by Mat Nastos
Cestus barely noticed the floor nearly buckling beneath him as Gauss blasted the wall before him to dust.
“How long will the negation field last?”
“Sixty seconds,” responded the computer.
“That’s all I need.” Cestus dropped the bloody carcass of the slain GMR he’d been holding to the floor and braced himself for Gauss’s onslaught.
So primed with power, each running footstep Gauss planted on the ground caused the heavily-reinforced floor to fracture and crack. The walls themselves seemed to flex outward in reaction to his presence.
“Kiesling sent me here to kill you, Weir!”
The two half-machine titans met in the middle of the room with a quick series of strikes and blocks, each cyborg feeling out the other. The first time they had met in battle, a freshly-awakened Cestus had been outclassed and overpowered by the sheer explosive power and vehemence of the other man’s attack; this time it was different.
Fresh and in full access of his abilities, Cestus found himself to be more than a match for Gauss—his speed was greater by a factor of two or more and allowed the super-soldier to easily dodge attacks from the magnetically-enhanced cyborg that might otherwise have blasted his bones to dust.
With each missed attack, Gauss became more and more angry, and his offense grew wilder as he realized defeating Cestus wouldn’t be the walk-in-the-park he’d thought it would.
“The only chance you had to kill me was when I first woke up,” taunted Cestus, easily dodging the increasingly uncontrolled attacks from his enemy. “Now I have full access to my programming.”
“So what?” snapped Gauss, a missed overhand strike that fractured the floor beneath their feet punctuated his disdain for Cestus and his programming. “Your little ‘Edward Scissorhands’ act doesn’t impress me. You’re nothing!”
“Wrong,” replied Cestus, shredding his opponent’s face with a backhanded strike that enraged the berserk cyborg even more. “They built me to take the other Prime Units down if any of you got out of control. I was made to kill you, Gauss…and Kiesling sent you here to die.”
Cestus dropped into a defensive stance and waited for the attack he knew would follow his enemy’s rage.
“LIAR!” roared Gauss, putting every iota of his power and energy into a haymaker that left him wide open and vulnerable when Cestus ducked under it.
Crossing his arms in front of his body, Cestus sliced upward with arms morphed into meter-long blades of titanium-carbon alloy, catching the overextended right arm of Gauss in their crux and tore it from his body.
Stunned, Gauss watched the amputated limb bounce across the floor, taking with it his capacity for magnetic-control. Cestus’s hand, morphed into a cruel fist of blades and spikes, tore into the shocked cybernetic-man’s stomach with enough force to splinter his spine.
The voices of both men lashed out in a duet of violence, pain, and fury.
“Take a look, Gauss,” said Cestus, rage fully on display across his face as he twisted the razor-blades of his fingers hard into the man’s gut. “Take a good long look into the eyes of the man who killed you.”
Any response Gauss had ended, dying in a crimson tinged froth upon his lips and a haggard cough. With a jerk and sickening suction sound, the living metal claw of Cestus came free, spraying blood and letting Gauss’s innards flop wetly to the floor in a hot cascade.
Gauss fell in mute horror to his knees staring at the ropey pile of his intestines on the floor before looking up to his conqueror one last time. The light from the cyborg’s eyes was already fading as Cestus leapt over his cooling corpse in pursuit of his true prey, Gordon Kiesling.
Entering the stairwell at full speed, Cestus took the last twenty flights to the roof four steps in a bound, taking less time that it would for a man to walk into the kitchen for a snack. He knew he had to hurry if he was going to catch Kiesling before the coward slunk away to hide somewhere out of the cyborg’s reach.
Reaching the last landing and the exit leading out to the building’s summit and heliport, Cestus leaned down and bowled through the metal reinforced door blocking his path without even slowing down. The super-soldier was ready for the automatic gunfire waiting for him on the fifty-foot flat expanse of roof, running in a mad-dash toward the dull black helicopter waiting to take off atop a raised platform in its center.
Four GMRs let loose with every bit of ammo they had in their MP5s as Kiesling made his way up five tiny steps towards the chopper. The two men locked eyes and knew they were in a race that meant death for one of them.
Cestus met the first GMR with a leap and dropped him with a pair of knees to the man’s chest, crushing his throat, shattering his collarbone, and collapsing his ribcage. The cyborg was dead by the time his body flopped to the ground. Spring up to his feet, Cestus decapitated the second GMR as the automaton opened fire and sprayed bullets in a mad dance of twitching death. Cestus grabbed the headless man’s body and spun it around, taking the last two roadblocks in their faces, killing them instantly.
“Kiesling!” screamed Cestus as he watched the director of Project: Hardwired climbing into the vehicle with his assistant close behind.
Swearing out loud, Kiesling turned just inside the helicopter’s tiny cabin and looked back and forth between the Cestus barreling in his direction and Ms. Roslan trying to climb on board. Making up his mind, Kiesling shouted for the pilot to go ahead and take off. He leaned down low towards the woman below and shoved her away from the aircraft, dropping her squarely on her backside.
“Gordon?!” she said, stunned by his sudden action.
“Get us off the ground NOW!” Kiesling yelled to the pilot. Catching Ms. Roslan’s attention, he ordered, “You only need to slow him down for a minute, Melissa…”
The woman’s eyes went cold as the vehicle with her boss—and her own rescue—began to lift off of the platform and move away from her position. Regaining her feet, Roslan turned towards the blood and gore soaked Cestus nearly upon her, gripping her gun tightly.
Cestus closed the distance to within feet, legs a blur beneath him, clawed arms wide apart ready for attack.
Ms. Roslan stepped meekly out of the way, arms raised in non-aggression, and allowed Cestus to bolt passed her unmolested. Momentum carrying his body towards the edge of the platform, Cestus watched as the helicopter slowly rotated away from the building, hovering ten feet up and twenty feet away from the roof and out in the yawning chasm of empty air that extended out over the Los Angeles skyline beyond. Without hesitation the cyborg launched himself into mid-air after the retreating aircraft, extending his arms to their full length. The cybernetic prosthetics groaned and stretched to over six fix, grasping out for the landing skids of the copter.
A scream tore itself from Cestus as time seemed to freeze with him hanging in air, unsure of whether or not he’d make it.
Miraculously, one clawed hand was able to hold on to the bouncing, rotating helicopter, while the other slapped the side and slid loose. Cestus dangled precariously by one hand, the ground screaming up at him from more than a thousand feet below. The chopper spun and dipped from the weight of the cyborg landing on its bottom-most structure, jerking out of the pilot’s control, nearly sending Gordon Kiesling bouncing out its still-open side hatch.
“He’s grabbed on! We have to shake him off!” Cestus heard Kiesling scream from somewhere right about his head.
“We’re off-balance and need to land, sir,” came the pilot’s reply, picked up over the sound of the helicopter’s diesel engine and its rotors.
The chopper tilted and started to descend, still jerking back and forth as Cestus swung freely underneath, threatening to send the man plummeting to his death on the earth below.
As the helicopter swung precariously close to the building as it dropped, Cestus made his decision to end it all right there, high up over the streets of L.A. before they landed. The cyborg grabbed the strut with both hands and used the bottom of the vehicle to kick himself into an
arc, flipping into the belly of the chopper.
Kiesling was dumbstruck by the turn of events.
Seeing the murderous cyborg bent on taking his life suddenly appear less than a foot away from where he was standing sent Gordon Kiesling into a panic. He started to open his mouth to beg for mercy—to offer Malcolm Weir whatever he wanted to let him go—when Cestus cut him short. The cyborg’s arm morphed into a lustrous blade of silver, which shot forward, running Gordon Kiesling through at the center of his chest. The sword continued into the back of the pilot’s chair, through the startled pilot struggling to regain control of the flight stick, and into the instrument panel. A shower of sparks sprayed the cockpit as Cestus yanked his arm free.
“That was for Kristin,” whispered Cestus into Kiesling’s ear before turning and moving for the exit of the helicopter, now spinning completely out of control and headed straight for the seventy-fifth floor of the US Bank Tower.
Cestus stared at the drop-off below him and leaped out into space, chuckling as he remembered this was the second time he’d jumped off of this particular building. He was in mid-fall when the Project: Hardwired helicopter smashed into the side of the world’s tenth tallest building, rotor blades shattering and shearing off as they struck its outer skin. A heartbeat filled with breaking glass and warping steel passed before the chopper’s gas tanks exploded into a fireball, destroying the four floors surrounding it in the resulting inferno. Flames eradicated all traces of the master Abraxas-Array computer and the core of Project: Hardwired.
The nightmare was over for the man known as Designate Cestus.
Nose-diving for the ground, Malcolm Weir smiled to himself and hoped the landing wouldn’t hurt quite as much this time around.
CHAPTER 22
The blistering Southern Californian sun was already heading below the horizon before Mal made it back to the Encino Hospital Medical Center to check on Zuz. His internal computer system had already supplied him with the good news on his friend’s prognosis—the surgery had gone fine and, aside from a few broken bones, a transfusion to restore two pints of blood loss, and a whole lot of sutures, Zuz was well on the road to recovery. A quick scan of the attending physician’s charts revealed the wounded man could be out of the hospital in as little as a week.
If he behaved himself, that is.
Getting more than a few strange looks at his unusual dress: he had liberated a bulky jacket and pair of latex gloves from an ambulance parked in the rear lot of the facility while its owners grabbed dinner inside—Mal strode right up to the front desk and asked to see David Zuzelo, admitting he was the patient’s younger, better looking brother when interrogated by the receptionist as to his reason for the visit.
Mal was glad when, after an intercom exchange with the nurse’s station inside, he was allowed back to see his friend. In spite of how easy it would be for him to break into Zuz’s room without being seen, Mal preferred the lower stress level of being invited in through the front door. A lot less risk of police being called and a brand new mess starting up.
He had just finished cleaning up the last mess, after all. Well, his version of “cleaning” it up, that is.
Surrounded by the smell of ammonia and powerful chemical cleaners, Mal pushed open the pale green and off-white door leading to Zuz’s bedside.
Striding over to the his prone friend, Mal marveled to himself over the incredible efficiency, and near paranoia, of his computer systems. In the matter of seconds, he was given a full run down on defensible areas of the room, diagrams of the wiring in its walls, the number of patients and their guests in the connecting room (there were only three, all with vital signs operating in the approved “safe” range), and even two possible escape routes. The first floor window facing the hospital’s large, off-street parking lot was the one designated as best for both solo or two-man egress should Zuz need quick evacuation.
Mal paused for a moment to take a good look at Zuz. The last time he’d seen his friend, when Mal left the man in the emergency room, David had been in dire shape and was losing a lot of blood.
What a difference twenty-four hours had made, even if Zuz still looked like he’d been chewed up and shat out again.
Bandages covered Zuz everywhere not hidden by the thin hospital blankets, tightly tucked under the mattress he was laying on. A cast covered the man’s right forearm and, beneath the covers, two more covered each of his shins. Miles of pale wires and fluid-filled tubes ran out of Zuz in a number of fairly uncomfortable places, including a catheter Mal wished his electronic know-it-all hadn’t so readily identified.
First thing tomorrow, thought the cyborg super-soldier, I’m going to teach my computer when to shut up.
The most interesting thing for Mal was that Zuz’s eyes were clamped shut and he was snoring at just over ninety decibels, just shy of a jackhammer pounding away. Mal was impressed by the sheer volume of the noise coming out of the single untaped nostril on Zuz’s face, and even more impressed by the fact that it was all an act and his friend, injured as he really was, was putting on a show for his benefit.
Zuz’s attempted deception was betrayed by two things: first, the passenger in the back of Mal’s brain informed him Zuz’s vital signs were normal but in an elevated state most often attributed to excitement; and, second, by the nineteen-inch television mounted on the wall opposite to the bed and showing off a live feed from the aftermath of the carnage at the US Bank Building.
“I know you’re awake, Dave,” chastised Mal, hiding his growing smile behind his disguised hand.
Lids sliding slowly over eyes more than slightly hazy from painkillers, Zuz oozed, “Oh, hey, Mal…didn’t know you were here.”
“I had to bring your car back,” Mal replied. “I got it detailed and had the valets park it for me.”
“Really?!”
“No, that piece of shit is toast,” Mal tried his best to summon a look of sincere sadness to his face, but failed miserable. “Gauss threw it at me.”
“What!!”
“I know! I was surprised there was enough metal in there for him to grab!” the faux sadness was replaced by an equally poor attempt at shock. “It was flatter than your sister’s chest the last time I saw it.”
“You’re such a dick. Do you have any idea what that will do to my insurance rates?” grumbled Zuz. “You know, if I paid them.”
A pregnant pause filled the room as the two friends stared at one another, both unsure of what to say next. So much had happened between them in less than 72 hours.
Zuz broke the silence, “You going to tell me what happened up there?”
“What do you think of my work?” Mal answered by tipping his head towards the crappy Vizio TV just past Zuz’s feet.
“It’s nuts! The government puppets in broadcast news are claiming it was the second terrorist attack on the US Bank Building this month. They’re showing the clean-up now,” Zuz’s eyes went wide at the sight of a smashed chunk of fiberglass being removed from the lobby of the building on screen. “No mention of you or Project: Hardwired. Hey, look! There’s my car!”
The two men sat and watched the wretched remains of Zuz’s old Nissan, pieces dropping off the entire time a crane carried it from the ruined front of the site of the car’s final demise.
The passenger’s side door and front tire plummeting to the scorched pavement below caused Mal to wince, but Zuz gave a more thoughtful look.
“I’m pretty sure I can buff that right out,” said Zuz from under the stark white bandages wrapped around more than a third of his skull. “Once I put in a new door, four new tires, some body work, a new paint job,” he paused, considering. “New windshield, transmission and headlights…we’ll be back to running away from mind-controlled robot assassins in no time!”
A dark cloud filtered over Mal’s face, halting his friend’s ribbing.
“Kristin is dead, Zuz. They killed her.”
“She’s dead? How? Why?”
Dropping down to his haunches,
head resting on arms laying crossed on the bed at Zuz’s feet, everything came rushing out of Mal all at once. Everything that had happened to him since Zuz’s injury the day before. It all spilled out, emptying the cyborg’s heart and soul, leaving him drained.
Over the course of three days he’d lost a year of his life, the woman he loved, and his humanity. He was on the run from the United States government, who wanted nothing less than to remove his head and take back the secrets it held. Needless to say, he was an exhausted wreck.
All David Zuzelo could manage to say to comfort and reassure his friend was, “Wow. Rough day, huh?”
“You have an amazing way with words, my friend. I’m not sure Shakespeare himself could have said it better.”
“I did minor in English Lit for one semester at college, remember?” grinned Zuz, proud of himself.
Mal dragged the hard wood-framed chair beside the hydraulic recovery bed Zuz rested on and plopped down heavily into it.
“With Project: Hardwired and Gordon Kiesling down for the count, what are you going to do now that the government isn’t out looking for Designate Cestus anymore?” Zuz asked after a few seconds.
A thin line formed between Mal’s eyes as he pondered the question for a long time.
“As long as they leave me alone, I’ll just keep a low profile, maybe travel the country a bit and see what I’ve missed in the past year.”
“You could always hit the professional arm-wrestling circuit,” mused Zuz.
“That’s a bit too ‘over the top’ for me,” Mal quipped back, enjoying the badinage. It was nice not to have to worry about swarms of bionic executioners bursting into the room, armed to the teeth and with a hard on to murder him in the most excruciating of fashions.
Events of the past few days replayed themselves through Mal’s head, sobering him up.
“And if they don’t, I’ve got enough running around up here,” Mal tapped his forehead, “to find whoever “they” are and make them regret it.”
Fingers, morphed into razor-sharped talons and, faster than a human eye could register, lashed out to shred a saline bag hanging unused from the back of Zuz’s IV stand.
