Read Online Apex: Nexus Arc Book 3 by Ramez Naam - Free Book Online Page A

“Override!” he yelled at it.
    The truck stopped moving. The indicator light switched back to MANUAL, and Earl Miller started backing them down the long country driveway again, Zoe pounding them with gravel and rain and debris as they went.
    “Warning,” the truck went on. “Dangerous weather detected. You should stop driving and take shelter immed–”
    “Shut up!” Earl Miller told the car, cutting it off in mid-sentence.
    Then the old farmer shook his head. “Never shoulda got this new truck,” he yelled over the sound of the storm. “Automobiles shouldn’t speak unless spoken to.”
    Through the pain, Rangan tried to laugh.
    He failed.
----
    E arl drove them into the gloom, on manual, the truck on battery only, the lights turned off. Zoe battered them, tried to push them off the road, threw branches and dirt and burst after burst after burst of hard horizontal rain at them.
    Rangan was cold all over, even with the blankets pulled over him.
    “They’ve closed off Seminole,” the old man yelled. “Spotswood Trail, Highway 33, Orange Road, James Madison Highway.” Miller shook his head. “They want you bad.”
    Rangan groaned as they rammed through a pothole.
    The windshield had night vision turned on, transforming the outside world to a surreal greenish landscape, highlighting outlines of the mud and water-drenched road, of downed trees, of intersections.
    But the scene kept changing, warping in crazy ways. The processors were having trouble parsing the world ahead through the biting rain and howling wind. They were driving nearly blind. And being hunted.
    He forced himself to talk, to distract himself from the pain and fear. “Won’t they see us moving?”
    Another piece of debris flashed out of the night at them. Rangan ducked reflexively. Earl Miller spun the wheel to avoid it.
    “Can’t fly their drones in this weather!” Miller yelled. “Can’t see us on satellite!”
    Fragments of cop shows flashed through Rangan’s head. “Infrared?” he asked.
    “You ever hunt, son?” Earl Miller asked Rangan.
    “Only girls,” Rangan replied.
    Earl Miller chuckled at that. “Well, I hunt deer,” he said.
    Something flew at them abruptly. Rangan cried out and twisted to avoid the blow. Miller turned the wheel hard. A massive tree limb slammed into them on Miller’s side. The truck shook. Pain jolted through Rangan’s side and up through his guts. Something else struck the window above Miller’s door window, leaving a spider web of cracks. Zoe took the chance to pummel them from a new angle, turning the windshield into a massive sheet of water, with augmented outlines of the road superimposed on it, and pushing the left side of the truck so hard that Rangan feared the wheels would come up off the ground. Then somehow Earl Miller brought them back onto the flooded country road, headed straight into the wind again.
    Miller took a deep breath, and then another. A while later he spoke again. “At night, you hunt deer with infrared, son. You can see ’em clear as day, a thousand yards out. Unless you got thick fog.” He glanced at Rangan and nodded. “Or a heavy rainstorm.” He turned his eyes back to the road. “And a truck runnin’ on battery, with the heaters turned off.”
    Rangan shivered, and huddled even deeper in the blankets.
----
    R angan lost track of the twists and turns Earl took. He was so cold. So tired. Everything hurt so much. His shirt was definitely wet above the bandage where the bullet wound was.
    Earl forded a flooded low point in a road, deep enough that water started to come in through his door, through some leak from where the tree limb had struck them. Then they were out the other side. They drove over tiny roads that were just mud now, mud raked up by wind to splash into their windshields. They drove across a field that had been flattened by Zoe, the tires just barely getting enough traction to pull them back onto the road at the other side. Earl pulled them up onto an