They flew Pete on a commercial plane from Charleston to St. Louis, where he boarded a military transport. The pilots seemed mildly put out to be hosting him, in the way military pilots always did, barely saying a word to him on the flight from St. Louis to Spokane, Washington.
At the Spokane airport, Pete was met on the ground by a military vehicle that was flying a small Alliance flag from the right corner of its hood. The drivers, however — two sergeants — were regular Army, and had numerous battlefield commendations. They weren’t talkative, with Pete or with each other, but they seemed happy to have him, to have duty on the mainland, for which Pete, as their cargo, got part of the credit.
“Seat belt, please, sir,” said the driver as Pete settled into the small backseat. As soon as it clicked, they were off with a roar of the vehicle’s heavy engine, heading west.
Pete realized that he’d been in the Alliance’s bubble for a long time. Outside the walls of the military bases where he’d spent so much of his time in the past few years, it seemed like things were starting to break down. In the hardscrabble towns outside of Spokane, a few people stared at them accusingly from their porches as they passed. Almost every store was closed. A few gas stations were open, but cars were lined up, most of them parked: they looked like they were waiting for gas to arrive. Lines also snaked out the doors of government clinics and pantries. A light mist began to fall, obscuring the view. The people in lines stood still, their faces blank, oblivious to the rain. Not long ago, Pete had associated poverty with obesity, a bad fast-food and junk-food diet accompanied by plentiful television and video games. The poor had transformed, he saw, back to an earlier version of want, where they looked gaunt, like images of dust bowl farmers during the Great Depression. Soon they were in the prairie, and Pete fell fast asleep as the sergeants murmured to each other about battles fought and comrades lost.
When they crossed the Northern Cascades and neared the coast, the area became increasingly militarized. A vehicle similar to their own sat alongside the road, charred, burned out.
“What happened to them?” asked Pete.
The solider in the passenger seat looked back at Pete without saying anything. He pointed to the sky.
After three hours of driving, they stopped suddenly on a deserted strip of highway, and the soldiers checked their tablet computer.
“Orders are updating,” said one of them.
“We should be OK,” said the soldier who wasn’t driving. “Looks like we’re meeting your boat in Bangor. Puget Sound is deep enough there for your ride, but pretty far inland. Improves our odds.”
They waited ten minutes until the tablet beeped. The driver read the orders, and then handed it to his partner to verify.
“We’ve got an hour to kill,” he said. “Looks like they want us to do the rest of the drive in the dark.”
“Sounds good,” said Pete. He was about to ask the soldiers if they had any food, but they had both already fallen asleep in their seats, trained, like soldiers everywhere, to sleep whenever an opportunity presented itself.
After fifteen minutes, he let himself out of the vehicle to urinate, and to stretch his legs. He walked a few feet away, not sure if he would be violating some kind of Army etiquette by peeing too close to their vehicle. It was a still, cool night, and Pete noticed for the first time that the soldiers hadn’t even pulled over: they’d stopped in the middle of the highway. It didn’t seem like any kind of martial arrogance; he assumed they must have good reason to believe that no other drivers were coming along. And, come to think of it, Pete hadn’t seen one in a while, in either direction. Not even another military vehicle. The interstate must be closed to civilian traffic, he realized.
Something caught his eye to the north, in the sky. A dark form, flying silently toward them. He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and fought the urge to shout out to his companions until he was certain.
It swooped low, and then curved back into the sky, too high for him to see in the blackness. He kept his eyes up, and saw it again, blocking out its silhouette in the stars.
It was a vulture.
He exhaled loudly with relief. Any other time in his life, the appearance of a lone vulture on an empty highway might fill him with silent dread, a dark omen. But under the circumstances, he almost laughed with relief.
The vehicle behind him erupted with alarms. The driver threw his door open.
“Get in!” he screamed.
Pete dived for the door. Before he even had the door shut, they were spinning their tires, speeding down the highway.
The soldier in the passenger seat reached up and silenced the alarm in the overhead console that was blaring. “Drone,” he said. “Directly behind us. Flying west.”
“What the fuck were you doing out there?” said the driver.
“Taking a piss,” said Pete.
“Did you see it? Why the fuck didn’t you say something?”
The driver had switched on a center console that showed the drone as a tiny, bright green blip to the east in the center of a small screen.
“Gaining on us,” said the passenger. “Radar says he’s going about one hundred knots.”
“That means he’s not armed,” said Pete. “That’s too fast for an armed bird.”
The two soldiers looked at each other, assessed Pete’s knowledge without saying anything to each other.
“So you think we should just go back to sleep?” he said. They were roaring down the highway, hitting potholes with jarring force.
“No,” said Pete. “It’s in suicide mode. Unarmed, far from home. He’s going to try to crash into us.”
“I’ve heard about that,” said the soldier in the passenger seat. “Kamikaze mode.”
“Well, fuck me,” said the driver. He was scanning the roadside, looking for some kind of natural cover, but there was nowhere to hide.
“Wait until he’s in his dive!” said Pete. “Once he starts free fall, he doesn’t alter course. Everything shuts down.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“I wrote the program,” said Pete.
“Did you also write the program that’s supposed to keep them from attacking on Alliance territory?”
“Five hundred yards,” said the soldier in the passenger seat, looking at the radar screen. “But he’s climbing.”
“It wants to gain altitude before diving,” said Pete.
“So what should I do?”
“Keep driving straight,” said Pete. “Let it commit to a solution.”
They roared down the highway. The driver suddenly veered to avoid a massive crater in the center of the road. Pete could feel the vehicle coming up on two wheels. They crashed back down.
“That’s a new one,” said the driver. “Not on the chart. Probably where our friend there dropped his bomb.”
“Bombing what?” said the other sergeant.
“Unlucky farmer?” he said. “Who knows. Maybe a mule or a goddamn enemy possum.”
Other alarms began beeping on their overhead console. “One hundred yards and diving,” he said. “Heading right for us.”
“Keep driving,” said Pete. He was counting down in his head, running the numbers, knowing the drone wouldn’t correct its free fall in the last ten seconds of flight. “Slam on the brakes when I say so.…”
They could see on the radar that it was directly behind and above them. They still couldn’t see it. Pete watched the two dots on the radar screen converge, their truck and the enemy drone. The two dots were almost on top of each other.
“Now!” he said.
The driver slammed on the brakes, and the truck skidded to a halt, going completely sideways. They sat for one pregnant moment, and then the drone crashed directly on the stretch of road in front of them, right outside the driver’s side window. There was no explosion, as the drone carried no fuel. Just sparks and the concussion.