Blind Lake

And the gate began to open. On some command from the truck, he guessed. But it was a beautiful sight. That nine-foot-tall reinforced barrier began to swing outward with an oiled ease so smooth it looked digitally rendered. Jackpot, Bob thought. “Buckle your seat belt,” he told Courtney.

Her eyes blinked open. “What?”

He made a mental estimate of the clearance ahead of him. “Nothing.” He sparked the engine and stepped hard on the accelerator.

Pocket drones, Elaine explained, were self-guided flying weapons about the size of a Florida grapefruit. She had seen them in use during the Turkish crisis, where they had patrolled no-go lines and contested borders. But she had never heard of them being deployed outside of a war zone.

“They’re simple and pretty dumb,” she told Chris, “but they’re cheap and you can use lots of them and they don’t sit in the ground forever like land mines, blowing legs off kids.”

“What do they do?”

“Mostly they just lie there conserving energy. They’re motion-sensitive and they have a few logic templates to identify likely targets. Walk into a no-go zone and they’ll fly up like locusts, target you, spit out small but lethal explosives.”

Chris looked where Elaine had pointed, but in the gathering dusk he could see nothing suspicious. You had to be quick to catch them, Elaine said. They were camouflaged, and if they hopped up without finding an allowed target — disturbed, say, by the rumbling of that huge automated truck on the pavement — they went dormant again very quickly.

Chris thought about that as the truck approached and the increasingly nervous security men shooed gawkers farther back from the road. Made no sense, he decided. The i

Unless the idea was to keep people in.

But that made no sense either.

Which didn’t mean the pocket drones hadn’t been deployed. Only that he couldn’t figure out why.

The crowd grew quieter as darkness fell and the truck crawled up within range of the gate and idled for a moment. Some few began to drift away, apparently feeling more vulnerable, or cold, than curious. But a number remained, pressed against the rope restraints the Security people had thrown up. They seemed not to mind the increasingly cutting wind or the unseasonable snowflakes that began to swirl into the truck’s high beams. But they gasped and withdrew a few feet when the gate itself began to swing silently open.

Chris looked behind him at Elaine and caught a passing glimpse of Blind Lake begi

He turned back at the sudden sound of an electric motor much closer than the rumble of the idling truck.

“Video,” Elaine barked. “Chris!”

He fumbled with the little personal-server accessory. His fingers were cold and the controls were the size of flyspecks and fleabites. He had only ever really used the thing for dictation. At last he managed to trigger the RECORD VID function and point the device approximately toward the gate.

A car sprang forward onto the tarmac from somewhere down by the guardhouse. Its lights were out, its occupants invisible. But the intention was clear. The vehicle was making a run for the half-opened gate.

“Somebody wants to go home and feed the dog,” Elaine said, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus, this is bad.”

The drones, Chris thought.

It seemed that the vehicle might not make it past the guardhouse, but the driver had estimated the widening gap pretty well. The car — it looked to Chris like a late-model Ford or Tesla — squeezed through the space with millimeters of clearance and swerved hard left to avoid the grille of the robotic truck. The car’s headlights came on as it bounced onto the margin of the road and began to pick up serious speed.

“Are you getting this?” Elaine demanded.

“Yes.” At least, he hoped so. It was too late to check. Too late to look away.

“Home free!” Bob Krafft yelled as his rear bumper swung past the bulk of the black truck. It wasn’t true, of course. Probably they’d be intercepted by a military vehicle, maybe even spend the night getting lectured and threatened and charged with violating small-print regulations, but he wasn’t an enlisted man and he’d never signed an agreement to spend a fucking eternity in Blind Lake. Anyway, the open land rolling out beyond his headlights was a welcome sight. “Home free,” he said again, mostly to drown out the sound of Courtney’s breathless screeches of fear.

She sucked in enough air to call him an asshole. He said, “We’re out of there, aren’t we?”

“Jesus, yeah, but—”

Something out the side window caught her eye. Bob caught a glimpse of it, too. Some small thing leaping out of the tall grass.

Probably a bird, he thought, but suddenly the car was full of cold air and hard little flakes of snow, and his ears hurt, and there was window glass everywhere, and it seemed like Courtney was bleeding: he saw blood on the dashboard, blood all over his good leather jacket…

“Court?” he said. His own voice sounded strange and underwatery.

His foot stabbed the brake, but the road was slippery and the Tesla began to swerve despite the best efforts of its overworked servos. Something caused the engine to explode in a gout of blue fire. The body of the car rose from the road. Bob was pressed against his seat, watching the tarmac and the tall grass and the dark sky revolve around him, and for a fraction of a second he thought, Why, we’re flying! Then the car came down on its right front fender and he was thrown into Courtney. Into the sticky ruin of her, at least: into Courtney gone all red and licked with flames.

“The fuck?” Ray Scutter asked when he saw the fireball. Dimitry Shulgin, the Civilian Security chief, could only mumble something about “ordnance.” Ordnance! Ray tried to grasp the significance of that. A car had run the fence. The car had caught fire and rolled over. It came to a stop, top-down. Then everything was still. Even the crowd at the gate was momentarily silent. It was like a photograph. A frozen image. Halted time. He blinked. Pellet snow blew into his face, stinging.

“Drones,” Shulgin pronounced. It was as if he had broken the crust of the silence. Several people in the crowd began to scream.

Drones: those objects hovering over the burning automobile? Winged softballs? “What does that mean?” Ray asked. He had to shout the question twice. Spectators began to dash for their cars. Headlights sprang on, raking the prairie. Suddenly everybody wanted to go home.

Heedless as a bad dream, the gate continued gliding open until it was parallel to the road.

The black robotic truck inched forward again, past the barrier and into the Lake.

“Nothing good,” Shulgin replied — Ray, by this time, had forgotten the question. The Security chief edged away from the tarmac, seeming to fight his own urge to run. “Look.”

Out beyond the gate, in the hostile emptiness, the driver’s-side door of the burning car groaned open.

Now that the car had come to rest Bob registered little more than the need to escape from it — to escape the flames and the bloody, blackened object Courtney had somehow become. At the back of his mind was the need to get help, but there was also, dwelling in the same place, the unwelcome knowledge that Court was beyond all human help. He loved Courtney, or at least he liked to tell himself so, and he often felt a genuine affection for her, but what he needed now more than anything else in the world was to put some distance between himself and her ravaged body, between himself and the burning car. There was no gasoline in the motor, but there were other flammable fluids, and something had ignited all of them at once.