“I’ve had too much Spasm to sleep quite yet. I’m going to deploy my drone swarm to keep an eye out. They see infrared, so if anyone comes close, my tablet will chime.”
Jacey settled in and tried to use one of Sensei’s breathing techniques to calm her jittery nerves. The soft whisper of drone props swirled around, then flitted away.
Jacey had gotten through a third cycle of inhalation, breath hold, and exhalation when Meow Meow touched her shoulder. “Stay quiet. Someone’s coming.”
34
Rectangular and Fairly Small
The overpass sheltered a band of roadway forty meters long. Belle stood in its shade, getting her bearings and looking for any hint of where the mystery vehicle might have gone. The stretch of road she’d flown along did not have many roads intersecting it. And all of them led to areas in the wide open.
Assuming Jacey or Captain Wilcox had been in the vehicle—a big assumption, she knew—they would have gone looking for cover. That was a base instinct.
This overpass was the closest thing to cover she’d found yet, and it wasn’t much. They wouldn’t have lingered here, if they’d stopped at all.
Flying along the roadway was not efficient. Instead of having Socrates show her a map on the tablet, Belle realized she could just fly a thousand meters up. She did so, and hovered there, studying the lay of the land. “Socrates, please flash the van site.”
A flashing blue light far off to her right showed her where the wreckage was. Directly below her was the overpass, a chunk of overgrown highway leading east to west. Socrates superimposed a label on it. Auto Auto El. He said, “A defunct infrastructure project, intended for driverless vehicles going 300 kilometers per hour.”
Belle’s eyes followed the roadway from the van site to the southern horizon. A blur of green hung out there. She teleported to hover over it. A forest.
“Now this is more like it. They could find cover here.”
Her enthusiasm faded quickly. A number of roadways cut through the forest, and the mystery vehicle could have taken any of them.
“A dead end,” she said.
“Of sorts,” came Socrates immediate reply. He didn’t bother speaking through the tablet now. His voice just came from the air. “You can still attempt to contact Captain Wilcox.”
“How?”
“How indeed? An excellent question.”
Belle bit off an angry response. No sense in being mad at herself. “I missed something?”
“Did you?”
If she accepted the idea that Socrates was tapping into some intuitive aspect of herself, then she had to accept that there was a detail she’d overlooked.
Her mind followed the trail that had led her to this point. From the Chinese restaurant to the surveillance video that identified Wilcox in a black truck in that weedy parking lot.
“Let me see that pic again,” she said.
Socrates posted it in a rectangle in mid-air. Belle vaguely realized that she didn’t even have her tablet anymore. Didn’t need it. The picture was from a high angle, taken from a police surveillance drone. There was glare on the windshield of the truck, reflecting a cloudy sky. Wilcox’s face was still recognizable through it.
He held something in his hands. Rectangular and fairly small.
“A tablet,” she said, body tingling with the exhilaration of a breakthrough. “He has a tablet. Of course he does. That’s how he talks to Dr. Carlhagen. Socrates, connect me to him.”
“You need an address or identifier number for the device.”
“Get me his number, then,” Belle said, exasperated.
“Vaughan looked for such an identifier for the device already. He called every Wilcox in every directory he could find. No luck. The man is likely using an alias for his device.”
“So that’s a dead end, too.”
“Not necessarily.”
“If Vaughan couldn’t find him . . .” Her eyes locked on the image of Wilcox. “Zoom out.”
Socrates complied, showing the full image taken by the police drone. It showed the entire vehicle and a good portion of the weedy parking lot.
Two things struck her immediately. With a thought, she extrapolated a three dimensional model of the truck. With another she was back to the site of the wrecked van and the field of fallen drones. She placed the three dimensional model of Wilcox’s truck in the clear spot of the mystery vehicle.
A perfect match.
She walked around it. And there, mounted on the front bumper, was an identifier plate. She checked the police drone image. The plate had a number on it. “Socrates, can we use this to see who owns the truck?”
“It belonged to one Sigmund Hopkins. He’s an IPA agent who goes by the nickname ‘Siggy.’ There are several tablet devices registered to him.”
“Call them. Call all of them.”
35
A Disinterested Scythe
The fugitives’ campfire cast dancing lights against the church’s weathered stone walls, a demonic eruption of orange and red in the midst of a black night. Overhead, the limbs of the great elm waved in a steady breeze. Jacey pressed herself to the thick trunk, Meow Meow kneeling below her, peeking around to see who approached.
The girl’s tablet screen showed a field of black with six green dots indicating the position of her drones. They were arrayed high up and twenty meters away from the tablet, forming a perimeter.
Their cameras had not spotted the intruder, who showed as a red dot near the top of the screen. It was the onboard microphones that had detected him, or her. The dot was inching closer. The attempt at stealth spoke of patience and skill.
“Should we get Dante?” Jacey whispered.
Meow Meow put a finger to her lips and shook her head.
The layout of the ruins was not shown on Meow Meow’s tablet. Jacey didn’t have any sense of how close the intruder was. Meow Meow motioned for Jacey to retreat.
Jacey picked her way through the moldering debris of the ruined church. She came to the wall opposite their humble camp. It ended in a jagged section where a twenty meter length had collapsed outward. Another step took Jacey out of the church. Trees and scrub grew right up to the exterior of the wall.
“Keep going.” Meow Meow pressed on Jacey’s back. “Let’s circle around to the truck.”
With the wind stirring the leaves above them in a wash of white noise, they were free to move more quickly. Meow Meow tapped her tablet, ordering her drones to monitor the red dot rather than continue to follow her. One green dot moved closer to the red dot. “I want to get a visual on that bastard.”
Jacey pushed through wiry scrub that grabbed at her clothes and scraped the exposed skin of her arms and ankles. The wind swirled all around. Weak moonlight edged tree trunks an eerie silver that did nothing to light the way. Meow Meow touched Jacey’s shoulder, motioning her to bear right. Jacey thought they were moving parallel to the wall, but she couldn’t see it.
She stopped to pluck a thorn from her calf, hissing through her teeth.
“Keep going!” Meow Meow urged.
“What about Dante?”
“I tried to wake him. He refused.”
“But—”
“Do you think we could carry him?”
Jacey knew they couldn’t. Not and stay quiet. Besides, they couldn’t have masked the fire in time to hide that they’d been there. Meow Meow’s plan became suddenly clear. Let whomever it was find Dante and assume he was there alone. A cold calculation, but it might give them enough time to get to the truck.
Meow Meow’s tablet vibrated. A second later, the girl swore. “My drones are going offline.”
She held up her tablet. Only three green dots remained. “Did you get a pic?” Jacey asked.
“No. The drone went offline before it could send one. I’ll send in all three at once. Now go!”
Jacey shoved through the undergrowth. Her eyes were starting to adjust to the darkness now. The hazy glow from their fire lit the underside of leaves far o
ff to her right. She worked her way closer to the wall. She spotted a slash of light high up on it.
It was the opening for the broken window. Kudzu climbed the wall here, blocking the opening except for a hair-thin strip at the middle. Idea and action occurred at once. She gripped the vines and tugged. They were so intertwined with each other that they formed a sturdy network. A climbable one.
“What the hell—?” Meow Meow rasped as Jacey started up.
It was easy, and soon Jacey was at the window. She pressed her eye to the sliver of a gap. It showed a narrow slice of the interior of the overgrown church. Shadows leapt across the weeds and rotting leaves of countless seasons.
Voices rose. Men talking.
Meow Meow tapped Jacey’s ankle. She’d climbed just high enough to get Jacey’s attention. She held her tablet so Jacey could see the screen. A dark image showed a close-up of a man’s face. He wore a bandage around his head.
What she saw explained why the drones had been going offline. Captain Wilcox—the man Dante claimed to have helped along on the path to death—was standing inside the church. And he was talking to Dante. From the tone of their voices, it wasn’t a particularly heated conversation. Jacey wished she could hear exactly what they were saying, but it was all hushed tones.
She climbed down. “Sounds like they’re working together,” she whispered into Meow Meow’s ear.
They needed no further discussion. Jacey started away from the church, then bore hard right as they made the corner. The trees thinned here. The crumbled asphalt of a driveway showed through the weeds. The truck sat directly ahead.
They ran, neither looking back. Meow Meow jumped in the driver’s side and started the motor.
The wheels spun as she tore back the way they’d come. She hit the roadway, now nothing more than tire tracks winding through the trees.
“Turn on the lights,” Jacey said. “We’ve got to be far enough away he can’t catch us.”
Meow Meow didn’t obey. “Think it through, darling. How did he get here so quickly?”
“Ah.” Wilcox had mentioned having a chopper on its way to pick up him and Jacey. That was before the drone swarm had risen from the trees and everything went to hell. “So there may be others around.”
“There must be a clearing somewhere around here, a place big enough to land.”
“How did he find us so quickly?”
Meow Meow pursed her lips and jerked the wheel to avoid a fallen tree in their path. She fiddled with the gear shifter and powered over the obstacle. The truck jounced violently as the rear wheels came off the trunk. Jacey opened her window and leaned out.
“What are you doing?” Meow Meow called, jamming on the brakes. “You’ll smack your head on a tree.”
“I’m listening.”
Meow Meow made a considering noise, then leaned her head out her window. The truck went silent as Meow Meow stopped it.
The world was still awash with wind through the trees. It was heavy with the moisture of approaching rain. The clouds had blocked the moon now, leaving the vaguest bright spot high in the sky.
Below the surf-like susurration of the treetops arose another sound. Buzzing. An ATV. Jacey recognized the sound. The same as the ATVs they had ridden to escape Vin’s mansion. “He’s coming.”
They pulled their heads into the truck.
“We can’t be stealthy in this thing,” Meow Meow said. “It leaves clear tracks in the weeds. But we can be faster. Once we get to clear pavement, we can put some kilometers between us and them.”
Meow Meow turned on the headlights and jammed the accelerator. Jacey held on, thinking of the times she’d been in a vehicle racing like this, careless of the danger. Belle had been driving once, then it had been Dr. Carlhagen. More recently it had been Summer, and then a driverless limo in San Juan. All that experience didn’t lessen the terror she felt every time the truck made a sharp turn to follow the hint of a track through black wilderness.
A half-hour of this left her jittery and exhausted. Meow Meow hit the pavement of the main highway and pushed the motor to its maximum, carrying them south.
The truck plowed through swarms of insects, a disinterested scythe, sweeping death through the night. Jacey knew how the bugs felt.
“Dante called him,” Meow Meow said.
“Huh?” Jacey had almost fallen asleep.
“Dante called Wilcox. Remember when he left camp to relieve himself? And then he came back and gave that speech about there being no basis for morality?”
“But how did he call him?”
“He had a tablet. He must have been keeping it hidden. Maybe he grabbed it from Wilcox when he grabbed the key fob for this truck.”
It made sense. Jacey was too tired to be outraged. Mostly she felt sad. She couldn’t understand a person like Dante. He was just as mercenary as Wilcox.
“Where are we going?” she said, letting her disappointment with Dante slip out the window and into the buggy night. A storm boiled off to the west, massive clouds lit occasionally by bursts of lightning.
“I think we should go through the fence.”
“To the plague area? Didn’t Dante say that was unsafe?”
“Not for me. I had it already, remember?”
“What about me then?”
“We can get you some protective gear.”
“From who?”
Meow Meow didn’t answer right away. She looked nervous, as if she were preparing for a particularly unpleasant confrontation. “From a scav supply cache. I—I know where we are now. My old tribe used to range this area.”
Jacey heard more doubt in the girl’s voice than confidence.
“What if the scavs get us first?”
Meow Meow sighed and smiled. It was spoiled by a quivering of her upper lip. “Then we’re no worse off than if Wilcox got hold of us.”
“Great. That’s very encouraging.”
“Let’s hear your idea, then.”
Jacey didn’t have one. Nothing new there. “Let’s do it. Maybe we can find that Ollie Montgomery person. She seems like the only decent person left in the world.” Since leaving St. Vitus, the only person Jacey had seen display true selflessness was a woman helping people in the Tent City of Kansas. True, she’d only seen her on an SNN broadcast, but she’d been impressed with Ms. Montgomery.
Meow Meow’s smile faltered. “Um. Yeah. Maybe that will happen.”
The rain swept in and Meow Meow started the windshield wipers frantically scraping across the glass. It did little to clear the blur of water that washed over them. And the water did little to wash away the squashed bugs.
Jacey fell asleep pondering the symbolism of windshields, wipers, and bugs.
36
Like a Pale Oval
Dr. Carlhagen was in bed when Lazarus woke him. The room already glowed with a soft, even amber light from the pixel walls. “An urgent call from Captain Wilcox,” Lazarus said.
Crawling out of bed, eyes as bleary as his brain was fuzzy, Dr. Carlhagen wrapped himself in a warm robe. He didn’t bother asking what time it was. He didn’t care. But whatever Wilcox had to say had better be good.
The man was not in holo when Dr. Carlhagen got to his office. He was still in a flat rectangle, which meant he was calling on his tablet from a low bandwidth region. The picture quality was worse than last time they’d spoken, and the lighting odd.
“Are you near a fire, Wilcox?”
“I am. This is the campsite where our fugitives were resting not long ago. I caught up with them, but just missed catching the girls.”
Dr. Carlhagen’s rising hopes collapsed. “Why the hell did you wake me then?”
“I have Dante.” Wilcox moved his tablet to aim the camera on a form lying near a low-burning fire.
“Is he dead?”
“No. But he is difficult to wake. He called me from a tablet he’d stolen from me earlier. He wanted to make a deal. Said it was life and death. It seems he left these in his hotel room in Chicago
.” Wilcox held up a pill bottle. “I’m glad I found them before the IPA did. Any idea what they are?”
Dr. Carlhagen knew exactly what they were. Dante’s ATR pills. A smile broke Dr. Carlhagen’s scowl. “Excellent. Feed him one of those and he’ll be up and awake in fifteen minutes.”
“What is it? Why would a newly transferred Progenitor need any medications at all?”
A sticky situation, this. Dr. Carlhagen couldn’t tell Wilcox about the ATR, because then the man wouldn’t transfer to his own Scion when the time came. And if he wouldn’t transfer, he had no long-term incentive to stay loyal to Dr. Carlhagen. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“He caught an infection,” Dr. Carlhagen said, enjoying the lie. “He got boisterous after the transfer and stepped on a nail. MRSA bacteria. Vicious stuff, and very resistant to antibiotics. Fortunately for him, I’m a skilled physician. Once he revives, remind him he must take the full course of the medicine for it to be effective, even if he’s feeling better.”
“Yes, sir.”
Wilcox was such a simpleton. That made him a blunt tool for a precision job, but he was the only tool Dr. Carlhagen had at his disposal at the moment.
“Now, how did the girls get away?”
“Meow Meow had a personal drone swarm deployed as a sentry picket. Must have seen me coming in time to slip away. By the time I figured out what was happening, they were in my truck and driving off.”
“Why are you wearing a bandage?”
“I had an accident. Fortunately, my pilot had a med-kit on his chopper.”
“Please tell me you know where Jacey went.”
“I do. My pilot was aloft when they drove off, a precaution against just such a situation. The truck entered a scav area along the Mississippi river. I believe the two are heading for the fence.”
“The fence! What on earth for?”
“They know nobody will follow them there. I certainly won’t.”
“They wouldn’t risk it. That would be certain death.” Dr. Carlhagen tugged at the terry cloth belt cinching his robe closed. The fence was a dead end. The girls would soon have their back to it and no place to run. “Isn’t that stretch thick with terrorists?”
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