He heard Silver offer an amused but satisfied grunt. Roddy supposed it meant he’d passed some test. He still didn’t know what was going on. But the advice to strap into his chair made sense, as it would keep him in one place, and was a far more practical suggestion right now than risking his job and possibly his life hollering at his boss for the lack of disclosure about the actual operational thresholds of the ship. And he could use the time to figure out how to get back to Silver and offer his plea to turn the ship around.
Roddy pulled the cockpit door closed, holding the handle to ensure that the momentum of the closing door didn’t send him hurtling across the cockpit. He maintained his grip on the handle as he turned around.
His chair was at the far side of the room.
He sighed. Of course.
He glanced around. He saw nothing functionally suggestive on the wood trim, something that would enable him to pull himself along to his chair. The control panel was all smooth surfaces. He could try to hold himself down but wondered if friction and inertia worked in low gravity situations.
He held on to the door handle and hoisted his feet up against the door, angling his body perpendicular to the floor. After taking a deep breath, he pushed off, floating straight across the room to the pilot’s chair. He seized the armrest and used it to pull himself into the chair before gratefully strapping himself in. As he slid over to the altitude readings—had they really traveled that far already?—he realized that the sliding chair was no mere luxury. It enabled him to move around the cabin in a low gravity environment. He searched his memory and realized that the craft he’d previously flown had a pilot’s chair bolted to the floor, but nothing that provided him with this sort of mobility.
His eyes located the groove enabling the pilot’s chair to slide around the cockpit and followed the groove to the cockpit door and beyond. That groove, he realized, extended into the wood trim lining the staircase and main cabin. He could slide out of this small space without leaving the safety of the chair in this zero gravity environment.
He scowled. Silver probably knew that. No, Silver definitely knew that. That knowledge undoubtedly added to the man’s amused smirk at Roddy’s flailing during his first stint in zero gravity. Silver knew it wasn’t necessary.
Well, now Roddy knew it wasn’t necessary either.
He didn’t see any point in delaying the confrontation any longer. He’d come here to figure out how to face his boss down without flailing about in three dimensions, and now he’d figured it out. Roddy rolled his chair toward the door.
As he reached for the handle, the craft shook violently and changed directions sharply, as if seized by a giant alien hand.
eleven
Sheila Clarke
Freed from the obligation of navigating the self-driving car, Sheila could instead stare in horror at the sight before her. The man had fallen from above—perhaps tumbling from a window after Ravagers destroyed the outer wall and shook the destabilized building—and plummeted before landing on the car. Sheila was briefly surprised that the force of impact hadn’t dented and slowed her car, but quickly remembered that this vehicle had plowed through a pile of concrete with nary a scratch.
At some level, Sheila knew what was coming, and yet morbid curiosity kept her eyes open and fixed upon the man. He was clawing at his skin with enough vigor to fillet himself, trying in desperation to remove the dark ooze slithering over his body.
As the man’s mouth opened in a scream of pain, Sheila found herself grateful the cabin was soundproofed. The agony as his face dissolved away into nothingness… she couldn’t fathom that level of pain. She knew only that the ooze descended through what had once been the face of a living human being, and watched as the frenetic arm movements, desperate to rip away the swarm of Ravagers, ceased moving, falling limply to the side, even as the Ravagers worked through the man’s torso and limbs. The swarming pattern resulted in the effective quartering of the man atop her car, pieces of his vanishing corpse falling off one at a time. The ooze, growing as it devoured him, prevented her from seeing much, but her mind helpfully filled in the more gruesome gaps.
Sheila leaned to the side as her stomach contents emptied onto the seat beside her. She couldn’t lean over far enough to ensure the metallic-tasting contents hit the floor. And thanks to the windowless cabin, she’d be dealing with the smell until the self-navigating car decided to let her out of the sealed interior.
She faced forward and wiped the residue from the corners of her lips, wishing she had water to clean the inside of her mouth as well.
The streets, generally quiet at this working hour, were filling. Sheila realized that the Ravagers were spreading from the multiple caches of Ravagers activated within the past few hours. The people she saw now looked confused and more than a bit concerned. They’d likely heard the rumblings in their buildings, exited due to concerns of collapse from what felt like an earthquake, and found themselves watching as a dark, oily mass spread over the nearest buildings.
The replication power added such immense destructive capacity to the devices. The cache she’d seen might still be working out of the Bunker without that. With it? It had taken less than an hour to reach buildings a quarter mile away. She glanced at those wandering the street, jumping out of the way as the car continued its oblivious trek toward the unknown-to-her destination. Jamison was right about one thing. Within mere moments, every person she saw would become little more than dust, blowing away in the window or used as raw materials for more Ravagers.
She felt her face warm at the thought of his name, her jaw clench. If Jamison knew what would happen and had done nothing to stop it, he bore responsibility for what she’d seen, for what she now knew was inevitable.
But there were others who’d designed those machines. Who’d built them to do what she’d just seen. And they’d willingly set them loose upon an unprepared, defenseless populace here in the Lakeplex.
What type of monsters would do something like that?
And why?
She realized that the true Ravagers weren’t the machines. The machines did as they were programmed. The true Ravagers were those who created the machines and set them in motion.
She’d find them. She’d confront them. And then she’d destroy them. Including Jamison, after she’d gotten every last detail about the scheme out of him.
But first, she’d have to survive.
She saw remnants of the Ravagers on the hood of her car, likely a portion of those that had devoured the man, and realized her odds of survival were low. Those remaining Ravagers would dissolve the car around her. And if the impact of her forward motion—with her no longer protected by the car and restraining harnesses—didn’t kill her? She’d suffer the same fate as the man she’d watched suffer through the throes of death only moments before.
But the ooze didn’t dissolve the car.
Instead, it rolled harmlessly off to the street below. Sheila twisted to look in the side mirror to her right. Were the devices somehow defective?
The Ravagers dissolved the pavement and burrowed into the ground.
Sheila sat back.
The car was immune. Jamison had put her in a self-navigating car that was immune to the Ravagers.
She didn’t know how he’d done it. She certainly didn’t know why he’d done it. But he clearly wanted her to survive this if he’d gone to this much trouble. She’d still not forgive him for not making a greater effort to stand up to the human Ravagers behind this self-inflicted apocalypse. But he’d been true to his word, working to ensure she’d survive even as hundreds of thousands of others perished.
The rumbling in the ground grew steadily more intense, as if a massive earthquake was shaking the area. Sheila felt a chill as she recognized another danger. The car might be immune to the Ravagers themselves, and thus offer her protection from a direct attack by the killer machines. But she doubted any vehicle would be impervious to damage should a forty story building fall atop her.
&nbs
p; She glanced warily out each side window. Most of the buildings were, to this point, unaffected. But she saw a few ahead of her that shuddered ever so slightly. She wondered again at the numbers of caches planted by those instigating the destruction. She’d not carried those devices this far on the surface of the car, acting like bees carrying pollen, though without the same type of benefit to the survival of life on the planet. And even if she had, they’d not been flung so far ahead of her, providing time for the machines to initiate the swaying dance of death in the buildings ahead.
Sheila watched a forty-story building two blocks to her left begin to sway in a more pronounced fashion. Given the height, if the building toppled in her direction, it would crush the smaller building between her street and the ravaged building, streaming massive chunks of debris down atop her.
She needed to go faster, if at all possible.
She looked again at the dashboard and tried to make sense of the controls. She found a dizzying array of imagery and numerical data displayed, all clustered around two side-by-side panels in the center. Might those center panels control the car’s speed and direction? She reached out with her arms, unable to lean forward due to the restraining harnesses, and managed to put her hands on the panels. Experimentally, she pushed straight down on the center portions of each. The panels didn’t move. She tried pushing with just her fingertips, tipping the upper portions of the panels.
To her shock, the upper sections of the panels tipped forward.
“Autopilot engaged. Manual directional input disregarded.”
She jumped at the sound of the disembodied voice, the first noises she’d heard since Jamison had sealed her inside, other than her own grunts and bodily excretions, then continued her discovery efforts. The panels would tip in any direction around a central axis. Pushing the panels forward would accelerate, backward would decelerate. If the panels controlled the spinning direction and speed of the wheels on each side of the car, though, she wondered as to the necessity of pushing the panels left or right rather than just forward and backward. The wheels couldn’t spin sideways.
She nearly laughed. She was in a self-navigating car impervious to the most destructive weapon she’d ever witnessed. Perhaps the car could travel sideways.
“Prepare for impact.”
Impact? She’d been so fascinated by the navigation panel that she hadn’t paid attention to her surroundings, choosing to ignore the ever-increasing number of buildings afflicted with Ravagers. She’d not even checked to see if the building she’d been so concerned about had even fallen. Was the car warning her about that very building? Or another? Was the car actually smart enough to sense something like that and offer a warning?
And what the hell was she supposed to do if a forty story building fell atop her anyway? Did the car want to give her a chance to scream before the building crushed her into pulp?
She looked to each side. Nothing but small, single-story buildings around her now. She then glanced ahead… and understood the message.
The great lake loomed before her. The car hurtled through the shipyards ringing the large body of water, racing at high speed toward one of the long piers stretching out like tendrils into the fresh water.
The vibrations reaching her feet changed as the car moved from solid pavement to the wood of the pier, and the car accelerated to a speed she’d not yet experienced.
Oh yes, she knew what the impact would be.
She let her eyes open wide and screamed as the car flew off the end of the pier and plunged toward the water below, knowing that her restraining harnesses would prevent her from escaping before the vehicle sank beneath the waves, drowning her.
twelve
Wesley Cardinal
Wesley twisted the throttle again, trying to push the scooter ever faster, faster than he’d ever gotten it to move before. The rough dirt road taxed the bike’s suspension; at these elevated speeds, he felt every dip, every bump, every stone. The air temperature seemed to drop around him, as if presaging the attack of the beasts from hell. He’d driven this route perhaps fifty times before on his way home from work, generally on those days when the weather was at its best. He left the safety of the walls at portals closer to his home on other days.
He’d never heard the beasts swarming during his previous trips. In fact, he’d never heard of any spotted so near the walls in the past. Given his frequent forays outside the walls and lack of direct contact with the creatures, he’d begun to wonder if they were a fabrication of the megacorps, a way of scaring the masses inside the walls, keeping them trapped and under their control through a vague fear of something terrifying outside.
Now he knew better.
The branches of the brush rustled on both sides, and Wesley’s ears ached as he strained to hear the faint padding footfalls, trying to figure out where the creatures were and how fast they moved. Available evidence suggested they were keeping pace, meaning his artificial transport failed to provide a speed advantage. The branches rustled again, this time ahead of him, and Wesley realized the truth.
They were toying with him, playing with their food before beginning the work of tearing him apart.
Panting sounds reached his ears, and he felt a brief sense of hope. Futile though it might be, he knew the scooter would run at a steady speed until drained of fuel. The beasts were living creatures with no such luxury. Muscles would tire, and breath would become short.
He might not be able to outrun them with the scooter. But he could outlast them, riding long enough that they’d tire and drop back, leaving him to reach his home in peace.
Wesley ducked, dodging a low-hanging branch, and exhaled. If this was the end, he wanted to go down fighting, not swiped off his bike by an inanimate tree limb.
The thought of fighting reminded him he needed to be prepared in the event the beasts tired of the game and brought the attack to him. He took his left hand from the handlebar, keeping the right in place, and tested his ability to maintain his balance on the uneven path. Once reasonably confident he’d not crash, he felt for the secret compartment latch once more. The latch released and he slid the top back, reached inside, and felt around. He found the sharp tip of the knife before he found the handle. He winced, gasping as the blade slit his finger. He bit his lip to keep from crying out as the pain shot through him, then carefully found the knife handle and pulled the weapon from the compartment. He transferred the knife to his right hand and pinned it against the bike’s handle, then moved his gashed left hand to his mouth, sucking on the blood in an effort to soothe the pain.
The Hinterlands beasts yowled once more, and Wesley swore the volume increased though they remained in hiding. He pulled the wounded finger from his mouth and watched as a small trickle of blood oozed out of the deep gash.
Blood.
The beasts hadn’t been so close to the cityplex in his lifetime. Were the mass casualties in the city the cause? By now, the death toll had to be in the thousands, with the blood of the injured and dying likely splattered on the ground. He didn’t think the Ravagers could process blood given the water content, but it didn’t much matter. Massive amounts of blood flowed. The scent would hang heavy in the air, beyond the range or destructive ability of the Ravagers. The beasts, reputed to have a powerful sense of smell, would interpret the scent as a bonanza, a feast, and move toward the metallic odor. They’d come looking for fresh meat.
And he’d obliged by riding out of the cityplex, beyond the now limited protection offered by the disintegrating walls.
He put his left hand back on the handlebar and felt the comforting smooth texture of the knife hilt with his right. He’d resisted the temptation to use the knife against the man who’d tried to pull him from the bike. But this was different. The man wanted him arrested. The creatures wanted him for dinner.
Like force against like force. Or something like that.
His reverie caused him to miss the rise in the dirt road, and he lost his concentration for a moment as the scooter
bounced into the air. He felt momentarily weightless, and had to focus to ensure he kept a firm grip on the handlebar. The scooter slammed back to the ground, and he swerved crazily as he tried to regain his balance.
He did. But the alteration to his path proved costly.
As he accelerated back to full speed, a burst of darkness flashed in from behind him. He tried to swerve to avoid it, but the beast crashed into the rear tire of the scooter. The rear tire slid left and lost its minimal traction with the loose dirt. Wesley slammed against the ground, aggravating his already injured shoulder, and he slid forward until friction brought him to a stop.
He was stunned, barely registering what happened. He let go of the handlebar and was vaguely certain that the skin of his right leg remained attached only because the thick material of his pants took the abuse instead. The burning, stinging sensation and pain hit him. Wesley pushed the pain aside.
He must survive. There would be time later to feel his pain.
A low, guttural growl sounded behind him, and Wesley slowly craned his head to look.
The beast was huge, between three and four feet at the shoulder. Matted, shaggy hair covered the body. Drool dribbled out of its mouth, sliding past the bared fangs. It was quite a terrifying sight, and Wesley felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.
Detonate (The Ravagers - Episode 2) Page 7
