Dead Run m-3

by P. J. Tracy

  "Those guys give me the creeps," Gino said. "They all look like the bad guy inMatrix. Who are they, Knudsen?"

  "Friends."

  "Gee, could you be a little more specific?"

  "No."

  In the next minute, the sky filled with noise and a big, dirt-brown sky pig came in fast, beating all the grass in the far corner of the field down into a crop circle. It had barely touched down before men started tumbling out, then lumbering toward them. They were already in full gear-bulky, padded suits, sealed helmets, ninety pounds of protection weighing down each man.

  "Don't they know the bomb's been deactivated?" Magozzi asked.

  "They know," Knudsen said. "But there's still a brick of plastique in there. They'd come in like that if it were floating in the middle of a swimming pool. As far as they're concerned, no bomb is deactivated until they say it is."

  "Goddamnit, that plastique is not going to blow, whether they believe it or not. You cannot let them go in there and start messing around while the Monkeewrench people are trying to . . ."

  "For God's sake, Magozzi, I'm not a complete idiot," Knudsen interrupted, then trotted over to meet the bomb squad and the other men who had disembarked.

  Magozzi sighed and looked at the trio from Kingsford County. Halloran and Bonar were standing close on either side of Sharon, who looked wired enough to start snapping apart. Magozzi figured they all looked a little bit like that.

  There was a flurry of activity and voices for a few minutes while Knudsen made the rounds of the arrivals, barking out instructions like a drill sergeant. By the time he was finished, the field was remarkably silent. Magozzi looked around and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There had to be at least fifty people standing in a ragged semicircle around a building that looked as benign and harmless as a thousand other old farm buildings dotting the mid-western countryside. Nobody was doing anything; nobody was saying anything. They were all just staring at the door, waiting for it to open.

  INSIDE the machine shed, Grace, Annie, and Harley hunched around Roadrunner at the computer, every unblinking eye fixed on the screen as pages of command codes scrolled by. A sheen of sweat washed Roadrunner's face as his twisted fingers talked to the keys, and then suddenly, his fingers froze and the scrolling stopped."What?" Harley demanded. "Did you find it? Is that the abort?" Roadrunner closed his eyes for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face them all. "There is no abort," he said quietly.

  OUTSIDE the machine shed, the semicircle of silently waiting people let out a collective gasp as Harley came barreling out the door. He was moving at a perfectly amazing speed for a man that size, a blur of beard and tattoos and black leather as he raced past all of them into the RV. He came out five seconds later waving a disk and hollering, "There's no abort-we've gotta try something else!" He was back in the building so fast that it was hard to believe he'dever been out. Everyone was standing up, hearts pounding, legs ready to run somewhere if they only had a little direction.

  "What do you suppose was on that disk?" Knudsen asked.

  "God knows," Gino said.

  "I'm going back in there," Magozzi said abruptly, heading for the door. He had license, he reasoned. He'd been in there before when things were really tense and hadn't messed anything up. Besides, this was driving him crazy. He had to know what was going on. He had to feel like he was part of it. He'd be very quiet. They'd never know he was there.

  Sharon stared after him for a moment, muttered, "Well this is just bullshit," and followed him.

  It was as if she had taken a cork out of a bottle. One by one, everyone in the field started to move toward the building and slip silently through the door.

  ROADRUNNER'S LYCRA SUIT was soaked with sweat, and his leg jiggled furiously under the desk while he pushed the disk Harley had retrieved from the RV into the computer drive.

  Grace eyed him worriedly. "Anything you want to run by us before you try this thing, Roadrunner?"

  He shook his head hard and fast, keeping his fingers over the keyboard and his eyes fixed on the screen. "No time."

  "Is this what you wouldn't let me get a look at in the office yesterday?"

  "Yeah. It's just something Harley and I have been working on."

  Annie forced herself to take a breath and blew the exhale up toward her bangs. "Are you saying you don't even know if itworks?"

  "Are you kidding me?" Harley rumbled. "Of course it's going to work." He clapped Roadrunner on the back. "Go for it, my little chickadee."

  Roadrunner pushed a few keys and started the disk loading, but Grace's eyes were on Harley. His voice had sounded strong and full of confidence, but there were bloodless white lines tracing around his moustache and down into his beard, and his eyes looked sad, almost hopeless.

  "How much time does it take to load?" she asked quietly when Roadrunner had finished typing.

  He punched a single key and brought up a time bar that started filling with blue color, millimeter by millimeter. "Five minutes, maybe. I don't know. We only did one test run."

  "And then how long to execute?"

  "I don't know." Roadrunner pulled his hands away from the keyboard and stared at the time bar. Everyone else was staring at the red countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.

  37:22:19... 18... 17...

  Jesus,Magozzi thought, moving a little closer to Grace, sensing her rather than seeing her because his eyes were fixed at the damn clock as it ticked down.It had to be wrong. It was going too damn fast.

  "Well, what the hell is this thing?" Annie demanded harshly, but her hands were on Roadrunner's shoulders, kneading through bunched muscles that felt like tangled tree roots.

  "Uh . . , sort of a virus . . ."

  "What?You wrote avirus? You went to the dark side?"

  "No, no, no, it's not like that." Roadrunner's mangled fingers were twisting together. "It's not really a virus. Well, it is, but it's not a bad virus. It's a good virus."

  Annie dropped her hands from his shoulders. "There are no good viruses. That's why we call them viruses, for God's sake."

  "It's not contagious," Harley broke in. "We only direct it to specific sites, and it can't go any farther. All it does is just eat away the guts of the computer we send it to, while the computer doesn't know it's getting eaten. It doesn't replicate, the recipient computer can't send it to anyone else-it's perfect."

  "But it destroys computers."

  "Boy, does it ever."

  Magozzi's eyebrows shot up. Behind him, in the back of the vast room, a lot of other eyebrows were doing the same thing.

  "Oh, for God's sake, you guys," Annie chastised them. "Who were you sending this to?"

  Roadrunner muttered something unintelligible down at his lap.

  "What?"

  Harley was staring at the countdown clock, and then at the time bar, shifting back and forth on his worn-down boots. "Oh, for Chris-sake, it's no big deal. We send it to the kiddie-porn sites. Shut down a big one last night."

  Annie thought about it for a minute, and then said, "Oh. Cool."

  Grace was looking down at the floor, saving up a smile for later. When she looked up again, the time bar was almost entirely filled with blue, and the countdown clock was at twenty-nine minutes.

  IN A SUBURB of Detroit, Michigan, a Good Health Dairies truck sat outside the entrance of a vast, sprawling building. Hundreds of people were skirting the truck as they went inside, eyeing it curiously, irritated by the group of playful neighborhood children who were gathered around the truck. They were climbing the running boards, pressing their noses against the window glass, chattering, and squealing in a most inappropriate manner.

  The oldest of these children, a boy closing in on eleven years, fixed his gaze inside the truck cab and gestured to a friend. "There's a computer in there," he whispered, tapping his finger against the glass, pointing to the glowing screen that was flashing numbers in bright blue pixels. "That's gotta be worth a bundle."

  His friend s
haded his eyes and peered inside. "What do you suppose those numbers mean?"

  "Hell, I don't know. You want to bust the window and do a grab-and-run?"

  His friend looked around at all the people streaming past and the cars still pulling into the lot. "Too many people around. Wait 'til they all get inside."

  They both climbed down and sat on the running board to wait, guarding their treasure.

  MAGOZZI WAS frantic, watching that goddamned clock count down second by second. Finally, the last slice of blue ticked into the time bar, filling it completely, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He broke the promise he had made to himself to stay silent and out of the way. "Is that it? Is it finished? Is it over?"

  Harley glanced quickly in his direction and registered a little surprise to see him there. The computer screen had been his total focus for so long that he hadn't noticed anything going on around him. None of them had. "It's loaded."

  Roadrunner's fingers suddenly started flying over the keys. Grace and Annie were leaning over his shoulders, watching the text appear on the screen as Roadrunner typed.

  Magozzi nodded rapidly. "Great. That's great. It's loaded. Now you execute, right?" He jumped when Grace reached back and touched his hand.

  "Not yet, Magozzi. If we execute now, we destroy this computer, and this computer is the only way we have to talk to the trucks."

  Magozzi tried to make sense of it, his mouth open like a fish, gasping for air. "I don't get it, goddamnit, I don't get it."

  Harley took pity on him. "We're just piggybacking the virus through this computer to the trucks, Magozzi. Get it? Those truck computers are already set up to accept data from the host computer and no place else. We're just sending them a package from Mama. So we download the program here without executing, have this computer send it on to the trucks, then send the execution command."

  "And what thefuck does that do?" Magozzi demanded, and Harley actually smiled at him.

  "It destroys the truck computers, and that, my friend, destroys the detonate command."

  Magozzi finally took a breath. "Okay, okay. I get it. So how long does it take?"

  "Roadrunner just finished sending the virus program to the trucks. Another five minutes at least to execute, maybe a little longer."

  Magozzi's eyes were glued to the computer screen, watching the countdown clock. "Christ, man, we've only got twelve minutes left."

  "Yeah, I know. It's going to be tight. . , oh, Jesus." Harley was gaping at the screen.

  Magozzi had to force himself to look. The monitor had gone black, and big, red letters were flashing in the center:

  DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED

  No one around the computer station moved. They just stared at the monitor, hanging on the meaning of red letters in the black box. Magozzi wanted to ask something stupid, like, What the hell does that mean? but he knew damn well what it meant, and he couldn't move his mouth, anyway. What really scared him was when Road-runner's hands started shaking visibly.

  "Fuck a duck!"Harley shouted, bulldozing closer to Roadrunner, shoving his face at the screen.

  The people gathered in the back of the room-Knudsen, the suits, the HAZMAT squads-all moved en masse to get closer, then froze when they were within sight of the screen.

  "What's that mean?" Knudsen breathed, his face a deathly white.

  Roadrunner didn't even look to see who had asked the question. "They must have rigged the detonation sequence to upload at a specific time in the countdown. It initiated when we were still executing the virus, and because the truck computers can't upload more than one program at a time, they kicked one off."

  "Which one?" Gino whispered.

  "Hard to say. Normally, they'd take them in order, which means they'd keep executing the virus and kick the detonation command, but if that were happening, that message shouldn't be there."

  Grace closed her eyes. "The detonation sequence was a priority. If I'd set this up, I would have put an automatic override on it, so it kicked everything else off."

  "Yeah. Me, too." Roadrunner's voice was shaking almost uncontrollably.

  At that moment, Magozzi felt something let go in his head, then his neck, his shoulders, all the way down to his gut. A strange sense of serenity followed. He thought it was probably a lot like what terminal patients felt when they acknowledged their impending death, relaxed their resistance, and let it walk in. A thousand people somewhere had less than five minutes to live, and there wasn't a goddamned thing they could do about it. So you just shut down, let it go. Roadrunner was still talking, but Magozzi caught only the last part.

  ". . , so the only hope we've got is that part of the virus got through, and that it will corrupt the computer enough to keep the detonation sequence from finishing . . ."

  Suddenly, "DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED" disappeared from the screen, and a new message took its place:"DOWNLOAD COMPLETE."

  "Which download?!" Magozzi shouted. "The virus or the detonation code?"

  Roadrunner's lips were sealed against a held breath. He raised a shaky, deformed finger toward the countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The numbers had frozen at just under two minutes.

  Magozzi had no clue what that meant. Neither did anyone else in the room. They were all leaning forward, like people bucking a strong wind, eyes wild and unblinking. Had the detonation code gone through? Was the clock wrong? Were a thousand people dead? Magozzi looked frantically from Grace to Annie to Harley, who all looked perilously close to meltdown, and figured it couldn't mean anything good. He almost turned away when Roadrunner started swiveling his chair, afraid to see the look in his face, but he made himself stand there. It was the least he could do.

  And then Roadrunner finished his turn, and the eyes he met first just happened to be Magozzi's. "We did it," he said. And then he smiled. "We shut it down."

  Suddenly, a tremendous noise shattered the silence. Roadrunner looked up with a baffled expression at the dozens of people he hadn't even realized were there. Harley, Annie, and Grace turned around in amazement. The place was filled with people. All of them were cheering, banging one another on the back, and moving together toward the Monkeewrench crew like out-of-control groupies at a rock concert.

  Harley, Annie, Grace, and Roadrunner watched as the crowd surged toward them.

  The cheering went on for a long time.

  IT WAS A BLINDINGLY sunny morning in the field outside the building that had housed death and hate and destruction. Magozzi drew in a deep breath that smelled of smoke from the Four Corners fire, but even that smelled good.

  His hand was glued to Grace's arm as surely as Charlie was glued to her leg, and he felt pretty good about that. He had hands and the dog didn't. Advantage Magozzi. He squinted in the sunlight and looked around at the mess of cars and trucks and choppers and people, and thought what a goddamned beautiful place the world was.

  He looked at Grace's face, trying to read her expression, and realized what a fool's errand that was. He looked at Roadrunner's face instead, which always gave away emotions for free. But even that reliable countenance was impossible to read. He looked like somebody had pulled the plug on his head and there was absolutely nothing left inside.

  Harley was frowning at all the confusion around him, looking like a man who had just woken up naked in a crowded room. Then he shrugged and walked over to Knudsen and handed him a piece of paper. "Here are the coordinates for the two trucks. I don't know where the hell they are; it's just a bunch of numbers to me."

  Knudsen accepted the paper without taking his eyes off Harley's. He looked like he was about to burst into tears, but then suddenly, he smiled.

  He had an astounding number of teeth, Harley thought. He looked a little like a mule getting ready to bray.

  The field got even busier after that. A few more choppers came in, and a lot of cars and vans. A large team of what might have been men or women dressed in bulky white self-containment suits finally got p
ermission to swarm all over the building, and disappeared back inside to take a look at the plastique and the trucks. Another HAZMAT team swarmed with equal purpose over everyone who had been in the building, sweeping them with wands from a dozen different instruments, then taking them into the back of the van for other tests.

  Halloran and Magozzi watched helplessly as Sharon, Grace, and Annie got the once-over about a hundred times.

  "It's just a precaution," Knudsen tried to reassure them. "Knee-jerk. They're at the highest risk. Not only were they in that building with the trucks, they were in Four Corners where the first one crashed; they've got to be cleared."

  "We don't even know if there's anything in those other trucks," Magozzi complained.

  "The team inside is checking on that. Until we get confirmation from them that there's no danger, we act as if there is."

  "Well, that's just plain dumb," Halloran grumbled. "We were all in that building."

  "Yeah, I know. We'll be next."

  Gino made a face. "Shit. Are there needles involved?"

  Knudsen just smiled at him.

  When Gino and Magozzi were finally released from the testing van, Gino rolled down both sleeves and stomped away in search of his manhood. "Well, that was about the most humiliating experience of my life, and that includes the time when my pants split in the middle of the medal ceremony for the Monkeewrench murders. I feel like aliens just harvested my eggs or something."

  Magozzi smiled, but Knudsen looked almost as distressed as Gino. His face fell when he saw a Missaqua County cruiser coming up the farm road. "That's Sheriff Pitala," he said miserably. "His sister ran the cafe in Four Corners."

  "Did she get out?"

  "Who knows? We're pulling a lot of bodies out of that place. No females yet, as far as they can tell."

  Magozzi nodded. "So there's some hope."

  "I don't know. We need to talk to the women. They're the only ones who were in there."

  "So what the hell did you do with them?" Gino demanded. "I haven't seen them since you dragged me into that mobile test tube and slammed the door."