“Don’t be.”
“I don’t know if I told you that, after what happened.”
“You don’t have to.”
He hugged her to him again.
“We have to do something,” Alex heard her say in his ear. “We need help.”
“Raiff will find us.”
“If he’s alive.”
“He’s alive.”
“And what if those things find us again first?”
“Then you’ll taser them again.”
She almost laughed. Almost. “I lost my taser.”
“We’ll buy another.”
“With what?”
“You ask too many questions.”
She slipped away from him, smoothed her hair and took off her glasses. “You said that to me in the hospital.”
“Because it’s true.”
“I’m not your tutor anymore, Alex. I think … I think it’s more like you’re mine.”
He reeled her back in against him. “Now, that’s a scary thought.”
Sam smiled and pressed her head against his heart.
Well, she thought, at least it’s beating. That’s something, anyway.
“Alex?”
“What?” he said, stroking her hair.
“It’s not a scary thought at all.”
Sam tightened her arms around him, feeling warm and safe in his grasp.
68
GROUND ZERO
LANGSTON MARSH WALKED ABOUT the ravaged FedEx Office store in Santa Cruz, awash in the spray of revolving light from the police vehicles still securing the scene with sawhorses. Dawn was just breaking, a beautiful sunrise starting to fill in the sky as if it were a coloring book. Marsh turned his gaze on that sky and envisioned what no one else did.
What was coming.
His identification listed him as Homeland Security, the catchall most guaranteed to keep other officials quiet and deferential. He didn’t have much time, knew real agents from Homeland Security would likely be here soon to try and make sense of the evidence and witness statements, which made no sense at all.
To everyone but him, that is.
Rathman trailed him at a safe distance, arriving here what might have been mere minutes after this, whatever this was, had happened. He watched Marsh retracing the same path over and over again, as if wondering if seeing the very same things might change his view of them. He let his gaze linger on the security cameras.
“Anything?”
“Just static. Nothing but snow, sir.”
“Our enemy is formidable, Colonel. We must give them that much.”
Marsh surveyed the scene once more, feeling as if it were the first time again. The shattered remnants of severed robotic parts, with wires running through them instead of veins and current instead of blood, that lay strewn all over the store’s interior was final proof, provided undeniable affirmation of the merits of his life’s work.
“A war zone, Colonel; that’s what this looks like. A war zone pulled from the future.”
“A war requires two sides, sir. And these … things aren’t what your Trackers have been pursuing.”
“Not at all,” Marsh acknowledged, looking at the upshot of the battle that had been fought here, again. “You’re reading my mind.”
“Just stating the obvious.”
“Which would imply these machines came after the boy. Are we to assume, then, that he’s the one who did this to them?” Marsh knelt and ran a finger sheathed in a plastic glove along the innards exposed by one of the robot’s heads being lopped off. “This cut is totally clean. There’s minimal scoring, suggesting the weapon that did it utilized heat or some kind of energy. A laser, maybe.”
“I’m seeing something else, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“A professional, capable of taking out the three in here and two out back. That’s not this boy.”
“We don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
Rathman crouched on the opposite side of the robot’s remains. “Because I know my enemies.”
“We need to collect some of this evidence, Colonel, before anyone is any the wiser.”
“Already done, sir.”
“And we need to find this boy,” Marsh said, his knees cracking audibly as he rose. “He’s the key. Find him and we’ll find the answers we need. I’ve already summoned all our teams to the area. Ground Zero—that’s what we’re looking at here.”
Rathman rose too, Marsh not liking something he saw in the big man’s eyes.
“What’s wrong, Colonel?”
“It’s all a bit hard to stomach, that’s all.”
Marsh knew there was more, even thought he knew what it was, but let it pass. In that moment, he felt like a frightened, bitter little boy again, angry over his father’s death and finding solace only in a resolution to seek revenge on his killers. From the first moment he’d glimpsed the wreckage of his father’s fighter plane, now displayed in his Memory Room, he’d known his murderer was something from beyond this world. Just as he’d known this day would come, the day for which he’d dedicated his entire life to preparing. Behind the vast success he’d attained, behind all the money he’d made, this day had been lurking. Soon the world would know what he had known for sixty years.