Dozens of drones blasted apart as she fell back firing. She was surprised how satisfying it felt.
In a moment Smokey was up again, firing with his HK. “Got it, Professor.”
McKinney lowered the smoking shotgun and reached down to help Odin drag Tin Man into the garage. There, Mooch took over.
Tin Man was cursing. “Motherfucker! I fell on one and a spike went through my leg. Their legs are aluminum spikes or some shit.”
It appeared that the spike had already been pulled from his leg, and Mooch was applying pressure.
McKinney looked up to see that Odin had gone back into the hallway, but now he and Smokey were falling back into the garage again-Smokey spraying with his HK, Odin using a pistol. In a moment they pulled the door closed behind them. Odin pounded it. It sounded solid. “Fire-rated door. Should give us a few minutes.”
They were both bleeding in several places.
Almost immediately the door began to deform in points with a popping sound-bullets being fired into it from the other side.
“Maybe not that long.” Odin looked ahead to the thick wooden gates of the garage door. The sound of bots surging against them rattled the doors.
McKinney held out his shotgun, and Odin grabbed it. “Thanks, Professor. Looks like we’re even.”
“Do you smell that?”
“The pepper?”
“Yeah. I think they’re laying down a pheromone matrix-like weavers. They probably release it as an attack signal.”
Odin nodded. “Interesting.”
Mooch looked up from ministering to Tin Man. “How bad are you, Odin?”
“Bullet fragments. Nothing serious. Foxy!”
“What?”
“If you don’t get that jeep started, we are fucked.”
“I appreciate your encouragement, but the battery was dead. I’m rigging an alternate with the comm set.”
Odin pulled the Rover tablet out of a pouch and looked at a raven’s-eye image of the house-from hundreds of feet above.
McKinney watched over his shoulder. The house was almost lost beneath the black swarm. They hadn’t even made a dent in it.
“What about Huginn and Muninn?”
“Ravens can outfly eagles. I’m betting they can outfly these things.” Odin tapped the screen. “Well, your computer model seems to work, Professor.”
“I’d like to get one. Examine it.”
The team groaned.
Ripper muttered. “You can study it while it’s chewing your fucking eyeballs out.”
The jeep’s ignition suddenly cycled, and the engine roared to life.
The group let up a shout. The hallway door was suddenly penetrated with a bullet hole. The projectile whined off the garage wall.
Odin motioned. “Load up! Professor, you’re a maniac at the wheel. You drive.”
“I don’t know where I’m going-”
“Downhill. We’ll handle defense. Do it! Go!”
McKinney crawled over the side into the driver’s seat, strapping herself in.
Odin grabbed an aluminum baseball bat leaning against the wall. “Everyone grab a club. We can’t use guns if they get in close quarters.”
Smokey grabbed several hammers off a pegboard above a worktable and tossed them to teammates. “Here.” Mooch grabbed a tire iron.
Everyone piled into the jeep, and with seven people it was tight. Foxy sat up front in the passenger seat, with Ripper, Mooch, and Tin Man pressed into the small backseat. Behind them, hanging on to the roll bars, were Odin and Smokey, trying to avoid kneeling on Hoov’s bagged body.
The group with proper seats was fastening and cinching seat belts. Tightening gun slings.
“Don’t take your helmets off. We’ve still got sniper stations out there.” Odin nodded to Smokey and Mooch as he looped his combat harness around the roll bar. “And if you don’t have a seat belt, strap yourself to something- we’re going overland, and it’s going to get rough.”
Bullets blasted the doorknob out of the garage’s interior door.
“You ready, Professor?”
She was examining the controls. Thankfully the jeep had an automatic transmission. One less thing to focus on. “Where am I going?”
“Just head downhill however you can. You can’t miss the landing strip. Then make for the hangar at the south end.”
“Who’s opening these garage doors?”
“Blow through them. And whatever you do: Drive fast, and keep driving fast. Even if we’re on fire and dead, keep driving fast. Do you understand?”
“Those instructions are pretty clear.”
The interior door popped and shuddered.
He slapped her shoulder. “Now! Execute, execute, execute!”
McKinney put the jeep into drive and revved the engine. Apparently this was a six-cylinder, because the acceleration was good as they hurtled toward the green wooden garage doors.
The steel push bar of the jeep blasted back the twin doors, momentarily sweeping aside part of a seething black cloud-even smashing a few drones against the stone walls of the house. It was actually dark out because of the hundreds of drones, buzzing so loudly that the sound entered McKinney’s middle ear-unnerving and terrifying.
She could barely make out the landscape ahead. The two Forest Service SUVs were parked off to the right, blocking the driveway behind a whirl of drones. So McKinney accelerated the jeep straight ahead into the cloud, aiming between two large pine trees at the edge of the gravel driveway.
Foxy next to her, along with several team members behind her, opened up with machine guns and shotguns, blasting apart the drones in front-which were quickly replaced by new ones pressing in.
They collided with the cloud of two-foot-wide machines, which ricocheted and bumped off the fenders and windshield. The impact was instantly followed by the crackling of gunfire and acrid, sulfurous smoke. Shouts of pain. Spattering of blood. The windshield pocked with a spider’s web of cracks, and she heard bullets whining past nearby. Several loud thwack s came to her ears as pieces of plastic and tufts of upholstery foam popped into the air around her. The steering wheel suddenly felt sluggish, as if a tire-or several-were flat.
But she kept her foot hard on the accelerator, and the jeep roared on. And then suddenly they were hurtling into space, falling.
The jeep lurched up as it impacted lower on the hillside. Having jumped off the level parking area, they were now racing downslope through sparse pine forest at forty or fifty miles an hour. She cranked the wheel to the left to avoid a large rock, only to discover that steering on pine needles was like swimming through melted marshmallows. The front tires trembled as though flat, and it required every ounce of strength to keep the jeep under control.
But McKinney kept the pedal down as she slalomed between the trees. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see a black cloud hurtling through the forest after them-behind that the upper stories of the house were engulfed in flames. But as she looked left and right she saw clear air-no drones. The team was shouting, whether in relief, encouragement, or warning, she didn’t know.
Odin’s voice in her ear. “Keep heading downhill.”
A burst of machine gun fire behind her.
“If you hit a dirt road, turn left. That’ll lead you right to it.”
“The front tires are flat.”
“Just keep going!”
McKinney drove on, dodging trees, while the cloud maintained a distance of a couple of hundred feet behind
