Fever (4 page)

            Jack shrugs. “Pretty basic things near the outside. Alarms, stun plates, that kind of thing. Further in, we’re talking automated mini-guns, but it’s not like we have a problem there. I have the clearance to go anywhere I want in these units. Or I should…”

            He tries the entry pad again. Nothing happens.

            “So we’re locked out?” I ask.

            “I think we should be able to get inside through the office,” Jack says. “The question is what’s going to happen then. If the power is down for the whole system, then we should be okay, but if there’s still emergency power for the inner defenses…”

            “Then we could be walking into just about anything,” I finish for him.

            We go in anyway. We can’t afford not to. As Jack said before, we’re going to need the contents of this place if we’re going to make it to Location Thirteen. If there are dangers inside, then we’re just going to have to risk them.

            Jack pauses at the door, kissing me.

            “What’s that for?” I ask.

            “Just for being wonderful generally. And because I’m glad I found you again. I’m glad I can remember how much I’ve always loved you, Celes.”

            I’m glad of that too, and it hits me then. Jack came back into the past to stop the apocalypse, but I came back just to find Jack. All this way, and I succeeded. I found him, exactly the way I promised myself I would, and apocalypse or no apocalypse, we’re together. That’s actually pretty impressive, when I think about it like that.

            We slip inside the storage facility, and I see that Jack has his gun out. I’m not sure what it will do against automated defense systems, but it’s better than nothing. Although I think what’s going to keep us safe has more to do with Jack’s ability to sense danger. With luck, that will at least keep us from stepping on any shock pads.

            “Are you getting anything?” I ask.

            Jack shakes his head. “I think the power must be down in the whole facility.”

            “Well, that’s good,” I say.

            “Not really. It means we won’t be able to get the front gates open, and for what I came here to pick up, we need the front gates open.”

            Jack continues to lead the way. I’m not sure I’d trust too many other people to lead me through an abandoned facility like this. Especially not after what we found in the library back in town. Grayson, maybe, but not many others.

            We check the facility carefully. Aside from us, it seems to be empty. Jack picks out a door or two, but it seems they aren’t locked by the usual arrangement of padlocks that I’d expect in a storage place. Apparently, the Faders prefer automatic doors. Which is as much of a problem as the gate was.

            “I can probably burn the doors open,” I say.

            Jack nods. “I know, but can you get the gate as well? There isn’t enough room between the units for what I want.”

            I think back to what I was able to do at one of the Others’ facilities. There, I blew a pretty good hole in one of their base’s blast doors.

            “Maybe. I mean, I can probably make a hole in them.”

            “A hole won’t work,” Jack says looking around. How big
is
what he’s here to collect? “We needhe ? “We to find a way to open them. There should be a power relay here somewhere. Maybe we’ll be lucky and it will just be a blown circuit.”

            “Which, when we’ve fixed it, will have mini guns shooting at us,” I point out.

            “I’m still working on that part,” Jack says. I guess that whatever we’re here to collect, it must be pretty important. Why else risk our lives over it? “First, we need to find the controls for this place.”

            That takes us maybe ten minutes. We finally find them in a fenced off area of the storage compound, behind a chain link fence that doesn’t take me long to burn through. Behind it, there’s a kind of control console, flanked on both sides by what appear to be turrets. I’d thought that Jack might be exaggerating when he mentioned the mini-guns, but here a couple are, right in the perfect position to kill anyone who tries to mess with the system. I’m just glad that they aren’t powered up right now.

            “So how can we do this?” I ask.

            Jack takes a look at the console. It’s as dead as the rest of the place. “I think that whatever has been messing with the cars has messed with this too.”

            “So in theory, I might be able to power it back up with my energy?” I ask.

            “Maybe,” Jack agrees. He looks at the turrets. “But there’s an obvious problem with that. The moment you power it up, those are going to start spinning, and a few seconds after that…”

            “We become Swiss cheese.”

            Jack nods. I look over the console. It looks like there’s a security scanner similar to the one on the gate built into it.

            “What’s this for?” I ask.

            “It’s so that they can check that anyone trying to use the system isn’t an intruder,” Jack explains. He looks at it, and I can see him trying to calculate something. “In theory, if I were able to log in, then we’d have complete control over this place, including the defenses. But no, it’s too dangerous.”

            “What’s too dangerous?” I ask. “We power the place up, you log in, and then we turn the defenses off. Easy.”

            “Depending on how long the log in takes,” Jack points out. He shakes his head. “Ordinarily, it would be okay. There’s a delay deliberately to allow an operator to connect. But we’re already trespassing, and we don’t know if everything will run at the same speed powered off you, Celes.”

            “So are you saying we shouldn’t do it?” I ask. I look him in the eye. “Is what we’re getting here worth it?”

            “It could get us to Location Thirteen quickly, and save us all the danger that might be on the way.”

            “Then it’s worth it,” I decide, and move up next to the console. “I believe in you, Jack. You can do this. Just be ready to log in when I power things up. On three. One, two… three.”

            I reach down into myself, pulling up power the same way I did with the car engine. Except this time it can’t be just a quick spark. It’s a constant stream. One that makes the console hum, and the gears of the turret beside me whir as it comes to life. Slowly, ponderously, it turns towards us, its barrels starting to spin.

            “Hurry up, Jack!”

            Jack puts his eyes to a scanner, punching in a number on the accompanying keypad at the kind of speeds only he can manage. The mini-gun is spinning faster now, its barrels a rattling whir as they blur their way round and round. Any second now, the first bullets will come out of it to tear the two of us to pieces. What will that be like? Will it even hurt, or will it be so fast that there isn’t a chance for it to hurt? I don’t want to find out, but it’s looking more and more like...

            The mini guns stop spinning, turning away from us. There’s a grinding noise as the gate at the front of the compound starts to open. Doors around the storage facility raise themselves in near silence.

            “You did it!” I say to Jack, stepping away from the console.

            “We did it,” Jack corrects me. “Come on. Let’s go see what there is that can help us.”

            The first locker we go to contains weaponry. We take a flak jacket each, just in case, while Jack passes me a handgun, a knife, and even a couple of grenades. He’s a little more heavily armed by the end of it, with a shotgun strapped to his back and a short, blocky sub-machine gun on a strap.

            The weapons aren’t the end of it though, because the next locker contains camping supplies. The one after that has food. As for the one after
that
…

            “It’s a helicopter,” I say. “You actually keep a
helicopter
in a storage locker?”

            It looks like one of those fast, long range ones the Faders favor. One of the ones we used over Switzerland. Only this one is somehow folded up neatly onto a large steel pallet for moving around. AmaTim aroundzingly, the two of us can move it easily. We take it out to the road in front of the storage location, and in less than another half hour, Jack has it looking like a fully operational helicopter again. We even manage to get extra fuel tanks onto it. We climb in and Jack sets the rotors whirring.

            “So,” he says through the comm-sets, “was this worth nearly getting shot for?”

            I nod. “Definitely.”

SIX

J
ack takes us up into the air effortlessly. Apparently, being in storage has protected the helicopter from whatever afflicted the cars we tried. We have plenty of supplies aboard. Enough to get us to Location Thirteen and maybe beyond, though Jack says it will be sensible to stop and refuel along the way. Neither of us wants to be stranded in the middle of the Nevada Desert with no fuel to get us back out again if there’s a problem at Location Thirteen.

            I try not to think about that. We’re pinning our hopes on help being there. The idea that it might not be, or that the Faders there might have been wiped out as easily as the inhabitants of Washington, just isn’t one that we can focus on. Instead, I try looking out at the ground below us as Jack flies the helicopter effortlessly, with the kind of skill that comes from a lot of practice.

            What I see from up here isn’t exactly encouraging though. Down below, the land is a patchwork of scorching, where fire has rained down. We’re still low enough that I can see buildings that are little more than burned out shells. Strangely though, others seem intact, and with that small oddity in my mind, I can see that the same is true of the ground below us. Patches of it, even large swathes, are scorched beyond recognition, but other areas are pristine and untouched.

            “I hope people were able to make it to shelters,” I say. I take a pair of binoculars from the supplies we’ve brought and look down. “Or that they were at least in the undestroyed areas.”

            We’re close to the White House now. I can see even without the binoculars that it’s heavily damaged. Almost destroyed. All than Tlt heritage and history, ruined, in just a few short days.

            “We need to find a way to talk to any people who are left,” I say, knowing that we know more about this crisis than most people do. “We need to be able to tell them how to stay safe, or at least what kind of threats might be out there.”

            Jack nods and I try the helicopter’s radio, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

            “It’s dead,” I say. “Do you think everything is like this, Jack?”

            “We know that a lot of communications are down,” he points out. “The TV in the room didn’t last.”

            I nod. It stayed on long enough to show us Wilson Hammond taking control, but not what happened afterwards. TV, radio, it’s like all the ways we used to communicate with one another are just… gone.

            “My guess is that the wires and the satellites are damaged,” Jack says. “Either fire damage destroyed the connections needed for the systems to work, or…”

            “Or?” I ask.

            “In theory, solar storm activity could act like an EMP, damaging electronic equipment and causing power surges. And we’ve just experienced the solar storm to end all solar storms.”

            I nod. That makes a kind of sense, though it does mean that we’re very lucky to have a functioning helicopter. I guess it must up to more than the Faders storing it well. The components must be individually shielded.

            “I guess that isn’t going to make it so easy to communicate with people,” I say.

            Jack shrugs and keeps flying. “We’ll just have to do it the old fashioned way.”

            “Face to face?”

            “Exactly. Though hopefully we won’t need to before we get to Location Thirteen. I don’t want to make a bunch of stops beyond those we need for more fuel. The longer we’re on the ground, the more chance there is of something going wrong, and I’m not going to risk your safety.”

            Jack takes the helicopter a little higher then, pushing on south. I keep watching the ground below as the helicopter eats up the miles. Still the ground is that ragged mixture of destruction and perfection, as though someone was trying to burn incomprehensible patterns into the earth below. There’s so much destruction that it’s hard to comprehend as we fly over towns, villages and opar lages aen farmland. I guess there’s a part of me that hoped that it wasn’t really the end of everything, that it was something more local. Something we could avoid if we just went far enough. Well, after an hour we’ve gone more than a hundred and fifty miles, and the destruction is still there below.

            Along with something else.

            “Jack, wait!” I call out. “Do you see that?”

            “See what?” Jack asks, but he does bring the helicopter to a carefully controlled hover while I point.

            “There,” I say, as I spot it again. A flash of light, followed by another, the brightness and intensity of the flashes all too familiar. “Did you see it this time, Jack?”

            Jack nods. “I saw it. The same as with the creature from the library. There’s one down there, and it’s burning something.”

            He doesn’t say that it could be some
one.
He doesn’t need to. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the remains of some poor person left charred beneath that reptilian beast that chased us. I know I won’t be able to forget the sight of it coming after us through the library. Sprinting after me while I threw bookcases down in front of it.

            “It’s okay, Celes,” Jack says, obviously guessing what I’m thinking. “It’s gone. We got clear.”