Mac stood up, and felt Disco rise and heel. He felt like a spring, coiled to tight, ready to explode into motion. “What the fuck is this?” exclaimed Dutch. Mac could hear the anger in his voice. Dutch was a longtime friend. They both went through Firewatch training together and had actually been lucky enough to serve in the same unit since. He and his girlfriend came over once every few weeks for dinner, and he and Mac hit the range together every Saturday. His anger was real as Mac’s family was like his own.
A few seconds passed and both of them re-joined the channel. “Mac, you are hereby relieved of duty. Get your ass back home now. Dutch, same status, stay with Mac. I’m contacting Control, and having them send uni’s here as backup, and a Knight patrol car to your address.” Mac was already bolting for the door, and the rover parked just beyond. He saw Dutch running all out from around the corner of the building. Mac hopped behind the wheel, feeling Disco take shotgun and hit the accelerator. He felt cold panic setting in, fear covered by action. He didn’t even feel the irritation that was standard with driving a car with pedals. His hoof stomped down awkwardly on the pad, sliding off a bit and he jerked the car away from the building. He didn’t even slow down for Dutch, who just grabbed onto the roll bar and swung in. Mac could hear him panting a bit, but didn’t look back. He just willed the rover to go faster than it could and stared straight ahead.
They hit the parking lot, growling through the gate house opening, guards stepping out in confusion. Last one in, first one out, Dutch was heading for his car as Mac engaged the parking brake. “My car!” Dutch called back over his shoulder, and Mac silently complied.
Dutch’s car wasn’t even out of the parking lot before Sims started updating the team. “Power grid still shows connection to the house, and accessing street cams shows the house whole and healthy. No car in the driveway though, does that sound right?”
Mac enlarged the street view Sims had sent to his overlay, looking for anything out of place. “Uh, yeah, it would be in the garage. We both park in the garage.”
“Mac, you and Sheila both on the corp lease program?”
“Yeah Cap, she just got her upgrade about 6, maybe 8 months back.”
“Sims, all the cars in the program have trackers on them. I’m tagging you for security clearance, check that out.”
It was a full minute before the response came back. “Yeah Cap, cars showing at that address. Also, my inquiry just came back. No Docwagon service calls in the whole neighborhood in the last few hours.”
No one responded.
Seconds ate miles and the car’s siren sounded like a screaming child to Mac’s ears. His jaw was tight,and he could feel his fist clenching and releasing, micro-tensions broadcasting his fear. Something was wrong. His gut was battling his brain, and his brain was losing. The windshield was a forgotten background to his AR display, yellow lines and sidewalk eaten by the cars passing, laid over with multiple cam feeds. At the very center was the static from his home cam, off to the right was the street cam showing the driveway- still empty. A third window erupted on the left side of his HUD showing a drone’s eye view of the city below. Sims explained that he was piggybacking feed from a KE advance drone that was in the area. He couldn’t control it but it was showing at least one other view of the neighborhood. Mac called Sheila again. And again.
Dutch hit the entrance to the Ares owned community, squealing tires, at 70 mph. The few other vehicles in the neighborhood were pulling over maintaining the emergency lane they had on the highway as a large rotating AR light popped up on each street corner letting pedestrians know of impending emergency services. Mac’s arm was nudged forward. He glanced back and Disco was now leaning into the front seat, recognizing either by scent or sight the place that was almost home. Mac leaned his shoulder into the dog's neck, feeling his own tightness reflected back. The car stopped in front of the driveway, abruptly blocking the anything that may come out of the garage from easy street access. Both doors auto released and Mac rolled out and to one knee, gun drawn, eyes scanning. He knew Dutch was pulling his Ares Alpha from the back seat and posting up over the roof of the car. Disco hopped out and broke training, starting for the front door. “Post!” Mac barked and the dog stopped. “Post!” Mac said again, more intently, and Disco moved back behind Mac’s right hip, legs slightly bent to stay under Mac’s firing stance. The house looked normal, everything seemed in place.
“Cap, we’re on site and about to breach” said Dutch.
“I see you” said the Captain, and Mac took note of his and Dutch’s positions on the street cam. “Moving” he said, dog and handler both quick walking toward the front gun up and eyes out. He stopped before he hit the stoop as the Captain said “Perimeter first Mac.” He growled and pulled his eyes away from the door, feeling the gut punch of procedure over instinct. Dutch’s SmartLink feed popped up in his view and he willed it off to upper right. He was sure his was doing the same on his partner's feed, courtesy of Sim’s no doubt. He saw himself and Disco take the edge of the house wide, clearing out to in, and then moving into the back yard. The little half picket Sheila had insisted on was no burden for either he or the dog to clear. The back yard, he could already see, was empty of life. A swingset his mom had ordered for Piper, and a few dog toys spotted the grass.
Mac switched his vision specs to thermal scanning the shrubs on the back fence line for anything out of place. The back door was closed, but the auto-tint was set at what looked to be full. They cleared the third corner and he could see Dutch standing steady, scanning the front of the house. His SmartLink feed immediately centered on Mac, and then back to the windows. Through that lens Mac could see that indeed all the windows were dark. “We don’t set our windows that low. Sim’s, if the house node is off then why are the windows still dark?”
“Good question man….uh….shit!”
“What?” said the Captain.
“Mac, you’re node’s not down. It’s just been put in a sort of stealth mode, and it looks like it has a new authorization code set to it.”
Mac growled again and cut the last corner tight, trotting faster for the front door. He could hear Dutch call a warning, knowing he was going in sloppy as he hit the door hoof first. It swung open fast with no resistance, banging loudly against the wall behind. He stumbled forward, having expected for the door to be closed and latched. His eyes took in the room and he0 stopped, mouth open, heart pounding. Over everything he could see in the house was a light dusting of some whitish powder. It was like some horrible christmas nightmare. “Sheila!” he shouted. “Piper! Honey!” He could hear Dutch running up to the door, seeing the feed dancing as the barrel cleared the front entry. By that time Mac was into the kitchen, working his way through the mud room, the dining room, and hitting the stairs three at a time. The furniture looked mostly in place, except for that one toppled chair. The blanket and pillow from the couch were on the floor, stretched long as if they fallen off a moving body. One of the frames on the stairway wall was knocked crooked, he and his family at an awkward angle on a beach in Maine. He heard himself calling, but couldn’t hear the panic in his voice. “Piper! Sheila!” Over and over drowning out the voice of Dutch trying to catch up and bring him back to focus; drowning out the chatter on comms of Captain Zell and Sims both asking for details.
As Mac and Disco cleared the last door they burst into Piper’s room. Toys and pillows scattered the floor, crayon lines on the wall from an unwatched moment last week, an Omai-dog’s robot bark counting time to it’s automated backflips as it’s motion sensor engaged. The static filled cam feed flashed out, and then reset. “You’re back on, Mac” said Sim’s. And like that, the emptiness of his home slammed into him. Every cam feed showed only he, Disco qand Dutch in the house. He moved over to the closet and ripped the doors open, whipping the hanging child's clothes aside. “Sheila! Piper!” He turned and flipped Piper's bed over eyes frantically searching. As Dutch filled the doorway Mac charged him and let his shoulder drive his partner to the wall as he rushed past. He went to his own bedroom again and searched the closets. The bed was still made from where Sheila fixed it up each morning, a light dusting of that fucking powder over their pillows. He grabbed the mattress and flipped it the same way as before.
“Sheila! SHEILA! SHEILA! FUCK!” This time Dutch made way as Mac came roaring past. Mac knew he was saying something but he and the rest of the comm channel were incoherent. He leaped down the stairs in a single bound, feeling the creak of the banister as he whipped himself back toward the garage door. He flung it open and ran in. The space was filled with assorted totes, tool benches, and Sheila’s car. He noticed something on top of the car, and more of the powder covering everything in the room. He finally recognized it as the source of the mess, guessing he had missed them in the other rooms of the house. As quickly as he considered if it was toxic, the thought left his mind. He looked frantically through the car windows and wrenched the door open when he saw they were dusted from the inside as well as out. The whole car was filled with a thicker layer of the substance. Mac turned and yanked the garage door up and over his head. He took a few staggering steps out into the driveway, feeling himself grow dizzy, not realizing he was hyperventilating and spinning in wavering circles. He felt rather than heard himself release a gut wrenching cry. Holding his hands to his head, pistol still clenched tight against his horn, he saw Dutch coming out of the garage after him. He was holding out his hand, his assault rifle pushed back out of the way, concern blazing across his face.
“Mac, brother, breathe man, breathe. You gotta get yourself together. Knights are on the way. We’re gonna find em Mac. I promise. We’re gonna find em.” Mac found himself turned away from Duch, from his home, from his dog, palms on the hood of Dutch’s Americar. He could feel the metal under his palms. He focused on the heat, focused on the solid, the strength in the hood. He breathed in and out, ragged breaths trying to find steady, and let the heat and steel bring him back to focus. He realized Dutch and the rest of the team were chattering over comms, and a sense of reassurance touched on him as he heard the Captain taking control, miles away, but a steady head and an expert under pressure. In the distance he could hear sirens approaching, a familiar whine unique to Knight Errant patrol vehicles.
He felt his leg buckle a bit and looked down to Disco butting him in the knee. Disco’s concerned whine brought Mac to a knee and he slid his hands back over the dog's ears. “They took them. They took our girls Disco. Disco, they took our girls.” He felt his eyes cloud over as he locked gazes with the dog. A sharp nose butted his face and a few quick licks swiped his cheeks, letting out another concerned whine. Mac hugged his dog tightly to him feeling Disco’s neck press hot against his own. “They took our girls” he whispered. His eyes raked back over the yard, seeing the door kicked in, the garden gnome Sheila bought when they moved in under the front window, and something shiny and plastic. Mac engaged the magnification mod in his eyes and his vision zoomed up on the object. Piper’s dinosaur.
He swallowed the sick fighting to come up and ground his teeth, feeling his lips tighten against his tusks. Someone took his girls. His family. Someone took them, and he was going to burn the world down to get them back.
…………………………………….
Mac finished scraping the last of his Meatloaf flavored Nuke-It soypack out of the plastic tray. He chewed it wordlessly, and washed it down with a swallow of beer. He stared at the table, filled with his helmet and vest, his gun belt laid over the back of Sheila’s chair. That used to drive her nuts. She was always getting on him about leaving guns on the table, never mind that the biometric lock made it impossible for them to be fired by anyone other than him. He pushed his chair back and stood up to throw away the remains of his dinner. Disco lifted his head from the arm of the couch where he had been watching Mac since they got home. He could see the corner of Piper’s blanket sticking out from under the dog's chin. Disco hadn’t slept without that blanket since the girls disappeared. Seven weeks now. The longest and most exhausting time in Mac’s life, and there was no end in sight.
The police had found nothing, and a CSI team associated with the Firewatch division had been called in to go over the house inch by inch. They were calling it an involuntary extraction, which was corp speak for intellectual kidnapping. They found Sheila’s personal terminal at the house wiped clean, and those powder packs exploded in every room. He had been told the the powder was some cleaning chemical called C Squared, and was used by terrorist and criminal elements to eliminate DNA evidence. They said it made tracking victims magically next to impossible. Whoever had taken his family had been thorough in that regard. There had been no sign. No evidence. It was like they turned into thin air and left only that damnable C Squared behind. It had taken over a week just to get that cleaned out of the house entirely. Conrad had actually called in a favor and gotten a special cleanup crew out to the house. They usually worked homicides, so had no issue with the mess he had.
The interviews had been endless, and the whole team had gone through the mill. As had the neighbors, Sheila’s co workers, and various sitters that had been used from the corp services. There must have been hundreds of hours of recordings those investigators had looked through, all for naught. Mac had been put on administrative leave for the first three weeks. His mother and father showed up the third week, and after listening to his mother cry and pray for her grand child for five days he asked his parents to leave and requested to return to work. Bizarrely he had almost attained a sense of normalcy in those intervening weeks. He woke up, took Disco for a run, ate, went to work, came home, ate a Nuke-It, had a beer or two, took Disco for a walk, and waited for sleep to take him. He found himself unable to watch the trid, or surf the matrix, or anything else that would have once provided distraction. He was feeling like he’d hit rock bottom.
Mac started to leave the kitchen, and then turned back and grabbed his gun belt from her chair. He pushed it up to the table and straightened it up before telling the lights to shut off and heading to bed. Every time he touched something he thought of as hers the guilt hammered home. He should have been here, should have protected his family. For the first time in his career he resented the job, the corp, and the life. This was his fault, and he knew it even if the whole world argued differently.
He hung the belt on the back of the bedroom door, pulled the gun out and set it on the bedside table. He thought about taking another shower, but gave up on the idea immediately. “You don’t think I smell bad do ya buddy?” he said while giving Disco and ear rub. “No you don’t. You think I smell just fine.” He sat down on the edge of the bed and rubbed his hand against his head. Just around the base of his horns he pushed and rubbed a bit harder trying to make his headache go away. He seemed to have had one now for weeks. He went back to the bathroom for a goodnight piss, and a couple of Pain Aid’s. The bottle was empty, and as he threw it away the reminder to buy more popped up in his display. He punched the YES button and it was added to his delivery order for tomorrow. “Perfect” he muttered. “Fucking perfect.”
He stood in the doorway and looked at his bedroom. Disco laid on the bed curled up on the blanket he had brought from the couch. Mac stared at Sheila’s bedside table, a small bowl with assorted rings and jewelry, a lamp she had swore was a great deal, and a digital photo of them on their wedding day. “Sheila” Mac said, and smiled a little as he walked over and opened her bedside drawer. There was more of the same, along with a bottle of lube, the pistol he got her for Valentine's day, and her own bottle of Pain Aid. “Thanks baby” he said picking up the bottle and sitting down on her side of the bed. He popped the top, to a couple more than the max dosage, and chased it with his last swig of beer. He toasted her face in the pic with his empty can. “Here’s to you baby, taking care of me when I sure as hell couldn’t take care of you.” He stared for too long until his eyes went back to the pistols handle. He had purchased her an Ares Predator of her own, and had it customized to his exact specs. Custom grips, smart link adaptor, biometric lock, and a safe fire system so she could never accidently shoot anyone in the house (not that she would, Sheila was a solid shot, as Mac had found out on one of their first dates to the range). He’d even had a personality chip installed of a sexy woman who would tell you how hot you looked every time you fired. He’d thought it was brilliant, and Sheila had confirmed his choice of voices as “just the right kind of sexy.”
He reached out and picked up the gun. His palms connected with the Smartlink sensors in the grip, and asked for the security code for anyone other than Sheila to use it. He tapped in the code on the pop up keypad- Piper’s birthday. The Smartlink fully engaged, targets sights popped up in his image display, as well as an ammo count, ammo type, and the wireless component kicked in to confirm that there was no wind in the bedroom to interfere with his shot. He aimed at the window, and realized that the persona chip wasn’t kicking on. He triggered the flashing light that engaged the program and almost dropped the gun in shock. It was Sheila’s voice.
“Mac, this was the only place I could think to leave a message that wouldn’t get found. Oh Mac, I’m so sorry. I wanted to tell you but couldn’t. I had it all planned out for us to go as a family. Mac, baby, Mac, I love you. We’re safe, know that. This was all planned down to the wire, and then when you got called it was too late to change. Mac, we’re with Evo. A team of people I don’t know are coming, I mean, came. By the time you see this they already came. They took Piper and me, safely. They are covering their tracks well. This is what they do Mac. They’re good. You’ll never be able to find them on your own, but you don’t have to. There’s a man who hangs out at the coffee shop right on Baltimore harbors east side. Fante’s cafe. I only ever knew him as Candy, but he always wore one of those ridiculous neck scarves you hate. Find him Mac. He’s expecting you, and can put you on the path to find us. Baby, I miss you. I know when you find this I’ll have gone crazy missing you, and I’m sure you us. Come find me Mac. Come find your family.”
And the message was over. He stared at that blinking light, mouth agape, for he didn’t know how long. He played it again. And again. And again. He realized his grip on the pistol was so tight his hand was hurting. He loosened his hold and played it a fourth time.
“Disco,” he looked over and locked eyes with Piper’s sworn protector, “Disco buddy, they took our girls, but now we’re going to get them back.” Disco huffed and licked the corner of the blanket protectively. Mac reached out and rubbed his ears, and then he hit play one more time.
