On its side was the name: Jack Daniels Kentucky Bourbon.
He paused, then reached in and pulled out the bourbon, brushing the dust off the box. This was a treasure. His father had locked it in a vault when the proof limit had gone into effect, and had died without ever opening it. This stuff was old. Dodd had inherited it and was saving it to celebrate the birth of either a son or a daughter – either one, he wasn’t picky. Now he thought: Why wait? Straining, he pulled open the wooden box and slid the bottle out. As he opened it, Sheila came from behind him, her arms loaded with clothes, and said, “I’m going to hate you forever for this.”
“Good,” he said without looking at her. He had popped the cork out of the bottle and was smelling it. Strong. He tipped the bottle to his lips, gulping some of the amber liquid down. Then he stopped, his eyes bulging, and erupted into a fit of coughing. He was still coughing as Sheila left, leaving a trail of clothes behind her.
The phone rang.
Dodd picked up the box of ammo and carried it and the bottle of bourbon with him to the kitchen table to answer the phone. It was Toby, the only friend he had left. He made what he hoped would pass for a pleasant expression. “Toby,” he said, “hi, how are you!
Praise the lord.”
“You are a bastard,” Toby said. “How dare you say that to me.” Toby pronounced “that” as “dot,” his accent very heavy. He was upset.
“What?” Dodd said. “What do you–-”
“I saw your stupid speech. I could not believe you were not struck dead and sent to hell right there on the camera. I guess that only proves that He has mercy. But I am not perfect. I can not tolerate stupid, godless vermin like yourself. Be it known, that you are no longer welcome here. And I don’t want you calling me no more.”
The screen went blank.
“Toby?” Dodd said to the screen. “Toby?” He took a swig out of the bottle, feeling himself sink into himself. Looking at one of Sheila’s stockings on the floor, he said her name out loud, then took another swig. What a disaster, he thought.
The screen blinked, and Dodd looked up. There was mail waiting. Oh, great, he thought. More hate mail. He turned it off and took another swig of the strong bourbon.
Dodd moped around his apartment for hours, drinking a third of the bottle. He was rolling the Jack Daniels cork back and forth across the table with his index fingers when it came to him. He knew what he had to do. Travels was created at least in part somewhere near Avilla Beach. He’d seen the pier in the background of Travels more than once; Dodd knew that pier, he practically grew up on it.
Without laughing, without smiling, Dodd corked the bottle of bourbon and put the bottle in a paper bag, got out a long, thin box for the gun, then grabbed a couple boxes of cartridges. He stuffed these into his pockets and walked out of the apartment, letting the door close softly behind him.
36. EYES ABOVE
They’d headed out like they’d planned, travelling no more than a few feet off the ground with painted blankets draped over the air launch to disguise it as a ground vehicle. At one point one of the blankets got caught on some brush and was pulled loose.
Danny cursed, stopped the craft, and got out with a roll of tape to refasten it. Looking up into the clear night sky he hoped no one was watching.
When he was climbing back into the Mercedes Wiley said, “Why am I more nervous than usual?”
“Every day is the last day of your life,” Danny said. “Think of it that way and you’ll get used to it.”
The hatch came down and sealed with a puffing sound. Danny settled himself in the pilots seat and nudged the craft forward.
Inside the craft it was very dark, and the readouts glowed dimly.
Outside the window everything seemed bright by comparison despite the fact it was deep in the night with only a sliver of a moon.
“I’m more nervous than usual, too,” Aaron said. “I think it’s because we’re finally vindicating ourselves.”
“From what?” Danny said.
“For writing CoGen in the first place.”
“The army made you write CoGen. The pentagon.”
“The devil worked through us.”
“You’ve been forgiven.”
“I know. But I don’t want to die until I know we’re done.”
There was a heavy silence after he said that. The night seemed to be filling with more and more menace. Danny weaved the craft through trees and made gentle hops over stumps. He was looking at the readouts and the scanning screens more than he was looking out the windshield. Once they were in the heavy tree cover and had turned due south they felt better, but Danny still remembered the war, and the terrible machines they had hiding in the forests. Crude by comparison now, but still smart and quick and silent. Drones that were ordered to shoot anything that moved, anything that didn’t carry a beacon that told it “I’m a friend” in machine language. They were designed to look like bushes, like rotted out tree stumps, like ruined overturned jeeps. Devious things, nightmarish and evil.
I was a pawn of the devil, too, Danny thought. Images of the dead haunted him, he couldn’t force them away except by concentrating on what he was doing. I’ve been fighting this for 16
years now. I feel I’ve repented, but I’ve been doing it for so long that I don’t know what else to do. The images still won’t go away. The memories are there until I die.
Danny brought the craft to a halt and let it settle gently to the ground. “Okay,” he said. “This is where we change the Mercedes’s clothes.” He popped the airtight hatch and it opened with a wheezing sound. He grabbed his roll of tape and the second set of painted blankets and stepped out into the dry grass, followed by the two hackers. They pulled the first set of blankets off and folded it up, then Danny threw on the second set and they positioned it and taped it down.
“Farm equipment,” Aaron said, reading the front blanket.
“You’ve got the bar code on here and everything.”
“Wait a minute, Danny,” Wiley said. “The USFMC monitors all this stuff with an AI program. The FarmSat is going to see this from orbit and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t scheduled to be out here now.’ It’s going to radio down to tell this unit to go back to where ever it came from and when you don’t respond it’ll send out a repair crew.”
“They’re not going to send down a repair crew in the middle of the night,” Danny said, but his voice was uncertain.
“With a fifteen million dollar piece of autonomic farm equipment, you bet your ass they would.”
“We’d better paint the bar code out,” Aaron said.
“I didn’t bring any paint.”
The two stared at Danny. “You camouflaged this thing too well,” Wiley said.
“Wait, what’s on the other side of these blankets?” Aaron said.
“A blanket pattern.”
“Hmm.”
“I’ll just put tape over it,” Danny said. He began pulling out an arm-wide length of the silver tape but there was a tearing sound. “Shit,” he said, “this is all there is.”
“We’re out of tape?” Wiley said.
“Yeah.”
“Now what?” Aaron said. “Maybe we can fold the blanket over a bit.”
“Fold it under at the top,” Wiley said. “So what if a little of the nose shows.”
“Okay.” Danny and Wiley pulled the front part off and reused the tape to retape it in its new position. The words and the bar code were no longer visible, but a good portion of the nose of the air launch was.
“They’ll think this is an awfully funny looking machine,”
Danny said, indicating the eyes in the sky with his finger.
“What the hell. At least we’re not inviting USFMC employees out to check up on us.”
They all climbed back into the craft and the hatch shut behind them. Danny sent it gliding forward, turning and doubling back but veering to the northeast as planned. They maneuvered around ruins and over old fences, dodged between trees upon trees.
When the trees thinned out a bit Danny sent the craft speeding along, and the front blanket caught the wind and began buffeting.
Halfway out to their goal the reused tape gave way and the front blanket flew off. “Shit!” Danny yelled. “This is the wrong place for this to happen.”
“Should we stop?” Aaron said.
“I think that would be more interesting to an AI watching than if we kept going,” Wiley said.