Heavenfall: Genviants Book 1 (14 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Mary's optimism at escaping Hadrian's security forces faded as Michael cleared the entrance ramp to the interstate and came to a dead stop. The area looked like an urban combat zone. Drivers had attempted to crash their cars through the concrete barrier between the eastbound and westbound lanes. Wrecked vehicles peppered the roadway and hemorrhaged gasoline, oil, transmission fluid, radiator fluid. Puddles formed over the concrete, and the cars that managed to dodge the accidents ended up spinning out of control.  Exhaust, smoke, and steam plumed into the sky and formed a noxious fog. Tempers rose as high as the fog. People got out of their cars, staggered through the destruction, bleeding and coughing, and fought over any car still running.

Behind them, military transport vehicles, flanked by armor
ed Humvees, forced their way through the tangle of twisted and smashed metal.

Michael rolled the bike behind an abandoned Ford F150 and cut the motor. The truck offered a little bit of protection and kept them hidden. For the moment. "Princess, if we're going to make it out of here, we've got to get past the military's rolling road block before they get to the Campbell Station exit. The road's shit, and don't take this personal, but no matter what, keep hold of me and your mouth shut. Close your eyes and stuff your fist in your mouth if you have to, but no screaming. Gotta focus all my energy on getting us through this mess." He shifted in the seat, stretched his arms.

"Might not be possible. We've got a bigger problem."

"There's potholes the size of Nebraska all over the place, pieces of busted concrete littering what's left of the road, people out of their cars, their wrecked cars, and a jack-knifed eighteen wheeler covering over two lanes about a quarter mile up. Half the damn military is out here, shooting at anything and anyone that moves. What could possibly be a bigger problem than all that?"

"I'm blasting."

He turned and faced her. "Oh, hell no. Not now, princess. You just hold that shit until we get out of here."

Despite the circumstances, his reaction made her laugh. "It's not like I've got to pee." She wiped blood off her upper lip. "It's not too bad. The headache is bearable, but I'm pretty sure it's going to get worse. A lot worse. The nanites are doing their thing. I swear I can feel them buzzing around in my brain. But they can only repair the damage as it's happening. Means I'll pass out before they get my brain patched up. Please tell me you have a paracord bracelet or something to tie me to the bike."

"Not a bracelet." He dug under his shirt collar and pulled the cord over his head. A gold band hung from the makeshift chain.

"You're married?" The words left her lips before she realized she'd said them.

He untied the knot at the clasp and pulled. "No." The cord unraveled down to the ring, and he stopped. "Well, yeah. Was." He pulled the ring off the cord and held it between his thumb and forefinger. "She died. About a year after the wave was discovered. Meningitis. She thought she had a migraine, took her meds, and went to sleep it off. A few hours later, I went to check on her, and she was burning up with fever. I managed to get her to the hospital, but it was too late." He didn't try to hide the pain, or wipe away the tears. "Thing is, I never wore my ring. I worked in a window factory before, and it was too dangerous to wear it around the machinery. Rings have a way of getting caught on things. I'd wear it on weekends, or if we had a date or something. Then I stopped wearing it altogether.
Lynn didn't mind, though. She was great that way. The last time I wore it was her funeral." He finished unraveling the cord and slipped the band on his finger. "If I'd checked on her sooner, or insisted she go to the hospital right away...."

"I'm so sorry." Mary put her hand on his arm. "But it wasn't your fault. You couldn't have saved her."

"No, but I can make damn sure you make it." He slipped the cord around her stomach, crossed it over her back, and brought it up over her shoulders. "I'll have to tie you to me, not the back rest. Got to have you moving with me on the sharp turns."

"Are you sure it's safe? Seems a bit risky to me."

"No choice, princess. Can't have you passing out and falling off. And if you're tied to the bike and it goes down? I won't be able to help you. Tied to me, if I jump, you jump." He slipped the ends of the cord through his belt loops and tied them off at his waist. "Can't go back." He started the bike slowly rode out of their hiding place.

The first wave of panicked drivers had settled down. The second wave moved slower, more cautiously, around the destruction, and Michael used the slow moving vehicles around them for cover.

Looking over his shoulder, she saw that the military stopped their rolling road block just shy of the Campbell Station exit and had formed a blockade. "The soldiers aren't going to let us through, and if they notice I'm blasting, they'll shoot both of us."

"Don't think we need to worry about getting shot. Look behind you, princess."

She turned, and despite Michael's earlier warning, almost screamed. A couple of tractor-trailers came barreling toward them, one about a mile behind the other, doing about eighty and plowing down everything in their paths. Michael jerked the bike right and slowed to let the big trucks, as well as the pack of vehicles drafting behind their trailers, pass them.

"When the first one crashes into the blockade, there's going to be one hell of a pile-up." He pulled over to the shoulder and stopped the bike. Other vehicles followed Michael's lead, or just stopped in the middle of the interstate.

The truck never slowed. Never tried to avoid the collision. Never made it through the blockade. The force of the impact crumbled the cab, turned the trailer over. The vehicles behind it crashed into the wreckage, into each other, and rolled onto their tops. A man crawled out of the passenger side of his SUV, and even from this distance she saw the blood matted in his hair. Streaming down his face. "What's he doing? Trying to wave someone down? Get help?"

David put the kickstand down. "Shit! He's waving an emergency flair. Idiot must be out of his head. We've got to get off the bike. With all the oil and gas on the road, when that rig hits, he'll drop that flair, and the whole thing's going to blow. Wrap your arms around my chest, then pull your feet up and wrap them around my hips."

Once she was piggy-backed on Michael, he dismounted. With no way to shield her eyes, she squinted and tried to see into the blinding afternoon sun, past the light reflected off the back windshields, and toward the blockade. "Hurry! The second rig's almost there."

Michael dove, like he was stealing home for the game winning run, into an overgrown copse of trees.

The paracord cut into her, but held. The thought wasn't as comforting as it should have been. "Mike, are you okay?"

He groaned and mumbled something about getting his breath, but she couldn't hear it over the sound of gunfire, the screeching of brakes being pulled hard, and metal against metal. Two seconds later, several small explosions rattled her teeth, followed by a final blast that sent glass, metal, and tires into the air and burned the sky.

"Princess," Michael wheezed out the word. "You still with me?"

"Ears are ringing, head's throbbing, and I'm bleeding. From the brain blast, though. Not from the big bang. Looks like we just caught the edge of the shock wave. Knees are scraped up some, and I'm going to have some nasty bruises from the cord. You?"

He huffed and pushed up on his elbows. "Couple of cracked ribs. Feels like my face is cut up some. Might even leave a scar. Ladies love a scar. The bike?"

She turned her head, surveyed the area. "I don't see it. Must be on its side."

"We gotta get up and back to the bike before somebody takes it." Arms shaking, he moved to a kneeling position. "Put as much weight as you can on your feet until I stand."

"Untie me. You can't carry me with your ribs hurt."

"No time." He stood, hitched his arms under her knees, and jogged back to where they left the bike.

The blast had knocked it over. The gas tank had some scratches, and one of the mirrors lay broken on the gravel, but that looked like the extent of the damage.

Michael took a deep breath, planted his feet, and pulled the bike upright. "Let's see if she starts." He mounted and put the key in the ignition.

Her butt bounced on the seat, and the paracord bit into her sore shoulder blades.

The bike started. Not that it mattered, because they didn't have anywhere to go. Through thick waves of heat, Mary looked at the resulting carnage and cringed. A fiery wall of twisted metal and busted glass blocked the interstate. The distinctive smell of burning rubber drifted on the air, and black smoke filled the sky. Drivers tried to use their vehicles to move the wreckage out of the way, with total disregard to the injured, but it only caused more of a pile-up.

The east-bound lanes weren't much better. Some cars traveling in the inside lane got caught in the explosion. Nobody slowed. Nobody stopped to help. The interstate had turned into a demolition derby. Making it out alive was the prize, and there was no second place.

"We're screwed." Mary slumped against Michael's back.

He stretched, pulled his cigarettes out of his pocket. "Yep."

A second later, she heard the familiar click, scratch, and snap of his lighter. "You're taking a smoke break? Now?"

"I'm thinking." He took a drag, tilted his head back, and let the smoke out in a long, slow exhale. "The way I see it, we've got three options. We can stay here and wait it out. We can try to get to the other side of the interstate and ride against the traffic. Or, we can double back to
Lovell Road and pray like hell that Hadrian's men are gone and the back roads are clear enough to get to the next interstate exit."

The horns, the motors, the screech of tires, all of it bored into her brain like a drill bit boring through metal. All sparks and heat and pain. Blood and sweat and snot covered her upper lip, but she didn't bother to wipe it off.  No point. "Too vulnerable here." She took a ragged breath and tried to ignore the tickle of blood dripping out of her ear. "Let's double back."

With vehicles crowding the shoulder, it was slow work to get the motorcycle turned around, but Michael managed it and drove through the maze of stalled cars on the exit ramp. About every two cars, he had to stop due to the congestion. The stops didn't last long. Once the motorists discovered he'd been close to the blast and she'd been injured, the drivers worked to clear a path.

He reached
Lovell Road and stopped. "Shit! One of the SUVs is up ahead. Looks like it's been trying to crash through. Got a couple of dings, and the front fender is smashed up some. Stuck now, though. We ought to be able to get past it and on to Hardin Valley Road before they can get out to chase us."

She didn't care. "Just go."

The roar of so many engines echoed in her head. They revved over and over, split only by the shrill blares of people laying down on their horns as if they could force a way through by blasting sound waves.

And Michael was laughing. No, that couldn't be right. Must be hallucinating.

"Mary, it's Ella." He laughed and let out a whoop. "She's driving the damn SUV."

Ella stuck her head out the window. "Were you guys injured in the explosion? Mary doesn't look so good."

"Brain blast," Michael answered. "Can you turn around? Make a path for us down to Hardin Valley."

"Sure. G
ive me a minute." The SUV moved back and forth, hitting everything in its path until Ella managed to get the vehicle turned around. "Follow me," she yelled as cars scrambled to get out of her way.

Mary smiled, and finally let the brain blast take over, thinking they might have a chance of making it to
Kingston.

CHAPTER FIF
TEEN

The anesthetic didn't wear off gradually. One minute Jonah was in a deep sleep, and in the next, information flooded his mind. Numbers, hospital codes, and frequencies bombarded him. Must be what a half-blast felt like. He tried to speak, to get help, but tremors wracked his body and the sheer volume of noise in his mind incapacitated him.

"Dr. Ernst!" Dex's voice cut through the noise. "Jonah's awake and overloading."

Jonah sensed more than felt the doc's presence at the side of the bed. Felt a short tug on his neck and instant relief. The flood went from a surge to a trickle. What felt like tentacles boring into his brain a few seconds ago turned to feathers tickling his consciousness. He knew the info was there if he wanted to reach for it, but it didn't force its way in.

"Sorry about the overload. I decided to test the port connection while you were still under. I must admit, I didn't expect your
technopathy to be so well developed, or that it would bring you out of a deep sleep. Otherwise, how do you feel?" Dr. Ernst asked.

"Doesn't hurt as much as the first mech implants."

"Glad to hear it. We used an experimental procedure to close your internal wounds.  It's a combination of protein netting, similar to the sac you have in your arms now, with the biosynth fluid. We grafted the barrier to the affected areas with an electro-heat pulse. It works much the same way as electroplating metal. In addition, we injected a mild analgesic into the fluid for pain management."

"Experimental?" Jonah turned to Dex. "You didn't say anything about me being a freaking lab rat."

Dr. Ernst defended the decision. "The procedure has exceeded our expectations in virtual simulations. And under the circumstances, we didn't have time to perform clinical trials."

"And if you had known, would it have made a difference?" Dex asked.

The first mech implants? A no-brainer, even though they were experimental at the time, and the only doctor who'd do the slice and implant was a junkie. But to survive in the fringes, he needed the advantage. Barricaded out of the city while the wall went up, he'd been forced to steal. Then forced to do it better. Survival then. Survival now. Only more than him and Mary. More than the gang he considered family. "No. Doesn't matter as long as it works." He sat up and stretched. Checked the range of motion in his left shoulder. Muscles the doc had cut pulled in his side, sent a spike of pain through his chest, but only for a second before it dulled into a shadow covering his entire left side.

"We know the controller port works. Almost too well." He pulled a porta-comp out of his pocket. "I need to perform the postoperative scans."

Jonah closed his eyes and stayed still while the doc did his thing, but all he wanted was to rip the IV out of his arm and get the hell out of the med center.

"Blood pressure and heart rate are normal." Dr. Ernst adjusted the controls and ran the scanner over Jonah's chest. "Respiration's a little low, but I'd expect that after the lobe removal." He turned to Jonah. "It'll take some time for your body to adjust, but as long as you don't try running any marathons, you should be good to go." He turned toward the door and smiled. "If you'll excuse me, I've been called for an emergency procedure. Some mech came in a few minutes ago. Strange injuries. He's got a couple of cracked ribs, cuts and contusions on his face, legs and back, and all the biosynth fluid has been drained from his arms."

"David? He made it out?" Jonah scrambled out from under the sheets. Got caught in the IV line. "What about Mary? Did Michael get her to John? I need to—"

"Slow down." Dex grabbed some gauze off the counter and pulled the needle out of Jonah's arm. It fell to the floor, the saline solution making a little puddle where it landed. "I received confirmation that Mary made it to John. They met up with the guides and are on the devil's footsteps now. Let the Doc take care of
David." He plastered the gauze on Jonah's skin. "You don't
need
to do anything, except get dressed and get to the prison comp. Mary should get to Brushy Mountain sometime around eleven or so, which only leaves you about five hours to get the place open. Approximately three hours after that, the wave is going to hit. You'll need every second of it to get the energy web to full power." Dex nodded, and Doctor Ernst slipped out of the room.

"You're wrong. Two freaking minutes wouldn't have made a hell of a difference. I may have controller mech, but I'm not voided yet. I still care."

"So do I." Dex pulled Jonah's clothes out of a small closet.

Jonah snorted. "Yeah, okay. You care."

"Do you know why they wire the controller mech through the emotional center of the brain and leave the hardware unshielded?" He handed the clothes to Jonah. "Not because they have to. It isn't necessary for the hardware to work properly."

The door flung open as Jonah pulled the shirt over his head, and Doctor Ernst went straight to the vid screen embedded in the wall. "You should see this." He pressed the on button. "Hadrian's called an emergency press conference. It's on every channel and being simulcast through the civil defense system."

The screen showed Hadrian sitting behind a heavy oak desk. Without his usual pomp and preamble, he spoke. "To the good people out there, I need your help. Earlier this afternoon, the Dragons, a mech gang which has terrorized our citizenry for years, engaged in one final, terrible act of terrorism." He picked up a photograph and showed it to the camera. "This is Mary Sullivan. Earlier today, she and an as yet-identified member of the Dragons, introduced a computer virus into the controller system. Our best computer engineers are working to eradicate the virus, and the unaffected controllers have been moved to a subsystem in order to keep the energy web stable, but it may not be enough." He took a deep breath, shuddered, and looked straight into the camera. "The energy web may fail."

The camera zoomed in a little on Hadrian's face with the lighting angled to highlight the unshed tears Jonah knew were fake. He stabbed his feet through the pants legs of his jeans. "That son-of-a-bitch."

"Good people," Hadrian continued. "We can only speculate as to why these...animals seek to put our survival in peril."

Someone spoke in the background, just out of sight of the camera, but the voice was too muted for Jonah to make out what was said.

Hadrian's face showed shock, but when he turned back to the camera, it was all righteous anger. "Good people, we have now learned what the Dragons want." A moment of dead silence emanated from the screen. "Gold. They would sacrifice your lives, your family, your homes, for nothing more than monetary gain."

"What the hell?" Jonah zipped his jeans, grabbed his boots. "What does he hope to gain from this?"

The photograph of Mary filled the screen. "The Dragons must have a way to stop the virus before it disables the energy web completely. Please note the dragon skin tattoo on her face. Every member of the gang bears this mark. Unfortunately, the virus has also affected the Palisade security force as well. So, I must beg you, good people, to help us apprehend the members of this mech gang. Especially Mary Sullivan. We believe she holds the key to disable the virus as she initiated it. Bring her to me—alive and well. The person who captures Mary will receive the ransom the Dragons have demanded."

Fists clenched, breathing labored, and sweat trickling down his spine, Jonah paced in front of the vid screen. Before he'd realized what he'd done, his fist went through the glass. Stunned, he shook the fragments off his fingers. Wiped the little drops of blood on his jeans. "I've got to call Mary. Make sure she's okay. And then David. Have him pull the Dragons back. But not to the park. They'll be on highway 441 by now, and the contingency plan was to get to Norris Dam and hold up in the wooded area at the northern end around the lake until they heard from me. Ursula and Niko should be okay. Neither of them have the tat, but I'll text her later anyway." The weight of the leather jacket pulled at his surgical wounds, but he ignored it and dug in his pockets. "Where's my cell?"

Dex leaned against the wall. "You're not making any of those calls."

In two steps, Jonah stood face to face with Dex. "Don't try to get in my way on this. Mary is out there
—"

"Safe with John,
and David knows what he needs to do. You make those calls, and Hadrian will use the GPS chips in their phones to find them." Dex stepped around Jonah, stopped behind his left shoulder, and whispered in his ear. "This is why they go through the limbic system. Controllers can't do their job if they're worrying about their family, friends, homes, or even their damned goldfish. If you want to help them, get your emotions under control. And if you want to worry about something, worry about getting your ass out of here."

Jonah turned. "What?"

"While you were out, the president declared martial law. Issued a curfew for six tonight. Everyone who doesn't have a bunker is being corralled into what he's calling community safety havens, and he's got the military setting up roadblocks on the interstates. People are storming the wall. It's chaos out there." Dex pointed at the door. "How many people saw you come in? Or Michael? Noticed the tat?"

"A lady in the lobby saw me. Maybe one or two more. Everyone at the reception desk." He closed his eyes, brought the memories to the surface. "Passed eleven people in the hallways. Probably about the same for Michael."

Dex nodded to Dr. Ernst, and the man left the room. "And after Hadrian's announcement, how many of them do you think called the security force, or went to find a weapon to capture you two for the reward?"

"Shit! Never crossed my mind."

Dex poked a finger into Jonah's forehead. "What. A. Freaking. Waste. How about using that blasted-out brain of yours to calculate some odds instead of letting your emotions control your reactions."

Jonah swatted Dex's hand. "Like you? No thanks."

"No, I expect you to be better than me." Dex let out a little laugh. "It took over a year, and a hell of a lot conditioning, a sort of self-inflicted shock therapy, for me to play the part. Convince everyone."

Dex never stimmed
. When he'd made the promise to remember that, he hadn't expected to keep it. Didn't think it mattered. Dex never stimmed, because he didn't need the kick of artificial emotions. He'd never lost the real ones.

"But you?" Dex continued. "You let people think you're out of control. The Dragons wouldn't trust you otherwise. Got to be crazy to take on Hadrian's security forces. Steal what you need to survive right under their noses. But I know it's all for show, especially after you blasted and your ability kicked in. But I knew it the day I blasted. I was half out of my mind with pain, and I grabbed your wrist, trying to hold on, literally and figuratively, and not pass out. I felt your pulse. Your slow, steady pulse, even while you were threatening to kill the doctor, and I locked onto it like a metronome." Tears filled his eyes. "It wasn't the doctor, or the blood thinners, or anything else they did to me. You saved my life."