Chapter 52 - The Echo of a Pulse
The drainage tunnel snaked for three miles beneath the frozen valley before terminating in a spillway hidden beneath an overgrown highway culvert.
By the time David kicked open the rusted iron grating, the sky above the forest was bleeding into the sickly bruised violet of early dawn. Freezing drizzle fell through the bare branches of winter pines, turning the needles into razor-sharp spikes of ice. The smell of burning petroleum still lingered on the northeast wind—the Sterling estate, three miles behind them, was an incinerated scar against the horizon, sending a thick column of black smoke climbing into the low-hanging cloud cover.
David hauled Leah up into the frosty ditch beneath Interstate 84. She was limping badly; her left ankle had twisted during the landing in the storm channel, and her lips were tinged with the faint, terrifying blue of early hypothermia.
"We need shelter. Five minutes in this wind and the babies will go into shock," Leah whispered. Her arms were wrapped fiercely around Maya, but her eyes kept darting down to Asset 409, whom David carried inside his zipped jacket, sharing his own fading body heat.
Suddenly, an odd, mechanical chirp broke the silence.
It came from beneath David’s zipper.
David ripped his coat open. Asset 409 was awake, his tiny brow furrowed. Embedded around the infant's left wrist was an ultra-thin, subdermal titanium band that Julian Sterling’s surgical team had welded into the skin. A microscopic amber LED was pulsing rapidly beneath the epidermis, emitting an intermittent high-frequency tone.
*Beep... beep... beep...*
"What is that?" Leah gasped, recoiling slightly before her motherly instinct forced her closer. "David, what is that sound?!"
"A proximity beacon," David said, cold sweat breaking out across his forehead despite the freezing wind. "When the sub-level power grid failed, the secondary failsafe kicked in. It’s broadcasting an encrypted VHF telemetry signal."
"Cassandra," Leah breathed, terror flooding her eyes. "She’s tracking him."
As if in horrifying confirmation, a low, mechanical thrum vibrated through the freezing air high above the treeline. It wasn't the distant rumble of the interstate. It was the heavy, rhythmic thud of twin turbine blades cutting through low cloud ceiling—a matte-black Eurocopter EC145, skimming just five hundred feet above the snow-covered canopy, sweeping south toward their coordinates.
"Move!" David hissed, grabbing Leah’s arm and dragging her under the concrete span of the overpass.
They pressed their backs against the graffitied concrete pillars just as the aircraft banked sharply directly above the bridge. A powerful beam of white xenon light cut through the morning mist, sweeping across the forest floor, vaporizing the frost where it touched the brush barely fifty yards from their hiding spot.
Beneath David's jacket, the amber light on Asset 409’s wrist changed from a slow blink to a solid, furious red. The signal had locked on.
Asset 409 looked directly up at David. For the first time since they had pulled him from the cryogenic amniotic cradle, the baby opened his mouth and let out a piercing, glass-shattering wail. At the exact same second, as if joined by an invisible phantom umbilical cord, Maya began to scream in Leah’s arms.
The twin cries echoed under the hollow concrete of the bridge, ringing out into the freezing forest like an alarm flare.
May you like
Fifty yards away, the helicopter’s searchlight snapped directly toward the underpass.
***
