by J. M. Lanham
Hesitantly, “Yes. That is my name. What is this all about?”
“Sir, you’re going to have to come with me,” the man said, arm casually propped on the window. Dawa hunched down to look inside; another man in shades and a black suit sat in the passenger seat. “I’d do what he says, Mr. Graham. Fast.” The man checked the mirrors. “We can’t be seen out here.”
The door latches clicked, and the driver motioned for Dawa to hop in. The detective’s brain went into overdrive searching for solutions, but none were plausible. It appeared he had little choice but to hitch a ride with the two strangers who must have been either CIA, NSA, or some hybrid and diabolical combination of the two.
“What about my car—”
“Leave it. Just get in. Now.”
Dawa obliged, accepting the uncertainty of his fate as his hand reached the door. He looked up the hill one last time, and said a little prayer for Claire and Paul. Please make it back.
He opened the door and stepped inside.
***
At first, Kovic wasn’t sure why he was lying in the hallway, face plastered to the linoleum floor. The fluorescent lights flickered above him—a settling reminder that the power was still on. He rose slowly, his cheek taking with it a thin coat of wax and grit, then pushed himself up, stumbling to right himself and using the wall for support. He leaned against the hallway wall by the door to the interrogation room, rubbing his strained eyes before moving his hand down to address the painful knot in his neck as he gathered his senses.
The facility was still rather quiet—at least compared to a normal workday. But as each second passed, Kovic began to hear groans coming from down the hall, in the main laboratory, just one or two at first before quickly turning into what sounded like a chorus of zombies painfully rising to their feet.
Whatever had happened, it appeared to be over. And that’s when Kovic realized something: Claire.
He busted open the door to the interrogation room. Empty. Nothing but a table and two chairs. The captive was gone. It was then he remembered being pushed into the hallway, right after he opened the door and was blasted with some strange energy he’d never felt before, an energy that had driven into his head and into his chest and swelled within as if his entire body were about to explode into a giant red mist, completely ruling out an open casket funeral. His heart had pushed against his ribs, seemingly eager to escape his chest as his pulse had soared. Veins had bulged in his head and pressed against every last nerve wrapped around his skull as the pressure within continued to rise. Kovic was no stranger to pain, but the experience had been the most excruciating sensation he’d ever felt before in his life.
Then, it had stopped. Suddenly, like a game of tug-o-war where one team decided to drop the rope at once, sending the other team falling back on their asses. The rope dropped, and Kovic’s vitals plummeted with him to the floor.
He was lucky to have woken up, but a period of grateful reflection was the last thing on his mind. He quickly paced to the room next to Claire’s—the room on the other side of the two-way mirror. Inside, Cline and Ramírez were lying on the floor beneath the mirror, both unconscious. Kovic looked around the room and shook his head. Unprotected. Because why would an outlier be on the wrong side of the glass? Claire must have known exactly where she’d be protected from an outlier’s attack—and what she needed to do to get there in time.
Kovic kicked Cline and Ramírez and yelled for them to get up, but his foot landed on motionless bodies. They were still out of it, and he didn’t have time to wait. He raced toward the lab, busting through the door before entering a room full of dazed and confused lab coats rubbing their foreheads and swaying like a herd of drunk college students after an all-night bender. He ignored the techs—it looked like it would be a minute before they could coherently explain what had happened to them in the first place—and rushed past them to the observation window.
Inside the patient room lay Mrs. Everly, asleep and still, apparently unaware that anything out of the ordinary had happened. Kovic leaned on the control panel and breathed a sigh of relief. She’s still here. Nothing’s changed.
But a quick glance up at the monitor, and Kovic realized he had spoken too soon:
Project THEIA
OS V 2.14.50
File C:/desktop/Asteria/Asteria.exe
Program executed 08/21/21 at 15:12
“Holy shit,” Kovic said, the ominous epithet muffled by the hand covering his mouth. It must have been Claire. That had been the plan all along—to get into the facility and take everyone out just long enough so she could send out a message.
Kovic read the screen again. Whatever was in the Asteria file, it couldn’t have been good. Kovic kept staring. His mind was still hazy, and it was taking a minute to process the words he was reading on the monitor. Then, a moment of clarity:
File C:/desktop/CIA/CIA.exe
Program initiated 08/21/21 at 15:18
In progress
Another program was running. Panicked, Kovic looked back into the observation room. The green headset. The light was blinking. How in the fuck hadn’t he noticed it before? An emergency cancellation button was ten feet away on the far end of the panel. He lunged toward it, hammering it with a closed fist, but nothing happened—the button was unresponsive.
The banging continued as he turned his head to yell at the rest of the lab. “JESUS, SOMEONE TURN THIS THING OFF!”
A couple of techs came to and approached the control panel, half wanting to help, half wanting to go back to sleep. Kovic yelled, “GET IN THERE, NOW!”
Rattled, the techs stammered to the door and into the patient room where Mrs. Everly’s subconscious was hard at work. They quickly pulled out plugs and flipped switches and yanked the headset off the outlier’s face. She continued to lie there, eyes wide open, darting back and forth, following traces left of the rapidly evolving images in front of her as if she were still wearing the device.
One of the techs tapped her cheeks in rapid succession, and her eyes began to stop. Then, she closed them, back to sleep, drifting slowly away from the influence of anything coming through the facility’s little green headset.
Kovic stood back from the glass, sick at the thought of repercussions to come. Had they stopped the program in time? What exactly was in the executable CIA file Claire had run to begin with? He looked around the room as everyone’s wits were slowly coming back to them. It was time for damage control.
In a daze, Cline emerged from the back, rubbing his temples as he stumbled toward the control panel.
Kovic asked, “Where’s Ramírez?”
“Still asleep. Whatever that was, it got him pretty good.”
Cline watched the techs wheel Mrs. Everly out of the patient room and back to holding, then asked Kovic, “How bad is it?”
Kovic pointed to the monitor. Cline read the program list over, then cursed under his breath. It was bad.
Chapter 36:
Disconnected
A cloud of pollen followed Paul like a contrail down the mountainside as quick feet sprinted across the dried and brittle leaves toward the sanctuary of the valley below. The incline was slick and treacherous, with no clear path to the bottom through a thick maze of trees. Every ten or so hastened leaps down the wooded slope were halted by short, erosive drop-offs that formed the giant staircase descending the northern spine of Skyline Mountain. Paul would baseball-slide off the short brown walls of dirt held together by tangles of roots that spidered out from the soil, skidding off the four- and five-foot edges before landing on a clear stretch where he could sprint again.
Back up the mountain, Paul’s pursuers were hot on his trail. While the two gunmen had lost sight of him the moment he’d leapt off the ten-foot drop surrounding the north side of the tower, the runaway wasn’t hard to track—the summertime drought had turned dried leaves and twigs into woodland alarms that gave up the position of even the smallest creatures moving across the forest floor. Couple that with the ragge
d trail of shuffled leaves and snapped twigs he had left behind, and the trail might as well have been highlighted with neon signs pointing in his direction.
Still, Paul had put some distance between him and his pursuers. He found a thick-trunked white oak and dove behind it, catching his breath while fidgeting with his walkie talkie. He clicked over to channel twenty-nine, one channel down from Fenton’s.
“Dawa. Dawa. Do you copy, over?”
The channel was silent. No response.
“Dawa. I’m in big trouble here. Had to take a detour, but should be near the rendezvous point soon. Do you copy, over?”
Still nothing. Paul toggled the squelch in search of chatter from truck drivers or hunters or hobbyists in the area, but the radio wasn’t picking up a thing. He flipped it over in his hand, inspecting the back, then the front, and that’s when he saw it.
Burn marks. Both the microphone at the bottom and the speaker near the top were fried. Now that he’d stopped running, the smell of burnt plastic rose to his nostrils as he sat back against the tree. The radio was busted. No calls in, no calls out.
Certain it was a loss, he threw the walkie talkie into the woods to the east, opposite the direction he was heading. He’d seen and heard of devices affected like this before, like the story Tanner had told him about an original outlier, poor Donna Edwards: the blind insomniac who had blown up an entire lobby’s worth of electrical equipment after a night out with Asteria’s hottest new sleeping pill.
Paul checked his wristwatch, just to test the theory. Sure enough, the digital numbers flashed all zeros. Another bust. There was little doubt now that Donny’s amplified dream had produced an EMP powerful enough to knock out surrounding electronics—at least above the surface.
And if that were the case, it meant complete radio silence. No cellphones, either. Everyone in the field was completely on their own. Paul peered around the tree, looking up the hill and listening for signs of the people chasing him. Not a soul in sight. But the gentle breeze rolling down the hill carried the sound of faint footsteps kicking up leaves further up the mountain.
It was time to move again.
***
Claire lay on her belly and snuggled tight to the stone wall separating Skyline Drive from the field below. Earlier that day, she had crossed the same field on the way down to the valley in search of Kovic’s secluded facility. Now she was returning, just as they had planned, to catch a ride back with Dawa and Paul to the motel. Everything seemed fine on the surface: she had escaped in one piece, and Dawa’s sedan sat idly by on the shoulder of the two-lane asphalt less than fifty yards ahead.
And that was the problem.
Skyline Drive was by no means off-limits. In fact, a moderate amount of traffic still took the scenic route through the Shenandoah National Park—especially on the weekends. Between the CIA keeping a close eye on anything suspicious near its latest pet project and running the risk of getting towed for illegal parking, they had already decided that Dawa would return at a designated time: 5 p.m. If Claire and Paul hadn’t made it back by then, the detective would drive back and forth, making a pass by the rendezvous point every thirty minutes so as not to attract too much attention by sitting still and waiting.
But as Claire peered over the mossy wall, it seemed like Dawa was doing just that. Sitting. Waiting. Sticking out like a sore thumb. The glare of the sun on the windshield made it impossible to see inside, but fortunately the wall ran parallel to the road and right past the broadside of the car. She lowered her head and started crawling, elbow to knee, core to the dirt, keeping her ass down so as not to get it shot off. (That final piece of advice Dawkins had given her years ago had saved her ass more than once.)
She kept her head down and hung tightly to the wall on her right until she felt like she was getting close. Slowly, she peered over the wall in search of the car. There, sitting only fifteen feet away, was Dawa’s sedan. The engine was off. The detective was nowhere in sight.
Claire checked her surroundings. Empty field. Empty woods. Empty two-lane wrapped around the mountain. A few birds chirped and the wind rustled the leaves in the trees, but all else was quiet. The serenity of the Appalachians relished by hikers and campers and Sunday drivers tested Claire’s nerves. Had Dawa been taken hostage? Had his car been left behind as bait? Was a sniper up there in the hills, scope homed in on the disabled vehicle, waiting to draw the nearby facility’s number-one troublemaker out of the shadows?
She had no way of knowing, and little time to think it through. She looked left, then right, then hopped over the short wall and ran to the car. The driver’s side window was down, and she leaned in to investigate. The front was empty. So was the back. A strange tingle crawled up her back, and she wondered if a set of eyes in the hills was upon her. She opened the door and hopped inside. Putting a little steel between her and the tree line may not have been a foolproof way to avoid getting shot, but it did give her some sense of security (however false it might have been).
Inside, something hit her right knee and jingled the moment she settled into the driver’s seat. Car keys. They were still hanging from the ignition—Dawa had never taken them out. Claire wasn’t sure what to make of it, but that damned familiar feeling of dread and guilt was starting to sink in uninvited all over again.
Maybe he was nearby, just pulled over to stretch his legs or find a tree and take a piss. After all, if someone had scooped him up, then why would they just leave the car unlocked with the keys still in it? There was no sign of a struggle, no blood or shattered glass or shell casings lying in the car or on the street. But did that really mean Dawa was safe?
And there she was again—worrying. She swallowed hard and brushed it aside as she turned the keys. No time for that shit now. Worry about it later, Claire.
She started the car and left it in park. Five minutes. That’s all she could give the good detective. After that, she’d have to get moving again.
Just five more minutes.
***
There. Just up the hill, the steel-gray line cut horizontally through the trees a hundred or so yards up the steady incline. It was the road out. Had to be. The foliage was thick, with no clear view, but Paul could see the asphalt line peeking through the trees and highlighted by the sun beaming down through the strip of cleared canopy that opened over the winding stretch of two-lane.
Deliverance.
It might not have been the rendezvous point. Come to think of it, Paul hadn’t a clue as to where on Skyline Drive he was emerging from the woods. (Running for one’s life tended to sideline one’s sense of direction.) But that didn’t matter. Skyline Drive was the only road in Shenandoah National Park. As long as he kept the late afternoon sun to his right once he hit the road, he knew he’d be fine.
He trudged up a hill strewn with rotting logs and rocky obstacles and the long shadows of the trees in front of him as the lazy sun teased the top of the ridgeline ahead. Westward bound. That was a good thing, since Skyline Drive ran west of the mountain summit. With any luck, he’d be just a little north of the drop-off point. And if Claire had made it back in time, then she would (hopefully) be patrolling the area with Dawa, eyes peeled.
The hill was steep, but Paul made progress one foot at a time, using protruding quartz rocks and thick roots as steps wherever he could to avoid sliding on the leaves. Slow and steady wins the race, or so they say. Of course, Paul was sure when they said it that they didn’t take into account armed gunman bringing up the rear, but he felt good about his prospects.
Until he slipped. A stepping stone had given way, and had it not been for the quick reflexes that led his nearest hand to the sapling on his left, there was no telling how far down the hillside he would have slid. He clung tight to the tree as he watched the rounded stone tumble down into the valley below, the prehistoric bowling ball taking long bounces and crushing sticks and stirring up leaves before finally coming to a rest near the bottom.
Paul waited for the sounds of the rock barrelin
g down the mountain to subside, only they didn’t. The rock came to a rest, and the leaves continued to crunch—and not in some haphazard way, either. Those were steps. Human steps. As suddenly as Paul had noticed them, they stopped.
Then the shots rang out.
Bullets met tree bark as Paul scurried up the steep hillside on all fours, using his hands and his feet to propel himself toward the top as fast as humanly possible, praying the entire time he didn’t catch a bullet in his back. The spooks had made it to the valley below him almost undetected—an impressive feat across the noisy terrain. Now they were right on his tail, firing into the hillside.
Paul cursed the rock he stumbled on as he worked his way up, trying his best to avoid more obstacles. He was getting close now. The road was just ahead: only a few more yards away. He hunkered down to dip under a low-hanging branch, and that’s when he felt a tug. A tree limb had snagged the top loop of his backpack and was holding him back. Son of a bitch! No time to detangle it. He wiggled out of his shoulder straps and let the backpack hang. Faster without it anyway.
And he was right. He hadn’t realized just how much the backpack had slowed him down until he left it behind. Now he was able to make a serious sprint toward the road, feet lightened and arms swinging. He emerged from the tree line, hopping the guardrail and hitting the asphalt in a few short steps. But, without a way to radio Dawa or Claire or Fenton for help, he was far from out of the woods yet. There was one silver lining to the EMP, however, and that was the fact that every radio above ground must have been affected by Donny’s dream. That included any radios or cellphones the goons behind him were carrying, too.
It was a modest advantage, but Paul would take it. He held tight to the white line and started to run to the south, pacing himself for what he imagined might be a long journey home. He worked to soften each step on the asphalt, trying to ignore the sound of his own feet while listening for cars.