The truth of the matter

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Battle Begins Four minutes thirty-three seconds… 4:32… 4:31…

I was glad to get out of that room of death. But the moment I moved back to the main part of the bunker, I saw the bomb again and the seconds ticking away. I stood in front of the device, holding the small controller to Milton Two in my hand. Four minutes twenty-five seconds now… So little time.

I tore my eyes away from the red numbers and looked down to study the controller.

At first, the little screen was blank. But I found a button built into the top of the device and pressed it. The gizmo’s monitor light came on. The small screen showed a terrain map with a green dot blinking on it and several blinking red dots as well. There was also a series of numbers up in the right-hand corner. More than anything, it reminded me of a PSP video-game screen.

Which was a good thing. I was always a pretty decent gamer. Not a game-dork or anything: I didn’t sit around getting fat on Pop-Tarts while fragging Covenant Grunts for fourteen hours at a time or anything. But when a cool new game came out, whether it was an old-fashioned platformer or a full-blown shooter, I was usually the first among my friends to get the hang of it. For some reason, I had a knack for figuring out a level even while escaping a horde of zombies through an underground storage facility. My dad sometimes said kind of bitterly that my generation had developed some new sort of DNA that helped us understand games-but I think he was just jealous because he usually got killed while he was still lifting up his eyeglasses in order to see which button on the controller was which.

So, forcing myself to stay calm, to ignore the dwindling red numbers on the time bomb, I did a quick study of the controller’s readout.

I could see right away that the terrain on the screen was the terrain outside: the trees were dark green patches and the buildings were shapes outlined in red. The green dot-that was probably M-2 himself. The red dots were probably bio-heat readings-the Homelanders. There was no way to identify what the numbers were, but I was guessing they were probably M-2’s speed, height, blast energy, and number of tear-gas shots-something like that.

I glanced up. I couldn’t help myself. The timer was ratcheting rapidly down to 4:00.

Come on, I told myself, concentrate.

I looked down at the controller again.

According to my reading of the map, Milton Two was lying on the ground at the very edge of the ruined compound outside. When I tilted the controller, the green light stopped blinking and the numbers changed: M-2 was rising off the ground and taking flight. I quickly found I could move him by either tilting the device or touching the screen. And more. The moment he started moving, a small square window lit up in one corner of the screen. It was video-the point of view from the camera in M-2’s single eye: it showed what M-2 saw in front of him. There were also two red buttons that lit up on the bottom of the controller. The one on the right was to fire electronic blasts. The one on the left let loose tear gas.

Again, I couldn’t stop myself from looking up at the clock: 3:56… 3:55… 3:54… I seemed to feel every second dying inside me as it ticked away.

I glanced over at the monitors on the wall. I could see the Homelanders there. Three of them had stopped moving now. They had taken up positions, standing with their guns propped on their hips. They were guarding the area, waiting for the explosion that would destroy the bunker-and me, if I was still inside.

Okay, I thought. Okay. I needed a plan of attack. What would give me my best chance at getting out of here?

My first thought was to send M-2 after the guy near the entrance in the brick cylinder. I remembered the pain of getting hit with M-2’s blaster: it paralyzed me, knocked me right off my feet. If I took out the entrance guard, maybe I could break out and make a run for it. But then I thought: No. Once the blasting started, the others would be alert. They’d come running in the direction of the fight. If I hit the entrance guard, they’d converge on the doorway, closing off my escape.

So the best idea was to strike away from the entrance first and hope the guard outside the brick cylinder abandoned his post so I could get away.

I studied the wall monitors quickly. All the Home-landers were at their positions now. They were communicating with one another through microphones clipped to the shoulders of their khaki jackets. The leader-the killer I knew as Waylon-was posted off at the perimeter, about as far from Milton Two as he could be. Waylon, I could see now, was a big man, tall and broad shouldered, with heavy, sagging features and a scruffy black beard. He had deep-set eyes that were always moving, watchful. I doubted M-2 could cross the facility and reach him before he or one of the other Homelanders spotted him and possibly shot him down.

I looked at another monitor where another man was standing beside a broken column of stone. This guy was young-maybe my age. Tall and skinny with light blond hair and a long, narrow face. His eyes looked angry and mean. I looked down at his feet. The morning mist curled around his hiking boots. But as the mist moved and cleared in patches, I could make out Milton Two-the little device shaped like an Xbox controller-lying in the grass about twenty feet away from him. Then the mist closed again and M-2 disappeared behind it.

I looked at the ticking clock on the bomb.