He was standing in the middle of what used to be a downtown street, now nothing more than scarred and blasted rubble on an urban battlefield. Sunlight glinted hard off the shards of pulverized glass among the sea of bodies and mangled cars, the air thick with the scent of blood and the crazy making, incessant drone of flies. If he stared too long at the tangle of severed limbs and torn bodies that covered the street like a bloody human carpet, he would see people he knew and loved, even those already dead. He didn't want to see them; he didn't want to see this. Again.

He closed his eyes and told himself to wake up, feeling dizzy and nauseous, and the buzzing of the flies became a voice in his ear. "Shouldn't have started a game you can't finish," the voice said, taunting him, the ground starting to tremble as the waves of screams came rolling in like a distant thunder. "Shouldn't have played with the big boys when you can't take the heat, when you can't roll with the pain, when you can't drink the blood from your hands-"

"Shut up!" He shouted, clapping his hands to his ears -

- and waking up freezing on his uncomfortable mattress, the plodding thud of a newborn headache starting to come to life behind his eyes.

Hazy yellow light was bleeding in around the edges of the flimsy beige curtains, and he squinted at the travel alarm clock he'd set up on the nightstand to see it was time to get going. For having slept for seven hours, he felt remarkably ill rested.

He got up and turned off the rattling air conditioner before retreating to the bathroom for another hot shower, aware by the time he got out he might be dying for the cold.

It was only when he got out of the shower that he realized he'd left the only really good towel on his bed, and he hadn't taken a damn thing out of his suitcase either. So he walked naked and dripping out into the front room, only to find that cold had become stuffy in a span of fifteen minutes. He knew that meant it was another roasting California day, although even at its worst it never felt quite as bad as a Texas heat wave. There it seemed like the air was trying to suck all the moisture from your body and leave you a desiccated husk for the crows to pick clean.
He pulled out his battered suitcase and sat on the end of the bed to open it, letting the stuffy air dry his skin as he dug through the few belongings he had brought with him.

The first thing he found was his bottle of Excedrin Migraine tablets, and he dry swallowed three of them, hoping to take the edge off the growing pain in his head. He then  dug through the bag and started pulling out clothes at random :grey boxers, sport socks, worn blue jeans, pumpkin orange t-shirt. He threw the clothes back on the bed and took his shaving kit to the bathroom before he decided not to bother shaving, at least not now. A little five o' clock shadow might add to his disreputable but casual appearance.

By the time he finished getting dressed, his sun bleached hair was almost completely dry, and he simply combed it out with his fingers before pulling his weathered and unseasonable leather jacket out of the bag. He really didn't know how long it would take for them to find him, but he supposed he ought to kill his time carefully.

He packed up his things and loaded up the car before checking out, donning the black aviator sunglasses tucked in the pocket of his jacket. The harried Pakistani motel manager barely gave him a second glance.

Stan was on his way out of town when he pulled into the lot of a decent looking cafe and decided to get some breakfast, if only to quiet the acidic growling of his stomach.

He perused the morning paper as he waited for his Spanish omelet, but as he expected there was no mention of a theft at the technically unopened Galleon, or at the neighboring Palisades Grand, which he thought might be the cover story.

From what he understood, Peacemeal was the realization of a dark dream.

Ever since the A bomb tests of the forties and fifties, all the 'super powers' (and several other nations, especially China) had been searching for a 'cleaner' weapon of mass destruction, something that would leave the targeted area more available for safer exploitation. The neutron bomb was considered an improvement - killing people but leaving buildings intact - but there was that pesky radiation problem still, so it wasn't perfect.

Eventually the scientists pinned their hopes on making a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapons, or as it was shorthanded in the research community, an EMP.  An EMP would not only kill all people within its detonation radius, but wipe out all computer records, whether on disk or on hard drives. It was a gigantic magnetizing pulse, even lead shielding might not protect your files, and in this day of high technology it would cripple most governments and societies even more than a direct nuclear strike. But making a 'clean' one - non-radioactive - had been a continual, almost insurmountable problem.

Until M. K. hit on a breakthrough.

Xrayeye was unable to explain it in English, but M. K. supposedly had come up with a workable 'clean' prototype, not only clean but portable; the 'suitcase bomb' of everyone's worst nightmares. Even its code name,'Peacemeal', was supposedly a play on words: PeaceMEal' (backwards, there was the EMP). The Chinese and American governments, hard at work on their own clean EMP weapons, claimed it still couldn't be done, and yet several spies for both sides had been intercepted before they could access M.K.'s lab. There was a fear it had been done, the code had been cracked, and now Stan was afraid he had the living proof in a steel suitcase in the trunk of his car.

The omelet came, and while it was palatable, it was a disappointment. It reminded him of one of the few things he liked about Texas. He knew of this great greasy spoon, Maybelle's, where the Spanish omelet was stuffed with olives and green chilies, and jalapeños so hot they'd make your eyes water. Also they used shreds of chorizo, a spicy Mexican sausage that was delicious, as long as you never stopped to wonder about what it was made of.

But it was the only thing he missed about Texas. Otherwise he hated almost everything about it: the unrelenting heat, the sun blasted landscape (especially in and around the oil field), the huge, vicious bugs, the suffocating nights when he'd be forced to sleep on the roof of his trailer just to get cool air, and if he never saw another scorpion in his life he'd be a happy man.

But he missed the simplicity of his life, when he had nothing else to do but work on oil pumps and his golf game and fret over whether he'd ever see Holly again.  The days before he got to watch so many people die, and for what? Nothing. It seemed like it was all for nothing. Carnage on the way to more carnage.

It made him long for machine simplicity. He had always liked machines - and code - better than people.

Mathematics, the basics for all machines and codes, was rigidly linear, had set rules that simply had to be obeyed. Even stupid machines like the oil pumps had clear, set rules; know the rules, and nothing could go wrong that you couldn't handle within those simple, regimented boundaries.

People weren't like that; people weren't really linear. They were these sloppy, emotional messes, unpredictable by nature, closed systems of pure entropy.  You could try and predict them to some degree, but there'd usually be something you couldn't predict, a variable that would spring out of nowhere, an action that would not have been anticipated. And that's where Gabriel went wrong; he thought he could predict him all the way through. He thought he'd never put together exactly why he was still alive. He thought he'd simply be grateful to be alive and never think anything more of it.

And Stan tried that. He really did. But it was hard to sleep at night remembering all the people that died, the ones he saw killed right in front of him, the ones killed out of his presence.

Just numbers. Cogs in the machine, numerators in the code, and for a while he thought he was going to go crazy.

If he concentrated on Holly, on keeping moving, on building his viruses and daemons and Trojan horses and worms, on occasionally drinking the memories to oblivion, he didn't have to think about it. He didn't have to think about the dead, or the sword dangling over their heads.

It finally came to the point where he realized he'd have to do something, or just let himself go mad. He just couldn't keep living the way he was. Even though, all things considered, it would have been the easiest thing to do.

It was honestly frightening how easy it had been for him to steal Peacemeal. It was as easy as hacking into NORAD, which was frightening enough on its own.

There was no security. There was just the false sense of it, something that let you sleep at night even though it wasn't true. And Stan still wasn't sure he wasn't going insane. Well, if he was, what could he do about it?

He ate mechanically, hardly noticing what he was eating, staring at the newspaper spread before him on the  formica table and not seeing a word of it. He was thinking of detonation yields and casualty projections.

Xrayeye said M.K. couldn't guarantee the yield without a direct test, but he estimated it to be close to a medium tactical weapon: detonated in the downtown area of a major city, he figured it could kill in the thousands, and do millions to billions of dollars worth of damage to computers, businesses, economies, societies. The damage would be honestly unmeasurable until long after the event; but in the meantime, chaos would reign. And anyone who knew what had been coming would probably be able to exploit the situation to their advantage. M. K. apparently thought no one would be 'stupid' enough to use Peacemeal, because the country that used it would be begging for a nuclear or missile hit from another country.

He hadn't thought of terrorists or freelancers like Gabriel. They would use it. And it might be nothing more than a ploy, a dupe, a way to make another government do what he wanted them to do. He was a born manipulator.

Stan knew if he thought of himself as the only thing standing between Gabriel and Peacemeal, the only thing keeping him from releasing this horror on the world, he would get sick. So he didn't think about it.

As he folded up the newspaper, his eyes scudded over a small black and white photo of a round faced young woman with milk pale straight hair spilling over her shoulder. She'd been missing for several days, after leaving her Contra Costa home for a concert in  Hollywood; they'd just found her body in a ditch in West Covina.  It reminded him of his first attempt to dig up info on Gabriel.

He decided to try and track down the only person he knew by their potential real name (or at least 'working' name) among Gabriel's crew: Helga.

A high class call girl, he was sure he could find her and pay her for any information she had on Gabriel, any conversations she might have heard indicating where he might be headed after all of this was over. She might not know anything, she might be too scared to talk, but she was his best starting point.

What he discovered was the call girl who went by the name of Helga was found floating off the Santa Monica pier several days after the bank heist. She'd been shot execution style, once in the back of the head with a .38 caliber bullet, and she'd been in the water long enough that there was no evidence to recover; it took days to identify her.
Gabriel had tied up all his loose ends with ruthless efficiency; there was no information left for either the Feds or Stan to follow.

But one day, Stan started to think about habits, and he realized he knew all he needed to get Gabriel. He just had to get going, and try and anticipate his move before he made it. Easier said than done, but he had his abilities with code, with computers and machines, and they were tools he could use that Gabriel couldn't. Used correctly, he could get the man, no matter how cyberspace averse he was.

And he did. Stan almost couldn't believe it.

Now the question was, when would Gabriel catch up to him?And how violent would his initial response be?
He bet he'd find out soon enough.

Stan finished his breakfast, gulping down his orange juice but ignoring the diesel grade coffee, and paid the bored cashier, who seemed to be waiting for someone interesting to come through the door.

The sunlight seemed harsh, so he donned his sunglasses (black, not blue)  and embarked on the long drive down to Costa Mesa. It was mostly long due to the legendarily  awful California traffic, but he was in no hurry and it didn't bother him.

It was amazing how irrelevant many things had become since...well,everything. Facing death was said to be a life altering experience, but he didn't think his was as life altering as most people's were.  He felt strangely detached from his life now; instead of wanting to live every moment, or appreciate what he had, he was no longer afraid of dying. He no longer cared what happened to him. It all seemed perfectly irrelevant.

He wanted to make sure Holly was okay, and he wanted to make sure Gabriel paid for everything he had done, but otherwise he no longer had any concerns at all. Maybe it was depression; maybe it was post traumatic shock, or some bullshit thing like that, but he didn't really think so. For the first time, he felt he had some real clarity in his life.
He had a purpose, a mission, and everything afterward didn't matter. Maybe it was just good to finally have a real purpose in life.

After returning the rental, he retrieved his own car, a  well preserved old black Mustang he had bought out of a sense of nostalgia, and a need for a vehicle that could move fast, take damage, and be abandoned if necessary. When necessary.

Although he briefly entertained the idea of never getting caught, it was a fleeting fantasy he didn't consider for long. He would be caught up with. So he decided to orchestrate it, be in control the whole time. This time he would have the ending he wanted.

Peacemeal briefcase secure in the trunk, he drove on, headed for the ramshackle trailer on the edge of Death Valley. Bought a week ago in Arizona by a man named Westerfeld and dumped rather inauspiciously in an abandoned camping spot on the edge of the desert, it looked like the home of a very desperate and needy man, who was asking to be evicted as soon as the property owners realized he found the only working working sewer , water and gas lines and was using them for himself.

If anyone bothered to search the blasted desert wasteland, where coyote tracks and rattlesnake paths were more abundant than the creosote bushes and tumbleweeds, they might - if they searched carefully and well - find a few things that were obviously not desert born. Human things. High tech things.

But people didn't look for such things in empty  desolations like this. It wouldn't even occur to them to look - and besides, where did you hide things in a place as open as this? In the desert, there was no place to hide.

Or so it was believed.

By the time Stan reached the rusting hulk of the Rambler, the sky had turned a vivid sherbet orange, shading to red near the bloody eye of the slowly setting sun. It was beautiful, turning the golden sand a burnt sienna, but Stan only noticed all the time slipping away.

He wondered how Holly was. He supposed he should email her, let her know he was okay, ask how she was doing. Maybe later, when he could think of something to say.

The trailer was as hot as an oven, containing all the heat of the day within its frail metal skin, so he turned on the small air conditioning unit, which was even louder than the one in the motel and even more poorly maintained. He stripped off his clothes and got into a bathtub full of tepid water, to wash off the sweat and remain cool until the a.c. brought the temperature down to a more manageable level.

He remembered to grab a beer from the mini fringe, so he had something to drink, but he hadn't eat since that diner back in Ontario, and the alcohol seemed to hit him harder than usual; he could feel his head swimming in the confines of his skull, like a trapped animal frantically looking for a way out.

The beer quickly got warm, and with half the can gone, he abandoned it on the vinyl tiled bathroom floor, some ugly brown pattern on white. Maybe it was supposed to be fleur de lis pattern, but it looked like nothing more than a repeating pattern of rust on a grimy white background. Stan stared at it until he thought he could make out a face in it, elongated grotesquely and missing eyes, screaming as its hair seemed to burn.

He got out of the tub, the water no longer cooling but uncomfortably warm, and went out to what passed for a 'kitchen' in the tiny trailer, hoping to find a snack. Maybe some food would help him get a grip on things.

He wrapped a towel around his waist -the air conditioner had brought the temp down enough that he felt almost cold without one- and the water continuing to drip down his body, from his hair to his face to his neck to his chest, finally down his legs, and he knew it was his imagination that it felt oily, almost viscous. But he didn't look down at the linoleum to confirm that.

It hadn't occurred to him to stock the place with food, but he found a bag of chips, and he sat at the tiny table that made up the dining/living room area (the bed was a fold out couch older than Holly), grabbing a Jolt cola from the fridge (no more beer for him, not now), and booted up his laptop as he ate mechanically, the potato chips noisy afterthoughts that never quite infringed on his concentration.

(Old piece of shit trailer or not, Stan made sure he could access the internet here - he was not being cut off from his life's blood ever again.)

He surfed all the spots Xrayeye had mentioned to him, and found the theft of Peacemeal was now a red hot rumor. The Russian mob was currently being blamed, although some thought American 'black ops' agents got it. But then again, most of these people seemed to think Peacemeal was a nuclear 'suitcase' bomb, and Stan knew, since his teeth or hair hadn't fallen out, that wasn't the case.

He surfed over to the altgroup where the hackers hung, and found out they were all gabbing about Houten getting 'reamed but good' by a 'master cracker'. They thought it was a cracker working for some shadowy government agency, though, especially since no one had heard of a guy quite that good on the net. But then he read a post by his old friend Alias359: "Maybe Killswitch isn't as dead as we thought he was."

Sakai had sussed him. He felt a small thrill of pride that he had recognized his work. If Sakai was here, he would have kissed him.

(And he'd probably have never gotten within fifty feet of him again, but hell, it'd still be worth it.)

He rubbed the sweating can of pop across his forehead as he went to one of his email accounts, a special place that would disguise your router address so you couldn't be traced. He set up Holly with an account here, and told her to use it as her primary, so no one could ever trace her. He remembered her looking up at him and grimacing, like he was being an embarrassing parental unit again, and she said, with a far too adult sigh, "You're being paranoid again, Dad."

"That's part of my job," he insisted.

He knew that maybe he'd been taking it to far. Still, what was that old saw about better safe than sorry?

But no one was safe, so that shot that cliché to hell and back.

He wrote a fairly long email, never mentioning the 'business' he had to attend to, but asking her how she was doing, and how things were at the school, a very subtle trolling for information about her surroundings and any 'new people' around the school. He was sure she was fine at the school - he'd have never left her there if he doubted it for a second - but he wanted to hear it from her.

Among the papers he had left with a lawyer he had on a confidential retainer was a will that left all his money, scattered across several different bank accounts, to Holly. Her custody, until the age of eighteen, would go to a woman named Claire Fortier, a woman who worked at the school. He had told her he may not have long to live (she promised not to tell Holly), and being a kind woman, with adopted children of her own, she agreed to look after Holly in case he 'succumbed' while gone, as he had no family she could go to, and he didn't want her to end up a ward of the State. Claire had no idea about the money he had, or that Holly would get, and he'd have it no other way. Claire would get something for her trouble, but only if she took care of Holly; he trusted the lawyer to make sure of that.

He was not planning to die. But he had to prepare for the worst, if only for her sake. And, if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't care at all. He supposed that should bother him, but he had no time to think about it now.

He had no emails in his account worth reading, so he went back to the hackers altgroup, just for a finally glance. It felt cooler in the trailer now, the dry air having effective wicked all the water off his skin and mostly out of his hair, and his flesh was starting to feel tight on his skeleton, almost itchy. Just the heat and the stress of the days, nothing more.

He'd come back to the altgroup in time to find a new, mysterious message posted by someone who seemed to leave as soon as they came in. The message said simply: "You can't hide from me, Stan."

Seeing it,he laughed, and slammed his palm on the rickety table, making it shake like it was on the verge of collapsing. He knew he was supposed to be afraid - he had been discovered, and there was no doubting that was a threat. Gabriel was probably figuring as soon as Stan saw that, he would get on the move, go for the border if he hadn't already, trying to disappear into the wide and relatively lawless expanse of Mexico. Or may he just expected him to run, to rabbit in incoherent fear.

What Stan did was log off, finish his soda and wipe his greasy, crumb laden hands on his thin towel as he stood up, out of the tiny, diner like vinyl booth. He took the towel off his waist and left it on the seat, walking naked to the couch, where the duffle bag that contained all the clothes he had brought with him sat like an obedient dog. He decide he was comfortable as he was, but pulled on a pair of loose black shorts, swim trunks that could pass for boxers, and vise versa.

Feeling as dressed as he was going to be until the temperature dropped another fifteen degrees, he left the bag open and retrieved from behind the ratty green sofa a scuffed nine iron and a shoe box full of assorted and mostly nicked golf balls. He made sure they were all the florescently colored type - yellow, with a few oranges, greens, and pinks in there - so no birds or desert wildlife would think they had the great fortune of stumbling upon an egg. Even the idea of innocent animals getting killed bothered him. He felt incidentally responsible for enough deaths, and didn't even want animal blood on his hands.

As soon as he stepped outside the trailer, the air seemed rough, warm and as hostile as a shove, and the orange sky was starting to deepen to the color of an angry bruise. It was pretty, but may have been prettier under different circumstances.

He simply tossed the golf club up onto the roof, where it landed with a hollow thud, and climbed up the small ladder he had set up at the far end of the Rambler, using only one hand, balancing the box of balls in his other hand until he was close enough to the flat roof to just shove it up across the edge.

The roof was as level as an a landing strip, and tar papered inexpertly, so it curled up at the edges and corners like sunburned skin sloughing off a body. It also felt like warm sandpaper under his bare feet, gritty with just a hint of stickiness, and he barely noticed it as he retrieved his club, and started setting up shots.

His back to the distant highway, he started hitting balls into the brush, the fringe of creosote and tumbleweeds on the desert floor looking like some fungal growth marring the perfection of the horizon.

Taking up a stance was a sort of Zen, an emptying of the mind that was as automatic as it was troubling.  After placing a golf ball near a depression that kept it from rolling, he held the nine iron firmly yet gently in his hands, arms rigid, feet planted hip distance apart, and swung  with a graceful arc. He made solid contact with the ball, but didn't bother to see where it had gone. He could slice to his heart's content here; it didn't matter where it went. He wasn't even aiming.

As he set down another nuclear orange ball, he wondered if this was madness.  If so, it really wasn't bad as he had always feared. There was a strange sort of inner peace when you no longer cared about anything, not even your own life or lack thereof.

He hit balls aimlessly into the desert, until the box was just as empty as the scenery, and the entirety of the sky had darkened to the color of a spoiled plum. It was still too light for the stars to appear, although the fingernail crescent of the moon was starting to glow in the lower right quadrant of the vast and lowering sky. The air had cooled, enough for the breeze to raise goosebumps on his legs, but it was still stuffy and nowhere near comfortable enough to sleep.
For a long while, Stan sat on the edge of the roof, legs dangling over the side, and wondered how Gabriel's men were going to come and get him. Helicopter?Car?Hydroplane was probably right out. Strangely, he wished they'd hurry up.

Finally he climbed down, leaving his club and the empty box on the roof, and had another beer as the trailer turned slowly arctic, and tried to watch a little television. He hadn't set it up for cable, so he just had the antenna on his little portable t.v., and since he was in the middle of nowhere the reception was really bad. But he drank himself to mellowness as he aced all the questions (well, answers) on  "Jeopardy", and found himself remembering several lines from an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Man, sometimes he was sadder than he realized, but he was too drunk to care.

He supposed he should get dressed before the troopers stormed in the door, but before he could rouse himself to do it, he fell into a dreamless, alcohol influenced sleep on the couch, in front of the flickering light of the cathode ray tube. For once, he was almost a normal person.

Stan woke up with a bad taste in his mouth, like he'd been chewing on a used sweatsock, a sour stomach, and a pounding headache, which the canned laughter on the t.v. set was making worse. Who in the hell showed old reruns of "Sandford and Son" this early in the morning?

Glancing blearily at the rooster shaped clock near the sink (it came with the trailer), he quickly amended that to early afternoon. No wonder he had to pee so bad.

He turned off the set and went off to the bathroom, where his bladder ceased hurting but his head and stomach were still threatening violent revolution.