Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  It might have simply been the light, but Eddie thought he could see weird muscle-masses moving under the skin. Half-thoughts of vampires, of zombies, flashed through Eddie’s mind. Walking corpses, monstrous after death.

  “There’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto repeated, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted zebra-striping of light and shadow from the Kliegs. “And I’m going to do it now.”

  In the burning ruins of Las Vitas, the flesh of any number of scavenging animals hazed instantly into molecular dust—along with the remaining flesh of that on which they were feeding.

  Is was not as if something were sucking some actual life-force, if that word can be made to mean anything in the first place. It was more as if something were feeding on some product of life-coherence…

  Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler, heading up the wet-squad out of NeoGen, was suffering from a small gap in basic expectations.

  The fact was that, over the years, military-grade command technology had evolved to the point where with a single and suitably controlled squad of operatives one could subvert the infrastructure and take command of an entire city or country.

  Schematic analysis of anything from the power and informational grids to the plumbing, plus detailed psychologistical profiling of the principle characters amongst the enemy, ensured that force could be applied to critical targets with a zero-tolerance of error: the equivalent of assassinating Franz Ferdinand because you really hate a bunch of limpid individuals banging on about the corner of some forgotten field, and want to see the lot of them end up dead.

  Such seriously shit-hot Control and Command equipment didn’t come cheap, of course, but NeoGen supplied its Retrieval people with the best—especially if said people were going up against such an equally-matched rival as GenTech.

  Such tactical control-processes had worked perfectly in the matter of setting some local jackgang on a GenTech road-train, manipulating the various factors in such a matter that the forces neutralized each other. Then Drexler and his squad had moved in to pick up the pieces… and hit that gap in expectations.

  There was another factor on the board. And that factor, simply, was just some guy that nobody gave a flying fuck about.

  There was not a single person who particularly knew or cared if he lived and died—and that was the problem right there. It was like some idiotic squit of a kid going up against a Grand Master in chess; the kid does things so flatly idiotic that it leaves the Grand Master momentarily flummoxed.

  The kid and the package, together with the package’s medical support, had fled the site of the road-train ambush just before Drexler and his NeoGen forces had arrived. Tracksat systems had pinpointed the little RV almost instantly, but the forces on the ground found themselves with a problem. NeoGen had come armed and ready to deal with GenTech or jackganger survivors; they were perfectly capable of leaving some escaping piece-of-crap van a smoking hole in the road that not even micro-engineered algaeic heal-sealant would be able to fill.

  What they did not have, however, was the capacity to intercept and stop it without damaging the package irreparably.

  Tracksat extrapolation had showed that the van was heading for Las Vitas, and military-spec four-wheel drive had made it in half the time, even over rough terrain. Drexler had looked around the shithole and not reckoned much to it. Too many holes and corners. Street-fighting could get messy.

  So Drexler and his boys had broken out their heavy-duty armament and removed the town from the equation.

  He didn’t feel particularly good about that, but then again he didn’t feel bad either. It was just what you had to do, sometimes.

  The only other place, within practical distance and with communications, had been the junker’s yard here. Strategic modelling of all available factors placed the probability of containing the target here in the upper ninetieth percentile.

  That, at least, was what MIRA had assured Commander Drexler. Drexler, on the other hand, was rapidly coming to the conclusion that MIRA was at this point just making it up off the top of her cybernetic head and winging it.

  “What was that shit about calling the guy a spic?” he asked MIRA. “Plus all that, you know, religious stuff?”

  Ordinarily, the Mobile Intrusion and Recon Application was capable of pumping all kinds of psychological disruption to a target: insults based on their specific gangcult, dark intimations of what the subject really felt about some family member and the so forth. This had just seemed unnecessarily basic and crude.

  “Yeah, well, I just don’t have the hard info,” MIRA said cheerfully. For all that the voice issuing from the exterior bullhorn-attachment had been deepened, roughened and masculinized, MIRA “herself” tended to adopt a female persona. That is, a lighter, higher and feminine voice, while still in some subliminal way failing to be human in any way whatsoever.

  “Filesearch on the girl throws up nothing, just like all these total blanks, yeah?” MIRA said. “Like someone went through the files and wiped her footprints out. And the guy never left no footprints in the first place—he’s just some kid, you know? I’m just playing the law of averages and throwing out some generic insults. I’m having to improvise.”

  Drexler ran his glance across the display-monitors bolted to the dash of the NeoGen-modified Humvee—or HumGee—parked under mimetic camouflage-netting outside the junker’s yard and which was serving as a scratch C&C for the guys inside.

  Wireframe topographies of the yard itself, thermograph readouts of the targets in the van overlaid with extrapolated bio-data. Outputs from the microcams of the three wet-operatives inside.

  “Don’t try to improvise when you don’t have the data,” he told MIRA. “It just sounds wrong. It doesn’t sound like anything a real human would say.”

  MIRA gave what sounded like a contemptuous little snort—possibly a sound-sample designed to convey that precise effect.

  “I’m a sentient-grade AI, chum, even if I occupy the lower end of the scale. You just follow the orders and do the job and come it like a frigging robot. I sound more human and alive than you do, most of the time.”

  “That’s my prerogative, MIRA. You don’t have the option.”

  “Yeah, whatever you say, boss,” MIRA said with marked cybernetic sarcasm. “And speaking of time, boss, we’re well over that deadline I gave the targets. You wanna give the go-word to take ‘em out?”

  “Do it,” Drexler said. “Remember that the package is our top priority. They can do what they like, but only after the package is secure.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we all know that,” said MIRA. “I’m relaying the order to… hang on. Something’s up…

  “Check the bio-readouts on the girl. Something freaky’s going on with the girl and it’s—oh my God…”

  There was a blinding flash from outside, washing out the Klieg-illumination in the intensity of its glare, and human-sounding or not, that was the last thing MIRA ever said.

  Shafts of magnesium light blasted from the windows and roof-ports of the van, from the rust holes eaten in its sides. Tendrils of electrical discharge arced to the junkyard-compound’s generator unit, travelling the leads to which it had been hooked to NeoGen’s Kliegs and exploding them in a shower of sparks.

  Vestigial petrochems left in tanks out in the junk piles spontaneously ignited; the tanks detonated. The junk began to burn. The van itself exploded—torn apart by forces within it that were not entirely physical.

  And something dark burst from it. Something dark in a wholly different sense than a mere absence of cast light.

  Something big. Something shrieking. Something coming now.

  5.

  In a place that has no name, a place indefinable in spatial or temporal terms—or for that matter, any terms that might apply to organic matter, let alone life—something vast and inimical and unknowable stirred.

  Something was calling to it. Something had made a small fracture in the world. A tiny imperfection, to be sure, but one that could be worke
d upon. Something that could be forced further apart, with time. If time had any meaning, of course, for this vast and inimical and unknowable thing, which it didn’t. It had an eternity in which to operate, after all.

  It would be a mistake to believe that the subsumation and destruction of all we know would be anything more than a light snack to this vast and inimical and unknowable thing. The equivalent of a quick pack of potato chips between real meals.

  Then again, potato chips come in a variety of interesting flavours, and a pack of them is just the thing to hit the spot. When you’re feeling peckish—as the vast and inimical and unknowable thing decidedly was.

  For the moment, though, it was in the position of having worked the pack open just enough to insert a finger. Just enough, if it inserted the smallest extremity of itself into the world of men, for a small taste. And this it had proceeded to do…

  Half-blinded and gibbering with terror, Eddie Kalish scrambled through the junk piles, trying to catch his bearings. Things had shifted around, of course, during the time he had spent away, but Little Deke’s had never been what you might call a roaring concern. Things, for the most part, had tended to stay where they were put; Eddie still had some idea of the layout. That was an advantage.

  That was, in fact, the only advantage he might have over the people out here in the dark. People and, of course, the… thing out here in the dark.

  “Oh yes, there’s something I can do,” Trix Desoto had said, eyes a kind of burning black behind the slatted light, “and I’m going to do it now.”

  She had ripped her hands from the hole in her stomach, trailing strings of some viscous substance that hadn’t quite seemed even organic, let alone something that a human body could produce. A mass of this stuff seemed to have clotted in her wound, tendrils of it forming and intertwining and pulsing of its own accord.

  The hands had seemed bigger—impossibly bigger, like those anatomical models where the limbs and extremities are distorted to a size comparable to the area of the brain controlling them. The nails had elongated to the point of talons.

  Trix Desoto had run one of these claws down her face—for an instant Eddie had thought that she was trying to claw her own eyes out in agony, but instead the tip of a talon had run gently down the side of her face, cutting a slit from the inside of which something glowed like embers in some long-banked fire.

  “Run,” she had told him, face deadly serious and positively demonic in the light from the slit she had made. A talon had jabbed in the direction of the pale form of the comatose old guy. “Take him and run.”

  All reasonable thoughts about armed NeoGen troops waiting out there in the junk years had vanished—indeed, it was as if all reasonable thought had shut down. The monster snarls and you just run for the tree line or the cave. He had leapt from the van without question and headed for the junk piles.

  It was only after the explosion had washed over him, miraculously failing to spear him with flying debris, that he realised that he had unthinkingly followed Trix Desoto’s order and taken the body of the old guy with him. It must have been her tone of voice.

  Now, Eddie Kalish decided, the old guy was just dead weight. He left the inert form sprawled by a pile of rotting tyres, gently seeping from the punctures left from being unceremoniously hauled from the med-units.

  Off to one side, through the junk, there was a single muzzle-flash and the complete lack of sound from an expertly silenced gun—though any sound of gunfire would have probably been drowned out, in any case, by the high-pitched scream and the sounds of tearing flesh. Whatever it was that Trix Desoto had turned into, it was having a ball.

  Or possibly two, Eddie thought, and then really wished that he hadn’t.

  Eddie moved on, crept around a vaguely familiar heap of panel-sections—and ran straight into one of the surviving NeoGen troops.

  Eddie Kalish would never know how lucky he was, in that instant—luck that had been brought about by the confluence of three main factors. The first being that the trooper was currently packing hi-explosive shells into his big MultiFunction Gun.

  This would have been singularly unlucky, of course, had not one Commander Thomas Marlon Drexler ordered that minimum necessary force be used until the object of their operation be secure. A single hi-ex round fired into the van would have exploded it in much the way that it just had, so the MFG was currently slung over the trooper’s shoulder and out of instant reach.

  The second factor was that, unlike that produced by conventional explosives, the detonation of the van had released a variety of localized electromagnetic pulse that had knocked out the trooper’s infrared night-sight. He was in the midst of tearing it angrily from his face and blinking his eyes to acclimatise to the sudden darkness when he caught the moving silhouette of Eddie.

  This lag in reaction-time gave Eddie Kalish the bare second he needed to let out a yip of fear and lurch back—and this was when the third factor came into play, in the form of the heap of panel-sections that Eddie himself had somewhat inexpertly stacked some years before.

  These had come, predominantly, from the hulking shells remaining from automobiles of the 1950s and 60s—from before oil embargos and the like had made sheer weight an issue. They were good, solid steel plate as opposed to membrane-thin aluminium that turned to lacework at the first breath of an oxyacetylene torch.

  They were an incompetently stacked accident waiting to happen, basically—and now they came crashing down on the trooper.

  The screams before, and as, they hit sounded a little odd to Eddie and it was a moment before he worked out why. For some reason, Eddie realised, he’d had trouble imagining a quasi-military stealth-killer as a girl, for all that there was no reason in the world why not.

  From the image that terror had etched onto his eyes, though, he now recalled that the shape under the combat-fatigues had been undoubtedly female, and damn well-built at that.

  Of course, any shape she might be in now would be decidedly unattractive and quite beside the point. This was the first person Eddie had actually killed in his life, whether by accident or design. He really didn’t know how he felt about that.

  There was another explosion of sound and light. It seemed that it was coming from beyond the compound wire, and that was just like as to fine with Eddie Kalish. Too much had happened. His reflexes were shot.

  All he wanted to do at this point was crawl away somewhere and hide and let the world go to Hell in any way that it liked.

  Thomas Marlon Drexler slapped at the inert monitors bolted onto the dash and said: “Fuck you you piece of shit!”

  This was, in actual fact, the longest single string of expletives he had ever used. He had simply, somehow, never seen the point or felt the need, even in the heat of combat. He was a little surprised that he even had it in him.

  The EMP from the explosion within the targets’ RV had knocked out the HumGee’s electrical systems. MIRA “herself” was probably still alive—or, at least, sentient-grade self-aware—since her housing was rated as shielded for anything up to a pony-bomb nuclear blast.

  The secondary systems that would make her being alive and aware of any actual use, however, were blown.

  These included the door mechanisms. Drexler had remained here, trapped, while things had exploded outside. He had attempted to work out what was happening in the junkyard compound beyond the wire, but the loss of Klieg-illumination had left him with nothing useful to see.

  It was the sense of disassociation from the world that was the worst thing, he vaguely realised. MIRA might have snidely called him a robot, but the fact was that a large proportion of Thomas Marlon Drexler’s self-image resided in the fact that he considered himself, basically, a tool.

  He was a part of something larger and more important than himself. He was the strong right hand—no, rather the hammer in that strong right hand—when his NeoGen masters required the application of direct force.

  This was his function, and he performed it without ego or sel
f-congratulation, without compunction or remorse. Taking out the ringleaders of a labour-dispute, removing some intracorporate rival together with his wife and kids, it made no odds. It was his function. This was the core of his being and his life.

  Now he was stuck here, sealed off from the world and unable to affect it in any way. He was about as much use as a spare dick—and the sensation was maddening.

  This was not, quite simply, what the world was and how it worked. It was almost enough to make him take the ten-gauge from where it was stowed under the dash and use it to just switch the world off.

  Something big and heavy thumped into the HumGee outside, rocking it on its suspension and flinging Drexler forward to smack his head against the padded crash-cage which—had the electrics been working—would have ordinarily racked itself down on servos to cushion the impact.

  This direct evidence of a world outside galvanised Drexler and his basic impulses took over. Now he grabbed the ten-gauge, pulling it free from its snaplocks with no thought in his head save to aim it at the HumGee’s windshield and blast his way out.

  The fact that the shot would have almost certainly rebounded from the impact-tempered glass and shredded him where he sat was beside the point—the mindless need to simply act, overwhelming as it was, had burned away any last vestige of rational thought.

  Thus it was that when the entire top of the HumGee split open under a claw and inhuman strength, Drexler was already in the process of bringing up the gun and unloading both barrels.

  The shot tore into the thing beyond, opening up a hole within which internal organs gave off their own pale glow.

  In this light—or for that matter any other—these organs looked like the insides of nothing on or of this Earth.

  For a moment, the creature recoiled, eyes rolling down to regard the wound and jaw yawning open in a moment of imbecilic, even comical, puzzlement.