Extinction Machine

Chapter Seventy-seven

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 12:01 p.m.

There were a million questions I wanted to ask Junie, but suddenly Ghost came racing down into the tunnel, gave me a sharp whuff, then turned around and stared back along the path he’d come. We froze and listened, and after five long seconds we heard it. Men’s voices. Terse and harsh.

“God,” whispered Junie, “they found us!”

I shook my head. “No, if they did they’d either be yelling or making no sound at all. I think they’re following that trail.” I nodded to the one we’d been paralleling. “Maybe there’s another team coming up from the far side and it’s our bad luck we’re in the middle.”

“What do we do?”

I held a finger to my lips and she nodded and fell silent. I left Ghost with her as I climbed out of the tunnel and up onto higher ground, ready to ambush them if they found our hidey-hole.

Five minutes passed and the voices faded.

Then we heard new voices coming from a different direction.

We waited them out, too.

Minutes crawled by.

The voices finally went away.

After they were gone, I drifted back down to Junie.

“Are they going to find us?” she asked. She leaned very close to whisper in my ear, and despite the blood and ash on our clothes I was very deeply aware of the sweet faintness of her perfume and the heat from her soft cheek.

You’re a frickin’ idiot, growled the Cop inside my head. Keep your head in the game.

I cut a sideways look at Junie’s beautiful face, and I told my inner Cop to go piss up a rope.

“No,” I said. “I’m going to go find them.”

Her hand darted out and closed around my wrist. “You can’t! They’ll kill you.”

“I need to go take a look,” I said. “We need to know if we can wait here or if we’re in the center of a net.”

Junie touched my arm. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

Her question caught me as I was rising, and for a moment I settled back down into a crouch. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll be very careful.”

That coaxed a smile from her. Small, but damn if it didn’t light up the day.

But I lingered a moment longer. “Junie … when we get out of this, when we get back to the world … you understand that my people are going to need to know everything you know about the book. You get that, right?”

She nodded.

“This isn’t about you getting revenge for what they did to your parents. And it’s not about sharing alien technology with the whole world. All personal considerations are back burner.”

“But—”

I took her by the shoulders and shifted around so that we were face to face. “Junie, this is about saving a big chunk of the world. The southern coast of Africa, all of England, Scotland, and Ireland, a sizable chunk of Western Europe, and the entire eastern seaboard of the United States. Do the math, honey, because that racks up to about a billion people who are going to drown under the worst tsunami in recorded history if we don’t stop it.”

“How can we stop it?” she demanded. “What if whoever took the president wants the Black Book destroyed? Will you shoot me? Or will you let Mr. Church do it? He seems cold enough.”

“You tell me what I should do,” I growled. “You saw the videos, you know the score. What should I do?”

“I think we should try and get the actual damn Black Book. There’s only one copy. Maybe that’s what they want you to get. They don’t even know about me.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Junie? Who do you think took the president?”

She took a moment before she said, “Them.”

“Say it.”

“The aliens, okay. I think the aliens took the president and they want the Black Book.”

“How does that make sense? If they can abduct the president, how come they don’t just take the Black Book?”

“Maybe they don’t know where it is.”

“How can they not? They’re aliens.”

“Does that automatically make them psychic? Who knows what the problem is? Maybe it’s taken them a long time to figure out how to communicate with us. Maybe there aren’t that many of them. Maybe they simply don’t know who has the Black Book.”

“Then why go to these lengths to get it?”

“I don’t know. Something pushed them,” she said with heat. “They’ve been silent all this time, but something changed. But they clearly don’t know everything. I mean … their ships crashed. A lot of them. That has to say something about them as fallible beings. Maybe they only just learned about the Black Book and realized what kind of threat it poses. I don’t know, Joe. I’m just guessing, too. All I know is that there are at least two copies of the Black Book. M3 has one and I’m the other. You have to decide which one you want to give to the aliens.”

I sat back on my heels. “Your aliens are playing some serious hardball. They’re willing to kill a billion people to get that book.”

“No,” she said. “We don’t know what they’re doing. The fact that you can make a comment like that shows how much you don’t know about them.”

“Junie, I don’t know anything about them. Even if I am starting to edge toward accepting that this is real, I don’t know one single thing about whoever built the crafts that M3 is studying. What are they like? Did they come here to conquer us? Are they studying us to determine our weaknesses? Is this some kind of alien seedpod invasion?”

“What they look like isn’t important, Joe. You’re like everyone else, you keep trying to ascribe human emotions to them. You think that if a race is powerful then they could only get that way through military force.”

“You saw the video…”

“Okay, we both saw the video. Do you understand what it means? I mean, really understand it? How do we know it doesn’t have multiple meanings? How do we know that it’s even a threat? It could be a warning.”

“Pretty harsh for a warning.”

“That’s because you think like a soldier and you think they think that way, too. They haven’t attacked us after all these years, what makes you believe that they’re even capable of violence? Maybe they’re warning us of what could happen if somebody else builds a working Device. China, Russia … They could be trying to help us. No, we just can’t assume they’re violent. Not everyone is.”

I shook my head. “Show me a culture that isn’t violent. Even the Swiss used to be warriors. Ditto the Tibetans. There were armed soldiers in the service of the Dalai Lama. Soldiers and armed police guard the Pope. History and every holy book you can find is filled with stories of war and conquest. It’s a side effect of being a predator species. We may aspire to civilized and harmonious behavior, Junie, but it’s not natural to us.”

“I’m not saying it’s not natural to them either.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying that they are alien, so we shouldn’t make assumptions. We have to stop trying to understand them based on what we know of ourselves. That’s polluted thinking.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, and rubbed my eyes. “I should have stayed in bed today. I was nursing a well-earned hangover and…”

My words trailed away as my mind conjured a picture of Violin. I glanced away from Junie, not wanting her to read anything in my eyes.

“Time’s flying away from us,” I said. “No more talk. Get down and hide. I’ll leave Ghost with you. If there’s something he can’t handle he’ll make some noise and I’ll come running.”

“Where are you going?”

“It’s hunting season, right?” I asked, and left it there. “Now come on, hide.”

She did as directed, vanishing completely in the dense undergrowth. All Ghost had to do was lay down and he became invisible in the tall grass. I moved off, veering away from our back trail and then heading upwind of the sounds.

I tried my earbud again, but got only dead air. Bug and Church had to know I was off the grid by now, even if the Coast Guard call didn’t go anywhere; but what was the best-case scenario for a rescue? Half an hour? An hour?

That was not encouraging. I didn’t know how many of the Closers were out in these woods. They had helicopters, too. Maybe thermal imaging.

I regretted not grabbing one of the long guns, but when the lighthouse blew up my mind was more focused on not burning to death than on arming for a prolonged war. Now I wondered if I should have circled around and made a smarter choice. I had my Beretta and a couple of full magazines, and I had my rapid-release folding knife, a lifetime’s study of jujutsu, and a lot of years camping in these woods. How did that stack up against the Closers? We’d have to see.

Best-case scenario was that the Coast Guard took our call seriously and a fleet of choppers and half a dozen Zodiacs crammed with sailors were about to bring down six kinds of hell on these Closers. Sure, I told myself, and the charge would led by the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Inside my head a debate was raging. The Modern Man aspect of my personality was yelling at me to Run, run, run.

The Cop wanted answers and he was losing patience. When he did that he tended to act more like the Warrior. And that part of me, the Killer, wanted to turn this reconnaissance run into a hunt. He was telling me that if you run then you’re prey. That’s weak, that’s vulnerable, and it would probably get Junie killed as well as me.

Hunt the hunters, whispered that merciless voice.

I slowed from a light run to a crouching walk and then to stillness. Shallowing my breathing. Listening to the woods.

At least one of the helicopters was up there, but it was far away. North and west of where I crouched. Searching down near the main part of the campground, blocking the most natural exit from the park.

When you hunt like this you learn to tune things out. It’s not that you don’t hear them, but once a sound is cataloged you allow it to fade into the background so that other sounds can present themselves for identification. The same goes with movement. The forest is a living thing, it’s always moving, it’s always making sound, even in the very depths of winter. Here, in this freakish holdover of a summer that did not want to relinquish its grasp on these Maryland woods, there were a thousand sounds. Birds and animals moving through the leaves, the creak of trees in the breeze, the exhalation of the forest as its breath passed between and through the millions of intertwined branches.

There were no more voices.

I waited, letting the Closers hunt Junie so I could hunt them.

The Closers.

Over the last hour that name had already been burned into my private lexicon. I thought of them as “Closers,” but on another level I had a different word for them.

Prey.

I heard a man’s voice, speaking low and quiet. Just two words.

“This way.”

Inside my head, the Warrior grinned.

Yes, he whispered, come this way.