The steering wheel was too hot to touch.
Jason was driving the War Rig wearing heavy leather welding gloves, and even they were starting to smoke.
The cabin of the truck was an oven. The dashboard was vibrating so violently the plastic dials had cracked and fallen out. The speedometer needle was pinned at ninety miles an hour, bouncing erratically against the broken glass.
They were flying across the Glass Desert—a thousand-mile stretch of the Midwest that had been fused into solid silica by a past nuclear horror. It was perfectly flat, blindingly white, and completely devoid of life.
The electric motor of the War Rig shrieked. It wasn't a mechanical whine anymore; it was the agonizing scream of an overcharged machine tearing itself apart.
"We have to slow down!" Hughes shrieked from the passenger seat, gripping the roll bar with white knuckles. "The frame is warping, Jason! If we hit a single bump, the chassis will shatter like a teacup!"
"We can't slow down!" Jason yelled back over the deafening noise.
He pointed through the cracked windshield.
Blue lightning was literally arcing across the hood of the truck. The unregulated power from the stolen Gates-Cell core was too massive for the drivetrain to handle. The excess energy was ionizing the air around the cab, creating a localized static storm.
"Look at the tires!" Hemingway shouted from the bed of the truck, his voice barely audible.
Jason checked the side mirror.
The heavy, off-road rear tires were melting. The friction of ninety miles an hour combined with the raw electrical heat radiating from the undercarriage was turning the solid rubber into liquid. They were leaving two thick, burning black trails on the mirrored glass of the desert floor.
"If the rubber goes, we're driving on the rims!" O'Malley yelled, bracing himself against the mounting of the heavy machine gun. "And if we drive on the rims on this glass, we'll spark a fire that'll cook us in our seats!"
"Hold it together!" Jason wrestled the shaking wheel. "We're almost to the Illinois border!"
The glare of the sun on the fused silica was blinding. Even with welding goggles on, Jason had to squint to see the horizon. The heat haze distorted the landscape, making it look like they were driving through a lake of rippling water.
Then, the water flashed.
It wasn't a reflection of the sun on the glass. It was a focused, concentrated beam of light shooting down from the sky.
FSSSSSH.
The beam hit the desert floor fifty yards ahead of the War Rig. The solid glass instantly boiled, erupting into a geyser of molten silica and steam.
"What the hell was that?!" O'Malley ducked behind the gun shield.
Jason looked up through the sunroof.
High above them, soaring on the thermal updrafts of the desert, were kites.
Massive, parabolic mirror-kites. They were hundreds of feet across, made of polished mylar and aluminum framing. They were tethered to low, flat sand-skiffs skimming across the glass parallel to the truck.
"Glaziers!" Amelia gasped, pointing at the sky. She was huddled in the back seat, nursing a massive migraine from her digital dive. "They're sun-snipers!"
"They're using the kites to focus the sunlight!" Hemingway roared. "Like a magnifying glass on an ant!"
Another beam flashed down.
This time, it didn't miss.
The concentrated column of light slammed into the passenger-side door of the War Rig.
HISSSSS.
The heavy armor plating instantly glowed cherry red. The paint blistered and peeled off in seconds. The metal began to bubble, sagging inward under the intense, thousands-of-degrees heat.
Hughes screamed as the heat radiated into the cab, singeing his eyebrows. He scrambled backward, pulling his knees to his chest.
"They're cooking us alive in here!" O'Malley racked his rifle and aimed at the sky.
He fired blindly into the glare.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
"It's no use!" Hemingway grabbed O'Malley's shoulder. "The kites are two thousand feet up! And you can't see the skiffs through the glare!"
A third beam tracked across the ground, chasing the War Rig's rear bumper. The heat ray sliced through the melting rubber of the spare tire, setting it instantly ablaze.
Thick, toxic black smoke poured into the cab.
"Jason!" Hughes coughed, his eyes watering. "The core is redlining! The heat from the beams is compounding the electrical charge! We're at 150% capacity! The battery is going to detonate in thirty seconds!"
Jason didn't brake. He didn't swerve.
He looked at the thick, raw jumper cables running from the Gates-Cell in the bed, over the roof, and into the engine block. They were glowing orange, pulsing with trapped electricity.
The War Rig was a rolling bomb. The Glaziers were lighting the fuse.
"We have to vent the charge!" Jason shouted, his mind racing.
He couldn't shoot them. He couldn't outrun light. But he had a truck full of angry lightning.
"Howard!" Jason yelled, slamming his fist on the dashboard. "Ground the chassis!"
"What?!" Hughes stared at him in horror.
"Take the main grounding wire!" Jason pointed to the thick black cable bolted to the dashboard frame. "Tear it off the terminal and slap it against the bare metal of the floorboard! Dump the excess charge directly into the hull!"
"Are you insane?!" Hughes shrieked, clutching his head. "If I dump a hundred thousand volts into the hull, it will electrocute every living thing inside this truck! We'll fry like bacon!"
Jason looked down at his feet. "We're wearing thick rubber-soled boots! The current will pass around us!"
Another heat beam swept across the roof, slicing the radio antenna clean off. The metal pooled like water.
"Twenty seconds until meltdown!" Amelia yelled, covering her head.
"Lift your feet off the metal!" Jason roared at the crew. "Do it now!"
Hemingway and O'Malley instantly scrambled up, standing on the rubber-coated ammo crates in the back. Amelia pulled her knees up onto the leather seat.
Jason pulled his boots off the gas and brake pedals, hovering them over the floor mat. The War Rig began to coast, still doing eighty miles an hour.
"Howard! Now!" Jason screamed.
Hughes squeezed his eyes shut. He grabbed the heavy black grounding wire. With a terrified yank, he ripped it from the plastic terminal block.
He slammed the exposed copper wire directly onto the bare, scorching steel of the floorboard.
KRAK-THOOM.
The sound was apocalyptic. It wasn't an explosion. It was the sound of a thunderbolt striking an anvil inside a tin can.
The entire War Rig erupted.
A massive, blinding dome of blue electrical plasma burst outward from the truck's chassis in a fifty-foot radius. The air turned instantly to ozone. The hair on Jason's arms stood straight up, singing from the static charge.
Thick, jagged forks of blue lightning arced from the metal frame, seeking the path of least resistance.
They didn't strike the ground—the fused glass was an insulator.
They struck the metal sand-skiffs of the Glaziers riding alongside them.
ZZZZZT-CRACK.
The lightning hit the first skiff. The electrical surge blew out the vehicle's engine instantly. The scavenger driving it was thrown violently into the air, his body smoking, dead before he hit the glass.
The lightning chained to the second skiff, then the third.
The massive surge traveled up the steel tether cables connecting the skiffs to the mirror-kites in the sky.
The electrical current hit the kites. The aluminum frames superheated in a microsecond. The mylar reflectors melted and caught fire.
The blinding sunbeams vanished.
The kites, now flaming wrecks, fell from the sky like dying, burning birds, crashing into the desert miles away.
Inside the War Rig, the violent shaking stopped.
The deafening whine of the motor died.
The EMP pulse had completely drained the massive overcharge from the Gates-Cell. The battery was dead. The engine sputtered, coughed a cloud of black smoke, and seized completely.
The truck coasted on its melted tires for another quarter mile, the metal groaning in protest.
Finally, it ground to a halt.
Silence crashed down on the Glass Desert.
Smoke poured from the hood. The paint on the doors was blistered and blackened. The interior smelled of cooked rubber, ozone, and sweat.
"Is everyone..." Jason coughed, waving the smoke away from his face. "Is everyone breathing?"
"I think my fillings melted," Hemingway groaned, climbing down from the ammo crate. He kicked the side of the truck. "But I'm alive."
O'Malley dropped his rifle, his hands shaking violently. "Remind me never to complain about the cold again, Boss."
Hughes opened his door and fell out onto the glass, gasping for fresh air. He patted his chest frantically. "My heart is beating in Morse code. I thought we were dead. I really thought we were dead."
Amelia slowly opened her eyes. She looked at Jason.
"We killed the battery," she said softly. "We're stranded."
Jason didn't answer.
He pushed his door open. The hinges screamed in protest. He stepped out onto the fused silica. His boots crunched against the glass.
He didn't look at the smoking ruins of the Glaziers' skiffs. He didn't look back at the broken truck.
He walked forward, cresting a small, smooth dune of solid glass.
He looked down into the valley below.
The glare of the desert faded, replaced by a thick, suffocating blanket of gray smog.
They had reached the edge of the Glass Desert. The Illinois border.
In the distance, sprawled across the horizon like a festering wound, was Chicago. Or what was left of it.
Germania Meat & Power.
The massive, rusted smokestacks of Adolf Hitler's industrial slaughterhouse pierced the smog. The sprawling complex of factories, holding pens, and processing plants looked like a medieval fortress built of iron and bone.
But the city wasn't churning out meat today.
It was under siege.
Jason squinted. Even from miles away, he could see them.
Tens of thousands of silver dots. They moved with terrifying, mathematical precision. They were marching in perfect lockstep, scaling the outer walls of the factory complex.
It was a river of chrome.
Gates had arrived. The rogue AI was already attacking the city, throwing its endless, emotionless army against Hitler's desperate, starving human defenders.
The sky above Chicago was lit with the orange flashes of artillery and the blue streaks of plasma fire.
The war for the Logic Core had begun.
Jason stood on the glass dune, the wind whipping his coat. His truck was dead. His battery was fried. His team was exhausted, battered, and out of ammo.
He looked at the machine god's army swarming the city.
He reached down and racked the slide of his rifle.
Ch-chk.
"Pack what you can carry," Jason said, his voice hard as iron.
He started walking down the dune, toward the smoke.
"We're walking the rest of the way."