by Russ Linton
But I can’t.
Every hope I have of finding her is in that backpack: the thumb drive, the laptop. I lose those, and there’s no hope. And the book, that’s in there too, the only thing I have left from her.
“…thick, premium coating that protects against harmful UV radiation, insulates, and provides ultra-bright colors with one-coat coverage…”
I grab the nearest can of miracle paint this guy is spazzing about and a church key from the paint desk. I race the row of street-facing windows, running perpendicular to the aisles. Through the glare on the windows, only ghostly motions are visible outside, and sirens wail in the distance. Headlights flash next, followed by the hiss of heavy-duty brakes.
I grab onto the shelf. As a toddler I had my own special powers. Mom said I’d climb stuff, make ladders out of the drawers and run around on the kitchen counters. Once, I got on top of the refrigerator where Mom hid my old pacifier. She called me Nips, after the monkey in Swiss Family Robinson. Climbing these shelves should be cake.
With a gallon of super paint.
With the entire aisle being rattled by an angry drone trying to reach my backpack.
Halfway up, I remember they also used Nips as a food taster. To make sure stuff they foraged wasn’t going to make them sick or kill them.
Yeah. Not cake.
Despite the difficulties, I make it up the backside of the shelf. About three feet of crawlspace exists between the top and the ceiling. The shelf continues to shake as I push through a gap between fuzzy rolls of insulation.
It’d be more fun to roll in poison ivy. Every inch of my skin, clothed or not, prickles under invisible thorns. Crawling only makes it worse.
My tattered backpack pops into view, inches from a clawed appendage anchored to the top shelf. Fumbling with the key, I start to loosen the lid on the paint. A whole hardware store, and this is the best idea I’ve got—straight out of a fucking cartoon.
The upper deck lurches with a tortured crack. The shelf sags, folding inward under the pull of the drone’s arm. Everything slides—me and the backpack included. Bales of pink, fuzzy insulation disappear over the edge. Grabbing the shelf with one hand, I manage to hook the backpack under a heel before it topples to the floor. The wire handle from the gallon of paint slips. Caught in the last rigid bend of my fingers, all the weight settles in a thin, stabbing line.
I let go of the paint can. At the last second, I direct it with a solid kick from my free foot. The loosened lid pops free and paint splatters across the multifaceted eyes. With both hands, I grab the shelf, twist, and secure the backpack.
I can almost see the subroutines firing in the blinded drone, searching for an appropriate response. A second arm snakes up from below, then a third. With a buzzing hiss, the pincers retract and small round ports appear in the palms.
Oh shit.
My flailing legs shake loose a bale of insulation that slides toward the blinded drone. With a wild, backward kick I send the backpack tumbling into the opposite aisle. A high-pitched whine fills the air, and tufts of insulation ride glowing tracers. Bullets sear through the shelf. Grabbing a bale of insulation, I dive to the far side.
My insulation ride strikes the concrete floor with the slap of a painfully failed cannonball. Air floods out of my lungs on impact. I roll, gasping on the cold floor.
Tracers continue to streak in javelins of orange fire above. They punch through the insulation, pushing out thick, pink cores that break apart and trickle down. Vision blurs. Sound fades. There’s only the strangled wheeze of my lungs. Maybe now I’m free.
A distant horn sounds. Through the threaded haze of pink snow, lights flash. An engine growls.
I try to look toward the light. An arm’s length away is the backpack. My backpack. My chance to end this bullshit. My chance to know the truth.
Light spreads across the store window and for a split second I see two distinct globes. The growl becomes a frenzied wail and the horn a steady blast. A big white box truck barrels toward the windows, aiming right for the aisle with the blind, backpack-obsessed robot.
I grab the shoulder strap of the pack and run down the aisle. Away from the windows. Away from the flying glass.
Doors, people. Doors!
Chapter 19
We’re rattling down the highway in Emily’s beat-up Bronco. This beast’s suspension is straight out of a covered wagon. Everything hurts, again, and I’m reminded of this fact on a regular basis by the ride. But that’s not the worst problem. With each little bump, my skin screams.
“It itches so fucking bad!”
Every inch of skin I have, had, or might grow in the future squirms and prickles as though I’ve been buried in a nest of ants.
I remember getting halfway down the aisle and the world exploding, and next, Emily was dragging me out the newly installed drive-thru. I might’ve even passed out. Not sure. It all seems like a blur of pink fuzz. Dreaded, horrific, pink fuzz. I should have let the robot shoot me.
Emily casts worried looks, finally forcing out a breath she’s probably been holding since she gunned that dude’s box truck through the store window and into the backpack-obsessed robot.
“You’ve got to think!” Her shrill voice does not help the constant prickly, tingly, writhy, please-make-it-stop feeling.
“I don’t…” squirm “…know…” twitch “…what you mean.”
“Damn it, Spence! You attacked a piece of military hardware with a can of paint!”
“High quality, single-coat, UV resistant.” I jam a hand down the back of my jeans and itch furiously as I add, “It protects and beautifies.”
“Are you serious? Think, Spence!”
“I’m completely serious…” thrash “…I’d die to be coated in it right now!” There’s sympathy in her eyes but I can tell she’s not going to give this up, so I plainly say, “I did what needed to be done.”
“What needs to be done is you staying alive!”
“I needed that data.”
“Tell me, how are you going to find your father if a robot blows your head off?” She shakes her head and says, “You’re exactly like him.”
“What?” I stammer as I rake my fingernails down my back.
“Your father. You’re just like him!”
“No. No way! I bet he’s impervious to itching!”
“Exactly like him,” she repeats, with much less sympathy this time.
“No!” There’s a twitch on my upper thigh. Did it really get through my jeans? Does this shit move? “No!”
She’s shocked by the emphatic scream, but shakes her head and keeps at the lecture. “Racing off into the nearest mess without a thought for yourself or what anyone else might be feeling—”
“Wait a minute! If I hadn’t left,” My God, the bottoms of my feet are itching! How the… “…the robot would’ve hurt you.”
“It was probably after you, Spencer. How can you not get that after what we saw on the news? He surrendered because of you.”
A silence descends filled only by the rumble of the engine and scrape of blunt fingernails on skin.
“It wanted the laptop,” I gasp. For an instant, the itching seems under control.
“How do you know?”
“I dropped the backpack and it left me alone.”
“That forum you posted to, that got tracked, I bet.” She thankfully says this without sounding too satisfied.
“No, I covered my tracks. The site is crazy hard to find.”
“Fine, how else did the killer robot find us?”
We hit another bump, and every subdued inch bristles with fresh itching. I lean back and try to focus. Or meditate. Some kind of yoga guru shit. Yeah, doesn’t work.
“What about your friend?” She says slowly between the fresh string of curse words I’m polluting the air with. “The one who’s going to help with the code.”
“Eric? No way. He doesn’t even know Dad’s an Augment.” I dig my fingers into my scalp, chasing an elusive twitch. �
�Who would he tell anyway?”
“Maybe he’s got new friends? It’s been a long while since you’ve seen him.”
She’s right, and his reaction online was… weird. But there’s no way Eric would do that. I’ve got to believe there’s at least one person I can trust. “C’mon. He’s just another kid, right?” I have to force that last part out as a fresh storm of itching erupts. “Oatmeal! I read something about oatmeal!”
“What?”
“You rub it on? Swim in it? Stops itching!” I grab a handful of skin on my side and squeeze. “Tell me we’re going to see that Quaker bastard!”
“We’ll get help, soon.”
“No! No! Now!”
Emily glances out the window, frustrated. “We’re not quite there. Forty minutes, tops.”
“Then here!”
“Hang in there.” Emily squints at a passing road sign. “We’re close to the university. I could swing by the office, drop off the few samples I have. Keep things business as usual. But is that even safe right now?”
“I don’t care about safe. How many times…”
Emily’s quiet, her face fading in and out under passing headlights. I clasp my hands together until my fingers start turning colors then close my eyes and think happy thoughts. Kiddie pools of oatmeal. Cold ice cubes on my skin. Hydrocortisone. Calamine! That’s right, that’s the stuff. “Drive faster.”
*
The George Mason University biochem lab is pretty much what I would expect from a top-notch research facility. Cabinets with glass doors line the walls, filled with opaque containers, their labels turned squarely toward the room. Others hold tubes and vials along with a bunch of technical equipment I’ve never seen. Recessed workstations dot the spaces between all the cabinets. It’s a nerd playground.
In one corner, there’s a glass partition that houses that bad boy Emily mentioned at her apartment: the electron microscope. A large vertical cylinder studded with dials, the microscope platform attaches to a workstation with two monitors.
Emily marches across the room and starts digging through a row of lockers, “What size are you?”
“What?”
“Pants, shirt. What size?” She’s pulling clothes out and checking tags, returning them without bothering to close the doors before she moves on to the next.
“Medium,” I lie. After a certain age, you get tired of saying “small”. “Pant size, whatever you can find.” Good luck with that. I usually have to find a belt and roll them up anyway. The college guys that probably use those lockers aren’t lamenting the loss of adjustable straps in kid clothes.
With as little movement as possible, I place my backpack on an empty table. The itching is only really bad now when my clothes shift. It’s why I refused help while limping up the stairs. Maybe Emily thinks I was acting tough, but really, I needed complete control over the movement of my clothes. “Hey, that was badass, back there.”
Emily twists my direction for a split second and goes back to peeking in lockers. “What do you mean?”
“The store. The truck.”
She doesn’t respond right away. “You kidding? It was insane. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“How’d you get that guy’s truck anyway? Was he…”
She holds up a pair of sweatpants between us and squints. Her hands are shaking. “He was fine. A little shocked, but fine.”
I nod.
“This will have to do,” she says as she crosses the room, glancing out the windows. “Ever been in a Decon room?”
“No. Went to Comic-Con once. That was freaking awesome.”
“This, this is not nearly as awesome.” She disappears into another locker and grabs a collared shirt. “I need your clothes.”
My eyes lose focus, and my mouth stops accepting signals.
Emily’s business-like demeanor shifts, and her mouth bursts into a fierce grin as her eyebrows swoop upward. “You’re blushing! And speechless!” she gasps. “God, I need to remember how to do that!” The delight in her face makes my cheeks burn even more.
“Uhhh…” I grunt in an unsuccessful attempt to refute the “speechless” part.
“Come on,” she says, and jogs by with the scavenged clothes draped on her arm. “I don’t have keys to the gym and it’s one in the morning. Not many options, but we’ll get you taken care of.”
My anti-itch shuffle doesn’t keep pace, but I don’t get too far behind. She stiff-arms her way through a set of double-hinged doors. I follow, carefully avoiding contact with the doors on the return swing.
We enter another stark lab room, but this one’s got a weird, ceiling-height caterpillar tent in the center. She pulls aside an opening in the first section and I see that the whole tent hangs on a circular rod suspended from the ceiling. She points inside. “Strip.”
I gulp. Her finger raises to point at the far side, where a second parted curtain reveals a chrome shower tree and a floor drain. “Flush.” She then raises the fresh clothes to eye level. “Cover.”
I begin to roll up my sweatshirt. She turns, heads to the far end of the tent chain, and drops the fresh clothes. “I’m going to run to my office, I’ll be right back.”
As soon as she’s out the door, I tear off my clothes and fling them aside even before entering the “stripping” tent. The shower head at the flush station isn’t any more than a shiny pimple, but it’ll do. I smash the button and scream.
She could’ve said it was cold water. Icehole-bunker-on-a-bad-day cold. It doesn’t matter. Undeterred, I take the spray full-on, and it strikes with enough force to leave little waves of skin in its wake. The pressure also makes me incredibly familiar with the location of every bump and bruise I’ve collected over the past few days, too. Between the cold and the pain, I’m positive I sound like a wounded monkey. But the itching is going away. That’s worth all the pain in the world.
The shower dribbles to a stop and I tiptoe into the next section. My scavenged clothes lie next to a towel on a small table. I should be feeling miserable—dripping wet, beat up, half-frozen. But I’m not.
Strangely, the world feels normal, for the first time in days. The curtained walls form a tight space. A chrome showerhead drips behind me. Goose pimples pucker on my skin. It’s so close to home. Well, the bunker.
How messed up is that? The bunker: my new gauge for “normal”.
A ticking sound creeps through the room. A noise that couldn’t have been heard over the shower spray, or my squealing for that matter. I don’t remember if I could hear it when I started or not.
The doors clack. I slip into a very loose pair of sweats, cinching the waist to the point I have to tie the cord in a knot and tuck it away somewhere around my knees.
Emily calls out, “I’ve heard primate mating calls that were more attractive.” See. A monkey. There’s the start of a snort but then silence, and the weird ticking takes over. “What’s this?”
I slip into the shirt and slide through the curtain. “I don’t know. Wasn’t it going on when we came in?”
“No.” Emily crouches over one of the tables where my Giants sweatshirt landed. She moves the shirt around and the time between clicks shrinks. “Strange.”
“What is it?”
“Geiger counter.”
“No way!” I watch as she puts the pants I was wearing next to the counter and the clicking increases again. “I’m, what, radioactive?”
Maybe I will be tossing cars soon. Or cookies.
Emily picks up the counter and starts exploring my stuff, testing distances, ranges. She checks me and comes up blank.
“The trip in the pod?” I ask hopefully.
“Pod’s shielded,” she mumbles as she methodically picks through my backpack.
“Well, there was the time I opened the robot and checked out its guts.” I say this with ripping-off-a-Band-Aid speed.
Emily barely swallows an instinctive response and maintains an attempt at a neutral tone, “Go grab your backpack.”
Through the swinging doors and up the hall, I return with the pack in seconds and she places it at a workstation. The Geiger counter clicks ferociously as she dangles the wand inside. “Okay, then.”
“We’re not going to get cancer, or lose our hair or anything?”
“Sieverts aren’t that high, but this isn’t normal.”
Sorting through the contents, she quickly narrows the source of the radiation down to the laptop and the attached sat phone. The clicking blurs into a rapid pulse. She looks on, confused.
“I’d like to point out, that’s your stuff.” Frozen in thought, Emily ignores my jab. “What do you think it is?”
“Not sure.”
“Any way we can find out?”
She snaps on a pair of latex gloves and carefully arranges the backpack’s contents on the table. “Maybe, but we shouldn’t stay in one place too long. Besides, our flight to San Fran is waiting.”
“Nice. That was quick. How?”
“I’ve got a friend, he owns a plane.” She splays my Giants sweatshirt across the table next to the laptop. I tense up, waiting for her to pin it down and reach for a scalpel.
“That’s my favorite shirt, you know.”
She only continues to wave the counter, adjusting knobs and listening carefully to the clicks and beeps. “If that’s the point of first contact, based on decay and what you’re telling me, it doesn’t make sense that it’s stronger on the laptop.” My stomach sinks as she wiggles the end of the sleeves. My favorite shirt, contaminated by robo-guts.
“Unless it was on your laptop first. Any way to figure that out?”
“We don’t have time for a thorough test. We need to keep moving.”
“What about that electron microscope? Think we could see whatever is there?” Flicking off the Geiger counter, Emily chews on her bottom lip. An almost pained expression scrunches her face and I try to persuade her, “C’mon. You know you want to play scientist.”
Emily rolls her eyes but the tight expression doesn’t change. “I can’t explain this. There’s no way the radiation would transfer with that kind of strength from simple contact with the shirt.”
