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 thwacks 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 them. She wondered about that. Was it the delay it took them to transmit the pursuit message to the others? Whatever the reason, it had given them time enough to break through.
In any event, there wasn’t much margin for error. Get stuck in a rut or strike a tree, and they were all as good as dead. She focused as she slid and weaved the jeep between trees, running now over nearly level ground. And then a dirt road did appear through the trees ahead, almost perpendicular to her. McKinney started to angle the jeep, veering left. She could see a ditch next to the road and figured it would be safer to cross if she was running nearly parallel to it.
Heavy brush forced her hand, and she had no choice but to drive straight for the road, taking the ditch head-on. A jolting lurch, and they landed on the roadway, veering toward the far side. She corrected, and they were now racing on the road, headed downhill—and toward a tall, corrugated metal building with no windows.
Foxy smacked her arm. “Straight ahead, Professor.”
Odin shouted, “Drive to the far side of the hangar. There’s a door there. Foxy, you able to move okay?”
McKinney glanced over and for the first time noticed that Foxy appeared to have been shot in the side. His glove was spattered with blood.