Unfortunately, the glitches he was discovering extended beyond technology. The people around him were as defective as miscoded programs.
Julie was being a wuss, not at all the stand-up guy Declan thought would emerge on this trip. Certainly he was not as savvy about the way things were as Declan had been at his age.
Bad, his most effective soldier, had allowed himself to get shot—by an arrow at that! He wasn’t down for the count yet; Declan intended on pushing him as hard as ever, on showing him that winners didn’t run home crying at the first sight of blood.
And now Cort. Declan and the guys had spent countless hours disabling vehicles, collecting keys, searching for communication devices, and locking up as many guns as they could find, either on their own or by coercing their locations from townsfolk. It took only one rogue individual to muck everything up. He’d seen it before: Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, even The Lord of the Rings—and that little troublemaker was a hobbit! And here Cortland goes and gives a weapon to these interlopers, his own real-life Bruce Willises. One of them already had a gun, as the shattered window of the Hummer attested. But either the people who came into town last night did not include the gunslinger, or something had happened to his weapon. Otherwise why resort to a weapon as primitive as a bow and arrow? As every shooting game proved, the more technology invested in a weapon, the better it was. Spears beat knives, pistols beat spears, automatic rifles beat pistols, bombs beat rifles, and Declan controlled the weapon that beat them all.
But despite his belief in the value of escalating technology, he knew that one man with one bullet could change the course of history. “For want of a nail” and all that, he thought.
He turned away from Cortland to retrieve his Jean Dunand wristwatch from the desk, but primarily to emphasize his displeasure. He said, “When Julie comes back from the car, tell him to get you a gun from the stash we locked up.” He fiddled with the clasp on his watch until he heard her footsteps heading for the door.
He glanced over his shoulder. “And, Cort? You won’t lose this one, right?”
She nodded and left.
The Slacker was in a metal case the size of a hefty paperback book. He plucked it up from the cot and followed her out of the room, stopping in the corridor.
“Pru!” he called.
Pruitt stepped into the corridor from the next room. He held the camera in his hands. An LCD monitor jutted out from the camera body. Declan could see flashes of moving color on the screen. A cord dropped down from a plug in the camera, then looped up to Pruitt’s ear. “Yeah?”
“Have you reviewed the footage so far?”
“Good stuff, Dec.”
“What do we still need?”
Pruitt pursed his lips in thought. He looked down at the camera, as though gazing at his own memory bank.
“Uh . . . we could use a couple more human targets, maybe some animals, definitely some vehicles . . .” He closed his eyes. “Burning trees, buildings, some misses would be nice.” His eyes snapped open. “Those night shots turned out fantastic! And the river yesterday, with that guy? Couldn’t ask for more.”
“Great.We’ll see what we can do about those other things. Got everything? Ready?”
Pruitt gestured with his head. “Let me grab an extra battery and a different lens. I’ll be right there.”
“Bad! I don’t see you!”
“I’m coming, Dec, man! My leg hurts like—”
“I don’t want to hear it!”
The same well from which Bad drew his competitive spirit—his ability to see everything as a game to be won or lost—also produced buckets of fierce independence.That his father was a multimillionaire didn’t help matters. But it was Declan’s father who had made Bad’s family rich. So it was to Declan that Bad owed his allegiance, even if it meant suppressing a natural desire to guide his own ship.
“Let’s go, people!” Declan bellowed. To Julian, who was heading toward the far corridor with Cortland, he said, “Hurry, Julie.We don’t have time for your shuffling around.”
Kyrill jogged up to him, .50-cal rifle in hand. “Ready, boss,” he said.
Declan punched his arm. “Good man, Kyrill.You drive the Jeep.”
The teen’s face lit up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Pru! You and Bad take the Bronco. Now! We’re leaving!”
He crossed the vestibule and pushed out the door.
34
“What,s going on? ” Laura said. She sat on the bed in the hotel room across from the community center. By the dim moonlight coming through the windows, she peeled away bandages on her fingers and knuckles, replacing them with fresh ones from Terry’s first aid kit.
“They’re leaving,” Terry said. He had spent the past ten minutes watching for additional activity. “Declan . . . one, two rifles . . . that camera guy . . .”
“Going after Hutch and Dillon,” Laura said, certain.
He turned from the window. “Any suggestions?”
She scrunched her face, shook her head.“What you said, about the vehicles you saw coming into town being all disabled. I heard them talking about it, getting all the keys, cutting wires. Cars, boats, ATVs. Sounded like they were pretty thorough.”
“They couldn’t have gotten every mode of transportation in the whole town.” It sounded more like a question than a statement.
“Not every family in town owns a car,” she said. “Everything we need is here or in walking distance. Some families pool their money and buy a beater. Lots of off-road toys, though: four-wheelers, threewheelers, dirt bikes. Snowmobiles, but that won’t help now.”
Headlamps from outside suddenly glowed against Terry’s face, catching worry lines as well as stern determination. The illumination rolled off his face. Engines rose in pitch, then faded as the trucks drove away.Terry came over and sat on the bed next to her.
“Let me do that,” he said.
“I got it.” Then she realized not only that it would be nice to have someone caring for her, even a stranger with this small thing, but that it would help him as well to feel he was doing something. She handed him the package and showed him her knuckles.
“We should put something on that.” He rooted around in the first aid bag and found a tube of antibiotic ointment. He applied it to the bandage, then laid it on her wound. “This cabin you say Dillon will go to—can we walk?”
“No, it’s pretty far. If Declan’s gang searches methodically for Hutch and Dillon, they’ll find it way before we get there by foot.”
“Do we have options?”
“I say we start searching houses for something—anything—we can use to get there.”
“I’d like to find a gun or two, or at least ammo for the ones we have. And there’s no chance of getting word out, as far as you know?”
“I’m sure they got all the satellite phones.They’re expensive and a big deal up here. Nobody would own one without the whole town knowing. Shortwave doesn’t work too well up here. Nobody within talking distance. I’d say light a building on fire and get the attention of the other towns that way, but Declan doesn’t seem too worried about drawing that kind of attention. They must have already informed the other towns that Fiddler Falls would be conducting some controlled burns or something like that. Otherwise, somebody would have already come.”
“I’m just amazed that there are still places in this world that are so isolated.”
“You said that’s what you guys were looking for, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re not the only ones.”
Terry finished with the bandages.
Laura looked at them, impressed by how tight and professional they appeared. She flexed her hand, feeling the tape. “Okay,” she said. “I got a kid waiting for me to pick him up.”
Hutch and Dillon felt like stowaways on a crashing plane. The Hummer jostled them so severely, Hutch had hit his head on the high ceiling and Dillon had vibrated right out of the passenger seat, onto the floor. Now they both wore
seat belts, and if they were no longer in a crashing plane, they had hitched a ride on a mechanical paint shaker. They went through fields of rocks and fallen timber and along paths designed for animals treading in single file. One side of the truck or the other seemed to be constantly canting down into a ravine.
“The road to Black Lake is worse than this?” Hutch asked.
“That’s what Dad says . . . said.” Dillon turned his face toward the window.
He was pushing back some serious hurt. When this is over, the kid is going to have a meltdown, Hutch thought.
The sky had lightened to reveal dark gray clouds rolling in from the north. Even the red-yellow-orange sunrise could not penetrate them. That beautiful light seemed far away, as remote as the towns they could not reach. Chilly wind howled through the glassless window behind Dillon.
“Are you sure we’re heading in the right direction?”
Dillon nodded.
Hutch scanned the instruments and LCD screens arrayed on the dash and center console. One large monitor had glowed white since leaving town. Every once in a while a serpentine blue line would appear, making him believe it was a GPS unit without the benefit of local maps. Other dials and gauges were as foreign to him as an Arabic recipe for samboosak. Hutch did not want to stop until they reached their destination, so he had made a mental note to ask Dillon to search the interior for anything useful as soon as they came to a patch of flat land. He was beginning to wonder if this region contained any smooth topography at all. The lightening day finally outshone the headlamps, which had seemed to shake independently of the passenger compartment, compounding an already disorienting and nauseating ride.
They rolled over a grassy knoll, and Dillon yelled, “Look!”
Hutch followed his finger to see two vehicles bouncing and leaping toward them. They were the SUVs that had been parked in front of the community center: a dark green Jeep Cherokee and a red Ford Bronco.They were descending the opposite incline of a shallow valley separating Hutch and Dillon.
“Oh no. How—”
If the Hummer continued its current trajectory, the Jeep and Bronco would intercept them at a ninety-degree angle in about five minutes. Instead, Hutch cranked the wheel right. They were now on the same compass bearing as Declan; instead of intercepting the Hummer, the freak would have to outrun it. They rose over a grassy hill and down into an adjoining valley. At the wide, gentle arc of the valley floor, he stopped. Somehow Declan had found them. He suspected the culprit was whatever contraption he had overhead that had also tracked Hutch to the campsite and spotted him,Terry, and Phil in town.That or some kind of tracking device on the Hummer itself.
He pulled out his topo map, studied it. He had started the sport of hunting well before the advent of GPS location systems and preferred printed maps to devices whose software he didn’t completely trust and whose batteries could fail at the worst possible times. Consequently, he could read the thread-thin lines of a topo as easily as a Grisham novel. Having a decent sense of their route since leaving town, and now scanning for topographical markers most other people would have overlooked, he identified their position. His eyes moved in each direction until he found what he was looking for.
“Okay,” he said, unsnapping his seat belt. He instructed Dillon to do the same. He rubbed his shoulder, sore from the constant chafing of the shoulder strap. “This is going to be scary, but you gotta trust me. Can you do that, partner?”
“Yes,” Dillon said firmly. The s sound revealed a slight lisp.
Hutch smiled at that.
He got the Hummer moving and turned to travel the length of the valley floor. It pitched and rolled like a roller coaster. Forward visibility was no more than three or four hundred yards, but he knew from the map that it sloped steadily and nearly without bend or yaw all the way to the Fond du Lac River, intersecting it a half mile west of Fiddler Falls.
35
The Hummer banked sharply and disappeared over the next rise.
“They’re onto us,” Kyrill said.
“What gave you that idea?” Declan intoned. He checked the cell phone-like device in his hand. It showed his position in relation to the Hummer. Until the Hummer turned again, there was no way for them to angle for an interception as they had done this time. As long as all three vehicles traveled in essentially the same direction, it was nothing more than a race, and the Hummer, which was the superior off-road vehicle, would win every time. He had a feeling the driver of the Hummer knew this as well. He checked his watch. He pushed the GPS tracker between his legs and pulled the silver case from the footwell onto his lap. He opened it and withdrew the controller. The controller that had been both a joy and a pain on this adventure. He pushed the case off his lap and flicked on the controller. The monitor showed static, and he checked his watch again.Very soon.
“Just get me within a hundred yards,” he told Kyrill.They reached the nadir of the valley and began climbing the other side.
“Dec,” Julian said from the rear seat. “I can’t take this shaking. I feel like my head’s going to split in two.”
Declan turned in the passenger seat. “You’re kidding me, right? Do you see what we’re doing here? We almost got the guys who stole the Hummer.” He raised his eyebrows. “If your head splits in two, Julie, I’m sure Dad’s got a doctor on the payroll who’ll glue it together for you. Okay?”
Julian looked out the window. The Bronco bounded and rattled beside them.
Declan could see Pruitt’s determined countenance behind the wheel. Bad sat in the rear seat looking worse than Julian. Declan smiled thinking about Bad’s leg bouncing up and down in the seat. If that didn’t make him mean enough to tear heads off, nothing would.
He remembered attending a training session for one guard dog of his father’s. The trainer had donned a ski mask and poked and prodded the rottweiler mercilessly. The trainer had explained that he would continue agitating the animal using several different disguises, the kind kidnappers used, such as Halloween masks and stockings over their faces. Eventually, the dog would attack to kill anyone on the property in such a disguise. Declan had wondered what would happen if he could convince one of his school friends to put on a mask and run outside.
That was one of the few curiosities he had not satisfied. But the reason the memory came to him now was not regret for opportunities not taken, but confirmation of how he was handling Bad’s injury. Pushing him would make him more determined to exact revenge, and that would return him to the warrior state he had been in prior to finding himself shish kebabed. So instead of being weakened by the experience, Bad would be strengthened.
Declan smiled. He was a leader in every sense of the word, always encouraging people to reach heights that even they had not imagined possible. He wasn’t monitoring the GPS, so it came as a surprise when they crested the hill to see the Hummer so close. It had reached the next valley floor and turned onto it to head toward the river way below. It disappeared over a low rise.
“Go, go!” Declan instructed, anticipating victory. He plucked a walkie-talkie from his jacket’s breast pocket and keyed the transmit button. He looked over his right shoulder to see Pruitt behind the Bronco’s wheel, lifting in his seat to retrieve his walkie-talkie from a back pocket or belt clip. He raised it to his mouth. His voice came through, tinny and staticky.
“Hello,” he said. “This is Pruitt.”
Declan rolled his eyes. He keyed the button and said, “Can Pruitt come out and play?” Through the windows of the vehicles, Declan witnessed Pru’s utter confusion.
“Pardon?” came his voice.
“Nothing,” Declan said. “Just get ready to film.”
“Now?”
“Think you can do it and drive at the same time?”
“What? No . . . I . . . well . . .”
Declan regretted his decision to let Pruitt drive. Julian would have been a better candidate; he was still years from getting a license, but he’d learned to drive on their father’s vast prop
erties. If Julie had been driving, Pruitt could have filmed from the passenger seat.Then again, Julian, being Julian, probably would not have kept up, and there would be no chance to photograph the upcoming fireworks.
“How about Bad? Can he film?” said Declan into the walkie-talkie. He saw Bad shaking his head and forming his lips into a big no.
“He says no. And he can’t move around too much. I don’t think he’d get it.”
“All right. Never mind. As soon as the thing goes up, get your butt out there and get what you can.”
“Affirmative,” Pruitt said. “Ten-four.”
Declan dropped the walkie-talkie back into his pocket.They reached the apex of the next hill just as the Hummer dropped out of view over the following hummock. It was still a good sixty seconds ahead.
“Step on it! Come on!”
Woods swung into view from the right, narrowing the drivable width of the valley floor. Kyrill edged left to keep from being anywhere near the trees. Declan glanced back, pleased to see that there was still enough room for the vehicles to drive somewhat side by side. He didn’t want Pruitt and his camera or Bad and his gun to fall too far behind. They flew over the rise, an elevator’s lurch in Declan’s stomach.
They had gained on the Hummer—by a lot. It was angling away from the trees, and Declan wondered if they had nearly crashed, the driver having to brake and adjust.
“Almost,” he said. He checked the device and saw that the monitor was online. A few clicks and both the Jeep and the Hummer came into view. He centered the Hummer in the monitor and expertly followed it using the thumb controls. He flipped open the targeting control; red crosshairs appeared on the screen. He positioned it just ahead of the Hummer. When he removed his thumb, the crosshairs blinked out.
“We need to get closer—step on it.”
Kyrill said, “We’re already—”
“Just do it.”
The Hummer banked up the left-hand valley wall, which was no more than a steep grassy hill. It came back into the valley and shot toward the trees before it arced back onto the valley floor. It seemed to be following the natural contours of the land, but Declan suspected the driver was trying to be evasive.