“The mission is over,” the voice said, the sound getting closer.
“Is it Irena or Amina?” I coughed out. “What’s your real name?”
“Does it matter?”
“You know everything about me.”
“So fair is fair? You want to know about me?”
“Something like that.”
I gritted my teeth and managed to break into a sort of jog. If I headed downhill, I would reach the river. There had to be cabins down there?
“It does not matter,” came her voice, but now it seemed to be ahead of me.
I stopped.
Scanned the tree trunks and carpet of pine needles and moss underfoot.
“You did not need to kill him, though,” she said.
Her voice changed. The American part of it seemed to disappear.
“Terek?” I said.
Where was she? I unholstered the Glock Chuck gave me.
No safety, right? I checked it, stumbled sideways, raised the weapon and scanned back and forth through the undergrowth.
“Whatever you want to call him, yes,” her voice replied, still unembodied. The sound seemed to carry through the rustling trees. “He watched our mother die, burned alive in screaming pain from one of your bombs. Do you know that? You wanted to know something about me?”
“I’m sorry about Terek. I didn’t want to hurt him.” I scanned back and forth and tried to get a fix.
My arms felt like they were full of lead. My hands shook. I was too tired to fight back. I needed another plan.
“Our entire village was bombed, destroyed like—”
“You can stop the charade,” I said. “And I’m lying. I’m glad I killed your brother. I enjoyed it. Little bastard.”
I saw her shadow move in the trees to my left. Were those two people I saw out in the trees? More? I blinked and tried to clear my eyes.
Her voice changed again, now into something purely American. “Ah—no more secrets? Is that what you want? It doesn’t matter, Mike. They will find Chinese drones scattered over that town and in DC, find the bodies of our soldiers that will be identified as Chechen freedom fighters. I will melt back into the background.”
The shadows moved.
She appeared to my right.
I turned and pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Again, and again.
Half of the shots didn’t connect, but half of them did. Bounced off her armor.
“You’ll need something with a little more penetrating power,” she said and walked closer. She ducked behind a tree as I unloaded the last of my rounds.
I stumbled. My arms came down. Too tired to even hold them up.
She said, “We needed the illusion to be perfect, otherwise you might have sensed it. You didn’t need to kill him, Michael. I would have left your family alive if you hadn’t done that.”
Was there someone else in the woods with us? My vision was blurry.
I raised my empty weapon. “Leave them alo—”
An arm wrapped itself around my neck. “Perhaps you will be payment enough.”
She was incredibly strong, and maybe two or three inches taller than me. She pulled the gun from my hands and turned me around to face her, then pressed my back against a tree.
My feet dangled off the ground. My arms hung uselessly by my side.
I was spent.
Beyond exhausted.
I looked up into the blue sky. The tree above me had little acorns under its green leaves. An oak. Luke loved oak trees. Olivia liked the conker ones, what were they called? Chestnut? Lauren, she always liked maples. I didn’t think I even had a favorite tree. Shame.
“I give you credit for persistence,” Irena said.
I could just see her brown eyes behind the ballistic visor, her face obscured by the armor that her neck and the rest of her body was encased in. It was wrapped tight around her body, just a small gap under the armpits where the seals came together, and she lifted me up.
In her right hand, a cruel knife edge glinted in the morning sunshine.
She leaned into me. “Goodbye, Michael.”
Small clinking noises punctuated the rustling leaves. I had pulled the pins from the grenades in my hoodie pockets, and now released the spoons. Just like Chuck told me. One, I counted. Nobody threatens my family. Two. I stuffed the grenades into the gap of her armor under the armpits.
Her eyes went wide.
Three.
I grappled to hold her tight and said, “Goodbye, asshole.”
Fo—
Chapter 44
LAUREN STRETCHED HER arms forward and yawned.
A warm breeze blew in from the rolling green fields, the air tinged with the sweetness of spring, the leaves on the trees bright green with new promise. Mountaintops rolled in the blue-shifted distance, and crickets chirped over the stirring of leaves in the treetops.
One of the horses whinnied in the barn. They must be hungry, Lauren figured, and was about to walk over to feed them when her son skidded onto the deck behind her.
“I’m going out,” Luke said.
He slammed the screen door behind him as he came onto the porch.
“Just because you’re ten doesn’t mean you can come and go as you please,” Lauren said.
“Mom, come on, where would I go?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m going to see Ellarose.”
Lauren smiled. “Ellarose, huh? You guys have been seeing a lot of each other lately.”
“Mom. Please.”
“I’m not saying anything. It’s great you guys are hanging out.”
It was before 9 a.m. She stooped to pick up her cup of coffee, her back still sore from the old injuries. She rubbed her left hand over her face and felt the scars, all healed, but still there, the bumps and calluses.
And some scars you couldn’t see.
The ones on the inside. They were harder to heal. Might never heal. Lauren still had nightmares, and Luke woke up screaming as many nights as he didn’t.
She had taken both of her kids to see a psychologist, which was helping, she thought. It was good that he and Ellarose were spending so much time together. Each might be the only person the other could really talk to.
She took the coffee and sighed, luxuriating in the warmth of it against her fingers.
“Hey, look at that!”
Luke hung off the front of the porch and pointed up into the blue sky. White streaks appeared, dozens of them, maybe hundreds. They looked like the contrails of jets, but they were higher. Much higher, Lauren knew. Debris being brought down out of orbit. It was an ongoing job that would still take many more years.
“That’s your Uncle Damon looking out over you,” she said. “Like an angel.”
“Dad would have liked to see that, huh? That’s a big one.”
“He sure would have.”
Luke watched his mother’s face. “Why don’t you come over to Auntie Susie’s with me?”
A crowd of people had already gathered on the roadway in front of the house. Lauren sighed and took a sip of her coffee. She looked up and watched the spreading white fingers streaking across the upper atmosphere. “Okay, but we feed the horses first.”
“You okay?” Susie said. “You want something stronger than coffee?”
The Mumford house was just a few streets down from her place, yet it provided much more privacy. She couldn’t stand it, sometimes, but then again, what choice did she have?
Lauren still had her cup in her hand. “Maybe just a tipple.”
“A little Kentucky moonshine is coming right up.”
Ellarose and Luke had run out of the house and disappeared into the woods the second they got here. Olivia had attached herself to Bonham, of course, and the two of them were doing a puzzle on the dining room table. Her little girl had outgrown Peppa Pig, but her imitation of the British accent persisted. It was cute.
Susie reappeared with two jam-jar glasses and an unmarked bottle of clear liquid. She poured them a finger each and the
y cheered each other and took sips.
Lauren took a tiny sip and coughed, then put her glass down. “I better not.”
“What’s wrong?” Susie asked.
“That you’re trying to poison me?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I’m just away from the kids so much lately.”
“I’m happy to babysit. Come on, that’s not it.”
Lauren took another sip and felt the bite of the moonshine. She grimaced.
“It’s Mike’s birthday coming up.”
“Ah, of course.”
“I never know what to do.”
“It’ll be okay. It just takes time.”
They clinked their glasses again, but Lauren didn’t drink. Susie poured more into her own glass, but when she lifted the bottle to her friend’s, Lauren had her hand over top of it. “Really, I can’t.” She smiled.
Chapter 45
THE SWIRLING BROWN water bubbled and frothed and churned as it cascaded over the rocks.
I dove straight into the foaming whitewater, heard the roar of the rapids beneath the surface. I popped back to the top and let the creek carry me downstream as I laid flat on my back and took a deep lungful of air to float.
Why had I never learned to swim before?
“Dad!” Luke yelled.
I rotated upright to tread water. “You okay? What’s wrong?” By habit, that was always the question when someone ran toward me in a panic.
My son appeared through the trees to the farm side of the creek, Ellarose smiling behind him. “Hi, Mr. Mitchell,” she said, waving.
“Dad, did you see that big one come down?”
“Nope. I was swimming.”
“You know how dumb it is to be proud of being able to swim when you’re middle aged?” Chuck floated in an inner tube about fifty feet downstream of me, a beer in one hand. “You’re getting soft, Mitchell.”
“I’ve always been soft, Mumford,” I laughed back.
After it was over, two years ago, the first thing I had done was learn to swim. Properly. The second was move out of the city.
I had had enough.
“Yeah,” Luke continued, “it must have been a military satellite or something. You didn’t see it through the trees? It was huge, like hundreds of fragments must have come down all at the same time. You could see the streaks of it reentering in broad daylight.”
“That’s your Uncle Damon at work,” I said. “Probably wanted to give you a show.”
Damon had taken over control of GenCorp when all the dust settled. He was leading an effort to remove all the junk from orbit. Despite all the conspiracy theories, it turned out that Tyrell Jakob had indeed been killed up at Chuck’s cabin. The FBI had recovered his remains and tested the DNA. He was definitely killed that night.
The only thing he’d lied about was having two children.
He must have told me that to make me feel better, or not arouse suspicion about having Peppa Pig videos in Selena’s memory banks. In the end, he had changed his will to leave his entire estate to Damon. Recorded the statement right there in the car just before he died, a digital copy of which had survived. It turned into one heck of an ugly fight with the diaspora of the Jakob family, but that’s what he wanted.
Odd guy, but Damon was a bit odd himself. I guessed that Tyrell saw more of himself in Damon than the rest of his family.
We hadn’t seen much of Damon lately, he’d been so busy with GenCorp. I didn’t want anything to do with it, though. After all that mess, I just wanted a quiet place to raise my kids.
“Mom’s kinda freaking out again,” Luke said. He followed me down the bank of the river as the water pulled me along. “Your birthday and all, and she’s going to be away.”
That’s right. My birthday was next week. I had almost forgotten. My dad had died on that date over twenty years ago. It always put me into a tailspin. Lauren was going to be away in Washington, so she wouldn’t be able to be here.
“Don’t worry, I got you guys here,” I said.
Lauren’s uncle, Senator Seymour, had died, killed by the assassin on the roadway as we’d tried to escape. In a groundswell of support immediately afterward, Lauren had been nominated to take his place. There had been a special by-election, and before we knew it, there was a Senator Mitchell in the house. We still needed a female president, my wife liked to say, and who was I to stand in the way?
The memory of the event was still fresh in my mind. Thinking about Senator Seymour made my stomach twist. “Maybe we should go in,” I said to Chuck.
“But it’s a beautiful day.”
“I don’t feel well.”
Chuck’s smile slid away. “No problem, let’s go.” He began paddling the inner tube to the shore. “We’ll get things fixed up.”
He always had a plan.
Back in the battle, what Archer had sworn he’d seen—Chuck’s body, blown apart—hadn’t been our friend. Just fragments of the scarecrow that the Vanceburg boys had put into the shed. Chuck had materialized at the church a few minutes after Archer had, stumbling down the church stairs and into Susie’s arms.
Chuck always had a plan. Diving into the shed had been his last backup.
There was an old cast iron tub in there—as Archer had told us—and Chuck had gone in before the fight started and prepared it in case he needed a quick escape. He always had a plan.
The past two years had been more than a bit of a struggle for me. It took most of a year to recover from the grenade blast I survived at close quarters, even protected by Amina’s armor. The wounds the experience had left in me went beyond the physical.
I still had nightmares.
Chuck was like a dandelion, however. He could thrive anywhere after going through just about anything. I was more of a hothouse flower.
Too much thinking, Chuck often told me with his grin.
For me, the events didn’t just go away. The memories of being hunted by machines, of the red dots flitting through the trees, haunted my nights and my days. I had been in therapy along with the kids. It would take a while to get back to normal, for the night terrors to stop.
I pulled my T-shirt and Crocs on and joined Ellarose and Luke and Chuck for the walk back to the farmhouse. It was a ten-minute ramble down the hill into the outskirts of Vanceburg and back to Joe’s place, as we still called it. We cleared the last of the trees, and the white farmhouse and church stood out in the fields and green shoots of corn below.
We’d rebuilt the place exactly as it had been.
After the farmhouse and church and barn had been destroyed, we’d come back in the weeks and months afterward and cleared the land and rebuilt everything exactly as it had been, down to the last sagging beam. In his will, Joe had given the land to the city of Vanceburg, as he had no family. The city, in turn, had offered it to us when we said we wanted to rebuild it. A way of erasing the insult to this land.
Everything now was exactly as it was before the Battle of Vanceburg, as we and the TV pundits had come to call it. The Vanceburg farmstead had withstood the final battle and turned the tide, had averted what could have become a global catastrophe from coming to pass.
I walked along the dirt path up from the creek into the forest. The trees had recovered quickly after the fires. Mostly just the leaves and branches had burned, leaving the trunks to regenerate. The greenery of the underbrush had returned within weeks.
“If Ella and Luke get together,” Chuck whispered into my ear, making sure the kids couldn’t hear us, “that would make us real brothers, wouldn’t it?”
“I think grandfathers-in-law?”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
Luke skipped up to join us. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing.”
Chuck dropped back and began explaining what each tree was to Ellarose, but she already knew each one. Maybe better than him by now. Our children were already surpassing us in some ways, and I hoped they always would.
&nbs
p; We had failed in so many ways.
The original CyberStorm six years before turned out to have been a test run for the final events of what media pundits had started to call “World War C”. The conspiracy theorists had been right—it hadn’t been only an unlucky confluence of events.
Years later, after what happened here, the truth came out.
The seventy thousand people that had died in the CyberStorm had been part of a cyberweapons test that had been made to look like an accident—but wasn’t.
Hundreds more had died in the targeted drone assassinations across America when the machines were unleashed from containers in New York and Seattle and New Orleans.
Under cover of the attack in orbit blamed on terrorists, dozens of shipping containers had made it through the ports that shouldn’t have. They were unloaded and the drone-birds were unleashed across America, hunting out people based on facial recognition algorithms and last known locations from social media feeds.
But it wasn’t Muslim terrorists in retaliation for America’s own drone program. It wasn’t an attack that was driven by America’s own targeted kill lists all over the world.
That explanation was a deception, just as Joe had said it was. That was just something to fill the conspiracy websites. Blaming the attacks on Muslim terrorists was a fiction.
A way to divert attention away from the one person at the root of it all.
Or so they said.
A crowd of tourists blocked the roadway on the path back to the farm. Most of them looked American, but at least half looked Asian. There were some Indians in their colorful saris. This farm had become an international tourist destination, and probably would be for years.
And it wasn’t the Indians who’d launched the first anti-satellite attacks, after all.
Chuck waved to Travis, who was leading the group.
“Please, leave some space,” Travis said to his gaggle of well-wishers. “This is a real home. They live here.”
Travis had started his own business, the Battle of Vanceburg Memorial Tours. Buses parked all along the main road beside the Ohio. Big business. Travis even got himself a new girlfriend.
CyberWar: World War C Trilogy Book 3 Page 29
