Dead Run (34 page)

The oldest of these children, a boy closing in on eleven years, fixed his gaze inside the truck cab and gestured to a friend. "There's a computer in there," he whispered, tapping his finger against the glass, pointing to the glowing screen that was flashing numbers in bright blue pixels. "That's gotta be worth a bundle."

His friend shaded his eyes and peered inside. "What do you suppose those numbers mean?"

"Hell, I don't know. You want to bust the window and do a grab-and-run?"

His friend looked around at all the people streaming past and the cars still pulling into the lot. "Too many people around. Wait 'til they all get inside."

They both climbed down and sat on the running board to wait, guarding their treasure.

MAGOZZI WAS frantic, watching that goddamned clock count down second by second. Finally, the last slice of blue ticked into the time bar, filling it completely, and he couldn't stand it any longer. He broke the promise he had made to himself to stay silent and out of the way. "Is that it? Is it finished? Is it over?"

Harley glanced quickly in his direction and registered a little surprise to see him there. The computer screen had been his total focus for so long that he hadn't noticed anything going on around him. None of them had. "It's loaded."

Roadrunner's fingers suddenly started flying over the keys. Grace and Annie were leaning over his shoulders, watching the text appear on the screen as Roadrunner typed.

Magozzi nodded rapidly. "Great. That's great. It's loaded. Now you execute, right?" He jumped when Grace reached back and touched his hand.

"Not yet, Magozzi. If we execute now, we destroy this computer, and this computer is the only way we have to talk to the trucks."

Magozzi tried to make sense of it, his mouth open like a fish, gasping for air. "I don't get it, goddamnit, I don't get it."

Harley took pity on him. "We're just piggybacking the virus through this computer to the trucks, Magozzi. Get it? Those truck computers are already set up to accept data from the host computer and no place else. We're just sending them a package from Mama. So we download the program here without executing, have this computer send it on to the trucks, then send the execution command."

"And what thefuck does that do?" Magozzi demanded, and Harley actually smiled at him.

"It destroys the truck computers, and that, my friend, destroys the detonate command."

Magozzi finally took a breath. "Okay, okay. I get it. So how long does it take?"

"Roadrunner just finished sending the virus program to the trucks. Another five minutes at least to execute, maybe a little longer."

Magozzi's eyes were glued to the computer screen, watching the countdown clock. "Christ, man, we've only got twelve minutes left."

"Yeah, I know. It's going to be tight. . , oh, Jesus." Harley was gaping at the screen.

Magozzi had to force himself to look. The monitor had gone black, and big, red letters were flashing in the center:

DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED

No one around the computer station moved. They just stared at the monitor, hanging on the meaning of red letters in the black box. Magozzi wanted to ask something stupid, like, What the hell does that mean? but he knew damn well what it meant, and he couldn't move his mouth, anyway. What really scared him was when Road-runner's hands started shaking visibly.

"Fuck a duck!"Harley shouted, bulldozing closer to Roadrunner, shoving his face at the screen.

The people gathered in the back of the room-Knudsen, the suits, the HAZMAT squads-all moved en masse to get closer, then froze when they were within sight of the screen.

"What's that mean?" Knudsen breathed, his face a deathly white.

Roadrunner didn't even look to see who had asked the question. "They must have rigged the detonation sequence to upload at a specific time in the countdown. It initiated when we were still executing the virus, and because the truck computers can't upload more than one program at a time, they kicked one off."

"Which one?" Gino whispered.

"Hard to say. Normally, they'd take them in order, which means they'd keep executing the virus and kick the detonation command, but if that were happening, that message shouldn't be there."

Grace closed her eyes. "The detonation sequence was a priority. If I'd set this up, I would have put an automatic override on it, so it kicked everything else off."

"Yeah. Me, too." Roadrunner's voice was shaking almost uncontrollably.

At that moment, Magozzi felt something let go in his head, then his neck, his shoulders, all the way down to his gut. A strange sense of serenity followed. He thought it was probably a lot like what terminal patients felt when they acknowledged their impending death, relaxed their resistance, and let it walk in. A thousand people somewhere had less than five minutes to live, and there wasn't a goddamned thing they could do about it. So you just shut down, let it go. Roadrunner was still talking, but Magozzi caught only the last part.

". . , so the only hope we've got is that part of the virus got through, and that it will corrupt the computer enough to keep the detonation sequence from finishing . . ."

Suddenly, "DETONATION SEQUENCE INITIATED" disappeared from the screen, and a new message took its place:"DOWNLOAD COMPLETE."

"Which download?!" Magozzi shouted. "The virus or the detonation code?"

Roadrunner's lips were sealed against a held breath. He raised a shaky, deformed finger toward the countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen. The numbers had frozen at just under two minutes.

Magozzi had no clue what that meant. Neither did anyone else in the room. They were all leaning forward, like people bucking a strong wind, eyes wild and unblinking. Had the detonation code gone through? Was the clock wrong? Were a thousand people dead? Magozzi looked frantically from Grace to Annie to Harley, who all looked perilously close to meltdown, and figured it couldn't mean anything good. He almost turned away when Roadrunner started swiveling his chair, afraid to see the look in his face, but he made himself stand there. It was the least he could do.

And then Roadrunner finished his turn, and the eyes he met first just happened to be Magozzi's. "We did it," he said. And then he smiled. "We shut it down."

Suddenly, a tremendous noise shattered the silence. Roadrunner looked up with a baffled expression at the dozens of people he hadn't even realized were there. Harley, Annie, and Grace turned around in amazement. The place was filled with people. All of them were cheering, banging one another on the back, and moving together toward the Monkeewrench crew like out-of-control groupies at a rock concert.

Harley, Annie, Grace, and Roadrunner watched as the crowd surged toward them.

The cheering went on for a long time.

IT WAS A BLINDINGLY sunny morning in the field outside the building that had housed death and hate and destruction. Magozzi drew in a deep breath that smelled of smoke from the Four Corners fire, but even that smelled good.

His hand was glued to Grace's arm as surely as Charlie was glued to her leg, and he felt pretty good about that. He had hands and the dog didn't. Advantage Magozzi. He squinted in the sunlight and looked around at the mess of cars and trucks and choppers and people, and thought what a goddamned beautiful place the world was.

He looked at Grace's face, trying to read her expression, and realized what a fool's errand that was. He looked at Roadrunner's face instead, which always gave away emotions for free. But even that reliable countenance was impossible to read. He looked like somebody had pulled the plug on his head and there was absolutely nothing left inside.

Harley was frowning at all the confusion around him, looking like a man who had just woken up naked in a crowded room. Then he shrugged and walked over to Knudsen and handed him a piece of paper. "Here are the coordinates for the two trucks. I don't know where the hell they are; it's just a bunch of numbers to me."

Knudsen accepted the paper without taking his eyes off Harley's. He looked like he was about to burst into tears, but then suddenly, he smiled.

He had an astounding number of teeth, Harley thought. He looked a little like a mule getting ready to bray.

The field got even busier after that. A few more choppers came in, and a lot of cars and vans. A large team of what might have been men or women dressed in bulky white self-containment suits finally got permission to swarm all over the building, and disappeared back inside to take a look at the plastique and the trucks. Another HAZMAT team swarmed with equal purpose over everyone who had been in the building, sweeping them with wands from a dozen different instruments, then taking them into the back of the van for other tests.

Halloran and Magozzi watched helplessly as Sharon, Grace, and Annie got the once-over about a hundred times.

"It's just a precaution," Knudsen tried to reassure them. "Knee-jerk. They're at the highest risk. Not only were they in that building with the trucks, they were in Four Corners where the first one crashed; they've got to be cleared."

"We don't even know if there's anything in those other trucks," Magozzi complained.

"The team inside is checking on that. Until we get confirmation from them that there's no danger, we act as if there is."

"Well, that's just plain dumb," Halloran grumbled. "We were all in that building."

"Yeah, I know. We'll be next."

Gino made a face. "Shit. Are there needles involved?"

Knudsen just smiled at him.

When Gino and Magozzi were finally released from the testing van, Gino rolled down both sleeves and stomped away in search of his manhood. "Well, that was about the most humiliating experience of my life, and that includes the time when my pants split in the middle of the medal ceremony for the Monkeewrench murders. I feel like aliens just harvested my eggs or something."

Magozzi smiled, but Knudsen looked almost as distressed as Gino. His face fell when he saw a Missaqua County cruiser coming up the farm road. "That's Sheriff Pitala," he said miserably. "His sister ran the cafe in Four Corners."

"Did she get out?"

"Who knows? We're pulling a lot of bodies out of that place. No females yet, as far as they can tell."

Magozzi nodded. "So there's some hope."

"I don't know. We need to talk to the women. They're the only ones who were in there."

"So what the hell did you do with them?" Gino demanded. "I haven't seen them since you dragged me into that mobile test tube and slammed the door."

Knudsen looked a little nonplussed. "Actually, they're in your RV. The big one with the bedroom eyes?"

Magozzi smiled in spite of himself. Every single man in the world reacted the same way the first time they saw Annie. And every time after that, in fact. "Annie Belinsky."

"Yeah, her. She said she'd whip the next man that tried to talk to her before she had a shower, and I swear to God she could do it. Especially with that big undercover tattooed guy from Kingsford County backing her up. Are those two married or something?"

"Not even close."

"Whatever. Anyway, when they're finished in there, we're going to have to start debriefing. At this point, they know more than any of us.

We've got three live ones in lockup we caught running from the fire in Four Corners. Camo, Ml6s, just like that woman said on the phone ..."

Magozzi stiffened a little. "The woman's name is Grace MacBride, Agent Knudsen."

Knudsen looked at him for a second, recording the connection, finding his boundaries. "Sorry, Detective. Anyhow, we need to hear what all the women have to say before we start interrogation." He turned his head when a cruiser pulled up close beside them and Sheriff Pitala climbed out.

The man's uniform was covered with soot, his face was drawn, and he walked with a stoop that Magozzi hadn't noticed before, as if a grief he wasn't sure he should be carrying was weighing him down. He nodded to the group, then turned to Knudsen. "I can't find anybody that can tell me about Hazel," he said. "I thought maybe you could help me out with that."

"Who's Hazel?"

The voice came from the steps of the RV. Everyone turned and saw Grace MacBride, black hair dripping on her shoulders, Charlie pressed against her side, smiling inappropriately. Stupid dog had no clue what was going on here, Magozzi thought; and then he realized that he felt almost the same way. As long as Grace was in it, the world was just as it should be.

Sheriff Pitala looked up at her and swept his hat from his head in manners so ingrained they transcended everything else. "Sheriff Ed Pitala. Pleased to meet you, ma'am, and Hazel's my sister. Ran the cafe in Four Corners."

Grace looked at him for a moment, then nodded ever so slightly. "Why don't you come on in for a minute, Sheriff."

HALLORAN and Bonar were wandering through the jumble of cars closest to the building, the ones that had already been there when they'd arrived. It was a motley collection of old and new, cars and trucks and vans.

"Who do you suppose these belong to?" Bonar asked.

"Sharon figured they were the cars in Four Corners when whatever went down went down. There wasn't a single drivable vehicle in the town by the time she and Grace and Annie got there."

Bonar shuddered. "You know, it's the little details that really get to you. Like walking into a town with no people, no cars, no sounds. That had to be weird."

Halloran barely heard him. He was staring at a big faded blue sedan parked almost out of sight behind a pickup truck peppered with holes. He and Bonar walked over and looked at the side. There was a hand-painted logo on the driver's door, letters just slightly off, white paint bleeding into the faded blue.

"The Cake Lady," Bonar read it aloud like a sigh, and they were both silent for a time.

"Probably stopped at the cafe for a bite on her way to the wedding," Halloran said. "That Gretchen, she loved her donuts."