by Judd Vowell
“Ok, Jacob. But you make sure I’m here for that first flight. I don’t want to miss out on anything you might find. And Salvador doesn’t want me to either.”
“Whoa, hold on a second. That might have sounded like a threat if I thought about it too much.”
She laughed under her breath. “You don’t have to think about it at all, dear boy. That’s exactly what it was.”
Jacob smiled. He knew he was going to miss her.
12.
A NTI-’s first full-scale drone flight was successful. Jacob’s team had prepared well. They could see what they wanted with clarity. Simone had brought Salvador with her when she traveled back for it. He was pleased, even though that first mission produced a harsh reminder of what they had truly done.
The aircraft flew for two hundred miles, where Jacob paused its flight so that it could hover over a small town. “This should give us good detail on how easily we will be able to collect information from people on the ground,” he told Salvador.
He instructed the pilot, who was sitting at a control platform just across the room, “Move over the area slowly. Keep it above the pre-determined flight deck.” Then he turned to the head engineer. “Make sure you record video of everything.”
The picture feed coming through the giant video screen in the underground control room displayed houses lining subdivided streets. Some had backyard pools filled with brownish-green water. Others were partially burned out from long-ago fires, missing roofs or walls or both. There were more of those than Jacob could have anticipated.
The video feed was clear. From the control room, they didn’t see anyone for several minutes as the drone surveyed the outskirts of the town. But as it moved closer to the city’s center, Jacob’s video engineer spoke up, “Starting to see movement, sir.”
Images of the townspeople appeared as the drone moved over the central square. It showed a gathering of sorts, outside a large building that appeared to be the town’s former courthouse. “Hover here,” Jacob told the pilot. “And zoom as close as you can,” he directed the video engineer.
“What is it?” Simone whispered.
“I can’t tell,” Jacob responded.
Salvador leaned in to the two of them and said in a soft voice, “It’s a trade market. Just like they had in the third world.”
Jacob started to discern some sort of organized pattern of tables and goods. Most people were moving around quickly and haphazardly. Some were slowly milling through the large crowd, while others weren’t moving at all.
“What are they trading?” Simone asked.
“Hard to tell,” Salvador answered. “But it looks as though everyone wants food.”
He was right. They could make out the goods by then. The food was mostly vegetables, fruits, and breads. A few tables held small dead animals, skinned and prepared for cooking. One older man stood at a table with buckets of water on it. He held a shotgun in the crook of his arm.
It became clear that there were more people without items to trade than there were with. Most of the crowd seemed to only be looking, with nothing to barter for much needed food and water. Jacob spotted a man with a bullhorn standing on the steps of the building, just above the gathering of sad souls. He had one arm in the air, as if he were directing traffic as he spoke. Jacob thought he looked mayoral, even though most of the crowd seemed to be ignoring him. It was a depressing scene of want and despair.
Jacob decided that they had seen enough. He was giving his pilot the instruction to start his flight back when suddenly he saw the man with the bullhorn on the ground. He had fallen so abruptly that Jacob thought he may have had a heart attack. But then he saw the pool of blood forming around his splayed body. The crowd began to panic, and what had been a fairly rapid but peaceful pace around the event turned into pandemonium, with people running randomly this way and that.
A man with a raised handgun slowly walking through the madness appeared. Jacob told the engineer to focus the camera on him. He seemed to be moving from table to table, taking aim at the people who had the most goods to trade. He had shot the man with the bullhorn first, and then a woman at a vegetable set-up. His next victim appeared to be a woman with baskets of apples. But as he aimed his pistol to shoot her, the older man who had been offering buckets of water walked up beside him. He raised his shotgun to the shooter’s stomach and fired. The shooter fell to the ground and grasped his midsection, and Jacob could see his face break into an expression of agony. The man with the shotgun straddled the shooter and took point-blank aim. From the control room, the voyeuristic ANTs saw the blast come out of the shotgun’s muzzle and the shooter’s head come apart.
There was a hushed moment in the room until Salvador spoke. “Fly the aircraft home, pilot,” he directed. Then he turned and left the rest of them in silence.
13.
T he Omni Operation continued on schedule for the next three weeks. Jacob tested multiple drones over varying distances, collecting mostly useless information on each flight. Still, his team was diligent in their record-keeping and maintained extensive logs on the performance of the unmanned aircraft. He was preparing to launch the second phase of the project in the next two sectors when Salvador called him back to the grid. It was almost a year to the day since he had unleashed the Domino Infection. Jacob thought that maybe it was time for an anniversary celebration, a new independence day of sorts.
An excursion team picked him up from the military complex and drove him back to the grid for the meeting. They arrived at the tower in Philadelphia at dusk. Jacob expected a chance to relax and get some sleep before he saw Salvador, but waiting in his apartment when he walked through the door was a handwritten note on the kitchen counter. “Refresh yourself and come up to the top floor. Quickly. We need to talk. – S.”
◊◊◊
The elevator doors slid open to a dimly lit room. When Jacob walked out into the open area, he noticed that the only light was coming from around the tops of the four glass walls. The edges of ceiling held a strip of ambient lighting, and it created just enough glow for him to see the shape of the room and the few hazy forms inside it. It also provided unfettered views of the outside night, with its design avoiding a single instance of glare.
Jacob saw a figure standing near the glass, facing south: Salvador. “Hello, Jacob,” he said, without turning away from the view. “Please, make yourself a drink.”
At the bar in the corner, Jacob saw a bottle of scotch sitting away from the other liquor. He poured two fingers into a short glass and walked across the room to where Salvador was standing. They stood silently, looking past the lighted grid into the never-ending darkness for a while.
After a few sips of scotch, Jacob spoke. “Everything ok, Salvador?”
Before he answered, he pulled in a deep breath through his nose and held it. “It’s been a lot tougher than I thought, Jacob. It’s affecting me differently than I thought it would.”
Salvador wasn’t drunk, but Jacob could tell that he had been drinking. His demeanor was confusing. He wasn’t himself. “What do you mean?” Jacob asked.
“I haven’t been able to get that image out of my mind. The one described by that Eastern Europe director. The kids. The Omega XT and what they did to those kids.”
Jacob tried to reassure him. He wanted to bring back the man whose stoicism he had grown to respect more than anything about him. “That was a random thing, Salvador. No need to dwell on it. And besides, didn’t you tell me that some of what happens with all of this might not be too pretty?”
“Yes, hijo, yes I did. But that wasn’t us, Jacob. It wasn’t what I set out to do with ANTI-.” He thought for a few seconds, as if considering whether he was going to say something else. Then he did. “And it wasn’t as random as you might think.”
“Not random?” Jacob was starting to feel concerned and anxious. The lighting, the urgency of Salvador’s note, and the man clearly at odds with himself in that moment had Jacob reeling.
Sal
vador continued staring into the night. “I’ve gotten more reports than I’d like to admit. The Omega XT seem to be relishing their power in some areas. And they’re brandishing it with more and more unnecessary violence. I feel like I’m losing control of the experiment before it even has a chance to begin.” He finished the drink he was holding in one large gulp and closed his eyes.
“Shit, Salvador. I don’t know what to say.” Jacob thought for a few seconds, dumbfounded. Then he proceeded anyway. “You have to have somebody to do the dirty work, right? I guess it’s like having a guard dog in your front yard. You need him to be vicious, but he’s got to know his place in the pack.”
“Good analogy, Jacob. You’re right.” Salvador turned to him and his mouth curled up on one side. It was almost a smile. “Problem is, I’ve got over a hundred front yards with thousands of guard dogs.” He laughed sarcastically and put his hand on Jacob’s shoulder. “But that’s not your problem, hijo. And that’s not why I called you here.” He walked across the room to the bar and poured himself another scotch.
“Ok, then,” Jacob said. “I’ll bite – why exactly am I here?” He had relaxed since Salvador’s mood had lightened, but the feeling didn’t last long.
“It’s Sector 3, Jacob. We have a situation.”
14.
T he situation at Sector 3 was strange more than anything else. But Salvador’s instincts had stirred at the information he had received from the directors there. They were telling him to be curious and to investigate. With so much at stake, he didn’t want anything slipping by him.
Located south in Nashville, Sector 3 had been picking up electronic signals close to its grid, meaning within 50 miles. There had been sporadic electrical activity across most of the planet for the past year, typically weak radio waves. But the Sector 3 signals were different. They were steady and strong. And for Salvador, they were too close to the grid there. His explanation to Jacob seemed to hold an element of anticipation. And Jacob had come to know Salvador as a man with very good predictive skills.
Salvador wanted Jacob and Simone to go there, monitor the activity, and investigate anything unusual. He was vague about it all, but concerned. Above anything else, he needed more knowledge.
“How close are you with the drones?” he asked Jacob.
“Not close enough for Sector 3. I was just getting ready to test into Sector 2, but 3 is so much further away.”
“That’s what I thought. And that’s why I need you and Simone to go there. We can’t let anything slip through the cracks. I want you two to see and hear everything that comes through. You’re the best minds I’ve got.”
Jacob thought before he spoke. He knew he would go on the mission, no matter the risk. “Ok, Salvador. To Sector 3, it is. And I’ll have my team continue working on Omni while I’m gone,” Jacob told him. “I’ll tell them to start preparing for flights to Sector 3. But it will take them some time.”
“Very good. And Jacob, listen closely. If this is what I think it might be, you and Simone have to stay away from it. I just want you to be my eyes and ears. Nothing more. I’ll handle our reaction from here.” Then Salvador moved close to Jacob to make his last point. “I can’t afford to lose either one of you now.”
◊◊◊
Jacob returned to the Omni Operation early the next morning. He needed to spend a few days there adjusting the drone rollout and delegating the updated workload. He also had to explain to Simone the plan for the two of them, and that they would be going to Sector 3 within the week.
“Going where?!?” she asked. She was flabbergasted, much like Jacob had been when Salvador told him the same thing.
“Sector 3. Nashville. Orders from Salvador. You and me.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Salvador told you, to tell me, that I’m going to Nashville. Nashville! What the hell?!?”
Jacob knew she felt slighted, like maybe she was losing some ground to him within Salvador’s power structure. He tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry about that, Simone. Look at the bigger picture here. Something’s happening, and it’s got Salvador scared.”
She calmed herself down. “I know, I know. It just seems a little risky, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I agree. But Salvador says the situation warrants the travel risk. And, don’t worry, we’ll have an escort for the trip.”
“Let me guess – the Omega XT?”
“You got it.”
Simone shook her head in disbelief. “Goddam, Jacob – this must be some situation.”
15.
T he convoy to Sector 3’s grid consisted of five vehicles: two converted jeeps and three military-style humvees. The jeeps, positioned in the front and rear of the pack, carried three Omega XT members each: two in the cab, and one who manned the rotating .50-caliber machine gun that was mounted in the back bed. Four ANTs rode in each humvee, with Simone and Jacob traveling inside the one in the middle of the group.
They had planned for an overnight trek, when there would be less chance of being spotted or encountering outsiders in the dark. The trip would take most of the night, even with traveling on fairly open roads at maximum speed. The Omega XT escort wore night-vision goggles to avoid using headlights. Besides the sound of the vehicles’ engines and the roar of the all-terrain tires against pavement, the convoy was invisible.
Simone and Jacob talked about what they might find at Sector 3 when they weren’t trying to sleep. “So, Salvador didn’t give you any specifics about what’s going on at 3?” she asked him.
“No, not really.”
“And you didn’t press him about it?” She had a way of changing the tone of her voice with questions when she already knew the answer. She was trying to make Jacob feel like he had missed something obvious. But Jacob didn’t let it get to him. He had wanted to make his own interpretation of the situation once he got there, and anything Salvador would have told him would have been assumption and conjecture. He didn’t need that to fog his own analysis.
“No, Simone, I didn’t. Why would I? He doesn’t truly know. That’s why he’s sending us.”
“Oh, he knows, Jacob,” she said with absolute confidence. “Don’t think for a second that he doesn’t. But that’s what I don’t get. This has got to be big. Or else he wouldn’t want the two of us to be there.”
Jacob turned his face to the humvee’s window and let the noise of the rolling tires drown out the conversation. Simone was right. Salvador had to know more than he was letting on. But he had also said how important they were. Jacob couldn’t imagine that Salvador would be deliberately leading them into danger. In fact, he trusted his mentor implicitly, but one of his remarks kept repeating in Jacob’s head – “If this is what I think it might be, you and Simone have to stay away from it.”
If he had only known then how significant those instructions really were, everything might have been different.
16.
J acob fell asleep soon after his conversation with Simone about Salvador. She woke him up by shaking his shoulders. “Jacob, get up. Something’s happening.”
He knew the humvee was motionless immediately. The two Omega XT were missing from the front seats. He leaned to the center of the backseat and looked through the windshield, but his view was blocked by the vehicle ahead of him. “Come on,” Simone said as he was trying to alert his senses from deep sleep. “We’ve got to see what’s going on.”
He followed her out of the humvee’s passenger side back door. That was another thing Jacob had learned about Simone: she was fearless. As they walked to the front of the stopped convoy, his eyes adjusted to the pitch-black darkness. The other vehicles were empty, too. When they got to the jeep that had been leading them, all of the Omega XT were gathered together there, watching something in the distance.
Jacob eased up next to one of them. He tried to ask with levity, “What exactly are we doing here? Sight-seeing?” It didn’t elicit the response he had hoped it would.
“See for yourself,” the Ome
ga XT soldier replied. He took off his night-vision goggles and handed them to Jacob.
Ahead on the highway, maybe two hundred yards away, was a herd of humans. It was the only way Jacob could qualify the sight, as humiliating as that sounded. With the limited detail Jacob could discern through the goggles, they all looked beaten down and tired, with ragged clothes and dirty faces. Some were shoeless. There were older ones and younger ones, children even. And too many of them to count. They were slowly trudging toward the convoy on the highway, seemingly walking without purpose except to move forward.
Jacob handed the goggles to Simone. “There’s a large group of people walking this way. Blocking the road,” he told her. She put the goggles on and looked for herself.
“Well, that’s just sad,” she said dismissively. “What an awful-looking bunch.”
“Don’t worry,” one of the Omega XT said in response. “We’ll take care of it.”
What transpired without warning in the next few moments took Jacob’s breath away.
“Hit the lights,” one of the soldiers said, and the driver of the front jeep turned his hi-beam headlights on. The band of vagabonds froze, each one like an animal about to take the brunt of a speeding pick-up truck might. It was apparent that they couldn’t see the source of the light. Most of them held their arms up to their foreheads to create some shade over their squinting eyes.
“Lock and load,” the same voice instructed. And before the realization of what was happening finished completing its synapse in Jacob’s brain, the soldier ordered, “Fire!”