The Atlantis Gene
Page 17
Otto stared at the mushroom cloud as it dissipated twenty feet above the parking lot before his gaze drifted back down to the car. The entire vehicle was aflame, the biggest fire coming from the engine, the flames reaching higher and higher as oil and rubber lit. The initial boom, he realized, had been the gas tank exploding. He’d have to remember that. It was gorgeous.
A screech of tires snapped him out of his daze and made him look to the right. A red Subaru Impreza swerved into the parking lot, the driver’s window open with an Uzi’s muzzle pointing out and flaring with gunfire.
“About time she got here!” Grunt shouted. “I hate waiting on women, especially when I’m getting shot at. You ready to run, Pyro?”
“If it means getting out of here, you can bet on it.”
The Subaru squealed to a stop in front of the gas station. Otto grabbed the duffel bag full of gear they’d dug up in the backyard and hurried out the front door as Grunt provided cover fire.
Vivian popped open the back seat, and he dove right in. A second later, he had the wind knocked out of him as Grunt landed on top of him.
“Sorry, Pyro.” Grunt rolled off of him and slammed the door.
“You boys have fun while I was gone?” Vivian asked, slamming on the gas and swerving the car around, making Otto fly to one side and bounce off of the wall of muscle that was Grunt.
“Otto’s getting good with that grenade launcher,” Grunt said, slapping a full magazine into his Uzi. “He’s figured out how to blow up a car.”
Despite the danger, Otto felt a flush of shame. For years, he’d struggled with his addiction to lighting fires, and now he had to do it to stay alive.
But stay alive for how long? Otto looked out the back window as the gas station dwindled in the distance. Already, the agents were getting back together. One of the sedans pulled away from the fire.
Dr. Yamazaki popped up in the passenger’s seat beside Vivian. She’d been hiding below the dashboard.
“Oh, there you are,” Grunt said in a cheerful tone.
The geneticist stared at him, her face pale. She was even more overwhelmed by all this than Otto was.
“They’re coming after us,” Otto said.
“Of course they are, honey,” Vivian said. “These guys never give up. Wonder how they found us this time.”
“Maybe someone hacked into Edward’s communications,” Otto said.
Grunt shook his head, the sweat glistening on the tribal tattoo covering most of his shaven scalp. “No one hacks Edward. Maybe they traced the Tohono O’odham. They’re careful but not as trained as we are. Someone might have slipped up.”
“I told you we shouldn’t have helped them trash that uranium mine!” Otto said.
The mercenary rounded on him. “Fighting General Meade isn’t the only war we’re in, Pyro!”
Otto glared back at him. “You busted me out of jail to save Jaxon, and all we’ve been doing is running around the desert for the past few weeks getting shot at!”
“We’ll get your girlfriend when we can, kid. Right now, we’ve got more pressing problems.”
Vivian chimed in from the front seat. “Um, boys? Perhaps you should stop arguing and see what our friends are up to?”
Grunt and Otto turned around in their seat to look behind them. The highway was empty. They looked at each other.
“That’s too good to be true,” Otto said.
Grunt craned his neck, looking out the window into the sky.
“What are you looking at?” Otto asked.
“Thought I spotted something. Damn, there it is. A drone!”
“What! Where?”
Grunt pointed. “There.”
Otto spotted a small black X silhouetted against the bright desert sky. “Vivian, start weaving. It’s going to shoot a missile at us!”
“Relax, Pyro,” Grunt said. “It’s just an observation drone. It’s too small to carry ordnance. It will keep after us, though. If we don’t shoot it down, we’ll never shake those guys. That thing’s got a camera they’re monitoring. They’re probably hanging back, waiting for reinforcements.”
Grunt rolled down the window, pulled a rifle out from behind the seat, and lifted himself partway out the window.
“Hold onto me, Pyro.”
Otto grabbed him around the waist. Vivian didn’t slow down. They must have been going eighty.
“Watch those hands, Pyro. I’m not phobic, but when I was in the service, the rule was ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’”
“Shut up and shoot that drone!” Otto shouted.
Otto would have never shouted at someone who looked like Grunt until a few weeks before. He’d never handled a grenade launcher either. A lot had changed in his life.
The sound of a high-powered rifle shooting next to his head slammed his eardrums. Grunt fired twice more. Otto craned his head and saw the drone plummeting to earth. The mercenary wormed his way back inside the vehicle.
“I hate drones,” Grunt said as he thumped back into his seat. “Damn things kill innocent people all around the world while their pilots sit back at base, thinking they’re playing some damn video game.”
“They only use them to kill terrorists,” Otto said.
Grunt snorted. “You keep telling yourself that, Pollyanna.”
“Now what?” Otto asked, peering up into the sky to search for more drones.
“Now we get out of here as fast as we can, ditch this Subaru, and grab another vehicle they won’t recognize, honey,” Vivian said from the front seat.
“But where will we get one?”
“Where do you think?” Grunt asked. “We’ll steal one.”
Otto threw up his hands. “Whoa! Wait a minute. I’m not a thief, and don’t pull that ‘Yeah, but you’re a pyromaniac’ line on me. Just because I’ve done some bad things in my life doesn’t mean I have to keep on doing more bad stuff.”
“If you don’t help us steal a car, you’ll be aiding and abetting a murder.”
“Whose?”
“Our own.”
Otto paused, trying to think of a way around that but came up with nothing.
“There’s got to be a better way,” he said, his voice lacking conviction.
“Wish there was, honey,” Vivian said. “But there isn’t. If they have one drone, they’ll have another. Let’s grab the first car we can, something fast and expensive. That way, the owner will be sure to have theft insurance. We’ll ditch it as soon as we can, and then the cops will collect it and give it back. Sure, we’ll be ruining someone’s day, but we’ll be saving our own lives.”
Grunt punched him in the shoulder. Just a playful punch. A real punch would have shot Otto through the door.
“Consider it a math lesson,” the mercenary said. “You gotta do a lot of math in this game. Here’s an equation for you. Are four lives greater than, equal to, or less than the value of one civilian’s ruined day? Hell, even if his car ends up getting trashed, four lives is greater than the value of one civilian’s car, right?”
Otto sank back in his seat and closed his eyes. Being with the crew meant he was always on the run. Back in California, he was wanted for a prison break, not to mention the false charge of setting fire to the greenhouse at his group home. The one fire he hadn’t set was the one he got tried as an adult for. Just his luck.
“I still don’t like it,” Otto grumbled.
Grunt put a beefy hand on his shoulder, and Otto turned to him.
“Good. I don’t want you to like it. You’re not a bad kid for a pyro, and I don’t want all this drama to turn you bad.”
Otto caught a look of pain in Grunt’s eyes, quickly hidden. Something had happened when he had been in the Special Forces, something Grunt only hinted at. Whatever that was, it meant he would leave the Atlantis Allegiance once they saved Jaxon. As soon as Dr. Yamazaki and her old professor Dr. Charles Smith had decided they needed to go to Morocco to hunt down the original Atlanteans, Grunt had told them he was out.
Whateve
r Grunt had experienced in North Africa, he didn’t want to face it again.
Otto looked at him out of the corner of his eye. As annoying as the guy was, he didn’t want the mercenary to leave. Grunt wasn’t a bad guy, and Otto had a feeling that if they really did get Jaxon away from Meade’s people and ran all the way to Morocco, that wouldn’t get them out of danger.
No, Otto thought as he put another flash-and-smoke bomb into his grenade launcher, the danger is just beginning.
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