Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “And I’ll say it again,” Alexa replied, the wind whipping her hair across her face. “Birnbaum’s going to have to shoot me to keep me on board. What happens when you find the President? Maybe you get cut off and you can’t make it back here, what do you do then? I’ll tell you what you do—you put the safety of the President of the United States ahead of the safety of some fucking teenager. I am not running the risk of being left here alone!”

  Kate flinched at the edge of fear in her voice.

  Alexa went on. “You’re gonna leave me with Birnbaum and the guy whose buddies murdered my dad? If you don’t come back, where do I go then with the three of us as the only possible crew? So I cover Khan with a gun while Birnbaum tries sailing the hydroptere by herself? I’m coming, Kate. Get it off your conscience. If I die, that’s on me, but I’d rather be dead than be left alone!”

  Kate stared at the girl for a second before glancing at Danny. He gave her a nod and she couldn’t argue with it.

  “All right…Alexa,” Kate said. “You’re coming along.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  As the hydroptere edged toward the marina’s sea wall, Kate turned toward the rest of her squad.

  “Someone’s got to stay here and guard the ship,” she said. “Alexa is right. There’s always the chance we’ll be cut off and need to find another way out of the city, so staying behind is a gamble. But we can’t leave this ship unprotected.”

  Zuzu raised his hand. “I’m your man, Sarge.”

  Tanya Broaddus shook her head. “Naw, Zuzu. The rest of our squad is dead. I’m not leaving you here.”

  “Actually, you are,” Kate told Broaddus. “We’re not voting on it. Zuzu volunteered, and I’m grateful. Zuzu, you’re on your own. Don’t let anyone take this boat. Broaddus, we’re taking Khan with us—“

  The Bot Killer lifted his head in surprise. Pale and drawn, the hate still burned in his eyes.

  Kate pointed toward the hotels and shops on the other side of the marina. “We’ll start in one of those hotels. Alexa, you’ll stay with Broaddus and Khan while we check out the signal. If we have to move more than a couple of blocks, we’ll come back for you and we’ll all advance together. That’s the way it’s going to be.”

  No one argued the point. This was her squad.

  “All right. Trav, over the side and tie us up to that sea wall. The rest of you, check your ammo. Whatever you’ve got left, now’s the time. We run into any rocket-men, I want them dead before they’ve even had a chance to pull the trigger. Go!”

  As the last of the sails furled away, Danny and Trav grabbed lines of rope and dropped off the left-side float and into the water. They vanished instantly, sinking hard to the bottom, and moments later they were clambering from the sea twenty yards away on the sea wall, already dragging the hydroptere toward the rocks.

  Kate rotated her arm, testing out her stiff shoulder. It would have to do.

  Trav signaled that the hydroptere was moored to the sea wall.

  “It’s go time,” Kate called to them. “Watch each other’s backs, eyes open for snipers and rockets. We follow the signal to the source.”

  “What if POTUS isn’t with the bot giving off this signal?” Broaddus asked.

  “Signal’s gotta be coming from one of the bots on the Secret Service detail. If he’s not with the President, the bot’s got to know his whereabouts. One way or another, we’ll know soon enough. Move out!”

  One by one they jumped over the side, some into the water while others made the leap. Zuzu dropped Hanif Khan into the water, where Broaddus waited to carry him up the sea wall. Soaking wet, the anarchist hung his head as he stood amongst them, not even looking up as they started to march.

  Kate hesitated, wondering if she should just shoot him now and be done with it. Leaving him alive to make trouble felt like keeping a crocodile for a pet. But President Matheson would want answers, and Khan remained the best way for him to get some of those answers.

  “Watch him!” she called to Broaddus, who gave her a thumbs up.

  Alexa climbed from the water nearby and Kate went to her.

  “Stick by me,” she told the girl. “Think bulletproof thoughts.”

  ~24~

  Felix stood just inside the foyer of Piraeus University’s main building and tried to hold back a scream. Bullets obliterated the glass doors, spraying shards all over the floor. The broken glass glittered in the moonlight that pooled at the foyer’s edge, but Felix stood in darkness, breathing in the shadows and praying they would make him invisible if the anarchists managed to get past Chapel and Bingham.

  The two presidents were pressed against the wall nearby. Kirkham stood with them, gun in hand, though compared to the two Tin Men—or to the dozens of anarchists who had pinned them down—the last Secret Service agent seemed almost pitiful.

  Not last, Felix told himself. Syd may still come back.

  He glanced along the pitch dark corridor where he’d last seen Syd but the shadows remained stagnant there. No movement at all.

  “We can’t stay here!” Felix said, his voice a rasping stage whisper. “We’ll die!”

  Rostov turned toward him. Hard as the man’s features were, the Russian president managed a gentle look.

  “It always seemed likely, professor,” Rostov said. “We would have needed better luck than we’ve ever had to make it out of this.”

  Felix shook his head. “I can’t accept that.”

  He stepped away from the wall, far enough to get a glimpse through the ruined front doors. Chapel and Bingham were still in front of the university building. The lights on their chests were off—why make themselves even better targets? They were moving from side to side, using decorative stone columns as cover. Felix could hear them shouting to one another even amidst the rain of bullets that fell upon them, ricocheting off of the bots or just plunking against their metal skins.

  “Police car, three o’clock!” Chapel shouted.

  Bingham turned to her right, spotted the abandoned cop car just up the road and the shooters behind it. She took aim and fired twice, killing an anarchist who stood by the trunk and another who crouched at the other end of the car, peering around it. Felix flinched at the sight—head shots, both of them—but in his mind he urged her on, and Chapel as well. They were so badly outnumbered, with more anarchists arriving in the street beyond. The Tin Men were such extraordinary marksmen that he knew they could have killed every anarchist if only they’d had enough time and ammunition, but both were quickly running out. There were too many anarchists—fifty or sixty by now—and soon they would get inside the university from some other entrance.

  Anxious, he glanced around for signs of incursion.

  Bullets sprayed through the shattered doors, tearing apart the viewscreens and vending machines and the information desk in the foyer. One bullet struck the floor only inches from his feet, embedding itself there. Felix hissed out a breath and took a step back.

  As a girl, his daughter had loved to play soccer. For them to really work well together, she had said, they needed to be like a family, to be able to predict each other’s choices on the field. They had to forge a bond, united by a single purpose—winning. Kate had been eleven years old when she had given him that speech and he ought to have known that very moment that she was destined for a military life. But how could he have envisioned that this eleven year old, tall-for-her-age girl with the wild hair and those lovely purple eyes would go to war? How could he have imagined that the girl who had so loved to run would lose her legs?

  He had missed more soccer games than he would have liked, and he had long felt guilty about that. But he had gone to every one of the father/daughter dances at her school. They had been held in the school gymnasium on the first Friday of December. What had they called the dance?

  Yes, he remembered now. The SnowBall.

  The little girls had never had much use for their fathers at these dances, clustering in groups and giggling or racing around like
lunatics. But once during each dance, the DJ would call a time-out to their antics and play a song specifically for the fathers and daughters to dance together. Kate had held him awkwardly, all too conscious of her peers surrounding her, never understanding that they were all holding their fathers in precisely the same way. He had loved that special dance even with its halting discomfort.

  As she grew older, Kate had pushed him away. Only later did he realize that he’d chosen not to fight this, had accepted the growing distance between them because it was convenient for him. The less involved he was in her life and the more time he spent away from home, the less effort he made to bridge the gap forming between them. He had told himself that she didn’t need him, never realizing how much he needed her.

  “Felix, get back!” Matheson shouted.

  A bullet grazed his shoulder. Felix blinked as if coming awake but still he barely moved. Imminent death had become a kind of mirror for him. He stared at his reflection, even if only in his own mind, and he found himself revolted not because he had so rarely been a part of his daughter’s life but because much of the time he had been relieved not to have his attention drawn away from his work. The angrier she grew, the more alienated she could be made to feel, the fewer demands she placed upon him.

  This is it, he thought. This is where I die.

  “Alone,” he whispered to himself, the word lost amidst the gunfire. “You sad old son of a—“

  A powerful hand grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. He stared into Rostov’s stony eyes.

  “Idiot,” the Russian president said as he shoved Felix back toward the wall where Matheson took cover, with Kirkham protecting him.

  Felix stumbled over his own feet and went sprawling across the floor, nearly colliding with Kirkham’s legs. Rostov called him an idiot again, a heartbeat before a fresh fusillade of bullets stitched the floor of the foyer. Cursing loudly in his native tongue, Rostov dove into cover, slamming to the ground only feet from Felix, who stared at the grim-faced man, thinking again of how surreal the world had become. The Russian president had just saved his life.

  Chapel barreled through the glass-less entry doors.

  “Incoming!” he roared.

  Felix stayed down. Kirkham dragged Matheson to the floor. He heard the scream of the rocket even as Bingham careened through the door behind Chapel, feet crunching glass. The rocket struck the other side of the entrance and exploded, destroying part of the outer wall. The blast blew Bingham off her feet. She tumbled and skidded through the garden of moonlit glass shards.

  Felix’s ears were ringing and he shook his head to clear them. When he looked up, Chapel was above him.

  “Up!” Chapel barked. “Let’s go!”

  “We’ve got to move!” Bingham said. “I saw at least four assholes with launchers out there!”

  As if on cue, another rocket screamed through the open foyer and struck the far wall. Felix rose as the two Tin Men used their bodies to shield Matheson and Rostov. Kirkham clutched his gun like some kind of talisman, but he looked as if he had never felt more useless in his life.

  “We’re going!” President Matheson said, pushing against the Tin Men and starting toward the corridor where Syd had gone on recon.

  The Tin Men stepped into moonlight and began firing through the door at the anarchists, covering their retreat deeper into the building. Felix hurried to keep up with Matheson and Kirkham with Rostov right behind him. The darkness slowed them down. Felix reached out and ran his hand along the wall, hoping he didn’t run into anything. He imagined that the faculty and many of the students had left school to go find their loved ones earlier in the day, before night had fallen, but where were the rest, now? All of them out in the street?

  One of the Tin Men clanked up behind them. Only when she turned on the light on her chest plate did Felix see that it was Bingham. She said nothing as she rushed past, guiding them through the darkness. Chapel caught up a second later and they ran along the hall past offices and what might have been a classroom or two until they came to a spot where corridors branched left and right and stairs led both up and down.

  “Which way?” Felix asked.

  Matheson did not hesitate. He went left and no one argued. It seemed the option that would take them furthest from the attack on the foyer.

  Footfalls came from the stairs they’d just left behind. They all turned, guns raised, and Kirkham fired once. Thankfully the shot went wide, otherwise he’d have killed the only other human member of the President’s Secret Service detachment.

  Syd had her hands up, gun in her right. Now she stared at him.

  “Please try not to shoot at me again,” she said. “Your aim might not always suck.” She gestured down the stairs. “This way. And running. I found an exit only a few of them are watching, but with no return fire back at the main entrance they’ll know we’re making a break for it.”

  “Well done,” Matheson said, but nothing more.

  They rushed down a flight of steps and then headlong down another corridor that seemed to run the length of the building heading south, taking them closer to the marina. Bingham’s guidelight shone ghostly yellow upon the walls as she ran. Felix felt exhaustion fall upon him, as if the Earth’s gravity had suddenly doubled. Weariness dragged at him and his chest ached with the thunder of his heart and the rasp of his breathing. His age dogged him.

  Then Bingham’s light picked out a narrow set of steps straight ahead. As the bot slowed, Syd raced past her and up the steps, where they found a wide metal fire door with mottled glass sidelights.

  “You’re on point,” Chapel told Bingham. “We’ll go out together, try to clear a path. From here we’ve only got a block or two to the marina. We get clear and we run for it.”

  Rostov uttered a grave little laugh.

  “This is funny?” Felix asked.

  “Have you ever seen the end of the American film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” Rostov asked.

  Felix felt nauseous. “I wish I hadn’t.”

  “Go!” Matheson shouted.

  Bingham kicked the door. With a screech of tearing metal it flew open and then she and Chapel hurtled into the street outside. Matheson didn’t wait. He ran out with Kirkham and Syd on his tail, trying to get in front to shield him. Rostov and Felix followed, rushing at an angle off to the left, to the corner furthest from the main entrance. The smell of the sea filled the night air and Felix thought they would make it.

  Kirkham’s head snapped back and the rear of his skull exploded in a spray of blood and gray matter. Syd shouted at Matheson to get back but the President kept running for the opposite corner, knowing as Felix did that retreat meant certain death. Syd, Chapel, Bingham and Rostov returned fire but Felix had no idea where the bullets were coming from. He focused on the corner of the building across the street, thinking if he could just reach it there would be some cover there.

  “You said four!” Chapel shouted.

  “There were four!” Bingham replied.

  “I count at least eight!”

  “Rocket! Rooftop at nine o’clock!”

  Felix ran, the world closing in around him. He tried to think himself small, as if by will alone he could make himself a more difficult target. Ahead of him, Syd stumbled, twisted around and nearly fell. Her momentum carried her forward and then he saw the bloodstain spreading from the bullet wound in her back—left side, just beneath her shoulder. He called her name, thinking of the people out there in the world who loved her. She had her own father; someone needed her to survive.

  Please, God, Felix prayed, don’t let her die.

  It had been so long since he had really prayed for anything and he feared that if God existed, He had already turned his attention elsewhere. But as he reached that far corner and ducked behind the edge of the building, he prayed nevertheless.

  Matheson knelt by Syd, who sat against the building with her eyes shut against the pain. Rostov spotted two anarchists further south along the street, held h
is gun in both hands and fired three times, killing one and wounding the other. He pulled the trigger on an empty clip and tossed the gun aside.

  “Weapon!” he shouted, and Syd held hers up to him.

  Rostov took it, even as the other anarchist started firing at them.

  Bullets strafed the anarchist’s chest and he went down. Felix pressed himself to the edge of the building and glanced around the side. Chapel and Bingham were in the middle of the intersection, under fire, trying to kill as many anarchists as they could. Felix counted more than a dozen. A rocket streaked down at Bingham but she dove from its path, the blast making her hit the street and roll before she sprang up again.

  “Chapel!” President Matheson shouted. “Trouble!”

  Felix whipped around and saw half a dozen anarchists fanning out just to the south, where the other two had been killed. The ones in the intersection had no shot at the two presidents, but these guys had a clear view and they knew it. Arrogant, they marched up the street, weapons ready.

  “Shit,” Syd groaned.

  Rostov aimed her gun at the nearest one and put a bullet in his chest. The man staggered back but did not fall. Unlike the others, he had to be wearing body armor.

  Felix glanced around the corner again, scanned the street for open doors or an alley, but he knew it was too late. They had nowhere else to go.

  His regrets were so heavy on him that he forgot to breathe.

  Gunfire ripped the air and he flinched, steeled himself for death, yet it did not come. Bullets went astray, chipping at the building behind him and shattering windows. Then the guns to the south went silent, replaced by screams and grunts and the sounds of close combat.

  Confused, Felix glanced up from his fearful posture to see Tin Men killing anarchists in the street. Five of the six men who’d appeared to the south were on the pavement, broken or dead, blood glistening black in the moonlight. The sixth tried to fight back as a robot soldier stripped him of his weapon, turned it on him, and shot him with his own gun.