Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “Shit,” Scalli shouted, his voice audible through the link over the staccato roar of his support rifle. “The gas can’t keep up with them! Another round!”

  “No!” Redeye’s voice rang in their ears, booming and loud as it pierced the noise of battle. “Protect yourselves! I will deal with them.”

  Redeye drew herself down into a kneeling position like a high-jumper, and time seemed to slow as she leaped – defying physics, defying reality. The dark-haired cyborg hurtled through the air as if shot from a cannon, sailing in a shallow parabola twenty feet down the aisle with impossible grace. Her dark hair and coat flew in the air behind her like war banners as she reached the zenith of her arc; Bobbi looked on in utter disbelief as Redeye caught her feet on a nearby wall of crates, doing a parkour run across its surface before pushing off the edge into a fresh jump toward the hapless corpse-machines.

  Time stood still as both sides could only stare at her – the living gaping at her impossible motion and the risen soldiers recalculating combat variables – as she came down upon them in a graceful arc. She disappeared amongst the white-plated monstrosities, and then time reasserted itself in the brutal chorus of violence. Once, when Bobbi was younger and she was living in the Verge, someone had been backed over by an electric truck outside her apartment building. The engine had been nearly silent, and over the shouts and screams to stop she heard the terrible crack of bones as the truck’s heavy wheels had trundled over fallen legs. The sound they heard now was like that, magnified many times – the sound of breaking limbs and body armor and the constant thump of impact paralyzed her for several moments before the sound of tromping boot heels forced her attention away.

  Violet had seen them coming first, hissing like an angry cat and spraying shots into the narrow lane to their left; Bobbi turned to see a white killer spinning away with a cratered chest, and more rushing up to meet them. While they had been busy with the fighters up ahead, they had been outflanked! Fresh adrenaline boiled through Bobbi’s system as she tore at her belt for her pistol, falling back onto the floor in the face of the charging knot of xsiarhotl. The thrumming cloud of small explosions spat from Violet’s rifle was not enough to stop them, and soon the corpses were upon them. The rifle clicked empty just in time for Violet to catch a combat limb across her chest. Bobbi yanked the gun free from her belt as Violet went down with a cry of pain and fury, threw herself back onto the floor, and fired blindly into the mass as best she could.

  Again time slowed down, and again the movie of her life seemed as though it might come to an end – her bullets pierced through their bodies, spalling pieces of armor and cold synthetic blood sting her skin, but the small slugs were not enough to keep the knot away. One of the horrors brought its sledgehammer limb down on her arm, and pain exploded through it; the sleeve of her armor jacket hardened instantly against the blow, keeping the limb from breaking, but she very nearly dropped her gun. Bobbi cried out over the link, above the chaotic roar of the guns, and tried to scramble away as it lifted its arm to strike again. It turned its head down to behold her, the seam in its faceless visor leering down at her. Bobbi felt her nerves harden in the face of immediate death, felt the clarity that had come when she had shot Diana with the crusher, and shot it repeatedly in the face. She watched in slow motion as its helmet became a mass of bloody craters, and then its body was flung away in a different direction; Bobbi had to blink twice before she realized that Mason and Scalli had turned their guns into the marauders. The remnants disappeared under the hail of death and the two men rushed to their side.

  “We got to get out of here,” Mason said hurriedly as he helped Bobbi to her feet. “You all right?”

  Bobbi’s arm was on fire but endorphins raced to keep it at bay. “I’m fine,” she said, shaking the worst of the pain out of her head for the moment. “Where are we supposed to go?”

  “No idea,” Mason said with a shake of his head. “Can you try and find something?”

  “Let’s walk and talk, people,” Scalli rumbled over the link as he hung the support gun up on his harness and hoisted Violet up into one arm; she hung like a limp rag from his grip, and Bobbi saw that blood oozed from the corner of her mouth.

  “She going to be all right?” Bobbi was already reaching out into the ether as Scalli stooped to pick up Violet’s rifle, holding it easily by the grip.

  “No idea,” Scalli said, then barked over the link. “Red,” he called out, “how are you doing?”

  Over the link, Redeye’s voice was eerily calm. “I cannot contain them much longer,” she replied. “More are coming from the factory above. We are not escaping this way.”

  Mason spat a curse; Scalli ignored him. “We are falling back to the next chamber,” he said. “Come on, we aren’t leaving you.”

  “Fall back, Marcus,” she replied, unhurried. “I will join you when you are clear.”

  “We can’t leave her to deal with all of those things,” Mason hissed. “We need her.”

  Bobbi shook her head. “She’s doing pretty well against them so far, man,” she insisted. “We need to get out of here.” She felt behind them, felt the door, and with a flash of cold horror felt new signatures blinking into being all around her. “We really, really do.”

  Scalli didn’t reply save to nod – and then they were moving, backing quickly through the empty lane toward the door with guns ready. Hundreds of new signals were appearing around them; Bobbi could not understand what they were or where they came from, but she got the distinct feeling of something, many somethings, coming to life. By the time they reached the door the question was resolved by the hissing of the cargo pods as their hatches cracked open and new corpses began to unfold themselves from their communal coffins, silver-eyed and horrible. Bobbi wished very much that they would all just wear armor to wall those faces away.

  It was no wonder that the facility had no automated security on this level; everything contained within the rooms was lethal.

  “Jesus,” Mason cried as he fired a burst into the opening hatch of the nearest opening pod. “Red, we could really use some backup here!”

  “We’ll be fine,” Bobbi said as she reached out for the door – and then hated herself for saying the words as felt herself hit a wall of security encoding. “Uh, you guys cover me,” she said as she sat down on the cold metal deck by the wall. Her heart rate was spiking now, and she felt the taste of metal in her mouth as hurried dread settled over her. “They got this door locked up.”

  “Got it,” Scalli said, holding out the rifle like a toy; he and Mason were firing single shots now, his armor systems and the old man’s much-vaunted reflexes allowing them to snipe the nearest of the slowly-awakening corpses as they appeared. And yet her head rang with the signals of the awakening computer brains within the awful things, and she knew that if she didn’t get the door open soon they would be swiftly overwhelmed.

  Well, fuck that. Bobbi closed her eyes and forced her mind to open, something which the roar of adrenaline in her blood made profoundly difficult – and perhaps she would not have been able to do it in her own had the software in her head not taken over, interfacing with the door system on its own and doing the work of uplink for her. Very handy, very handy, Bobbi thought to herself before she focused her mind on the system to which she now connected; template sprang up and went through permutations, the Rosetta stone of the Yathi protocols working under Bobbi’s will to form data into a well-honed origami spike. She slammed it home into the substance of the encryption wall, the diamond-hard counterprog withstanding several attempts without scratching the surface. Far away she heard the scattered thunder of the two men’s guns turn into bursts.

  Come on, girl. Come on.

  Bobbi collected herself, took a deep breath. She felt her fear and anxiety within her, boiling like molten sulphur. Carefully she envisioned it, swirling inside of her mind like a poisonous tide, whirling under pressure until she forced it out again. A great plume of yellow light it was, tipped with the data
-spike that she had crafted like a spear, and with her mind’s unyielding arm she flung it into the encryption wall. This time metaphor won out over hard perception, and the counterprog buckled. Bobbi reached in through the wound, made contact with the door code, and unplugged herself before it even had the chance to start the open cycle.

  She came back to a world filled with smoke and the sting of ozone and spilled synthetic blood. The chemical tang was thick in her nostrils; as her eyes came back to her, Bobbi looked up to find a horde of corpses plugging up the aisle ahead of them. The xsiarhotl were rising in legion from their storage pods, and like any good horde of walking corpses were heaving themselves against an increasingly frantic hail of rounds.

  “We’re in,” she cried above the din, and sprang to her feet as the doors began to hiss open behind them; Mason took a step back, taking Violet – who had been transferred to his custody while Bobbi was out – and continued firing as he backed through the growing aperture with the fallen woman over his shoulder. Bobbi added her own pistol shots, for all the good it did, and stepped back with him; the corpses were very close now, so close that they could nearly touch them, and Bobbi was having wild flashbacks of the scene back in the Chorus chamber as she fired into as many white faces as she could.

  They were pressed through the doorway into another corridor, sparing just a cursory look behind them to ensure that there was nothing waiting, only the dim glow of horrid lamps mounted in the walls. Even as they backed through, however, the opening doors provided more and more space for the corpses to come in; soon they would be surrounded as they flooded in from all sides, and then they’d be fucked. “Red,” Scalli called over the link, his voice carrying through the connection like the very voice of a very worried god. “Get your ass in here, please, we gotta close the door!”

  A few seconds passed without answer, and Scalli called again – still, there was no response. Bobbi shook her head and dropped down to one knee. “Sorry, Red,” she whispered to herself as she shut her eyes tight, and reached out with her augmented mind for the door controls. She engaged them with adept mental fingers, then replicated the security wall that she had pierced before – nothing to hold them back forever should someone want to hack it, but there was no time for masterpieces. When she snapped back into consciousness, the doors were beginning to contract once more, and for a moment it seemed that they would be saved. But then the doors began to slow as the sheer volume of ruined corpses piled between them began to gum up the works, becoming horribly ground beneath them. And then – incredibly – the corpses began to aid the fallen in keeping the door braced; many pairs of strong white hands forced back the slabs, able to stay the closure through sheer numbers. The xsiarhotl had become a seething mass ahead of their flickering guns, filling the gaps faster than they could exchange magazines.

  Bobbi looked into a sea of silent faces, the emotionless death which boiled from every container beyond the gap, and it was then that she felt real fear that they were all going to die. As they backed further away from the doorway and the dead began to force their way through, she believed that they would. When her gun clicked empty at last, she knew it would be so. She pulled her father’s knife from the inside of Tom’s coat, knowing that it would not save her, and prepared once more for the end.

  “Well, boys and girls,” Mason, shouted over the chattering of their gunfire, “it’s been nice knowing the two of you.”

  The words pulled Bobbi back. “What?”

  “I said it’s been nice knowing you!” Mason let Violet slip from his arm and slide gently to the floor. “Gonna take care of this. Get that door closing again.” He reached behind him, to the small bundle on his back, and pulled free the satchel charge he had been carrying.

  Bobbi clutched the knife hard in her hand as Scalli peeled back another rank of the corpse-machines. “You can’t do that,” she called, her eyes wide as she realized what he was going to do. “No!”

  “Red ain’t coming,” Mason said. He smiled at her, but his voice was etched with resignation. “Besides, this old man has seen enough action to fill two lifetimes. Scalli, clear me a path. I’m gonna get their attention.”

  Without a word, Scalli tossed his rifle to Mason, who dropped the charge and laid into the charging shamblers with both guns. Feet braced, teeth clenched, he sprayed rounds until Scalli could unlimber his support gun once more and spin it up again. As the doors continued their agonizing closure and the corpses began to boil through in earnest, Scalli’s big gun began spewing fire into them on full automatic. There was no pretense of conserving the remainder of his ammunition, now. For a moment, Bobbi stared as their combined firepower tore a wide swath through the horde, splattering the deck with a fresh torrent of white, wondering just how many rounds were lost in his backpack and awed by the sudden and desperate storm of carnage. Then, Mason dropped his guns, picked up the explosive and a detonator from his belt, and charged.

  The next moments came as a blur to her, like individual images clipped out of a magazine. Mason running toward the howling mass; Mason diving into the path that Scalli had freshly blown through the crowd, making it past the doors; the white hands closing in on him; the grin on his face, knowing and terrified; the mass turning to converge on him, turning its attention on him all at once. The doors sealed shut just as his face vanished beneath the tide, and he was lost to them forever. The bomb didn’t even go off.

  Bobbi stared at the black portal, drowned in shadows and the dim glow of the factory lamps, and felt her face burn. They had lost Mason, and most likely Redeye – the sole agency of salvation that they had. They were trapped, and they were doomed. “Not like this,” she whispered, a prayer and a statement of defiance all at once. “Not like this.”

  The doors could provide no reply.

  Unlike Freida’s passing, Mason’s death could only be mourned for a moment. Priorities were engaged in the shocked way of those who were still in danger despite the loss of a comrade; they were alive, and apparently secure for the moment until the corpses found a way to get in. All the same, there were tears brimming in her eyes as she scanned the dark corridor, trying to get a grasp as to what fresh chambers of Hell they were now caught between. Behind them, there was death and the corpses of at least Mason, if not Redeye as well. Their whole reason for being here – gone. No understanding of where they were, what they were facing ahead; the room on the other side could be empty or it could be filled with more sentries prepared to finish them off or worse.

  “Bobbi.”

  “Hmm?” She turned at the sound of Scalli’s voice, blinking the angry mist away. “Yeah?”

  Scalli was crouched down next to Violet, looking up at Bobbi with concern. His face was drawn as he looked over the fallen woman, hollowed with loss. He had taken off her armored vest and pulled the undershirt below to just under her breasts; a wide and ugly bruise was blossoming across her ribs. “You with us, honey? You all right?”

  “No.” Bobbi felt her guts flowing through a drain in space to some distant, horrid hinterland. “No, not really.”

  “I can imagine.” Scalli frowned past Bobbi at the tomb-machine, then looked back at her. “Listen, he did what was necessary.”

  “The bomb didn’t go off,” she said in a small, dark voice. “He might as well not have…” She took a deep breath, forced the scream she wanted to let out down into the bottom of her stomach. “Is she gonna be all right?”

  “She’s fine, as best as I can tell.” He gestured to Violet’s body, which lay there as peaceful as if in death. “I can’t see any damage other than this bruise. The armor’s built to take blows like that, even a clotheslining like she got.” Scalli pulled a narrow pouch from his belt. “I’m going to dose her up and get her going.”

  “Yeah…” Her voice trailed off, and Bobbi watched as Scalli drew a pneumatic injector from the pouch, pressed it against the side of Violet’s neck, and then followed it up with another. She lay there for a moment as the chemicals coursed through her body
, and then in an eerie parallel with the corpses beyond the door her blue eyes snapped open and she let out a gasp of pain.

  “Vi,” Scalli said, flipping up his visor and looking down into her face. “You’re here, girl, it’s all right. You’re safe.”

  Violet lay there for a long moment, staring up at the ceiling; her muscles tensed in an all-over wince of agony that lasted only for the few seconds it took for the painkillers to kick in. Then she relaxed with a soft sigh, collected herself, and struggled to sit up. “Fuck,” she breathed, looking down at the bruise on her chest with the slight glazing of the dope in her eyes. “I think I got my chest caved in.”

  “Nothing so bad as that,” said Scalli with a grunt. “You’re fine except for the bruise, but you’ll sure hurt like a fucker.”

  “Glad I didn’t fight you on that body armor then,” Violet said with a dazed blink. She took a deep breath and pulled down her t-shirt. “Where’s Harry at?”

  Bobbi and Scali said nothing.

  “Oh.” Violet frowned. “What happened?”

  Bobbi told her, and Violet shook her head. “Jesus,” she muttered. “Poor guy. Well, the Eye will no doubt be with us soon enough. We can stick those fuckers up their own asses.”

  “Violet,” Scalli began, but Bobbi lifted her hand to hush him.

  “She’s on the other side of the door,” Bobbi said. “And she’s not responding on the radio. I hate to say it, Vi, but she might be dead.”

  Violet only shook her head again, and tried to get up. “If she were dead,” she said as Scalli helped her to stand, “I’d know it.” She tapped her head. “In here. We all have status implants – she knows our status, and we know hers. Part of joining her little army. She knows how we’re doing, we know if she’s alive.”

  Bobbi looked at Scalli a moment. “What about the others? I mean, Red felt them dying…”

  “Yeah,” said Violet, nodding once. “That’s why we can only sense her. If I felt everyone else dying off, it’d make me crazier than I already am.”