CICADA: A Stone Age World Novel (24 page)

She stood up and saw that Lunder had already dashed toward Carrington and hit him with his entire body weight, knocking him down to the floor.

The room filled with light.

Max hobbled into his residence, exhausted and in agony. He hadn’t slept for over sixty hours, and there was no way he was going to get any sleep soon. He tossed his equipment down in a heap in the living room, grimacing at the burn raging in his right bicep, where he took a bullet and his swollen left ankle, where he landed after falling from the rope.

He limped over to the bookshelves between the living room and office and stopped at the one garnering the most attention since his return. He called it his Decision Shelf, because he knew life came down to one of these two decisions: on one side of the shelf was a three-quarters-full bottle of tequila and on the other side, his military leather Bible. The bottle of tequila had lost most of its dust; the book was still covered by over a year’s worth of neglect. He knew the decision he would make right now, even though the other offered wisdom and peace. He didn’t want peace; he wanted justice. He wanted to seek revenge and had no desire to find peace or purpose in all of this.

Max swiped the bottle and a glass from another shelf and moved over to his desk. A healthy pour later, he slumped in his chair, deflated. He gazed at the amber liquid, its satisfying fragrance already greeting his nose, beckoning him to take a sip. He took a gulp as he mulled things over.

Senator Brian Westerling, the leader of Bios-2, a Cicada copy, was killing the world and probably didn’t even know it. Yet this man, who convinced Preston to give up their building and design plans and to divert their scientists and who had killed two of his people today, seemed determined to kill them or make them suffer. And now Bios-2 had sent an invading army.

But why?

He took another gulp, his festering anger not at all tempered by the tequila’s harshness, despite its spreading warmth. “And where the hell are you, Bill? Cockerell said you took the hovercraft. Did you really go on some stupid mission just to get intel while riding on some experimental blue toaster?” He hollered at the tequila bottle, as if it were responsible.

He cackled at the thought of calling Bill’s mission stupid when his own mission was at best a fool’s errand. How could he have thought that taking five people, four with little training, on an assault mission to a place they’ve never been to and had no intelligence on, all to turn off a nuclear reactor that was killing the planet, was anything but idiotic?

“How could you be so damned stupid?” he scolded himself. First Felix was zapped by some sort of lightning gun, burning him so completely, you couldn’t carbon date him. Then Rob died while Max was carrying him back. And then there were Sue’s and Pel’s injuries, which weren’t life threatening, but still serious. These casualties were because of his rush to judgement and poor planning. It was so unlike him. He always planned.

But lately he had been filled with rage; a frustration born from a desire to keep everyone safe.

He took another sip of the harsh liquid as he tilted back in his chair with his eyes closed.

Think Max, think
.

“We have a mole.” He sprang forward and glared at the bottle that held all the answers. “Westerling found out about our raid from the mole. No other way he could have known I was there and taken credit for my killing. And that’s why they were ready for us. He was contacted by one of the people we trust. It had to be someone who has phone access, too.”

He looked to the left of the bottle and noticed the portable hard drive and notebook he had taken from Sampson’s lab on his desk, waiting for him to investigate. “Sampson, you must have been up to something, or why else would your apartment have been tossed? Someone, probably our mole, was looking for something, but what?”

Max booted up his computer, and while he waited, he slid the notebook to him and started to thumb through it. When the computer was ready, he plugged in Sampson’s portable drive and then leaned back and looked at Sampson’s nearly illegible handwriting, hoping he could make sense of it.

He was sure the answers lay within.

Sally King was grinning, babying the new-to-her copy of
The Stand
under her arm and gripping Max’s monster flashlight as she emerged from Cicada’s not-at-all-public Library. She was excited, almost giddy. Uncle Max was alive, and she had a date. Okay, maybe not a date in the normal sense of the word, but she was meeting Webber in Comms. He had just stopped by after the man-whose-name-she-still-can’t-remember told her the news about Max. Webber told her not to worry about the invading army, as they had a plan, and he wanted her help in Comms because Magdalena was with Max in the infirmary. Afterward, they’d have some dinner at the Rec Facility. She wasn’t sure if it was the tech or the man or both, but she was positively excited about this.

She strolled through the Library’s grand doorway, its hinges not making a peep as it closed, and she practically skipped to the elevator.

She heard something and stopped.

The sound of a man’s voice, muffled as if he was holding his hand over his mouth, perhaps in an attempt to be not heard. The disjointed mutter seemed to come from above, floating down from the concrete ceiling. It was a man’s voice and it sounded familiar. She shuffled around trying to determine its origination.

The closet.

It was the utility closet, and besides Dr. Ron’s laboratory and the Library, it was the only other door on this floor.

She was told that there were communications boxes and much of the network cabling running through there to other points in this building and out to the others. But currently inside this closet was a man having a conversation with someone, but she only heard the one voice, as if he were on a phone.

Max stopped at a note in Sampson’s notebook, scribbled in almost illegible script, and read it twice:

There is one other on the inside, like me: he is IT
.

Max thought about what that meant. This mole, who has been working under their noses this whole time, whose sole purpose has been to hurt us and was directly responsible for today’s deaths of Felix and Rob. It had to be someone he didn’t know. It had to be someone who Bios-2 sent to them or they got to, like Sampson, although he still didn’t understand Sampson’s motivations. Perhaps this would be on his portable drive, but he didn’t have the time or the desire to investigate someone’s motivations. He was much more interested in their actions. The land they now lived in required decisive actions, with little consideration to the reasons why. And when someone committed a crime, the punishment needed to be quick and absolute.

Who could it be?
he wondered. What the hell did he mean by
he is it
? He looked again and noticed that Sampson had written
I
T
, not
it
; he meant the mole is an Informational Technologies guy.

Then he knew who it was.

“Yes, plans are in place,” the muffled male voice said, much more clearly, her ear practically on the door.

Silence as the man must be listening to the other voice on a what? Phone? Radio? Probably not a radio because you couldn’t transmit out of this building. It had to be a phone.

“When will it happen?”

Silence.

“What, in an hour?”

Rustling sounds, as if equipment was being moved.
He’s leaving!

“Okay, I’ll be waiting for a sign—”
Click-click-click
. “—Operations, are you there?”

Then there was a louder click and more movement.

Sally softly bounced on the balls of her feet toward the Library, to a niche where she thought she could hide in the shadows. She saw the closet door open further, just as she slipped into the protective darkness.

The door closed and the man’s footsteps moved away from her, to the elevator.

Tentatively, she stuck her head out, just enough to see him walking away. He was carrying a small orange case, the kind that might carry a two-way speakerphone butt-set, used to test and talk on phone lines. And… he was wearing a blue baseball cap, just like Webber’s.

Max drained his tumbler in one gulp and slammed it down on the desk, almost breaking it. Grabbing his .45 and scabbard off the pile on the floor, he slipped both into his belt against the small of his back while moving to the door.

The burn of anger squelched his pain and fatigue.

Before he was out his front door, he examined the picture of the Kings and said to Bill’s image, “Hang on, buddy. I need to kill an asshole traitor first before I can go out and find you.”

The blast was strong enough to blow back one of the glass wall’s doors, propelling her backwards into the window-wall. Now Melanie felt like all the air was sucked out of her lungs. She breathed so rapidly that she was hyperventilating and near passing out.

Did this just happen?

Had she seen the man she loved kill himself and take out Lunder and Westerling?

She could only gape, dumbfounded and desperately trying to take in air. It was as if she forgot how to breathe.

Westerling’s office was obliterated. Wires and pipes hung from the ceiling, water spurting from a severed pipe; sparks flew, arced and then dropped into the smoky air like fireworks; and ragged debris hung or piled up everywhere. The glass wall held up, with only one panel laced with cracks; thousands of little bits of glass still held together as one but threatening to fall into a heap of unrecognizable pieces like the rest of the office.

There was no other movement inside. After that blast, she didn’t expect to see any. Carrington had been thorough, planning every part of this, and they hadn’t seen it coming; neither did she. He wanted her to hear what that monster had done, to all of them… to the whole earth. She couldn’t fathom that one man would kill billions of people just to have control over the surviving population.

“Well, looks like you can’t control everything, asshole,” she said glumly, finally regaining some of her breath.