by Duncan, Ian
“Alright,” Cole said cheerily, mustering the most sanguine attitude he could manage. He cleared his mind of doubt, grasped the cable, and stood with his back to the drop, as one might when rappelling, but of course he had no climbing saddle or fall harness or descender or D-ring—just the determination to survive, and to overcome.
He looked up at Emily and found her pale blue eyes gazing at him, open to him, it seemed, in a way he hadn’t seen before. “Wish me luck.”
“Be careful,” she said.
Cole nodded. “You can be my lookout. If you see something I ought to know about, fire a single shot into the air.”
“Okay.”
Cole slid his heels to the edge, and then, quickly sliding one hand back while gripping tightly with the other, he worked his feet over the edge until they were planted on the rough stucco wall and his AR swung freely behind him, and the ground, thirty feet below, was only a blur in his peripheral vision that he dared not carefully consider.
He attempted to walk his feet down the wall while letting himself down with his hands, but only five feet over the edge his feet slipped, his body swung forward, and he banged his knees against the building, scraping his knuckles in the process.
“I can’t watch,” he heard Emily say above him.
Cole wrapped his legs around the cable dangling below him and tried to clamp it between his boots to create more friction, like a fast rope. He would have given anything, at that moment, for a pair of leather gloves. He managed to make ten more feet of progress, but the tendons in his arms had started to spasm and the palms of his hands burned so badly he wondered if he would have any skin left there at all.
So concentrated was Cole on the painful effort and critical technique of descending the cable, that the sound of bees hardly registered in his mind until he realized, at once, that the sound was coming from below him. He froze, gripped the cable, and looked down.
The drone was slowly ascending, rotors ablur. It climbed steadily until it hovered directly beside him, perhaps only six feet from his grasp.
“Sons of bitches,” Cole muttered. The bastards knew he couldn’t let go of the cable. Couldn’t grab it or swat it or shoot it down. Cole glared at the drone, at the dark glass eye that regarded him with serene detachment. He was filled with an insane hatred of the machine and its controllers, enough that he briefly contemplated leaping for it and taking it with him in what would, perhaps, be a fatal plunge to the ground. For one irrational moment it seemed it would be worth it.
Cole pressed his forehead against the cable and closed his eyes, trying to remember why he was doing this, who he was doing it for. Emily. The baby. Something more he couldn’t have explained. It was the type of thing he needed to do.
He began to work his way down again, grip and slip, squeeze and slide. The drone kept pace beside him. The air from its rotors fanned Cole as if a giant hummingbird were hovering beside him.
He had a thought. If he could grip the cable with one hand while he slid the other, could he grip with one hand a little longer? Long enough?
Yes. An impulse in Cole’s brain told his left hand to clamp down with everything left. It did. His right hand, still stinging from rope burn and aching from overuse, went for the Glock. The blocky little pistol came out of the chest rig with the satisfying hollow scrape of a holster being vacated. His eyes wild and bloodshot, Cole extended it toward the drone, his finger finding the trigger and the gun firing before he even aimed it, the pistol bucking in his hand, firing again and again at the drone, hardly three feet from the end of the barrel.
Cole got off five rounds before he lost the pistol and grappled wildly for the cable, slipping several feet before his hands found it and burned to a stop, his exhausted muscles able to clench just long enough for him to look down and see the pavement less than six feet below his feet.
Cole collapsed in a heap at the bottom of the wall, his heels hitting the pavement only an instant before his rump. He rolled away from the cable in silent agony, gasping for air. The air finally came, filling his lungs. Everything hurt, but nothing hurt all that bad, really. He willed himself upward onto his hands and feet.
A clattering noise on the pavement beside the wall. Cole looked. The drone was scraping along the ground, dragging itself like a broken insect, one of its rotor arms shattered and trailing behind it by a bundle of wires, the blades striking the ground uselessly.
Cole got to his feet and limped to it, stomping on the broken rotor arm and pinning the drone to the ground while the good rotor continued to spin impotently. Despite the rage he felt, Cole calmly unclipped the AR from his backpack, barely noticing his hands shaking and his knuckles bleeding before he raised the rifle and brought the butt down on the drone’s housing, once, twice, three times before the flying machine burst open and the rotors stopped and its circuitry was laid bare. Cole planted his heel in the wreck and ground it into the pavement.
Thirty-Eight
COLE CROSSED the parking lot in the waxing light of dawn with the rifle in his hands and a wary eye cast to the furthest corners of the strip mall, where he expected the armored vehicle or a horde of coughers—or perhaps both—to appear at any moment. He tried at first to jog and felt stabbing pains in his knees and one ankle, reducing him to a strange, limping skip that must have looked, to Emily and Brandon watching from the rooftop, like the pantomime of a child riding a hobby horse.
The first car he came to, a compact Lexus SUV with dark tinted windows, was parked neatly between the white lines and locked tight on both the passenger and driver’s side. A peek through the driver’s side window with his hand cupped against the warm glass revealed nothing out of the ordinary. A little red light blinked in perfect synchrony with a world of safety and assurances that no longer existed. Cole didn’t bother breaking the glass. A luxury SUV would likely have too many anti-theft features. Maybe if he had more time.
He started for the next vehicle, glancing back to the parapet wall on the rooftop, behind which stood Emily’s faithful silhouette. Seeing her spurred him on. The next car was a white Chrysler minivan with several frosted white bullet holes in the front windshield. When Cole circled it and opened the driver’s door, an incredible stench hit him in the face. The body lay twisted across the middle console as if blown back, the dark line of a leather dress belt encircling the corpse, and exerting upon it, if the swell of the flesh on either side were any indication, an equatorial constraint.
Cole stumbled back, bent to pavement, and vomited, coughing and staggering away from the car while ropy lines still swung from his mouth. He shuddered at the bile and spat fiercely, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. No, definitely not that one.
He limped past the next car without stopping, a four-door sedan with a wrecked front end and a front tire so flat it appeared melted in a puddle under the wheel. The fourth car he’d seen from the rooftop was a burgundy Subaru wagon, the interior of which, he could see as he approached, was stuffed to the ceiling with looted merchandise. He went to the driver’s side and found the door ajar. The seat empty. A yellow-capped bottle of Mountain Dew in the console. Cole glanced around him, quickly checking the perimeter before he opened the door. The hinges squeaked. He ducked his head and slid onto the seat. The passenger side was piled high with home goods and boxes still shrink-wrapped in clear plastic, some of them tagged with security devices from the retail stores where they had been plundered.
Cole looked behind the steering wheel. The keys were in it.
The keys are in it.
Cole reached for the ignition, surreal, as one might feel in a dream.
He turned the key.
A rapid-fire clicking sound issued from deep in the engine compartment.
Cole pounded the steering wheel with the heel of his fist and swore. He was about to reach for the ignition again, out of a wild sort of irrational hope, when, outside the car, he heard the distincti
ve, firecracker-like pop of a nine-millimeter round.
Cole tumbled from the Subaru and brought the AR up to his shoulder, scanning the parking lot in every direction. He expected to see the armored vehicle charging like an angry rhino, come to exact revenge for the drone he’d killed. Instead he saw, at a distance of at least one hundred yards, a solitary figure walking toward him. Cole lined up the gunsights and blinked. His finger hesitated on the trigger. Whoever it was, they weren’t coughing and their hips seemed to roll as they walked. Cole blinked again. It was a woman. A woman with a huge knife in her hand.
By the time Cole lowered the rifle he could see the tattoos on Chloe’s arms. She walked with a swagger and when she stopped in front of Cole she rested one hand on her hip and patted the broadside of the butcher knife on her leg. She wore a pair of sunglasses, but angry red scratches crisscrossed her forehead, neck, and face not covered by her blood-stained dust mask. Without the tattoos Cole might not have recognized her.
“Where the fuck have you been?” she said.
Cole only stared at her. He had lowered the barrel of the rifle but still had his finger resting on the trigger guard, the safety off.
“The last I saw of you,” Cole finally said, “you were giving a nice little interview on Cordyceps Nation.”
Chloe lifted her sunglasses to reveal two bruised and swollen eyes. “What the hell are you talking about? The last you saw of me,” she said, pointing accusingly at Cole with the butcher knife, “I was fighting for my life covering your damn retreat to the fucking rooftop. You’re welcome, by the way.”
Cole realized just then that there was a kind of maternal gentleness about Emily that he had come to love, and now missed. Chloe’s coarseness, by contrast, diminished what he might have once considered an arresting and even forceful kind of beauty. Cole looked away across the parking lot, already bored with the exchange. He had to admit, though, that the bruises and cuts on Chloe’s face were a significant evidence in her favor. Walsh and his technical experts had apparently stolen her identity for the show as well.
“What happened to the kid and the guy with the axe?” Cole thought to ask.
“Dead,” Chloe said. “Clawed to death and trampled flat as pancakes.”
If she was waiting for some evidence of perturbation or guilt from Cole, it never came. “What about the ones with you?” she finally asked.
“Emily and Brandon are still alive,” Cole said, watching Chloe’s face for any sign of surprise. “I shot Trudy and Miguel sprouted,” he added, matching her apparent penchant for shock value.
Chloe bit her lip and looked away. “I’m so sick of this shit,” she admitted at last.
Cole nodded. “You and me both.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Trying to find some wheels.” Cole pointed to the fifth and last car in sight, a white Chevrolet Suburban, perhaps three hundred feet away. “It’s either that thing or one of a few unpleasant alternatives.”
Cole started across the lot for the Suburban, Chloe following.
“What did you mean you saw me giving an interview?”
“They had you on Cordyceps Nation,” Cole said. “I was on there, too. We didn’t cooperate with their show, so they just used some kind of digital voodoo, some kind of face and voice mapping software to make us say whatever the hell they wanted.”
Chloe seemed flabbergasted. “You saw me talking and it looked real?”
Cole nodded. “Have you ever been on TV? Or posted videos online?”
Chloe fell silent for a moment, considering it. “I used to have my own YouTube channel.”
“Well, that’s all they need to fake you saying anything they want,” Cole said.
“Son of a bitch,” Chloe said. “What did I say? What did they make me say?”
Cole turned and checked their entire perimeter before he continued. Still no sign of the armored vehicle. “I honestly can’t remember now. Something about fighting the coughers.”
“Are we going to get paid for this?” Chloe wondered aloud, “for using our faces and voices?”
“Maybe if we survive,” Cole said, “and hire a good attorney.”
“Sons of bitches,” she muttered.
They reached the Suburban, a late model, polar white, with darkly tinted windows.
Cole went straight for the driver’s side door. He remembered, oddly, reading a news article once about the problem of “bumping” in upscale suburban neighborhoods, how certain criminally minded youth would stroll neighborhood streets casually trying the doors of parked cars until they found one unlocked. The so-called problems society used to have.
Cole pulled the handle. Locked. He sighed. He was beginning to regret not having more experience as a carjacker. He stepped back and raised the AR to his shoulder, wondering which window he should shoot out.
Cole was looking down the side of the Suburban at the large tinted windows toward the rear when he heard Chloe exclaim, “Oh shit, there’s someone in there!”
Cole’s head snapped back to the rifle, still aimed at the driver’s side window. A human shape was barely visible through the tinted glass. Someone in a white wife-beater, with pale skin and skinny arms moving frantically at the steering column.
The engine turned over and fired, revving.
Cole lowered the rifle and held up his hand. “No, no, no! Let’s talk!”
“He’s going to get away!” Chloe yelled. She ran to the driver’s side window and dealt a glancing blow to the window with the cleaver, knocking a white scar in the glass, but hardly shattering it as the tires chirped and the SUV bolted from its place, mufflers bellowing from the sudden acceleration. The Suburban grew smaller and smaller until it disappeared with a sudden, lurching turn around the far side of the mall.
Cole looked at Chloe. “What the hell was that?”
“What do you mean, what the hell was that? You wanted a car, didn’t you?”
“I was hoping to talk to the guy, not chop him into steaks! Good fucking grief.”
Cole started walking back across the parking lot, limping only every few steps now. Chloe followed a few paces behind. Only a few seconds had elapsed when she called out, “You could have totally shot that little turd, you know. And we’d be riding in a Suburban right now.”
Cole neither stopped nor turned to look at her. “This isn’t Vietnam, Chloe. There are rules.”
Chloe started laughing and for a few minutes it seemed she would never stop.
Thirty-Nine
AN HOUR before dawn, for reasons about which not even Trubilinski himself seemed inclined to speculate, the operators lost their mobile satellite connection. Without the uplink, there were no blinking dots, no fix on any of the principals, and no hope of making another interception. The coms in their ears only continued to work off a Bluetooth connection with their individual smartphones, giving them limited range and effectiveness for separating again into two teams.
The air inside the Excursion had grown stale with the scent of blood drying on Wes’s clothes and burnt nitroglycerin wafting from the exhausted barrels of the operators’ SAWs. Even though they were men used to waiting and lying in wait, accustomed to killing and skilled, even, in the ability to sort through their own thoughts in the silence that came after such things—even then, the attitude in the cab of the Excursion had grown morose, or as close to morose as fighting men will tolerate before something within them either snaps or begins to die.
Trubilinski had warned them not to remove their respirators until they’d rigged up some sort of impromptu decontamination shower. He parked them deep in the shadow of a pine with low-hanging limbs, largely hidden from sight but providing a view of the street both behind and before them for a half-mile in either direction. Then he turned off the ignition and fell asleep without another word. Cuban took the first watch, scanning the street with a helmet-mount
ed pair of night vision goggles, while Wes and Sam dozed on the rear bench seats, respirators on their faces and weapons cradled in their arms, rising and falling slowly on their chests.
The light outside the SUV was gray when Cuban woke them.
“Guys,” a low, rumbling voice in their earpieces said. “Guys, check this out.”
Sam, Wes, and Trubilinski stirred in their seats, coming out of the fog of an insufficient sleep, adjusting their weapons and rubbing their eyes with the backs of their hands.
Cuban held up a pair of FLIR thermal imaging binoculars and pointed down the street, nothing visible in that dim light to the others. “I’ve been watching this little operation for a while now,” Cuban said. “Take a look.”
He handed the binoculars to Sam, who blinked several times and raised them to his eyes. His vision adjusted quickly to a spectrum of color native only to some alien planet, and bizarre to all but those trained to distinguish the hot white heat signatures of humans from the cool violets and fuchsias of their inanimate surroundings. The movement he saw played out in silhouette form, faceless men glowing like angels standing on either side of an open tractor trailer. They held assault rifles and seemed to be supervising the unloading of a cargo. The cargo was human, Sam realized.
“These might actually be the dudes we’re pretending to be,” Cuban said.
“Worse,” said Sam. He adjusted the binoculars to a different color spectrum, this one more grayscale, and looked again. The human cargo all seemed to share the same slender profile, while the guards were clearly military age males. Some of the cargo were much shorter and smaller, but Sam soon realized what it was that all the figures seemed to share in common. Their wrists were bound before them by plastic zip ties.