Multiplayer (39 page)

“This is the way to our mosque!” cried Shah, from the front seat. “If we can get there…”

“Then you’re about to lose your cell signal,” said Sanjar matter-of-factly. “There’s never any signal here.”

“It has to stop somewhere,” said Izaak. “Might as well stop here.”

“Do you think this changes anything?” sneered Mal-X, “Do you know who you’re dealing with? What you’re dealing with? You’d be surprised who’s heard the name, Hector West.”

Hector froze for an instant. They knew his name.
Terrorists.
“Doesn’t matter,” he replied with Izaak, now certain the FBI would listen to him. “I know enough to shut all your asses down.”

“Too bad you won’t live to tell anyone,” Mal-X replied. “I’m going to enjoy splattering your brains all over the ground. The real ground.”

There was suddenly a loud popping sound like they’d driven into a hail storm. One of the windows shattered. The screen dangled by its wires for an instant after Sanjar let go of it, then went dark and fell to the floor. The steering wheel wrenched out of Shah’s hands. He cried out as the Hummer slid off the road. Hector’s father flashed through his mind – dying in a Humvee. They crashed through a guardrail and the Hummer and its occupants tumbled into darkness.

Ch. 35

Hector awoke with his head spinning. The darkness was so intense he couldn’t even be sure his eyes were working. The patter of rain and the whir of wheels turning reached his ears as he tried to get his bearings. A dim flash filtered through the cabin followed by a distant rumble. The storm had passed and he was still alive. He hadn’t died but the Hummer was upside down.

His vision returned slowly passing from black, to invisible gray, to the deepest midnight. And though he couldn’t see past his hand, he could smell gasoline and scalded rubber. Something was hissing somewhere. He felt like he’d been shaken inside a tin can. People were sprawled everywhere inside the darkness of the Hummer’s ruined cabin, groaning in pain, contorted in weird positions, in the darkness, lying on the ceiling. Apparently, only Helen had been wearing a seat belt and she hung in the straps like a fly caught in a spider web. A deflated airbag sagged in her face. Deion lay beneath Hector on the ceiling.

Deion groaned, pushing himself up.

“This is not good,” Hector added, rolling off of him. “Everybody okay? Sanjar?”

“I can’t believe I broke the DVD player,” came his voice from the darkness. “Dad’s going to kill me.”

“You really think he’s going to give a crap?” Deion answered.

“I think my leg’s busted,” Shah moaned from the front. “God, it hurts bad.”

“Don’t move,” said Helen, reaching over to cradle his head in her hands, all of them upside down and smashed into the ceiling.

“Mal-X is going to come kill us,” Hector said grimly, as the reason they lay here came to him. “We’ve got to get out of here. Now.”

“Shah can’t move,” Helen answered.

Hector, Deion, and Sanjar managed to free themselves from the wreckage by crawling through a broken side window, out into gooey mud. Hector’s head was throbbing, but it didn’t seem serious. He hurt everywhere but nothing seemed broken. Deion had cuts from glass. Sanjar seemed entirely unscathed.

Sanjar was holding his cell phone, staring at it intently. “No signal,” he said, his voice trembling. “Dad won’t be able to find us.” No one else could find a cell phone in the wreckage of the truck.

Outside, crouched next to the wrecked SUV, Hector realized it had almost stopped raining. Lightning still flashed but now it provided no light. The Hummer’s ceiling had been crushed like a tin can and across the undercarriage of the flipped truck, Hector could make out three men coming slowly down the hill through the brush. Their flashlights stabbed through the rainy night like spears. They were talking to each other but Hector couldn’t hear what was being said.

“We got to get you guys out of there!” Hector hissed, tugging on Helen through the window. “They’re coming.”

“I can’t move,” Shah groaned. “And I sure can’t walk.”

“I’m not leaving him,” Helen said flatly.

Hector stood quickly and glanced around. Nothing here but a glow from one direction across the field on the other side of some woods.

“I got no signal, either,” said Deion, staring at his phone. In the pale light, Hector could see tiny cuts all over his face.

“I told you, there’s no signal here,” came Helen’s voice from inside the inverted SUV. “Go. Get away from here. Now.”

Hector knelt next to the wreckage, his gut sick at the thought of what was about to happen. “I’m not leaving you, Helen.” He reached through the window and groped until his hand linked in hers.

“Get out of here,” she ordered him. “It’s okay.”

Shah groaned in the darkness. “Get out of here, you idiot.”

“Helen…” Hector said, when he suddenly had an idea. His spirit leapt as the thought formed in his mind. “We’ll draw them off. They’ll follow us. Toward those lights.”

“What are they?” asked Deion, doing a fair job of trying to sound brave.

“It’s a concrete plant,” answered Sanjar. “We pass it on the way to our mosque.”

“Maybe there’s a telephone. Or a caretaker or something.” Hector squeezed his sister’s hand. “Everything’s going to be okay. They don’t know there’s five of us. Just lay here and be very quiet.”

The first few steps were the most painful Hector had ever taken. Every joint in his body, every muscle, cried out in pain. Beside him, his friends moved just as woodenly, groaning with each step across the slick, uneven ground. “Come on,” Hector grimaced, through clenched teeth, and forced his body to move. He stopped some hundred feet away and turned, seeing that their pursuers had almost reached the Hummer. “Hey Mal-X!” he yelled through hands formed into a bullhorn. He forced himself to sound nonchalant “We’re going to bury your butt, dude. We got all the names. I’m going straight to the cops.”

“You know nothing,” came a voice from the night. The same stilted American voice that had mocked Izaak after he stole
Vera
. The same person he’d talked to just moments ago in
Omega Wars
. Hector’s head swam at the sudden merging of real and virtual. “You are mere children.” They had stopped at the Hummer, their flashlights examining the wreck.

“Wanna bet, you Muslim dork,” Sanjar hollered beside him. “We know you’re trying to kidnap the President at the summit. We know everything. And in a few minutes, so will the FBI!”

They heard swearing and three flashlight beams bathed them in the darkness. “Soon as I get to that light, I’m calling the cops,” Hector added.

“Try to stop us, you Muslim dork!” said Sanjar.

“You already called him that,” said Deion, as they backed away.

“They’re not coming,” said Hector.

Sanjar turned back to the terrorists and blurted something in what sounded to Hector like Arabic. Suddenly, the flashlight beams were dancing wildly in the darkness as the three men barreled wildly toward them through the darkness, snarling and cursing. “Your stomach roast in hell, you miserable infidel!” one of them snarled.

“What did you say?” Hector asked, as they turned and fled.

“A thousand dicks in your religion,” gasped Sanjar, stumbling over a log.

“You people really need to learn to swear,” Deion added.

“No,” replied Sanjar. “
We
know how to swear.”

They ran across a short space of muddy ground, then plunged into a sparse forest, dodging trees by instinct more than anything else. Just behind them three flashlight beams chopped the night air. Sanjar kept babbling about his father finding them with their phones, to which Deion reminded him that there was no cell signal here.

Then the ground gave way and they were stumbling down a steep, wooded slope choked with weeds, sticks snapping under foot. Hector heard running water and a second later splashed through a creek. They ran up the other side, slipping on deep leaves, feet sinking into soft earth beneath.

At the top of the creek bed, the ground evened out again and they went back to dodging trees until they fought their way through a heavy barrier of brush. Their hands and faces stung from the scratches of thorns as they stumbled out into the open at last. Across a short, grassy field lay the concrete plant surrounded by a chain-link fence. A slowly blinking red light beckoned them from high atop a tower. There were gantries and walkways, chutes, ladders, and big steel buildings, piles of dirt and rock, and empty vehicles. Security lights turned the place into a mix of searing brightness and coal-black shadow. Behind it all rose a naked plug of stone. Like something straight out of
Omega Wars
, Hector thought.

“Still nothing,” said Sanjar, checking his cell phone. Deion confirmed the same.

“If we can get up there,” said Hector, pointing to a slowly blinking red light high up on a tower. “We might have better luck.”

Behind them, the flashlights finally penetrated the dense wall of brush. “Come on!” Sanjar hissed, taking the lead with a burst of speed. “Do you want to get caught?”

They crossed the weedy field, stumbled over a gravel road, and found themselves at the fence where it took only moments to find a way under. The fence jangled as they slipped through and they raced between two dark, conical mounds of earth or rocks, and kept moving deeper into the industrial complex. They jogged into a jumble of flat-sided, windowless buildings and shacks connected by catwalks and piping.

“Feels like
Omega Wars
,” panted Deion. “But I don’t remember Darxhan ever getting this tired.”

“Except when you’d run him out of power,” Hector added, and they all tried to laugh. It didn’t work.

Footsteps sounded not far behind them as they ducked behind the rusted, steel panels of a building that might have been used to store equipment. Close at hand was the concrete mixing plant. At one end, big conveyer belts lead to huge hoppers supported some twenty feet above the ground by giant steel beams. A tall silo stood at the center of the plant, near what looked like a huge mixing drum. All the machinery was supported on girders and connected by catwalks so the concrete could be poured into trucks that would move along below it. The red light, glaring down on them like the eye of Sauron, topped the silo a hundred feet high. Security lights on some of the gantries and catwalks turned the area into a maze of shadows.

“There’s nowhere to go now, Hector,” came Mal-X’s voice, not close but too close. “You’ve led your friends to a dead end. Very dead. I know you don’t have a cell signal. And there’s no one here but us. Give it up now boy, and I’ll kill you quick. Otherwise… well, you can use your imagination, but I can promise you it will be far worse than anything you can think of.”

“I doubt it,” Deion yelled back. “I’ve seen
Saw
. All of them.”

“What are we going to do?” whispered Sanjar.

Hector glanced at his friends. They were terrified and he was too. But they’d made it this far. “You know what’s at stake here,” he told them quickly. “We go down and it’s World War Three. We can’t let that happen.”

“We’re with you, man,” said Deion, his eyes shining in the darkness. “Whatever it takes.”

Sanjar nodded with steely resolve. “Me too. We have to stop them.”

“I bet we can get a signal up there,” said Hector, pointing up at the red beacon. “I bet Pappous and your dad are out –”

Sanjar took a step backward. “I’m not going up there. I hate heights.”

Deion shook his head as well. “You’re the parkour master. Didn’t you and Chaz used to do this kind of stuff?”

Hector’s stomach dropped, sending a tingling shock though this entire body. “I’ve never done anything like this! That’s a hundred feet high. All we did was mess around up at the school.”

“Well, I’m not going!” Deion shot back.

“So much for whatever it takes,” snapped Hector.

“Children…” sang Mal-X, now closer. “Where are you? Am I getting warm?”

“What are we going to do?” squeaked Sanjar. Deion and Sanjar were both staring at Hector, waiting for him to make a decision. “I don’t want to die.”

“What would we do in
Omega
?” Hector hissed, wondering why they were staring at him. He waved his arms about. “I mean, this
is
Omega Wars
.”

“Mow those choads down with a chain gun?” Deion answered.

“Yeah, you probably would, wouldn’t you?” snapped Hector. “Come on Deion! Be helpful!”

“Sorry,” said his friend, then grew thoughtful. “Tell you what, Hector. If this was
Omega
, Izaak would climb that tower and get us a signal.”

Hector slumped over with his hands on his knees. “I know,” he groaned, fighting a sudden sick feeling. “I was thinking the same thing. And Alkindi would start one of those dump trucks.” Hector pointed to a parking area, about a hundred yards away, where a dozen or so trucks sat in the searing white of a security light. “We could use that to smash through the fence and get away. Do you think you could do that, Sanjar?”

The terrified look on Sanjar’s face suddenly relaxed. “Maybe. If it’s an older one without a chip.”