Written in Fire

by Marcus Sakey

  A moment later they were on the edge of the combat zone, gunfire still constant but mostly behind them, when Cooper’s foot caught on a body splayed out in a pool of blood. He hit the ground, the impact banging up his knee. So much for kung fu.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded. As he pushed himself up to a crouch, he noticed the man’s throat had been slit wide.

  Not two blocks later they found three more bodies, clustered in a circle. Two had knife wounds, the third was missing part of his face. Shannon grimaced as she pulled out the d-pad.

  “Turns out we hardly need the tracker to find Soren. We could just follow the corpses.” Cooper laced his hands on his head, sucked in breath. Then he looked at Shannon’s face, saw her expression. “What is it?”

  She glanced up from the screen, the pale light of the d-pad hollowing her eyes like a corpse. “I know where he’s going.”

  The canisters were awkward, and each weighed about fifty pounds. Soren spent ten of his seconds considering taking just one of them; he’d move faster, and knowing how John’s mind worked, if success had required two tanks, there would have been four here. His friend had never aimed for good odds—he sought certain victory. That was how he could win even in death.

  In the end, the dolly made up his mind. It was heavy-gauged and wide-wheeled, but designed for two tanks. Loading just one would leave it off-balance. It took him less than a minute to strap them in and be on his way.

  His body felt strong and limber, and even pushing the dolly he could keep up a swift pace. Captivity had afforded him ample time to exercise, and here at the city’s edge, the streets were smooth and the buildings undisturbed. The battle raged on, but he hadn’t seen any militia since the three he left in the alley. It made sense. They weren’t here to hold territory, weren’t interested in establishing a base camp.

  They had come to burn.

  Soren didn’t care. Let them. Let them raze and rape and ruin. Let blood flow in the gutters. He’d never felt any particular loyalty to brilliants in general. The boys who had tormented him at the academy had been brilliants; Epstein and Nick Cooper and Rickard the torturer had been brilliants.

  All that mattered now was that he finish what his friend had started. Not for the cause, but for John. Then find Samantha, the real one, and keep her safe while the world fell to ruin.

  As he rounded the corner, he saw his goal ahead of him. A broad space hundreds of yards across, bounded by a chain-link fence. Red and white lights marked the edges, and a windsock hung limp. The gates were unguarded, but on the runway, a pilot had pushed a carbon-fiber glider out and was hurriedly attaching the cable that would fling it into the sky. The Tesla airfield.

  Let this barbarian militia have their little massacre.

  He would burn the whole world.

  CHAPTER 40

  Life had been reduced to extremes.

  There was silence; and there was the thunder of gunfire. Cold, clean air; and the reek of smoke and gasoline. December chill; and the sudden sharp burn of an ejected casing pinging off Natalie’s skin. Strangest of all was the darkness broken only by flares of brilliant light. Each muzzle flash revealed a living photograph, lovingly composed and yet vanishing almost too quickly to absorb, like a piece of conceptual art.

  Flash: Here is a man in a puffy black ski jacket with a pistol in each hand, his mouth contorted in a howl as he pulls both triggers at the same time.

  Flash: Here is the kind-faced older man in the neighboring building, tongue caught boyishly between his lips as he fires into a crowd.

  Flash: Here is a teenager with a buzz cut hauling his bleeding body across broken ground as he shoots blindly.

  Flash: Here is your hand on the barrel of a rifle, pale with cold and carved with the lines of your history.

  Flash: Here is gentle Jolene screaming obscenities, lips curled back, hair swinging like snakes.

  Earlier, when Natalie had tried to imagine the assault, she had mentally screened old movies, columns of men goose-stepping like Nazis down the center of the street. She had wondered if she would be able to frame the sights up on a living target and pull the trigger, send a hunk of metal screaming through space to tear the flesh of another.

  That turned out not to be the problem. Any reluctance had vanished when they started shooting floodlights—when, like the beast that had lived in her childhood closet, they drew their strength from darkness. She had gone through five magazines of ammunition already, and although she couldn’t say for sure how many people she had hit—how many she had killed—she knew the number was far from zero.

  No, the problem was that the militia didn’t goose-step down the middle of the street. Instead they sprinted, zigzagging. They hid behind every scrap of cover. They stormed the barricade and leapt from the top and hit the ground at a roll and came up running. They dashed along the paths that ran between the buildings. There were so many of them, an endless stream, and all desperate to live, and even as she lined up and fired and lined up and fired, even as she knew that her rounds found targets, there was always another, and another. It was like trying to poke holes in the ocean, only this ocean was clothed in black and howling and shooting back.

  The slide of the rifle locked open. Natalie dropped to her knees, spun so her shoulders were against the filing cabinet. She spared a moment to look at her d-pad, where the battlefield map glowed faintly. Drones circling above tracked heat signatures, motion, and gunfire to build an interactive picture of war as a living organism. It looked like a ring of fire squeezing inward. The colors shifted and flowed as she watched, vortices of furious red spinning against blue as the New Sons broke the city defenses.

  And there in the center are the bunkers where your children huddle.

  Natalie released the magazine from her rifle and slapped in a new one, then poked her head up. A bullet snapped above, close enough that she could sense its passage. She dropped back down as more rounds blew through the shattered window and tore holes in the ceiling.

  I think they’ve figured out where you are.

  She grabbed a couple of spare magazines from the bag and crawled on hands and knees to the next window. Earlier she and Jolene had dragged a heavy desk from the corner office of some executive and tipped it up in front of the window. Her ear to the wood, she slowly eased her head up enough for one eye to clear.

  Flashes and cracks echoed from all directions, but the area in front of her window, the space she felt responsible for, seemed quiet. She squinted, trying to separate darkness from darkness. The purple light was on the far side of the globe and helped not at all. Was something moving? She thought so. But the shape was wrong, motion here and here and there. How could one person—oh.

  Natalie dropped the rifle, stood, and ran back to her window, ignoring the blasts that came from the street, the splintering of the walls, the wood spraying off the desk, just focused on making it to the filing cabinet, at the base of which stood five glass bottles. She grabbed one and the lighter, white plastic, the same Bic available in ten million checkout lines, but this one she was using to light a rag soaked in gasoline, the chemical smell ringing in her nostrils. One spin of the wheel, two, three, and then the lighter flared, and the flame leapt eagerly to the cloth tucked into the bottle. She risked standing up long enough to hurl it out the window as bullets blew in at her. She dropped too quickly to see it break, but she could hear the whoomp of gasoline and the sudden crackle of hair and cloth, and right on the heels of that, screams.

  The sound tore at her. Instinctively, she wanted to call a time-out. To rush down and help whoever was hurt, as she might if one of Todd’s friends were hurt roughhousing—put on a Band-Aid and call his mother. Instead, she returned to the other window, picked up the rifle, and made herself look out.

  While shooters farther back had tried to pin her down, a group of ten or so had been crawling through her field of vision. The firebomb had landed amidst them, the glass shattering and gasoline flinging out, and now they writhed and
screamed and flailed furiously at the flames. In the sudden glow of light, she could see not only the men she had lit on fire, but also many beyond, eyes glinting in the darkness, indiscernible shapes, a horde of them stretching into the horizon, a monster that wouldn’t quit coming, and instead of bandaging the wounds she lined up her rifle and started shooting them, taking advantage of the light from their burning brothers.

  CHAPTER 41

  Soren worked.

  He’d never mounted a canister of biological weaponry on a drone before, but John’s notes were straightforward, and with the leisure of his perception he had time to review them twice before he even picked up a socket wrench.

  The airfield had two hangars. One was for civilian gliders. The other was marked with Epstein Industries logos and warnings of dire consequences for trespassing. There had been no guards; no doubt they were back on the front lines, defending the city. The only people he’d seen were the glider pilot and a middle-aged mechanic with a broad gut. Neither had slowed him down.

  He worked steadily, carefully. He had failed John when Cooper tricked him, and the mistake had cost his friend’s life. He wouldn’t let a mistake destroy John’s dream, too.

  The drones had a sort of alien grace to them that he admired. Streamlined and to the purpose, they resembled dull dragonflies with sixteen-foot wingspans. The schematics showed him exactly what to do, and the process was mechanical. Detach a dozen bolts to remove the modular payload—in this case, a camera package three feet long and dotted with lenses and sensors. Secure the high-pressure tank in its place, valve pointing downward. Push the drone to the open hangar door—it rolled surprisingly easily—and move to the next.

  Earlier, searching the toolbox, he had come across a knife with a short, curved blade, and Samantha shrieked in his memory as a similar blade cut away her lower lid and popped the eyeball from its socket. He jammed the drawer shut so hard he almost took a finger off.

  Not real, he had reminded himself. She wasn’t hurt. She wasn’t even there.

  The thought didn’t bring relief. It brought disgust. Self-loathing that he had been fooled, and a faint contempt for the methodology. Just before the cutting had begun, Soren had thought that Cooper had been bluffing, that he wasn’t strong enough to do what was necessary. He had been right. Cooper’s will was not the equal of his, or of John’s.

  Soren would teach him that tonight. He would finish what his friend had started and destroy everything Cooper had fought for. And when that’s done, find him, and repay the suffering. Let him die alone and screaming.

  He had recoded the girl’s d-pad to his own thumbprint, and he activated it now. One of the files John had sent was a program to hack the drone controls. He executed it. A graphic of a radar ping appeared, the sensor line sweeping the circle once, twice, searching for signal recipients. When it found them, it gave way to a command screen.

  The drones could be flown manually, and he considered it. There was a certain poetry to steering the engine of the world’s death and rebirth. But he knew nothing of flying, and in the end, chose to upload the autopilot patterns John had provided. Simple inward spirals, one clockwise, the other counter. They would circle Tesla until the liquid hydrogen fuel cells gave out. Hours, he assumed. Maybe days.

  He stepped back to examine his work. The tanks detracted from the aesthetic. Unlike the camera package, they hadn’t been designed for this purpose, and they bulged like tumors on the bellies of the sleek machines. No doubt the drones’ efficiency would suffer as well, but they didn’t have far to go. As he had worked, the slow-motion thunder of the battle had, if anything, intensified.

  Soren found the valve of the first tank and twisted it until he heard a faint hiss.

  Then he pressed a button on the d-pad, and the engine spun to life.

  Seconds later, the drone began to roll.

  Cooper’s veins pumped fire and his head ached. Adrenaline made his hands tremble. They had been running at a full sprint since Shannon figured out where Soren was headed, slowing down only when they just-shy-of-literally collided with a group of militiamen. It had been a fast and brutal fight, five Sons to the two of them, but at close range the men’s weapons were useless, and he and Shannon had fought together with calm synchronicity, her spinning and sliding, never where they thought she would be, throwing high kicks and sword strikes with the edge of her palm, his approach more about churning through them, bulling right into one before stomping the heel of a second, twisting his arm back, and breaking it at the elbow. The third, a monster who looked like he could bench a truck, had gotten him in a bear hug, and it had taken a knee to the groin and two head-butts to the man’s nose to break the grip.

  By that time the one he’d first knocked over had started to rise, but Shannon’s shotgun had put a stop to that. They had looked at each other, then leapt back into a sprint. The streets were dark, the buildings deserted, but behind them the battle raged on. The smell of smoke was in the air, and the sounds of dying men and women.

  When they reached the airfield, his first thought was that she must have been mistaken. The runway lights were on, but there was no one around, no guards at the gate, no planes streaking down the field. Then he saw the glider at one end, already wheeled into position, the cable attached to the nose of it, the left-hand door open, and, crumpled beside the front wheel, the body of the pilot. Too far away to make out many details—other than a reflection of the moon in the pool of blood. Soren’s signature.

  Too late? Fear skewered him; if Soren had already taken off, it was all over. Not just this battle, but the whole of the world he knew. John Smith’s virus would consume everything. It would destroy the government and bring ruin upon America, and perhaps the whole world. It would kill Natalie and corrupt his son and lead to the deaths of—

  A small light danced in one hangar, the one marked with the Epstein Industries logos. Beneath the gunfire and growing louder was a sound. A hum, like a turbine, or . . .

  An engine. “Shannon!” He didn’t wait to see if she would follow, just ran toward the hangar with everything he had, his heart ripping his chest and breath burning.

  A shape rolled from the open hangar, low and predatory. It was a third the size of the Seraphim the military used, but he recognized the UAV easily enough, and, as it began to pick up speed, he saw something slung on its belly. A cylinder perhaps four feet long.

  He weighed options—

  It’s thirty yards away on a perpendicular path, and the engine is accelerating.

  You don’t know that an explosion will destroy the virus.

  But once it’s in the air, it will take less than a minute to reach the front and infect tens of thousands of people.

  And you know for certain what will happen then.

  —and had only one.

  Cooper shouldered the assault rifle, standing in a bladed stance, the stock braced against his shoulder. The weapon had no scope, but the sights were luminous. He fired three quick bursts.

  Two things happened. Sparks flickered off one of the wings where his rounds had hit.

  And the slide of his rifle locked back. The magazine was empty.

  Beside him, Shannon fired and racked again and again, but Cooper wasn’t surprised to see the drone still rolling, rapidly picking up speed. If his bullets had ricocheted off the skin of the thing, shells would be useless. He thumbed the release and let the magazine fall from his weapon as he reached for his last one. The drone was hauling now, the distance growing rapidly, forty yards, fifty. He considered the fuel tank, but if the wing could take hits, there was no way in hell the fuel tank couldn’t, which left what? The drone wasn’t military, but it was newtech, obviously built to survive small arms under battle conditions.

  Battle conditions. Not takeoff.

  He primed the rifle and toggled it to full auto, trusting to muscle memory, to basic training. Seventeen years old, allowed to join up with Dad’s consent, a heady, hard time, and he’d done well, this was just another drill, prac
ticing against a moving target, moving fast, he let the sights lead the drone as it gathered speed and he stared down the barrel, unblinking as he aimed at the strut of the rear wheel and fired half the magazine in a go, set up again and loosed the rest.

  The retractable strut tore away, the bottom two feet spinning and bouncing ahead of the drone as it rocked back on its hindquarters, the material shearing and tearing, surfing a trail of sparks, and friction took the fuel tank and the liquid hydrogen blew in a dazzling fireball of pale blue flame.

  For a moment he just stared at it. Then Cooper threw his head back and roared. Beside him, Shannon was laughing, one hand cupped to her mouth, the shotgun dangling from the other. They had made it, pulled it off, and even as the battle raged behind them, even though the world was far from safe, it would keep turning, there was still time . . .

  Is what he was thinking as the second drone left the hangar.

  He and Shannon looked at each other. Then she glanced down the runway.

  Cooper saw what she was looking at, said, “No.”

  “Yes.” She threw him the shotgun. “Get Soren.”

  Then she sprinted for the abandoned glider.

  CHAPTER 42

  Luke Hammond stood in the darkness and watched men burn alive.

  He had been a warrior his whole life, and long ago he’d recognized that no good man could have been the places he had been, seen the things he had seen, done the things he had done. It didn’t matter that he had fought for his country, for his children. It didn’t matter that he possessed discipline and restraint. There was a beast, a slavering, rotting, smiling thing that smelled of sex and sweat and shit. Every man sensed it. Most lived and died without spending time in the beast’s company, without tasting that terrible freedom or knowing the beauty that grows in horror. There were no words to convey it, because it came from a place beyond words, before words.