Pox Americana 2 Page 2

  “Top speed?” I asked.

  “A cool forty miles per hour.”

  “Sweet.”

  “The only downside is the operating time.”

  “How long does the charge last?”

  “Seventeen minutes depending on conditions.”

  “Not very long.”

  “Yeah, it’s not that long, but it gets the job done.”

  “I bet that what’s you used to tell all your ex-girlfriends.”

  There was a moment of silence and then Slade chuckled. “I deserve that.”

  Smiling, I stooped before the wing. “Okay. Let’s see what happens if I strap this puppy on.”

  3

  The next fifteen minutes were spent working with the ladies to get the wing slotted onto the back of my battle suit. The wing, made of what Slade said was graphene, was surprisingly light and we were able to secure it in place using some elbow grease and a pair of thick R-clips we sourced from the vault. Once the wing was in place, we all worked to wire it into the battle suit so that I’d be able to operate the damned thing.

  “Every new machine needs a test drive,” Slade said.

  Reentering the shark cage, I moved to the center of the vault. Then I waited for Slade to download the applicable operations protocol on the HUD so that I could test the wing out. He walked me through how to operate it and I tapped an icon on the HUD as the tiny jets began humming to life.

  “You ready?” Slade asked.

  “I’m always ready, baby.”

  “Do you think you can handle it?”

  “How hard can it be?”

  Turned out, surprisingly hard.

  The propulsive force from the wing’s engines shot me forward and I was unable to control the shark cage. It was like holding onto a fireman’s hose that was whipping back and forth. I clipped the edge of an ammunition pile and flipped forward as the jets spun me around the vault.

  “Need some help, Nick?” Lexie shouted.

  “I’m getting the hang of it!”

  Standing, the jets shot me up into the air and I grabbed the suit’s controls, finding that I was able to maintain control by leaning forward, my weight balanced against the pressure and upward thrust of the jets.

  Rotating around, I swooped down and juked to the side, flying back and forth before landing in front of Lexie and Raven who whooped and clapped their hands.

  I felt pretty good about the fact that not only could I appear invisible for several seconds given my cloaking device, but now I could fly. Glancing around, I spotted Deb who rose from where she’d been kneeling next to Ocho.

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we need to talk, Nick.”

  “About what?”

  “About what the plan is.”

  “The plan’s a pretty simple one. We’re going outside to get Hollis.”

  Deb frowned. “That wasn’t why we came here. The plan was we hit this vault, weapon up, and find that super-secret continuity of operations information or whatever it is.”

  “Okay, so the plan changed.”

  “For you, maybe.”

  I shot looks at Raven and Lexie who glanced at the floor. “Hollis got kidnapped, Deb.”

  “Yeah, I’m real sorry about that and all...”

  “Sorry isn’t gonna cut it. We’re going out to get her back. Now.”

  I took a step and Deb called out: “There’s another compartment in here.”

  I looked back. “Excuse me?”

  “I think…there’s a vault within this vault, Nick.”

  “And you’d know this, how?”

  She pointed at Ocho. “He kinda told me.”

  “Great. She’s listening to the goddamn zombies now?” Slade said in my ear.

  I exited the shark cage and stood before Ocho, and I swear to God the zombie raised his hand in a kind of halfhearted greeting.

  “He communicated by clucking and clicking his tongue in a kind of…paralanguage,” Deb said. “It’s no different than the ones I saw back at the casino.”

  Ocho did indeed cluck and click his tongue, a dry rasp that sounded like a blade being dragged across a rock, but I couldn’t make anything out.

  “Just sounds like gibberish,” Raven said.

  “You have to know what to listen for.”

  “How do you know what to listen for?” I asked.

  “Because I didn’t always work at the casino,” Deb said. “I was a nursing tech at a rehab facility for two years. I worked with people with traumatic brain injuries and strokes who were trying to learn how to talk again, some with the assistance of service dogs.”

  Ocho clicked his tongue once more and this time, while I still couldn’t discern anything resembling a language, I did notice a pattern.

  For instance, the zombie sucked his tongue down from the roof of his mouth three times, the pitch of his voice got louder, then two clicks, then three tongue sucks. He repeated this several times in a kind of pattern. Deb seemed to find meaning in it because she clicked her tongue in response and God help me, the zombie seemed to recognize this and nodded.

  Raven rolled her eyes. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

  “He’s saying there’s something in his front pocket,” Lexie replied, pointing at Ocho’s soiled torn slacks, which had an intact, right, front pocket.

  “How do you know?”

  “I read his microexpressions.”

  “That is some straight-up, Category-5 bullshit, Lex,” Raven said.

  “Check his pocket and let’s find out,” Lexie offered.

  Raven smirked. “You first.”

  Deb negotiated around the zombie and paused, watching the thing watch her. She clicked her tongue and reached a hand down toward the pocket. The zombie was still wrapped in the nylon webbing, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t lurch free or crane his neck to sample her fingers. Raven made a move to further secure the creature and Deb waved her off. It was as if she wanted to test Ocho, to see if he still posed a threat.

  Her fingers inched down and I watched the zombie tracking them. Lexie was holding a machine-pistol just in case things got dicey.

  Deb reached Ocho’s pocket, her fingers entering it.

  Ocho reacted and Lexie brought the gun up, but Deb held firm. “Don’t,” she said.

  The gun lowered and Deb held up something she retrieved from the pocket.

  What looked like a security card.

  Then the zombie did something unexpected. He motioned to the nylon, its bindings, jerking his head back and forth.

  Deb grabbed a knife.

  “Nope, no way,” Raven said. “Don’t even tell me you’re thinking of cutting that thing loose.”

  “He knows the way.”

  “Yeah, the way to eat us.”

  Slade chimed in. “Even if the thing wanted to sample you, he’d be dead before he took three steps.”

  “You’re actually okay with this?” I asked.

  “Affirmative. It’s worth the risk.”

  Raven muttered to herself and Deb sliced the nylon, freeing the zombie who jerked himself upright.

  Ocho blinked and spun on his feet, reaching out a palsied hand, stabbing a finger toward the back of the vault.

  The zombie limped forward and we fell in step behind him, heading through the rows of weapons and gadgets.

  At the rear wall was a collection of wooden pallets filled with shrink-wrapped food, currency, and clothes.

  Ocho clicked his mouth and pointed. Deb slashed at the shrink-wrapping as I tossed aside boxes of MREs and stacks of military garb, mostly camouflaged BDUs. Back and forth we went, moving aside the clutter, searching for something, anything, and that’s when we saw it.

  A nearly imperceptible scanner.

  No larger than a garage door opener.

  A red light blinked on it.

  Deb tossed me the security card and I slapped it against the scanner. The red light turned green and a nearby section of wall powered up to reveal a niche no bigger than a large master bathroom.

  Waving a hand inside the niche, a motion sensor light flicked on and I gasped.

  4

  The inside of the niche was filled with more weapons and gear. But these were unlike the rest of the materials back in the vault. In fact, they looked like items that had been plucked off an armaments menu of a high-tech first-person shooter vidgame.

  There were, among other items, sets of futuristic boots, what looked like haptic gloves for a VR game, underwear cocooned within tubes, braces, and conduit, one sniper rifle fitted with a massive scope, several vests that resembled a combination of body armor and chainmail, and a black briefcase stenciled with strange symbols.

  “What is all of this?” I asked.

  “Whatever it is, let’s bring it out,” Deb replied.

  We grabbed most of the goodies and hauled them outside. Hefting the sniper rifle, I noticed a hatch and a handwheel on the niche’s back wall, what I thought might be an exit through the building onto the street.

  Someone whistled. I toted the rifle back into the main vault, then powered up the shark cage and positioned its camera so that Slade could view everything.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of loot,” Slade said. “My compliments to Ocho.”

  “Henry Shusterman,” Lexie said.

  My gaze smoked into hers. “What?”

  Lexie held up what looked like a wallet. She pulled out a soiled ID badge stamped with a green “G,” and held up it up for all to see. “He dropped this when he walked over to show you the other vault.” The face on the badge was indeed Ocho’s.

  “His name’s Henry Shusterman,” Lexie continued. “He was some kind of high-level civilian contractor. That’s probably why he knew where the vault was.”

  Ocho, the
former Henry Shusterman, moved over and took the badge from Lexie as Stevens hissed at him. The zombie’s head cocked to the side and he stared at the photo, running a gnarled finger over it, a wistful look in his sunken eyes. For a moment I thought I heard a tone of contentment in his grunting as he perused the badge.

  Shusterman clutched the ID and shambled off toward the other side of the vault. Raven pulled the slide back on her pistol and Deb took it from her.

  “What are you? The fucking zombie whisperer, now?” Raven asked. “No mames. Give me a break. He’s still one of them.”

  “He helped us out.”

  “Speaking of which,” Slade interjected, “would you like to hear the good news or the super-fantastic news?”

  Lexie clapped her hands. “Super-fantastic!”

  “Thanks to Shusterman over there, you’ve got yourselves a collection of some of Uncle Sam’s finest equipment for Bigarmy’s next-gen warfighters.”

  Lexie made a face. “In English.”

  “That there is some mighty fine, kickass weaponry. Most of it I reviewed specs on back in the day.”

  I pointed to the chainmail vest and Slade said: “Graphene-based chainmail directly from MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.”

  Deb held up the boots. “Augmen-boots that were designed to mimic the explosiveness of kangaroo tendons.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Deb asked.

  “No, ma’am, I shit you not,” Slade replied. “Those boots can provide, depending upon conditions and the user, twelve-foot leaps and twenty-miles-per-hour springs.”

  She waved to the haptic-like gloves and Slade continued, “the synthetic adhesion gloves are from something called the Z-Man project and allow the user to climb sheer rock faces or buildings without any other equipment. What looks like underwear is actually a soft exoskeleton made of newfangled fabric muscles that reduces fatigue and increases strength.”

  Lexie held up a pair as if modeling them. “How do they look?”

  I gave her a thumbs up and Raven lifted the sniper rifle. “What about this sucker?”

  “It’s a gun,” Slade answered.

  “I can see that.”

  “A really big gun with bigger bullets. Fifty-caliber rounds embedded with optical sensors designed by EXACTO, DARPA’s Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance program. They allow an experienced marksman to repeatedly hit moving and evading targets.”

  “You mean—”

  “Yep,” Slade said, cutting Raven off. “That bad boy contains self-steering bullets.”

  “Okay, I’m in love so this one’s mine,” Raven said, hugging the rifle, kissing the barrel.

  “It’s like Lexie said before. Happiness is a warm gun,” Slade offered with a chuckle.

  I turned my attention to the black briefcase. I undid the metal clasps on the sides of the briefcase and opened it to reveal several shiny medical devices and a thumb drive stored in fitted foam, including what looked like two syringes on steroids. One of the syringes contained a bluish liquid and the other was filled with an amber liquid.

  I held each item in front of the shark cage’s camera for Slade to inspect. I did the same thing for the briefcase so he could check out the stenciling on the side.

  “That’s from the Aceso Program,” Slade said. “Aceso was the Greek goddess of healing. The program was a joint operation between the DoD and the Centers for Disease Control.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Part of a brain-machine interface. There are injectable nanites in one of the syringes, implants that can migrate and wire themselves into the brain and the rest of the body.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “Telepathy, for lack of a better word. Those implants were designed to allow the host to communicate with machines, but the idea was scrapped because the big boys were worried about their soldiers getting hacked. You see that thumb drive?”

  I nodded.

  “Slot it in my front port.”

  “What is it?”

  “Patience, grasshopper. All will be revealed.”

  “We don’t have time for this, Slade. Hollis is outside and—”

  “And we’ve got one fucking shot at this. Just one. We need to take some time and get to know our gear and prepare an order of battle. Otherwise, we’re just gonna be out there stumbling around, shooting at anything that moves.”

  “That’s kinda what we always do.”

  “Focus, Dekko.”

  “Ten minutes,” I said.

  “Only need five, brother.”

  The thumb drive was pressed into the port on the shark cage and a light flashed, followed by a series of what looked like blueprints that were beamed into the air in a swirl of yellow light. I moved around the blueprints, studying them.

  Raven squinted at the light, using her index finger to point to various areas in the building. “I think this is where we are,” she said, circling the vault.

  “Here’s the other vault,” Lexie said, drawing a finger around the hidden niche as Shusterman waved his hand in the light, mesmerized by it.

  “There’s the space behind the wall,” I offered, tracing what looked like a passageway that lay behind the small hatch and handwheel I’d witnessed on the niche’s back wall.

  Lexie handed out MREs to everyone and then was kind enough to load some ammunition into my cannons as Slade rotated the blueprint around and zoomed in to allow us to see the dimensions of the passageway and the fact that it appeared to lead out onto Independence Avenue. From what I could see, the passageway was tight, but seemed large enough to accommodate the shark cage’s bulk.

  “That’s it,” I said. “We can use that to get outside.”

  Deb cast a wary look in my direction. “And then?”

  “And then we find Hollis, come back and grab all the gear we can carry, and get the hell out of here.”

  “Just like that?”

  I nodded. “Just like that.”

  The blueprints changed to a more detailed image of what appeared to be downtown Washington, D.C. I recognized some of the main arteries. There were two other places marked by glowing orange circles.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  Slade didn’t respond, but instead highlighted the two orange circles which expanded to reveal their locations. I drew a circle around the first one with my finger.

  “That’s down under the Ellipse,” Slade said, referencing the circular fifty-two-acre park south of the White House.

  “And the second one?” I asked, drawing a line from our present position to the next orange circle.

  “The lawn outside the Washington Monument,” Slade answered.

  “What’s in them?”

  The images wavered. An error signal appeared in the air. Slade cursed. “Bastards have thrown up a security block.”

  “How big of a wall?”

  “Think of it as a digital version of the Great Wall of China. Times a million.”

  “Why the max-security?”

  “Because what we’re looking at is likely part of a SAP, a special access program. Whatever is inside those vaults is so important that only Cabinet-level officials could view it.”

  “You think this is it, maybe? The continuity of operations info? The shit that might tell us where a safe zone could be?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Can you bypass the wall?”

  “Anything’s possible, but it would take some serious time.”

  I brooded on this, chewing on my lip. “Time is something we don’t have.”

  BOOM!

  Something smashed into the door leading into the vault. We looked over to see spindly hands reaching through the gaps near the entryway. The zombies had found their way down to the basement.

  “Grab as much gear as you can carry,” I said. “We’re going outside in two minutes.”

  Lexie and Raven began prepping weapons and gear. Both of them climbed into the soft exosuits, Augmen-boots, and chainmail vests that went on over their clothes.

  Lexie slid the exosuit down over her Tri-Delta sweatshirt, then made sure to stash one of the exosuits in a compartment under the battery on the back of the shark cage just in case I needed it.

  Deb slipped on one of the exosuits as well, which allowed her to hoist her mini-gun with ease.

  Raven attached a sling to the sniper rifle, shouldered it, and filled a rucksack with self-steering bullets.