Past the amusement park was an empty shopping mall done up in an amusement-park theme. The faux-marble pillars outside the dead department stores featured vintage-esque signs for a place called Wonderland. Annie passed a banner featuring cane-bearing gents and parasol-carrying women gunning down moon men. The mall was inspired by the old park she’d just crossed.
People once had fun for its own sake. Then fun became shopping with a fun veneer. Such a place was without a spirit long before Mr. Brill came to take it.
After the mall came a narrow, cracked road with the remnants of a double-yellow line running down its center. Annie soon reached an intersection where the pavement ahead was torn up for construction, broken into large chunks of decaying asphalt. She had no choice but to turn left onto an even narrower road, identified by a rust-abbreviated sign as “ntier.”
Her little boy was out here. On his own.
“Bad parent” was too kind a term for her level of failure. Avenging Annie, Char used to call her when she was hell-bent on fixing someone’s mistake, but Char knew enough to leave it alone when Annie was tackling one of her own.
At the end of the road, she did her lopsided lope through a gravel parking lot filled with the oxidized corpses of a dozen school buses. They rested on squashed tires that lent them a cockeyed, lazy composure. The question of the name on the partial sign was answered by the neatly painted letters on the side of each: Frontier Day Camp.
She continued down a gravel road, past an assortment of storage sheds and two hulking converted barns. The place had been a farm before it was a camp.
The roll-up door to one of the barns was open. Inside, generations of kids and counselors had marked their time at Frontier in thick, bright paint. Diane did so in broad aqua strokes in ’68. Mush followed in coral with an even wider brush in ’72. Skeeter left word in hunter green a year later.
The road took her along an overgrown athletic field and a ring of painted turquoise boulders placed around a fire pit. It ran off into a treed-in patch just past a swimming pool that the years had turned into an algae-crusted petri dish. The hurricane fence surrounding it was no longer any sort of barrier, but no kid would get near that water, given the stink and the likelihood of snapping turtles the size of rider-mowers beneath the slime. And there weren’t any children around anyway.
She damn near missed the Black Hawk.
Annie only happened to look back because she wanted to see how far she’d come. Spotting the helicopter across the athletic field with the sun in her eyes, the machine’s paint job camouflaging it against the trees, was a matter of not-to-be-hoped-for-twice luck.
She hit the deck. They’d all watched the propaganda videos of the Ravagers running live-fire exercises in the choppers. June Medill had followed Truitt’s orders to the letter and made the data-diggers watch the footage to remind them of who they worked for—and what kind of strength backed him. It wasn’t unheard of for the Black Hawks and their Ravagers to hunt down staffers like her who decided the job was no longer a fit.
You didn’t resign. Mr. Brill retired you. Everyone knew that.
Limping along, how long had she been exposed to those in the Black Hawk or to the troopers who might be deployed around the field? There was a chance that they weren’t looking for her—that they were on some unrelated mission. But she knew how tightly Mr. Brill managed resources—all expenditures were about ROI, and she’d taken a lot of know-how with her.
She remained flat on her stomach on the crushed stone, waiting to hear the sound of boots on gravel or feel the prod of a rifle barrel in the back. Between wondering how she’d be able to make her way out of range and worrying over her lack of progress toward Zach, it only felt like a month or two.
She’d been dumb-lucky all along, or maybe Truitt and the boys were just toying with her to see where she’d go. She prepared herself for the inevitable crackle of a nearby radio or a truncheon upside the skull.
What she didn’t count on was what she got—the rapid-fire knock of a far-off woodpecker, the trill of a cicada, and long silences. No arrest. No boots swishing through the knee-high grass of the overgrown field. Nothing.
She didn’t feel safe enough to stand and survey the area. So she fired up her phone to see if Char knew how many units were operating in the area or, that being too much to ask, something as simple as where the hell she was.
The phone greeted her with zero bars, zero signal. Yet an answer awaited her: “Your ride’s here.”
After a sufficient amount of time in combat, Annie lost the ability to wake up in the morning without the fear that someone out there might want her dead.
Developing that level of foreboding required two shots. The first had to be close, the next nearer still. With the second one came the realization that the shooter was trying to leave you bleeding in the dirt and was, in fact, methodically sighting in to ensure that you soon would be.
It dawned on you that some people’s plans involved stopping your heart. After that, you no longer saw the world as a place that by default desired you to be in it.
Everything took on a muted tone of vigilance. Beware the unseen who sees.
So Annie decided against strolling across the field to the chopper, shouting out greetings and asking the Ravagers what kind of MRE desserts they might like to trade. She advanced with care—poised for the static rising up the spine that would have her kissing the ground, frantic, weighing her next move on the way down.
Closing in, she saw, heard, and felt nothing. That didn’t soothe her in the least. If the chopper was her way onward—and she noted that Charlene had never said where it would take her—who was supposed to fly the thing?
She saw who wasn’t supposed to when she drew close enough to spot the toes of two polished black boots through the open side hatch. Those boots didn’t move, and she knew that no matter how sneaky she’d been, she’d made enough noise for whoever was inside to hear her.
Her days as a trained warrior slipping unheard over the sand were long gone. She was a freaked-out mom who had no practice advancing through tall grass in a hot situation. Yet whoever was in those boots didn’t budge when she snapped a stick beneath her heel.
Because there wasn’t anyone in them. The uniform draped over the seat was empty, too, as if the person who’d worn it had been spirited away or turned to powder, like the unnamed grayscale soldiers in late-night alien-invasion movies. The helicopter’s only inhabitant was a dead pilot whose arms dangled at his sides, fingernails a half-inch shy of scraping the cockpit floor.
Annie entertained the notion that maybe Char knew what she was talking about—that maybe the helicopter represented no threat. In which case, the worst part of the situation was that there were no living fliers to be seen.
She worked her way around the Black Hawk and peered into the cockpit at the slumped body of the pilot. He looked like he’d fallen asleep, his bones jellied while he dreamt of someplace better.
He was pitched forward in his harness, his helmet’s ebony face-plate an electrical storm of cracks. Blood crusted his pants and seat. Maybe he’d had a hard landing against the control panel, had broken his neck. Whatever had befallen him, he wasn’t taking her anywhere.
Wait—what was she doing?
A man was dead, Ravager or no, and she thought only of what he couldn’t do for her? Maybe the pinkies weren’t entirely gone from her system.
How many pilots had she known during her deployment? Could she remember their names now? Where had her caring gone?
Ravagers had no identification on their black uniforms. Brill thought of them as just another asset, and he exploited their sense of duty to command them. They wore no dog tags. They had no identities. So there was nothing to call the dead man unless she gave him a name of her own.
The only one that came to her was that of a ghostly soldier from TV-watching years gone by. Weston. The pilot would be Chief Warrant Officer Weston, a name that was better than none at all.
“I’m sorry,
Weston,” she told the dead man. “I wish there were more I could do for you.”
Weston showed no gratitude. But he wore an M9 in a holster. However she moved on from this place—whether by air as Char indicated or at her own limping pace—it would be a good idea to arm herself.
She surveyed the scene behind her yet again. She saw no signs of life across the field. There was no helpful pilot on his or her way to whisk her off into the sky and carry her to Zach.
The Commons was built on dream and memory, but Brill owned most of both. The Annies of The Commons didn’t receive deliverance from thin air.
A breeze kicked up, rustling the tall grass in the sun. The warmth of the sound in contrast to her predicament brought a small stab of despair. The real world was giant enough. This one, for all she knew, was even larger.
Zach was out there in it, and she didn’t know where. The promise of a ride to him—if indeed that was what Char meant, and if indeed it really was Char texting her—was a heartless prank.
The grass swayed. The leaves in the nearby trees whispered. They said that Annie was stuck with a dead pilot.
What she heard next ran counter to that. She hadn’t been doped up enough to forget the sound of a Beretta slide pulling and returning to chamber a round.
She faced the cockpit again. What registered first was the intense blue of CWO Weston’s right eye, now seen easily as he glared through his shattered visor.
The next thing was the terrible void of the barrel’s nose. She couldn’t help but stare into it—and at the former dead man who aimed it.
28
A Strangelove Fetish
The hair-madillo, as it turned out, was a far cry from its underpowered Type Two forebear. It was electric, armored, and quick.
Nicolette drove, and the ride was so smooth that Paul didn’t realize how fast they were going until he checked the speedometer. The needle was nestled comfortably at 125. These hippies liked their tech.
After a half-hour ride that would’ve taken twice that in a lesser vehicle, they left the highway. A series of ever-narrowing roads carried them past overgrown fields, abandoned houses, and imploded barns. Emaciated cattle, their hides taut like shrink-wrapped calaveras, were penned in by wire fences of barbs and rust. D.W. explained that the landscape had been shaped by one Journeyman’s memories of childhood farm foreclosures and the misery and decline that followed.
Several more turns put them on a pitted road winding through woods of primeval density. The surfaces were more pothole than pavement, but again, Paul wouldn’t have known had he not looked at the asphalt ahead. The microbus absorbed the terrain’s abuse with ease and handled curves like it was traveling a track designed just for it.
As they approached a house-sized pile of rocks and rubble, a hole of light up ahead indicated they’d soon be leaving the trees. Nicolette let up on the gas, and Liam thumbed a password into his smartphone.
The front of the pile lifted up—a gate revealing a hidden garage. Nicolette cut the bus to the opposite side of the road and backed in.
“Neat,” Porter said as they climbed out. “I don’t remember this.”
“We keep plenty busy with mods and projects,” D.W. said. “We don’t want to announce our presence to anyone passing through.”
“Who would that be?”
“Ravagers, mostly. They already know about us, of course, but they have no idea how we’ve grown.”
“And how have you grown?”
D.W. chuckled as the gate dropped behind him. The garage was a pile of rocks again. Water even burbled up from between two of the larger stones, completing the deception.
They walked out of the woods and across a field to a downcast one-room cabin that looked as if it could be flattened by a sneeze. After the impressive illusion of the garage, Paul expected to step into a high-tech palace, but the interior matched the outside. A couple of old chairs whose glue had long since departed flanked a neglected fireplace and a table that hadn’t seen level in decades, if ever.
Paul tried to keep the surprise off his face. Rain surveyed the room with a practiced stoicism. Ken and Po, similarly, betrayed nothing.
Nicolette seemed touched by the group’s attempt at manners.
Liam pressed his palm against a portion of the wall over the fireplace. The wood glowed green under his hand. A section of the rough plank floor opened with a hydraulic hiss, exposing a steel stairway lit by indigo LEDs.
“Come on down,” Nicolette said. “You’ll love what we’ve done in the basement.”
Mr. Brill sat slumped in his desk chair, eyes closed and head back, as if dozing. Truitt knew better. The big man was hard at work in the guise of the Shade, lids fluttering as he guided the shadow beast. He merged more completely with it, his breathing deeper.
The monitors floating around Mr. Brill displayed what the monster saw. It traveled through thick woods, outpaced by the microbus driven by the Envoy’s friends.
Two sources tracked the movements of the Envoy and Journeyman. The first was the visual input from the Shade. The second was a data stream available only to Mr. Brill. He’d shared nothing about it with Truitt.
The Shade rested. Sheltered from the morning sun by the trees, it studied the tiny cabin as the pathetic structure slowly lost its struggle against gravity in the adjacent field.
Rhythmic blades announced the approach of a Ravager helicopter overhead. Mr. Brill stirred in his trance.
When the beat of the chopper’s rotor was loudest, the Shade rushed the cabin. The ground around it remained in shadow as it kept pace with the Black Hawk above. It stayed beneath the machine as it buzzed the sad little hut, safe from the sun’s damaging rays.
The beast plowed into the cabin door, smashing it open. Mr. Brill grunted with the effort. The barrier had been more solid than it looked.
The Shade entered, panting, Mr. Brill breathing with it. A look around revealed a dirty little space that appeared to be unoccupied.
But Mr. Brill had chosen to focus on it. Mr. Brill did nothing without a reason, and that reason was always profit.
The stairs descended ten long flights beneath the surface. At the bottom, Liam led them through three heavy access hatches as thick as Paul’s arm was long, each of which required a breath scan from him before opening. They entered a tunnel hallway large enough to accommodate foot and vehicle traffic together and passed both as they progressed deeper into what looked to be a military complex.
The people in the tunnels were dressed in uniforms identical to those worn by their three hosts. All sported headbands and beads—the women with hair past their shoulders, the men with equally long hair, many with beards as well.
Some carried clipboards, like counselors headed off to teach campers the proper care of an automatic weapon. Others had laptops. All were armed.
It was some operation. Even the usually guarded Rain appeared to be impressed as she watched the hippie soldiers and their firepower.
They stopped at an elevator, and she caught the eye of a passing soldier who looked to be about her age. The guy smiled. She held his gaze for a long second before looking away.
Paul’s face grew hot.
D.W. came to his rescue without knowing it by choosing that moment to start telling them about the complex. “We take credit for finding it, not building it. All this came from one Journeyman, a five-star general with a Strangelove fetish. Believe it or not, as much as we’ve grown, we only use part of the place. There are miles of tunnels and hundreds of missile silos. Frankly, we barely maintain security in our little sector as it is. We’d never be able to cover even a fraction of the thing.”
Porter watched hippies pass as Nicolette stopped the group at a pair of brushed-steel elevator doors and pressed her palm to an adjacent reader pad. “All bona fides,” he said. “Brill leaves you alone?”
“Ravagers probe our defenses, but they ease up if we don’t fight back hard enough to make them suspect what’s down here,” Liam said. “The bona fides w
ho’ve been hiding out up there all this time find their way here once they’re told about us. We’d love to rescue the new people, too, but we can’t afford to go to war.”
“Yet,” Nicolette added as the elevator arrived. “We can’t yet.”
The Shade sucked wet wind, and Mr. Brill matched it breath for breath. Spinning in place, the monster scanned the cabin’s interior. As it turned, ropes of black drool flew, splattering the walls, telling Mr. Brill all he needed to know about the space.
Truitt had to look away from the screen before he grew sick from the motion.
After too long a time for Truitt’s taste, the spinning ceased. The beast’s gaze focused on a spot in the middle of the floor. It hopped over to it, its breathing ragged and excited, and looked down at a patch of planks that, to Truitt’s eye, were no different from its neighbors. They were all splinters and raised nail heads.
Again, Mr. Brill knew better. A portion of the wall over the fireplace glowed blue, and the section of floor in front of the Shade rose up, exposing a hatchway beneath.
Mr. Brill smiled again.
The trip down should have felt like jumping off a skyscraper, given how fast they plummeted, but there was no physical sensation of it. The chief indication of the elevator’s speed was a digital readout indicating the number of feet passing. Paul tried to watch it, but the display made him feel queasy.
Next to the readout was an old military insignia that had been redone in rainbow colors. Dancing bears flanked it, and larger versions of the same peace signs that were on the hippie-soldier uniforms graced the doors.
“Your tax dollars at work,” D.W. said. “Masada, only down deep, not up high.”
A loud rumble shook the elevator as it reached bottom and came to a halt.
“Masada didn’t end well, did it?” Nicolette said.
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