The Last Peak (Book 2): The Darwin Collapse (13 page)

"I still can't believe you’ve never seen
A New Hope
."

"Was never my thing. And doesn't look like it’ll ever get a chance to be now."

Juice’s face brightened. “Banish the thought! I’ve got it on my laptop. We can send it over to the flatscreen.” He pointed at an enormous TV on the wall. It was so big Mason hadn’t noticed it wasn’t the wall itself until now.

"Another time."

"Well, what can I do for you?"

"I was hoping you could help me with a long-range communication system."

"What do you need it for?"

Mason related the highlights of Beth's plan and the necessity of it. It sounded no less insane coming out of his mouth then when he tentatively agreed to it after coming out of hers.

"Sounds dangerous."

Mason nodded. "Not many things aren't these days."

"Well," Juice said. "The zoo is what, twenty miles as the crow flies?"

"Near enough, yeah."

Juice looked up at nothing in particular, murmuring to himself, tilting his head back and forth. Mason waited quietly. He'd seen Juice like this countless times back in the sandbox. Another minute or two of waiting and Juice snapped back to the present.

"Yep, I think I can patch something together. I’m going to have to bounce it through a relay station here to pick up enough power, but it should work. It’ll take a half hour or so. Want a cold beer while you wait?"

Cold
.

Beer
.

Mason wasn’t a beer in the morning kind of guy, but this might be the last cold one he ever had. It wasn’t even a choice, really.

Mason glanced at his watch. It was a quarter past eight in the morning. Yep, a cold beer sounded like the closest thing to heaven that he was likely to find on earth. "Cold?"

"Arctic."

"Yes," Mason said. "Like nothing else in the world."

Juice chuckled and retrieved two beers from the futuristic refrigerator. “All of this is solar powered from panels I have up on the roof." He handed one to Mason.

"Pliny the Elder?" Mason asked. "You're getting pretty cultured in your old age."

"An ice cold Schlitz may have tasted like liquid caviar back in the sandbox. But here in civilization, it tastes like the watered-down piss that it is."

"I'm not sure we qualify as civilization anymore."

Juice tapped the neck of his bottle against Mason's. "All the more reason to enjoy a fine microbrew while we still can."

Mason took a long, slow drink and enjoyed the bite of the hops as it slid over his tongue and down his throat. He finished the gulp and stared at the half-empty bottle. "Wow. As long as a man can drink a cold beer, there's still hope in the world."

He looked over to see if Juice agreed but the eccentric tinkerer was already hard at work. The outside world had faded to black. Juice was like that. Artillery could be coming in danger close and Juice would only look up and swat it away like an annoying fly before returning to his work.

Realizing he was no longer needed, Mason wandered the aisles of stocked shelves amazed at what his friend had squirreled away. Cases of wine stacked six high and three deep with probably ten bottles per case. Further down, a portion of one shelf held enough batteries to power a thousand Energizer bunnies for a thousand years.

“Grab a bag and take whatever you want.”

“You sure?”

“Absolutely, Linda and I won’t use all this stuff in a hundred years.”

Mason spotted an ordered pile of brown paper bags. “Thanks. We can definitely use it.” He went about filling a number of bags, as much as he thought the cargo bike could hold in its saddle bags. As he shopped around, he noticed a surprising lack of drinking water. He looked through all six aisles and saw nothing more than a few cases of bottled water. There was no way that Juice had overlooked something so basic.

"Mason, come hold this together for me." Juice handed him a collapsible antenna with exposed wires coming out the end. He held the exposed ends to the contact points on a radio. "Keep them right there."

Mason took over while Juice retrieved a soldering gun and a roll of solder. "You could open up a Walmart with all the stuff you have in here."

Juice shook his head as he started to melt the wires into place. “Don’t think so. I don’t sell at bargain-basement prices."

White wisps of smoke curled up into the air as he worked.

"One thing I don't see is enough water. Are you handling that?"

Juice pulled off his safety goggles and grinned. "Astute observation. We have a 10,000 gallon water catchment system underneath the house. Even with the drought of the past several years, it's never gone below half full. It's sitting at around 7500 gallons right now. You'd be surprised how much 2000 square feet of roof surface can gather."

"How much did that cost to install?"

Juice winked. “Wasn't cheap. Hold still now while that cools."

"Juice, tell me if I'm being nosy here, but… where’d you get the money for all this? I mean, I know you have a few patents. Is that what bought all this?"

Juice’s eyes lit up."Yeah, for the most part. General Electric ended up licensing one of those patents for a manufacturing process. That paid millions."

Mason shook his head. "Looks like I went into the wrong line of business."

"Those patents are small potatoes compared to what I was working on before civilization decided to take a giant shit."

Mason laughed. "Tell me you were working on a giant roll of toilet paper."

"If only I'd had the foresight."

"What was it then?"

Juice rubbed his hands together. His eyes sparkled like a ten-year-old about to show off his favorite Christmas gift. "Personal aerial transport. PAT. It’s a she.”

"You mean like a flying car or something?”

“Not exactly. Smaller.”

“A jet pack?”

Juice pinched his brows together and grimaced. "Jet pack? What am I? An idiot?"

"I think we both know that's not the case."

"Exactly," he said as he checked the soldered connections. “That's gonna take another few minutes to set. Come take a look."

They entered the second door on the right and entered a large room filled with a dizzying array of advanced electronic equipment. The stuff out on the workbench looked like Legos in comparison. If someone had told Mason a nuclear bomb was under construction, he wouldn't have ruled it out. In the center of the room, a large tan tarp covered what was presumably not a jet pack.

"Prepare to witness the future," Juice said as he grabbed a handful of the cloth. “Or what would’ve been the future." He tugged the tarp off. It tumbled to the floor revealing a steel-framed half-cage that hugged the form of the intended occupant, much like the bottom half of an Egyptian coffin. Behind that were two large turbines about three feet across each. Shiny black housings encircled each propeller. It sat on skids like a helicopter. Two metal arms extended out and ended in joysticks. The left one had a small digital screen at the end.
 

Juice stroked the smooth surface like it was his firstborn which, considering he didn’t have kids, maybe it was. "This baby was gonna change the world.” He looked down at the concrete floor and shook his head sadly. "And now it'll never see the light of day."

"Looks a lot heavier than a jet pack," Mason said.

“It is. But it’s infinitely more reliable and has ten times the range, too. The latest state-of-the-art fly by wire controls. Self stabilizing gyroscopic attitude mechanism.”

“What does that mean in English?"

"It means even an idiot like you could fly it without killing himself."

"How did you plan on getting it out of here? I know it’s not making it through that doorway."

Juice held up a finger without saying a word.

"You're going to blow a hole in the ceiling?"

"No need. See those controls on the wall over there?"

Mason nodded.

Juice then pointed to a fine line along the ceiling. "That seam is the edge of two panels that split apart and fully retract. That nearly featureless front yard you may have disparaged on the way in is for more than satisfying my distaste for lawn work.”

"Makes for a nice skylight."

"Perhaps it’s a little ahead of its time, but I had this bay built in anticipation of the technology making it mainstream. I bet every house would’ve had one of these within the next ten years."

Mason didn't reply. He didn't think there was a chance in hell that would've been true. He'd heard the promise of flying cars from the age of four. And it was always just a few years away. But he didn’t see a point in raining on his nonexistent parade. “I’m sure it would've changed the world.”

A scream echoed in from another room.

Mason dropped his hand to his holster.

Juice bolted for the door. "Linda! It's okay. I'm coming!"

Mason hustled after him expecting trouble. He followed him back into the main room and then to the closed door to their left. Juice threw it open and hurried inside. The trouble that Mason found was not what he expected.

Linda cowered in a corner with her arms wrapped around her naked body. A bed sheet lay crumpled on the floor at her feet. She wept uncontrollably with a hand covering her face.

Juice knelt beside her, and she jumped at his touch. "It's okay, baby. I’m here. It's okay."

Mason's heart ached. He waited while Juice tried to calm and reassure her.
 

The room was a complete mess. A total juxtaposition to the extreme order of the rest of the bunker. He remembered that Juice sometimes complained about Linda's natural state of messiness, but this was a whole other thing.

A bed in the corner had sheets pulled off and piled on the floor. An open closet had a rack full of empty hangers and a pile of clothes underneath. A plastic cup lay next to a puddle of what looked like spilled milk on the floor.

Linda finally calmed down.

"She okay?" Mason asked.

His question drew her attention. She screamed and broke away from Juice and bounded into the closet on all fours. She cowered in a dark corner watching Mason with wide, unfamiliar eyes.

He’d seen eyes like those before. The last time he’d seen them, they were trying to kill him.

“Mason, get out!” Juice said. “Get out and shut the door!”

“Sorry,” Mason replied as he hurried out. He waited by the workbench trying to think about anything other than what he knew to be true. After several minutes of failing effort, Juice emerged and closed the door behind him.

All the happiness had drained from his face. His skin was waxy and hollowed out. He stumbled to a chair and collapsed. “It’s getting to the point where I’m not sure she recognizes me anymore.”

“I’m sorry, brother.”

Juice looked up, his words coming out in a stuttering rhythm. “Why her? She was the most generous soul I’d ever met. She was everything. And now she’s turned into that.” Tears welled in his eyes and he curled forward as his body convulsed.

Mason laid a hand on his back. “I’m so sorry.”

Juice sniffed and wiped his eyes. He made an effort to straighten up and get his breathing under control. He plucked a tissue from a box on the table and blew his nose.
 

Mason waited for him to compose himself. Besides, he didn’t know what else to say.

Juice cleared his throat a few times and then chugged the nearly full bottle of beer he’d left on the table.

“What happened?” Mason asked.

Juice shook his head. “She got infected and turned into a delta.”

“A delta?”

Juice nodded. “It’s what they call the people changed by the Delta Virus. Guess it’s why they called it the Delta Virus in the first place. You’ve never seen one?”

Mason recalled the mother and her kids in Holly’s garage and the close call at the neighborhood market. “Yeah, I have. A couple of times now, but I wouldn’t say I know much about them.”

“Not a surprise if no one in the family has turned. The government didn’t give out a damn bit of useful information while it still functioned. I picked up bits and pieces from other HAM operators around the country. Then, when Linda changed, I got a front row seat.”

Mason chugged the last of his beer and set it next to Juice’s empty bottle. “I’m completely in the dark on this one. I’d like to know more if you’re up to sharing.”

Juice nodded almost imperceptibly. “She’d been to Reagan Medical Center the day before the outbreak for her annual physical. All routine stuff. She checked out fine. But the next day, the day of the official outbreak, she started complaining about stomach cramps and nausea. She woke up in the morning with a burning fever. I did my best to keep her cool and she seemed to improve after a while.”

He stood up and wandered away. “Want another beer?”

“Nah, thanks though.”

He pulled a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. After a long pull, he continued.

“I thought she was getting better. That we’d beaten it. And there was nothing on the news or radio about people changing. But she didn’t get better. Yeah, the fever and vomiting let up, but she seemed to sink away into herself as it did.”

“What do you mean?”

He took another drink. “I don’t know how to describe it. The Linda that I knew and loved, the personality that made her who she was. It just faded away.”

He squeezed his temples with one hand and scrunched up his face like the memories were a migraine. Maybe they were.

“It was only later that stories started to leak out over the shortwave frequencies. People talking about seeing their loved ones change. Becoming deltas, as they started to call them. Some idiots were calling them zombies and screaming about the zombie apocalypse.”

After the attack last night, Mason didn’t think that sounded totally off base.

“They’re not zombies,” Juice said. “They’re people, only changed.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, it’s like they devolve. The unique thing that makes us human is stripped away.”

“You mean our intelligence?”

“Yes, exactly.” He turned and hurled the bottle across the room. It hit a concrete wall and exploded into a shower of foam and fragments. “It’s like she’s an animal. You saw her.”