Upgrade(42)

We passed an old church that had collapsed in on itself.

And then the ruins of a bar. Old neon beer signs hung by their cords in glassless windows, and a wooden sign—MIS AMIGOS—still swung over an entrance to nothing, faded by decades of high-elevation sunlight.

Kara was driving.

I was looking at her phone.

“No cell service,” I said, “but the car’s GPS still works. I’m just going to put the raw coordinates in and see what happens.”

I converted the decimal degrees to standard degrees/minutes/seconds, and then input 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W into the GPS.

The map on the enormous display screen changed to show the location of the pin drop, which was 8.7 miles away.

The automated voice said, Warning: Driving navigation can only take you to within point five miles of destination.



* * *



—

Two miles outside the village, the road went from pavement to hard-packed gravel.

We climbed into foothills.

Evergreens crowded up against the shoulder of the road.

After five miles, we hadn’t passed another building or soul.

Just us and the car and a trail of dust in our wake.

At 5.9 miles, we turned onto a road of lesser breadth, more rocks, and melting patches of snow in the shade.

Kara had to slow down considerably, and it was becoming clear that the Google suspension package wasn’t intended for old logging roads.

At the 8.2-mile mark, the road ended.

The navigation assistant said: You have gone as far as possible on known roads. Your destination is approximately two thousand feet north-northwest of your current position.

Kara turned off the car.

I stepped outside.

My door slam echoed through the pine forest.

Kara got out, went around to the trunk, popped it open.

I walked over, saw that she had her duffel bag open. She was pulling out a Garmin minisatellite communicator for off-grid GPS tracking.

She handed it to me. “Can you put the coordinates in?”

While I programmed 36°33′45″N, 106°13′04″W into the device, Kara palmed a magazine into a Glock, which she slipped into a hip holster and secured with a magnetic clasp. Then she loaded shotgun slugs into the same weapon she’d used to shoot me out of the vivarium.



* * *



—

We left the road on foot and headed into the woods, the Garmin taking us on a northerly track.

It was cold and clear.

Sunlight slanted through the trees, creating light wells in the forest.

The air was rife with the smell of pine and spruce.

We climbed a gentle hill.

Despite being at an elevation of almost nine thousand feet, neither of us had any trouble exerting—the hemoglobin in our blood efficiently pulling oxygen out of the thin air thanks to modifications in our EGLN1, EPAS1, MTHFR, and EPOR genes.

The forest was spacious and the underbrush spotty. If we’d had a vehicle with better clearance, we could have driven up this mountain.

I glanced down at the Garmin.

We were fourteen hundred feet from our coordinates.

“There’s something up ahead,” Kara said.

I didn’t see anything.

“Where?”

“Fifty yards straight on. I saw a glint in the trees.”

We went a little farther.

And then I saw the old pickup truck.

The front half was in a patch of sunlight. It was the chrome side mirror that Kara had seen glinting.

We approached.

No sound but our footsteps on the pine needle floor of the forest.

Twenty feet away, we stopped.

It was an old Chevy, yellow and white—one of the first fully electric pickup trucks. Pine needles had nearly pasted over the windshield, and the rear left tire was low.

We crept closer, Kara smoothly shouldering her shotgun and aiming it at the driver’s-side door, which was coming into view. The window was iced up on the inside.

Kara stopped several feet away.

I felt a pit in my stomach, and a premonition that I was walking into a trap.

Again.

Kara glanced back at me and motioned to the door. “Pull it open,” she whispered.

“You sure about that?”

“Got a better idea?”

“Yeah. Leave and come back with hazmat suits.”

She rolled her eyes and moved to the truck and jerked open the driver’s-side door.

There was a person lying across the bench seat.

Kara said, “Oh god.”

She stepped back as the waft of putrefaction hit. I’d encountered my share of dead bodies during the course of my work as a GPA agent, and while I’d certainly experienced worse, this was wildly unpleasant.

Kara leaned her shotgun against the tree and pulled her parka up over her nose. I moved closer, taking a quick glance into the bed of the truck. It was filled with old, dirty snow covering the remnants of a load of firewood.

I walked around to the passenger door.

It made a grinding screech as I wrenched it open.

I was breathing through my mouth now; my eyes watered from whatever decomp gases had been accumulating in the cab of the truck.

Kara came up behind me.

The corpse wore a blue fleece jacket, black jeans, and hiking boots.