Those same hollow-eyed stares now followed me as we moved through small town after small town. Death had not come swiftly to this area; they were far enough out to only get brushed with destruction, yet none of these areas had power. Lines were long outside any store that seemed open. Most now appeared to be makeshift food banks. I stopped twice looking for the anti-radiation meds, but the drugstore had been relocated, and the hospital pharmacy had never stocked it according to Ada’s scan of the system.

  Walking back toward the truck from the hospital, I saw a group of men squared off at the opposite end of the parking lot. They were all carrying rifles. Sumo was positioned at the rear of the truck where I’d left him to stand guard. Being back in my full body armor left me more confident than I really should have been. After all, one lucky shot was all it would take to put me down.

  I bypassed the truck, both women watching me pass as if I’d lost my mind. My weapons stayed holstered as I made my way down to the group. I hoped they didn’t want trouble, but I knew better than to expect that.

  “I told you he was some kinda soldier,” a kid in his early teens said loudly.

  Ada was routinely marking targets based on a threat assessment algorithm that had proven uncannily accurate over the past year. She had a bright red number one floating over a slender man near the back of the group. I moved through the front of the pack and right up to the man. I didn’t much like avoiding confrontation. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.

  “Do we have a problem?” I asked softly.

  The man was in his early forties, in good shape, and carried his rifle like someone who’d done it for a living at some point.

  “We do, Sergeant.”

  The man knew his ranks. He almost certainly was ex-military. “Where did you serve?” Using the brothers-in-arms approach was a bit of a shitty move, but hey, I wasn’t looking for a fight. The longer we stayed here soaking up rads, the more time we’d need to get rid of it. The three rules of radiation exposure had been drilled into us back in Ranger school. Proximity, duration, and shielding. So far, we weren’t being successful on any of those three.

  “Don’t much matter anymore. The fuckin Ruskies won, didn’t they?” the man said with a voice that was far too weary for his years.

  “Don’t think it was them, but I get your point. Whoever pulled the trigger, we let it happen.”

  “You let it happen,” someone else said.

  “It was on your watch,” another chimed in.

  I got the idea now. These guys were just pissed. They wanted someone to strike out against. A government official would have been best, but a soldier in full battle rattle would work, too.

  “I was on leave, fellas. Just minding my one business, just like you.”

  Something hit me in the back of the helmet. I staggered forward a few steps. I heard my dog and knew he was about to go full psychopath on the closest man. “Hold,” I ordered.

  Another punch landed but did little other than glancing off my armor. I heard the man swearing as he moved away, holding his hand. “Non-lethal, Ada.” I had no desire to hurt these people. They were dying anyway with no help from me.

  A panel in my leg armor rotated out. I reached down and pulled the ten-inch cylinder out and held it in front of me. Ada triggered the rod which fully extended. In seconds, the six-foot weighted baton was slicing through the air at the oncoming men. One man went down with a broken jaw. Two more got jabs into a windpipe, which left them crawling and gasping for air. While I didn’t want to kill them, I wasn’t too concerned with how close they came to it.

  “Weapon rear,” Ada stated.

  I ducked, spun, and swept the staff up with a swing for the outfield bleachers. The attacker’s wrist cracked, and the gun fell limply in hands that would likely never work again. I whipped the weapon back and inadvertently caught a man trying to attack me from the other side. He went down with blood gurgling from his throat. My alpha threat had smartly moved back several dozen feet, and I could see he was taking aim with his gun. Not at my head or torso, but at my hip joint. The one place battle armor is traditionally weakest.

  “Hit, hit, hit,” I yelled, and seconds before the impact, I saw a white and grey blur flying into the man from the side. The round hit, and I felt a jab of white-hot pain lance up and down my side.

  “Minor damage, Prowler,” my built-in AI said, clearly not understanding how the human body works.

  “My ass, you bucket of…”

  “I have your dad on the line. Would you like to…”

  “I’ve just been shot, Ada, and since when do you announce his calls?”

  “You said to let you know as soon as I could reach him,” the clueless computer said. “I reached him.”

  “Ada, run diagnostic. You are turning into a smartass.”

  “Diagnostic in progress,” followed quickly by, “Nope, all good.”

  “That you, Joseph?” My dad’s voice sounded unnatural and tinny. The connection sucked.

  “Yeah, Pops, it’s me.” I activated the suit’s trauma kit to disinfect the wound, staunch the blood flow, and administer pain meds.

  “You sound tired. Are you not sleeping well?”

  “Um, yeah, that’s part of it.” I watched the blood leaking from the leg and knee joints of my battle- suit.

  “Were you in a fight?”

  “Yeah, several.” I motioned for Sumo to leave the dead man alone and come back to guard the truck. Most of the other men that could were slowly moving away.

  “Well, leave them where they fall. Don’t waste time burying their sorry asses. Buzzards need to eat, same as worms!”

  “Yes, Pops,” I said weakly, the drugs beginning to take hold.

  “You did win, right? You showing those commie bastards who’s boss?”

  “They weren’t Russian, Dad. Do you have any idea what’s going on out here?”

  “Hey, it’s okay, Son. I know you suck as a fighter. But know that, win or lose, you know we love you… okay, that’s bullshit. You lose, and you are dead to me. You have literally been hard-wired for victory. Lose and you are 100 percent dead to me.”

  “Are you done?” I asked, praying the bullet would move up my leg and kill me before I had to continue this conversation.

  “Sure, Joseph, what’s on your mind?”

  Oh, hmm, end of the world, flesh-eating houseplants, killer robots, and something freaky haunting my sleep. Let’s see. “What do you know of a secret DARPA site, code name Ranier?”

  “Weird question to ask during a fight.”

  “The name, Dad. Do you know it?” My voice was getting groggy now. “Do you know of a secret base named that?”

  The line stayed silent for a long moment. I was beginning to think he was gone. My legs suddenly gave out, and I sat down hard on the pavement. I was vaguely aware of Carol and Damiana trying to help.

  “We had another name for that place, Son.”

  “Ow!” I yelled as the women helped me back up. I used the battle staff to walk back toward the pickup.

  “The Nightmare Factory,” Pops said coldly. “I don’t know what you saw at Iron River, but Rainier is where all the bad shit was perfected and produced en masse. You do not want to go there—ever.”

  The line went dead.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-THREE

  Ada had us moving out of the nameless town in minutes. I triggered the release on my armor, and Damiana tugged gently then with even more force to pull it off. I heard Carol gasp as she saw the wound.

  “They shot you.”

  “Not the first time it’s happened,” I stated through tightly clenched teeth. “My upgrades help with a lot of things, but they don’t do shit to ease the pain.”

  “Do I need to get the bullet out?” Damiana asked.

  “It was an old metal jacketed round, probably split up when it went in. The Regenerax will either dissolve it or force it back out through the entry wound overnight. Best just to leave it alone.” My blood was full of artificial nanobot machinery whose sole job was keeping me alive and functioning in battle-ready condition. That also did little for the pain, but I’d learned to compartmentalize that long ago.

  “There’s so much blood,” Carol said, the panic clear in her voice.

  “Look up here, Carol. Up here.” I didn’t want her watching what her friend was doing. “I have something to ask you.”

  She looked a little scared, as if everything over the last two days was crashing down on her, and I was about to make her pay up for the ride. “Relax, I need to get to another Hammer Industries facility. One called Rainier.”

  All color drained from the woman’s face, and she began to shake her head slowly at first, then increasingly more animated.

  “No, no, no…no.”

  Tears began flowing, and she looked again like the woman yesterday, someone on the verge of shutting down. Damiana suddenly slapped her across the face, leaving a bloody handprint.

  “Snap the fuck out of it, Carol. Joe asked you a question. Help him, it’s the only chance you have of seeing Lux again.”

  Carol’s eyes met mine. Yeah, what she said, I wanted to say. Maybe I should have just slapped her myself and not wasted so much time. No… I decided that probably wouldn’t have been smart.

  “You’ve heard of it?” I asked.

  She gave a small nod.

  “You know where it is?”

  The look of fear returned, and she glanced at her friend for support. None was forthcoming.

  No,” she answered.

  My heart sank.“Fuuuuuck!”

  Then her mouth moved, making no actual sound. I knew she was working something out in her head.

  “Maybe,” she said slowly, her eyes still full of terror.

  My eyes closed from the pain. My self-healing body was doing what it needed to repair the damage. I got to enjoy white-hot pain and other parts of my body going numb as I was slipping down a long slide toward unconsciousness. I needed to hear her answer, but everything went black, and what I wanted… no longer mattered.

  “I just need to get to my son,”

  I heard Carol say from somewhere close. My eyes flickered slowly to life. My dreams had again been filled with nightmare creatures and fear that I had let the entire world down. I never recall feelings like this, but something was off in my head. I had Ada run neural diagnostics. I was starting to feel seriously unhinged.

  “You’re back.”

  Damiana eyed me warily. She was behind the wheel of the truck, but I could tell Ada was still doing the actual driving.

  “Yeah, for better or worse,” I responded, sitting up and glad that most of the pain was numbed.

  “We are heading west, Joseph,” Ada said internally. “Carol has given general directions, but very little specifics.”

  “The grid must be working here,” Dami said, pointing out to the road. “Your truck seems to have locked onto the smart road system.”

  I just nodded, not wanting to get into that conversation yet. I scrambled to find food. The one thing with a body like mine is the increased metabolism means increased intake. Especially when I was injured, I woke up starving.

  Damiana seemed to understand and pulled the car over so we could eat.

  Carol became much more animated over the next few days. Damiana seemed to have moved in the opposite direction. She’d become more surly, less confident, and something else even less identifiable.

  Ada had delivered us to the Rivex distribution center. I was still weak, the nanobodies still busy repairing my insides. Sumo took the lead, and Damiana went in alone bringing out four battle suits. The suits were made in only eight standard sizes and had enough flexibility to fit them easily. It wouldn’t be as effective as the full body armor/battleskin combination, but it should be enough normal protection for them. We packed the spares into a storage box in the truck.

  Carol modeled hers for me, and I had to admit the dark blue, form-fitting garment cast her in a new light. I saw her friend looking at her with a frown. Both then showed off to each other, then donned regular clothes on top of the new ‘bad-ass warrior gear’ as they called it.

  I was still unclear on what Carol’s role with the Nightmare Factory had been, but some of her work was apparently vital in some part of the development. Later, when I was feeling marginally better, we finally talked. The truck was parked behind an ancient store, something my dad would have referred to as a gas station.

  “You did behavioral studies?” I asked, again hoping if she said it enough times, I would see a connection to these warfare labs.

  “Yes and no,” she began in a voice a kindergarten teacher might use with a particularly slow student.

  “Do you remember studying the early days of social media? You know, back when everyone shared every minor detail about themselves on public websites?”

  “Yeah, we studied it in school. They gave up all privacy just to be popular or trending or something.”

  “Rich,” Carol said, looking out at the green pasture stretching out from the highway. “Back then, they didn’t realize they were the product. To be more specific, the hundreds of thousands of data points they provided those sites with for free. Data that the algorithms used to predict with uncanny accuracy future behaviors.”

  * * *

  “Okay, yes, I recall more of it now.” Amazing how far back to the side of privacy society had retreated since then.

  * * *

  “Well, that’s what they sold to their advertisers, and that predictive modeling grew into what my specialty is today.”

  She stoked Sumo’s fur unconsciously while she discussed her work. The woman had relaxed significantly around my dog since their first meeting. “Joe, my system can analyze your behavior for a few hours and then predict how you would react to a particular thing with an accuracy of over ninety percent. If I give it more time studying you, or as we say, acquire more data points, the predictive relevance goes up significantly more.”

  I wanted to say we were not just ones and zeroes but thought about my own cerebral passenger and thought better of it. “But we have free will. We can change.”

  “Free will is an illusion, and humans are notoriously easy to manipulate. Advertisers do it all the time. So do politicians. We all like to think we behave rationally and have common sense. The scientific truth is that human brains are mostly designed to ignore rational thought. That’s why the conspiracy theories or clickbait headlines work so well at drawing us in. Even if your conscious brains know this is a lie, you are driven to click on it just to see what it says.”

  “I can kind of accept that,” I said.

  “We call that social conditioning. We believe what we’re told, even without desiring to believe it, even when we try not to believe it, and even when we know it is false. Even our educational system is built largely on this, so from a young age, we’re taught to believe what someone says.”

  “So how are you weaponizing this, Carol?” Damiana leaned in, apparently also curious to hear.

  Carol scrunched her face up into a frown. I know she was thinking back to all the NDAs and top-secret certification she’d likely had to endure to rise up the ranks of Hammer’s Industries. After a moment, she continued,

  “I did the behavioral modeling. Assembling the data points into reliable predictive behaviors for various scenarios.”

  “Battlefield scenarios?” I asked.

  “Um, some, but not many. Battlefield tactics are relatively routine and less impacted by conscious thought. War fighters tend to be proactive as in ‘Follow the mission directive’ or reactive as in ‘That guy’s shooting at us, let’s hide.’”

  I had to nod in agreement. “That’s a pretty accurate description in a nutshell.”

  “No, I built models on micro and macro events. How people will react to everything from major crises down to hearing a baby cry in a restaurant. Honestly, some parameters they had me run were so banal and boring I thought they were kidding. One was to see how long any random group of fifteen people would sit in a locked room before one of them tried the door.”

  The pieces weren’t fitting for me, but her role with Rainier could be merely a sidebar on one of the many projects going on there.

  “I don’t think I understand why you were so scared when I mentioned the place. What else is it that you know?”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-FOUR

  BANSHEE

  Priest looked over the loadout and was duly impressed. “This is different.”

  “Don’t get too comfortable with it. If that Wulf back there dies on us, we’ll be hoofing it. All this gear will just slow us down.”

  The TriCraft interior was crammed full. The Wulf, or more accurately, the military’s ground assault transport, was a rugged beast of a machine, but it was notoriously prone to frequent breakdowns.

  Major Kerns walked in with a wiry, Asian man. “Banshee, you are down a man. We happen to have a suitable replacement for you. Please meet Staff Sergeant Dae Him-Chan of the ROK’s Special Operations Division.”

  Adding someone to a team just before a mission was… well, it just wasn’t done. The lieutenant saw the looks her other two men were giving both her and the major. These were unusual times, though. “Ma’am and Sergeant Dae,” she said, stepping forward with an outstretched hand.

  “Just use my call sign,” the man said in letter-perfect English. “G-force. Or, more often, just Gi.”

  “ROK SpecOps, you guys have a reputation for getting the job done.”

  G-force bowed slightly. “Very kind of you to say. We do our best.”

  “The staff sergeant came to us by means not so different from your own journey,” the major added. “Our war commander, Admiral Reese, believes he will be an asset to you.”

  More likely someone to spy on us, Bayou thought, but she would gladly take advantage of the man’s talents. She knew they were about to jump into the shit. “Grab your kit, synch comms, and get with Priest over there to go over some of the specific signals and tactics Banshee uses that may be unfamiliar. What is your weapon of choice?”