Free Subterrene War 02: Exogene by T.C. McCarthy Page B

enough time for fear, and once we pried the door open, we had less than a moment to drop through the dark hole and land in a concrete basement.
    A roar tripped the cutoff for my helmet pickups. Overhead the kitchen floor rumbled and a huge crack appeared without warning, dropping chunks of cement on top of us—until the trapdoor disappeared. I screamed. A jet of plasma shot down through the narrow hole and spread out over the floor, its tendrils snaking toward us as our temperature indicators shot upward, but the things dissipated before reaching us.
    We huddled in a corner for what seemed an eternity. Drones screamed overhead in multiple passes and dropped a variety of ordnance on our position so that eventually, thermal gel ate through the basement roof to sprinkle around us like drops of hissing acid. By the time it got quiet, the sound of jets fading in the distance, we saw morning sunlight stream through the trapdoor opening and I shook with relief.
    “We must move,” said Megan.
    “Wait.” I pulled my helmet off and removed the vision hood, careful to make sure that its power cables stayed connected, and then activated my receiver.
    “What are you doing?” asked Megan.
    “Shh,” I said.
    Megan stood so that I could move the headset over her armor. At a point close to the back of her neck, the sound of static swelled in pulses, and I waved it over once more to make sure before trying it on myself.
    “It’s in our necks,” I said, “some kind of tracking device that must be millimeters below the skin. I would guess it began transmitting on our eighteenth birthday.”
    Megan handed me her knife. I dug the thing from her neck, wiped the blade clean, and then waited for her to do the same to me. The transponders looked like black capsules, each of them marked with tiny red lettering, and we crushed them with a chunk of concrete before sweeping ourselves one more time and resuiting.
    “They will still know the direction we’re taking,” said Megan.
    “Vaguely, but we have no choice. If we move south to change direction we’ll approach our forces in Iran, and if we head north we’ll run into the Russian lines.”
    Megan checked her carbine before shouldering it, and muttered as we crept upward, back into the farmhouse. “ ‘Without the conviction of a killer, it is impossible to please Him. For she who comes to God must believe that she is death embodied, and that He is the reward for those who massacre.’ ”
    “Amen,” I whispered.
    There was nothing left. The ceramic structure had melted and shattered to its foundations, and all around us lay a bumpy field of dark glass, which reflected the sunlight with such intensity that our goggles frosted into near obscurity. We sprinted to the edge of the destruction, where we dove into the switchgrass, crawling westward with the sun at our backs.
    Beyond the farm we moved into an abandoned mining area that transformed the Uzbek flatlands into an unfamiliar terrain, pockmarked by tiered pits that stretched for miles to end in aqua-colored lakes. Our chemical sensors tripped on multiple occasions. It occurred to me then that these weren’t simply water bodies, man-made or natural, but that they were the refuse of a generation’s worth of digging for metals, of extraction, and that although to me the greens and blues mixed with brown seemed beautiful and intense, they were equally lethal, the liquids comprised of water, weak acids, and cyanide. Nobody would ever live here again—if they ever did in the first place.
    And fear had made its return. What before had been the terror of dying mutated to form a knot in my stomach, a paranoia insisting that Special Forces waited behind every rock or lay waiting among the huge piles of dirt. Within an hour it exhausted me. Both feet had gone numband no matter how hard I tried, efforts to cut off my nerves, which had been so easy the day before, now didn’t work at all so that above the numb area both sets of calf