Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (20 page)

He was holding it by the barrel. Well, maybe that was safest.

I grabbed his other hand and pulled him along the hallway to my bedroom.

I left him standing in the hallway, still looking down at the gun in his hand. Inside the bedroom, I hurried to the wall safe. I pressed my hand to the touchplate, and the door opened.

Inside was an automatic, in a pretty pink leather holster that could fasten around your waist or be adjusted for shoulder carry. It had been manufactured shortly before the ship left Old Sun, so it looked nothing like the old Glock. I quickly strapped it around my waist.

There were many things I wanted to do, but I only had time to do one thing. I clicked to the security camera in the music room. I saw Max slowly crawling across the floor, getting as far from the door as possible. He was talking on his phone, but there is no sound in those cameras. Governor Wang was cowering in a corner.

I quickly zoomed in on Mama, who had fallen over and was almost hidden behind a display case with several instruments in it. I zoomed in even closer, on her head and upper body. After a few seconds I was sure she was breathing. I felt a great weight lift from my heart. If she was alive, they were most likely all alive, and Max and Wang were not mass murderers.

So the . . . Let’s call them what they were, okay? The mutineers were only two in number, and they didn’t seem to be armed. Max had taken the gun from Travis. Patrick and I were both armed now. Storm the room. Move the sideboard, pull the door open, and come in blasting.

But . . . no, dammit, they were both still wearing their gas masks, and if it was me, I’d take the damn things off as soon as the gas had cleared. So going into the room probably meant we would pass out. I remembered that moment of dizziness when I’d first opened the door.

The issue was decided for me when alarm warnings started appearing on the screen, and a calm voice alerted me to an unauthorized trespass from the road. The scene switched, and I saw a group of a dozen people, all dressed in black, hurrying through the trees and up the private road. I didn’t see any firearms, but some were carrying clubs, and ropes. Following them was a large panel truck.

I noticed it had begun to rain. I automatically checked my weather almanac, and sure enough, a fair-sized downpour was scheduled.

Another camera showed another group coming through the woods.

I frantically flipped through the outside cameras. The rear of the house—the dock and the boathouse and the pond—seemed empty. It looked like our only chance.

Time to go.

Patrick was still in his semistupor and had begun to wander back toward the music room. I grabbed his hand, and he pulled it away.

“I need to see if my mother and father are all right,” he said, and started down the hall. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt and swung him around.

“Patrick, they’re alive, I saw them breathing.” A lie, but I was confident the part about their being alive was true. “But there are people in there who wish us harm. Max was going to shoot us, you understand?”

“Max? But can’t we—”

“We don’t have a lot of options right now, Patrick. I saw a large group of people coming up the driveway, and some are carrying weapons and ropes. There’s at least one vehicle that looks like it could carry a lot of unconscious people away. We have to run.”

“Run where?”

“Out the back door, for now. For later . . . I don’t know. Listen, you just stay right here for a minute, okay? There’s one more thing I have to do. Will you stay?”

“. . . Okay.”

“Good boy.”

I took the old Glock from him and ran past the music room, down to the end of the hall, and opened the back door. I could see both groups coming toward the house. They were still about a hundred yards away. It was raining heavily now.

I took my shooter’s stance and aimed into the dense woods, just above their heads, and shot four rounds at each group. I could see some of the rounds knock bark off trees.

A few of them hit the ground at once, but most just stood there dumbly, not quite realizing what had happened.
Gunfire?
Was that
gunfire
?

“Yes, you stupid pricks,” some of them seemed to be yelling, motioning for the standees to get down and take cover.

I didn’t intend to shoot anybody. I didn’t really know who they were and what they were up to. My point was to let them know I
could
shoot them, and with any luck that fear would slow them down considerably. And it ought to be pretty unpleasant, lying prone on the ground, which was rapidly turning into mud.

I had seen the driver and passenger fling themselves from the truck and crawl for cover. So I aimed at the truck and shot the pistol until the slide stayed open. I could see and hear the windshield glass break, hear the rounds hitting the sides of the truck. That should give them something to think about.

Time to go, go, go.

Back in the house, I could see that Patrick was shaking, maybe going into shock, wavering between heading for the back door and the music room. There was no sign that Max had grown a pair of balls and started shoving at the door. I grabbed Patrick’s hand and pulled him toward the back.

There were so many things I wished I had the time to pick up in the house, but as I thought of each one, hurrying through the family room, I rejected it, realizing it would take too much time, and I was feeling strongly that time was running out. If the house got surrounded, we’d last until the bullets in my pistol ran out. I hadn’t expected to encounter guns from the opposition; Travis had controlled that too strictly. But it could be possible to make useful pistols or rifles. A bullet from a zip gun could kill you just as easily as one of my explosive rounds. And there were always bows and arrows, easy to come by, slings and spears and who knew what. People had been killing each other long before gunpowder.

Someone had planned all this out. It might not have been the greatest plan in the world—else why were Patrick and I still running around loose?—but I couldn’t count on stupidity on the other side.

So. No time to lose. I pulled Patrick through the screen door in back, then down the pier to the very end. By the time we got there, we were soaked, almost as if we were in a shower stall.

“Patrick, we have to go. Now.”

“Okay.” He still seemed dazed, but getting him outside seemed to have awakened him a little.

“Here’s the plan. The weak point in their perimeter is the pond back here. We need to swim someplace where we can get out unseen and find someplace to take cover, at least for a while.”

“Okay. Where?”

“You just follow me, got it? I know this pond like Mama Podkayne knows Pod music.”

We sat down on the end of the pier. I took off my shoes and shoved them under my gun belt. Patrick stuck his under his waistband. Then I lowered myself into the water. No diving, no big splash to alert the pursuit.

“Just a slow breaststroke, okay?” I told him. “Keep as low as you can, underwater as much as possible.”

He nodded, and we were off.

—

So you may be asking yourself, how did she do it?

How did an eighteen-year-old girl who had never encountered anything more violent than a hair-pulling match on the playground or anything more life-threatening than a fashion disaster at the junior prom manage to make all those split-second decisions, avoid dozens of pursuers, and just generally behave like a ninja assassin in a stupid, virtual-reality video game?

Well, part of the answer
is
video games. But not ordinary video games. The rest of the answer is training, practice, and a certain innate ability. You might say I was born to be a ninja assassin, then trained up to the role.

Since we were big enough to hold a pellet gun or a .22, Cassie and I have shot on the practice range at least once a week. When Travis is out of the bubble, he trains with us. But we both soon became better shots than he is. So we are quite familiar with weapons that no one else but Cassie and I, Mama, Uncle Mike, and Marlee even have access to.

Chalk it all up to Travis. Eternally paranoid, he insisted that Cassie and I train for the worst possible scenarios. In this, he had the support of Mama, who had been in a worst possible scenario and survived, and of Granddaddy Ramon and Granny Evangeline, who had fought in the Second Martian War and also knew what danger was.

So we learned to handle weapons. And we played video games.

Not the usual kind. Those are mostly a boy thing. There are no reset buttons in real life, more’s the pity. So the games we played were different.

Our video games were adapted from military, police, and real guerrilla-warfare training games. No monsters out in those simulated jungles and deserts and city streets, just a lot of real smart virtual guys and gals out to kill you before you killed them. Winning didn’t depend on body count, only on staying alive.

The games could take place anywhere on Old Earth or Mars, or in a hypothetical best-guess New Earth, where the exotic made-up animals lurked, but the ones I liked best happened all over
Rolling Thunder
. They could be human-violence or physical-emergency scenarios. Floods, breakdowns, explosions, cave-ins. The most frightening ones happened in a simulated interior of our own home. Which is why I was able to react quickly. I’d already been there, done that.

Training. Practice. And a sense of where you are, and what’s around you. Travis called it the ability to twist around in any situation and land on your feet. He has it, strongly, and so does Mama.

And Cassie and I have it even stronger. It’s one of the things that make us such good . . . well, I’ll go ahead and say it,
great
 . . . skypool players. We’re good at seeing things developing, patterns, multiple possible outcomes, alternatives. Split-second decisions. I imagine all athletes have it.

In case you think I’m bragging, I have independent confirmation from Mama. She didn’t tell us for a long time, saying she wanted to keep us sharp, but not long ago she revealed that she was having trouble coming up with situations we couldn’t handle.

“I just can’t seem to kill you girls anymore,” she told us.

—

We kept low in the water. Every minute or so, I went over on my back to take a look behind us, and for the first ten minutes I saw nothing. The gunshots had probably been a huge shock to them. They would approach the house carefully, or maybe not at all until reinforcements arrived.

The house had dwindled quite a bit when I finally saw a group of people come out on the dock. I couldn’t tell if they had come around the house or through it. But they were looking all around them. One of them looked like he had a pair of binoculars.

“Patrick, we need to move closer to shore.”

The closest side of the pond was lined with reeds and cattails and other growth sprouting from the water and trees that overhung it. Good cover, but also the obvious place for fugitives to hide. Anyone with any sense would be searching there first. On the other hand, the opposite shore was bare beach, and anyone coming out of the water there would be totally exposed. I headed us into the nearest shallows. Looking behind us, I could see a party of three moving along the opposite bank and a group coming along the shore in our direction.

“Patrick,
carefully
move in behind me here. Try not to stir up the silt too much. Try not to break off any of the reeds.”

“Toward the shore?”

“We have to conceal ourselves, even if it means moving closer to the ones over here. We need to vanish.”

He looked dubious, but he was still willing to follow my lead.

I paddled into the reeds. When I was a few yards in, I stopped. I raised my head a little, but the reeds were too tall to see over. I could hear people talking, though, which meant they were entirely too close.

I broke off one of the heftier reeds, got a three-foot length of it, and put it in my mouth. I could blow through it. Not a lot of air, but it would be enough to keep us alive for a while. I illustrated what I had in mind by holding my nose and easing myself over backward into the water and sinking until I could feel the bottom with my back. I stayed there for a few seconds, then came up.

“Could you see me?” I whispered.

“Looking straight down, yeah. But probably not from the shore.”

“Let’s hope they don’t wade in, then. I may have to kill them.”

“Kill . . .”

“Yeah, I don’t know if I can, either.” Needless to say, I’d never killed anyone real, never even given much thought to it. “We have to hide until they get past us. Hold the reed steady. We don’t want them seeing one moving back and forth, though in this rain . . .”

Was there anything I hadn’t thought of? I reviewed it and couldn’t see anything I’d missed. It was a bad situation, but other than coming out of the water and shooting at them, I didn’t see any other choice. I handed Patrick another reed. He looked at it.

“Polly, I don’t think I can—”

“Don’t think. Just do it.”

“I’m . . . I’m sort of claustrophobic. I can’t get enough air through this thing. I’m afraid I’ll panic.”

“I know you can do it, Patrick. Me and Cassie used to do this all the time, playing commando with our friends. I know it’s scary, but you’ll get used to it.” At least I hoped so. Claustrophobic? I forgive any phobia in Papa, but am not quite so understanding about others. Except about bugs. Fearing bugs is okay.

“Here’s what I’d rather do,” he said. “I’ll swim for the other shore. They’ll see me and go after me, and you can get away.”

“What? Let yourself get caught?”

“Maybe I’ll get away.”

“Not a chance. I will
not
have you do that, Patrick. Now get that damn thing in your mouth and
submerge
!”

He did, reluctantly. I sank back into the water, holding my nose. Things got murky as my face went under the water. Our little pond is not dirty, but it’s no blue mountain tarn, either. Its purpose is fishing, and as such it is full of algae and moss.

Looking up, I saw a school of minnows and a tadpole swim over me.

Then there was a splashing sound right next to me, and a cloud of silt rose around us. I swam up and broke the surface, and saw that Patrick’s head was clear out of the water and he was breathing hard.