“In that case, I wish Birnbaum had come with us instead of staying with them,” Alexa said. “Just in case. Is that horrible to say?”
“If it is, we’re both horrible, ‘cause I was thinking the same thing.” Trav looked out at the Mediterranean.
Alexa caught a glimpse of profound sorrow on his face, and it hurt her heart so deeply that she wished whoever had created the Tin Men had not made the robots’ faces so expressive.
“Torres,” Trav said. “I’m going to see if I can find a rowboat or a kayak or something. I figure they’re all gone, but I’ll look.”
He turned to head down the dock. Alexa glanced past him at the gray-haired old woman and the three kids she figured were the woman’s grandchildren. An afternoon breeze had kicked up, growing stronger as the sun slid lower in the sky. The twin girls’ hair blew across their faces and the one with the purple bow grabbed it as if fearful the wind would steal it away. The old woman wrapped her arms around herself, steadfast in her refusal to look out to sea as the children did, perhaps afraid that she would not see whatever it was they were so eagerly awaiting.
“Trav!” Torres shouted.
Alexa automatically looked southward. A robot had appeared at the turn of the seaside drive, a quarter mile away. She watched that curve in the road thinking that others would follow, but none were in evidence.
Trav stalked up the dock to stand beside Alexa.
“Which one?” she asked, remembering that his vision was much more powerful than hers.
“Mavrides.” He spoke the name as if he didn’t like the flavor of it in his mouth.
Alexa walked toward the Humvee but thought better of it and moved off to her right, not wanting to be close to Hanif Khan. Not wanting to see her father’s body any more than she had to.
Trav moved close to Torres and Khan as Mavrides raced up to them.
“Did you find the boat we need?” Mavrides asked, frowning as he glanced out at the marina and the bay beyond. In the long afternoon sun, the ace of spades on his forehead looked almost faded.
“We found one, yeah,” Trav replied. “Where are the others?”
Mavrides shook his head. “Not coming. It’s just me.”
Alexa felt the world crumbling beneath her.
“What?” Torres snapped. She took a step toward Mavrides. “I don’t believe you.”
“You think I’d lie about this?” Mavrides said. “I get you don’t like me. But seriously, Hawkins was…I don’t have a lot of people in my life to look up to, but I looked up to him. The guy’s dead. And Birnbaum—“
Torres sagged on her feet, grief cutting her deep. Her robot eyes searched the curve of the street from which Mavrides had appeared and she gave her head a single shake before covering her eyes with her free hand, weapon dangling forgotten in her right.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Mavrides said.
Torres pointed her gun at him. “Don’t mention her again. You aren’t worthy of speaking her name.”
Mavrides threw his hands up. “Fine, okay? Fuck you.”
Trav took a step toward him, one hand up to silence him. “Tell it to me from the beginning. What did you actually see? Can you be absolutely sure they’ve all been destroyed? A dozen Bot Killers isn’t enough to take down a squad of Tin Men unless they’ve got a nuke, and I didn’t see a mushroom cloud.”
Mavrides stared at him. “It wasn’t just the guys who’d trapped the bots in that bank. Right after you drove off we saw the first TSV. The fuckers from Damascus caught up with us and there were a hell of a lot more than we thought. We were pinned down, Trav. They had so many rockets and the ones around the bank, they’d set some IEDs. We didn’t have a chance.”
Torres stepped nearer to him. “But you’re here. You made it. Sole survivor, Mavrides. How does that work?”
“Look, we don’t have time for this. I don’t think they saw which way I went, but you can bet they’ll figure out the waterfront in a heartbeat and it’ll take them minutes to find us. We’ve got to get to that ship and get out of here!”
The argument continued, voices growing more hostile, but Alexa had stopped listening. In the midst of it, she caught herself glancing at Hanif Khan. His dark eyes were on Mavrides but Alexa saw the change in his expression when Mavrides started talking about the Bot Killers from Damascus—Khan’s own men. The ghost of a smile had flitted across Khan’s face but then his brow had knitted with confusion, as if Mavrides’s words did not make sense.
“Oh my God,” Alexa whispered.
Robots had better hearing than humans. All three of the Tin Men turned to stare at her.
Shaking, Alexa started toward Mavrides. Grief and horror made a volatile mix within her and she felt like she might explode.
“You’re lying,” she said, marching up to him. “I don’t know why, but you’re—”
It came to her then. She halted a foot in front of him.
“You ran,” she said.
Trav loomed behind her. “Alexa, explain.”
She half-turned toward Trav and Torres, pointing at the seated Khan.
“If you’d seen his face when this guy was talking about the Bot Killers, you’d know he was full of shit.” She turned to the anarchist, who managed to keep his face blank. “You’d suck at poker.”
Anger fueled her, pushing away sorrow. She turned back to Mavrides.
“I hate you, but I didn’t think you were a coward.”
Mavrides lashed out and Alexa flinched, but he didn’t hit her. His arm wrapped around her neck and he dragged her close, squeezing too tight and cutting off her air. As Trav shouted and drew his weapon, Alexa twisted herself around just in time to see Mavrides shove the barrel of his gun into Torres’s face and shoot her through the eye.
Torres cried out and spun away, falling to one knee and clutching her face.
Khan started scrambling toward the Humvee.
Mavrides shot him in the shoulder. Shot him from behind.
Trav roared at him. Alexa could barely make out the words over the chaos of her thoughts. She tried to scream, tried to twist free, but Mavrides had her. Her face flushed with heat as she tried to breathe. Mavrides dragged her backward and she moved her feet to keep up with him, afraid that if she let him just take her he would break her neck.
Frantic, she looked around for Torres, who leaned against the Humvee, one hand still over her gunshot eye. Without her, they would never be able to sail the hydroptere. They might never leave Israel.
“Let the girl go, Mavrides!” Trav yelled. “Let her go or I’ll rip out your fucking core myself!”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Mavrides said. “We’re going out to that ship. The three of us and the girl. Khan gets another bullet, this one in the head.”
Hanif Khan lay groaning on the ground with blood soaking into the shoulder of his shirt. The hatred and pain in his eyes gave him the savage countenance of a wounded beast. He grabbed the top of the Humvee’s tire and tried to rise.
Mavrides went on. “Find something to row us out there. My gun’s on the girl the whole time—“
Torres stumbled over beside Trav, slightly hunched, gray smoke rising from the hole where her right eye had been.
“The girl has a name,” Torres said, a tinny buzz to her voice. “It’s Alexa. And you’re choking her to death.”
Alexa gasped as Mavrides loosened his hold on her, dragging air into her burning lungs.
“The girl gets a bullet in the head if I’m interrupted again.”
Alexa squeezed her eyes closed. In the darkness inside her mind, she felt almost as if she could see her father in the back of the TSV. She imagined being wrapped up with him, tufts of her hair sticking out the way his did. Weariness enveloped her and she sank back against Mavrides, thinking of the gentle smile on her father’s face whenever she’d come into her parents’ room in the middle of the night, frightened by a nightmare. He had always walked her back to bed and stroked her hair a while to make the bad dreams go aw
ay. Nurturing had generally been her mother’s job, but the middle of the night was for some reason her father’s province. His voice had always soothed her when she was a little girl, afraid of the dark.
Perhaps death would not be so terrible. Perhaps he would be there to talk to her and stroke her hair as she tried to forget her fears.
I’m sorry, Mom, she thought.
“Fuck Athens,” Mavrides said. “President’s on his own.”
“It won’t work—“ Torres said.
Alexa opened her eyes, daylight making her catch her breath. Shaking, she shushed Torres, but none of them seemed to hear her.
Mavrides jammed the gun hard against her temple. “I told you—“
“It won’t work!” Torres shouted, grotesque with her gaping, ruined eye. “There aren’t enough of us! Birnbaum told me it takes a minimum of five to crew the hydroptere, and Khan’s not in any condition.”
Alexa felt Mavrides freeze, felt him hesitate.
“Bullshit!” he barked. “You’re just saying—“
Mavrides froze again. Footsteps coming fast behind them. Mavrides started to yell and she could feel the gun push harder at her skull and then he pulled it away, spun her around and took aim at the tin man hurtling toward them. Alexa recognized the target on Danny Kelso’s chest.
Danny shouted as he smashed the gun out of Mavrides’ hand and kept going, reaching over Alexa’s head to grab Mavrides by the throat, peeling the lunatic off of her. Mavrides caught her by the arm and dragged her along as Danny took him down. The three of them hit the ground with a clack of metal and bone. Her skull struck wood but Mavrides lost his grip and momentum kept her rolling.
Alexa tumbled off the seawall, flailing at the air until she hit the water below.
Panicked, she clawed at the water, but she didn’t know which way was up.
Danny clamped his hands on the sides of Mavrides’ head and slammed it hard onto the wooden pier. Mavrides tried to push him off and Danny pummeled him with four blows in quick succession: left, right, left, right.
“Trav, get the girl!” Danny snapped.
Travaglini was already ahead of him. His feet made the boards of the pier thunder as he pounded toward the edge and leaped into the water. The weight of his bot took him under and the water made a gulp and then flowed in to fill the place where he’d entered, as if the sea had claimed him.
Mavrides raised his hands again, but Danny batted them away and then shoved off of him, stood up and drew his weapon. Only as he took aim at Mavrides did he glance around and see that the others had caught up with him. Hawkins covered Khan, prodding him with a foot to make sure he was alive—or maybe for the satisfaction of hearing the wounded man scream. Birnbaum stood by Torres, investigating the ragged hole where her eye used to be. Zuzu and Broaddus held their weapons, knees bent, as they moved to either side of Danny, covering Mavrides, who groaned and tried to rise.
“Stay down, shit-for-brains!” Zuzu snapped.
Broaddus fired once, deliberately shooting Mavrides in the forehead.
“What the fuck was that?” Mavrides said, rubbing the small new dent on the forehead of his bot. He glared at Broaddus. “Who the hell are you?”
Mavrides tried to rise and Danny kicked him in the head, dumping him onto the wooden boards of the pier again.
Boards creaked as another bot approached along the pier. His aim steady, Danny glanced back to see Kate approaching. Much of her chassis had been charred black, even warped in some places by the heat of the rocket explosion that had caught her, and she carried her left arm in her right. It dangled downward, almost scraping the pier.
Mavrides saw Kate and laughed. “Damn, woman, you look a mess.”
It was then that Danny felt something give inside him, another little piece of whatever armor he wore around his heart breaking away. He turned and kicked Mavrides again and found himself doing it a third time and a fourth time.
Mavrides grabbed Danny’s foot mid-kick and shoved him backward. Danny staggered as Mavrides launched to his feet, driving a fist into his jaw. Danny shook it off and took aim again. He’d let his mind wander…kept kicking without even realizing he’d been doing it. Just how much of a robot had he become?
“Zack, goddamn it, not another step!” Hawkins roared, drawing his own gun.
Mavrides froze, staring as Hawkins came toward him, joining Broaddus and Danny and Zuzu. Guns surrounded Mavrides. The kid had no weapon, but he was one of the Tin Men—they could do plenty of damage with just their hands.
“All of them,” Hanif Khan said, voice tremulous with hate. “You killed all of them. Even Drazen.”
As most of the Tin Men turned toward Khan, Mavrides kept his eyes on Hawkins. Something ugly lived beneath the younger soldier’s metal skin, lingered behind his eyes, but now that ugliness had turned petulant. He stared at Hawkins with the gaze of a spoiled child whose mother has finally learned to say no.
“Man, you were different before,” Mavrides whined. “You didn’t take shit from anyone. Half the platoon out for a beer and us on the outside. You never said a nice word about any of them but now here you are, kissing their asses. That EMP must’ve taken more than your comms away. It took your balls.”
A choking sound came from behind Mavrides. Danny glanced past him just as Alexa Day dragged herself up onto the pier, soaking wet and coughing up seawater. Her hair hung in a sodden curtain that covered her face as she knelt there, more vulnerable than ever. Danny thought Mavrides would go for her again, but then Trav came up out of the sea behind her, hands clanking as he gripped the old wooden boards and hoisted himself onto the pier. Mavrides didn’t dare.
“What’s your plan, anyway?” Hawkins said. “You abandon the squad, shoot Torres…you had to have a plan.”
Mavrides stood alone. Trav put a hand on Alexa Day’s shoulder and guided the girl away from him, moving back toward the TSV, where Torres stood by while Birnbaum tried to doctor Hanif Khan’s gunshot wound.
“He told us you were all dead,” Torres said. “Figured he could get us to leave with him, just take the hydroptere and get back to the Hump, to hell with POTUS. I just finished telling him Birnbaum said it takes five to sail the bitch.”
Mavrides took two steps toward Hawkins, who lifted his weapon higher, aiming at the kid’s eye.
“You were my friend,” Mavrides said.
Hawkins kept his weapon in place. “I was. Tried to teach you how to be a goddamn soldier. Maybe my way of soldierin’ ain’t everybody’s way, but it’s the only way I know. I got some thorns on me—I get that. But killing civvies just cuz you feel like it? Betraying your platoon? We ain’t friends, kid.”
Mavrides hung his head. Danny thought sadness had claimed him, that he’d surrendered. Then a sound built in Mavrides’s chest, something between a battle roar and a scream of pain, and he hurtled toward Hawkins, who tried to defend himself only to find he was not the kid’s target. Mavrides knocked his gun hand aside and kept going.
Zuzu fired, hit Mavrides once and the Humvee twice.
“Watch out for the kid!” Broaddus barked.
Danny tried to get a bead but Hawkins was in his way. Mavrides went for Kate, raked her severed arm from her good hand and then jammed his fingers into the hollow of the wound. He dug and twisted, tried to tear something loose, doing whatever he could to hurt her with a dog-like snarl. Torres lunged for them, got hold of Kate and tried to drive a wedge between them.
All thought left Danny. He shoved past Hawkins and jammed his gun against Mavrides’s temple, then pulled the trigger twice. The bot’s head jerked to the side but he turned and grinned.
“I’ve got hold of something in here,” he said, hand sunk into that wound where Kate’s arm had been.
Kate grabbed his throat, but Tin Men didn’t breathe. She couldn’t choke him. Instead she grabbed Mavrides’s wrist to keep him from pulling and turned to Danny.
Hawkins pushed Danny aside.
Mavrides looked at him, forlorn.
“Zack,” Hawkins said. “Some things you can’t come back from.”
With his left hand he grabbed the back of Mavrides’s neck even as he stepped in closer to the kid. Hawkins pressed his gun to the sweet spot on the seam between Mavrides’s chassis and chest plate, and fired twice. The kid’s eyes went wide and he started to argue, to try to twist free.
Danny dove to the ground, dragging Kate behind him.
Hawkins hugged Mavrides close. If he said anything to him in that last moment, Danny couldn’t hear the words. Hawkins pulled the trigger a third time but there was no whine of ricochet or clang of the round stopping dead. The bullet punched through with a crack and then Hawkins dropped his gun.
He lifted the kid off the ground, took four staggering steps, and threw him off the pier. Mavrides hadn’t even hit the water when his power core exploded, knocking Hawkins off his feet. Hawkins cracked the wooden planks beneath him when he fell.
For a second, Danny held Kate against him. The burnt smell that clung to her filled his senses.
“I think we’re clear, lover boy,” she whispered to him.
Danny rose to his knees, reached out and picked up her scorched, severed arm and handed it to her. “A few inches to the right and that rocket downtown would’ve done you in. Don’t joke, okay?”
They rose together. Danny had one hand on the small of her back as he turned to face the others. Trav had Alexa safe behind the Humvee. Birnbaum and Torres stood by Khan as if they were guarding him, but the bullet wound in his shoulder had kept the anarchist from trying to flee; he had gone pale from blood loss. Zuzu and Broaddus kept back, aware they were not a part of this squad.
Hawkins stood at the edge of the pier. The wooden pilings had caught fire from the explosion and the flames had begun to spread.
Kate shuffled slowly toward him, the burnt wreckage of a one-armed robot.
“You’re a good man, Hawkins,” she said.
“That what I am?”
“A good soldier, then.”
Hawkins nodded once.
Danny walked over to where Birnbaum and Torres were watching Khan.
Tin Men Page 26
