Extinction Machine

Chapter Sixty-four

Turkey Point Lighthouse, Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 10:57 a.m.

We ran and hell followed after.

The whole lighthouse shuddered like a man does when he’s taken a bullet but hasn’t yet realized he’s dead. The walls cracked, crooked lines ran from top to bottom. The wooden stairs groaned as the bolts tore themselves free from the juddering structure.

“Run!” I screamed.

But she was running as fast as she could. As fast as it was possible to run down a set of stairs that was rippling like a serpent, twisting itself into an Escher-esque impossibility. The top of the lighthouse was a fireball. Flaming debris rained down on us. There was a great cry of tortured metal and I looked up to see the massive reflector come plunging through the burning deck to drop like a fiery comet to the concrete floor below. I dove for Junie and nearly crushed her against the wall as tons of metal and wood and flame smashed past us, the jagged steel beams of the reflector’s support reaching out to pluck at the handrail.

“God!” Junie shrieked.

The stairs were starting to collapse. I grabbed Junie’s hand and pulled her as I ran down. Shocked and terrified as she was, she ran with me. Civilian she might be, but she was not falling apart. Chunks of building stone tried to crush us. The stairs wanted to die beneath us. Heat bloomed up from the growing mound of debris that now filled the center of the lighthouse.

There was a huge crack and I felt the whole last section of stairs cant outward, reeling like a suicidal drunk toward the fire.

“Junie—jump!”

Her hand locked tight around mine and then we were in the air with nothing under us but hot air and a hard landing.

Ten feet doesn’t sound like a lot of distance to fall.

It is.

As we hit, I dropped into a crouch, taking as much of the impact as I could in my calves and thighs. I pulled Junie against my chest and twisted so that we hit the ground on my side and rolled over and over like a log, sloughing off the foot pounds of force. But I rolled a half turn too far. Into the edges of the burning rubble. Flames leaped onto my shirt and jeans.

With a howl of pain I thrust Junie away from me and I tried to roll fast enough to smother the flames. Then a shadow passed in front of me and Junie was there, on her feet already, tearing off her coat, swatting at me with it, killing the fires that wanted to consume me.

I scrambled to my feet, my clothes smoking but no longer burning.

“Thanks,” I said breathlessly, and she managed, despite everything, to give me a crooked grin on a soot-smudged and fear-flushed face.

One hell of a woman.

There was another cracking sound and we looked up in horror to see a massive fissure snapping its way down the wall.

“It’s all coming down,” she cried.

“We have to get out of here,” I snapped. “Right damn now.”

Junie tossed her smoking coat away as we headed for the back door to the house. The door was still ajar and I shouldered through it, drawing my gun, pointing the barrel everywhere I looked. There was no one in the kitchen except the dead man Ghost had killed, sprawled in a lake of blood.

I heard Junie make a soft sound, a grunt that was an inarticulate and visceral reaction to the presence of violent death.

“Don’t look at it,” I said, but it was too feeble and too late.

Junie edged around the blood as if it were a hole into which she could topple and fall. I jumped over the corpse and ran to the window. She crowded in beside me. Perhaps it was an accident or maybe she had that much presence of mind, but she pressed against my left hand rather than my gun hand.

Outside, the helicopters were still hovering above us, admiring the destruction they’d wrought. One was stationed high, missiles aimed for another blast. The other was lower, angled sideways with the bay door open and the ugly snout of a minigun pointed straight at the house.

But we were inside, in shadows, and they couldn’t see us.

“What are they doing?” asked Junie.

“Watching to see if anyone comes running outside.”

“What can we do?”

Without getting too close to the window glass, I angled my head to look up and down the yard. I spotted Ghost. He was alive, crouched under a pine tree forty feet from the house. He looked terrified.

Lot of that going around.

“Are we dead?” gasped Junie.

It was so strangely worded a question that I turned to her. Usually people ask Are we trapped? or Can we get out?

Are we dead?

That was a different kind of question and it opened within my mind a window of speculation about her. It also provoked a response from my inner committee. The Cop barked a sharp denial. Cold and certain. The Warrior rose up and thumped his chest to prove that he was the toughest ape in the tree. But the Modern Man, the quietest and least often heard from of my inner selves, spoke in the clearest voice.

“No, Junie,” he said, using my mouth, my voice, “we’re going to live.”

It was a clumsy line, awkwardly phrased, a bit of bad melodrama. And yet I knew that I meant it, and I knew that those words conveyed more than their surface meaning. I looked into Junie Flynn’s blue eyes and saw understanding and trust and—something else. It looked like sadness, but she gripped my wrist and gave me a firm nod.

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

We backed away from the window and ran through the house to the front door. The dead men lay where I’d left them. Inside and out.

“Listen to me,” I said. “Right now they don’t know if we’re alive or dead. They’re going to shoot at anything that moves.”

“What do we do?”

“We give them something to shoot at.” I pointed to a stand of sassafras trees thirty yards to the right of the open door. “I’m going to draw their fire. You run for those trees like your ass is on fire.”

She frowned. “What about you?”

“I’ll be right behind you. Their focus is going to be the kitchen. As soon as you hear them open up, you move.” I touched her cheek. “No matter what happens, stay low and get lost in the woods. You know this forest, you live here. Find people. Find help.”

I fished a card out of my pocket. All it had on it was a phone number.

“As soon as you can, call this number. They’ll connect you with my boss, the man you spoke to earlier.”

She glanced at the card and handed it back.

“No, you’ll—”

Junie recited the number back perfectly and tapped her head. “Like an elephant, Joe, I never forget.”

I grinned at her. “Good brain you have there.”

“At times.”

As I made to move away, Junie suddenly grabbed my shirt and pulled me close for a very brief and totally unexpected kiss.

“For luck,” she said as she pushed me away.

I goggled at her. “Wow,” I said.

“Go!” she ordered.

I went.

The chopper with the minigun was slowly descending, clearly preparing to land on the lawn beside the flower garden. The kitchen was filling with smoke and I realized that pretty soon the entire place was going to be a bonfire. Junie was going to lose everything she owned. That gave me a flash of panic and I spun and ran back to the living room.

“Junie—the fire’s spreading.”

“No!”

“Your computer, the records about the Black Book. We need to get that stuff—we need to take that with us.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I have it all stored on my Web site in blind pages, and I’ve attached a lot of it to e-mails I sent myself. There’s some stored in cloud servers, too. The rest of it…” She went to touch her head, but her hand faltered. She took a breath and tapped her skull. “I’ve got the rest of it here. I don’t forget things.”

Smoke was coming up from between the floorboards now. Some of the debris must have punched through into the cellar and now the fire was burning up. We were out of time.

“We need that information,” I warned Junie.

“Then we have to get out of here. Get me to a good computer with a secure Wi-Fi and I’ll get you everything you need.”

I nodded and ran through the smoke into the kitchen. The chopper was ten feet above the grass.

Scary in one way, perfect in another.

With my Beretta in a two-handed grip, I leaned my thighs against the sink, aimed out the window and squeezed the trigger. The first shot hit the black metal beside the open door. The second shot hit the Closer who was crouched over the minigun. Not sure where I hit him, but it was solid enough to punch him back into the shadows of the helo. I paused to wait for the next man to swing into position to return fire. He did, leaping forward to grab the minigun, swinging the barrel around toward the house.

I took him in the face.

It was a long shot and I was aiming center mass, but it clipped him right above his snarling mouth. Lucky shot for me, damned unlucky for him.

Then the pilot turned the bird to bring his 30mm gunpods to bear.

“Kiss my ass,” I yelled, then spun and ran like a son of a bitch for the living room even as the first bullets began tearing the rear of the house into splinters, broken glass and flying debris.

Junie was right there and I did not even pause. I shoved her toward the door and I was pleased to see that she took the force of my push and used it to settle into a nice, fast, efficient sprint. For a tall woman she ran well.

The machine gun fire was continuous, the sound enormous; with that din we never heard the sounds of the other helo firing its rockets.

We were a dozen feet from the sassafras trees when the house exploded.

A huge, rolling, tumbling ball of superheated gases chased us across the lawn, caught us, plucked us off the grass, and hurled us screaming into the forest.