Authors: Brian Falkner
45 | THE DESERT
The Geiger counter clicked constantly on the car seat beside Sam. The reading was high enough to worry him, but according to the manual, they could handle this level of radiation for an hour or two. Still, the less time they spent in the more radioactive areas, the happier he was.
“Take the next right,” he said, trying to match up the streets in front of them with the maps in the book on his lap.
It was easier said than done. Few street signs had survived the blast, and buildings that might have served as landmarks were scattered in pieces across city blocks.
The pickup had a GPS, and he was tempted to use it. Even in Las Vegas, the satellite-based GPS system should work. The problem was that Ursula might well wonder what a GPS-equipped vehicle was doing roaming through the supposedly deserted streets of Vegas.
“We might be just wasting our time,” Dodge said, maneuvering the pickup around a pile of rubble to take the turn. “If Tyler has any brains, he’ll be watching and listening out for us, and he’ll take cover the moment we get close.”
“Still gotta try,” Sam said, scanning the roadside for any sign of movement. A pair of binoculars sat on the seat beside him, but they were of little use in the built-up areas. “If he makes it to the outside world, we’ll have no chance of getting to Cheyenne Mountain. Our only hope is to stop him before he reaches somewhere with phones that work.”
It was their third day of searching. They took it in shifts, two out searching while the third person remained at the house, in case Tyler should turn up there for any reason.
Dodge said, “Maybe we should just make a break for it now. Try and get to Cheyenne before he gets to Ursula.”
“There’s no way out of Vegas on foot,” Sam said, and added, “Try a left at the T-intersection.”
“Tyler’s a member of the Tactical team,” Dodge countered. “They’re highly trained and very resourceful. I really think we need to give up looking for him and head to Colorado.”
“Without a vehicle, without water, he’s going nowhere,” Sam said. “But if we don’t find him today, then we’ll start making tracks. How’s the Plague coming along?”
“It’s finished,” Dodge replied. “Just a little testing to do.”
“It’s taken a while,” Sam said, hoping that didn’t sound critical.
Dodge nodded. “When I started working on it, I realized that I had to do more than just take out the time limiter. Ursula has seen this virus now. That means she will have had a chance to build defenses against it. So I’ve had to rewrite a lot of the virus to make it different, hopefully different enough that by the time Ursula recognizes it, it will be too late.”
“Let’s hope,” Sam said.
Dodge pulled up at the end of the road and said, “Where to now?”
Sam consulted his map. “Okay, if he stayed in Vegas, I don’t think we’ve got any chance of finding him. It’s too big and too much of a mess. He could be anywhere. If he’s headed out of town, he would be easier to spot. But we’ve already tried all the main highways out.”
“So we give up and head to Cheyenne?”
“Let’s try Highway 95 one last time. We didn’t go far that way yesterday because of the wind. It’s worth another shot.”
The wind had come in from the north the previous day, while they had been searching, pushing back the haze that covered the area. They had dared not venture under the open sky because of the risk of being spotted by a satellite, so they had quickly returned to the safety of Vegas.
“How’s the gas?” Sam asked as they wound a tortuous route back to Highway 95.
“We’re okay today,” Dodge said. “Vienna found a treasure trove yesterday. Three vehicles in a concrete garage, all intact. Two had full tanks, and the third was at least half full.”
Sam put the binoculars to his eyes as they left the built-up area of the city. This end of Vegas had suffered little from the bomb, and the going was relatively clear.
He watched the road in front of them, hoping to catch a glimpse of Tyler before he realized they were behind him. The highway stretched ahead for miles, completely empty.
He scanned the desert to the left and right. It was brown and desolate, just a few scrappy bushes offering nowhere for a human being to hide.
A billboard advertising free credits at one of the casinos appeared to his right, and he examined it carefully as they passed. It stood on tall posts, too narrow to hide behind, and he let it slip past without comment.
“You’ve known Vienna a long time?” he asked after a while, trying to make the question sound casual and innocuous. It still sounded forced and deliberate to his own ears, but Dodge didn’t seem to pick up on it.
“A few years,” he said. “Since she came to CDD.”
“Always just friends?” Sam asked, still as casually as he could.
Dodge looked sideways at him. “No romances allowed in the office. It’s in the rules. Didn’t you read that?”
“Must have missed that bit.”
“You got your eye on her, Sam?” Dodge laughed suddenly.
Sam felt his cheeks redden. He turned away from Dodge and raised the binoculars to hide it.
“She’s a hard nut to crack, that one,” Dodge said, still laughing. “Think you’re up to it?”
Sam said truthfully, “No.”
“Still,” Dodge said, “I suspect that if you ever managed to get through that tough outer shell, she’d be all sweetness and light on the inside.”
“I doubt that,” Sam said. “More like molten lava.”
“Well, good luck to you, then,” Dodge said.
“I never said I was interested,” Sam said.
“I know,” Dodge replied. “But you also never said you weren’t.”
Sam started to reply when a flash of light caught his eye from far out in the desert. A shiny stone? A broken bottle?
“Slow down,” he said, fiddling with the controls on the binoculars. A white mound came into focus, at least a hundred yards from the road. “Go left—I want to check something out.”
Dodge steered the big wheels of the pickup off the highway and onto the hard dirt of the desert. The scrub made a whooshing, scraping noise against the underbelly of the vehicle as they traveled.
“A little to the right,” Sam said, but by now Dodge had seen it too.
A few more yards and it became clear that the shapeless white patch of desert was in fact Tyler, and from the slight movement of his chest, he was still alive.
Dodge skidded the pickup to a halt beside him and grabbed a bottle of water off the seat as he jumped out.
Sam was already taking readings with the Geiger counter, but the level of radiation this far from the blast was no higher than normal background readings.
“Tyler,” Dodge yelled out, and there was a slight stirring from the mound.
Tyler’s mask was off, lying beside him, and it was the sun reflecting off it that Sam had first seen, he realized. Out here, the radioactive dust was not so much of a problem; the danger lay in the heat.
Tyler’s lips were dry and deeply cracked. His face was red and blotchy. His eyes were shut and did not open, even when Sam shook his arm and poured a little water into his mouth.
Dodge was grim-faced as he shouldered Tyler’s body and eased him onto the backseat of the pickup.
46 | RECOVERY
They took turns sitting with him, but it was Sam who was at Tyler’s side when his eyes finally opened, wincing against the light from the window.
“Sam,” he said in a voice that sounded like dry skin rubbing deep in his throat.
“Don’t talk,” Sam said, but Tyler took no notice.
He took a sip of water from a glass by his bed, then another, wincing each time he had to swallow. “I spent the first day trying to find a car that worked, but their computers were all fried from the blast. Then I figured that the cars in Indian Springs might have escaped the EMP, so I tried to walk there.”
“You nearly died,” Sam said.
“When I was lying in the desert, after my legs gave out,” Tyler said, “there were all these mad dreams chasing around inside my head.”
“Delirious with the heat, I expect,” said Sam.
“Seemed real at the time,” Tyler said. “Which got me thinking about that memory of you and Dodge running out of the swamp. Vienna was right—I should have felt angry or shocked, but I didn’t. It’s just like a movie clip inside my head.”
“It never happened that way,” Sam said.
“And there were some other memories too,” Tyler said. “Memories about stuff that Dodge had done in the past. Stuff that should have made me dislike him or at least distrust him. But I don’t. I’ve always liked Dodge. Why would I feel that way if he had done bad things in the past?”
“She did that to you,” Sam said.
“Who? This Ursula creature that you keep talking about?”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
Tyler closed his eyes and laid his head back weakly on the pillow. “She’s been poking around inside my head. That ain’t right.”
“She’s gotta be stopped,” Sam agreed.
47 | MEMORIES
The neuro-headset sat on a cradle beside the computer screen. Jaggard stared at it without enthusiasm.
He knew things he shouldn’t know. He had seen things he could not possibly have seen, and he could not understand how this could be so.
He had images in his head of a Ford pickup truck. An F-150 crew cab with off-road suspension. It was missing, stolen, from a north city car dealership. But how did he know that?
He clearly remembered seeing the same vehicle cruise past him in Fremont, although he had been nowhere near Fremont in the last few weeks. It was dark, but not so dark that he could not recognize Vienna at the wheel of the truck.
Even stranger was his recollection of the vehicle nearly colliding with him in Jean. He was driving a car, a small Honda.
It was dark, and he had forgotten to switch on his lights.
Suddenly, lights from another car were bearing down on him, and he had slammed on the brakes to see the big Ford pickup truck whistle past just in front of his nose.
The memory was vivid, yet he had never been to Jean and did not drive a small Honda.
He remembered seeing the pickup truck turn onto the old Boulevard in Las Vegas, which was the next strange thing to happen. Nobody went out along the Boulevard anymore. There was nothing there. Not anymore.
Just the contamination zone.
These memories were not his. That was clear to him. They were memories of other people, somehow filtering through to him as those people reconnected to the neuro-network.
Gasgoine entered without knocking and sat in the chair in front of Jaggard’s desk, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the desk.
“I need you to report progress,” he said. “How could it possibly take more than two weeks to find a bunch of teenagers and a missing agent?”
“I’ve located them,” Jaggard said, still not sure
how
he had done so. “Just now, the information has come through. They’re in Las Vegas.”
48 | THE COMING OF THE WAR
The wheels of the golf cart kicked up a squall of deadly Vegas dust, which was caught by the gusting breeze and pattered against the fabric of Sam’s hazmat suit. Vienna sat beside him, holding the Geiger counter. It began to buzz but subsided rapidly as the gust of wind fell away. Sam found he had held his breath instinctively, although he knew the mask was protection enough.
They’d found a whole garage full of the golf carts. They were small, quick, and nimble, ideal for maneuvering around the city, especially on short expeditions like this shopping trip to stock up on supplies for their run to Cheyenne Mountain.
A strip mall, almost intact, rose on their left, and Sam gazed up at the broken billboards above, then at the scattered shelving in the first of the stores. A minibus lay on its side in the street, and he skirted around it.
They drove in silence. It was strange, Sam thought, to be so close and yet so distant. He was merely inches away from her but was separated by the gulf of the hazmat suits and the particles of radioactive dust that swirled around and between them. “Vienna,” he started, a little uncomfortably.
“Yeah?”
“The other night, when we were watching the planes …” He paused, unsure how to continue.
“It was your birthday. I gave you a birthday kiss. Don’t worry about it,” she said brusquely, but a turn of her head revealed a coy smile through the face mask.
“I really—”
“Stop!” Vienna said, and Sam took his foot off the pedal, activating the brake automatically. The cart skidded a few feet in the dust and stopped.
“What?”
“Shh!” She looked up.
A strange distant humming sound deepened and turned into a roar overhead. “Jets!” Sam said.
“Get out of sight!” Vienna yelled as three jet fighters flying in tight formation appeared in the distance. They were flying low, beneath the omnipresent haze of the oil fires.
Vienna dived for the cover of the wrecked minibus. Sam leaped off the cart and ran into the entranceway of a store.
Vienna called, “Stay under cover. We can’t risk being picked up on reconnaissance cameras.”
At that moment, a second set of jets appeared, emerging from the smoky sky as if materializing from another dimension. Four planes in this group, in a V-shaped formation, on an intercept course with the other fighters.
Must be joining up with the group, Sam thought, although that thought shattered as the first group broke and scattered, turning toward the oncoming fighters.
A moment later, there were bright flashes from the first planes and tiny trails of smoke streaked out from their wings.
One of the oncoming jets exploded in flames, but the others managed to dodge the hail of fire and responded with missiles of their own.
The jets jinked and dived or rocketed toward the heavens, avoiding the missiles and each other by what seemed like inches.
It was all over in seconds as two of the first group of jets exploded in fiery balls, debris raining down over the city. The remaining fighter turned tail and ran, hotly pursued by the remaining three from the second group.
“Someone has started a war,” Sam yelled out as the thundering crashes of the explosions finally reached them.
But who was winning?
he thought.
Vienna stood up behind the minibus, watching the departing jets.
Sam, however, stayed put, not yet daring to emerge from his hiding place in case the jets should return. His eyes scanned the horizon, watching the shrinking dots until they disappeared into the haze.
The danger, when it came, though, was not from the sky but from the land.
Two gray vans were sliding to a halt in front of him before he even knew they were there, his eyes still focused on the sky.
Tactical team soldiers poured into the street in shiny silver radiation suits and full face masks.
They were heading for Vienna and hadn’t yet noticed Sam, crouched and unmoving inside the ruined store. Sun reflected off visors, silver flashed, and black boots kicked up dust as they ran past his hideout.
Vienna saw them and turned to run, but it was already too late.
Sam saw her struggling in the arms of one of the soldiers, his arm up around her neck.
She twisted and scratched, and suddenly she was free, her hazmat suit tearing and the hood, complete with the mask, coming off in the soldier’s hands.
She ran into the maze of broken and crushed buildings, through the billowing cloud of dust kicked up by the tires of the vans, as shots rang out and puffs of masonry powder punched out of the rubble around her.
Sam watched helplessly as Vienna ran through the clouds of radioactive dust without her protective hood. Without her mask.