They exchanged a look and both nodded at the lie. Accepting it for what it was. Then, without waiting to be told, Brick pulled his own cell phone and began making calls. The first one was to the flight deck to order Church’s chopper, and the second was to the private airfield to tell the pilot to have the Lear smoking when they got there.
“Doc,” began Church, but the tall, gangly scientist shook her head.
“We got this. Go .”
He whirled and ran for the door, with Brick right beside him.
INTERLUDE NINETEEN
Valen and Ari sat in the matched leather pilot’s chairs and studied the island. They both held powerful binoculars and had them trained on the camp.
Ari’s face was swathed in bandages and one eye was swollen shut. He had tissue plugs in his nose and he hovered on the narcotic edge of being awake. Hours had passed since Valen dragged him off the island, and the drugs and booze in the Greek’s system were fading, leaving Ari more or less awake and aware.
The Suicide Kings bobbed in the swells a hundred yards from the shoreline. The research camp was surrounded by a new fence of sturdy pipes and chain link, and the silver finish glittered in the morning sun. The guard booth was painted a pale green to allow it to fade somewhat into the background. The booth was empty and its glass window was painted a different color. Red, in an artless splash pattern.
“What the hell happened to us?” mumbled Ari slowly. “I mean, what the actual hell?”
Valen shook his head, but in truth he thought he knew. Last night, when everyone was killing each other or themselves, when he was beating Ari, something happened. The violence caused his hearing aid to come loose, and suddenly the madness that had overtaken him ended. Just like that. As if a switch had been thrown. The utter silence inside his head was replaced by his own confused and terrified thoughts; but they were his thoughts. He could hear them even if he could hear nothing else, deaf as he was without the aid.
He’d staggered to his feet and blundered out into the camp. Into carnage and wholesale slaughter. Into rape and sodomy and self-mutilation and suicide. When he reached the lab, it was immediately clear to him that the fool technicians had not only completed assembling the new machine, but they’d turned it on as well. The device squatted like a conjured demon while all around it the air seemed to shimmer and shift as if it was a sheer curtain hanging between this world and some hellish otherwhere.
Valen saw that the dials on the device were positioned on their lowest settings. Beneath his feet a tremble troubled the ground.
“No,” he breathed as understanding flooded into him. He shut the machine off, staggered back, fetched Ari, and dragged him to a Zodiac and from there out to the boat. There was no one else left to save.
“We have to call Gadyuka,” said Ari thickly. His words were softened to a lisp because of his missing front teeth. “We have to tell her what happened.”
Tell her it failed, whispered a voice inside his head. Or maybe it was the fading voice from his breaking heart. It will be so easy. Shoot Ari. He’s a monster anyway. Shoot him and then take the machine far out to sea and throw it overboard. Do the same with the hard drives and the research and all of the spare parts and extra crystals. This is the only chance to end it all right here and now. Do it. Do it!
He closed his eyes as he made the call to Gadyuka. She answered right away.
“The device works,” he said in a voice he did not even recognize. “It works perfectly.”
If Ari noticed the tears running down Valen’s cheeks, he did not comment on them.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Doc Holliday came on the line.
“Cowboy, listen to me,” she said, “there’s no help coming. Not from the locals and not in time. There are already three hundred dead and five thousand injured, with new reports coming in every second. Emergency response networks are swamped. How close is your car?”
“Four blocks away,” I said, and heard her hiss like she’d been scalded.
“I know you’re hurt, but can you carry her?”
I ground my teeth together. There was no way I was going to be able to pick up a badly injured 220-pound woman and carry her — carefully — all that distance and across those obstacles. No way in hell.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“When you get her there,” said Doc, “hook her up to Calpurnia so I can assess remotely. We’ll try to arrange a medevac chopper to meet you once you get out of the city and—”
Bug suddenly cut in. “Cowboy, listen, I think we can shorten the distance you’ll have to carry her. Betty Boop has autonomous drive. I’ll have Calpurnia bring it as close as possible. We have drone pictures, so we can see you and see the street. There’s a lot of damage and some of it’s going to mean we have to come to you the long way, but I think we can get the car as close as one block. You’re looking straight down East Capitol Street Northeast. It’s totally blocked, and First Street Southeast is not happening. Between street damage and parked vehicles, the closest we can get your car is across the grounds to the Southeast Drive loop closest to the corner of First Street and Independence Avenue.”
“Understood.”
“Cowboy,” said Doc, “don’t move her until you see the car. We need to reduce the amount of additional trauma and shorten the time between moving her and getting her to the chopper.”
“Understood,” I said again. “Do it. And don’t stop for coffee, Bug.”
“Rolling. ETA seven minutes.”
I told Auntie that help was on the way. Maybe she understood. Hard to tell with stroke victims. Sometimes the body dies by degrees while the mind remains alert and aware of the burning building in which it’s trapped.
Seven minutes. We huddled together and waited for hope. I talked to her, got her to grunt. Even got her to laugh, kind of. Telling stupid stories about the weird stuff that happens on field ops. It did not take seven minutes. It took thirteen. I tried so hard not to take that as an ill omen.
Then a voice in my ear said, “Cowboy, on your six.”
I turned and saw Betty Boop come thumping over the cracked asphalt sixty yards away. The windshield was white with spiderweb cracks, the armored shell was streaked with dust and blood. It rolled as far as possible and stopped on the other side of an overturned news van.
“Your carriage awaits, princess,” I said.
Auntie looked confused, and I explained that I needed to carry her to the car. I padded that with too much technical information and a lot of preloaded apologies for how much it might hurt. Auntie’s fingers twitched, pointing to her slack mouth, so I bent and listened to what she was trying to tell me.
“Stop…,” she gasped, slurring the word so that I had to reconstruct it phonetically, “being… such a… pussy… and just… f-f-fucking… do it.”
I straightened and grinned down at her. There was a glitter of her old edge in one eye. Even then.
“Yes, Auntie,” I said, and did not let her see my own tears.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
“They don’t understand,” growled the president, shaking his cell phone at VanOwen. “How can they not understand? What are they? Stupid?”