Dodge met him at the front of the house. Ranger was right behind him, holding the laptop, still looking weak and pale from his ordeal.
“Thanks, Dodge,” Sam said.
He shrugged. “Thank Ranger, it was his idea.”
“We’re leaving,” Sam said. “Now.”
“What about Vienna?”
“I don’t know.”
Sam peeled off his hazmat suit, tossing it into the dry fountain, along with any dust, the residue of his frantic dash through the streets. The others did the same.
Dodge jumped in the driver’s seat and Ranger in the front passenger seat of the pickup truck, parked in the courtyard. Sam dived in the back as Dodge gunned the car, spinning the steering wheel as he flung the machine back around onto the narrow road through the forest.
His eye caught a movement as they raced back towards the North Boulder Highway. A lone figure, running, stumbling, falling.
“Vienna!” he shouted.
Dodge had seen her too, and veered the pickup towards her. Sam jumped out even before they had stopped and hauled her up by one arm.
Her face was grey as he dragged her back towards the pickup and dumped her on the back seat, before climbing in beside her.
Dodge took off as Sam was shutting the door, spraying dust into the air behind them.
Vienna coughed and coughed again, bringing up grey mucus.
Sam watched her, horrified. But there was nothing he could do.
“Where are we going?” Ranger asked as the western mountains slid their way around to the right side of the car.
“Head south,” Sam said. “Maybe we can convince them we’re heading for Mexico. As soon as we can, we’ll hide the pickup and change cars. Then we’ll cut east into Arizona and up through New Mexico to Colorado.”
Sam glanced back at the mountains on the far side of the lost city. A rising plume of dust caught his eye in the centre of the city.
“That’s one of their vans,” he said, “moving through the–”
Dodge cut him off. “If we can see their dust cloud, then they can see ours.”
He floored the gas pedal and the pickup surged forwards.
The vans picked them up just on the outskirts of Henderson. Sam could see two vans screaming along the freeway as they raced to beat the pickup to the interchange with South Boulder Highway and cut them off at the pass.
They narrowly made it through, swinging through the interchange on protesting tyres and veering around onto Route 93 just a hundred yards in front of the vans.
“Take my gun,” Ranger said, retrieving it from the glove compartment. Ranger held the gun through the gap in the front seats. Sam looked at it blankly.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I wouldn’t know which end was which. Pass me the laptop!”
It was on the floor in the front of the cab by Ranger’s feet. He passed it to Sam.
“What are you doing?” Dodge asked.
“Government vehicles,” Sam said. “They’ll be LoJacked. If I can hack into the satellite system, I might be able to shut them down.”
“Go for it,” Dodge said with a tight grin.
“Damn. No cellular signal,” Sam said, after a moment of trying to connect.
“Keep your eye on it,” Dodge said. “We should pick up something as we approach Boulder City.”
“I’ll need their licence plates,” Sam said.
“I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Ranger said as they flew across an overbridge and found themselves suddenly surrounded by tussock and scrub.
One moment they had been amongst the built-up houses of a Las Vegas suburb, the next it was gone, and the desert enveloped them.
The fence was in front of them before they realised it, blocking the road, stretching as far as they could see to either side. The end of the contamination zone. There was no way to go around it, no time to avoid it.
“Hang on!” Dodge yelled, and powered the pickup towards the centre of two gates, locked with a chain.
The pickup hit the gates dead centre with a terrible grinding crunch. The heavy chain in the centre held, but the hinges on either side gave way. The pickup carried both gates forward for a few yards before the gates flipped over the top and crashed to the ground behind.
There was a screech of brakes as one edge of the gates dug into the highway and the other edge reached out for the windscreen of the leading van behind them.
The van hit the gate with a loud crack that starred, but did not break, its windscreen. The following van also slammed on its brakes to avoid a collision, and the gap behind the pickup widened rapidly.
It wasn’t until they reached Boulder City that the vans caught up with them again. Boulder was virtually deserted, most of the residents having long since moved away, in preference to living adjacent to a nuclear bombsite.
“Government plate, CDD7605,” Sam said out loud, reading the plates of the closest van.
“Don’t let them get in front of you,” Ranger warned. “They’re trained to do that.”
The vans tried, several times, on the left or the right, sometimes both sides simultaneously, but Dodge countered them with violent swings of the big pickup.
“I’ve got a signal,” Sam cried out, just out of Boulder. It was weak, but it was there.
They were climbing now. Hilly peaks to the right and scrubland to the left as they closed in on Lake Mead and the historic Hoover Dam.
A sharp burst of firing came from behind them as they straightened out after a sweeping right-hand curve and there was a series of thuds from the back tray.
“I think they’re running out of ideas,” Dodge said, swinging the truck around corner after corner.
“They’ve changed their minds,” Ranger said.
“Changed their minds about what?” Sam asked.
“Taking us alive,” Ranger replied.
“Give me the gun,” Vienna said, in a voice that was little more than a rasp.
“Are you okay to–” Ranger started.
“Just give me the gun.”
She wound down her window and aimed the pistol backwards, letting off two quick shots, coughing weakly as she did so.
“How’s that site coming?” Dodge asked.
“Almost in,” Sam said.
It was a virtual private network and he had to crack the PPTP to gain a foothold.
One of the vans hurled itself up on the right and Dodge slammed the pickup over into it with a juddering crash that threw Sam’s hands from the keyboard. The van stuck there for a moment as if glued to the side of the pickup, then dropped back as Dodge twisted the wheel around further, forcing them off the road.
The other van was making a run on the left-hand side, burrowing its way in front of them to block their path. Dodge wrenched at the wheel and the tyres of the pickup screamed as they veered onto an off-ramp to Hoover Dam.
“You can’t get across the dam any more,” Ranger yelled. “They closed it to traffic when they opened the bypass!”
“Got nowhere else to go,” Dodge yelled back.
“There’s a vulnerable TCP port in the NetBIOS,” Sam said, poking around the LoJack server. “The session services in the message block.”
Another hammering burst of fire sounded behind them and the rear window starred and cracked. Vienna fired twice, the gunshots crashing like thunder inside the cab of the truck.
“Can you discover the Windows shares?” Dodge asked through gritted teeth.
“Already got them,” Sam said. “Trying to wriggle into the RPC.”
“Here they come again, get down!” Ranger yelled as the vans took advantage of a passing area to attack from both sides, raking the pickup with automatic fire as they accelerated alongside.
Dodge forced the left van towards the rocky wall, ignoring the firing from the right until the van fell back, then swung the pickup violently over to the right.
The right-hand van slammed on its brakes to avoid being shunted off the side of a cliff, and fell back in behind the pickup with a squeal of protest from its tyres.
“Hang on!” Dodge shouted.
Sam looked up to see concrete crash barriers in a line across the road in front of them. He braced himself against the dashboard and hugged the precious laptop into his body.
The bullbars of the pickup truck smashed into the barrier at the narrow gap between two of the units. Concrete exploded past both sides of the truck and Sam’s seatbelt slammed into his chest, the laptop almost flying out of his arms. But the concrete barriers gave way, bunted to each side to make a gap for the flying pickup truck. Then they were through, and on the old road across the top of the dam itself.
“Okay, I’m in,” Sam cried. “What’s that plate again?”
“CDD7605,” Vienna rasped over the sound of gunfire close behind.
Sam keyed it in and hovered the cursor above the Remote Shutdown button.
“Hold it,” Dodge said. “I’ll tell you when.”
Through the left window Sam could see water. To the right, the vast concrete structure fell away from them into a deep canyon. Stretching between the walls of the canyon, impossibly high, was the massive arch of the bypass road, pencil-thin concrete towers supporting a narrow ribbon of bridge.
Another concrete barrier came and went with the same shattering explosion of concrete chips and dust. Then they were across, and careening around a tight curve beneath a rocky cliff face. Sam’s eye was caught by a massive drainpipe, surely a hundred yards high, that disappeared into the rock face to the right. Another tyre-screeching corner and they were rising up a gently curving road towards a hairpin bend.
“There,” Dodge said. “Right on the bend.”
He gunned the engine towards the corner.
Sam looked back and saw a dark shape leaning out of the window of the nearest van, readying another shot.
“Shake her around a bit,” he yelled and Dodge jerked the steering wheel back and forth, spoiling the man’s aim. The driver’s wing mirror cracked and starred, but the rest of the volley went wild.
For a moment Sam thought they were going to roll, but the huge tyres of the pickup steadied and straightened out of the curve.
“Now!” Dodge yelled.
Sam hit the button on the laptop just as the first van entered the apex of the curve. For a half second he thought nothing would happen, then the nose of the van, which had been riding high, suddenly dropped as the engine lost power.
On a steep rise, on a hairpin bend, it had almost the same effect as slamming on the brakes of the van, and there was a screech and a thud from behind it as the following van swerved hard to the left, to the outside of the bend, clipping the rear of the lead van and spinning it around a hundred and eighty degrees. It slid over toward the side of the road, hit the safety railing with a crunch and stayed there.
The trailing van was not so lucky. It rose up onto two wheels with the impact of the collision and continued to veer to the left, crunching into and rolling over a thick stone wall, and disappearing from sight.
On the other side of that wall, a steep slope led straight down to the lake, and Sam didn’t need to hear the splash to know that that van would not be following them again.
Vienna whooped with excitement, then convulsed as a spasm of coughing racked her body.
Overhead a cloud burst with a flash and a distant roar of thunder, and it began to rain.