“All right so you think the map is important because it can help us get into Pallas. I’m going to let that go even though it doesn’t make any more sense when I say it than it did when you said it. Where’d the map come from?”
He looked in the rear mirror at Ben.
“Did you draw it?” he asked.
“I copied it.”
“Where’s the original?”
“Lemme restate. I copied it from memory. I looked at the original a long time ago.”
“And you don’t know what it’s for?”
“I kinda do. I know it’s for treasure. Not like pirate treasure, like, some other kind of treasure.”
Ollie rubbed his face. “None of this makes sense, guys,” he said, to both of them.
“It’s starting to rain,” Minnie said, tilting her head to look up out the windshield. “Told you.”
The perfectly blue sky had indeed given way to a heavy cloud bank that appeared to have manifested out of nothing in the past ten minutes.
“Is rain bad?” Ben asked.
“Yeah, rain’s bad. Rain’s really bad.”
“Why?” Oliver asked. “Why is rain bad, it’s just rain? Are you a witch? Are you going to melt? What’s so terrible about rain?”
“In this rain, I might, yeah.”
Then the sky opened up.
Water came down in heavy sheets, like a tropical event that belonged in a warmer place closer to the equator. Or a monsoon in India. The wind, though not all that powerful, was enough to push some of the water into ropy waves. The ambulance was filled with the sound of drops pummeling the metal roof.
Oliver kicked the windshield wipers up to the fastest available speed, but the deluge between swipes was so significant he still couldn’t see.
“We’re going to end up in an accident,” he said, with a relative calm that belied the circumstance. Sure, there was a man of questionable health and sanity riding behind him with a loaded handgun, but the real threat at this moment was the rain coupled with the forward motion of the vehicle Ollie was trying to steer.
“Hang on,” Minerva said. She was examining the middle of the dashboard, above the radio. “Here, this will help.”
She flipped a couple of switches.
“What did you do?” he asked. Nothing appeared to be any different.
“The dome lights should be on now,” she said. “And the siren. Assuming they work.”
“I can’t hear the siren.”
“I can,” Ben said. “Rain’s drowning it, but it’s there.”
Oliver caught the red flash of the ambulance light in the window of a store.
“Okay, it’s working,” he said.
Cars ahead of him were making efforts to get out of their way too, which was all good, except they weren’t actually an ambulance on their way to an emergency. This was the sort of thing that landed people in jail.
“Great, I have a clear path to get to nowhere in particular.”
“Just keep going,” Minnie said.
The worst of the deluge only lasted about two minutes, before the storm settled into a heavy, but not blinding, downpour. They were still riding with the lights and sirens, but it was getting a lot harder for the cars ahead of them to get out of the way.
Oliver realized he knew where they were: he’d managed to connect them with Dot Ave. Better, the intersection ahead of them was with another major street. Dot Ave. didn’t follow a straight path all the way out of the downtown area. It snaked and curled in several spots. One of those spots linked it up to Common Ave., with which Oliver was extremely familiar.
If he was right, and that was the intersection they were about to get through, he thought he could probably drive them all the way to M Pallas. He knew the way.
It was a nice idea. The problem was that Common Ave. appeared to have been converted into a parking lot. None of the cars on the street were moving, and so none of the cars on Dot were moving either. It made the siren and the dome lights useless.
“Something’s going on,” he said.
“It’s just the rain,” Minnie said. “Visibility and all. It’ll start moving.”
Then there was a godawful sound. Considering Oliver could hardly hear the siren coming from the roof directly over his head, the noise he could hear—from apparently a great distance—must have been incredibly loud. It was a metal-on-metal grinding sort of noise. It sounded like someone tried to drive a cement mixer under a steel bridge with insufficient clearance, only this lasted about ten seconds too long to be that.
“Well that wasn’t the rain,” Oliver said.
“Turn us around,” Minnie said, with some urgency in her voice.
People on Common Ave. were getting out of their cars and running down the street, all in the same direction: away from the center of the city.
“Yeah, maybe I better.”
“No,” Ben said, “you have to keep going.”
“To where?” Oliver asked. “The road is blocked. Look. People are abandoning their cars.”
The running people kept looking over their shoulders, as if they were being chased. Maybe they were. Maybe whatever made that noise was barreling down Common, and Oliver couldn’t see it because there were too many buildings in the way. He couldn’t imagine anything happening in a modern city that would foster a reaction like that, not unless that modern city was Tokyo and this was a Godzilla movie. A building collapse might do it, except that wasn’t typically the sort of thing that chased people.
“You have to keep going,” Ben insisted, again. To underline this, he held the gun up to Minerva’s head again.
“Ben,” she said, “be reasonable, you don’t even know where we’re meant to go. Maybe it’s behind us?”
“No, this is the right direction. You have to go that way.”
“How?” Ollie asked. “We can’t fly.”
“You start driving or I will shoot her! I will…”
He trailed off and lowered the gun, not out of some sudden rediscovery of basic common sense, but because something really wrong was happening in his chest. He grabbed his heart, gasped, dropped the gun, and fell down backwards. As he was already on the edge of one of the crash carts, he had a soft landing.
“Ben!” Minerva cried, jumping out of the seat to help.
“Is he all right?” Ollie asked.
“Pull over!”
“There’s nowhere to pull over to.”
“Then just put it in park and help me!”
He did, and climbed in back. Ben was convulsing, his hand still squeezing his chest. He was turning purple.
“Get him on the floor,” she said. “Do you know CPR?”
“No.”
“All right, I do, sort of.”
Oliver helped her get Ben on the floor, which didn’t make a lot of sense—he was on an emergency gurney already—until Minnie straddled him and began chest compressions that would have been harder to do on the cart.
“Can I do anything?” he asked.
“Check the cabinets, see if there’s anything we can use,” she said.
“Like what? You think they forgot to clear the medical supplies before this thing was junked?”
“Just look.”
Minerva was counting out beats and pausing to listen to Ben’s breathing, so Oliver figured this wasn’t the best time to have an extended conversation. But he had so many more questions.
Meanwhile, outside, more and more people who were nice and dry inside of their cars were electing to hop out and run, from something he couldn’t see. Considering how hard it was raining, whatever was coming had to be pretty bad.
“Maybe it’s a volcano,” Oliver said.
“What?”
“What they’re running from. A volcano sprung up downtown and they’re running away from the lava.”
“Oliver, I really need you to focus on what’s in front of you right now, all right? Did you find anything we can use to help Ben?”
“No, the cabinets are empt
y. No defibrillator or needles full of adrenaline. I can see if the radio works, but I don’t think it’ll help. Oh, hang on.”
There was a foot-locker-like box on the floor behind the passenger seat. He flipped it open, and discovered two black bags that looked very familiar.
“What do you got?” Minerva asked, without looking.
They were the bags she pulled from the helicopter two days earlier, and then pretended didn’t exist. He was sure of it.
She glanced over and saw what was in his hands.
“Oh good, we’ll need those.”
“I know where they came from, but what are they?”
And why did you lie about them? he thought.
Ben gasped, and his eyes popped open.
“Ben?” Minnie said. “Are you okay?”
“You two…” he rasped. It was hard to hear him, between the rain and the siren. Ollie dropped the bags he was holding and edged closer.
“You two make a cute couple,” the old man said.
“Aw stop,” Minnie said, clutching his hand tightly.
“You find my treasure. Find it or…”
His lips kept moving, but the words weren’t coming out, and then the lips stopped and so did his breathing.
“Ben? Ben?”
She jumped back into chest compressions, but they both knew it wasn’t going to matter.
“I think he’s gone,” he said.
She tried for another ten seconds anyway, before giving up.
“Dammit.”
She wiped the sweat from her forehead and sat back against the wall. Oliver wondered if he was supposed to do something. Ben’s eyes were closed already, so he couldn’t do that, and that was the extent of the knowledge he had gleaned from televised entertainment.
“Ever seen someone die before?” Minnie asked.
“I don’t think I have, no.”
“That’s the sort of thing you’d remember, if you had.”
“Have you?”
“Yeah. Couple of times. Elderly center, they’d lose a few now and then. It’s where I learned CPR.”
She was lost in a thought for a couple of seconds. It didn’t look like something to interrupt.
It was interrupted, nonetheless. The weird metal-against-metal sound returned.
“That was closer, wasn’t it?” she asked.
“It was. But maybe it’s just quieter. The rain’s easing.”
“Check out front, is there room to move?”
He did. The entire intersection had gone from a metaphorical parking lot to an actual one. All the cars looked abandoned.
They were also sandwiched on both sides and in back. The only clear path was the lane on the opposite side of Dot, but he’d have to drive over three cars to get to it, and ambulances weren’t built for that sort of thing.
“If we’re going anywhere,” he said, “it won’t be in this.”
To underscore the point, he flipped off the dome lights and the siren.
“I guess it’s time, then,” she said. “Let’s open those bags.”
“What the hell is this stuff?” Oliver asked.
He was holding what looked like a virtual reality headset, attached to a helmet that was probably bulletproof. It looked expensive. It also looked like a prop from a sci-fi movie.
“The visor will help with the rain,” Minerva said.
She had set aside her helmet and was busy slipping on some kind of light armor based on the design of football shoulder pads. The armor went all the way down her arm, though. She strapped it on and then bent her arms carefully to make sure she could. The armor’s joint lined up nicely with her elbow.
“How will it help? How will… Minnie, will you please just explain all of this?”
A third roar sounded.
Oliver decided that was what he was hearing: a roar. It made no rational sense at all, because there wasn’t anything on Earth that made a vocalization like that outside of a special effects studio, so surely it was a mechanized sound. But until he saw what was making it, he was going to think of it as a roar.
“Put on the gear, we have to get moving.”
“No. Explain first.”
“All right, Oliver,” she said. “This is high tech military gear, we’re going to be wearing it when we leave the ambulance, and we’re leaving the ambulance very, very soon, so you need to pick up the pace.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
She put on her helmet, and hit a button on the side, near the ear. The front of the goggles turned violet.
“This is how it will help with the rain. Is that a good enough explanation?”
“No! How do you know this?”
“Oliver, I swear to God, if you don’t start getting dressed right now, I’m going to shoot you.”
Ben’s gun was on the floor next to his foot, but she wasn’t threatening him with that. She had her hand in the bag.
Apparently there was some kind of weapon in there too.
“All right.”
Oliver slipped the armor on over his head, as she had. The arms each had a loop for the thumb, and straps around the wrist and up the arm. When he flexed, it felt like a tailored fit.
The chest armor hung loosely, but there were straps under the armpits to fix it in place. He did so, as Minerva—who was already fitted—watched.
He slid on his helmet, and the world got quiet.
“Can you hear me?” Minerva asked, through a microphone. It sounded as if the speaker was buried in his skull somewhere. He nodded.
“You can talk,” she said.
“I can hear you.”
“Good. Hit the button on the left of your helmet. There’s only one.”
He did so. It added some clarity to the back of the ambulance, but that was about all.
“It will help with visibility in the rain,” she said.
“Fine. What are we even doing? I assume we’re not going to Pallas at this point. Should we find Wilson?”
“Of course we’re still going. Just follow my lead, okay? Now…”
She reached into the bag and pulled out a smaller backpack with a long rod sticking out of it. The end of the rod was attached to a rubber tube that met up with some kind of aperture under the pack.
“This goes on your back.”
“Is that a gun?” he asked.
“It’s a kind of gun.”
“Minnie, who are we shooting at?”
Another roar. Maybe, he thought, it was a dinosaur made out of used clock parts. Or a sentient iron trebuchet.
“Won’t know until we see it.”
“Well I’m not shooting anybody, that’s for sure.”
She sighed, and pulled open the pack surrounding her gun.
“Pay attention. This is a second generation ion cannon. It shoots energized pulses of coherent light. Looks like a big fat bullet. It releases a lot of energy on impact, but you can adjust how much energy right here, on the barrel. See the knob? You want to break a window, set it to low. You want to take down the building the window is in, set it to high. It uses a zero-energy recursive self-charge battery system, so it can pretty much keep on going forever, but if you fire close to high more than two or three times, you’re gonna lose about ten minutes to the recharge. Try and keep it in the middle-to-low region if you can, and probably don’t ever turn it all the way to full. It might rupture the battery, and that would be very bad.”
She closed it up, and slipped it on her back. “Goes on like this, see? You should be able to reach over your head and grab the barrel, like this. You’re right-handed, right?”
“Minnie, I—”
“Yeah, you are. I remember. It should be fitted and calibrated, so just put it on. The on-switch for the cannon is next to the frequency knob.”
She pushed the button on her cannon and a green light traveled from the back to the front, blinked twice, then settled into a gentle yellow.
“And you’re good.”
“Minnie, what the hell.”
“This is ridiculous. These aren’t real. This isn’t something that’s been invented. You just made all of that up.”
“Well I had to make it up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
“That makes no sense!”
“Are you going to put it on or not? We have to go. Those things are getting closer.”
“What things? What things? What the… NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE! Who are we shooting? What is making that noise? Where did these cannons come from?”
She held up a hand to calm him a little. It didn’t work.
“All right, all right. I can see you’re getting upset. The problem is I do not have time for you to be upset right now, so…”
“Minnie!”
“Right. Fine. Listen carefully, because I’m only explaining this once. The reason I don’t know what’s coming is because you never got around to actually describing it, so we’re gonna have to wait and see what it looks like together. I asked you what the aliens looked like, remember? And you didn’t know. Now I know you’re confused, and I do not care. I’m going to go out the back of this ambulance into this vinegar-smelling acid rain, which, for whatever reason, you did describe in detail, and I’m going to shoot some things. Why? Because that’s what happens next, that’s why. And you’re coming with me, soldier, because we’re a team and right now I outrank you. Is that perfectly clear?”
She opened the back door without waiting for a response, and jumped down to the rainy street.
Chapter Nine
There Goes the Neighborhood
They were running.
Oliver couldn’t remember ever being all that athletic in general, or a good runner in particular, but he wasn’t having any trouble keeping up, which either meant that he was better than he thought he was, or that Minerva was equally unathletic.
She was the only person he could measure his progress against, since from the moment he exited the ambulance to the several minutes that had since elapsed, they encountered no other people. On the one hand, this was the expected end-state when everyone on the street elects to evacuate, but on the other hand there was a huge difference between all the drivers fleeing on foot and no other living soul anywhere. Even with the best civic evacuation plan imaginable, there was bound to be a straggler or two, and yet they’d not seen one. Also, nobody was inside any of the stores they ran past, or at the windows of the office buildings, or the residences.
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