Then he saw flashing blue electricity and the shape of a metal vehicle of some kind, and the air filled with whipping clouds of dust and sand. The sand engulfed him so fast he didn’t have time to close his mouth, and sand pushed into his lungs. Opposing gales of air squeezed him front and back, spinning him.
He retreated, but in the maelstrom he had to have staggered in the wrong direction. He found himself right up close to the machine that clawed out of the earth, and the crackling blue energy reached out for Frank Socol.
The vehicle crawled onto the level surface of the desert. The lightning vanished, allowing the clouds of sediment to settle like sifted flour. A light breeze carried the lingering dust away from Jack’s Earth Drill.
The hatch opened.
“Holy smokes! It’s hotter out here than at two thousand feet!”
Jack Fast slid out of the hatch feetfirst and stood blinking in the powdery sand, then saw he was not alone. “Hey, cool!”
Fastbinder emerged, merely happy to be alive and back on the surface of the earth again. He found his son examining the blackened, burned remains of a human being perched alongside JED.
Frank Socol was kneeling, his arms stretched out to either side, as if frozen in a state of worship. The static discharge of the earth drill had burned and blackened his flesh and bones halfway through his body.
The false idol to which he was praying was the gleaming, spotless earth drill.
“You like yours extracrispy, Pops?”
“No, thank you.” Fastbinder, to be honest, was nauseated by the remains—-and now he was worried about who else might be around.
“Don’t worry, it’s still early. Nobody for miles,” Jack explained. “Let’s go shopping!”
Fastbinder saw they had surfaced alongside Route 66. Miles to the east along this road were the abandoned remains of his own precious museum.
This place was also on a similar deserted stretch of Route 66, with the quiet mountains rising out of the dry earth a few miles behind it. It was old, but not a bad-looking retail establishment.
They emptied the antique, hand-built wooden shelves of This Little Piggy Market. They took over-priced foam coolers and filled them with everything from the refrigerated display cases.
“Told you, Pops,” Jack said as they each navigated a shopping cart through the desert weeds. “It’s too early for tourists.”
Fastbinder held up a small box of his favorite sugar-glazed popcorn snack. “Zees Screamink Yellow Zonkers would be a dollar and ninety-nine cents at zee zupermarket, but he was zelling it for six bucks U.S.”
“You talk like a real kraut when you get worked up, Pops,” Jack observed.
“I like zis place very much,” Fastbinder admitted. He typically restored antique machinery, but he could see that a lot of love and elbow grease had gone into restoring the market. The expensive furnishings in the living quarters, and the spotless new Land Rover parked in back, proved that This Little Piggy was quite profitable.
As Jack was tossing groceries in JED’s hatch, Fastbinder used the boy’s mobile phone to reach his lawyer in Cologne, Germany.
“Herr Fastbinder, I am so glad—”
“Shut up and listen. There is a property I want you to buy for me as soon as possible.” Fastbinder described the market.
“A grozery store?” his lawyer asked. “Eet duss goot bizeeness?”
“A tourist grocery store,” Fastbinder said. “And soon it will be zeetop tourist destination on zee famous American Route 66.”
Jack Fast was grinning. “Pretty savvy, Pops. Americans love this kinda bizarro unsolved-mystery stuff.”
“And zee Finns,” Fastbinder reminded as he ducked back into the earth drill. “Never underestimate zee buying power of zee Finnish tourists.”
Jack’s Earth Drill rolled into the tunnel and the flashing of lights didn’t appear again until it was a hundred feet down.
Nobody was there to witness its departure. Frank Socol, late owner of This Little Piggy Market and Gift Shop on America’s Historic Route 66, was too extracrispy to notice.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was tossing people out of an airplane.
“Three, two, one, go!” He hoisted the skydiver through the open floor hatch with one hand.
“Ten, nine, eight!” Remo said loudly over the wind and aircraft racket, staring at his watch.
“I will exit under my own power,” declared the next skydiver, words muffled by the helmet enclosing his entire face.
Remo, who took his job as jump coordinator very seriously, shook his head. “Six! No room for error five! Four!” At zero the skydiver jumped, but not before Remo gave him a quick shove that sent him spiraling away from the plane at an unplanned trajectory.
The next skydiver curled his lip as Remo counted down the next jump.
“You touch me, I kill you,” the squat, powerful-looking man called.
“Four! Eat shit ’n’ die three!”
The skydiver stepped through the hatchway on three, only to find himself dangling in the thin subzero wind just outside the belly of the aircraft. The jump coordinator was gripping him by the harness in one hand as if he were holding an alley cat by the scruff of the neck.
“One! Wait for it, zero!” Remo released the jumper with a twist. The skydiver with the bad attitude went flopping end-over-end toward Earth.
Only one skydiver left, and he decided it was in his best interest to cooperate. This no-nonsense jump coordinator was clearly not a man to cross. Remo wasn’t bothered by the frigid wind. He sucked on a spare oxygen bottle occasionally, but it was almost as if he were doing it just for show. He was thin, but his wrists were so muscular he had to use a six-inch aircraft screw, bent like a twist tie, to extend the bands of his watch. The guy was either inhuman or a lunatic.
But he was a reasonable lunatic, anyway. The last skydiver behaved himself and in return Remo jettisoned him powerfully from the aircraft at exactly the right instant. The launch was smooth and straight—no out-of-control free fall to fight his way out of. The skydiver happily considered that his smooth exit was going to gain him a few vital seconds.
Outside the aircraft, fifty thousand feet above the earth, the skydiver deliberately forgot all about the strange jump coordinator and concentrated on what he was doing. He was a professional extreme athlete. Distractions were lethal to peak extreme performance. Taking control of his fall, he drew in his limbs to cut wind resistance.
The goal was to get to the surface faster than all the other divers. The winner of this competition was the jumper who used the least total time to get from fifty thousand feet to solid ground—without dying.
“This is a stupid sport,” Remo observed.
Free fall was the last place on Earth you would ever think to find yourself with unexpected company. The skydiver jerked and twisted until he found who had spoken.
It was the jump coordinator from the aircraft, the fool in the T-shirt, hovering just above him.
“What are you doing?”
“Skydiving, duh, what’s it look like?” Remo didn’t shout, but the extreme athlete heard him clearly through the wind noise and his face mask.
“You got no chute! No oxygen! No thermal suit!”
“The chute I’ll pick up later. It’s not like we don’t have time. We’re practically in orbit.”
“Come here, I’ll harness you in with me.”
“No, thanks.”
The skydiver sputtered and tried to give chase, but Remo turned his body into an arrowhead that slipped through the thin air faster than the skydiver in his bulky gear.
Remo was slightly peeved. He had thought the last man in the line would be the guilty one. It made sense, right? If you’re going to kill a bunch of your fellow skydivers, wouldn’t it be optimal to shoot down instead of up?