by Nick Ryder
“So what’s the plan?” Lisa asked, standing with her arms folded. She didn’t balk at the thought of facing the intruders head on.
“We should let them come down here,” I said. “And then surprise them.”
“How do you know they’ll come down here at all?” Marie asked. “There are five sub-levels available to them. They won’t know this is the one we’re hiding out on. They don’t even necessarily know that we’re here.”
“They will do,” I responded. “Ego I need you to do something for me.”
“How can I help?”
“I need you to change the number on the elevator, so that it shows the floor we’re currently on.” I wasn’t sure that the tribal people would even understand what an elevator was, honestly, if they didn’t know what a solar panel was, but it was the best plan I had. If it didn’t work I always had the ability to follow them around and send the girls to wherever they were.
But if I could lead them straight into our hands, that would be the ideal scenario.
“Mission accomplished,” Ego said.
“Great. Thanks Ego. Now, if they figure out what the elevator is, that means they’ll come straight down here knowing we’re here, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” Marie asked. “We have no idea what they actually want out of this scenario. Maybe they’re searching for things they can scavenge rather than trying to find whoever is in charge here and overthrowing them.”
“And their numbers are pretty depleted,” Elaine pointed out. “They might be ready to run for the hills by now.”
“But they’re not running, they’re still coming.” I wanted to point to the screen, where they were mourning their second dead and then gathering near the two doors, one that would lead them to the elevator, and another down a corridor that would send them deeper into the facility and down a path of destruction if my traps had anything to do with it.
“Look at his face,” I said, making the camera they were watching zoom in on the chief. He wasn’t crying, but his cheeks were flushed with rage. His jaw was tense and when he spoke his lip was curled with disgust.
“He’s out for revenge,” Lisa realized. “He wants to do to us what happened to them.”
“Exactly,” I said. “If he can find out where we are, he’s coming for us.”
The first stage in finding us was complete when they chose the left door.
They came into a room riddled with traps that I stopped from activating.
“Hurry,” I said. “Go to the elevator room and get ready. This might be brutal.”
The fact this guy was so motivated made him dangerous. My girls were competent fighters, but they still weren’t experienced. They had only a few real fights under their belts, and fighting against humans might make them hesitate in a way they didn’t when they came across mutated creatures out in the wilds of the desert.
But when they’d saved Cara’s village there had been no hesitation. They’d done what had to be done. It came as an instinct to them more than a standard human, I thought. Being in a body that was half-animal wasn’t just something that affected appearance. It ran deeper than that. Elaine still had the mannerisms of a cat, she’d still taken on the elegant way of walking and sitting, she had that disinterested air that cats always seemed to ooze. It was the most obvious example of how they weren’t the same people they had been before the change.
I was torn between looking at the girls to make sure they were in a good position so that I could instruct them differently, and watching the tribe’s reaction to the elevator.
I went with the second option. I could trust the girls to know what they were doing. Elaine had her lizard, and they’d taken a few of the creatures in reserve with them, too. Lisa had three wolf-hybrids behind her, ready to accept any command they gave.
The tribe were having a harder time.
They looked around the elevator room – reduced to just two healthy and two injured – and were clearly skeptical of it. The chief visibly clocked the number at the top of the elevator showing sub-level two, which I took as a good sign.
Because it was the top floor, there was only one arrow, the one pointing down, that would call the elevator.
It took lots of looking around the room, talking to each other in that gruff, short language before the chief finally took his sword and pressed the end of it against the button.
After a few minutes of chugging from the elevator, it dinged. I smothered a laugh when Ego’s voice said, “Going down.”
The doors opened, but no one got inside. The chief put his sword against one of the doors, stopping it from closing, and peered in.
“What?” the healthy woman asked.
“Same number,” the chief replied.
It had worked.
“Going down,” Ego repeated, and his voice had none of the intonation he normally spoke with. It was only now that I realized how much Ego’s voice really had changed since I’d first woken up. It wasn’t just that his personality had evolved the more media he consumed, and the more he spoke to me and the girls. His actual voice had changed. He’d been a genderless robot at the beginning, speaking in total monotone and without superfluous language.
Recently the voice had gotten a bit deeper, taken on a more distinctly male quality. He’d started talking with emphasis on certain words, with sarcasm and some humor. He sounded like a person now, not a robot.
“Going down?” the man with the large gashes on his arm asked. They’d been wrapped with fur, but even the thick fur was starting to weep blood.
“Going down,” the chief confirmed, and took the step into the elevator.
The rest hurried to follow him, helping the woman with the shredded ankle to walk. No one even questioned whether she wanted to come, or whether she should wait alone at the top of the elevator so she didn’t face more threats. She just hobbled in with them, still clutching and old and rusted sword tightly in her hand.
The chief pressed the button for sub-level two with his finger rather than his sword this time. He seemed to be breathing more quickly, his chest rising and falling quicker with a pounding heart.
He was more than ready for this fight.
“Sub-level two,” Ego voice announced, and I could have sworn I heard a twinge of excitement.
Because I was in the camera inside the elevator, I saw the girls and their wolves the moment the tribe did.
They were more than ready. The girls stood in a triangle around the elevator. Elaine’s lizard was pulling on its leash, teeth bared and smoke leaving its mouth in a steady stream. She was on the left, claws outstretched. She preferred to use them to a weapon, getting up close and using her superior agility to outmaneuver an opponent.
On the right was Marie. She stood with the three original rats I’d created in the facility gathered around her. They were crouched on all fours with their backs arched and ready to leap, while she stood on two. It looked like she was sitting on a furry throne. Her face was completely serene, a cute little smile on her lips.
She might be sweet, but there was a bloodlust in her that ran deep when she saw an enemy. Her appearance was deceptive.
Lisa stood in the center, her wolves behind her. She stood tall, hands tight around her daggers. Of the three, she was the only one who had found an actual weapon she wanted to use. She’d had some training with weapons before I’d reanimated her, and she liked the daggers. She was good with them, too. Her claws were the least sharp of the group, but the daggers could easily slice through the flesh of anything she came across.
Circling above her head was the bird I’d created for her. I felt sure she’d have put it in a cage or left it in the lab, but perhaps it had refused to leave her alone.
What was certain was that they were more than ready to face what was inside the elevator.
Seeing my girls ready to fight made me ache with the urge to join them, but watching their lithe bodies expertly dismantle the tribespeople would have to do.
I couldn’t complain, really.
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Chapter Fifteen
I switched camera so I could watch from the room outside the elevator rather than the restricted view the elevator camera.
I realized quickly that this fight wasn’t going to be the walk in the park I’d expected.
The girls had instructions to take the chief alive. I both wanted to question him, and I wanted to make sure that I could isolate whatever DNA was giving him his superpower before he lost his life. If we could scan him in while he was alive, preferably using his power, it should light up easy for us to see, like with the fire sacs.
I hadn’t necessarily been against the death penalty before the change had happened, and that was how I justified the fact I intended to take him prisoner, experiment on him, and then have him killed.
The chief hadn’t demonstrated the full extent of his superpower when he’d been upstairs. His reflexes were definitely heightened, it had to be what allowed him to predict the moves of his attackers so easily, but there was more to it than that.
I wondered for a brief second whether he could predict the future. He was so quick to counter any and all attacks that came his way, that it was surely impossible.
It was something I wouldn’t know until I could ask him about it.
The tribe hurried to get out of the cramped metal box and into the large space of the room so they had enough room to move.
The fighting started immediately. There was so much going on that I had to choose what I wanted to watch. There was no way I could see it all.
Of course, my focus was on the chief.
The rats leaped at the chief as per Marie’s instruction the second he left the lift. They scurried across the floor with the intention of biting at his ankles. The chief dodged deftly, hopping out of the way and landing easily on his right leg. With his left, he revealed that his boots had sharp razors on the side. Marie made a noise of protest as he kicked out at one of her rats, slicing its neck with a well-placed sweeping movement.
The rats were cowardly creatures, and even when Marie instructed them to keep fighting they scurried away. They were good only if they were winning. The only reason I hadn’t reclaimed them was because Marie was attached to them.
I was surprised she’d brought them to the fight at all, but maybe they gave her confidence.
Seeing them slaughtered in front of her wasn’t likely to instill her with confidence.
Elaine was out of the fight with the chief because she and the lizard were taking on the remaining tribes people. They didn’t bother trying to attack the injured parties really, because they weren’t dangerous, but instead focused on the two healthy threats.
Lisa focused all her attention – and the wolves’ attentions – on the chief. She lunged forward with her daggers and the wolves followed without hesitation.
This was where I realized that the chief wasn’t just relying on good reflexes. There was something more there. When he leaped into the air it was with more power and grace than a normal human should have possessed. He seemed to stay in the air an impossibly long time, and the wolves ran straight under him because they’d committed to the chase. Lisa stopped herself just in time, skidding on her military boots to look up at the chief in astonishment as he fell more slowly than should have been possible back to the ground.
“What are you?” she asked, in a way that demanded an answer.
The chief didn’t bother to respond to her. His eyes flashed with killer instinct, and he swung at her with his sword.
His actual fighting technique wasn’t anything special. I doubted he’d been skilled with a weapon before the change, but his powers gave him an edge in one-on-one battle against even the best fighter without powers.
I didn’t just have one fighter, though. I had multiple. That was where I got my edge, I was sure of it.
Lisa dodged the attack by the chief easily and by then her wolves had turned and started out, ready to attack again. The chief seemed to thrive when there were multiple attacks against him at once. He twisted bringing both his sword and dagger to exactly the right place to make the wolves impale themselves on them.
“Fuck,” Lisa hissed.
Marie was using this time to try and sneak up on the chief, coming from behind with her claws outstretched. She could move low, make use of her deceptively powerful legs to get in a position where she could pounce.
She launched herself exactly when the wolves attacked, so he would have to counter three attacks rather than two. It was a solid strategy. She got her claws into his back, but the furs around his upper body were so thick that it didn’t seem to have done much damage to him.
“His neck!” I shouted to her. The chief frowned and looked up.
She removed her left claw, keeping herself attached to his huge back with the right, and clawed at his throat. The wolves now dead, he caught her wrist with his hand and pulled her away the second her claws touched his exposed neck. She barely broke the skin before he’d used his weight to fling her away. She slammed hard against the wall of the room, head making a sickeningly loud sound as it cracked against the metal.
Lisa was furious now.
The chief grinned.
Lisa lunged, but her movement was erratic and not thought through. She did it so suddenly that the wolf couldn’t keep up with her and the attack was desynchronized. It gave the chief an advantage he should have never had. He dodged the attack from Lisa with a simple movement that mean her dagger only sliced a small gash in his cheek, and then unleashed the brunt of his strength on the wolf. He sliced through its arm, chopping it clean off with his sword.
The wolf let out a shrill whine and staggered away, blood spurting out and all over the room.
A crash finally brought my attention away from the fight with the chief that Lisa was losing.
Elaine was winning her fight, but the woman with the shattered ankle had been left to her own devices as Elaine focused on the two able-bodied fighters.
She’d found a door that was locked and pried it open with her sword, obviously planning to make some kind of escape, or find some advantage they were currently missing.
What was inside definitely wasn’t an advantage for anyone.
The door was slammed backward as the eagle spread its wings wide and gave a piercing cry. It had been locked in the room for a good few days now, and it didn’t seem to have done much for its temper.
“Oh shit,” Elaine said, careening backward at the eagle saw her and made a move to attack. She rolled deftly out of the way, landing easily on all fours but releasing the leash of the lizard as she did so.
The eagle went wild, flying around the room but still finding it too small to properly maneuver. It landed on the shoulders of the woman with the shattered ankle and clawed her throat out with a sharp talon. The woman’s scream quickly faded to a garbled moan as her throat and mouth leaked blood.
“We have to take it out,” Lisa hissed, taking almost all her attention from the chief. “We have to get it back into that room.”
They reformed, Marie having picked herself up off the ground, ready to take on the eagle. It was staring with beady eyes at all of them, and, thankfully, it picked the chief to focus its attention on. Maybe the fact it recognized the girls was something that worked in out favor for now.
The chief’s reflexes were heightened just as the eagle’s senses were though, and it made them formidable opponents.
When the eagle lunged, razor sharp beak ready to pierce the chief’s rib cage, judging by its trajectory, the chief ducked and danced to the side, going under the wings and causing the beak to miss.
Lisa had stopped to watch, and we obviously shared a thought: maybe we could just let the eagle take out the tribe and then get it back into the room afterward.
When the attack failed, though, the eagle made Lisa its focus and attacked again without hesitation. Lisa, whose arm was only just healed from dealing with the eagle last time, jumped backward and lifted the same arm to ward off the attack.
She
only just got low enough to spare her arm another scar, but the eagle was prepared. It planted both feet on the wall and used it to push itself off again, diving straight back at Lisa.
Lisa’s cry made me cringe as the eagle’s beak clamped down on her shoulder and ripped a large chunk of flesh away. The snap of her collarbone echoed throughout the room.
“Lisa!” Marie cried, and then her face was furious. She leaped at the eagle the same way she’s leaped at the chief, landing on its back and tearing it apart with her claws. Rivulets of blood emerged through the plumage before it managed to throw Marie off.
By then Elaine was in action. She’d regained control of her lizard, and used the beast to scare the eagle with its fire.
She angled the lizard just right so that the eagle was in between it and the door. When it blew a large cloud of fire from its mouth, the eagle flew automatically backward.
And into the room. The lizard advanced under Elaine’s instruction and breathed more fire, scaring the eagle once more.
Marie slammed the door to the room shut, and I locked it with the system.
Marie slumped against the door for a second before rushing over to Lisa, who had passed out from the pain. Her smaller eagle was circling on her stomach, looking distressed.
The tribe had fled. I barely caught them running from the facility on the camera by the solar panels. The facility had taken three of their lives, though, and gravely injured another. Maybe that would be enough to keep them away for good.
Chapter Sixteen
Lisa was awake again in no time, but the girls had managed to move her to her bed before she opened her eyes. She was laying with her arm in a splint, the nanobots working tirelessly to heal her shoulder and collarbone.
“They said something about the solar panels,” I said. “They knew we were here. He said ‘They were right.’ Who was right about what? About where we were?”
Lisa was dosed up on some heavy painkillers, but she looked as alert as ever. “I don’t know. Maybe one of Cara’s village let it slip before they were attacked.”
