CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (26 page)

After setting the charges, he dashed away from the gate, his people supplying constant fire on the empty wall, and ducked behind a berm fifty feet away from where the blast should be.

“Fire in the hole!” John loved that expression.

He pressed the button.

“I don’t give a damn if the entire Army, Navy and Air Force poured over our walls. The priority is to find that bitch Dr. Melanie Reid and bring her to me alive, dead, or in pieces,” Westerling roared to the five security guards fidgeting in front of him.

“Now!” he snarled, lighting a fire under their feet, and they scattered. He should have had more security, but they all seemed conspicuously absent.

Reynolds hesitated, not sure whether to follow or stay.

“Stay near me, Reynolds. You’re now my Number One, since Lunder gave himself to save me. Keep your eyes open and report to me what you see outside, but hang within earshot.”

He watched Reynolds shuffle out the door and immediately take on his role, giving orders to guards outside the door. Westerling sat in a comfy swivel chair in the Operations Center, in the same tower where his office used to be. Operations had lots of top-of-the-line communications equipment, but now that the EPF was down, very little of it worked. Even their cameras, like much of their equipment, were shielded but seemed mostly nonfunctional, at best broadcasting staticky images of murky nothing.

He thought for a moment about what had just happened. His entire body throbbed with searing pain; he found it hard to breathe, which was understandable with a broken rib or two, wrapped tightly by the doc; and his arm continued to seep blood—even with the suture strips—which dripped off his pinky.

How could he have been sidestepped by some geek scientist in a fedora and his bitch wife? Everything was going perfectly, and then they screwed it up.

He figured he would stay in Operations until morning, catching a nap or two until then, when he hoped to hear Johnson’s voice on the phone, confirming Cicada was theirs. Lunder’s plan would have to wait until his people sorted out the wires in the damage.

“Sir,” Reynolds piped up as he popped his head in, “we’re holding the invaders back on all walls. And one of our guards has a prisoner you will want to see.”

“Okay, send them in—and Reynolds, please bring the doc here to finish his work on me.”

Two guards, one on each side, brought in a man who looked more beat to hell than the senator was. He was semi-conscious and was only vertical because the guards held him up. They deposited him on a side chair at the back of the room. One came forward and spoke to Westerling in a low voice. “This is Bill King. He’s from Cicada. He was doing recon on Bios-2 and crashed outside the north wall in a blue flying machine that is nonfunctional. We picked him up just before he was about to be eaten by the Outsiders. We think he has a concussion because he keeps mumbling something like, ‘Max can’t be dead.’”

Westerling rolled his chair over to where Bill was heaped in his chair, rolling in and out of consciousness. He was about to say something when an earth-rattling boom shook them.

A ceiling tile fell in front of him, but Westerling didn’t flinch. He had a new plan.

“Connect me with Cicada right now,” he bellowed to the lone Operations tech watching over the mostly inert equipment.

Max sat alone at the Comms console, sipping on a coffee, nursing the agonizing pain in every part of his body, but it wasn’t his body that hurt the most. After many offered apologies, Webber was in the infirmary being tended to from the beating Max gave him. Johnson, the traitorous mole, was still at large. Magdalena, at this point, would have nothing to do with him. Tom Rogers was tending to their people, getting them ready for battle. There was a gigantic army, sent by a madman bent on Cicada’s destruction, assembling outside their walls. And to top it off, his best friend was missing after taking an experimental hovercraft out for a test flight. “What else could possibly go wrong?” he asked the back of his eyelids.

The phone rang.

Automatically, he slid open the large drawer, as he had done before. But now he stared at the pulsating phone, like it was some object he had never seen before. He knew who was calling, or at least he suspected.

It rang again.

“Preston,” Max shouted. He didn’t need to yell, because Preston had a light in his office, as did Max in his, that flashed when there was an incoming call—but he did.

Max pressed the speaker button, picked up the receiver to silence its infernal ringing and put it to his ear. “This is Maxwell Thompson, Co-Creator and Director of Cicada. Who is this?”

There was only static, barely masking the heavy breaths on the other side.

“You are by far the luckiest sonofabitch I have ever come across in my sixty-four years of life… As I’m sure you know, this is Senator Brian P. Westerling, Creator and Director of Bios-2. Pleased to finally make your acquaintance.”

Max inhaled slowly and deeply. He tried to focus. He wanted to say something reasonable and unemotional. This man had power over them in ways Max was only just beginning to understand, and he had to be careful. But at this point, he didn’t care.

“Listen, you prick asshole; I tell you at this moment that I have made it my personal mission to make sure you don’t see sixty-five.”

That felt a little better
.

“I heard you were a bit of a hothead. Now, before you say anything else you might regret—Ow! Shit, doc, can’t you wait till I’m done with my phone call?—Anyway, I have someone you’ll want to talk to… bring him over here…” Murmured conversations in the distant background got louder; then the sound of a heavy chair being slid across a long floor grew as well, until it was almost too much for the phone’s little over-modulated speaker.

Max looked up and saw that Preston, Lisa King and Magdalena were all inside Comms now, listening with him. There were several others outside the door.

“Hello…” a scratchy, but familiar, voice spoke on the other end. “Max?” It was Bill!

“Bill? Is that you?” Max hollered into the phone. “Are you all right, buddy?”

“Yeah, just a little bang—”

“That’s enough,” Westerling cut in. “Do you believe me when I say I have your friend Bill King?”

Max looked up and saw Lisa holding her mouth, eyes watery, nodding a confirmation he didn’t need.

“Yes, I believe you. Now-what-do-you-want?”

“It’s very simple. My army should already be at your doorstep. When they announce their demands, you are to fulfill them, without resistance. When my guy Johnson calls me to tell me that the army has taken over, without incident, I will release your friend Bill. That’s all.”

Max leaned forward on the console desk, his weight on his elbows; it was as if Westerling’s face were in front of him and he was moving in closer to it. “Now, listen to me, you douchebag,” Max said very calmly. “If you at all harm one hair on that man’s head, I will make you suffer the most horrible death imaginable. And because you seem to know everything about me, you know what I have done to people and that I mean every word I say. Do we understand each other?” Max stood bent over and still leaning on the desk—his face pressed against Westerling’s imagined one.

“I’ll wait for my call. Remember what I sai—”

Max slammed the phone down in anger. “Ahhhh!”

He stood up and stomped past Preston, up to Lisa and hugged her.

Her words tumbled out. “Max. Ple-please don’t let them hurt Bill.” She pressed her head against his chest and sobbed uncontrollably.

A murmur grew into loud debate in the Comms room and in the reception room, until one of their guards burst through the building’s front door and yelled to the crowd, “The enemy’s made their demands.”

Everyone held their breath, waiting for the guard to say more.

Max led Lisa out of the Comms room, onto the walkway outside their office and above the guard and the people in the open reception area. Magdalena followed, and then Preston, who called to the guard below. “Go ahead, Tony, what did they say?” Preston figured this concerned everyone anyway.

“They said that we have ten minutes to surrender Cicada or they will destroy it and kill everyone in its walls… What should we tell them?”

Everybody, even Preston, turned and looked at Max.

Melanie knew that it wasn’t in their apartment, but she had hoped that maybe there was another note or that Carrington somehow had time to get the second bomb back and leave it for her. No, that was asking too much and too risky. And one thing she knew about Carrington, he planned for every contingency.

Her luck was holding out, not that she believed in luck. Still, there were no guards to be seen anywhere on their floor. She glided quietly across the polished concrete like a figure skater, glad for her sock-covered shoes. There were no other sounds but her soft steps and the constant hum of the machinery below.

The door to S227 was open; several papers were resting haphazardly in the threshold and out the doorway. Looking in, she saw why. Their place had already been ransacked. Hopefully the goons hadn’t taken everything. There were a few things she wanted before she left this place, their home for the past several months.

She shut the door and walked to the sofa, its foam-stuffed cushions ripped open and tossed aside. Reaching under, she found the two knives stored on the underside wooden lip. She had developed a love for knives. They were silent killers. She had learned how to throw them in Laramie, but in the last couple months she’d developed proficiency with them, practicing on the underside of their coffee table for hours.

She examined both blades. In their former lives, they had been steak knives. Now, each had another edge and better balance thanks to her repurposing. She placed both on the coffee table along with the two magazines and her pistol, a newer Glock confiscated from the guard.

She examined the rest of the apartment. Into a large backpack from the closet, she tossed items picked from clothing strewn on the floor: a shirt, her good jeans, her only non-holey tennis shoes and three pairs of panties. Standing in front of the bookshelf, she searched. It wasn’t there. Her heart rose almost to a panic until she saw it,
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
half-buried in with the other books tossed from the shelves. Unfolding the back cover, she saw all of his notes still there—and several new additions, taped to the book’s final pages. This went in the sack too.

She dropped the bag at the bathroom entrance and attempted to bring some order to her disorder. She sucked down some aspirin, and then tossed the bottle on the bag—definitely coming with her. She did her best to brush the blood from her hair, being extra careful to not touch the sensitive area where Lunder had hit her. She slipped a band around her tresses and made a ponytail.

What else?
Finally, she snatched a roll of toilet paper, her hairbrush and the surgical tape from their first aid drawer and tossed them in the bag.

From the front of the little desk, its contents on the floor, she snatched a piece of stationery like the ones he used to write his notes and sonnets to her. Her fingers curled around the elegant Mont Blanc pen, a gift from his daughter and his preferred note-writing instrument. Looking up for inspiration, she carefully wrote the note, mimicking his hand.

Satisfied, she walked to the coffee table and slid one knife and both spare magazines into the front of the backpack. The other knife she shoved into her waistband, trying not to stick herself with it.

Let’s go get a bomb
, she mouthed, not wanting to say anything in case someone was still listening.

She took one final look at their apartment—their home for many months—and said goodbye.

Matt Richards wasn’t about to leave his post. The place may fall to invaders, but he wasn’t going to give them access to Supplies without a fight. He had been given this post by the big man himself, after being the senior security officer in the senator’s detail. After a stint in the Marines and then DC Police, he had been the first on the scene when the senator’s wife and son-in-law were murdered by the two drugged-out miscreants. He shot one, who later died, but the other got away, stealing a few dollars and a bottle of Percocet. It was a tragedy for sure, but this tragedy had led to a much higher-paying job on the senator’s security detail, as thanks for killing one of the perps.