by Mat Nastos
Head down, arms limp at his sides, Mal didn’t seem to notice the uneasiness in his old friend’s actions and pushed past him. The sound of metal on metal echoed through the empty space of the warehouse, bouncing off of the wreckage before disappearing into the distance as Mal leaned down onto the half-rusted table, bracing himself on widespread hands.
“Mal…if there’s anything I can do…”
A thunderous boom and the sound of shrieking, tearing metal interrupted David Zuzelo’s attempt to comfort his friend. One moment, his forty-year old solid steel work table had been whole, the next it was dented nearly in half by a single blow from a gleaming metal fist. The force of the blow was so great, its reverberation so powerful, it knocked Zuzelo off his feet and painfully onto his rear end.
The pure fury of Malcolm Weir was visible to his friend, even from behind, and five more titanic blows reduced the half-ton table to a demolished ruin. Each blow sent another spider web of cracks streaking out in the concrete floor from beneath the mess of tortured iron.
Before his anger was spent, Mal gripped two sides of the bent and ruined six hundred pound tabletop in his mighty hands and, straining, tore the piece from its welded mountings. With a primal scream he threw the unwieldy projectile with enough brute force to obliterate the burned out Volkswagen frame it slammed into at nearly sixty miles per hour.
Scrambling to his feet, Zuzelo dove behind the poor cover of a rolling tool rack for safety.
“Dude, Mal! I think you skipped a couple of grief stages and went right to ‘pissed off!’ I know you’re mad, but don’t destroy my home, man.” Zuzelo’s voice leapt five octaves as he yelled at the maddened cyborg. “Stop!”
The hammering fists stopped their relentless assault on the now nearly formless lump of steel, seemingly halted by Zuzelo’s plea. Shoulders shaking from the adrenaline shooting through his veins, Mal bowed his head for a moment and replayed the day in his head, analyzing every second that had gone by with a microscopic gaze.
He had missed something and it was nagging at the back of his mind.
“How did you find me?” he finally said, in a voice far too calm to be natural, or safe.
From behind his shield of plastic and nylon, David Zuzelo responded meekly, “Excuse me?”
Mal shot a glance at Zuzelo over his shoulder; eyes alight with a rapidly rekindled fire. “I disappeared for a year—you haven’t seen me in five years—and you knew right where to find me. How did you know, Zuz?”
“Mal, I…you…” before Zuzelo could finish, Mal had moved across the floor with the speed of a serpent’s strike, covering the twenty foot distance between them in the blink of an eye. The cyborg sent the protective chair spinning across the floor with a backhanded blow, and jerked the nearly two hundred and twenty-five pound man to his feet as if he weighed nothing at all. It took every ounce of control Zuzelo had to avoid soiling himself in response.
“How did you find me? Answer me!” Mal raged, spittle flying as he shook his friend like a rag doll, lifting his bulk four inches off the floor. “Did they send you?! Tell me! Tell me! How did you find me?”
“I…ack…”
Unable to speak as he was being manhandled by his enraged half-machine friend, David Zuzelo reached into the inner pocket of his worn denim jacket and started to pull something out. Mal saw the movement and responded with all of the inhuman speed his living metal implants had given him. He locked one hand around the throat of his supposed savior, suspending him in the air with the sheer power of his arm, and caught the man’s hand in a crushing grip with the other.
“You…” choked Zuzelo as unyielding metallic fingers cut off his oxygen.
“Not so fast,” spat Mal, barely contained fury threatened to bubble over into more violence. In his grip, Zuzelo choked and sputtered and squirmed, trying to free himself. Mal sneered to himself as he flipped the man’s hand over to see whatever weapon he had hidden. All that greeted him was the sight of a thin black cellphone, clutched tightly in a hand rapidly turning purple from the loss of circulation Mal was inflecting upon it.
“Aw, shit, Zuz…” Mal released his hold on the nearly unconscious man and tried to help him to the nearby water cooler for a drink. Zuzelo was having none of it and slapped the cyborg’s offending hand away and stumbled his way to snatch a tiny paper cup from its receptacle and pour icy liquid down his half-crushed throat.
After a moment of sputtering and coughing, Zuzelo barked, “You’ve got a funny way of thanking a guy for saving your bacon.”
Fists thrust hard into his sides and still far from trusting, “How did you find me, Zuz?”
“I got your damn text, you douche bag.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Zuz?” Mal’s eyes turned to slits as he watched the man warily.
“Your text came through…you told me where you were and when to get you,” seeing Mal’s quizzical look, Zuzelo tossed his cellphone to Mal and added, “Take a look for yourself.”
With a quick flick of his wrist, Mal caught the phone and brought it up to his face for a closer look. Still unsure of his newfound strength, he delicately pulled open the phone’s history and saw a series of messages sent from his cellphone. Zuzelo had even programmed it to display an old, drunken college picture of the two of them whenever Mal called.
There were three messages in total, giving the address where Mal had woken up, the request for a fast car, and a demand for Zuzelo to hurry. Looking at the time stamp for the first text, Mal saw it went through at almost the exact same time he came to in the operating room.
He had no idea what was going on, but Mal knew those messages weren’t his. Hell, he didn’t even know where his phone was.
“They’re not from me, Zuz. Someone else sent them.” Seeing the confused look on his friend’s face, Mal told him about the time stamps on the messages and that there was no way he could have sent them.
“You’ve got yourself into some deep shit,” whistled Zuzelo in astonishment.
“Yeah, I guess I do. I’ve got no idea who had me or why, and I have even less of an idea of who called you. None of it makes any sense.”
“I still can’t believe it, Mal…gone for a year and waking up with metal arms. It’s like everything we talk about online is true—abductions, conspiracies, cover-ups—and all of it’s happening to you. Oh, shit,” eyes wide, a pained and worried look formed on Zuzelo’s rather expressive face. “You weren’t…probed were you?”
Mal looked at his friend, taken completely by surprise. Then, over the course of two heartbeats, a giant smile split his face from ear to ear.
“You’re a nut, Zuz,” laughed Mal. “You’re crazy.”
“I’m crazy?” retorted Zuzelo from behind an incredulous smirk. “Says the man who just tore a bunch of rent-a-cops to shreds with his freaky metal arms…yeah, I’m the one with issues here.”
Mal let loose with a great belly laugh and clapped his friend on the back, causing Zuzelo to cringe a bit from the impact. The recently awakened cyborg still didn’t have a handle on the extent of his new strength. He was going to have to walk on eggshells when interacting with normal people for a while.
“Sorry…still getting used to these things. It’s not every day a guy wakes up with stainless steel arms, right?”
“Speaking of which…” Zuzelo said from beneath a bushy graying eyebrow, intrigued. “Let’s take a look at those things and see what’s going on. See if we can figure out exactly what those jack-booted pawns of the imperialistic establishment did to you”
Mal stared back at his friend, completely unconvinced.
“C’mon, let’s check those puppies out!” David Zuzelo tapped his teeth for a moment while he stared intently at the gleaming metal of Mal’s arms and chest. Mal could almost see the man thinking.
Face brightening, Zuzelo shouted, “Got it!” and bolted for a darkened corner of the room.
Although Zuzelo had disappeared into the shadows, surrounded by steel frames, piles of r
ubber and God knows what else, Mal found himself able to follow the man’s progress in spite of the lack of light. It seemed his upgrades included some sort of night vision along with everything else.
They’ve turned me into a living weapon…some kind of an ultimate soldier.
Mal shuddered at the thought, watching Zuzelo find whatever it was he was looking for and move back towards the light of the work area carrying something that turned out to be a rather vicious-looking sledgehammer with an enormous head and four foot long haft.
“And what the hell are you going to do with that?”
“We’re going to perform a series of scientific experiments to determine the make-up and capabilities of your new prosthetics,” Zuzelo dropped the head of the hammer down onto the concrete floor with a thud that caused Mal to grimace. Spitting in to his hands before taking up a baseball like grip on the tool’s handle, Zuzelo added, smiling wickedly, “Trust me. I’m a professional.”
“Trust you?” repeated Mal as he widened his stance and lowered his center of gravity in preparation. “This is payback for the choking thing, isn’t it?”
Zuzelo’s only response as he started his swing, “No comment.”
The hammer slammed into Mal’s braced right arm, just above the elbow. It should have pulverized every bone in the area. Instead, the force of impact knocked Mal from his feet and sent him bouncing roughly across the dirty, oil-covered floor to slam into, and knock over, one of the rusted steel art pieces Zuzelo had created from the salvage.
Mal slowly pushed himself up to a rather unsteady standing position, teeth still vibrating from the blow. Looking down, the cyborg noticed the living metal of his arm was unmarked, completely unblemished from the hammer strike. His eyes went wide and met with Zuzelo’s own astonished orbs.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” agreed Zuzelo, resting the hammer’s shaft on his shoulder. “Do you know what just happened?”
“You just hit me with a sledgehammer?”
“Besides that, Mal. Don’t you understand?”
Mal’s eyes bunched together and their lack of realization made Zuzelo shake his head in frustration.
“The amount of forced delivered by a sledgehammer is one half the mass of the hammer’s head times the square of its speed at the time of impact.”
“…and that is?”
“It’s approximately…” Zuzelo’s face scrunched up, eyes gazing towards the ceiling, and mouth silently working through what seemed to be a rather intense equation. Nodding, the engineer answered, “…a shitload.”
“A…shitload, you say,” grinned Mal. “Is that a technical term?”
“Yup,” replied the man, mirroring Mal’s smile as he dropped the heavy tool back to the ground and used its shaft as a cane to lean on.
“So what, pray tell, did you learn from that shitload?” requested Mal.
“Quite a bit, actually. You see this?” Zuzelo flipped the sledgehammer back up for the cyborg to examine. “It’s got a tungsten-alloy head. One of the hardest metals around—it’ll dent, even punch through solid steel.”
Mal gripped the hammer’s head in his right hand to examine it. He hardly felt its 35-pound weight in his hand.
“Go on.”
“The tungsten-alloy has a Mohs hardness rating of about nine—diamond has a ten.”
“So?” Mal responded, unsure of what Zuzelo was trying to say. Unconsciously, his finger had begun to gouge thin strips of material from the side of the sledge’s hammerhead.
“Look at your arm…I hit it full on with a sledgehammer made of one of the toughest substances around. It should be dented. Crushed. Damaged in some way.”
They both stared hard at the gleaming, unblemished surface of Mal’s living metal arm, stunned.
“It’s not even scratched…” came Mal’s voice in a half-whisper.
“Not even scratched,” repeated Zuzelo, knowingly. He grabbed Mal’s arm and pulled him over to an open area of the workroom that contained a dark metal worktable nearly 10 feet long, a number of dark red gas canisters, each standing nearly five feet in height, and a welding set-up of some kind. “Come over here. Let’s try something.”
Zuzelo popped on an old welder’s goggles and a pair of thick, dirty brown gloves. After a moment of fiddling with the machine’s controls, a bright white light emerged from the tip of the welder, and the engineer moved towards Mal.
“What the hell are you doing?” gulped Mal as he shielded his eyes with one hand.
“This is a gas tungsten arc welder. It burns at just over 3400 degrees Fahrenheit and slices through reinforced-steel like butter,” Zuzelo grabbed Mal’s hand dramatically, pausing for effect. “I’m going to try and cut your arm off, Mal.”
Mal found himself unable to move as Zuzelo jammed the pulsating blue-white flame of the GTA welder to the top of his forearm and began to slide it around. He could feel his mouth drop open, eyes tearing up as he stared a bit too long at the painful light of the high-powered torch.
“Surface temperatures have reached thirty-four hundred and twelve degrees,” came the until-now silent computer voice in Mal’s head. It felt almost reassuring. “Nano-drones affecting cool down. All systems within normal operating parameters.”
The metal ‘skin’ of Mal’s forearm began to move under the heat in the same way muscles move beneath normal skin, but the arc welder seemed to have no other effect upon it. No burns. No oxidization. No damage or carbon scoring at all. If anything, Zuzelo’s ministrations seemed to do nothing more than clean the dirt, blood and grime Mal had collected during his escape, and shine the metallic surface to an almost mirror-polish.
“Holy…”
“…shit!” finished Mal as his friend pulled the welding apparatus away and shut it down.
Licking his lips, eyes glittering darkly, Zuzelo set the welder down and strode back over to Mal’s side with purpose. He dropped both gloves to the ground at their feet, took a deep breath and grabbed on to the gleaming chrome lower arm. Both men gasped out loud at the action.
Zuzelo’s eyes went so wide Mal was afraid they were going to pop out of the man’s head. “It’s cool to the touch.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, it’s not even warm,” replied Zuzelo as he began to run his hand up and down the arm, tracing it’s every nook, cranny and groove. “It feels cold.”
“That’s my arm you’re molesting there, Zuz.”
Realizing what he was doing, David stopped and thought for a moment; staring hard at the man he rescued a handful of hours earlier.
After a few long moments of silent analysis, Zuzelo spoke, a seriousness Mal had never heard before filled his voice, “I don’t know what they did to you, Mal, but that is some top secret government researched alien shit going on there. You’re an X-file.”
Mal nodded.
“So what should we do now?”
“I have no idea,” the bald man answered, calloused fingers stroking his goatee thoughtfully
“Big help you are, Zuz.”
“What did you expect?”
“Well, I was kind of hoping you had something in mind more technical than just hitting me with things to see if something breaks,” spit back Mal.
“Like what?! You’re the first government cyborg I’ve ever run into, my friend.”
Mal slumped down to the floor and held his head in both hands, weariness and frustration finally getting the best of him. He looked up at his friend and pleaded, “I don’t know what to do. They’ve taken everything. Help me.”
Sighing, David Zuzelo scratched his head and nodded.
“Let’s go up to the computer bay and see if we can’t access whatever internal systems you’ve got going on there. There’s got to be something in there making everything tick and maybe, just maybe, we can hack into it.”
Zuzelo extended his hand down to his weary friend and backed it with the familiar, warm smile Mal had known for more than a decade, “C’mon.”
As the pa
ir headed upstairs towards Zuzelo’s computer room, he asked, “By the way, what do you think your fiancée is up to?”
“Oh, shit…Kristin!”
CHAPTER 7
Seated at the head of a large conference table, Gordon Kiesling was already three Vicodins into his headache by the time Representative Michael Fountain had arrived from Washington, DC. Stroking the bottle in the pocket of his still crisply-pressed pants, Kiesling felt the need to increase that number every time the Congressman interrupted the meeting with one his snide little comments. He may have been Washington’s liaison with Project: Hardwired, but Fountain’s attempted Columbo act was getting on the director’s nerves almost as much as his cheap gray Men’s Warehouse suit.
Seriously, thought Kiesling to himself. Brown shoes with a gray suit? They should be allowed to kill the man on principal alone.
“…is beyond me,” cut in Fountain’s voice, snapping Kiesling back to reality with its over-excitable San Diego cadence.
The last time Kiesling had heard a bass voice as whiny and annoying as the Congressman’s was from Darth Vader at the end of ‘Revenge of the Sith.’
“Are you listening to me, Director Kiesling,” came Fountain’s poor attempt at gravitas.
“With rapt attention, Representative Fountain,” replied Kiesling, his smile filled with the whitest teeth this side of a Hollywood blockbuster. “As to why we haven’t been able to locate Designate Cestus, I’ll leave that answer to our head tech on the project.”
Chair half spinning far enough around to get the politician’s face out of his peripheral vision, Kiesling gestured to the now sweat-drenched Carl Anderson. “Please explain to the Congressman and to all of us, Mister Anderson, why we are unable to locate the prodigal Captain Malcolm Weir? If my memory serves me correctly, and I have Ms. Roslan there to ensure it always does, the first thing Doctor Ryan’s lab boys do with every single Project: Hardwired recruit is surgically implant a sub-dermal tracking device. Beyond that, I’ve seen POV video from Designate Cestus in his mission logs. Shouldn’t we be able to access his cameras by now?”
