Infernal

“Do you have any weapons?” Sophia demanded.

“What?” Richard blinked, still stunned by the apparition before him.

“Do you have any weapons?”

She dragged him into the living room, clutching his arm and guiding him like a small child. He’d been dumbstruck by her sudden appearance; she looked like Sophia in every way except one. She wasn’t pale from exhaustion and injury. She was vibrant, alive. Energetic. And she carried with her an air of urgency that demanded he take action.

Richard shrugged her off, pulled his desk chair to one side as he knelt and pulled back an area rug. Underneath was a grate concealing a void where a floor furnace, removed decades before, had been. He lifted the grate and pulled a duffel bag from the space. His original pack—he’d called it his bug out pack, as in, in case he had to bug out fast—had been so badly beaten and burned during the incident in Kansas that he’d replaced it. The duffel was larger and could accommodate far more than the fifty thousand in cash and the single handgun his old pack had contained. At present it held extra clips and ammo for several guns, twenty thousand in cash, a small copper box, and a first aid kit.

“In the bedroom,” he said, pointing over his left shoulder, “Attached to the bottom of the nightstands on each side of the bed are two Beretta PX4’s.”

Sophia moved to collect the firearms hidden there as Richard collected the twin M&P compacts, the .454 Casull, and the Glock 19 from the living room and kitchen. He placed each in the duffel. They met up in the hall where he hesitated before handing the duffel over to Sophia.

Who was this woman? He’d watched the Sophia he knew die. Not a Hollywood death that was vague and undefined, allowing a character to return in a plot twist the audience would (hopefully) never see coming. But a brutal, definitive death that left no room for doubt. Her head had exploded for Christ’s sake.

Still, it was Sophia. She looked the same. Sounded the same. Even smelled the same. As she’d dragged him into the living room from the entry hall he’d caught a hint of lavender scented shampoo, just as he had in Kansas. The look of determination and urgency on her face mirrored the expression she’d worn when questioning the man he’d known as ‘Doc’ in the HumVee before the world had turned upside down. Despite all logic and what he knew to be reality, instinct told him that this was the same woman. He decided, for now at least, to trust her.

He handed Sophia the duffel and pressed what appeared to be just another section of the wall with the palm of his hand. A concealed latch sprung and a panel opened. Inside was a touchpad for a home security system and the Beretta 92FS. He took the gun, leaving the panel open.

He crossed to the entryway and was pulling the trap door to the attic down when someone knocked on the front door. Richard startled. Sophia, who’d been eyeing the contents of the duffel with approval, froze. The ladder slid down its track and thumped on the floor.

“Mr. McGee?” Samantha Peterson called.

Richard looked and saw with dismay that the front door was hanging open a few inches. When Sophia had pushed her way into the house, neither of them had thought to close it.

The door swung inward as Samantha, as unmindful of propriety as any nine year old, pushed it open.

“Oh, hi, Mr. McGee,” Samantha smiled her usual sunny smile. The smile faded somewhat as she took in the scene: Richard looking guilty, as if caught in the act of doing something he shouldn’t: Sophia, a duffel full of handguns and ammo gaping open at her feet.

“Uh,” Samantha continued, a small frown of confusion creasing her brow, “I have your change.” She held out Richard’s two dollars, eyeing him with suspicion.

“Thanks, Sammy,” Richard said.

As he reached for the money two things happened at once. A low hum, the sound of a cell phone set to vibrate, came from somewhere on Sophia and a black SUV screeched to a halt at the curb. Four men in assault garb emblazoned with the yellow FBI logo poured out before the vehicle had come to a complete stop.

“They’ve found us,” Sophia said.

Before the words were out of her mouth Richard slammed the front door shut and threw the bolt. He scooped Sammy from the floor with an arm around her waist, grabbed an Ingram Mac 11A1 from its mount with his free hand and headed for the back of the house. Sophia snatched the duffel from the floor and followed.

“There’ll be another ’round the back!” she called out. As if to emphasize this point, there was a loud crash from the back of the house.

Richard, a struggling and squalling Samantha in arm, altered course into the bedroom.

“That door is 22 gauge steel set into a 24 gauge steel frame with composite locking blocks,” Richard explained. He spoke to reassure Sophia, to calm the child, and keep his own mind clear. He set Samantha on the floor extended his finger in a ‘stay put’ gesture, then started pulling up the carpet along the outside wall. To her credit, Samantha obeyed, sniffling back her tears and quieting immediately.“Not steel clad, mind you. Steel wrapped. So is the front. It’s one of the reasons I rented this place. They’ll be a while trying to get in through there.”

What he didn’t say was what he feared they would try next.

Under the carpet was a trap door leading to the crawlspace beneath the house. Realizing Richard’s intent, Sophia moved to help him wrestle it out of its frame. Once open Richard swept Samantha into the opening. She squawked as her rump hit earth three feet below. Sophia followed, duffel in tow, and Richard nose-dived in behind her.

The sound of breaking glass came from above the trio and Richard yelled “Cover your ears!” and did so himself.

Flashes of light followed by percussive blasts filled the house. As the thunderous noise died away Richard rolled, located Samantha and Sophia near the outside wall of the foundation, and quickly appraised them. Sophia had covered her ears and opened her mouth to reduce overpressure. Samantha, not understanding Richard’s warning, had not. Eyes wide with pain, blood trickling from one ear—probably a burst eardrum, Richard thought—the young girl screamed so hard that no sound came except hoarse exhalations of air. Richard grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her gently.

“Sammy,” Richard said. “Sammy.” He knew she couldn’t hear him and so moved his mouth carefully to form the words. “Sammy, you have to be quiet. Shh,” he said, gesturing with a finger across his lips.

Though tears coursed down her cheeks and her body quaked like a rag doll, she seemed to understand. She quieted, her breathing now coming in hitches and gasps that tapered off slowly.

Christ, Richard thought, she must be more terrified than she’s ever been in her life. And yet she followed his lead having no reason to trust him whatsoever. He impulsively hugged her.

Gunfire erupted in the kitchen. A wide burst designed to maim or kill anyone hiding within. A similar burst came from the living room.

Richard turned to Sophia and pointed out the vent covers for the crawlspace.

“That lets out into the neighbor’s yard through a three foot privet hedge. Take Sam and get her through the hedge. There’s a privacy fence at the back of the property. Just reach over the gate and pull the latch. Sammy’s house is three doors down and they never lock the patio doors. Get her home safe. I’ll slow these guys down and catch up to you.”

“I can’t leave here without you,” Sophia said. “You have no idea how important you are.”

“Lady,” Richard hissed, digging in the duffel for clips, “the only thing I give a shit about right now is getting this little girl home. She didn’t ask for any of this. Now you move your ass!”

Anger, so quick Richard almost missed it, flashed across Sophia’s face. She scooted to the vent and kicked it open with her heels. Richard slapped a clip home in the belly of the Mac 11 as woman and child slipped through the breach and turned back to the opening above his head.

And waited. He wanted to give Sophia and Sammy as much time as possible before making his next move. It bothered him that the men invading his home wore federal garb. Could the entity he knew as BanaTech, officially nonexistent until less than an hour ago, have enough power to have infiltrated and corrupted the Federal Bureau of Investigation? Or was it merely a ruse to appear as law enforcement officers to any onlookers? Were these BanaTech security forces? Or innocent cops just following orders?

He prayed it was the former.

There were footsteps throughout the house. Stealthy creaking and groaning; the sound of men in heavy boots searching. He could hear what sounded like two sets from the kitchen area, two more from the living room. He held his breath as the floorboards at the threshold of the bedroom gave out a soft squeak. Fine dust drifted down from spaces between the hardwood.

“I have a breach in the bedroom,” a soft voice came to him from the bedroom door. The low voice of a man speaking into a throat microphone. “I think they’re under—”

Richard popped up through the opening like an armed jack-in-the-box and leveled the Ingram a few inches above the floor. He fired in a short arc centered on the doorway. The man just inside the door took a round through the shin, toppling him backwards. A second man, just outside the room, took a round in the arch of his foot, his boot filling with blood as he screamed and lurched back. Richard heard him crash to the floor outside the bedroom.

Richard sprang out of the hole and rolled to the side of the bed while chaos erupted around him. Someone yelled: “The bedroom!” Someone else yelled: “Go!” A third and closer voice, probably the man Richard had shot through the shin, screamed: “I’m hit, I’M HIT!”

Gunfire erupted from the doorway. A third and fourth man had taken up position there and were firing blindly into the room. Lead filled the air, sending plaster and woodchips flying from the walls, trim, and crown molding. One round tore through the mattress mere inches from Richard’s head.

He made himself as small as possible and crawled for a section of wall at the side of the bed. Overturning the nightstand, he pulled down and outwards on a slightly discolored section of baseboard revealing a timer and a host of wiring.

After the incident in Kansas, Richard had lived with a recurring sense of impending doom. That two day period—it boggled the imagination that so much had happened in so little time—had turned him away from the road he had chosen to follow with what was left of his life after ten years of incarceration: The sedate, if not somewhat reclusive, normal life he had so desired during ten years in the company of murderers, rapists, and thieves. Prison, he had soon learned, is a timeless, soulless void in which one does not mature, grow, or experience even the simplest of life’s pleasures. It is, instead, a venomous atmosphere rife with hatred, hostility, and petty indifference to the needs of any living being. One cannot live in such a place. Only exist. He had vowed to do everything in his power to prevent a return to such an existence.

It had taken less than forty-eight hours to turn Richard away from his chosen path and set him back on one of the multitude of roads that terminate in confinement or death, each of those roads littered with violence and paranoia.

“A.P.P.A.” a fellow inmate had once told him. “Absolute paranoia is perfect awareness.” He’d then added, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.”

Richard had since decided that the lower end of paranoia was vigilance. With that in mind he had prepared a little surprise should BanaTech’s security forces again invade his home. Richard had wired two other panels similar to this one in the kitchen and living room, all synchronized. Setting the timer on this unit to three seconds activated all three. Richard curled himself into a fetal position, opened his mouth, squeezed his eyes shut, and covered his ears.

His heart beat just twice before the thirty-six CTS 9590 sting ball multi-effect grenades he’d purchased over the Internet with false law enforcement ID went off. The near simultaneous explosions sent over 3500 .31 caliber rubber balls racing outward at tremendous velocity, accompanied by a 101 millisecond burst of light at 6-8 million candela and a 1755 decibel ear shattering blast. The six man retrieval team sent by BanaTech was instantly incapacitated.

Richard didn’t escape the melee unscathed. Several of the rubber balls had peppered his back, arms and legs. The effect of the flashbang portion of the grenades was minimal since he’d been prepared for it. Abandoning the Ingram, he rolled over twice, not bothering to survey the inside of a room he’d never see again, and dropped into the crawlspace beneath the house.

The duffel was undisturbed. He pulled the first weapon his hand touched from the bag—one of the M&P compacts from the kitchen—zipped the duffel shut and pulled it behind him as he duck-walked to the vent and outside through the privet hedge. He pulled the duffel over his shoulder as he stood erect. There were groans and sounds of pain coming from the bedroom window to his left. Its glass littered the side yard like little gems gleaming in the sun. The windows that hadn’t been broken by the assault team had had coughed out their glass when Richard’s nasty little surprise went off.

From his position between the two houses Richard could see his neighbors coming out onto their porches. Into their yards. Into the street. All curious, attracted by the action at Richard’s house.

Ignoring them, Richard headed for the back of his neighbor’s house. He’d made it to the gate when Sophia came dashing through the opening at a sprint.

“Sammy?” he said.

“Fine,” she answered, pulling him towards back of the property as sirens took up a mournful song in the distance. “Safe. But her father is pissed. And headed this way with a shotgun.”

“Damn,” Richard said and reversed direction towards his own back yard. A small grass alleyway separated his house from the next and he pulled Sophia towards it. A twin of the black SUV that had pulled up in front sat catty corner to his back porch, doors open, engine idling.

“The SUV,” they both said in concert.

They raced for the vehicle as gunfire erupted from the back of the house.

Lead tore up clods of earth and foliage, tree bark splintered and flew. The shots went wide and missed the SUV. Richard dove into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. He raised his head enough to peer out the window as Sophia slammed the driver’s door closed and threw the vehicle into reverse.

Jefferson stood on the back porch grinning his mad hyena’s grin and lining up a shot with what looked like a Colt Defense M4 Carbine. He looked different, somehow. It took Richard a millisecond—about the time it took Jefferson to squeeze his finger around the trigger of the weapon—to realize that the difference was the man’s nose. His eyes still had that dancing light of madness in them, the face still rugged and creased. He was still larger than life and twice as intimidating. But his nose was flatter, squashed down and bent to the left. BanaTech’s doctors had been unable to restore it to its former aquiline form after Richard had shattered it. Richard’s grin at that realization rivaled that of his adversary.

Sophia tromped the accelerator and the SUV lurched backwards. Jefferson’s round sailed over the hood and into a tree lining the opposite side of the alley. The vehicle shot down the narrow passage in reverse, gaining speed and blowing by a startled Norman Peterson who was indeed toting a shotgun. The rear doors of the vehicle, still open, missed bowling him off his feet by inches. He wisely dove for cover.

As the SUV hit the entrance of the alley at high speed Sophia made a left hand turn in reverse. Richard spotted Jefferson limping into the alley from his back yard hoping for another shot. Jefferson, Richard guessed, had not been spared the multiple impacts of high velocity pellets from the sting grenades. His grin grew larger. A horn blared and the sound of anguished brakes filled the air as the SUV slammed to a halt narrowly avoiding a nasty collision with a Chevy travelling on the main thoroughfare. Sophia slammed the vehicle into drive and tromped the accelerator, the rear doors of the SUV chunking shut with the change of direction.

“Go left. Left!” Richard yelled.

“Why?” Sophia asked, but complied.

Richard dug in the duffel bag until his fingers found what he was looking for. Curious neighbors, startled by the appearance of the vehicle dove out of the street where they had been gathering to discuss the melee at the McGee house.

“Here!” Richard yelled as the vehicle approached the front of his house. “Stop!”

The SUV squealed to a halt.

Richard popped open the passenger door, stood on the running board, and leaned over the roof of the SUV. Neighbors screamed and ran as he put five .454 caliber rounds from the Taurus through the engine block of the assault team’s remaining vehicle.

“Go! Go! Drive!” Richard yelled, ducking back into the vehicle. He wore a lunatic grin of his own as the SUV sped away. “That ought to slow them down.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Sophia said sharply, glancing away from the road as she blew through the quiet residential neighborhood at well over sixty miles an hour. “They have resources you can’t even imagine.”

“Who are they?”

Sophia tore twin paths through peonies and nicely manicured fescue as she cut a corner too fast and accelerated. The route she was following, Richard noticed, would take them to the Interstate.

“The security arm of BanaTech,” she said. “They may look like the military, or the FBI, or even the OSS. And they’ll have the ID to back it. But they’re really just Jefferson’s goons and they do whatever he tells them.”

OSS? Richard thought. He said: “What do they want from me?”

Sophia said nothing. Simply merged the SUV onto the Interstate and reduced speed to the legal limit. The Saturday morning traffic was light by California standards. There were only a dozen or so other cars heading north. Richard knew it would get much busier as the lunch hour approached.

“What do they want with me?” Richard repeated.

Sophia remained silent.

Impatience leads to frustration and anger. Richard had learned this as a prisoner of the state of Kansas. A man doing time, where there is little to do but wait for the next meal, the next yard period, the next day that brings you closer to the day they finally let you back into the real world, can easily implode under the weight of all that anger. An intelligent man will seek to fill all that time spent waiting. With card games, television, conversation with other inmates—though that holds its own perils—or, in Richard’s case, education. He’d first studied religion, then philosophy, then human psychology. What he’d taken away from the experience was patience. All things reveal themselves in due course. When Sophia didn’t answer the second time, he decided to let it go. For now.

A semi with the Mayflower logo emblazoned on the trailer passed them. It was running at least ten miles an hour over the legal limit.

“I know you have a lot of questions and I promise you’ll get your answers,” Sophia said shortly. “But we don’t have time for that. Not here. Not now.”

“When then?”

“Soon,” Sophia replied. “When we get a little distance between them and us. For now I need you to navigate. Can you do that?”

Richard sighed and answered: “Of course. Where are we going?”

Sophia fetched a slim black object out of her hip pocket and handed it to Richard.

The device appeared to be a cell phone, a clone of the one he had retrieved from Sophia’s belongings as she lay wounded in his home in Kansas. He started to mention this, then thought better of it. Trust can be built quickly in times of duress, but months of vigilance born of years of paranoia advised caution. He thumbed the slide open and got the idiot glow of the login screen.

“It wants a password,” he said.

“Sophia six three,” she said, “no caps or spaces.”

Richard entered the eight characters, pondering their significance. He was rewarded with a topographical map of the county with several blinking dots.

“The steady blue dot is us,” Sophia told him. “What we need is the closest steady red dot. It’s a touch screen, so just touch it and it will tell us how to get there.”

Richard did so. The image shrank then expanded to a smaller section of the county complete with roads and city names. Other lines that seemed irrelevant crossed the screen at odd angles. Richard ignored them as a yellow route between the icon representing the SUV and the red dot lit up.

“Okay,” he said. “It says there’s one of those things, whatever they are, about three miles from here. You need to take the next exit and backtrack one-half mile on the feeder road until you come to a street marked ‘J’ avenue.”

“There should be a counter at the bottom left corner of the screen. What does it say?”

“Four minutes, thirty-eight seconds. Counting down.”

“Shit,” Sophia muttered and tromped on the gas. They shot past the Mayflower truck that had passed them just moments ago, blowing the speed limit by a good twenty miles an hour.

“Hey!” Richard exclaimed, “What the hell?”

The exit they wanted was less than a quarter of a mile ahead. Sophia cut the semi off to the accompaniment of barking airbrakes and the loud wail of the truck’s air horn, taking the exit at close to eighty miles an hour. She turned onto the feeder road at perilous speed, kept the accelerator glued to the floorboard, and sped back in the direction they’d come from, albeit on a different road.

“Jesus,” Richard said. The truck they’d just cut off had jackknifed on the interstate and now blocked both lanes. Traffic was slowing to a halt behind it. “Take it easy. You could kill someone that way.”

“You just keep an eye on that counter,” Sophia said as the SUV passed one-hundred miles an hour.

“There’s ‘L’ avenue,” Richard pointed out as they blew past the marker. “And there’s ‘K.’”

He started to tell her she should slow down or they’d miss the turn when Sophia abruptly turned off the feeder road, the tires of the SUV leaving the ground as they bounded over a shallow drainage ditch, and headed out onto barren ground at an angle.

The vehicle bucked and jerked and Richard hit his head on the roof as they slipped into and then out of an arroyo. Then they were on ‘J’ avenue and the ride smoothed out once more.

“That’ll save some time,” Sophia said and winked at him.

“Hmmph,” Richard pulled the seatbelt over his shoulder and snapped it into place. Sophia had already locked hers down. Sparse vegetation and telephone poles flashed by the windows.

“How are we doing on time?” she asked.

“Two minutes, fifteen seconds,” he said. The screen changed; Richard assumed the satellite feeding information to the receiver was updating their location as they approached their destination. Details on the screen steadily became more defined.

“Uh-oh. According to this your red dot is less than a mile away, just up there,” Richard gestured towards the windshield. “It’s in the middle of a network of arroyos. There’s nothing else out there at all.”

“There’s something out there, all right,” Sophia said. “And we need to find it.”

“But what could—” Richard began, and the device began to vibrate in his hand.

“Damn!” Sophia said. “They’ve found us.”

Richard’s stared hard at the device. The image had zoomed out again. A second blue dot was moving rapidly across the screen on an intercept course heedless of roads or vegetation and much too fast to be anything but airborne. Richard craned his neck up and back and spied the black dot of what he feared to be a helicopter on the horizon.

“If you’re going to do something, now would be a good time,” he said.

In answer, Sophia drove off the road and dropped into an arroyo with a crash that again sent Richard’s head into the roof. She braked, took a right hand fork in the wash, and accelerated as the walls of the arroyo narrowed on both sides. Richard watched the ominous shape of a Blackhawk helicopter flash by overhead.

“Which way?” Sophia demanded.

“Back,” Richard said. “To the left. We’re moving away from it.”

The arroyo branched again. This time Sophia took the left-hand wash. It deepened and the walls were now above the roof of the vehicle.

“That’s better,” Richard said. “Less than a thousand yards if we can stay on this course. Whatever this is it better be good.”

The arroyo took a left-hand swing and widened out, the bottom turning from semi-smooth to buckboard. The two of them were bounced around like corn kernels popping in a pan, their seatbelts the only thing saving them from flying out of their seats. Richard lost track of the number of times his head hit the roof. They were again swinging away from their target.

“We’ve got forty seconds,” Richard said. “We’re going to miss it. No! We have to go right!”

Sophia slammed on the brakes, fetching Richard up hard against the shoulder restraint. She then reversed and pulled a perfect three point turn. They’d passed a side tributary about twenty yards back. It had looked too narrow for the SUV to get through.

She took the turn anyway, peeling the side view mirrors off their mounts along with a goodish amount of paint from the door panels. A large clod of earth broke free and fell into Richard’s open window. Dirt and dust filled his mouth and nose. He spat it out.

The arroyo widened, the walls dropping away at the same time. It looked as if they would crest the slope and be in the clear when the helicopter dropped in front of them, cutting off their route.

Richard recognized the Sikorsky MH-60L Direct Action Penetrator from his research. This Army variant of the UH-60 was equipped with External Stores Support System stub wings, each capable of carrying M230 automatic cannons, rocket pods, and various other armaments. Manned M134D miniguns depended from each door. He ducked instinctively as the miniguns thundered to life. The ground between the helicopter and SUV began to churn

Sophia didn’t flinch. She sped towards the helicopter. At the last second, she swung the vehicle left past the field of fire and under the helicopter. The craft rose to avoid the onrushing SUV, then nosed down and to the right to follow. The unexpected maneuver had spoiled the door gunner’s aim.

“Where is it?” Sophia cried. “That won’t work a second time!”

Richard looked at the device and saw only the red dot. They were here, wherever here was. He saw nothing out of the windshield save the faint silver-blue shimmer of a desert mirage some fifty feet to the right of the vehicle.

“We’re right on top of it, but there’s nothing here!”

“There!” Sophia pointed at the mirage. She hauled the wheel to the right and tromped the accelerator. The mirage seemed to shrink from the size of a large barn that of to a small house, but did not recede before the vehicle as had every mirage Richard had ever seen before.

“Damn it!” Sophia smacked her hand on the steering wheel. “It’s closing!”

The earth behind the fleeing SUV began to churn as the Sikorsky lined up and began another run on the vehicle. In seconds 30mm shells from twin M230 cannons would find their way inside and begin chewing through steel, vinyl, and upholstery before shredding Richard and Sophia’s flesh, bones, and vital organs. Richard steeled himself for the onslaught while a quiet, rational part of his mind told him that the mirage now looming in front of them looked more like a curtain of heat waves rising from the ground.

Then they were in the mirage and everything Richard knew to be the truth was in doubt.

Nausea passed through Richard and day turned to night as if some celestial switch had been thrown and the sun had winked out of existence. Water, cold and invigorating splashed against the side of his face. As his eyes tried to adjust to the sudden darkness twin lights loomed in the windshield, grew larger, and then wailed at him with the sound of an air horn as they swerved to avoid a collision.

The sound of the California desert rushing past the window fell away, replaced by the thrumming sound of pouring rain, wet tires on pavement, and the burst of not too distant thunder. More light loomed before him and a shriek of brakes added their voice to the cacophony.

He was thrown left, then right, then left again as his mind tried to sort through the onslaught of new information that could not be. More lights, more onrushing objects, more protesting sounds of rubber against asphalt. Then the world did a one-eighty as Sophia slewed the SUV around in the direction of traffic flow and pulled to the side of the Interstate.

Though impossible, on Richard’s right and seen through the downpour of a nighttime summer thunderstorm was the six-hundred and thirty-four foot steel archway—resembling a single sheen rainbow that led not to a pot of gold but was the Gateway to the West—on the bank of the Mississippi River. To his left reared a building that appeared to be ablaze but was not; the artificial inferno the result of a clever computer program controlling thousands of LED’s that covered one entire side of the Millennium Hotel.

Before him lay Interstate 70-North. Eight lanes of traffic going to and fro as is normal for a bustling city. Richard took a deep breath as what just happened to him began to set in.

Sophia smiled at him from the driver’s seat.

“Welcome to St. Louis.”