My head swiveled to my left.
To Lauren.
She was already hauling Susie over the top of a fallen tree. My wife had her submachine gun in her right arm, up and high.
Dots in the sky over the trees behind her. A cloud of them.
I patted my chest and waist. I’d left the Glock in the car. I hadn’t wanted to step out of the car armed. Too late now.
“Mike, get down!” Travis yelled.
I was standing still, right in the middle of the paved road. Time seemed to slow down. I watched Travis’s arm waving at me to move to one side. Overhead, the drones to my left were at least a few hundred yards away, the ones behind Lauren even farther.
How long would it take those machines to cover the distance? Twenty? Thirty seconds till they reached me? How far could I run in that time?
I was no sprinter.
“Mike!” I heard Chuck yell. “We’ll come to you. Get into cover.”
I was in the middle of the road, the chipped yellow divider paint stripe under my sneakers. The kids were safe. Luke had made it into the truck. Olivia was there too. Ellarose and Bonham. The super-truck would provide protection from these things. Right?
To my left was ten feet of hardtop, then twenty feet of hardscrabble gravel and dirt that ended at a wood-post fence of chicken wire that extended around Joe’s farm. Flattened corn stalks beyond that, which provided no cover. To my right, five feet away Travis crouched behind his motorcycle, maybe forty feet to Lauren and the fallen tree, and fifty feet up the road to the pickup.
My feet felt frozen to the pavement.
Screaming and yelling.
Rick and Percy stood over the fallen tree where Lauren and Susie were. The two men now had on silvery ponchos, both of their backpacks on the ground, open with black ropes spilling out. Their weapons were out and up, following the drone formations in the sky.
My brain finally kicked into action.
“Lauren,” I yelled. “Chuck is bringing the truck to us. Stay down.”
“You get down, you idiot,” she yelled.
I remembered that Joe was beside me. He seemed like he could barely walk a minute ago. I turned to grab and help him into the cover of the motorcycle, but he shrugged me off.
“Get into cover, son,” he said calmly. “I got this.”
Two. No, five. Maybe a dozen little dots raced toward us from the west. More of them hovered in the distance and seemed to spread out in a circle around us a few hundred feet up. I stepped backward and away from Joe, checking once over my shoulder at Lauren. I crouched under cover of the motorcycle beside Travis.
“Put this on,” he said.
One of the silver ponchos Rick and Percy were wearing.
“Space blankets from the camping store,” Travis explained. “It helps confuse their image recognition software. Don’t know where the hell these little bastards came from. Must have followed you in.”
I put on the poncho as I knelt. “You cut the power lines?”
He nodded and put on a tinfoil hat. “Don’t laugh, it helps.” He handed me one, which I tried to stick on my head by crinkling the foil around my ears.
I said, “You guys have fought these before?”
“You know how to use one of these?” Travis handed me a sawed-off shotgun. Two barrels.
The humming-fluttering whine grew louder. A terrific blast, then the clicking chunk of Joe pumping the action on his shotgun.
“Sort of,” I said. “We tried shooting these things, it’s way more diff—”
Another roar from Joe’s shotgun. “Got one,” he exclaimed triumphantly.
While Travis and I cowered, Joe stood straight and trained his weapon on the incoming swarm of drones. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
“It’s a shotgun. Pull back the safety here.” Travis indicated a nub on the top. “Then pull the trigger. We filled the cartridges with birdshot. About four-hundred pellets per shell. Sprays wide in kind of a fan pattern, much easier to hit them than with bullets. You only use this when one gets within five feet, you understand? And don’t hit one of us, for Pete’s sake. Probably wouldn’t kill but definitely not nice.”
I nodded and took the gun. The whining of the drones grew louder. Joe pumped and fired again, then cursed. Travis pulled another sawed-off shotgun from one of the saddlebags on his bike. He had a pump-action gun as well, but he laid both guns on the pavement and slung his backpack off. He peeked over the top of the bike’s seat.
Joe pumped and shot once more, and this time whooped in glee. He pumped again.
The whining grated into my ears.
“Chuck is coming to get us in the truck,” I said to Travis.
“Truck?” He peered over the seat again and grabbed something in his open backpack.
“It’s armored enough to protect against these things.”
“Didn’t a guy run out and say he had a signal on these things?”
I nodded.
“That was Damon Indigo, right?”
Again, I nodded.
“Hot damn. Damon Indigo. Right here.” He rose into a crouch. “We need to get to the pickup first.” He glanced up. “And why the heck are these things spreading out like that? I’ve never seen them do that before.”
While a dozen or so dove toward us, the rest had spread into a wide circle hundreds of yards across and more than fifty feet up, above the tree canopy.
From the corner of my eye, a flickering light and more shotgun blasts. A hot-orange flash as one of the drones exploded, then a squeal of pain. I saw my wife roll behind the tree on her back and fire upward and blast another drone.
Travis jumped into the air beside me. He left both shotguns on the ground.
Joe fired, pumped, and then swore. “I’m empty,” he yelled.
“What are you doing?” I asked Travis.
He ran straight at the swarm of approaching drones to our left. They zigged and weaved as they zeroed in on him. He had no gun, no weapon. Travis twisted back and then threw his left arm high, his right following it, launching something up.
A spiraling net twenty feet across materialized in the air in front of him.
Spinning and spinning, it expanded.
Lauren squinted into the setting sun. She had one arm around Susie. “There’s a doctor,” she said to her friend. “He just got here on a motorcycle. You’re going to be okay.”
Susie nodded and tried to smile, but she was barely conscious. Lauren did her best to wrap up the wound in the side of her gut, but every time her friend moved, more blood oozed out.
“Just hold on—”
What was that? In the sky?
“Mike!” Lauren yelled, just at the same moment as the doctor on the bike screamed, “Incoming!”
Her husband started running toward Luke, but her son was already most of the way to the truck. Could she make it to the truck? Too far.
Lauren stood up and grabbed Susie, hauled her back over the fallen tree into cover. Her friend hit the dirt on the other side with a sickening thud and screamed in pain.
“Susie?” Lauren said. “Suse?” But she was unconscious.
Blood seeped into the dirt under her.
Percy and Rick, the two men who had come to help them, were already up and standing in a protective stance around the two women. The men had put on silver ponchos, which was odd, but Lauren figured it was camouflage against the drones. They had obviously encountered them before.
Which was good.
Through the burnt tree branches to the east, a swarm of tiny drones dropped in altitude, sped into the cover of the canopy, and veered toward them.
“Cover me,” Percy said to Rick.
Percy dropped his pump-action on the ground and kicked it over to Lauren, then bent and fished something from his backpack.
Two drones dodged and weaved through the tree trunks not even fifty feet away.
Lauren tossed her submachine gun into the dirt and picked up the shotgun. These guys had fought these things be
fore. They had to have shot cartridges in these things.
“What are you doing?” Lauren asked Percy, who stood in front of her holding what looked like a mess of string. “Get out of the way.”
She raised the shotgun.
Percy hesitated, but as three of the weaving drones came within twenty feet and darted at him, he hauled back and threw a net whirling into the air. It expanded and enveloped the three approaching drones.
But then one twisting edge caught a branch.
The net collapsed.
Two drones sped around it. Lauren aimed around Percy and pulled the trigger. One of the little bastards exploded in a yellow ball of flame. Rick fired twice from her left.
But the drone darted into Percy.
He screamed, his hands out, trying to bat it away. An orange fireball engulfed his head. His body flopped to the dirt.
Another swarm of dots slalomed through the trees farther out.
“We’ve got to move,” Lauren yelled.
She grabbed Susie’s inert body and began dragging her through the dirt, a streak of blood left across the leaves and mud as she pulled.
Chapter 32
“GET DOWN!” I yelled.
Travis’s spinning net caught four of the drones speeding toward Joe.
One of them darted around it to the right, but Joe tossed aside his pump-action gun and swung up his sawed-off, leveled it from his waist as the drone sped straight at him. The drone exploded in flaming fragments that showered over us and clattered to the pavement.
“Want more?” Joe laughed a throaty growl. “Come on, I got lots.”
Where he looked frail a few minutes ago, now he looked fearsome.
“We need to move,” I heard Lauren yell out behind me.
I turned to see her dragging Susie’s body. Her friend’s head lolled from one side to the other. At a crouch, I ran the thirty feet across the pavement to the edge of the dirt and leaned in to grab Susie’s collar. Rick followed behind us, his gun up and scanning the tree line. He fired his shotgun and pumped and fired again and again. Flaming yellow fireballs lit up the air as he hit the drones.
No sign of Percy.
And where the hell was Chuck? Where was the super-truck?
Lauren and I pulled Susie together, and we almost managed to run back to the rear of the pickup truck. Travis and Joe were already there. I nodded at Ken, who had disembarked with the three other guys. Two of them to each side of the truck, all of them in silver ponchos and tinfoil hats, with sawed-off shotguns strapped to their thighs and pump-action guns in their hands.
Hundreds of drones circled in the sky, making a ring with us in its center. The first salvo of drones had apparently been sent in. They were testing our defenses.
“What happened to Percy?” Travis said breathlessly. He tore back a tarp covering whatever was in the bed of the pickup.
Rick shook his head. “He didn’t make it.”
I closed my eyes. Percy. Rosy cheeks. Had hugged me when we left here not even a week ago. Thanked me for saving his town. He owned the diner. Now he was dead, after protecting my wife.
I opened my eyes. “What is all this?”
Car batteries littered the bed of the truck, connected by protruding wires. Travis clicked an electronic device on the back gate. Switches and dials covered the device’s surface. A squiggly green line glowed to life on its screen.
“It’s a jerry-rigged jammer,” Travis explained. “Those things communicate on low power signals. Any way to get your friend Damon up here?”
I glanced over the side of the pickup. It was an invisible truck, but now that I’d gotten used to the camouflage, I could see the way it patterned the background, like an octopus sitting on a seafloor. “They’re not moving,” I said.
Travis squinted into the sky. “Why are they circling like that?”
I held up a hand to guard against the sun. “We have an EMP device.”
“Did you say electromagnetic pulse device?”
“In the truck. Disables them up to a hundred feet away.”
“We had EM drone guns in Syria.” He twiddled the dials on his device. The green squiggle on the screen wobbled.
“Where did you say you served?”
“Echo company. 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. Syria. Iraq. We were usually were the ones with the fancy drone equipment and the towelheads were the ones improvising.” He considered for a second. “No offense intended if anyone here is Muslim.”
Joe and Travis and Ken formed a protective shell around us.
“How’s Susie?” I said to my wife.
Lauren knelt beside her friend. “Not good. She’s bleeding internally, I think.”
“If we can jam the external control frequency,” Travis said, still fiddling with the equipment, “it at least removes the human operator.”
“Does that stop them?”
“They’re mostly autonomous. But it does make them dumber. And removes eyes on us.”
“Eyes?”
“Stops whoever is spying on us from getting a look. Just wiggle this dial back and forth and try and get the waveforms to match up.” He took a second to illustrate. “I’m going to see about Susie here—”
“Incoming!” Joe said.
The circling drones split off from their circling orbit into a tightening spiral. A dozen angled inward and toward us.
“Where the hell is Chuck?” I looked up the road past the pickup. A door opened on our invisible truck. Someone got out and ran toward us.
“Luke,” I yelled, “go back!”
Luke was halfway to the truck when he heard someone yell behind him. It was so cool to see Joe again. Joe was just about his favorite person in the world, after his dad, of course. And maybe Uncle Chuck. So maybe his third favorite person in the world. Oh, and mom was pretty awesome too. So, fourth.
Someone yelled again.
Then his dad screamed.
Luke looked back and felt his stomach fall through his knees. Drones darted through the sky. He heard their flittering whine over the rustling of the burnt leaves in the wind.
He stumbled to a stop.
Uncle Chuck was ahead of him, with the truck door open, urging him forward.
Luke almost stopped to go back to his dad and Joe, but he had a better idea. He ran forward and jumped into the middle seat.
“Stay here,” Uncle Chuck said. “Take care of your little sister.”
Olivia was still watching Peppa Pig.
“Mike!” Luke heard Uncle Chuck yelling through the open driver’s-side door. “We’ll come to you. Get some cover!”
Instead of staying next to his little sister, Luke jumped over the divider into the back with Uncle Leo. “You okay?” Leo said.
“I’m fine.” Luke reached into the foot well in the back, grabbed the gray box of the EMP device and grabbed the power cord. They said that they couldn’t plug it in because it would take too much power, but this was an emergency, right?
He plugged it in.
“Let me go.” Archer grunt-talked around the T-shirt tied between his teeth. “I need to get out there.” He kicked one of the crates in the back.
Luke didn’t turn around and didn’t respond. His mother had told him not to. He heard the other bad man back there, the terrorist, kick the crate back. Uncle Leo was holding a submachine gun, guarding the both of them.
Uncle Chuck was in the front, talking to Ellarose and telling her to keep hold of her little brother. He flicked a switch on the front dashboard.
“What the hell?” He flicked the switch again and again then slapped the steering wheel. “Damn it, we’re out of power.”
Gunshots cracked in the distance. One and then two. Luke jumped in his seat and pressed his face against the window. His dad needed him. He looked down at the EMP device. More gunshots. Someone screamed. A man’s voice.
Chuck said bad words from the front. “Luke, did you do something?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Luke lied.
>
Uncle Chuck flicked the switch again and again and let out more words that mom said were very bad.
More gunshots.
Luke heard Uncle Leo whisper, “If I untie you, you won’t hurt anyone?”
“Only the right people,” Archer growl-whispered back.
The senator continued talking to Archer in the back. Uncle Leo glanced at Luke, then at Chuck, then back at Luke. He held a finger over his lips. Luke nodded. He would keep quiet. He wouldn’t say anything. Luke liked Archer, and he didn’t see why he had to be tied up.
Uncle Chuck said more bad words from the front of the truck. Uncle Leo leaned over the divider into the trunk area and whispered to Archer.
Out the window, the circling drones broke from their pattern and began to spiral in.
Toward his mother and father.
Chuck said not to leave his sister alone, but she was fine watching Peppa Pig.
His dad needed him. Luke had saved his dad’s life at the cabin. He’d saved his life at the waterfalls. Now he would save everyone. Luke reached down and unplugged the EMP, made sure Uncle Leo wasn’t looking his way.
Luke clicked the door handle.
And slipped out.
The drones fell from the sky in a spiral, zoomed right toward his mother and father.
Luke ran to them as fast as his legs would pump.
“Go back!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
My son held the gray EMP box out ahead of himself with both arms and ran as fast as he could toward us. Two hundred feet of distance, maybe less. I peered up at the drones streaming in a dozen spiraling arms toward us. Some of them split off.
They saw my son.
Someone appeared behind Luke. The bulk of him unmistakable. It was Archer. How had he gotten loose? The blood drained from my face. Had he killed Chuck? Was that why the truck wasn’t moving to us? Was Luke running toward me, or was he running away from Archer?
“What’s wrong?” Lauren said from below me.
“It’s Luke, I...” I wasn’t sure what to say.
Should I tell Luke to go back, or to run faster?
The circling drones angled in. The men around us tensed and began tracking their targets with their weapons.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 22
