Driftless (Part 4)

Part 3

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It's been thirty minutes.

The screen on my Toughbook is flickering more continuously now, brief horizontal static lines cutting through the white text of this document. The battery indicator is down to fifteen percent. Outside the shelter, the fog has settled to the ground. It's so thick that the security camera feed on my terminal is just a wall of static white noise, a blank gray eye staring back at me. The silence outside feels heavy, like it's pressing against the door. Sometimes, I swear I can hear boots on gravel outside.

I keep telling myself the automated upload script is still running, that I can still get this out to everyone, but I don't know how much longer that will be true. I have to keep typing, to keep the panic in my throat at bay. So let me go back once more. Let me finish this.

When my tablet screen shut down in the truck, that message still burning behind my eyes, my hands were shaking so hard I could barely keep the van between the fog lines. Someone had watched the exact moment I pulled that card, and they’d reached directly into a company system to tell me so. Tom had told me to go home and lock my doors. But that message had proven the network wasn't just watching the coulees—it was watching me, by name. If I went home, I'd just be sitting in my kitchen waiting for whoever this was to come for me.

I swung the van off the highway onto a narrow county road and pulled into the gravel lot of an abandoned limestone quarry, tires crunching over loose rubble and broken glass. I needed somewhere to sit and think, and more than that, I needed to isolate myself from the grid before I did anything else. The pit smelled of wet stone and old diesel, the fog pooling low against the quarry walls.

I ripped the company tablet off its dashboard dock, pulled the SIM card, and threw it into the weeds. Then I powered down my personal phone, pried the back off, and tossed the battery onto the passenger seat next to the tablet's guts. My hands worked while my mind kept circling back to Tom—his face gone flat and unreadable as the drive disappeared into his breast pocket, followed by that heavy hand on my shoulder. He didn't understand what he was carrying, I was sure of it, and I could only hope he was already on the phone with people who could stop this.

In my line of work, you learn how wireless tracking functions. When you make a call, the device doesn’t just broadcast, but constantly handshakes with every tower and micro-cell within range, leaving a breadcrumb trail of location data in the sector logs. By killing my personal phone and gutting the van's telemetry unit, I had effectively made myself invisible to standard cellular tracking.

Or so I thought.

My first instinct was to get to Rochester. I would take Highway 76 north to I-90 and drive until Houston County was nothing but a memory, then walk into the regional FBI field office with my laptop and the SignalScout logs and let people with badges and federal jurisdiction handle it from there. I pulled back onto the highway and pushed the van north, the fog thinning slightly as the bluffs began to roll out into flatter ground.

I didn't get far.

Two miles shy of the interstate on-ramp, I came up on a line of orange cones narrowing 76 down to a single lane. A county highway crew stood around a flatbed with their hands in their coat pockets, doing absolutely nothing that looked like work. Past them, a Houston County squad car idled sideways across the shoulder, its lights off and engine running. A bored-looking deputy leaned against the fender with a clipboard, waving cars through one at a time. I recognized him. He'd waved at me outside the hardware store two weeks ago.

I didn't stop. I drifted the van into a ditch turnaround before I reached the cone line, heart slamming, and doubled back south, telling myself I was seeing things; going crazy. But when I cut east and tried the most direct route toward the Iowa line, I found the same thing waiting outside Eitzen—a "DNR safety check," the same cruiser and crew doing nothing, positioned exactly where a man in a hurry would have to pass. I recognized the people here as well. I’d seen them and they’d seen me around town, just like the deputy.

That was when it fully landed: every paved road out of this valley was already compromised. It didn't matter which direction I ran, because the direction wasn’t what mattered to them—only the roads did, and they owned them.

I had no choice left but the one thing I actually had that they might not.

Not letting myself second-guess anything, I dropped off the pavement entirely and onto the gravel, taking the most obscure backroads I knew. This was my turf. After eight months, I knew which dips below the limestone bluffs went to complete radio silence, and which high ridges still caught a faint, distant ping from towers three counties over. I was going to use the dark spots on the map to disappear into the one place a real-time network shouldn't be able to follow. At that point, it was all I had left to trust.

For thirty minutes, it worked. The van rattled over crushed limestone through deep, forested ravines where the oak canopy closed overhead like a lid, the smell of wet leaves and cattle manure thick in the vents. Fog rolling off the harvested cornfields wrapped around the van like a shroud, turning my headlights into two cones of white nothing, my visibility dropping to just past the hood ornament. The whole time there were streetlights or houses, nothing but gravel and mist.

Underneath all of it, I couldn’t shake the image of Chloe Martin's face: the zip-ties, the tape, that green Winona State sweatshirt, the S_AL headers hidden in the metadata of police cars that were supposed to be protecting her. The same invisible grid that had swallowed her whole was now the only thing standing between me and the state line.

I was three miles from the Iowa border, dropping down into a deep cut called Bear Creek Coulee, when the needle on my dashboard's passive spectrum analyzer twitched.

Even with the main telemetry unit dead, the van still carried a piece of analog hardware that read raw RF noise straight out of the air, no SIM required. I watched the needle climb.

–100 dBm... –92 dBm... –85 dBm... –70 dBm...

The background noise on the 900 MHz band wasn't random static anymore. It had a rhythm to it, a pulse, climbing in even, deliberate steps like something counting down. I slowed the van, ice crawling up my spine, and scanned the treeline along the ditch.

There it was.

It was another matte-green junction box, bolted to a weathered fence post near a rusted-out cattle chute, its thin directional antenna angled down the gravel lane—pointed, I realized with a sick lurch, directly at my headlights.

Immediately, a pair of high-beams snapped on in the middle of the road half a mile ahead in the belly of the coulee. They were parked sideways, blocking the lane completely.

I slammed the brakes. The van fishtailed on loose limestone and shuddered to a stop fifty yards out. I threw it into reverse, checked my mirrors—and a second set of headlights was already crawling down the hill behind me, sealing off the only way I'd come.

They hadn't needed my phone, I realized in horror. They hadn't needed the SIM card rotting in the weeds back at the quarry.

I understand it now, though I didn’t at the time. The LoRaWAN nodes weren't just cameras and repeaters. Strung along every backroad in the county, they functioned as a distributed motion-sensor mesh, each one silently registering the disturbance a two-and-a-half-ton utility van makes passing through its field. My own signal-mapping logic, still open on the Toughbook seat beside me, was lighting up my exact route in real time.

I wasn't hiding in the dead zones, like I thought I was. I was broadcasting through them.

I was trapped. Trapped at the bottom of a coulee with two-hundred-foot cliffs on either side, zero cell coverage or radio signal, and two vehicles closing from both directions at once.

I reacted without thinking.

I killed my headlights, hauled the wheel hard left, and put the van through a rusted barbed-wire fence, plunging down a steep, muddy embankment toward the treeline. Wild berry bushes and saplings snapped against the windshield before the front bumper caught a submerged boulder with a metallic CRUNCH that I felt in my teeth. The airbag went off in a white flash, slamming into my chest and face, punching the air out of my lungs.

For a few seconds there was only the hiss of the radiator and the acrid, chemical smell of spent airbag powder settling over everything like a second fog.

My nose was bleeding, my ears ringing. I fumbled my seatbelt loose and grabbed the Toughbook bag off the floorboard, leaving my duffel and wallet in the van; the laptop had the SignalScout logs still on it, and it was the only thing left worth saving.

I kicked the jammed door open with both feet, tumbling out into the freezing mud.

Up on the road, I heard doors slamming shut. Voices drifted down through the fog, low and calm, no hurry in them at all. They already knew there was nowhere left for me to go.

I didn't look back. I turned and scrambled up the slick, rock-studded face of the bluff on my hands and knees, thorns tearing at my jacket, my own ragged breathing the loudest thing in the world. I was certain they'd have my van's headlights—and me—within minutes.

I'm still typing. The battery's at twelve percent now. And underneath the wind and the hum of the tower, I think I can hear an engine idling somewhere out past the gate.