got close enough now, and was low enough, that he had a view beneath all those stretched nets that covered the complex. He glimpsed steel buildings, systems of pipes and conveyors, parked forklifts.
When he got back to his feet he knew right away that walking to Mexico wasn’t going to happen. After he completed the mission, he was going to have to come out with his hands up and surrender. Hopefully there’d be someone to surrender to; right now the complex seemed deserted. The only thing that kept it from being a total ghost town was some kind of activity along that row of train cars, involving sporadic gunfire and screaming birds.
The sooner he got this done, the sooner he could surrender and request medical attention. People around these parts would have snakebite kits and antivenom. They’d know what to do. Unless this thing on his back was a bomb, in which case he’d be dead anyway.
Limping along, just forcing himself to keep going, he bent his neck and looked up, trying not to be blinded by the sun, which had become brutal, like a sun on some godforsaken science fiction planet. He was looking for drones. It was no longer about the protection they afforded him. It was about Pippa. The stuff Pippa thought about. How the story was captured, how the tale was told. More important in the big scheme of things than what actually happened. He wished it was her flying those things, cutting the footage together, telling his story her way. He wished she had stuck around. He would have liked to be with her. Maybe after all this was done he could look her up. Los Angeles couldn’t be too far away. He would go to the City of Angels and find her and tell her the true story.
He was so close to the Climate Weapon that he could have thrown a rock and hit it. The whole place was eerily quiet. All he had to do was drag himself another few yards. Then he could throw this monstrous weight down the shaft and be done with it. He was close enough now that he could see into the steel framework that enclosed the gun barrels and the elevator shaft and all the rest. He was looking for the right place to drop the briefcase down the hole.
But then he saw movement. Someone was moving in the middle of the structure. Climbing up from below on a ladder. He emerged into full view and stood there in plain sight on the top of the elevator enclosure. He looked around and immediately focused on Laks. A young man with long reddish-yellow hair. He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. Laks thought it must be a gun until light gleamed through it and he saw it was nothing more than a plastic water bottle. The man leaned back and dropped it. Then, after a last look back toward Laks, he turned away and dropped out of sight.
The man had gone back down the shaft.
There were people down there. At least one. Maybe more.
Whatever this device on Laks’s back was, he was about to drop it down a hole where people were taking shelter.
He stopped. This wasn’t part of the plan. Or was it? People weren’t supposed to be down there.
Something jerked him around, shifting his weight to his bad leg, causing him to spin down onto his ass. A moment later he heard the report of a rifle. Someone had shot him! No, not him. The bullet had struck his backpack. It had scored a hit on the briefcase.
He couldn’t get up as long as the weight of the pack was strapped to his back. He loosened the shoulder straps and shrugged free, undid the waist belt, got on all fours, then used his arms and his good leg to stand up.
Immediately the pack spun away from him and he heard a second shot. Then a third. The pack got a little farther away from him each time. The briefcase was getting more and more mangled. It was leaking some kind of silvery powder onto the ground.
The heat was terrific. He felt sunburned all over.
No, not all over. On his front. The side facing the mangled briefcase and the trail of silver dust it was leaking across the ground.
The horizon swung round and a rock smashed into his shoulder. He knew what this was. He’d just fallen down. Used to happen all the time after his inner ear had got messed up, before they’d fixed it. Something must have gone wrong with the equipment in his head.
He couldn’t get up now. He didn’t know what up was. He just lay there on his side, feeling the pressure of the world on his body. His right arm was extended on the ground in front of him, exposed skin turning red with sunburn, the steel bracelet—not a speck of rust on it—cool and pure against the blistered skin. A reminder that he should always use his strong right hand to do the right thing. He was pretty sure he had.
COMBUSTION CHAMBER
Coke,” T.R. said, drawing his finger along the wall of the combustion chamber. It came away black. For the wall, indeed all the interior surfaces of the place, were as black as black could be. And not shiny black. This had a coarse, matte texture that swallowed all light.