I twitched and thrashed and screamed and could not do a single useful thing. Voices in my ear — Bug and Doc — sounded like they were a hundred miles away, on the other side of a vast thunderstorm. I caught words, but each of them cracked open like fortune cookies in which no one had thought to include fortunes.
The man returned, and for a moment I thought he was going to strike me with the crowbar. Or worse, Ghost. He didn’t. Instead he went immediately to work on the trunk of one of the smashed cars. It took him maybe ten seconds to break the lock. It went up with a creak of protest. The man dropped the crowbar between Ghost and me, then bent to lift something out of the trunk. It was a device about the size of an old-fashioned boom box, but not shaped like that.
No. This was built like a small generator but with a large circular opening wrapped in coils of silver and copper wires.
My heart stopped beating for a moment. I was sure of it.
I knew that machine.
I’d seen two of them. Big ones. Much bigger than this. One was down in Antarctica. The other was in the basement of a mansion on the West Coast. I knew what those machines could do, and nothing I’d ever seen in life scared me as much as seeing one now, in the hands of some stranger.
He began walking toward the parked Harley, then stopped at the edge of the lawn, and looked down the street toward burning houses and the endless sound of sirens. Then he turned back to me.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “If you were me, you’d do the same. The war never ends, does it?”
I was incapable of speech. I wanted to ask what he meant. I wanted to tell him that he was a murderous bastard. All I could do was scream.
He nodded, though, as if I had agreed with his words. He went over to his bike and put the device into the cargo rack behind the saddle, wrapping it in a blue tarp and securing it with bungee cords. Then he put on a plain black helmet and swung his leg over. He started the engine, turned once more toward me, though now his face was nothing but a wall of curved, impenetrable plastic. He nodded to me.
Then he drove away.
The battery sputtered out and died in a puddle. I fought against the lingering pain and disorientation and rolled over onto hands and knees. Ghost was whimpering and trying to stand; and failing.
I lifted a trembling hand to tap my earbud. The ones we use are hardened against most kinds of power surges or shocks, but even so I was surprised that it still worked.
“C–Cowboy to T-T-TOC.”
Doc Holliday was right there, clear as a bell and urgent as a heart attack. “Cowboy, your telemetry is spiking. Are you all right?”
“No,” I gasped as I crawled over to Ghost and pulled him into my arms. “Nothing’s all right, goddamn it.”
“Did you locate the bomb?”
Ghost gave my face a feeble, desperate lick.
“It’s not a bomb,” I wheezed.
“You’re not making sense.…”
“It was a God Machine.…”
Ghost shivered and I bent and pressed my forehead against his and waited for the pain to stop.
Knowing it would not.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
The Arklight team moved through dusty shadows, following old maps and instinct. The leader was wise and older than she looked, and the others trusted her intuition when it came to missions like this. The older members of the team had walked through worse shadows than these with her and come out on the other side. Only the youngest of the team, Adina, Qadira’s grandniece, was new to field missions of this kind. She tried not to let her fear and apprehension show, but her words betrayed her nervousness.
“Won’t there be aftershocks?”
“Probably,” said her great-aunt.
“These walls are all broken,” said Adina. “Most of the ceiling has collapsed. What if—?”
Qadira stopped and turned to her, holding the flashlight so that they each leaned into a cone of its glow. “Listen to me,” she said. “There are always dangers. There will always be dangers. You know this. You were born into horror, and every day of your life until you were five was filled with dangers worse than anything down here. The walls may collapse, the rest of the roof may fall, and Gaia might swallow us whole. All of that could happen, but if so… then what?”
“We would die.”
“Yes. We would, as so many of our sisters and mothers and daughters have died. So, tell me then, Adina… what is death? What is it to women such as us?”
Adina straightened and took a breath. “Death is a doorway,” she recited. It was part of a very old catechism the Mothers of the Fallen had written for themselves during their centuries of captivity in the breeding pits of the Red Knights.
“What is beyond the doorway?” asked the older woman.
“There is life beyond life beyond life.”
Qadira smiled and touched Adina’s face and hair and shoulders.
“Men fear death,” said one of them. “But we are women. We give birth to ourselves.”
“Death is a doorway to life,” said Qadira. Then she grinned, and the lines on her face creased like a playful monkey’s. “But let’s not wait for death to catch us. He is slow and we are… what…?”
“We are fast,” said Adina, smiling in spite of herself.
“Yes, we are.”
And, true to their litany, the women, old and young, moved off quickly through the darkness beneath the broken earth.
Ten minutes later they found a man sitting with his back to a wall. He was covered with dust and blood, and his eyes were filled with madness. A woman lay on the ground with her head on his lap. She, too, was bloody. A pistol, with the slide locked back, was on the ground near them.
Both the man and the woman were as pale as ghosts.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
It took a long time to get back to the car.
Ghost limped along on wobbly legs and we both had to stop and rest. Whatever kind of stun gun was used had more kick than anything I’d ever even heard of. Nearly lethal, but not actually.
When I reached the Betty Boop, I collapsed against it and stood there on macaroni legs, trembling and weak and stupid. The locks clicked open and I helped Ghost inside.
“Calpurnia,” I wheezed, “get a forensics team here. I want that car taken to the Warehouse. And find that motorcycle. Retask any drones you need and access all pertinent traffic cams. This guy doesn’t slip away, understood?”
“Of course, Cowboy,” she said briskly, then added, “You appear ill. According to the RFID chip, there is a ninety-two percent possibility that you have been Tased.”
“Well, no shit, Sherlock.”
“Don’t be snotty,” scolded the computer. “And watch your—”
“If you tell me one more time to watch my fucking language I’m going to open up your CPU and let Ghost take a piss in it.”
There was a beat. “Initiating a full medical diagnostic, Joseph.”
“Do that,” I said, and called Doc Holliday. “Tell me if Sam is alive.”
“He is,” Doc said, “but he’s in bad shape. Shrapnel, shock, and blood loss. An evac team is flying him out of D.C. and when I know more you’ll know. He was wearing a bodycam but it was damaged and the video feed is distorted. Our people are running all kinds of filters and we should have something soon. One thing I can tell you, though, is the blast that took him down was weird. Not orange or yellow flame. It was bright green. That jibes with witness reports from the other explosions.”