SecondWorld (44 page)

“What happened?” Miller asked. “Who is he?”

“Is maintenance staff. Pale Horse broke his neck,” Vesely said, pointing to the man’s shirt. “I have idea. Well, Charlie’s idea.”

“Actually,” Miller said, “so do I— Wait … Charlie’s idea?”

57

After hearing Vesely’s plan, which was risky as hell, but perhaps their best chance of success, Miller added his idea to the mix. The combined plan was bold and messy, but if it worked, the enemy wouldn’t know what hit them.

Ten minutes later, they were ready. Miller put the general’s shirt back on, covering the fresh bandage on his arm. He threw on the coat next and looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. The sight of himself dressed in Nazi regalia was disconcerting, though not nearly as much as the dead maintenance man lying in the tub. The man was just as dead as before, but was now stripped to his underwear, covered in his own blood, and missing a hand.

He left the bathroom and found the others ready to go. Vesely was now dressed in red, and had the maintenance man’s satchel over his shoulder. He still wore his two guns and Stetson despite Miller’s protest. A cowboy to the end. The satchel, which had been full of tools, now held a severed hand—Charlie’s idea.

Vesely shook Miller’s hand. “Good luck, Survivor.”

“You, too, Cowboy.”

After tilting his hat toward the other two, he opened the door, looked both ways, and then slipped out into the hallway, heading up.

Miller wasn’t sure he’d see Vesely again. They were about to embark on suicide missions. That both of them would survive seemed unlikely. Still, they’d come this far, so he decided to hold on to the hope that he’d see the quirky Czech cowboy again.

Miller turned to Adler and Pale Horse. “You two ready?”

Adler held out her hand. She had changed into a brown uniform that was a few sizes too big. The rolled-up sleeves and pant legs looked a little off, but she looked far less conspicuous. With her loose-fitting clothes and her hair tucked up inside a brown cap, she could almost pass for a man—a very short and pretty man. “Have a gun for me?”

Pale Horse handed her his sound-suppressed Sig Sauer along with three spare clips. “I seem to be a slow draw with this,” he said, and then patted his UMP submachine gun. “Besides, I think I’ll have more use for this in the next few minutes.”

Miller confirmed the man’s thought with a nod and headed for the door. He looked to Adler. “Ready?”

She stepped around him and opened the door. With seriousness Miller hadn’t yet seen, she said, “Let’s go,” and stepped into the hallway. Miller and Pale Horse followed.

A quick check revealed no one nearby and no robo-Bettys. They approached the railing and looked down. The atrium at the bottom of the complex looked like a galleria at Christmastime. The sea of voices. The bustling bodies. The sound of the fountain. There was an energy to the place. An excitement. Miller saw coins in the fountain and wondered if he would find George Washington printed on them, or Adolf Hitler.

He could see a hallway entrance across the way. Above the doorway was a sign that read
SECURITY AND CONTROL
. According to Adler, the vaultlike door was at the end of that hallway. With all the security, they would never get the door open from this end, so Miller came up with a plan that would get them to open the door from the other side.

Miller reached into his pocket and took out the plastic Ziploc bag in which he had kept his painkillers. Now it was full of still-warm liquid—his blood. He poked several holes in the plastic with his knife, then sliced it down the middle for good measure. “Stand back,” he said to Adler and Pale Horse. Better if they didn’t get the blood, containing his DNA, on them—like everyone below them was about to.

He gripped the corner of the bag and sent it flying out over the atrium with a flick of his wrist. The bag spun out over the open space like a Frisbee, spraying his blood in every direction.

The first reaction came fast, but was confused. A woman below yelped and said, “What was that?”

A chorus of voices soon joined the woman, none too fearful until one person said, “Is that blood?”

Another replied. “It is!”

And then it happened. An alarm.

Miller peeked over the railing. The crowd below was frozen in place, some looking up, trying to figure out where the blood had come from. He could see specks of it covering their faces. But that’s not why they weren’t moving.

A single robo-Betty at the center of the group was flashing red. An electronic voice spoke from it, “Anomalous DNA detected. Please remain still until security arrives to assist you.”

Miller realized that if he hadn’t shot the robo-Betty in the elevator, he might have gotten the same message. But at the same time, it might have alerted security to his presence. This turn of events threw a rather large monkey wrench in his plans.

Another alarm sounded. Then another. Ten more followed. All of the robo-Bettys in the atrium had detected his blood and sounded the alarm. But none of them were activating, and probably wouldn’t unless … someone disobeyed. That’s why the crowd had frozen. If they ran, the Bettys would activate. These people had been trained well. Too well.

A loud pinging noise drew his attention up. High above, where the flags were attached to the ceiling, were sparks. When the first five-story-tall flag fell, Miller knew what had happened. Vesely had seen their predicament and fired on the flags. The giant flags would send people scattering, or set off the Bettys themselves upon reaching the floor. The second flag fell moments later.

“Go!” Miller said, and began running down the spiraling ramp. No one was paying any attention to them.

As they rounded the second floor, the flags fell past.

“Run!” Miller shouted. “The flags will set them off!”

That’s all it took. The people below realized he was right.

And ran.

The Bettys sprang into action, even as more of the killer devices arrived on the scene, alarms sounding. Screams rose up from the atrium as a thousand metal balls blasted through the air, cutting down at least fifty people. Miller felt a moment of regret for the people. They weren’t soldiers. But they were complicit to genocide, so his regret didn’t last long.

As Miller rounded the ramp to the ground floor, he noticed a robo-Betty up ahead. He slowed and let Pale Horse and Adler catch up. “Grab that thing,” he said to Pale Horse. “Don’t let it see the blood, or me.”

Pale Horse ran ahead and picked up the device. It scanned him as he held it, the light turning green. Then the wheels just spun as it tried to move on. Pale Horse kept the sensor turned toward the ceiling as Miller passed and said, “Let’s go.”

They rounded the ramp onto the atrium floor and were greeted by a war zone. At least a hundred people lay dead and dying, many of them wearing blue and brown. A few survivors clung to the far walls, afraid to move. A single robo-Betty sat at the edge of the atrium, flashing its red light at a corpse and ordering it not to move.

Miller led Pale Horse and Adler across the opposite side of the atrium and headed for the hallway to Security and Control. As he approached the hall, he saw that his plan had succeeded. The four security personnel that had been guarding the large vaultlike door had rushed toward the atrium when the first alarms had sounded. Three of them lay dead. A fourth, farther down the sloped hallway, was injured. Miller took aim and shot the man as he walked past. The man would have died from his injuries, so it was a mercy, but Miller also didn’t want the man shooting them in the back when he saw what came next.

Miller stopped his advance next to the security station, which reminded him of a bookstore help desk, thirty feet from the vault door.
C’mon,
he thought,
open.

And then it did. Security was responding to what they must believe was some kind of malfunction. A terrible accident.

As the door slid silently open, Miller turned to Pale Horse and the robo-Betty. “Point it at me!”

Pale Horse complied without pause. The red light on the front of the machine began to blink as it scanned and analyzed Miller’s DNA. Knowing full well what the end result would be, Miller smashed the sensor with the butt of his gun, took the device from Pale Horse, and tossed it toward the opening door. He ducked behind the security station with Adler and Pale Horse.

The robo-Betty stopped in front of the door just as it revealed ten guards—ten very surprised guards.

The Betty bounced into the air and fired its payload. The men, who stood at point-blank range, were cut down before any of them could scream. As metal beads rolled up the ramp, Miller jumped from his hiding spot and sprinted toward the now-closing door.

He reached it with time to spare. He stepped into the dimly lit hallway on the other side of the door. Adler and Pale Horse followed him. The hallway grew darker still as the big door closed over several guards’ bodies behind them with a crunchy squish. Miller ignored the sound and motioned the team forward. “Almost there.”

58

The hallway was dimly lit by two rows of LED lights running the length of the hall where the walls met the floor. Miller holstered his handgun and readied his UMP, sliding the rack. “Straight ahead, I assume?”

Adler stepped up next to him, handgun gripped like a pro. “This hallway was bright when Brodeur brought me through. There’s a set of double doors at the end. No security. Just doors. They open to a large chamber, like we saw in Antarctica, but there’s nothing natural about this. It’s a smooth dome. There’s a control center in the middle, but it’s at least four times the size of the one in Antarctica. Security is based to the right of the control area, past rows of storage arranged like a warehouse.”

“A warehouse?” It struck Miller strange that they would keep things stored in the space designated for security and control.

“I think it is older equipment. Relics from the war. Maybe art. Gold. Souvenirs. I am not entirely sure, but it is all crated.”

“Like the warehouse in
Indiana Jones
?” Pale Horse said.

“
Ja.
But not as big. Security is past the warehouse area, through a pair of double doors that
are
locked. Cryogenics is to the left via an open tunnel. Same as Antarctica.”

Miller slid up to the double doors and peeked through the windows. The space was just as Adler described it. A large octagonal control center lit in bright white filled the center of the large space. A massive viewscreen hung above it all, displaying a mix of active screen captures from the computers below as well as a mix of video feeds. Miller squinted, trying to make out the images, but distance and glare worked against him. Polished walkways outlined by white lines cut through the place, and reflected the bright lights. The ceiling of smooth concrete arched up over the hanging lights, its peak at the center concealed in darkness high above. A maze of large shipping containers, crates, and oversized canisters blocked his view of Security to the right, but he trusted it was there. He counted twenty soldiers wielding World War II–era weapons, which helped level the playing field a little bit. But there were also at least forty other, nonmilitary people dressed in lab coats or white coveralls. Most of them sat at the computers, no doubt monitoring the purification of the human race.

He pointed to Pale Horse. “We’ll go in first. Everyone is a target, but start with the brownshirts. They’ll be the ones shooting back.” He turned to Adler. “Once things get chaotic, come in and make your way to the computers. We’ll give you as long as we can.”

“I will get it done.”

Miller once again wondered where Adler’s confidence came from. He remembered how quickly she’d accessed the computer in Antarctica. With Brodeur’s traitorous revelation and Miller’s nearly melting, and then freezing, he hadn’t given it much thought. She’d said it was a “Linux-based system,” but who the hell used Linux? Certainly not Interpol. Most people hadn’t even heard of the operating system. But the woman was a whiz with a computer, and a gun.
And
she could understand complex math. She’d claimed to not comprehend some of the other equations, but Miller didn’t believe that anymore. Once she figured out the page confusion, the rest had fallen into place, and she’d understood the math without tearing out the pages and lining them up as she had done for him.

Focus, Miller,
he told himself.
She’s on your side. For now. Sort it out later.

“Ready?” he asked Pale Horse.

“Let’s do it.”

Miller pushed through the double doors, raising his weapon. He picked out five targets, each a little farther away than the other. By the time the fifth registered what happened to the first, they’d all be dead. Then he’d have fifteen soldiers left to deal with, minus any Pale Horse shot, plus however many were behind the locked double doors to Security. Miller’s finger squeezed the trigger.

A gunshot rang out so loud and so close that it threw off Miller’s aim and made his ears ring. Miller spun around, searching for a target.

He found it at the center of Brodeur’s head.