SecondWorld (11 page)

Miller turned left and pulled over. He turned to Arwen. “You okay?”

She looked small and frail in the seat. She had her seat belt on over the white tent tarp, which was wrapped around her like a blanket. When she gave him a small smile he realized she could breathe.

She noted his attention and said, “The air is okay. You opened the valve on the tank, remember?”

Miller removed his face mask, leaned forward, and shook out of his clunky rebreather apparatus, which had pitched him forward in the seat. He twisted the air supply valves to Off and put the whole thing in the back. The air inside the car smelled strange, but it was breathable. The car had become a mobile oxygen tent.

“We’re going to have to do some more fast driving. Might get bumpy.”

She grimaced.

Miller realized he should have taken some painkillers from the hospital. They’d probably been giving her morphine. He made a mental note to get something for the pain if they escaped the city in one piece.

Miller pulled away from the curb and wove his way through the city, avoiding bodies and the occasional abandoned vehicle as best he could. “We need to find the highway. Head north. Do you know your way around the city?”

She looked at him with squinty eyes. “You know I’m twelve, right? I usually read while my parents drive.”

“Right. I think I need to—”

“What was that?” Arwen said, her voice tinged with fear.

Miller glanced at her as he rounded a body. She was looking beyond him, out the driver’s side window. “What did you see?”

“Something red. Two intersections down. Thought it was moving.”

Miller picked up speed, steering past obstacles like the street was a slalom course. He had no doubt that the red she’d seen was one of the two red Tesla Roadsters that had been on display at the dealership. They were two-seat sports cars and no doubt faster than his four-door sedan.

He turned right at the next intersection, hoping to put some distance between them and the red car. He glanced in the rearview after making the turn. The Roadster was cruising up behind them. One man drove, a second stood in the passenger’s seat, weapon at the ready.

Miller pinned the gas pedal and shot forward. He did his best to avoid the bodies in the road, but knowing the bullets would hurt Arwen a lot more than bumps, he clipped a few arms and legs to maintain speed. He felt the tires spin whenever they hit a patch of rust flakes, like driving through sand, and adapted his driving to the conditions.

As they passed through the next intersection a streak of red to his left caught his attention. He turned to find the second Roadster aiming to T-bone them. He had no time to think about how insane the act was—the morons in the Roadster would almost certainly die. He acted on instinct, twisting the sedan toward the oncoming car and throwing on the parking brake. The Model S spun quickly through the red dust, kicking up a cloud. Miller saw the surprised look on the face of the Roadster’s driver as the two cars came parallel to each other.

As the sedan’s spin and forward momentum pulled it through the intersection, a loud metallic crunch filled the air as the pursuing Roadster T-boned the second. Miller saw both cars flipping through the street. A moment later, a body flew past, legs and arms sprawling out like a rag doll. He crashed to the street with a puff of pink dust. Miller twisted the wheel, straightening out the car, and zipped around the flung man’s motionless body.

The encounter, while brief, had taxed Miller’s body. He hadn’t seen action like that since the SEALs. Adrenaline pounded his heart and made his hands shake. He gripped the steering wheel tight and slowed the car, catching his breath. Once he felt a measure of calm return, he looked to Arwen. She stared back at him with wide eyes. Her lips showed a slight grin. If not for the dry cracking on her lower lip it would have been a full-fledged smile.

“That was awesome,” she whispered.

He smiled for her. “It was, wasn’t it.”

“Where’d you learn to drive like that?”

“Defensive driving course. Part of my job.”

“That was
defensive
? What are you, in the army or something?”

“Or something— Whoa!” Miller hit the brakes.

Arwen became quickly frightful. “What is it?”

“Look,” he said, pointing.

Arwen relaxed when she saw the Interstate 95 sign. “The highway!”

Miller checked the car’s charge. It indicated they could travel an estimated two hundred miles before the car needed a recharge. He figured they had about five hours of oxygen left, too. And the rebreather tank if it came to that. He considered trying to find the scuba shop and all of his supplies, but a flash of blue passing through a faraway intersection in the rearview sent him toward the highway. Predators were still hunting in Miami.

They drove in silence until they reached the on-ramp for the highway. “We made it,” Arwen said as they rode up the long, curving ramp.

When Miller saw that the double-yellow-lined road was almost completely free of cars and bodies, he powered up to eighty miles per hour and relaxed. The city of Miami, once full of life and never-ending parties, had been reduced to a red-hued ghost town hosting a gang of neo-Nazis somehow capable of reigning in their own SecondWorld. Leaving the city behind lifted a sinister weight from his shoulders.

As the buildings shrunk down to apartment buildings and then homes, Miller turned on the radio. He was greeted by static. He hit the Scan button and the numbers scrolled past until the cycle had completed and started over. Nothing but static. There were either no stations in range transmitting or something was blocking the signal.

Arwen leaned forward with a grunt and opened the glove box. It was empty except for one CD. “Score.”

“I wasn’t looking for music,” he said. “I—” He saw the CD’s label.
U2—War.
Score indeed. He took it from her and slid it into the CD player. Once “Sunday Bloody Sunday” started playing he knew the disc was kept in the car to show off its amazing eight-speaker sound system.

Miller and Arwen sat in silence as they cruised down the highway listening to an early Bono and The Edge pour their hearts into the music that made them famous. Red flakes danced on the breeze around them, flowing up and over the car.

Ten minutes into the CD, they passed an airplane that had crashed into the opposite side of the highway. It was big—a 747—and probably carried hundreds of people. Fire had consumed the middle of it, and Miller had to pull into the breakdown lane to skirt one of the destroyed wings.

“What happened?” Arwen asked.

“Engines can’t run without oxygen,” he said in a hushed voice. “They must have tried to land on the highway.”

“Maybe the red stuff clogged it up?”

He nodded. “That, too.”

Once past the plane, they fell silent again, neither wanting to talk about what they’d seen. After roughly twenty-seven minutes, nearly a minute into “Two Hearts Beat as One,” Arwen turned down the music. “Enough old-people music.”

“Old-people music? U2 is…” Miller paused. He was talking to a twelve-year-old. U2
was
old-people music. “I thought you liked it.”

“You thought wro— Ahh!”

A split second of confusion struck Miller as his ear picked up on Arwen’s scream a fraction of a second before his mind registered what he’d seen—a bullet hole in the windshield. He yanked the wheel from side to side, hoping to throw off the sniper’s aim. A second round tore through the windshield and blasted a hole out the back.

The third round found his left arm. Miller shouted in pain, twisting from the impact. He hammered the brakes as the car veered off the road toward a copse bordering an off-ramp.

16

A wave of leafy bush branches covered the car as it sliced into the brush like a dull knife. Each shattered branch sent a jolt through the car, but ultimately helped avoid a bone-crushing stop against the guardrail, which was just a few feet beyond where the car came to rest. Once stopped, Miller took stock of the situation.

Arwen was still conscious, though dazed, and most likely in intense pain. He glanced at his shoulder, now covered in a maroon stain. A gash stretched across the side of his shoulder where the bullet had skimmed past. A little to the right and his arm would have been all but useless. He’d survived worse—much worse—and didn’t give it a second thought. He couldn’t see past the brush covering the car, but suspected the sniper had been on the overpass to which the off-ramp led. And since he couldn’t see the overpass, the sniper couldn’t see them, which meant he had a minute, maybe less, to figure out some kind of plan.

He ejected the clip from his handgun and checked the rounds. One in the clip. One in the chamber. Two shots. Against what? A lone gunman with a sniper rifle? Ten gunmen with automatic weapons? There was no way to be sure.

Arwen groaned. “What happened?”

Miller slid into the backseat and started putting on his rebreather. There wasn’t time to explain. “Stay in the car. No matter what you hear or see.”

With the rebreather secured to his back, he slid the mask up over his head and secured it over his face. He adjusted the valves and took a breath. “Keep your head down. I’ll be back soon.”

“But—” Before Arwen could speak, Miller had slipped out the back door and closed it behind him.

Miller followed the rise of the off-ramp toward the overpass, staying well within the concealment of the tall bushes. The brush thinned out as several taller trees blocked out the sun. He paused at the edge of the brush, lowering himself down behind a leafy branch, and listened. His patience and instincts were rewarded thirty seconds later.

Fallen leaves and dry branches cracked beneath the careful approach of a lone figure. Miller watched him through the brush. He had the same look as the Miami gang—shaved head, blond hair, blue eyes, the military-grade rebreather—but a few details set him apart. He held the confident posture of a hunter. His black fatigues were similar to those worn by U.S. Special Ops on night missions. But his weapon stood out the most and made no sense. The Karabiner 98k was a five-shot bolt-action rifle sometimes fitted with an optical scope for sharpshooting. It was the standard infantry weapon of the Germans in World War II. But here it was, in the year 2012, held by the man who had just tried to kill him. In the open, with some space between them, the sniper had the advantage. Here in the brush, with twisting branches all around, the long rifle would be unwieldy. But if he reached the clearing …

Miller rose from his hiding spot and raised his weapon. The wound on his left shoulder pounded through him as he fired the first shot. The pain threw off his aim, and the bullet zinged past the sniper’s head.

The man ducked and raised his rifle, but it snagged on a branch and his shot dug into the dirt at Miller’s feet. As the man chambered a second round, Miller took careful aim. Before he could pull the trigger, he noticed the sniper was about to fire from the hip and ducked instinctively. Both shots went wild.

He had no idea how many shots the sniper had left in his five-shot magazine, but he knew how many he had left—none. He left the brush behind and charged through the sloped clearing. When the man charged as well, Miller knew they were both out of ammo. But the stranger still had the advantage. Not only was he not wounded, but the rifle had been fitted with a very sharp bayonet, which essentially turned it into a short spear.

The two met in the center of the clearing, both moving fast. The sniper thrust the bayonet toward Miller’s chest. He spun like a football player, dodging the blade with his body, but felt a tug on something as he passed. He gave it no thought as he continued his spin and pistol-whipped the man in the back of the head.

The two men separated. As Miller watched the man stagger for a moment, he thought he’d gained the upper hand. But the man’s smile, twisted by the thick plastic of his rebreather mask, revealed otherwise. Miller found out why a moment later.

He couldn’t breathe.

The hose that supplied air from Miller’s rebreather to his mask had been severed by the knife.

The ramifications of this struck both men at the same time. The sniper didn’t need to fight. All he had to do was wait. Without air, Miller would soon drop dead without another blow landed.

The man turned to run, but stumbled, weakened by the hard blow to his head. Miller charged, his subconscious counting down the minutes his body could keep going without another breath, and then cutting that time in half because of the oxygen being eaten up by physical exertion.

Miller caught the man’s shoulder and spun him around, but had to jump back as the bayonet swooshed past his stomach. The man’s quick strike overextended his arms and Miller filled the gap, planting a punch into the man’s stomach. The blow would have sent most men to the ground, gasping for air, but the sniper was a trained fighter. He flexed his stomach muscles and sucked in his gut, absorbing the blow’s energy, and keeping his air—of which he had plenty—in his lungs.

In close, the sniper twisted the butt of his rifle up and caught Miller in the side of the head, sending him to the ground. Miller reached out as he fell and managed to pull the face mask from his attacker.