Zero Sum Game

Chapter 34

We left the motorcycle in a park a few blocks out and I led the way at a jog, hoping I remembered the layout of streets correctly in this part of Los Angeles. I didn’t have the city memorized by a long shot, but I’d had enough close escapes that I had made a point of swallowing large portions of the road map, and hard experience had taught me to take special care to know the areas near the airports.

Of course, the moment we skidded around the corner onto El Segundo, we ran straight into a gang of looters shouting raucously and hurling Molotov cocktails through the windows of a large sporting goods store.

They saw us. One of them catcalled. Another drew a knife. I shot him before he finished the motion.

The shouting stopped as if the looters’ voices had been snuffed out. I saw another guy start to reach into his pants and shot him, too. One of his mates started screaming profanity at me, and my handgun barked one more time—I had far more bullets than I had patience.

The looters all froze. The sporting goods store started to catch fire, the flames roaring upward and backlighting them into aggressive silhouettes.

By that time Arthur had the shotgun up on my left. “Get out of here!” he shouted.

The gang scattered.

I started to move forward, but Arthur grabbed my arm, hard. “The Air Force base,” he said. “We ain’t killing anyone. Looters who try and attack us, that’s one thing, but we ain’t killing men and women just doing their jobs.”

His grip was powerful enough to leave a bruise, and his stance said he would stand his ground unless I shot him, too. Part of my brain noted this as impressive, considering that at this point, he had to know how pitifully his skills stacked up against mine—not to mention I was still holding a pistol with which I’d just shot three people, and also had a G36 assault rifle slung over my shoulder.

I searched his face. He’d go down fighting for this. “Okay,” I said.

His fingers tightened, the muscles around his eyes pinching. “Promise me.”

“I said okay!” Behind me, flames rose in the store in a whoosh, punching up through the second floor, the heat scorching my exposed skin. “I promise, all right? Come on!”

He let go of me, and we dashed.

As we slipped onto the edges of the base property, I caught sight of flashlight beams dancing through one of the far buildings in a beehive of activity. That building must be the nerve center of whatever disaster response they had going, I thought—farming out personnel to help local authorities quell the rioting, coordinating logistics during the crisis. While, I hoped, maintaining some sort of emergency communication with the outside world.

We hurried into the complex. With the personnel all concentrated elsewhere, this end of the base was mostly deserted. Only one young man in fatigues tried to challenge us, running forward through the dark and shouting; I pulled my otherwise useless phone out of my pocket and threw it. He collapsed to the pavement as if his strings had been cut.

Arthur’s expression tightened.

“What? He’s not dead,” I snapped.

We hurried toward one of the central buildings, a looming white-and-glass edifice that probably housed offices. I took a moment to get my bearings, turning toward the southeast. Yes, this was the one. Perfect.

“Let’s split up,” I said to Arthur. I gestured toward the far-off flashes of light and movement. “Whatever communications equipment they’ve got is probably that way somewhere, where all the people are. Go do your PI thing, figure out if they’ve got a line to the outside world and how we can get access.”

He hesitated, and I literally held my breath.

“Where are you going to be?”

“I need to jury rig some working hardware. I’m going to look for a server room in a Faraday cage, maybe try to cobble together some unfried equipment.” I was improvising the technobabble, but it sounded good. “Meet me back here on the top floor.”

Before he could respond, I drove the butt of my rifle through the glass of the door next to me, the pane showering down with a crash. Arthur winced and glanced around, but no alarm sounded. As I’d suspected, security was at least partially down. “Top floor,” I reminded Arthur, and ducked through the broken door.

The halls inside were dark and cavernously empty. I didn’t waste any time: I broke into the first office I came to, unscrewed the back of a dead computer, and yanked out all the circuit boards. When I’d asked Checker how much Arthur knew about computers, his answer had been, “Well, he knows how to use a search engine, which is sadly more than I can say for a lot of people.” I didn’t know too much more than that myself when it came to hardware, but Arthur didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

I collected an armful of as many sufficiently electronic-looking doodads as I could and headed for the stairs. The ground floor had been deserted, but in the stairwell I ran into one surprised-looking woman in a civilian suit who ended up sleeping off her concussion hidden in a dark bathroom stall. See, Arthur? I’m keeping my word.

Fortunately, the top floor was just as empty as the bottom one had been. As per Rio’s instructions, I found the southeast corner, which turned out to be a conference room. It was slightly less dark than the rest of the building by virtue of the two walls’ worth of windows that let in whatever moon and starlight Southern California had tonight. I dumped my armful of circuit boards and ribbon cable on the table and left to find another nearby office; within fifteen minutes, I had amassed a large pile of random electronic hardware as well as four laptops, a pair of scissors, a utility knife, a roll of scotch tape, and a screwdriver. I surveyed my stash.

“Time to be a motherfucking genius,” I muttered to myself, and set to work.

I wondered if Arthur would come back and find me. I wondered if the people I’d sent him for would find me first.

I wondered if he’d do what I needed him to in the first place. If he’d try. If the base personnel would take him down before he had a chance.

Enough time passed in the dim conference room that I started to wonder how much longer I should give him until I should assume my plan had failed. How much longer until I should start coming up with other options. But then I heard a quiet call from somewhere down the hall: “Russell?”

I drew my gun and didn’t move, in case he wasn’t alone. “In here,” I called, equally softly.

Footsteps approached from down the hallway, and Arthur came in, holstering his own weapon. “They got communications,” he reported. “Think I see a few ways in, but it’ll be tricky. How long will you need in there?”

“Not long,” I said. “Couple of minutes, at most. I’ll, uh, I’ll be able to let you know in a second.” I put my gun down and picked up the utility knife. While Arthur had been gone, I’d had time to twist wires between a whole mess of the circuit components until they twined into an overlapping tangle, as if Checker’s Hole had upchucked on the table. I’d opened the cases of two of the laptops as well, spreading their guts into the jumble. Now I picked up a bundle of wires and started stripping the ends with confidence.

“What can I do?” said Arthur.

I badly wanted to know if he’d made the call, but I couldn’t ask. “Watch the door,” I said instead.

He moved over and did so, Mossberg at the ready. “We going to have to move all what you’re working on over there?”

Shit. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead, given that this was a fake plan and all. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Or, no, not all of it. I’ve got to find the pieces here still working. Some bits are fried more than others.”

“You can do that without power?”

“The laptop batteries still have juice,” I said quickly.

Fortunately he seemed to accept that.

I tinkered pointlessly with the components for another twenty minutes, long enough to begin resigning myself to suspecting we’d underestimated Arthur after all. But then he straightened in the doorway with a roar of “Incoming!” and the corridor exploded with gunfire.

I leapt forward, hurled a grenade out into the hallway, and yanked Arthur back into the room with me. The blast thundered against our eardrums and made the wall buckle and shudder—I’d thrown just far enough down the hall not to tear open the conference room. “Get behind me!” I shouted at Arthur over the ringing in my ears.

I risked a glance into the corridor. Hulking, dark shapes swarmed from wall to wall, the stairwells disgorging more of them. Dawna’s mooks.

I could tell within the first split-second that they had been ordered to avoid killing me. To my mathematically-guided vision, they were aiming so far off line that it was laughable, their rifles jerking to the side almost comically as I poked my head out. After all, I had the fabled antidote their boss needed to live, so their plan must have been to overwhelm me physically or intimidate me enough to force my surrender. I also saw some of them packing Tasers and glimpsed at least two with riot guns—apparently the total nonlethal force they’d been able to muster from their armory in a few minutes’ time.

I, however, was not constrained against killing any of them—even my promise to Arthur had only been about the Air Force base personnel—and they never got close enough. The G36 jerked madly in my hands; it took less than half a magazine to take down everybody in the hallway. I was too good to miss, especially when I could see that the guns pointed in my direction weren’t targeting anywhere near me.

Arthur gaped at me. But only for a moment, because then Dawna sent a second wave.

By the fourth offensive, it was becoming clear that her new plan was to run me out of ammo. She probably thought that would force me to surrender.

Well, she was about to find out how wrong she was. I ran out of 5.56 rounds and dumped the G36 to swap out with Arthur for the shotgun; when I ran through the shells for that, I switched to the handguns. I’d long used up the grenades, but setting off any more would likely have taken out the building’s structural supports anyway.

Arthur was doing a good job of backing me up, firing above my head, and if his batting average wasn’t quite a thousand, it was nice to have the cover when I had to reload. Though when I caught a glimpse of the grimness in his eyes, I almost felt bad: Arthur hated killing people, and thanks to my perfect marksmanship, the bodies were piling high enough in the hallway to provide flesh-and-bone cover for each following wave of troops, the blood seeping from beneath them into expanding black pools in the dim light. The Los Angeles Air Force Base was becoming a mass grave. And worse, who knew how many of Dawna’s troops were only here because she’d told them to be in words they couldn’t disobey.

I’d never felt any twinge of regret at defending myself before.

One of my handguns clicked to empty, the slide locking back. I dashed from the doorway, neatly dodging the Taser leads one grunt desperately shot at me and spinning to pistol whip him in the head while I fired the last two rounds out of the gun in my other hand. Then I dove into a slide, the soles of my boots skidding on the wet floor, and came up with one of the dead soldiers’ Berettas. By the time it clicked open, I’d taken out the remaining seven attackers in the hallway.

I snagged a few more weapons off our downed enemies and returned to the doorway, handing Arthur a share of the new munitions. My boots left wet, red footprints behind me. The crisp burnt scent of gunpowder clogged the air and stung my nostrils, the hazy smoke from the fray curling through corridor.

“What’s the plan?” Arthur asked, holding a Beretta at high ready and not taking his eyes off the death-wrapped hall.

“We fight,” I said.

“Can’t fight forever.”

“I can.”

His eyes strayed to the bodies, skittering across the blood. “God help me, I maybe believe you,” he mumbled, so softly I wasn’t sure he knew he said it out loud.

I had a stolen M4 settled against my shoulder, waiting. But this time the building stayed quiet.

One minute.

Two minutes.

“Get back into the room,” I said, taking my own advice and retreating to the table.

“Ain’t got a vantage point,” Arthur objected. “When they come—”

“They aren’t coming,” I said.

“Wait, what? Russell—”

“You can watch and wait if you want,” I said. But I couldn’t. If I did, I might compromise the whole plan. My eye fell on the scattered computer components. “I have to fix this,” I said, putting down the gun.

“Russell—” started Arthur again. His tone clearly thought I had gone insane.

I forced myself to turn my back to the door. “It’s important,” I said, and picked up a circuit board as if it had meaning. It was a PCI card of some kind. I didn’t even know what it did.

I took the utility knife and started prying tiny microchips off it. They went flying into the chaos of components with tiny pings.

They weren’t so loud that I couldn’t hear the footsteps in the hallway.

It was only one set of footsteps this time. One light, quiet set of footsteps.

Arthur was silent, and didn’t fire.

I was gripping the utility knife so hard my hand was shaking. I still held the PCI card in my other hand, but my brain was buzzing so madly with something I was fairly sure was terror that I couldn’t even remember what I was pretending to be doing with it.

Arthur moved back from the doorway. The footsteps entered the room.

“Good evening,” said Dawna Polk.