by Matt Forbeck
“Then why the fuck the fucking bomb?” asked Barrera. Despite the coarseness of his language, he bore no tone of anger in his voice, only irritation.
Samuel came to Brother Fredrik’s rescue.
“Because, Corporal Barrera, one of us is going to put the bomb inside the Machine.”
“‘The Deliverer,’” Duval said. This time she had no trace of sarcasm in her voice.
“That’s right.” The fact that she’d made the connection impressed Samuel. It meant she’d been listening and thinking about what he’d said, not just tearing it apart.
Barrera shook his head in mock dismay. “Who drew that pendejo?”
“I did.” Samuel said the words with as little emotion as he could. He didn’t know for sure that he was the Deliverer, although he suspected that was the case, but he was willing to don that mantle either way.
Samuel looked at each of the soldiers in turn and saw new respect for him in their eyes. He’d gone from being the man who’d hired them to being their leader, and unlike their corporate masters, he’d shown he was ready to lead from the front.
Sensing he had a prime moment to finish his briefing, Fredrik began speaking again.
“We’ve interpreted key passages in the Chronicles, and they correlate to an archaeological site here, in Canaan.” He pointed to a spot on a large map, right at the eastern edge of a large and wide sea. “We believe there’s an entrance to a series of caves, and these caves lead to the Machine. Kind of a back door.”
Barrera grinned at the words back door. Samuel decided he didn’t want to know what kind of double entendre the man was enjoying.
MacGuire craned his neck for a better look at the map, then turned to Fredrik. “That is a very handy book, but I’ll hazard we’ll do some killing on our way down. Does your Chronicle offer any suggestions there?”
Fredrik started to shrug, but then one of the soldiers answered MacGuire’s question.
“I can,” said Oberleutnant Steiner.
22
Mitch already hated this. The monk—Brother Samuel—had talked a good game, but the operation stank of failure. They hadn’t even left the damned monastery yet, and Mitch could already see it going a dozen ways wrong. Now the Cog from that first night against the mutants, the one who had tried to slice him to pieces with a knife, was leading him and the rest of their motley crew down into the monastery’s frozen bowels, deep in the heart of the mountain.
The Brotherhood had paid a handsome price for his services, though, and Mitch wasn’t about to back out of the deal. At first he had wondered if this all was too good to be true. Two tickets for offworld transport landing in his lap, just when he needed them? And all he had to do was save the world—or die trying.
The tickets had seemed real enough, although Mitch hadn’t had a way to confirm that before he’d had to leave. The best he could do was leave them with Addy and hope that she managed to get to the transport in time. He’d watched from the shadows of her building’s central courtyard as she’d opened the door to look for him. Failing to find him, she’d broken down on her threshold and wept. She knew what the tickets were and what they meant. She’d get Grace to safety if there was a way.
Now, though, Mitch wondered if he hadn’t gotten the raw end of the deal. It was one thing to risk his life for a paycheck—he did the same thing for Capitol every day—and another to throw it away. At least his superiors at Capitol made some attempt at having a workable plan. Brother Samuel seemed to have only hopes and prayers.
That and the Brotherhood’s connections. Capitol had granted Samuel’s request to second Mitch to his task force without hesitation. What the Cardinal wanted, the Cardinal got, especially when it only involved giving up a corporal and a sergeant for this fool’s errand. Mitch suspected that no one at Capitol thought Samuel had a chance in hell of success, but it wasn’t worth angering the Cardinal over a couple soldiers’ lives.
Steiner called a halt as he reached the door to a cell. They’d passed several like it on the way here, but this was the one he wanted. Brother Fredrik hustled forward with a set of keys and fumbled with them for a minute before managing to unlock the door.
“Courtesy of the Bauhaus Corporation,” Steiner said as he held the door wide.
The team filed in past Steiner. El Jesus had to duck to avoid hitting his head on the door. Mitch felt tempted to lean into the Cog with his shoulder as he passed him, but he resisted.
Inside, Mitch couldn’t tell the size of the room. A circle of light pooled on the ground several feet into the room, cast by a single lamp set into a barred fixture in the ceiling. Beyond that lay only darkness and who knew what. They could have been standing in a cavern or a closet.
No one said a word. Mitch watched how they moved: padding in on stealthy feet, spreading out in either direction. They might never have worked together before, but—with the exception of Fredrik, who hung back behind the open door—they were all professionals. They knew what they were doing.
“Keep to the near wall,” Steiner said.
As the words left the oberleutnant’s lips, a mutant warrior lunged out of the darkness and into the pool of light.
Juba had his pistol out before any of the others even touched their weapons, and he had a fistful of bullets in it before they could cock their guns. He stepped forward as he fired, his shots hitting closer to the monster’s center as he went.
The slugs slammed into the mutant and ripped huge chunks of flesh from its bones. It kept charging, not slowing for a moment or noticing a thing. Only the chains around its arms and neck finally brought it to a halt inches from Juba’s face.
Mitch had seen the mutants on that night when they’d lost Nathan, but they’d been like sharks in the sea of mists. He’d never gotten more than half a glance at any of them. Here, under the light, he finally got a good look at one of them, and he wanted to vomit.
It looked like a man—probably once had been one—but only in a twisted, horrible way. Its eyes were black, as if the pupils had exploded and splattered across their insides. It was bald, and its skin looked greasy and gray.
Something black flowed in the mutant’s veins—or sat there unmoving. Mitch could see the dark lines of the violated blood vessels snaking beneath the monster’s hide.
Both of the mutant’s forearms terminated not in hands but in boneblades, much like the one Mitch had chopped off this creature’s cousin on that dark and hateful night. In the light, it looked like the blades had grown straight out through the mutant’s flesh, and the tarry black stuff showed where the blades had punctured through it. The edges of the blades were serrated, and both were covered with dried dark red blood.
Mitch had expected the mutant to show all the emotion of the dead. Instead, its features were twisted into a waxy mask of rage. It didn’t want to just kill everyone in the room. It wanted to slaughter them and tear them apart into unrecognizable pieces.
Pulling on a metal gauntlet, Steiner stepped up and gestured toward the thrashing mutant like a carnival barker at a sideshow. He showed a strange mixture of pride and revulsion tempered with an infectious curiosity like that of a biologist explaining his latest dissection.
“As you see, individual bullets are largely useless.”
To punctuate his claim, Steiner punched the mutant across the face with his armored fist. Chunks of the creature’s cheek splattered onto the floor, but it did not seem to notice.
“Mutants don’t feel pain or go into shock.”
Mitch scowled. He didn’t like being this close to the mutant, and the way Steiner abused the creature turned his stomach. He saw Samuel look away.
Duval leaned in close to the mutant and cocked her head to one side as she peered at it. The creature was close enough for her to feel its fetid breath on her face. She stared at its wounds, at the places where the flesh had been blasted away, a question forming on her pouty lips.
“How can they move at all?” she asked.
The mutant kept up the p
ressure on its chains, straining tirelessly against them. The links creaked with the effort of keeping the creature in check.
“There’s changes to the mitochondria which boost myofascial release,” Steiner began. He cut himself off when he noticed the blank looks on the faces of everyone in the room but Fredrik, who still stood half cowering behind the door.
Steiner scowled for a moment, searching for the right phrase in his lightly accented English.
“Cut a chicken’s head off. Watch it dance.”
The others nodded their understanding, although few—perhaps none—of them really got it. The answer was too pat for Mitch. If you cut the chicken’s head off and ripped off parts of its wings, it couldn’t move its wings. Something else was going on here, something Steiner’s Bauhaus scientists couldn’t quite explain.
Of them all, Mitch noticed, only Brother Samuel seemed to have no questions. As a man of faith, he already had all the answers. Mitch just hoped they were the right ones.
“How’d you capture this thing?” MacGuire asked.
Steiner rubbed his hand against his gauntlet, warming to the subject. “Our scientists requested a subject for tests. We went out with shocksticks and nets. The sticks were useless, and those blades tore our nets like paper.” He allowed himself a small smile. “We finally pinned this one under a tank.”
MacGuire shook his head in disbelief. He spoke in a voice filled with reverence. “How many men did you lose?”
“Didn’t count.”
The Cog’s dismissal of the price his men had paid to bring him this prize disgusted Mitch. Steiner reminded him of a big-game hunter he’d met in the Venusian jungles once. The fat pig of a man had taken great pride in the giant hunting cats he’d felled, but he never mentioned the number of people who’d died flushing the damned things into the open for him.
“What’s the fastest way to kill them?” Duval asked.
“Catastrophic tissue damage,” Steiner said, ticking the recommended methods off like a list. “Automatic small-arms fire, usually a clip or more. Explosives.”
El Jesus patted his shotgun. “Willy-petes?”
The Cog raised his eyebrows at the corporal’s peculiar choice in specialized shells for his weapon. “White phosphorus? Of course.”
Steiner would have gone on, probably at great length, but the groaning of the mutant’s chains finally twisted to a scream as the main length, which anchored all the rest to the far wall, snapped.
The mutant lunged forward, and the soldiers scattered. They all went for their guns, and Mitch wondered if the greatest danger in the room would be from the mutant or from the soldiers shooting at it and hitting each other.
Duval blocked the mutant’s first attacks with her armored forearms, parrying the mighty blows. But the force of the slashes knocked her back and finally off her feet.
Before any of the others could squeeze off a single shot in their defense, though, the grim and silent monk with the swords—Mitch thought he’d heard Samuel call her Severian—skinned her blades. They flashed at the mutant faster than the eye could follow, and the creature dropped to the ground.
Both of the mutant’s arms and one of its legs lay separated from its body, which writhed among its pieces on the floor.
“And swords,” Steiner said, finishing his checklist.
Severian spun her blades, flinging the oily black gore from them, cleaning them with her speed. She sheathed them with the same smooth motion she’d used to draw them, then fell silent again, like a clockwork toy that had completed its preprogrammed routine.
Mitch knelt next to the mutant and prodded the creature with his pistol. He half expected the thing to bound up on its remaining leg and try to bite him. Or for the severed limbs to snake back to its body and reattach themselves.
Instead, the fire in the mutant’s eyes died. As the black sludge flowed from its wounds, its pupils returned to a human color, and the rage melted from its face.
Then its mouth worked open, and it said something in a horrible whisper.
“Help me…”
Mitch stared at the man dying before him, trying to grasp what all this meant. He knew one thing for sure, though. “This guy’s still alive.”
23
It wasn’t that Mitch hated churches—just the people in them. He had nothing against the buildings themselves and could appreciate them for their architecture and decor. He knew that a great deal of thought and care went into evoking the proper symbolism in every element of the monastery’s chapel. The color of the carpet, the angles of the pews, even the height of the altar—it all meant something.
He just didn’t give a fuck about it.
He watched from the back pew in the chapel as the other soldiers all knelt before the altar. A monk named Brother Henrik presented El Jesus with a bit of communion bread, then continued down the line.
For a moment Mitch felt a tinge of jealousy. He wanted to be up there with the others, joining them in the sacrament, in the community that it helped build between them, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It would have been easy to fake it, to take his place in line and mouth the words that the others all spoke in unison. He’d known many soldiers who did that before every battle. He’d once asked El Jesus how he could believe in the Cardinal’s teachings after everything he’d seen. The big man had shrugged and said, “’Cause I fucking do.”
Nathan had chipped in then. “You don’t see the beauty in the world anymore, Mitch?”
“There’s plenty of beauty outside of a church. I don’t need a dusty old book to show me that.” He’d shot Nathan a surprised look. The two of them talked about many things, but they usually managed to avoid the subject of faith.
“What the hell you talking about anyhow?” Mitch asked. “You’re a condom converter.”
“The fuck?” said El Jesus.
“He converted so he could get married and quit wearing rubbers.”
Nathan gave Mitch a grim look at that, and Mitch wondered if he had not only crossed the line but pissed on it as he went by.
“Don’t give me that,” he said to Nathan. “I knew you before. You never saw the inside of a church unless you were chasing someone into it.”
“That doesn’t mean I didn’t pray.”
“We all pray in the trench,” El Jesus said.
“Not your top,” Nathan said.
“No shit?” The big man sized Mitch up once more. “Bullshit! He just keeps his mouth shut when he does it.”
Mitch had laughed it off then, let it slide. But Nathan had been right. He never did pray. He had no one to pray to.
The problem wasn’t that Mitch couldn’t fake it. He didn’t want to. He took religion as seriously as anyone else. He wanted to believe. He just couldn’t.
“You do not receive the sacrament?” Brother Samuel said from behind him.
Mitch didn’t jump. He’d heard the man padding up behind him. He didn’t look back either.
“I’m not hungry.”
Samuel sat down on the pew, next to Mitch. He rubbed his face and eyes and blew out a deep sigh. Mitch sensed that the man had a tremendous amount on his mind and probably could have used someone to talk to.
He supposed that was what the monk had his god for.
“The man?” Mitch asked. He didn’t have much hope for him. He’d tried to bind up the ex-mutant’s wounds with strips torn from Brother Fredrik’s robes, but not too many men could survive a triple amputation, not to mention whatever had been done to him to turn him into a mutant.
“He died.”
Mitch nodded, still not looking at the monk. “He say anything?”
He didn’t know what he was looking for. Perhaps some sort of explanation for what had happened to him and how someone might stop it.
Samuel worked up a grim smile. “He asked forgiveness.”
They let the silence sit between them for a moment while the soldiers at the altar finished their communion.
Finally,
Mitch turned to the monk, a question forming on his lips as he gave voice to what had been churning in his mind. “Do you think, inside every one of those things…?”
Samuel shrugged inside his heavy robes. “I do not know. We can only pray that God is merciful.”
Mitch suppressed a bitter laugh. “No days like that.”
With the sacrament finished up front, the soldiers stood and began to mill about. El Jesus stood looking up at the Brotherhood icon over the altar, and Mitch knew the man was offering up some last-minute private prayers of his own. He wondered if his soul was on El Jesus’s list.
MacGuire strode up the aisle and stood in front of Samuel. He was all business. Mitch wondered if the man was ever off duty.
“Brother Samuel.”
“Captain.”
MacGuire fished a slip of paper from his breast pocket and handed it to the monk. Samuel unfolded it, revealing a series of items written in a clean, steady hand.
“Please give your abbot this list,” MacGuire said. It wasn’t an order but was more than a request. “We’ll need them as soon as possible.”
Samuel scanned the list and nearly choked. Mitch had an idea about what was on it. MacGuire had already approached him about it.
“Any last requests?” the Imperial had said.
“World peace.”
“We’re working on that. Anything the brothers here can provide?”
“What do you mean, like for a last meal?”
“It’s a tradition for the condemned.”
“Glad to know you have such high hopes for our mission.”
MacGuire had smirked at that. “This is my fifth final meal.”
“This year?”
MacGuire had pursed his lips and then shaken his head. “Ever, of course.”
Mitch had nodded. “You Imperials sure have it easy.”
Brother Samuel, in contrast, didn’t seem to find the list so amusing. He tried to give it back to MacGuire, but the Imperial would not accept it.
“This is a house of God,” Samuel said, as if that ended the argument before it started.
MacGuire refused to back down. “And we’re going to die doing His work.”
