Even though it was early, vendors were selling beer by the hundred gallon. Hot dogs and chicken wings, chips and pretzels were being devoured by the ton.
It had all started. The race season was on.
Danny Perry, the rising star of the NASCAR world who’d come out of nowhere two years ago to win a record number of races, was there, third back on the inside, driving a Ford Fusion with the decal of a sports drink on the hood and half a dozen other advertisers crowding the doors and roof. The car had a sky blue body, and images from the interior cameras inside the car flashed the masked and helmeted face of the four-wheeled hero onto the screens. The hot money was on him to come in no lower than fourth, and maybe even second place. High enough to insure his place in the rest of the series. Some of the sports reporters were saying that he had the chops to make it all the way to the winning flag at the end of the season. He had more under the hood, they said. He had tricks he hadn’t yet used, they said. He had things to prove, they said.
A lot of fans in the stands wore his colors. One group of three hundred people who had bussed in from his hometown of Greenwood had little fans with cutouts of his face on them, and each time his car roared past they waved his own image at him, and then chased him with their screams.
The cars ripped around the track, changing places, fighting each other for position, taking calculated risks, going too fast for mistakes. The interior cameras flashed one face, then another and another, onto the screens. The helmets and fireproof masks showed nothing, but the commentators made those masked faces human with anecdotes and predictions. The crowds knew the faces of their heroes anyway.
Twenty-six minutes in, just as the pack began to stretch out and lose its bee-swarm shape, Danny Perry made his move. He was known for waiting to see how the other drivers were playing it, getting the pulse of the players on the field, and then he’d make a move to take the lead. So far he’d made that play sixteen times, and each time he got the lead early he kept it. As soon as he cut through a gap that didn’t look wide enough for a bicycle and shot out in front with an acceleration that lived up to the hype, the crowd went absolutely mad. Even the fans who weren’t rooting for Danny leapt to their feet because this was a history-book moment. Danny wasn’t racing against anyone who lived on the second or third tier of the sport. He was jousting with kings, and he’d just taken the lead in a move that made a bold damn statement.
Catch me if you can.
If you can.
The whole pace — already insane — rose up as the hunt began in earnest. It was going to be brutal. Everyone knew it.
Which is when it all went to hell.
There was no warning. No bomb. Nothing that indicated an attack. Nothing sinister.
On one side of a scalding moment of raw high-speed entertainment, sixteen stock cars raced at more than 185 miles an hour. Danny Perry had bulled his way to 190.3.
On the other side of that moment the engines of every car on the track stopped.
There were no explosions. Not at first.
The electrical conduction within the transmissions ceased. Gone. Just as the video feeds from the cameras and the big screens mounted around the track went dark. Bang. The commentators’ voices were silenced. Just like that.
Only the sound of the crowd pushed its way past the moment. They were screaming, cheering, yelling. And then when the first cars spun out of control and the next wave struck them, it was only the screams that lingered.
Lingered, grew, rose, detonated into shrill blasts of horror as every car crunched together. The drivers had no chance. There was no power at all. No steering, nothing. Only the bull muscle of feet on brakes and desperate hands on dying steering wheels gave the cars any chance.
It was too small a chance, though. The speeds were too great. The shock was too much.
Engines exploded. Electricity was not flowing and there were no sparks from damaged wires. No, the sparks that touched off the fuel were from metal hitting metal. Not many sparks.
Enough.
Enough was too much.
A fireball punched upward from amid the crunched fist of the collision. The screams of the crowd changed in pitch, rising higher, sounding like a great flock of birds in pain.
CHAPTER NINE
Top pulled off his helmet and balaclava so he could see better as he applied a quick field dressing to Bunny’s face. I stood guard. Nobody talked about the penguin. We probably should have, but we didn’t.
Instead Bunny asked the only question that mattered. “What the hell is going on down here?”
Good question, but none of us had even a clue how to answer it.
Once Bunny’s wound was dressed we began moving again. I checked the BAMS unit and got the same steady green, so I tugged down the edge of my own balaclava and sniffed the air. It smelled of machine oil, ozone, ice, and sulfur. Nothing more mysterious than that. Even the rotted meat smell seemed less evident the deeper we went into the complex.
We checked the rest of the storeroom, but it was empty.
Almost empty.
There were no more penguins and there were no people, but all along the back wall there was blood. Pools of it. Drops of it. Arterial sprays of it on the wall.
“Oh… shit,” breathed Bunny.
Against the wall was a stack of crates that was ten boxes high and went all the way to the ceiling, the wooden boxes pressed closed. Somebody had written across the face of the stack.
THE SEQUENCE IS WRITTEN IN THE STARS
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?” asked Bunny.
Instead of answering, Top leaned close to the writing, then he winced and recoiled. He didn’t have to tell us what had been used to write those words. The floor was covered with bloody footprints. In shoes, in military-style combat boots, and in bare feet.
“Looks like a parade’s been through here,” said Top.
“Whoa, whoa,” said Bunny, kneeling by one set of boot prints, “look at this. That’s not American.”
He was right. The tread marks of those boots were different from any of the patterns used on the boots and shoes of American military. In our line of work you learn these things. Just as you learn the tread marks of shoes worn by allies and others. This was an “other.”
“Russian,” said Top. “No doubt about it. Standard-issue combat boots.”
We spread out and checked the rest of the prints and found two other sets of Russian boots and five different sets of Chinese boots.
“So,” said Bunny, looking around, “this was an invasion? Does that mean this was an act of war or—?”
Instead of answering I called it in and told Bug, Aunt Sallie, and Church what we’d found. Bloody footprints. No bodies, no shell casings. No answers.
“That base is U.S. military property,” said Aunt Sallie. “That makes it de facto U.S. soil. If you encounter enemy combatants anywhere in Gateway and if they do not surrender their weapons, you will respond appropriately to protect yourself, your team, the Gateway staff, and the physical assets on site. In that order.”
“Copy that,” I said.
Church added, “Get us some answers, Cowboy.”
I promised that I would. Answers would be nice. Kicking some ass would be nice, too.
We followed the Russian prints out of the storeroom and down a corridor lined with closed doors. These opened into offices, bedrooms, small labs, an infirmary, and other functional rooms. No one was in any of them and there was no sign of disturbance. No blood, no damage, no shell casings. The bloody footprints had long since faded to paleness and then vanished.