“You are my lord,” she mumbled. “You are my husband.”
And she passed out.
***
Synthetica and the others caught up to them a few moments later. The obeyers looked in wonder around the room. Awed by the devastation. The metal bird sculpture had melted and deformed like a blowtorch through butter.
“She used the Tox. Then she passed out.”
The android nurse helped lower Tesla to the hot-to-touch ground and scanned her with the K-kit. Immediately began preparing some sort of injections.
“Did she do all this?” Synthetica asked, glances at the melted room.
“No. Yanco is still alive. With Milan. We have to get to them before he escapes.” Jake was on his feet. “How is he getting out? He must have a plan. How would the people normally have got in or out of this place?” Jake asked Synthetica.
But it was Flux who answered. “An interconnected private rail line. A corporate subterranean gravtrain system that connected the Nevermore facilities across the continent.”
“Would it still work?” Jake asked, shocked at the scale of such a thing.
“Unlikely. The train tunnel might remain unbroken, but the superconductor tracks could have suffered damage and have gaps in the grav suspension. Since the train travels in excess of 200 klicks per hour, any gap large enough could cause a lethal derailment.”
“So, no free rides on the subway.”
Jake’s eyes went to the wide sloping ramp where Yanco had vanished. There was a rumble of machinery from below. A hum of something big powering up.
“Go,” Synthetica said, still rushing care for Tesla. “I can save her. Go get Milan back.”
Jake took off at a run. A dozen half-naked blue savages following him. At his side was the scout leader, Venti. A big voxer battle-ax in both hands. They picked up speed running down the ramp, until Jake was almost running too fast to keep from tripping on his own feet. When it levelled out at the bottom he staggered, lurched into the open-air of the tunnel below.
It was a subway platform. A long, half-circle tunnel tiled in glowing white. Instead of tracks the lower area beside the platform had a long series of glowing metal plates. And hovering in midair over the grav-plates, halfway down the platform, was a single train car.
Holographic signage hovered in places over the platform. Some rectangular pylons that might have been turnstiles allowing access to the trains had slowly blinking green arrows. Above the train car itself was only the words:
Northbound track
CHARTER
DEPARTURE: delayed
The floating car was streamlined, like a wingless airplane, and had wide, clear plastec windows that showed the rows of comfortable arm-chair seats inside. Yanco was dragging Milan inside the car while his neanderthallish guards formed a rear guard, backing up along the platform. The priest had less than a dozen followers left.
“Welcome to Auricom Transglobal, Terra Transport Network,” a friendly woman’s voice announced from somewhere above. She sounded British, by way of Hong Kong. The acoustics of the sound system were so good there was barely an echo.
Jake ignored the corporate advertising. With Yanco and Milan aboard the voxers broke ranks and ran inside the car.
“Enjoy your trip on Nevermore line 613 and remember, travel safe, travel Auricom,” the voice told them again and was followed by a snippet of pleasant harp music.
He took off at a run, but the platform was almost a kilometer long, and he watched helplessly as the doors closed and the car slowly began to pick up speed. He had a last glimpse of Milan’s terror-stricken face and the car suddenly accelerated like a bullet.
Jake let himself slow to a halt. Stared at the vanishing car while rage and frustration boiled hotter than the plasma detonation he’d survived.
There was a horrible scraping sound from the train. Jake’s eyes snapped up. The car was no longer floating, it had crashed to the bottom of the tunnel, shedding sparks as it banged gracelessly along the floor and shuddered to a crumpled halt just before the end of the platform.
Flux’s words came back to him. Break in the superconductor line. Catastrophic anti-gravity failure.
A three-toned chord of harp music sounded from overhead. The gentle voice made another announcement.
“Attention all passengers on platform N12. Due to mechanical issues the departing train will be cancelled. Please debark the train car and proceed to emergency exits. Thank you for travelling Auricom.”
“Dumb fucking luck,” he breathed out. Hope jolted up his spine, and with that the modified fight or flight drive kicked into overdrive. With a yell he was sprinting again.
He watched as the train car doors were forced open. Saw Yanco and his guards carrying Milan as they staggered or crawled from the wreck back onto the platform. There was a moment when they gathered themselves, then the entire retinue was vanishing through a door at the far end of the station.
Jake slid a fresh magazine of 10mm slugs into his pistol as he ran.
Passing the midway point of the platform Jake saw a pair of crates that Yanco had left behind in his haste. They were stuffed with looted equipment from the bunker. And guns.
He slid to a halt. Had to choose quickly. Don’t get fancy, Mortimer.
There was a compact-looking automatic slugthrower. He cleared the action, checked the barrel, thumbed the battery charge and it showed full. Selecting one of the half-dozen factory-loaded mags, Jake loaded it and fired a test shot into the ceiling with a satisfying CRACK!
“That’ll do,” he said.
The obeyers were just catching up to him. The blue barbarians were gasping and flushed purple with effort. He hadn’t realised how fast he’d been going, for how long. They were exhausted. But refusing to quit. Jake hesitated then offered his pistol to Venti. The girl looked from him to the gun then bent to pick up a riot baton from the crate instead. Thumbing the power switch it crackled with a force field.
“Ready?” Jake asked her.
“Ready go,” she replied.
“Ready?” he asked the other obeyers.
There were some grim faces but they all muttered a phonetic approximation of “Reddigo,” imitating Venti.
Jake turned and raced for the far end of the platform with the blue barbarians following. He slowed only as he approached the train car. The car had been badly crumpled at the front end, and half the plastec windows popped loose or shattered. It listed at a thirty degree angle. He spotted two wounded voxers inside. Both too badly hurt in the crash to go on. Before Jake could decide whether to stop and investigate a half dozen of the obeyers climbed into the wreck giving war cries. It was over in moments as they butchered the defenceless voxers.
“Sucks to be you,” Jake shrugged and went to the doorway Yanco had vanished inside.
It was only a sealed slab of metal with an air-tight gasket around the edge and a heavy crank handle. Painted on the surface was the pictoglyph of a man running up stairs. If that didn’t say emergency exit he didn’t know what did.
“I don’t imagine the useless lazy humans of the 23rd century climbing the stairs.”
Hand on the latch Jake forced himself to pause. Throttling the urge to run in blindly. Yanco had already sacrificed some of his guards in suicidal rear-guards. Jake didn’t want to run into another ambush.
Cracking the door open a couple inches he jammed the barrel of his slugthrower in and hosed a long burst of full automatic fire around inside, hearing the rounds ricochet and bounce back and forth inside the enclosed stairwell. Satisfied he’d discouraged anyone waiting on the other side Jake carefully cranked the door entirely open and poked inside.
Nothing. Only bare cement-like ‘duracrete’ steps with a metal railing and a single, dim light at every landing. Carefully edging forward to crane his neck up the central well of the stairs he saw movement far above, almost at the top.
“Up is out?” Venti asked.
“Let’s go!”
Jake led the tribe int
o the emergency exit stairwell; it was full of stale air and some sort of industrial stink that caught in his throat. As they climbed Jake began to be less cautious, rushing upwards, suddenly feeling an uncontrollable urge to be rid the underground bunker. Felt the unbearable weight of hundreds of tons of rock above him and couldn’t stand it any longer. He had to reach the surface. Had to get back to the world.
His breath was coming short, the air quality getting worse. The obeyers were even worse. He decided to slow his climb enough to save some of his breath for the fight he’d certainly meet up top. They mounted eight flights of stairs to reach the top and finally arrived at another battleship-type hatch with a sealed gasket.
It had been left half-open, and with the release of the airtight seal it brought a feathery hint of fresher air that Jake gulped greedily. He was the first one through the door.
It was a sub-basement of some kind. A single, circular room ten meters across with a stairwell leading to a similar door. Again. It was half-open and the air that came through it held more of the sweet freshness of living things. Of trees and dirt and rain. Jake almost shuddered in satisfaction.
“I go first,” Venti said.
Jake almost told her no, but knew she was just trying to protect him. The scout with her cybernetic hand and three more obeyers rushed the doorway and charged through.
Into screaming pain.
Jake’s head filled with unbearable electric torture. Like a rusty sawblade being slowly forced through his head. Like a choir of migraine headaches shouting through blown-out speakers twisted to maximum volume. It was Yanco, delivering his psychic brain shocks.
Not just to Jake, to the entire group. Around him the obeyers collapsed, screaming and vomiting. Jake almost dropped to one knee and only through rage-filled drive not to be defeated by the tangerine mutant did he put one foot in front of the other and force his way up the short flight of steps to the hatch.
On the far side of the door was darkness. Convulsing just over the threshold were Venti and the others. Jake groaned through gritted teeth and made himself go on. For a moment he thought he was seeing burst capillaries in his eyes, but the blobs of red light closing in were real. The grub lanterns in the hands of Yanco’s guards.
The blinding pain was so strong Jake couldn’t even see straight. But silhouetted against the lantern light at that range, the gorilla-like neanderthals might as well have been paper targets. He fired the slugthrower on full automatic. Smalls bursts. Staggering forward and shooting at anything that moved. Distantly he was aware of cries of pain and anger, and he kept shooting.
When the mag ran dry, he dropped it. Fumbling a new one blindly. Chambering the first round.
Just in time. Three killmen charged out of the dark, weapons ready to hack him down and Jake’s imprinted combat reflexes took the gun in his hands and turned it into an instrument. He aimed and fired without thinking. Without actual control. Shot them all so fast that as they tumbled forward, already dead, he tapped a three-round burst into each one before they hit the ground.
Jake screamed out loud, not anger or even frustration. Just a defiant howl against anything in his way. Against the entire universe. He’d died five hundred years ago, but he was still here. It would take more than troglodytes with home-made weapons to finish him.
The binding pain stopped.
The relief was like nothing else. Like a thousand dentists drills in his head had ceased at once, and the sudden absence of pain was like a rush of painkillers flooding his veins. Blinking, he saw he was surrounded by dead voxers. The blue-skinned obeyers and Venti were moaning relief but unable to move from where they lay.
“You not right,” Yanco said from someplace hidden. “Not right in the head!” he yelled, clearly furious.
“Says the sick fuck cannibal,” Jake snarled in reply. Where was he?
They were in the ground-level of a building, ten meters across, and aside from a few support pillars it was empty of everything but bits of debris. It had once had floor-to-ceiling windows but except for a few fragments the glass was long gone, exposing bits of bushes and trees that had overgrown almost into the building.
Jake realised it was dark because it was night.
“Nobody can do that! Nobody right!” Yanco complained hysterically. “What are you?”
“Didn’t anybody tell you, asshole? I’m the last real man alive.”
Jake still didn’t feel right. His vision was flashing with stars of color, like he was near to passing out. There was a warm, wet pain in his head like something inside had burst. He wanted to puke. Felt like he was running a high fever and his body was drenched in cold sweat.
Just a little further. Kill this guy, then you can pass out.
Jake staggered towards the sound of the man’s voice. Yanco was on the other side of the bushes. Almost in a dream Jake drew the machete, walked to the nearest open window space, and began to slash away the vegetation. Swinging more wildly each moment, suddenly frantic to get through it all, and the leafy chlorophyll smell of crushed vegetation was sweeter than anything he could ever imagine. With a dozen strokes he slashed through finger-thick bushes and vine stalks and frantically struggled through the foliage until he stood, finally, on a bare patch of cracked duracrete, bordered by massive trees on all sides.
But above… above was a night sky, filled with pinpricks of white light on a tar-black, moonless sky.
Sky. Real sky.
He was out.
On the far side of the clearing the orange-skinned priest stood with a strange, bulky pistol in hand. A pair of red grub lanterns were the only light, leaving the place bathed in hellish red. The priest had two voxers left; hulking overmuscled brutes in plate-mail made of street signs beaten into shape, complete with horrifically demonic masks. One of them held Milan by the neck; his hand big enough to wrap almost entirely around.
“Jake,” she gasped, barely able to breathe. “Don’t.”
And suddenly he was paralyzed. As Yanco’s eyes went bright glowing green Jake felt his entire body trapped in a vice. The entire weight of Yanco’s psychic power crushing down on him.
Fuck that!
Jake fought. Managed to raise the gun barrel. One inch. Two. Squeezed off a shot that hit the duracrete surface beneath the weeds and ricocheted wildly into the night.
“Why can’t you just die!” Yanco screamed and shot Jake with the strange pistol.
It was an energy beam that glowed like it was under a blacklight. An ultraviolet color that shouldn’t have existed. And for a moment the light of the beam painted everything around it, like a miniature sun. Only instead of light it shone with an anti-light. Like everything had become a photonegative of itself. And where the beam hit Jake his flesh withered.
But as Yanco fired, the voxer not holding Milan slammed his spiked mace into Yanco’s arm, so the beam went wide and only struck Jake a glancing blow.
It was enough to cripple him. It was like watching a time-lapse photograph of a corpse rotting. The skin blackened and died, necrotic flesh cracking and crumbling. Jake was literally being hit with a death ray. He collapsed like his legs had been sawn off and lay in agony – real agony this time. Watched the flesh of his body slowly die spreading outward from the impact point.
But his attention was on the sudden, vicious fight between the two voxers. The big one tossed Milan aside and the one who had clipped Yanco charged. The two traded enormous, ringing blows that would have crumbled cinderblocks as they fought back and forth.
“Enough!” Yanco shouted.
And the black light of the death ray shone again, cutting down the voxer who had attacked him.
“Go! Take her and go!” Yanco shouted, cradling his bleeding arm.
The last voxer bowed his head, scooped Milan from the ground as she screamed, and walked into the woods.
Yanco took one look at where Jake lay dying and sneered before Jake watched him steal Milan and vanish into the dark of the bushes. The red lantern getting more distant unt
il it was swallowed by the trees. Jake tried crawling after them and made it as far as the body of the other voxer before his limbs wouldn’t respond. His heart was hammering. The necrotic blast reaching his core and organs shutting down.
The voxer fumbled with a palsied hand. Reached out and stroked Jake’s face. The voxer managed to paw the metal mask off.
It was Krill.
She tied to talk but couldn’t make words. Just smiled and went still.
Jake rolled onto his back.
“Well, hell,” he whispered.
He was dying again. And who knew if he’d come back this time. The Nevermore bunker could be dead by now. Circe might be gone.
His nine lives might have run out.
“Lord Jacob!” he heard the yell from inside the building.
“Jake?” Synthetica called.
Or maybe not.
“Why are you smiling?” Synthetica demanded as she dropped next to him, K-kit already open and scanning for wounds.
She paused. Looked at him in disbelief.
“You’ve been hit with a black ray gun and you’re still alive?’ she said in wonder. Then set about frantically pulling equipment from the K-kit. “Hang on, Jake. Just hang on.”
Jake could feel his heart beating slower. Slower. Vision narrowing down. He saw Tesla crouched over him, tears running down the mask of dirt on her face.
Time to reset this game.
Get the next screen.
It went dark.
***
Keep reading for an exciting excerpt from the next book in the series!
The Big Weird
Making his way to the forest stream Jake found it deserted now, and on a shady bank he scooped up several bags of fresh water and ran them through the chemical and UV filters to make it drinkable. The water splashing on his hands felt indecently cool and in a few moments he’d made up his mind to take a soak. For peace of mind he tasked one of the drones to watch over him and then shucked out of his clothes and sank into the waist-deep water. It was like sliding into a cool bath of sweet relief. Tension drained from his shoulders and after a few minutes the headache that had been clenched at the back of his neck was gone.
The Apocalypse Watch Page 16
