by Paul Mceuen
Jake picked up the balloon. Something was inside it.
Jake ripped the balloon away, the rubber old and brittle. Inside, he discovered a rectangular metal box the size of a paperback book. Jake guessed it was made of titanium. The box was featureless except for a thin, almost invisible seam at its midsection and an index card–sized display panel on top. The panel sprang to life, turning a soft white in response to Jake’s touch.
Words appeared on the screen.
ENTER #1
Orchid stared at the box for a long moment, then said, “Touch your right index finger to the pad.”
Jake did as ordered. The words on the screen faded, then said:
IDENTITY #1 ACCEPTED
ENTER #2
Orchid said, “Take it to Dylan.”
Jake understood. Liam had programmed it so that only Jake and Dylan could open it. Jake guessed that Maggie’s prints would open it, too. Any two of them.
He carried the box to Dylan, the boy’s hands still cuffed together.
Dylan looked terrified.
“Hang in there,” Jake said. “You never know when the blueberries will come.”
Dylan seemed to understand. It was one of his elephant jokes. It wasn’t blueberries that would be coming. It would be elephants.
Jake held the box out. Dylan touched his finger to the pad.
The screen changed again, said:
IDENTITY #2 ACCEPTED
Jake stepped back. He heard a click. He opened the lid.
Inside was a layer of gray clay. Pushed into it was a thin brass cylinder, perhaps an inch long and thin as the ink cartridge in a ballpoint pen. Jake guessed what it was. Liam had told Jake how on their missions the Japanese Tokkō had carried the Uzumaki in small brass cylinders.
“Put it down,” Orchid said. “On that table.”
Jake ignored her. He carefully removed the cylinder from the box. The thickness changed slightly midway along, where there was a seam. The two halves were threaded, then screwed together. Unscrew the two halves, release the contents, and millions of people would die.
“Professor Sterling.”
He glanced up at Orchid. He saw the excitement written on her face. This was it. This was when she was most vulnerable.
“Put it down on that table. Then reconnect your cuff,” Orchid said.
Jake turned to face her. He held the cylinder tight in his right hand.
“Put it down,” she said, raising the gun to point it directly at his skull.
Jake said, “No.”
EVERY GOOD SOLDIER KEPT A THREAD, A LIFELINE TO THEIR larger self. The lifeline was a rock-solid anchor, a fixed point that would allow them to act for the greater good no matter what the cost, to put aside any fear or hesitation. For some it was a connection to a particular person: a wife, a parent, or a child. For others it was an idea, a belief in the rightness of their task. For Jake, it had been his belief that a soldier’s suffering, given or received, prevented a still larger suffering. That had been his anchor during the Gulf War. It let him come back from what they had done.
Soldiers without an anchor were time bombs. Once they left the military, once freed from the structure of regimen and hierarchy, these souls became lost. The darkness in Orchid’s eyes said she was capable of anything. She had killed Vlad at close range, without a thought. She had tortured Liam Connor in an unimaginably gruesome fashion. She would set off a pandemic as easily as another might kill a fly.
She could not be allowed to have the cylinder.
Jake glanced at Dylan. He was watching everything closely, intently. He was terrified but still very aware of his surroundings. He knew something was coming. He was ready.
“Give it to me,” Orchid said to Jake. “Or he will pay.”
“All right,” Jake said, swinging his arm back. “Here. Catch.”
Jake tossed the cylinder.
For Jake, the world slowed to quarter speed. Orchid reached out with her free hand. She couldn’t help it, the desire to catch from the air what she most desired. But the cylinder was outside of her grasp. Jake had not tossed it to Orchid. He tossed it toward Dylan.
Orchid lost her focus for just a split second. Her gun hand drifted slightly. Jake was already moving toward her. She was off balance now, trying to recover, and she overcompensated. She tried to do two things at once. She tried to bring the gun back to Jake and fire. And she simultaneously went to tap out the sequence on her leg to shock him.
Twice meant neither. Both were slowed by a split second. The split second that Jake gained was enough. Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Dylan catch the cylinder. At the same instant, Orchid fired, but the bullet missed, screaming past Jake’s right ear.
Jake caught her square and they both went down, the gun skittering away across the concrete. Jake landed a blow on her cheek. He felt the crunch of bone, and she seemed to go limp, her hands at her sides.
Zap! The electricity hit him like a hammer, every nerve in his body firing at once. He fought it, forcing himself to focus through the fireworks going off in his head. He felt as though his entire body were on fire.
He grabbed her right hand and pulled her fingers back, breaking at least one of them. He gritted his teeth, growling through them to keep focused, and tapped her broken hand against her leg, trying to reproduce the sequence that would stop the electric shocks. He smashed her hand again and again against her leg, losing his ability to think. He held on to her tightly, but she was like an eel in his grasp, twisting and turning.
“Dylannn, ruhhh! Ruhhhh,” he dribbled out, the words barely understandable, his teeth chattering, his stomach convulsing. He threw up.
Jake held on and Orchid fought, Jake’s thoughts reduced to a single command: Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze. In the strange contours of his electrified mind, he had become a python, choking his prey to death.
They were like this, Jake holding her, the shocks hitting him in waves. He had no idea how long this went on. Seconds? Minutes? All he was aware of was the continuous chatter of the impulses running up and down every nerve in his body.
Then suddenly Orchid was free of his grasp. He reached for her, but his arms curled up like a dying spider, every muscle contracting, every nerve firing at once. He could no longer see Orchid. He could no longer see anything but burst after burst of searing white light.
He could form only one thought: Run.
34
DYLAN RAN.
He bolted out of the bunker, brass cylinder in his hand. He ran as fast as he could down the middle of the road, back the way they’d come, heading instinctively to his mother.
After a few hundred yards he realized that is exactly what Orchid would expect him to do. He turned right, running as fast as he could between two of the bunkers. The weeds sliced and grabbed at him, his side already starting to ache. He knew he was making all kinds of noise, but he had to get away. He would reach the next road, then turn back in the direction of the FedEx van. Was it better to run down the road? Or stick to the grass?
He heard a slam in the distance, what he took to be the closing of the bunker door. He stopped and listened. Who was closing it? Jake? Orchid?
Please let it be Jake. He wanted to run back, to Jake.
But it might not be Jake.
He started forward again, running fast. He’d heard footsteps. In the weeds.
It had to be Orchid. Jake would call out.
He looked down at the brass cylinder in his hand. Dylan understood. This was the most important task that he’d ever faced. Maybe that he would ever face.
She couldn’t get it. No matter what.
He had to hide.
The big metal door on the bunker to his right was open a few inches. He was drawn to it, a primordial instinct, seek shelter in a cave. He ducked inside, just able to slip through.
It was dark inside, pitch-black. Not like the other one with the glowing Fusarium.
He wanted to pull the door closed behind him, but that would make a noise. Go
all the way in. He’d be safe. There was no way she could check them all.
He stepped deeper into the bunker.
The darkness swallowed him.
The bunker was in bad shape, damp and leaky. The smell of mold was strong. He walked with his hands in front until he found the back wall. He moved as far as he could from the strip of moonlight that leaked in through the partially open door.
He crouched down, cold and scared. He listened carefully for any sound, trying not to breathe. All he heard was a steady drip of water. He wanted to go inside himself, to hide far away.
The blackness was absolute. Darker than anyplace he’d ever been.
Otherwise, he would have never noticed them.
On his shirt sleeves were tiny pinpricks of glowing light, slowly pulsing on and off. Bits of glowing fungus were still clinging to his clothes.
ORCHID SCANNED LEFT AND RIGHT, LOOKING FOR ANY SIGN of the boy with her night-vision goggles. She cradled her gloved right hand in her left. The son of a bitch Sterling had broken two of her fingers. She’d kicked him senseless, then had grabbed her backpack and filled it with Connor’s fluorescent fungus, scraping it off the metal trays as fast as she could.
She’d tripped the electronic controller near the main door that activated the self-destruct mechanism, a series of incendiary devices she had placed in strategic positions inside the bunker. She had always planned to destroy Connor’s hideaway. In two minutes, there would be no traces left of anything inside, all of Connor’s work turned to ash. And now Jake Sterling would be ash, too.
She just had to deal with the boy.
He had a head start, and the Seneca Army Depot was a huge damned place. If he decided to hide, she would never find him in time. It would take days to search all the bunkers. And she didn’t have days. She had only minutes. Soon the explosion would go off and this place would be crawling with people. She had to get the cylinder, get back to the FedEx van, and head to the border.
Stick to basics. Keep looking.
Orchid checked up and down the empty road between the bunkers. Which way?
Then she saw something odd. She almost missed it, thought it was a flicker in the noise in her infrared CCDs.
But there it was again. A tiny blinking light. She took off her glasses, and it vanished. It was so faint, she could see it only with the goggles.
She jogged over to investigate. It was a tiny piece of fungus, stuck to a blade of grass. The blinking fungus.
She wiped it onto the finger of her glove. It must be on his clothes.
She scanned the weeds around her. In a few seconds she saw another little glowing patch. Then another, like bread crumbs.
The trail was almost too easy to follow.
JAKE REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS SLOWLY. HE FELT AS THOUGH he’d been beaten with a hammer, every muscle aching and pulsing as he sat up. The room was dark, save for the glowing fungi and a flashing red light near the door.
How long had he been out? He had no idea. He tried to remember what had happened. At first his memories were jumbled, like a jangly, disjointed dream. But after a few seconds his thoughts popped into their proper place. The digging. The cylinder. The struggle.
Dylan.
He jumped to his feet and tried to open the door. He pushed on it hard, looking for a handle but finding none. He threw himself against it. The massive thing didn’t budge an inch.
It must be locked from the outside. He’d never get through it.
He turned to inspect the blinking red light next to the sealed door. A timer. Fifty-four seconds and counting down.
Oh, shit. Jake had been in the 46th Engineer Battalion. They worked with explosives all the time. He recognized the box for what it was: a timer counting down a destruct sequence. Three dots below the numbers told Jake there were three explosives.
He picked up the timer, looking for wires. None. It was wireless, he was sure.
“Damn it!” he yelled, the sound echoing in the sealed bunker. He knew the design—the timer had a fail-safe mechanism so it couldn’t be disarmed once the destruct sequence had begun. Once started, the timer put out a steady signal to the bombs. When the signal terminated, the explosives detonated. If you disabled or destroyed the timing unit, the signal would cease and the bombs would go off immediately.
His only chance was to find the bombs.
The first one was easy, taped into a corner near the door. It was sealed in a plastic shell. There was no way he could disarm it without setting it off.
Jake scanned the place, looking for cover. The only light was from the glowing fungi.
The numbers in the corner counted down.
Forty seconds.
There must be ventilation in these bunkers. Jake scanned the walls, up high. On the back wall, and the end of the chamber, was a HEPA filter unit designed to remove any particulates. He pulled over a table, jumped up, and ripped out the unit. Beyond it was a thin passageway in the concrete, maybe wide enough for him to crawl through, maybe not. At the far end he saw a metal grating—cast iron, he guessed. No way he could get through that in time.
He’d have to let the explosives do it for him.
He tossed the first explosive into the vent, then searched for the others. The second one he found in the back corner of the room. He grabbed it and tossed it into the vent with the first. But where was number three? He checked the timer. Ten seconds left.
Nine, eight…
Damn it, where?
Jake turned over tables, looking everywhere. Then it hit him. She’d want an explosive in the ventilation passageway. An explosion there would create a pressure wave that pushed inward, sealing in the roiling heat and pressure from the other two bombs. The three explosions together would turn the bunker into a high-pressure, high-temperature inferno, incinerating everything inside.
There was only one problem. He hadn’t seen a bomb in the vent passageway.
Five seconds. Four…
Jake ran to the HEPA filter on the floor. He ripped off the back panel.
Three.
Two.
There it was. Jake grabbed it, did a hook shot with the bomb into the vent chamber, and dove behind a table.
DYLAN HEARD THE BLAST AS HE COWERED IN THE CORNER.
His whole body was shaking. He wanted more than anything to cry out, to scream and holler and draw the attention of someone. Anyone. But his mother was tied up and drugged. Jake? He didn’t know about Jake. He prayed that Jake was out there, but he knew that he wasn’t. Jake would be calling his name. The only person who would be searching for him without calling his name would be the woman. Orchid.
There it was again. Footsteps outside.
He looked at the cylinder in his hands. He had to get rid of it. Jake had trusted him. He tried to figure out what Jake would want him to do.
Why hadn’t he thrown it in the bushes? There was nowhere to hide it here. If she found him, she would get it.
Dripping water. He heard dripping water. Where did it go?
He thought of the other bunker. It had a drain in the floor, in the middle of the room. Maybe this one did, too.
He crawled on his hands and knees in the direction he thought was the center of the bunker.
What could he do? Swallow the cylinder? No. If she knew what he’d done, she could… The thought made Dylan shudder. Then how?
Then Dylan realized he didn’t have to keep the cylinder from her. The dangerous stuff was inside. What if he emptied it out? Gave her an empty cylinder? How would she know?
He tried to twist it open, felt the threads give. The rectangle of light at the door to the bunker flickered. Be brave, Dylan, he told himself.
The shadows at the door shifted. Orchid was out there. He rapidly unscrewed the cylinder. Turned it upside down over the grating to dump the contents.
What?
He was pretty sure nothing came out. He took half of it, tapped it on the floor. Nothing.
The other half dinked onto the concrete and rolled away.
Was it empty? Could the cylinder already be empty? Why would Pop-pop hide an empty cylinder?
Surface tension. Pop-pop had taught him how bugs could slide along the surface of the water, held up by surface tension. He also told him how hard it was to get liquids out of small spaces in rocks, for the same reason. He’d demonstrated with a thin little straw, about the same size as the cylinder. You get water inside, you couldn’t get it out by shaking.
There was only one way to get it out. Negative pressure.
Suck it out.
Be brave.
Dylan saw Orchid’s shadow in the doorway. “Don’t move,” she said.
Dylan placed the half-cylinder to his lips and sucked on it. The liquid hit his mouth, salty. He spit it out. Into the drain, spitting and spitting, trying to get it all out.
He was shaking, scared to death. He looked around him. Where was the other half of the cylinder?
WHEN JAKE CAME TO, HE COULDN’T HEAR A THING.
The blast had left him dazed, ears ringing, with a brutal aching in his skull. He tried speaking, but his voice sounded muffled, barely audible.
But he was alive.
He coughed, tried to stand. The air was searing hot, the chamber full of smoke. He couldn’t see anything, couldn’t breathe without his lungs burning. He found the ventilation shaft, grabbed it and pulled himself into it, his hands burning from the heat. Unable to breathe, he crawled forward, then pushed out the remnants of the grating and fell out headfirst, dropping ten feet to the earth like a bag of rocks.
The first gulp of air was the sweetest he’d ever tasted.
He coughed and spit, his lungs still on fire, his hands covered with blisters. He staggered around to the front of the bunker, but he saw no one.
He called out, “Dylan!” But he barely heard his own voice.
He started running down the middle of the road. “Dylan!”
He saw nothing at the first juncture. Just rows and rows of bunkers. He couldn’t hear anything. He felt as though his head were full of bees.
