CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3

by Matthew Mather

  “This is going to be ugly,” Ken muttered from my left.

  Luke ran and ran. He was fast for an eight-year-old, but not as quick as an adult. Archer gained on him from behind, his submachine gun bouncing on his back.

  Twenty drones dropped from the sky, heading right at Luke.

  He was halfway to us, out in the open. No cover.

  “Damn it.” I pushed past Rick and began running down the side of the pickup, past the motorcycle.

  What was Luke doing? Trying to save us? Or trying to run away from Archer? The asshole was gaining on my son with every step. Had that EMP thing even been charged? Wasn’t Selena too low on juice to fill it up?

  No time to think.

  Just act.

  Run faster, you asshole, I said to myself. My legs pumped, my feet pounded the pavement. I cleared the motorcycle. A hundred feet to Luke. Get to the goddamn gym when this is over, for once, won’t you? From the corner of my eye, someone else was already running toward Luke.

  It was Joe.

  The old man had surprising speed. As he ran, he leveled his shotgun and took aim at the leading edge of the drone swarm descending toward Luke.

  Archer stopped running and took a knee. He swung out his weapon from behind his back.

  And pointed it straight at me.

  Thirty feet to Luke. I could make out his blue eyes and his gap-toothed grin. Was he smiling? Or grimacing in terror? My son stumbled to a stop and lifted the EMP device. He held one finger up to press the button. I watched Joe side-stepping toward my son, the warrior’s weapon high and tracking.

  Joe.

  Joe’s heart. The pacemaker.

  “Luke,” I screamed, “don’t push—”

  Muzzle flash from straight behind Luke, and a split second later, the crack of the shot.

  The spiraling drones dropping toward us stopped. Hung suspended in space. Again. Luke smiled proudly, his finger on the button of the EMP.

  Joe collapsed to the pavement.

  I threw down the sawed-off shotgun. It clattered on the road. Dropped to my knees and picked up Joe and turned him to face me. His body convulsed, eyes glazed, but he recognized me and smiled. “Never finished that chat, did we?”

  “Tell me later,” I said softly.

  Travis ran over, his medical kit in one hand.

  “We don’t see the world as it is, Mike,” Joe whispered as he urged me closer, “we see the world as we are. You tell the boys tha...”

  His eyes rolled back. Body went limp.

  The mass of drones, beyond the frozen ones, circled high in the blue Kentucky sky like vultures.

  Chapter 33

  “I KILLED JOE,” my son cried out between sobs.

  I held him as tight as I could to my chest, tried to squeeze out all of the grief and pull it into me, but couldn’t. I was crying, too. Joe had died, taken his last breath, right there in my arms in the middle of the road. His pacemaker had stopped, but that shouldn’t have been enough to kill him. It was the stress, the exertion, his diabetes, a lot of things had gone wrong at the wrong time.

  Travis had tried to revive him, but it was no use.

  Luke cried great heaving wails, snot and spit mixing as he wiped his face.

  We were back in the barn, the same place that Oscar and Joe had taken us a week before when the Vanceburg Rifles militia had taken us captive. Except now, both Oscar and Joe were dead. In the time between, we had become heroes and saved the town, but now we’d once again become unwanted outsiders. Not just unwanted but reviled by some here. Six of the Vanceburg Rifles stood guard in the center aisle between the stalls.

  Our side of the family wasn’t wanted inside the main house.

  Lauren and Senator Seymour and Olivia were in the next stall over from Luke and me. My son wanted some privacy to cry, and I understood that, but I still didn’t want him to be alone. Susie had been taken into the main farmhouse and Travis was doing his best to patch up her wounds. Chuck and his kids were in there too.

  “It wasn’t just the EMP,” I whispered. “Joe had a lot of bad things happening in his body. He had a heart attack two days before. It was just his time. You saved our lives.”

  “Ken said I didn’t. He said they could have handled it. He said I killed Joe.”

  “He was mad. He didn’t mean it.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  My son was right.

  Ken had meant what he’d said, but then I was also right. Ken was mad and angry and hurt as hell, and people feeling like that said things they might regret later. Not just Joe had died, but Ken had found out his best friend Oscar was dead as well, after leaving two days before, also to help us. Percy, another good friend of his, died out there today as well. I couldn’t blame Ken.

  But then, who could I blame?

  When Luke had set off the EMP device, all the incoming drones had halted in place. Gone into reset mode, Travis said, just like they used to do to enemy drones in Syria. Frozen in place and hovering, Lauren and the boys had picked off the drones one by one with the shotguns. The drones farther out, in circles at a distance greater than the EMP had effect, then filed off and disappeared over the hills and left us alone.

  With Joe dead in the middle of the street.

  Damon watched the retreating drones and said that they were out of power and needed to recharge. Travis had a different opinion. These were scouts, he said, and they had found us and done recon and tested the target.

  They would be back, and in force, Travis had said.

  “Try and get some sleep,” I said to Luke, wrapping him in a blanket. He pulled it around himself and nodded, sniffling and shaking.

  I sighed, ran a hand through his hair, and got up from the bench. A candle burned in the corner of the room on the cement floor. Blackout curtains hung over the window and metal bars. Nice woodwork, I thought to myself, looking at the sloping roof. Joe had built this place for his wife, he had told me, for horses that they never got around to owning.

  Now both of them were gone.

  “This is an embarrassment,” Archer hissed from outside my stall.

  The man stalked back and forth down the center of the barn. He had his backpack on, his sidearm and rifle slung over his shoulder. The Vanceburg boys had tried to tell him he needed to give them the weapons, but after a tense standoff, let him keep them. Six of the militia stood guard in the middle of the barn, two of them inspecting our vehicle.

  We had towed the truck, Selena, into the structure to get it out of the way. It was now just an expensive paperweight. They had generators, but it would probably take a week for a small diesel engine to repower the massive batteries. She still could be useful, Damon and Travis had both said.

  The terrorist Archer had captured was in the stall at the end. We had tied him up, but the Vanceburg boys did one better and chained him to a wall. The man watched us but never said a word. He sat still and stared at a wall, seemed to be meditating. Two of the Rifles kept watch over him.

  I checked on Luke again, asked him if he wanted an iPad or some water or something to eat. He pulled the blankets tighter and shook his head. I went to the next stall over.

  “Lauren,” I said quietly, “I think I’m going to go to the farmhouse. Do you want anything? Do you want to come in?”

  “I’m staying here,” my wife replied. “And could you get that out of here? It’s scaring our daughter to death.”

  She had her arm around Olivia. In the opposite corner of the stall was a scarecrow, a remarkably lifelike one dressed in dungarees and a white shirt and with shoes on. I said I would take care of it.

  Senator Seymour had his arm around my wife and my daughter, the three of them propped up on a bench in the stall next to Luke’s. Ken and Ricky didn’t want Seymour coming into the farmhouse. Security risk, they said.

  “You okay?” I said to Senator Seymour.

  “Not exactly the InterContinental, but it’ll do.” He smiled.

  He still had on the same blue shirt and red tie th
at he’d had on when we’d left his house. We were all in the same clothes, spattered in blood and mud, coated in dried sweat. I still reeked of manure. I suggested we go in for a shower—cold water only, as the power was off—but Ken said that wasn’t possible. He’d offered us a tin washbasin. Lauren and Leo had politely declined.

  I said, “I’m going to go in and talk to Chuck, okay?”

  “You do what you have to,” my wife said and closed her eyes.

  I dragged the scarecrow out and asked one of the Vanceburg Rifle guys if they could put it somewhere, a place where my daughter wouldn’t see it. One of them said it would fit in the shed out back. I left the scarecrow in their care and walked to the back, nodding to the Vanceburg Rifle men doing guard duty. I stopped at the last stall, where Archer was eyeing the terrorist chained to the wall.

  “I think it’s time to get some answers from our friend,” Archer said. “If you think he’s one of my men, wait until you see me peel away a few layers of his skin. I speak two or three languages from this asshole’s neighborhood. Not fluent, but well enough.”

  Archer terrified me, the way his eyes seemed to glow with intensity in the candlelight.

  “Don’t do anything in here,” I whispered. “My wife and kids, please...”

  “I’ll take him to the shed on the other side,” Archer replied. “There’s a big cast iron bathtub in there I can use. I need to get some tools first.”

  I didn’t ask what those might be, or what the bathtub was for.

  Talking to Archer made my skin crawl, but I shared his frustration. Half of the people here thought that we were the enemy.

  And they might not be wrong.

  I left the barn and ventured into the cool night air. Looked up at the stars and the sliver of the crescent of the moon rising over the black mountains to the east. The smell of scorched earth wafted on the breeze. Almost black outside. I had walked the pathways of the farm many times when we were here a few days before. A diesel generator grumbled in the farmhouse, vented in the basement, but they put up blinds over the windows.

  I made my way carefully to the veranda in the darkness.

  A hundred feet to my left, candles flickered. Two people paid their respects. Ken had laid out Joe’s and Percy’s bodies on wooden tables fifty feet apart, put candles in jars to mark the spots, and had two of the Rifles stand guard to make sure no scavengers picked at the corpses. People came in from the town in ones and twos to pay their respects.

  And only in ones and twos.

  Travis said that funerals made for great targeting opportunities for drones. He said they used funerals all the time to target terrorists in Iraq and Syria, as people tended to congregate and high-value targets couldn’t keep away.

  Now we were the targets. Scurrying around in the Kentucky farmland, our bodies the glowing heat signatures to the eyes above. Travis said to keep the tables with the bodies at least two hundred feet from the barn and the main house, just in case either got hit with a missile strike from a drone.

  I looked up. Who knew what was circling and watching up there?

  I quickened my pace.

  “Close the damn door,” Ken said.

  I had opened it a few inches and squeezed through. I closed it behind me.

  Nine people sat around the oak table in the kitchen of Joe’s farmhouse. A single incandescent bulb, dimmed, illuminated the center of the deer antler chandelier over the table.

  Ken was closest to me on the right, scowling, with Chuck sitting between him and Rick farther down. Past them were Steve and Brandee, the two hikers my son and I had rescued from the fire the week before. They waved at me, Bonham and Ellarose on their knees. Travis sat at the other end of the table.

  A crackling fire burned in the kitchen hearth just beside and behind him.

  Damon sat at the table to my left, his laptop out, of course. I had no idea what network he might be connecting to. It was more his security blanket than anything else, I suspected. Paulina, all freckles and blond hair, who had kissed Damon on the dock when we left here a few days ago, sat right next to him. Practically on top of him. That made me smile.

  “Nothing funny here, Mitchell,” Ken said.

  “No, I know.”

  “What’s the goddamn grin for?”

  “Sorry, I just...” I began to sit down in an empty seat.

  “Not there, dammit,” Ken growled. “That’s Joe’s spot, at the head of the table. That chair will forever remain empty. Can you not sit in his seat while the man is out there”—he pointed at the window—“being laid to rest?”

  I took the place next to it. “I didn’t realize. Can I take this one?”

  He didn’t reply. Looked away from me. Chuck didn’t even meet my eyes. What had they been talking about? I had left them alone for an hour, which now seemed like it had been too long a time to let things fester.

  I sat.

  The fire crackled in the silence.

  “Maybe we’ll take the kids upstairs,” Brandee said. She had straight brown hair and clear eyes and balanced Ellarose on her knee.

  Ellarose had recovered quickly from the concussion, but we didn’t want her going to sleep. Not that anyone would get much this night.

  Steve, Brandee’s boyfriend, said, “Yeah, why don’t we do that? Go and see how your mommy is doing?” He said it both to us and to Bonham, who was on his lap.

  Bonham nodded. “Yeah, let’s go see Mom.”

  Travis had managed to set up a blood transfusion. Rick had the same blood type, which Travis had asked again and again just to make sure. He gave Susie some antibiotics and saline on a drip. He had set up a field hospital in a spare bedroom upstairs. I had a sinking feeling more of us might be needing his expertise soon.

  Damon waited for them to leave the room before saying, “All the incoming connections to the meshnetwork have been cut off. Even radio signals are being flushed.”

  “KLMB, from two towns over in Portsmouth,” Rick said, “can’t get reception anymore.”

  “Means someone is purposely jamming it,” Travis said.

  Ken said, “Or someone destroyed Portsmouth.”

  “What we did hear, before KLMB went out,” Rick said, “was a report that Senator Seymour has ties to the Chinese through GenCorp and Tyrell Jakob. The US government is looking for him, and not in a good way.”

  “Those are conspiracy rants,” Damon said. “What I got on mainstream media was that our military has stamped out the drone attacks in Washington. The fires have been extinguished. There’s talk of a military strike against China unless the leadership is removed. Of course, their Politburo is refusing.”

  “How do they know it’s China?” I said.

  Nobody answered.

  “They’re sure it’s not Chechen terrorists?”

  Damon said, “They’re saying China supplied the weapons. China isn’t denying the drones are theirs. Our government’s hands are tied, anyway, without a commander-in-chief.”

  I said, “They haven’t sworn in Secretary of State Timothy Chen yet?”

  “Who is a puppet of the Chinese Politburo himself!” Rick slammed the table. “That man wasn’t even elected to Congress. Nobody ever voted for him. He’s an underling of Seymour, out there in the barn. It’s not just China, it’s our own government that’s letting this happen. Cleaning house because they can’t win an election.”

  “Hey, hey, come on,” I said quietly.

  “Come on?” Ken said, getting up from his seat. “First you bring terrorists here, last week, telling us they were your friends.”

  “They fooled us.”

  “You are saying you are easily fooled,” Rick said to me, pointing a finger. “You just remember that.”

  “Then right after you leave,” Ken said, “the feds show up, helicopters and Humvees and FBI and CIA and who the hell else knows what. They take that truck you came here in, they rip our town apart, look up and inside all our assholes and accuse us of things, and then leave.”

 
“I am sorry about that,” I said.

  “You’re always sorry, Mitchell. Now Joe is dead, Oscar is dead—”

  “Percy is dead,” Rick said, tears coming to his eyes.

  Ken looked straight at me. “Why did you come back here, Mitchell?”

  “Because we needed your help. And it was Chuck’s idea.”

  “I think Chuck’s on our side in this.”

  What did that mean? My friend kept his eyes averted. “Chuck, what are they talking about?”

  “The last messages we got from Xenon—”

  “That’s their conspiracy theory message board,” Damon cut in.

  “A high-ranking member of the American military,” Rick continued, ignoring him, “said that Senator Seymour wasn’t dead. And he was right, because now, magically, here he is. Xenon also said that Seymour had a big secret contract with Tyrell Jakob, that the Jakobites were taking over the country. They’re the ones that used his satellites to wreck our military over our heads. Again, connected to China, who are the only ones with their GPS and military still intact. Why do you think their drones are working?”

  “This stuff is garbage,” Damon muttered.

  “And Mr. Indigo here,” Rick said, jabbing a finger at Damon, “has a father who is a senior member of the Chinese State Security Ministry. Is that right, or am I just conspiracizing again?”

  Damon’s head bowed. He ran a hand through his matted black hair. “That’s not a lie, no.”

  That was news to me. “Damon, that’s true? You always told me—”

  “I never met him, I swear.”

  “So he says.” Rick was up from his chair. “They’re also saying Tyrell and the Jakobites have put control of GenCorp into Damon’s hands. Tyrell isn’t dead, he’s working with your friends, Mitchell.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “I think it is,” Damon said quietly.

  “You’re working with Tyrell? He’s not dead?”

  “I think Tyrell might have named me as a beneficiary for his corporate shares. I have no idea why. We had been working closely together on some projects, but I’m as surprised as anyone else.”