Extinction Machine

Chapter Eighty-eight

Elk Neck State Park

Cecil County, Maryland

Sunday, October 20, 12:33 p.m.

I found Junie and Ghost where I’d left them, and I popped a flare for the Echo Team chopper to pick us up. If there were any Closers left in the forest, they steered clear.

Bunny and Lydia and Pete pulled us into the Black Hawk and we dusted off immediately. Everybody wanted to do a lot of back-slapping, but I growled for some damn quiet so I could yell at the pilot.

“Get us the hell out of range of this damn jammer. Pedal to the metal.”

The chopper rose high and turned to the southwest. Ivan and Sam were crouched down behind the two miniguns, the barrels depressed toward the forest.

Nothing and no one shot at us.

We thought we’d come through the fire.

Then we passed out of the jam zone.

I called the Warehouse. And got nothing.

I tapped over to Bug’s channel.

He was there.

He was crying.

He told me why.

Everyone was on the team channel. They all heard it.

It punched the air out of my lungs. The interior of the helo began spinning as if we were trapped in the heart of a cyclone.

“What?” I whispered. “What?”

A big sob broke in Bug’s chest. This was killing him.

“Bug … what about Rudy? What about Church?”

“Oh, Jesus, Joe,” he said, his voice breaking with pain, “I don’t know. The whole area around the Warehouse is gone…”

I spoke to Aunt Sallie, to Dr. Hu. I spoke to several other DMS officials. There was a scramble to get the staff out of every field office. Bomb squads were searching the buildings, inside and out.

No one knew anything.

There was no word about Church and Rudy, or about anyone else who had been at the Warehouse.

Auntie went over everything. Stuff I knew about, stuff I didn’t want to hear. It was all bad. The events at Dugway. The Chinese pilot who got shot down trying to make a suicide run at a carrier in the Taiwan Strait. And the thing that had appeared in both places. A massive, triangular craft that destroyed the Locust and shot down the Chinese fighter and then vanished at impossible speeds. She told me about sightings of UFOs all over the country. All over the world.

And she told me about the warrant out for my arrest on charges that I was a terrorist.

When I told her that I had Junie Flynn and that she was, for all intents and purposes, a living version of the Majestic Black Book, all Aunt Sallie said was, “Okay.”

She ordered me to go to a safe house. I told her that I had one in mind and explained where it was. Then I hung up and went back into the main cabin. We clustered around the computer in the back and listened to the news. Dozens of buildings were on fire, hundreds of people injured. The number of known dead was forty, but the newscasters couldn’t have known that the entire staff of the Warehouse had been called into work. All of them. Two hundred people.

Gone now.

I felt totally numb.

I looked at Junie, who was huddled in a seat, hugging Ghost to her chest. I looked at the shocked faces and horrified eyes of Top and Bunny and the others.

None of us spoke.

None of us could.