by J. A. Dauber
I must have said something about getting Caroline to a hospital, and for the first time the woman showed some emotion. She started shaking her head wildly.
“It’s insanely infectious,” she said. “It’s aerosolized. And viral.” She started speaking more quickly. “This house—it looks like a regular house, but it’s sealed. You didn’t notice the hiss when you came in? Negative pressure. It’s got its own atmosphere. You bring her out of here, to a hospital…we could lose the entire state if the wind patterns are wrong.” And then she said something even scarier. “And that’s not the plan,” she said.
“DON’T TRY TO FREAK ME OUT,” I said, though she was doing a pretty good job of it. “I’M HERE, AND I’M FINE.”
“Well, of course, in the Mayhem suit,” she said. “It has its own filtering systems. But she’s been breathing virus since she got inside.”
I didn’t wait to hear more.
The scientist had been wrong. Caroline wasn’t dead yet. But it would have been better if she had been.
She had convulsed hard enough to break bones in her body, and she was greenish gray with big zits, pustules I think they call them, all over her skin. I was hoping that she was unconscious since her eyes were closed, but then I realized, with a jolt in my stomach, that they were swollen shut. I punched a wall in frustration, and my fist went through it.
She tilted her head, just a little, toward the sound of me and said, “Doctor…hospital…”
And I hated myself and hated myself, but I shook my head. “I CAN’T,” I said. “I CAN’T. IT’S—” and I stopped. I didn’t know what to say next. How to tell her.
But she was nodding. No, not nodding, she wasn’t strong enough, but she moved her head up and down just the tiniest bit. She understood. Then she let out a rattling breath. And then she laughed, a little.
“CAROLINE,” I said.
“I get it,” she said.
You can’t touch your face when you’re inside the suit. Which is terrible if your nose itches, or something. Or you want to wipe away the tears streaming down your face.
I should have told her I loved her. I mean, I did, of course. Not romantically, but I loved her so much.
I think she knew, though. I do. At least, that’s what I need to tell myself.
She didn’t say anything else before she died.
* * *
I want to say that that was the worst part. The worst of all this. But you know what? I’m not even sure that’s true.
Because when I looked down at Caroline’s face, which was now yellow and black and bubbling, a new thought clawed through my pain. Something terrible. And terrifying.
I shot back upstairs to the scientist. She was at her computer, typing quickly, concentrating. “I’ve wiped almost everything already, a hard-terminal wipe,” she said. “I don’t know who you’re working for now and I don’t care. You can’t take it with you.”
I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about and I didn’t care, either. What I did care about was that I’d broken down the door when I came in. Leaving a wide open space for whatever was there in the house to slither out into the world.
I thought the scientist had been upset before. But now she looked furious. And then…resigned. She looked resigned. “I have a kid,” she said, and I remembered the car seat, the small toy bulldozer.
“I’M NOT THREATENING YOU,” I said. “I JUST—”
“No, you don’t get it,” she said. She turned to the computer and typed in a few keystrokes, then a few more. “I know she loves me. I just wish I had the chance to see her one more time.”
“WHAT ARE YOU—”
“I just checked the weather conditions,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “Totally calm. No wind, thank God. We still have time.”
“I SAID, WHAT ARE YOU—”
“Mr. Jones always thought this was a possibility,” she said, and her voice was quiet, calm, without emotion. Like she was a robot. “That’s why he let the Bloody Front set up headquarters here. Off the grid. Far away from you and your missions. Far from other towns. I don’t know much about your end, but here a lot of us are just working for a paycheck. But preparations were made. There’s a protocol. In case the Front ever decided to go off the rails, there were…precautions taken.”
“PRECAUTIONS? WHAT PRECAUTIONS? I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE—” Some part of me realized this was important, the smoking gun, but my head was full of Caroline and panic.
“In about fifteen or twenty minutes, based on when you made your idiotic entrance, the airborne virus that killed that girl will float past city limits. At that point, once it gets out, it could infect anyone. It will infect everyone. The only way to stop it is to burn it out.”
“WHAT—” I started. But she kept going.
“I ordered an airstrike,” she said. “The drones are on their way from our private hangars. Omega Protocol. We’ve gamed this over and over again, and the scientists don’t think nuclear weapons are necessary. Intensive firebombing should do just as well. This virus doesn’t do well in heat.” She closed her eyes. “There won’t be much left, but enough to identify this as the Bloody Front’s stronghold. He saw to that, with those steel dog tags he gave those idiots to wear. They won’t burn. Everyone will assume they were trying to test some weapon and blew themselves up in the process.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. I couldn’t get my bearings. If I’d been standing on my own legs, not inside the suit, I might have fallen down.
“He won’t care,” she went on, no longer really talking to me. “He’ll find some other way to do what he wants, to finish the plan. But we won’t be there to see it. It’s mostly Front members here, but there are others, too. Workers. Support staff. Janitorial. There should be”—she paused, and when she spoke again, her voice shook—“about two, three hundred people in these houses at this time of day. You’ve killed them all. Congratulations. You were a jewel thief with pretensions. Now you’re a mass murderer.”
NOW. FRIDAY. 10:41 P.M.
I just don’t understand. I don’t understand any of this. I haven’t from the beginning, it turns out.
Was my dad working with the Bloody Front? How else would that woman have known about him? I mean, she talked to me like I was an old coworker…
Maybe he’d been trying to fight them from within. Like a double agent. And then they found out, and that’s why they took him prisoner.
Or…maybe he’s not a prisoner at all. I only have Mr. Jones’s word for that, after all, and he’s a liar.
And my dad wouldn’t have been working from within the Front. At least, not exactly. From what the scientist said, Mayhem and the Front weren’t exactly working together. They were part of something bigger.
Something headed by Mr. Jones.
So Mr. Jones and the Bloody Front are…partners? And they’re willing to kill people. Millions of them.
Maybe they’ve already killed my dad.
Oh, God. Maybe I did.
Maybe he was there. Hidden somewhere.
No. Mr. Jones wouldn’t have kept my dad there. Not with other people. People who might have asked my dad questions about Mr. Jones’s past, questions he had answers to. Not with Mr. Jones’s obsession with keeping everything about himself supersecret.
I’m going to believe that. I have to believe that.
And why would Mr. Jones spend all this time with me in the first place? Why wouldn’t he just kill me?
Here’s the thing. If by some miracle he didn’t know I was trying to figure out his secrets before—if he didn’t know about the money I kept from him, the secret message from the library—he must know by now.
I have to stop him. Somehow. I’ll never be safe if I don’t. And even if I could vanish without a trace, what would that do to my mom? She’s already had to go through that once, with my dad…a sec
ond time would kill her.
If Mr. Jones doesn’t kill her first.
I’m getting too comfortable with talking about death and murder.
All right.
Let me finish this.
Then maybe I can sleep. For a little while.
THIS AFTERNOON
My main thought at the time was: Get out.
Get out and find Mr. Jones and tear him into tiny pieces for what he’d done. To Caroline. To my dad. To the Bloody Front’s victims, however he was involved with that. Get out and make sure my mom was okay. And, of course, get out before the drones with missiles leveled the place and scorched me to a cinder along with it.
But there was an…ethical question, I guess I had to call it. If I escaped, I’d bring the virus with me. Wouldn’t I kill more people? Wasn’t the right thing to do, well—to go up in smoke? As I looked down and saw Caroline’s body on the monitors, there was a part of me that knew that was exactly what I deserved.
The scientist saw me thinking—or, at least, she saw the armor stand there, unmoving—and said, “I should just let you die here with me. But I’m not a murderer.” She paused. “Here’s the thing. The virus only incubates in, and on, living things. Even if your vaccination’s out of date, you’re not exposed. The suit’s filters are clearly working because otherwise you’d be dead. So you’re safe. Hurrah.”
I wish I’d said something comforting to her. Or something philosophical. Or anything at all. But all I could think about was getting out of there—getting out, and getting revenge.
And that was when I realized that the answers were right in front of me. To everything. To what Mr. Jones was doing. To what his plan was. Maybe even to what had happened to my dad. But there was no way I was going to be able to understand the answers, not without some supercharged version of a tech support guy; but there they were. Right on the scientist’s computer.
I snatched the computer off her desk, ripped it apart, and yanked out its hard drive. Wires sparked as the screen flickered and died. Maybe that stopped the wipe. I’d read somewhere that data never truly disappears. I didn’t know if that was true, but the way the scientist tried to jump for the drive and grab it out of my hands made it seem like she thought there might still be something valuable on it, too.
Then I blew a hole in the roof—I mean at this point, who cared, right?—and headed west as quick as I possibly could.
But not so quickly that I couldn’t see the people venturing out of the houses, those identical houses with who-knew-how-many secrets hidden inside, to watch me go. And then I was too high up to see them, but I could imagine.
They would follow my trajectory to see where I’d come from. See the holes in the lab house’s front entrance and roof. Then turn, surprised at the sound of the drones, and put two and two together. By the time I reached cloud level I was pretty sure that everyone in Clapham Junction knew the score, or at least part of it.
Which wasn’t to say they deserved it. Not by a long shot.
The suit got me a little over half a mile away before the blasts hit.
They were not messing around. It was like one of those video games where the target goes up in light and flame and then just isn’t there anymore. I don’t mean that to be cavalier—it’s the only image I can think of. I got sent tumbling head over heels by the shock wave, and the readouts showed the air temperature around me going up, up, up. Below me, the trees were catching on fire.
I guess this was the gift that came with all the hours in the suit: I didn’t panic. I didn’t flail. I took deep breaths, tried to ignore the fact that I was crying so hard I could barely see, and tried to get out of there.
It was only when I spotted the fighter jets heading in my direction that I started hyperventilating.
* * *
It made sense. I mean, when a good chunk of the US military is packed into a fairly small geographical area looking for terrorists, and there’s a gigantic explosion nearby, they’re going to check it out. And they’re going to come heavy. And then when they see Mayhem flying away from it…
I’d done a lot of stuff with the suit over the past few weeks. But going head-to-head with the air force was taking it to a new level.
I cricked my head and eavesdropped on their chatter. It wasn’t difficult—I think Mr. Jones had bribed defense contractors to build a back door into the communications system of every aircraft in use in America. When I heard them ask their commanders whether they were cleared to shoot missiles over civilian areas, I got nervous. I set the navigation system to make sure I wouldn’t fly over any highly populated areas. Not so hard to do in this part of the country, where there’s a lot of ranching. Maybe if I got caught there would be some hamburgers charbroiled before their time, but that’s all.
It was probably right around then that the first missile caught me in the small of my back.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t paying attention. I’d been counting on the radar to sound the alarm and on the automatic pilot to keep me safe—both of which I’d activated precisely according to the instructions in the manuals and files.
And neither of which came online.
I imagined Mr. Jones somewhere, smiling under the mask.
Watching the ruins of Clapham Junction and looking for revenge. And deciding to take it slowly: playing with me, cat and mouse, through his control over the suit. Until he got bored and decided to totally take over and drop me right out of the sky.
It wasn’t like I had much choice other than to play along, though. I’d be dead sooner—blown right out of the air—if I didn’t get it together.
The suit held together, but even with the internal dampers, the shock wave from the missile was intense. I could feel bruises forming all over my body, and I heard some funny tones. I think I might have perforated an eardrum. It gave me some sense of what that scientist must have felt like when I lifted her up. And then I thought about what had just happened to her, what she probably looked like now, and I concentrated.
Until this point, I’d only scratched the surface of the suit’s offensive capabilities. What was the use of swatting flies with a bazooka? But now I was mad. At the Bloody Front. At Mr. Jones. At myself.
I locked on to the first jet and kicked in the afterburners. Matched velocities, then exceeded them. Headed straight for it—and then straight through one of its engines—before it had a chance to take evasive action. I knew the pilot would be able to parachute out. One down.
The second pilot was better, though, and he’d had more warning. He started twisting and turning all over the sky, firing at me with everything he had. The machine-gun bullets simply pinged off the suit. I was going fast enough that they didn’t even knock me off my course. But those missiles were something else. I wasn’t sure how many more of those I could take.
Mr. Jones hadn’t frozen the suit yet. I guess he was enjoying this, seeing how it played out. Well, if he wanted a show, I’d give him a show. And if somehow I survived, I’d cram it down his throat.
I shot off two smaller missiles of my own. Not that he couldn’t avoid them, but they’d be a distraction while I got up close, with a bit of cloud cover for assistance. Then I took the subtle route.
You know those pulses that fry all communication and electrical activity and whatnot? EMPs, they’re called? Guess who can generate them from inside his suit.
Zap.
The plane started dropping out of the sky like a rock. Perfect.
The only problem, I realized, as I saw absolutely no indication of the pilot parachuting out, was that I had fried the cockpit release along with the rest of the plane.
The pilot was still in his seat, banging at the top of the window. As I flew in really close, he stopped banging and put his head in his hands. Clearly he assumed I was going to make things even worse.
Well, screw that. I’d made myself a promise—no more killi
ng—and even if it meant my joining him inside a crater, so be it. But I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
I grabbed the plane’s fuselage with one hand, the cockpit top with another, and separated the two. Quite violently. The pilot looked at me, confused, but didn’t activate his parachute. He was pointing to the chair, then to his seat belt, then back again. I guess there was fried electronic stuff in that, too. Oh, and by this point, I had noticed, we were a lot closer to the ground.
Fine. I activated the torch on my right index finger—thermal amplifier, whatever—and burned away the restraints and the chair, making sure I had a firm hold on his uniform with my left hand.
Seeing the whole plane drop away from us was really something.
I rolled over as the plane hit the ground, to put my back between him and the gigantic explosion. Through the monitors, I could see the pilot was shouting at me, but the sound dampeners filtering out the explosion muted him, too. Was he saying thank you? Was he telling me to go to hell? I couldn’t tell, but both were definitely appropriate.
I dropped the pilot off next to the smoking wreckage of his plane, double-checked the hard drive—still safe inside the armor, nestled against my chest—and kept flying. Home.
* * *
I kept wondering if I should fly at all. I mean, Mr. Jones had seen what I’d done to the fighter jets. Maybe he’d get tired of whatever cat-and-mouse game he was playing. Or even see me as a threat. With all the camera footage he had to tap into, he must have seen me grab the hard drive, and put two and two together. And he wasn’t a man who liked to take risks. Just drop me from ten thousand feet, and that would be that.
Or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he was worried someone would find the suit before he did, call in the FBI, and they’d discover the hard drive. A hard drive that must have something pretty incriminating on it, otherwise I’d be pavement pizza already.
