston’s chest.
“I’m done messing around,” said the agent. “I’m going to count to three, and then this is going to get a lot worse for you, understand?”
“It seems pretty bad already. Can we discuss the details?”
“One!”
Winston gave the woods another scan and saw nothing that would help him. He tightened his grip on Little e, and the energy arcs gathered into a tight, swirling ball suspended between the tube tips.
“Two!”
Suddenly, Agent Parker’s aim wavered, and he took one fumbling step forward. His lips parted with surprise and pain. With his free hand, he reached behind his shoulder. Then his legs buckled, and he fell forward onto his hands and knees. The gun tumbled and bounced beyond his reach. Winston saw a red dart flange quivering in the in the broad, fleshy area below his neck. Thirty feet away, partially hidden behind another tree, Shade stood grinning, fully assembled blowgun in his hand. He caught Winston’s glance and raised a finger to his lips, urging silence.
The agent looked up at Winston. His expression showed confusion, as if Winston had suddenly grown a second head. He reached one shaking hand toward Winston, overbalanced, and fell forward onto the side of his face with a small “uunff!” A few seconds later, his eyes closed. Thankfully, Winston could see the fabric of his jacket still rising and falling. He lowered Little e.
Shade slung the long tube of the blowgun across his back, where it sat awkwardly over his pack. He approached Winston and said in a hushed, excited voice, “That worked really well. Good job.”
Winston wanted to strangle the friendly smile off his face. “Can you stop enjoying this so much? He almost had me!”
Shade shrugged. “It’s all good.”
Down the hill and off to their right, Winston heard a sharp crack, as from a small gun. Shade squinted thoughtfully into the trees and made a tsk-tsk sound.
“Trying to flank us,” he said.
“What was that?”
“Remember the mouse traps?”
Winston nodded.
“Remember the wire, tent stakes, and gunpowder caps?” he asked.
He nodded again.
“There you go. I strung six of them to give us a sense of their positions and maybe keep them nervous.”
Hearing him talk like this was almost surreal. “Keep them nervous?” Winston asked. “I’m just trying not to pee my pants.”
Shade’s frown returned as he bound the agent’s wrists and ankles in duct tape. “But you’re doing really well. Why are you worried?”
Not waiting for an answer, Shade stuffed his other filthy sock into the tranquilized agent’s mouth and once again secured it with duct tape. Satisfied, he stood and dragged the agent off into a clump of bushes.
Winston closed his eyes. He needed to concentrate. They had to get out of this forest. His mom was still out there, as was the fifth Alpha Machine piece. Which should he go for? Every hour spent out here depleted Winston’s resources and gave Bledsoe time to use the geoviewer for any purpose he wanted. Still, he had no idea where to start looking for his mom — or how not to die at Hanford.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Winston said.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Shade replied.
“Everything around the hangar will be thick with cops, though, and I don’t trust the open highway. Do you still have that map? What’s on the far side—”
They heard the sharp report of another gunpowder cap, this one much closer.
“Not yet!” Shade hissed as he pushed Winston away. “Keep left. Find the path. And make sure you only step on bare ground.”
Shade trotted deeper into the trees and soon vanished.
Run, thought Winston. Only bare ground. Find the path.
He jogged down the hill, watching intently for bare ground, which wasn’t always easy given how much underbrush there was in places. Winston kept edging to his left and eventually came back to the path. A path, anyway. He was now so freaked out and disoriented that he felt lost. His only hope was that whatever path he followed would eventually join with others and he would end up in the right place.
At a few points, sprays of twigs and leaves obscured the trail, and Winston did his best to either sidestep or jump over these, never knowing if or where Shade might have set some booby trap. In some places, it was almost like playing hopscotch. He became so engrossed in the ground and his footsteps that the X in the path took Winston by surprise. Shade hadn’t said anything about looking for an X, but the placement of the sticks was clearly intentional — two stripped branches about an inch in diameter, each a couple of feet long, one laid perpendicularly over the other.
Winston stopped and peered more closely. He saw blue fishing wire looped around one of the sticks and followed it with his gaze into the brush. Why blue? That was so easy to see.
About fifty yards into the brush, Winston saw something moving in the trees too high off the ground to be an animal. A few steps revealed the object to be an FBI agent, jacket tails flopping around his head, which swung back and forth five feet from the ground. He dangled from the rope cinched tight around his ankles. His hands were duct taped behind his back and, of course, another sock was taped firmly into his mouth. Apparently, the X of sticks and impossible-to-miss fishing line had lured the man to investigate right into one of Shade’s traps.
He spotted Winston, thrashed a bit more, and said, “Mmm-mmpphh!”
Winston gave him a small smile and a wave, then continued jogging downhill.
From what sounded like a surprisingly short distance below him, Winston heard the crack of one of Shade’s mousetrap alarms. As he slowed to a walk, there came a second, much louder report, then a third.
Gunshots.
Without thinking, Winston broke into a run. He ducked and bobbed along the path, trying to dodge branches, then came up short when two figures appeared on the path before him. He recognized the spot: deadfall to the left, rocky ground to the right, small clearing in the middle. In that clearing, Shade lay on his belly, hands clasped behind his head. Above him stood a man with mud-smeared slacks and a bald strip along his head — the same agent Shade had shocked earlier. The man wore a malicious grin and had one black, mud-crusted dress shoe planted squarely atop Shade’s backpack. His handgun pointed at Winston’s chest. The two broken halves of Shade’s blowgun lay several feet behind them.
“Two for one,” he growled. “I’m a very good shot, and I’ve had a very bad day. Drop it.”
Winston swallowed nervously even as he breathed heavily from his downhill dash. “Again?” But he complied and let Little e fall where he stood.
***
The agent pointed his gun at the back of Shade’s head. “You’re going to come here, very slowly, understand? You’re going to take the handcuffs out of my hip holster and put them on your friend here. If you so much as try to scratch an itch, I will blow his head off.”
The man moved his gun a few inches to the side and fired into the ground. A flurry of dirt exploded a foot away from Shade’s ear. Shade and Winston screamed simultaneously. All of Shade’s recent bravado and confidence had vanished.
“Any questions?” asked the agent.
Winston barely heard the man over the sudden ringing in his ears, which is what gave him the idea. Still, he forced himself to stop and consider. He would only get one chance. He shook his head.
“Good,” said the agent. “Handcuffs, nice and slow.”
Winston was happy to move slowly. It gave him the time to mentally reach out and find the agent’s earpiece and cell phone. At this range, he didn’t need Little e, but deciphering the circuit paths and how to overload them took considerable focus.
“OK, not that slow,” said the agent.
“Just…trying to…cooperate,” Wins
ton managed.
When he was only two steps away from the agent and starting to reach his hand out for the man’s pocket, he found what he needed. Winston pulled all the energy he could from the phone’s lithium-ion battery. It was less than half-charged, having been powered up all night, but it was enough. The rapid spike in voltage and drain, combined with Winston overriding the phone’s shutdown sensor, heated the battery electrolytes far past their safety limits.
“Ah!” said the agent. He shifted and swatted at his pocket with his gun hand. “AHH!”
His battery ignited.
There was a loud, muffled pop, and a burst of yellow flame erupted from the man’s hip. He howled in pain, eyes frantically searching for a way to be rid of this sudden agony. He held his gun up high and batted at his right pocket with his left hand. The scorched fabric gave way, and the phone tumbled to the ground.
Then Winston overloaded his earpiece, and the shrill screeching was easily audible around the clearing. The man involuntarily hunched over, right hand convulsing to the side of his head. The guy would never get more disoriented than this moment.
Winston used the small gap between them to do his best impression of the lineman tackle Shade had given Brian Steinhoff in the gym so long ago. He botched it entirely, of course. His shoulder collided with the man just below his armpit, and he forgot to wrap his arms around the man’s body. He also tripped over Shade. Nevertheless, the impact was sufficient to knock the bewildered man off-balance and reeling to the side. He hit the deadfall at a bad angle, and his knee collapsed. He fell over the log, and his gun flew far into the shadows.
In an instant, Shade was on his knees and scrambling toward his broken blowgun.
The agent’s hand gripped the top of the deadfall, fingertips groping for a hold. The man pulled himself up, eyes blazing, lips peeled back from clenched teeth. This was not the look of a man dedicated to truth, justice, and calm diplomacy. He jumped and got one foot up on the fallen tree. From there, his next move would be to pounce on Shade.
Shade wasn’t waiting for that. He dove for the back part of his blowgun just as the agent leaped from the deadfall. The man’s feet hit the ground only an arm’s reach from Shade’s head, just as Shade’s hand seized around the blowgun shaft. He rolled away from the agent — no small feat of strength, since he had to go over the bulging mass of his backpack — and when he came to rest, it was with the blowgun’s mouthpiece pressed to his lips.
The agent reached for Shade, finger’s outstretched as they clearly meant to seize around his throat.
Shade adjusted his aim to miss the hand and blew. The dart burst from the broken end of the tube with a quiet poof and embedded itself in the man’s throat just above his Adam’s apple. Then he was on Shade, one hand locked on the front of his orange sweat jacket while the other made a fist and pulled back to strike.
Winston grabbed the man’s wrist with both hands.
Even as Winston pulled on the arm, trying to get the man off of Shade, Winston could see and feel the strength draining out of him. He wavered, and when he fell to the side, Winston let him go. A moment later, his eyes were closed, arms splayed out, face in the dirt.
Winston helped Shade to his feet. They stood over the sleeping agent, dazed and breathing heavily.
“He was going to blow my head off,” Shade breathed. “For real.”
Winston patted his shoulder. “This is why kids should stay in school.”
Shade gave a long sigh. “True that. Oh, by the way.” He mustered a grin. “You made his phone blow up. That was awesome!”
“Thanks. I’m not sure it’ll be my most appreciated superpower.”
Shade chuckled. “Yeah, probably not.” He glanced around them, searching for any signs of movement. “You know, soon as one of these guys gets found, they’re gonna call it in and bury this hill in special ops. What’s our next move?”
Winston had no next move. He only had the impulse that his heart demanded he follow and the barest, flimsiest idea of how to pursue it.
“I have to go after my mom.”
Shade’s eyes narrowed. “We.”
That confused Winston for a second, but then he saw where Shade was headed. “Dude, I can’t take you with me. I’m going back to 1966 to find Theo. I’ll be safe there, and he can give me a ride to—”
“We,” repeated Shade more emphatically. “You are not bailing on me, understand? Stop trying to do this on your own. In fact, you need more than me, in case this whole recent experience doesn’t make the point clear enough.”
Winston looked up and the sky and, feeling tired and exasperated, said, “I don’t have more than you. I mean, there’s Theo, but he’s back then. You’re all I’ve got now, and, as you so brilliantly pointed out, that guy was gonna kill you.”
Shade poked Winston in the chest with his finger. Winston hated that.
“We need more help,” Shade said.
“Like whom?”
“Seriously? Don’t you whom me right now. What about Alyssa?”
Winston’s reaction came out before he could even consider the words. “No way. Not Alyssa. I mean…we need shock troops, not more kids.” Winston knew how hollow the words sounded even as he said them, but the last thing he wanted was to endanger Alyssa. “No. I can do this.”
Shade paused to think. “She used to talk about her grandfather. He was a jet pilot in the Air Force, if I remember.”
“I don’t think the Air Force is going to help a nuclear terrorist.”
“But he’ll know people. She’ll know people.” When Winston again tried to dismiss the idea, Shade poked him again. “What have you got to lose, man? Just try it! You got somewhere else to be?”
“Well…the last piece is at Hanford,” Winston said. “The nuclear reactor place in Washington. That’s our final destination.”
“But first your mom.”
“Yes. Although I have no idea where she is.”
Shade nodded. “Right. And Bledsoe’s not going to just hand her over.”
“Nope.” Winston took a deep breath. “Unless we make him.”
“How?”
Winston shook his head. “I don’t know yet. But I do know that he’s going to kill her tonight.”
“OK.” Shade began to pace in front of the fallen FBI agent, head bowed. “Bledsoe is the only one who knows where your mom is, and he’s using her to get the Alpha Machine from you.”
“Right.”
“So he’s going to tell you where and when to show up.”
“Yes.”
“Unless you tell him first. It’s straight out of The Art of War. Bring the enemy to your battlefield. Don’t let him pick.”
“But I don’t have—”
Winston stopped as the beginning of an idea began to form in his mind.
“Alyssa’s grandfather was in the Air Force?”
Shade bobbed his head. “I think that’s what she said. You really should try, you know, talking to girls. It’s amazing what you might learn.”
Winston ignored that. “All right. Then I’ll get Theo to take me to Alyssa.”
Shade tapped his temple. “Hel-lo. Alyssa isn’t in 1966. She’s — ah, dang!”
“Time machine,” they said in unison.
“Can you get out of here by yourself?” asked Winston.
“Of course.”
“OK.” Winston finally had his tactical brainpower engaged, and possibilities started to interlock in his mind. “If you can get to the Fred Meyer back in Tillamook, I’ll figure out how to have a ride there waiting for you this afternoon. By the main entrance at, say, three o’clock.”
Shade beamed. “Nice! Now, where are we meeting up?”
Winston gave the idea one last spin in his imagination as he took the Alpha Machine pieces from his pack. He couldn’t think of anything better.
“Council Crest. But before that, I think we’re gonna be hungry.”
Shade fist-pumped with anticipation.
37
> Arrival at Alyssa
As soon as he landed in the fall of 1966, Winston jogged from the forest down to the blimp hangar, once again set alongside its massive twin within the airport. The old lady at the front office, once sufficiently charmed with a story about Winston having been stranded by prankster friends, let him use her phone. Two hours of pacing followed in which he waited for Theo to close up his museum and drive from Astoria. In each of those minutes, Winston fought the urge to comb the phone book for his father’s name. The potential for damaging his dad’s plans far outweighed any emotional benefit to himself.
While waiting, Winston debated over how much to tell Theo. The man was understandably annoyed at suddenly having to play teen chauffeur after months of not knowing what had become of Winston after his drop from the Astoria Bridge. He deserved answers, but Winston couldn’t stop hearing his father’s words in his mind: The future is slippery. If he told Theo everything, that might give Theo time to amass the army of Council Crest shock troops Winston wanted. But Theo would surely be pushing one hundred years old by then. Even with QVs, Winston doubted that time and random chance would spare him. Fewer than two in every ten thousand Americans lived to one hundred. Even if the QVs gave him a 10x improvement, those were still terrible odds. That meant whatever preparations Theo made would have to be passed off to another person, who would have to know everything about Area X and the Alpha machine — and that was more chance than Winston wanted to take.
And, of course, the more Theo prepared, the bigger a target he would become for whatever government agency sat behind Bledsoe. That alone might undo everything and lead them to Winston and Claude before he could hide the Alpha Machine pieces.
Theo arrived with a brown bag full of Chinese food for their ride to Portland. He appeared just as Winston remembered. Winston said nothing of the disaster at the hangar, only that he was still searching for the other Alpha Machine pieces while Bledsoe pursued him. His one slipup came as Winston went through his backpack, confirming what was in order and what had been lost along the way. Theo commented on Little e, saying he thought he’d seen it drop into the river. Only then did Winston realize that he’d left the geojumper on the seat between them, but the geoviewer he had pulled from the Japanese bomb in Theo’s museum was conspicuously missing. He quickly put everything in his bag, hoping that Theo hadn’t been observant enough to spot the disappearance.
Winston Chase- The Complete Trilogy Page 59