The look of madness was there in Vance now. He had been pushed too far. Spurlock wondered vaguely if Ingles had seen that same look in his eyes earlier today. Perhaps he had. He decided not to make the same mistake that Ingles’ had. It was best not to call a desperate man’s bluff.
“He’s buried,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Is he on Ingles’ land?” asked Vasquez quietly.
Spurlock rolled his eyes up to her. Since he was laying on his back, he tried automatically to look up her skirt. He could see a hint of white satin up there. He leered. Then he leaned forward as if to kiss Vance’s ear. “In an orchard,” he whispered. “Look for backhoe, about a hundred yards away from the main road.”
“Where?” growled Vance.
“Ingles’ land,” Spurlock whispered. “But you knew that already, didn’t you?”
Vance smiled down at him. “No,” he said.
… 1 Hour and Counting…
Vasquez and Hansen drove back out to Ingles place. They circled the property on the main roads, looking for a backhoe. Driving at less than thirty miles an hour while Vasquez hung her head out the window and peered into the green gloom of the trees, Johansen was becoming impatient.
“We need support,” he said.
“We’ll get it, after we find the site,” replied Vasquez.
“The sheriff’s office is coming to beat the bushes. They’ll be out here in less than an hour for one of their own lost kids.”
“What if the kid doesn’t have an hour left?” she asked.
“I’m just hoping we have jobs to come back to next week.”
“I’m just hoping that we find Vance’s kid.”
“You seriously think he could be buried alive out here somewhere?” he asked.
She turned on him and the look on her face said it all.
“I’m sorry, Letti,” he said quietly. “It’s just been a long day for everyone.”
“Don’t call me Letti,” she said, turning back to the orchards. “I hate that.”
“Okay. Sorry. Let’s find that kid.”
The two of them drove for some time. They passed the house, went to the canal which bordered the property, then turned and rolled along the dusty embankment. A tow truck was hauling the Lincoln up the side of the canal with a winch. They maneuvered around the truck and kept on to the back road, then worked to search the entire region. There were two sheriff’s vehicles in evidence, but they were parked at the house.
When they had made it back to the place where they had started, Johansen braked gently and looked at her with eyebrows upraised.
“Let’s do it again,” she said.
“Um, about the other night,” he began a few minutes later. She tensed visibly. Here it came. The talk.
“I think it’s clear that we’re still working together reasonably well.”
She nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off the orchards.
“Well, what I wanted to ask was-” he paused, and she expected him to clear his throat like an adolescent. But he didn’t. “Can we get together again sometime? Or was it just a freak thing?”
She was silent. She wanted to speak, but couldn’t come up with anything to say. Her throat felt locked.
“Do you want me to drop it for good?” he asked quietly. “‘Cause I will, if that’s what you want.”
“A freak thing?” she responded belatedly. She gave him an appalled look.
“Okay, it was wonderful thing. I can drop it if you want. No pressure.”
She liked that. She thought it over for awhile. Outside the car, the quiet orchards rolled by.
“Well?” he asked.
“I’m thinking.”
When she finally did see the backhoe, she didn’t react right away. They had passed it and gone another hundred yards before she said, “Stop the car!”
The brakes squeaked and the hood nosed down. She was out of the car and running before they had come to a complete stop.
“Bring your cell phone!” she shouted.
He was right behind her, crashing through a thicket of weeds and weaving through the lanes of trees. They reached the backhoe and circled it in a pattern. Soon, she came upon a white PVC pipe that thrust up from a mound of disturbed earth. One spot had sunken in like a gopher-hole.
Johansen handed her his cell phone. “It’s not working for some reason, maybe we’re too far from a tower. Keep trying to call an ambulance. I’m going to get that backhoe started.”
As she watched him run for the backhoe, she made her decision. She decided that it wasn’t just a ‘freak thing’. She decided that she liked this thing, and they would make whatever they could of it together. Bureau policy be damned.
Then she returned herself to the emergency at hand. She froze for just a moment staring down at the mound of earth. Could a small boy really be buried down there?
… 0 Hours and Counting…
With a silent, rolling thunder that wilted everything that it touched, the bomb flowered outwards as the clocks of millions of CPUs touched the final hour. Time zone by time zone, sweeping across the world like a great gray tidal wave that left nothing behind in its path, circuits fell idle. Tiny electronic minds were stilled as the deadly wave touched them. Magnetic memories were forgotten, an infinitely varied landscape consisting of trillions of ones and zeros became a flat, seamless plain of zeros. A billion words, pictures and ideas were smoothed flat and vanished forever.
The internet, built to survive a nuclear holocaust that would remove entire cities from the globe, died at its own hand, following instructions written in secret that none had expected. Nog’s legacy flourished and raged like a living thing, which in fact, many philosophers would argue later, it truly was.
Phones stopped everywhere. Airliners crashed. America’s defense system lost forty years of technological sophistication in an hour. The Russian, German, British and French systems failed soon thereafter.
Like the unsuspecting natives of beautiful islands visited by Cook and his crew two hundred years earlier, whole populations of computers died when faced by a common cold against which they had no immunity.
Vasquez punched buttons repeatedly, but the cell phone didn’t work then, it didn’t work when they raced the dying boy back into town-and, in fact, it wouldn’t work for some weeks to come.
By the end of that week, when Ray was released from prison and his son was released from the hospital, the world had changed forever.
But only a few people realized it was the end of the first great network built by humanity.