If there was a weak spot, it was clearly the rounded hump within which his head still survived on pumped oxygen and nutrient baths. That hump, with a slit for his eyes, sat where the turret would be on a real tank. And that slit was his world now. He was a sardine in a box atop a box inside a box inside a cave.
Tolliver suspected he was losing his mind. Most days he spent doing nothing, nothing at all, but sitting in his cell. Naturally his weapons systems were all unloaded, or he would, without the slightest question, have tried to blast his way out, even if it meant the shock waves would kill him.
He might be a cyborg, he might be a slave with a pain chip in his head, but still . . .
I am Master Sergeant Matthew Tolliver, United States Marine Corps.
Semper Fi. Always faithful, the Marine Corps motto.
But faithful to what? he asked himself bitterly. To the government that had done this to him?
And he knew he wasn’t the only one. He was a careful observer, and on testing runs either out in the cave or even out in the open air, he had seen others similar to himself, each a bit different, as if each was a new stage of development.
At least, he told himself, he was better off than the new drones he’d heard referred to by the sickeningly cruel term “baby-go-bang-bangs.” These were drones piloted by the brains of infants. The Ranch’s researchers had discovered that no computer could identify a human face with anything like the accuracy of a human brain. So infants had been . . . obtained . . . and the unnecessary parts removed, so that what was left was a baby’s head and eyes as the “pilot” of a small, quick drone that carried no weapons but its own speed and weight. The brain was trained to respond to a photograph and, once launched, would search for that face, and upon spotting it, would accelerate and ram the target with a hardened steel nose cone. The infant brain was not expected to survive. He’d caught a glimpse of an iKaze, like a quarter-scale Predator with a glass bubble nose, within which rested a small pink brain and the globes of two eyes connected to the brain by a tether of nerves and blood vessels.
So many nightmares he’d seen here. That was the worst.
Semper Fi. Always faithful. To men and women—including military officers like DiMarco—who would do that?
I, Matthew Tolliver, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the president of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.
That was the oath he had taken eighteen years ago when he enlisted at age nineteen.
But back then he’d been fully human. Back then he had trusted. He had been proud to serve. But how to remain faithful when his nation had lost its moral compass? The first part of the oath was to defend the Constitution. It was the Constitution he served, not just the people in the chain of command.
He moved his wheels and crept closer to the glass barrier. Something wasn’t right out there. Something was happening. He could barely see, but he was pretty certain that two guards were in serious trouble.
Something was happening. Something unexpected. Something that had his jailers twisting and writhing in apparent pain. He himself was distantly aware of pain, but it did not quite reach him, as if he was standing next to a rushing river, catching the occasional drop but mostly staying dry.
Once, years ago in Afghanistan, he had been on a patrol that had been cut off. Tolliver and three of his marines were in a narrow defile with snipers on high points all around. Their radio wasn’t working; they had no way to call for help. It had been hopeless, and they all knew it. And then had come the faint sound of a helicopter, and in the space of three heartbeats he’d gone from grim despair to hope.
This was like that.
His weapons systems were not loaded. He had no bullets or missiles. But he sure knew where to find them. And how to use them.
And who to kill if he got the chance.
I am Master Sergeant Matthew Tolliver, United States Marine Corps. And I will kill these bastards with no more pity than they’ve shown.
Semper Fi!
CHAPTER 13
Letting the Animals Out of the Zoo
SHADE WAS IN morph, and Cruz joined her, deciding to mimic the appearance of Dekka—first because she admired Dekka, and second because it would confuse HSTF-66 and whoever else was watching. Sadly she would not have Dekka’s power, but a Dekka sighting here would perhaps help keep the real Dekka a bit safer. Wherever she was.
“Okay,” Cruz said.
“Okay,” Malik echoed, eyes still closed. Then he opened them on the view of the Ranch spread out ahead. He formed his hands as if he meant to encompass the Ranch, holding it in a frame of fingers. He breathed deeply.
Cruz felt the invisible blast of pain that came from Malik. It was like someone had suddenly opened a dam and a huge wave was rushing past her. It did not touch her, but Cruz felt its power. And she saw and heard its effects on the men and women down in the greenbelt. Most fell to their knees, on their backs, on their sides. Others ran in wild panic, batting at their bodies as if they were on fire. All screamed.
So many different ways that people expressed agony, Cruz thought. Some high-pitched, some lower register; some a single long ululation, others cursing, and still others making animal noises. One man sounded as if he were barking.
This must be what hell sounds like.
Cruz suddenly realized how calmly she was taking this. Human beings, men and women whose only sin was enlisting and being assigned to the monstrosity that was the Ranch, were crying like babies, writhing like animals, running in panic. And her first thought had not been Those poor people! but a distant, chilly What strange sounds people make when they are in pain.
Malik nodded. “Now, Shade.”
Shade tapped the button on her GoPro and was off like a bolt from a crossbow, blowing past trees, sailing effortlessly over the writhing, desperate security men. She reached a guarded gate and used her momentum to leap over both of the fourteen-foot-tall chain-link fences. A millisecond later she was at the first building. She paused and heard a noise like something from a madman’s nightmare: screams and cries from every direction, some muffled by walls, others shrill and near.
She went in, and it was like passing through some modern interpretation of Dante’s “Inferno,” a bright-lit, neutral-colored office-building hell. Men and women lay in corridors screaming, with tendons standing out in their necks, with eyes bulging, fingers clawing at their own flesh.
She didn’t even need her speed. She could have strolled through the place eating an ice-cream cone. But she could feel that Malik had ended his brutal assault. Gradually the effects of Malik’s pain blast would lessen; people would wipe their tears and change their soiled underpants and get back to work. But having been briefly exposed to Malik’s first assault, she knew it would be some time before people were really functional. What Malik did, the power that he had, was impossible for the human mind to process easily, or easily move past. Even now the sense memory of it was like a wound in her brain, a wound that had only begun to scab over and was a long way yet from healing.
A wound I deserve.
Shade spun back up to full speed and within a minute or so had found an access point from the aboveground Ranch to the underground heart of the place.
She stood there atop a newly repaired scaffolding, vibrating, staring, taking in an impossible sight. It was much as Dekka had described it, but no description could have prepared Shade for the sheer size, the vast space that could have been used as a landfill for half a dozen sports stadiums, with room left over for a scattering of shopping malls.
It was roughly rectangular, with massive, intimidating towers at the corners like something out of a maximum security prison. Cells lined much of the wall space, some only at ground level, others stacked atop each ot
her, most fronted by bulletproof glass so thick that what light escaped from inside those cells was faintly green. Those glass barriers also had the effect of making it impossible to see into a cell without being almost directly in front of it.
The Ranch’s hidden underground was a work in progress, with construction equipment and a crane. The crane must have been rotating when Malik had struck—it had smashed into a stone wall, precipitating a small rock slide. She saw the operator in profile. He seemed to be bent over, head between his knees, either crying or throwing up.
Everywhere uniformed guards and white-coated technicians sat or lay stunned, weeping, wiping snot from their faces, reeking of their loosened bowels. None was yet on their feet, but they would be soon.
Shade knew she had limited time, but she could not stop looking—and more importantly, showing. She had learned from her earlier experiment with the camera that at full speed it showed little but blur. So she zoomed from cell to cell and paused, counting slowly, keeping the camera fixed for what she calculated was a full second of real time.
It was a video tour of man-made evil. Cell after cell housed monstrosities, horrors, the results of experiments so devoid of human compassion or decency they reminded Shade of what the Nazi monster Dr. Mengele had done in Auschwitz. A one-second take was a long time for the morphed Shade, and at many of the cells she had to close her eyes. There were things she did not want to see.
But interestingly, few of these poor creatures in the cells showed the effects of Malik’s pain blast. It seemed the Rockborn were, if not totally immune, at least much less affected by the Malik effect. Good and bad. Good that Shade could function; bad that Malik would have no power against someone like Dragon or Knightmare.
There had to be a control room. Shade took in the layout of the place, saw an oblong building perched on a shelf at the far end of the chamber, presumably a head office. But, she imagined, controls would be . . . yes, probably in what was evidently, based on rust weeping from one steel panel, the oldest of the towers. In a blink she was in the tower, racing methodically around, coming at last to the uppermost room, which evoked an airport’s control tower, with distorting bulletproof glass all around, framing a podium console with a touch screen embedded. She tapped it slowly, letting her finger remain in contact.
She was prompted with, Fingerprint not recognized.
“Yeah, I figured that,” Shade muttered. She grabbed a woman technician who was sobbing in the corner, dragged her by the wrist, and placed her finger on the screen, which obediently opened up.
Still no one had recovered enough to sound an alarm, let alone form a reaction force. Slowed now only by the processing speed of the computer, Shade clicked through the menu until she was confident she had what she wanted.
The tiers of cells had to be opened one by one: A Block, Tier One; A Block, Tier Two; B Block, Tier One—through eight separate releases. A digital map showed cells turning from green to red as she unlocked them.
Not all the prisoners were quick to emerge—some had been human enough to suffer from Malik’s pain wave. Some no longer possessed a body capable of moving on its own. Something like a great, fat centipede the size of a school bus emerged from one of the cells and instantly chomped into a prostrate guard, leaving his torso looking like an apple with a bite missing.
Was a giant carnivorous centipede really the intended result of these mad scientists’ work?
Shade ran up onto the roof of the tower and then leaped slightly upward so that she would fall in real time, which seemed almost comically slow, but which allowed her to take in more detail. She landed atop a big yellow bulldozer’s cockpit, then bounced up to balance on the raised steel blade, like a general astride a very unusual horse.
There, she de-morphed and looked down at an audience unlike anything seen in the history of life on Earth—morphs and monsters, cyborgs and Rockborn.
“I’m Shade Darby,” she said. “I’m the one who opened your cells.”
A creature larger than most and as strange as any, a bizarre, impossible melding of man, robot, and porcupine, spoke in a strained but piercing voice.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to be free,” Shade said. “Get away from this place. Spread out. Move. The guards will recover. So, run! Get away while you can.”
Many waited no longer but ran. Among them a handsome young man who, as he ran, began to morph, with a long blade growing from his right arm as chitinous armor covered him.
Knightmare!
Well, it was not the time for dealing with that particular creep; she had bigger fish to fry. She wasn’t here to settle scores, she was here to expose the Ranch and liberate its victims.
Hero stuff, she couldn’t help but think. Hero stuff. Finally.
“Everyone out!” Shade yelled. “They’re recovering, and they’ll be on us quick!”
“With all due respect, miss, no,” a man’s gruff voice said. It came from a sort of tank creature with an articulated robot arm and a bristling weapons array that included empty missile-launcher tubes. A human head could be just glimpsed through a visor slit. The placement of the head made it nauseatingly clear that there was no body attached to it.
“No?” Shade demanded. “Why not? And who are you?”
“I’m Master Sergeant Matthew Tolliver, United States Marine Corps.”
“Okay, Sergeant, what is it you want to do?”
“Miss, I first want to thank you. Second? Well, miss, second, I want to take this place apart, brick by goddamn brick, computer by computer, man by man. That’s what I would like to do.”
This was met by sounds of approval ranging from the timidly reluctant to the fierce. On the fierce end of the spectrum was the porcupine creature, a body so poorly conceived, so misshapen that he bled from half a dozen punctures he himself had inadvertently made. He had one human eye, and one mechanical eye that bulged out a bit like a thermostat. His mouth was too wide, as if he was auditioning for a role as the Joker. His teeth, tiny and sharp as needles, made speech difficult. His tongue bled when he moved it over his teeth. Quills like knitting needles stuck out from his forehead.
“I’m Jasper Llewellyn,” the monster said, his own blood trickling down his chin. “I speak for no one. But before I run, I’m killing some of these bastards!”
Someone in the crowd hissed the single word “Revenge,” and Shade had a sudden, sickening realization that she had done more than free these poor people and expose the Ranch to the world: she had doomed the Ranch’s staff.
Disturbed, but with no idea what she should do about it, Shade simply said, “You’re free. Do what you want.”
Then she stripped off her camera and turned it around on herself. “I’m Shade Darby. This horror show is run by the US government, by a group called Homeland Security Task Force 66. Do you see what they’re doing here? Do you see what they’re doing supposedly in your name? So who are the bad guys? Us or them?”
Not all the mutant or cyborg denizens of the Ranch were capable of escaping. Some were dependent on exotic chemicals being pumped into their systems. Others were so malformed, so twisted and destroyed by the effects of experiments with DNA and the rock, or such ill-conceived man-machine fusions that they were utterly crippled. But many could escape, and fled into the woods to be pursued by news helicopters filming both the freaks and the military helicopters raining murderous fire down on them.
Others, though, had the means to inflict revenge. And their victims, too, fled for the woods.
Those who lived that long.
CHAPTER 14
Missed Him by That Much
THE VENETIAN CASINO had already seen many strange things, but none stranger than the sight of what looked like a very large, bipedal, tailless, black-furred, snake-haired feline, followed by a towering bipedal, humanish-faced polar bear.
The casino level was a scene of utter chaos. At least four separate groups of EMTs hunched over bloody people, and were surrounded by cordons of police a
nd casino security struggling to hold back what looked like tourists, many elderly, who seemed determined—as astounding as it was—to eat each other, the cops, the EMTs, and the wounded. Indeed, the wounded themselves snapped at the medical techs’ hands as they tried to apply bandages. Many of the wounded had been handcuffed for their own safety. Other handcuffed people lay on their sides gnawing at the air, growling and mewling and trying to squirm toward the nearest living person.
And all the while came the moans of those helpless to resist Dillon’s cruel orders. I’m sorry! I can’t stop myself! Someone stop me! My God, I can’t stop!
Dekka and Armo shouldered through crowds of people in uniform, the wounded, the mad, and the terrified, demanding to know how they could get to the tower.
Once they were noticed—and Dekka thought it showed just how crazy the scene was that Dekka and Armo were not immediately noticed—a trio of Las Vegas police detached themselves from handcuffing people and advanced with guns leveled and very serious, very angry looks on their faces.
“Freeze or we shoot!” This came from a police sergeant, a Latina with eyes that very definitely meant business.
“Who is doing this?” Dekka demanded.
“Get down on the ground, now!”
Armo leaped, swung one big paw, and knocked the sergeant’s gun to the ground. He wrapped his powerful arms around her and turned her, helpless as a tantruming toddler, to face Dekka.
“Listen to me, Sergeant, I realize what I look like,” Dekka said. “I realize what you probably think of me. But I am here to put a stop to this bullshit, and from the look of it you could use some help.”
“Let me go or I will charge you with—”
“Dammit, tell us what’s going on! There are cops jumping off the roof!”
Armo released the sergeant but stayed ready.
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