Immortality (80 page)

The experience-flood was over in an instant. Mark was stunned and disoriented. He had seriously underestimated Alexander. The man must have found them in his dreams and then used mental stealth to conceal his advance. How had he covered fifteen hundred miles so quickly with slow-moving armor?

“Everyone, back to the Humvees,” yelled Mark. “We’re pulling out. That dust cloud’s an army that will murder us all.”

Carl took the turn out of the parking lot at what felt like full throttle. The tires screeched as he fishtailed until he got it pointing straight down the road. Mark looked back and saw Humvee after Humvee pulling out of the lot. The last ones were towing trailers. They would be the slowest. Mark had given orders for the two-way radios to be hooked back up, but to transmit only in case of emergency or if they got separated. He was already thinking about desperate tactics.

“Carl, that way,” shouted Mark while pointing. “It‘ll lead into westbound I-10.”

“You got it.”

Soon, they were racing down I-10 heading toward New Mexico. The tires on the Humvee were creating so much road noise that conversation was impossible without shouting. The speedometer needle was pegged at its sixty mph limit. By timing highway mile markers, Mark estimated their speed was eighty-six mph. The Humvees pulling trailers were being left behind.

An
assist
told Mark that armored personnel carriers had a top speed of forty-five miles per hour. Could they be modified to go faster? He didn’t know; and it didn’t matter because just as they were outrunning their Humvees with trailers, Alexander’s faster vehicles would outrun their slower heavier armor. Not good.

“Pull off,” said Mark. “Signal everyone to stop. We’re going to ditch the trailers.”

After an anxious and precious fifteen minutes, they had unhooked all the trailers. As many supplies as possible were transferred to the Humvees. One man had seriously injured his hand on a trailer hitch. Major Franklin came up to ride with Mark; his military experience was needed. Mark had stationed men with military training in the rear Humvees. Thanks to the Major, they had two fifty-caliber machine guns and grenade launchers. Taking potshots might slow Alexander down enough. The men at the rear had orders to open fire as soon as they had a chance of hitting anything. The range of a fifty-caliber was a couple miles. The Armored Personnel carriers had greater range with their cannons; but they had to be losing ground at forty-five miles per hour, which Major Franklin swore was as fast as they could ever go. The Major said he was hoping they didn’t have any missile launchers. Mark was just praying there would be no potshots today, but he doubted those prayers would be answered. Hadn’t there been enough death already? Why were there always madmen who thirsted for more?

They’d been racing flat out for over an hour. The highway they were on was clear of sand, so there were no dust clouds to give away their position or Alexander’s. They were in the middle of nowhere. I-10 was surrounded by endless miles of desert and mountains in either direction. There were no turns Mark could take to shake Alexander’s pursuit. All the small, side roads were covered in sand, which would give away their change in direction if they ran fast; and if they ran slow, they wouldn’t be out of sight before Alexander raced by. The next big turnoff where they could lose Alexander was over a hundred miles down the road, and it dead-ended into Mexico. They were trapped in a fight where speed trumped all.

Something about the experience-flood he’d received an hour ago from Alexander was troubling Mark. It wasn’t the obvious, but something subtle. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was something odd about what Alexander had been thinking. The man was pleased that a Traitor was in his mind spying on him. It didn’t exactly make sense… then Mark realized what was out of place. He felt like the world had been tipped to an odd angle. Alexander behaved as if a Traitor was spying on him at the time of the mental recording; but Mark knew this was impossible because of how experience-floods were relayed by the god-machine. Experience-floods were received as implanted memories that appeared after the fact, and then surfaced in the mind and were instantaneously relived. There were real-time delays of minutes or even millennia in the case of timeline records; and that meant Mark was not spying on Alexander. He was only an after-the-fact voyeur of recorded material. During some of the experience-floods, Alexander clearly knew what his eyes were seeing would be received by a Traitor; and to know that meant Alexander had to be either consciously or subconsciously planning on sending his experiences to the Traitor. There was no other explanation. Alexander could not have sensed someone spying on him when the actual
spying
wouldn’t happen until minutes or hours later. The implication was astonishing. Alexander was either feeding crafted disinformation or was living under the paranoid delusion of being spied on while subconsciously tipping his hand to the Traitors. Mark was betting on the latter, and if true, that was a powerful piece of information to have as a weapon. Was it possible that at some level Alexander wanted to fail?

Mark decided to try to tune into Alexander’s mind. If successful, he intended to stay only long enough to get a bearing on the man’s position by spotting a highway sign or some other landmark. An experience-flood hit him before he even had a chance to try. What Mark perceived was confusing. The road noise was extremely loud. Alexander’s Humvee was doing a hundred miles per hour and the armored personnel carriers were with him. This was impossible! How could armor keep up? How could military Humvees go that fast? More of Alexander’s memories unfolded in Mark’s mind; and Mark understood and was stunned: the Humvees had been modified for speed. He’d been badly out-maneuvered a second time by Alexander. They were being overtaken. More memories surfaced. Mark was rattled. Alexander behaved as if he thought Mark was in his head at that moment and was sending Mark a message. The soldier twisted a side-mirror inward so Mark could see the expression on his face. He appeared confident and pleased with himself. He leaned out the window and looked backward showing Mark how badly he had been deceived. There was a convoy of eighteen-wheeler flatbeds hauling the slower-moving armored personnel carriers and fuel tankers behind the flatbeds. They could keep going at a hundred miles per hour until they reached the ocean, and then keep going up the coast or anywhere else their quarry might flee. Alexander’s face was back in the mirror. He mouthed the words, “No hope.”

Nearby, a long zipper of explosions shocked Mark out of the experience-flood. Dozens of clouds of smoke were spiraling into the air from rocky outcroppings a few hundred yards behind them. The experience-flood had come to Mark before he’d tried to initiate it. Wasn’t that evidence that Alexander was intentionally feeding him disinformation?

“That’s small cannon fire,” shouted Major Franklin. “Bushmaster cannon would be my bet. Nasty weapon. Fires small 30mm cannon shells as fast as a machine gun. Each round’s got a nice little punch; one or two could wreck a Hummer’s day. Four miles max range, one mile effective; so best guess is they just closed to within four miles, because they’re lobbing ’em instead of taking direct shots. I’m betting one or two vehicles are stopping to fire and then pulling out to catch up. What you saw was pretty accurate work. You better hope it was luck. If not, we’re in a world of hurt; because that’d mean he’s got some fuckin’ good shooters and once they’re closer, they’re gonna rain hundreds of those shells down on us.”

Mark heard what the Major said and knew what it meant. Desperate times had arrived and he had nothing left to fight with. The safety of everyone was his responsibility. The time had come for the bait to lead the sharks away from the tribe. He looked at Sarah in the backseat. Her head was down. She hadn’t spoken since they’d pulled out of El Paso. She must have sensed some of the same things he did about Alexander; and more with her heightened empathic wiring. She had to have been dipping into Alexander’s broadcasts.

“Sarah,” he shouted over the road noise.

There was no response. He leaned backward between the front seats and squeezed her shoulder. Nothing…

“Sarah!”

She looked up at him with hollow eyes, as he felt something which took his breath away. There was a body-sense of it at first; then, the impressions came into focus. He released her shoulder. A kill zone was forming around them or near them. He had a fleeting impression that the zone might actually be somehow moving with their Humvee, targeting them. Sarah’s cheeks were damp with tears. Her expression was stoic. Her stare tugged at the back of his mind like a magnet pulling another of its kind. He broke eye contact by looking out the rear window. A string of cannon shells burst in the road farther behind them.

“Are you doing this?” asked Mark. “The kill zone.”

“Don’t know… Sensed it coming,” said Sarah. “I was sending messages for the god-machine to help us.”

Her voice was labored as if she was struggling to lift a heavy weight. Mark felt the impending zone growing in strength. He didn’t know if she was subconsciously causing the zone, or if the god-machine was protecting two hybrid-humans who were important to its future plans, or if it was just dumb luck; but he had to act now. He had to separate his people from this death maker and draw Alexander into it. This was not the kind of trap he’d have planned, but it could work.

“Stop the car,” shouted Mark.

“What?” yelled Carl.

“Just do it!” ordered Mark. “A kill zone is coming right here, right now. Sarah and I will draw the bastards into it. We’re bait for the trap. You have to get in another Humvee and run. Kathy …”

“I’m not leaving you,” she cried.

“No time,” said Mark. “If you stay, you die. We’re not going to be killed by this zone.” Mark pointed his finger, like a weapon, toward the rear window. “They are!”

The line of Humvees pulled out fast. Mark knew that image of Kathy’s face staring back at him would haunt him for the rest of his life, whether it ended today or in hundreds of years. His heart had been hopelessly broken in those few seconds that were now gone and could never be changed.

He and Sarah were sitting in a Humvee, which was parked in the center of the highway. The scene was staged to look like a break down. A spilled toolbox was lying in the road next to the vehicle. He didn’t believe it would fool Alexander for very long, but anything that slowed him down worked in Mark’s favor giving Kathy and the others precious time and distance. Whether the kill zone worked or failed, Alexander’s hunt would still end in the next few minutes. He would have his prey or be dead. Parked at the crest of a hill, through the windshield, Mark saw the last of his Humvees disappear around a bend. He turned around in his seat and stared down the hill through the rear window. The road was empty for now. He could see a couple miles back, all the way to a spot where the highway dipped from view behind a steep decline. An experience-flood hit him without warning. Alexander was back. Mark felt the swiftness with which the soldier was closing on them. The man was saturated with blood lust; he was hungering for their deaths. Mark fought back the mental invasion. His hands felt unclean. He glanced at Sarah. He could sense the kill zone on top of them like an electrical storm, like some great thundercloud drawing itself closer to the ground before striking.

Almost as an involuntary reflex, Mark linked with Sarah’s mind. How had this connection happened? Somehow they were sharing each other’s mental landscape and senses. Was this Sarah’s normal empathic experience, her equivalent to his data-floods? Even at this intense level of intimacy, he could not tell if she was causing the zone or just sensing it. He realized she didn’t know the answer herself. What he found in her heart was power, confusion, and strong conviction. The inside of the Humvee was silent. The trap was set. In a very short time, death would surround them. Mark prayed that their pursuers would be destroyed and that the kill zone would not begin too early or too late. He prayed that he and Sarah would live through this horror and walk out the other side. Mark felt a physical repulsion from his own instincts to kill. His mind was battling with his soul. This was no the time for debating right or wrong; this was survival. He focused all his thoughts to join Sarah in watching and concentrating, as the whirlwind of death materialized. Sarah had been unable to explain if anything going on inside her was having an affect on the zone. Almost everything in her conscious mind was being relayed to his. He tried to duplicate her thoughts. He tried to synchronize his mental focus with hers. They were like a pair of ancient priests enchanting magical prayers, hoping to will the kill zone god into existence at the right moment. Were their concentrated thoughts making any difference? This was no time to stop and put it to a test. They were at the dark intersection of faith and reality, where superstition was born. Who could tell why this kill zone was coming? The god-machine’s war map came up superimposed over his vision. He could see the area the kill zone would cover. An
assist
was tracking and showing the zone’s perimeter with a set of concentric-circles on a topographic roadmap. The outer ring was a target hundreds of yards wide with him and Sarah near its epicenter. It wasn’t enough. The circle was too small to cover all of Alexander’s army, but there was nothing he could do about it. He forced all doubts from his mind and concentrated harder with Sarah.

Mark spotted movement at the edge where the highway sunk from view. His vision was computer enhanced by an
assist
. The movement resolved into tiny square specks as vehicles crested the incline. More and more came; ten, then twenty; soon it looked like a hundred specks were racing toward the two of them. Bullets nicked the roadbed nearby, kicking up sparks and small puffs of debris. They were going to be cut down before the trap sprang. A bullet pinged off the roof. Mark felt the kill zone stirring, igniting. An invisible column of human death rose to encircle them. In a corner of his mind, doubts reemerged. Mark knew the zone was inadequate. The trap wasn’t going to destroy enough of them. No, keep focused! He pushed his attention back to concentrating with Sarah. Their minds were synchronized. Their thoughts were merged into a single point of awareness. A bullet cut through the rear window and punched through a seatback.