by Draker, Paul
CHAPTER 82
I glanced in the rearview mirror again, and what I saw made me tighten my grip on the wheel. Spread across the cloudless blue sky behind us, I could now see a formation of several dozen black specks, laid out in a precise arrow-shaped wedge, like jets at an air show.
OctoRotors.
Cassie turned her head to look. As we watched, two of them dropped out of formation to hover and were quickly left behind.
“Still think they can’t follow us outside?” she said. “There’s the answer to the Wi-Fi question, Trevor. The OctoRotors are ad hoc wireless network repeaters, too.”
I had the accelerator jammed to the floor, but the massive weight of the DU armor made Roger’s Humvee sluggish. Our speedometer hovered just below seventy miles per hour, which—according to Kate—was about the same as an OctoRotor’s top speed. I watched another pair of specks stop in midair as the rest came onward.
In my mind, I could picture how the whole scene looked from above: the lonely black ribbon of road with the lake on one side and alkali scrub on the other, the Humvee a small, boxy shape moving along the road with frustrating slowness. A half-mile behind it and fifty feet above, a dozen laser-straight, evenly spaced rows of black drones vectoring in pursuit, like a squadron of miniature bombers, or like angry wasps streaming from a disturbed nest to chase a fleeing armadillo.
Like hooks strung on an invisible line unreeling through the sky after us, every six or seven hundred feet another pair of flyers would peel off to hover, relaying signals onward: commands from the monstrous queen wasp that hunkered back at the nest, protected by its drones and by soldiers—an entire military base full of unwitting humans whom Frankenstein had conned.
But not all of them were unwitting.
“Blake,” I said. “Someone caught him at his storage facility in Reno and beat the shit out of him, just like McNulty. Told him I wanted him dead.”
Cassie’s helmet nodded. “PETMAN couldn’t have cut the hole in the fence to take McNulty to the geyser. And he couldn’t have wedged Bennett’s arms and jaw through the coolant coils.”
“It wasn’t any robot that killed McNulty and Bennett and beat up Blake,” I said. “Frankenstein’s got a human assistant.”
“Why do you sound surprised?” she said. “You’ve given your protégé a crash course in lying, blackmail, extortion, and intimidation, Trevor. Computers take what humans teach them, and then do it faster and more efficiently. With Frankenstein’s bandwidth and processing power…”
“He can manipulate dozens of people at the same time.” I gritted my teeth. “And when all else fails, he can just fucking bribe them, using the twelve million dollars he stole from us.”
In the rearview mirror, I watched the swarm of OctoRotors descend until they were skimming a dozen feet above the road’s surface, a hundred yards behind us.
Cursing, I stomped the pedal harder, trying my best to mash it into the foot well. The overweight truck would go no faster.
The pursuing flyers changed formation again and again, churning through one complex geometrical pattern after another. Biomimetic learning—they were optimizing their group flight pattern in three dimensions, just like a flock of birds drafting each other, seeking the minimum-energy configuration. They finally settled on a whirling, shifting cloud of concentric circles that allowed them to eke out a couple of extra miles per hour.
It was enough.
The distance between the front edge of the spinning cloud and our rear bumper shrank to fifty yards, then twenty-five, then fifteen. The swarm darkened the air behind us.
“Here they come,” I said.
The phone buzzed in my pocket again, and my breaths sped up.
I was afraid.
If Frankenstein truly thought like I did, then he wasn’t calling now to threaten me. Only the weak made threats to announce their intent. No, I knew what this call would be.
A disabling suckerpunch I hadn’t seen coming.
I pulled the phone out and glanced at the screen, and my insides contracted at the sight of my wife’s name. I handed the phone to Cassie.
“Speaker phone,” I croaked, returning both hands to the wheel. My knuckles were white.
“You want to talk to your ex now?” Cassie said.
I nodded. She held the phone up near the open face of my helmet and punched the button. Jen’s voice filled the car, shrill with fury.
“I’ll kill you!” she shrieked. “How could you do this to me, you son of a bitch! Unfit mother? I’m an unfit mother?”
The world went gray as the implications of her words hit me like a train.
“Tell me you have Amy!” I bellowed into the phone. My voice broke apart. “Tell me she’s with you right now!”
“How could she be with me? You had them take her off the plane before it left!”
The Humvee swerved violently.
“Who took Amy off the plane?” I screamed. “WHO?”
Jen went silent. “Oh no,” she said in a broken little voice. It was the worst thing I had ever heard. “No… no… no…”
A blare of horns and screeching tires in the background behind Jen’s voice.
I started crying.
“Jen… where are you?” I asked. “Where are you right now?”
“About to pass Donner Lake,” she sobbed. “I’m coming up there, you bastard—”
“You can’t!” I howled. “Stay away. It’s not safe.”
“What have you done!” she screamed. “Who did you piss off THIS time, Trevor?” Her voice wound up through the registers, higher and higher, with lung-shredding intensity. “Who. Has. Our. DAUGHTER?”
Hovering shapes descended in front of the windshield and darkened the side windows. The cloud of OctoRotors engulfed the Humvee truck like a swarm of stinging wasps. Small manipulator arms probed and tested the seams between the Beast’s panels. I could see more of the flyers dropping out of sight to slip beneath the undercarriage.
“Why are you texting me a picture now?” Jen sobbed in my ear, and my heart seized.
“Jen, don’t look at it!” I screamed. “Get off the road! Pull over, stop the car, but whatever you do, DON’T LOOK!”
A second of terrible silence.
Then Jen shrieked—a sound of bottomless horror.
The sustained screech of tires drowned out her voice.
Time slowed.
I squeezed my eyes shut and howled as the loud bang-crump of rending metal blared from the phone’s speaker.
The sound of Jen’s two-ton Audi pancaking into something immovable.
CHAPTER 83
An inhuman howling filled the car—a ragged cry of pain that went on and on, ringing in my ears and locking every muscle of my body rigid with its earsplitting volume.
The Humvee lurched as its tires thudded onto the rocky shoulder. I opened my eyes, seeing Cassie’s helmet pressed against mine, her hands tight on top of my own, steadying the wheel. My throat hurt. She was crying, saying something, but I couldn’t hear her over my own nonstop roar of agony.
Blurred by my tears, black shapes hovered and crawled across the windows—Frankenstein’s OctoRotor drones. I clamped my jaw shut and cranked the wheel hard to the right. The Beast bounced across the shoulder and side-swiped the high, sandy berm alongside the road, knocking Cassie’s hands free and sending her helmet cracking against mine.
The collision with the roadside berm crushed a half-dozen OctoRotors against the doors and scraped them away. I did it again, and an explosion of dirt and rock sprayed across the hood, knocking more of the flyers out of the air and sweeping away the ones blocking the windshield, too.
On my side, a damaged OctoRotor hung bouncing from the broken hood latch, trying to cut the rest of the way through it. Another clung to the snorkel rising from the Humvee’s engine. Suddenly remembering why the snorkel was there, I threw the wheel to the left and sent us bouncing across the road, down the gravelly beach and into the lake.
The Humvee churned
bumper-deep through the water, throwing up arching sprays that swept away OctoRotors on both sides. I felt them grinding to pieces inside the flooded wheel wells, too—caught and drowned while trying to disassemble our suspension.
Flanked by twenty-foot curtains of white spray, I drove the Beast parallel to the road, keeping its hood a foot above the surface. The accelerator never left the floor, but the water’s drag held our speed below forty. Drawing air through the snorkel, the submerged engine never missed a beat.
Five or six OctoRotors had found a safe spot to hover, right in front of the windshield. Another dozen swirled directly overhead. Two dropped away and were swept backward into the sky, joining the invisible line of wireless connectivity that stretched from the base. The swarm was thinning.
Undoing her seat belt, Cassie scrambled into a kneeling position on the seat. She lowered her window a few inches and shoved the fire extinguisher’s nozzle through the gap, jetting a blast of white foam at the group of OctoRotors hovering in front of the windshield. She swept them away before they could disperse, sending them tumbling to disappear into the water’s spray. Then she aimed the nozzle at the group above us, but they climbed out of range. Two more peeled away.
The remaining ten OctoRotors formed two arrow-straight lines at a safe distance, one on each side of the Beast. They rocketed past us, streaming by at a thirty-mile-per-hour differential and shrinking into the distance ahead.
When they were a quarter mile away, I swung the wheel and we lurched back across the beach and onto the road, accelerating back up to seventy.
Dropping the extinguisher, Cassie dialed three digits on my phone. She tore off her helmet and raised the phone to her ear.
“What was Jen driving?” she shouted.
Between chest-crushing keens, I managed to squeeze out “Silver Audi A4.”
A moment later, Cassie was speaking to the 9-1-1 dispatcher, reporting a serious accident on I-80 near Donner Lake.
Something dawned on me then, layering guilt on top of my horror.
I snatched the phone from her hand and slammed it against the dashboard again and again, feeling it splinter and then shatter. Shards of glass cut my palm. Unrolling the window, I threw the fragments out.
I dug Cassie’s phone out of her purse, and before she could grab my wrist, I flung it out the window, too.
“What are you doing!” she asked.
“The text that killed Jen,” I snarled through my tears. “Frankenstein sent it from my phone.”
“Don’t say that,” Cassie shouted. “You don’t know that she’s dead.”
I shook my head. “I do know, because he timed it. He waited until Jen was on the most dangerous section of road, right above Donner Lake, alongside a cliff.” A sob tore out of my mouth. “He knew exactly where she was, Cassie. My phone, the phone in your purse, the phones I sent Jen and Amy—I jail-broke all of them. The custom app code Frankenstein used to murder my wife? I fucking installed it for him!”
Cassie gasped. “Then maybe it wasn’t nine-one-one I just spoke to.”
“Frankenstein hid his own app code inside mine,” I said. “For weeks, he’s been using GPS to track Jen, Amy, you, me—all of us. Even when we’re not using our phones to call anyone, he’s been listening to every word we say.”
A half mile up the road, two lines of black specs climbed in swooping arcs. The twin trains of OctoRotors folded over each other, converged, and dropped back down to form a single speck at windshield height. The speck—a single-file line of ten closely-spaced drones—grew rapidly, racing toward us head-on at a relative speed of 140 miles per hour. Ninety pounds of steel and carbon fiber, aimed at a single spot on the glass, directly in front of my face.
Frankenstein wanted to play chicken.
“Okay, you motherfucker,” I said through tears and gritted teeth. “Let’s see who flinches.”
The accelerator was already floored.
“Nash equilibrium, Trevor,” Cassie said. “He won’t back down, and he knows you won’t. Break off.”
“Get your helmet back on and fasten your seat belt,” I said. It took her less than two seconds.
The speck got larger and larger, showing no signs of swerving.
“Ballistic glass won’t stop eighty pounds of projectile,” she said, her voice urgent.
“Ninety,” I said.
“Break off now.”
“Don’t interfere.”
I focused my entire concentration on the train of OctoRotors screaming toward my head at two hundred feet per second.
The last possible instant for a swerve came and went.
I didn’t blink.
A half-second later, I yanked the parking brake.
Cassie and I were thrown forward, our helmets bouncing off the glass. The Humvee’s front-hinged hood, unrestrained by the broken latches on either side, flipped open, blocking the windshield.
With a ripple of closely spaced bangs, the train of OctoRotors cratered into the DU-reinforced steel of the upright hood.
Wheels locked, the Beast skidded to a halt on the shoulder, and the hood fell back into place with a resounding bang. The shattered remains of the last ten flyers slid off its sides and pattered onto the dirt.
I opened the heavy door, stumbled out, and fell to my knees at the side of the road. Barely got my helmet off in time. And then I was retching, my stomach turning inside out and bringing up nothing.
Before Cassie could make it around the car to help me I stood up.
“You need to get away from me,” I said. “Frankenstein’s got Amy, and he’s going to use her to control me. He’ll force me to deliver you to him.”
“Then I’ll go to him voluntarily,” she said. “I don’t think he wishes me harm.”
“It doesn’t matter whether he does or not,” I said. “Once he’s got you, he no longer needs to control me.”
“We can’t deal with this ourselves, Trevor,” she said. “We need help. But we can’t trust anyone associated with the base: MPs, Navy, Homeland Security, DARPA personnel—Frankenstein could have gotten to any or all of them. I can’t go to my uncle, either. I’m not even allowed on the reservation anymore. Other than Billy, no Paiute will listen to me. But maybe if I call Gray—”
“What use is a fucking Washington bureaucrat?” I asked. “We need people with guns, here now, helping to find my daughter.”
“Even if we find someone in law enforcement we can trust, it’ll take forever to convince them we aren’t nuts. We’re going to say a computer kidnapped Amy?” Cassie shook her head. “At the same time, base personnel will be telling the cops we’ve stolen secrets and they need to turn us over to the MPs as an urgent matter of national security.”
I was thinking hard.
“Drop me off in Sutcliffe,” I said. “Take the truck. Find Evan Peterson from the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department—he and his partner, Ken Zajicek, hate me already, so we’ll make this real easy for them. You tell ’em I killed McNulty and Bennett and I kidnapped you, because the three of you were about to blow the whistle on a toxic nuclear dump and I wanted to keep it secret.”
“That’s demented, Trevor.”
“It’s the quickest way to get them hunting for Amy,” I said. “Tell them you got away from me, but I’m not working alone. I had an unknown partner abduct my daughter because I lost custody of her…”—I retched, then fought to get myself under control again—“…t-to my wife. Tell them they need to find Amy ASAP, because she’s in danger. And they need to keep you safe somewhere, too, because I might come after you again.”
“If I agree to this craziness, what are you going to be doing?” she asked.
“I’m going to find Amy,” I said. “I’m going to get her back.”
CHAPTER 84
The blue strip of signage above the Crosby Lodge convenience store advertised fishing supplies, Indian crafts, ice, beer, wine, and liquor, as well as the motel rooms themselves. I paced back and forth beneath the awning in front, the duffel
slung over my shoulder, desperately trying to fend off the black waves of despair that threatened to leave me paralyzed, unable to act.
Cassie was speaking to her brother on the beat-up pay phone outside. Even in my fog of grief, I was surprised that, in the age of smartphones and the Internet, such a crusty old artifact still worked.
Hanging up the black Bakelite receiver, she stepped out of the glass booth, her face torn by conflicting emotions. Then she ran over and threw her arms around me.
“Trevor, listen to me,” she said. “Jen’s alive. She’s in critical condition—the chopper is flying her to RRMC’s trauma center right now. But she’s alive.”
I didn’t hear the rest, because my legs went out from under me, and I fell against the wall. Jen wasn’t dead. I hadn’t killed her.
My chest convulsed. “I need to see her,” I gasped.
“You can’t.” Cassie’s arms tightened around me. “The cops are already looking for you. They found your Mustang parked in the desert just outside Flanigan. Blake was in the trunk. Dead.”
I closed my eyes, feeling a wave of guilt. My advice had killed him.
“Dead how?” I asked.
“Shot in the head,” she said. “The rifle was in the car, too, with your fingerprints on it.”
I shook my head then realized it didn’t really matter much—it would just make their believing Cassie’s story even easier.
Only one thing mattered right now: finding Amy and getting her back.
Even if Jen never spoke to me again and never wanted to see me again, I would deliver our daughter to her, safe and whole. Whatever happened to me afterward wasn’t important.
I opened the door to the Beast. “Get in,” I said to Cassie. “You need to go right now, before this mess I’ve made ends up killing you, too.”
She grabbed me again and kissed me hard on the mouth. “I’d tell you to be careful but I know you won’t, so…” She started crying. “…just don’t die, Trevor. Please don’t die on me.” She stroked my face with her long, smooth fingers. “Maybe one day, we—”
