Connie’s situation was all his fault.
Every bad choice he made delayed his trip back to Garth.
“Oh, no!” Connie said with fear in her voice. She pointed to her side mirror.
Buck looked in his.
Three motorcycles came up the hill at about seventy miles an hour and weren’t more than a quarter of a mile back.
“Is that them?” she asked.
Buck picked up the Beretta from the center console. He already knew the answer.
Nine
Staten Island, NY
Garth had learned from his dad that once you choose a course of action, you should stick to it and give it everything you’ve got. When he decided he wasn’t going to stay in his house and wait for the radiation to get him, he committed one hundred percent in carrying out his flight.
He’d put several of Dad’s ARs in the trunk of the taxi parked behind Sam’s house. He also tossed in a case of bottled water, some random food he pulled out of the pantry, a tent and sleeping bags, and a backpack labeled Bug-out Bag his dad kept in the garage.
The cab was stolen by a man named Dawson, who’d tossed a bunch of “weapons” into the trunk when he went on his quest to kill a fake dinosaur. Garth left one hammer and one shovel at the bottom, but he also kept the wooden guitar. He had no idea why the crazy man considered it a weapon, and Garth couldn’t play, but it was already in the trunk, so he left it there.
When everything was ready, he sat in the cab’s front seat and paused for one final assessment. Once he drove off, he wasn’t sure when he’d return.
The storm was over three hours away, so he had some time, but he didn’t want to waste a minute. The news didn’t seem to know when the radiation would arrive, because they claimed it was hard to detect. Their best guess put it in his backyard at the same time as the storm, but they advised people to stay indoors for twenty-four hours to prevent exposure.
“Dad, freaking pick up!” he shouted at his phone when another call failed.
“Sam, I hope you are there.” He texted his best friend, not without some misgivings. He might have tried to go pick up Sam and his parents, but traffic would make that an all-afternoon affair. He sincerely hoped they already had other plans to get out of town.
‘Sam, look at the news! Radiation cloud headed for NYC. Have to evacuate!’
Do I tell him what I’m doing?
He hoped it wouldn’t look like he was abandoning his buddy, but he couldn’t just leave without giving him a warning. What if Sam fought across town to get back to him, only to find he’d taken off to safer spaces?
‘I’m taking the taxi and going south. Get your parents to a safe zone.’
The tornado sirens cranked up again, first far away, then closer to home, like a wave of noise coming his way.
His phone vibrated as a message came back. ‘Dude! You are leaving without me? WTF?’
Garth laughed. ‘You want me to wait?’
Sam didn’t text back right away. It meant he was thinking of something to say. ‘No. My parents have arrived. We’re good. They’ll know what to do.’
‘We good?’ Garth texted.
‘Yeah. We’ll catch up to you, bro. Promise.’
He hoped they would but knew that was unlikely—mostly because he had no idea where he was going, other than south. First get off Staten Island, then get out of New Jersey.
‘Good luck, dude,’ he texted to Sam while experiencing a wave of nostalgia and emotion for his friend. It felt like he might never see his buddy again, something that was as incomprehensible as it was crazy. Sam’s parents would take care of him, just as Dad had given him the tools to take care of himself until he got back.
He started the engine, and his heart revved with it.
Dad had warned him about taking the cab out into the world because the police might frown on it, but he didn’t have a better choice. His dad owned a pickup truck, but that was parked at some shipping terminal in White Plains. It was far to the north, and he needed to go south. The Yellow Cab might have been a bad idea, but it was the only way he could make some miles. He decided to take his chances.
Garth looked at the phone one last time, hopeful that his dad would text and tell him if he was doing something fatally stupid, but nothing came through.
He put the phone on the center console.
After backing out of Sam’s driveway, he gunned the motor.
“Looks like I’m making a run for it.”
Highway 395, California
Buck’s grip on the Beretta tightened as he ran the odds. Hitting moving targets was a tough proposition, but it got even more difficult if you were also on the move. Plus, if the bikers were smart, all they had to do was shoot out his front tires and he’d end up in a flaming wreck. If violence was coming, he had to fight back fast with the only asset he had while driving his tugboat on wheels: surprise.
That made him quite nervous because surprise worked both ways.
He spoke fast. “There’s a rifle on my bed. Can you shoot?”
Connie shook her head. “I’ve written about guns but never fired one.”
“Go back there. I’ll need you to grab some ammo. It’s in my bag next to Mac’s crate.” He’d taken it into the motel room just to be safe. Highway robbery was a real thing.
She hopped out of her seat and scooted by him. Her hip brushed his elbow and he flinched, pulling away quickly so he didn’t appear to be trying to cop a feel. At the same moment, Garth’s ringtone blared from the phone in the dashboard holder. Despite everything going on, he had to know what his son needed.
“Radiation?” he said in disbelief when he read the text message.
There was no time to respond. The bikers had closed the distance in seconds and were almost alongside his trailer.
“Fuck, we can’t reload yet,” he said to her. “Just stay down.”
He’d shot six times back at the motel, which meant he had eight rounds left of his 13+1. There were three guys, but he was a huge sitting duck and they were nimble targets. It would not be a fair fight.
Once again, his heart rate launched into high orbit, but his sense of calm came down to Earth as battle approached. He loosened his grip on the Beretta and visualized what he was going to do.
When they get close, I’m going to lean out and pick off the leader. The rest will fall back…
As the three riders attempted to pass his tractor and trailer, he leaned around the window frame and aimed at the first asshole. Buck met the eyes of the man—
“Fuck me!” It wasn’t the Trash Pandas.
The rider jammed on the brakes and his two friends followed suit.
He brought the gun back inside but leaned toward his mirrors to see what he’d done. The three men skidded to a stop, narrowly avoided getting rear-ended, then turned around to head back down the hill.
“Aw shit, they think I’m some kind of nut job,” Buck said to Connie.
He sat in shock for a minute while he contemplated how close he’d come to shooting an innocent man. When he snapped out of it, he set the pistol back in the center console and picked up his phone.
Connie returned to her seat carrying the 10/22 takedown and a box of ammo for his Storm. It impressed him that she didn’t cower in the back but was grabbing guns and hanging up front where she’d be in greater danger.
“Just a second,” he told her. “I have to figure out what my son wants.”
He held up the phone to read it aloud. “Dad, nuclear fallout is headed this way. Should I shelter in the basement or get out?”
“Get out,” Connie said immediately.
Buck checked the mirrors out of habit and turned to his passenger. “You don’t even know where he is.”
“When radiation comes, you go. That’s bad stuff.”
He couldn’t argue about it being bad, but he had plenty of gear back at the house to build a relatively decent fallout shelter. Also, his kit included iodine tablets to counter the effects of low levels of r
adiation, plus gas masks, protective suits, and all kinds of goodies. Garth might need some instruction on how to use it all, but it was doable.
While he thought about his reply, Big Mac came out of his crate and shoved his way into the space under Connie’s legs.
“Aw, he’s so cute!” She rubbed both sides of his face like he was a stuffed animal.
“I think he wants his seat back,” Buck said to lighten the mood. The three bikers had nearly been a debacle. No one had taken a shot, and no one had died. Buck had every reason to celebrate the tiny victory.
“I’m so sorry!” she said to Mac. “I won’t be here long,” she added.
That should have been good news, but Buck didn’t feel it.
Looking at Buck, she continued. “I don’t have a car to get back to New Mexico, which is that way.” She pointed behind them. “But if you drop me off at the nearest town, I’m sure I can call a tow truck to get my car back.”
Garth.
He held up his finger. “One sec.” He was going to text something to his son, but he remembered a hundred lectures on texting and driving he’d given the teen boy. “Will you type something for me?”
She took the phone from his hand. “Sure.”
“Stay at home. Will call you with instructions ASAP. Driving.”
She keyed it in and hit Send. “Anything else?”
“No. He won’t do anything without consulting me. He’s staying at a friend’s house in New York City. Staten Island, actually. That’s where we live.”
“Well, I hope the radiation isn’t too bad. What do you think that’s all about? Was there an accident?”
Buck wanted the answer to that question, but another vehicle in the mirror caught his eye. It demanded his full attention.
He shifted into a middle gear because they’d finally gotten near the summit of the incline. All of Mono Lake and the surrounding basin was visible behind them. It would have made a nice photo.
But his eyes were on the yellow VW.
Search for Nuclear, Astrophysical, and Kronometric Extremes (SNAKE). Red Mesa, Colorado
“General,” Faith said as she caught her breath. “As I stated before, this is the most complex piece of machinery in the world. There has to be a reason this is here.” It was a deflection, because she was ninety-nine percent sure it should not have been there. It wasn’t in any of the plans.
Who would have added something? SNAKE was supposed to be an open research facility, not a maximum-security prison. Just about anyone could walk in the front door by signing their name, although it did require a keycard to activate the Silver Bullet and go down the tunnel.
Unless they walked.
Unable to figure out how it had gotten there, she turned to the machine. “There is no way the power for this is coming from inside this facility. I mean, look at it! There aren’t even any wires.”
The general leaned around the box to look at the other side. “It must have a battery in the casing.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she replied.
General Smith chuckled. “I never would have thought we’d get seven miles in without you admitting to this. You had to know I was going to find it. Why didn’t you move it?”
Faith held out her wrists. “Just take me in, general. I give up. My life’s goal was to screw up the world doing illicit experiments in the name of physics. I specialize in time travel and quantum teleportation. I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for your meddling ways.”
“Scooby Doo?” he asked with a full helping of sarcasm.
She nodded gravely. “I have two Ph.Ds, three Masters, and two undergrad degrees. General, I know there are book smarts and street smarts. I’ve got a lock on books, but I’d like to think I do all right with street smarts, too. If I knew this was here, it would make no sense for me to voluntarily bring you right to it. Someone put this here, perhaps not understanding what would happen. Whatever it does, it’s still doing it. We have to figure it out.”
“Can we just move the box?” he suggested. “That will turn off the beam, won’t it?”
She laughed a little. “You are trying to trap me into admitting it will, aren’t you?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It couldn’t hurt. Figured you’d get sloppy.”
“What’s it going to take to earn back your trust?”
“You never had my trust, doctor, so don’t feel bad. My job is to save the American way of life, not avoid hurting people’s feelings. I know you are a very smart woman, and I’m just a run-of-the-mill general who got Cs in high school physics and felt pretty good about it. I have to assume you are trying to pull a fast one on me. I live for paranoia so our citizens don’t have to worry.”
“That’s terrible,” she replied.
“It’s my life right now.” He whipped out a phone and ordered his scientists to come into the tunnel. She hoped she could bring people too because no one knew the collider raceway better than her team—present box excepted.
The general hung up, and she saw her chance. “May I use the emergency phones to contact my staff, so they can also bring equipment to help?”
He stared at the faint blue beam coming out of the box.
“How many do you need?”
“Six?”
“I’ll give you three. And I’ll have six of my own, plus security. No one touches this device without me knowing about it. I’ll put a detail on the others too, once we locate them down the tunnel. And I think I’ll order a room-by-room sweep of the entire complex. We’ll see what other oddities pop up.”
She was crestfallen to suddenly be a second-class scientist under threat of being searched, but she tried to see things from his perspective. She would probably have mistrusted her too. It would have been nice to have more of her team on hand, but three would be enough to get things going.
She found the phone and called the administration wing.
The general stood close so he could hear her talk. When she hung up, he invited her to come over to him as he stood by the mystery device.
“No bullshit, doctor—what do you think this is doing?”
“No BS? I don’t know. The light goes into the collider at an angle, and might not even be lined up with the beam inside. That suggests it is going somewhere else.” She took a moment to reflect. There was no way someone could have snuck anything inside the collider channel. It was built to exacting standards across all 62.5 miles.
“You mean this beam goes beyond the tubing?”
“This tube has high-powered magnets and extensive shielding, so I have no reason to believe it could go through—”
Faith wore nice slacks and a silk blouse but got down and slid under the collider pipeline like a professional mechanic. Sure enough, the blue beam came out on the other side and went into the concrete wall about five feet away. She estimated it angled underneath the tram tracks, so no one would see it on the tram side of the tunnel.
“Holy shit! Uh, it comes out on this side.” She didn’t dare touch it since she couldn’t imagine what it was. Her radiation badge was silent, so that threat was minimal, but the light’s behavior would best be characterized as exotic, given the way it penetrated metal and concrete. It meant it was likely dangerous.
“Come on up. Get off the ground, doctor.” He held out a hand to help.
She slid out and got to her feet without his assistance. It made her feel good for doing it, but the general continued speaking as if nothing happened.
“What if this beam was on yesterday during your experiment? And what if it got inside the collider when everything went to shit? Could it have been responsible for the blast of energy we saw?”
She straightened a few loose strands of hair. “Everything here at SNAKE runs with computer guidance. If we saw even a trace of unexpected activity, the computer algorithms we monitor would have paused the entire project. These collisions take place at the atomic level, and the precision needed to achieve that would blow your mind. But...”
&n
bsp; Faith paused as she thought about what to say next.
“If the person who put this here knew enough about those guidance issues—and knew how to get around them—perhaps this beam could have been inserted without anyone knowing about it. As to whether it caused the blue light? Right now, it’s the best theory we have. It is the one thing that doesn’t belong.”
What else is here I don’t know about?
She shivered for a second. It was chilly in the subterranean chamber, but the vastness of it gave her reason to worry. There were sixty miles of hiding places. Could there be more of these mystery boxes beyond the four the general claimed to have found? More importantly, who had put them there? It had to be someone on her team, didn’t it?
Had she just invited the culprit to come assist her?
Ten
Highway 395, California
“Look behind us,” Buck told Connie. “Is that your car?”
He had to be sure this time.
She expressed frustration despite leaning over to her window. “I can’t see anything from this side.” She hopped out of her seat and stood to get a better look at his mirror. “It might be.”
The yellow VW Beetle raced up the hill, weaving through the slower-moving traffic. It even swerved into the southbound lanes to avoid two cars climbing side by side. The act showed desperation, but it wasn’t yet proof of who was inside.
“Maybe they won’t know it’s us,” she added in a downcast voice. “Your truck doesn’t have any markings, and we blend in with the other big rigs.”
“It’s a good thought, but I highly doubt they wouldn’t recognize the rear crash-under bar. I’m sure it’s bent to shit after crushing their bikes.”
“Oh, yeah.” She sighed as she returned to her seat.
He looked back one more time as the roadway crested a scrub-covered hilltop. The car had a clear path in the next lane, and they would be next to them in seconds.
As he started downhill, he hoped to see a means of help, but there was nothing but desolate, treeless hills in all directions. The rocky peaks of the Sierra Nevada lined the horizon to the west. I-80 was somewhere far to the north. If there were towns or police stations out there, he couldn’t see them.
End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4] Page 32