by James Axler
They were on a walkway made of metal mesh, which would allow debris and liquid to be brushed through the holes and collected using a series of inclines underneath. The walkway led into the main body of the hangar, lit only by moonlight through the high windows.
“There’s a door on the far side,” Ricky explained, leading the way along the walkway at a jog. “Never went into this place until now, but it’s easy to see the door from outside.”
Jak peered down the walkway. It followed a straight path to a distant door identical to the one through which they had entered, maybe seventy feet ahead. As he peered at it, he saw something move across his field of vision, zipping through the darkness in a blur of shadow.
“What—?” Jak muttered.
Then the thing materialized from the gloom. It was a robot, nine feet tall with a human-style torso and arms and a set of bulky caterpillar tracks in place of its legs.
“What the heck is—?” Ricky began, bringing his blaster up to target the machine.
Beside him, Jak brought up his own blaster to target the robot. As he did so he heard noises coming from all around, things waking up in the darkness. A quick glance to his right confirmed his suspicion—there were more of them. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. And they were all just now coming to life.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The sec men in the elevator had reanimated. Led by Roma, they gathered themselves, sending data about the escaped captives.
There was a gaping hole in Roma’s gut where J.B. had blasted her. The hole went through her robe and showed her flesh and the circuitry beneath, glistening like some strange piece of jewelry—one that had been embedded beneath her flawless skin. Like the other residents of Progress, Roma was a simulacrum, a robot made in human form to integrate with the people around her.
She stood in the lobby of the council building, absorbing orders from a remote download as her sec team prepared themselves. “The fugitives are still loose,” she explained. “Indications are that they have rearmed themselves and have split up. Two were spotted heading toward the factory quadrant. They must be located and deleted.”
* * *
MOVING STEALTHILY, DOC and J.B. made their way to the single-story structure that housed the ancient military redoubt and the mat-trans they had arrived in. Few people were on the streets, but by sticking to the shadows and staying alert they managed to slip inside the redoubt without incident.
Lights flickered on as the two men entered, motion-sensors responding to their presence. The air smelled stale while the walls had been washed clean with some kind of antibacterial cleanser. It made for a nasty mix of acid scent and dust.
J.B. hurried through the bland corridor, making his way to the nearest workroom. Something flickered on his lapel as he entered, his rad counter picking up trace radioactivity nearby.
Standing inside the room were four desks with comps and desk lamps, behind which was a large, old-fashioned pin board that displayed a creased map of the local area beside a larger map of the United States of America with a copyright date of 1998.
J.B. stepped over to one of the desks, tried the comp and—when it whirred to life—drew up a chair and sat down.
“The power’s working then,” Doc observed.
J.B. nodded. “These old military bases ran on their own jennies,” he said. “So long as nothing’s been trashed they should still function the same way they did when they were shut down.”
“A window into the past,” Doc agreed. He took up a position at the doorway where he could watch the corridor while J.B. tapped out instructions on the computer keyboard. “Never thought I’d see the day I’d be grateful that Mildred showed me how to work one of these things.”
“What are we looking for, J.B.?”
“Evidence,” J.B. replied. “The council told us that they were following a plan that had been put in place before the nukecaust. I just can’t believe that there was a plan to chill everyone to keep the U.S. safe. From what we’ve seen of the U.S.A. the survivors were the ones who’d rebuild.”
“The council are the survivors,” Doc suggested, “still manipulating things for the old order.”
“Then let’s see what that old order is,” J.B. said, working the keys of the comp.
* * *
JAK AND RICKY stood in the vast, warehouselike room, staring out across the sea of metal bodies.
“Thinking this mistake,” Jak told Ricky as the robotic things began to advance toward them. He had them pegged for military combat drones of some kind.
Behind them, a second group of drones came to life, bringing themselves erect as they powered up, striding down the walkway to block off the door through which the two youths had entered.
Then a dozen artificial voices spoke up as one, doubling as they came from speakers all around the room: “Unauthorized personnel. To be eliminated with extreme prejudice.”
Jak turned to Ricky. “Run!” he shouted, before he took off toward the distant exit of the building.
Ricky followed, sprinting as fast as he could along the metal walkway that ran down the center of the room between twin banks of waking combat units.
* * *
IN THE OPERATING ROOM, Mildred worked the scalpel carefully around the edge of Ryan’s artificial eye. Her hand was steady, her breathing slow and deep as she slipped into the almost-trancelike concentration level needed to execute this procedure.
Krysty had quietly stepped away from the gurney and was standing beside the only door to the room, just in case anyone tried to barge in past the heavy cart that she had dragged there when the operation had begun.
Sweat glistened on Mildred’s forehead, above the line of the surgical mask. She worked slowly, moving the scapel with absolute precision as she worked to loosen the eye. A spot of blood budded just below Ryan’s eye where the blade had irritated an old scar, and Mildred swallowed hard as she watched that single speck swell larger. Carefully, she removed the scapel and waited, watching the bloody spot to see if it would continue to expand or if it would seal when she blotted it.
The tension in the air was palpable, like standing beneath a colossal weight, trying to balance it and continue walking.
Mildred waited.
* * *
INSIDE RYAN’S HEAD, the other voice was bickering with him.
You need to wake up to chill humans. You need to break out of this and chill everyone, otherwise they’ll chill you, Ryan.
No one’s getting chilled today, Ryan insisted, shouting the words in his mind.
Now, you know that’s not true, boy. There’s not been a day in your life since you left Front Royal that you haven’t chilled someone. I know you. You’re me. Don’t kid a kidder.
I never chilled anyone who didn’t deserve it, Ryan told the voice.
And you won’t now either. You’ve spent all this time refining your skills and now you get to chill the mother lode, every last fireblasted human who ever got in your way. A full purging of the nation until it is finally safe and right again, the way it was before all this started, before they dropped the bombs and made a mess of everything.
Ryan thought about that as the voice continued to goad him. That would make me what those people were who dropped the bombs, he argued. Just chilling people arbitrarily. No good can come from that.
All good comes from chilling. It’s the only way to be sure that good can flourish.
Never! Ryan thought, recalling the image of Krysty by the river. “Whatever you are, you’re not me. And you’ve lost.
* * *
“HERE IT IS,” J.B. said, his eyes fixed on the stream of information running across the comp screen.
Doc eyed the corridor beyond them once before joining J.B. at the terminal.
“It’s incomplete but it says here,” J.B. read, “tha
t the military had a fail-safe program in the event of a substantial—which is to say nuclear—attack.”
“‘To rebuild for humankind,’” Doc read, “‘beginning with factories to manufacture robots to perform the necessary tasks in a world rendered temporarily uninhabitable and thus protect U.S. soil from invasion.’”
“I’ve heard it said that the nukecaust culled the population to 10 percent of what it had been,” J.B. recalled. “Makes sense to repopulate using machines to get things started up again if the workforce just isn’t there.”
“But these machines have corrupted the program somehow,” Doc concluded. “They should be working for the betterment of humankind, not to wipe us out the way they have been.”
J.B. tabbed through the file, scanning over the document. “Some parts of the instructions are missing,” he said, showing Doc where the data had disappeared, leaving strips of nonsense in its place.
“What would do that?” Doc wondered.
J.B. slapped the top of the comp terminal. “Mildred said that a system like this utilizes magnetism to function. Something could demagnetize it and wipe the data.”
“Surely it would have been shielded from suchlike,” Doc insisted.
“Big enough radiation leak in the redoubt’s reactor could do it,” J.B. proposed, and he automatically checked the Geiger counter on his lapel. “There’s some radiation swirling around here, not a lot but still more than I would expect for this kind of place. Mebbe the end of something big.”
“A radiation leak,” Doc mused, “spoiling the data files and corrupting the good intentions of a generation of military men no longer here to correct it.”
“Some of their plan survived,” J.B. reminded him. “Which means we’re sitting on a stockpile of tech designed for just one purpose—to eradicate ‘the enemy.’”
“The enemy being the people of the Deathlands,” Doc said gravely. “We have to stop this.”
J.B. looked at Doc. “And do you have any bright ideas how we do that, Doc? I came back here to get Ryan some help for that eye—”
“Which was a sick part of this demented End Program,” Doc cut in. “J.B., we must do something.”
J.B. looked pensive. “Nothing we can do, Doc. It’s gone too far.”
* * *
THE FIRST BATCH of war drones loomed before Jak and Ricky as they ran through the vast room. Behind them, the door opened and the three remaining sec men came marching through, commanding the two companions to halt.
Ahead, the war drones’ weapons cycled to life, heat blasters powering up to burn the intruders. They required no bullets, no reloading—concentrated heat was their weapon, generated in their metallic cores.
Ricky fired his Webley, sending a shot into the nearest war drone as it fired its first blast at him. Beside him, Jak dodged aside as a heat beam scored a red trail across the floor. Then Jak was in the air, spinning and leaping as two more drones sent beams of searing heat from their nozzlelike limbs.
Ricky fired again, drilling a bullet into the boxy mechanism that sat atop the war drone’s “shoulders.” The bullet clashed against the metal, kicking up a shower of sparks in the semidarkness. Unaffected, the drone shot back.
Jak ran for the next war drone. They were designed for distance work, he guessed, intended to travel shoulder-to-shoulder as they were now, eradicating all opposition. But close up they might be vulnerable.
Jak evaded another heat blast and clambered up the shooter at a dead run, rushing up the mechanical beast as if he was climbing a staircase. In an instant, Jak was atop the robot and he jammed his Colt Python against the thing’s head. There was a series of plates there to protect the central processing unit, like the shell of a turtle. Jak yanked at one, but was unable to move it, so he simply rammed his blaster through the layers between plates until the barrel was as close as he could get to the drone’s processing core. Then he fired, point-blank, cracking the “skull” unit and sending a slug into the thing’s brain box.
Jak leaped off as the “brain” exploded in a burst of sparks, using the momentum of his point-blank blast to leap to the next nearest robot, landing atop its shoulders. The thing reacted, swiveling its torso as it tried to track its antagonist, heat beam blasting until it struck another war ‘bot that erupted in a burst of flames.
Then Jak placed his blaster against the robot’s processing unit, driving the barrel between the protective covers and sending a bullet into its “brain.” The robot seemed to sag as soon as the bullet struck, stumbling aimlessly forward with its heat beam firing erratically.
On the deck, Ricky ran between two robots as their heat beams chased him. He was a small target, fast too, and many of the war drones were only now powering up to full functionality. As Ricky slipped between the robots, their heat beams crossed and then they were blasting each other, searing red circles appearing on their metallic torsos.
Ricky raced on as the two robots burst into flames while, behind him, the sec men continued to chase these two fearless intruders.
All around the warehouse, chaos reigned.
* * *
MILDRED MADE THE final incision that would grant access to the artificial eye. Then, using metal tongs, she clutched the eye top and bottom, gritting her teeth as she began to pull.
“Mildred...?” It was Ryan’s voice, weak and muffled by the dressings Mildred had placed over his face. He was waking up. It gave her a shock.
“Ryan, don’t move,” Mildred said.
From across the room, Krysty hurried over and touched Ryan’s hand. “Ryan, lover, it’s me,” she said. “Stay still. Stay really still.”
Then Mildred began to pull, yanking at the eye with all her strength. For a moment it wouldn’t come out, it was wedged so tightly in Ryan’s eye socket.
“Come on, you tough bastard,” Mildred spit. “Get out here already.”
“Krysty? Mildred?” Ryan asked. “What’s going on?”
“The eye’s trying to change you,” Krysty explained. “We’re going to get it out.”
* * *
IN HIS MIND, Ryan heard the other voice—the one that sounded just like him—laugh cruelly.
Chill them, it said. This is the perfect opportunity. Chill them and end this nonsense. Your first casualties to the new world.
* * *
MILDRED SWORE AS she fought to remove the eye. Suddenly it was free of the socket and clamped in the jaws of the tongs. But a great trail of circuitry wended back inside Ryan’s skull, feeding him information along the tract of the optic nerve, still connected to him.
“Can’t...get it,” Mildred stated through gritted teeth.
“Can I help?” Krysty asked, watching her friend struggle to pull the eye loose. “Cut it mebbe?”
“Cutting it won’t help,” Mildred insisted. “Look at this—it’s nanotechnology and it’s reaching for Ryan’s brain. Just cutting it won’t stop that. We need to get it all out.”
* * *
RYAN FELT HIS body tense, felt the pain of the eye being manipulated in his head even through the sedative. No, he told the voice. You’re not giving the instructions.
I’m you, you idiot, his voice replied. I’m the plan you’ve always been following. I’m the plan you’ll always follow.
* * *
ON THE GURNEY, Ryan’s hand reached up and grabbed the eye from Mildred, pulling it from her grasp. Then he yanked, dragging the full length of the thing’s artificial brain stem that was feeding information to his own brain out of his head.
“No, you’re not!” Ryan snarled, tossing the rogue hunk of hardware to the floor.
The eye slopped against the floor in a smear of red, blood and fluid glistening across its surface. For a moment Ryan thought he could still see what the eye saw, watched himself on the gurney as he sat up and wiped the b
lood away from his face while Krysty and Mildred looked on in astonishment.
The artificial eye twitched for a moment, the long trail of optic nerve—seven inches in length and segmented like an earthworm with tiny metal barbs running its full length—wending like a snake’s tail as it tried to move back to its victim.
Mildred’s hand reached for the ZKR blaster she had replaced at her hip and shot the twitching eye to shrapnel. “Operation’s over,” she said. “And it was a total success.”
Behind her, Krysty hugged Ryan as tightly as she could while his empty eye socket wept tears of blood.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Ryan’s head ached, and blood ran down his left cheek from the empty hole in his face. Still, he led the way, rearmed with the SIG Sauer in hand, Steyr Scout across his back and the panga strapped to his leg.
Mildred could not really explain why she trusted Ryan now, when just two days before he had tried to chill her. All she could say was that his demeanor was different—the way he carried himself, the way he spoke and acted. He was Ryan again, anyone who knew him could see that.
Krysty stuck close to Ryan, watching him with all the concern of a lover.
Ryan told them about the thing that had been in his head, trying to change him. “It spoke in my voice,” he said, “but it said sick things, wanted me to chill.”
“You didn’t let it,” Krysty said soothingly.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Ryan replied.
From the thing that had been in his head, Ryan could see what the Progress council’s plan was. It was horribly direct and utterly efficient—to chill every human on U.S. soil so that it could be reclaimed.
“The council isn’t human,” Ryan said. “No one here is.”
“How do you know?” Mildred asked as she checked Ryan’s wound.
“They’re like me,” he told her grimly. “Like what I almost became. Mebbe they started out as human but this thing—whatever it is—got them in its grasp and never let go.”
