The Rising(64)
“Count to ten,” he told Dancer and the girl. “Jump out at one.” Raiff met Dancer’s eyes. “Open the door.”
“Not until you tell me what I’ve got that the ash man wants.”
“I told you we haven’t got the time,” Raiff said, reaching across the seat to thrust open the door himself. “And if you don’t get out now we might never have the time.”
Alex didn’t bother to protest further, just started counting, mouthing the numbers. He eased the door further open, and a cool rush of air flooded the truck’s cab.
In the side-view mirror, the dark vehicles were drawing nearer; Raiff realized it was going to be close.
“How do we find you?” Dancer asked, hand moving to the girl’s shoulder to ready her.
“Don’t worry about that. Just stay out of sight. Don’t use any cell phones or computers, nothing that can be traced digitally back to you.”
The truck eased into the curve, Raiff slowing its speed as much as he dared.
“Now!”
Dancer had already grabbed hold of the girl, easing her up even with him. Pushing the door all the way open as he tugged hard and drew her out into the night.
Raiff watched them separate in the air and hit the soft shoulder together: Dancer with grace and his tutor with a thump and a thud. It made him wince as he leaned over and got the door closed, just as bright headlights flashed anew in the side-view mirror. He gave the truck more gas, needing to widen the distance between them but not too much.
Just enough.
Thoughts flooded through his mind in that moment, most notably the fact that all this wasn’t just about Dancer’s identity being compromised. Something else was happening: what he knew was coming now and had sacrificed everything to prevent.
So this world could survive. So its people would not know the pain and hardship his did.
Raiff checked the gap between his truck and the pursuing vehicles. Not wide enough for comfort but as good as he could manage.
He took a deep breath and changed his hand position on the steering wheel.
*
Alex watched the two big black SUVs speed past without noticing him, already moving to Sam, who lay dazed and bent on the downward slope of the shoulder.
“Sam, Sam! Look at me, can you hear me?”
She looked at him. “Ouch.”
“Can you move?”
“I’m afraid to try.”
But she did anyway, found herself sore and scraped but otherwise okay.
She managed to sit up. “I just jumped out of a moving truck.…”
“Yeah.”
They looked down the stretch of straightaway into which the road had settled. The garbage truck and SUVs shrank in the growing distance, their lights becoming mere specks on the dark horizon, when the garbage truck suddenly twisted round and skidded sideways down the road.
Sparks and smoke erupted beneath its big tires, the SUVs powerless to do anything but surge on. Then the garbage truck was twirling, a giant clock hand spinning in sped-up motion along the center of the road.
The screech of tires echoed in the night air, the first SUV slamming into the truck broadside by its nose and sent rolling, tumbling, across the road. The second SUV rammed it dead center, halting the truck’s spin and driving it forward until it toppled over. The contents of its hold coughed into the air in a ribbon of stray refuse and bags, seeming to float down in slow motion, as the SUV pitched over it and spun in the air.
It came down on its side directly in the path of the other SUV, still spinning wildly. The crunching impact showered steel and rubber into the air just ahead of the flame burst that left Alex and Sam covering their eyes, even before the garbage truck erupted in a curtain of fire.
“Raiff … Do you think he…,” Sam began, leaving it at that.
“I don’t know,” Alex managed. “I don’t know.”
66
WAR
“JANUS DIDN’T EXIST THEN,” the woman in the top right reminded him. “But we do now. Please speak plainly, Doctor.”
“Suffice it to say,” said Donati, “that our experiments were figuratively based on leaving bumps in the night. Until something bumped back.”
At that point, the principals of Janus had requested a complete report on what exactly had transpired in Laboratory Z, leaving Donati utterly perplexed. Didn’t these people understand the gravity of what was unfolding? Is this how they or their counterparts in the Near-Earth Object office would react if informed that a potential planet-killing asteroid was on a collision course with Earth?
A bad metaphor, really, considering that this threat was potentially just as bad and far more immediate than that one.
Donati, though, had no choice other than to succumb to the bureaucracy, the Janus board not seeing any harm in putting off action for the few hours it would take to consider his full report on Laboratory Z before reconvening. He knew this was a stall tactic as much as anything, since there was really no action they could take if what he suspected turned out to be true.
Indeed, what action, exactly, could the Earth take against a possible alien invasion?
No copies remained of his original report, but Donati was able to re-create the most salient facts from a memory that had never relinquished its hold on them. He kept it short and sweet, not wanting to burden the Janus board with too much technical or scientific jargon. And when they finally reconvened three hours after the initial call concluded, Donati sensed a different attitude and approach from the four voices, which had now been joined by a fifth in the center. More somber and inquisitive, while less confrontational, all the participants’ comments and questions laced with something as clear as it was undeniable: