The Unseen (25 page)

“Where are you parked?” Kari said.

“Way back there; I couldn’t drive over all of this mess.” David started to lead them through the mechanical graveyard down the long driveway. His car wasn’t even visible from where they were, which made Kari nervous. They needed to get out of here quickly; there would be hundreds or even thousands of troops closing in on Valhalla right now.

“How did you even find us?” Kari asked.

“Lars was waiting for me at the front door in a panic. I just followed him upstairs.”

“Wait! Wait!” SeptemberMist called out. Kari looked back to see SeptemberMist wildly trying to follow them. “Take me with you! Please, you can’t leave me here.”

Motorcad looked to Kari and shook his head.

“You know what, honey? How about you hold down the fort here. You’ve been such a great friend to me; I think you deserve to meet another good friend of mine. I have a feeling you and Henderson will get along well!” Kari said.

“Freelancer, Motorcad, please . . .” SeptemberMist pleaded, but they didn’t stop again.

Kari slipped a few times while trying to step over fried cheetahs or drones, barely keeping herself from falling. Before long, she was able to see the Pratt’s manual truck parked down the road where the sea of dead electronics ended. She tried to check the news or find feeds of data about what was happening, but she discovered that the government had already dropped a communication bubble over the property, which prevented any digital communication from getting in or out.

“So who’s this Henderson guy?” Motorcad asked.

“He’s the man who arrested me and David last year. He held us both in prison until I broke out with a few thousand other people I set free. The chip you sent to David in the package of EMP guns had instructions for him to tell Henderson where the assassins were so they could come arrest Joseth at just the right time.”

“And he just did it?”

“Oh, Henderson never passes up the chance to make a splash, and being responsible for bringing in the world’s most wanted criminal is a big, big splash,” Kari said. “Him coming through for us was the least of my worries.”

“What were your worries, then?” David asked.

“Being able to draw all of Joseth’s troops in so a single EMP bomb could take them out was the first big concern.”

“And the other?” Motorcad said.

“Being able to make it out of here before Henderson floods the place with troops.” A swarm of hand-size drones burst from the trees, and Kari screamed as they closed in on them.

She could see their stingers extend and charge with electricity as they got closer. She heard the familiar sound of the EMP guns first and then saw the blue light stop the drones in midair. They fizzed and fell to the ground with a loud clatter, colliding with other destroyed electronics. Behind them, a loud buzzing noise made Kari turn around; a couple of Middle States gunships were circling Valhalla.

“Time to run!” Kari rushed forward, jumping over every obstacle in her way. She heard a few other EMP shots as Motorcad and David continued to shoot drones down as they ran toward the manual truck.

Auto-autos were fully electronic vehicles that would have been destroyed by an EMP, but the old gas technology in David’s manual truck was unaffected by it. It was the perfect escape vehicle. Motorcad and David both pulled ahead of her as they got closer to the truck. She pushed herself to keep up, running as quickly as she could. Her foot caught as she tried to clear one last defunct cheetah. She put her hands out to break her fall, but she still hit the ground hard. She felt something crack in her left arm, and she screamed in blinding pain.

“Cover me!” David shouted to Motorcad as he helped Kari to her feet. Together they limped forward toward the truck while Motorcad continued to blast drones from the sky with his EMP gun. They finally made it, and David handed her his EMP gun.

“This won’t do any good,” Kari said through gritted teeth. Her arm hurt as badly as anything she’d ever felt. She was certain she had broken something in her left wrist. “I can’t use it with just one arm.”

“We need the extra cover!” Motorcad said. He was struggling to keep the drones at bay by himself. He had a burn mark on his shirt, a sign that he already been stung once. He was lucky to still be on his feet.

“You have to drive,” David said as he pushed her to the front of the truck and opened the door.

“David! I don’t know how to drive!” Kari protested, but David pushed her into the driver’s seat anyway, next to a pair of old shotguns. He reached in and turned the key, which caused the engine to sputter to life. Lars jumped up from the ground and took a seat in her lap. The truck was shaking as the gas engine was gearing up to go.

“That’s the brake, that’s the gas, that’s the steering wheel.” David slammed the door shut behind him and fired a couple of EMP blasts.

“I don’t know what that means!”

“Go slower, go faster, and change direction!” David yelled as he jumped in the back of the truck with Motorcad, continuing to fire EMP blasts. “Now drive!”

Kari slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, and the truck squealed forward. It scared Kari so she left off the gas pedal, and the truck slowed instantly. “I can’t do this!”

“Go!” Motorcad shouted at her, his voice said he was unwilling to even consider the possibility that she couldn’t do it.

Kari stepped on the gas pedal halfway and kept the truck on the road by steering with her right hand. She was still in a lot of pain, but that was less important than not killing everyone in the truck.

A swarm of drones came rushing at the front of the truck, but one of the guys in the back flashed them before they could do anything. The disabled drones smashed into the windshield and created sprawling cracks all over the glass. The cracking glass scared her, which caused the truck to swerve drunkenly in the road.
How did people do this without killing themselves?

“Steady!” David shouted from the back of the truck.

“Good advice,” Kari shouted back. “Really helpful.” A pack of cheetahs jumped out onto the road ahead and started firing energy blasts at the truck. The first few shots blew big smoking holes in the truck’s hood, and one shot smashed through the glass window and narrowly missed Kari.

She tried to dodge the blast and shielded herself from the shattered glass, which had the side effect of pressing the gas pedal to the ground. The truck accelerated at the cheetahs, which stood their ground. David and Motorcad didn’t blast them for some reason, so Kari braced herself as the truck rammed the cheetahs.

“Careful!” David yelled. “My dad’s going to kill me if I don’t bring the truck back.” Kari winced.
Great, another reason for Mr. Pratt to hate me.

“Too late!” Kari shouted back to him as she received a notification that Joseth was calling.

“Remember me?” Joseth said. He broadcast his bloodied face to Kari, and his eyes were still rabid. He was still in his room, but he had somehow found another functioning processing unit. Kari put his face in the far corner of her vision, as she needed to focus on driving.

“Of course I remember you. I make a point to remember people like you,” Kari said.

“Did you think you were the only one with a Faraday cage and a spare processing unit?”

“You know what, now’s not a good time talk.” Kari tried to keep the truck steady as Motorcad and Joseth continued to blast drones from the air.

“On the contrary, I think now is the perfect time for me to join you on your drive with your little boyfriend.”
Oh no.

Dust filled her view as the ground started to move. Everywhere she could see tiny tendrils of nanobots starting to emerge from the dirt.

“You didn’t think it would be that easy to beat me, did you?” Joseth said. “I have more nanobots buried under the dirt, where they were safe from your EMP bomb, than the world has seconds left in its existence.”
I should have known there was more he wasn’t telling me . . .

“Kari!” David yelled from the back of the truck. “What’s going on?” Motorcad cursed loud enough for Joseth to overhear.

“Your friends aren’t carrying two EMP guns, are they?” Joseth laughed manically.
He filled them with nanobots!

“Throw the guns away!” Kari screamed. Instinctively, she turned back toward them, and the truck swerved off the road and into a rough patch of plants and rocks.

“Focus on the road!”

“The EMP guns—get rid of them!” Kari yelled back, barely managing to bring the truck back onto the path, which was darkening to a shade of black as more nanobots emerged.

“You should have never have chosen him over me,” Joseth said as the nanobots on the road in front of her started to form giant snakes.

“Well, he’s not a psycho, so that made it pretty easy.”

“What is this place?” David yelled in the back of the truck.

The good news was that drones stopped attacking the truck and instead focused on the giant snakes of nanobots. The bad news was that the snakes of nanobots swallowed them, quickly chewing the drones into infinitely small pieces.

The door on the opposite side of the cab opened and Motorcad leaned in, holding himself to the side of the truck, and grabbed the shotguns from the front seat.

“Just like my favorite game,” Motorcad said as he handed the guns behind him to David.
Manual truck, nonelectronic guns, when did we go back in time?

BANG! BANG!
The shotguns were punching her ears as she struggled to keep the truck moving forward. Nanobots chewed into the tires of the truck, popping the air-filled tires and sending violent vibrations through the truck. Kari heard an explosion, but it wasn’t from around her. Pieces of wood and dust filled the camera feed from Joseth. He coughed loudly, trying to breathe as more explosions happened around him.

“They think they can stop me—no one can stop me!” Oedipus yelled as soon as he caught his breath.

“Just surrender, Joseth,” Kari said.
He’s got billions of nanobots, but they’ve got gunships and drones that can drop bombs from ten thousand feet. They’ll blow him to pieces if he keeps fighting.

“The world needs me. I will bring them freedom no matter the cost.” The truck was starting to lose pieces of its framing as the nanobots tore into it. It wouldn’t last much longer. The snakes of nanobots on the road ahead merged together to form a wall of impassable death.

“Let it go, Joseth, please. There’s so much you can do for this world.” Kari tried to yell over the sound of the shotguns blasting gaping holes into the wall of nanobots in front of them. The damage they inflicted disappeared in milliseconds as more nanobots replaced their fallen comrades.

If she stopped the truck the nanobots behind them would kill them, but if she kept going they would hit the wall. She pressed the gas to the metal and accelerated, hoping to punch through the wall before too much damage could be done.

“Let it go? This is just the begin—” Joseth’s feed died, and the ground shook like an earthquake.

“Hold on!” Kari shouted as she covered her face. The wall of swirling, hungry nanobots collapsed as they plunged through it. Millions of nanobots showered into the front seat, no longer moving. The sight of the nonresponsive nanobots gave her the chance to think about what being chewed alive by nanobots would have felt like if they hadn’t gone offline.

With the wall of nanobots gone, Kari could now see up ahead to where the long path leading from Valhalla ended and joined a paved road. The road ahead was blocked with barriers and human soldiers. It was hard to see, but Kari thought she saw markings of both the Middle States and the United States.

“Guys! Straight ahead!”

“Shoot!” David said.

“Path to the right ahead—take it,” Motorcad said over the sound of the continued EMP blasts and rickety truck. “It leads down to the river.”

“What good is that going to do?” David said.

“Easier to swim out of here than to try to ram that barrier with this pile of ancient metal.”

“Hey, this is my family’s truck,” David said. Kari swerved at near full speed down the dirt path to the right. The trail was even rougher than the gravel road they had been driving on. The truck bumped and shook with each little dip. Smoke poured from the truck’s hood, blinding and choking Kari, as the truck no longer had a windshield.

“Stop!” David shouted at the same time as Motorcad. Kari slammed down the brake pedal, causing the back of the truck to slide off of the path and into a tree. It made a loud crashing sound, but luckily it didn’t send anyone flying out of the vehicle.

Kari climbed out of the truck, trying her best not to hit her left arm on anything, and David and Motorcad climbed out of the back. They all looked at the truck. It had burn marks from energy blasts and stingers covering its body, while the front of the vehicle hardly looked like a truck anymore. The nanobots had chewed the bottom half of the vehicle to the point that Kari was amazed that it had still been functioning.

“Sorry,” Kari said.

“Oh, well. He’ll get it over it,” David said, but it didn’t sound like he was convinced that was the truth.

“What now?” Kari said. A giant plume of smoke rose into the sky where Valhalla had been.
Guess they dropped something bigger than an EMP when he wouldn’t stop fighting. What a waste of talent, Joseth.

“We swim,” Motorcad said. He jogged past her, pulled off his thin t-shirt, and jumped into the small but powerful river in front of them. Kari surveyed her injuries.
This is going to hurt.
David grabbed her good hand, and they stepped into the icy cold water together. Lars hesitated but jumped in after them.
But, at least I’m with David.

“Well, here we are,” Motorcad said. He leaned back in his seat in the auto-auto. Apparently, he already understood that Kari and David would probably want to spend a few minutes alone, saying good-bye.

It had been a long journey from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to Kansas State University. That was because Motorcad insisted that they take a number of routes that took them in the opposite direction so that they could switch auto-autos to ensure that no one was following them. Kari had agreed with him—anyone with ties to the Unseen was now public enemy number one.