Andrew Klavan - The truth of the matter

A wave of hopelessness washed over me. I felt as if all my strength had drained away. For a second or two, I actually thought I wouldn’t be able to move again.

But there was no time for that. No time to indulge that sort of emotion. The bomb was ticking. I had to keep going, had to. Waterman was dead. All right. That’s the way it was. He had died trying to protect America from its enemies-trying to protect liberty from its enemies. A lot of people have died that way in a lot of places over the years. God knows their names-every one of them-I believe that-but they’re beyond my help. The only thing I could do was go on, never give in, keep fighting the fight they fought.

I pushed off the door. I forced down my dizziness and sickness. I felt something flaring up inside me, a new heat, a new fire of determination. I knew I had only minutes to live. But I was going to use every one of them. I was going to do everything I could to get out of here, to find help, to find someone who would believe me when I told them about the Homelanders, to find someone who would help me stop them, help me bring them down.

A new bolt of pain went through my head, and for a second I was afraid another memory attack would knock me over. I couldn’t let that happen. I massaged my brow with my fingers, trying to think. My eyes went to Waterman’s body one more time. The pool of blood. The outstretched hand… I wondered…

As much as he could, Waterman had tried to watch out for me, to think of me and my safety. He had brought me to this bunker in the hopes of evading the Home-landers. He had hidden me in the Panic Room so I wouldn’t be discovered during the memory attacks. He had left me the symbol so I could escape if he was captured or killed. And now…

I looked at the pool of blood on the floor. The trail of blood leading into the room. The second pool beneath Waterman’s head.

He had been shot in the doorway. He had struggled to get into the room. He had managed to position himself before he was shot again-position himself with his hand outstretched, pointing…

I turned and followed the direction of Waterman’s hand. He was pointing to the slim section of wall beside the doorway. That’s all it was, a slim section of wall between the door and a metal shelf. Blank wall.

I went to it. I raised my palm. I traced the shape of the house against the blank wall. Instantly, there was the sound of a motor. A panel slid back. A small panel this time. A hidden cache about the size of a paperback book.

I reached into the cache and at once my hand touched a metal object. My fingers closed over it. I drew it out.

I knew what it was as soon as I saw it. It was the little gizmo Milton One had been holding when I first came into the compound. The little control panel the size and shape of an iPhone. It was the thing Milton One had used to control Milton Two, that flying security robot that had blasted me when I tried to escape from Waterman and Dodger Jim.

I looked from the little device back to Waterman’s body where it lay on the floor.

“Thanks,” I whispered to him.

The Homelanders had killed him-and now they were trying to kill me, to make sure there was no one left who could stop them.

Well, they could try. But at least now I had a weapon. Waterman had left me a weapon.

And I wasn’t going down without a fight.

The Battle Begins Four minutes thirty-three seconds… 4:32… 4:31…

I was glad to get out of that room of death. But the moment I moved back to the main part of the bunker, I saw the bomb again and the seconds ticking away. I stood in front of the device, holding the small controller to Milton Two in my hand. Four minutes twenty-five seconds now… So little time.

I tore my eyes away from the red numbers and looked down to study the controller.

At first, the little screen was blank. But I found a button built into the top of the device and pressed it. The gizmo’s monitor light came on. The small screen showed a terrain map with a green dot blinking on it and several blinking red dots as well. There was also a series of numbers up in the right-hand corner. More than anything, it reminded me of a PSP video-game screen.

Which was a good thing. I was always a pretty decent gamer. Not a game-dork or anything: I didn’t sit around getting fat on Pop-Tarts while fragging Covenant Grunts for fourteen hours at a time or anything. But when a cool new game came out, whether it was an old-fashioned platformer or a full-blown shooter, I was usually the first among my friends to get the hang of it. For some reason, I had a knack for figuring out a level even while escaping a horde of zombies through an underground storage facility. My dad sometimes said kind of bitterly that my generation had developed some new sort of DNA that helped us understand games-but I think he was just jealous because he usually got killed while he was still lifting up his eyeglasses in order to see which button on the controller was which.

So, forcing myself to stay calm, to ignore the dwindling red numbers on the time bomb, I did a quick study of the controller’s readout.

I could see right away that the terrain on the screen was the terrain outside: the trees were dark green patches and the buildings were shapes outlined in red. The green dot-that was probably M-2 himself. The red dots were probably bio-heat readings-the Homelanders. There was no way to identify what the numbers were, but I was guessing they were probably M-2’s speed, height, blast energy, and number of tear-gas shots-something like that.

I glanced up. I couldn’t help myself. The timer was ratcheting rapidly down to 4:00.

Come on, I told myself, concentrate.

I looked down at the controller again.

According to my reading of the map, Milton Two was lying on the ground at the very edge of the ruined compound outside. When I tilted the controller, the green light stopped blinking and the numbers changed: M-2 was rising off the ground and taking flight. I quickly found I could move him by either tilting the device or touching the screen. And more. The moment he started moving, a small square window lit up in one corner of the screen. It was video-the point of view from the camera in M-2’s single eye: it showed what M-2 saw in front of him. There were also two red buttons that lit up on the bottom of the controller. The one on the right was to fire electronic blasts. The one on the left let loose tear gas.

Again, I couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the clock: 3:56… 3:55… 3:54… I seemed to feel every second dying inside me as it ticked away.

I glanced over at the monitors on the wall. I could see the Homelanders there. Three of them had stopped moving now. They had taken up positions, standing with their guns propped on their hips. They were guarding the area, waiting for the explosion that would destroy the bunker-and me, if I was still inside.

Okay, I thought. Okay. I needed a plan of attack. What would give me my best chance at getting out of here?

My first thought was to send M-2 after the guy near the entrance in the brick cylinder. I remembered the pain of getting hit with M-2’s blaster: it paralyzed me, knocked me right off my feet. If I took out the entrance guard, maybe I could break out and make a run for it. But then I thought: No. Once the blasting started, the others would be alert. They’d come running in the direction of the fight. If I hit the entrance guard, they’d converge on the doorway, closing off my escape.

So the best idea was to strike away from the entrance first and hope the guard outside the brick cylinder abandoned his post so I could get away.

I studied the wall monitors quickly. All the Home-landers were at their positions now. They were communicating with one another through microphones clipped to the shoulders of their khaki jackets. The leader-the killer I knew as Waylon-was posted off at the perimeter, about as far from Milton Two as he could be. Waylon, I could see now, was a big man, tall and broad shouldered, with heavy, sagging features and a scruffy black beard. He had deep-set eyes that were always moving, watchful. I doubted M-2 could cross the facility and reach him before he or one of the other Homelanders spotted him and possibly shot him down.