by Mat Nastos
Kristin appeared, hot on his tail, completely ignoring the fact she was unarmed and ordering Mal to surrender.
As Kristin charged down the cold aisle toward him, Mal gripped the freezer unit to his left with both hands and pulled, straining every muscle in his body. The woman leapt at him with a flying kick, too late, as the entire structure gave way to the irresistible force of his cybernetic strength and capsized onto her, pinning Kristin to the ice-chilled floor.
Praying to God that Kristin would be all right, Mal turned and headed back to where he had hidden Zuz to collect the man, who had grown deathly white in the cyborg’s absence. At first Mal was afraid he was too late but his computer sensors picked up a heartbeat, faint and nearly imperceptible even to his superhuman senses.
He still had time!
With Zuz in his arms, Mal crashed through the heavy wooden loading dock door and moved into the late afternoon sun shining down on the worker’s parking lot behind the building. The roar and whine of landing helicopters masked the sound of a shattered window as Mal found a car to ‘appropriate.’ Mal had the vehicle hot-wired and in motion mere seconds after placing Zuz delicately into the backseat, peeling out and punching down hard on the gas in a race against the clock.
*****
Thick-soled combat boots ground the broken glass littering the pharmacy’s tiled floor into a fine powder beneath them as a veritable army of battle-ready Project: Hardwired soldiers swarmed into the building. The men, machine guns at the ready, swept through every inch of the building, securing entrances, exits, and everything else in between. A moment later they were joined by a tall muscular man with shimmering metal arms and a silver cybernetic eye.
Gauss surveyed the situation for a moment, analyzing the information being fed to him by his ocular enhancement. Nearly every inch of the store’s interior was destroyed—the whole place virtually reeked of Cestus’s handiwork. He’d been on enough missions with the rogue cyborg to recognize the sort of mess the man tended to leave behind.
“I need a sit-rep?” demanded Gauss of a group of GMRs working their way through the clutter. “Where is he?”
“No sign of Designate Cestus, but we have two squads canvassing the immediate vicinity now, sir,” answered the top ranking GMR present, his name-tag read ‘Lambda-One.’
“Ran away again, Cestus? This is getting redundant,” muttered Gauss to himself, then demanded to know where the girl was.
“Unit Galatea is trapped beneath one of the freezer units near the center of the store,” responded Lambda-One. “Tau-Unit is bringing in equipment to free her now.”
“Don’t bother.” Gauss stormed past the lower level Project: Hardwired grunt. The lack of initiative programmed in the Gomers was a real pain sometimes, thought the cyborg, stomping his way to the area where Kristin’s struggling form was still pinned beneath two tons or more of heavy machinery and rapidly defrosting boxed dinners. “Fall back and secure the front of the building—I’ve got this,” he ordered the ten or so GMRs of Lambda-Unit loitering around the mess of broken metal and spilled milk.
Reaching out with his mastery of magnetic fields once the area cleared out, Gauss slid one hand underneath the fallen refrigerator and flipped it across the room as if it’s almost five-thousand pound weight was nothing. Splitting in half, the ten-foot long icebox crashed through aisle after aisle, sending shelves toppling and smashing into one another before hammering into the rear wall.
Gauss stared down at the unconscious figure splayed out on the ground in front of him. A small groan escaped from her lips, causing the cyborg to grin, revealing his perfect white teeth. Mirror-finished titanium fingers slid through Kristin’s long golden hair, reflecting back the tight smile carving itself into Gauss’s face.
“But now that he knows we have you, Cestus won’t be running for long.”
*****
Mal watched the emergency room staff so intently as they wheeled Zuz’s nearly lifeless body down the ammonia-scented halls of the Encino Hospital Medical Center that he completely missed the fact one of the nurses had stayed behind and was attempting to get more information out of him. It took her no fewer than nine ‘ahems’ and four more ‘excuse mes’ before she was at last able to grab his attention.
Referred to as a ‘fireball’ by her co-workers, Heidi Jensen was small, compact, and full of a seemingly endless amount of energy and attitude. Unfortunately for Mal, he was the target for both.
“I said, we’re going to need you to fill out an incident report and wait here for the police,” the tiny woman had gotten so worked up from being ignored that her dirty-blond ponytail was snapping back and forth faster than a whip. “What exactly did you say happened to Mr. Zuzelo?”
Looking down quizzically, Mal answered as if on auto-pilot, “Carjacking. They tried to take his car.”
Unconvinced, Nurse Jensen gave Mal the once over again for the eighth or ninth time since his arrival at her emergency room: he was tall and good looking in that sort of way that you’d regret the next morning, dressed in jeans and an old, threadbare Christmas sweater with tiny reindeer and snowmen on it—something Mal had scrounged up in the back of the Volkswagen he’d stolen from the pharmacy’s employee parking lot. All of that in and of itself was enough to set off the nurse’s finely-tuned trouble alert, but when combined with the burns and copious amounts of blood covering nearly every inch of his body, Jensen’s alarms were blaring away at full volume.
“What about you? That looks like a lot of blood—it looks like you were in a fight yourself,” she asked, doing the little hop and stretch short people do when trying to see over a crowd as she attempt to locate one of the on duty police officers that frequented the hospital. “We should have one of the doctors check you out, too.”
“I’m fine…the nanites have me back to 98% operating capacity,” responded Mal still lost in his thoughts.
“Excuse me?” Jensen said, finally able to catch the attention of the slightly rotund Officer North from his usual spot flirting in front of the nurses’ station. She waved him over frantically.
Mal snapped back to reality and looked around, seeing the cop heading towards him with resolve in his eye and donut on his chin.
“I have to go.”
Protesting, the nurse tried to get her hands around Mal’s arm only to stop, horrified at the inhuman way it felt beneath the wool material of the sweater’s long sleeves. The cyborg pushed his way down the hall and was outside before the huffing Officer North reached Nurse Jensen, asking if everything was okay.
Staring after the vanished man, Jensen nodded. She just hoped he stayed vanished.
Unsure if anyone was still pursuing him, Mal rushed across the busy car lot outside the hospital’s front doors, dodging vehicles and people with uncanny agility. Along the way to the purloined vehicle waiting for him with its doors still open from the hasty exit he’d made to get his friend inside, Mal had made his decision.
He was done.
“It’s time to stop running,” thought Mal, determined. He was tired of having to watch his back every second of the day, and tired of having his friends threatened—having them hurt. It was time to take the fight back to where it all began: Project: Hardwired.
CHAPTER 18
For the first time since the September 11th terrorist attacks, the US Bank Tower building was closed to the public.
At precisely one hour before the normal close of business at the tower, an announcement blared over the public address speakers requesting the immediate shutdown of all businesses operating at the location. A few minutes later, all residents were escorted from the premises by heavily-armed US government troops and informed that the facility would re-open the next morning.
When pressed on reasons for the abrupt evacuation and shut down of one of the largest business centers on the west coast, the soldiers, uniformed in a manner unrecognizable by even the most experienced of military veterans working at the facility, would only say it was a precaution against terr
orist threat. More than one overly vocal tower resident were escorted off-site at gun point when they refused to vacate the area.
None of the civilians knew precisely what was going on at their place of business, but deep down they knew it was something far beyond what the Kevlar enshrouded men were telling them.
Tension was thick in the air and grew thicker as the minutes ticked away after the evacuation. As one hour passed and then two, everyone on duty grew anxious. They knew an attack was coming, but not when or how. The cadre of men stationed around the building were fully aware of who was coming and what he was able to do, and the tension quickly spread.
The attack came just as the sun began to kiss the horizon. Men on the periphery began disappearing, their radios hissing static and then nothing, their vital signs flat-lining on the monitors high up on the seventy-sixth floor in command and control.
“Target has breached the perimeter!” The GMR overseer’s voice screamed out across the radio waves. From his position seated behind a bank of computer screens, monitors were flashing more and more red as the lives of his charges were snuffed out. “Weapons free, deadly force authorized!”
In spite of the nearly impenetrable contingent of seventy Project: Hardwired soldiers, human and cybernetically-enhanced GMR alike, the living weapon known as Cestus had found a way to breach their defenses: the sewage tunnels lining the area were child’s play for him to enter a few blocks away. As the number of disappearing men hit ten, the cyborg took advantage of the resulting chaos and popped up in the midst of a group of the black-clad mercenaries. Two were decapitated and a third bifurcated from collarbone to groin before the men realized death had landed amongst their group.
With enemies surrounding him on all sides, Cestus gave his mind completely over to the programming that had been forced into his brain and the world turned red with blood and rage. He punched through the first unit of urban warriors like they were single-ply toilet paper in a shoddy gas station bathroom. Within seconds, men were dismembered and left lying in bloody pools covering the ground in his wake. The unyielding claws of his nanotech-driven arms showed no mercy to anything they touched.
Responding to the screams of the dying, a second and third battalion of Hardwired GMRs crashed down onto Cestus from every direction, guns blazing. Humanity repressed, the cyborg dove headfirst into the wave of men attempting to bar him from gaining access to the building and exacting his vengeance. His claws scythed out like the blades of a metal and flesh grim reaper, snuffing out life with each touch.
When it was over, the flesh and bone barrier made up of six dozen men lasted fewer than ninety seconds against the berserker fury of the super-soldier.
Covered in blood and cordite residue, and dripping with perspiration, Cestus was barely winded. Seventy men had been killed in the time it the it took to heat a convenience store burrito and it meant nothing to the government-spawned killing machine he’d become. It did nothing more than whet his appetite for death.
Pulling up a tactical update from his internal sensors, Cestus saw that nothing lived within a one hundred meter radius of the carnage surrounding the building. A blank spot in his readouts, corresponding with the building’s immense entrance, caught the super-soldier’s attention, drawing his gaze magnetically toward it.
The almost colorless blue eyes of the cyborg narrowed to razor slits, fighting against the darkness staring back at him from the shadowed skyscraper’s interior, struggling to pull clues from the twilight within. The computer augmented eyes of Cestus quickly deciphered the subtle movement of cloth and steel, identifying the next obstacle the head of Project: Hardwired had placed in the cyborg’s path.
Cestus smiled coldly as his eyes finally revealed to him the identity of the man standing across the battlefield from him: Fortified at the center-point of the lobby with an M246 SAW machine gun at the ready and flanked by thirty armed-to-the-teeth GMR warriors was Captain Marc Morrell, the sight of whom filled Cestus with a particularly intense need to kill. Reacting of its own accord, the cyborg’s body bulked up even further, thick armor plates formed across his chest and back, and his arms grew, lengthening to gorilla-like proportions, growing serrated flanges, blades along the forearms. Wicked knives extended out twenty inches from his hands and twitched in anticipation.
As the transformation completed, Cestus launched himself forward at the mass of enemies waiting for him inside.
“FIRE!” ordered Morrell at the top of his lungs, his SAW echoing his voice with a scream of more than 200 rounds per minute, perforating the ground around Cestus with a hail of hot lead.
The cyborg danced through the withering storm of high caliber rounds, ignoring the odd shot that glanced off the thick armor of his prosthetics. Bursting into a run directly toward the heart of the gunfire, Cestus leaned low, reached out with the gnarled talons of his hands to catch the thick nylon straps lining the back of a fallen GMR, and pulled the corpse up from its final resting place to act as an unliving shield for his advance. With the limp body flopping over one shoulder protecting the cyborg’s torso from incoming attacks, Cestus’ left hand reached up and tore the MGL-140 free of its restraining harness on the dead soldier’s side, and aimed into the center of the rapidly disintegrating plate glass lobby wall. Titanium-alloy fingers tightened on the trigger and let loose with a volley of 40mm tear gas shells, covering the front of the sieged building in a dense fog.
“Maintain fire!” Morrell screamed in response.
Thousands of rounds lanced holes of light through the gray cloud of smoke rolling into the lobby, trying to catch a lucky break and take down the advancing Cestus.
Tear gas mixed with gunpowder clouds and steam from red hot weapon barrels, transforming the once gleaming marble lobby into a hellish cavern lit only by flashes of gunfire and the fading light from outside. For more than a minute, the Project: Hardwired response team poured bullets into the growing fog bank blindly, having lost sight of Cestus seconds after their barrage had begun.
Eyes squinting against the burning chemical gas, Morrell finally removed his right hand from the trigger of his smoking weapon and held it upright, signaling his men to cease fire wordlessly. As one the robot-like GMRs stopped firing.
Ten long seconds passed in complete silence as the men waited to see if they’d stopped the rogue cyborg. Ten seconds that seemed to drag on for a week to Morrell. With the silence a thunderous drumbeat in his ears, the officer ordered a squad of five members of GMR Unit Upsilon forward with weapons at the ready.
Before the automaton soldiers disappeared into the foul-smelling gas cloud, Upsilon-Six called out “Something’s movi—” before his arms and most of his face were torn from his body by a shining silver flash from deep within. A microsecond later, Cestus burst forth from the densely packed gray mist, arms slashing out in front of him. Three GMRs dropped, the top halves of their skulls sliced cleanly from their heads.
Like puppets on a string, the remaining GMRs let their machine guns swing back on their side harnesses and drew electro-batons in near perfect unison. They charged Cestus as one and somewhere 75 floors up the controllers prayed it would be enough.
It wasn’t.
Cestus moved like a whirlwind through the attacking men, carving flesh and ignoring blows from the electrified weapons the May brothers had guaranteed Director Kiesling would nullify his threat. Men fell before him in droves, dead or dying, as he pushed his way towards the man responsible for taking Kristin from him.
Swearing aloud, Morrell decided it was every man for himself and swung his SAW around, aiming into the mass of his own men surrounding the crazed cyborg. Taking Cestus down once and for all was worth the cost of a few GMR lives—besides, Morrell knew the boys in the tech department could patch a GMR back to fighting capacity as long as its brain case was mostly intact. The soldier opened fire, shredding everything in front of him.
Dodging beneath the stream of armor-piercing rounds, Cestus dropped to his knees, snatched an MP5 from one of h
is fallen foes, and in one fluid motion let loose with a burst of shells that took Morrell in the right side of his chest, disabling his arm and causing the man to lose grip on his weapon with a shriek.
The empty space between them took Cestus three long strides to cross and backhand the wounded Morrell, knocking the giant machine gun away from him. Losing blood rapidly, Morrell attempted to gain some distance from the rampaging cyborg with a a snap kick to the chest that caught Cestus by surprise and spun him around on his heels. Morrell used the distraction to back away from his reeling foe. He jerked the 9mm Beretta 92FS from the holster on his thigh, thumbed it to semi-automatic and begin firing as fast as he could.
Dancing around the wounded man’s attack, Cestus stepped behind Morrell, shoved the serrated blades of his hand claws into the soldier’s back and ripped away seven inches of spinal column with a wet slurping sound.
Morrell flopped onto his back bonelessly, his mouth continuing to scream soundlessly as the final few breaths fled from between crimson-stained teeth.
“There will be more upstairs,” Cestus thought to himself as he watched Morrell’s vital signs fade away with his computerized senses, confirming the man’s death.. There would be more GMRs and at least one Prime Unit waiting, ready and eager to kill him. But it didn’t matter to the battle-hungry cyborg. He knew the lesser units were only a challenge in large groups, and even then all they could do was slow him down. As for the Primes like Gauss and the others, their enhanced abilities were no match for his own melee-specific capabilities in the tight confines of the skyscraper’s upper floors.
Outside or there in the lobby’s large open space—places where the Project: Hardwired pawns could act freely and without constrictions—had been their only real shot at stopping him.
