Transformers Dark of the Moon (33 page)

“No. Not him.” Sam’s face twisted in disgust. “I saw the way he was looking at her. He’s gonna keep her around for as long as possible.” Steeling his resolve, he said, “I’m going. All she’s ever done is try to help me. And this is what I’ve done for her? I can be there in …” He glanced to Dutch.

“Eighteen hours, twenty minutes,” Dutch said briskly. “If you regard speed limits as only guidelines instead of the law, then probably fifteen hours.”

Sam started to head out. He had no idea where he was going to find a car, but one thing at a time. Before he went even a few feet, however, Epps was in his way. He expected Epps to try to stop him, to talk him out of it. Instead, Epps said firmly, “You’re not going alone.”

“What?”

“NEST is out there, preparing for war. They’ll never
sign off on going after one guy even if there’s a kidnapped girl involved. Lemme make some calls, round up whoever I can to help.”

“Why are you helping me?”

“Because,” Epps said, “those assholes just killed my friends, too. And if Gould is connected to them, then I’m making sure he’s going down in the same kinda flames the Autobots did.”

Mearing had spent the last few minutes getting in touch with various NEST forces and briefing key individuals on the tragedy that had just transpired. Now she was heading to her airplane, never more anxious to leave someplace than she was right then.

And then she heard a by now all too familiar whizzing of wheels and knew who was coming in fast behind her.

“I want in the mix!” Simmons called out. She stopped with one foot on the stairway leading up to her plane. But she didn’t board the plane, and he sped around her so that he could face her. “Two outs, bottom of the ninth, you send your DH to the plate and you go down swinging.”

“Do you have any idea how much I detest sports metaphors?” she said. There was no energy to her voice, however, no real snap in her protest.

He rolled closer. “I have dedicated my life to beating these … bastards. Not you. Not your yes men. Me.”

It would have been so easy for her to climb the rest of the way into her plane and get the hell out of there. It wasn’t as if he could follow her up the stairs.

Instead she remained where she was, looking deeply into herself. Every instinct she possessed told her to leave this lunatic behind. But lately her instincts had been pretty lousy. Maybe it would be smarter for her to start acting in a manner contrary to what her instincts
were telling her. She might be able to save some lives that way.

And then Simmons said, “Plus I’m good for all kinds of stuff. If you don’t want me riding up there with you, strap me to the plane’s belly. I double as landing gear.”

She laughed. Despite everything that had happened, despite all the uncertainty, she actually laughed. Not long and not loud, but enough.

Simmons grinned lopsidedly. “Admit it: I’m still the only guy in the world that can get a chuckle out of you.”

“Shut up and have your bodyguard”—she pointed to Dutch, who was standing behind him—“get your ass into the plane.”

“Yes, ma’am. By the way, does it still turn you on when I call you ma’am?”

“You realize I can just shoot you, fill out some paperwork to explain why it was necessary, and no one will question it, right?”

“Dutch! I need a lift!” Simmons called.

In an underground loading dock at the Hotchkiss Gould Building in Chicago, Illinois, Carly watched in silence as Dylan supervised the strange, ornate six-foot-long metal pillar being off-loaded from an armored car.

Off-loaded by a Decepticon.

It was the one Sam had referred to as Soundwave, the one who had nearly crushed her to death. As it carried the pillar on its shoulder, it cast a glance toward her and slowly closed its fist, apparently to remind her just what it had done to her—and could still do if she tried something cute like running away.

She shuddered. Dylan seemed to notice and naturally grinned upon seeing her discomfort. He gestured for her to follow him, which she did reluctantly, trying to decide whether, if she had the opportunity, she’d have the nerve to strangle Dylan with her bare hands. She decided that the longer this went on, the more likely it was.

Moments later the Decepticon, Dylan, and Carly were in a freight elevator, heading upward. Deciding that silence would serve nothing where information might actually be of use, she said, “What does that mean? Their planet needs our ‘resources’?”

“You haven’t figured it out yet? You’re a smart girl. Work on it.” He waited a few moments and then prodded her. “Got it yet, Duchess?”

“No.”

“Whaddaya think those resources really are?” he said.
“Iron? Metal? Steel? They could mine all that from the you-name-it galaxy. Not to mention Mars. Why here? What’s here and nowhere else?” The dime dropped. “Us …”

He nodded. “Can’t rebuild without a slave labor force,” he said cheerfully. “How many rocks out there in the universe offer six billion workers? I asked. It’s a short list.”

“But … you can’t transport people. We wouldn’t survive … would we?”

“Probably not,” he said reasonably. “I hear that the energies unleashed … for a human, it would be like sticking your head into a blast furnace. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. They’re not gonna be shipping people. They’re shipping their planet here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “That can’t possibly …”

The freight elevator opened, and Dylan stepped out onto the roof of the building, locking the car as he did so so that she’d have no means of heading back down. The sun was setting, night creeping over the horizon. Far below was the Chicago River, with a series of drawbridges stretching across it. The one closest to them was the one on North Wabash Avenue, although she could also see the ones at North Michigan Avenue and North State Street from where she was standing. Under other circumstances, it might have seemed beautiful. With Sam at her side, it would even have been romantic. There was one day in particular, in spring, when the tall boats would come sailing up the Chicago River from their winter boathouse homes on Lake Michigan. As they passed through, the drawbridges would go up in waves to let them through and then close in their wake. Months later, in autumn, the process would reverse itself. It was as if the city were saluting the passing of the seasons.

But there was nothing romantic in what immediately drew her attention.

Tall, even majestic, two gargantuan robots stood on the far end of the rooftop, waiting. If they hadn’t been living symbols of the end of everything, she would have been awed instead of struck with fear.

The Decepticon proceeded to erect the pillar in the middle of the roof, and now Dylan saw where she was looking. He came to her side as if they were sharing some mutually wonderful and inspiring sight, such as the Grand Canyon. “Sentinel,” he said, “and Megatron. Look at those two. Takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Their war destabilized their galaxy ages ago. Destroyed their planet and half its stars. Whole thing is doomed. So these two worked out a secret deal.”

“A deal … to move their whole planet?”

“Yup. Bring it right here. A neighboring world.”

“That’s insane,” she said, facing him. “You can’t just … just drop another planetary body next to ours. It has mass, for God’s sake! Its own gravity! Think, Dylan! Think of the effect the moon has on the tides! And that’s just a … a ball of rock. Another planetary body within range of us … it’ll wind up tearing our world apart!”

He waved dismissively. “I’m sure they’ve got it all worked out.”

“You’re crazier than they are!”

“They’re not crazy at all,” he said. “They’re organized. They’re spreading hundreds more pillars across the earth so they can launch them into orbit by morning. That,” he said, smugly pleased with his knowledge of these matters, “that’s the control one. It needs to stay anchored by the earth’s magnetic core.” Then he hesitated. “I think it’s magnetic. Or kinetic. It’s something.” He shrugged. “When you’re born rich, you’re just not into science. Anyways … tomorrow morning? Bang!” It was appalling how enthused he seemed about it.

From a distance, she could hear the howling of police sirens. There was no doubt in her mind why that was. The Decepticons had been spotted. No surprise there. They were impossible to miss.

Dylan was grinning, watching the approaching flashing lights with as much eagerness as if he were sitting in the bleachers at a baseball game. “Yeah. Those guys are gonna make a big difference.”

“You want this to happen!” Carly said.

Suddenly Dylan snapped. It was as if his personality had undergone a complete transformation in a matter of seconds as he shouted, “No, I want a world of happy children, laughing, singing, nibbling on fields of cotton candy, but that’s not what I’m dealing with right now!” She was taken aback, and just as quickly as he had flared up, he reined himself in once more. The same cocky smile returned, and he continued with a forced calm that didn’t match his expression. “I want to survive. I want forty more years. Every slave labor force needs a hierarchy. They’ll need human leaders—”

“And a CEO,” she said drily.

He wagged a scolding finger at her as if admonishing a child. “Duchess! Don’t jinx it for me. We had a good long run, we really did. But we don’t own this planet. We’ve just been renting.”

Suddenly the building shook.

For the first time, Dylan showed genuine alarm. Explosions had begun in the distance, but they were coming closer and closer, one set of buildings after another erupting in flame. There was so much smoke billowing upward that at first it was hard for Carly to make out what was happening, but then she saw it.

Decepticon battle cruisers were hurtling down from above, threading their way through Chicago’s concrete canyons, firing everywhere, seemingly at random. They weren’t selecting targets. They were just firing everywhere,
both at things that were in their way and at things that weren’t.

Pedestrians were running desperately to get out of the way, but it wasn’t as if there was a safe haven. Buildings were blasted apart at their foundations, crumbling into vast piles of rubble. Cars were struck with stray blasts and promptly erupted, causing massive fires to start rolling down the streets. From North Columbus down to LaSalle, as far as Carly could see, Chicago was under an assault that seemed to be ripped straight out of
War of the Worlds
. And this time germs weren’t going to be sufficient to take down the aliens.

She grabbed Dylan by the shirtfront and screamed in his face,
“Didn’t tell you about this part, did they? You inhuman monster! You—!”

His hand swung fast, taking her across the face, knocking her off her feet. She stumbled back, landing hard on her backside, and Dylan was shouting,
“Hey! You think I’m in every meeting?”
His hands were clenched into fists. And they were trembling. “Look, I’m safe! They said I’m safe, which means if you stick with me, you are, too. You have to stand on the side of progress if you want to be a part of history! Even if it means you stand alone.”

At that moment, she truly wanted to leave him alone in every sense of the word by bolting toward the edge of the roof and throwing herself off. That gave her a nice mental picture: swan diving while Dylan was left behind, shouting after her, cursing her name. It would give her the final word, of sorts.

Because she was positive that Dylan was deluding himself in accepting the word of the Decepticons. He had to be. He was just a means to an end to them, and there was no way he was going to come out of this alive. Which meant she wasn’t going to, either. At least she could choose the manner of her death.

But she didn’t.

She didn’t because of one thought that kept going through her mind:

Sam will come for me. He’ll save me. Somehow
.

It was ridiculous. In her own way, she supposed she was as insane as Dylan was. Yet it was that firm belief that kept her right where she was and prevented her from ending up a splotch on the sidewalk far below.

As the city of Chicago was hammered with death on all sides, Carly dared to dream of life with Sam, as thoroughly unlikely as that was.

From the moment Sam had hit the road with Epps behind the wheel of his sporty Mustang—which Sam half expected to turn into a robot—the ex-soldier made phone call after phone call. Three dozen phone numbers he went through, and most of them didn’t answer, and some of them did and offered apologies …

 … but half a dozen of them were in a position, both healthwise and geographywise, to say yes.

“How the hell many mercs do you know, anyway?” Sam said at one point.

“How many mercs do you think I know that are giant robots?”

“Uh … none?”

“Right. So however many mercs I
do
know, it’s not enough. But we’ll make do with what we’ve got.”

The rendezvous point was a rest stop just north of Indianapolis. They pulled in, and Epps killed the engine. Sam looked around. There were a couple of cars there, but they were filled with families that were sound asleep, using the rest stop to grab some shut-eye and break up a lengthy trip. “Where are they?” he said.

“They’ll be here. When they’re ready for you to see ’em, you will.”

Epps exited the car, going into the station to use the restroom and returning with an assortment of candy bars and soda he’d gotten out of the vending machines. When he returned, Sam went to the restroom as well,
splashed water on his face, and returned to the car. It was four in the morning, and he was functioning on a combination of adrenaline, Kit Kats, and Red Bull. Presuming he survived this, he was going to crash and sleep for about a week and a half.

He prayed that Carly would be at his side.

She had to be.

“It was my fault.”

Epps, who had been about to eat another square of chocolate, turned and looked at him. He didn’t seem any the worse for wear after having driven all night. He was geared up for whatever they were going to have to face. “Dude, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Way I see it, you have the least reason to—”