Camouflage

by Aaron Pogue

  She stopped halfway to the bottom when a break in the trees gave her another chance view of the uplink. Closer, now. So close. If she'd had a rifle, she thought, she could put a bullet through it from here and get her life back. But she guessed she was still at least a quarter mile away, and if Timmy's notes were right, the device was a hundred feet in the air even when she got to it. She wasn't sure what she intended to do. If it had a wire running down the pole, she could cut or break it easily enough. That seemed a little too easy, though. If it was wireless, she could maybe try firing straight up at it—

  She put the thought from her mind. This close, it made more sense to just get there and then figure it out. Still...she was stopped. She listened to the night, vastly quiet in all directions. She couldn't know what waited for her below, but she would figure it out when she got there.

  She checked both her guns, checked her watch, and then helped herself to another bottle of water. The chlorine was just strong enough to leave a thin, foul aftertaste on her tongue. She made herself drink the whole bottle. Then she strapped the backpack across both shoulders, more securely than she had before, and moved forward with the shotgun slanted across her chest. Ready.

  She didn't run now. She stalked, quiet and deadly, eyes constantly searching. It was tough. She wanted to sprint straight there, to end this nightmare, but too much depended on her right now. If she died here, she was practically gift-wrapped on the Gun Club's doorstep. They'd add Faye's body to hers before sunrise, and then they'd own this town.

  A shiver chased down her spine at the thought. She picked her way carefully on ahead, and it was only because she was moving so slowly that she spotted the spidersteel guyline cutting across her path. If she'd come through here at a run, it might have taken her head clean off. As it was, she stood staring for several seconds at the shimmering line that stretched through the air before she recognized it.

  She stepped forward, right up next to it, and peered up its length into the dark night. Limbs and leaves blocked her view, but she knew where it went. Straight to the top of the antenna pole. It was thinner than her pinkie finger and stronger than a braided steel rope even at that length. She followed it back and down, through a little thicket, to a giant concrete block three feet on an edge buried in the hillside.

  The cable plunged directly into the concrete, and Katie shook her head in dismay. With a sledgehammer and a couple hours, maybe she could have cut the cable free, but she didn't have either. And if Timmy's drawing was right, there were five more of these out there. Breaking this one cable wouldn't do much of anything.

  She looked at it sadly for a moment longer, then turned back downhill. At least she knew she was close now. She followed the line up into the sky one more time, then got her bearing off its angle and cut across the slope, down and to the right.

  A hundred yards down in that direction, she stepped out from the trees and, at the same time, lost the thin light overhead. She looked up, but the sky above her felt close and completely black. She couldn't even see the white glow of the beacon uplink that had drawn her all the way here. There was no sign of the guywires, either.

  Her handheld gave her enough light to see the area around her, though. It was cleared of trees, and it felt like a big open field—or almost like a cavern—stretching out before her and off to either side for maybe fifty yards. There was something flat and gray in the middle of it, and she crouched in the darkness and watched it.

  The bunker. She couldn't really make it out from here, just the slight lightness of it against the black background, but she drew up the memory of the square structure from Timmy's drawing. Fifteen feet by fifteen feet, roughly, and maybe ten feet tall. She had no idea if he'd done that to scale, but it felt about right.

  There was no sign of movement, no sound. Katie still waited, wondering if there was someone in there. Had Jim come back? Had Avery come after all? Was Eddie in there, waiting? She felt a growl rumbling low in her throat at the thought of it. Either way, she was here.

  She considered her options for a moment, then unbuckled the backpack and shrugged out of it. She stepped back into the trees and stowed it against the base of a tree. After a moment, she added the shotgun. She drew her handgun and held it out in front of her in firing position. She raised the handheld in her other hand, lighting her way, and pushed cautiously toward the building.

  It stood almost exactly as Timmy had drawn it, a heavy concrete structure, and Katie quickly realized the antenna rose directly out of it just like the guy wires in their bases. As she approached she shined some light toward the pole, but she saw no sign of wires wrapped around the outside of it. She'd have to go inside and hope to find something there.

  Easy enough. There was a door set into the concrete wall, in a shallow alcove probably meant to provide some little shelter from the rain. She felt a tremor of fear when she spotted the camera mounted directly above the door, staring straight at her, but it was too late to back away now. She went ahead to the door and tried it.

  There were keyholes for four heavy bolts in the face of the door, but it swung open easily when she tried it. She had a feeling that was a matter of Jim's carelessness. She silently thanked him for it and stepped through the door and into a narrow staircase.

  Concrete pressing close on both sides, she wound down and down into the darkness. It couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen feet, but it felt like miles, and she was constantly wondering what might be waiting for her around the turn. The darkness here was absolute apart from the pathetic light of her handheld. She spent a moment's regret wishing she'd brought the brighter flashlight from her pack, but she wouldn't waste the time to go back for it.

  She finally reached the bottom—another steel door, another four locks, and once again it moved easily beneath her hand. She shook her head and pushed it open.

  And then there was light. It was faint, the glow from a handful of medium-sized monitors, but it felt like daylight to Katie. She stepped in, lowered her handheld, and looked around.

  It was clearly a control room, fifteen by fifteen, with a modest little desktop and a computer tower blinking its little signal lights beneath. A countertop stretched the length of the opposite wall, maybe two feet deep, and a pair of monitors were mounted on each of the four walls like windows. They all showed closed-circuit camera footage.

  She saw the view of the camera that had watched her approach, operating in low-light mode that gave the whole scene an antique black-and-white feel but still captured most of the detail. Looking closer, she could clearly see the strap of her backpack sticking out from around the trunk of a tree. So much for that precaution.

  Looking at the four walls, she could get a good view of the area around the bunker, and it was much as she'd imagined—a large clearing—but it wasn't as empty as she'd imagined. She clearly saw a mess of tire tracks in the dirt floor to the north, and off to the west she saw an empty horse trailer resting on a concrete brick, and a small steel shed.

  But she couldn't imagine what they would need the storage for. Only half the monitors showed exterior camera footage. The other half showed the inside of storage rooms, dark, sprawling, and windowless. There was another steel door set in the west wall, opposite the door she'd come in through, and this one was closed and bolted fast.

  The monitor beside it showed a long corridor, wide enough for two men to pass side-by-side, and lined on the far side from end to end—probably a hundred feet along—with racks of weapons. She saw Tasers, handguns, assault rifles, and what looked like rocket launchers. The cameras were focused on the weapons, not the facing wall, but Katie had a feeling it held doors back into the other rooms.

  One was clearly a storage facility, five rows deep of shelves stocked with foodstuffs, huge barrels of fresh water, medical supplies, electronics parts, and ammunition. The other monitors showed sleeping quarters suited for a dozen but apparently unused, as well as a bathroom, a kitchen, and an extensive cafeteria with some signs it might double as a recr
eation area.

  The whole place felt extraordinarily expensive. Wade and Ken between them would've had the resources to finance it, but it brought her back to the same question she'd asked about the uplink. Why? Whether they could afford it or not, nobody spent this kind of money unless they had a reason. And even though she only had a quick glance to go on, none of the rooms behind the locked door really looked like they'd ever been used.

  The control room was another matter. A trashcan by the desk was filled to the brim with empty soda bottles, candy bar wrappers, and emptied bags of chips. She knelt next to it for a moment in the hopes of finding some kind of notes, something useful, but this was apparently the one place in town they didn't use paper notepads.

  She woke the desktop, but it wasn't running a Hathor operating system. It was clearly connected directly to the standalone machine underneath, and the desktop wanted a password before it would give her access. She tried "avery" and "leader," and then she gave up.

  Most of her attention was drawn to the workbench behind her. As soon as she'd come in the door, she'd recognized the devices spread across it. There were half a dozen SpectreShields in various states of disassembly. She wanted to rush straight to them, but that first glance had been enough to tell her none of these was the one ghosting her—none of them could have been operational like that—and curious as she was, she didn't have the understanding to do anything with a closer look.

  What she wanted to do was shut off her own, or shut off the antenna making it work. She scanned the room quickly, looking for any sign of wires that might run out to the antenna, but there were no likely candidates. She did find a thin twisted pair of filament wires running under the bottom edge of the desk, and down the wall, and back to a corner behind the trashcan. When she shoved that aside with her toe, she found a little brick of plastic explosive sitting unceremoniously on the floor.

  It was about the size of her fist and probably sufficient to destroy everything in the room. She scanned the monitors then, looking for more, and spotted possible candidates in two of the rooms. She was almost definite about the one in the corridor armory. She even thought she could make out the twisted wire. This whole place was rigged for instant demolition.

  She did what she could. She pulled the two leads out of the brick in the control room, folded one back as far from the other as she could, and then set them back on the floor about a foot from the explosive. Then she slid the trashcan back in place, hoping it would hide her feeble effort. If all the rooms around here were rigged, it might not make any difference at all, but she had to try.

  Then she went back to her search. She finally checked the SpectreShields on the countertop, but it only confirmed what she'd suspected. Not a one was functional, and apart from that she learned nothing from her inspection. She gave each of them a good smack with the butt of her gun, hoping to break the delicate internals, but she didn't have time to do a proper job.

  A moment later, a glance at the storeroom monitor above the counter revealed a familiar stamp on the side of one of the boxes in the electronics section. A crate that size could have held three dozen SpectreShields, even in individual packages. This handful meant nothing.

  Intriguing as it was, the room was small and spare enough that she was out of options in a matter of minutes. She tried three more times to guess the password for the computer, but it didn't work. Then she glanced up at the low concrete ceiling that hid a hundred-foot antenna above her head and wondered if maybe the computer ran the uplink.

  She got down on her knees and shut down the computer, pushing and holding the power button until its row of indicator lights all flashed at once, and then it shut off. She smiled to herself, grateful for the years she'd spent as a child playing with her dad's ancient machines, but a moment later her smile disappeared. The monitors on all four walls shut off at once, dropping her in complete darkness.

  She checked her watch. The ring was red. She shook her head. Even that wasn't necessary. She still had her headset on her ear. Even useless, it felt more natural than going without, and the moment she got network access back, it would be buzzing with updates. She pulled her handheld out again and let its error message light her way through one more search of the room. Then she headed back up the stairs.

  She was halfway to the top when she heard the growl of Avery's Jeep up above.

  10. An Old Friend

  She climbed three steps between the time she first heard the sound and the moment she recognized it for what it was. Then she flew the rest of the way up. Maybe if there'd been a light down below she would have frozen in a fit of indecision, but with the cold black of a tomb below her she didn't even hesitate.

  She climbed the spiral staircase three steps at a time and got to the heavy steel door just as the bright beams of the Jeep's headlights flashed past outside. It rumbled to a stop in the parking area she'd noticed off to the left, the bright white flood of its lights bathing the wide open space between her and the safety of the trees. It was twenty yards in the flat open. It felt like suicide, but waiting here was worse.

  She stepped up to the door, tensing to fling her body out, and then froze when she heard sounds from over by the Jeep.

  "Come on!" Avery shouted. "Dammit, we've got to hurry. I need to be back before sunrise, and he needs to be finished. Move your ass."

  "I'm moving," she heard, but she didn't recognize the voice. Ken's, she guessed, and he certainly wasn't the revered leader. Not the way Avery was talking to him.

  "What the hell have you been up to, anyway? I told you we needed this done—"

  "And I told you he's been no help!" Ken snapped back. "All he does is whine."

  A third voice spoke up, timid and hesitant. "But...but isn't he supposed to—" That was Jim.

  "He'll do the job," Avery snapped back. "Come on. You too. We'll need your help."

  Katie frowned, trying to figure out how many people had come with Avery. Had they given up on hunting her down? Or had Wade just given up using Jim as a helper? She risked a peek, but all she could see was the huge white glare of the Jeep's left headlight, and it left her blind even when she pulled back into the darkness of the staircase.

  She heard grunting from the direction of the Jeep, and a distinct groan of pain, and intense as her curiosity was, she knew this was her only chance. While they were distracted—if they were distracted—she had to go.

  She grabbed the doorframe with both hands and threw herself forward, hurling straight into a full sprint. She pounded across the packed earth, fast and quiet, aimed like an arrow straight for the spot she'd left her supplies.

  She needed that bag. And maybe the gun. She was out of options with the bunker a total bust. Her only chance now was to lie low until reinforcements came, and even if she evaded her captors she'd need Faye's supplies to survive much longer than a few hours. She could have gone faster without them—maybe she would have even escaped undetected—but she wasn't willing to risk it.

  So she bolted, straight across the opening, and she was two paces from the trees when she heard a heavy steel bang right behind her. It was the bunker's door, jostled by her start, slamming against the inside of the stairwell, and it echoed in the little cavern.

  All three men shouted, and she risked one look in their direction as she snatched up her bag. It was Avery and Ken, as she'd suspected, and there between them was Eddie. He had one arm around each of the other men's shoulders, and Jim was walking along one step ahead, carrying three rifles and a small black duffel bag that Katie recognized. She'd carried it into the hotel room for Eddie.

  Her stomach plunged. Across the clearing, Avery met her eyes, and his upper lip curled in a cruel sneer. All in the instant it took her to grab the bag's strap in one hand, the shotgun in the other. "Get her!" he bellowed, rage twisting his face, and she turned and ran.

  Uphill, back the way she'd come, but after ten seconds she remembered the steep slope she'd slid down and instead cut to the right, across the hill. She ducked und
er the guywire, ready for it, and then leaped over the brush that concealed its base, and sprinted on. She was in unfamiliar territory now, but the only way she knew would have left her cornered.

  She could hear him coming behind her. Jim. It had to be Jim. Avery and Ken had been burdened with Eddie. They would be after her soon enough, but she had the lead. Jim was the only one immediately on her tail.

  That gave her hope. She jumped to the top of a wide boulder and then turned on her heel and darted off to her left, ninety degrees from her earlier angle and uphill now. The trees were thinner here—for a moment, anyway—and she was able to unleash. She ran all-out for a hundred feet, then turned hard right and drove straight for some scrub. She vaulted over it, hoping not to leave a visible path, but she landed blind on the other side and her right ankle twisted under her. She tried to run anyway, to keep her feet with the momentum, but she tumbled forward.

  Her right hand smashed against the trunk of a fallen tree. Her fingers were crushed between the tree and the barrel of the gun, and she yelped before she could stop herself. She fell down and to her left and jammed her wrist trying to keep her feet. She landed on her shoulder, then twisted at the waist and heaved herself back up. A moment later she was running again.

  She could hear him still following her, crashing even louder than she was, but he wasn't straight behind her anymore. He wasn't on her trail. Jim. Avery hadn't trusted him to find his way in the woods. That was a spot of luck. She scrambled forward, half of the time scrabbling with her hands on the steep slope, and managed to gain another hundred feet in the open before she reached a narrow ridge and slipped down into the scrub again.