XOM-B

by Jeremy Robinson

  “I understand,” I tell her. “Then the person I have seen you become is really the person you have always been … but hidden.”

  “Pitiful, right?”

  I shake my head in disagreement, but realize she can’t see it. “You’re like wheat.”

  “Wheat? The plant?”

  “The seeds can lay dormant for thirty years, surviving brutal conditions. Drought. Freezing. It retains all of its strength and vitality in a hostile environment until the right conditions emerge. Then it shoots up out of the ground, grows strong, provides nourishment for animals and reproduces, spreading its power and influence. Changing the world around it. See? Wheat. Luscious wheat.”

  “Quite poetic,” Harry says from up ahead.

  Poetic: possessing the qualities or charm of poetry. Poetry: the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative or elevated thoughts.

  I smile. “I think I like poetry.”

  “Keep it down,” Heap says, pushing forward. He’s making so much noise clearing our path through the brush, I’m not sure what difference our conversation makes, but I comply nonetheless. Maybe Heap doesn’t like poetry.

  Luscious finds my hand in the darkness and gives it a squeeze, whispering, “Thank you.”

  When we enter a large sulfur-scented swampy clearing lit by the rising sun, Heap slows. The sun’s orange glow strikes the sides of several dead, branchless trees rising from the muck like miniature gray Council Spires. Despite the beautiful color, the sight reminds me that another good portion of Liberty’s population has been brutally slain during the night. By this time tomorrow, there will be nothing left. Parts of the city might still stand, but everyone in it will be dead or undead.

  Then it will just be the four of us, and whoever is directing this attack. That’s assuming we survive the next day as well.

  Heap takes a step forward. The marshy terrain absorbs the impact of Heap’s footstep. In the brief silence, I shout, “Heap!”

  He stops so fast that Harry bumps into him and falls back into the muck. Heap’s weapon comes up, aimed in my direction, no doubt believing I was under attack.

  “Heap,” I say again. “We’re okay. We can slow down.”

  My big protector looks from me to the surrounding environment, searching for targets. Finding none, he lowers his weapon and his shoulders, and reaches his bulky hand down to help Harry out of the sludge.

  “We can’t stop,” he says.

  “I know that,” I say, slightly annoyed that he’d believe I was suggesting such a thing. “But it would probably be good if we made an attempt to not leave a path leading directly to us.” I point to the edge of the swamp where a small tree has been knocked over and a bush crushed beneath Heap’s foot.

  “If we cross the swamp and exit carefully, they won’t know which direction we’ve gone.” I illustrate the plan by lifting my foot from the mud. It clings to my foot, rising with it before popping free and sliding back together. No trace of my footprint remains.

  “A dreadful idea,” Harry says, flicking slime from his hands.

  “But a good plan,” Heap says. “I should have thought of it.”

  “You were worried about us,” I say with a shrug, dismissing his self-evaluation. I place my foot down, feeling the cool sludge slide over it. The ground beneath is firm and ridged, like I’m standing on bars. I feel a crunch beneath my heel.

  “Wait…” I say, looking down. The black layer of water covering the mud swirls around my legs. I crouch and then slowly reach in.

  “Ugh,” Harry says, as my arm slips downward through the film and into the thick sludge. “What are you doing?”

  It doesn’t take long to find what I’m looking for, mostly because there is so much of it. I take hold and lift the object from the mud, shaking it around in the water for a moment to clean the darkness away and reveal the gleaming white bone beneath.

  Luscious steps away from the ancient limb. When she does, we all hear the crack beneath her feet. The bones are everywhere, hidden by the swamp.

  “It’s like the bone pit,” I say. “We’re walking on the dead.”

  “On the Masters,” Luscious says.

  “I’m not sure it matters who they were,” I say, looking at the bone. Like the ones in the pit, it seems unnaturally brittle, but I’m not an expert on death and decay, nor do I want to become one. I lower the remnant of some long-dead Master back into its thick grave.

  “They didn’t deserve this,” Harry says, scanning the clearing. “No one deserves this.”

  I’m not sure if he’s talking about the mass burial in mud or the mass killing, but I suspect he finds both ideas equally disturbing, as do I. That doesn’t change the fact that other dead, very living dead, are hunting us, which leads to my rather crass assessment. “We still need to walk over them.”

  Harry shakes his head. He doesn’t like the idea of walking over the dead. Who would?

  “What is left of these people is just physical matter,” I tell him. “What made them … people, is gone.”

  “You’re talking about their souls?” Harry asks, a little surprised.

  “He thinks that energy isn’t destroyed,” Luscious says. “That it only transforms.”

  “If these people still exist in some form, spirit or soul, they’re not here in these dead bones. Even the undead. Whoever they were is gone. Their corpses have been animated, but they’re still dead.”

  “Souls,” Harry says with a nod. “I like that. I believe Mrs. Cameron prayed to God just before the end. I’ve always hoped it made some kind of difference.”

  “We should go,” Heap says, having no trouble with the idea of marching over the long-since dead.

  I give a nod.

  He turns his back to us, lifts his big foot from the muck with a slurp and takes a step forward. The mud beneath his foot erupts.

  A gaping mouth rises, filled with mud, teeth bared. A head follows, eyeless and gnarled. Hands explode upward, reaching, finding Heap’s armored leg. It pulls, lunges and bites. Teeth shatter on impact with Heap’s armor.

  Then in a flash, the head caves in as the clap of a fired bullet cuts through the quiet morning.

  Unseen birds squawk and take to the sky, their flapping wings like applause.

  But the sound has stirred other sleeping dead, groaning and pushing up through the muck.

  I clench my fists. “A trap?”

  “Sentinels,” Heap says. “Guardians.”

  “Like the old lady’s floodlights,” Luscious says.

  “But why?” I ask.

  Heap turns to Harry. “How far are we from the city?”

  “One or two hours. I think.” Harry lifts his eyes from the destroyed zombie and looks beyond the swamp. “Maybe less. I always circumvented this mire.”

  “The capped city is important,” Heap says. “We need to press on.”

  “Through them?” Harry asks, as undead rise from the mud, howling through the slime in their mouths.

  Heap looks back to me.

  I draw my weapon. “Straight through.”

  Before I can take a step forward, the entire surface of the swamp jitters back and forth. Bones crumble beneath my feet as they shift about.

  Something massive rises from the far side of the swamp.

  35.

  Harry waves his arms, fighting to remain balanced as the ground shakes and our already unstable footing breaks apart. “What is it?”

  No one has an answer, but one is provided a moment later.

  As the swamp surface rises up, water drains away, revealing scores of skeletal bodies embedded in thick mud. Several skulls, long since detached, roll free as the thirty-foot-wide mound grows taller. With a wet snap, the sheet of earthen gore comes apart and falls away, revealing the behemoth beneath.

  It’s hard to see, because the dark swamp sludge blends with the dark gray and black coloring, but I think it’s a soldier. The huge kind. Like the giants that protect Lib
erty. Five of its six eyes glow a sinister red bright enough to be seen through a layer of clinging mud. Vast sheets of oozing muck, full of dead bodies hangs from its body like rotting skin. But not all the bodies are dead. Three well-preserved zombies flail about, thick mud gluing them to the giant’s chest.

  As it stands tall and some of the loose earth falls away, I start to notice some differences. First, it’s not armed with a railgun, which is a relief, but where there might normally be a gun, there is a wrecking ball, like the demo-bot’s. In fact, the whole yellow arm has been transplanted. Its other arm looks normal, but when it raises its tensed fingers, I see the tips have been modified—filed down to a blade’s edge.

  Moans rise up all around as undead rise from the swamp. Their smaller size makes them less intimidating individually, but there are scores of them. If not for the restricting goo coating their bodies, they might be on top of us already. The powerful drone has no such problem. It lifts a colossal foot up and brings it down hard, launching a cascade of mud, like the ocean waves I’ve seen in holo-casts.

  The mud falls with a series of wet splatters, some of it reaching us nearly two hundred feet away.

  “It’s not a man,” I say, stating the obvious. “So it’s not a zombie.”

  “Do you have a point?” Luscious replies, railgun in hand.

  “If it’s not a man, and not a zombie, how do we kill it?”

  Luscious and Harry crane their heads toward me, eyes widening, and then shift their gaze to Heap. He draws his handgun, which looks pitifully small, and says, “We destroy it.”

  A loud clanking pulls my attention away from Heap in time to see the massive mud-covered metal ball arcing through the air, headed straight for us. I shove Luscious hard, slamming her into Harry and shoving them both out of the way. The unfortunate consequence of my heroic action is that I’m now directly in the projectile’s path. I try to leap away, but my foot is held fast by mud and a tangle of bones.

  Heap’s hand wraps around my waist and pulls, tearing me free of the swamp along with a rib cage and partial skeleton. The three of us fall back just as the metal ball impacts the swamp, covering us in layers of black sludge and bits of bone.

  I sit up, kicking the body free of my foot and spitting mud from my mouth.

  The chain snaps tight and the wrecking ball is dragged away toward the swamp soldier, who is making his way toward us, one long wet stride at a time.

  Luscious and Harry sit up on the other side of the gorge carved by the ball, which must weigh several tons. Luscious reaches up and scoops a handful of mud from her eyes. “Can we run away now?”

  I shake my head. “You two circle to the right. We’ll go left. Harry, you clear the path, Luscious, you keep its attention.”

  She raises a mud-covered eyebrow. “How do I do that?”

  I look at her railgun. “Just keep shooting.”

  “This is a horrible plan,” Luscious says, but gets to her feet.

  “It can’t follow all of us,” I tell her.

  “Let’s go,” Luscious says, striking out into the swamp, moving horizontally to the still-approaching behemoth. Harry follows her closely, raising his shotgun up. He takes aim at the nearest undead struggling to reach them, but holds his fire. The zombie isn’t going anywhere fast.

  Heap leads the way, heading away from Luscious and Harry. Unlike the former domestic servant, my protector takes no chances with the zombies sloughing toward us. One careful shot after another, he clears a path.

  When our party is fifty feet apart, the soldier stops moving, glancing back and forth at its two sets of targets. Perhaps judging the larger Heap to be a higher priority, it turns in our direction. But before it can fully turn our way, one of its five glowing eyes shatters and extinguishes. The twang of Luscious’s railgun echoes over the swamp. The soldier’s only reaction is to turn toward Luscious.

  Before it can make up its mind again, I fire at the back of its head, punching a hole clean through. It starts to turn back, but Luscious nails it with another shot and it responds quickly, flinging the wrecking ball toward her.

  She dives forward. The metal orb just misses her feet and collides with the swamp like a meteorite. The bony swamp floor beneath us shakes as the wrecking ball buries itself in the mire. The chain retracts, but snaps to a stop. The metal sphere is stuck.

  “We could just leave it here,” I say.

  Heap fires two shots, dropping two waterlogged dead back to their graves. “If it escapes, it will pursue us. It must be destroyed here.”

  Too bad. I was hoping to avoid my first plan, which now strikes me as a really bad idea. I stop, directly behind the giant, who is now stomping toward Luscious and Harry. “Throw me.”

  Heap looks down at me. “What?”

  The giant closes in on Luscious and Harry, who are now on the run. Harry fires and reloads his shotgun as fast as he can while Luscious continues to fire back and up at the soldier, but they’re almost out of time.

  “Throw me!”

  Without another moment of hesitation, Heap picks me up, hauls back and tosses me. The swamp falls away beneath as I sail through the air, trailing a stream of mud. For a moment, I fear I will overshoot the giant and land in the swamp only to be stomped on, but the soldier takes a step forward, unknowingly aligning itself with my trajectory and plan.

  As I descend, I realize that this could hurt. A lot. My eyes shut involuntarily and I cringe. The impact is jarring, but not nearly as bad as I feared. That is, until I open my eyes and see that I’m embedded in a sheet of muck hanging from the soldier’s back like a cape.

  And I’m not alone.

  A frantic hand scrabbles at my face, clawing and pinching the skin. I lift my head out of the viscous goo and see an undead man—half of a man—stuck next to me, stretching out with his mud-filled mouth and letting out a muffled moan. My arm comes free with a slurp and I reach out, taking hold of the man’s collarbone. With a hard yank, he comes loose and gravity takes over, pulling him to the ground.

  While the sheet of wet earth keeps me from falling, it doesn’t immobilize me. Punching my hands and toes into the mucky fabric, I’m able to climb the drone’s back, all the way to its shoulder, where a tangle of roots holds the whole mass in place like it was meant to be there.

  Camouflage, I realize. This robot was concealed here on purpose.

  Crouching atop the giant’s shoulder, I cling to the twisting roots with one hand, keeping my balance, and draw my railgun with the other. Taking aim at the soldier’s head, I slip my finger in front of the trigger and pull.

  My finger never finishes the two-centimeter distance it needs to complete in order to fire the round. A massive hand reaches up and plucks me from my perch. I’m a bird in the coils of a constrictor.

  Despite being lifted into the air so easily, I see Harry helping Luscious to her feet below and feel relief. The giant had nearly reached them and would surely have crushed their bodies into the swamp along with all the rest. Of course, it now appears a grave in the muck may soon be my fate.

  “Freeman!” Luscious shouts from below.

  The soldier’s grip tightens and my reply sifts out between grinding teeth. “Get back!”

  I can feel each individual finger compressing around me. Soon, something in me will break, or burst. Maybe both.

  “Fight it, Freeman!” Heap shouts from somewhere behind the robot. Several gunshots follow his voice, but the weapon’s booming report doesn’t fill me with hope. Quite the opposite. The way Heap is firing, without pause, without any real target. It smacks of desperation. And that’s not a good thing.

  “Gah!” I shout, pain rupturing through my body.

  A series of twangs from below stop the crushing weight around me. As the drone turns downward, I see Luscious below, firing away, aiming for the giant’s kneecap. But she’s so focused on the soldier that she can’t see the growing mob of slime-covered zombies closing in around them. Harry continues to fire at the encroaching undead, filling the
air with shotgun thunder, but the time it takes him to reload between shots can’t keep up with the dead still sliding up out of the swamp.

  I’m suddenly lifted higher into the air and realize the soldier is about to pound Luscious into the earth while I’m still in its grip. My body tenses with desperation and my index finger tightens, pulling the railgun trigger. The twang is muffled, but the weapon’s effects aren’t dulled. The round travels through the drone’s palm, a portion of its arm and then its chest, disappearing into the swamp. With my finger jammed down, the gun fires again and again in rapid succession. I wouldn’t normally waste my limited ammunition, but I don’t have much choice. And the continued barrage seems to confuse the giant.

  It twitches violently, twisting from side to side as holes are punched through its torso and head, leaving Luscious free to continue her assault on the robot’s knee.

  And then, the soldier’s weight and now severely damaged joint conspire against it. With a crack and screech of metal, the knee crumples in on itself.

  The soldier reaches out to brace its fall, inadvertently tossing me aside. Looking back as I flip through the air, I watch the behemoth land on its broken knee, but the force of the impact drives the limb into the mud and gravity continues pulling the giant down. Its clawed hand slaps into the swamp and sinks beneath the surface, the several-ton weight of the giant shoving the limb down to its elbow.

  I miss the next twenty seconds of action as I land in the swamp and become embedded in five feet of clinging sludge. I try to lift myself free, but I’m held firmly in place by the thick mud and tangle of dead limbs, both plant and human. My mind fills in the image and I see the people around me, hooking their fingers around my arms and legs, pulling me deeper. And then, something really does grab hold. But instead of dragging me deeper, it lifts me up.