“Nice work, everyone. In and out, no casualties. Stack ‘em, pack ‘em, and rack ‘em.”
Farrow began to break down the equipment and pack it away. Kessler and Michaels stepped into the hallway. Kessler manned the door to the room while Michaels stepped down the hall to clear the stairwell for their exit.
Nomura was looking down at the quiet street. They chose a location away from the bars and cathouses, so that any approaching enemies would stand out rather than blend in with a crowd.
Nomura was looking at a holographic advertisement flashing something about a local beer when he saw something move swiftly down below, almost out of his field of vision. He looked down, but there was nothing there. Maybe it was a stray cat.
“Kessler, how’s the hall?”
“All clear, sir.”
“The stairwell is clear as well, sir,” crackled Michaels into Peter’s earpiece. “Hanretty, we’re ready for exit,” Peter said into his microphone. “Copy that.”
Farrow was zipping up the luggage shut to some TV commercial blasting trumpet music and a clown riding around on a unicycle, when Nomura saw it again.
If he wasn’t mistaken, it looked like something jumped from the second floor balcony up to the third floor balcony right beneath him.
Peter saw Nomura looking over the edge. “Everything cool, Nomura?”
Nomura was peering over the edge, his sidearm now in his right hand with the safety off. There was a shadow moving around on the balcony below, but it was too dark for him to make anything out.
“Nomura,” Peter demanded impatiently.
Nomura saw something flitter to his left. When he turned his head, he saw a man clinging to the sea foam railing on the balcony. The man looked at him with cats’ eyes…four of them…and hissed, flashing long fangs.
“JESUS.” Nomura swung his right hand over the railing to take aim when the shadow grabbed his hand from below in a vice like grip, yellow fingernails digging into his flesh.
Farrow was with Kessler by the door, ready to leave. Peter stepped onto the balcony as he saw Nomura pulled over the side.
“Holy shit!” Peter cried out, and he drew his gun as two figures landed on the balcony from either side. They hissed and bared jagged fangs. Peter heard Nomura screaming and pleading for his life down below.
“Get Farrow out of here!” he barked at Kessler over his shoulder. Kessler didn’t need to be asked twice.
“So what the hell are you supposed to be?” Peter quipped, training his Beretta M9 at the two…men. They blinked their four yellow eyes at him.
In the background, the host of some ludicrous game show was consoling a contestant who was apparently losing, prompting the obnoxious trumpet music and some buxom woman in a bikini to jump into a vat of pudding.
The two men didn’t answer. They just smiled at him viciously, brandishing fangs dripping with saliva as Peter realized that Nomura had gone quiet.
Peter shot one in the head, sending him backward into the third from below, who had just climbed over the railing to join the party.
He fired another shot at the one on the left, but the man moved too quickly. Peter sidestepped as the assailant flew past him.
The one he shot in the head stood upright, fingering the bloodless head wound curiously; the one who caught him now stepped around to advance upon Peter. The one that flew past him into the room was now coming at him from behind.
“Ah, hell,” Peter said, sounding like John Wayne, and he rushed the two on the balcony, catching each of them with an arm and pushing them against the balcony railing. The one from behind hit him so hard in the back that they all fell over the railing in a heap of bodies.
Peter felt the wind knocked out of him from the impact with the sidewalk and the guy behind him that landed on his back, but he was cushioned by the two assailants he positioned in front of him. They, too, were momentarily disoriented. The third one rolled off his back and on the sidewalk.
“Nice teeth, but you bastards can’t fly,” Peter muttered as he rolled off of the two under him. He got to his feet as the three fiends got to theirs. They recovered a little quicker than he would’ve liked.
He fired shots into the two near him and then the third a little further away, but it didn’t even slow them down. They only mocked him with their toothy grins. Peter had seen zombie soldiers before, but nothing like this.
He darted in between two parked cars and across the empty street, the three monsters quick on his heels. As he looked around for his ride, the SUV came careening down the street and plowed right into the three pursuers, crushing one beneath its wheels and sending the other two ricocheting off the grill.
A door swung open and Farrow yelled, “Get in!”
Peter jumped in, as he heard tires screech on pavement, and the SUV pulled away with the back door still ajar. Farrow was clutching Peter’s wrists as Peter pulled himself into his seat and closed the door.
“What took you guys so long?”
“What were those things?” Farrow’s face was white.“Something new,” replied Peter. He was looking out the window at the blur of palm trees and short, multi-colored buildings, all appearing to be different shades of blue in the moonlight.
As the SUV made a sharp right turn, there was a tall lithe shadow in the middle of the road. It was holding something over its shoulder.
“Sir,” said Hanretty.
“Carl,” gasped Peter.
The figure fired off an RPG that whistled toward the SUV, but the driver swerved in time as it shot right past and blew up a storefront behind them.
The SUV careened into a parked car, pushing it onto the sidewalk. Hanretty had slammed his head into the steering wheel and was feeling woozy.
“Get us out of here!” Peter shouted at him as he saw Kafka reloading. Hanretty shook his head and put the SUV into reverse, but the front bumper had become attached to the parked car.
Peter saw Kafka aiming the next RPG. “Gun it, Hanretty!”
Hanretty floored it, and the SUV pulled free. He put it in drive and gunned down the sidewalk as Peter heard another whistle. This one caught the rear of the SUV, sending it flying forward, rear end up, until it landed upside down. It skidded to a stop on the sidewalk, crashing into a storefront window and tearing down the striped cloth awning.
Peter put out his hands and feet to get his bearings and unbuckled his seatbelt. He crashed headfirst onto the roof of the car.
“Farrow, you all right?”
“I-I think so.” He had blood running down the side of his head. He appeared to be cut from flying glass.
“Kessler, Michaels, you all right?” Peter shouted, as he helped Farrow with his seatbelt. There was no answer.
“They’re dead, sir.” Farrow said, his eyes wide with terror.
Peter grabbed Farrow by the shoulders. “We need to get out of here. You can do this, Farrow. You’re a soldier. Remember your training.”
Farrow swallowed hard and nodded. Peter had apparently gotten his wish. He was no longer moving the chess pieces. He was on the board. In the mix, just like he wanted.
Peter slid out of the broken window, shards of glass scraping his back through his golf shirt. He felt warm, wet blood mix with sweat, making his shirt stick to his back. Farrow followed behind him.
Peter crouched and waddled to the broken rear window of the SUV, and he pulled out two AK-47’s. When Farrow was out, he reached back in to grab the luggage.
“Forget it,” said Peter. “We have to keep moving.” He held up his right hand and showed Farrow a thermite grenade.
Farrow nodded and retracted his hand. Peter grabbed him under his left armpit and hoisted him to his feet, shoving an AK-47 into his hands. Then he pulled Farrow deeper into the store. “Follow me.”
They quickly waded through canned food, opened boxes, and various other food products strewn about, and headed down one of the grocery aisles to the back of the store.
Peter pulled the pin and tossed the thermite grenad
e down the aisle. It slid right up to the overturned SUV whose front protruded through the broken storefront.
They ducked through a back door into a small storage room. As the door shut behind them, the store shook with a boom as the grenade went off.
“There’s a back door,” said Farrow, pointing to an exterior door in the back of the storage room. There was a cheap metal shelf stocked with more canned goods in front of it. “They don’t seem to care about fire codes.”
Peter gave Farrow a sardonic look. “Let’s get out of here before the gas tank blows.” Farrow nodded, and they each took a side of the shelf and pulled it down, sending the cans rolling everywhere.
“Wait,” Peter said, and he disappeared into the storefront. The SUV was ablaze, blocking the breach with flames. He didn’t have much time. He went behind the enclosed glass counter and turned on the gas grill, blowing out the pilot light underneath.
As he rounded the counter, he thought he saw the wraithlike silhouette of Kafka stalking up to the bodega. He wasted no time.
Farrow, who was waiting by the rear exit, saw Peter re-emerge from the front. “What did you do?”
“Something Carl told me he did in Xcaret when trapped in the resort with the drones. A little taste of his own medicine.”
He pushed Farrow out the back door, and they spilled into a narrow alleyway. They ran down the alley, followed by a louder boom, and the bodega began to cave in on itself, flames shooting out of the collapsing roof.
“Do you think we got him?” asked Farrow.
“I think we bought ourselves a few extra minutes,” panted Peter as they sprinted as fast as they could down the alley. He grabbed his mini-com multi-tasker. “This is Team Leader, exit compromised. We need immediate extraction at new coordinates.”
“Roger that, Team Leader. We have your location. Sending coordinates for extraction.”
Peter looked down at his screen as the coordinates uploaded, and a navigation map appeared with the extraction coordinates indicated in flashing green. ETA, twenty minutes.
“It’s six blocks away,” said Peter. We won’t win a straight-up fight with Kafka, so we have to evade until our ride comes.”
Farrow nodded.
They came to the end of the alleyway and turned back onto the street. They hit an intersection and turned right onto a busier boulevard. Peter and Farrow shoved past pedestrians in the dark under flashing holographic ads, onlookers recoiling from the sight of the AK-47’s, and jogged until they hit another intersection.
“We’ve got to get out of here before the authorities catch up with us,” said Farrow.
Peter knew he was right. They didn’t want to be intercepted by Kafka or the local police. Either way would end in certain death.
“Three more blocks this way,” Peter said, pointing down the boulevard. “We’ve gotta get out of public, or we’ll definitely run into local law enforcement. It’s an aerial extraction.”
Farrow understood. “Rooftops.”
Peter nodded. He kicked in the front door of a yellow apartment complex covered in graffiti, and they ran down the hall to the stairwell. They climbed the stairs, two-at-a-time, and ran down another long hallway, toppling a drunken resident standing in the middle as they passed.
Peter pointed to the stairwell at the other end of the hall. “There’s the roof.”
Peter shot the lock off the chained door at the top, and they burst out onto the roof. He checked his multi-tasker as Farrow bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“Eleven minutes. We need to be there.” Peter pointed to a rooftop several buildings away.
He went to the edge of the roof and looked down at the street. They were on a main boulevard, and the street below was teeming with nightlife.
“Do you think he’s been following us?” asked Farrow, walking over to Peter. He, too, was looking down at the street.
Peter frowned. “Let’s not stick around to find out.” He shouldered his AK and Farrow followed suit.
They ran to the edge of the roof and hopped the four-foot gap between the buildings onto another flat, asphalt rooftop. They ran across that rooftop, dodging waste stack vents and skylights.
The next rooftop was pitched and covered in Spanish tile. Peter and Farrow jumped simultaneously. Peter landed and began to scale the pitch on all fours. Farrow landed less gracefully, tiles sliding out from under his feet.
Peter heard the clinking of dislocated tiles and turned to look back to see Farrow sliding towards the edge. Farrow got a grip and held it right at the edge, but he was afraid to move.
Peter turned and slowly crab-walked back down the pitch. When he reached Farrow, he turned sideways and reached out a hand. “It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
Farrow reached out with a trembling hand and took Peter’s. Peter’s grip closed around Farrow’s hand like a vice, and he pulled Farrow away from the edge. Farrow struggled to find secure footing as more tiles slid off the rooftop.
Peter was suddenly reminded of a story Nolan Kettle told him about how Carl coaxed a terrified soldier through the dreaded rope bridge of the Victory Tower exercise in Basic.
“Just follow me on all fours. Slow and careful.”
“Got it,” said Farrow, recovering quickly.
They crawled up to the peak and then crab walked slowly down the other side, Peter leading to stop Farrow in case he began to slide again.
They made it to the edge, and Peter heard the staccato blade of a Black Hawk cutting through the night sky. He checked his multi-tasker. “Three minutes.”
They had two more roofs to cross. The next two appeared flat, as did the third where the extraction was to take place.
They jumped together, grabbing the edge of the flat roof on the other side. They pulled themselves over the lip and rolled to standing position. They crossed the rooftop, hopped across to the next one, and hopped to their final rooftop.
Peter and Farrow heard sirens from below. The police were on the scene. The sound of the Black Hawk was getting louder. Farrow looked up as it approached. “We made it.”
However, Peter was looking at the rooftops they just crossed and saw two of the fanged men from the hotel leaping from roof to roof with unnatural speed. They were only two rooftops away.
Peter grabbed his AK-47 and opened up on the two men, but the men moved too quickly and easily dodged the fire.
Farrow was calling it in to the Black Hawk. “Enemy bogies approaching on rooftops.”
“Copy that.”
The Black Hawk, which was flying over the fanged men heading towards the extraction point, turned in the air and the guns opened fire on the leapers. Bolts of light shot across the sky as the two pursuers were lit up like Christmas trees.
After their motionless bodies slid down and off the pitch of the Spanish-tiled rooftop, the Black Hawk swung back around and hovered over Peter and Carl. A rope ladder unfurled and landed between them.
“Age before beauty!” Peter shouted at Farrow over the helicopter blades.
Farrow didn’t need a second invitation. He grabbed the rope ladder and began to ascend the rungs.
Peter looked around, his AK trained on the rooftops in case they had more party-crashers. He looked up and saw that Farrow was almost up and in the helicopter.
He shouldered his AK and grabbed a rung of the rope ladder, when something in a blur snatched him away from it, sending him staggering backward and falling through a large skylight.
As he fell, he saw the helicopter quickly recede from his view and he landed on a pile of boxes. Winded, he rolled off the boxes and landed face-down onto the harder laminate flooring. The room smelled like leather.
He pushed himself up on his hands and knees as he heard gunfire on the roof and saw the Black Hawk pull away. He felt for his AK-47, but it must’ve been thrown off his shoulder in the fall.
Peter looked around and saw piles off boots, belts, and women’s purses on tables by the boxes. A lithe form descende
d through the skylight and landed in front of Peter.
“That wasn’t very nice, Carl.”
Kafka smiled, his four eyes glinting in the low light like a twisted cat. “Oh, that? It was just a love tap, Pete.” He saw Peter’s expression. “You don’t like it now that the tables are turned. Now, I’m smarter and stronger than you.”
Peter hated to admit it, but Kafka was right. “You look like shit, Carl. How’s that gypsy girlfriend of yours? Sorry I got to stick her before you, but the last thing that went through her before she died was…well, I’d like to say it was thoughts of you, but it was the point of that umbrella.”
There was a micro-expression of barely contained fury on Kafka’s face.
Peter smirked. “So you did sleep with her.”
Kafka grinned in a horrible display of tooth and fang. “Sorry about Fiona, Pete. I heard she gets around…as in all over the place. You might say she went to pieces over me.”
“How did you find us?” Peter demanded, quickly changing the subject.
Kafka cocked his head sideways, amused at the question as if the answer was obvious. “I followed your little trail of crumbs, Pete. You really need to be more careful.”
Peter had no idea what Kafka was referring to. He reached at his side, concealed by the dark, and silently activated the touch screen on his multi-tasker. “So where’ve you been hiding all of this time?”
“Who says I was hiding?” croaked Kafka. His voice made Peter’s skin crawl.
“You dropped off the grid for a while after Monterosso. I heard you paid Ramses a visit.” His fingers were typing furiously on the touch screen.
Kafka stroked his black, oily chin with elongated fingers that ended in sharp wisps. “He nearly shit himself when he saw me, but he was on the john anyway, so I guess it was okay.”
“Still with OIL these days?” Peter probed, trying to sound like he was engaging in small talk. He was dragging out this reunion to stall for time.
“More like OIL is still with me,” Kafka corrected. “I serve a higher purpose now.”
“How are your Martian friends?” chided Peter. “Coming to take you back to the mother ship?”
I am Automaton 3: Shadow of the Automaton Page 4
