by Nick Cole
This is where you die, Darling.
“Warlord to...”
Zekes were slamming into the MRAP like falling sacks of wet cement. Thumping, beating, and below it all, a whisper-rasp growing like an avalanche of white noise coming down the mountain for everyone in the world.
How much of the world is left, Darling?
“All units!” called Steele over the net, his voice loud and strident but still eerily calm. “Button up and follow the lead vehicle. We’re leaving this facility now.”
Gunners withdrew into their hatches as the dead continued to swarm the vehicles, and suddenly Humvees were speeding off, dragging corpses under their wheels.
A shadow darted out of the gloom above and smashed into a Humvee farther up. Then it flew off into the recess of the vaulted ceiling. It was carrying one of the flailing mercs. When the MRAP passed the vehicle, its doors were torn off the hinges and zekes were swarming the interior. Blood and the bright lights of gunfire up close and personal were everywhere for a moment. Then it was just a mass of moving gray corpses like some dumpster rat pile.
“Fun, eh, Cap-i-tan?” prompted Gautreaux as he ran over a fast mover weaving in front of the vehicle’s high beams. A child in the back of the MRAP was wailing. Braddock shook his head. The guy was right. Keep it light.
“Y’know, Cap-i-tan...” Gautreaux turned down a walkway that led toward another exit, through a food court, following the speeding Humvees ahead, smashing into mall furniture and sending kiosks flying. “That was the right thing to do. Leaving people behind... That’s bad business, eh?”
Braddock said nothing.
Ahead they could see full sunlight beyond the food court as Humvees smashed through more tables and sent chairs flying.
In time the dead fell behind as they approached one of the smashed entrances to the mall. Behind him in the rearview mirror Braddock could see blurry shadows moving and darting in the heights of the gloomy mall like sudden angry hornets enraged and furious.
Chapter Forty-One
Beyond the door was a factory.
At least to Holiday’s eyes that’s what it looked like. Some kind of high-tech automated car assembly plant. Except that everything was an antiseptic white. Or gleaming steel.
Nothing moved. Everything was motionless but on the verge of somehow springing into precision mechanical life. Holiday wove through low benches that were like operating tables where spindly hydraulic-assisted arms hovered above like the legs of mechanical spiders.
He passed racks of surgical instruments and mechanical tools. Engraved on every surface were small bar codes or long strings of hexagonal ones and zeroes.
In the distance he could see one operating station come to life. Banks of monitors suddenly flicked on with dull, barely audible, electronic thumps. Like a high-end stereo coming to life once the power had been switched on. A pulse. Then from out of nowhere, drones began to ferry various components from different parts of the lab to the operating table.
The hovering arms began to twitch and move, adjusting components, then suddenly firing hot lasers, or going in for furious bright kisses of spot welding. In seconds it became a frenetic dance of metal arms and components punctuated by high speed drills or sudden shrill bursts of precision grinding.
Holiday moved forward, one stunned step at a time.
A mechanical skeleton was beginning to take shape on the table.
Hydraulic legs. Pneumatic piston arms. Complex multi-jointed metal hands.
The hovering surgery and assembly arms worked quickly to fasten everything together.
Holiday was now rooted to the spot, watching the skeleton as the monitors above showed what could only be various testing diagnostics that seemed to come and go every few seconds. There were no words. Just more ones and zeros falling down across the screen in an almost random order that seemed on the verge of incomprehensibility.
And then Holiday’s face appeared on one monitor near the gleam-smiling titanium cranium that had just been attached and spot welded onto the spinal hydraulic assembly of the machine taking shape on the table.
It was an image capture.
Another one appeared. It was Holiday and Jesus standing at the entrance to the simulation. Holiday’s body was graphed by an electronic pulse of laser light and then what had to be measurements, but expressed in the same computer-speak of ones and zeroes, appeared across his body.
Another monitor started with a wide shot and then irised in on his arm.
The words skin match appeared on the monitor.
Another monitor showed Holiday again. Except this time he was in the video game. It was a recording from earlier. Holiday watched himself holding the automatic shotgun. He could see random sudden quick pulses of laser light scattering away from the barrel. But nothing else. No trenches of Verdun. No blood and mud and death. Just a dark charcoal gray mist surrounding everything.
Category Operation Mode: Infiltrator appeared on a screen.
And then beneath that, a small message began to flash.
Unit Incomplete: Awaiting Skin Harvest/Reclamation and Neural Imaging Download
A small monitor showed the pit where Holiday had fallen. It switched views from looking up the shaft to looking down the shaft. Then, it finally settled on a surgical table at the bottom of the shaft. Surgical arms waited motionlessly, their blades and scissors gleaming in the pale blue light.
Waiting for a corpse that would fall into their embrace. Waiting for Holiday at the end of his fall.
Unit Incomplete: Awaiting Skin Harvest/Reclamation and Neural Imaging Download
Chapter Forty-Two
“Keep calm,” someone once told Frank. “And have a plan to kill everyone.”
That someone was a mysterious Spaniard named Reyes who taught everyone in the order how to kill. He’d heard something like that from someone else. Some other killer. Now Frank would have to kill just as he’d been taught.
The Gorilla.
The Eurasian.
The Stewardess.
And Ravenhill. But Frank wasn’t counting Ravenhill. Ravenhill was already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.
The 747 banked over the clouds, turning to catch some high altitude flight corridor, the sun brightly shining through the tiny square windows in the main cabin. The sunlight reminded him of Marie. Their day at the beach. All the good things in his life.
What am I doing here? thought Frank. And if we both get killed? Jordana and myself. What? What happens to our little girl then?
Stop, he ordered himself. He’d been staring at the scotch. Thinking. Trying to figure out how to kill three other assassins onboard the trans-Pacific bound 747 now making for the west coast of the United States. And then the Pacific beyond.
It’s hard. But it’s not impossible, he thought and got up to go the lavatory at the back of the plane, intent on finding out exactly where the gorilla was sitting.
Except he isn’t.
He’s not sitting in the back of the cabin at all. He’s missing.
So, it’s going to be difficult, Frank thinks grimly and locks the bathroom door behind him.
It takes two minutes to get the forty-five assembled from the various compartments sewn into his expensive Italian suit and loafers. The silencer goes on last. But not yet. So he shoves the gun down his pants and puts the fat cylinder in his jacket pocket. When he gets back to his seat, he sees that the Eurasian girl has made her way to first class. She sits across the aisle from Ravenhill, leaning over to chat animatedly with him. Long caramel legs without shoes gently shift with each joke the old man trots out, along with billboard-sized helpings of his ego.
And after five minutes, Frank hasn’t seen Jordana or the other stewardess.
Things are going from difficult to dangerous.
After dangerous... comes fatal.
“Don’t
think about her,” he mutters, pushing away thoughts of Marie. He’s up and moving toward the galley as though to get a fresh drink. When he arrives, neither stewardess, nor Jordana, is there.
And the elevator that leads to the lower galley is down-shaft in the belly of the flying giant.
Frank is just reaching into his jacket pocket for the silencer as he readies to pull out the forty-five, when he hears Ravenhill’s nasally laugh and delicate footsteps approaching the galley along the aisle from first. The Eurasian girl gives a deep throaty giggle that ends in a wicked high soprano whoop, they turn the corner, and she’s as surprised to see Frank as Frank should be to see her.
It’s clear Ravenhill has no idea what’s going on here. He only thinks he’s about to get ridiculously lucky at altitude.
A moment later, Frank hears the galley elevator lock into place and the door swings open.
He turns and gets the butt of a gun right in the forehead.
Lights out.
***
“I thought he said we’d be using this stuff in Cambodia... to support the guerillas.” It’s Ravenhill and his normally nasal, hiccupping, self-assured academic’s voice is whining like some spoiled child. He’s afraid too. Frank can hear the fear. Loud and clear.
“Well we’ve decided to test it here. Now. Over the U.S.” Her tone, the come-hither plaything-of-your-dreams sex-kitten fantasy Eurasian girl is gone. This is all headmistress who wears the pants, and carries the guns.
That much is clear.
“Get it through your head... this is happening now, you little worm! And if you want to get off this plane before it slams into that rock, then work with us. I need the arming codes and the mixture ratios for both tanks.”
“But the plane...” whines Ravenhill. “If it explodes, it’ll destroy the contaminant. I’m almost sure of it.”
“Our data says otherwise,” lectures the Eurasian schoolmarm. “So we’re doing this. Codes... now!”
Frank’s feet and wrists are bound. He opens one eye and sees Jordana on the floor next to him. She’s bleeding and he knows in a heart that has just stopped... he knows she’s dead. Except why would her feet and wrists also be bound like his? Then he sees the barest rise in her chest.
His first thought is gratefulness. His second is that he’s going to kill the hell out of these people once he gets free.
“Manually set 001001000 on the digital switches,” begins Ravenhill reluctantly. He’s giving them codes to whatever bomb it is they want to set off. In a 747. Cruising over the top of the United States.
They’d used the word “contaminant.”
Frank’s third thought is that he’s in a lot of trouble.
When he opens his eyes, he sees the Eurasian standing over the little tweed-suited academic who’s on his knees and sweating even though it’s freezing cold down here in the belly of the giant aircraft. The other stewardess has Frank’s gun and she looks mean. The kind of mean that gets a thrill out of hurting other people.
And, wonders Frank distantly, where’s the gorilla?
Now Ravenhill is babbling about pressure ratios and mixtures.
“You realize the genetic agent and the defoliant are going to destroy that valley.”
“That’s what we were hoping for. We’re of the opinion that would be a “best case scenario” for us, Poindexter. A win, if you will,” says the Eurasian smugly.
“It’s aahhh... a watershed!” His voice is incredulous. “You’ll destroy glacier ice and California’s whole aquifer will be poisoned. Within five years, the entire west coast will be a desert wasteland. A dustbowl. I thought you guys were with the CIA.”
Frank watches as the Eurasian Headmistress nods at Mean Stewardess.
Quick as a snake, she stands back and points the pistol at Ravenhill’s head.
“N-...”
And then his brains are all over the lower galley wall.
“Well, you thought wrong,” she sneers. Then laughs. “Forgot the silencer.”
The Headmistress shakes her head and goes to the back of the galley, toward the rear of the airplane.
“Any minute now!”
And as if on cue, there’s a loud metallic clanging. As though someone has begun to demolish a steel girder. Five minutes of this, and the rear wall comes apart at the seams as the hulk that is the gorilla tears his way into the galley.
“Did you get in the cargo compartment?” asks Eurasian Headmistress.
Through eyes half shut, Frank sees Gorilla nod. Slowly.
“Good, now you two go clear the upper lounge and take control of the aircraft. I’ll go back into the hold, find the cargo, and arm the canisters. Climb to forty-five thousand and set the autopilot and glideslope for our target. I’ll get our chutes laid out and we’ll open the cargo bay. After that, it’s a long fall to all that money that’s waiting for us. Go!”
Frank hears the elevator activate on a low whiny hum. Then watches the Headmistress climb through the tear in the galley wall.
For a moment they’re alone.
No one had asked what they’re going to do with the stewardess and the guy they clocked. The two people tied up on the deck of the lower galley in the plane they’re about to crash.
I guess they know exactly what they’re going to do with us, thinks Frank. And it probably isn’t pretty.
He struggles at the bindings, but they’re done by a pro. They feel impossible to break. Frank has to fight off the hopelessness that wants to surround him.
So he continues to struggle.
“Frank,” whispers Jordana.
“Yes,” he grunts as he tries to snap the ropes which only tighten.
“I need you to break my hand.”
Frank puts everything into one last heave. Break, dammit, he screams at the bindings inside his head.
“Save it, Frank,” she says softly. “I need you to do this.”
“No!” grunts Frank.
“You’ve got to.” Her voice sounds weak. As though she’s in pain. And fading.
“Are you okay?”
“She stabbed me. I’m putting pressure on the wound with my arm and elbow. I think the bleeding has stopped.” But they both know what she really means. She hopes the bleeding has stopped. That’s what she really means.
Again, Frank silently promises to murder these people in whole new ways.
“Break my hand and I can slip the knot, Frank.”
He struggles again and knows there’s no arguing. She’s right. There’s no way to stop them unless one of them can get out of these bindings. And then defuse a bomb of some sort. Before this jet slams into the ground.
They said a rock, Frank reminds himself. A rock in California. They’re going to slam the plane into a big rock. He didn’t know California well enough to know which rock they were talking about.
He turns over on his side, knowing if the Headmistress suddenly walks back in, she’ll know something’s up. Then she’ll kill them both.
And they’ll never see...
Stop that. Right now.
He takes his wife’s hand in his.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he whispers. He’s on the verge of tears. Hot angry frustrated tears. He’s shaking with rage and he feels suddenly helpless as he takes her long slender hand and feels that it’s slick with blood.
Her blood.
Then he crushes it.
Because... Marie.
I’m happy, Daddy.
Because they have to make it back to her. They have to.
He feels Jordana go tense. Hears her stop breathing as she tries to resist the pain. Hears her holding her breath as she fights the nausea he knows she’s going through. Knows she’s fighting the blackout that’s threatening to take her. Because if she blacks out now, they’re dead.
A moment later she’s breat
hing. Crying softly. Whimpering. But breathing.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” Frank is whispering over and over as softly as he can.
He hears her murmur. “It’s okay. Everything for our little darling, right? It’s okay, my love.” She is softly sobbing because of the pain.
And Frank is convinced they’re not going to make it. That this is all too tragic. That death has made its appointment with them.
That it’s coming for them.
Jordana is wriggling. Wriggling through the ropes.
“What the...” it’s the Headmistress, and her voice is pure righteous indignation.
How dare they try to save themselves from her!
Frank rolls on his back, sees the Eurasian Headmistress climbing through the rent metal gap in the galley that leads into the dark belly of the aircraft and whatever bomb waits back there... then he rolls straight at her.
She’s moving fast to avoid him but Frank hears a leg snap as he rolls into her shin, forcing the leg in a direction it does not want to go.
She’s down on top of him, all long hair and teeth and claws, swearing and scratching. Even through the blinding pain he has caused her, she’s trying to claw his eyes out as she screams at him. Trying to kill him. In a moment she will.
Before that can happen, Jordana starts to strangle her even though her hand is broken and she’s screaming in pain, and when she finishes the Headmistress off, sightless eyes bulge in shocked disbelief at what has just happened.
A few minutes later, they’re unbound and as Frank stands, feeling blood rush to his hands and feet, he sees the dried blood along Jordana’s blue coat. They both stare at it.
“Don’t touch it. It’s stopped for now. We don’t want to open the wound,” she says in her husky Italian-accented English.
She smiles at him, seeing the worry on his face. Languidly, seductively, through the pain she winces at, she murmurs, “Don’t be so pessimistic, my love.”
They take the elevator to the upper galley.
In the galley, a drunken Asian businessman is prowling through the trays looking for scotch and muttering to himself in Japanese. Jordana ignores him and leads Frank into first class. A few of the well-to-do are reading magazines. Some are passed out. Frank looks out a window and feels the airplane begin to climb. He reaches for his gun and finds it’s not there. Of course it wouldn’t be. They’ve taken it.
