Automatic Assassin

by Marc Horne

  Chapter 17

  The weaponization of zombies by the forces of the Earth had now been fully conceptualized. There was now the challenge of gathering pure zombie.

  They headed out in the rain. Above them, the likeliness of genocide asserted itself.

  Boa Morte took the lead, Tamano and Gomez in the next rank. Twenty other special forces troops behind. The absolute best of the best. Killers without will or ego. Samurai.

  They crossed the hills and saw the remains of a city, slanted to one side like it was waiting impatiently for its turn to piss. Marble and concrete are equals when they lie in the dirt of disgrace. The beauty of this city was gone somewhere, freed like a genie.

  They kept their horses pounding. They had a map that they had pulled out of 'Xolo's’ ship plus some data they finagled out of Tamano's parents. They figured out the nearest big zombie birth node - the kind of thing they typically cautiously retreated from - and they rode there.

  They started to ride down death rows. They saw people and then they saw rivers of meat and then they saw people and then they looked at their own hands and they saw...what?

  They blasted and chopped and hacked and then when they got tired they stopped and thought they might die but they didn't because the zombies just streamed out, all chained up like three blind mice. Or three thousand.

  Weird green and black chains of enemy dead skirted them. They threaded the needle of obliteration. They passed through valleys with foggy eyeballs.

  “The deeper we go, the blacker and more cybernetic it gets,” noted Boa Morte. He was right: it was probably fifty percent cybernetic by now. Across the fields lay thick black fingers of a hand big enough for a man to spend his whole life there. Tamano took the lead for a while. She could hear the whistling of the occasional attacks: big shiny black pillars that would fall and blast a rain of heads at them, nibbling and nutting heads. Heads on the floor, the carpet of this time in their lives. Gomez was laughing for no reason as they walked through a field of people bits.

  “Who am I?” he said

  Tamano looked at him like he was a fool. Her fool. She was student of history. She knew that a few hundred years ago they would have been surfers or backpackers together, full of love for life, each other, a little restaurant that no one went to. God, it stank of nearly death here!

  They came over a crest. They saw a black ball the size of a town, with ten dicks stuck in the ground, finding bones and milling the pus out of exflesh. Gomez was looking at a zombie face from perhaps a meter away. It was not unlike his in the way it looked. But it reacted to him like a fast mushroom. They were surrounded by dazed zombies who had not yet been sent a mission.

  Tamano turned to Boa Morte. “Think fast Bolivar, because eventually these beasts will remember to attack us and then your legend will be about how you became the smallest and most widely spread man who ever lived.”

  “We ride!” he said.

  Boa Morte had never ridden a mantis horse before this expedition began but riding and sailing and flying were in his blood. With confidence and smart dodging when new corpses came shooting up from the ground he took them through the fields of shambling cadavers deep into where they wanted to go but eventually there was a point where he had to stop.

  They saw something different than the chains of human corpses that they had skirted for the past few hours. Instead there were half a dozen huge armored trolls. Each one was three meters tall, with a large square jawed head. Their bodies were covered with a colony of plastic and metal extracted from the great trashifers that ran beneath the earth, full of twenty-first century treasure. In addition, through the little gaps around the joints, the warriors could see innovative muscle structures that looked both fast and strong. The trolls patrolled and their movements alternated between the heavy rumble of a rhino and agile spurts of monkey when they hit rough terrain. They were armed with axes and some kind of rocket launchers on their backs.

  Tamano looked over to Boa Morte. He was rubbing his long thin nose as he hid behind a boulder. His breathing was imperceptible.

  “Working on another suicide plan, Xolo?” she whispered.

  “Call him Boa Morte, Tammy,” winked Gomez from behind his own, less secure looking boulder.

  “You think those rocket launchers grow organically out of their bodies?” asked Boa Morte softly and calmly. He spoke like he was in the middle of a painting. In the middle of painting a painting. Not in the middle of being in a painting. But, yes, he was static. The movement of his lips could have been an acrylic illusion.

  And what beautiful light. It came under the clouds somehow, arcing beneath their glower.

  Gomez had good eyes and knew zombie biology well. “Yes, I think so. When they move their arms, those side muscles twitch and the launchers twitch a bit. I think they have internal ammo stores that feed from their chest cavities and load up the launchers.”

  “So you are telling me that our enemies are literally full of explosives?”

  “That's one way of looking at it.”

  For the next twenty minutes the team spread itself out in sniping positions. Three shooters per team, each trying to make an impossible shot that would fuse up or blow out the cannon. When they heard the owl cry, they would take the shot.

  There was no grass for a mile, let alone a tree. But the was plenty of wreckage. Humans are even harder to see amid wreckage than they are in nature. They all got a good vantage point.

  HOOT!

  Twenty-three shots rang out in a ripple of reaction times.

  The trolls staggered. One popped. The one next to it popped too and then became a fireball. The first one became a fireball too. Further away one of them ripped in half and then turned into two fireballs. One started shooting fire out of his cannons, but had no strategy to deal with it.

  That left three on the field. The human soldiers roared! Their chance of death had just halved. It was still fucking high, but it was important to celebrate life's successes in the moment.

  They jumped out for the fight. An RPG killed two of them in a second. Looking on the bright side, the troll who fired it also disintegrated at around the same time. Boa Morte ran in fast, wishing they hadn't had to tie up the horses far away. His troll flexed and flexed but no rockets came out. Caught in the familiar loop of shattered dreams, he was a statue basically waiting for a parkour kill. Boa Morte ran up his leg, shoved a gun deep into his armpit, fired, kept running and got about ten yards away before the heat and the blast smashed him on the back. A compact disk hit him on the left buttock at one hundred kilometers per hour. Could have been worse.

  The special forces guy with the red Mohawk got too close to his troll and got an axe planted right in the middle of the tempting target of his hairstyle. He split like a banana peel all the way down to his pelvis and his blood fell like a bomb. Screaming, Gomez rolled the dice again and let off his rail-rifle, blowing the troll's legs off which let the angry humans swarm on him like beetles, stabbing and gouging.

  The battle with the remaining troll was slow. They attacked him from a distance and ran. No one wanted to get killed by this guy. Not fear but a dislike of battle irony moved them.

  Two minutes later he was burning.

  The twenty survivors headed into the big black ball through one of its many honeycomb entryways.

  When they got in it, and noticed the way it throbbed, it occurred to them that all this thing would have to do was suddenly contract and they would all be dripping out of the bottom of it.

  The only thing that reassured them was that the zombies today were acting dafter than ever.

  “I wonder if the huge space jump is somehow affecting their brains?” pondered Boa Morte as he clambered up over some glistening horizontal bars and climbed deeper into this lung cancer surrounding them.

  “We don't think they use the headnet,” said Tamano. “So they don't get a bandwidth hit from the jump.”

  “They have their own data supply?”

  “Yeah. It's no
t so good though. Otherwise we'd all be dead.”

  “I like your attitude.”

  (She had been trying to be negative, but on reflection saw that she had got it wrong. Was that just clumsiness, she wondered, or was something about today inspiring her. Something about the strange battles they'd been having so close to where she was born and had grown and had hidden from all of the grown ups who wanted to operate on her head.)

  After an hour or so they found themselves in a strange chamber full of chairs and televisions. It was brightly lit and it hummed. It almost seemed like a lure in a giant Venus flytrap. What would happen to you on the lovely chair in front of the pallid light of the little television?

  They scanned and popped around all the nooks and crannies, backing each other up. Even though they couldn't really rule out the possibility that the room would suddenly swallow them like a small bunch of grapes, they carried out their responsibilities anyway.

  “What are we looking at, jefe?” asked Gomez as he looked down his gun sights at this strangely soothing place.

  “It looks a lot like an early twenty-first century workplace,” said Boa Morte, moving his face close to one of the screens, which appeared to give some kind of writing all over it “What they used to call an office.”

  “What does it do? Why all the televisions?”

  “People used the televisions and these little pianos to access the net. See it looks a little bit like the controls of a classic spaceship. But I think they did watch entertainment on the screens too, sex shows etc.”

  “Where are the brain plugs? The eyephones?”

  “This predates all that. They would just imagine words, tap them out on the little pianos and then throw them into a net.”

  “Word based net! Wow. I guess that would work.”

  Boa Morte looked around the room even more intently and intensely. “Is this a relic or a re-creation? Why would a zombie horde need an office? Did the horde start somewhere like this? Is it a memory of some old science place where it began?”

  “Nice guesses, monkeys,” came a voice from everywhere.