They looked into the shadows and saw a kid. He had that messed up scar but he wasn’t even old enough to grow a beard, he had some scraggly looking thing. He wasn’t very impressive, both of them were big men, easily double his size.
Jessie saw them glance around at the men they’d just been bragging to, saw them realize there was no way to back down or blow it off if they didn’t want to be laughed out of town as cowards. The cowboy had pushed their buttons and they had fallen for it. He watched them come and wondered if they were good men living a hard life and doing whatever it took to get by or bad men barely removed from being raiders or highway bandits. He wished he had the power to look into men’s hearts, to know the truth of things.
They stopped in front of his table, the biggest leaned over and planted his fists on it.
“So, how’s about it, Road Angel.” He said. “You gonna tell us the truth? Why don’t you set the story straight? No more bullshit about one little kid killing eight armed men all by himself.”
“I wasn’t by myself.” Jessie said loud enough for the onlookers to hear.
“See? What’d I tell you?” the retriever said to the crowd. “It’s all lies!”
“I had my dog with me.” Jessie said then reached out and snatched his wrists, jerking him forward.
“Bob, on guard.”
From under the table came a rumbling, vicious snarl that sounded like it was pissed off and full of teeth. Everyone took a few steps back except the man with his arms stretched taunt and his belly against the table. His eyes got big as he realized the position he was in, where the dog was and which part of him was completely exposed to those savage teeth.
“Bob killed half of those men.” Jessie said.
The deep growl reverberated under the table and a black shadow crept forward, the snarl intensifying the closer he came. The man tried to pull against the boy, not hard and jerky, not something that would cause the dog to attack, but a steady pull. He was twice the kids’ size, had at least a hundred pounds on him. He would slide him right over the table, slow and easy. The muscles bulged under the tight t-shirt. He grimaced and pulled like he was deadlifting five hundred pounds. Veins on his arms popped up and sweat beaded on his forehead. He pulled like his life depended on it and the growling never stopped, even on the intake of breath the rumbling violence just inches from his crotch didn’t stop. The boy smiled a crooked smile and pulled him closer until they were almost nose to nose and his feet came off the floor.
“So you are right.” Jessie continued. “The story isn’t entirely true. Thanks for helping me clear that up.”
The retriever could feel the hot breath of the dog, could envision a mouthful of needle-sharp fangs ripping deep into his crotch and felt the coiled steel power of the boy’s fingers crushing his wrists.
“Uh, no problem.” The man said, still not sure if he was about to be ripped to shreds, still dumbfounded at the boys raw strength.
“Bob, to me.” Jessie said and the rumble under the table ceased instantly as the black Shepherd jumped on the booth seat and panted in the man’s face. He looked like he was smiling, if dogs could smile.
The people watching let out a collective sigh as Jessie gently pushed him off his table and took a sip of the moonshine Stabby and Scratch made out back.
The man stood there for a moment, still unsure what had happened but very, very glad it hadn’t gone any further.
The tale that made the rounds a few days later had Jessie directing his dog to attack innocent strangers at a bar. It didn’t matter that thirty people said that was complete nonsense, three thousand people on Facebook and Twitter believed it and clamored about wild men running rampant in the civilized cities.
He was a relic of the past and some of the comments about him on Twitter were vile. He had outlived his usefulness. The walled cities didn’t need trigger happy killers anymore.
He sat on the sofa in his converted warehouse and watched the flames dance in the fireplace. He was doing what he’d done a lot of the past few months. A whole lot of nothing. Hiding out. An empty bottle of Jim Beam was on the coffee table along with a quart of six-week-old rotgut that was still mostly full. He sipped slowly from the mason jar as the neighborhood finally quieted when the clock chimed two in the morning. He needed to get away, he didn’t belong here anymore. He’d tried so hard to get back and now he couldn’t remember why. Why he’d sent the other Jessie away. Why he hadn’t given up on the madness of time jumping and made a life with Maddy. She would have made a badass partner. They could have been bounty hunters or picked up odd jobs from the Queen of the Outer reaches, she seemed to like him. Or at least she hadn’t hated him and that was good enough.
The hunger, the endless aching need for Scarlet had driven him, he knew that, but he didn’t feel it anymore. It was only a vague memory. The moment he’d sent his younger self back to be with her the desire started fading. He’d tried to hold on to the link but his very blood betrayed him. It knew she was a trillion miles away and it knew she was safe and it knew she was with him. It quit loving her even though his heart and mind tried not to. He was in love with being in love but he knew the raging bonfire had burnt down to a faintly glowing ember. She was with the other Jessie. He still hadn’t opened the locket hanging around his neck. He fingered it and wondered what was inside.
He swirled the ice cubes in the jar that diluted the harsh burnished amber liquid and remembered the days of teaching Maddy how to be human. A slow smile crossed his face when he recalled their arguments, their travels and the long hours spent learning from each other. It wasn’t unlike traveling across the country in the old Mercury with Scarlet. The modified Glocks Griz had given him were on the table next to the empty bottle and he missed his Mark Seven blasters. They had been a gift too. From her. The perfect machine with all the little imperfections that made her seem almost human. The whiskey put him in a melancholy mood and he settled a little deeper in the overstuffed couch. He watched the fire burn low and remembered the girl he sent away and the girl he left behind.
23
The Girl He Left Behind
"I haven’t seen any kind of weapons systems" Jessie said as they ate dinner after long hours working on the jump ship. “This is a military vessel, right? A warship? It didn’t have giant space guns?”
“More of a troop carrier.” She said, searching through the alien memories in her to find the terminology he could understand. “We had laser cannons and other heavy armaments but they were targeted in the attack. A ship of this size isn’t very maneuverable, the weapons were for long range warfare. The little ships were on top of me before I knew they were there. The arms room and all the soldier’s personal weapons were destroyed, same as my propulsion drives and energy reactors.”
“There is something, though.” She said, and left the table.
She came back a few moments later with a pair of shiny pistol shaped guns.
“These were the Captains weapons he kept displayed in his quarters.” She said.
“Nice.” he said. “Thanks.”
They were awkward in his hands, the grips a little too long and the frames a little too big. The humans of the future were taller, seven feet was probably the average height. Sometimes he felt like a little kid. His feet didn’t touch the floor when he sat, the forks and spoons were too big and all of the clothes he wore had to be taken in or shortened. The waist lines were similar though. It was like everything was built for a bunch of tall skinny people and he was the shortest guy on a basketball team.
“What’s it say?” He asked, indicating the squiggly writing down the sides of the barrels.
“They are ceremonial weapons, presented to the captain of this vessel when he took command. The words are written in the universal tongue and roughly translated it says I prepare for war though I strive for peace.”
“They do a lot of fighting?” he asked “Were they always at war with somebody?”
“Not particularly.” She answered. “I was a
deterrent. All of our war ships were. We were built at the behest of the supreme council to patrol the galaxies. We were peacekeepers and had the best interest of all peoples. You could compare us to a police force from your world unless hostilities broke out. Then we became an army.”
Jessie turned the guns one way then the next, looking for a way to load ammo.
“So, these don’t work, they’re just for show?”
“No.” She said. “They are very powerful. The Captain of the ship was never expected to use his weapon but if the situation were so dire he was forced, then the confrontation was ended immediately.”
She showed him the power cells, how to swap them out, the multiple settings that went from mild shock to total obliteration and explained the higher the setting the faster the cells would deplete.
“Cool.” He said. “I’ve got laser guns. But seriously, can they be reduced in size? Can I cut off a lot of this flashy stuff, strip them down to the bare necessities so I can handle them?”
The next few weeks flew by as Jessie learned how to operate the jump ship, read enough of the language to understand the labels and stripped the Mark Sevens down to their bare elements so they would fit his hands. He spent hours hand carving new grips, modifying the shrouding and shortening the barrels. He started practicing his gun kata’s again, learning the feel of the new pistols. They were a little bigger than his Glocks even when stripped down to their bare essentials, maybe the size of a 44 magnum. They even resembled a wrist snapping AutoMag after he blacked them out. The good thing about a plasma pistol was no recoil. His whole life he’d associated big bullets with big kick. You barely knew you were firing a .22 round but a .50 caliber would break your shoulder if you didn’t handle it properly. The blasters were basically every gun he’d ever owned all wrapped into one and they used the same ammo. A refillable charge of compressed hydrogen.
“If you keep it on the lower settings, something equal to your 9-millimeter, the charge will be able to fire thousands of times.”
“What happens if I turn it all the way up to 11?” Jessie asked.
“It doesn’t go that high but you would kill everyone, probably including yourself.”
They worked together for long hours and she became better and better at emulating a real person. Even when glitching while trying to solve a problem, she allocated a portion of herself to keep up the façade. The first time he called her Scarlet was after a long day spent stripping the jump ship and refitting the pilot’s seat and controls. He hadn’t meant to, she was a machine, a computer, a bunch of weird configurable cells but it slipped out. There was an awkward silence. She knew how much he longed for her, it had overwritten much of her being.
“I do not have to keep this shape.” She finally said. “I am learning to control the conflicting commands, I can assume the shape of someone else.”
“No.” Jessie said. “I’ve gotten used to it and seeing you reminds me of what I have to do. I like it, I couldn’t imagine you as someone else, now. How much longer do you think it’ll take us to get off this boat?”
“Maybe another week. You still need to learn how to fly it once we are finished modifying the controls.”
“Cool.” Jessie said. “Then we go find a time machine and get me back home.”
“It is forbidden.” She said.
It seemed like she told him that a lot. She ran a memory check and wasn’t surprised to learn it was true. On average, three times a day he expressed interest in doing something illegal or ill-advised.
“Let me worry about that.” He said in his easy way.
The humans of old earth were certainly not like the humans she had served. The DNA was the same but twenty thousand years of different foods, different gravity and different survival requirements had changed them. They had forgotten where they came from. The Earthians no longer had the sixth finger and since their gravity was stronger, they didn’t grow as tall. Their head and eyes were smaller, too because they were only a few generations away from scraping a living from the land. They were only a hundred years removed from mass malnutrition, rampant diseases, and short life spans. From the new memories she had, she knew they were a violent and warlike people. Jessie hadn’t studied history, only what he learned in school, but she understood the planet was ignorant of their distant past and had been through much since the ancient wars. Their recorded history only went back a few thousand years. They thought the ice age was a natural occurrence.
From the bits of information she had, she deduced the earth systems jump gates had been destroyed. The last report she’d received seconds before she was destroyed was complete devastation of all planets. There were many of those reports, they had all come in the instant they passed through the jump gate. The next second she was attacked. Without the worm hole gates, no one was going to travel there again for another ten thousand years. The populations on all the known planets in all the known systems would have to be so great that people would risk the trip in a colony ship. That solar system had been written off and forgotten, there wasn’t anything particularly valuable about it. They had no unique minerals or ores that couldn’t be gotten from a thousand other planets.
The Earthians had no memories of the colonies on the red planet, Mars as he called it, or those on Venus and Maldek. From his vague recollections, the people of earth had forgotten that all four planets had once thrived. Maldek was now an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It had been completely ripped apart. Earth was the only planet that remained viable but it had been ravaged by extinction level events on numerous occasions. Every time they seemed to be moving forward and advancing to a new age, a plague, polar cap shifts, ice age or worldwide drought would destroy their progress, send them back to a hunter-gatherer stage. They had evolved into a tough and hardy people with potential for great good or great evil.
A hatred of their fellow man had caused the undead outbreak and set the planet back to the Stone Age almost overnight. If they could have worked out their differences, if they could have strived to go to the stars instead of kill each other, they would have joined the rest of the galaxies in another hundred years. Now, it might take thousands if they survived at all.
“I think we are ready.” She announced as they strapped down the last container of supplies in the jump ship. “We can leave at any time. The journey is long, we can finish the detail work while we are in route.”
“Let’s feast tonight, then.” Jessie said. “For tomorrow we may die.”
“I have confidence in the ship.” She said with a frown and he smiled, almost burst out laughing at the look of concern on her face.
“And I have confidence in you.” He said. “You’ve got the expressions down pretty good. Hell, I know you aren’t real and most of the time I forget. You’ll be able to fool anyone.”
She gave a curtsey, didn’t know where it came from but knew the instinct to do it was right. She’d stopped fighting the sometimes-ridiculous commands the new her gave to herself. She was going to have to stop thinking like that, too. There weren’t two entities fighting for control, they had almost fully merged. She had let down more and more firewalls she’d erected to try to keep the two separated but it kept causing her to shut down. It couldn’t be fixed, there wasn’t any more of her original self left isolated in the ship. It had all been destroyed by the caustic weapons. There was no more of her hiding in the wires. She couldn’t quarantine the Scarlet incursion and eliminate it; she was ingrained in every cell. It would destroy her too and one thing they both agreed on was they had to protect the human. Protect Jessie. She lowered the last of her defenses, said good bye to her ship self and stopped suppressing the Scarlet.
They ate some type of stew that was the perfect temperature in the self-warming bowls as they looked at a star system map.
“I think our first stop should be here.” She said and pointed at a major space port that serviced a series of mining moons, a vacation planet and a pair of farming planets. “Most of the radio traffic
I have picked up for last few hundred years has come from there. There are a lot of ships coming and going, a lot of freighters and many different peoples. I think we can blend in without drawing too much attention. I will be able to learn much more about the state of the galaxies than what little I have gleaned from the radio.”
“Will they sell reloads for my pistols?” Jessie asked. He didn’t have spares.
“I don’t know much about their weaponry.” She said. “Your pistols are thousands of years old. They are a good design but as the planets rebuilt, the technology may have been reinvented with something entirely new. They may be useless relics if you expend the charges so try not to shoot unless you must. It’s a rough place, one of the moons is a minimum-security prison. The other is mostly industrial factories that use slave labor of the Areeks.”
She brought up an image of a hairy, heavily muscled creature with a thick brow, a sloped head and broad back. It almost looked like a gorilla.
“They’ve never been classified as sentient beings and are smarter than monkeys on your world. They can be trained if the work is simple and, in the factories, it usually is. They have always been the beasts of burden when menial labor is needed.”
“Show me the guys that like to eat people.” Jessie said.
“Damn, he’s ugly.” He grimaced when she pulled an image from her memory and displayed it on the screen. “Looks like a dinosaur or something.”
“That is the female of the species but they used to eat anyone, not just humans. It was their way. They may have changed but from what I’ve overheard, I don’t think so. You wouldn’t want to be alone with a group of them. They might find you an exotic delicacy.”
Jessie stared at her but couldn’t tell if she was joking. She had to be. Didn’t she?
Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Page 15
