Signal by Patrick Lee

as if its hood were made of aluminum foil. The crumple zones in the front three feet of the vehicle had done their job, but all the same, hitting a tree at 40 brought all kinds of unforgiving physics into play.
    Dryden reached the driver’s-side door. The window there had burst, too, though the door itself was mostly undamaged.
    His eyes went to the details of the vehicle’s interior, logging them in rapid succession.
    The blond gunman was dead. He had worn his seat belt, but the passenger air bag had apparently been switched off. Maybe the kid had known that. Maybe he’d even hit the button to disable it, in the instant before jerking the wheel. Either way, the gunman’s head had collided with the metal windshield column, which had bent inward in the crash. The guy’s body hung slack, leaning forward over the footwell with his arms and head draped. There was blood coming out of his head at about half the volume of a faucet tap, pattering the floor with a sound like rain spilling from a downspout. Cerebral hemorrhaging. The guy was long gone.
    The kid was alive.
    His eyes were open and he was staring through the window frame at Dryden.
    And holding his stomach, just below his diaphragm. There was blood seeping out between his fingers.
    “You’re the guy,” the kid said. His tone was flat and matter-of-fact, the way people often talked when they were in shock. “You’re Dryden.”
    Dryden was still staring at the bloodstain, expanding through the fabric of the kid’s shirt. Then his eyes picked out something on the passenger side floor, gleaming in the darkness there. A single brass shell casing.
    “He got me,” the kid said. “Christ, he got me.”
    Beneath the kid’s hands, the blood was running in rivulets down the front of his T-shirt. Pooling in the folds of his pants, and on the Tahoe’s leather seat cushion. A huge amount of blood.
    Dryden knew human anatomy from training and from experience. He knew about the thoracic artery, running down through the abdomen and branching to form the two femoral arteries in the legs. A person stabbed or shot through just one femoral artery could bleed out and die inside of sixty seconds, if nobody was around to apply a tourniquet.
    The thoracic artery carried twice that much blood, and no tourniquet could be applied to it.
    The kid’s face had lost a bit of color even in the ten seconds Dryden had been standing there. He was going fast.
    “Are you Curtis?” Dryden asked.
    The kid’s eyes had begun to drift. Now they fixed on him again. He looked surprised to hear that name spoken, but only a little.
    The kid nodded.
    “Came to find Claire,” Curtis whispered. “I thought she might be with you. She told me all about you.”
    A shiver went through Curtis’s body. The morning air was easily seventy-five degrees, but the kid reacted as if it were forty. To him, it was. He forced himself to keep talking. “I guess she found you, then.”
    Instead of verifying the statement, Dryden leaned in through the empty window frame and spoke carefully.
    “Curtis, the people who attacked Bayliss Labs have a place they call the interrogation site. Have you heard of that? Do you know where it is?”
    Curtis’s eyes narrowed. Then he shook his head.
    “Are you sure?” Dryden said. “Think as clearly as you can.”
    Curtis nodded, and when he spoke again, his voice was only a whisper. “All their language is careful. All their e-mails, the stuff on the server. No locations. No names. I copied all of it, though. Took it with me. Figured a lot of it out…”
    He was losing strength by the second. Fading.
    “Curtis,” Dryden said.
    “I’ve been hiding three days,” the kid said. “I printed it all, got it organized.” He nodded weakly toward the space behind the front seats. “It’s all in a bag back there, for Claire. I even wrote a letter to go with it. It’s everything I know.”
    The shivering was getting worse.
    “I tried to be careful,” Curtis said. “I made