Wasteland Marshals

by Gail Z. Martin

  “I don’t think they’re ‘stalking’ him any more than the ghosts are ‘stalking’ you,” Karen replied. “Did you know that we’ve been getting one or two people every month or so coming to find the coven because they’ve suddenly found themselves with psychic gifts they never knew they had before and don’t know what to do?”

  She looked from Lucas to Shane. “In the first year after the Events, it was just a few. More the next year, and now almost a steady stream. What happened to the world changed everything. It changed us.”

  “Think of it as upgrading your subscription and being able to stream new channels. The daemons and ghosts were always there, but you weren’t receiving a clear signal. Now, there’s less interference,” Findlay said.

  “Shit,” Lucas said. “They definitely didn’t cover that in Basic Training.”

  “I’ll get a couple of my coven sisters to come over and start your training. You won’t learn it all in one sitting, but you’ll at least have some basics to practice that can help you gain control and shield yourselves,” Karen offered.

  “When do you want to start?” Shane asked, and gave Lucas a kick under the table.

  “I’m in,” Lucas added, in a voice that was less than enthusiastic.

  “Give me two hours to put out the word, and we’ll meet you here,” Karen replied.

  8

  “You want me to sit still while you attack me?” Lucas’s eyebrows practically crawled up his forehead. They had settled in a quiet room with a cozy fire and comfortable pillows for sitting on the floor. Shane felt intrigued at the opportunity to learn from the witches, but he wasn’t surprised that Lucas’s reaction was far more skeptical.

  Karen shook her head. “Not a physical attack. A psychic one.”

  Lucas quirked a thumb at Shane. “He’s the one with mojo. I just shoot things.”

  Karen shot a look at Shane for support. He just smiled and nodded, confirming what she already had probably figured out about Lucas. Shane loved him like a brother, but Lucas could be a serious asshole when he wanted to be.

  “And if you don’t learn to shield as much as possible, then you become a liability, a distraction, a target which will get your partner dead,” Karen replied evenly, narrowing her eyes in challenge.

  Shane bit back a snort, wishing he had popcorn to watch the battle of wills. Karen had nailed Lucas’s soft spot, and from the grim line of his partner’s mouth, Lucas knew it.

  “Fine. But don’t blame me if it’s a waste of time,” Lucas muttered.

  Lucas and Shane settled in, crossing their legs and getting comfortable. Even when he closed his eyes, Shane could sense Lucas’s impatience. He didn’t need to look at this friend to know Lucas was twitching—jiggling his knee, tapping his fingers, biting his lip. Lucas never sat completely still, unless he was on sniper duty. Then all of that nervous energy turned into lethal focus.

  Shane didn’t recognize the assault for what it was at first. It started slow and gentle, easily mistaken for meandering thoughts until pulling back turned difficult. He forced himself to take a deep breath and stop struggling, then gathered his resources and pushed back with an effort of will. The invasive thoughts winked out.

  Beside him, Lucas’s restlessness took on a more frantic cast, and he swore under his breath. Shane opened his eyes and saw his friend’s face twist in discomfort, while Lucas’s entire body had gone rigid with the effort of fighting off the mental incursion.

  All of a sudden, Lucas fell forward, released from the assault. The glower on his face told Shane that the other man knew he’d been let go, instead of freeing himself.

  “Now you see what I mean,” Karen said mildly. Lucas glared but wisely kept his thoughts to himself.

  “So we can use these skills to keep from being distracted by entities like the daemons?” Shane asked.

  Karen nodded. “Distraction would be the least invasive, but it could be deadly if it disrupted your focus in the middle of a fight.”

  “What kind of attack do you really think is likely?” Lucas wiped the sweat from his forehead. Despite his skeptical attitude, he looked flushed from the effort of fighting off the mental assault. That meant he was taking the training seriously, Shane knew.

  “This.”

  Between one breath and the next, Shane found himself plunged back into the chaos of the first weeks after the Events.

  Shane felt panic rise as he dialed every number in his contact list, to no avail. Even their emergency numbers got no answer. Some of those official numbers were supposed to be valid in the event of an attack, but planning had obviously fallen short of reality.

  Worse, Shane got no answer when he tried to reach his family.

  “Maybe the towers are down,” he’d said. Lucas looked up from his own phone, and the desolation on his face said everything Shane needed to know.

  “Hey, fellas,” Vinnie Scarpelli said, pointing toward the TV on the wall with a sick look on his face.

  Only one TV channel still worked, and it ran a no-frills, one-camera news marathon reporting whatever information the crew could gather. Since the internet was as spotty as the cell phones, news beyond the local area was nearly impossible to come by, and what Shane had seen merely confirmed they were all fucked.

  “We have confirmation that Washington, D.C. and several other major capital cities around the world were hit with nearly simultaneous nuclear strikes,” the haggard anchor reported. Without makeup or hairstyling, he looked as if someone had grabbed him off the street and stuck him in front of the camera. Pale and wide-eyed, he had ended up as the voice of the Cataclysm.

  “Did you hear that?” Vinnie screeched. “Bombs. Lots of them. Oh god, this is bad. This is real bad.”

  Shane stared at his useless phone as the call to his dad’s number rang without an answer...

  No! I lived this once. Not again. Shane mustered his will and slowed his breathing, taking a mental step back from the horror the vision forced him to relive. This time, instead of pushing back, he envisioned high, impervious castle walls made of thick stone. He built the wall piece by piece, until nothing remained of Vinnie, the frightened news anchor, or the memory of the day everything ended.

  Inside his mental fortress, Shane breathed a sigh of relief. The quiet was a balm, shutting out the noise and the loss. But gradually, Shane became aware that he was rocking back and forth, as the motion grew harder to ignore.

  His control snapped, the walls fell, and he realized that someone’s fingers dug painfully into his upper arm, jerking him from one side to the other.

  “Hey! Wake up!” Lucas yelled. Shane’s eyes opened, and he saw his partner’s worried face only inches from his own. “You got lost inside your head,” Lucas explained, letting go and sitting back. “I was afraid I’d get lost in all the empty space if they made me go in after you,” he added with a lopsided smirk that didn’t hide the worry in his eyes.

  “You did a little too well,” Karen said, eying Shane as if he were a puzzle. “Excellent shielding for someone without training, but if you aren’t careful, you could wall yourself away so well you can’t respond to a physical threat.”

  “Or give your partner a heart attack,” Lucas muttered. “I wasn’t sure you could find your way home.”

  Shane could see that despite his bluster, Lucas had been rattled by whatever vision Karen had plunged him into. His gaze was haunted and his jaw clenched. There had been many horrors for the witch to choose from, some worse than others, but all of them bad.

  “Have I convinced you that the need is real?” Karen asked, directing her attention to Lucas, who nodded at the same time he gave a sullen shrug. “Good. Then I’ll stop with the demonstrations and get down to work on showing you how to defend yourselves.”

  Shane and Lucas spent the next two days with the witches, who did their best to pack as much training as possible into a short period of time. Karen also brought protective amulets for both Shane and Lucas, to help safeguard them from gaining the wrong ki
nd of attention. By the end of the marathon session, both men were exhausted, but Shane felt more confident about their ability to defend themselves from a psychic assault.

  “Thank you,” Shane said as the witches rose to leave. “This is all very new to us. We really appreciate it.”

  Karen smiled. “Given what you two do, I think on the whole, your new abilities will be more helpful than not. Just remember what we taught you and come back for another lesson when you pass this way again.”

  Shane had felt certain that he was tired enough to sleep like a rock. But despite how exhausted he felt, his dreams were dark.

  Shane looked around, and realized where he was, and when. Youngstown. A year after the bombs hit Washington.

  The year the epidemics started.

  Bloated, discolored corpses lay stacked like cordwood along city streets, with nowhere to bury them, and no one to come take them away. Flies, rats, and vultures feasted, and spread disease. A new, potent strain of influenza didn’t just hit children and the elderly; it seemed to strike hardest at those in their prime. Whole families died, sometimes within a single day. Those who weren’t infected fled to save their lives, carrying contagion.

  The power grid wasn’t dependable, which hit the pumping stations, sewer treatment plants, and reservoir filtering equipment. Gasoline became too scarce to run garbage trucks, so trash piled up in the streets, next to the bodies. Modern cities weren’t designed to function without sanitation. Those who didn’t die from influenza sickened from typhus or cholera.

  Whole sections of Youngstown fell silent, filled with the dead. The decision to do a controlled burn, block by block, made sense. It just didn’t work the way anyone planned, not when a sudden storm swept in from the plains, carrying embers aloft and setting half the city on fire.

  Shane found himself trapped by the fire. He had gotten separated from Lucas and the others, and now nothing but flames surrounded him. The blaze turned Youngstown’s streets into pyres, stinking of burning refuse and charred flesh. Shane gagged, and his eyes watered from the heavy smoke. The flames hadn’t reached his section of the street, but it wouldn’t be long; he could feel the heat on his skin, stealing his breath.

  Lucas, where was Lucas? Shane thought his partner was right behind him, but when he turned back, he found himself alone.

  Shane heard the crackle of flames and distant crashes as the fire brought down buildings. An explosion rocked the street and sent bricks tumbling from a nearby facade. Cars, left behind by the dead, became bombs as the fire reached them.

  Nowhere to run, no one coming to save him. Shane knew he was going to die.

  The song called to him, and he wondered how he could hear it above the din. It touched his mind like cool water, beckoning him to follow. A narrow passageway opened between two tall buildings that were, as yet, untouched by the conflagration. The song grew louder, and with nothing to lose, Shane ventured after it.

  No words, just a melody he would never be able to remember enough to hum, and an unspoken promise of safety. Shane ran, covering his mouth and nose with his shirt as ash swirled around him. He didn’t know where the corridor led, but if he was going to die, he’d rather do it trying to escape than waiting to be burned alive.

  Then he heard it, the rush of water, and he emerged into the blessed rain of pumper trucks doing their best to hold back an inferno. His skin was red and scorched, falling embers burned his hair, and his lungs ached from the smoke, but he was alive, and as the water soaked him, he started to laugh in sheer, delirious relief.

  Shane came awake with a start. Lucas stirred from where he sat near the window, his back to the wall so he could watch the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Shane raised a trembling hand to wipe his sweat-soaked hair from his face. “I was back in Youngstown. In the fire.”

  “Shit.” Lucas gave him a look. “Was it just a dream? Or was someone trying to get to you?”

  “Pretty sure it was just a nightmare—or a memory,” Shane replied. “It didn’t feel like a vision. But in the dream, I followed a daemon’s song to find the path out of the fire. I don’t remember that…but, it’s possible? I was cut off, I didn’t know that part of the city, and I thought I was going to die.” His voice sounded wrecked. “Something made me run the opposite direction I meant to go, and that’s when I saw the alley.” Shane looked up at Lucas’s worried face. “Could it have been a daemon guiding me, even then?”

  Lucas pulled a flask from the pocket of his coat and handed it to Shane. “That time in Iraq, when we got turned around in Mosul, and I ‘figured out’ where to go?” He shook his head. “It wasn’t me. There was a ghost, a young boy, who led us out. I didn’t say anything because…”

  “Yeah.”

  This time, Lucas met Shane’s gaze. “So…what do we do now?”

  Shane closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall. “We use what the witches taught us. God knows we need every advantage we can get.”

  9

  “Did you just refer to artificial intelligence units as…feral?” Lucas looked at the IT Priest as if he had lost his mind.

  “How does that even happen?” Shane asked, looking completely lost. “I mean, most places can’t keep the electricity on for a full day. What are these bots using for power?”

  The young man, Tony, leaned back in his chair, trying to keep the long sleeves of his academic robe out of his dinner. His “patron saint” dangling from the Mardi Gras beads around his neck was a superhero action figure. “Batteries. Some of the bots had built-in solar recharging capabilities. Others can run for a long time—years—off stored power.”

  “So Siri and Alexa went rogue?” Lucas asked. “Knowing that my refrigerator was spying on me still makes me feel violated.”

  “We think the IOT is how the learning-capable bots are communicating with their lesser brethren.”

  “Lesser brethren?” Shane echoed.

  “Some of the bots were programmed to be able to adjust their tasks based on the success or failure of their actions. They were used in factories, warehouses, and the military,” the priest said. “Compare that to drone bots, like self-propelled vacuum cleaners. We think the more advanced bots have started using the IOT to co-opt the simpler mechanisms to perform tasks—surveillance, monitoring, information gathering.”

  “This is where H.A.L. tells us we’re up shit creek, right?” Lucas still wasn’t sure he was buying what Tony was saying, and a glance at Shane showed his partner’s skepticism as well.

  “Closer than you might want to think,” the wandering programmer replied. “There were rumors in the IT community that the army was working on some advanced, rather freaky AI—all very hush, hush, down at Fort Ritchie. Near where the other team of Marshals was last seen, before they disappeared.”

  “Fort Ritchie? That’s been decommissioned for a long time,” Lucas protested.

  “Officially, yes. But someone I know has first-hand knowledge that before everything went to hell, a skunkworks tech site set up in the old facility. He thought it was a shell company for a large robotics weapon manufacturer.”

  “This keeps getting worse and worse,” Shane muttered.

  Tony pulled a drawing from his messenger bag for several compact, tread-driven robots that looked a lot like breadboxes with turrets. “When Professor Brown told us to look for you two, he asked us to pass along this drawing. I copied it as best I could from the screen at the last university stop.”

  “Who gave WALL-E a machine gun?” Lucas asked. “These don’t look very complicated. From what you said before, I was expecting robot soldiers, or maybe the Terminator.”

  “Don’t underestimate them. They’re armored and carry a surprising amount of ammo.”

  “So you think these are…what did you call it? Learning capable?” Shane questioned, frowning as he studied the drawing.

  “We don’t know. This would have been classified…if anyone still was around to care about that kind of
thing. But Raven Rock isn’t far from Fort Ritchie. And if Raven Rock was a secret bunker, then it’s possible that some AI from Fort Ritchie might have had something to do with the missing enclave.”

  “It’s been three years since the Events,” Lucas said, frowning. “Why start killing people now? What’ve they been waiting for?”

  The priest met his gaze. “That’s what worries me. Because a human enemy wouldn’t have a reason to wait. If terrorists had seized the site, they’d have capitalized on the initial chaos, not waited until most of the Washington-Baltimore corridor evacuated.”

  “You think the bots are somehow running themselves?” Shane didn’t try to hide his horror.

  “It’s possible. The black ops tech company was shady as fuck—tied to arms dealers and weapons smugglers.”

  “Great,” Lucas said. “So when you said ‘feral,’ you meant that either security bots are running unsupervised on old orders, or somehow making up their own?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean,” the programmer replied. “Professor Brown wanted us to warn you that you’re heading into a clusterfuck.”

  “Same shit, different day.” Lucas sighed.

  “Brown said to tell you his hackers are working on finding out more. If we score any usable intel, we’ll send it on to Gettysburg.” He gave a sad smile. “I’d give a lot for good cell phone reception. And toilet paper.”

  “With you on both counts,” Lucas agreed.

  Even in the gray, cold November morning, the countryside on the road to Gettysburg was beautiful—rolling hillsides and open fields.

  “I know that look,” Shane said after they had ridden in silence for over an hour. “You’re scheming.”

  “Trying to figure out how to take out those security bots,” Lucas replied. “We need to get some black powder, tin cans, glass bottles, alcohol or gasoline, and cotton cloth.” He paused. “Oh, and a couple of long steel poles wouldn’t hurt.”