Brain Jack Read online

  With an effort, she rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “Sam, you’re such an egg,” she said.

  The heavy, armored army Humvee felt more like a tank than a car.

  Wheeler had spent a couple of minutes showing Sam how to use the automatic gears and the pedals. There was nothing to it, really.

  Dodge was making some final modifications to the Plague virus, a power cable snaking from the laptop to the cigarette lighter on the dash.

  They were only five minutes into their run when Wheeler came on the radio. “I just got word of a lot of activity happening up in Wyoming at the air force base,” he said. “Lot of soldiers getting loaded into transport choppers, attack choppers, the whole nine yards. Looks like they’re getting ready to hit something real hard.”

  “Let’s hope they don’t find us,” Sam said into the radio.

  “That ain’t the worst of it,” Wheeler said. “We have reports coming in that over in Missouri at the Whiteman Air Force Base, a lot of planes are getting prepped. Lot of bombs getting loaded. Looks like nukes.”

  53 | DIVERSION

  Tyler drove as though the devil was at his back.

  The big engine of the Shelby growled like a wildcat as it ate up the highway east toward Kansas.

  The road still groaned under the weight of the refugee traffic, but he was no longer concerned about being noticed and used the power of the big car to weave his way along the blacktop, veering onto the left side of the road for long stretches, as there was little oncoming traffic.

  The farther he got, the more time he spent running, the better the chances that Dodge and Sam had of making it to Cheyenne.

  Even close to Colorado Springs would be good enough, he thought, as Fort Carson would have thrown up a protective screen by now. If they could make it that far, they could probably make it all the way.

  He scanned the sky constantly as he drove. Early warning of an attack might be his only chance.

  He could dodge; he could weave. If it came to it, he could leap from the car and try to make a run for it.

  Deep down, he knew that he had little to no chance of survival if they found him, when they found him. But there was no point in thinking like that.

  The first hour of the journey was monotonous, uneventful, and fast. Sam drove and Dodge worked on the laptop.

  They passed through a small town, Trinidad, at high speed, ignoring road signs and the startled glares from the people on the streets.

  Sam caught a glimpse of one sign as they left the town behind them, curving around to the north: FREEDOM ROAD.

  Somehow that seemed weirdly appropriate.

  Other towns flashed by: Aguilar, Walsenburg.

  But the trouble didn’t start until they got to Pueblo.

  The radio suddenly went wild with shouted orders, the sound of heavy machine-gun fire, and the thunder of the rail guns on the Abrams tanks.

  The airwaves were full of shouts and screams, and Sam could not tell what was going on or who was winning.

  In front of them, the rumble of gunfire sounded above the engine and the radio, and flashes lit the horizon.

  There was a long sustained period of heavy firing and a series of booming explosions; then the radio suddenly went quiet.

  “That didn’t sound good,” Sam said.

  “How far away are we?” Dodge asked.

  “Less than an hour,” Sam said. “That’s just a guess, really.”

  “This thing go any faster?” Dodge asked, turning back to his work.

  “Only if it had wings,” Sam said.

  • • •

  The choppers came out of the south, just as Tyler passed the turnoff to Patterson Crossing. He saw them when they were still dark dots on the fading sky, and he knew what they were before they evolved into their menacing, wasplike shapes.

  Helicopters—Apaches.

  He stamped on the brakes and swung the car around the intersection, away from the constant stream of traffic on the highway.

  Maybe at Patterson Crossing he could find somewhere to hide the Shelby: in a barn, behind a tree, anything.

  Here, there was nothing but grassy scrub for miles on either side. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.

  He urged the car forward, roaring toward the tiny town. They had found him. That was enough, wasn’t it?

  That had created the diversion. Now if he could hide the car or just distance himself from it, he might survive after all.

  He passed a couple of grain silos and briefly contemplated trying to hide behind them but dismissed the idea.

  The Apache helicopters had him in their sights by now. The silos offered no protection.

  A large building of some kind loomed to his right.

  Perhaps if he could make that …

  A flash in his rearview mirror. A smoke trail heading toward him from the first of the two choppers.

  Tyler slammed on his brakes.

  The rocket must have triangulated on the speed of the car, because it passed well over his head and impacted on the road in front of him, throwing up a storm of tarmac and dirt.

  He slued the car to the side, narrowly avoiding the erupting crater, and swung back on the highway behind it.

  Time to get out of the car now!

  He saw another flash in the mirror and tried the same trick, but the car was moving slower than before. The road erupted just in front of the vehicle, lifting the two front wheels off the road and throwing the car sideways into a drainage ditch.

  Tyler saw the ditch approaching in a strange slow motion, and observed, rather than felt, the impact as it hit.

  Then came the body slam of the side door, and the world turned to black.

  By the time they reached Wigwam, the sound of the explosions ahead of them were no longer distant but were loud crumps that vibrated the Humvee. Sam kept the speed as high as he dared through the township, not wanting to risk an accident.

  Dodge closed the laptop and sat back in his seat, his eyes closed for a moment.

  “Cheyenne Mountain is supposed to be impregnable, right?” Sam asked.

  Dodge nodded.

  “Even from a nuclear attack?”

  Dodge nodded again but said, “I don’t think it’s us she’s after with the nuclear bombers.”

  “No?”

  “She’s pouring all her troops into the area to try and stop us. If she bombed Colorado Springs, then she’d be killing them.”

  Sam took his eyes off the road for a second and frowned at Dodge. “If not us, then what is the target?”

  Dodge shrugged. “My guess is where she’d find the highest concentration of non-neuros. If she can’t get them to join her, then she wants to destroy them. Probably around Wichita, where all the refugee camps are.”

  Sam thought of Brenda and Olivia and the two children, and his breath caught in his throat.

  “Oh my God,” he said at last.

  Tyler was lying in the wreckage of the car. His arm felt broken, and there was blood running down his face.

  The pain meant he was alive.

  He had survived!

  His pistol was jammed under his body, and he struggled to get his weight off it.

  Boots were approaching, two pairs.

  The pistol was still jammed.

  Voices now.

  “It’s Agent Tyler. He’s alive.”

  “Where are the others?”

  “Must have taken a different car, headed somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  “Tyler’ll know. Get a neuro-headset, quickly.”

  Tyler’ll know.

  Tyler did know. That knowledge was in his brain, and if they got it out, then they’d know where to find Sam and Dodge.

  The pistol came free from under his body, and he raised it, slowly, past his hip, which was surely also broken. Past his shoulder and his neck.

  He raised the pistol to his head and flicked off the safety.

  But suddenly there was a boot on his wrist, and the
pistol was wrenched out of his hand.

  “Not so fast, Agent Tyler.”

  54 | FREEDOM ROAD

  Wheeler came on the radio. “News ain’t getting any better, boys. Heavy concentrations of neuro-troops have hit Fort Carson from the north and east. Neuros must know where you’re going. Jackson has put some of his armor to the south to hold the road open for you. Hope you’re nearly there.”

  “Not far to go now,” Sam said, looking up at the skies around them. “What about jet fighters and helicopters?”

  “You’re clear so far. Jackson’s boys took out two fast movers with Stingers a few moments ago, and the rest are keeping clear. I think they’re trying to break through the lines and cut you off from the mountain on the ground.”

  “Tell them we’re doing our best; be there as soon as we can.”

  “Good luck. You’re going to need it. We’re all going to need it. Those bombers at Whiteman just got airborne.”

  They screamed around the off-ramp to Colorado Springs behind a quartet of tanks that had clearly been stationed there to protect the interchange and were already engaged in a furious firefight with troops advancing down the freeway from the north.

  A helicopter gunship streaked down toward them low over the rooftops as Sam put his foot down along Academy Boulevard.

  A series of rockets flashed from a pod beneath a stubby wing, blasting tarmac and dirt into the sky just behind them. It swung around on their tail, but before it could fire again, a pinpoint of light streaked skyward, clipping the machine’s tail rotor and exploding.

  The helicopter began to spin uncontrollably, like a toy unwinding, and belly flopped onto the road with a horrible grinding sound.

  Soldiers in full combat gear were laying down a fierce fire toward the troops arriving from the north, but the sky was turning black with troops and gunships. There seemed to be no end to them, and already Sam could see resistance forces starting to fall back under the assault.

  They raced down the boulevard, right between two groups of soldiers firing at each other from either side of the road. Bullets cracked the bulletproof glass of the Humvee but did not penetrate.

  In front of them, a man appeared with a shoulder-fired rocket of some kind. He dropped to one knee and aimed it right at them. Sam swerved from side to side, trying to shake off his aim, but the man was too close. Suddenly, a series of shots rang out around them, and the man with the rocket staggered. A puff of smoke came from the rocket, but it went wild, spiraling off into the sky as the man fell.

  “Not much farther.” Sam gritted his teeth and hurled the big car around the winding mountainside roads.

  They barely made it.

  Neuro-troops were charging down the hillside at them when Sam rounded the final corner and shot forward into the circular opening that was the mouth of the underground facility at Cheyenne Mountain.

  Explosions and light-weapons fire rocked the vehicle on its springs as they hurtled inside, and Sam fumbled for a moment with the lights, trying to adjust to the sudden dark, despite the strip lighting that ran down the ceiling of the tunnel.

  There were soldiers everywhere, running up behind them to try to defend the mouth of the tunnel, and the gunfire and explosions behind them were continuous.

  “There!” Dodge shouted, and Sam hit the brake pedal, the heavy vehicle sliding to a halt beside a massive metal blast door.

  A wiry, gray-haired man in full combat gear ran over as they jumped out of the car.

  “I’m Jackson,” he shouted over the sounds of the battle at the entrance. “You got here just in time. They’ve overrun our perimeter. We’re falling back here to the tunnel, going to put up a last-ditch defense until we can get as many of our boys as possible in here and shut the blast doors. You get in there and do what you need to do.”

  There was a sudden burst of firing from the tunnel entrance, and they ducked behind the Humvee as bullets whined off the rock walls around them.

  “Get in there!” Jackson shouted, and ran toward the entrance, drawing his pistol.

  Sam didn’t need any encouragement and ran after Dodge, who seemed to know where he was going.

  “Where’s the laptop?” Sam shouted as they ran in through the huge blast door.

  “Don’t need it. The virus is finished,” Dodge yelled back, holding up his skull-shaped USB drive.

  They were in a corridor with rock walls and a metal roof. In front of them was another blast door, a twin of the one behind them.

  That led them into a wide concourse, with a low mezzanine running around the outside. Various doors led off on both levels.

  Dodge was still running, up a flight of metal stairs, heading for a doorway on the mezzanine level with the familiar Homeland Security CDD logo above it. Sam bounded up the stairs behind him.

  The door led into a control room with workstations and computers, each with a keyboard, a mouse, and a neuro-headset.

  Dodge slid into a chair, sweeping the headset to one side, and slotted his drive into a USB3 port.

  “All right, you witch,” he said. “Get a taste of this.”

  55 | INFECTION

  There was a series of beeps, and a row of lights on a central console turned from red to green as the computers in the control room went online. No longer isolated from the rest of the world. Dodge removed his hands from the computer and just watched as the virus ate its way into the network.

  The first computers to go were the ones around them. Screens turned blue with indecipherable error messages.

  “How will we know if it’s working?” Sam asked.

  “We’ll know,” Dodge said. “Whenever it infects a machine, it sends the IP address back here so we can monitor the spread.”

  Sam watched the screen. The familiar four-part numbers of IP addresses appeared on a list at the top of the computer screen.

  First just ten or twenty, then more and more, faster and faster until the screen seemed alive with the numbers, scrolling off the screen faster than the eye could read them.

  Above Dodge’s head, security monitors showed the battle in the corridor outside the blast doors. As Sam watched, the resistance fighters fell back, and the soldiers of the neuro-forces filled the tunnel.

  Jackson ran into the control room behind them.

  “I need an update,” he yelled. “I got a wing of bombers inbound to Wichita, and they’re loaded for bear. What’s happening?”

  “We injected the antidote,” Dodge said. “Just watching now to see it do its work.”

  “It had better happen quick,” Jackson said. “Those bombers will be in Wichita in minutes, not hours. I don’t know if you heard, but there are hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps around the city and no time to move them.” He turned away from them and shouted outside, “Get those blast doors closed!”

  “I hear you,” Dodge said, “but it’s out of our hands. It’ll spread as fast as it can.”

  “Keep me posted,” Jackson said, and ran back onto the main concourse.

  There was an explosion from outside, and the entire room shuddered. Sam ran to the door of the control room and looked down.

  Smoke was billowing into the room through the blast door, which was almost closed but not moving.

  Resistance soldiers were arrayed around the concourse, weapons trained on the narrow gap in the doorway.

  Jackson was lying on the metal floor of the mezzanine walkway nearby, and he grabbed Sam’s arm, pulling him down as machine-gun fire sounded on the other side of the blast door and lightning flashes of tracer fire lit up the gray smoke.

  “They’ve jammed the blast door,” he yelled over the sound of the firing. “We can’t close it. We’re trying to hold them out.”

  Even as he spoke, a group of neuro-soldiers ran through the partially open doorway, firing from the hip as they came.

  Gunfire sounded from around the concourse.

  The men staggered and fell, but more men were right behind them.

  “Get back in there
!” Jackson yelled, pushing Sam back into the control room.

  Sam slammed the door behind him. It seemed paper thin against what was coming.

  Dodge was gazing at the computer screen. It was a blur. Numbers cascaded from the bottom to the top and out of sight. Column after column, row after row.

  “You sure there’s nothing we can do?” Sam asked.

  “Nothing but watch,” Dodge said. “See how Ursula likes a taste of her own brain-wiping medicine.”

  Sam watched a little more, mesmerized by the numbers.

  There was an explosion from outside and the control room shuddered again. Smoke curled underneath the door.

  “This had better work,” Sam said. “And soon.”

  “Sam,” Dodge said sharply.

  Sam flicked his gaze back to the computer. The long rolls of numbers were slowing down. Slowing, slowing, and eventually stopping.

  Then the list began to unravel. Numbers began to disappear faster and faster.

  “What’s going on?” Sam cried out in horror, knowing what the answer would be.

  “She’s beaten it,” Dodge said slowly. “I was afraid of that. She’s seen this virus before, remember, when we used it to escape from the mall. She’s recognized it despite my mods and found some way to defeat it.”

  Faster still, the screen scrolled backward, the Plague reversing, the computers freed from Dodge’s disease.

  There was long, sustained gunfire from down in the concourse; then, without warning, the computer screens around them all flickered back to life.

  56 | FULL-FRONTAL ASSAULT

  “Well, that’s it, then. We’re fried,” Dodge said. “She’s beaten it.”

  “There’s one thing we haven’t tried,” Sam said, staring at the neuro-headset hanging off the desk by its cable. “What if we went neuro? Went in all guns blazing and went for the jugular. Full-frontal assault.”

  “No way,” Dodge said. “You stick that neuro-headset on your noggin and she’ll pass your brain over the bulk-eraser, say thank you very much, and spend the rest of the day playing ping-pong with her jumbo jets.”