by Mark Alpert
An instant later, the truck was barreling down the road, its two-stroke engine screaming.
FIFTY-SEVEN
In the sudden darkness of the computer room, Layla felt a strong hand grab her wrist. Wen Hao yanked her backward and she stumbled across the room, her bare feet slipping on the linoleum. She was terrified and disoriented and couldn’t see a thing, but she could hear the wailing of the schoolboys from Lijiang and, even louder, the nonstop pounding on the other side of the locked door. It was a steel door and the lock was sturdy, but soon Layla heard more footsteps in the corridor, and then a loud, scraping, grating noise, the sound of metal grinding against metal. The Modules were using a pry bar to wrench the door out of its frame.
Wen yanked her arm again, and Layla felt the frigid air under her hospital gown. They’d entered the inner room, the one with the long rows of server racks. Wen slammed the inner door shut and threw the lock. Although they could still hear the Modules struggling to wrench open the outer door, the noises were distant and muffled now. Fortunately, the inner room wasn’t totally dark. Several LEDs glimmered on the other side of the room, from the air conditioner’s control panel, and the air conditioner itself still chugged away, blasting arctic air from its vents. Although Supreme Harmony had shut down the room’s computers, most likely moving its operations to another server hub, the cooling system was still working. It was so critical to the computers, it apparently had its own backup power supply. Water still flowed in the system’s tubes, running from the server racks to the radiator, and the radiator’s fan continued to blow cold air on the circulating fluid.
After several seconds, Layla’s eyes adjusted to the feeble light from the LEDs. Wen led the schoolboys to the corner of the room farthest from the door, then knelt beside them for a while, murmuring in Mandarin. Then he grabbed three of the down jackets hanging from the pegs on the wall. He gave two of them to the children and handed the third to Layla. She quickly donned the jacket and zipped it up, but she couldn’t stop shivering. “Don’t you want one for yourself?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I’m not cold.” Then he walked down the aisle between the rows of server racks, carefully surveying the inner room. Layla assumed he was trying to determine the best place to make his final stand against the Modules. He wasn’t shivering. He held the pistol in front of him as he inspected the room, and the gun in his hand was absolutely still.
Layla felt a pang of guilt. Wen was so much calmer, so much more competent than she was. “I’m sorry,” she said.
He stopped beside her. “Why do you say that?”
“I failed. I fucked up. Going to the computer room was a bad idea.”
“No, it was a good idea. It just didn’t succeed.”
“I should’ve known better. The surveillance cameras saw us go into the room. Supreme Harmony knew we were here, knew what we were trying to do. So of course it shut down the servers before we could get on the network.”
Wen shook his head. “It was still worth an attempt.”
“I don’t know. We did all that planning, but we didn’t accomplish a damn thing.”
Layla turned away from him and stared at the floor. But Wen reached out with his left hand and gently lifted her chin. “We did accomplish something. Now we can perform…” He stopped himself. “I’m sorry, I don’t know the right expression in English. We can perform a mercy. Do you understand what I mean?”
Something in the tone of his voice made Layla nervous. “No, I don’t.”
“We can choose the lesser of two evils. What Tài Hé is doing… it’s worse than death.”
Now she saw where he was going, and she didn’t like it one bit. “What, you want to kill yourself? Blow out your own brains before they can hook you up to the network?”
“I wasn’t thinking of myself. I intend to kill as many Modules as I can before I die.” He let out a long, labored breath. “I was thinking of the children. If we can’t save their lives, at least we can stop Tài Hé from desecrating their bodies.”
Layla took a step backward. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You want to shoot the boys?”
“I can make sure it’s painless.”
She took another step backward, then another. She retreated all the way to the other side of the room, trying to get as far away from Wen as possible. No, she thought. This was a nightmare. This was worse than anything Supreme Harmony could do to them. The horror of it filled the whole room, permeating the darkness. She glanced at the corner where the boys huddled and saw the light from the LEDs reflected on their newly shaved heads. Then she lowered her own head and clamped her hands over her bare scalp. No, no, no! There has to be another way! She frantically looked for some kind of escape, turning this way and that, but the horror was all around her. It was in the silent racks of servers and the deep rumble of the air conditioner and the ceaseless whirring of the radiator fan, which was on the floor by Layla’s feet and making such a maniacal racket that she had to cover her ears to stop herself from screaming.
Then she heard an even louder noise, so loud it went right through the hands clamped over her ears. The Modules had broken through the first locked door and rushed into the outer room where the computer terminals and screens were. They immediately started working on the door to the inner room, which reverberated with their pounding.
But instead of terrifying Layla, the noise cleared her head. She looked down at the radiator, a boxy machine about four feet wide and three feet high. The annoying fan was blowing cold air through the mesh of pipes that held the warm water from the server racks. And behind the radiator, a thick accordion hose funneled the heated outflow air to a vent in the wall. Belatedly, Layla saw the thermodynamic principle she should’ve grasped as soon as she stepped into this freezing room. To remove all the excess heat from the server racks, the cooling system needed a larger-than-normal duct for venting the warm air out of the lab.
Bending over, she gripped the plastic pleats of the accordion hose, which was thicker than a python. “Wen!” she shouted. “Come over here and help me!”
Without asking any questions, he put down his gun and grabbed the oversized hose. Layla counted, “One, two, three,” and on “three” they tore the end of it off the wall, exposing a square vent about eighteen inches wide.
Luckily, there was no grate over the vent. Layla poked her head into the opening and saw a horizontal air duct with metal walls. It was so dark she couldn’t see very far inside, but she confirmed by touch that at least the first few feet were navigable. The duct wasn’t big enough for a full-size adult, but the kids might have a chance to squirm through.
Layla stood up straight and turned to Wen. “Tell the boys to get in there and start crawling. I don’t know how long this air duct is, but I’m sure it goes outside the lab complex. Sooner or later they’ll reach the outlet. There’ll probably be a grate at the end of the duct, but maybe they can kick it loose. Then they can run the hell away from this place.”
Wen nodded in agreement, a look of enormous relief on his face. Striding to the schoolboys, he crouched beside them and gave orders in Mandarin. He smiled as he told the boys what to do, and when he was finished, he playfully slapped them on the back.
The nine-year-old entered the duct first, lowering his head to crawl into the vent. The older boy followed, scuttling on his elbows and knees. As they disappeared, Layla heard the scraping, grating noises again, coming from behind her. The Modules had applied their tools to the inner door and were gradually prying it out of its frame.
Wen turned to her and Layla saw that his gun was back in his right hand. But in his left hand, unexpectedly, was a pair of cheap running shoes. They were his shoes, she realized. He’d taken them off.
“Here, you’ll need these,” he said, thrusting the shoes at her. “And don’t forget your gun. I have two pistols and that should be enough.”
“Wait, what are you—”
“You have to go with the boys,” he said firmly, pointin
g at the vent. “You’re not much bigger than they are, so you’ll fit inside the duct. Just take off your jacket and push it in front of you.”
“But what about you? I can’t leave you here!”
He shook his head. “I’m too big. I’ll get stuck.”
“You have to try! If I can make it, then you—”
“No!” he shouted. His voice echoed against the walls. “The most important thing is the safety of the children. You have to help them escape. And I have to stay here and stop the Modules from following you.” He removed his second pistol from the back of his pants. “If I take cover behind the computers, I can keep them pinned down for a while. Maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty. That should be enough to give you a head start.”
Wen looked at her intently. Layla opened her mouth to continue arguing with him, but his expression stopped her. It wasn’t an angry look. It was more like the look she used to see on her father’s face when he asked her to do something important, like visiting her grandmother in the nursing home or standing up for the national anthem. Wen was reminding her that she had a responsibility. She had to live up to it. She couldn’t turn away.
Layla took off the down jacket and put on Wen’s shoes. She didn’t say goodbye. She just couldn’t do it. But just before she climbed into the vent she looked over her shoulder. The last thing she saw was Wen’s bare feet, which glowed for a moment in the room’s feeble light as he took cover behind the server racks.
That image stayed in her mind as she crawled through the duct, pushing the jacket with her left hand and holding the gun in her right. She didn’t know why she kept thinking about it. She should be remembering Wen’s face, the smooth handsome face she’d kissed. But, instead, she saw his feet, which seemed to float in the pitch-black darkness in front of her.
And then she heard the gunfire start in the inner room, booming so loudly that it made the air duct quiver, and Layla could think of nothing except scrambling forward.
FIFTY-EIGHT
The road into Yichang was broad and new, with three lanes in each direction, and fortunately it was downhill all the way. The slope allowed the three-wheeled truck to build up speed despite its small engine. Soon it was flying down Fazhan Avenue at eighty miles per hour, rushing past the factories and warehouses on the city’s outskirts.
Jim glanced at Kirsten, who’d slipped back into her bloodstained blouse. Luckily, she was a superb driver, and now she was pulling out all the stops. About two miles past the checkpoint they came to an intersection where a dozen slow-moving cars blocked all three lanes. Jim yelled, “Watch it!” but Kirsten didn’t slow down. Instead, she swerved into one of the oncoming lanes and whipped around the traffic. They needed to haul ass until they reached downtown Yichang; once they got there, they could ditch the truck in one of the alleys near the riverfront and find a hiding place where they could hole up until nightfall. But the downtown was still five miles away, and Jim could hear sirens in the distance.
After another minute they saw police cars up ahead. Four black-and-white cruisers rolled into the next intersection, about a quarter mile in front of them, and stopped in the middle of the road. The cops spaced the cars evenly, one in front of the other, so that they blocked all the traffic lanes, both inbound and outbound. There was nothing to do except turn around, but when Jim looked over his shoulder he saw four more patrol cars behind them. “Shit!” he yelled. “We’re trapped!”
Kirsten lifted her foot off the accelerator. “Should we stop? Get out of the truck and make a run for it?”
In frustration Jim smacked his prosthesis against the passenger-side door, and the truck’s narrow chassis rattled. But as he stared at the police cruisers blocking the road, he noticed something. The front bumper of the patrol car that blocked the right lane was about four feet behind the rear bumper of the car in the left lane. The gap between them was way too small for an ordinary car or truck to slip through, but the three-wheeler’s cab was only four feet wide. “Don’t stop!” he yelled, pointing at the gap. “Go right between them!”
“Jesus! Are you nuts?”
“Just do it!”
Frowning mightily, Kirsten adjusted the steering wheel, carefully aiming the truck’s nose. Jim leaned out the window and fired his Glock, putting the shot above the roofs of the cruisers. As he’d hoped, the police officers leaped out of their cars and scattered. Then Jim ducked back inside the cab and braced himself.
It was like driving full speed through a car wash. The bumpers of the police cruisers passed within inches of the truck’s doors. The cab sped through the gap without a scratch, but the truck bed smashed into a headlight. The rear end of the truck lurched to the left, and for a heart-stopping second the three-wheeler became a two-wheeler. But then the right rear wheel fell back to the asphalt, and after a hard bounce the truck straightened out.
“Holy fuck!” Kristen yelled. “Look behind!”
Jim turned around and noticed that the bale of hay wasn’t in the truck bed anymore. After being jolted into the air by the sideswipe, it came crashing down on the hood of one of the cruisers. The bale disintegrated on impact, showering the whole intersection with dried grass.
“Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. He was so ecstatic he kissed Kirsten on the cheek. “Nice driving, Kir. Keep it up and I’ll buy you a new blouse.”
She smiled but didn’t say anything. Another intersection was up ahead, and six more cruisers were speeding toward it from the left. Kirsten hit the gas again, pressing the pedal to the floor. Soon they were going at least ninety miles per hour, faster than any three-wheeled truck had ever gone, and they blasted through the intersection just ahead of the patrol cars.
Then the road leveled out and began to slope upward. About half a mile ahead, a high tree-covered ridge rose abruptly from the urban landscape. Jim peered at the hill through the truck’s windshield, trying to see if the road went over or around it. Then he noticed a concrete rectangle at the base of the ridge.
“It’s a tunnel,” he said. “We have to go through that tunnel to get to the downtown.”
Kirsten shook her head. “Damn it! They’ll stop us there for sure!”
“Well, we can’t turn around.” He pointed over his shoulder at the half-dozen cruisers that were about two hundred yards behind them.
“Shit, shit, shit! This is one hell of a vacation you booked, Pierce!”
She was still cursing as they sped into the tunnel’s entrance. Jim noticed that the traffic in the outbound lanes was much heavier than the inbound traffic. At any moment he expected to see the flashing lights of a police blockade inside the tunnel, but there was nothing but headlights and taillights ahead of them. And after a few seconds, he noticed that there were no flashing lights behind them either.
“That’s strange,” he said. “It looks like the cops didn’t follow us into the tunnel.”
“They don’t need to,” Kirsten replied. “The whole goddamn police force is probably waiting for us at the other end.”
After another few seconds, Jim saw the tunnel’s exit. At the same time, he heard a low rumbling. He wondered for a moment if there was also a train tunnel that went under this ridge. Then they burst out of the tunnel and emerged at a bustling intersection and, miracle of miracles, there wasn’t a single police car in sight. Just ahead was Xiling Road, Yichang’s main boulevard, full of luxury stores and neon signs and sidewalks crowded with pedestrians. The street was bordered on both sides by skyscrapers, an impressive double row of glass-and-steel towers. The tallest was more than fifty stories high.
Jim’s heart leaped. The riverfront was less than a mile ahead. It would be easy for them to ditch the truck there and disappear into one of the alleys, especially if the police weren’t right behind them. But instead of proceeding down the boulevard, Kirsten slowed the truck to a halt. “Jim, what the hell is that noise?”
The rumbling was louder now, a deep thunderous crashing that seemed to come from the west. Jim noticed that the pedestrians on the bouleva
rd weren’t strolling down the sidewalks. They were running in terror away from the riverfront. Then Jim looked past the running people and saw the skyscrapers shudder. The tallest one swayed violently, then pitched forward and broke apart, disintegrating into hundreds of tons of steel and glass. And beneath the falling debris, a great black wave came raging down the street.
FIFTY-NINE
Supreme Harmony observed the inundation of Yichang. Module 104, who’d formerly been the chief of the city’s Public Security Bureau, stood on a high cliff overlooking the Yangtze River, at the eastern end of the Xiling Gorge. From its perusal of the Internet, Supreme Harmony had learned that this promontory had been the site of many battles during China’s long history. It was here, for example, that the Chinese Nationalists had stopped the Imperial Japanese Army from progressing up the Yangtze during World War II. And now the network was using these heights as an observation post for its first battle with Homo sapiens, a battle in which no guns or artillery pieces would be fired. In this engagement, Supreme Harmony’s weapon was water.
The Xiling Gorge was filled to the brim. The Yangtze River, which under normal circumstances flowed calmly eastward at the bottom of the deep trench, now sluiced through the gorge, its frothy surface sloshing against the cliffs on either side. The floodwaters rose so close to Module 104 that he could feel the spray from the roaring current. The color of the river had also changed. This stretch of the Yangtze was usually greenish brown, but the water had been blackened by the billions of tons of silt that had accumulated in the reservoir behind the Three Gorges Dam. According to Supreme Harmony’s calculations, the massive buildup of silt would’ve eventually caused the dam to collapse on its own, without any need for explosive charges. The network had simply hastened the inevitable.