Directly beneath the pincer apparatus’s electronic eye.
It had engaged automatically when Raiff had put the truck into “park” and now it lowered with a mechanical whir and captured the android in its grasp at the shoulders, a near match to the width of the trash containers for which it was fitted. The pincer apparatus clamped on tight, lifted the android up and out. The thing desperately tried to free itself, almost managing to when the pincers lowered it into the compactor.
Raiff grabbed Dancer and shoved the boy behind him before he could move to rescue the girl. Above, the android was clawing desperately for anything it could grab, as the compactor sucked it further and further inside, until a crunch sounded and nothing but its hands remained visible. The compactor bucked once, settled, then opened anew.
The other android tossed the girl aside to move for Raiff, who went for his whip, now to find it gone, lost when he’d grabbed Dancer in its place. The android flashed its laser knife, reeled it back to send the first blade flying, Raiff’s best hope that it might miss him.
He caught a flash of motion at the android’s rear and then the girl was on it, something in her hand coming forward.
A taser, Raiff realized, in the moment before she jammed it against the back of the thing’s neck.
A buzzing sounded and kept sounding, as the girl held the taser firm against one of the android’s most vulnerable spots, where conduits of wires joined together, all spooling out of its computer brain. The thing lashed out with an arm that sent both the girl and her taser flying. Not a blow so much as a reflexive response.
The thing’s arms began to flap about. It spun and smoked and sizzled, but still somehow lurched toward Raiff, blindingly fast.
To Raiff’s amazement, the boy—Dancer—broke free and threw himself on top of the android, giving Raiff time to dive headlong for his whip. Taking it in his grasp and lashing it forward to catch the thing hard against the left side of its head, which snapped and lopped to the right. The android beginning to snap, crackle, and pop as sparks flew from its steel neck like Fourth of July sparklers.
Two more down.
Raiff pulled himself back to his feet, feeling pain in too many places. Watched Dancer heaving for breath, steadying himself against the garbage truck’s frame directly below the robotic arm that had dumped the other android into the compactor.
Raiff had just started moving toward him when a pair of disembodied hands grabbed hold of Dancer from inside the truck’s rear.
* * *
Raiff glimpsed what remained of the android still attached to the forearms and hands, which were all that were still intact, the rest of it no more than a flattened husk of steel and wires compressed into a jagged assemblage, still sparking and popping but maintaining enough “brain” function to complete its mission of capturing, or killing, Dancer.
Its hands had found the boy’s neck, tugging on it as if to pull his head off, when Raiff lashed his whip into motion and sliced the forearms free of what remained of the thing’s body. That, though, made its fingers clamp down, sure to squeeze mindlessly until there was nothing left in their grasp.
Raiff knew they couldn’t be pried free, knew he couldn’t risk using his whip, either. That left …
The girl’s taser!
She seemed to read his mind, or form the same thought, located the taser and tossed it to him. Raiff snatched it out of the air and lunged toward Dancer, who was gasping for breath now and fighting desperately to work the hands killing him free as his face purpled.
Raiff touched the taser to one hand, then the other.
Dancer jerked and spasmed both times, but the fingers snapped open and locked there. Raiff peeled the fingers off the boy and tossed the hands into the trash truck’s rear, hoisting Dancer to his feet and shaking him to keep the boy from passing out.
“Can you hear me? Can you hear me?”
Dancer managed a nod, still gasping for breath. The red had started to wash from his face, but the bruises left on his neck by the android’s grasp were already turning black.
“Can you move, can you walk?”
Dancer opened his mouth to answer but no words emerged, so he just nodded again. His knees buckled as he moved from the truck and Raiff caught him, held him upright while steering for the truck’s cab.
“Come on,” he said, jerking the passenger-side door open with his free hand, “let’s get you inside.”
Then Raiff turned his gaze on the girl, who stood silent and still ten feet away, staring at him.
“You too. Hurry,” he continued, beckoning her on, “we need to get out of here. Before more of them show up.”
64
AC/DC
RAIFF REVERSED, DANCER AND the girl squeezed next to him in the cab.
“Tell me this isn’t happening!” he heard the girl utter, her words partially drowned out by an AC/DC song blaring over the speakers.
“Highway to Hell,” of all things.
The dashboard was too dark for him to find the controls to shut it off, as a raspy voice screeched something about a one-way ride.
“Alex!” he said, calling him by name.
“Who—”
“Am I,” Raiff completed. “Doesn’t matter. Tell me you’re okay, you’re not hurt. That you’re whole.”
“Whole?”
“Intact!”
“I’m not hurt. I’m not okay, either.”
Raiff looked at him, then back to the front as he reversed the trash truck around the front of the strip mall and ground the gears into “drive.”
“You saved me, us.”
Raiff said nothing.
“Who are you? It does matter.”
“I’m a Guardian, your Guardian. Have been for your entire life.”
“Then you know who I really—”
“Yes, I do know,” Raiff said, completing the boy’s thought yet again.
“Then tell me, please, because I don’t know shit.”
“Yes, you do,” Raiff replied, stealing a look at him. “You know everything. You just don’t realize it.”
* * *
AC/DC was now headed to the promised land along the highway to hell, Alex sitting board straight against the passenger-side window of the trash truck.
“Am I an alien or not?”
“We both are.” Raiff gave the big truck as much gas as it would take. “But we’re human too.”
“You just said—”
“I know what I just said. We’re human, but also aliens. To this planet, anyway.”
Sam rotated her head back and forth between the two of them as each spoke, trying to make sense of their words. She reached forward and turned off the radio just as the lyrics “highway to hell” sounded for what felt like the hundredth time.
“You’re losing me,” Alex said.
Raiff’s eyes fixed on the side-view mirror. “It’s them I want to make sure I lose.”
“‘Them’ as in the drone things?”
“Interesting term.”
“It’s what the ash man called them,” Sam interjected. “Drones. Back in Alex’s house after…”
“It’s okay, Sam,” Alex said, trying to sound reassuring.
“Ash man?” Raiff repeated.
“Before Alex split him in half. He kept talking out of both sides of his mouth.”
“That’s because he wasn’t real,” Alex added.
“No, he was a projection,” Raiff noted.
“Like a hologram or something?” asked Sam.
“Far more advanced,” Raiff said, holding both of them in his gaze. “Holograms don’t split in half. Weapons go right through them, for obvious reasons.”
“Like a drone’s severed arm,” Alex told him. “That’s what I used.”
Raiff glanced over at Alex to make sure he’d heard that right. “Not holograms as you understand them. Next generation, actually about five hundred generations. I call them Shadows.”
“Shadows,” Alex repeated.
“Bu
t they’re more like astral projections—with actual mass created by a gas and gamma rays; the particular gas is found only on our mother planet.”
“What,” Sam speculated, “like an out-of-body experience?”
“No,” Raiff said, impatient to have to be addressing her at all and aiming his response at Dancer instead. “Our world is so far away from this one, there’d be no way to hold the signal carrying the hologram together. So this projection who spoke to you, the Shadow you call the ash man, is instilled with gamma energy to simulate form and matter in order to maintain structural cohesion during the transmission.”
“Okay,” Alex managed.
“Like pouring sand into water,” Sam concluded.
“Pretty much.” Raiff nodded.
“So he was talking to me from your planet.”
“Our planet, Alex, but yes.”
“He said I had something he wanted, something that belonged to him.”
“You do, but it doesn’t.”
“Oh, boy,” Alex said, shaking his head again.
“It belongs to us,” Raiff told him. “That’s why you were smuggled here.”
“Smuggled?”
“How many androids, drones, were there in your house?” Raiff asked, hands squeezing the wheel tighter, eager to change the subject.
“Four. Dressed as cops.”
“And you killed them all?”
“You can’t kill a machine but, yeah, I messed them up pretty good. What are they, exactly?”
“Long story, Dancer.”
“Dancer?”
“Your code name. What I’ve always referred to you as.”
“You can call me Alex. Now, tell me about these drone things, androids, or whatever they are.”
“They’re soldiers.”
“From?” Alex demanded.
“From the world you and I come from,” Raiff said, then added, “Well, not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What, then?” Alex asked.
“The technology comes from our world, but they’re manufactured here. Truly made in America.”
“Like in a factory?” Sam asked before Alex could.
“Sort of.”
“Could you be any more vague?”
Raiff shot her a look. “I don’t even know who you are.”
“His tutor,” Sam said, gesturing toward Alex.
“You’d think I’d be smarter, coming from a world that can manage all this shit. What’s your name, anyway?” Alex asked him. “I mean, you do have a name, right?”
“Clay. Clay Raiff. Call me Raiff.”
“And why do I need a Guardian, Raiff? Why have I needed one all of my life? What the hell is going on here—just who, what, am I?”
“Tell me what you know, and I’ll fill in the rest.”
“That’s easy: nothing, I know nothing!”
“Wrong. You know plenty, lots more than you realize. Think!”
* * *
Alex summarized what he’d learned from the flash drive hidden inside Meng Po as best he could, his mother’s final message to him, those test results still tucked into the pocket of Dr. Payne’s jeans. He hit on all the most salient points, including Dr. Chu’s findings, as well as the circumstances of his rescue and “adoption” by the Chins as a baby.
“Guess I’m the ultimate illegal alien,” he finished.
“Join the club,” Raiff told him.
They’d swung onto the Pacific Coast Highway, heading north, just as Alex began telling his tale to Raiff. The sharp, maddening curves of the PCH were treacherous enough without having to negotiate them in a garbage truck. But Raiff nonetheless gave the truck more gas and its poorly weighted frame instantly began whipsawing from one curve into another. Undeterred, Raiff held his speed steady, settling into the drive despite the truck seeming to protest the effort by bouncing and shaking. Every twist of the wheel became an adventure, the truck seemingly ready to shimmy itself off its frame. The road widened and then straightened appreciably as they wound into the Santa Cruz Mountains, all of them able to breathe easier without the air clogging in their chests.
For Alex, it felt like a roller coaster finally docking at the end of the ride. “I leave you enough to fill in?”
“Plenty,” Raiff said, checking the side-view mirror again.
“So start.”
“Sorry. Can’t right now.”
“Why?”
And that’s when Alex glimpsed headlights brightening in the side-view mirror.
“Because we have company,” Raiff told him.
65
CHASE
“TWO VEHICLES,” RAIFF CONTINUED. “SUVS, or vans, maybe.”
Sam instinctively turned to look behind her, forgetting the enclosed cab of the garbage truck had no rear window. “How could they find us so fast?”
“Because they were close all along. Backup for the androids we destroyed. Or the cleanup crew, like the one that erased all trace of what was left of them at your house, just in case.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “Well, ‘just in case’ happened again.”
“You need to get out of the truck,” Raiff said to both of them.
“We’re not finished talking yet,” Alex said stubbornly.
“We are for now.”
“How are we supposed to get out, exactly?” Raiff heard the girl named Sam ask him.
“I slow down as much as I can around the next bend, and you jump, Tutor,” he said, coining a name for her.
“Don’t call me that. It sounds—Wait, did you say jump?”
“Like in the movies,” Alex told her, readying his hand on the door latch.
Sam gazed out the window toward the dark swatch of the coast redwoods forest, over which the mountains towered like giant sentinels.
“People in the movies don’t understand the physics involved,” she noted. “If they did…”
Alex watched the shoulder flashing by through the passenger-side window. “Well, I don’t, either, and please don’t tell me.”
Raiff scanned the road ahead, then looked back at the side-view mirror to gauge how fast the pursuing vehicles were gaining on them.
“Count to ten,” he told Dancer and the girl. “Jump out at one.” Raiff met Dancer’s eyes. “Open the door.”
“Not until you tell me what I’ve got that the ash man wants.”
“I told you we haven’t got the time,” Raiff said, reaching across the seat to thrust open the door himself. “And if you don’t get out now we might never have the time.”
Alex didn’t bother to protest further, just started counting, mouthing the numbers. He eased the door further open, and a cool rush of air flooded the truck’s cab.
In the side-view mirror, the dark vehicles were drawing nearer; Raiff realized it was going to be close.
“How do we find you?” Dancer asked, hand moving to the girl’s shoulder to ready her.
“Don’t worry about that. Just stay out of sight. Don’t use any cell phones or computers, nothing that can be traced digitally back to you.”
The truck eased into the curve, Raiff slowing its speed as much as he dared.
“Now!”
Dancer had already grabbed hold of the girl, easing her up even with him. Pushing the door all the way open as he tugged hard and drew her out into the night.
Raiff watched them separate in the air and hit the soft shoulder together: Dancer with grace and his tutor with a thump and a thud. It made him wince as he leaned over and got the door closed, just as bright headlights flashed anew in the side-view mirror. He gave the truck more gas, needing to widen the distance between them but not too much.
Just enough.
Thoughts flooded through his mind in that moment, most notably the fact that all this wasn’t just about Dancer’s identity being compromised. Something else was happening: what he knew was coming now and had sacrificed everything to prevent.
So this world could survive. So its people would not know the pain and hardship his did.
/>
Raiff checked the gap between his truck and the pursuing vehicles. Not wide enough for comfort but as good as he could manage.
He took a deep breath and changed his hand position on the steering wheel.
* * *
Alex watched the two big black SUVs speed past without noticing him, already moving to Sam, who lay dazed and bent on the downward slope of the shoulder.
“Sam, Sam! Look at me, can you hear me?”
She looked at him. “Ouch.”
“Can you move?”
“I’m afraid to try.”
But she did anyway, found herself sore and scraped but otherwise okay.
She managed to sit up. “I just jumped out of a moving truck.…”
“Yeah.”
They looked down the stretch of straightaway into which the road had settled. The garbage truck and SUVs shrank in the growing distance, their lights becoming mere specks on the dark horizon, when the garbage truck suddenly twisted round and skidded sideways down the road.
Sparks and smoke erupted beneath its big tires, the SUVs powerless to do anything but surge on. Then the garbage truck was twirling, a giant clock hand spinning in sped-up motion along the center of the road.
The screech of tires echoed in the night air, the first SUV slamming into the truck broadside by its nose and sent rolling, tumbling, across the road. The second SUV rammed it dead center, halting the truck’s spin and driving it forward until it toppled over. The contents of its hold coughed into the air in a ribbon of stray refuse and bags, seeming to float down in slow motion, as the SUV pitched over it and spun in the air.
It came down on its side directly in the path of the other SUV, still spinning wildly. The crunching impact showered steel and rubber into the air just ahead of the flame burst that left Alex and Sam covering their eyes, even before the garbage truck erupted in a curtain of fire.
“Raiff … Do you think he…,” Sam began, leaving it at that.
“I don’t know,” Alex managed. “I don’t know.”
66
WAR
“JANUS DIDN’T EXIST THEN,” the woman in the top right reminded him. “But we do now. Please speak plainly, Doctor.”