Only to Die Again

by Patrick Lee

  ‘For a while, nothing. Everyone was saying all the right things. They agreed with Dale’s ideas on how to approach the government, and in the meantime the research continued. They built other prototypes of the machine. They tried tweaks in the design, but always got the same results. The time difference is always ten hours and twenty-four minutes. And there’s no way to tune it – you can’t go up and down the dial or anything. You just hear what you hear. But anyway, yes, everything seemed fine at the beginning.’

  ‘Seemed,’ Dryden said.

  Claire nodded. ‘And then it didn’t.’

  Dryden waited.

  Claire leaned forward and folded her arms atop the steering wheel. She rested her forehead on them. Enough time went by that Dryden thought she might have passed out. Then she began speaking again.

  She and Dale had done their best to be vigilant for leaks, she said. To the point of being paranoid. They’d enlisted one of the computer techs, a guy named Curtis whom Dale had known longer than anyone else in the company, to help snoop on all the rest. The snooping included personal communications in employees’ homes, illegal as it was. There was just so much at stake.

  But for nearly four weeks, nothing struck the three of them as suspicious. Nothing seemed wrong. Until three days ago.

  Claire’s phone had rung at five minutes before six, Wednesday morning. Dale calling, sounding panicked.

  Get out of your house right now. Get in your car and go somewhere.

  What is it? Dale, what’s happening?

  Curtis found something. Evidence of something going on.

  What do you mean?

  We think there are people at Bayliss who’ve been working with someone on the outside, sharing the designs for these machines, maybe since the first days after the breakthrough. Someone out there with high-level resources, we don’t know who it is yet.

  Dale –

  Jesus, Claire, just get in your car –

  I’m going right now.

  Do you remember the safe location you picked out, when you protected my family? The place we’d all meet up if something happened?

  Yes.

  I’m going to hide one of the machines there. I want you to pick it up later today.

  Dale, what are you going to do?

  Nothing too risky if I can help it.

  Where’s Curtis?

  He’s going to meet me later. He says he copied a huge amount of data from these people – some kind of secure server they were using for all their communication. He already told me some of what he found. It’s scary stuff, Claire.

  Like what?

  They’ve built their own copies of the machine, but there’s more to it than that. They’ve got some kind of system they created, to exploit this technology in ways we never thought of.

  Exploit it how?

  Claire raised her head from her forearms and met Dryden’s eyes. Hers looked haunted.

  ‘Dale told me some of what Curtis had told him,’ she said. ‘Details about this system these people built, whoever the hell they were. It scared the shit out of me, just hearing about it. It’s … brilliant. And horrible. Dale told me that much, and then he said he had to go. He told me to ditch my phone and get a throwaway. He said he’d get one, too, and he’d leave the number with the machine I was supposed to pick up.’

  Her gaze dropped to the open case. The tablet computer and the strange black box.

  ‘This machine was there when I got to the place,’ she said. ‘And the phone number. But when I called it, thirty seconds later, there was no answer. I gave it a minute and tried again, and then I ditched that phone, too, and got out of there. Six hours later, on the news, I found out what had happened. Maybe you heard about it, too, in a way.’

  Dryden thought about it. Three days ago, the Bay Area – some memory flickered but didn’t quite light up. Some big story he’d just caught the end of, flipping past the news.

  ‘Chemical fire and explosion,’ Claire said. ‘A company called Empire Services. All employees dead or simply unidentifiable. Empire Services was the public name of Bayliss Labs. The building that was destroyed was Bayliss’s entire facility. I have no idea if Dale or Curtis is still alive somewhere. I don’t have any safe way of looking for either of them, and I guess they could say the same for me.’

  For a long time she just sat there, holding the wheel again. Like it was the gunwale of a lifeboat. Like her own weariness would drag her into the deep if she let go.

  ‘Whatever you need help with,’ Dryden said, ‘I’m in. You know that. You had to know that before you even called me.’

  She looked at him. An edge of sadness twisted her features.

  ‘What?’ Dryden said.

  ‘I had no intention to involve you in all this,’ Claire said softly. ‘Not for something random like the guy in the trailer, and not for the rest of this, either. I never meant to drag you into it at all.’

  ‘Then why did you?’

  Claire’s eyes went back to the machine.

  ‘I didn’t, actually,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Claire started to respond, but stopped. A pair of headlights broke into view to the south, coming up 395 in the same direction Dryden and Claire had driven a few minutes before. The vehicle’s outline was just visible against the dim sky – a low shape with a light-bar on its roof. A police cruiser.

  None of its flashers were on. The car was going the speed limit, maybe a little faster. Nothing about it suggested urgency or purpose. Just a random patrol.

  ‘Shit,’ Claire whispered.

  She closed the plastic case, blacking out the glow of the tablet screen and plunging the Land Rover’s cab into darkness. Already its headlights and instrument panel were off. Along with Dryden’s Explorer, the Land Rover sat two hundred feet off the road where the cop would pass. The two vehicles were unlikely to be visible to the officer, though they would have to arouse suspicion if they were spotted.

  Closing in now, the cruiser passed through a long, gentle curve where the road skirted some shallow rise in the desert. Dryden had hardly noticed the curve when he’d driven it himself. He noticed it now because it sent the police cruiser’s high beams swinging ten degrees west of the highway, out into the darkness where he and Claire were parked. An unwitting searchlight.

  The brightest portion of the beams came nowhere near the two parked vehicles, but the beams’ periphery cast a faint glow through the nearby scrub, setting shadows beneath each chaparral bush. Dryden instinctively looked down to keep his eyes from shining. Claire did the same. Nothing could be done about the reflective metal and glass of the two SUVs.

  Claire’s fingertips drummed on the wheel, the uncharacteristic tension running through her again.

  ‘It’s not a problem if he sees us,’ Dryden said.

  ‘It’s a big problem.’

  ‘We’re seventy miles from the trailer. There’s nothing to connect us to it.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m worried about.’

  ‘What, then?’ Dryden asked.

  Claire didn’t answer. She raised her eyes just enough to watch the cruiser coming on. It was a few hundred yards south now, its headlights finally swinging back onto the road as it moved beyond the curve. A few seconds later, without slowing, it blasted by and continued north into the darkness.

  Then its brake lights came on.

  Claire’s breath hissed out like air from a ruptured pneumatic line.

  The cruiser came to a stop. For five seconds it just sat there in the road, maybe three hundred yards to the north, its taillights glowing. Like the officer was weighing the decision. Wondering if he’d really seen something.

  In the same moment, Claire did something Dryden couldn’t understand. She ignored the cruiser entirely and turned her gaze on the surrounding desert. She scanned the darkness, her eyes going everywhere, as if she suddenly believed something dangerous was out there. It made no sense – she had shown no such fear until now, after all the min
utes they’d been parked here.

  The cruiser’s brake lights stayed on. Like a tossed coin, tumbling in the air. Stay or go.

  The brake lights went out.

  The officer goosed the vehicle forward.

  And brought it around in a tight U-turn.

  Its headlights lit up the world, filling the Land Rover’s cab with harsh glare that made Dryden squint.

  The effect on Claire was immediate. She turned the key in the ignition and shoved the selector into drive.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Dryden shouted.

  Claire had not taken her foot off the brake yet. She turned to Dryden, and when she spoke, her voice was saturated with fear. ‘Get back in your vehicle and go. Now.’

  ‘Claire, this is –’

  ‘I can’t explain it! Go! Please!’

  The way she screamed the words, it sounded like she was begging. Like she was kneeling beside a ditch with a pistol to her head. The sound of it pierced Dryden – a needle into the deepest part of his brain, the reptile complex where fight-or-flight decisions were made in thousandths of a second.

  He decided.

  He reached for the door handle.

  But before he could pull it, everything changed.

  A hundred yards away off the vehicle’s left side, far from both the Land Rover and the police cruiser, a pinprick of light flared. A millisecond pop, like a flashbulb – but it wasn’t a flashbulb.

  The windows on both sides of the Land Rover’s middle bench seat shattered, and Dryden heard the buzzing whine of a bullet cutting the air, passing through the vehicle maybe a foot behind him.

  On instinct, Claire took her foot off the brake and shoved the accelerator to the floor. The Land Rover lurched forward into the dark, its headlights still doused.

  Way out in the night, the muzzle flash came again, followed by others in unison, like spastic fireflies. Three shooters, maybe four, clustered tightly together, all firing at once.

  Claire had the SUV doing 40 now, jostling over the scrubland. She was driving by the indirect glow from the police cruiser, still a couple hundred yards behind them. All at once the cruiser’s beams swung sharply away. Dryden turned in the passenger seat and looked back. The patrol car had jerked sideways and stopped. In the faint interior glow of its dashboard equipment, Dryden could see that its windows had all been blown out. As he watched, one of its headlights burst. The cruiser was taking the brunt of the rifle fire; the cop was almost certainly dead.

  Claire cursed under her breath, pushing the Land Rover to 50. Without the patrol car’s headlights, the desert surface was nearly pitch black. The only visible detail was the road, a faint asphalt ribbon reflecting the predawn sky. Claire veered toward it across the hardpan but had gone only a few hundred feet when another bullet hit the Land Rover, punching through metal somewhere toward the back. A second later the concentrated fire from all the shooters began to rain against the vehicle, blowing out the rear windows, punching through the panels of the body. Clearly the shooters had night-vision scopes of one kind or another.

  A tire blew; the vehicle slewed violently to the left before Claire got it back under control. The road was close now, fifty feet away as she angled toward it.

  Then the driver’s-side window shattered, and Claire gasped, losing hold of the wheel. The Land Rover pulled hard left again, much too sharply for this speed. Dryden reached for the steering wheel, got his hands on it in the darkness –

  Too late. The world heaved sickeningly beneath him as the big vehicle pitched onto its side and then its roof, tumbling hard enough that he had to hang on to keep from being thrown clear. He felt the strange machine in its plastic case, his own body pinning it to the console as he leaned across and clung to the steering wheel. Then the rolling vehicle came down on its roof for a second time, and Dryden’s head smacked against something, and all sensation switched off.

  Chapter Eight

  She’s breathing. I think she’s good.’

  A man’s voice, somewhere in the dark and the choking dust. No concern in his tone. Just flat assessment.

  Dryden cracked his eyes. He was lying in the half-crushed cab of the Land Rover, which lay on its roof. Claire’s midsection was beside him; someone had dragged her halfway out of the wreck. Flashlight beams cut through the dust – a talc-like powder in the air, probably from the air bags. Ragged scraps of plastic hung from the blown-open steering wheel and the passenger-side dashboard.

  The hard plastic case with the strange machine inside it lay next to him. Through the closed lid he could faintly hear it still working, the static hissing out through the seam.

  ‘Wake up,’ the man outside said.

  A slapping sound followed, a hand to a face, over and over. A different man laughed, high and jittery.

  Claire murmured in response to the slapping. She took a sharp breath. The laughter continued another few seconds.

  Dryden’s head cleared the rest of the way.

  The Berettas. Where were they? Claire had stowed them behind the seat after they left the trailer, but now –

  The answer came by way of a metallic clatter, someone fishing something out of the crushed vehicle, just behind Dryden.

  ‘That’s two weapons,’ a man said. ‘I don’t see anything else.’

  ‘He awake in there?’

  ‘He’s coming around.’

  ‘Who the hell is he?’

  ‘Get him out of there, let’s see.’

  Four different voices – two on each side of the vehicle.

  A second later, hands gripped Dryden’s ankles and pulled. He slid out into the clear air and the darkness, the flashlight beams blinding him. Through their glare he saw a rifle aimed down on him, far enough out of reach that he could make no move against it. Smart men. Well-trained men, anyway.

  Someone rolled him over and patted his pockets. Found his wallet and then his keys, and took both. One of the light beams swung away as the man flipped open the wallet and studied his ID.

  Dryden turned and stared through the blown-out window frames of the flipped SUV. The dust inside had mostly cleared. He could see all the way through and out the far side, where Claire was now fully conscious. It looked like she had a bullet graze across the back of one hand – the one she’d had on the steering wheel – but no other visible injury.

  ‘I got his name,’ the man above Dryden said. ‘Want me to call it in?’

  ‘Not out here.’ This voice belonged to the first man who’d spoken, standing over Claire on the other side of the Land Rover. He seemed to be in charge. ‘Throwaway phones or not, they don’t want the cops tracking anything at this site. Keep them switched off until you’re on a freeway.’

  ‘What do we do with him?’ the man with Dryden’s wallet asked.

  The leader was silent for a few seconds, thinking. Then: ‘They want the girl taken to the interrogation site, but they want the thing in the hardcase brought directly to them. So we’ll take the girl, and you take the case. Take the man with you; they can decide what to do with him. Use his vehicle, it’s not damaged.’

  A third man spoke up. ‘We need to go. Dispatch keeps trying to raise that cop. Every minute we spend out here –’

  ‘We’re set,’ the leader said. ‘Move.’

  The man crouched down over Claire, wrenched her arms behind her back, and zip-tied her wrists. Then he and the other man on that side of the Land Rover hoisted her up by her arms and dragged her away toward a vehicle Dryden could just make out: an open-top Jeep Wrangler.

  The man standing over Dryden pocketed his wallet, then squatted down and grabbed his forearms; he shoved them together behind Dryden’s back. Five feet away, the man with the rifle repositioned, keeping his friend out of the line of fire and the barrel squarely on Dryden’s center of mass. Dryden felt a zip-tie encircle his wrists and pull tight enough to dig into the skin. Finally the second man lowered the gun. He crouched at the Land Rover’s passenger window and pulled the hard plastic case out into the light.
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  They marched him back toward his Explorer at nearly a jog, keeping one of the Berettas tight against his rib cage. The Jeep Wrangler started up before they’d gone even ten paces; Dryden craned his neck and watched it go. It pulled around in a tight arc and raced away southbound on 395.

  The pistol barrel dug into him like a spur. ‘Move, goddammit.’

  He picked up his speed. He had his own reasons to go as fast as possible, but it was just fine to let them think he was compliant.

  As they neared the Explorer, his eyes picked out the police cruiser. It sat dark and steaming a hundred yards farther back, its windows shattered and its radio squawking. A woman’s voice, clear and urgent. The word respond kept coming through the hiss.

  They covered the last stretch at a run. The man with the Beretta gripped Dryden’s arm tighter; the second opened the Explorer’s back door on the passenger side. Together they shoved him through, headfirst, onto the floor behind the front seats. For maybe two seconds, one of them stood staring down on him, studying the vehicle’s interior in the dome-light glow. There were scraps of construction materials everywhere in back: lengths of two-by-four lumber, spools of sheathed electrical cable, PVC piping.

  ‘Who is this guy?’

  ‘Who gives a shit? Come on.’

  They slammed the door and climbed into the front seats. In the seconds it took them to do that, Dryden positioned himself so that his hands, bound behind him, were pointed back into the space beneath the middle bench seat. He could feel the bottom of the seat’s cushion pressing against his side, the whole length of his torso. Which meant his hands would be blocked from the passenger’s view – and free to grope for anything he might reach beneath the seat.

  A second later the vehicle roared to life. Dryden expected it to veer only slightly as it made for the road; it had been parked already facing south.

  Instead it took a hard turn, a hundred eighty degrees, the movement sliding his body roughly on the matted carpet. Then the vehicle straightened out and accelerated.

  They were going north on 395, not south.

  Opposite the direction of the men who’d taken Claire.