Resurrection America

by Jeff Gunhus

  “Getting killed ourselves isn’t going to help any of them, Rick. Not Dahlia. Not Charlie. Not any of them,” Cassie yelled. “Use your fucking head for once. They’re all going to die.”

  Rick fell silent. Cassie instantly regretted the words. She slouched forward, exhausted.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t know what Keefer is planning.”

  Rick nodded. “No, you’re right,” he said. “My plan will probably get us killed. But there’s a chance, minuscule as it might be, that we can stop them. But I need your help. I wish to God I could tell you to hide in a basement until the cavalry showed up, but I can’t do that.”

  Rick’s voice was slow and measured. She could tell he was picking his words carefully.

  “I think I can get us into the mine without them knowing. If we can do that, we have options. We can find a phone or radio that connects to the outside world.”

  “Or a computer station,” Cassie whispered.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Rick said. “Or a computer station. With a computer in your hands, if you had access to their system, you could cripple whatever they had going on.”

  She nodded. Reluctantly. “Maybe. If we could get in.”

  “And it’s a huge if, I’ll give you that,” Rick said. “But if we don’t take the chance, if we sit here and do nothing, or go try to hide out in the woods, I think we both know all those people are going to die. And, if you buy what Keefer was saying, maybe a whole lot of other people too.”

  She nodded. Her gut told her what Rick was saying was true.

  “You know the mine,” Rick said. “You came here because the data trunk was being used.”

  Cassie saw where he was going. “So they are in the old lab space.”

  “It makes the most sense. That space is enormous. And I only saw the parts that weren’t off-limits when I visited you.”

  “It’s bigger than you think,” she acknowledged.

  “And if Morris is involved …”

  “… there’s likely some kind of Genysis technology they’re utilizing.”

  She felt every muscle in her body coil up. “When I first met Keefer, he said he was a fan of my work. He said my technology would change the world in ways I couldn’t even imagine.”

  “Is it too much of a stretch that whatever he’s planning on doing, he’s using your work?”

  “We don’t know that for sure.”

  “But if he is using your work, don’t you want a chance to stop him?”

  Cassie shook her head. “Don’t do that.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t try to guilt me into going with you.”

  Rick fell silent. He walked to the window and looked up the mountain. Then quietly, he said. “I’m going either way. Because if they all die and I stay here and survive, then it’s even worse than getting killed. I’ve lived with that kind of guilt since the war. I can’t do it again. I can’t live with myself if I don’t at least try to save them.”

  Cassie closed her eyes, digging through the layers of her fear to try to find some hidden repository of strength. “You really think we can get in?”

  “I think we have a shot,” Rick said.

  She didn’t need to open her eyes to imagine the hopeful look on Rick’s face.

  “And if it doesn’t work,” he said, “we can come back here and wait it out.” He paused then added. “Cassie, I need you. All those people up there need you. I’ll do everything in my power to keep us alive. But if we don’t do––”

  “All right,” she said, cutting him off. She opened her eyes, looking past his to the empty square outside. “I’ll do it.”

  As she said the words, fear sliced right through her and curled through her insides. She didn’t want Rick to see it, so she mustered what she hoped sounded like a line one of those tough women in the action movies would say.

  “I just hope you don’t slow me down on the way up there,” she said.

  He gave her a short chuckle, but it was clearly a courtesy laugh. She wasn’t fooling anyone. She was scared shitless and they both knew it.

  39

  The Blazer bumped over the rocky terrain, the suspension complaining about the abuse it was getting. Rick sped down the road without any skill or finesse. It didn’t matter if the vehicle got a few dents along the way; all he cared was that he didn’t push so hard that they got stuck or broke an axle or something. He knew there was a line between being fast and being reckless, and he was erring on reckless.

  Rick scanned the way ahead. He didn’t think Keefer would have used manpower to have surveillance on this road, but there was a chance they’d dug in a few mines to deter people. Finding one of them would bring their adventure to an abrupt halt.

  “How much farther?” Cassie asked. She held on the best she could as the Blazer rocked violently, one hand propped up on the ceiling overhead and the other in a death grip on the door handle.

  “Five minutes. Maybe ten. Depending on how bad this road gets.”

  They were headed to the old alternate entrance to the mine. The secondary entrance was a safety precaution put in place decades earlier after miners were trapped for days underground after cave-ins on the East Coast. It had timed well with the resurgence of labor unions, so mining companies around the country found themselves drilling exits, whether they made logistical sense or not.

  The alternate entrance for the Resurrection mine had never been used by anyone other than teenagers looking for trouble as far as Rick knew. In fact, he’d spent more than a few Saturday nights sneaking into tunnels with his friends, all of them with backpacks full of cheap beer, a few of them with bags of weed. On good nights, it was with mixed company. At some point they’d turn the flashlights off to show the girls how dark it was in the mine, a trick they did on the official tours in underground caves. Quite often, the lights didn’t come back on for a while. Those were the good old days.

  When he first became sheriff, he’d made a couple trips up to the entrance to make sure it was secured. It was a classic case of the older guy looking back on his adolescence and wondering just how in the hell he’d managed to survive. To his adult brain, the thought of teenagers climbing through abandoned mineshafts was ridiculously dangerous. There could be a cave in. Someone could get lost. A girl on the wrong date could find herself pressured to do something she didn’t want. If that happened, being in the mine was like being on a different planet. Screaming didn’t bring help, it only brought echoes.

  Surprisingly, the younger generation seemed to agree with him. From what he could tell, there was little or no interest in crawling around the mine. Whether due to fear, or the desire to plug into first-person shooter games on a video console instead, the idea of exploring the dirty, cobweb-filled mines was no longer the hot ticket in town.

  Still, Rick had gone up there and installed a heavy-duty gate on the entrance and some warning signs about motion detectors, video surveillance and all the terrible things that would happen to trespassers. The signs were lies; the town couldn’t afford fancy surveillance electronics, but they’d seemed to do the trick. The entrance was left alone.

  “Dang,” Cassie said as the Blazer bottomed out on a rock. “Let’s get there in one piece.”

  Rick backed off the gas a little. She was right. If the Blazer broke down, it’d take them a half hour to get there over the rough terrain. Not only that, but there was a chance they’d get to the secondary entrance and find that Keefer’s men were guarding it or that they’d booby-trapped it somehow. If that happened, they needed the Blazer for a hasty retreat to think up a Plan B.

  He had no idea what a Plan B might look like quite yet, but he figured if it came to it, having transportation would likely be essential.

  “What do we do if the entrance is blocked off?” Cassie said.

  Rick shook his head. “I don’t know. We’ll think of something.”

  “Bottom line is that we just need to get in there,” she said. Cassie the scared woman was go
ne now, replaced by Cassie the problem solver. “I’ve been thinking about what you said. They were using the main data trunk to communicate with the outside world, so whatever their plan is, it has to involve using that transmission point to connect to the external grid.”

  Rick knew better than to interrupt. He’d seen her like this when they were together, pacing the floor of his living room, talking full speed, dissecting a problem down to its core. Those conversations had been about algorithms and heat exchange issues with microcomputer processing power, all of it a different language to him.

  “The massive amount of data in the packets my sensors detected might have been accurate,” she said. “Morris had a whole part of the company working on data compression. With advances in AI, the theoretical limiting factor was the transmission ability.”

  “You think they’re creating some kind of artificial intelligence,” Rick said. “Why here? Why do they need all those people?”

  Cassie shook her head. “No idea. And it’s not necessarily an AI, but it’s something they need to be able to send huge amounts of data out to the world.”

  “So if we disable that data trunk, then they are cut off,” he said, slowing the Blazer down. “Can we access the data line out here?”

  “The data trunk is protected in the same way as NORAD and missile silos. It’s burrowed through solid rock. I asked Morris about it once and he said it was to shield it from external radiation. I accepted the answer. I mean, our entire lab was in a mine for the same reason, so it sounded reasonable at the time.”

  “But really they were protecting it from attack. Once they button that place up, there’s no getting at them. It’s a full-on military installation.”

  “Which is why I left the sensors on the data trunk to begin with,” she said. “Morris promised he wasn’t doing anything with the military beyond the BMI I worked on for prosthetics like your arm.”

  “BMI?”

  “Sorry, brain-machine interface,” she said. “Even though the shielding breakthrough made it possible to move our work out of the mine, I begged Morris to leave it open. The lab was set up. It was good for the town. It was good for me. We had a huge falling out over it.”

  “You never told me that,” Rick said.

  “You and I were too busy fighting by that point.” She waved a hand as if swatting away the memory. “Doesn’t matter. The point is, even then I suspected Morris had ulterior motives.”

  “Oh, I know what his motives were,” he said.

  Cassie pursed her lips. It was part of the old fight. Brandon Morris the billionaire genius was always the third person in their relationship. Rick used to hate how petty he felt when the man gave Cassie attention, assuming it was for something more than just appreciation of her brilliance. He had never thought of himself as a jealous guy before, but being sized up next to one of the richest men in the world had made him insecure in ways he’d never experienced. The feeling had resulted in some less than stellar moments on his part.

  “If it makes you feel better, you were right,” she said. “Only a couple of weeks after I relocated to Denver, he tried to start up a relationship. I shut him down, but he never really stopped trying.”

  Rick couldn’t help but feel a little vindication, but he kept his mouth shut. An awkward silence dragged out as the Blazer bumped down the road.

  Cassie finally broke the tension. “Go ahead. You can say it.”

  “What? That I told you the little shit was after you?” Rick said, grinning. “Thought hadn’t crossed my mind.”

  Cassie took the jab with a smile. “Feel better now?”

  “Actually, a little bit,” he said. It was a needed lighthearted moment, but he steered the conversation back to the matter at hand. “So, you’re saying Morris doesn’t know about the sensors.”

  “No, I did it on the down low because I didn’t know whom to trust,” Cassie said. “No one knows about them. And here’s the best part. The sensors are physically attached to the data trunk.”

  “I thought it was buried through solid rock.”

  “I discovered the one place to access it,” she said. “If we can get to it, that would be our best chance to disable the whole thing.”

  Rick nailed a pothole in the road and the Blazer jolted hard enough to rattle their teeth.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Unless we die out here from your driving first,” she said, pulling her seatbelt tighter.

  Rick grinned. He enjoyed seeing her spark to the challenge in front of them. He hadn’t been sure she was up for what he was asking of her when they were back in town. But now she appeared ready.

  “So, we have a plan,” he said. “Access the mine through the safety shaft, make our way to the lab level, access and disable the data trunk, then call for help.”

  “While evading a hundred armed mercenaries led by a madman with a Messiah complex and two thousand civilian hostages,” she added

  “Sure, when you say it like that …”

  Rick hit the brakes and slid to a stop on the loose gravel road. He pointed to a grey metal door embedded into the mountain wall to their left.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  40

  Rick didn’t see any sign of recent activity in the area. No tire tracks on the road. No footsteps near the door. Seemed good, but didn’t mean one of Keefer’s men wasn’t looking at him through a scope.

  “Wait in here,” he said.

  “I’m coming with you,” Cassie said. “That’s the whole point of me being here.”

  He pointed to the mountains around them. “Just let me see if we have anyone waiting for us.”

  Cassie’s expression changed and she looked out the window.

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  Rick knew that didn’t mean anything. If there was someone watching them, and if the person was even half-decent at their job, then they wouldn’t be visible. Rick and Cassie wouldn’t know the sniper was there until the moment they took a bullet.

  “Just give me a minute. Slide over to the driver’s seat when I get out. Just in case.”

  “Why would I …” Cassie stopped herself. She was smart and she seemed to grasp what he was doing. He was bait. If he got shot, that meant someone was there.

  Rick pulled the M-1 from the backseat and climbed out of the Blazer. As he walked around the front of the vehicle, he imagined he could feel a sniper’s crosshairs on his chest, but he knew it was just his imagination. At least he hoped it was.

  He scanned the area, using his trained eyes to look for threats. Naturally, he started by checking the spots where he would have set up to cover the entrance. If he’d been tasked with protecting an exposed area like this door, he would have set up at least a hundred yards away. Conceal, wait, and then pick off anyone who showed up from a safe distance.

  After sixty seconds, he breathed a little easier. His guess was that during the operational phase of Keefer’s mission, the rules of engagement would be to shoot first and ask questions later. The fact that he was still alive meant they’d won the lottery.

  If the door was unguarded, there was a good chance Keefer didn’t know about it.

  He waved to Cassie and she climbed out of the Blazer. She did so tentatively and for good reason. Rick tensed for a few seconds on the chance that any sniper may have just been waiting for both targets to be in the open. But no shots came. They were alone.

  “Where does the power source come from to electrify the fence?” Cassie asked.

  Rick grinned as he walked to the fence, slinging the M-1 on his shoulder. “There isn’t one. I put those signs up to keep the teenagers out.”

  He was about to reach out for the combination padlock on the fence when Cassie cried out, “Wait!”

  He froze. In a combat area, if someone said stop, you stopped. Often it was a tripwire to a booby trap visible only from their angle. Stopping saved your life.

  “What is it?” he said.

  Cassie pointed to five or six black
masses along the base of the fence, each one about the size of a softball. “Are those what I think they are?”

  Rick walked over to the nearest one and nudged it with his foot. The charred outer surface broke apart, revealed brittle bones inside.

  They were birds and a couple of small animals. Burnt to a crisp.

  “No power source, huh?” Cassie said.

  Rick swallowed hard, remembering the voltage going through the fence line up at the main entrance to the mine. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a penny. He tossed it at the fence, but it passed through one of the holes in the chain link, not touching anything.

  Cassie shot him a look. “Really?”

  She picked up a rock the size of her fist and threw it at the fence. The rock blew back at them in a cascade of sparks, pelting them with shrapnel.

  “Holy shit,” she said, slowly looking up.

  “That would have been me,” Rick said. “You saved my ass. Thanks.”

  “Get me out of this little adventure alive and we’ll call it even.”

  Rick knew she meant it as a joke, something to break the tension, but he couldn’t bring himself to smile. Her words only emphasized what an impossible task lay ahead of him. If he was being honest, their chance of success was rapidly trending toward zero. Seeing that her joke missed the mark, she changed directions.

  “Okay, so now we know this thing is protected by the electrified fence from hell,” she said. “What do we do about it?”

  “You’re the scientist,” he said. “Can we short it somehow?”

  Cassie looked around the area, taking stock of her available tools. Her eyes came to rest on the Blazer. “Not eloquent, but it’ll get the job done.”

  A couple minutes later, following Cassie’s plan, Rick opened the Blazer’s door and jumped out. The vehicle was only going twenty miles per hour, but jumping out of a moving car at any speed didn’t feel good, especially on the rocky ground. He tucked his shoulder and rolled, popping up onto his feet just in time to see the Blazer barrel through the fence.

  Rick shielded his eyes against the explosion of sparks. The fence collapsed, twisting and turning as it wrapped around the Blazer’s front and tore away from the anchors drilled into the rock face. The vehicle bumped down a rocky slope, dragging the fence with it. It was twenty yards away before it thumped into a sheer rock face in a slow-motion crash, crunching the bumper and popping one of the headlights.