“So they’re on their way?” His voice was full of fear. This operation wasn’t just a step up from their usual. It was like ten.
“Yes,” Jennifer said, “At least, I have to assume so.”
Ramon pulled out his phone and started texting a simple message to Sheila: GO. Jennifer did the same, but sent to Dan.
The two of them sat in the dark and waited.
Sheila’s phone buzzed and she glanced down. She didn’t need to read it. She knew in her gut it was a go across the board. The wind was with them. She could just feel it deep inside. All the tools felt right in her hand as she lifted the match, whispered an invocation to a god of bright light and searing heat – technically, she noted in some part of her mind, an atavistic construct made of previously deconstructed belief systems dissected on the altars of hegemonic faiths, but that was just the sort of noodling around she and all the other technopagans had going at any one time – and set flame to a two-minute measure of timed fuse.
The fuse was in turn taped to one of the landing legs of a four-bladed remote control helicopter. Watching through her phone, she guided it into the air from behind one of the many empty homes, one with empty houses on either side to minimize possible witnesses. The copter was also carrying what looked like a badly deflated water balloon. It was, in fact, an only barely inflated water balloon carrying a half-pound or so of homemade napalm. The other end of the fuse was taped against it.
Sheila was no expert in flying these things but she’d practiced a little that morning, out on the beach, way out on the end towards the nature preserve so no one would see her. The whipping Atlantic wind made it no easy feat but she brought the helicopter up between the dark, scrubby trees to hover high over the houses, where no one would see it. Counting backwards from one hundred twenty the whole time, she piloted it across the street, to one side, and across another street so that by the time she reached eight she was hovering directly over the chimney of the target house. The camera on the copter couldn’t afford her enough of a view to know whether the flue on the chimney was open or closed, but she bet nobody much thought about them. Open was probably a pretty safe bet.
At zero, with the copter angled just so, she crashed it into the inner corner of the chimney as the flame of the fuse kissed the flesh of the napalm balloon. One perfectly banked ball of fire struck the edge of the brick and wood siding so that some of the flaming gel sprayed across the roof and some spattered against the pile of pristine, desiccated driftwood decorating the fireplace below.
Even three houses away, she could hear the soft sound of a fwoosh.
In the far distance, across the marshy width of the Intercoastal Waterway, Sheila heard sirens. She smiled to herself as she ducked back under the house, into her car and off up the street. In part Sheila smiled because the sirens had, themselves, been the signals for Dan to start his part.
Swagbot, as Dan called his creation, was not truly his creation. It was a bunch of open source code and off-the-shelf parts he’d enhanced with code of his own and then brought to life the first time in a ritual he designed with the rest of the technopagans.
“Brought to life” is probably too strong a phrase as it had no mind, no animus, but it was how Dan thought of the thing. All his creations were like children to him. He thought of them as extensions of himself, of his own will and potential, more than he thought of them as offspring per se, but that’s the thing: so do most parents, though they don’t like when you tell them that.
Swagbot was maybe four feet tall, on a set of treads that could swivel in any direction. Its base was weighted so its center of gravity was low. It had four arms with different kind of grips and connectors. It held them all partly aloft as it moved, elbows crooked, “hands” held out flat to the side. It looked like a hat rack sticking out of the top of a tank. Dan said it sashayed like it was walking the runway, like it was showing off for everyone else every time it rolled into a room, and thus its name.
The part of it most impressive, he told people, was its ability to hold and use tools otherwise made for human hands.
That morning, the sun high in the sky as noon approached, Swagbot was in the driveway of a random beach house on Sunset. It was a modest home, bright blue with white accents, but there was a two car garage on the ground floor. Dan was four doors up, alternately bouncing back and forth between the tablet computer in his hands and looking at the robot itself. The tablet displayed the view from a camera mounted just over the central ring of shoulder joints for Swagbot’s various arms. Dan was wearing head-mounted binoculars, an expensive piece of hunting gear he’d picked up at a going-out-of-business sale for an online outfitter during the last tech bust. When everyone else is yelling sell sell sell is usually a great time to buy.
The hole saw in Swagbot’s hands was a pistol-gripped maw of metal teeth in two rows, the blades made so they could cut through wood like butter and through metal like wood. The plastic dust shield between the bearer and the blades – like the round bell-shaped guard on a sword – was a hilarious touch of propriety on a machine designed to look like a gun that cut six-inch holes in whatever needed a tidy but gaping wound.
Dan used the controls on the tablet’s screen to nudge Swagbot forward and raised the saw. Very gently, he pressed the shield to the garage door. Xi 2.0 hovered nearby and blinked his green LED at Dan. Swagbot pulled the trigger on the saw at Dan’s direction, and dust and sparks filled the plastic guard like a snow globe version of Hell.
Twenty seconds later, the blade plunged through the door and Dan backed up to switch arms. The one that swung to the front held a long plastic tube up to the “eye” atop Swagbot, the other end inserted into the hole in the garage door. Dan tapped the tablet screen and flipped to night vision mode.
In the darkness were several people. Three were lying on beds with their arms folded across their chests like vampires from an old Hammer film. Did anyone actually bury their dead like that? Would any self-respecting creature actually sleep that way? Surely these assholes had watched a movie before. Surely they knew how ridiculous that must look.
There was a fourth person who was sitting in the dark. It looked like the sawing had startled her awake, as she was blinking in the general direction of the door and rubbing her face. Dan supposed this was the thrall, enslaved and forced to be their guard during the day. She realized where she was, and what was happening, and she stood up and staggered over to the garage door to see what was going on.
She blinked sleepily into the black plastic tube, like a peep hole in reverse, and then stood up again. Dan guessed she finally awoke enough to start processing what was going on because she screamed: not the long, sustained scream of mortal horror he imagined most people produced when one of these monsters grabbed them and dragged them off to die, but rather the short, sharp scream of shock of someone who has just realized there’s a fire in their trash can.
“Shit!” He heard her say it through the tube, then over and over again as she ran away from the tube and over to one of the sleeping forms. “Shit shit shit shit shiiiiiit,” she yelled. Tugging on the arms of the first vampire did nothing; same for the second; same for the third. Dan almost felt sorry for her. She was already gone, though. Jennifer had explained it to them. Once a human was addicted to vampire blood they were beyond help. It wasn’t like heroin, or meth, or anything else. It changed them forever. It was the worst sort of magic: the kind that can’t be unwound.
The woman started slapping the faces of the vampires, trying to get them awake. It did no good. They weren’t going to awaken. Jennifer had told Dan that, too: the sun puts these fucks to sleep hard. Dynamite wouldn’t wake them. One junkie smacking them on their withered old cheek wasn’t even going to show up in a dream.
Dan backed Swagbot up and raised the arm with a pneumatic battering ram held in it. It wasn’t big, but with a hole already made in the door, it was enough to start caving in the door around the hole, widening it and letting in the sun. The woman started scream
ing at the top of her lungs, the mindless shriek of someone who sees her death coming down the train tracks towards her.
Xi 2.0 had already started to hover backwards, slowly retreating while keeping his cameras aimed at the house.
Dan raised the mirror to the hole and panned it around in a slow arc for one second, two – surely he’d hit a vampire with the rays of the sun sooner or later, right – then a third and then –
The garage door exploded outwards in a fireball.
Windows upstairs in the house shattered.
Windows in the house across the street blew inward.
There was a tremor in the earth.
At least three car alarms went off.
Smoke washed out over Swagbot, obscuring his camera and Dan’s view of Xi 2.0. After five excruciating seconds, Xi 2.0 emerged from the smoke and started flying fast towards Dan. In Morse, he blinked: we need to get the fuck out of here.
Dan smiled. It looked like they had managed to preserve at least some of Xi’s personality.
The smoke cleared after a moment and Dan used Swagbot’s still-working arms to right it, then backed it up the street at high speed towards their position. This was going to provide lots of good data.
The sirens from across the Waterway came blaring over the top of the bridge, from the mainland, and barreled down the other side into town.
Jennifer and Ramon moved the car a half-mile to get away from the phone booth, then hauled out the laptops and candles. While Ramon murmured and flipped the switches on the bottom of a set of LED “7-day” saint candles – in honor of Saints Dorothy, Sophia, Rose, and Blanche – Jennifer set up the satellite modem. Expensive as hell, but when you needed connectivity anywhere, it worked.
She had spent the day researching what she wanted to do but never tried it in the wild. It didn’t seem especially complex, but the candles certainly made her feel better about it. As the satellite connection established she fired off a script. Through an obfuscating chain of other sites and servers, long enough to make it very hard to track her down, she broke into the monitoring infrastructure for Henrietta Industrial Insurance Worldwide.
There were plenty of stories in the tech media about people having figured out how to hack cars via the onboard monitoring and roadside assistance systems installed on them. Think for a moment about the sort of feature where you can, in addition to asking directions, maybe also get your car’s manufacturer to find out where your stolen sedan was taken and lock its engine so it can’t be driven anywhere. If the manufacturer can do that, so can anyone who hacks that system. Remote control is only an Internet connection away.
The same sorts of systems are installed on heavy equipment. In that case, they aren’t to get directions. They’re only to track them in case of theft. A brand new backhoe can cost many tens of thousands of dollars. Insurance rates for businesses can be through the roof. The insurance company may cut them a deal if they install a tracking device on all the bulldozers and backhoes and other equipment someone could literally drive off with in the middle of the night.
Or, Jennifer thought, Drive it off in the middle of the day.
Systems like that check in regularly with their controller rather than maintaining a steady connection. All it took was a little patience and ping Jennifer had one call home. It was a hydraulic excavator: a long arm with a toothed bucket, an enclosed cabin, and giant tank treads. Jennifer smiled. It would do the job just fine. While her scripts ran to take control of the excavator, she checked the position and registry: it was among the equipment owned by a particular construction company there in Sunset Beach, where there was a house going up on an empty lot. Ramon’s Golden Girls candles were worth it: the coordinates looked good. The excavator was maybe a two-minute drive from her target.
The guy inside – if there was one – probably wasn’t going to enjoy the ride very much, but she was going to do her level best to keep him safe.
Jennifer didn’t have long to get her part done. The driver would pull out his cell phone and call 911 the moment it drove off with him in it. She had to get it there and attack the house, blind save for the directions Ramon would feed her based on the view from a weather conditions webcam Ramon had already hacked. It was like driving a remote control car on a track you can’t see while someone in another room shouts directions.
The script finished. The indicator on her custom-written application turned green.
Go-time.
As Jennifer started to drive, two fire trucks blew past.
Sheila screeched to a halt in front of Dan and Xi 2.0 and hit the button to pop the hatch on her minivan. That’s the funny thing about minivans: they often handle way better than you’d think just looking at once. Sometimes I think that’s supposed to be a balm to the ego of whoever is stuck toting their kids around: it may look like a shoebox but at least it drives okay.
Dan yanked out the plank they were using as a makeshift ramp and drove Swagbot up it and into the back. Xi 2.0 flew in and set down on the bench in the middle, his battery light blinking. Sheila plugged him in and Dan climbed into the passenger seat.
“Sounds like we were both successful,” he said with a grin.
The sirens went up in resolution as the trucks came around a corner and roared past at the end of the street.
“C’mon,” Sheila said, “We’ve got to get over the bridge and back to the hotel before the camouflage wears off.”
Dan whistled as four cop cars blew past the other end of the street.
“I wonder if that’s for Jennifer?”
Sheila sucked air through her clenched teeth. “Did you strap down Swagbot?”
“No,” Dan replied.
“Then get back there and hold it down. We need to go.”
Jennifer’s hijacked excavator was careening – there was no other word for it – down the street. “Careening” takes on a different meaning when the vehicle’s top speed is 21 miles per hour, but 21 can look pretty damned fast when it’s a machine the size of four or five cars piled on top of one another, with a giant arm sticking off the front. A couple of degrees off at the point of the cabin could put the arm many yards to one side or the other. At least Ramon’s webcams had confirmed the cabin was empty.
“That was… another mailbox.” Ramon winced. “Oh, Jesus, Jennifer. This is ugly.”
“That’s what insurance is for, kid.” Jennifer gritted her teeth and tried to adjust the steering a hair’s breadth this way and a hair’s breadth that.
Ramon clapped one hand over his face, but didn’t block his own view all the way. “Right… right more… more no left a little… OK, now.”
Jennifer rammed the accelerator control and the excavator spun on its center axis, the treads ripping up asphalt and leaving a long, rippled impression like feet in the sand. The target was dead ahead on her map, and Ramon held up one thumb to signal she was good to go. The arm of the excavator extended before her, held aloft, like a battering ram or the jousting lance of a charging knight. In her mind, she could hear the engine revving up, redlining, chugging its heart out, and she hoped to powers above and below no one chose this moment to back out of their driveway.
“Well, shit,” Ramon said, and Jennifer leaned over to look at his screen since her own controls were set.
Two police cars skidded to a halt in front of the excavator and their occupants dove out and ran to the side. The whole police force in a town like this, Jennifer thought to herself. The cops seemed to be shouting at the empty excavator as it charged them from two blocks away. They lifted their guns and started firing. The one frame-per-second video was jerky, to say the least, but she could see the sparks of bullets ricocheting off the bright yellow excavator. At the last moment the cops ran from the path and watched as their cruisers were crushed flat beneath the excavator’s ridiculous treads. It rode over them with the barest wobbling rise and fall, charged up the driveway at the end of the street, and rammed its bucketed arm through the center of the modest beige beach house at th
e back of the lot.
Jennifer looked back at her screen, wiggled the controls for the bucket arm to angle it down like a cat pawing at the edge of a counter over which it can’t see, and then hit reverse.
On the webcam, the excavator seemed to be sitting still. The cops stepped back into view and were aiming their pistols at it, but seemed uncertain: half-crouched, half-standing, guns only half-lifted.
Abruptly the excavator ripped free of whatever had held it in place. The treads spun, then bit, and it pulled half the house out from under itself like a tablecloth yanked out from under the place settings in a magic trick.
The house crumpled like a tin can. Junk started falling out of the bottom: a great cascade of furniture gushing out as it sagged and split open down the middle. Each half fell away when the excavator’s bucket split a support beam or two on its way out, and the house opened like an apple split in two.
The light of the sun struck sleeping vampires, Jennifer guessed, because the next frame showed a burst of light from three places, like incendiaries going off in a Polaroid.
The next second, the image was nothing but white light, brighter than the sun.
The next second, the image was of the cops being knocked flat, the excavator rocking to one side by the blast.
The next second the excavator swayed the other way, its arm a ten-ton pendulum. Smoke billowed out of the house. Debris flew at the camera.
The next second, the house’s shattered husk was consumed by flames.
“Oh, shit,” Ramon said.
Jennifer already had the car in gear. She shoved the laptop at Ramon and said, “Wipe my trail, and don’t turn off those saint candles until you’re done.”
So, Jennifer thought to herself as she drove. They definitely won’t think that was the work of another vampire. The Hinson list Roderick sent her had seven addresses on it. They had just singlehandedly assaulted three of them during broad daylight with no witnesses and no fingerprints left behind. If this didn’t make the ancients jump, nothing would. She just hoped they didn’t decide to run away and hide.
Attempted Immortality (Withrow Chronicles Book 4) Page 9
