Kill Switch by Jonathan Maberry Page A

half-hidden in shadows, was a machine. We approached it with caution. My heart was still beating wildly and there was cold sweat on my upper lip.
    Bunny stumbled a couple of times because he kept looking at the city instead of where he was going. Guess I wasn’t the only one who was out of it. And that was deeply troubling. Even with everything we were seeing, we were above becoming slack-jawed tourists. Except right now that’s what we were.
    â€œGet your fat head out of your white ass, Farm Boy,” snapped Top.
    Bunny twitched and gave Top a brief, blank stare that showed a lot of fear and a lot of incomprehension, then his eyes cleared and he nodded.
    â€œThis is nuts,” he murmured.
    â€œWell, no shit,” said Top. He was trying to sound casual, offhand. He didn’t. There was a quaver in his voice.
    â€œCome on,” I said, walking down a steep granite slope toward the object. Our shoes had gum-rubber soles but they still managed to send rhythmic echoes up into the frigid air, and distance warped the sounds as they bounced back to us. The noise sounded like the muffled heartbeat of some sleeping thing.
    Because everything down there was on such a cyclopean scale, it took longer to reach the machine than I expected. And when we got there it was larger than I thought. It was built like the mouth of a tunnel, thirty feet high, with a series of inner rings that stepped back at irregular intervals. The primary structure looked to be made of steel, but there were other metals, too. Lots of exposed copper, some crude iron bands, gleaming alloy bolts, and long circular strips of what looked like gold. Heavy black rubber-coated cables were entwined with the rings of metal, and coaxial cables as thick as my thigh snaked along the ground and ran farther down the slope to where a series of heavy industrial generators were positioned on a flat stone pad. Sixteen generators. Lots of power.
    The tunnel stretched back so far it disappeared into darkness. Top shone his flashlight down the gullet but the beam simply faded out after fifty yards. I leaned around the outside to see that the tunnel was built into the wall. There were blast and drill marks on the stone to show that they had bored into the heart-stone of the mountain. The throat of the machine looked like it ran deep into the bedrock.
    â€œWhat the hell is this?” asked Bunny.
    Top cut me a look. “Hadron collider? I mean, what else it could be?”
    Bunny touched the bundles of copper wire. “Doesn’t look right, does it? Different than the big one at CERN. I read about that.”
    â€œSo you’re an expert in damn collider design now, Farm Boy?” Top smacked Bunny’s hand away from the machine. “Don’t touch nothing. We don’t know shit about this thing. Might be something nuclear. Don’t know, can’t say, so don’t touch. Besides, you already been bitch-slapped by a mutant penguin. You want to get your balls blown off, too? No? Good, then stop getting grabby.”
    â€œCopy that,” said Bunny, taking his hand back.
    I tapped my earbud for Bug. It took a few tries and when he came on the line I couldn’t understand a word he said because of the static.
    â€œCowboy to Bug, do you copy?” I said it again and again. Static. Maybe a fragment of a word. Nothing I could understand. Just in case it was my gear I had Top and Bunny call in. Same thing. And we couldn’t hear each other on the team channel. We stood for a moment in silent frustration.
    Top said, “Interference? Iron in the mountains could be eating the signal.”
    â€œWhat’s the play?”
    â€œTake some pictures and then we’ll leave it alone,” I said. “We have bigger fish to fry.”
    â€œLike finding out why everybody lost their damn minds,” said Top. “And whether we’re at war with Russia and China. Little stuff like that.”
    â€œYeah,” I agreed.