Chapter 28- Intelligence Work

Several hours later they landed in an airport outside of New York. It looked abandoned.

"Isn't this unsafe, seeing as this area just got hit by a nuke?" Keith asked.

"In theory, yes, but the fallout won't spread for a while." Matt said. "It was a small nuke."

Keith raised an eyebrow. "A small nuke? There's no such thing as a small nuke."

"The army crafted a few so-called 'precision nukes' which only contain about 40 grams of Uranium. They don't devastate such a large area. Anyway, we're not headed in that direction. We're going to the suburbs, in the opposite direction, so we should be okay."

"Isn't that Air Force One over there?" Drake's dad said, pointing out of the windshield of the B-17.

"So it is." Matt said. "I don't think the president will mind if we borrow if permanently."

"Seeing as he's dead, I doubt it." Helen said. Everyone disembarked, including Drake's dad, who rushed over to Air Force One, opened the door, jumped in, and pulled it shut behind him. Matt turned to the old plane, stuck something to it, and walked away.

"Don't want to leave something that will allow them to trace us too easily." He said. "Let's go. Thirty seconds till that thing blows up." They began to walk away, and, as Matt had said, thirty seconds later, the B-17 was torn apart by an explosion.

"Wasn't that a bit irrational?" Keith said. "What if Air Force One isn't in flyable condition?"

"It will be. Don't worry. And if it isn't, there are several other planes to choose from, all well-equipped, as they all ferried world leaders here."

"Ah. Where exactly are we going?"

"This way." Matt lead them down a side street. "William's home is in Brooklyn, pretty close to the city outskirts. He lives in a pretty large house; it should be easy to find."

"Why didn't we bring Brooklyn with if we were going to Brooklyn?" Julie asked. "Wouldn't he know the city he's named after well?"

"Brooklyn has never actually been to Brooklyn, not even once." Matt said. "Actually, I don't even think he's ever been over it either."

"Weird."

"Yeah, I thought so too." Drake said. "Is that it?" Drake pointed to a mass of fiends in the distance. They seemed to be defending a large house. Matt nodded.

"Yeah, that's probably it. Fortunately, they haven't noticed us yet. So, here we-" Matt was cut off by a gunshot. One of the fiend's head exploded. "-wait for the happy guerilla sniper to get a few shots off, then rush in, cut a swath through the fiends, stay together, and get into the house. Don't try to kill all the fiends, just stay close to me and keep firing to keep a lane open. Then, once we've gotten into the house, we'll clean up a bit so we can search easier."

Another gunshot rang out and another fiend went down. Several of the fiends who had guns began to search the area with the scopes on their guns, drawing all their attention away from Drake and the others. "Now looks like a good time." Keith said, as another fiend fell to the sniper.

"Yeah, let's go!" Drake said. Matt nodded and ran forward at a speed they could keep up to him at. Drake and Julie, the closest two to Matt, began to fire, drawing the attention of several of the fiends, one of whom had a rocket launcher. The rocket fiend roared, took aim, and fired. Immediately after he got the shot off, he collapsed, capped by the sniper. But the rocket was already moving. It came in to Matt's left, flying toward Julie and Helen. Before it got close, Matt stopped, reached out his hand, and snagged the rocket from the sky. Before it had stopped completely, Matt turned it around and sent it flying back at the fiends. The ensuing explosion created a hole in the swarm of fiends, augmented by the sniper's devastation.

"There's the hole, now let's move in!" Matt said. Drake followed him into the hole. He could hear Julie hammering away right behind him. The sniper had stopped firing.

A fiend to Drake's right tried to impale him on a spear. Suddenly, Matt's wall of faces stretched out and blocked the attack. Then, it rushed outwards, seized the fiend, lifted it off the ground, and tore it to pieces.

Wow, that was kind of creepy. Drake thought, staring at the falling fiend parts. Helen grabbed his arm and pulled him along.

"Stop staring and get moving! No one wants you dead!" She said.

"Right!" Drake said, getting back to running along behind Matt. They were almost there now, closing in on massive oak double doors that marked the entrance of the house. Matt was tearing anything in front of them apart.

They were right next to the oak doors now. Matt reached back and punched the doors, breaking both clean off the hinges. "In!" He shouted. Drake dove through the opening, rolling to his feet inside the house. There was no one there.

"Where is everybody?" He wondered aloud.

"Seems deserted." Flynn said, running his finger along a line of books on a shelf. "None of these have been touched in a while…"

"Shouldn't we try upstairs?" Helen asked. "That's usually where the bedrooms are…"

"Usually, but there's no guarantee that we'll find anything in his room." Keith said, firing through the opening as he backed into the house. Everyone safely inside, Matt grabbed the doors from off the ground and forced them back into the frame.

"That might hold them for a while. At least our sniper-happy buddy can take a few of them out before they can get in." Matt said. "Upstairs." He pointed toward the stairs and they all ran up the stairs, Flynn first, Keith last. They emerged onto a massive landing with hallways branching off in several directions.

"This could take a while." Julie said.

"No…" Helen said, crossing the landing, opening a door, and peering inside. "This is it."

"How do you know?" Flynn said, peering into it as well.

"Judging from the cards scattered across the room and the pictures." Helen said. "And the suitcases on the bed."

"How did you figure on that one?" Drake asked.

"The Maquine family is renowned for pampering their sons. I would suspect that his parents wouldn't want him to have to walk too far, so they would put his room as close to the stairs as possible. I'm actually surprised that the stairs aren't an escalator."

"Search the place!" Matt said. "Raid it! Pull everything off the walls! Everything out of the closet! If it can be moved… see that it is! If you find something, tell me!" Drake moved into the room and pulled open the closet. He began moving aside clothes that had been thrown onto the bottom until a book fell out of a pair of pants. Drake picked it up and read the title.

"I might have found something!" He shouted. Matt came over.

"Maybe. Look through it, check for notes, that sort of thing." He moved away to check up on something Keith had found. Drake opened the book and began to thumb through the pages.

"…but it's broken." Drake heard Keith say.

"Let me see this thing." Matt sat down at the computer that was in the room. "Hm… he seems to have induced an extremely powerful virus into his own computer to prevent someone from using it. It causes the computer to imitate a hard drive failure… but of course I can see it isn't. Everyone can stop looking now!" The random shuffling around the room stopped as everyone crowded around the computer. No one else had found anything. Drake kept skimming the book.

There was a loud crash from downstairs. "Sounds like our friends have broken down the doors again." Flynn said.

"Kill them as they come in." Matt said, still focused on the computer screen before him as he hit a series of complex moving targets that Drake knew he would never understand. "I can't multitask well enough to be any help to you, but it shouldn't be too hard for you guys to hold them off."

Drake slipped the book back into his pocket and cocked his rifle. He could hear the fiends thundering up the steps as Matt tapped at the keys of William's computer. Suddenly, the entire front wall of William's room was torn off and the fiends began to pour in. Drake dropped to a knee and began hammering away.

I'm going to end up deaf after this, Drake thought, with all this shooting going on. He pulled out the old depleted clip and locked a new one into place. Matt was still typing away furiously.

"Hm… various notes… unrelated news articles… nothing on the Shadow Realm here…" He was muttering.

"Why don't you stop doing that and help us out here?!?" Keith shouted.

"I can't! There's a very tight time constraint that I need to hit to stop this computer from crashing itself for real." Matt didn't even look away from the screen. ".…here it is… various hate notes concerning us… oooo, that's a nasty one. Elaborate plans, notes about rumors of the Shadow Realm and its connection to the Academy…" The printer spit out several sheets of paper. "…let's see… more hate notes… hate notes… hate notes… location of his secret base… that could be useful…" Another sheet of paper came out of the printer.

"Hurry up Matt!" Helen shouted. "They're getting closer! Too close!" She stood and backed up a little. Drake swung his rifle at a fiend who had gotten too close, stood, and began to back up. Matt was still scanning the screen.

"Almost out of time… crap… let's see… more hate notes… more hate notes… notes on Julie's relation to this… that's a disturbing thought that he underlined there… hey, Julie, he's stalking you."

"WHAT?!?" Julie said.

"He's got cameras in your dorm room, it appears. I think he had suspicions to your role in this whole thing pretty close to beginning of this little misadventure, based on the rumors, but that doesn't warrant some of these… he's disturbed… or just very… uh…"

Julie stopped shooting for a minute and moved to look at the screen. Without her, the fiends were suddenly able to get close enough to attack everyone. "Wait!" Drake shouted. About eight fiends reached the line that they had formed, claws raised and ready to strike.

And suddenly they were blown away by a single burst of bullets from Drake's left. Drake stood still, shocked by this development. There was the sound of a shotgun being pumped, and then another blast. The fiends were stunned. The shotgun pumped again, and blew another hole in the fiends formation. There were no other sounds. Everyone was completely shocked and paralyzed by the sudden appearance of the shotgun-toting guy who no one had seen.

The shotgunnner kept blasting and blasting until the entire fiend army was gone. Somehow the shotgunner had taken down about 40 fiends with five shots. Everyone but Matt had frozen up at his appearance. Finally getting over the shock, Drake turned to look at him.

"Owned." Said the hoody-wearing person. He was carrying a sniper rifle on his back. "They all froze up because I'm just that awesome."

"Hello there Adam." Matt said, still intently focused on the computer screen. "What are you doing here?"

"Taking target practice on the fiends who stand outside this house! They're all so stupid, they've never caught me yet. I'm gonna go kill some more of those stupid things. I leave you again, with you fully knowing that I have saved your asses once more." Adam jumped out the window.

"That guy sounds kinda conceited." Flynn said.

"Yes, he tends to come off that way." Matt swept the papers out of the printer as the computer started to smoke. The screen went blank. "But he is incredibly combat-proficient, as you have probably noticed. And he can show up anywhere." Matt flipped a few papers away and checked something. "Interesting place for a secret base."

"Where?" Flynn said, moving over next to Matt. Matt gave him the paper. Drake noticed that Julie was still staring at the screen. Drake moved next to her and whispered in her ear.

"What is it?" He asked.

"Those pictures…ugh…" She shuddered. "Sometimes I wonder what he was thinking… he had these extensive notes… it seemed that he was… uh… enamored with me… or rather not with me… in a creepy way…" Drake put his arm around her.

"Just forget about them." He said. "We need to put this behind us. We need to move on. And we need to find William."

"And when we do, I'm going to kill that bastard for this…" She said. Drake was taken aback. He didn't think that Julie was capable of nasty thoughts, but then again, if he was in her position, he might be a little agitated too.

"Where are we going?" Helen asked after Flynn had scanned the page for a while.

"Everest." Flynn said. "He's got a very detailed plan for a secret hideaway there, so it would be rational that he would be there. We'll need to get up close to the top…"

"That's not good." Keith said. "It's quite an achievement to climb Everest for the most accomplished climbers, much less a bunch of no-talent mostly-out-of-shape teenagers and their school teacher."

"We'll have to manage somehow." Matt said. "We can't just let him sit up there with the world at his fingertips. No matter how many exceptional fighters we have, and we have quite a few, if he remains that isolated, he will defeat us eventually. So we'll have to get up there. Next stop, Nepal." He turned to Julie and placed a hand on her shoulder. "You gonna be okay?"

"Yeah… as soon as I get to William and kill him, I'll be fine." She said.

"Slow down there, killer. You'll get you shot, probably, but don't harbor those kinds of thoughts. Not yet anyhow."

"Okay… for now. But once I get the chance…" She shook her fist at nothing.

"Fine, fine." Matt waved a hand carelessly. "Let's get out of here. I have a really bad feeling…" They walked down the stairs and left the house. As soon as they got about ten feet away, the house exploded behind them, throwing each of them to the pavement but Matt, who of course couldn't feel it anyway. "That's what I was talking about."

"He rigged his house with a bomb?" Keith said. "Probably was activated when you hacked the computer."

"Most likely, but that's unimportant. What's important is to get out of here in case there are more bombs somewhere around here."

"Probably are some." Keith said. "I sure hope he didn't lock someone in there."

"If he did, we'll never know." Flynn said. "Let's go." Drake followed Flynn as he lead them back to the airport. Air Force One was on an turning toward the end of the runway. As they entered the landing area, the plane stopped moving and Drake's dad popped out of the side door.

"It's ready!" He shouted. "It needed a little gas, but I've inspected the whole thing and it should still be flyable!"

"Should be?" Helen questioned.

"There's a couple of minor stress tears here and there, but they aren't near anything critical, and they don't look serious or deep. Now get on!" He dropped a folding staircase from the door and everyone climbed on.

"Nice." Flynn said, seating himself in a huge plush chair that looked like it belonged in a mansion rather than an airplane.

"This is all zero-class level seating." Matt said. "Of course it's nice."

"Zero-class?"

"Even better than first class."

"Ah."

Drake seated himself next to Julie, who was sitting next to a window. Matt left the cabin and entered the cockpit. The plane's engines whirred as they warmed up again, and they took off.

"And now." Matt said over the plane intercom. "If you'll look out your windows, you'll see our in-flight entertainment for today." Drake leaned past Julie, who was still seething over what she had seen in the computer, and saw huge flames leaping out of the buildings of New York.

"The entire city is blowing up!" Keith said. Matt came out of the cockpit, a manic glow in his eyes.

"I know, isn't it cool?" He said.

"That's not exactly the word I would have used to describe it, but you have to admit it is quite impressive." Flynn said. "One of the largest cities in the world, up in a burst of flames… if there was still someone alive there, they won't be alive much longer."

Drake flopped back into his seat, exhausted by all the destruction. It was starting to get worse. There was hardly anything left of the human population, and pretty soon there would be nothing left of the infrastructure that the humans had lived in.

If this doesn't end soon, Drake thought, there might not be much of a world to save.