John Barnes - Directive 51

“No,” she said. “Six minutes.”

“What?”

“Six minutes since you took over launching balloons, and you haven’t launched even one. You’re not even close to beating me.”

He laughed and said, “Now time me on this next one.”

“Go,” she barked.

He lunged for the next balloon and jar. One hundred four more tries, and he never beat her best time, but he was pretty bombed for the last thirty. “What a grand day,” he said, watching the last one sail off toward the California coast. “What a goddam well grand day, with a grand life to follow.”

Probably that nice hippie mechanic guy just didn’t realize that some younger girls like interesting older guys, Marshalene decided. He was a good mechanic, though, no question. According to the graphics on the dash, the gas engine had settled right on the peak of the power curve and was purring away in easy perfection, despite being an antique 2012 model, spinning power out to the wheel motors and filling up the batteries. Or maybe it always did that, but she preferred to think hippie mechanic guy did it. Especially if he was thinking about me while he did.

She had finished the chicken from the bucket and was well into the Doritos, her coustajam hookmix cranked up to the top, buzzing the two car windows that weren’t quite tight. Well, it was sad college hadn’t worked out, but right now she had food and tunes and open road ahead of her, and she was good at accepting what was good and not worrying much.

To her left, in the other lane, she saw a column of trucks drafting; the IBIS wireless system on the interstates, one of Prez Pendano’s big deals that her dad was always complaining about the cost of, let a whole big huge row of trucks work their brakes all together, so they could be almost on each other’s asses, taking turns breaking the wind for each other. It meant sometimes you’d have like five gazillion trucks passing you on the highway.

No worry about passing them because when they were drafting, they were doing like a hundred or better; that didn’t seem fair to Marshalene, but shit, life wasn’t fair. She’d just barely found her groove, living in Missoula, when they threw her out of her apartment and made her go home. The whole world was full of mean people, and like the sticker said, they sucked.

Behind the rear passenger-side motor, where Jason had planted them, the two black eggs were getting steady sunlight from the south, warmth from the motor, and a steady flux of alternating magnetic fields; as programmed, each of them kept resetting and streaming out slightly different versions of nanoswarm every hundred thousand copies or so, which was about every four seconds.

Almost all of the nanoswarm were caught in the slipstream as the air rushed around the spinning wheels, scattered into the wake in the air behind the Prius. The strong southwest wind off the mountains blew them in a thick cloud across the wide median; some landed in the dirt, many on the small, scrawny pine trees or in the brush, but millions of nanoswarm were sucked into the six-mile-long cyberlinked truck convoy, lighting in the engines and on grilles, finding energy sources and metal and beginning to feed and reproduce.

By the time Marshalene’s Prius had passed—only about two minutes, since they were going in opposite directions—all 562 trucks in the locked chain were infected, and for the next few hours, they covered Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho’s lifeline highway with tens of billions of nanoswarm, till a few peeled off the convoy; till their engines, electronics, and motors failed and stranded a few more; and till the rest piled at the foot of a cliff in Lookout Pass where IBIS had gone dead and so had the warning system.

Behind a boarded-up apartment building, Zach stripped off his coat, and with it the cheap whiskey smell; his dirty, ragged outer shirt; and his filthy dreadlocked wig and knit cap. He left the clothes on the old bicycle, to be stolen and carry the bug farther. The wig might look suspicious, so he threw it under the old, rotting deck—anyone who saw it would think it was a dead animal.

At the mall, Zach squatted in the stall till the men’s room was empty, then climbed at once onto the sink, pushed up the ceiling tile, and pulled down the white plastic bag. He jumped down and scrubbed the brownish blotchy makeup off his face, hands, and neck in the sink.

In the stall, he took clean shoes, shirt, pants, and a light jacket from the bag. He dug out the hotel keys and car keys from the pocket of his bum pants, and put his bum clothes into the bag. As he emerged from the stall, carrying the white bag discreetly by his side, a high-pitched voice declared, “I’m going to poop right in here ,” and an indulgent adult male voice said, “That’s right, Malachai, that’s what we come here for.”

Zach nodded at the little boy and his harried father; the kid looked a lot like his firstborn, Noah, at that same age. Enjoy indoor pooping while you can, Malachai.

He emptied the bag while unobserved in a toy store (plenty of plastic there).

At the opposite end of the mall, he caught the shuttle bus to the Holiday Inn, where his car, regular-person clothes, razor, and tub were waiting for him. On the shuttle bus, he bowed his head to pray gratefully. His phone vibrated; he put it to his ear. “Hey.”

“Hi, I’m looking for Laura Haxson.”

“Nobody by that name at this phone.” Zach hung up.

In his hotel room, he hit the dialback.

The view from Jason’s picnic table at the roadside rest, just outside Gillette, was very Hollywood: water towers and steeples above the blaze of fall colors from the old trees. No doubt it would turn out to be seedy and run-down.

His cell phone vibrated; the call was from UNAVAILABLE. “Yeah?”

“Did you want to buy a snowmobile?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you have to trade?”

“Real old F-150.”

“Okay, meet me at a rental property I own, it’s real run-down and doesn’t look good, just bring the truck all the way up the driveway.”

Sounded like WalksWDLord had found a good concealed spot, just as they’d agreed. Jason scribbled directions in ballpoint on his hand. “Got it.”

“I’ve got a shower here.” WalksWDLord explained how to walk to the Holiday Inn. “I’m in Room 215. You can clean up here and then we’ll grab some dinner and be on the road.”

“Very cool.”

Jason prayed that the truck had one more start left in it. He didn’t think the nanospawn would be able to knock out the alternator quite this fast, but shorting out the battery or eating the electronic distributor was well within their reach, to judge by the way the music had gone dead half an hour ago.

He thought about peeking under the hood, but there’d be time enough for that once he got to his destination, and meanwhile it would be better not to let in light, or more nanospawn.

The house with the FOR RENT sign was right where it was supposed to be, and Jason followed the driveway around to the garage in the back.

Jason stripped off coat, hat, gloves, and sweater, and tossed them onto the back porch. Maybe some homeless dude would find them and spread the nanospawn. He erased the cell phone’s recent calls, turned it off, and tossed it over the alley into a toy-crowded back yard to spread more nanospawn.

Jason took out his second pair of clean chem-proof gloves (sprinkled with Drano crystals, inside tied-off condoms) and slipped them on, walked back to the truck, opened the passenger-side door, poured Liquid-Plumr over the top of his pack, rinsed with a bottle of distilled water. He shrugged the pack on.