Watching the techno-fetus, he backed to the front door on the opposite side of the main room. The drone held steady. The 360-degree eye pivoted within the geometric diamond to follow him. With his back to the front door, Teagarden felt for the knob and slowly opened it.
That’s when the second drone fired.
Phfft! Phfft!
It was hovering twenty feet from the entrance, in a direct path between the front porch and the car. Just as he slammed the door, he saw the twin stains of white liquid dripping down the door’s front panels at chest level.
That left him only one option.
Chapter Five
It had been many years since he fired the shotgun.
He’d never been a hunter. But he used to shoot skeet. While in undergraduate school at Chapel Hill, he failed to qualify for the U.S. team at the ’92 Olympic Games in Barcelona. At the time, he suspected his age was a handicap because he’d skipped two years of high school and entered college at the age of sixteen. He did win the first backup spot, but there were no dropouts that year, so he never got the go-ahead phone call.
Fighting back fear and tears, he careened from room to room, flinging open doors so forcefully that doorknobs cracked the walls. In the cluttered basement he knew approximately where he’d stored the old shotgun.
The small workshop was illuminated by a single sixty-watt bulb with a pull chain. On first scan, he saw nothing. He pulled down the golf bag. Nothing. He knocked over an upright stack of lumber leaning in the corner. Nothing. He snatched a leather carpenter’s apron from a wall hook.
And there it was.
The canvas harness holding the weapon stood upright, behind an old Packard Bell computer, which sat atop an older Kaypro II. He yanked the harness hard, toppling gallon-sized coffee cans filled with nails, screws and pieces of junky hardware, decades of impedimenta that accompanied everything from power tools to picture frames. The old gun looked fine. It was a Remington 1100, twelve-gauge, four-in-one auto-loader, the most popular shotgun in the history of the world. The stock had silly scrollwork fashionable in 1985 when his father bought it for him. The rust at the tip of the barrel had been there when he last fired it.
Now for the shells.
It may have been a crapped-up room, but he never considered it a room full of crap. Everything in it was perfectly useful. He now regretted that sentiment. The shotgun shells, wherever they were, would be easier to find if he’d cleaned out the shop years ago.
He pulled down more coffee cans filled with junk, flipped open boxes and unlatched portable tool chests.
Nothing.
He tugged the hard case that housed a chainsaw and stood on it to reach the upper shelves, frantically pulling at old math books and stacks of spiral notebooks filled with algorithm scribbles for decoding and deciphering, research for his master’s degree at George Washington and Ph.D. studies at Columbia.
Still nothing.
His instincts nagged at him to settle down. The only way to find a solution was to be calm, turn inward and let the subconscious whisper the answer. That was the way all great solutions are born. It happens when people are in the shower, waking-up, falling asleep, mowing the grass, jogging. Only when the mind is empty of all competing nonsense, will the voice of atavistic clairvoyance speak loud enough to be heard by the conscious mind.
Teagarden cradled the twelve-gauge in both arms. He narrowed his eyes, trying to think back.
Where would an obsessively cautious man like me hide shotgun shells?
It seemed to take hours. In reality it took seconds. Shotguns shells are dangerous. They’re especially dangerous chambered inside a shotgun. That’s reason enough to never store them within easy reach of a firearm. Therefore, the safest place to store them in a house was—nowhere. They wouldn’t be stored here at all. That meant they were outside, in the tiny garden shed with the gabled rooftop that made it look cute, like a gnome’s home.
Teagarden hurried to the adjacent laundry room where there was a small window for venting the dryer under the screened-in porch. There wasn’t a very good view of the side yard, but it was a better option than the front door. Using the clothes dryer as a foot hoist, he threaded the shotgun through the window, then squirmed out to the crawl space under the long porch where he terrified three chipmunks and a nest-sitting robin.
With the Remington cradled in the crooks of his elbows, he crouched between the wheelbarrow and lawnmower to lean forward and look about. The garden shed stood about forty yards to the left, against the rear fence in the shade of the big willow. The sundeck where Coconut lay dead was above and to the right, in the opposite direction.
From this perspective, nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
He listened intently for the low-pitched techno whirr. It came from above and to the right, the direction of the sundeck. There was no mistaking that sound. It was the same engineered hummingbird buzz of the drone that attacked him minutes earlier.
Then, he heard it again. The second buzz was also in the air above him. But that one came from the left. Then it came again, from the right. Then again, from the left.
As wary as a turtle hiding from sniffing coyotes, he poked his head past the lawnmower for a better look. The sight left no doubt.
There are four of them. Four! And they’re circling the house.
Chapter Six
Teagarden pulled his aching knees to his chest and listened to the pace of the orbiting buzz. It was rhythmic, like a musical refrain.
As with the much larger Predator drones that hurl Hellfire missiles, these were remotely controlled. It had to be the case. He wasn’t ready to consider extraterrestrials. And it was apparent that when the first drone failed to kill him, the controller sent a back-up to the front door. When that too failed, the floodgate opened. Every hummingbird in the aviary had been released. He assumed that if his theory about firing capacity was correct, the first drone had since been re-armed. That meant a control vehicle was somewhere nearby.
The prickly lettuce and crabgrass weeds that sprouted around him held a vague odor of urine. He wondered if it was his own, but had no inclination to check. It was probably from Coconut’s frequent visits under the porch, or the many chipmunks that used the space as a safe highway between their home nest and the bounteous ground under the bird feeder filled with sunflower seeds.
He calculated four drones because the first two were identical. The back-up pair was a little larger, the same design but the size of a softball. They all buzzed at the same steady clip, alternating in opposite directions like asteroids caught in the gravitational pull of a larger body. It meant that no part of the house was without surveillance for more than a second or two. He calculated their spacing. Each whirring sound rose, then faded to silence for perhaps two seconds, before the whirring of the next drone rose from the opposite direction and faded to silence for another two seconds. That didn’t give a forty-nine-year-old math professor with bum knees much time to dash forty yards, open a garden shed, find shotgun shells, load at least four into a heavy old Remington twelve-gauge automatic, aim, fire, and—hope—he still had what it takes to hit four moving targets.
Moving targets—shit.
Teagarden recalibrated. Clay pigeons were moving targets. These targets were armed with a deadly poison and trying to kill him. They’d already taken out his best friend, now moldering in the afternoon heat on the sundeck.
The garden shed was dirty white with bright red eaves and matching red gables. One corner of the base sunk a little, the result of the latest flash flood, which gave it an antiquated, long-lived appearance. His wife, Kendra, built if from scrap lumber left over when the house was completed. She loved it, painted it, pronounced it a masterpiece, and named it “The Little House of Teagarden.” Along with the color and enveloping shade of a nearby willow, the slightly sunken corner made it look more like an authentic gnome’s abode than what it really was, a warehouse for rakes, shovels, birdseed—and shot
gun shells.
None of it mattered now. There was no way he could make the dash to the shed and blast all four of the orbiting drones. Betting odds are based on numerical averages, and the numerical averages were overwhelming. A twenty-year-old Olympic sprinter couldn’t do it. At his age, and with knees still hurting from the auto accident that broke his legs and killed his wife just eight months earlier, there was no way. He didn’t stand a chance.
He thought of waiting them out. But that seemed pointless. He wasn’t expecting visitors. And for all he knew, there were a dozen more of these things being mobilized by nearby controllers.
He again poked his head out, ever so slightly, from under the porch. He looked just far enough to see them circling, the weaponized antennae of each drone aimed at window level, ready to fire should the cameras detect movement. Teagarden listened for the timing again: clockwise whirr, two seconds; counter-clockwise whirr, two seconds; clockwise whirr, two seconds; then again, counter-clockwise whirr, two seconds.
What—is—happening? This was not on my day’s agenda.
That morning had been occupied with his once-a-week summer math class at the local maximum security state pen. He enjoyed working with inmates struggling to earn a high school GED or college credits. It was rewarding work. Teaching math to students genuinely motivated to improve their lives was always rewarding, even if some were murderers. In some ways, it was better than his tenured job at Columbia University where he taught prodigies who planned on becoming the next Einstein so they could discover things like teleportation and molecular manipulation of antimatter.
On the way home from prison that day, he’d stopped at the Bethel Post Office to pick up his mail. The box was crammed, mostly with junk because he’d been in New York City for a few days, attending a math conference at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. After tending to e-mail and paying bills, the afternoon was supposed to be occupied with baseball on TV and maybe a nap, to be followed by a phone conversation with his daughter at the Naval Air Station at Key West. She would pass the phone to his granddaughter, nicknamed Chopper, with whom he shared a birthday, and who always made him smile because it meant listening to her baby talk. She laughed when she recognized his voice and called out her pet name for him: “Da-Da Tea-Tea…Da-Da Tea-Tea.” After that enjoyable afternoon, at some point during the evening, there would be dinner of some sort.
No. This wasn’t anywhere on his “to do” list.
Crouching under his porch to hide from four buzzing drones that spit deadly poison was definitely not a planned part of his day. Neither was being killed by one of these micro-monsters.
His knees ached. He leaned back to let his butt rest on the deck of the lawnmower. There was barely enough space to sit on his ankles, but then, he hadn’t been able to do that since the accident. He wanted to weep for poor Coconut, yet dare not risk being heard by the circling drones, though he was uncertain if they had actual hearing. That first drone did seem to react when Coconut barked.
He scanned the underside of the screened-in porch. Old spider webs and wasp nests from previous years needed to be cleaned out. The support beams needed re-staining. The mama robin he scared away had built her home on a low crossbeam. From his crouching position, he could make out the rounded edges of three soft-blue eggs cradled inside the nest. The underside of the porch floor still held a rosy glow. It was redwood from Oregon. His wife designed the house based on a plan she saw in a magazine. She too had been a professor at Columbia. Kendra’s subject was American history. Her book, The Greatest American, about Ben Franklin, had been a bestseller and short-listed for a Pulitzer, no surprise to anyone who knew her.
The drones droned, searching for their target. Right, left; right left. Right, left; right left.
Who put in an order for this? Some psycho genius who didn’t get a full scholarship? Some pissed off candidate for the annual Randolph Honor who got passed over and blames me?
Whoever it was, he or she at that moment was most likely sitting nearby in a van looking at an array of video consoles with a game control. Probably a game control in each hand.
That’s it—enough.
No more thinking about his dog, deceased wife, daughter, or granddaughter. And no more speculation about who was behind this, or why.
Focus. Focus!
Teagarden considered his options, but quickly realized he had none. Therefore, he had to create his own. The only way to do that was to invent a distraction, something that would draw all four orbiting drones from their circling vigil. In the movies, someone would simply toss a rock.
Yeah, right.
That’s when he noticed the wire.
Chapter Seven
It was a newly strung coaxial television cable.
The cord was connected to a satellite dish loosely clipped to the sundeck railing. The installer left it rigged in a makeshift position the previous Monday, and departed with everything functioning. It allowed Teagarden to pick up his baseball games better than regular cable service and at a cheaper price, which was why he made the switch. The installer was supposed to return on Tuesday to scale the roof and secure the dish on the southern gable of the house. Afterward, he would tack down the wire along the eaves and bury the rest up to the point where it entered the house. Then came a call explaining he wouldn’t be in the area again for a week.
That was routine.
The town of Bethel wasn’t convenient to the sellers of goods and services requiring home delivery. It was off the beaten path for half-a-million hippies in 1969, and it was still isolated five decades later. The nearest shopping mall was sixty miles away, the local mini-hospital was more of an infirmary staffed by nurses, and there was one pharmacy in a twenty-mile radius. If there was a foot of snow, which was often, a delivery of heating oil required days of advance planning.
Teagarden looked back at the wire’s entry point into the house. It was a caulked-up hole in the concrete directly under the laundry room window he’d just scampered from. Between that point and the satellite dish, the loose wire lay atop the ground. It stretched around the house, and draped limply over the deck railing to the dish.
That was it. It was his only way to create a diversion. If it worked, it might draw all four drones to the clamor. And that might buy him enough time to hustle in the opposite direction toward the garden shed.
All right, just get on with it. No point overthinking it.
Teagarden’s knees creaked as he shifted to a squatting position. He gripped the loose cable with both hands and pulled gently, taking out as much play as he dared. Too much and he risked the drones noticing movement. Too little, and it could take too long to reel it in before dislodging the dish.
He waited.
He slowly tugged again to ease out a little more play in the line.
He waited.
He tugged again.
The quickly moving shadows of the drones passed by in the afternoon sun. Clockwise whirr, two seconds; counter-clockwise whirr, two seconds. He tugged again. Clockwise whirr, two seconds; counter-clockwise whirr, two seconds. He tugged again.
Finally, the wire tightened to a point where he heard the distant sound of rubber pulling taught against the deck railing. That was it. He dare not pull any tighter.
Teagarden coiled the loose wire around his palms. He flexed his shoulders. Clockwise whirr, two seconds; counter-clockwise whirr…
“Urmph…”
In the next two seconds he yanked hard, hand-over-hand, fist-over-fist, hand-over-hand. It took more than two seconds. It may have taken five full seconds. However long it took, it worked. The dish dislodged with a noisy crash, first to the sundeck flooring, then it dragged up and over the railing before smashing to the bluestone boulders fifteen feet below.
Did it draw the attention of all four drones? He couldn’t be certain. If he looked out to investigate, it would eat up all the time he’d just created. So he bolted. He dashed from under the porch to the garden
shed as fast as he could go, cradling the shotgun as he ran.
So far, so good. That much is obvious because I’m still alive.
The shed door creaked loudly when he yanked it open.
That’s bad.
He quickly found the box. It was on a shelf, wedged between fertilizer stakes and carpenter ant poison.
Still no buzzing sounds from behind. That’s good.
He one-handed the box, looking over his shoulder as he inserted first one, then two, then—he dropped the third.
Shit!
He grabbed a fourth shell and managed to insert it when the buzz of the first drone arrived. It came from the front of the house, immediately followed by the techno-whirr of a second drone zooming from the opposite side, past the screened-in porch on the same path he’d just run.
That was it. He was out of time.
The shotgun was loaded with three shells, but he still had to release the bolt to chamber the first shell before he could fire. The drones quickly found him and headed straight for the red and white gnome’s home. Teagarden stood erect in the short doorway, he leaned slightly forward in a proper shooter’s stance, released the bolt, aimed and fired—twice.
BLAM, BLAM!
He did it. Both drones shattered mid-trajectory. The way they blew apart was not unlike a clay pigeon, except there was no dust cloud. The drones exploded into hundreds of miniature pieces of metal. It looked phony, like a CGI special effect in the movies.
There was no time to celebrate. The other two drones were right behind the first two. Worse, he had only one shell remaining in the Remington. Teagarden pulled the shed door closed. He felt behind him for the box and loaded one additional shell. His next move was instinctive, but from what instinct he had no idea. He leaned against a garden rake hanging upside down, the metal teeth poked him in the neck as he kicked the door open. The nearest drone immediately fired into the empty doorway.
Flight of the Fox Page 2