RESTORATION (a science fiction novel) (RESTORATION (the science fiction trilogy)) (44 page)

Dodge leaned back and put his feet up on his desk as Tom and Jerry began playing on the
PC.  He sat there and enjoyed the show while he munched on his stash of pistachios.  How much more natural than this, can you get? He wondered if the watchers were enjoying Tom and Jerry as well, that funny little mouse, what a hoot!  They just didn’t make good stuff like that anymore. 

He ran out of nuts and his coke was just about all gone so he turned off the
PC and left the office turning off the light on the way out.  Now he just had to wait and see if the watchers would take the bait. 

He went downstairs and turned on the TV to catch some sports highlights.  He watched it for about twenty minutes and then decided to wash the car.  He pulled the GTO out in the drive and got everything out.  The boys saw what he was doing and offered to help. 
        Just a few minutes into it Toby’s phone rang.  He half way dried his hands on his pants and answered the phone while walking to the other side of the driveway.  It was Glitch.
         “Hello Toby,” Glitch’s creepy voice came through the phone more slowly than normal.
         “Hi Dad,” said Toby, to provide cover.  Glitch got it and continued.      “Mr. Kerrington has a key hidden in his office over the window sill.  In his desk is a strong box that it fits.  In that box is an orange microdrive.  I want the contents of that drive.” 

“Okay Dad,” he said, “I’ll clean it up as soon as I get home I promise.”   Pretending that his room was messy and he was in trouble.  Toby heard a “click”.  Glitch had hung up without saying goodbye or anything. 
“Weird little dude.”
         “Okay, bye,” Toby said, as if Glitch was still on the line.  Toby came back and started washing the car again and explained that his Dad had called and complained about him leaving his room a mess.  They all played along just in case Toby’s phone was bugged, they couldn’t be too careful.

A few minutes later Toby began holding his stomach.     

“Hey guys I don’t feel so good, I think I had better go to the bathroom.”
         “All right,” Bobby said, “If you still don’t feel good, just go lie down in my room, I’ll be up when we get done washing the car.”
         “Okay,” he said. 

He went inside and looked around to make sure nobody was watching him.  Linsey and Sarah went to the store and wouldn’t be back for a while.  Dodge and Bobby wouldn’t check on him because they knew exactly what he was doing and certainly didn’t want to spoil it.  He still had to act like he was worried about getting caught just to sell it to the watchers back at the compound. 

He went into the office and grabbed the keys off the window sill, it was on the second one that he checked.  He ran over to the desk and turned the PC on, it only took him a few minutes to hack the password.  He used the key, unlocked the  safe and got the orange drive.  He stuck it in the first port and then laid his phone down on the desk and began a sync.  He opened the drive contents on the screen and highlighted everything in the drive and then selected send to, wireless devices, site survey, he located his phone from the list and hit execute. 

It only took about one minute to copy all the orange drive contents onto his phone.  He put everything away and closed out the windows on the
PC and shut it down.  He returned the keys above the sill and left the room.  They had done it, he thought, all he had to do was get this file on his phone back to Glitch and the take down could begin.

  Meanwhile back at the compound Glitch was watching, we have done it, he thought,
we’ll soon have more information about the LifeTech hardware.

Toby went to Bobby’s room and lay down.  He actually was a little tired after playing ball, washing the car, and stealing secrets.  He awoke to Bobby standing over him.
         “Hey Toby, wake up man, you feeling better?”
         “Oh, Sorry. I just closed my eyes for a minute and boom, out.”
         “Oh, that’s all right, you must have been tired, you feeling better?”
         “Yes, I am thanks”
         “Come on,” said Bobby, “Let’s go downstairs and have a burger, Dad’s fixing them on the grill.” 

Bobby, Dodge, and Toby sat around the patio table and had some burgers hot off the grill.  It was a sunny day and it was perfect for eating outside.  They wanted to talk about the plan but couldn’t until the ride back to Toby’s house.  Toby was anxious to ask about the drive contents and to tell them how Todd and Cheyenne might be easy to recruit to their side.  Pretty much everyone except Glitch was a prisoner in their situation and they all hated what they were doing but simply had no choice.

After filling up on burgers, chips and dip, they all went into the TV room to relax and watch sports highlights.  Their bellies were full so they got lazy and laid around until time to take Toby home. 

They all piled into the GTO for the ride back to Toby’s
        “Don’t worry about my phone, it’s wrapped up good in my bag just like it was on the way here,” said Toby.  I copied the orange drive contents is that good?  Dodge smiled.     

“Yeah that was the
bait, I guess they really are watching.”
         “Okay, listen guys,” said Toby, “I really need to talk about this and we only have a few minutes.  I think we can flip Cheyenne and Todd.  Cheyenne likes me and we talk a lot.  Todd is absolutely nuts about you because of this kick ass car.  I don’t know too much about either of them yet, but Cheyenne and I got into a conversation about the head bombs and about getting inside something  metal to survive, and she asked a lot of questions.  I think, pretty much everyone hates Cyrus, and would jump at the chance to escape if they had somewhere safe to go where their heads wouldn’t go bang.  If I could get a bunch of them on board could you find a place for us to go, you know, like when it all comes to a head and you guys take down Glitch and Cyrus, maybe we could make a run for it?”
         “Sure,” said Dodge, “But that’s going to be tricky to figure out.” 

“If we managed to get into a metal container, we
could  wait there until the battle was over.  Once Cyrus is taken out of power, we could be certain that the death signal wasn’t being transmitted.  After that we could go to the doctors to get these things out of our heads.” 

Dodge was listening intently, and was impressed with Toby’s idea. 

“Well, I see where you’re going with this, and if we can time everything just right, something like that might just work.   If we attack just moments after most of his people have disappeared, he wouldn’t even know you guys were gone.  He would find out when he began putting out orders while still under attack, that plan would also keep him from properly defending himself and the compound.  Be very careful Toby, if anyone that you talk to were to go to Cyrus or Glitch, out of some twisted sense of loyalty, then the whole thing could fall apart on us, and we could all end up dead.”

Dodge knew that his family was safe due to the clones being grown at the farm, but he held back from telling Toby, just in case he were found out at some point, he could be tortured into telling everything. 

Bobby had an idea.     

“What if you wrapped your head in tin foil or window screen or something like that?”  Dodge chuckled.

“Well Son, that’s pretty close to the right idea, and that’s what most people think will work, but it won’t work because the signal can still get in through the neck hole, where you can’t put the foil, high frequency will travel through walls, glass, and even your body.”

“Wow,” said Bobby, “I didn’t realize it was that powerful.”
         “Yes radio waves can permeate just about anything.  In fact it’s good that you mentioned that Bobby, Toby is there any place at the compound that you can think of that is solid metal construction?  Something that if you got inside of it you would be completely surrounded my metal, no windows, no doors, no openings at all?”

“Yeah there are some old ovens on the lower floor and I think they’re all metal.  They’re stripped out you know, the wiring is gone, and the heaters are gone, but the shell is still there.  They do have some openings in them though like for air and gas to go in and big metal doors for putting things inside them.” 

“All right that’s good to know, if you get a chance to check them out a little closer look at the doors and see how tightly they close.  Make a note of the holes in them and how large they are and where.  Try to get an idea of which one is the tightest with the least openings in it and let me know how large it is.” 

“Okay, I can do that, we’re allowed to go in them, some people actually hang out in them and play cards and stuff, they’re big enough to park a dang bus inside.  Some people go in them to sing because it echoes so well in there.”

“That’s good, we might be able to save some of these people and have some living witnesses to testify against Cyrus and Glitch when this is all over with.” 

Dodge and Bobby dropped Toby off at the house around 4:00 p.m. as planned.  Todd and Cheyenne were inside watching a documentary about the pandemic of 2027.  When Toby went in he was surprised to see them getting along so well.  Todd looked up at Toby when he came in.
         “Heads up,” said Toby as he tossed Todd the blue micro drive.  He looked at the label on it.
         “All right!  GTO stuff!”  He Said. 

He jumped up and went to the next room to look at the GTO restoration files on his
PC.  Toby plopped down where Todd had been sitting, threw his leg over the arm of the big puffy chair and looked at Cheyenne with a smile.     

“Miss me?” He asked. 

Cheyenne was watching TV and didn’t turn to look at him.

“You know I did, Todd isn’t much company ya know.  I’ve had better conversations with rocks.” 

“Yeah, I know, but I think deep down inside he’s probably okay.”  Cheyenne nodded in sarcastic agreement.

“So, you know that conversation we had about the metal box thing and the whole head bomb thing?”
         “Yeah, what about it?”  Replied Cheyenne.
         “Well, you know those big old ovens down on the main floor of the factory?”
         “Oh, my god!  You read my mind, me and my friend Alice . . .”         She stopped short, realizing she might be saying too much. 

“Alice?  Is she the one that does the genetic stuff for Cyrus?”
Asked Toby.
         “Yeah, that’s her.” Cheyenne said quietly.
         “I didn’t know you two were friends.”  Cheyenne leaned forward to see if Todd was still engrossed in the GTO stuff on the PC in the other room.     

“Well I’m not really supposed to be, she said in a softer voice.  I probably shouldn’t have said . . .”      

“It’s okay Cheyenne, don’t worry, I won’t say a word to anyone.”
         “You promise?”
         “Yes of course.”
         “All right.  Sometimes Alice and I sneak at night and hang out in her room and watch old TV shows on her PC and sometimes we have ice cream or pop corn or something.  The guards are really sloppy at night.  I mean seriously sometimes they are gone for fifteen minutes to the commode or they fall asleep at their post.”

“Really?
  Wow,” said Toby, “Go on.”
         “Well the other night we started talking about what you said, you know, getting inside the metal box, we thought the ovens down there in the old factory would be perfect.  We were thinking of just locking ourselves in there forever.”
         “Cheyenne that’s brilliant!”
         “What? No, Toby of course not, we couldn’t live in there, we were just kidding, Cyrus would get us eventually, I mean, we wouldn’t have food or water.”

“Yeah you’re right, but it was a fun thought” Toby played it off, but he believed it might be
feasible, he would investigate this more another time. 

They went back to watching the documentary again for a while and Toby began telling Cheyenne what the pandemic was really like.  He was a middle-aged man when it had happened so he actually experienced it firsthand.  Cheyenne and Todd were just small children at that time and could barely remember anything about it. 

They watched the rest of it and talked about it until they got tired and turned in for the night.  Todd was still going through the GTO pictures and video files when Toby went by to go up to bed.  He lay awake in bed for a while working on his plan, if they could get most of the people to agree to it, they could go inside one of those ovens to survive. 

If planned carefully, they could go in right before John and Dodge and then the Black Ops team would burst into the compound and do what they do best.  Toby and his friends could seal themselves inside the oven somehow.  They would have to devise a way to lock it from the inside so that Cyrus’s men couldn’t get to them in the amount of time they had available.  They would need air but
couldn’t tolerate a hole where a signal could get through or where a grenade or poison gas could be tossed in.  He would have to talk to John and Dodge about how to keep the radio signals out. 

Dodge said that holes were no good and the doors had to fit tightly.  Just how tightly he didn’t really know, only John or Dodge could tell him that.  Normally he wouldn’t care to go to the compound, but now he found himself anxious to return so that he could check out the ovens more closely.