After Life (Power Reads Book 2)

by Dean Crawford

  Marcus followed her up the embankment alongside the freeway, crouching tight against the concrete wall of the overpass as they listened to the scratching, rolling sound nearby as it descended on the opposite side of the overpass. As the sound reached the freeway, they turned and leaped up onto the overpass.

  Kerry led Marcus silently across the road to the far side, and they crouched to peer down onto the freeway below.

  There, a three foot diameter metallic sphere rolled slowly through the grass toward the shattered chunk of asphalt. Metal feet crunched as they flicked out from the ball’s surface one after the other and dug into the road behind it, propelling the sphere forward. As Marcus watched, a small compartment opened on the sphere’s surface and the black eye of a camera lens appeared and shot an image of the damaged asphalt.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ he whispered to Kerry, keeping his voice so low that even he could barely hear it.

  Kerry did not reply, her face rigid with fear as she looked past him.

  Marcus turned and saw another sphere rolling rapidly toward them on the overpass.

  ***

  32

  ‘Run!’

  Kerry sprinted for the opposite side of the bypass as Marcus struggled to keep up with her. He vaulted over the trunk of an old Lincoln as he looked over his shoulder and saw the metallic sphere rolling rapidly toward them, its metallic feet flicking out one by one from its smooth surface and propelling the sphere at frightening speed with a clicking sound like a machine gun.

  ‘Shit!’ Marcus yelled as he saw Kerry leap over the side of the overpass just as the sphere suddenly halted and reared up on spindly metallic legs that shot from beneath it in a tripod formation.

  Moments later, two parallel compartments opened on the side of the sphere and a burst of flame erupted from within each. Marcus leaped into thin air as bullets raked the road where his feet had been in a cloud of dust and fragments of rock.

  Marcus plummeted eight feet and hit the sloped embankment hard. The bones in his legs shuddered as pain bolted through his ankles. He rolled as he landed and tumbled down the embankment until he plunged into the knee high grass on the freeway.

  ‘Get up!’

  Kerry’s voice was high–pitched as she ran past him, her hair flying behind her like a banner. Marcus dragged himself onto his feet as he saw the other sphere rolling between the abandoned cars on the freeway and weaving to get a clear shot at them.

  ‘What the hell are they?!’ Marcus yelled as he ran after Kerry.

  ‘Who cares?!’

  Kerry ran across the freeway, taking the barrier in the centre in a single bounding leap as she fled for the cover of abandoned buildings lining the side of the freeway. Marcus jumped over the barrier and hurled himself to the ground as a burst of gunfire raked the asphalt behind him and punched holes in the metal barrier to send sparks flying across him.

  The sphere on the overpass had rolled down the embankment and pursued them, but the central barrier on the freeway was an obstacle it could not pass. Instead, it reared up on its legs and began firing over the barrier at him.

  ‘Stay low!’ Kerry yelled.

  Marcus dodged behind the dusty wreckage of an old SUV and then moved directly away from the line of fire. Bullets pinged and twanged off the metal vehicle behind him, punching holes at odd angles through the bodywork. The vehicle’s structure deflected the bullets away from him and the sphere was unable to account for the unpredictable angles the obstacles produced.

  The gunfire stopped and Marcus eased his way further from the SUV until he reached the far side of the freeway. He rolled flat over the top of the barriers and dropped down alongside Kerry.

  ‘They know we’re here,’ she said.

  ‘You think?’ Marcus asked breathlessly. ‘Holy shit, Kerry. Since when did they have machines like that out here?’

  ‘Since forever, probably,’ she replied. ‘Classified military kit, perfect for hostile environments. Who knows?’

  ‘We know, now,’ Marcus shot back. ‘They’ll figure out what we’re trying to do.’

  Kerry nodded.

  ‘Those spheres are not likely to be automated, like WASPS,’ she said. ‘They’re remotely controlled. The same system we need to hack is what sends them signals from whoever is controlling them.’

  ‘Great,’ Marcus replied. ‘So the closer we get to their base at the airport, the more horrible things they can throw at us?’

  Kerry nodded. ‘We must be close.’

  ‘Close to what?’ Marcus breathed. ‘These machines, who built them and what are they doing out here anyway? There’s no population, no enemy other than The Falling so what are they protecting?’

  Kerry sat for a long moment as she stared into the distance.

  ‘That’s a very good question,’ she whispered in reply. ‘There’s supposed to be nothing out here but relay stations and the regional broadcast hub. A couple of guys with guns would be able to hold out against any infected animals still living out here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Marcus replied, ‘and they sure don’t need all of that hardware to kill us. Between the WASPS and those rolling nightmares it’s a wonder we even got out of the relay station.’

  ‘Whatever they’re protecting, it’ll be at the airport. They’d have had to fly these things in as there’s no manufacturing them out here.’

  ‘So we keep going?’ Marcus uttered, hearing the despondent tone infecting his voice.

  ‘There’s no going back now,’ Kerry reminded him. ‘We do this and finish it or we’re toast anyway. Those spheres will find a way around the freeway barrier to us before long. Let’s move before they get too close.’

  Kerry moved off at a low run, moving into the shelter of a half–collapsed warehouse as she turned east again toward the distant airport. Marcus followed her as they moved parallel to the freeway, aware of a dizziness and a buzzing in his head.

  ‘We need to eat something,’ he gasped as he followed Kerry.

  ‘I know.’

  They moved as swiftly as they could around rusting oil barrels, cars collapsed on sunken suspension, through dense weeds as tall as their heads that had pushed up through endless acres of cracked asphalt. The rising sun beat down with relentless blows, soaking Marcus’s shirt with sweat. The rising humidity prevented the sweat from evaporating on his skin and the sense of disorientation increased as he stumbled after Kerry.

  He was on the verge of begging her to stop when he saw her trip and collapse onto one knee, her head hanging low.

  ‘Kerry,’ he gasped.

  His own voice sounded dry and weak. He crouched down alongside her and noticed the bite in her neck was inflamed and leaking a fluid that looked almost like syrup. It didn’t smell anywhere near as good.

  ‘We need to rest,’ he urged her. ‘It’s too hot.’

  Marcus looked through the forest of weeds and grasses toward a dense copse of trees set just back from the freeway near ranks of old clapperboard houses. He recalled sitting under trees in his youth, how the mass of leaves above his head had cooled the air during the long hot summers of his childhood.

  With a heave of effort he helped Kerry to her feet and guided her across the open ground of what had once been a convenience store’s forecourt, filled with rusting cars awaiting owners that would never return. Half way across he saw a twisted piece of metal perforated with holes lying on the ground that had once been a registration plate. He picked it up and tucked it under his arm as they walked.

  A bank on the far side dropped into a ditch that contained a shallow stream. Marcus helped Kerry across the ditch and into the shadows beneath the broad limbs of the trees. He gently set her down with her back to the thick trunk.

  Her eyes rolled up into her head and her jaw hung slack.

  ‘Stay with me,’ he rasped.

  With agonised steps he crept back to the shallow stream and filled their canteens with water, then dragged himself back to Kerry’s side. With one canteen he washed both their fa
ces and drenched their festering wounds with the water, but he dare not drink it.

  Instead, he dug a shallow pit in the soil with one hand and then filled it with dry twigs and a strip of his shirt tail. Moments later, he used a cigarette lighter he had always carried with him in the laboratory to ignite the dry twigs and flames spat and writhed from the tiny fire.

  Marcus built a crude stand from old windscreen wipers and then lay the registration plate over the flames and set the spare canteen onto it. His eyes felt heavy with sickness and exhaustion, his joints ached and his head throbbed as he fed ever larger twigs and debris into the fire, the water in the canteen bubbling as it finally boiled. He hauled himself back to the stream and refilled the other canteen, bringing it back to the fire and replacing the one with the boiling water, which he then set down in the shade to cool.

  He did not know how long he lay, waiting for the water to cool enough to drink without scalding their parched lips, but he finally drank from the canteen. It tasted of dirt and decaying foliage and yet seemed as sweet as the finest wine, the boiling having destroyed any threat of bacterial contamination. He felt his head clear a little, and he grabbed Kerry’s jaw with one hand and tipped the canteen between her lips.

  Kerry coughed and swallowed, then gulped from the canteen as though it were the last drink she would ever taste. Water spilled down her chin and Marcus endeavoured to catch every last precious drop with his spare hand.

  Kerry drained the canteen and slumped back against the tree once more. Marcus watched her for a few moments. He was no doctor, and had no idea whether Kerry was dying or whether he had just saved her life. But somehow, instinctively, he knew that he had done the right thing.

  Marcus refilled the spare canteen and set it to boil, then repeated the whole episode once more before he finally relented to his weariness and slumped alongside Kerry against the tree.

  The cooling breeze that drifted beneath the tree lulled him toward sleep, and as his eyes grew heavy and he drifted between wakefulness and sleep he dreamed of seeing several shiny spheres rolling by on the distant freeway, their metallic bodies glinting in the bright sunlight and their feet clicking on the ground as they wound their way east.

  Dozens of spheres, with WASPS hovering in the air above them in evil black clouds.

  ***

  33

  Surrey,

  United Kingdom

  The tent was silent as Arianna stared at Icon.

  ‘You want me to do what?’ she asked.

  ‘You must upload and find out what you can from Alexei Volkov,’ Icon repeated. ‘He was murdered, and as the only person connecting you to your father and everything that has happened recently he must be the key to solving both his own murder and the greater conspiracy of Kieran Beck and the Prime Minister.’

  ‘You think that Alexei knew where this “kill–switch” was?’ Han asked.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Icon said. ‘He was burned alive, was he not? Perhaps his murderers tried to threaten him with immolation if he did not reveal the kill–switch’s location. When he refused or did not know, they carried through with their threat. It would not be beyond a man like Kieran Beck.’

  Han Reeves frowned. ‘You sure about that? His death could just have coincidentally been at the same time as the hit on the Re–Volution headquarters.’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidences anymore,’ Icon growled back. ‘I don’t even believe that governments wanted to cure The Falling when it first began.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ Arianna gasped. ‘That’s one conspiracy too far.’

  ‘Really?’ Icon shot back. ‘Our world was dying. Climate change had ravaged food production, novel diseases and antibiotic resistant strains were causing the loss of millions of lives every year and wars over water, fossil fuels and territories based on archaic religious beliefs were killing millions more. Don’t you think that it occurred to governments even back then that the population problem could be solved with a suitably virulent disease?’

  ‘That’s a big difference to saying that The Falling was a planned event,’ Han pointed out.

  ‘I didn’t say planned,’ Icon corrected him. ‘It’s as likely that The Falling started naturally enough, perhaps because mankind’s obsession with antibiotics created a weakness in humans to a disease that might otherwise have been harmless to us. The Falling was in the soil, in wood and foliage, in plants. It was everywhere and had been for millions of years without causing a pandemic. Once it got out and was identified I can’t believe that nobody, anywhere in the world in all of those laboratories didn’t figure out a cure, or learned that some people were still immune. I heard once that ten per cent of people were immune to HIV, the last really dangerous illness to emerge before The Falling. And what about people in foreign countries who had never had exposure to antibiotics, who might have retained immunity to diseases like it? How did they fall?’

  ‘It probably mutated,’ Myles said. ‘There’s more to disease than just the start. HIV, the common cold, they’re all able to mutate within individuals so you can’t cure people with a single vaccine, only slow the illness down.’

  ‘Forget all that,’ Arianna snapped. ‘How on Earth do you expect to get me to upload? I’m not dead in case you hadn’t noticed, and I want to stay that way.’

  Behind the shadows of his hood, Arianna thought she saw Icon smile softly.

  ‘You wouldn’t be dead,’ he replied. ‘Not quite.’

  ‘Not quite?’ she echoed.

  ‘You have an upload,’ Myles realised as he looked at her. ‘They want to use that to get you inside.’

  ‘Won’t work,’ Han pointed out. ‘The police are after you now, if everything Icon says is true. They’ll identify you the moment you show up on the Re–Volution servers and terminate you.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Icon said, ‘which is why it won’t be Arianna that they see uploading.’

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Arianna snapped.

  ‘Your DNA,’ Icon smiled, looking directly at her with his one good eye. ‘It’s contained in your white blood cells. We will transfuse them with the cells of one of our own, a survivor who is not on Re–Volution’s or the government’s watch list. You’ll then upload and be able to move freely as a holosap for a while.’

  ‘Wouldn’t they check the chip itself?’ Han asked. ‘I thought that they recorded stuff, who we are, where we’ve been and so on?’

  ‘It has to only appear to be somebody else,’ Icon replied. ‘There is no way yet for Re–Volution to match a brain to a specific person without a body. An upload becomes effective immediately upon death so in such cases Re–Volution are dependent upon the information contained on the chip alone, which is chiefly comprised of that person’s DNA. With no teeth or other identifying traits, they’re reliant upon the upload working at all to verify who a person actually is. Arianna will upload but we will hack her chip first and alter the registration details to match our donor’s chip. Arianna’s appearance will be generated in their likeness as per the donor’s digital birth certificate. Re–Volution will run checks of course, but they take time.’ He looked at Arianna. ‘It is the mother of all identity theft, but you will have only a few hours before the deception is uncovered.’

  ‘I almost don’t want to know,’ she replied, ‘but how do you intend to make me dead?’

  ‘We have an expert,’ Icon replied, ‘a former surgeon who survived the pandemic. He will be responsible for hacking your chip, and will then use a medical procedure that will send you into a state of clinical death, although your body will in fact be in a sort of stasis. The procedure is normally used for people undergoing deep heart and brain surgery. Once you are in stasis, you will be uploaded and must obtain the information we need to expose Kieran Beck’s conspiracy before it can be put into action. You will effectively be both physically alive and dead at the same time.’

  ‘Which is illegal,’ Arianna said and swallowed thickly. ‘And what happens after I expose the con
spiracy?’

  ‘The medical process is reversed and you will be revived.’

  ‘Just like that,’ Arianna uttered.

  ‘Your holosap will remain of course, but by then Kieran Beck’s operation will be ruined and your name cleared. If we get what we want, all holosaps will be shut down afterward, including yours.’

  Icon looked up at the entrance to the tent. A woman stood there, her face half–shielded by her hood. Arianna could see that she had been beautiful once but the ravages of The Falling and countless years in the wilderness had aged her features. Arianna realised that she must have been a child when the pandemic struck.

  ‘This is Lynda,’ Icon said. ‘Her white blood cells will be transfused into you, effectively concealing your identity.’

  ‘And you’re okay with this?’ Arianna asked Lynda.

  Lynda stared back at Arianna for a long moment before replying. ‘My entire family died when I was seven years old,’ she whispered. ‘I barely survived myself. If this procedure can help to bring Re–Volution down it’s worth every sacrifice,’ Lynda looked at Icon, ‘by any means.’

  ‘By any means,’ Icon replied as though reciting a mantra.

  ‘Where will all of this be done?’ Han demanded of Icon as Lynda left the tent. ‘You don’t have any technology here, nothing like a laboratory or operating theatre.’

  ‘We have a site,’ Icon replied, ‘this side of the Thames.’

  ‘So you do go into the city,’ Myles pointed out.

  ‘Not into the city but we do approach it to trade,’ Icon admitted, ‘with people from inside for things that we cannot obtain like medicines, clothes and such like. Much of the equipment abandoned by people lying around out here is considered valuable by elements within London.’

  ‘Like weapons,’ Han snapped.

  ‘Those who would oppose Re–Volution,’ Icon replied without rancour, ‘is the enemy of my enemy, and thus my friend.’

  Han shook his head. ‘Innocent people have died in their hundreds in London from the blasts caused by the terrorists.’