Mark Alpert - Extinction

Worse, daylight was fading. The sun had already sunk behind the ridges to the west. In less than an hour there wouldn’t be enough light to see. The drones, though, had infrared cameras—Jim remembered this feature from the demonstration in Afghanistan—so they would quickly catch up to him. Then Jim’s only defense would be the canister of parathion, which was almost empty now.

He panted as he charged through the brush, furiously swinging his prosthesis. He wasn’t going to worry about the night yet. He remembered the training he did in Ranger School twenty-five years ago, the brutal marches through the Georgia woods and the Florida swamps. Since then he’d kept himself in shape by running and hiking with his old army buddies, going at least once a month to the state parks in Virginia and Maryland. You can do this, he told himself. Just remember Ranger School. Think of the mountaineering exercises, the march to Camp Darby.

He couldn’t picture Ranger School, though. He just couldn’t visualize it. Instead, he pictured his daughter. He saw Layla as a ten-year-old, a skinny girl with long blond hair tied in a ponytail. Jim used to take her hiking all the time. She loved to run ahead of him and investigate the woodland ponds, pulling rocks out of the mud to see what was crawling underneath. And now he imagined her running through the Yanshan Hills, her sneakers kicking up the fallen leaves and her ponytail bouncing against her back. She was his miracle child, the last precious remnant, and in the years after the Nairobi bombing his love for her had filled his heart, leaving no room for anyone else. His dead wife and son faded to distant memories, flickering ghosts in the corners of his mind, because Layla was his world, his life. So when Layla left him—first the slow drift that started in high school, then the sudden break two years ago—he lost everything. He busied himself with his work, building ever more powerful replacements for his arm, but his heart became a hollow thing, merely keeping time until the end.

But now he saw Layla again, skipping through the forest just a hundred feet ahead. He ran to the bottom of a ravine, then galloped up the other side, trying to catch up to her. She was in danger again. He had to save her! But when he reached the crest of the ridge, he saw no sign of the girl. The vision was gone. There was nothing but wooded ridges ahead, blurring together below the darkening sky. And as he stood there he heard the buzzing of the drones. He looked over his shoulder and saw the two swarms converging on his position.

Jim hurtled downhill. He was exhausted now. His legs ached and his right shoulder was sore from the exertions of his prosthesis. Staggering, he tripped on a tree root and tumbled into the forest litter, cutting his left hand on a rock as he broke his fall. He lay there for a moment, stunned, but then he heard the buzzing again and rose to his feet in a frenzy. It was so dark he could barely see the tree trunks, but he dashed down the slope anyway, zigzagging wildly. Now he was too panicked to think of Layla. The forest had become his enemy, its roots and branches reaching out to trap him, trying to hold him in place until the drones could attack. He roared, “No!” in desperation and his cry echoed against the hillside.

But as the echoes faded away, Jim heard another noise. Not a buzzing this time—it was a mechanical noise, a familiar thumping. He’d heard it a hundred times before, on a dozen army bases. Helicopter rotors. A helicopter was approaching. After a few seconds he saw the chopper’s spotlight shining on the treetops, about half a mile ahead.

With renewed energy, he raced toward the spotlight. Someone must’ve picked up his distress signal. The helicopter must be carrying a search-and-rescue team. He ran like mad, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the drones. He saw the helicopter hovering above a clearing in the woods. But just before he entered the clearing he saw the spotlight of another helicopter, and then a third helicopter just behind it.

What the hell? It was an unusually big search-and-rescue team for one lost hiker. Suspicious, Jim stopped at the edge of the clearing and peered at the hovering chopper. Despite the glare from the spotlight, he could read the Mandarin characters on the fuselage. They spelled out Beijing Gonganju . The helicopter belonged to the local police force, the Public Security Bureau responsible for the city of Beijing and its outlying districts. This was reassuring—the local police, after all, would be the people you’d expect to see in a search-and-rescue operation. But then Jim glimpsed two of the policemen crouched in the helicopter’s doorway. Both wore black SWAT-team uniforms and pointed assault rifles at the woods.

Before Jim could back away, the spotlight swung toward him. Everything turned horribly bright. As Jim sprinted for the shelter of the trees, the policemen fired their rifles. The bullets whistled through the leaves and chipped the bark off the tree trunks. Jim leaped through the forest, practically flying down the slope, but he knew there was no chance of escape with three helicopters close behind him. All he could do was make a last stand with his Glock and his remaining clip of bullets. He scanned the terrain ahead, looking for a hummock or rock pile that would make a good defensive position. Instead, he saw a path cutting through the woods, a narrow trail. And then he heard another noise coming from that direction, neither a buzzing nor a thumping. It was the growl of a two-stroke gas engine. A scooter came tearing up the path, with its headlight turned off. It screeched to a halt about thirty feet ahead of him. The driver, an Asian woman wearing glasses, turned the scooter around and waved at him frantically.

“Come on!” Kirsten yelled.

Jim charged toward the scooter and jumped onto the seat behind her. He clutched Kirsten’s waist as she hit the gas, and they took off down the trail.

“Jesus!” Jim shouted over the engine noise. “How did you find—”

“Your radio beacon! Now turn the damn thing off!”

In Room C-12 a bald man with fresh stitches in his scalp was shearing off Layla’s hair. He wasn’t dressed in a PLA uniform like the other Modules at the Operations Center; instead, he wore a white lab coat, which made him look, appropriately, like a barber. His face was blank as he ran the electric razor over her head, which was held stationary by a leather strap looped around her brow. She sat in a high-backed chair equipped with other straps that tied her wrists to the armrests and her ankles to the chair’s legs. She couldn’t turn her head, but by shifting her eyes downward and to the left she could see her shorn locks drifting to a pile on the floor. The pile was mostly black, with scattered flecks of gold. Layla hadn’t dyed her hair for three weeks, so her blond roots were starting to show.

Layla had been terrified when the lobotomized soldiers strapped her into the chair, but her fears gradually eased as the Module shaved her. Although Supreme Harmony was preparing to absorb her into its network, she didn’t struggle or wail or beg for her life. Instead, she grew calmer, steadier. It was the same feeling of calm that always descended upon her when she was writing software code or debugging a program or figuring out the best way to penetrate a firewall. Layla was subtracting herself from the equation so she could concentrate on solving it.

In a few minutes the barber finished shaving the left side of her head. As he stepped to the right and began working on the other side, the door to Room C-12 opened and two lobotomized soldiers entered the room. Each held the hand of a boy dressed in a school uniform. One of the boys was a skinny preteen, maybe twelve years old. The other was short and doll-like, no older than nine. Behind them was another soldier Module, who gripped the arm of a bespectacled young man dressed in a shabby gray suit and cheap running shoes. All six of them headed for the other side of the room, about twenty feet away, where there was a second high-backed chair, identical to Layla’s. The soldiers led the twelve-year-old to the chair and said something to him in Mandarin. The boy sat down, his eyes darting wildly, and the soldiers fixed the straps around his wrists and ankles.