Die Again To Save Tomorrow (Die Again to Save the World Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  The top went flying across the room, landing upon the floor with a click. Pete's gun was swinging around as the razor blades sprang out. He fired at it, missing on his first two shots and hitting it on his third.

  It was the perfect distraction and bought Rueben the time he needed to close in the rest of the distance to Pete. Realizing too late that this was some trick, Pete was in the motion of turning the gun back on Martha when Rueben thrust the letter opener hard into Pete's back.

  Pete stumbled, then whipped around, the blade still lodged in the back of his body armor. “Ow." He felt at the wound in his back irritably with one hand and sucked in a sharp breath. "Who stabs with a letter opener? Hah. I knew it wouldn’t be long before you two showed up.”

  He scrunched his face with pain, then reached back and ripped the letter opener from his back. He held the bloody knife, and it dripped on the floor. “Good. You’re getting better at this. I can see you’ve been practicing.”

  Rueben scoffed. “Stop playing the timeline card. It’s not as predictable as you make it seem.”

  “Yes, it is. I knew you were coming. I prepared for your arrival.”

  “How so?”

  Pete fingered his gun and waved it in front of him. “Silencer. And I have at least two bullets with each of your names on them.”

  He gestured toward Rueben. "Of course, then you'd warp back in time and try to stop me a different way. No matter. You can't go back farther than the Exit Bar, and if you like, we can keep going around and around until the end of time.”

  His gaze sharpened on Rueben. "I'll never stop. I will eventually complete my mission."

  Aki snuck around Pete and worked on trying to free Martha.

  Rueben knew his best bet was to keep Pete talking. “Your little suicide mission?"

  Pete scoffed. “Oh, my mission isn't to die. No, no. You catch on slow. Not that I should fault you for that. You haven't evolved yet into the strongest version of yourself that you can be." He pointed to his chest. "Me. However, you're making quite the accelerated progress…I mean, stabbing me with a letter opener? That's cold.”

  “I am not you.”

  "Not yet." Pete sneered. “Welcome to the dark side."

  Suddenly, Aki did a spin kick and staggered Pete a bit. “Shit. I always miss that one.”

  Martha shrugged off her bindings as Pete's gun slid across the floor. Throwing the heaping coils aside, she lunged out of the chair to grab it. But Pete was faster, and he hip-checked her, sending her sprawling to the floor. Aki picked up the silenced pistol and fired at Pete's chest. The bullet ricocheted off.

  Pete stripped the gun from her hand in a swift backhanded sweep as he spun on one heel while simultaneously lifting one boot and planting it against Aki's midriff. He kicked out, sending her sliding along the floor.

  "I still got some of your dance moves, kid." Pete grinned as he watched Aki collide with one of the tables in the room.

  Rueben clenched his teeth as he stepped toward Pete. "Then why don't you try to use them on me?"

  He swung his fist at the older version of himself, but Pete sidestepped. Then Pete punched, and Rueben barely danced out of the way. With Pete caught mid-swing, Rueben brought his shoe up, kicking Pete broadside just below the ribs.

  Grunting, Pete clutched his side as he repositioned himself across from Rueben like a matador might a bull.

  Rueben couldn't help but smile at his training and dance footwork paying off. "You've lost a step or two, senior."

  Pete made an exasperated face and punched forward. Rueben sidestepped again, realizing too late that it was a feint, and Pete clobbered him where his neck met his shoulder with a solid fist.

  Rueben collapsed to his knees, seeing spots, as Pete walked around to face him.

  "Stay. The. Hell. Away." With that, Pete slugged Rueben across the cheek and Rueben slumped onto his chest.

  Pete took off down an aisle of shelves at a brisk jog.

  Rueben meanwhile moaned and turned his head to check on his friends. Martha was also lying on her chest. Blood matted her hair to her forehead where she must have struck a table when Pete had hip-checked her. She was still breathing, though. A few yards away from Martha, Aki groaned and rubbed her head.

  "You've failed." Rueben turned his head again to face the far wall of the warehouse as Pete smiled and pushed a button on the wall. With a series of clicks and some hydraulic whirs, the entire warehouse wall parted down the middle, and both sides slid back like the opening of a hangar.

  Outside was a private parking area they hadn’t yet seen, with the green Ford Escape. Pete tapped on a tablet, and all two hundred drones in the room came to life as one, lifting from their shelves and hovering in midair.

  Martha and Aki were still on the floor, but Rueben managed to stagger to his feet as drones swarmed him and buzzed past him like bees. With a satisfied laugh, Pete stood with his arms akimbo as the drones darted out the now-open side of the warehouse. They ascended into the sky, and like a flock of birds, disappeared from view.

  Rueben raised a hand uselessly. "No…" His throat felt parched, and he knew that Pete had beat him. One of the drones lingered behind and jabbed Rueben with a cattle prod. With a zap of electricity, Rueben fell to his knees. The drone buzzed off into the sky to join the rest of the flock.

  Pete pulled a tiny key from his pocket. He tossed it into the air and caught it with flair. Then he flicked it onto the floor. “That’s the key to closet 1A. You can free Zach if you’d like. I told you, I don't want to kill you. But I will if I have to. As Marshall might say, 'It's all over but the crying.' There’s nothing anyone can do to stop things now.”

  Pete pulled his car keys out of his pocket and climbed into the stolen Escape.

  That's when soldiers rushed around both sides of the open warehouse. They poured in with rifles raised, surly expressions on their faces.

  "Shouldn't have interrupted chow time," Jeebs said, and his fellow soldiers nodded in grim agreement.

  "This is all a big misunderstanding—"

  Jeebs cut Rueben off. "Shut it. Not another word or we'll shoot."

  Rueben glanced up into the sky and watched hopelessly as the straggler drone became a dot up in the sky and disappeared.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Monday, May 22, 5:40 p.m.

  Buzz stood on the rooftop of the Mount Olympus Grand Hotel, ten blocks from the U.N. building. Sixty stories below him, the streets were empty, blocked off by police before the day had begun. Peering over the edge of the roofline, Buzz let the music from the concerts outside the summit reach his ears.

  “Dude, man, is that Springsteen? Wish I was at that concert.” The voice came from Mike Fury, standing a few yards behind Buzz in jeans and a leather jacket.

  Zach cleared his voice from beside Mike as he raised his eyes from the tablet in his hands. “I had two tickets to it, you know.”

  Mike turned to Zach and slapped a strong hand on Zach’s shoulder. He smirked and cocked his head over his shoulder toward the center of the hotel’s rooftop. “I say screw it. The real party is right here. Glad you were resourceful enough to join us.” He winked exaggeratedly, but it came off as cool and confident instead of awkward. “Amiright?”

  Zach turned and gulped. Standing in three rows of ten, like Rockettes lined up for a show, were thirty leggy Binnies, dressed in tight-fitting gray silk blouses complete with sparkly silver miniskirts and black fishnet stockings beneath plunging to silver laced up boots. They stood at attention, the world’s sexiest robot army. Except, of course, they looked perfectly human.

  The thirty Binnies wore fantastical silver flight goggles over their eyes and a compact futuristic device on their wrists that looked like some kind of hand cannon straight from a sci-fi flick.

  “Y-yeah,” Zach agreed. “Party’s here all right.”

  All this Buzz watched from his peripheral vision as he scanned the sky above the cityscape beyond. After checking the laptop resting in front of him on the
raised lip of the roofline, he spun on his two assistants.

  “Let’s get our heads in the game. The drones will be here at any moment.”

  “Yes, sir, Boss Man!” Mike saluted while Zach cleared his throat.

  “Are they on the radar yet?”

  Buzz shook his head and lowered his fingers back to his laptop’s keyboard. He tried to hack back into the central “brain center” that controlled the drones’ collective movements while in swarm formation but found that he was still locked out.

  From the time Pete had released the drones from the military base, Buzz had been successfully hacking into their pre-programmed flight pattern and altering it at intervals. Inevitably, the drones’ program would kick Buzz out, and they’d begin rerouting back to their destination. Then Buzz would run a hacking application in the background until the digital backdoor was open again—then he’d add a lengthy detour to the drones’ route.

  He’d found that he couldn’t alter their destination—the U.N. building—but he could slow them down. Maybe they’d even run out of battery before they even reached their target, but he wasn’t counting on it.

  He recalled listening to Rueben’s, Aki’s, and Martha’s interaction with Pete via a microphone patch-in on Rueben’s smartwatch. He’d had to divert his resources to his contingency plans after that. Aside from Zach, who had escaped the base on his own, Buzz hadn’t heard from any of his friends since.

  Buzz’s White House connections had allowed him to rent out the hotel’s rooftop even though it was in a controlled zone and had gained assurances that no government rooftop snipers would harm them.

  With a chuckle, Buzz recalled walking down the streets of New York, him and Zach and Mike, surrounded by thirty Binnies while sewer smoke drifted up from all around them in an alley. It was like a wall poster of some badass action film, the gang fully assembled and ready to kick some ass.

  Himself, his laptop tucked under his arm. Zach, readjusting his novelist’s pencil behind his ear. Mike, toting dual machine guns. The Binnies blowing kisses to heart-struck men and women with their faces pressed up against the windows of their homes as they observed the procession.

  Luckily Buzz had enough Binnies on standby in his mansion’s subbasement—never know when you’re going to need thirty sexbots, er, robots—and Mike had been able to commandeer and drive a school bus from his mansion out to the blockade around the summit.

  Zach had met them at the roadblock, where they’d walked the rest of the way. It was fortunate Zach had been able to escape the closet on the military base as well as steal a Jeep with skills he’d picked up from “book research.”

  Zach had escaped before Rueben and Aki had found Martha and confronted Pete. After finding his cell phone outside the closet and calling Buzz, Buzz had directed him straight to the blockade for their last stand in case Pete released the drones. Zach had been concerned about Martha. Buzz had assured him that Rueben and Aki had it covered, that Pete outmatched Zach.

  Wiping off a bead of sweat forming on his forehead, Buzz hoped that his decision had been the right call. What if Pete had incapacitated Rueben and killed Aki and Martha?

  Buzz’s laptop beeped, signaling it was time to do his hacking. He input a few route changeups, and the drones’ guidance system ejected him again.

  He wiped his forehead again with his sleeve. With his slowing down the drones, if Rueben, Aki, and Martha had managed to escape the military base—they had to have, right?—they might still be able to reach the summit before the drones finally struck. But it would be awfully close. Hopefully, it didn’t come to that.

  Buzz had been working on this plan ever since Rueben and Aki had left, and if the drones didn’t run out of battery, he’d hard-coded their flight path to fly a mere seven feet over this hotel rooftop on their way to their final target.

  Yes, the world’s final defense against global nuclear war stopped and ended with a rooftop containing a super-genius, a muscle man, a competent hacker and novelist-wannabe, and thirty smoking-hot robochicks.

  Buzz didn’t discount their chances. He’d thought of everything, but he knew how actual outcomes could differ from hypotheses.

  He checked his laptop one more time, his fingers poised over the keyboard to reroute the drone swarm yet again as soon as his hacking program let him back into their system.

  From behind him, Mike Fury uncapped a flask, took a swig, and tried to hand it to Zach.

  “No way.”

  “Aw, come on, be a man.”

  Zach waved his hands emphatically, and Mike shrugged. He turned to Buzz. “You want some, Boss Man?”

  Buzz turned and held out his hand. Mike nodded and tossed the flask to him. Buzz, not being an athlete, completely missed the flask. He picked it up. Damn. With my brain calculating its velocity and the best angle for which to catch it, I shouldn’t have dropped it.

  Picking up the flask, Buzz uncapped it and prepared to throw back a gulp.

  “Wait,” Zach called. “You’re our leader. You can’t get drunk right before we go to war.”

  Mike nudged him. “We’re drinking because we’re going to war.”

  Zach shook his head. “Well, I’d rather be a sober liability than a drunk asset.”

  Mike thought about that. “Hey. That’s pretty good. You ever think about being a writer?”

  Buzz was about to toss the flask back to Mike when his laptop beeped. Then again. Then again.

  “Let the war games begin.”

  Buzz tossed Mike the flask and turned to his laptop. Catching the flask, Mike slid it inside his leather jacket and shouldered his machine guns. Zach readied his tablet in both hands.

  “Men, to your positions,” Buzz ordered.

  He ran and ducked behind an AC unit with a section jutting out that was perfect to place his laptop on. Meanwhile, Zach and Mike took cover behind opposite corner walls of a rooftop outbuilding where they’d both be able to peek around the corner to attack.

  “What about us, Master Buzz?” the Binnies called in a unified sexy swoon.

  “Ladies, battle formation.”

  “Yes, sir, Master Buzz.” The Binnies moved as one well-oiled machine, spreading out their three lines to cover more space as well as to provide adequate social distancing in case one of them took fire and exploded.

  Peering out over his cover, Buzz saw a black cloud approaching. A cloud of drones.

  “Ready, people?”

  “Yeah,” the Binnies cried.

  “Yep,” Zach said.

  “Bring it!” Mike roared, and Buzz turned to see the man with a lit cigar balanced between his teeth. A chill gust of wind chose that moment to flip the flaps of his leather jacket open to reveal the crisscrossing ammo belts wrapped around his chest.

  Buzz turned back to the front. As the black cloud grew bigger, a seed of doubt niggled in his mind, and he recalled dropping the flask. He was good, right? He was in control?

  If he had to be honest with himself, he’d been resorting to drink to calm his nerves more and more here lately. Ever since their last mission. The Pout mission. Where he’d been held at gunpoint in a van by a crazed trucker.

  Could he redeem himself now? Or would he break under pressure again, right when the world needed him most?

  Now, directly ahead of him, the illusion of the black cloud started to dissolve into individual drones.

  “Steady, people. Steady. Don’t fire till you can see the blacks of their touchscreens.”

  Nerves started to worry at Buzz like a dog chewing on a piece of meat. What if he failed? He needed a drink.

  He reached down toward his chest and remembered he’d tossed the flask back to Mike.

  Now he could hear the collective buzzing of the drones. Heh. Buzzing. Like his name…

  Focus. Focus!

  His troops were counting on him to get the job done. The whole world was depending on him. Him?

  Directly ahead, the drone swarm narrowed into two single-file lines and began their desce
nt toward the rooftop, as Buzz had programmed them to do.

  Any moment now. Any moment now…

  Moonlight reflected off the touchscreens of the two lead drones.

  “Fire!”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Monday, May 22, 6:15 p.m.

  Buzz’s laptop screen showed a zoomed-in satellite image of the rooftop so clear that Buzz could read the serial numbers off the drones if he were so inclined to snap a screenshot of them. He wasn’t inclined to snap a screenshot of them though—he wanted to disable and kill every last drone that got past the Binnies and Mike Fury.

  While the drones had been out of range, Buzz had only been able to redirect their flight route. Now that the drones were in such proximity to them, Buzz’s laptop and Zach’s tablet could do some real damage to them.

  The first of the Binnies fired their wrist-mounted microwave hand cannons—patent pending—at the lead drones. The concentrated bursts of microwaves were completely invisible, but the weapons made a soft pew! pew! sound for the benefit of human ears.

  The first two drones dipped in the air before plummeting to the rooftop, their internal circuitry fried. The two nearest Binnies, anticipating the drop, stepped out of the way with precise aplomb. Identically, the Binnies took down the next pairing of drones and then the next. The drones crash-landed on the roof, exploding in magnificent bursts of red and yellow and orange and black smoke.

  “All right!” Zach whooped from across the roof.

  Then the program running the drones wised up, and the drones separated from their dual lines. They were still seven feet over the hotel’s expansive rooftop, but they had spread out, making them much more of a challenge for the Binnies to hit.

  Now it was Buzz’s and Zach’s turn.

  Tracking the oncoming flow of the drones on their screens, Buzz and Zach began frantically tapping on targets and queueing up strings of attacks upon the drones’ internal components. Propellers froze up. Internal gyroscopes signaled that down was up and up was down. Essentially, the drones that got past the Binnies braked and tilted and hovered in place.