The Rendering (23 page)

After a minute of that, Hund interrupted: “What should I do with the skunk-things?”

The manic gleam in Roach’s eyes brightened. “They’re a fascinating anomaly, the most advanced biodigital life-forms I’ve ever seen.” He tapped at a command console, and a web of glowing lines appeared on the floor. “Toss them onto the grid.”

Hund dragged the semiconscious skunks across the room.

“Skunk ’em,” Cosmo muttered. “Dunk ’em.”

“Junk ’em,” Poppy moaned back.

Hund tossed them onto the grid and they fell silent.

Yet not completely motionless. The automatic-repair mechanism on Larkspur’s suit sprang to life, welding his broken cable, working slowly and steadily, a tiny repair-bot shuttling inaudibly away.

Completely unnoticed.

Roach tapped at his keypad, and a nightmare dentist’s drill slid from a metal housing near the grid and pointed at the skunks.

“Are you digitizing them?” Hund asked.

“Dissecting them,” Roach said. “Taking them apart one line of code at a time.”

“Will that destroy them?”

“Perhaps. If they survive, I’ll reformat them—into loyal drones.”

He flicked a switch and rays of blue light shot from the machine and pulsed around the skunks, growing brighter as the machine started to thrum loudly.

“Are they … dead?” Jamie whispered.

Like I had any idea. “Check out Hund,” I said.

He seemed kinda the same—huge and scary—and yet completely different. His implanted lens covered more of his face, and cables flexed beneath his skin. Looked like he’d gotten those biodigital upgrades he’d wanted.

I guess if Roach could create biodroids by splicing together genetically altered animals and military hardware, he could
really do a job on a guy who was already a totally deadly mercenary fighter.

“Hund, version 2.0,” I said. “That’s all we need.”

“Shut up! Look at the skunks, they’re not moving. Look at them!”

I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to admit how bad things were.

But I did. I looked.

And things were very,
very
bad.

All three skunks, battered and bleeding, lay slumped at Hund’s feet while Roach tapped commands into a keypad nearby. A machine with a huge swiveling arm—that nightmare dentist’s drill, tipped with laser scalpels and titanium pincers—hovered over the skunks.

They’d lost. They’d just … lost.

Which meant we
all
lost. Because without the skunks,
nobody
could fight VIRUS.

Nobody could stop them. Even after what they did to my aunt, and Jamie’s parents—and all my neighbors, all my friends.

Nobody could stop them.

I stared at the screen, seeing the skunks helpless under Roach’s machine and Hund upgraded into an invincible monster. And sure I’m a kid, but I’m not dumb: I knew that sometimes the bad guys won—maybe more than sometimes.

I watched the news. I knew that.

But I’d been scared to death for two days: I’d been bombed and handcuffed and chased by killers. I’d been shot and tear-gassed and I’d lost my home and family.

And I’d been terrified the whole time. I’d felt sharp jolts of adrenaline, but also a soul-deadening fear, the kind that makes thinking impossible. Because you don’t want to think; you just want to curl into a ball.

Well, watching that screen, I reached the end of my fear, and like Wile E. Coyote hitting the edge of a cliff, I just kept on running.

I left Jamie outside—she must’ve thought I wanted to be alone to cry—and climbed into the truck. I adjusted the driver’s seat. I didn’t know much about driving, but I’d logged hundreds of hours on
Xtreme Racer 500
.

And I didn’t care anymore.

So I turned the key and stomped on the accelerator. The engine roared, but I didn’t move an inch.

I heard Jamie yell, “Bug!”

I stomped harder. Still nothing. Then I remembered the emergency brake.

I popped the brake and the truck shot forward.

They were a mile away. At this speed, that wouldn’t take a minute.

The cornstalks blocked my view through the windshield.

I pressed harder on the accelerator, speeding blindly forward. The corn whirred past and flattened under the truck, and everything seemed okay.

Until a wall of corrugated steel loomed in front of me. A huge round grain bin.

I stomped on the brakes, but couldn’t stop. I screamed and—

C   R  A  SHED

into the wall.

And kept going. I smashed through and the seat belt slammed into me, and the front of the truck fell about ten feet, pointing almost straight down, into some kind of huge pit.

Well.
That
never happened on
Xtreme Racer 500
.

Then, with a
screeee
, the truck tore loose and started falling, still pointing straight down. I hadn’t driven into a pit; I’d driven into a huge vertical shaft—and the truck dove toward the bottom.

Lucky for me, the shaft didn’t end abruptly. Instead—

And lucky for you, you were wearing a seat belt
.

That message brought to you by the Auntie M Safety Council.

Anyway, the shaft narrowed and slowly squeezed the truck to a halt.

When I finally remembered how to breathe, and trusted my legs to stop trembling, I climbed from the back of the truck, not quite sure what to expect, given how incredibly loud my stealth rescue mission turned out.

Fortunately, the worst of the noise coincided with the loud thrum of the dissection machine. And even more fortunately, when I climbed down a nearby maintenance ladder and opened the first door, I saw the skunks.

But not fortunately at all, they were still lying motionless on the grid. And Roach and Hund and a bunch of VIRUS soldiers were standing around, watching.

I guess I was feeling kinda crazy.

I shoved a wheeled tool cart toward the middle of the room, then ran the other direction, toward Roach. I didn’t have a plan to stop him; I just figured I’d try to mess up whatever he was doing.

I ran fast and low, hoping all the soldiers would watch the tool cart roll across the floor. And it might’ve worked, except for one tiny detail: Commander Hund.

He was standing right next to Roach. Looming there, massive and deadly, his implanted lens scanning his surroundings.

And sure enough, in a flash, he’d grabbed me.

“You’re a glutton for punishment,” he said, and smiled his freaky smile.

“Not now, Hund!” Roach said. “I need you to keep the skunks on the grid.”

Hund tossed me to one of his soldiers and looked at the skunks. Poppy and Cosmo were semiconscious and crawling toward the edge of the grid. So Hund kicked them back to the middle and sneered at Larkspur, who was curled tight in the center of the grid.

Larkspur looked like he’d given up, but really he was just waiting for his suit to finish repairing itself.

Still, what was he gonna do then? Hund had already beaten him. How could Larkspur save the day with Hund standing there?

That didn’t occur to me until later, though.
Nothing
occurred to me right then—no thoughts, no plans, just a white-hot anger.

I started screaming at them. Swearing and shouting.

Fascinated by the dissection of the skunks, Roach bent over his monitor, his eyes bright, his fingers tapping, his tongue flicking between his lips. So I screamed even louder, just to distract him.

Not too bright, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

He finally turned to the soldier holding me and said, “Shut him up.”

The soldier put a gun to my head.

You know what?

That shut me up.

But I didn’t get any less angry.

In fact, I got even angrier. I was helpless again, and I hated that. I hated Hund and Roach with a burning intensity. I stood there shaking with rage as the blue light zapped the skunks, dissecting them.

I found myself staring at Hund’s huge gun, the one he’d dropped on the floor. I imagined I had a carapace rifle in my hand—

And something clicked.

In my head.

Across the room, a red light flashed on Hund’s gun.

I focused on the light. I focused on the redness and my anger. The flashing got quicker and quicker. Then I heard a beep, a soft alarm.

Hund cocked his head. With his augmented hearing, he localized the sound in an instant. He grunted and stalked over to his gun. It must’ve weighed two hundred pounds, but he lifted it effortlessly, opened a console, and checked the readout.

The beeping came faster and louder.
Beep beep beep BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE …

The soldier clenching my arm took a step backward. Then another. He knew something was wrong.

I heard a few soldiers mutter. Then one called, “Commander?”

The beeping changed to a buzz. Stopping and starting, like a short circuit.
Zzzt. Zt. Zzzzt. Zzzzzzzzzt. Zt
.

Then silence. Which sounded almost worse. Then sparks started shooting from the gun’s console.

Someone yelled, “RUN!”

The soldier shoved me across the room and dashed for the exit.

In a sudden explosive lunge, Larkspur—his suit finally repaired—yanked the other skunks off the dissection grid, keeping his armored body between them and the sparking gun.

And me? I scrambled toward the door I’d entered through when the buzzing changed to a whine.

Hund hurled the gun across the room. “Evac! Evac!” he bellowed. “Roach—the evac pod!”

Roach slammed a button on his console and an evacuation pod burst from beneath the floor. Roach jumped into the pod, followed by Hund and a handful of soldiers, and the entry hatch slammed shut.

Meanwhile, I was racing toward the access tunnel. No idea why. I wasn’t really thinking, just retracing my steps, I guess. I
sprinted to the military truck—still wedged nose down in that huge shaft—and crawled in the back.

I flopped down, breathing hard … and realized how stupid I’d been. What was I gonna do,
fly
the truck outta there?

Which was when the gun exploded.

Plumes of burning air poured up the ventilation shaft like lava erupting from a volcano, and pounded into the truck. Or maybe not like lava from a volcano, maybe like gunpowder in a barrel. Because instead of being incinerated, the truck shook and shuddered … then blasted from the ventilation shaft.

Straight into the air. Hundreds of feet into the air.

That was when I tumbled out the back.

So this is what happened: the gun went haywire, and I hid in the truck. Then a tremendous BOOM rocked the world, with flames and heat, and the truck jolted back and forth and finally turned upside down.

And I fell out the back and looked down and saw cornfields far below.

Only
then
did I realize I was in midair.

And

Larkspur yanked Cosmo and Poppy off the dissection grid, keeping his armored body between them and the beeping gun.

“Detonation in twenty-two seconds,” he said.

“No … way out,” Poppy said weakly.

“We know there’s no way out,” Cosmo muttered. “Thanks for the bulletin.”

“I’ll try to protect—” Larkspur said.

“No.” Poppy pointed. “There. A way out.”

Roach’s evacuation pod rose toward the ceiling, and Larkspur understood immediately. He wrapped Poppy and Cosmo with one arm and leapt toward the pod.

Damaged and holding the two of them, he almost didn’t reach the undercarriage in time. But he did, his fingers digging into the metal base. Barely. The pod emerged from the underground bunker and rose above the cornfields with the skunks clinging beneath.

Larkspur grunted. “Losing my grip.”

“Um,” Cosmo said. “Er …”

“What?” Poppy asked.

“There’s a joke there somewhere,” he said. “ ‘Losing my grip.’ ”

The carapace rifle exploded far beneath them, sparking a chain reaction. Explosion triggered explosion, and the entire underground bunker detonated like the world’s biggest Fourth of July show.

Larkspur lost his handhold.

They fell about five feet before the blast caught up with them and hurled them a hundred yards, where they dug three deep furrows through the cornfield.

For a moment, none of them moved.

Larkspur slowly stood. “Everybody functional?”

“I’m good,” Poppy said, lying on her back, her fur still smoldering.

“Cosmo?” Larkspur asked.

“Skunk ’em,” Cosmo muttered. He’d taken the brunt of the blast and was in tatters.

“Where’s Bug?” Poppy asked. Then she answered her own question. “Sweet skunkin’ samurai!”

She pointed high into the air, and Larkspur and Cosmo looked up and saw me.

Plummeting toward the ground.

Cosmo drew his gun and started spinning the cylinder. “I’ve got foam in here somewhere, could cushion the fall …”

“Not enough time,” Poppy said. She looked at Larkspur. “Slingshot.”