Deadfall (42 page)

After the circle of light above had become a distant disc, the ladder became whole again. He moved down more quickly. He stopped once to gauge his progress and thought he was near the bottom.

“Hello?” he called.

An echo. No answer. A sound—like pant legs rubbing together.

“Dil—”

A tree branch struck his head. It continued on, its needles brushing against the wall of the shaft. He looked up to see another branch sailing down. He ducked out of its way. The branches landed just under him.

He found the end of the ladder and hopped down. A large boulder immediately met his feet, he slipped on it, fell. His head struck more debris from the widened shaft. He felt around and realized most of the concrete that had come out of the shaft had pulverized into powder. The larger blocks evidently broke off after the laser strike; they had not been directly in its path. He found what he was expecting to—a length of metal rebar and, after some searching, a particularly stony fist-sized wedge of concrete. With these items and the branches, Hutch moved deeper into the tunnel.

“Dillon,” he called. And again. “It's me, Hutch!”

He laid the branches in the center of the tunnel, speared the rebar through the bundle of needles, and started striking it with the concrete. After a few strikes he found the sweet spot, and sparks flew.The needles did not ignite, and after twenty strikes he worried that the rain had drenched them too thoroughly.

He kept striking and striking. With each blow he called into the tunnel: “Dillon! . . . Dillon! . . . Dillon! . . . Dillon!”

His voice grew hoarse. He stared into the darkness, which seemed to shift, black on black. Every time it did, he expected to see the boy. A flicker caught his attention. He looked down to see flames. They were indistinct and blurry. He realized his eyes had teared up.

Teared up?
He had wept in frustration and worry.

None of that now,
he thought, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.That was no good. Useless. Pointless.Weird.

He tossed the rebar and the cement chunk aside and blew gently at the flames. The fire grew larger. He had made a torch. Smoke curled from the dry needles, stinging his eyes, making him cough. He picked up the branches, holding them together. He went back to the open shaft, slowly arcing the torch across the area.There were large chunks of fallen concrete, a lot of powder, but no Dillon. He felt relief wash over him. Now it was a matter of finding the boy, not burying him. He noticed something in the dust and bent to retrieve it. It was his bowstring, the one he had used to tether himself to Dillon. He would need it. He looped it into a tight coil and slipped it into his coat pocket.

He considered briefly which way to head. He had told Dillon to go back into the tunnels. He believed the boy would head back to the beds they had made and wait for Hutch there. With the fire flickering, spreading yellow light five or ten feet into the tunnel ahead of him, and smoke pooling like gravity-deprived liquid on the roof of the tunnel, he headed toward the mine's main entrance, calling Dillon's name.

60

Laura clung to Terry,
trusting his navigation.The smoke, rising from where the green light had flashed down, had become almost invisible against the white-blue sky. The ferocity of that green light, coupled with its thundering peal, had made her think that the smoke would go on forever, but it hadn't. By the time they realized they could not use it as a marker, they were already near enough that they didn't need it.

Twice more she thought she heard the same crack of thunder that was not thunder. Each time Terry had stopped and killed the engine. They'd listened, heard nothing, and started up again.

Terry had tried to keep their route as straight to the smoke as possible. He was now traversing a swath of woods, slaloming around trees, crashing through brambles and tangled clumps of dead branches.

As his confidence increased, so did his speed. Laura gritted her teeth and held on tightly. She wanted to reach the spot of that strike from the sky as fast as she could, but it would be nice to arrive alive. Several times Terry had zoomed so close to a tree that Laura felt her knee and thigh scrape it. She was happy to recognize the end of the woods not far off.

She did not know why she believed that Declan had used his sky cannon to shoot at Dillon and Hutch. She just could not imagine that other people were out here, or that he would be doing anything but pursuing her son and his protector.Terry came out of the trees and slid to a stop.A shallow hill sloped down to a long wide valley and up again, becoming woods and more hills upon which the smoke emanated. Now she saw a second column of smoke, darker than the first. Coming from some place lower than the first, it dissipated and vanished lower in the sky.

Almost directly in front of them, heading for town, was a green Cherokee. It was coming from the direction of the smoke.

“Maybe they haven't seen us,”Terry said.

“I don't care if they do,” she said, not really meaning it. “Just get to those hills, okay?”

He nodded.

Then the truck turned directly toward them.

People were always amazing
Declan. He needed to work that fact into his video games. Most often, programmers were immersed in a corporate environment, despite believing themselves to be independent and artistic souls. Their monsters were deadlines, bosses, and the never-ending competition for employee of the month.The games they created often involved characters battling invading armies or creatures from hell or from another planet, or a biological experiment gone haywire. Always, they were pitted against things that wanted to tear them apart, to destroy them; the stakes were as high as they could possibly be. The Harley-riding, tattooed MIT graduates who fancied themselves both tough enough and smart enough to design video games always created characters who earned stamina and strength by surviving increasingly difficult challenges. To programmers it was a logical progression: lift a hundred pounds today, a hundred and ten tomorrow; kick little Tommy's butt today, his big brother's tomorrow.

Made sense to Declan as well—until this trip.What he'd witnessed up here was not so much a progression of strength and skill. After all, in a condensed timeline, people grew tired, tempering their physical and mental abilities. No, what he learned was that people developed stamina and ingenuity in proportion to their level of attachment to whatever it was they stood to lose—a loved one, their life—or the anger of having been attacked. Call it the adrenaline factor.
That's
what he wanted to work into future games.

And it would look like this: The woman he'd kept in the storage room—Laura—whose husband he had killed, whose son he had cut. Finding a weapon in a room full of paper. Knocking out her captor. Escaping. Joining forces with—

Declan squinted through the windshield.

“Is that the guy who shot at us? The hunter?”

Cort leaned forward in the passenger seat. “I think maybe . . .”

Okay. Joining forces with another rogue element of the adventure.

Great stuff.
The adrenaline factor.
He liked that.

If Laura had been a character in a video game, by this time she would be either dead or holed up somewhere, waiting for rescue. Or, on the other end of the spectrum, she'd have acquisitioned a bulletproof flying suit, acquired martial arts skills, and found a gun to rival Declan's to vanquish her enemies. The vanquishing part Laura seemed to have got. That she would attempt it without a special suit, skills, or weapon was something nobody in the world Declan came from would understand.

Chaos theory. The unpredictability of life. Programmers talked about these things, but they didn't get it. Not really. The hunter who had taken shots at them; the man with the bow; jacking their Hummer; Laura and her kid escaping from the community center. The archer had said Dillon was dead. Declan had suspected otherwise. The blast to the mine's emergency hatch had been meant to kill anyone hiding in the shaft, or at least turn the tunnels into an inescapable tomb. But now, here was the kid's mom, looking to wreak some serious havoc. Declan was learning what chaos theory meant in the real world. This knowledge was so invaluable he would not have believed it without experiencing it. Excellent.

“Get your gun, Cort.”

“I don't have one, remember?”

“Julie, give her your gun.”

Without a word, he did.

Cortland held the pistol in both hands. She bounced up on the seat, tucking her legs under her. “What are we gonna do?”

“We're gonna go get 'em.” Declan's answer made the question sound stupid.

He accelerated toward the motorcycle. Instead of peeling away in another direction, to his astonishment it came straight for them. No,
not
to his astonishment. Not anymore: Chaos. Unpredictability. Adrenaline.

The Jeep bounded through the open field. In the rearview mirror, Declan glimpsed Julian pulling the seat belt over his shoulder. He laughed.

“Shoot them,” he instructed.

“Now?” Cortland asked. The motorcycle was still at least a hundred yards distant.

“Plug away, baby.”

She rose onto her knees. “Like Bonnie and Clyde,” she said, a big grin splitting her face.

“I was thinking more
True Grit
.”

She skewed her face:
Whatever
. Then she popped her head and shoulders out the window.

The speedometer edged up to fifty. The ruts and rocks of the field shook them like dice in a backgammon cup. The motorcycle—sixty yards away, closing fast.

Cort's body was shaking wildly, responding to the Jeep's dance over the terrain. Her head smacked the window frame hard enough for Declan to hear it. She might not be able to hit a hill under these conditions, but . . . who knew? That would be something they'd talk about for years, her blasting someone off a motorcycle. Forget
Bonnie and Clyde
and
True Grit.
They were in
Easy Rider
territory.Very cool.

When no shots rang out, Declan's smile faltered. “Shoot 'em, baby. Shoot 'em!”

Cort returned her upper half to the cab. She was holding the top of her head with both hands. A pained grimace contorted her features.

“Where's the gun?” Declan asked.

“I banged my head, hard. I think I'm bleeding.” But when she looked at her hands, no blood.

“What are you saying? You've got to be kidding.”

“I hit my head, Dec! I mean really hard.”

“You lost
another
gun? Another gun?”

They were right on top of the motorcycle. Declan cranked the wheel to collide with it.

Laura leaned around Terry
to watch the Jeep as the dirt bike tore for the smoking hills. She strained to see Dillon in the vehicle. If she did not see him, their best hope was to get to the location of Declan's last attack. As they drew closer she recognized Declan. He was driving. How badly she wanted to rip those tight, smug lips off his face. She considered drawing one of the two pistols they had put in Terry's pack to keep them safe from all the rattling and shaking on the bike. She calculated that the two vehicles would pass before she could retrieve a gun, and she knew without question that the effort would result in wasted ammo.

Apparently someone thought differently. The girl, Cortland, rose up from the passenger window. Something was in her hand, and you didn't have to be Einstein to know what it was. Her head bounced up and down, seeming to make several jarring points of contact with the doorframe. Then the something in her hand flew away. Holding her head, the girl slid back into the vehicle.

They were almost on top of it, ready to pass it. She heard Terry let up on the accelerator a second before he swerved sharply left. As he did, the Jeep's right front corner lunged at them like an attacking dog. It missed Laura's leg and the rear wheel by inches. Had Terry not anticipated Declan's move, they would be performing bone-shattering cartwheels through the field right now.

Terry corrected their direction and continued heading toward the hills marked by columns of fading smoke. Laura craned her head around to see the Jeep making a tight circle, turning around.

“They're coming back,” she informed Terry.

“We can outpace them . . . on the bike,”Terry called back to her between jostles up and down. “But we're still not gonna have . . . much time . . . to find out what . . . he was shooting at!”

“I have to
know
,” she said. The shoulder of a hill encroached onto the valley floor. It created a steep slope that Laura assumed was matched on the other side.

Instead of going around it,Terry hit it head-on. They rose up and up, both Terry and Laura leaning forward to prevent the bike from tumbling backward. It was the sort of hill off-roaders loved to tackle, though they were not always victorious.

Declan might attempt to follow them; he had the personality required to attempt it, but considering his desire to get them, he might not risk it. At the top, the shoulder crested in a jumplike ridge; the bike sailed over it.Terry and Laura stood on the pegs to better position the bike when it came down and to use their legs as shock absorbers. When they landed, their rear wheel wanted to slide out from under them. Terry expertly steered into the slide and kept the bike up. The long wide valley continued for another half mile before becoming the hills of their destination.

Laura looked back. The Jeep had not yet appeared at the crest of the shoulder, and she believed now that Declan would go around.The maneuver bought them probably an extra three or four minutes. At the pace they were going, there was a good chance they'd have seven or eight minutes on Declan by the time they reached the source of the smoke. The valley slowly arced up toward the hills. She could now see an old road cutting across the hill at a shallow incline and then turning to the opposite direction to complete its climb to the top.The right half of the hill appeared to have been shaved off to form a plateau lower than the left half.The road came from around a bend, but Terry had the bike pointed directly at the hill.They would meet the road halfway up.