It was always at these moments, when they were so hungry for the shining dream to be true, that they made a leap that was a leap too far. Julio. Witzgenstein. Now Lucas.
There were too many variables. Too much risk. Trusting him could lead her people reeling into the void.
"No," she said.
Amo twitched on the screen.
"No, I don't accept your conditions. No, I don't trust you. No, I don't need you. No, you can't come with us to Europe, and you won't have a chance to find our cure, or save the world, or whatever other grand dream you have, if you don't accept my terms without conditions of your own. The people of two generations time can look after themselves. It's my job to look after these people now. Accept that or stay behind. Which is it?"
Glaring. Heat. He hated her? That was great. It would make it easier.
I accept.
Anna nodded. Good. Bad. Things would only get harder from here.
ODYSSEY
12. LANDFALL
They overtook the front wave of the ocean around five miles after it made landfall on the southwestern coast of France, marching through endless fields of tangled green vineyards and heading broadly for Bordeaux, and beyond it bunker number 1.
The horde's front line looked to be a sprawling mile or so in width, and stretched lengthways back into the Bay of Biscay; scattered and fragmented after the travails of the sea. The bunker zombies, once so plainly plumper and ruddier than the skeletal, bone-white veterans from Yankee Stadium, were now indistinguishable. En masse they looked like an undead army.
Nobody cheered. The cabin of the Pilatus PC-12 was frosty and silent as they flew by overhead, haunted by the one person who wasn't there.
"You're not coming."
Only twelve hours earlier she'd said it to Ravi. His absence now was like a black hole, sucking out any relief she felt at seeing the ocean again. But then this wasn't about relief. It wasn't supposed to be pleasant to kill thousands of people. It wasn't comfortable to come here and stare down the line of eleven bunkers, with each one promising more horror, more loss and more crippling weight on her soul.
Jake in the copilot's seat hadn't met her eye the whole journey. Lucas in back had been silent. Wanda and Macy spoke only in hushed whispers. So the Atlantic had passed.
"I can't lose you," Anna had told him, on the runway just hours before they were due to embark. It had burned within her for days, as they drew closer to the date. Watching Blinky and Sergio drift closer to landfall had become a terrible countdown in her chest, mounting the pressure.
It would change him, and she didn't want him to see those things, to feel responsible for them, to watch her do them and order others to do them. Murder, genocide, cruelty. He'd seen her with Lucas, he'd heard what she'd said about her priority, but he still didn't feel it. He didn't know about Maine.
But if he came with her, he would. He would feel it, and know it, and finally see her for what she truly was, and that she could not allow. He was the warm breath on the back of her neck, the kind soul who wouldn't hurt a fly, the reason she had the strength to do these things. Without him?
"I can't lose you," she'd said, and he'd thought she meant him dying. She couldn't tell him the truth, because the truth was so much worse. She was protecting his gentle soul, and so protecting herself, keeping a reason to come home as whole as she could.
He hadn't taken it well. Right up to the plane he'd pleaded with her, but no matter how much it hurt, she couldn't relent. What was the point, if she lost him, or he lost who he was in the war? She'd hugged him, and kissed him, and tried to explain, and at the end he'd stood looking broken on the runway while the cabin door closed.
They took off and left him behind. Probably he was well on his way back to New LA now, driving alone. Perhaps it was a mistake. Maybe he would hate her forever now, for taking away his right to defend New LA, but what else could she have done?
Already she'd thought about him enough; every moment of the flight so far plagued with indecision. Ought she go back and pick him up, bring him along? But she hadn't, and there was a mission ahead now. She blinked and looked down.
Relief aside, it was good to see the ocean. That was something to focus on. They were a solid, anchoring presence below; the movement of their bodies rippling like the glint of sunlight off waves. They were always there, and now they would do this thing together.
She clicked the radio on, reaching back to the P-180 Avanti cruising a mile behind.
"Peters?" she asked. "What can you tell me?"
"No change, Anna," he came back. "The nearest demons are miles away, a cluster of two or three, I'm not sure. Perhaps a day's run to the east."
That was good news, at least.
She turned in the cockpit to face Wanda. Wanda was a big girl, easily one hundred sixty pounds, and most of that was hammer-throwing muscle, though she still bore the signs of Julio's abuse. A scar on her cheek. A tendency to stammer her words. A sensitivity to being touched.
"A day, two or three, to the east," Wanda confirmed. "J-just like Peters says."
Anna nodded. Lucas glared at her with dead eyes from the back, squashed in next to the electron microscope. He had fought long and hard against this plan, arguing they had to give the first bunker the first chance, but Anna hadn't listened.
There wasn't time. There wasn't room for mercy. It was happening this way.
In ten minutes they were above Bordeaux, circling long and low enough to take in the lay of the city. It was a beautiful, classical beige and green metropolis, nothing like the modern urban sprawls of America. She'd flown over so many on the exodus to Maine; all sparkling glass, vast desert parking lots, inert black roads and lead-lined roofs. Bordeaux was a class above that; a vision clothed in sandstone and marble, where even the roofs and roads looked finished to a high polish, despite the ten years they'd lain neglected. Huge green spaces dominated large swathes of downtown, clustered to the banks of the broad Garonne river.
She'd studied it months ago, looking at photographs downloaded from CD encyclopedias until all the city's major arteries and esplanades were burned into her mind, seeking out a reliable supply depot. This huge rectangular square was the Place de Quincunxes. Here was the Bordeaux cathedral. There was the port, once a big contender, until she'd settled on the military base in the north bend of the Garonne. Banking in a tight spiral, Anna could pick out the short airstrip, the squat hangars, the triple layers of razor wire fencing.
Everything they would need.
"It's good to be home," said Peters over the radio.
Anna didn't bother to remind him he was from Sweden. Banter didn't feel right. If he felt good, that was good.
"Can you land there?" she asked. "The runway looks short."
"On a dime."
"Then do it. You know what comes next. I'm going to circle over the bunker mouth."
"Radar," Peters replied, starting down a list they'd been over a dozen times before on practice runs and raids. "Narrow and broad. Stay above ten thousand feet. Get your flares ready and keep your course unpredictable."
"Roger that," Anna said. "Entering radio silence. See you on the ground."
She clicked the hiss of the radio away then pulled back on the stick, starting the ascent. Her stomach lurched as the plane tipped upward, pointing at cloudless blue spring sky. The dial clicked over steadily as they climbed hundreds of feet.
Beside her Jake worked the controls, bringing up the broad and narrow-gauge radar arrays he had fitted to the Pilatus' fuselage. The broad range gave a standard rotating radar, good to detect everything of any size on a similar horizontal plane to them, while the narrow-gauge was more precise, didn't rotate, and pointed in one direction only.
Up.
The drones from Salle Coram's bunker cruised at altitudes upwards of 20,000 feet, and typically carried up to a ton of gear, with the capacity for six Hellfire air-to-air and six Griffin air-to-surface missiles. Call that twelve air-to-ground missiles, each capable of ki
lling all of them several times over. That was the reason she'd labeled assault from the sky their number one threat.
If there were drones up there, they had to be taken out first. Her job was to locate them. It was Feargal's job to take them out, using the battery of surface-to-air missiles they'd brought in the back of the Avanti.
Five missiles was all they'd been able to carry. Salle Coram's hangar bay had had space for five drones, and they anticipated the same for the Bordeaux bunker. Such were the calculations they'd had to make. If they'd dumped Lucas and the electron microscope, perhaps they could have squeezed six, but Amo had been adamant that Lucas join them.
So five it was. No room for error. No room for carry-over to the next bunker. Everything from now on was to be done with the strictest economy and speed.
The GPS pinged for five miles out. Approximately fifteen miles northeast of Bordeaux, in the middle of a lush green vineyard with only a few farm buildings spotted through the vines, lay bunker number one. Salle Coram's notes, inherited from the true commander of her bunker, described a four-floored, triple-pour cement construction here, with its own hydrogen line shield, proof against bunker buster bombs, zombies and demons.
Not against her.
The GPS pinged again, as she glided ten thousand feet up above the patchwork quilt of vine-growing fields. One mile out.
"Jake?"
He was poring over his radar readout. "Nothing. On broad I'm getting ghost signals off some of the structures below and the mountains to the east. On narrow it's all clear. Overhead the sky is empty."
Anna turned the Pilatus into a spiral, affording her a clear view down on the fields.
"Is that-?" she started.
"Yes," Jake answered. Far below, barely visible at such a height, there was a white smudge that could be a building or large vehicle or…
"I'm reading an active signal off it," Jake went on, "it's definitely a live antennae. They could have radar through it too, in which case they'll definitely be reading us."
The gun turret.
This was the plan. Everything had been gamed out every way they could imagine. If the drones were not up yet, then this flyover would tease them out.
"Turn the narrow beam facing down."
"Done," Jake replied, and peered at the screen as fresh results came up. "I can read the bunker, through the earth. It's a large dense mass just where we expected, right on coordinates. I'm not reading any missile launches."
The moments stretched out and sweat trickled down Anna's neck. If the bunker launched a ground-to-air missile they'd have seconds only to react; punching out the door and firing one of their sparkler flares to draw the fire. The GPS continued to ping and the twin radars gave their low, insistent beeps.
"Jake?" Anna asked.
"Still nothing. If they have eyes then they can see us, but they haven't launched. It looks like we're clear."
Anna ran one more circle, scanning the land below for anything that could hurt them; demons, men in shielded suits, a tank, but the vineyards looked peaceful and silent.
"I'm taking us back," she said, and banked the plane sharply right, back toward Bordeaux.
Peters guided her over the radio, like a missile shot from the eastern seaboard and finally delivering its payload to the earth.
"Little wind," he warned as she dropped altitude over Bordeaux. "Some weeds on the asphalt but it's an easy run, just a little short. Hit my footprint exactly, if you can. You never know which parts might have warped."
"Roger that."
She finished a broad circle and the airstrip came into sight over the Garonne; she'd have to almost clip the innermost razor wire fence to hit the onset of the runway, but this was something she'd trained for. She pushed the nose harder down and the little craft responded with violent juddering and a spill of smoke from the right engine.
"Is that-" Jake began.
"It's fine," Anna said. "We're on fumes."
The ground rushed up and the plane raced on. There was such a difference in speed from being high and being low. High up speed was grace and beauty, a landscape gliding by effortlessly, whereas up close like this it was a violent kind of tearing away of the earth underfoot; faster than any human should go.
"Brace yourselves," she called as they plummeted in, then pushed the stick down as the fence rushed up. The plane hit the ground with a jolting THUD, bounced once, almost pinwheeled away to the left, then settled into deceleration as the engines throttled down and the propellers began to drag.
Five minutes later they were at a standstill, on chocks next to Peters' Avanti. He waved up from the asphalt. So this was France.
"Well done," Lucas said from in back.
She turned. Jake was already climbing out, Wanda and Macy were following, leaving the two of them alone with the cooling engines and a bay-load of equipment. Lucas still had his hand protectively on the electron microscope. A month had passed and his throat had healed well, so his voice almost sounded normal.
"We're just getting started," she answered.
* * *
They'd practiced their supply runs in Maine, assuming modern military bases would be much the same the world over. Once inside the outer fence, a world of munitions opened up; there was SWAT-type equipment on the surface in the hangars and ammo stores, such as rifles, body armor, armored Humvees. To get to the heavier weaponry you had to burrow deeper, through heavy plate-iron doors into underground repositories of explosives, missiles, tanks and bombs.
Every person in their team had their shopping list. Some were sourcing, tuning, charging and fuelling a fleet of four Humvees. Some were blowing open the safe doors to get at the explosives and gas stored within. Some were lifting the radar off the Pilatus and bolting it onto an armored Humvee.
Everyone had a job, even Lucas; to work with Jake on getting their hydrogen line scanner mounted and operational on a cart.
Within an hour all the contents of the two planes was out on the parched gray apron before the first of two low hangars. The bunker buster bombs were the most important. There was no telling if they'd have these here. They were specialist weaponry, essential for digging in to the ground.
There were also machine guns, munitions belts, a laser-targeting kit paired with an artillery and five basic shells, the five surface-to-air missiles and launcher, two RPGs, a flamethrower and gas tanks, a heavy-duty drill kit, grenades and spare car batteries. Jake was starting the process to mount the launcher to one of the Humvees, while others were prepping, loading, arming, reinforcing and outfitting like a well-oiled machine.
Anna threw herself into it. They all did. The clock was ticking.
* * *
Three hours later they were closing on the bunker site over land, out in the fresh country air that smelled of fermented grapes for miles around, hovering in the air like an alcoholic fog. The roads leading through the country were minor and narrow, lined with gorse bushes and rustic vineyard fencing, so Anna took to rolling her Humvee directly through the vineyards, tearing a hole in the dense vegetation. Furrows in the earth kept them bouncing in their seats, while vine stems and leafs battered by in a constant sappy barrage.
The GPS began to beep rapidly as they closed on the bunker. The white smudge Anna had taken for the antennae tower soon loomed up over the interwoven branches, crisp and sharply defined now.
"Four autocannons," Peters radioed from the second Humvee in the convoy, coming at it from an angle of one hundred and twenty degrees to the right. His voice was a bark that barely registered above the cough and bristle of the vineyard coming apart beneath their wheels. "Just like Salle's."
"Any electrical signal rising off them?" Anna called to Jake in back.
"None clear," he answered, listening intently through a handheld microwave dish pointed through the windshield. "Just a low buzzing."
"Is that caused by the shield?"
"It's not the same frequency as ours, but I think so."
This was essential information;
one of the theories they'd been batting around for shutting the demons down without first hacking into the bunkers. Each demon had a different shutdown code on the hydrogen line; that seemed clear since only the button inside each bunker was capable of shutting them down. The working theory was that those shutdown codes could be tied to the frequency of the shield. It was possible. It was just one of the projects Lucas had volunteered for, claiming success in it meant they wouldn't have to infect the bunkers at all, to get at the off buttons.
"Keep that in mind," Anna said, "now all stop and everyone ready."
She hit the brakes hard and the Humvee skidded to a bumpy, sliding stop some two hundred yards from the gun turret, lodged in the middle of a thicket of cascading vines. Ropey tendrils with thick fleshy green leaves pressed up against the window. The engine roared down, leaving briefly the roar of two other vehicles around the tower cutting out too, followed by silence and the ticking of the engine.
"Ollie," Anna called.
"Roger that," he answered, and somewhere one hundred and twenty degrees to the left he pushed open the ceiling hatch in his Humvee with the laser-targeter on his shoulder. He'd remained the best shot with heavy weaponry ever since he took out a demon on the run as it bore down on Amo near Albuquerque.
"I think it's about to-" Jake said, then the air was split by a cacophonous-
RATATATATATATATAT
"Hoods up!" Anna shouted into the radio, and pushed the spring to raise the reinforced-armor front hood, blocking the windshield.
A grunt came through the radio, followed by an, "Oh shit!" and a thud from Ollie.
RATATATATATATATAT
"All four cannons are firing!" Ollie shouted. "One almost took my goddamn head off."
RATATATAT THUMP THUMP RATATATAT
Armor piercing rounds strafed the front of Anna's Humvee, plowing into the hood plating and shaking the whole vehicle as the autocannon fixed its targeting, digging at the hood like a ballistic woodpecker, every shot of the dozen fired per second hitting dead on, too fast to distinguish.
The Last Mayor Box Set Page 99
