by Mat Nastos
“Fucking turn around, you little shit!”
“No.”
The gun almost fell from TJ’s hand in disbelief at what he was hearing from the smaller man he thought would be begging for mercy by then. Instead, Carl had found his balls at the most inopportune of times.
TJ lashed out, striking Carl across his sweat-covered forehead with the barrel of his gun, sending the smaller man stumbling across the room to smash into the side of the cheap IKEA-brand desk they’d forced him to put together all by himself three weeks earlier.
Panic pulsed through every iota of Carl’s being. It was bad enough that he was going to be killed by a hipster in a plaid vest, but the idea of dying on a piece of cheap mass-produced Swedish furniture was too much for him to handle.
“You brought this on yourself, Bro,” spit TJ, gripping the gun high so he could stare down at the back of Carl’s head through the small sight mounted just over the tip of its dull-black barrel. “You should have turned around and made it easy on both of us. It didn’t have to come to this! You always fuck things up!”
Spinning around from his supine position across the top of his desk, Carl held up a brand new red and silver Swingline stapler in a defensive position.
“Back off, Teej! I’ll use this, I swear!” barked Carl.
With Carl’s upper lips trembling, his eyes dripping moisture, and the stapler opened up, the entire situation was almost too much for TJ May. All he could do was laugh at the spectacle before him.
“And what do you think you’re going to do with that, Carl? Staple me to death?” TJ chuckled, feeling sorry for the little man he was going to kill.
“Yes,” replied Carl, closing his fist around the shiny chrome office tool.
Before either man fully realized what was happening, Carl had slammed steel bodied stapler into TJ’s throat five times in rapid succession, planting a series of thin metal wire pieces into the hollow of the man’s throat just above his collar bone. The force of the blows was enough to cause TJ to lose his grip on the pistol in his hand, and each subsequent impact on his throat encouraged Carl to keep going. Blow after blow rained down onto TJ may, quickly dropping the man to the ground—first to one knee and then onto his back.
Carl didn’t stop his attack for nearly a minute and only stopped then because enough blood coated his hands to render his makeshift weapon too slippery to hold. Looking down at the gore covering every inch of the front of his short-sleeved button-up shirt, staining its once pastel green an ugly purple color, the stocky technician doubled over and began to wretch violently into the open space between his desk and the trio of off-white bookshelves that lined the south wall of his office space.
The vomiting went on for two long minutes and would have gone on for even longer had not a quite, terrible gurgling reached Carl’s ears. A shivering, unsteady hand wiped away bile and sputum covering trembling lips as Carl peered over his shoulder to identify the horrific, wet sound assaulting his sense. His eyes met the frantic, wild orbs of TJ May as the man suffocated slowly from the damage to his windpipe. Blood inflated into giant bubbles as the dying man struggled to sit up…his ruined face pleading silently with the man who had once been his friend—the man he had failed to kill.
TJ May’s death rattle was quiet, inaudible to anyone who may have been listening more than a few feet away, but to Carl Anderson is was like a cannon firing in his ears, shaking him to the core.
Tears began to stream down Carl’s face, drawing thin lines from his eyes to the mass of dirty blond facial hair he kept only semi-trimmed. Every muscle in his body went rigid, locking him into place even as his mind screamed for Carl to flee. For ten seconds, he sat unmoving aside from the shuddering of his breath. Unmoving as he locked eyes with the cooling corpse of his would-be murderer. He might have sat unmoving for the rest of the night if not for the sound of the building’s janitor beginning his nightly rounds echoing through the nearly empty facility.
Carl Anderson was saved by the most mundane of sounds: that of a vacuum cleaner being switched on by a tiny Hispanic man named Andres.
The sound spurred the little man to action. In one continuous motion, Carl leapt from his seat, grabbing the dust-covered gray Member’s Only jacket that had been hanging on the back of his door, untouched, since the team had been relocated there. Pulling it over his body to cover the Rorschach of blood affixed to his shirt, Carl snatched up TJ’s fallen pistol with one hand and the satchel with the other and bolted for the door.
He’d come too far to be caught now. He almost added ‘and they’ll never take me alive,’ but he hadn’t convinced himself he’d be able to stick to that particular vow if push came to shove.
The only thing Carl loved more than his freedom was his life, and he prayed he wouldn’t have to choose between his two loves.
Well, he came as close to praying as any lifelong atheist would allow himself to do.
Carl exited the building, forcing himself to keep his steps slow and steady as he crossed the parking lot to his dull blue Toyota Corolla. His hands were shaking enough to cause him to lose his grip on the backpack containing enough stolen top secret information to cause an international incident a few times before he slung it over his shoulder and broke into a trot.
He had no idea how much of a head start he’d get before they discovered TJ’s body.
TJ’s corpse.
Standing next to his car, Carl froze at the thought: he’d just killed a man…killed someone he knew…in cold blood. He’d never killed anyone before—hell, he’d never killed anything before. Timid Carl Anderson was the sort of guy who had become a vegetarian because he couldn’t bring himself to eat eggs. The idea of taking some thing’s life, even as food, had been an anathema to him.
And now he’d murdered someone.
What was he going to do now? If they were going to kill him before, Carl dreaded what the government was going to do to him now that he was responsible for killing TJ May in cold blood.
“No,” he thought. “Not in cold blood…in self-defense.” After all, TJ had been sent by the men upstairs to terminate Carl with extreme prejudice. Carl had only done what he needed to do to protect himself.
Self-defense.
Not that it mattered to a government that regularly killed its own people on a whim. Self-defense or not, they were going to keep coming after him and there was no way nice, timid Carl Anderson was going to be able to save himself against a wetworks unit or worse…what if they sent a Project Hardwired Prime Unit after him? The only thing that had been able to stand up against those monsters had been…
An idea began to form in Carl’s rattled mind.
Malcolm Weir could save him. After all, it was HIS fault Carl was in this mess to begin with. All he had to do was find the rogue cyborg and convince the man to get him somewhere safe.
But how?
Drumming on the sun-damaged roof of his car, knocking off quarter-sized chunks of paint with each hit, Carl ran through everything he knew about Weir. He’d been one of the members of the tech-ops division administering to the Primes since before the first one went live. Surely there was something he could remember that would help him locate Weir.
Family? No, that was the first place the government had looked when Weir broke his programming. His family in Texas was a dead end.
Friends? Something there jolted Carl’s memory.
Yes! A friend. What was the name on Weir’s file? The computer engineer who had helped the renegade cyborg during his escape from Project Hardwired headquarters. Carl jerked open his car’s door and half-fell inside while he wracked his brain for the answer.
“Zuzelo,” he thought.
That was it. David Zuzelo. But the man had disappeared in the chaos after Designate Cestus had destroyed the Abraxas Array. Fountain had put ten agents on trying to find the man once things had calmed down and they’d all come up blank.
Dropping his car’s automatic shifter into ‘drive,’ and roaring out of the underground
parking structure connected to his former employer’s main building, Carl Anderson flashed a half-smile at himself in the rear view mirror.
Sure, they had ten regular agents working on locating the man, but they didn’t have one real genius. They didn’t have Carl Ambrose Anderson on the job. He’d find David Zuzelo, along with the missing Malcolm Weir, and make them help Anderson get out of the mess they’d gotten him into in the first place.
Easing himself out into traffic, maintaining his speed at exactly the posted speed limit so as to avoid notice, Carl Anderson began the most important quest of his life.
CHAPTER 7
The call to the 125th Street offices of the Manhattan District Attorney had been finally made from what Mal had been relatively sure was the last working payphone in New York City. It had taken him nearly thirty minutes of searching from one torn out, vandalized husk to another before the cyborg was able to find a public phone that retained enough of its parts intact to actually make the connection.
The object of his hard fought quest was settled onto a free-standing kiosk just outside of a Korean restaurant that smelled of far more fermented cabbage than the Texas-bred veteran would have preferred. On the plus side, the pungent aroma kept the area around the phone clear of all but those whose destination was the restaurant itself. Mal’s growing paranoia appreciated the clear line of sight around him afforded by the odor.
When the secretary on the other end of the line informed Mal that Amy Jensen was unavailable, he left a brief message letting her know, in the best covert style spy code he could manage on short notice, that the ‘tin man’ would be waiting to meet her at Clancy’s Bar & Grill in SoHo at 6pm, before thanking the young woman and hanging up. He knew from Zuz’s instructions that he should only remain on an open line for as brief a time as possible to help avoid any sort of trace that might be going on.
Although, once he had time to think it over, Mal wasn’t sure if that was the case with modern telephonic devices. Didn’t caller ID’s work as soon as a call came into a phone? If AT&T or Sprint could track a call before it was even answered then Mal was pretty sure the government could do the same.
Even so, it was better to be safe than sorry, so Mal kept it under a minute from start to finish. If nothing else, he’d be long gone before a government-sponsored hit team could reach his position and he’d get to Clancy’s early enough for a solid recon of the area.
The thought of recon made Mal smile. It was something familiar to him—more familiar than fighting creatures right out of Steven Spielberg’s nightmares. The exercise would give him a specific, quantifiable task he could focus on during the four hour wait until the female lawyer arrived for their meeting.
Anything that took his mind off of the uncertainty his life had become was a welcome distraction for sure.
Established in 1927, Clancy’s Bar & Grill had been the run down, seedy type of dive made famous in the black and white detective films of the forties and fifties. A place with a long history of violence and less than legal activity, Clancy’s had been bought out ten years earlier by a large corporation and transformed into a place more often frequented by upwardly mobile thirty-somethings than the criminal underworld. And, from Mal’s perspective, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
It was sort of like seeing a shark without teeth or watching a modern Rolling Stones concert: sad, pathetic and an impotent shadow of what once had been.
Still, he thought to himself as he wrapped up his fourth walk of the joint’s perimeter, it was the perfect place to meet an assistant district attorney for a cocktail and a little bit of conspiratorial conversation.
It didn’t hurt that Mal hadn’t had a good drink in as long as he could remember. If you added in the year he couldn’t remember, then that amounted to a very long dry-spell indeed.
Mal spotted Amy on his fifth patrol, catching sight of her well before she noticed him. Exiting one of the bright yellow painted taxicabs that filled the streets of Manhattan like a school of tuna, the woman was dressed in a black skirt suit with a pale apricot half-sleeve coat covering her torso. Having spent most of the past month alone and on the run, the cyborg was more than a touch disappointed Amy was keeping her ‘girls’ reined in. The five-foot-five lawyer, with her blond hair drawn up into a high-set bun, was way too classy for Mal’s normal taste, although he did have to admit that Amy hadn’t aged much at all in the nearly decade-and-a-half since he had last seen her.
Rubbing the week-old stubble on his face made Mal realize he couldn’t say the same about himself.
Thick, black glasses of the non-prescription variety—confirmed by a quick scan with his computer senses—topped off the woman’s ensemble, giving her the ‘sexy librarian’ look that had become so popular with professional women over the past ten-years. Mal had never been overly attracted to the ‘hot Velma’ type, but thought it worked well for Amy, especially after the rather unfortunate infatuation she had with Juicy Couture and Uggs back in college.
Anything would have been an improvement after that bit of fashion faux pas.
Navigating through the crowd mingling out in front of Clancy’s, Mal eased up behind the nattily dressed woman. Bending low, with his head just over Amy’s shoulder, he whispered in her ear, “Excuse me, miss, but you wouldn’t happen to know a good lawyer, would you?”
The gag gave the playful cyborg the exact reaction he had been hoping for. Startled by the sudden voice in her ear, the normally unflappable woman nearly leapt out of her skin in alarm, dropping her purse and sending its contents spilling across the warm evening pavement. Amy had hauled back with a balled up fist to pummel whoever had dared surprise her before she realized who her ‘attacker’ was.
“Whoah, tiger, it’s just me!” laughed Mal as he watched her face change from anger and shock to recognition and back to anger again.
“Maybe scaring the hell out of the only person in New York who could help me wasn’t the best of plans,” thought Mal as he reached down to recover Amy’s fallen purse and its disgorged contents. He beamed a smile at the lawyer as he returned her clutch. “Great to see you, Amy.”
“It’s nice to see you again, Malcolm,” the tone of the lawyer’s voice didn’t completely match up with the words she spoke as she reclaimed her bag, which worried Mal. He didn’t like the idea of starting off on the wrong foot with Amy. She cast a sideways glance at his clothes and general unkempt appearance, rewarding him with a look that was equal parts concern and disgust. “What happened to you? It looks like you were run over by a truck.”
“More like a train.”
“Excuse me?” Amy’s eyebrows snapped up, questioningly.
“Nothing…let’s go grab a couple of seats and get something to drink.”
Mal held the door open for the newly arrived woman and followed her into Clancy’s.
*****
Once they had been shown a table by a perky red-headed waitress with long legs and the sort of curves that guaranteed good tips, Amy said bluntly, “I don’t have much time…can we get on with this?”
The straightforwardness of her attitude brought back memories of the woman’s legendary cut-to-the-chase attitude at college. She was upfront, honest to a fault, and righteous. The woman didn’t like to waste time. It was one of the reasons a younger Mal had never tried to hit on her, fantastic rack or not.
In his current mess of a life, however, Mal respected the woman’s forthright nature. Of course, he was also a military man with a boatload of testosterone and the obsessive need to maintain control of whatever situation he had gotten himself into. With things being as chaotic as they had been since his escape from Project Hardwired, that need had gone unanswered far more often than not.
Mal wasn’t about to lose control now.
“No,” he said, removing a tiny menu card from its spot nestled between a fat red candle-holder and a half-full container of mixed sugar substitutes in the center of their black-and-white checkered table. “Drink first.”
Signaling the waitress with a waive of his gloved hand, the handsome cyborg revealed his preference of alcoholic beverages. The choice of Mal’s drink came as a humorous surprise to the lawyer.
“A Midori-Sour? Isn’t that a bit…y’know…for a strapping army guy like you?” The look on Amy’s face was one of shock and the sort of disappointment you get from a child who has figured out that Santa Claus is really just her creepy Uncle Johnny in a cheap red suit and bad dime store beard.
“I’ve killed more than seventy men in the last month alone, I’m not sure mocking my preferred choice of beverages is the wisest thing to do,” replied Mal between sips of the bright emerald liquid.
“Fair enough.”
Between sips of her own adult beverage, Amy’s eyes wandered all over Mal, taking in as much of him as she could while trying to be sly about it. To a man like Mal who lived by his ability to observe others, it was almost laughable.
Mal threw down an exaggerated gulp of his drink and asked, annoyed, “Is there something on your mind, Amy?”
Red flushed the woman’s cheeks. She nodded, gesturing with a quick wave at the man across the round table from her. “David told me some of what the government did to you…the cy-bionics or whatever, but I’d like to see for myself. Can you show me?”
Mal nodded, sliding the left shoulder of his jacket down far enough for Amy to get a look at the parts of his shoulder and arm where living flesh met the warped technology Project Hardwired had grafted to his body in a fine spiderweb of interlocking scars and metal.
“Cybernetics,” Mal corrected. “Nanotechnology they called it.”
Amy reached out to tenderly touch the unevenly textured metal of Mal’s bionic arm. She held it there for a few seconds, feeling the movement of its living circuitry beneath her fingers, before yanking her hand back, startled.
“It’s…warm,” she said with a look of wonder that seemed to jump back and forth across the border to horror. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
