by Nick Petrie
“Edgar’s not watching the Subaru. If you think Holloway has taken Spark and somebody stabbed Kiko, then that means Edgar was there, too. If the Mercedes is trashed, he’s probably still with them. They’re probably in Edgar’s car.”
“June, this is a really, really bad idea.”
“I’m not going to sit in some goddamn hotel room and wait to hear if you’re alive or dead, all right? Put Lewis on the phone.”
“June. You’re upset.”
“Hey, Marine? You’re full of shit. Put Lewis on the goddamn phone.”
Another pause, then the low dark voice came on. “Jarhead ain’t wrong, June.”
“Neither am I and you know it. The clock is ticking and we’re it.” She tucked the phone against her shoulder, notepad in one hand and pen in the other. “Now, what do you need and where do you keep it?”
62
PETER
Peter lay atop the semi-trailer with his toes hooked into the safety rope, watching the sun go down. Five o’clock. Three hours until Spark’s fail-safe tripped and all hell broke loose.
He’d started on this hunt as a way to protect June and get his own ass off the FBI’s Wanted list, but he had different reasons now. He wasn’t exactly a convert to Oliver’s larger mission, but this one made sense to him. He didn’t want to see these hyena things turned loose on the world.
Yes, you could program them to behave better, maybe even to help old ladies across the street, but Peter knew there were powerful forces in the world that would use these machines for their own purposes regardless of consequences. Peter had seen those consequences close up, and he would do what he could to limit them. Which meant stopping Holloway, and stopping Spark from releasing Holloway’s technology to every wingnut with an Internet connection.
So Peter would put his life on the line again. It wasn’t the first time, and if he was being honest with himself, it probably wouldn’t be the last.
But that didn’t mean he wanted June to risk her damn life, too.
Now he listened as Lewis rattled off a list of gear that would supply a full squad of Marines. Three rifles, three armored vests, three sets of night vision goggles. He closed his eyes and took slow, deep breaths as he tried to quiet the roar of static in his head. It wasn’t claustrophobia, it was fear.
Fear for June. He didn’t want to lose her.
“Hey, good idea.” Lewis fussed with the phone’s screen for a moment, then put it back to his ear. “Okay, you got him. I’ll do mine when we hang up. Be safe, June. But drive fast. And better not get pulled over with all that ordnance in your car, neither.”
Peter felt a tap on his arm and opened his eyes to see Lewis holding out his phone. It was open to a locator app called Find My Friends that would allow June to home in on his location using GPS. “Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t give me that look, Jarhead. You know she’s right. We got two handguns and maybe sixty rounds between us.”
Peter felt the static swell to fill him completely. “She doesn’t have the training we do, Lewis. She hasn’t been in the fight.”
“It’s her call to make, brother. She ain’t exactly June Cleaver, you know. Plus, she’s in better shape than you, and a better shot, too, with a pistol anyway. She held her own against Edgar three times. He’d have got your ugly ass at Franny’s house if it weren’t for Mingus. Don’t go thinking June can’t handle it. She got as much reason to step into this as you and me.”
“Oh, I get it.” Peter’s voice was thick. “But I don’t have to fucking like it.”
Lewis put his hand on Peter’s shoulder, that familiar strong, solid grip.
“Back in the sandbox, all us grunts were s’posed to be fighting for our country, right? But when the shit came down, we were really just fighting for each other. Not even to keep ourselves alive, but to keep each other alive. That’s what I’m doing right here beside you. That’s what you were doing when you got that damn hyena thing off me back there.”
Peter nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
“Shit, brother. June just wants to do the same thing.”
Peter wiped his eyes. “Goddamn you, Lewis.”
Lewis thumped him on the shoulder. His voice was kind. “Fuck you, too, Jarhead. Now gimme a granola bar.”
* * *
—
The semi stayed on 94 south into Chicagoland. They passed Six Flags and Abbott Labs and turned onto the Dan Ryan toward downtown. Peter wondered what had happened to the enormous red lips of the Magikist sign, which had been a favorite landmark when he was a kid, visiting his grandparents in Chicago.
To their left, the sun was low in the sky. The afternoon had gotten warmer and Peter could taste the ozone in the air. The flow of cars got thicker, but the self-driving semi found invisible seams in the traffic and rolled forward past dusty pickups and sleek sedans and dented old beaters alike. As they came into downtown and the road dipped below the surface streets, the sun blinked on and off with each rust-crusted overpass.
One advantage to riding atop a semi-trailer was that they could see all the road signs. Peter thought they might take 55 downstate or the Skyway toward Indiana and Michigan, but they stayed on 94 until the Stony Island Avenue exit, which dumped them past a pocket of town houses and a baseball diamond onto busy 103rd Street.
They passed a Chicago Transit facility, then turned at the first intersection. Peter saw a row of intermodal containers and worried the trailer would end up on a rail car behind a locomotive headed nowhere June could follow, and they would be truly fucked. Instead, at a blue sign marking the Calumet Industrial Corridor, they veered in the other direction and headed south between a shallow marshland on the left and a vine-covered chain-link fence on the right. Behind the fence lay an enormous auto impound lot, then a weirdly green golf course, then a stretch of open water.
Peter pulled out his phone to get oriented. If they’d gotten off the freeway here, they were going to stop somewhere soon enough and he wanted to know where he was. The marsh was part of a park and past it was a former landfill and Superfund site. The body of water was the Calumet River. In the two miles of road before the dead end, his phone showed businesses like Dockside Steel and Atlas Tube anchoring a series of enormous piers angled into the river.
After a gentle curve in the road, the water on the right receded. They passed a featureless gray steel shed the size of an airplane hangar, then a wide swath of tangled scrub surrounding the rusted bones of a crane gantry jutting up toward the sky, and Peter felt the semi begin to decelerate. Next came a row of buildings behind a single rail line and a brush-choked fence topped with razor wire. If the complex housed a business, it wasn’t named on the map.
The first structure was a small unpainted cinder-block gatehouse beside a driveway completely blocked by three sections of crumbling concrete Jersey barrier. The second structure was much larger, two stories of rust-colored brick with inexpensive decorative details, like a school science building from the seventies. Most of the windows had blinds lowered against the sun. Probably offices over warehouse space or maybe an equipment shop. Tall bushy weed trees grew right up against both buildings, as if the tenants had abandoned the place after a previously unreported apocalypse.
The sun was a half-circle astride the western horizon, burning a bright chemical orange through the haze. The semi was down to maybe twenty miles an hour and still slowing. Peter untied the left side of their safety rope while Lewis did the right. After the seventies-era building, they passed another entry drive, wider but also blocked, then another ratty cinder-block gatehouse, this one two stories. It was probably the freight office and site security, back when this place actually did something.
After a hundred yards of high grass, the truck turned into a gravel lot, the surface pocked with deep potholes that made the trailer thump on its tires. Peter and Lewis had to drop flat on their bellies and hold
on to the sides of the solar panel platform. While Lewis threaded a doubled drop line through a platform bracket at the back, Peter looked ahead. At the far end of the lot he saw another high gate topped with razor wire, but this time it stood open. “Time to go,” he said.
Lewis went first, a quick rappel down the back of the moving truck, then he kicked off the underride guard and released the rope and landed on the run as if he were just out for a jog. Peter followed and somehow managed to not fall on his face while keeping hold of one end of the rope. He chased the accelerating semi, hauling the looped line free from the bracket with both hands, then pulled it into a coil and sprinted to Lewis, who crouched behind a stand of scrub.
They watched as the driverless semi sped through lengthening shadows across cracked and rubble-strewn pavement toward the larger, seventies-era building. As the truck disappeared around the corner, the last of the visible sun flashed bright orange on the dull silver skin of a four-legged creature standing sentry there beside a wide mound of crumpled cardboard boxes.
The thing began to trot toward them, heedless of the debris in its path.
Lewis spoke in his ear. “Time to go find us some high ground.”
Bent low, they angled away from the open gate and into the tall grass.
63
JUNE
After talking with Peter in front of the District Five station, June had returned Dean Zedler’s call.
“I left a message an hour ago,” he said. “What took you so long? I feel like I’m stuck doing your grunt work.”
As if she hadn’t just spent most of the afternoon in an interview room, being grilled by the police.
She’d gotten more and more pissed that he was essentially blackmailing her into letting him piggyback on her story, but now he was just being a dick. She wondered if this was who Dean really was, underneath that Weaponized Nice. Maybe he’d stopped being even half-decent once he realized she was with Peter.
“I’m just leaving the cop shop but I don’t have a ride,” she said. “My Subaru’s in the lot and there’s a spare key in my desk. Come get me at District Five and we’ll catch each other up when you get here.” It was faster than waiting for a cab.
Waiting, anxious to get out of there, she used the black phone to send Oliver a text. Things are heating up. Check your email for engineering docs. Those machines are now in the wild. She gave him a summary of what she’d learned. If you have a team available, now would be the time. I’ll text when I have a location.
Dean rolled up and she felt a wave of relief. Not at seeing Dean, but at finally getting the hell away from Detective Hecht and Lorenz and Sergeant Mustache. She walked into the street and opened the driver’s side door.
“Out you go, I’m driving.” He opened his mouth to object, but she just shook her head. “Nope, it’s my car. Out.”
She drove ten blocks to the coffee shop on Humboldt, fending off his questions the whole way. “Let me get some coffee and go through my notes, okay?” She needed the caffeine anyway.
They ordered at the counter and waited for their drinks. He wore a soft brown leather jacket and jeans and side-zip boots polished to a high gloss. She flipped through her notebook, thinking of what she should tell him. Instead, she asked, “What did you get on that LLC I sent you? Graham, Brown?”
“It’s got a Nevada incorporation address, but it’s just one of those registration shops, basically a PO box. The bank account is with Chase in Chicago, the main branch at Chase Tower downtown. But there are electrical permits on file in that name with the city of Chicago. Something about new transformers, which sounds major. The address for the permits is 11660 Stony Island Avenue, on the south side.”
Nice work, she had to admit. “What’s at that address?”
“According to Google Maps and the city, nothing. It’s right on the Calumet River. It used to be an industrial shipping outfit, moving steel from the smaller mills in Gary and Hammond. Now it’s owned by some trust out of the Cayman Islands. That was as far as I got, probably as far as I’ll ever get.”
They picked up their coffee and walked toward her car. “Your turn,” he said. “What’d you get today?”
She took the key from her pocket, unlocked her door, and got in. He tried the handle on his side, but it didn’t open. “June, it’s still locked,” he said.
She turned the key and revved the engine, then rolled down the passenger window a few inches. He hooked his fingers over the glass and bent to talk through the gap. “June, this isn’t funny. You haven’t told me a damn thing. We have a deal, remember?”
“I remember, but I’m not ready to share yet.” She put the car into gear and he pulled his hand back.
His face was red. “What are you doing now?”
“Picking up a bunch of guns and transporting them across state lines.” She gave him a smile. “I’m pretty sure that’s not your kind of thing.”
She checked her mirror and hit the gas and got the hell out of there.
64
PETER
The wild grass grew thick and close and well over their heads. With Lewis on point, they made a silent path toward the fence, parting the sawtooth blades with their hands. Still outside the weed-choked chain link, they followed it away from the gate until they came to a corner section and a broad drainage ditch filled with cattails.
Past the ditch was an overgrown rail line, the creosote ties turning to poisonous dust in the gravel bed, and past that, the road. On the other side of the blacktop was the former landfill, a broad and verdant hill rising a hundred feet or more, the wind making abstract patterns in the lush green meadow. Peter hadn’t seen or heard another car or truck since they’d turned away from the intermodal yard. The breeze carried the rich smell of the marsh and growing things. They might have been a thousand miles outside of Chicago, or in another world altogether.
They turned the corner and chased the sagging fence toward the two-story security building until they found a spot where the top rail was rusted loose and the posts were tilted in the dirt. Peter used the multi-tool from his go-bag to cut the last few tie wires, then they walked the chain-link down into the dense vegetation, mindful of the rattle. Now inside the perimeter and hopefully unnoticed, they stepped carefully through their concealment with the flat-roofed gatehouse ahead.
The fence ended at the corner of the building, which sat inside the perimeter, but their cover ended at the edge of a six-foot walkway. Still inside the green, they stopped and looked out at a wide concrete yard, a vast metal shed with one side open to the weather, and a rusting yellow crane at the edge of a narrow lane of water between two earth-filled piers the length of two city blocks, lined with fat metal bollards where a cargo ship would tie up. Peter figured they could see less than a third of the complex.
While Lewis took out his phone and texted June the GPS coordinates of their location, Peter took several minutes to eyeball the area for mechanical monsters. He was still deeply unnerved by the fight at Metzger Machine, and wondered how many more might be walking around this desolate place.
He didn’t see the hyena that had run toward the open gate, but somehow that didn’t make him feel better. It could be coming up behind them, or standing somewhere in shadow where it was less visible. If it had infrared vision and pattern recognition, it could probably spot their heat outlines through the thick grass. He assumed it could communicate with the other hyenas, and with whoever was controlling them. He hoped June had reached Oliver. He hoped the cavalry was coming with heavy weapons. He wasn’t holding his breath.
Lewis nodded at the cinder-block gatehouse. The windows were still intact, but there was a door on the exposed side that looked like it was pushed in from the jamb, as if the knob simply hadn’t latched. “How ’bout in there? Get up to the second floor, we can see most of the grounds.”
Lewis wasn’t asking about tactics. He was asking about Peter’s
claustrophobia.
“I can do that,” Peter said. Aside from the constant fear for June’s safety that he’d pushed deep down inside, he was doing okay.
He took another slow look for four-legged machines, then nodded to Lewis and stepped out of the grass and across the walkway. The door swung inward at his push, and he saw that the jamb was cracked and the latch had nothing to grab. Someone had broken in before them, but the pile of dry, windblown leaves on the dirty tile floor told him it wasn’t recent.
He was inside letting his eyes adjust when Lewis came in fast on his heels. “Here they come,” he said in a conversational tone, then slammed the heavy steel door and leaned his weight against it. Something outside pushed inward for a moment and Lewis had to set his feet to hold it back. “How do we keep this fucking thing shut?”
They were in a small dingy office maybe twenty feet square with a Formica counter against one wall, a pair of ancient steel desks along the second, and stairs going up along the third. The windows were dirty and it was dim inside. Peter ran to a desk and shoved it across the floor to Lewis. “How many?”
“Only one so far.” Still holding the door, Lewis helped Peter snug the desk up against it, then sat on the desktop with his legs drawn up. “My opinion, that’s one too many. Those damn things give me the willies.”
“Whose idea was this, anyway?” Peter hauled another desk across the tile, then flipped it on its side with a thump and pushed it into place. There was a soft metallic sound and they both looked at the door. The knob turned slowly. “Jesus.”
The knob kept turning until it hit the limit, then it paused, creaking, until something went ping inside and the knob spun freely, around and around and around and around.
Lewis looked at him. “How long ’til it decides to come through the window?”
