Jacob set the cigar down on the table and looked at his surroundings. He carefully placed the thumb drive in his pocket with awkward fingers.
"Oh, just a friend I guess," Jacob shrugged. He then stood up and moved with his slow and casual swagger to the window and looked down at the streets below.
"This building use to boast some of the highest rent in town due to that view," Dimitrikov said from his desk. "Now there's nothing but dirt out there. You know, I always took trees and grass, even the sky for granted. Now that they're gone, I miss them. What's there to look at anymore?"
"Come see for yourself," Jacob laughed.
Dimitrikov got up and stood beside Jacob. He watched as the Shadow Army finished disarming, and began eating, the Syndicate guards. Dimitrikov sighed and turned to look at Jacob.
"The irony is that," Jacob talked to the glass, unable to take his eyes from the feeding that was occurring below, "you didn't get The Shot, but you went ahead and fed off the people anyway. We became monsters, you chose to be monsters. Do you see the irony?"
"Please, please, Jacob, we can work something out."
Jacob laughed as he finally pulled himself from the window and moved towards the small man.
"I'd really like you to acknowledge the irony."
"See you in hell, Jacob."
Jacob leaped forward and bit into the throat of the man. The warm blood of his pierced jugular flooded into Jacob's mouth. A tingling pleasure pulsed through Jacob's entire body and the bones of the man's neck crunched easily under the pressure of his jaws and the sharpness of his teeth.
Chapter 46
***
Nestor woke up in a dark room. A man was heating up something on a propane stove in the middle of the floor. With his face now uncovered, Nestor saw that the man was dark and bearded with delicate features. The same smiling eyes moved up to Nestor's face as he began to cough.
“A salaam alaikum. How you feeling, Nestor?”
“Been better.”
"Well, you look better."
"How long was I out?"
"A week. I thought you were gonna die for a while, but you're tough. It’s the radiation, the fallout from the bombs. You shouldn’t go out in that. The air’s bad.”
"Anything happen in that time?"
"People died I would think."
“Your car... how do you have a car?”
“Yeah, an old Mazda M3. Last of the combustion engines, doesn't use a battery. It wasn't a successful model really, ran great but the public was so excited about those electro-cells. EMPC's couldn't hurt these guys, though. Most of them are gone, but if you know where to look you can find about anything out there in the world. All free for the taking.”
Nestor reached to his waist, for his gun.
“Your guns are over there. I went ahead and cleaned them for you. I could see that they had been well cared for, which is good. You got to take care of your tools. If you do, they’ll take care of you.”
“My knife?”
“It’s there too. You want me to bring them over to you?”
“Don’t figure in my condition that I could stop you from killing me even with a gun.”
“Probably not. You don’t need to worry about that yet.”
“Will I eventually have to?”
“I expect so.”
The man held up his arm showing the scar where The Shot had been given.
"It's this Shot that makes men mutants. It warps them. Soon it will warp me."
"The Shot?"
"Yes. The Shot. It was supposed to save us. Now, well, it’s just a matter of time before I become one of them.”
“What are they?”
“Not sure really. Some people say it’s the radiation, that it messed with the way The Shot works. Some say the scientist who made The Shot made a mistake. The Shot, they say, was supposed to accelerate things. Apparently one of the things it accelerates is the growth of our fingers into claws, our teeth into fangs, our bones into armor... Interesting, isn’t it? If you speed up a person’s body enough, they evolve into a terrifying killing machine. They seem to become animals almost, the teeth grow out, and the nails turn vicious. They eat people. Living people, preferably. That’s why they prefer to use their bare hands and chase you down. Thrill of the hunt, like wolves. They eat the dead if nothing to hunt can be found. I know it can’t be long now, that I turn, that I start looking at you as food. That’s a hard thing to know is coming. That's a hard thing to face.”
“You should try facing it from my point of view.”
The man stared at Nestor in silence. Nestor tried to get up, but the man put his hand on Nestor chest and pushed down. It felt like razors slicing his lungs apart. He coughed until he could again manage to clear a sip of air back into his broken body.
"Not so fast, friend. You need to rest. Sleep, Nestor, as long as we're human you have nothing to fear. I give my word."
"And when you change?"
"I don't suppose you’re a praying man then?"
"I've always had a gun."
“Well, I guess that’ll work too.”
For a moment Nestor's vision blurred and then everything went black.
The man was sitting by Nestor's bedside when he awoke. Nestor didn't know if that meant he'd been out a short while or if the man had stayed there all night. He coughed for a few minutes after sitting up. Once he had gained back his breath the man gave him water. Then he gave Nestor tea and bread.
"Eat slowly, Nestor. Slowly."
After eating Nestor drank more water, washed his face and hands and then sat down on the bed to talk to the man.
"What's your name?"
"Aamir."
"You're a praying man, Aamir?"
"I am, Mr. Bravo.”
“How do you know my name?”
"Your feed, of course. Isn’t that why Jacob sent you in there, so that the President would give his little speech and we’d all see it?"
“That's what Jacob said. So it worked?”
“Yes.”
“And The Island? What is happening there?”
“I don’t know. I’m good with cars, not people. I’ve always been sort of an outsider. What friends I had are gone now. I haven’t heard a word from anyone in a month. Just luck I happened across you while I was foraging that day. You would have died had I not happened by.”
"I suspect I still will," Nestor said with a sip of tea.
The man smiled and leaned back in his chair.
"Yes, Nestor, I suppose you will."
“So, before you stopped hearing things, what did you hear?”
“I heard most of the cities are gone. Bombed out by our own government. Many of the rural areas were spared since they hadn't been good targets. Predicting this, the government had made sure those areas had been the most thoroughly inoculated. So that is what’s left of America, the old and impotent, the young and impotent who hadn't served in the military, and the inoculated. I guess you could call us the lucky ones."
"Have any of them found you here? The mutants?”
“The ones who knew I was out here from before... they came. I had to...”
“You had to kill your friends.”
“Yes. They were my friends.”
“I’m sorry.”
“A lot of them owed me money anyway.”
Nestor managed to stand up and looked out the window.
“Jesus. It looks like a nightmare, that sky...”
“Get some more sleep, it’s what you need right now.”
“Where are we?”
“A small town in west Maryland. It was called Hilmore before it all blew up. Hell’s a fine name for it now.”
Chapter 47
***
Caleb finished tucking Mary into bed.
"I'm too old to be tucked in."
"Should I stop doing it?"
"No. I just want it acknowledged that I'm not a child," she said with her monotone earnestness.
"Okay. I acknowled
ge that. You did good today. If you keep memorizing code and algorithms at this rate, you'll be better than me."
"You know Keelie, the cook?"
"Sure."
"She says that you are an idiot. That by teaching me how to hack you're making yourself obsolete."
"Did she?"
"What's obsolete mean?"
"Outdated. Without value. Not needed."
"Doesn't that worry you?"
"Not even a little. Now shut up and go to sleep because I'm sick of you," he said with a smile.
She laughed and threw a pillow at him.
"Keelie said she'd tell me the story of Nestor Bravo."
"Who's Nestor Bravo?" Caleb said, eyebrow raised in confusion.
"Come on! It's been months and you won't tell me who he is! It's not fair."
"Life's not fair and Nestor Bravo isn't the kind of guy that little girls need to hear stories about!"
"We spend all day hacking a feed to watch him and everyone in the world knows who he is except me."
Caleb nodded and sat down on the edge of his bed. Her big eyes locked onto him and he smiled.
"Okay. All right. Fine I'll tell you about him, but I'm not a great story teller."
"Keelie's pretty good."
"Shut up about Keelie already!" Caleb laughed. "Okay, so before you were born, there used to be all sorts of countries. You’d get on a plane, fly for hours, land somewhere and everyone would look different, speak a different language. There were wars between these different countries. For a long time they were fought by people, soldiers. Guys who were trained to kill. But, as time went on, technology made the wars different. The drones, the robot planes that fly over our heads even now, they became the weapon of choice after awhile. Drones, long-range missiles, satellite imagery, they just took right over. So, soldiers became…"
"Obsolete?"
"Very good, kiddo. So, they stopped training soldiers. There just stopped being armies of trained killers all together. And for a while, there was basically a period of peace. Satellites overhead keeping an eye, drones doing circuits, blowing up anything suspicious... it was a kind of peace anyway. Then, one day, this little nothing country, they show up on all the satellite feeds. It looked like they’d built a nuclear facility. Which meant they could build a weapon that could do… well, make the world how it is now. But, this was confusing, because you don't build anything like that overnight. It should have been caught earlier. Something was very wrong."
"Where were you when this happened?"
"I was in college, at a place called UCLA. That doesn’t matter really. All of us just went about our lives, not too concerned as the machines of war arose. We all just figured that though this was weird, it was nothing a well-placed missile couldn't fix. America, China and the UN Army surround this little country, this little facility and they try and negotiate a peaceful solution, but this little country ain’t talking.
"So, what do you know? The world attacked. The world had no idea what it was exactly they were attacking, but they went ahead and attacked anyway. That was the moment where the world saw that this little country was able to sneak by with this facility, because it wasn’t a nuclear facility - it was something else entirely. The nuclear residue they’d detected was simply the last step, the battery being put inside a new kind of weapon. It was an EMPC, Electro-Magnetic Pulse Cannon, a ray gun that would shut down every computer, vehicle, or whatever in a five hundred mile radius and turn it into a bomb.
"With a push of a button this little country took out about half the world's military. Drones exploded in mid-air. A thing we don't even have anymore, drone tanks, boom. Everything just blew up. Satellites were out of range of the ray, but the missiles they guided, got scrambled and landed wherever gravity took them once they entered the realm of this weapon's power. Just like that, a new superpower was born. It was terrifying. No one knew what was going to happen next. And then, while we were wondering, the whole thing was over."
"Because of Nestor Bravo?"
"Because of Nestor Bravo. You see, it turned out that America had kept a few squadrons of Special Forces soldiers, trained killers, around for little things, like killing individual lunatics that threatened the greater good. I don't know, it was all secret, to this day we don't know much about them, just that they existed and the best, most dangerous one was a squad called the Alpha Team. It was fifty guys. Lethal. Vicious. They were so highly trained that they’d never left a trace, they were spread all over, and no one had even heard of them, until they stopped this lunatic and saved the world on, "The Night of a Hundred Bullets."
"Was Nestor the leader?"
"No. Jacob Rothschild was."
"Jacob? The one who…"
"The same. Their political go between was October Carnegie, the man who is now President. How they pulled it off no one knows to this day. It's all myth, but they say that the dictator of this little country had a thousand soldiers protecting this weapon, this EMPC. Somehow Nestor and Jacob snuck past them while the other forty-eight of their squad created a distraction. The distraction was effective, in that they killed half the soldiers, but eventually the forty-eight Americans were overrun and the only two left were Nestor and Jacob. Between them they had one hundred bullets and there were five hundred soldiers coming for them. But they didn't run. Instead, somehow, they survived. They held off the soldiers long enough to shut down the weapon, and allow the last remaining drones to come in and finish the rest of the dictator's army off."
"Wasn't it all recorded on Nestor's feed?"
"Yes. But, it got erased. No one knows why, but the story says that the government erased it, because they didn't want anyone else to see how the EMPC worked, or could be shut down. You see America seized it and put it on their satellites. Which is why when the Great War broke out, we were the only country able to stop the missiles. The rest of the world just went ahead and nuked each other, until America was all that was left."
"Everyone else is dead?"
"We've never heard otherwise. Search parties were sent to Canada and Mexico early on, but they couldn't find anyone and they couldn't make it too far in because the radiation was too strong. Drones flew search missions farther out, but if they picked up a sign of survivors the government kept it a secret.
"So what happened to Nestor then? After all that?"
"They said Jacob killed Nestor over a woman, before the Great War. They also said he never existed. I guess neither was true. Jacob went underground, claiming he'd been attacked by October Carnegie and his uncle Sage, who wanted him out of the way so he could become President - which he did. Jacob became the head of a Shadow Army aimed at killing October. And that brings us to now, bedtime."
"Caleb?"
"What?! Little girls need sleep!" Caleb shouted while squeezing her foot. "Not that you're a little girl."
"Why are you training me to be a hacker? Why are you making yourself obsolete?"
"I'm not making myself obsolete. Keelie is wrong. I was obsolete, baby. I've always just been someone. Someone to talk to or sleep with, someone to keep you warm as the world ends. You changed that. You gave me value. You need me and I need you to be okay, to be safe. I'm keeping you safe because that's what family does, that's all."
"We're family?"
"Don't you think so?" Caleb asked with a look of concern.
"My family was… to me family was never…"
"Yeah, my family sucked too, but, a lot of people have… had good ones. I used to see them, they were just like the happy families in movies and books. I always wanted one. I figure you and me, we are one. A good one."
"Yeah," she smiled. "We're family."
"Damn right, baby, now get some sleep."
Chapter 48
***
October stared across the desk at his Sage Carnegie. The pizza between the men was getting cold, but October resisted its appeal, the smell making his brain fuzzy.
“How the hell is this possible? How can they be turnin
g into mutants who eat people, October?! I mean in the vast array of possibilities of what could go wrong, this is not one that I considered!”
“It seems the man who explained it to Nestor got it pretty right. Something about the acceleration of the body.”
“This is a nightmare, Nephew. And now, because you didn't turn off Nestor's feed, everybody is seeing it! Why can't we stop it?!"
"In order to encrypt at this level it takes time. We had to lump our feeds. Now if we lose Nestor, we lose the drones.
"Which is another thing, how is it possible that this Nevers guy hacked it? And why is it that we can't re-encrypt it?! Do you realize that our soldiers and potent women are watching this?! Oh and then, you go and kill one of the most powerful men on The Island! I've had to call in favors just to keep you alive for a few more days! This is a disaster! The Founders were looking for a reason to take your head off and this is it. This is your decapitation!”
October slumped down at his desk and grabbed a slice of pizza and devoured it.
"Stop yelling at me, Uncle," October said with a full mouth.
"Someone needs to! You're failing, October! Failing! Carnegie's don't fail!"
"Stop yelling at me or I'll beat you to death," October said with a quiet calm.
Sage Carnegie pulled back, his eyes wide. October grabbed another piece of pizza and glanced over at Miho who was, as always typing away on her tablet oblivious to all that went on around her. Flores kept his eyes unfocused and above the men who sat at the table.
"What did you say to me? Don't forget who got you where you are?!"
"Nestor Bravo and Jacob Rothschild got me here. "The Night of a Hundred Bullets" got me the recognition and respect that my father and you had only dreamed of. They were the ones who made me. And now they are the ones who are unmaking me. You mean nothing to me, Uncle. My father is dead, you are not. Outside of that fact, you've done nothing to achieve your status. You were born rich. You were born connected. The only reason you are here is because you share my last name. That is all. And trust me, that is not enough to save your life at this moment."
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