“Why… I mean, how could that happen? Something wrong with you know… my hardware?”

  She took a while to answer. I’m sure it was a totally artificial pause simply to appear more human and show empathy or something, but I noticed. “You are not like others, Joseph. You have an organic computer in your head. A control system wired into your spinal column. Also, we are in very challenging times and traveling through areas irradiated by both gamma radiation and neutron saturation. I originally assumed some combination of this could be causing your issues… the night terrors.”

  “So, you don’t think that creature back at the Iron River facility…”

  “Possibly,” she answered smoothly. “I didn’t think it did anything to you. It is theoretically possible, but only if it possessed some psionic capability.”

  “A what?” I asked.

  “If the biologist that likely created this creature had been able to give it the ability to essentially project fear into the minds of the enemy, a psionic or psychic broadcast, that would be an incredibly useful adaptation.”

  “And you think that’s what that thing had?”

  “Monitoring your stress levels from the first likely encounter outside that door, yes. I believe it was likely the case.”

  “I’ve never heard of any animal that could do that.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Humans are the only ones to use fear in that way, but even they can’t effectively convey it on a purely subconscious level.”

  I noodled on that all afternoon. If this was the level of dark-site research Hammer was diving into, I’m not sure I wanted to know what else they were doing. I thought about Banshee and what they were heading into. We were all working blind right now. Way more questions than answers. These attacks had loosed God knows what from the darkest corners of our nightmares.

  What Carol knew about Rainier was largely anecdotal. Information reports she got back from the other lab’s production to help refine or corroborate her own data modeling.

  “Some of them were holos. Where they set up real-world scenarios and used test subjects or focus groups to see how accurate my predictions were,” she offered.

  That all sounded reasonable to me. “Like, how long it took the subjects to try the locked door?”

  “Twenty-three minutes,” she said instantly. “Sometimes they included other things… stuff I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to see. Most of it was disturbing.”

  My injury was mostly healed already and beginning to itch. I took over the driving from Ada; all I knew was to keep heading west for a few more hours before turning south. The ruins of Louisville were to the north, and yes, I had decided to listen to my AI despite what my gut told me for once.

  “Rainier is the primary production war lab,” Carol continued. “All the rest of the locations are just development sites. All our research goes into whatever projects are active at that location. Exotic technologies, genetics, enhanced humans, cyborgs, propulsion, robotics… I could guess at some of the rest, but it would simply be a guess.”

  “Tell me some of what you saw.”

  She grew more anxious; her emotional state had seemed fragile before but now seemed to escalate even more. Over the next hour, the woman tried to relate to me at least some of what she’d seen. Then she added what she had pieced together from other bits of data she’d had access to.

  “I saw a video of them testing prototypes of combat droids. All shapes, all sizes. First, they used them against animals, then against something that looked like a man but clearly wasn’t. It was deformed or something. It could have been a genetically altered human.”

  She described it: large head, bony chest, massive torso. The description was way too close to a thing I had encountered myself years ago. A thing guarding an enemy lab thousands of miles away. Genetic enhancements with humans had been a growing business for many years, mostly in the cosmetic or health maintenance segments. Gene editing at the level Carol described was off limits and heavily illegal. The technology had been around for decades, but ethics laws strictly prevented almost all germline edits and anything as radical as creating a mutant human. We only saw that in the illegal baby labs like the one where I’d nearly been killed.

  “Some of the weapons’ systems seemed downright bizarre. After seeing the killer kudzu at Iron River, it makes more sense.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I thought some of it was, you know, animated. CGI for a virtual reality game or something. Like they were testing weird shit like trees that shot some kind of darts at intruders. I think they were modified cones or seed pods. Grass with poisonous barbs and, of course, the vines we already saw. When I asked a supervisor, he said they were doing some terraforming projects for NASA. You know, coming up with creatures that could live in harsh environments and change the atmosphere and soils to ones more suitable to our biosphere.”

  “But you said that Rainier was a production facility. They wouldn’t be doing the testing there, right?”

  She nodded. “Probably not. Judging by the department that handled it, most of these fell under the passive intrusion prevention. BioSecurity Division they call it.”

  “Yeah, I’m familiar with that. A security system that’s always on works great as a perimeter defense.” Also, from Hammer’s standpoint, that could be weaponized to pacify wide swaths of the planet if needed. The byline for Rainier was they seemed to be into lots of fringe science. Exotic technologies and a few things that neither Ada nor I could make sense of.

  “And all you know is that it’s somewhere south of here?” I asked.

  Carol shook her head. “I saw the same IP coordinates on enough of the files that I could guess the whereabouts of many of the other facilities. As you probably know, satellite IPs are assigned by grid, unlike the old school ones that were mostly random.”

  I did not know that, but I did now, thanks to Ada. “IP addresses are standard for any device connecting to the web?” I asked, parroting what my AI had just said internally.

  “Yes, Internet Protocols,” she said. “Been around since the early days of the web.”

  “And you somehow knew it was down there.” I waved my hand in the generally southern direction.

  “Nothing in the entire sector except a small town. Sparta, Tennessee. I even site-mapped it, virtually nothing that looks like you might expect.”

  That would make sense. Hammer wouldn’t want to be obvious with a facility that important. I now had a destination. Now, if they just had the meds I needed. My finger twitched involuntarily. It’s nothing, I told myself.

  Ada let me know we would need to stop soon to recharge. I needed to get this next part out while I had the chance. Carol deserved to know what I knew. She’d been forthcoming with her information. Now it was my turn.

  “Carol, there’s something I need to tell you.” I wrapped the truth in a lie, just a small one. I told her I had gotten a brief internet connection back in the last town and had used my military web search to do a trace on her son. I was hoping it would go over easier for me… It didn’t. I let her know everything Ada had uncovered.

  “So, you’re telling me my son isn’t with his father in Atlanta? That he was in an autocar when the missiles hit?” She had her hands on her hips, and her face was red with rage.

  “When were you going to tell me this, Kovach? Huh? After you got what you wanted, what you needed?”

  Yes, I thought. “No, of course not.” My voice held just the perfect amount of righteous indignation at the accusation. Have I mentioned I’m an asshole?

  Atlanta had been destroyed. If her son had stayed there, or the car never got out of the metroplex, then he would certainly not be alive. Unsurprisingly, that nugget of intel didn’t help their feelings at all. Both women quizzed me relentlessly, but soon accepted I had no other useful information to offer.

  I got only perfunctory nods of acknowledgement for the rest of the day and into the night. I knew they both were upset. Carol was on the ground rocking back and forth, hugging her knees. Damiana tried to comfort her, but it was hopeless. I could read their looks of hatred directed at me across the campfire. I took the first turn on guard duty and heard Carol softly crying long into the night.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  The morning air had a faint smell of wood smoke. It was an increasingly familiar smell as the nation’s survivors shifted from restaurant delivery and modern kitchens back to patio grills or plain old campfires. I looked around for the women, both of whom were usually up by now. Carol would have had the last watch, but we’d gotten a bit lazy this last week maintaining the vigil. Nothing had threatened us since back closer to Virginia. Now that we were several hundred miles away, that fear wasn’t as pressing. I unfolded myself from my sleeping bag and went to do my business.

  “Ada, status update.”

  The call into my AI had also gotten routine. Ada didn’t reply, not immediately, which was more than a little troubling.

  “Sumo!” I called, softly at first, then louder.

  “Ada, locate Sumo!”

  “Sumo is outside transponder range,” she replied in an oddly official voice. What in the fuck did that mean? He was never outside a range that she could locate. Not in the many remote locations we had been together since we became a combat team.

  “Where are the women?” I had now made a full circuit of our campsite

  “I am unable to say,” Ada replied, also in the same cold mechanical voice.

  “Ada, run deep diagnostic.”

  Something was clearly wrong with her.

  “Yes, of course. On what?”

  “On you, goddamit! You are fucking up!” My gun was now in my hand, and I was sliding my other arm into my chest armor now. I could feel the tension rising. I’d gotten caught sleeping on the job, and now the two people that I was supposed to be protecting were missing.

  Carol’s bedroll lay where it had been the night before. Damiana’s was missing entirely. I checked supplies. Nothing gone as far as I could tell. I was the only one who had an actual backpack, but the women had found duffels to use, and both were still here.

  I wasn’t a fool; I knew Carol was pissed at me and they could have chosen to leave on their own, but that didn’t feel right. Also, Ada would have known that and, well, shit… Ada was acting weird, too. What in the hell had happened?

  Sweeping wide right, I almost yelled for Sumo to take the opposite side before remembering he, too, was missing. As much as losing the two of them, Sumo being gone was like losing a part of myself. I’d given up on family, given up on relationships, and started to even hate the Space Corps, but Sumo was the constant. I switched to his private frequency and started talking to him. The tiny ear bud implanted inside of his right ear should still pick up my signal no matter what Ada was saying.

  “You okay, man? Tell me where you are. Bark.”

  I stopped moving to listen. My suit’s audio sensors were highly sensitive, but I heard nothing. I circled in larger and larger arcs. No sign, not even any footprints. No bent grass or broken twigs. Even the covering of light morning dew seemed undisturbed. I was originally an Army Ranger. My tracking skills were a little rusty, but I was better than most, and I wasn’t coming up with jack shit.

  “Ada, status.”

  “Boot sequence at ninety-two percent,” the mechanical voice said. Boot sequence? As far as I knew, my AI had never rebooted, never needed to. It had been upgraded twice and maybe then she was briefly offline. I was unconscious at the time, so I really didn’t know. Yeah, I get a little squeamish about them doing brain surgery when I’m awake, even if it’s to simply get me the newest version of Windows.

  “Fuck, fuck fuck…”

  “Joe,” Ada’s actual voice finally said, then nothing.

  “What, Ada, what?” I couldn’t believe how dependent I was on this thing in my head. How had I not realized that before? “Talk to me, goddamit!”

  An overlay popped up in my vision. It took me a minute to recognize it as this place. It was a topographical map of the surrounding area with a single green line moving away from the center. So, my AI couldn’t communicate yet, but she was trying to help… at least I hoped she was helping. Minutes later, I had crossed the road we had come in on and was standing on the bank of a wide, fast-moving river. Not exactly a river. Back home we would have referred to it as a creek, but the current was swift, white caps showing in many places. I’d seen it when we came in last night. All of us had refilled water bottles in it. The sound of the rushing water had been what finally lulled me to sleep.

  I hadn’t bothered searching on the other side ‘cause I didn’t see how they would have crossed it. But the nav line left little doubt that was where I was to go. If I trusted my AI not to be trying to kill me, that is.

  Shouldering the MK4, I slipped off the bank into the icy cold water. The thermal response of the battleskin kicked in relatively fast. Still, the current was already pushing me downstream. The water level was up to my chest and then deeper toward the middle. The armor makes it hard to swim, so I simply walked across the sandy bottom. My head was quickly underwater, but the helmet sealed the water out, and the suit had a built-in oxygen supply. All I saw was a cyclone of brown and gray water and foam. I was being pushed downstream faster than I was moving across, so the visual nav line kept readjusting.

  Just past the midpoint, I was leaning into the current, my feet driving into the soft river bottom. There was no way Carol and Damiana went through this, not willingly, at least. I felt my body coming up to a massive boulder. I could see the roiling water several feet above. If I moved to the lower side, the current would be less, but it might sweep me underneath it and trap me until my air ran out. I pushed myself up to the front and let the water pound me into the face of the stone. I moved a hand over it, my palm slipping along the mossy rock. My hand grasped frantically in all the mud tossed up by the turbulent water.

  I was exhausted. The effort was draining everything in me. Finally, my helmet broke out of the water, and I hoisted myself up on the rock. I needed to catch my breath, to think this through. Then my suit mics registered a faint blip. “Sumo, that you, friend?” The faintest of barks came through my speakers.

  I lunged from the top of the rock to the next one and then did it again, missing the last one, only to splash down in the water. I didn’t care. I was re-energized, and Ada had me going in the right direction. Five minutes later, I was out of the water and moving up through the tree-lined hill bordering this side. The Rattler was out again, and Ada seemed to be coming back online.

  “Headed your way, buddy!”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  LUX

  “I’m sorry, kid.”

  Lux was uncertain what Mister Bill was apologizing for. He held the iron bar overhead and placed it into the crack between the door and the frame opposite the doorknob.

  “I know this is going to be hard for you, but you need to know all this. You need to know how to break into houses.” He put his weight on the bar and the door popped loose. Next, he inserted the crowbar lower and had the boy try.

  Lux felt uneasy trying to break into another person’s house, but Bill said he might need to someday. The wood didn’t separate and splinter like it had for the man. The crack just got a tiny bit wider before he let off, and it went back to normal.

  “It’s okay, Lux, I was hoping it would do that. Remember, you can always break a window, too. I’ll show you that next. Sometimes the windows will be too high or covered with bars. Getting into doors is always useful.”

  Bill searched around the house and came back with a piece of metal pipe that he slid over the crowbar. “Move out to the end of this pipe and try it again.”

  Lux thought that was silly, like much of the stuff Bill had been trying. He’d about decided that Laura was right. Bill wasn’t good at a lot of things he tried. Reluctantly, Lux leaned into the pipe, and to his surprise, the hinge side of the door popped free.

  “Perfect,” Bill said. “The hinge side screws rarely go in as far. There are more of them but still easier than prying loose the lock side.”

  “Mister Bill,” Lux began reluctantly, “things aren’t getting any better here, are they?”

  Bill pushed the rest of the door in, then sat on the side of the steps resting the iron bar under his chin. “No, they aren’t.”

  “I guess I need to be getting home.” Lux said the words, hoping the man would shake his head, tell him no.

  The man’s eyes looked up, studying the boy briefly before looking away.

  “That’s why you’ve been showing me all this stuff, isn’t it? I can’t stay with you no more.”

  Bill wiped an eye and nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, Lux. We’re barely getting by as it is.” He tossed the crowbar to the side in disgust. “I was supposed to send you off a few days ago. I just couldn’t.”

  Lux went over and touched the man’s shoulder. The first time the two had shared anything like a personal connection. “It’s okay, thank you for helping me not get dead.”

  The man was crying openly now. Lux was moved by the man’s guilt over sending him away, but he was still so scared of going on alone. He heard the two other children playing down the street. He wouldn’t exactly miss them, but he’d enjoyed his time here. He would miss Timber. The dog had saved his life first.

  Bill stood suddenly and said, “Hang on.” He moved through the wrecked door and came back out a few minutes later carting something. “I made you a pack, a survival pack. It’s not much, but it should help.”

  The man went through everything in the worn knapsack. He was right, it wasn’t a lot, but it was better than his bookbag. Lux understood now, he wasn’t going back over to Bill and Laura’s house. They had come over here for Bill to send him away.

  “Thank you. Thanks for everything. If…”