Deadfall Read online

  “Lot of people feel alone,” Terry agreed. “All the indifference forces you to either put up a wall or band together. Most people put up walls.”

  She looked around. “Up here life gives back what you put in.You can see it. The town council decides to make literacy a priority, and within months kids are reading everywhere. They declare that young people are important, and suddenly teens are getting scholarships or starting businesses. One person convinces her neighbors we need to improve the water, and within a year you can taste it. Where else can you see your efforts pay off so clearly, so quickly?”

  He picked at the drying mud on his forearm, thinking. He said, “What the rest of us do is create little towns out of our social networks. We don’t see our tax dollars working directly for us, so we pass our own entertainment bill and buy a big-screen TV. The lucky ones find a handful of friends who care about them the way people in small towns do.”

  “How did you—”

  Thunder boomed in the sky some distance away.

  Laura jumped up. Her eyes swept over the distant hills. She locked in on an area from where the sound seemed to have emanated.

  Terry joined her, and as they watched, a streak of green light, perfectly straight, perfectly vertical, flashed from heaven to earth. In less time than it took for the image to travel from eye to brain, it was gone. Then the crack of thunder reached them. A thick snake of white smoke began rising, as if the light were returning to the skies, not nearly the spectacular being it was on the way down.

  Laura ran for the bike. She yelled over her shoulder, “Terry! We gotta go! Let’s go!”

  Hutch stopped trying to force Dillon away from him. Instead he stood, accepting the burden of the boy the way he would an injured companion. Dillon’s legs encircled his waist. He was firmly attached. Hutch picked up his bow and slung it over his shoulder. Next he picked up his utility belt, buckled it, and draped it over the same shoulder. He picked up the camper’s lantern and considered taking one of the blankets. His left arm was crooked under Dillon’s rump and not good for anything else. He could barely carry what he had, so he opted against the blanket.

  Another strike. The vibrations came through the floor and ran up his legs. His ankles and knees took the shock, but still he nearly fell. He imagined Declan’s weapon pounding into the hill above them. He checked his watch. He knew that Declan’s cannon became operational in cycles of time. He believed that Declan had access to the weapon every eighty to one hundred minutes. But how long could he use it each time? As Hutch moved toward the mine’s entrance, he thought about the pattern of firepower he had witnessed. Insane as Declan was, he did not simply release unaimed volleys of explosions as soon as and for as long as he was able. Targeting was part of his game. A guy like Declan, a control freak if Hutch read him right, he wanted not only to call down the power of lightning but to direct it, to be precise in his destruction.

  Consequently, Hutch could not count on having heard a perfect start and finish to the operating time of the weapon. From when the caribou blew up to the end of that first cannon attack on him seemed like ten or fifteen minutes, but he couldn’t be sure. First, he’d been running for his life, scared out of his mind. If he discovered that his estimation was off by double, it would not completely surprise him. And second, he had no way of knowing if the strike on the caribou marked the beginning of the weapon’s functionality for that circuit or whether Declan had been using it for a while before he attacked the caribou.

  The attack in town also seemed to last ten or fifteen minutes. After the explosion at the back door, Terry and Laura had remained exposed in the moonlight for several minutes. Why hadn’t Declan attacked again? The most logical answer was that his window of opportunity had passed.

  Okay . . . so if the weapon’s periodic functionality was ten or fifteen minutes, could Declan bring the entire mountain down on him and Dillon? Probably. But if they could manage to stay alive, the pounding would eventually stop—and pretty soon too. Then they’d be free of it for about an hour and a half. Enough time to make an escape.

  Another explosion shook the tunnel, pitching Hutch into its concaved wall. At the last moment he bent and twisted to prevent Dillon’s head from connecting with the concrete. Rubble fell and rolled out of sight. He reached an intersecting passageway and turned left. The entrance should lie roughly forty yards ahead. He did not expect to see daylight at this point because of the shut door.Then the illumination of the lamp revealed fine fissures that expanded into gaping cracks, which in turn gave way to the complete destruction of the cocrete and the collapse of the tunnel. Rock and dirt and bits of concrete tunnel, like huge eggshells, sloped from the floor to the ceiling, blocking the passage.

  A strike of Declan’s weapon rattled him to his knees. He managed to keep hold of Dillon and the light. More of the tunnel’s ceiling and walls in front of him not only sloughed in, but also exploded into the passage. Hutch backpedaled away from falling dirt and concrete. It seemed that Declan was targeting the hill above the adit, either assuming they would have remained near it or with the intention of sealing them in.

  He turned and quick-stepped back to the intersecting tunnel, where they had talked and slept. He didn’t know much of what lay beyond. More tunnels, the few rooms he had seen the night before. He knew only that they had to get away from the tunnels near the adit.

  He remembered the way Declan’s weapon had stripped the branches and leaves from directly above its striking point in the woods. A welldefined circular pattern. Declan was jabbing a finger at them, a big, invisible, infinitely strong finger.

  Jab: the crushed car on Provincial Street.

  Jab: the depression in the asphalt, beside which lay some poor soul’s foot.

  Jab: the destruction of the rec center’s back door.

  Jab: David.

  We’re nothing more than ants to him, Hutch thought. He’d never bitten his lip in anxiety, but he did now, drawing blood, tasting it.

  A finger jabbing into the hill above them. Jabbing into the mine. He imagined a finger-shaped hole opening up, rising like a chimney to the surface, exposing the network of tunnels. Declan’s gang would fan out from its edge into the passageways, shooting any survivors.

  The tunnel shook, and this time it felt like the entire hillside shifted.

  Survivors? At this rate there would be none. Hutch moved quickly through the tunnels, ignoring some cross-passageways, turning into others. Though there were no markers identifying specific tunnels or distances, Hutch felt they were moving deeper into the hill, farther from the adit.

  He hoped to find . . . he did not know what he hoped to find. Something that would save them from the jabbing finger: a place to wait it out, another exit. He was thankful for the camper’s lantern.

  The mine most likely had been wired with battery-powered lamps that illuminated automatically with the disruption of AC current. Along with everything else, emergency equipment had left with the previous tenants. If they only had his small penlight, which was now juiceless, they’d be stumbling around in the dark. Any chance of finding either a safe haven or an exit would have been reduced to sheer luck.

  And Hutch did not believe in luck.

  49

  Hutch ran, stopping only to brace himself when the tunnel shook.

  He felt Dillon’s weight, his tightly gripping arms and legs. Survival meant more to him than his own life—it meant the life of this boy. For the first time he really understood what it meant to care more for another person than himself. It was a sentiment he had felt for Janet and Logan and Macie, but in the comfort of his home in a country not racked by war.Would he have died for his wife and children? He believed he would have. But the luxuries and relative safety of his life had never forced him to take the question seriously.

  Here he was with a child he had known for less than a day, but he knew the answer. He would die for Dillon.

  A terrible thought occurred to him. The damaged street, the severed foot: could that
have been Dillon’s dad? Dillon had said his father had died the other day with the strike of Declan’s weapon. He had no way of knowing this, but Hutch believed Dillon’s father had given his life trying to protect the town, his family. Why else would he have been targeted? Most of the townsfolk had been corralled into the auditorium. Something Dillon’s father had done provoked Declan. What would have irritated Declan was someone standing up to him.

  A portal opened on the right, different from the intersecting tunnels. Hutch paused to peer in, holding the lantern up. It was a room devoid of furniture. Paper posters remained taped to the concrete walls. Several corners had come loose to dog-ear over the message. Enough of the posters showed for Hutch to understand their purpose: safety messages, both general (“Report all injuries at once to management”) and mine-specific (“Never descend without your partner”). As he turned to leave, a notice by the door caught his attention. The size of a sheet of copy paper, it was mounted behind a sheet of scratched and murky Plexiglas. His heart raced as he held the lantern closer.

  It was a map of the tunnel system showing routes for emergency evacuation. From an X, which Hutch took to indicate this room, a series of heavy red arrows turned left and right through a diagram of the tunnels ending at the main entrance. A series of orange squiggles like tildes followed a serpentine path in the opposite direction. A legend at the bottom of the map identified the red arrows as the “primary emergency evacuation route” and the orange squiggles as the “secondary emergency evacuation route.”

  “Dillon, I think I found a way out. I need to set you down for a minute.”

  Dillon leaned his head back to look Hutch in the face. “I’m okay now. I can walk.”

  Hutch bent forward to set the boy on his feet. “Can you hold this for me?” he said, handing the lantern to Dillon. Dillon took it and held it high. Hutch pulled at the Plexiglas, but it was solidly affixed to the wall by a screw in each corner.Time had not loosened any of them even enough for him to wedge his fingertips between the wall and the Plexiglas. Hutch had nothing on him to unscrew the mounts or pop the covering free.

  The room shook. Nearby, a wall cracked. In the tunnel rubble tumbled and fell.

  “Come with me,” he told Dillon. He stepped into the hall. His shadow grew long and swung like a time-lapsed movie of a sundial as Dillon brought the lantern up behind him. He did not have to step far into the tunnel to find what he was looking for. He bent and hefted a chunk of concrete.

  “Okay. Back into the room.”

  With Dillon holding the lantern a few feet from the map, Hutch said, “Turn your head away.” He smashed the concrete into the map’s clear covering, creating a small white bruise in the Plexiglas. He hit it again and again. Either the concrete was not as hard as it should have been, or the Plexiglas was tougher than it needed to be; whichever, the combination wasn’t working. He dropped the concrete and stared at the map. The volume of tunnels, coupled by the number of turns required to reach the first secondary exit, defeated his thought of memorizing the route or even accurately copying it to the back of the topo map.

  Another strike.The floor canted and leaned. Dillon staggered back.

  “I have an idea,” Hutch said. “Set the lantern on the floor and go into the hall for a sec.”

  Unsure, Dillon relinquished the lantern, walked to the portal, and stopped. Hutch removed his utility belt from his shoulder and snapped it around his waist. He unslung his bow, removed an arrow, and nodded at Dillon. “Just around the corner.”

  Dillon stepped into the tunnel and stopped.

  “I know it’s dark, Dillon. But it’ll be okay, and I need only ten seconds.” Slowly Dillon edged around the corner.

  Hutch backed to the center of the room, nocked the arrow onto the bowstring, and pulled back.The broadhead struck the Plexiglas at 240 feet per second and ricocheted back into the room. It clattered against a wall before settling on the floor.

  “Okay, Dillon,” Hutch said.

  The boy hopped into the room as though he’d heard something whispering to him in the dark.

  “See?” Hutch pointed toward the map.

  The arrow had struck the Plexiglas two inches below its top edge and horizontally dead center. It had caused a shard of Plexiglas to break off and a crack to run in a jagged line down to the bottom edge. Hutch pried at the break with his fingers. It lifted, allowing him to get a grip. He pulled hard and half of the cover snapped away. He did the same with the other half. Hutch suddenly worried that the map had been plastered to the wall and would not come free intact. But when he picked at a corner, the entire page fluttered loose. Dehydrated squares of rolled tape remained on the wall.

  Hutch smiled at Dillon. “And they say men don’t ask for directions.”

  The room shook more violently than ever. It may have been his imagination, but Hutch would have sworn the dog-growl had become a full-throated snarl, as though they were no longer hearing the cannon strikes, the finger jabs, through tons of earth and concrete; somewhere the tunnels had opened up to the sky. If Declan had continued to pound at the area near the entrance, most likely he would now target the tunnels deeper into the mine, closer to where Hutch and Dillon were. If they didn’t move fast, all the maps in the world, all the secondary exits, would be as helpful as a parka in hell.

  The room shook again, and the beast’s voice bellowed through the tunnels on a current of hot air. The blasts were coming quicker. Inscrutably optimistic, part of Hutch believed that this signaled the approaching end of the weapon’s window of opportunity. Declan was racing against a clock.

  Dillon had just picked up the lantern when yet another strike came. He staggered sideways, took two steps back, and plopped on his butt to the floor. A second shock wave—or a new blast—rippled the ground, flipping Dillon backward. His leg rose straight up; his arms shot out for balance.

  As Hutch watched in horror, the lantern crashed to the concrete and winked out.

  50

  Declan sat on the ridge of the crater directly opposite the mine’s entrance. He held the weapon’s control device in two hands, playing it as he would a video game.

  That was, after all, the point. For years he had been telling his father that the future of warfare lay in the technology of video games. Not only did hyperrealistic simulations train soldiers and pilots, but since an entire generation of game-heads were reaching fighting age, equipping them with weapons modeled on controllers and games would facilitate their success on the battlefield. Instead of video games mimicking reality, reality would be shaped by the imaginations of video-game programmers. In the gaming community, the learning of new skill sets occurred lightning fast. Each new game required new abilities, new disciplines. Hand a new recruit a traditional assault rifle, and with intense instruction and practice he might master it—that is, use it to kill before being killed—in a month or two. Give a gamer a weapon patterned after one used in a popular first-person shooter, and he’d be down with it in two days.

  His father owned several companies that serviced the industrial military complex. They designed weapons, both small and large. One division focused on antipersonnel weapons—such cool little devices as cluster bombs, which explode in the air and hurl shrapnel over a wide radius. Other divisions worked on anti-bunker, -building, and -vehicle devices; large-scale destruction; antimissile technology; and satellite weaponry.

  These companies worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the Pentagon’s division responsible for thinking up crazy, sci-fi technology and getting it into soldiers’ hands. DARPA was credited with developing stealth jets, night-vision optics, the M16 rifle, and the computer mouse. Countless weapons and devices still on DARPA’s drawing boards had already found their way into the video games Declan’s company created. These cutting-edge, seemingly fanciful tools of warfare made his business one of the fastest growing and most successful game producers in the world.

  Not that Declan was satisfied. He was convinced that ente
rtainment was only the tip of the gaming iceberg. The ergonomic, timesensitive nature of video games made their technology ideal for many other aspects of a busy, frantic world. For instance, smart homes, controlled by remotes modeled on handheld gaming devices, could save hours a day in a homemaker’s life. Are the kids doing their homework? Check the controller. Did you forget to shut the garage door? The controller will check and shut it if necessary. Ready to start dinner? You get the idea.

  Declan believed the best opportunity for synergy, growth, and profit was the incorporation of gaming culture into the art of war. Not only could weaponry and training bring warfare into a new age, but gamers were hungry for military scenarios. Money would flow in both directions. And money was Daddy’s language.

  Declan’s father had finally consented to bring Declan into the loop on a top-secret new weapon. Everything about this weapon demanded the skills found in top gamers: hand-eye coordination, quick thinking, digital dexterity, the ability to scan a series of numbers and icons and instantly know what they meant in all their various combinations, and the ability to manipulate a dozen different buttons and combinations of buttons in response, all in three seconds. The weapon his father’s company had created was a satellite laser cannon—SLC. Current satellite weapons were relatively weak because their chemical oxygen iodine lasers tended to be solar powered, which didn’t give them enough “oomph” (a word his dad’s scientists had frowned at, but ultimately agreed was accurate). Couple that with atmospheric turbulence, which dissipates laser beams, and by the time they reached the earth’s surface, they couldn’t light a birthday candle. His father’s company had developed a laser powered by a nuclear reactor. The reactor amped up the laser to a degree that made it an effective weapon against earthbound targets. In addition, the nuclear power allowed the laser to recharge in seconds rather than the minutes or even hours of previous laser-weapon technology.

  Trouble was, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibited nuclear weapons in space. It was his father’s belief that demonstrating the effectiveness of this weapon to the powers at the Pentagon would convince them to find a way around the treaty. One loophole his father’s attorneys found was large enough to sail a satellite through: the nuclear reactor they needed was not itself the weapon; it only powered the weapon. It should be classified not as a nuclear weapon, but as a nuclear power source.