The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (25 page)

I keep my eyes on the road. “You wouldn’t ask me to give up the legs, would you? They’re prosthetics that let me walk. The skullnet is a prosthetic that keeps me humming along while people I love die around me and assholes try to blow up my life. Take either of them away, Jaynie, and I’m a cripple. No use to you. So yeah, I’m more worried about losing that functionality than about the Red hacking into my head.”

She is unimpressed by my rant. “The real story is you don’t mind the Red hacking into your head. It almost killed you at Black Cross, but you trust it anyway.”

“Not true. I just deal with it. Part of the terrain. The Red’s not going away, Jaynie. Sheridan proved that on Coma Day. You either learn to live with it, or be like her and build yourself an Apocalypse Fortress and lock the Red out.”

Jaynie settles back into her seat, her gaze returning to the road ahead. “I thought about that,” she concedes. “Be a lot of money to buy that kind of privacy. More than this job is going to pay.”

“You wouldn’t want to live in a hole in the ground anyway.”

She doesn’t answer, so I just drive.

In Ohio, young corn crops are already several inches high in some of the fields that flank the freeway—but many more fields have gone unplanted. On both sides of the interstate, miles and miles of land are growing a harvest of bright green weeds.

“What the hell?” I finally say. “People don’t need to eat anymore?”

“You ever been hungry, Shelley?” Jaynie asks. “Three-days hungry?”

“No.”

I wait for her to say more. She doesn’t. When I glance at her, she’s staring straight ahead, her back straight, shoulders squared. I return my gaze to the road.

It’s Delphi who fills the silence. “Farms like these, they need fuel, fertilizer, machine parts, bank loans. Cash. The system that used to deliver all that got broken on Coma Day.”

It’s not just the fields. Gas stations are abandoned too. We top up whenever we come across a rare open one. They’re all automated. No one is around to talk to.

At one of our stops I spot an EXALT node floating low above an abandoned field, just north of the interstate. At first, I’m not sure what I’m seeing. It looks like a stack of curved blue reflections just a little brighter than the
background blue sky. When I look at it through the binoculars, the curves become the visual edge of a series of small spheres. Their smooth surfaces reflect the color of the sky around them, making them hard to see even with magnification. From the article last night, I know they’re linked together by a filament, but I can’t see it. As I lower the binoculars, a bright white light flashes from the topmost sphere, like a star briefly flaring to life in the daytime sky. A navigation warning light? Maybe. Flynn sees it and wants to know what it is, so I hand her the binoculars and tell her about the EXALT project. “It’s supposed to be a new communications grid, but either it’s not working yet or it requires its own account”—I tap the corner of my eye—“because I’m not getting a link.”

Connectivity is intermittent as we head west, but frequent enough that at least once an hour an e-mail comes in from Shima. It’s always the same thing: No news to report in the hunt for Vanda’s nukes, and Vanda’s own whereabouts are presently unknown. Maybe the same players who tried to cover up the real story at Black Cross are at work again.

We reach Iowa—and drive past more unplanted fields.

Coma Day throws one hell of a long shadow.

•   •   •   •

We stop for the night half an hour outside of Des Moines at a little commercial development built to capture weary travelers. It includes a three-story hotel—part of a low-priced chain—just off the exit, along with a gas station and a fast-food place. A competing hotel is a hundred meters west along a frontage road that separates the interstate from an abandoned field. There are no other buildings nearby. Jaynie decides we’ll stay at the second hotel—she likes the isolation—but first we fill up the tanks, and pick up dinner.

To make Jaynie happy, I wait in the car while Delphi goes inside with Tuttle and Moon to order the food. I’ve got a feed from Tuttle’s farsights running in my overlay. I shift my attention between that and the traffic on the interstate.

The restaurant is clean and bright, but it’s a sign of the times that half the slots on the electronic menu behind the counter are blank and all the tables are empty. There are only two other customers—both white kids in their early twenties, maybe a brother and sister. As they wait at the counter, they eye Moon and Tuttle nervously. I think if Delphi weren’t there to provide some feminine balance, they’d bolt. “You look like thugs,” I mutter in Tuttle’s ear.

“Beats looking like a victim,” he answers in a low whisper.

When the two kids finally get their food, they leave in a hurry.

Moon steps up to the counter, where a middle-aged woman with short, curly blond hair greets him with an apologetic smile. “I am so sorry to keep you waiting, sir. We don’t get anywhere near the traffic we used to, and I’m down to one assistant in the kitchen.”

“Not a problem, ma’am”—and Moon rattles off an order that keeps the manager and her assistant busy for the next fifteen minutes.

•   •   •   •

We drive slowly along the frontage road to the hotel Jaynie has chosen. It’s three stories high, built like a box, with a brightly lit company logo near the roof, facing the interstate. Lights are on in several rooms, but when we turn in to the huge parking lot behind the hotel, we see only two cars, both near the main door. It makes me wonder if the manager turned on some room lights so the place will seem busier than it is.

We park close to the building so our vehicles can’t be seen from the interstate. The landscaping beside the hotel is neatly tended, but the surrounding field has gone wild. Spillover light shows tall grass and waist-high brush beyond the parking lot—too much for one missed planting. My guess is this section has been sitting idle for a year or more. Maybe it was scheduled to be developed, before Coma Day. Now it’s home to a million crickets, chirping and buzzing in the night.

“Tuttle, launch the angel,” Jaynie says. “Flynn, you’re on watch.”

The skullnet icon flickers to life in my display. A vague, restless feeling comes over me. After a few seconds, the icon fades back to invisibility, but the unsettled feeling remains. It’s like a reminder to stay alert. I look around again.

To the east, streetlights illuminate the frontage road back to the overpass, where a little Midwestern forest grows in the triangles created by the ramps. In the other direction the frontage road is lit only by the occasional headlights of cars passing on the interstate.

Flynn watches me curiously through the faintly glittering lens of her farsights as the rest of the squad disappears into the hotel.

“You’re hooked into the angel?” I ask her.

“Yes, sir.”

I link into angel sight too, and take a look at things in night vision. There’s scattered traffic on the interstate, but I confirm the frontage road is as empty as it looks from the ground. To the west, maybe
120
meters and beyond the reach of the streetlights, the landscape gets even wilder, overgrown with young trees that branch all the way to the ground. There’s no one out there—not that the angel can see—but it was the same last night when that girl popped up out of nowhere.

“I’m going to get checked in,” I tell Flynn, “but I’m coming back out again.”

“Sir?”

The skullnet icon brightens again. Its glow is faint but steady—and I’m feeling edgy. “Everything looks quiet. I just want to make sure it is.”

•   •   •   •

Behind the desk is a Caucasian man in his fifties with iron-gray hair. Unlike the kid last night, he knows who we are, and he wants us to know we’re all on the same side. He talks as he scans our IDs and logs us into the rooms.

“Coma Day ruined me. I used to have a healthy business—I had this place and two other properties. This is the only one still open, but it’s just a matter of time. You know what Coma Day did for me? It gave me a full house. For three days after the bombs went off, every room was booked as people left Chicago, but we haven’t been more than a quarter full since. People around here are desperate—while the richest of the rich buy playhouses in orbit. Have you heard of Sunrise Fifteen? It’s a company launching little prefab space stations, for only a billion dollars or so. Can you imagine having that much money to spend? And there’s talk about a resort being planned for the Moon—but not for people like us. The big shots have got everything now. Everything worth having. But at least you made one pay.”

•   •   •   •

In the room, Delphi watches me suspiciously as I put my armor on over my civilian clothes. “I don’t understand why you have to go out. You’re not on watch until later.”

“I just want to keep an eye on things.”

“Have you got a feeling about something, Shelley?”

She wants to know if I’m King David again, with the Red riding me, warning me of impending danger. I eye the skullnet icon, its persistent glow an indicator of artificial activity in my head.

Yes, I have a feeling. It’s the first time in months I’ve felt this way.

But I don’t tell her. She’ll take it the wrong way. She’ll ask questions I can’t answer.

No way though, that I’m going to ignore the warning. “Just stay inside, okay? If you need me, use gen-com.”

•   •   •   •

In the parking lot, I open the back of the gray SUV and get out one of the new HITR M-CL
1
a assault rifles, still in its case. I take it into the backseat, switch it on, and run through the initial security sequence that registers it to me. Flynn watches me doubtfully through the partly open door. “LT—”

“Get me some ammo, Flynn.”

“LT, if something’s happenin’, you gotta let me know.”

“I don’t know that anything is happening. I just want to walk around.”

I rig up in my dead sister, using the SUV as cover against a security camera that’s keeping watch from the hotel entrance.

“LT, you don’t look like a civilian.”

“It’s okay, Flynn. There’s no one here to see.”

I put my helmet on so I can use night vision, and then I move swiftly into the cover of the overgrown field, silencing the crickets with my presence.

•   •   •   •

I stay low, so that the brush and tall grass hide me from the frontage road as I creep toward the thicker cover of the
young trees on the western edge of the field. I carry the HITR close to my side to make its profile less obvious to watching satellites. The angel will notify me with a blue alert if a traffic drone gets close, but my goal is to reach the trees before that happens. Four times as I cross the field I freeze within the cover of the weeds, waiting for interstate traffic to pass before I move again.

I take up a position twenty-five meters within the woods, well beyond the angel’s patrol route, surrounded by young trees with spindly trunks holding up a dense canopy of spring leaves. The lights of the hotel glint through the brush, but I can see Flynn only when I look with angel sight.

At
2200
Tuttle comes to relieve Flynn.

At
2248
my helmet’s audio pickups filter a faint buzzing sound from the rustle of windblown leaves. The anomalous noise is coming from somewhere behind and to my right. I resist the urge to turn around. Moving nothing but my eyes, I summon the feed from my rear helmet cam. Several seconds pass before I spot an aerial seeker—a mini surveillance drone like those that tracked me in Manhattan. It’s at least eight meters away and only a meter and a half above the ground as it moves slowly east through the trees alongside the frontage road.

It gives no indication it’s detected me, but as it nears the edge of the woods it suddenly descends to the ground. I check my feed. The angel is approaching the western limit of its programmed route, swinging past the seeker’s position before circling back toward the hotel. I wait and watch to see if it will pick up the seeker, but it fails to do so, and as it moves off, the seeker rises from the ground, ascending just high enough to achieve a clear view of the hotel across the field.

It’s possible the seeker has been fielded by a government
agency, but a seeker requires the oversight of an operator and I can’t see an agency expending the manpower when our position can be easily monitored through traffic cams, police drones, and satellite surveillance. It’s far more likely the seeker belongs to someone with a special interest in the Apocalypse Squad. I’ve been expecting Carl Vanda—but I need to confirm it’s him and I can’t send our angel to look, because any deviation in its route will be a warning to Vanda that we suspect he’s there.

I’ll have to go myself.

But I’m not going to leave the squad vulnerable. I open a solo link to Tuttle, and then I concentrate on a thought:
Don’t make a move.
The simple AI in my skullnet senses my intention, picks up the thought, translates it to words, and then synthesizes a verbal message, which it sends to Tuttle, who is wearing his audio loop.

“LT? Where are you?”

Wary of the seeker’s audio pickups, I answer in a barely audible whisper: “West of you. Don’t look. Don’t move. Don’t change the angel’s route. Just listen. You’re being watched, okay?”

“Okay. By who?”

“I want you to call a general alert. Wake everyone up. Have them evacuate on foot from the hotel’s east end. They have to stay out of sight. Got it?”

“Yes, sir?” Not sounding sure at all.

“Your assignment is different. You need to stay where you are and act like nothing is happening.”

“Sir, what
is
happening?”

“Now, Tuttle.”

I listen to him call the alert. He does a good job, repeating what I told him precisely, insistently: “Evacuate, but stay out of sight. . . . I don’t know what’s going on, just do it.”

When I’m satisfied the squad is on the move, I move too, west through the woods as quietly as I can, my footsteps padded by damp leaves and everything around me bright in night vision.

The ground begins to slope up under my feet. I’m encouraged, because logically, I’ll find the enemy at a high point. I move as quickly as I dare. I’ve advanced over two hundred meters through the woods when I see a two-story house with trees leaning over it. Its white paint is stained by time and neglect. Shingles are missing from the roof, and moss is growing on the ones that remain. It looks abandoned. The only sign of life is a faint glow, visible because I’m using night vision, coming from the second-story window.