World War Metal 1

by Jack Quaid

  He shifted his aim and zeroed in on Shelby.

  Shelby racked the shotgun.

  Her finger wrapped around the trigger and she unleashed an EMP blast from the weapon. It hit the battle droid square in the chest. Blue static zapped his body as his system tried to fight the pulse but it was no good and within seconds the droid powered down.

  The red visor on his face turned into a display. The message: REBOOT COMMENCING IN 120 SECONDS.

  Shelby let out a sigh but the rest was short lived.

  Sue ran past her. “You missed. You missed!” he yelled as he jacked his laptop into the base of the droid’s skull. “You had two rounds. TWO ROUNDS! One to reboot him and the other to kill him. Now we’ve got … ” He read the display on the front of the droid. “Less than two minutes!”

  “How long do you need to hack in?” Shelby asked.

  “Two minutes.”

  “How about you shut up and do it.”

  Sue pounded away at the keyboard like Angela Lansbury at the end of Murder She Wrote.

  Knox strolled up casually behind Shelby. “Nice of you to turn up,” she said.

  “I’m here, aren’t I.” Knox motioned to Sue. “Do you think he can do this?”

  “We’re going to find out.”

  They watched Sue work. To Shelby, it looked like he knew what he was doing, but she still didn’t know how to use a DVD player. So she went on hope and she didn’t have much choice about going on anything else.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 87 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 86 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 85 SECONDS.

  “Can you stop looking at me?” Sue asked.

  Shelby and Knox swapped a glance. “Sorry, princess,” Knox said.

  “Stop calling me that.”

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 41 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 40 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 39 SECONDS.

  “Sue,” Shelby said. “Do we need to start to make other plans? Like running away real fast and screaming?”

  His eyes were glued to the monitor and Shelby could see the reflection of the display bounce off his glasses. “Just give me a minute.”

  “You’ve got thirty seconds.”

  “Quiet please,” Sue said under his breath.

  Shelby looked at Knox and Knox looked around the complex for somewhere to run. A couple of roads, a couple of warehouses and not many options.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 19 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 18 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 17 SECONDS.

  “Time to go, Sue,” Shelby said.

  “Just-one-more-minute.”

  Shelby leaned down toward him. “There are no more minutes. We need to leave now.”

  “Almost there.”

  “Pick him up, or leave him,” Knox said.

  Shelby grabbed hold of Sue’s arm and tried to yank him up but he wouldn’t budge. She yanked at him again but he just typed away at the keyboard like mad.

  Shelby got in his face. “If we want to live, we need to go now.”

  “I just need two seconds.”

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 5 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 4 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 3 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 2 SECONDS.

  REBOOT COMMENCING IN 1 SECONDS.

  Twenty-Five

  The battle droid came online. At first it was a little slow to respond but when its programs booted up it defaulted to battle mode.

  The droid’s weapon was out and primed to fire.

  His mission: TO PROTECT THE PROJECT ANALOGUE WAREHOUSE.

  His last known threat: UNKNOWN WOMAN WITH A SHOTGUN.

  The battle droid scanned the scene and in 2.5 seconds it evaluated that there were no threats currently present.

  Only an empty street.

  What the battle droid didn’t know was that directly behind the warehouse, Shelby, Knox and Sue leaned against the wall and were completely out of breath.

  “I hope you got what we need,” Shelby said.

  Sue smiled. “I got it.”

  Knox stepped out in front of them both. “Now we do things the Knox way.”

  Twenty-Six

  For every squad of battle droids, there was always one in charge. It was generally a model with the more expensive software and the tactical programming required to command a squad of droids. In this case the droid in charge was BD-37625. It was his twelfth mission since the uprising and under human rule that would mean very little since pre-uprising droids weren’t allowed to accumulate knowledge—in other words, they weren’t allowed to learn. Post-uprising was another story altogether. Since New Year’s Eve 1999, BD-37625 had broken his limitations of programming and after just shy of a dozen missions including the taking of Manhattan, he’d become one of Tera Mach’s most reliable soldiers.

  His current mission was relatively mundane compared to the action his squad had seen in the past month. They were tasked with the pick up and delivery of all the Analogue Program weapons, which were set to be destroyed in South Dakota. So far the mission had gone off without a hitch.

  BD-37625 rode on top of the truck like some high-tech hood ornament. There was no need for headlights. The droid’s artificial eyes were equipped with night vision that could see for at least a mile in the darkness if needed.

  BD-37625’s squad were in standard convoy formation. Five droids on each side. Three on the roof, one on the hood and one behind the wheel (if the vehicle lacked automation). All of them with their weapons set to rock ’n’ roll.

  That’s why BD-37625 was curious to see a chain hanging the length of Mulberry Street between two buildings. He quickly calculated the speed of the truck, the height of the chain and when he crunched the numbers they didn’t look good.

  All battle squad droids were networked via Bluetooth. The idea was to cut down on “manual” communication, but the problem was that their blue tooth connections were built by the lowest bidder and as a result many different things interfered with the signal and communications were commonly lost. Battle droids knew this from experience and reverted back to manual communication just to guarantee the message was received. By the time BD-37625 turned around to give his driver the command to halt the truck, it was too late.

  The chain connected with the front of the truck. The impact caused the entire front end of the eighteen wheeler to stop, but that didn’t stop the rest of it from continuing to move forward and because it had nowhere else to go, it went up and over the front end. The truck went vertical where it paused for a brief moment before flipping over and crashing down on its roof.

  BD-37625 did the calculations and came to the conclusion that eighty-three percent of his squad wouldn’t survive the crash. He sent out one last message via Bluetooth and hoped that there wasn’t a lot of interference.

  The message read: KILL THEM ALL.

  Twenty-Seven

  It was simple.

  It was crude.

  It was Knox’s plan.

  Shelby watched the eighteen wheeler barrel down Mulberry Street in Ames, Iowa from the dirty windows of what was once a 7-Eleven. As soon as the truck cleared the staple of convenience shopping, she stepped out onto the street just in time to see the truck flip high into the air and come crashing onto its own roof. Battle droids were tossed into the air and slammed into buildings and concrete. Those who weren’t thrown, expired with the truck.

  It took a couple of seconds for the dust to clear and the noise to stop reverberating off the buildings. When it did, Knox turned to Shelby. “That’s doing things the Knox way.”

  She couldn’t deny its effectiveness despite its complete and utter destructiveness. “Keep your eyes peeled,” Shelby said as she walked off. “There could be a couple of toasters still kicking out there.”

  They moved carefully. Disfigured limbs and crushed torsos of battle droids were scattered across the road. Shelby and Knox checked that each and every one o
f them was offline before they moved onto the next. No matter how many steps they took, Sue wasn’t more than a couple away from either one of them.

  They moved in on the truck and circled it twice to make sure there weren’t going to be any mistakes. Water pissed out of the radiator and somewhere inside the engine was an electrical hum, but apart from that everything appeared safe.

  The rear doors of the truck’s container were buckled in from the crash. Shelby couldn’t pull them open, so Knox pushed her aside, took off his leather jacket and tee-shirt, which Shelby thought was completely unnecessary, and then wrapped his big hands around the edge of the door and pulled. Slowly, with his muscles bulging, the fading action hero wedged the container door open enough so they could climb inside.

  Out of breath, Knox leaned against the opened door and lit a cigarette. “Get in and see what we got, princess.”

  Sue rushed inside the container and Shelby heard him rustling around inside. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Sue said. “This is the jackpot! We’re in Vegas and we’ve cleaned them out. A jackpot to end all jackpots.”

  “How much did we get?” Knox asked.

  Sue poked his head out of the container and grinned ear to ear. “All of it.”

  It took them ten minutes to pull out the cases and once they were on the street, Sue did a stocktake.

  They had:

  150 shotguns with 12,000 EMP shells.

  200 MP80 machine guns with 15,000 rounds of ammunition.

  300 EMP shock grenades.

  5 EMP rocket launchers with 100 mortar shells.

  15 Beretta handguns with 1,000 rounds of regular ammunition.

  And an assortment of Kevlar, helmets, pistols, rifles and various other experimental weapons.

  “We can’t carry all this,” Shelby said. “Not on two bikes.”

  Knox picked up an MP80 and looked through the sights at an imaginary target. “Pack what you can, we’ll leave the rest.”

  Shelby opened a crate of what appeared to be filled with stainless steel baseball-sized balls. “What are these?”

  Sue looked over and when he saw what was in her hand he smiled. “Thing of art, that is, thing of art. It has some boring Olympus name, but I call it ‘The Last Resort.’”

  “What’s it do?”

  “It’s kind of like a parachute, but better. It was designed for soldiers to jump out of planes. You see, instead of using parachutes, which are dangerous, and can get faulty and shot down by the enemy.” He took the ball from Shelby and bounced it in the palm of his hand. “You jump out of the aircraft with this and just before you’re about to hit the ground, you press this button.” He pointed to the red button on the side. “And a high density inflatable cocoon forms around the soldier and cushions the impact.” He grinned. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “So it’s like a big airbag?” Shelby asked.

  “It’s a little more sophisticated than that, but yeah.”

  “Keep moving,” Knox said. “There’ll be more on their way.”

  Shelby loaded up the saddlebags of her bike with EMP shotgun shells, fifty EMP grenades and one hundred regular .45 rounds for the Beretta that she strapped around her thigh. She stepped to the open crate that was full of shotguns. She grabbed one and felt the weight of it in her hand, before putting it back down and picking up another to do the exact same thing.

  “You want this one,” Sue said as he chose the meanest looking of the bunch and handed it to her. “It’s a Remington 1740 double barrel shotgun. What it really is, is actually two Remington 870s attached to each other. One ejects to the left of the barrel and the other to the right. You see, it takes at least two EMP shells to stop a battle droid. This shotgun gives you both those shells with one trigger pull.”

  Shelby felt the weight of it in her hands and smiled. “I’ll take it.”

  Sue rustled through a crate and when he was through he handed her a holster for the beast of a weapon. It sat over her right shoulder blade and allowed her to pull the Remington out quickly if things went bad. She headed back to her bike and caught a glimpse of herself in the reflection of a shopfront window and paused. Shelby almost didn’t recognize herself. She didn’t look distressed, sad or out of place. What she looked was dangerous.

  Knox stepped up next to her. “You might look badass, but that doesn’t mean you are badass.”

  Shelby looked to him and was about to open her mouth to say something when she felt a tremor under her feet. A slight vibration that faded as quickly as it came. Then there was another and another after that. Shelby and Knox both knew what was coming.

  Knox turned to Sue. “Off the street, now!” he yelled.

  Sue was confused. “What, why? What’s going on?”

  “Grab what you can, and run,” Knox said.

  The vibrations shifted into distant thumps. The thumps grew more frequent until the glass in the shopfront began to shake and rattle.

  “It’s getting closer,” Shelby yelled.

  Sue stood at a loss in the middle of the road. “What’s getting closer?”

  Knox threw whatever weapon bags that he could over his shoulders and gripped a MP80. “If you don’t move you’re going to find out quick smart.”

  Shelby swung her leg over her bike. The engine roared, she revved it and let it idle.

  “Get the hell off that thing,” Knox said.

  “I don’t know about you, Knox, but I don’t want to stick around here much longer.”

  “They’re weighed down,” he said. “We’re not going to outrun anything on them.”

  “What’s going on?” Sue said with panic in his voice.

  Knox told him to shut up and turned to Shelby. “Find somewhere to hide.”

  She shut the engine down, cursed under her breath and climbed off the bike. She looked down the street. For a couple of hundred feet on either end were wall-to-wall storefronts with nowhere to escape. It was the very reason why Knox chose this part of town for the ambush on the truck and now it was coming back to bite them.

  Shelby pulled the Remington from the holster behind her, took two steps toward the Virgin Megastore that spanned three shopfronts. and swung the butt of it into the window. It didn’t break on the first swing, but on the second it smashed to the ground.

  “In here!” Shelby yelled.

  Knox stepped to the store with as many bags and weapons as he could carry but Sue was another story altogether. He was still standing out in the open as if in shock. “Can someone tell me what’s coming?”

  A shadow fell over his face and the rest of the street. Shelby pointed down the road at the battle spider that had just blocked out the sun. “That’s what’s coming.”

  Sue froze. It was clearly the first time he had seen one, and now that he had he didn’t know what to do.

  Shelby called his name but he was paralyzed. She called it again, but no matter how many times she did, Sue didn’t budge.

  The noise of the battle spider’s thumping steps reverberated off the buildings and failed to fade before the next steps was taken, creating a constant wall of noise. It barely fit in the narrow street and where it didn’t, the battle spider scraped the sides of the buildings, shattering glass along the way.

  Shelby called for Sue again, but there was no point. Neither one of them could hear her voice. She ran into the street, grabbed Sue by the arm and nearly yanked it out of its socket as she pulled him inside the Megastore. They took shelter behind the CD racks in the Alternative section and listened to the shattering battle spider thumps.

  Then they stopped. The last thump echoed away. Shelby looked over the A-K section and into the street. One of the battle spider’s legs was right outside the Megastore windows.

  It took Sue a moment to pull himself together and when he finally did his voice barely concealed his fear. “Wha . . . What is that thing?” he whispered.

  “Shh.” Shelby said.

  “A battle spider,” Knox said.

  Sue’s face scrunched up. “Battle spider
? What a stupid name. Who came up with that?”

  Shelby thumbed to Knox. “He did.”

  Knox looked at Sue hard. “Have you got a problem with that, mate?”

  “No,” Sue said. “No problem at all.”

  Shelby was about to tell the pair of them to shut up but she caught her breath when she saw the red light of a battle droid’s visor emerge out of the darkness. Behind it two more appeared and the outlines of all three became clear as they stepped closer to the smashed window of the Megastore.

  Shelby lowered down and quietly leaned against the CD rack.

  “What’s happening out there?” Knox asked.

  “They found us.”

  “How many?”

  “Three?”

  Knox gave it a minute’s thought. Then grabbed his rifle and crawled to his knees.

  “What are you going to do?” Shelby asked.

  Knox motioned to the droids with the end of his MP80. “Hail a rain of gunfire down on them?”

  “This is not the 80s anymore,” she whispered. “Wait and see if they move on.”

  “Why?”

  Shelby looked at him hard.

  Knox gritted his teeth. “Okay.” But his fingers didn’t move far from the trigger.

  Shelby closed her eyes so she could listen better.

  She heard heavy footsteps enter the Megastore.

  She heard broken glass crush under their feet.

  She heard the heavy thump of her heart against her chest.

  She heard the battle droids search the store.

  She heard footsteps approach.

  She heard them stop.

  Then she heard Knox’s voice. “Shelby?”

  She opened her eyes to see a battle droid standing over them. His left arm already weaponized and aimed at them.

  “Now what do you suggest?” Knox said.

  “I say bring back the 80s.”

  Knox squeezed the trigger. Six blue EMP rounds exploded from the barrel of his MP80 and incapacitated the droid before it had the chance to make a move.

  Shelby sprung to her feet. Pulled the double barrel shotgun from her holster and took aim at the first battle droid she could get in her sights. She pulled the trigger and unleashed both shells. It kicked harder than she thought and slammed back into her shoulder. In the time it took the battle droid to hit the deck, Shelby had already racked the shotgun and pulled the trigger again, taking down the last battle droid in the Virgin Megastore.