This is the End 3: The Post-Apocalyptic Box Set (8 Book Collection)

by J. Thorn

  “What do they eat?” he asked.

  “Sometimes people try to escape, find these old tunnels, and well… not many make it. Don’t have a train like us, see,” Petal said. “We’re getting off here, Gez. Need to get you kitted out.”

  Petal and Gabriel alighted from the train and headed towards one of the mould-covered posters.

  “Wait here a sec, Gez,” Petal said, as she approached the wall with Gabe.

  A simple hand gesture from her elicited a red LED beam from the wall. It scanned her eye, and the poster, attached to a door, opened. Petal waited for Gabriel to crawl up into the dark gap before turning back, beckoning to Gerry.

  He barely squeezed his large frame into the tunnel. Only the sliding of Petal’s and Gabriel’s shoes against the stone surfaces gave him any sense of direction. For hundreds of metres he crawled on hands and knees, occasionally scraping the crown of his head against the rough, low surface.

  “How long does this go on for?” He tried to hide the strain in his voice, but the tremble was still evident. His breath became shallow, the confines of the small space crushing down on his psyche, making his chest feel as if someone stood on it, squeezing the air from his lungs.

  His elbows and knees burned as they rubbed against the concrete. All he wanted to do was stretch out, but the tunnel remained unforgiving.

  “Breathe, Gez. We’ll be out in a bit.”

  How long was a bit? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? It felt like he’d been stuck in there for years already. He focused on the rhythm of shuffles ahead of him, counted his movements, listened to his breathing. Anything to not think about the mass that surrounded him like a tomb.

  Up ahead, the pitch-black void took on a slate grey aura, and as he neared, its luminosity increased until finally Gabe pushed open another door. Artificial sunlight flooded the tunnel, covering Gerry as if it were a cleansing shower of healing water. He scrambled faster, wanting to reach the light before it went out.

  Stretching his cramped legs, Gerry breathed a deep sigh of relief, letting out all the pent-up, trapped anxiety. Resting his hands on his knees, he waited for his back muscles to relax. All around him, the light beamed down from a solid OLED panel in the low ceiling of the room. The room itself was nothing more than a concrete cupboard. A vertical tomb this time. At least he could actually stand here.

  Petal tapped him on the shoulder. “Just through here.”

  Gabe took out his HackSlate, punched a series of finger gestures across its surface and waited. Two long seconds later, another door opened.

  “I take it no one else knows this place is here?” Gerry asked as he followed Petal and Gabe into a larger room.

  His answer came not from Gabe or Petal but from the unwelcome crackling of electricity from a stun-baton.

  A black-masked figure shifted like a shadow and struck out with the baton, catching a bobbing Gabe on the shoulder. The force threw him back, knocking Petal to the ground and collapsing into Gerry’s arms.

  The shadow phased closer, and the baton arced through the air again. Gerry twitched away, closed his eyes, and involuntarily tensed up, fully expecting to feel that surge of power through his nervous system for the second time that day.

  It didn’t come.

  All he heard was a low guttural choke and then the clatter as the baton crashed to the floor.

  “Damned rat-bag. A breach? How the hell did she break our security?”

  Petal stood wide-legged over the rumpled body of a woman in a black fabric suit. It no longer shifted in and out of the visual spectrum. It, like the woman wearing it, was no longer operational. Blood pooled from a twenty-millimetre hole created by a chromed spike extruding from the inside of Petal’s right forearm. She lifted it into the air, flicked back her wrist, and the spike telescopically shot back within a hidden subdermal sheath. Very clever. It made Gerry wonder what other tricks Petal hid under her sleeves—literally.

  “Who, or what, is that?” Gerry asked.

  “Ninjas, man. This is gettin’ serious.”

  “You okay, Gabe?”

  The hacker rubbed his shoulder, squinted. “Been better.”

  “This ninja, who would have sent her, and why here?”

  “We know why, man. That ain’t the problem. It’s by who that’s the issue.”

  Gabe stepped over the corpse and motioned for Gerry to follow.

  Racks standing over head height and extending five metres wide were filled with computers, cables, and more of that meshlike fibre-optic cabling. It looped from the top of the rack and ran across the ceiling and down the sides. Lights pulsed like fat pills through the cables as data flowed through the gas-filled tubes.

  “Another secure network, I assume? Like your home?”

  “Yeah, something like that, man.”

  “It’s actually a Meshwork hub. The only one in City Earth, or I should say under it. No Family members can trace this. Like infiltrating from the inside. It’s how we track the AIs and stuff. Anyway, let’s see what the thief was after.”

  Petal withdrew a HackSlate from her leather coat’s breast pocket. “Crap a doodle-do. Seems your pals from Cemprom have been tracking you, Gez.”

  Gerry and Gabe huddled around Petal’s HackSlate. It streamed video, presumably from a hidden camera in their home. So much for it being secure.

  “That’s Jasper!”

  The white-haired man, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit, led a team of heavily armed security.

  “Is this live?”

  “Nah, about five minutes ago.”

  The video showed Jasper entering Gabe and Petal’s home through the smouldering remains of the front door. The haze of smoke marred the high-definition video. Jasper and his team systematically tore through the place, ripping out wires, scanning each nook and cranny.

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Traffic. They must’ve bugged you or had at least some kind of surveillance to have found our place. It’s secure as a gnat’s chuff on a winter’s day, but they ain’t blind. They can see our mesh protection. I don’t think this Jasper is the wet-behind-the-ears kid you think he is. That dude’s got some serious game face. He knows what’s going down.”

  Jasper followed two wiry security women into the kitchen and approached the dead body of Mike. He crouched and lifted what was left of Mike’s head and stuck his fingers right into the eye socket, pulling out a wire. Taking a thinner slate, he attached the wire from Mike’s head and plugged it in. After a few seconds, Jasper disconnected, stood, and nodded to his team.

  One of the members carrying a smouldering large shoulder-mounted weapon stepped forward and doused the body with steaming liquid, turning Mike into nothing more than soggy pulp.

  “Poor Mike… this is… just…”

  “Work of the devil, man. Ya pal Jasper ain’t no good. No good at all,” Gabe said.

  “What the hell does all this mean?”

  “You know as much as we do,” Petal said, closing the video and gesturing across the surface of her slate again. A string of numbers flowed down before coming to a stop. “Log files say the ninja didn’t change a thing. She managed to get into our system, but didn’t touch a damn thing.”

  “Maybe she was just doing some reconnaissance?” Gerry was clutching at straws and had no clue as to what was going on. Why would Jasper connect to Mike’s… what exactly? His brain? Some kind of internal storage system? He’d known Mike since they were toddlers. He’d have known if he had any kind of cybernetic implants.

  “You might be onto something there, Gez. I know one thing. She ain’t working for Jasper or the Family. Look at this.” Petal played another video. “This must have been just before we found her going by the time code.”

  Jasper, seemingly satisfied with his business with Mike, approa
ched the secret door leading to the old escalator when he suddenly turned his head. Piercing screams sounded from outside the kitchen. The video switched to the camera in the living room. Jasper’s entire security squad collapsed to the floor, simultaneously holding their ears. Their eyes distended, and veins popped from their foreheads. With a unified, horrific scream, the squad fled from the house.

  Jasper ran into the shot, ran his hands through his hair, and spun away from the scene. Clenching a fist, he screamed at the walls before chasing after his squad.

  “Ninja here must’ve set off our local EMP. Wow, it actually worked. Though this tells us something about your pal Jasper,” Petal said.

  “It does?”

  “Yeah, it tells us he ain’t on any network. The boy’s all flesh. No implants for him, otherwise he’d have been as fried as his little security detail there—unless he’s got some kind of internal dampener…” Petal pursed her lips, thinking.

  “So this woman was helping us?” Gerry said.

  Gabe shook his head. “No. This is what they want. The Family. This Jasper’s a fine actor—he knew what was gonna happen. With the EMP activated, our security’s blasted to the great hard drive in the sky. Our Meshwork hub here and node up there are the only ways into City Earth’s wider network. It’s how we make our money, ya see. We use our tech to track these AIs that are trying to do bad stuff, and we exorcise ’em. Only now, it seems we’ve been found out, and someone is using our gear to crack the network.”

  “Damn it. You’re right, Gabe.” Petal frantically gestured across her HackSlate, shaking her head. “That other demon AI’s all over the place, piggybacking on our Meshwork to attack City Earth’s defences, which, now you and your pal Mike are out of the game, are severely weakened.”

  “But Jasper is from the Family,” Gerry said. “Why would he sabotage the very city that belongs to him and his kind? It doesn’t make any sense. The guy is on the inside. If he wanted to get to Kuznetski, he’d just do it himself or use one of his relations. They rule this place. They don’t need to resort to all this nonsense just to get rid of the president.”

  Gabe smiled. “So what does that tell ya, man?”

  Gerry tried to think. As expected, his reliance on Mags, his AIA, had slowed his analytical thinking. He was tired, weak, and just couldn’t think. “I don’t know!” He kicked out at the woman on the floor. “This ain’t me—I don’t know all this stuff. I’m just a regular guy who’s been screwed over.” He wanted to explode. The frustration built in his head so that he thought he’d completely lose the plot, but then, like a supernova, the answer came to him.

  “Jasper isn’t from the Family! Holy crap. He’s the insider… the hacker. He’s the swine that put the demon AI into Mike… and me. He must have been working with her.” Gerry nudged the woman again with a toe, fully expecting her to jump at the revelation.

  “I think ya right, man. It’s logical. Enna could probably shed some light on this.”

  “Enna?”

  “Someone who hires us,” Petal said. “She gives us contracts, deals in information. She’ll pay big for this.” Her toothy grin was back, not from the situation but from the results of a NanoStem injection. The syringe stuck out of a raised vein on her forearm.

  “Don’t look so freaked out, Gez. Think of this as medicine, yeah? I need it to help hold all this stuff in… I’ve a weak immune system; hence why we should get you geared up pronto. Talking of which, Gez, come here.”

  Gerry stepped towards Petal, and that’s all he remembered.

  ***

  A jabbing pain in his neck woke Gerry up. Touching it, he felt something cold and hard. Something made from metal. “What the hell?”

  “It’s just a connection port, man,” Gabe said. “Ya’ll need it outside of the City. We had to put ya under. It can be messy.”

  Gabriel was right. Next to Gerry’s foot lay a crimson pool. When he inspected his hand, spots of blood covered his fingertips. “It hurts like hell. Was this entirely necessary?” Gerry leant over and waited for a wave of nausea to pass. Neck ports weren’t unheard of. City Earth citizens had them up to a few years ago when they were outlawed due to the new all-encompassing wireless network.

  Petal slapped him on the butt. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Gerry sat back down on the plastic seat inside the train carriage and admired his new leather duster jacket and strong boots. The gun belt made carrying the revolver easier.

  He was concerned about the numbness in his neck. Gabe gave him a shot of NanoStem to ease the pain, and he could understand Petal’s previous expression. It was delicious. Like being carried on wings of air. It felt almost as if he were sleepwalking with all his faculties turned up to max. It even felt like he had use of Mags again. Thoughts processed so quickly he couldn’t get a handle on them. Knew that eventually all that computation, all that analysis of the day’s events would deliver a result and unravel the mystery of who Jasper was, or working for, and who was behind the malicious AI apparently gunning for Miralam Kuznetski.

  “Okay, Gez,” Petal said. “I want you to access your dermal implant and enter this code: oh-forty-seven-hash-three-hash-one-nine-fifty-eight-colon-six. That’ll connect you to our short-range, virtual private network. Our VPN. Once the NanoStem wears off and you can fully interact with your neck port, we’ll be able to communicate securely and send data to each other. Where we’re going, we’re gonna need it: it’s a dangerous place out there in… the abandoned lands.”

  “Sure. No problem. I got it.” Without thinking he did as he was told, and he felt a slight buzz of electricity in his dermal implant.

  Petal was saying something again. Her voice lilted and floated as if it were some far-off song from an audio system. He knew what she was saying was important and useful, but he just let the words flow through his brain, socket themselves into places that he’d recover later. For now, he was just pleased to be numb—to let the grief and heartache melt away like ice on a summer’s day.

  His eyelids grew too heavy to resist. Leaning back, he gave in to the drugs and conjured memories of his two girls: they grew faint and indistinct, and the last thought he had before sleeping was that he couldn’t remember exactly what they looked like.

  Chapter 6

  The clacking and whirring of the train penetrated Gerry’s subconscious. The depth of his sleep became thin, like NanoSheets: parts of the real world transforming the cadre of diaphanous thoughts that ran through his mind.

  The steady rhythm from outside melded with his frantic cogitations until, within his mind, all he saw was a stream of code. At first he couldn’t make sense of the programmes—being made up with the symbols and characters from the old C language—but then, like a student of foreign languages, who, being thrown into the deep end with fluent speakers, soon started to understand: rhythms, grammar, syntax, logic, loops, statements, call-backs, variables, constants, objects… so much data—so much possibility.

  The train screeched to a halt.

  Gerry snapped his eyes open with a start, sucked in a breath, and gripped the handrail as if he were falling off a cliff.

  Ahead of him bright light reduced his pupils to dust specks. The aurora of white light encompassed everything, so that for a minute, Gerry thought he was dead.

  No one spoke. All around him, more blinding light… but there, in front of him in the next row, a head… dreadlocks.

  “Gabriel. Is that you?” His voice felt small, shaky, like a boy’s.

  The head turned.

  Gabe’s voice was hushed, filled with tension. “Quiet, Gez, we’re approaching the toll. Let us handle this. You stay where you are, okay?”

  A hand, cool and clammy, circled his forearm. Her grip delicate, like his grandmother’s on her deathbed. The image struck Gerry like a bullet, and it was all he could do to choke down t
he welling up of emotion. A simple touch shouldn’t be able to bring so much pain. He thought of his grandmother in her hospice: withered and grey. Her skin gone translucent so that her slow veins showed through like blue string. He, his wife, and his father sat around her—waiting. Her touch was the last thing she gave him.

  A tear fell down Gerry’s cheek. It reached halfway before another soft, caring hand wiped it away.

  Petal slipped across the plastic seat until her warmth radiated into his leg and ribs.

  “It’s okay, Gerry. I understand. You get used to it. You’ll forget. Well, in my case the memories faded for other reasons. S’all part of the job. You’ll get through it, Gez. I promise.”

  The train came to a full stop. Its motors whined down, and the doors slid open with a whoosh of air.

  Petal gave his arm a quick squeeze before standing up. “We’ll be right back. Let us scope it out first. We ain’t in Paradise anymore. They’ll ‘love’ the likes of you. All fresh and innocent.”

  “Who will?”

  Petal gave him a quirky, side-lilting smile and flipped over her mirrored lenses on her goggles. “The natives… let’s just say they’re a little eager.”