Remote (15 page)

He tied the cord around the door and brought it to the foyer, then dragged the robot in as well.  He was tying additional knots in the cord when he heard Remote’s voice again.

“I’m not sure what you think you can accomplish now.  Assuming my stronghold
is
on the second floor, you still won’t be able to breach it.  You have no equipment beyond a few salvaged scraps—you’re a caveman battling an astronaut.”

“Don’t count the caveman out just yet,” Jack muttered.  The banister that ran along the stairway continued at the top of the stairs, branching off to the right for eight feet or so before ending at a wall; the banister was made of hardwood, a smooth polished rail over carved posts.  Jack swung the microwave door back and forth a few times experimentally, than arced it over his head as high as he could reach while holding on to the cord’s end.  It bounced off a post the first few times, but he adjusted his swing until he got it to pass, edge-on, between two of them.  He pulled on the cord slowly, sliding the microwave door back toward him until its edge caught against a post on either side of the cord. 

“Very clever.  I suppose you think you can batter down my door with that, as well?”

Jack ignored him.  He climbed the chassis of the overturned robot to get himself as high as possible, then gripped the knotted power cord and planted a bare foot against the wall.  He began to haul himself up.  His back screamed at him, but he ignored it. 

He had just grabbed the bottom of a post when the charge blew.

***

Nikki knew she had a problem. 

Even shackled, Goliath could do at least one thing: he could make noise.  He’d started with drumming on the bucket, but now that his gag was gone he could just start yelling his head off, or slamming that massive body against the walls of the trailer.  She wasn’t even sure the door would hold up against him. 

She had to move him, and fast.  But she couldn’t leave Parkins alone, either, and it was too soon to cut him loose—while she was pretty sure Parkins would stick with the story they’d came up with, letting him go now might screw up Jack.  She was flying blind with her co-pilot gone, and a one-eyed, human bomb ticking away in her back yard.  She had to do something, and she had to do it
now
.

She opened the door to the basement and almost stumbled going down the steps.  Parkins was asleep, huddled around the pipe he was manacled to.  She fished the handcuff key out with one hand, the gun in her other.  “Hey!” she said.  “Wake up!”

He blinked at her with bleary eyes.  “Whuh?”

She unlocked his handcuffs quickly, before he could even think about reacting, then stuffed them in her pocket and stepped back.  “Come on, get up.  We’re moving.”

“Moving?  To where?”

“You don’t need to know that.  Let’s go.”  She motioned with the gun, impatiently.

He didn’t move.  He didn’t look half-asleep anymore; he looked scared.  “I—I don’t want to.”

Nikki got it.  “You think I’m gonna take you somewhere and pop you, is that it?  You’ve seen too many goddamn movies--if I was gonna kill you, I’d just do it here, all right?  No, I’m moving you because this location isn’t safe any more.  Unless you’d like the cops to show up and take us both into custody so I can explain in detail why you’re here?”

“Uh—no.”

“Then come on—you’re driving.”

She herded him upstairs at gunpoint, then grabbed the gym bag she’d already packed.  They left through the back door.  The truck was still hooked up to the trailer. 

“What’s the trailer for?” Parkins asked.

“Cargo,” she said.  She unlocked the driver’s side door and opened it.  “Get in.”

She joined him on the other side, then handed him the keys.  “Take it easy—we don’t want to get pulled over.”

He started the truck.  “Are you going to answer any of my questions, or am I just supposed to shut up and drive?”

She pulled the cuffs out of her pocket and locked one of his wrists to the steering wheel.  “We can talk once we’re on the road.”

She flicked a quick, nervous glance toward the trailer behind them, then had a sudden flash of inspiration.  “I’ll tell you what I can, all right?  I can’t divulge too much, though—as much for your safety as anything else.  You can tell we know what we’re doing, right?  But you know we’re not cops.”

“Yeah, I pretty much got that.”

“We’re not holding you for ransom, we’re not crazy, and we’re definitely not terrorists.  What’s that leave?”

To her relief, he took the bait.  “Some kind of government operatives?”

“Close enough.  Throw together any three initials you’re comfortable with and assume that’s us.  We grabbed you because we needed a plausible cover story for someone
like
you disappearing.  It directs suspicion a particular way for a particular period, and when that’s over you’re home-free.  No one’s going to come after you or your family, no one’s going to think you’re part of this.”

“I’m like a decoy.”

“Right.  But I’ve got another prisoner in the trailer, and he’s
nothing
like you.  He needs to stay off the board until this is all over, and he’s extremely dangerous.  We need to get him somewhere more isolated, and fast.  Like, ten minutes ago fast.”

“So this guy is, like, Hannibal Lector scary?”

“No.  More like Charles Manson meets Andre the Giant scary.  He’s strong enough to pull your head off, and crazy enough to think it might be fun.”

Parkins swallowed.  “And why are you telling me this?”

“Because we’re gonna drive out to the middle of nowhere and take turns baby-sitting him.”

“Oh.”  Parkins shook his head.  “I don’t suppose you have any of that tequila left, huh?”  He put the truck in reverse and checked the side mirror.

“Careful backing up.  You don’t want to jackknife the trailer and get stuck.”

“No, we wouldn’t want that.  That would be far worse than getting murdered by a psychotic giant in the middle of nowhere . . .”

***

The explosion slammed Jack against the wall and tore open his grip.  He fell ten feet to the floor and landed on his shoulder, wrenching his back.  Agony flooded up his spine as his ears rang and his vision blurred.  He fought to stay conscious. 

He lifted his head, looked down at himself.  Wooden splinters jutted from one arm, down his torso and thigh.  None of them seemed terribly deep.  He sat up slowly, touched the side of his face.  It came away wet, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding too badly.

The bomb had been midway up the stairs, as he’d expected.  The charge had been shaped to direct its force upward, so he’d escaped the worst of it.   Still, he was half-deaf, every wound he had was howling at him, and his back threw daggers of pain up his spine whenever he moved.

Jack smiled.

“Getting a little desperate, are we?” he said aloud.  His own voice sounded strange to him, muffled and echoey.  “Strike two, Remote.”

He got to his feet slowly, feeling shaky.   Had he actually passed out for a minute?  He wasn’t sure.  He was disoriented, dizzy. 

“You overplayed your hand,” Jack said.  “No way you set off an explosive in your own home unless you don’t have a choice.  That means no second robot upstairs, that means no poison gas option.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that if you had anything left to throw at me at all you’d have used it before setting off a fucking bomb on your own stairs.  How’m I doing?”

No response.

“Here I come, asshole,” Jack said.  “Hope you’re ready.”

***

Nikki pointed them east, toward Nevada.  They took Highway 50, aiming for the wilds of the El Dorado National Forest that bordered the state line.  They’d only been on the road a few minutes when their passenger in the back decided to make his opinion of the trip known.

“Jesus, what the hell is that?” Parkins gasped.  The unearthly howl cut through the wind noise like a siren, echoing off the metal walls of the trailer. 

“An extremely pissed off psychopath,” Nikki said.  “Guess he’s decided he’s not crazy about relocating.  Or maybe he doesn’t like the fact that his new nickname is gonna be Patch.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Parkins kept glancing over his shoulder like he expected the giant to come crashing through the rear window at any moment.  “He’s—wow, he’s making a lot of noise.”

“Yeah.  I’d turn up the radio, but it doesn’t work.”

“What if someone hears it?”

“Well, it’s one AM, we’re doing sixty miles an hour, and there’s not a lot of traffic.  Anyone on the side of the road or going the other way isn’t going to hear shit.  We don’t get too close to anyone ahead of us, and anyone that comes up behind we pull over and let pass.”

“And if we get pulled over by a cop?”

She shrugged.  “Then we’re fucked--unless we can convince a State Trooper we have a sasquatch locked in there.”

When the howling wasn’t enough, Goliath added percussion, swinging his chains against the metal walls of the trailer.  It sounded like they were being followed by a cement truck full of ball bearings.

“He—he can’t break out of there, right?”

“If he does, he’s gonna face-plant on asphalt going a mile a minute.  ‘Course, that’ll probably just tick him off. . .”

And then, half an hour in, Goliath came up with something new.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

Jack knew he didn’t have long.

He could already feel the benzodiazepine creeping up, a fog curling in at the edges of his brain.  The pain he was in helped keep it at bay, but that wouldn’t last forever.

He took the stairs, stopping at the jagged hole the blast had inflicted on two of the risers.  It had torn loose a couple of the bannister’s posts as well, and he paused to rip one the rest of the way free.  It was the first decent weapon he’d had in his hands since he’d unchained himself. 

He got to the top.  At the head of the stairs was another display case, holding an actual cage within: a miniature lion tamer with a bristling mustache raised his whip to fend off the snarling tiger crouched on the other side. 

To the right of the stairs was the banister Jack had tried to climb, ending at the edge of a doorway.  Jack could see the foot of a bed and what looked like a dresser.

To the left, the hallway continued for a few feet and then ended in a featureless metal door painted white, set into a steel frame.  A numeric keypad glowed to one side.  It had no doorknob or handle.

He checked out the bedroom first.  Queen-size bed, a dresser that turned out be made of high-impact plastic.  Neatly folded clothes inside—t-shirts, sweatpants, socks, underwear.  The closet held much of the same, all the clothes hanging on plastic hangers.  He found more of the heavy industrial gloves filling one drawer, and several pairs of rubber-soled loafers in the closet. 

But the truly interesting thing was the poster.

It was the only art he’d seen in the house so far.  It was in an expensive-looking carved wooden frame, bolted to the wall behind a sheet of the same shatter-proof plastic the windows were made of.  It depicted a young blond woman in a white halter-top and tight black shorts, teary mascara streaking her cheeks, hanging off the back of a monster with one arm around its throat.   Her other arm arched over her head, clutching a large pot by its handle, the image slightly blurred as she swung at the creature’s skull.  Her mouth stretched open in an angry scream of defiance.

The monster was tall, muscular, with reptilian skin.  Its large jaws bulged with crocodilian teeth, its inhuman eyes as flat and black as a shark’s.  It held a large meat cleaver in one hand and wore a butcher’s apron spattered with crimson.

A large word balloon hung over the woman’s head, aimed at her mouth.  It read, “I’m Not
Ascared
of YOU!” in big, lurid letters.

Jack frowned.  There was something familiar about the words, something he couldn’t quite place.  It had the familiarity of a tagline or a commercial jingle—was it from a movie?  A television show?  Since he’d begun his crusade, the only monsters he was familiar with were real ones—modern media was just so much background noise to be filtered out now, mindless filler between news reports of bodies being discovered and ongoing investigations. 

But while meaningless to Jack, it obviously meant something to Remote.

“You know where I am,” Remote said.  Was it Jack’s imagination, or was there something like nervousness in his voice for the first time?  “Come and get me, Closer.  Just one more door to get through.”

“Suddenly we’re eager for a confrontation . . .” Jack murmured.  He felt a little dreamy, and realized he didn’t have long.  If he’d found any coffee or tea down in the kitchen he’d be eating handfuls of it raw by now, but there hadn’t been so much as decaf.

He left the bedroom, approached the steel door at the other end of the hall cautiously.  This is where Remote would have his last ditch defenses, some sort of lethal option outside the panic room itself.  Jack didn’t see any gunports, for which he was grateful—though he’d bet Remote probably had a gun inside.  He didn’t think Remote would use explosives, not so close to his own safety.  That left—

Jack stopped.  The thick, padded carpet underfoot only extended halfway down the hall, ending a good six feet away from the metal door.

He knelt at the edge of the carpet, peering down at the floor.  It looked like hardwood, but on closer examination the wood grain was only painted on.

Not painted plastic laminate, though.  Jack couldn’t be sure without touching it, but he thought it was painted metal.

He went back to the bedroom, pulled the mattress off the bed.  It was made of foam, and easy to haul down the hallway and onto the metal surface.

“Congratulations,” Remote said.  “Very perceptive.  Yes, the floor is wired to deliver a rather large jolt of electricity.  But that’s not the only surprise I have in store.”

Thinking back on it later, Jack realized he should have known the ceiling would be rigged.  An electrified floor, while effective against someone with bare feet, wouldn’t do much against someone wearing rubber-soled shoes—but few people wore rubber hats, at least not indoors.