by Nick Ryder
“Do I really sound like that?” Ego asked quickly. There was a collection of over reactive whirring and hums, and then a pop. “How’s this?” The voice was smoother. It still had the tone of something balancing between male and female, but the metallic edge was gone.
“That’s better, I guess.” Her shoulders shrugged. Then shrugged again, she looked from one shoulder to the next. And then she turned in a full circle several times reaching out, trying to snatch the thing that kept eluding her.
“Is she chasing her tail?” I asked Ego and immediately forgot that the rat queen could hear me.
She didn’t look offended. Maybe the obedience Ego had added meant I couldn’t offend her. I didn’t know how strong it was.
She stopped and continued to look around the room as her hand reached behind her back along her ass and grabbed the tail before it could escape again. She pulled it around and looked at it.
The end of the tail slowly shifted while she cradled its length and stroked it like a pet.
“I feel so weird.” She continued to look around the room. “Where are you?”
“I’m somewhere else.”
“You are the system,” Ego reminded me.
“The system?” she repeated.
“It’s the way this installation works. The people who made this place decided to keep it automated. But they left Ego in charge.”
“I got curious,” Ego finished.
“They planned to use genetically modified beings to combat the onslaught of the superhumans,” I said.
“So that was all real,” she hummed to herself, admiring her claws as she spoke. She sat up again this time with more ease. “I remember some of that. I know I was at work. But there was an explosion, and something happened.”
“I think they wanted volunteers,” I started. The government was going to take anyone damaged and didn’t care about the consequences. “I was as a sergeant. US Air Force. I broke my neck shortly after it all started.”
She chuckled, which came out as a lighthearted growl. “I guess I’m Marie Duncan. I was a paralegal in Chicago.”
“It’s good to meet you, Marie.”
She looked around the room. I saw her through the camera. Marie wanted to see my face, but I didn’t have one. And if she found the CCTV camera, I supposed it was fine. But it felt too science fiction for me to have her talking into a camera lens. I watched her make a face, which was a combination of modest snarls and twitching whiskers.
“You’re not what I expected,” Marie said.
“I know I’m a disembodied voice.” I wanted to sound hopeful. “But I’m working on that.”
“Oh,” she said quietly. Her hand turned up, and a finger pointed to the far side of the laboratory. “Then who’s that?”
I had to switch cameras quickly. In my haste, I went a long way, through the corridors, the bathroom, and finally over Marie’s furry shoulder to look in the direction that caught her attention.
There was a figure crouching on the floor. Its massive chest heaved as it surveyed the area. It was hard to see entirely because somehow it managed to pull the shadows around it like a blanket. I knew exactly what it looked like, though: I’d been the one who couldn’t bring myself to terminate a living thing. A cat’s face, lips pulled back to snarl, with a pitbull’s powerful body and tiger’s deadly claws.
“Subject one is awake!” Ego said gleefully. I didn’t need him to tell me the stats of the thing. It looked good at everything, but its strength was obviously the biggest threat.
The sound of the voice made the creature launch at Marie.
Immediately she leaped, twisting in the air completely and landed on her feet again. The surviving rat from the expedition to the vehicle bay woke from its recuperating slumber and hissed at the creature as it snaked under the counters. It made its way to crouch behind Marie.
The beast had a crazed look. There was something feral in its eyes. The jagged teeth clicked together as its claws dug into the tiles for momentum and went after Marie with a vengeance.
She managed to skirt away from it. The creature slid across the floor, into a cabinet of steel and glass.
“What do you want me to do?” she asked hurriedly. The giant rat kept trying to keep Marie between it and the attacking creature. She stumbled over the rat, stepping on its tail as she broke through the double doors into the hallway.
“That has a bad brain,” Ego said. “Oops.”
The beast crashed through the door, bounding after Marie as she and the rat scrambled over each other trying to get away. Every time she turned a corner in the opposite direction as the rat, it twisted and bolted after her.
“You need to kill it.” I wanted to make sure nothing happened to Marie. “Ego, can you shut it down?”
“How?” Ego replied. “Don’t you believe in free will?”
“Find something,” I called from the PA system throughout the building. “See if you can use something as a weapon.”
“She is a weapon,” Ego reminded me.
“She doesn’t know that yet,” I said.
Marie and the rat scrambled through another set of doors. They turned a corner and crashed through a stairwell.
“I can’t see you down there,” I shouted. At least I thought I yelled. But it seemed there was a compressor affecting volume levels in the system to avoid damage to the speakers.
She heard me because instead of padding downstairs, she moved upward. The next level, through the doors, was the sleeping quarters. I didn’t have access to the rooms.
“Just find something to defend yourself.” I saw several missed opportunities. I was a soldier, she was an advanced librarian, and her ideas of self-preservation went as far as a morning coffee and a new ball-point pen every few months.
She and the rat beast darted into a room.
The creature smashed through the doorway to the stairwell. It waited a moment, testing the air. It glared over the railing to the darkness below. Then it twisted its thick neck around to look up. It went upstairs missing three steps at a time.
At the end of the hallway, it waited. My camera was over its shoulder and another camera at the end of the hall. There were eight doors on either side of the corridor.
“Hey! Dumb shit!” I called the thing. It twisted its head in several directions, trying to pinpoint my voice. “Yeah, I’m talking to you! You’re a real mess you know that?”
And it squatted on the floor.
“What’s it doing?” I asked.
“I believe it is defecating.” Ego sounded embarrassed. “I’ll get one of the automatons right on that!”
The creature stood up again. It found the camera peering at it and crushed the lens in its claws. The view I had from the other end of the hallway was too far to see its smug face well.
“Thought you got me?” I said. “You’re a dirt bag. You need to clean up that mess on the floor, right now.” Somewhere in my protocols that connected with the facility, I felt maintenance was higher in the sub-programming.
It saw the other camera. Once it crushed the CCTV, I was blind in that hallway. As it picked up speed, heading toward the camera, Marie cut it off, slamming against it, shouldering it into the wall across from the room she’d hidden in. The rat attacked as well. The two rats tore and punched and bit the thing. Marie ripped off its arm and started beating it about the head and neck. It slumped to the floor, twitching, dying.
When she finished, Marie stood up and dropped the arm. Her nose wrinkled.
“What the hell is that smell?” she asked.
“It, um,” I said. “We’ll get it cleaned up.”
Marie was preening her fur, blood mottling it.
“You should clean yourself up too,” I suggested. “And… maybe find some clothes.”
She didn’t look concerned by the fact she was completely naked, but nodded at the suggestion anyway. There were bound to be some clothes in the place somewhere.
Somewhere inside the facility, far below any o
f the levels I saw, there was a switch and a jingle. The smallest of sounds started. It was a pulsating that took on rhythm but was as inaudible as a fly’s fart.
Chapter Nine
The buzz in the village surrounded Cara and Wilbert like the gnats that swarmed around her body because of the copious amounts of crusty blood. The journey from the village to the shiny panels on the mountain top took several hours. It took a few more to get back.
On the return trip to the village, Cara and Wilbert ran into a nest of snoozing pernicious kangaroo rats. Their numbers went unchecked for the last twenty years and their sizes went up to a meter. Since vegetation stopped providing enough nutrients for their expanding sizes, the occasional frog or foot long grasshoppers sated their hunger.
But in huge numbers, lumped together at the mouth of the cave, meant they were dangerous to humans.
Trending carefully, Cara and Wilbert managed to skirt the danger. But the rattle of the snake some meters from the napping furry pile, meant they’d moved from one dinner plate to another.
Since humans hovered at the bottom of the food chain in the last years, other animals grew in size and danger. The rattle on the snake sounded like a gourd-sized maracas. It was pendulous and the rumba shaker had a deep resonance.
The head was as wide as a door. The eyes that opened from the bed of sand near Wilbert’s foot were as large as shiny golden footballs.
“Wh—” he started.
Before the snake could cock back and sink its long fangs through Wilbert’s middle, Cara lopped off its head with the halberd.
“Stop screwing around,” she hissed. The rattlesnake roosted near the napping kangaroo rats, not too far from an abundant food source.
Wilbert and Cara lugged the huge carcass back to the village. It wasn’t in their best interest to waste food. The rattlesnake was thicker than Victor McKinney’s middle, and longer than several of him. It weighed a few hundred pounds. But they were strong and between the two of them, managed to drag the dead snake back to the parish.
That’s when the fun started. The buzz in the village surrounded Cara and Wilbert like the gnats that swarmed around her body because of the copious amounts of crusty blood. The journey from the village to the shiny panels on the mountain top took several hours. It took a few more to get back.
That’s when the fun started.
She’d shared the spoils with the rest of the community. There was an enormous celebration with barbequed rattlesnake for everyone. The snake skin was salvaged from the carcass before the men of the village carved thick snake steaks and grilled them. Cara heard the older men complain about how the snake steaks would taste better with beer. But she didn’t know what beer was and found a place for the huge rattle in the hut she shared with her father.
Shedding the tartan, Cara washed in the communal shower. It was Saturday and against the rules. But she needed to peel and scrub the congealed goo from under her armpits, and somehow it had collected between her butt cheeks. The pumice she used to wash got a lot slimier before she was done scrubbing.
Cara didn’t spend a lot of time with girls her own age in the community. The closest in age to her was Rebecca, but they’d never got along. Rebecca was standoffish and protective of her brother and father. The rest of the girls were much younger.
Since Victor was community leader, Rebecca’s allegiance meant a lot of reporting to her father after mingling with the groups around the huts. Cara’s new notoriety happened when she and Wilbert returned to the village as champions. There was no doubt they killed the snake for the banquet, but Isaiah and Karl Holland disputed their claim to the mountain kingdom.
She’d dressed in a tunic with a braided leather belt. Free of the battle gear, she’d left the tall boots in the bedroom and wandered barefoot across the sandstone path toward the gathering. Her hair was still wet from the shower. But the perpetual warm wind across the valley blew dry her hair so its silky layers draped over her shoulders.
The blue tunic went to her knees and was enough clothing she thought before she left the hut. Sampson went to the gathering before she returned from showering. Cara had to subconsciously remind herself to cross her legs whenever she sat down because she’d neglected to slip on panties before she went to the town meeting.
She gave Wilbert the head of the snake. It seemed fitting since his foot was closest to its mouth. The elders in the villages mulled over how to extract the venom from the sacs before Wilbert turned the snake head into a sombrero. He was disappointed to learn they had to remove the fangs to get to the poison. He kept the fangs and Sampson told him he’d turn them into brackish blades for Wilbert’s weapons cache.
Isaiah and the uncomfortable-looking Karl stood at the center of the gathering describing how Cara and Wilbert were at fault for the now dead Troy Vaughn. His mother sobbed miserably at the sound of her deceased son’s name.
Cara joined her father, leaning against him as she watched Isaiah prancing around, reinventing a battle to the death with the mutant rat from the steel cave door. She looked at Wilbert from across the amphitheater. He sat next to his parents, grinning with rattlesnake meat clenched in his teeth. He waved a fistful of steak at Cara.
“And there she is,” Isaiah responded when Wilbert’s attention to Cara drew the rest of the crowd’s attention. “She’s the reason poor Troy is no longer with us,” he said dramatically.
Cara looked to Victor, with Rebecca sitting at her father’s side. There was a look in the old man’s eyes that suggested he knew the truth but was unwilling to change his son’s view of the events to match reality.
“I challenge the claim to the underboss points.” Isaiah looked gangly in the red tartan. A breastplate that was too big for him. It’d been designed for Victor’s brother, Edgar.
A man of legend; Edgar died during a trek through the badlands with Isaiah when the boy was fourteen. Edgar and Isaiah went out, only Isaiah came back. He had the claw of an underboss to boast of victory. It didn’t seem to matter that his uncle had died in the process.
Edgar McKinney was the founder of the village, along with Sampson and some of the other elders that helped the people flee the cities and start a new life. Once he died, Victor, by proxy became the new leader. No one challenged him. It didn’t make sense to worry about the head of the village if they didn’t work together to keep the security. There was an unspoken alliance within the village. While some of the power shifted between the reds and blues, it was still the dominance of the reds that kept the community together.
“You know that’s a dirty lie!” Wilbert said, lifting a large snake steak in his greasy fist. “Cara killed that thing. She killed two of those things inside her cave!”
Wilbert covered two points clearly without leaving the limestone seat at the base of the amphitheater. Karl tried to get smaller, even move away from Isaiah, but Victor’s son yanked on his friend’s red tartan, keeping him close.
“You should challenge that claim,” Sampson reminded his daughter. They lived with death at the doorstep every day. It was impossible to not think of the loss every time someone didn’t come back to the community. He was proud of his daughter, but Cara took no interest in the political struggles between the red and blue. She just wanted to live her life, free of the conflicts. Maybe have a little more shampoo rations when she showered.
“I don’t care what Isaiah says,” Cara said to her father quietly. “Wilbert and I know what happened. Besides, no one killed the mutant rat that ate Troy.”
“Therefore,” Isaiah started, opening his arms to the crowd and turning in a semicircle, “I claim the shiny panels and the whole mountain kingdom.”
“What!” Wilbert shouted, displaying trouble in believing what he heard, standing up finally. “That’s a load of shit.”
“She is responsible for Troy’s death.”
“Man, you know that asshole got in the way of that thing,” Wilbert yelled, bits of chewed snake sprayed over the ground. “That idiot didn’t know enough
to get out of the way.” This time he stepped from the bottom seat and into the open space. “And hell no, you have no claim on that mountain kingdom. That shit is Cara’s, and maybe a little bit mine,” he added quietly, testing his claim with Cara across the arena. “You don’t get shit!”
Cara moved away from Sampson. The crowd quieted as she made her way to the bottom of the theater. She didn’t look at the upturned faces of the people she walked by. She didn’t want them to think she’d become some savior. Her father told her the steel sheets on the mountainside were solar panels. They could use the panels to collect the energy from the sun and convert it for the village if they had access to generators.
Wilbert and Cara decided to keep quiet about the robots. Since they didn’t know what kind of loot the mountain held, both agreed to wait before they spread the word.
“You’re not even a level 10,” Isaiah said with venom in his voice. It was a low insult. “You can’t challenge my claim. I’m level 46. And the confirmed kill today brings me closer to my next level.”
“Troy’s dead,” Cara said. She made a mistake finding the boy’s mother in the crowd. Seeing the woman’s teary face made Cara’s chest burn. “I don’t know why you think it has anything to do with me. You’re the one that led him and Karl out there.”
Isaiah wasn’t used to face to face challenges. He was good at ambushes and sniping. One to one combat didn’t settle with him. He took a step back from Cara. Karl moved behind him, using Isaiah as a shield.
“We came to help you,” Isaiah stammered quickly.
Cara leaned to one side enough to look Karl directly in the eyes. “Is that true?” she asked.
Karl wasn’t designed for confrontation. He was useful in battle because minions chased him around, making easy picking for more experienced fighters. He didn’t shake his head. But he got a little smaller.
Cara was intimidating. There was something profound in her ability to silence a room; even if that room was as big as an auditorium. Her magnificence and the simmering power inside her eyes made even the oldest men of the village blush. Isaiah never experienced Cara’s wrath. But she was careful never to give away anything before it was necessary. On that Saturday afternoon, it was necessary.
