by Nick Ryder
And they were coming anyway.
Whatever happened to them, they’d brought it on themselves.
So I didn’t feel a shred of guilt as the two rats dragged the woman to the floor, ripping out chunks of her neck before anyone could react.
They hacked the rats to death, dragging them away from the woman they were trying desperately to maul. The other four rats were attacking too, but when the element of surprise was lost, they were no match for the tribe. These were humans, gifted with both intelligence and weaponry, and they easily dispatched with the rats when they were given room to attack.
But the rats had done their job. They got plenty of bites into the arms and hands of the tribe attacking them, making it so one man had to swap his sword to his non-dominant hand because his index finger was practically hanging off due to an especially nasty bite.
That, and the woman they first got the jump on was lying, unmoving, on the ground. She coughed suddenly, blood flowing from both her mouth and the gaping wounds in her neck.
“Oh God,” Marie said, putting her hands to her face. “She’s not going to make it.”
Marie was right. The woman’s wounds were extensive, and even as people gathered round and put pressure on the neck, the pool of blood on the ground was growing steadily.
“She’s the one who tried to get in,” Lisa said, echoing my earlier thoughts. “She knew the risk when she opened the door.”
“But it’s so gruesome.”
“That’s war,” I said.
“Did you really see a lot of combat?” Marie asked. “You never talk about it.”
I’d mentioned that I was in the Air Force, but we hadn’t talked much about personal things in general. “I saw some combat.” It was my normal reaction to downplay stuff like this. If they cared at all, people were one of two ways when they knew you were in the military: wanting the gory details, or wanting to tell you all about their opinions on how we were all war criminals who murder civilians.
Marie took the hint. “I’m glad you know what you’re doing with all this stuff.” She gave me a smile to let me know she wasn’t going to bug me for more info.
“I served in Afghanistan,” I told her, well aware that the other girls were listening intently, even though they didn’t take their eyes from the screen where the tribal woman was dying. “And I saw some horrible things, and I saw some things that gave me hope. And I suppose none of it even matters anymore, since the world basically ended.”
“Of course it mattered,” Lisa said, not taking her eyes from the screen. “You remember it, and so will thousands of others. So it mattered.”
“You’re right,” I agreed, wishing I could smile at her. I wondered how much closer we’d all be if they could actually see my face, see the small reactions I had to things they said. “And I’m going to use every bit of information I learned then to keep us safe now. That’s the most important part.”
Marie beamed at him, and then turned back to the screen. Her face quickly fell.
The woman’s last moments were a cold affair from the tribes people. They stood around her, not touching her, as her fingers scrabbled against the cold metal floor, finding only her own blood.
Then she stopped moving. The tribe didn’t attempt to lift her from the ground, like they would be taking her with them. I thought they were completely heartless until I zoomed in and saw the silent tears on their faces. It was nothing to do with a lack of feeling, and everything to do with stoicism.
I could respect that.
They would hold it in until their mission was over, and then they would grieve.
That was how it had to be if they had any chance of succeeding.
It was with tear-stained cheeks that they saw acknowledged the room they were in was a dead end before turning around and picking a different door.
The girls held their breath, waiting to see which direction they would go in, but it was the door to the right they opened. This one was another corridor, and it would take them further inside the facility.
Closer and closer to where we were.
But now there were only five of them, and I was quietly confident that there would be even less by the time they eventually realized they had no chance of overrunning my facility.
Chapter Thirteen
The next corridor held one of my favorite traps.
The idea had come to me when we’d been watching Indiana Jones the night before, and I’d been eager to find a place to put it into our defense system. In the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the temple had collapsed around Indy when he’d taken the gold statue from the pedestal.
I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my whole facility to make it collapse in on intruders, but I liked the concept.
Somehow people never seemed to suspect things falling from the sky.
I had to disable the trap when the girls wanted to enter or leave the facility because otherwise they’d be snared by it, and this was still near enough to the entrance that it was the only way out.
I watched with keen attention as the tribe stood in the doorway– just five of them now– and waited to see what they’d do.
They hadn’t taken a single step inside the room yet, and there seemed to be some kind of silent conversation happening between them.
Eventually, the leader crouched down and tapped on the floor panels just inside the room with his sword, as he had in the last corridor. Nothing happened.
So, he stepped forward. Again, nothing happened.
This was a trap that could work one of two ways. Either I could set it on a pressure sensor like the others, or I could override that sensor and take control myself.
I didn’t want to rely on the pressure sensors this time– they’d already sussed out that trick. This time I was going to catch them off guard with the human element. I could see every move they made, and that meant I would know the perfect time to strike.
They crowded into the narrow, but long, corridor and stood in single file so they still had enough space to move and fight if something attacked them. They were poised and ready for something, and moved slowly, the leader checking every floor panel for adverse reactions with his sword before standing on it.
“What are you waiting for?” Elaine asked. “They’re all in.”
“I just like the suspense,” I replied, again wishing I could give her a grin.
When they were well into the corridor, I finally let the trap rip.
It was combined things that fell from the ceiling. Aside from the heavy metal panels, which had the potential to do plenty of damage on their own if they got a solid hit, were both animals and nets.
The animals were spiders. Small and deadly. I was worried about keeping them in the facility at all because their poison was so deadly, but Ego had assured me that they could be kept in metal boxes that they would have no chance of escaping.
I was still uncomfortable with it, and all the girls shifted their weight with the same sense of horror when the spiders fell onto the crowd of people below.
The nets would be useless as actual nets. They were made of thin wire because it had been the quickest way to construct them, and the bots were busy enough as it was. Attached to the nets were battery packs, that sent volts through the wire.
The problem with them had been figuring out how to make sure the battery packs didn’t get used up well in advance of the nets actually being used. The solution I’d come up with seemed to have worked. While stored in the ceiling, they weren’t electrified, but when the ceiling panel fell away, it also flicked a switch that would trigger the battery to turn on.
There were two nets. One missed everyone, and the other fell on the woman with the mauled leg. The ceiling panel had slammed into her shoulder, making her cry out, and then the net made her convulse with spasms. They sent her to the ground, juddering as the current flowed through her. It didn’t seem like her heart had stopped beating, though. I could still see a visible rise and fall of her chest.
&nbs
p; People were too concerned with the spiders to run to her aid, though.
They rained from ceiling panels but failed to latch onto any surface, except the leader. One single spider had landed on his shoulder, which was covered by a thick fur.
I couldn’t get close enough to see whether the spider had even tried to bite him or not, but the spiders that were on the ground didn’t look like they were in any hurry to close the distance between them and their targets.
“Out,” the leader barked, brushing the spider from him shoulder with his sword and flinging the tiny body against the wall. “Out now.” He grabbed the still spasming woman from the ground and slung her over his shoulders. Thick black hair stood on end on his arms, as though she was still slightly electrified.
“That didn’t go as intended,” Lisa said as the tribe hurried out of the corridor and into the next one. They’d had a choice of two doors, left or right, and the leader had taken the left without hesitation or consulting the rest of the group.
He realized that they had to get as far away from those spiders as he could, and he was right to do so.
“Yeah, that was intensely disappointing,” I admitted. “Ego, those spiders were nowhere near aggressive enough. We’ll have to get them back into gestation.”
“First we need to get them back into cages,” the AI said.
I looked at the deadly spiders crawling around the floor. One stepped on one of the wires and was dead immediately.
I laughed in spite of myself. “Well, that’s definitely one way to do it.”
“There’s no way I’m going in there to put them back in their cages,” Elaine said.
“Seconded,” Lisa agreed.
“And thirded. The fact they’re even in the facility gives me the creeps.” Marie visibly shuddered.
“The robots can deal with them.” Though I didn’t want to send the precious few robots we had anywhere near the tribe, so that would have to wait.
Luckily the tribe did half of my work for me. They barred the door to the spider corridor themselves to prevent the arachnids following them and getting a bite in.
The corridor they inhabited now was scarily close to an elevator that would allow the savages to descend levels. It was a design flaw in the facility that I had no control over. The entrance was close to the elevator. It was how the place had been created.
So as many traps as were dotted around the first layer– and there were plenty to get caught in and lose your life to if you happened to take a wrong turn– there was also an alarmingly quick path to where the traps were a lot less frequent and a lot less robust if you happened to have an uncanny sense of direction. Or get lucky.
The electrocuted woman had been laid against a wall. Her legs were still strong enough to keep her upright.
“The nets weren’t powerful enough either,” I said, “There’s no way she should still be alive.”
“We need better batteries,” Lisa suggested. “The voltage can’t have been high enough.”
The women and I watched the screen, waiting to see how they would react to their latest challenge.
At the end of this corridor there would be two options, left or right, and if they picked the right one they would be at the room that housed the elevator. That was when I’d have to send the girls out to do my dirty work for me.
But for now there were plenty of obstacles still in their way.
I liked this trap, too. Following the same format as previously, the leader went first, tapping the ground with his sword. The traps on this corridor weren’t activated by pressure sensor. Another watched the ceiling, waiting for something to fall. He had unwrapped a fur from his shoulders and held it above his head, ready to protect both him and the chief in the occasion that something fell on them.
They walked single file, and it was perfect.
Marie bounced on the edge of the seat.
I switched to the camera actually inside corridor so that I had a better view before I activated the trap. I could see exactly how everyone was spaced when I flipped the switch that triggered the the trap.
Two solid sheets of metal slammed across the room, splitting it into three evenly spaced chambers. I thought I’d managed to time it so that one of the slabs of metal would crush a woman, but she dodged out of the way just in time.
When the metal had separated them, they immediately started banging on the new walls and shouting to each other. The metal was so thick that the sounds were muffled. They tried to pry them away with their weapons, but it was no use.
This one, I’d really thought through.
There was a small indent in the opposite side of the wall so that the slabs of steel didn’t just rest against the opposite wall, but actually slotted into it. That meant it would require something shaped especially to get under the metal and shove it back. The metal was thick and heavy, too. It wasn’t something that could be cut through, not without some heavy machinery.
And now they were cut off from each other, with less ability to work as a team, their challenge emerged.
Panels in the wall opened. Two panels for each cell. Two creatures behind each panel. Four for each room. Twelve total.
The way the tribe had been split would be interesting to watch. The chief was stuck on his own. I’d get to see what it was about him that put him in charge. Was it just name alone? Or was he a good fighter and that was why he was the one leading this small group. I had no idea how high up he was in the overall hierarchy of the group.
The creatures were cat and lizard hybrids. They were short, and on all fours, but more deadly than they looked.
I liked that about them. It would be easy to underestimate just how much damage they did when someone first saw them, and that would give them a window to act.
They had short, stumpy legs that were pure muscle. It gave the illusion that they would be immobile, but the influence of the cat DNA meant they were as agile as if they weighed twenty pounds less. Their skin was an ugly mix of fur and scales that made the fact they were a mutation plainly obvious.
Their claws were thick, and their sticky tongue had a weaker version of the poison contained in the spiders. The lizard-cat body hadn’t been able to handle the poison at full strength–it had started to damage the host. Even at this strength the effects of carrying the poison would start to take their toll, but that was the advantage of reclamation and gestation. When they started getting too weak, I could take back some of the nutrigel I’d spent to create them and make some more. The rabbit farm was almost back to full capacity. There would definitely be enough to keep reserves way up.
In the middle block was the other man, and a woman, and in the final block was the injured woman – effectively useless in a fight – and another woman, the one the girls had recognized from the fight when they’d rescued Cara.
I returned to the camera where the girls were sitting, and watched the screen with them. Marie was looking at me, like she’d said something and was waiting for an answer.
“Did you say something?” I asked.
“Just that it worked well,” she said. She was obviously hoping this would be the one that proved her strategy was the right one. So far the traps had been a bit hit and miss. The group of six had barely been dwindled, and they were nearly at the elevator already.
“So far,” I agreed, though I was more optimistic than I sounded. “I want to see how the chief handles it.”
The chief handled it well, straight off the bat. One of the monsters darted its tongue out, aiming straight for the exposed arm of the chief. He cut it off with one swift movement from the dagger he held in his non-dominant hand.
“No way,” Elaine breathed, and for the first time sat up in her beanbag to look at the screen with wide eyes. “No way.”
“That wasn’t human,” Lisa said, and it wasn’t just a statement of awe.
“He’s got a superpower,” I agreed. “It has to be. There’s no way he could have reacted that fast on his own.”
They all
watched with wide eyes as the chief easily took care of the four creatures he was locked in with. He went straight from cutting off the tongue of one beast to slitting the throat of another in mid-air with his sword as it leaped toward him. One monster got its claws into his arm before he killed it with a dagger to the center of its chest. The fourth got nowhere. It hung back, hoping to use its tongue to deal damage. It lost its tongue, too, and then its head.
“Shit,” Marie said. “Shit. Shit. Shit. I felt sure this was the trap that would give us our victory.”
“The other teams don’t look like they’re doing as well,” Lisa said. “The injured woman has finally succumbed, and the middle team have got some pretty bad injuries.”
Lisa was right. They’d been taken down to four people, and another two were sporting quite bad injuries. One had a gash on his arm that was spurting blood at an alarming rate, and another’s ankle had been mauled to the point where some bone was exposed. She could barely walk.
“And the trap at the elevator is powerful,” Marie pointed out. “That might be enough.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to spring the elevator trap.”
“What?” Lisa asked, turning sharply to look at him. “What are you talking about? It’s perfect for their injuries.”
“He’s got a superpower,” I reiterated, as if it wasn’t obvious.
“So? It doesn’t mean he’s invincible. And we still have to stop him.”
“I don’t want to kill him, I want him.”
Marie’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t realize you were that way inclined.”
I wished desperately that I could scowl at her. “I want to reclaim his DNA,” I clarified. “I want to run tests. I want to see if we can get a blueprint for his superpower.”
Understanding dawned on the girls. “So we can add it to the creatures?”
“So we can add it to me.”
Chapter Fourteen
