Inferno (The Glitch Book 2), page 9
Elias raised his hands. “He’s some kid who—” Elias noticed the screen had gone black and placed his left hand back on the side of the monitor. Travis’s image reappeared. “Yeah, yeah keep my hand where it is,” he said too Travis.
The young man on the screen was looking at Madeline. “We do not have much time. I need to get to my father and Elias believes you can help make that happen.”
“I… Wait… who are you? How are you doing this?”
Elias rolled his eyes. “Mads. I know nothing makes sense and it seems crazy. But you just got to believe me. What you’re seeing on the screen is some kind of advanced AI. All of what’s been happening around the country, hell, around the world is because of something similar. Believe it or not, that young guy, is one of the good guys. And he says we need to find his father.”
“The father of the… AI?”
“I used to be flesh and blood,” said Travis looking away. “But the AI absorbed me. He absorbed hundreds at first. The human minds unbeknown to those that were taken helped the AI learn how human’s thought. You see information on computers, in databases wasn’t enough for it, it needed learned experience and only absorbing the actual memories of human’s could give it that. So it took technology which human’s had already designed and used it to absorb matter, which it then used against the human race. But… I managed to escape, and now I reside inside the man you see in front of you—” Elias half frowned, half smiled. “— My father has something which we can use to fight back against the AI, but the AI knows that too, and will stop at nothing to try to kill him.”
Madeline closed her mouth. “What do you need me to do?”
“First. I have something for you…”
The screen changed to a webcam view of a young woman, behind her a similarly aged man. They were both trying to get their computer to work.
Madeline ran forward to her desk. “Laura!” she shouted.
“I’m afraid she cannot hear you, or you her.”
The screen was replaced with Travis. Madeline hammered keys on the keyboard, then grabbed the screen, making Elias almost lose his grip. “Show me her again!”
Travis’s virtual face was only inches from hers. “I’m sorry, any longer would have compromised our location. But you can see she and her husband are safe and well.”
Becky started walking to the stairs. “Okay, I’m out. This is too freaky.”
“No, stop!.. Please,” said Travis.
Madeline placed the monitor back down, her expression one of bewilderment. Becky stopped her progress, her boot on the bottom wooden step.
“I can help you find your sister.”
Becky turned around slowly. “What do you mean ‘find my sister’ she’s gone! I saw her be taken by those things! You said, they absorb—”
“No. The AI is no longer powerful enough to do that. All it can do is inhabit a host, like—” He looked up at Elias who frowned. Madeline looked at the older man. “— I have done to Elias. But the AI can also leave a human. And then they will be fully themselves again. I can help you find your sister, once you help me.”
Becky walked forward to the screen. “Show me her! Like you did with this woman’s sister!”
Travis shook his head. “I cannot. Even doing what I just did was a risk. The more I access the networks, the easier it will be for the AI to track me.” His eyes shifted to the left and the man still with one hand on the side of the screen. “Elias. They are coming. If we don’t leave now, we’ll never be able too.”
Elias looked at Madeline, who nodded then turned and started frantically filling her large bags with the items from the shelves.
*****
“They keep coming! We can’t hold them back indefinitely!” shouted Dawn. She reloaded her shotgun as the blue swirling lights that were once human eyes of a tinnie flickered then went out and its human host collapsed to the tarmac, a piece of his skull now exposed. Smoke and fumes made visibility ten or so feet at best. She pulled back from the hood of a car, one of a few rolled into place in the parking lot as a makeshift barricade. Behind her men, women and children ran from the station to the entrance of the bus. The one that still operated.
Brad fired off two shots from his assault rifle, felling another AI controlled human that appeared from the shadows. Mike ran from the open doors of the station, behind a limping Holland and coughing Meyer, he broke off and joined those at the wall of parked vehicles.
“That’s—” Before Mike could finish the ground around them lit up from the headlights of the three cars. Then the engines fired up. He knew what was happening and pulled Dawn backwards. As they all turned and ran for the bus, the cars drove forward smashing into each other, then reversed into the front wall of the station.
“Shoot the tires!” shouted Mike to Brad who was the last person on the bus and was standing on the bottom step. A clatter of fire tore from the M4 and burst the front tires of a green sedan, slowing it, but it still charged forward. Brad ran up the steps just in time before it slammed into where he was just standing. The air filled with screams from the children.
“Get us out of here!” shouted Mike to Alexis in the driver’s seat. The space behind her was full of people, crammed into every available space, with children on the laps of the adults, and others filling the aisle hanging on the backs of seats. She hit the gas and they sped off, with the car doing its best to knock the large bus off track. Brad fired more shots into the hood, and steam shot out of the grill and the car stopped, but not before the other two bounced over the sidewalk and into the street behind them.
“I can’t see shit! Where am I going?” shouted Alexis.
“Stay on the main road!” replied Mike.
Brad leaned out, trying to get a good shot on their pursuers as flames snapped at the bus from both sides.
Alexis’s eyes grew wide at the sight of a burning trunk across the road. “Everyone hold on tight!” She floored it but their momentum wasn’t what she hoped due to the slope they were driving up. They crashed into the top of the large evergreen, the tree shattering into ashes. Mike pushed his way past the passengers, to the back of the bus just in time to see Holland kick open the rear door and fire off repeated rounds from a twelve gauge. Mike didn’t hesitate to join in the barrage of fire and both cars swerved then careened off the road being lost to the wall of flames.
Holland turned with a frown, “Damn tinnies.” Despite the smoke Mike could smell the alcohol on the older man’s breath.
Lucky bastard.
As Holland returned to one of the seats, shouting at the young couple there to get up, Mike looked down the two-lane road, the same one they had walked in on, for any sign of more cars. There weren’t any.
Lost within the inferno that was now the town of Pine Needles, Edward Dyer got into his almost new four wheel drive truck, his pride, secured his belt, looked in the rear mirror and smiled. Then drove out of his driveway, heading east.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The twin beams of Elias’s truck cut through the darkness. He looked into the backseat. Becky was asleep, her head leaned on the back right pillar, with Brillo somewhere around her feet. Travis was looking at her.
You got nothing better to do than creep on a young girl?
Travis didn’t bother removing his gaze. “I’m observing.”
Is that was AI’s call it.
Travis shook his head. It looked to Elias that the young man was having some trouble with his own thoughts.
“I’m not an AI. I’m a… person. You have to remember that. The others, they are controlled by the AI. I… I’m not like that.” He looked directly at Elias. “Do you understand?”
Elias frowned. “Sure.”
Madeline looked at him from the passenger’s seat. “Are you talking to him?”
“Yup. He likes Becky—” Travis went to speak, but Elisas continued. “I guess that’s a good thing. Mean’s he’s something close to human still.” The young man in the back closed his mouth. Elias glanced at Madeline. “Crazy situation eh.”
She smiled. “Not the first messed up situation, we’ve been in. Won’t be the last.” She looked down, ruefully. “Can I talk to it… I mean him through you?”
Elias looked at her again. “Umm… yeah.”
“What’s so important about getting to your father?”
Elias looked in the rear mirror at Travis who was now paying the woman in front attention.
“He has something important,” said Elias, relaying Travis’s words.
“Something that can end this madness?”
“Yes.”
“And what happens if you do not get this thing?”
“The end will be quicker.”
“Quicker?”
“Yes.”
“Wait. You mean, I’m driving through the middle of the desert in the early hours of the morning to who knows where—”
“Roswell.”
Madeline turned around in her seat, looking to where Elias’s eyes were pointing in the rear mirror. “We’re going to Roswell, New Mexico?”
“Yes.”
“We’re going there, and it’s not even going to kill this AI thing?”
“It will give humanity more time to survive if I find my father. Otherwise all the humans that inhabit the earth will be become slaves to the AI within thirty-two days, sixteen hours and fourteen seconds.”
She turned back to face the darkness of the road ahead.
*****
Mike kneeled next to the driver’s seat. For the first time since they left the city, the sound of the engine was louder than the noise from the passengers. “I think most of the kids are asleep,” he said too Alexis.
“Good.”
He could see her eyes were heavy. The small amount of sleep they had inside the car wash felt like weeks ago. “I can take over the driving.”
She shook her head. “I know you’re just as tired as me. I can handle it.” She looked at the dashboard. “Maybe there’s a radio or something to help keep me awake.” She fumbled across a few buttons, pressing one marked with the word ‘Radio’ and static noise burst from the bus’s internal speaker making everyone jump. She quickly turned it off, swearing. “Sorry!” she said over her shoulder.
“Did someone say they wanted a radio?” Mike and those standing alongside him turned around to face an old man wearing a baseball cap. He was seated in the second row and was holding a small rounded black box with a large aerial. “I brought my solar and wind up radio with me. It’s also got short wave. I don’t know if we are still in the mountains, but we might get a signal.” He passed it forward until it eventually got to Mike at the front, who nodded to the old man.
Mike extended the aerial as far as he could, then turned the plastic knob. Crackling came from the speaker until he kept on turning and found the voice of a concerned man.
‘Get to Roswell, New Mexico if you can. Stay away from the national parks. Most are ablaze. We think started by the government as a kind of decontamination process against the nuclear fallout, or… something else. But hundreds are now arriving at Roswell. The city is doing its best to accommodate those from the west, but please if you have supplies, be willing to share them. The date of this message is November twelfth. This is a recorded message and will repeat.’ The man’s message then looped and begun again. Mike lowered the volume.
“Are we heading towards Roswell?” said Brad.
Ruth was standing behind him, near the door. She looked out into the gloom. “I think if we take the main route to the east when we can, that will take us in that direction.”
Mike looked at Alexis. “When we get to the exit to the east. Stop and I’ll—”
Brad put his hand on Mike’s shoulder. “No offence but I didn’t survive that shit storm back there, just for you to drive us all off a mountain. I had some sleep earlier, I’ll drive us to Roswell.”
Mike nodded.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mike was surrounded by smoke, as thick as the kind in the town but with more purpose. It swirled and formed patterns, faces and places. He knew it was his mind doing the creating, and tried to imagine a bikini-clad Alexis but instead the smog suddenly cleared until only his son was left standing inside an infinite black void.
“If you want to see your partner in beachwear, why not just ask her?” said Travis confused.
Mike frowned, “good to see you too son.”
Travis’s look of confusion quickly evolved into one of concern. “I will not be able to get to you in time.”
“In time for?”
“There is a ninety-eight percent chance that the AI will get to you, before I am able to. You must prepare.”
“I hate to break it to you Travis but the AI has already done a lot of getting to me and I kicked its ass each time. The town—”
“Yes. I was not aware that the government would implement such a plan, although it was the right thing to do. Fire would not in itself destroy the AI, but the intense heat of a forest fire would certainly damage it.”
“So the fires will just burn out of control? What about towns in or around the parks?”
Travis looked down. “It had to be done.”
Mike starting coughing. The smoke was returning. “We’re going to Roswell!”
Travis nodded. “Yes, logically that would be where I thought you would go, however the AI will also calculate the same.”
Mike looked at Travis as entrails of dark wispy smoke filled the air around them. His son was different, not the same as when he saw him on the platform out in the desert, and definitely not the same young man in the video. But then Mike never knew him, maybe this was Travis, unemotional, cold, distant. He reached out to Travis just as the teen was completely swallowed by the dark and opened his eyes in a jolt from the bus bumping over something. He blinked. A part of him wanted to stay unconscious, with his son.
Along the aisle, just visible through the other sleeping bodies, the sun was rising, behind hills and a strip of cloud. He tilted his neck left and right to try remove the stiffness but instead was just reminded of his eye injury, then did his best to stand without knocking anyone around him. Most of the bus appeared to be sleeping, although there were a few that were reading or just staring out into the desert, lost in their own thoughts.
He stepped between arms and legs, making his way to the front, where Brad was driving, and noticed Reed was sitting near his seat. They appeared to be talking in a hushed tone, which stopped when they realized he was just behind them. He sat on the step to the door.
“Feeling better?” said Brad keeping his voice low.
“A bit.”
Mike instinctively reached for the pocket inside his jacket, then stopped when realizing there was nothing there. Reed tried not to notice, instead handing him her own flask.
“Water,” she said.
Mike took a few sips and handed it back. He wondered how difficult it would be to get a proper morning drink in Roswell. He looked at the road which was now clearly visible. They were driving between low hills. A few small residences and farm buildings slid by a mile or so off. “How far are we to Roswell?”
“Not far,” said Brad. “Maybe another half hour.”
Mike nodded towards the old man’s radio which rested on Reed’s lap. “Anything more on that?”
She shook her head. “No.” Her eyes were red, and the bags under them were more pronounced than before. He was glad that Brad could distract her, but it was obvious she still carried the weight of what had happened.
A road sign for a city called ‘Tinnie’ flashed by which they all caught, and then smiled at.
“Where else do you think I got the name from?’ grumbled Holland, sitting just in front of the first row of seats. Mike hadn’t seen him there. The older man leaned forward, wanting his turn on the flask, which Reed gave him, but instead of drinking he waved it around. “All of you did a fine job back in that town, but this is a military operation from here on out. Whoever’s in command in Roswell I will outrank, so I’ll be in charge of that city as—” The bus quickly slowed, and he used the back of someone’s head for support. “Hey, what’s going on?” He stretched to see out of the windscreen, the others could see why they were stopping through. An expensive looking truck was on the side of the road with its hood up. A man stood back from it, looking at the approaching bus. Brad stopped just a few yards short.
The suede jacketed man, tall by how much he loomed over the top of the truck, produced a big grin and waved, then walked to the driver’s side window that Brad had already lowered.
“Howdy. You folks on the way to Roswell?”
“Yeah. Engine trouble?” said Brad. Reed noticed Mike had his hand on his holster.
The man looked back at his truck with a frown. “Out of gas. I was thinking of walking to the nearest homestead…”
Brad looked back to the others for guidance.
Mike stood, leaning slightly over Brad. “Where you traveling from?”
The man smiled again, showing a perfect set of teeth. “Albuquerque. Was up there on business. Originally I’m from Santa Fe. Real shame about the forests, but I guess if it has to be done. What about you folks?”
“West,” said Mike trying to see into the man’s eyes, but they were mostly cloaked by his pronounced brow.
“I see… I heard it was real bad out there.”
Mike’s hand stiffened on his gun.
A rumbling made them all look behind them, to the road they had just come down.
The man backed up. “Looks like some more folks on their way to Roswell. You look quite full up! I’ll see if they got any room. Thanks for stopping though.” He walked off towards the cream and silver motorhome that was stopping behind the bus.
“We might have room Mike,” said Brad.
“Drive.” Mike leaned back, but as they pulled back onto the road he watched the man produce the same grin to the driver of the other vehicle and the side door open.
After a while the road widened to four lanes and patches of green appeared amongst the sand and beige colored hills, which themselves eventually faded into the distance being replaced with an almost completely flat landscape, only broken up by farm buildings.
