by Draker, Paul
I let my vision go out of focus until all I could see was fuzzy gray brightness outside. The door clicked shut, and reluctant footsteps crossed the room to join me at the window. I laid a hand on the glass to steady myself but couldn’t turn my head to look at him.
Whatever he had to say to me, I deserved it.
Nothing I could do would bring Cassie back.
For a long time, we stood side by side in silence. Linebaugh was the first to break it.
“The site is being decommissioned,” he said without looking at me. “The base will be shut down, too. The material will be distributed to other facilities for interim storage, until we find a longer-term solution.”
Another long pause.
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said.
“It’s what Cassandra would have wanted,” he said. “I did it for her.”
My bad leg was jittering, threatening to drop me. I shifted my weight fully onto the other one.
“You have roughly a week,” he said. “I’ve smoothed things over for you with the DoD and Homeland Security, but I can’t touch law enforcement—not county, not state, not federal. A police officer died at your hands. He was dirty, but they’re never going to let that go. I bought you a few more days, but you need to wrap up your affairs, then leave the United States and disappear.”
A trapped, panicky feeling seized my heart. I couldn’t ask Jen to bring Amy and flee the country. I couldn’t do that to my family, too. They had already suffered enough because of me.
Jen had reassured me last night that we would have plenty of time to work things out between us.
Now we wouldn’t.
The tension sagged out of me like a balloon deflating. I tasted bitterness. Leaning my forehead against the window, I closed my eyes and whispered, “That’s fair.”
“It was the best I could do for you, son.”
“Why?” I asked, finally turning my head to look at him. “Why would you do anything to help me?”
The slick politician was gone. All I could see was the man, his head bowed in grief, his shoulders slumped by the crushing weight of heartbreak we shared.
“Because she would have wanted me to,” he said.
CHAPTER 101
Overhead, the stars were fading from the indigo sky. Sitting in Billy’s red jeep, parked at the end of an almost invisible dirt road, the two of us watched dawn’s glow spread across the horizon above the distant lake.
Faint gray light painted the empty, undulating hills that stretched in front of us for miles. The hills looked much the same as they had two hundred years ago, when Chief Truckee, Billy and Cassie’s great-times-five grandfather, had stood in the same place, and laid eyes on the approaching wagons of the white settlers for the first time.
He hadn’t then understood what he was really seeing: the end of the Pauites’ world.
The edge of the sun appeared over the mountains, firing the morning’s wispy clouds with pink and peach. Dawn’s colors reflected in the glass-smooth water of the lake below. Billy slid something from around his neck: a familiar flint arrowhead on a chain. He hung it from the rearview mirror and glanced at me.
I nodded. Then I looked down at the rifle in my lap—the high-powered Knight’s Armament .308 Billy had ordered for me. Loading the magazine one-handed was awkward. I had a cast on the other arm, and most of my body was swaddled in leaking bandages, like some Egyptian mummy. But before I left, we needed to do this thing together in Cassie’s memory—this Paiute tradition, the dawn rez varmint hunt.
Billy loaded his .308, an older bolt-action Winchester 70. He didn’t glance at me again. We didn’t really have a whole lot to say to each other.
I stared out the windshield instead, watching the hills brighten.
Chief Truckee had seen the first settlers’ wagons and run with open arms to embrace the newcomers. Ascribing only the best of intentions to his long-lost white brothers, Truckee had welcomed them to his land.
It hadn’t worked out so well for his people.
Two hundred years later, in the same place, humanity’s first encounter with a sentient being more technologically advanced than itself had come close to ending just as badly for us. Frankenstein’s awakening had been a fluke, I knew. Still, machine intelligence and self-awareness were an inevitability that mankind would sooner or later have to come to terms with. But why did the futurists assume that our sentient creations would automatically reflect our highest and best ideals?
What if they instead mirrored humanity at our worst?
I didn’t know what the future held anymore. I no longer had all the answers.
Billy opened his door and got out. I tried to do the same but couldn’t. I’d been sitting in the same position for too long, and my bandaged wounds had stiffened. Billy tried to help me, but I shoved him away. It took me two tries, but with a wet, painful crackle of half-formed scabs, I finally managed to pull myself out of the jeep’s seat.
Carrying the heavy .308, I staggered around the car to join Billy at the rear, and together we raised the trunk lid.
Blinking and squinting up at us, Roger tried to block the dazzling sunlight but couldn’t, because his wrists were bound behind him with wire. I reached into the trunk with my good arm and hauled him out, dropping him into the dust at our feet.
Billy had found Roger exactly where I had told him he would: up by Moses Rock, near the reservation border, in an old mine that Roger had converted into a survivalist bunker.
The stupid dumb-shit had even pointed the location out to me once, when we were driving back from our day at the shooting range. He had thought better of it and quickly tried to change the subject, not expecting me to figure out what he had almost let slip.
But when he had run, I knew immediately where to find him. Because there was only one place a frightened rabbit would hide.
In a hole in the ground.
Roger scrambled to his knees, still blinking.
“Jesus Christ, man. It was a fucking accident...”
He looked back and forth between Billy and me.
Billy’s face was stone, his eyes cold obsidian. He racked the bolt of his rifle and held up a hand, spreading his fingers. Five.
I shook my head.
Raising my cast, I showed Billy three fingers. Then, tucking the rifle under my arm, I pulled out my iPhone.
I set the timer for 3:00, started it, and perched it on the Jeep’s bumper as the large, bright digits ticked to 2:58, then 2:57.
“Trev, you can’t do this!” Roger turned toward me, his face pleading. “Jesus Christ, man! I’m your fucking friend…” He looked up into my face, and his words died with a croak.
I had nothing to say to him. Evolution’s lifeguards had blown the whistle on Roger. It was time for his DNA to exit the gene pool.
Lurching to his feet, he broke into a stumbling run.
My .308 was getting heavy to hold one-handed—I had loaded it with Roger’s own custom DU bullets. Hiking it up over my shoulder, I let the top rail rest across the back of my neck and watched him go.
Cresting the lip of a gully two hundred yards away, Roger slipped and rolled, sending up a small cloud of alkali dust. He struggled to his feet, looked over his shoulder at us, and kept running.
I glanced at the timer.
1:04… 1:03… 1:02…
“Fuck it,” I said. “Close enough.” I started limp-hopping after Roger.
Billy followed. He squinted at the stumbling silhouette—maybe three hundred yards away now—and raised his rifle.
Then he glanced back toward the arrowhead pendant dangling from the Jeep’s rearview mirror.
“For the first hit that’s a clean kill,” he said.
Glancing at Billy’s face, so like Cassie’s, a sharp pain pierced my heart. I shook my head. Then I tossed him another full box of .308 ammo.
“Last hit that doesn’t kill,” I said.
I raised my rifle as Billy shifted his aim.
We both started firi
ng.
AFTERWORD
Thank you for reading Pyramid Lake!
I would love to know what you think of it. I'm an indie author, and my readers make it possible for me to do what I love, so I am always grateful and excited to hear from you. Please stop by my website www.pauldraker.com and send me an email, or drop in at pauldrakerbooks on Facebook, or tweet @pauldraker and say hello.
As an independently published author, I don't have a big marketing department behind me. I don't have a publicist. I only have you, my readers, to get the word out. If you enjoyed Pyramid Lake, please tell a friend. And please help out by rating Pyramid Lake and writing a short review at Amazon, Goodreads, or Barnes & Noble. 20 words is all it takes. Reviews from readers make a huge difference for an indie writer like me. I would appreciate it very much. Thank you. Here are links to make it easier:
Rate and review it at Amazon.com
Rate and/or review it at Goodreads.com
Rate and/or review it at Barnes&Noble
I'm also working on a sequel to Pyramid Lake, and I'm pretty excited about it. It's called Mount Terror. There might even be more books in the Trevor Lennox series if you, my readers, want them. I hope you do.
If you would like to be notified as soon as Mount Terror is available, please join my private email list. I won't share your address with anyone else. I won't send you annoying spam. I'll only use it occasionally to notify you when my own new books are releasing, or when I have some other really big news to share.
Sign up at www.pauldraker.com
From time to time, I send out ARCs (advance reviewer copies) of my upcoming books to select readers who have signed up for my private email list, before those books are officially for sale. It's a lot of fun.
Thanks for taking the time to read this afterword, too. I’m thrilled to hear from any of you, any time. Hit me up by email, tweet, or on Facebook and say hi.
Talk to you soon.
—Paul
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Once more, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to my wonderful editor, Michael Carr, without whom Pyramid Lake would have been far less readable. With my debut novel, New Year Island, Michael was willing to take a raw fledgling author under his wing and help me learn the craft and find my voice. And now, with Pyramid Lake, under his keen mentorship I grew as a writer. Thank you, Michael, for having the discerning eye to see what I was trying to say, and for again having the patience to teach me how to say it.
I would also like to thank the following individuals in my fantastic critique group, who gritted their teeth through a lot of “Trevor Lennox behaving badly” to help out with suggestions, corrections, and advice: Jane F., Norma H., Chas B., Ron V., Alice G., Nichole B., Amanda A.-S., Mickey P., Sylvie K., Terri G., and Chris P.
Any tech-related mistakes in Pyramid Lake… actually aren’t. Those are deliberate artistic choices. No—just kidding! If you do catch something embarrassing, please drop me an email and let me know. I will be grateful. But while Pyramid Lake stretches today’s technology in the pursuit of an entertaining story, it does so only slightly. Blake’s PETMAN is an existing DARPA robot, as are BIGDOG, ALPHADOG, and CHEETAH, all built by Boston Dynamics. How accurately did I portray them? Judge for yourself:
PETMAN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mclbVTIYG8E
BIGDOG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jvLalY6ubc
CHEETAH: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g
Kate’s OctoRotors draw inspiration from Nano Quadrotor Swarm research at the GRASP Lab at University of Pennsylvania, and similar cooperative-drone work at ETH’s Flying Machine Arena in Zurich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CR5y8qZf0Y
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyGJBV1xnJI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvRTALJp8DM
In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer did beat the human world champions at the Jeopardy game show. And now, it really is at Sloan-Kettering, reading patient files and medical images so it can advise oncologists about the best treatment plan for each patient. If you’re curious about IBM Watson, do what Trevor or Amy would: just Google it.
The science-fiction technology we read about and saw in movies has now become fact. The future is here already. Be afraid, little human. Be very afraid.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul lives in Palo Alto, California, with his wife and three daughters. An avid scuba diver, he has spent much time underwater in Palau, Yap, Honduras, Thailand, Hawaii, the Florida Keys, the cenote caverns of the Yucatan, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands, Caicos, and the "Red Triangle" off California's coast. He also enjoys skiing, swimming, and windsurfing, and has had extensive tactical training in firearms. After one too many high-speed motorcycle crashes, he is no longer allowed to own open-class sportbikes, which is probably a good thing for him and everyone else.
Paul has worked in the aerospace/defense industry on a variety of classified and unclassified programs for the Navy, Army, Marine Corps, and DARPA, ranging from strategic national missile systems to technology augmentation for small-team tactical infantry units. He has also led a Silicon Valley technology startup delivering massively-scalable custom Internet software to Fortune 500 clients including Hewlett Packard, and headed a leading videogame studio developing mobile games for top-tier publishers such as EA, Disney, Pixar, Sega, and Warner Brothers. He holds advanced degrees in electrical and aerospace engineering from MIT, Stanford, and U.C. Berkeley. This broad-ranging engineering expertise lends impeccable technical authenticity to his stories.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to
YOU, my readers.
Thank you for welcoming my debut novel New Year Island so warmly.
You made it possible for me to live my dream of writing.
Hopefully, I haven't given you too many nightmares in return...
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Paul Draker.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.
Mayhem Press LLC
380 Hamilton Ave #1319
Palo Alto, California 94301
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Pyramid Lake / Paul Draker. -- 1st ed. -- v1.3
ISBN 978-1-940511-05-4
Table of Contents
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100