Firebolt

by R. M. Galloway

  “The rod has dropped,” he said. “The bucket of worms you call a government is about to be wiped from the face of the planet. And then my day shall dawn!”

  Someone started shooting, but it couldn’t have been the mercenaries because they were still behind their boss. Whoever it was didn’t manage to hit anything, but one of the mercs grabbed Vitalius from behind and pulled him rapidly away. They disappeared into a side room, and someone grabbed my injured left arm and pulled me up as I yelled out in pain.

  “Come on, boss, we need to go!”

  It was a man named Steve Heron, one of the bodyguards in my security team. He was with two others, and three terrified-looking scientists.

  “Damn glad to see you, Steve,” I said, grabbing my .45 up from the floor.

  “Those assholes killed McCoy,” he said, and opened fire again. The mercenary who had poked his head out slumped down dead.

  “She was worth more than one of them. But it will have to do,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  We ran straight for the elevator, and this time I made it.

  Chapter 48

  The ride upstairs seemed to take three days. The world went black, then cleared a little to show Steve Heron staring up at the numbers as if he was willing them to change more quickly. Then the blackness returned, to be replaced by the dark wet alley and the site of three men beating a homeless guy to death for no reason at all. Then Steve Heron again, turning to say something to one of the scientists. Then the burning family in the car and the dead child smeared across the roadway. If there is such a thing as Hell, or “the hell worlds” as the Ja Lama would have said, then I got a glimpse of it in that elevator. It was as if the Quod Glasses had infected me, stained me too deeply to be rinsed away by anything as simple as taking them off.

  But the elevator doors came open at last, and we stumbled out into the hallways and lay panting against the wall. Steve reached in and stopped the elevator, effectively trapping our enemies downstairs until they managed to override it.

  “We need to tend to your wounds,” said one of the scientists, a balding guy with little round John Lennon glasses.

  “No time,” I croaked. “Get out now…”

  “I’m sure they’re stuck for at least a little bit,” said Steve. “You need first aid.”

  “No time. Get out now!”

  I started running toward the doors, or not so much running as shambling. They followed after me, and when I slipped and fell down hard on my right shoulder they pulled me up, and we kept running.

  “What’s the hurry?” asked Steve. “I know we have to leave, but…”

  “Run. RUN!!!”

  They didn’t know about the Rod from God. Well, the scientists might have. Kohl kept people in the dark, but he couldn’t have kept his intentions completely secret from the people who were actually making his kinetic bombardment satellite. At least not from all of them. But that was a matter for the courts, and right now my only goal was to get gone.

  We reached the parking lot, and Steve led all of us to his SUV because it was big enough to carry everybody. We tumbled in, and one of the other bodyguards drew his weapon and fired three times in the direction of the front doors before Steve pulled out of the Quod Corporation parking lot at high, screeching speed. I never found out what the man was firing at.

  “I think we can drop to a safe speed now,” said Steve after a certain point, just as I was drifting off into another nightmarish virtual reality hallucination. From my place in the back seat, I sat up and gripped the back of his chair and pulled my face up to his ear.

  “Don’t slow down, Steve. Go as fast as you possibly can! Do you hear me? As fast as you possibly can!”

  “You got it, boss. But I don’t think those mercs can catch us now. We’re miles away.”

  “Just go, Steve. Keep going and don’t stop. Break a hundred if you can!”

  “Well, I don’t want to flip this…”

  I’m not sure if there was a sound or not. I was drifting in and out of reality at that point, and my memory of a rolling thunderous sound wave might not be accurate. But something made me look back, and everyone else in the vehicle did too. Steve slammed on the breaks, which very nearly did make the vehicle flip over.

  From a cloudless sky, a streak of searing flame leaped down in an instant. It was a spear of fire, a bolt from heaven, a little chunk of the sun. It was a tungsten rod, falling from space faster than sound itself and blasting straight through the Quod Corporation headquarters, through the underground bunker, through everything Father and Mother had made in one awe-inspiring moment of annihilation. Light burst from the earth, and the ground behind us jumped up into the heavens. The earth heaved, and this time the SUV did flip over. I have no idea how, but I remember having one thought before I fell unconscious.

  Kumar. You did it!

  Chapter 49

  Poker night at my new neighborhood bar in Washington, DC. My shoulder was sore, my left hand had lost some nerve function that it would never completely regain, and months spent recovering in a hospital bed had left me weak and shaky. I still had nightmares about the Quod Glasses, though not nearly as many as the people who were wearing them when the firebolt hit.

  But I was home. I was in DC, and playing poker with people I certainly never expected to be playing poker with again: Violet Manchester, Bruce Putnam and John Grimassi from the FBI’s residential agency in Hennington, Minnesota. The three of them were in town for a conference and had called me at home to invite me to come out for a hand of cards with them.

  “So you’re back in, then?” asked Grimassi, throwing a few chips into the pot. “I mean, you’ve got to be, right? You’re a national hero now.”

  “It’s not quite that simple,” I said. “They had to keep my name out of all the papers because they could hardly admit to the Bureau’s actual role in all of this. But they saved my life, rolling up right after the explosion like they did and got me to the hospital. Better than that, they’ve released a public statement clearing me of all responsibility for what went wrong in Hennington. Alvin told me they’d review my file, see what the FBI could do for me. But I have to heal up first.”

  “They should really give you a medal,” said Violet. She dealt the hand, and I was mildly irritated to see that I had no one-eyed jacks or suicide kings, the two wild cards in the middle school version of poker we were playing.

  “I have just one question,” said Bruce Putnam, the only one of the three who had even been slightly friendly to me back in Hennington. “So you were deep undercover, right? On some sort of illegal, unofficial basis?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  I threw three cards down, and Violet handed me three more. No suicide kings or one-eyed jacks among them.

  “So, how did you do it? How did you outwit a man everybody acknowledges to have been a genius? How did you bring down Ultima Thule?”

  “Yeah,” said Grimassi. “How’d you do it, Holder?”

  “Well, you see,” I said. I pushed a big stack of my chips across the table, betting big despite my weak hand. “I actually had the good fortune to meet a professional poker player once. Vegas level. And he gave me a few tips on a strategy that has always stayed with me.”

  Their eyes went to my chips, then back to their own hands, then back to my chips again.

  “He told me that there are really four points you need to know to be successful in poker. The first one is naturally when to hold on to your cards.”

  “Go on,” said Bruce Putnam.

  “Not me,” said Grimassi. “I’m folding. Holder’s got a big hand, that’s just too obvious.”

  “And that’s the second point,” I said. “It’s equally important to recognize those moments when it’s more strategically advantageous to fold.”

  “Oh, hold on a minute…” said Violet.

  “The third point is to know when you really ought to just walk away from the table.”

  “You son of a bitch,” said Bruce. G
rimassi groaned.

  “And the fourth and most important point is to know when to run. When Vitalius Kohl started talking about the glorious culmination of all his plans, I knew the tungsten rod was about to drop. So I made a run for it, and got away from the building just in time.”

  “But there’s one thing I’ve never understood,” said Violet. “Oh hell, I’ll fold too. Anyone who can work a Willie Nelson joke into his apocalypse story like that is obviously holding a great hand. But here’s what I still want to know.”

  “Go on,” I said. I was feeling indulgent.

  “The rod was programmed to hit Washington DC. If there’s one thing I know about Gavin Holder, it’s that the man I know is no computer expert. So how did you know it was going to hit the Quod Corporation instead?”

  “Because a man named Kumar, a fearless man who deserved much better than what he got, changed the GPS coordinates just before the rocket took off.”

  “Kumar?” said Grimassi. “Was he FBI too?”

  “No, not at all. He was a member of some sort of vigilante group that had also infiltrated the Quod Corporation. In fact, they caught poor Kumar not too long after and tortured him to death under suspicion of being a spy. But he never told them about me, and he never told them about the altered GPS coordinates. I wasn’t even sure he’d pulled it off, not till that firebolt came down from the sky behind us and blew Vitalius Kohl to Kingdom Come.”

  “That’s kind of amazing,” said Bruce. “That guy deserves a medal even more than you do. He’ll never get one though.”

  “No. He won’t. Now are you going to fold and give me my money, or are you going to make me take it from you?”

  “I’ll fold.” He sighed. “Some people are just born lucky, Holder.”

  “Some people maybe. But not me. High card queen.”

  I held out my worthless hand for everyone to see, and raked their chips over to my side of the table.

  Chapter 50

  There was a note on my door when I got home. I don’t know how it got there exactly, but it doesn’t really matter. Someone tacked it to my door, which means that someone knew exactly where I lived. How did they know that? I don’t know. But it’s not too hard to find these things out, not unless you go far out of your way to keep it from happening.

  I saw the envelope, plucked it from my door without too much thought, and went inside. I dropped the envelope on the coffee table, went into the kitchen and took out a glass, dropped some ice in the glass, and poured a splash of Grey Goose. Then I went back to the couch. On the front of the envelope, it said “To Chaos,” referring to my street name when I was a homeless gutter punk. That alone was curious because not too many people would even know to call me that.

  I opened the envelope and took the letter out, took a sip of Grey Goose, and then stopped dead. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. And yet there it was.

  Gavin, you know who this is. There’s no point in looking for me because I’m not in DC and I never was. I had someone deliver this.

  I don’t know how you did it, but what happened to Vitalius and Theresa has been all over the news. I can’t tell you how scared I’ve been, seeing Father become famous suddenly and wondering if he would somehow find me. Now he never will, and I will always remember who did that for me.

  Well, not for me maybe but still. I did so many bad things, and so many of them were to you, Gavin, and that hurts so bad. The one person I should never have hurt, the one person who loved me. But that’s just how it goes.

  If you had any idea what it was like to be raised by those monsters… but never mind that. After everything I’ve done to you, I don’t even have the right to ask for sympathy or understanding.

  Just take out your mom’s old pocket watch sometimes and think of me, yeah?

  Love,

  JC

  PS – Actually, forget about the pocket watch. You don’t owe me that. Just be happy.

  I put the letter back down, leaned back on the couch for a moment, then let out a deep sigh. It felt like letting something go.

  “Okay, Jackie,” I said quietly. “Will do.”