by SL Huang
I pressed the detonator in, got behind the desk, and pushed the button.
The bang shot bits of metal and flooring and debris against the walls of the office. I came back around to the safe, kicked the remains of the bolt away, and heaved the thing in my arms, the open door banging against my hip. I staggered and almost dropped it—holy crap, the thing was heavy. One hundred and three point eight pounds. Perfect.
Three minutes and fourteen seconds.
I shambled down the hallway as fast as my shuffling feet would go without unbalancing the safe. The burn on my left hand felt like I was putting a knife through it where the corner of the thing dug into my palm.
I made it back to the explosives lab and thunked the safe to the floor as gently as I could, open side up. The DHS woman was only a few seconds after me, pushing a wheeled cart stacked with ammo cans and cases. Good. I’d been afraid they hadn’t left enough behind. Eight grams for a round of 7.62—and multiply—
“A hundred and seventy-three pounds, right?” I said to the man on the pressure plate, who was sweating so much he looked like he was boiling from the inside. A hundred and seventy-three point…four, I thought, including his gear.
“Something like that,” he got out. “This won’t work. It’s not as simple as—”
“Then you have nothing to lose,” I said, starting to tear the ammo cases open.
Two and a half minutes.
“I saw some blast shields back there,” I tossed to his partner without stopping what I was doing. “Go grab some.” This time she didn’t hesitate before sprinting away.
The math here wouldn’t be difficult. Just simple division: weight and volume. And then watch like a hawk to see where my darling victim was putting his weight so I could match it. The massively hard part would be the juggling act itself. And fuck, I’d probably pull a muscle.
Whatever. Man’s life, and all that. Arthur was a bad influence.
I heaved over the first ammo case. The dimensions of the fire safe gave it a volume of just over five gallons, which would be enough, barely. I poured the cardboard box of ammunition inside, my senses alert to double-check the weight and keep track of where I was at. The rounds tinkled over each other as they filled the bottom of the safe.
“I’m telling you, this won’t work,” the male agent said again, his young voice hoarse and dry. “Go. Just go.”
I ignored him. I was too busy updating the calculations and staying alert for any weight irregularities in the ammunition as it streamed in.
The other agent returned with a couple of blast shields. “What can I do?”
“Leave one of those here and get out,” I said, without looking up.
“Like hell. Cliff—”
“Do it,” said her partner. “You’re not going to die here too.”
“Noble of you,” I said, then snapped at her, “Ninety seconds, go.” She drew back and then hoofed it, thank Christ. I concentrated on Cliff, tossing the last few rounds into the safe one by one. Tink. Tink. Tink. “Okay, here’s how it’s going to work. When I say go, you’re going to start transferring your weight off the plate very, very slowly. As smoothly as you can. Got it?”
“Got it,” Cliff croaked. He slid his weapon into his holster and worked his hands at his sides, opening and closing sweaty fists.
I gathered my legs under me and heaved the ammo-filled safe. It was too heavy for me. My muscles protested, and my left hand screamed. “Go now,” I grunted.
Cliff lifted one boot as if he were pushing through molasses.
“Faster,” I gasped. “Just do it smooth.”
His foot touched the ground.
The balance blazed through my senses as I let the bottom edge of the safe graze the plate, releasing the slightest bit of weight, then more and more and more and—shit, less as he wobbled, gathering the heavy metal box back into me—I levered the ammo-filled safe onto the plate ever so carefully, matching him bit by bit, releasing or lifting back tiny increments of the weight as he teetered, the ammo clinking softly as it shifted. My tendons strained, muscle fibers beginning to tear, the vertebrae in my lower back crunching and stabbing, and pain raced up my left arm until I couldn’t feel my hand anymore…fuck…
And then Cliff was off the plate and the safe was on it, and we had twenty-one seconds left. “Go,” I choked out, and scooped up the blast shield to follow him at a stumbling sprint, my body shaking, my muscles not responding correctly to the neurons firing against them. But that was all right, because all I had to do was run, run, stagger, run—
I was counting down in my head as we rounded into the garage. Eleven—ten—
We pounded across the cement, the open door filling my vision like a mirage, the promise of survival. Eight—seven—six—
We hit the door.
Four—three—
Still in the blast zone, still very much in the blast zone. Two—
I launched myself and tackled the DHS guy, taking us both to the ground and covering with the shield at an angle.
The concussion slammed into us like we’d been hit by a train. Flattening. Deafening. Turning the world inside out. Debris battered the shield, as if the building had been cheated and was reaching out vindictively to bury us.
When it finally all stopped it felt as if my surroundings had gone to mute after the sensory overload. The dust, the debris, the street, the blast shield I still clung to, the man I was hunched over—everything was deadened and dulled.
Someone pulled at us. The other agent. Mouthing words at Cliff.
I rolled away and forced myself up to stand, annoyed it had taken me a moment. The female agent, covered in dust but otherwise unharmed, was helping her partner to his feet. He almost fell. His hands shook where he clutched at her for support.
I left them to it and loped away.
“Hey!” the woman shouted, the audio muffled like she was calling from very far away, but I didn’t turn. They weren’t going to shoot me in the back. At least I didn’t think so. They did yell after me, but I couldn’t hear what they said, which was just as well.
Chapter 12
I turned the corner to find a black SUV with police lights still flashing. I’d fucked my car when I’d broken in here, so I stole theirs. Served them right for almost getting me blown up.
I was just ditching the government car in favor of a more anonymous one when my phone buzzed with Arthur’s number. “Speak loud,” I said. “I found their old base, but they blew…”
Arthur was talking.
From a ways away, and goddamned hard to hear. I turned the volume on the phone all the way up, but the ringing in my ears was still too bad for me to focus past it.
I needed an amplifier. I spotted a coffee cup in the detritus on the floor of the passenger side of my new ride and picked it up. A few rips and a twist and I had something that would bounce my sound waves into constructive interference. I tore a slot in the base and slid it over the phone’s speaker, then held the mouth of my makeshift amplifier up to my ear.
“…ain’t gonna let you go,” came Arthur’s voice, quiet and inexorable.
“You’re fucked up, man. You’re fucked in the head. You really wanna die for this?”
“I ain’t walking away.”
I dropped the cup and texted as fast as my fingers could move:
Helicopter and Arthur’s location
NOW
Checker was prone to asking far too many questions, but he knew an emergency when he saw one. Thirteen seconds later I had the freeway exit for a nearby hospital.
Hospital security is effectively nonexistent. At least when it comes to someone like me. I was lifting away from the roof helipad into a darkening sky before anyone registered I was stealing from them.
By that time, I had another text from Checker with an address and a pair of coordinates. The latter were what I needed—thank God for smart people and their forethought. I steered the helicopter west into the blood-colored sunset, pushing it to its breaking point unt
il it tried to shake itself apart around me. It bucked and fought, but I held it on the edge.
I couldn’t hear the murmur of voices from the still-open cell phone call over the roar of the blades, but I kept it on and in my pocket, my side of the conversation muted. The pessimism of the math pressed me to urgency—Arthur was back in the city, and my top speed was only a little less than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Even though I’d skip traffic and go the crow-flies route, I’d still need almost half an hour to get to the location Checker had sent.
A lot could happen in half an hour. Too much.
The ’copter ride gave me too much time to think. Maybe I should have called the cops, or told Checker to. Get the fucking DHS in there. But no, wouldn’t Arthur have dialed them in the first place if he’d wanted police?
Unless he’d only called me because I was the last person who’d texted him. Unless I was the first contact he’d hit when he’d tried to be surreptitious. Unless he’d only called me because it was convenient.
The helicopter shuddered beneath me, the blades catching on the pressure differentials and almost sending it into a roll. I manhandled it back on course.
Night crept across the sky as I flew, the city springing into illumination beneath me, a quilt of yellow and white crisscrossed by whizzing red taillights. The location Checker had sent was on the northern reaches of the city. I let the latitude and longitude lines net the globe beneath me, a finer and finer mesh, until I zeroed in on the building: a broad, flat-roofed place with an acre of cars gleaming like beetles in the floodlights behind it. Right, Arthur had gone to find the SUV. This had to be a vehicle processing center and impound lot.
I dropped the helicopter toward the broad roof of the main building, looking for the best place to land, when the whole roof folded in on itself beneath me in a thunderous collapse.
The helicopter bucked against my hands, fighting the air as the concussion grabbed and buffeted us. For one sick instant I thought it would twist against the blast and dive headfirst into the implosion. I fought the controls, correcting for every variable I could, but I ran head first into Navier-Stokes and in that moment I sincerely thought I was about to die.
But a split second later the numbers collapsed into solvability, and the skids glanced off tumbling cement blocks and flying rubble as I got clear.
I was only twenty feet up, and landing smoothly was out of the question: the best I could do was fall rather than crash. The skids hit the asphalt at an angle, jarring me to the teeth as the machine dropped the rest of itself down and jolted to a stop even as the outside world continued to blow up, the collapse finishing itself with an earth-grinding rumble. The rotors wound down in an ugly whop whop whop above me.
Whop. Whop. Whop.
My joints felt locked up. Brittle. I wanted very badly to cough but to cough I would have to breathe, and breathing was going to hurt.
I had to get out—do something—
Arthur.
My left hand was fused to the collective. I pried the fingers apart. It felt like I was peeling the flesh off and leaving my skin stuck there, as if I’d touched a frozen lamppost. I dug my right hand clumsily into my pocket for the phone as I did so.
Arthur’s call had ended less than a minute ago.
I half-fell out of the helicopter and onto the blacktop. Dust clogged the air, drifting down to settle across the lot. I coughed. It hurt.
I punched the buttons on my phone to call Arthur back, my hands shaking. It went to voicemail.
My brain was blanking out. I forced it to think. The coordinates Checker had sent me went out to five decimal places. An error of half a hundred thousandth of a degree of latitude would be less than two feet—which gave me a four-by-four square. Sixteen square feet Arthur could have been standing in.
But Checker had most likely gotten those coordinates from cell phone tracking, and I didn’t know how accurate his methods were—even if he found the location to within a few feet, a few more feet of inaccuracy began multiplying the search area into hopelessness. Not to mention the possibility Arthur had moved, or run, or tried to take shelter—
Please let him have taken shelter.
I stumbled toward the remainder of the building, the soles of my boots turning on the debris. I hiked up into the pile of rubble the place had become, trying not to think, the geographic grid overlaying itself for me. There, there was where his cell signal had come from. At least, where it had come from more than half an hour ago.
I closed my eyes against the grit and did the last thing in the world I wanted to: I recalled the structure to my mind as I had seen it from the air and rewound the explosion.
My memory wasn’t perfect, but a cascade of calculation had been torrenting through my head as I’d tried to keep the helicopter aloft, and I could remember enough of the numbers to reconstruct how the building had imploded. The placement of the charges highlighted itself in my brain. The way the walls would have fallen in, the way the roof would have collapsed.
Where any air pockets might have formed.
I started digging.
I lost much of the next few minutes. My brain kept skipping. It couldn’t have been that long, as the sirens hadn’t arrived yet. Long enough for my hands to turn bloody, the skin and fingernails torn. Long enough for me to tear a muscle in my back.
Long enough for me to think it was hopeless. I still didn’t stop.
My senses screeched back into alignment when a muffled call strained through the rocks a few yards to the left of where I was digging. I tore toward it, forcing chunks of concrete out of my way with a single-minded mania. A long twist of rebar was in one hand; I couldn’t remember picking it up but I used it as a frenzied lever, heaving through debris that were larger than I was.
“Arthur? Arthur!” My voice was hoarse. How long had I been shouting?
“Russell?”
He’d taken shelter under…something…that was large and metal. I couldn’t tell what it had been from the corner I’d uncovered, but I didn’t care. I dug out the edge, down to the dark triangle underneath, and Arthur’s hand appeared, dust-covered and grasping. I grabbed on and pulled.
He grunted and coughed as he squeezed through, half-collapsing. I grabbed him around the middle and hauled, and we fell together on the rubble.
“Fuck you,” I croaked, when I could manage speech. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt, but I couldn’t feel it. I was too angry. Or something. I wasn’t sure.
“Thanks,” Arthur said.
I was having trouble forming thoughts. “Fuck you,” I said again. “What—the—hell—?”
“They sent someone to destroy the evidence. ’Parently.” He sniffed and swiped a hand across his face, leaving streaks of dirt and blood. “Seems a bit extreme.”
I wanted to hit him, but that would require moving. “They offered you the opportunity to walk. I heard it.”
He looked away. “Had him at gunpoint. Wasn’t about to let our best lead walk out of there and blow the evidence.”
“And that plan worked so well for you.”
He flinched and said softly, “They got Sonya.”
I pushed myself up, stumbling, my boots sliding in the jagged depths of the rubble. “And you’re willing to blow yourself up for that? You’re willing to drag all the rest of us down with you? Me and Checker and Pilar, we’ll end up buried in buildings or buried by the DHS, and that’s just fine with you, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t see his face in the darkness. “I’m sorry, Russell. I should’ve gone to the authorities in the first place, this was too big—”
It was the worst possible thing he could’ve said. “Go to the cops, then,” I spat. “I hope you and Homeland Security are very happy together.”
I left Arthur sitting in the dark and struggled down off the heap of rubble. Fortunately, an impound lot gave me ample choice of a new vehicle.
I expected to hear sirens on my way out, but there was nothing. The processing center was on its own lot, out
of line-of-sight of its nearest neighbors—maybe people had thought the implosion had been an earthquake.
The cops would get here eventually, though. Arthur could go to hell and join them.
Chapter 13
I called Checker as I was jacking another car, once my hearing had mostly returned. “How’s the plan going?” I asked. We didn’t need the Feds. I’d show Arthur. I’d show him.
“In place—I think—”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because my worst nightmare has come to pass. The apocalypse. The end times—”
“Checker!”
“There are NSA agents in my house.”
Okay, for once I wasn’t going to accuse him of exaggeration. “Shit, what do they want? Do you need me to come over there and—”
“What? No! I mean, I don’t think so. I’m not under arrest or—or—whatever else they do to overzealous white hat dudes who are creative enough to step out of the narrowly confined boxes proscribed by our myopic legal system. They don’t even seem terribly interested in what I do, only what I know about Professor Sonya’s case, and trust me, I am not disabusing them of the notion that I am a small fry beneath their notice.” He paused unhappily, and the hyperbole went out of his voice. “I just…I just don’t like them in my house.”
I got that.
“What’s going on with Arthur?” Checker asked. “Is he okay? I didn’t want to call in case you—”
“He’s fine. He had a building fall on him.”
A full six seconds passed before Checker sputtered, “He what? Is he okay?”
“Are you having trouble hearing me? I said he’s fine.”
Checker didn’t answer.
“Don’t you dare feel bad for him. He did it to himself.” He should’ve stuck with me. “Besides, he got underneath something. He’s fine.”
