Rob pulled a mallet from his knapsack and handed it to me. "It'll probably take them a minute or two to realize the alarm's been cut. Give them another minute to realize which building it is, one more to make it to my office. Four minutes--plenty of time. You remember everything?"
"What's to remember? I break the window, climb in, and grab one of your little notepad computers."
"Notebook computers. There should be three of them, all black, on the shelves behind my desk. Any of them will do." He grinned and slapped my shoulder. "Good luck, little brother."
I nodded. Rob took out a small hammer and a pair of wire cutters, slipped the now-empty knapsack over my shoulder, and disappeared into the shadows toward the back of the alley.
I slipped the mallet through my belt, took a deep breath, pretended to be brave, and began climbing. Coarse, sharp edges of brick cut my fingers as I pulled myself upward, but it was much easier than the rock climbing I used to do. Before.
I emerged from the shadows of the alley, felt exposed in the light of the distant streetlamps--clinging to the wall like a human insect, trying to strike a blow against the aliens infecting our planet. I smiled at the irony.
My palms dampened against the cold, grainy brick. I tried to calm myself. The creatures had trouble elevating their heads, so there was little chance of a passerby on the street spotting me thirty feet overhead. I kept crawling. One step at a time, three points of contact . . .
I reached the window of Rob's old office and hoisted myself onto the wide sill to wait for Rob to cut the security system. Pressing my face to the cool glass, I tried to peer through the window; all I could see was blackness.
I had spent many lunch hours on the other side of that glass, playing chess with my older brother while he bitched about military funding cutbacks in his software security research. Of course, that was before the Bugs came. Decades of bad science fiction--combined with their insectoid appearance--had resulted in that inevitable nickname. But it seemed appropriate: Their ships had fallen from the sky like a plague of locusts. Within weeks, the entire Earth lay crushed beneath their chitinous legs and superior technology. They set up command centers where ours had been: the Kremlin, Buckingham Palace, the White House.
Bastards.
They rounded up every leader, every head of business or military, every technical expert they could find. No one knew what had happened to them, though I heard a rumor that the Bugs were meat eaters. . . .
Rob had escaped capture, wandering for months in places he still wouldn't talk about, even to me. Eventually, he showed up at my house, and I hid him in a crawlspace for nearly a year. Finally, the Bugs stopped searching for him.
Big mistake. My brother--computer genius, designer of networks and security systems for the government and military--had a plan. And now I was part of it.
Rob came running back into the dim light below me, thrusting a thumb skyward. The clock had started.
I slammed the mallet into the window; glass exploded inward. Pulling myself carefully over the sharp remnants in the frame, I dropped into the dark office. I pulled a small flashlight from my pocket, thumbed it on, scanned the room. Banks of monitors, printers, papers piled everywhere; just like old times. My light flickered off his chessboard, our black and white armies still facing each other across the dusty, tiled battlefield.
I scanned the light to the far wall, danced it along the gray metal shelves. Empty shelves.
The computers were gone.
"Shit!" I muttered. I swept the light-circle around the room. No computers anywhere. I began opening drawers and doors, looking under cabinets--
A sound. I held my breath, listening. Outside the office door, something scrabbled against the uncarpeted floor. A nightmare silhouette crawled across the translucent glass.
As I turned to leave, and my light glinted off something on the floor: One of Rob's old briefcases. Rushing over, I clicked the latches. Inside sat a gray notebook computer.
Yes! I pulled it out, stuffed it into the knapsack, and lunged for the window.
The lock clicked behind me.
I climbed through recklessly, my pants catching and tearing on a jag of broken glass. Light streamed around me from behind.
I practically skated down the wall, leaping the last ten feet.
"Jesus, Mike, what took so long?" Rob hissed, helping me to my feet. "Get it?"
I stuffed the knapsack into his hands. "Got it!"
He grinned. I grinned. We ran.
Rob sat on the cold cement floor of the warehouse we had broken into, huddled over his little computer like a bird of prey mantling over its feast. I lifted another heavy box into place, sealing us into a corrugated-cardboard nest.
Slipping a disk into a slot, he frowned at the computer. "God, it's been a long time since I used one of these."
"It's all that was left. Will it work?"
He shrugged. "Sure, just take me a little longer. Gotta make it read this disk."
"What are you doing to do?"
"I hack into the White House network, take it down, simple." He turned on the computer; after a few seconds, it chimed--da-da-ding--and finished booting. Rob snapped a phone cord into it and plugged the other end into a wall jack. He rubbed his hands. "Here we go."
"What are you doing? Some kind of virus-thing?" Computers never were my specialty; I'm a sportswear salesman.
Rob snorted. "Virus? Puh-lease! This isn't some stupid movie. I'm crashing the whole fucking system. A virus is like a scalpel; what I'm doing is a goddamn nuke!"
"Won't they just get it back online?"
Without lifting his gaze from the computer screen, Rob grinned. "If they had time--which they won't, because there soon won't be any Bugs left to do it. During those months I was in hiding--before I came here--I hooked up with a resistance group, ex-military guys mostly." He glanced at me, eyes gleaming in the dark. "Tonight's the night, little brother. We're taking back what was ours."
A shiver tickled my neck. "A full-scale assault! And you're clearing the defense network for them."
"Right on."
I frowned. "How come you didn't tell me?"
He shrugged, computer keys still clicking rapidly. "Sorry, bro'. The fewer people who know . . ."
"How long will we have? The Bugs are ugly, but they aren't stupid. Won't they be able to trace what you're doing?"
Rob's fingers stopped dancing. He took a deep breath. "Probably. But it won't matter. You see, they don't just look like bugs; they have a similar hive mentality. Once the assault really gets going, every Bug in a hundred miles will be scampering back to defend the home nest." The clicking resumed. "We don't have much time. The assault starts in a few minutes."
Rob paused, took a deep breath, pressed a key. He chewed his lower lip the way he always did when he was nervous. Or scared. The disk drive ground and ground, something clicked and buzzed inside the computer, then--
He punched the air. "I'm in! Now, I need to upload the override kernel . . ." The keys chattered. "Got it! The system is primed and awaiting my command." An icon appeared on the screen: a bug being squashed by a red, white, and blue fist.
"Do it!"
Rob looked at his watch. "Timing is everything, bro'. If I bring the system down too early, the bugs will know something's on, have time to react. Gotta wait till our boys are already on the move. At thirty seconds till eight, I double-click that icon, and the defensive system drops. Half a minute later, our guys hit the gates.
"Then it's all over but the stomping."
I put my hand on his shoulder. He put his over mine. Together, we watched the seconds tick by.
"Three, two, one--NOW!" Rob clicked the button. "Oh, shit!"
"What's wrong?" I squeezed closer to look over his shoulder. "What's it mean when the screen turns all blue?"
"It means we're fucked!"
"Did they--"
"No, it's not the Bugs." He chewed his lip. "Maybe I can . . ." He tried several things while the seconds ticked by. Somewhere, miles away, brave humans were storming against impenetrable, heavily-guarded gates. And dying before them.
"Goddamn it! Multi-tasking, my ass. I'm going to have to re--"
"Shhh!" I whispered. Rob froze. From somewhere behind the boxes, the main door into the warehouse scraped open. "They're here."
I heard the scrape-scrape-scrape of Bugs skittering across the floor--not close, but not far away.
"Hurry!" I hissed.
"I'll have to reboot," he whispered. "Don't worry. All I have to do is reconnect and send the command. It'll take only a minute. Just be quiet; they won't hear us."
We hunkered down tighter. I had thought Rob paranoid when he demanded I build our little hideaway of boxes; now I wished we had a concrete bunker.
A Bug moved closer; I heard its mandibles softly clicking, the scraping of its body joints. It passed us.
Rob touched the computer's power button.
The startup screen appeared, and--da da ding--the greeting chime rang through the computer's speakers once more.
"Gaa!" Rob gasped, stuffing his hands over the tiny speaker.
Too late. The boxes around us crashed away. One of the brown, lobster-like monsters towered over us, eyestalks weaving, tiny claws snapping. Before I could move, a tentacle shot from the Bug's thorax with frog-tongue quickness, wrapped around my chest, and coiled me with bone-crushing strength against its hard exoskeleton. Sharp corners dug through my shirt, its chittering laughter assaulted my ears, and the thing's stench caused me to gag.
Rob grabbed the tentacle, tried to pull me free. A second bug appeared, its tentacle snapped out, and Rob, too, was snared. Next to us, the computer finished booting, welcomed us, and sat quietly, the stomped-bug icon sitting in the middle of its screen, waiting.
I leaned, pulled, stretched trying to reach the keyboard. I got one finger on it, a second, but then the monster yanked me away.
As they pulled us toward the door, Rob's gaze locked onto mine. In my brother's eyes, I saw bitterness, rage, and most of all, sorrow. He shook his head.
"Needed . . . one of my black computers," he said, struggling to speak.
With the Bug's tentacle crushing my own ribcage, I could barely squeeze out a word. "Why?"
"Because the black ones," he gasped, "were Macs."