An Armageddon Duology (31 page)

“
T
he transformer’s burning
?”

Lightfoote’s voice rang out desperately over the phone. Lopez exited the car and stared forward, shielding his eyes from low-lying morning sun. Houston shut off the engine, grabbed the phone, and followed.

“I’m not sure,” said Houston. “Lots of fires and smoke. Some around the transformer. But, no, it doesn’t seem hit.”

“Then there’s still time!” cried Lightfoote. “We still have power. You still have a transformer. I need power to get the last code out! Hang up, get in there, and stop them!”

“Yes, ma’am.” Houston closed the phone. “She’s right. There’s still a chance. They haven’t managed to bring it down yet.”

“Could happen any moment,” said Lopez. “We don’t know their numbers or how they’re armed.”

Houston removed her Browning and pulled the mask over her smile. “I’m a lady who loves surprises.” She jogged down the small road from the gate, toward the flames.

Lopez reached inside his vestments and grabbed the submachine gun. His left shoulder was screaming, useless to help him aim his pistol. The submachine gun would blanket his targets and help compensate. He ran forward, chasing Houston.

They passed grassy lawns on both sides of the road. Ahead, rows of wired equipment intersected above them. In the middle of it all lay the concrete slab with the transformer inside. Keeping alongside a row of utility sheds, they remained concealed from anyone around the object. Apparently, the idea had occurred to others. The bodies of three men—not Guardsman—were strewn along the path of the sheds, gunned down while moving toward the transformer. The bodies of several soldiers were across from them, near the far corner of the sheds.

“They must have used the shelter of the sheds for a last stand.”

Houston pressed her back against the cold metal, stepping over the body of one, and peered cautiously around the corner.

Her head snapped back and her eyes locked with Lopez. “More dead guards. Looks like grenades.”

“The strike team?”

“They’re there. Alive. Right next to the concrete around the transformer. One had his hands on the wall, fiddling with something. The other seemed to be yelling at him. That’s all I got.”

“Bomb,” Lopez said.

“Likely they’re wiring it up now. From the argument, we can only hope some of the dead bodies were their demolitions experts.”

“Assuming those two are the last.”

She nodded and spun around again, keeping her sights forward for several seconds before whipping back around.

“You think you can get me on top of that shed?”

Lopez frowned. “It’s over fifty yards, Sara. That’s a good shot, even for you.”

“You have better ideas? It’s all open field from here to the transformer. No way to sneak up on them. We could go in blazing and hope for the best, but odds are not good for a clean win. I’ll stabilize on the roof edge. Three shots or less and you owe me a drink.”

Lopez frowned and got on one knee. “Just don’t step on the left shoulder, or you forfeit any winnings. I’ll be ready for a sprint.”

She holstered the weapon and he hoisted her toward the roof. She grabbed the edge, swinging herself over. Lopez couldn’t follow with his bad arm, so he returned to the corner and crouched, weapon readied.

Houston kept low and crawled to the end of the shed overlooking the transformer. She could see the two men facing the concrete wall, oblivious to her actions as they worked on the explosives. She removed her Browning. The edge of the roof rose several inches from the base and she used it to steady her weapon. She sighted the two dark shapes, focusing on the one who seemed to be taking the lead. She calmed, steadied her breathing. His torso fused into an extension of the barrel. She felt the metal tube reach outward towards him, connecting, closing the space between them. She stopped breathing and pulled the trigger.

There was an explosion. The figure before them shuddered, hands jerking outward and away from the bomb. He fell to his knees, then onto his side. She repositioned the gun.

The man next to him froze for an instant and then wheeled in their direction, weapon raised. He scanned a small arc across the sheds, then centered on the roof, and Houston. He dropped to one knee and aimed his gun in her direction.

Two more shots burst in the compound, the sounds reverberating off the concrete and metal, echoing and blending in a dispersing chaos of noise. The man in front of them buckled but did not fall. He began to turn toward the wall slowly, gait lumbering, face toward the device fixed to the transformer.

A fourth shot rang, a third bullet embedding itself in his torso. This time he fell, his weapon dropped. His legs jerked as he tried vainly to rise. Houston saw the broad form of Lopez race toward the shape.

“Four,” she said, sitting up and scanning around them for hostiles. The place was empty but for the dead and Lopez, who now stood beside the explosive device, waving her over. “Perfectly good glass of whiskey shot to hell.”

H
ouston sprinted
across the lot toward the concrete security barrier. Two bodies lay beside the house-sized transformer, unmoving. Lopez had laid out several of their items: firearms, cell phones, and, most crucially, detonators and radio-controllers. He was studying an array of what looked like beige clay blocks taped across the concrete. Detonators and wires ran down from the blocks to a metal box.

"C-4?" Houston said, catching her breath.

"That, or something similar. Twelve blocks."

She examined them closely. “I'm guessing M112—military issue. Uncle Sam needs to keep his shit off the arms markets."

She crouched and examined the wiring. Above her, the huge expanse of two transformer arms cast a long shadow in the early light. The hum of the electricity flowing through the area was almost nauseating. Thick wires like oak limbs sprouted from the arms many tens of feet away.

"Look at this shape," she said, turning back to the molded plastique. "It's going to funnel the blast inward and up. Twelve blocks? Shit, this concrete wall will be turned into a weapon. Those humming arms are coming down, probably the whole thing will take major damage. No way this thing survives. Game over. Power gone."

"No timer, so we don't have to deal with that," said Lopez, eyeing the metallic box.

"Is it trapped?"

He shook his head. "Doesn't seem so. They didn't have time and weren't planning to leave it here long. Set it up, reach safe distance, maybe behind those sheds, radio the signal into this control box. Boom."

"Should be easy to disarm then.” Houston frowned. "Why does that make me nervous?”

"Because nothing is ever for free."

Houston centered on the far-left block and placed her hand around the blasting cap wires. "Let's make sure and remove the detonators from each."

Lopez mirrored her actions. "Here goes."

They pulled on the wires. Thin metal tubes resembling smoothed hinge bolts came out of the soft material. As the end of the tube was cleared from the explosive, they paused and locked eyes.

“No boom,” she said.

They repeated the process until all the detonators were removed, and tossed the blasting caps onto the ground beside the dead men. Lopez removed a large knife and cut through the thick tape sticking the blocks to the barrier. Soon there was a stack of clay blocks on the ground as well.

“All right,” he said, wiping sweat from his face. “Always exciting. Let’s call this in to Angel. We did our bit to preserve the lights.”

Houston punched her contact number for Lightfoote’s burner cell. She frowned and looked at the phone.

“Zero bars. No signal.”

Lopez looked around. “This place should be blanketed. We had signal when we arrived.”

“Check yours. Maybe this cheap thing’s failing.”

He removed his phone. “Nothing. No signal.”

“Shit.” Houston folded her arms over her chest. “No coincidences. The towers are down. Probably the worm.”

“Or more of these guys,” he said, nodding toward the bodies.

“I doubt it. No way he has an army. This was a strategic target. Too many towers for physical strikes on the cellular system. That’s got to be the worm.”

Lopez nodded. “Maybe it’s just some of the carriers.” He reached down beside the corpses and grabbed two phones.

“Everything’s down. AT&T. Verizon. This guy had T-Mobile.”

Houston scanned the horizon back toward New York City. “Everyone’s cut off now. No voice, no data. I think this will trigger a real panic. After a few hours, it’s going to be mayhem.”

“There’s more here,” said Lopez working on one of the phones. “Messages. All about this raid. Has to be from Fawkes.”

Houston stepped beside him and looked at the screen. “With those kind of details? Fawkes for sure. They were getting sloppy.” She took the other man’s phone and examined it as well.

“Well, tomorrow’s the fifth, right?” said Lopez. “The end of the world as we know it. Security is so pre-apocalypse.”

Houston continued scrolling intensely through the phone’s messages. “Or maybe not.
Fuck
. Francisco, tell me you don’t recognize this address.”

The former priest stared at the small screen, brow furrowing. “That’s the warehouse in Brooklyn. Where they’re taking Poison. How—”

His eyes widened.

“They know, dammit!” said Houston. “Look at this message. ‘Heading to the site. When finished double back there for backup.’ They’ve known for a while!”

Lopez glanced up toward the car. A line of dark clouds was moving in from the south, promising to bring showers and possibly thunderstorms.

“Savas isn’t setting the trap. Fawkes is.”

“Jesus! No cell phones. We can’t reach them. We have to get over to that warehouse!”

“We took out their strike team. That helps.”

“Judging from the message, he wasn’t counting on them. They’re backup. He’s got others.”

“But what do we do with this mess? Dead men? Bombs?”

Houston stared down at the bodies with disgust. “Leave these assholes to rot.” She began stuffing the plastique inside a bag lying on the ground beside them. “But we take the bomb. Could prove useful.”

L
ightfoote stared
at hundreds of lines of code on her screen. She spoke in a distracted monotone. “All the carriers are down?”

Rideout nodded, tossing his phone on the table next to five others. “I checked them all. He’s nuked the cellular system.”

“Damn,” she said. “Cut off from everyone. Power’s still up so our Dynamic Duo hasn’t let us down. But we need the coast power up or we’ll never get this new worm out there with enough time to spread.”

He grabbed two of the phones and held them up. “You guys want your phones back?”

Across the room three men were arguing animatedly over the scrolling text of a computer screen. They waved him away to continue their heated debate.

Rideout leaned over the computer desk and whispered into Lightfoote’s ear. “I don’t trust those yahoos.”

She smiled, never removing her gaze from the screen. “John does. The older one, anyway.
Simon
. They have some kind of history. And to be honest, the coders from the NSA are really good. I’d never have gotten this finished in time without them.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Rideout. “And
are
you finished, anyway?”

Her face clouded. “Getting there.” She returned her gaze to the screen and typed furiously.

A stout man, near sixty, ambled over toward them and dropped heavily into a wheeled chair. He looked at Rideout.

“Ah, John-David?”

“Jean-Paul. Just call me JP. And you’re who again?”

“Fred will do,” said Simon, rubbing his eyes. “
Angel
I do remember. I’m getting too old for this shit.” Lightfoote ignored both of them as Simon continued. “Look, Dietrich at NSA lent us these two programmers. Technically, they’re not under our authority. I’m CIA. You’re FBI. But with our connections, and dangling your project in front of them, they ate it up. But they’re stuck on something now.”

“Can’t keep up?” asked Rideout.

“It’s not a pissing contest, son. It’s the new bit, the code randomizing thing.”

“The mutagenesis,” cut in Angel absentmindedly.

“Whatever you call it.”

She turned to him. “It’s important! It’s key. I call it mutagenesis because the whole thing is based on mimicking biology.”

“Is this going to be a graduate school lecture?” asked Simon, his face weary.

Lightfoote continued. “Look, we have code that hunts and recognizes Fawkes’ worm like a white blood cell. In the body, one thing those cells do is
mutate
the parts of them that recognize the foreign invader. For some mutants it screws them up. They don’t work anymore. But for a few, the mutations make them better or create variant cells that recognize mutant pathogens. And when you combine that with recognition-based replication, you quickly select for optimized cells and make lots of them. It’s evolution!”

“I think I’m gonna fail this test, professor,” said Simon.

The two NSA men stood behind him. One interjected. “Yeah, but you know what happens when you get a lot of mutants in a population? You get cancer. Or autoimmunity.
Bad
changes with the good. Things go south, you know?”

“Sometimes,” admitted Lightfoote.

“And so what are we doing?” continued the man. “Unleashing rogue code, independent of any controls, that’s designed to replicate and mutate? We could lose control over it.”

The other coder chimed in. “We probably
will
lose control over it.”

Rideout waved his arms animatedly. “Does what is happening now look like an abundance of
control
? Sounds like you’re scared this thing might actually work, take down the worm. How about we put that fire out first, before it burns everything to the ground? We can worry about Angel’s mutants afterward.”

Simon nodded. “That’s about how I see it. We either fire the new weapon and hope the collateral damage is low, or we watch as that thing out there tears our world apart.” He stared at the two men. “But we need you two on this. Angel’s nearly done, but she needs those modules from you. You in?”

They looked at each other. One sighed. “Yeah, I guess so. We have to do something.”

The other nodded. “Okay. But we are literally letting a genie out of the bottle here. Remember that a year from now.”

Lightfoote nodded. “If there still is a digital world left over for this code to haunt, we’ll work on it.”

“How close are you two?” asked Simon.

The men were back at their terminals. One called over. “We’re done. That’s the fight. We built a bomb, we’re just pissing our pants about arming it.”

Simon turned to Lightfoote. “Angel?”

“I’m debugging the mutation code. I don’t have the time to fine-tune it, and that worries me. Too much and it will fuck itself to oblivion. Too little and it won’t adapt fast enough to identify all Fawkes’ worms. But I’m almost there! Then I just need to assemble the modules and fire it out.”

An explosion rocked the building and the lights flickered.

“What the hell?” cried Rideout.

Dust filtered down from the ceiling and the lights completely cut out. Emergency lighting clicked on while the computers continued to hum. Shouts from floors above erupted, followed by gunfire.

“Fawkes,” said Lightfoote, her face grim. “He’s going to shut us down the old fashioned way.”

“Jesus,” mumbled Simon, rising stiffly to his feet.

Rideout unholstered his pistol and checked the magazine. “Thank God you put the servers on generator power. That explosion blew the main lines.”

“But not the hard lines. They’re buried too deep. We still have time!”

More gunfire. More screams above.

“Not much!” cried Rideout. “You two, you’re done, right? So get your asses over here! Move those cabinets to the door—quickly!”

The NSA programmers shoved the two waist-high cabinets, computer paraphernalia spilling out of the poorly closed doors, to block the entry. Rideout overturned a long table, spilling workstations and monitors to the floor.

Lightfoote tossed him a holstered firearm. “Mine. Give it to them.” She returned to the code.

“Spread this out!” said Rideout, waving his arms across the room. He frowned. “Either of you ever fired a weapon?”

Both shook their heads.

“Either of you ever
want
to fire a weapon?”

One put out his hand. Rideout gave him the black pistol.

“Safety’s in the trigger, so don’t point unless you mean to kill. Got it? Pull the trigger with follow-through, you’ll feel the safety release and then the shot. Slow, steady, pull. No panic. Aim and pull slowly, even if Godzilla comes through.” The NSA coder nodded frantically. “You,” he yelled at the unarmed coder, “grab that large wrench over there. Hide behind the server wall. If the guns fail, beat the shit out of the first person who comes in range.”

Simon braced himself on the wall beside the door, gun pointed at the entrance. “I’ll have the first. They won’t know what hit them.”

Rideout crouched behind the overturned table and motioned the NSA man with the gun over. “They’ll have to get past us to get to Angel, then get around the server farm between the door and her desk. We need to buy her all the time we can. Even if that means our lives, you understand? Her code has to get out!”

The programmer simply stared at him.

“What about the servers?” asked Simon.

Lightfoote called back. “I just need this computer, this one connection to send it out through the NSA backdoors. It’s the end game now.”

The door shuddered from a heavy blow. Rideout and the NSA man concealed themselves behind the table, positioning their weapons forward. Heavy objects slammed repeatedly into the door, rattling the metal cabinets. The drumming was offset by the maniacal clacking of Lightfoote’s keys, the two percussions accompanied by the ever present hum of the server farm between them.

The thudding stopped. Dust continued to drift down from the ceiling. The sounds of muted shouts outside could be heard, along with muffled shuffling and scrapes. Several seconds of silence followed. Rideout and Simon aimed their weapons.

Then the door exploded.