by Kaleb Schad
The jeep hunched up and down as it climbed over a mostly rotted tree stump.
“Huh,” Tyler said.
Why would they do that? Why would they give their weapon emotions and guilt? It seemed an extra ounce of cruel. One more reason to kill every one of those bastards.
After a while Tyler leaned over the steering wheel and said, “Well, anyway, this is important.”
“Why? Blowing up a building won’t matter.”
“It will when Staern himself is in it.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.” Isn’t that what parents would tell their kids in the syncasts?
“But why?”
Tyler would be damned if he was going to play confessional with an eleven year old murder machine made by Staern, but he needed the kid to shut up so he could think. “Because I’m dying at twenty-seven and because of the shit he put me through and made me do. Now, enough!”
“Maybe you could make a syncast. Give it to those other people who don’t like the government and are putting out syncasts all the time.”
Tyler didn’t know what “other people” the kid was talking about, nor did he care.
“Stop, please,” the boy said. “Just stop so we can talk.”
Tyler pressed the accelerator.
“Why won’t you stop?” The boy was nearly screaming now. “Why aren’t you doing what I say?”
Tyler felt dizzy, seeing the world as if through heated air, flapping and false. The kid reached over and grabbed the steering wheel and tried to pull it. With the back of his hand, Tyler slapped the boy’s mouth, knocking him into the headrest, then slammed on the brakes. The kid plunged forward, catching himself on the dash.
“Look at me,” Tyler yelled. “Look at me. If you want to get to Elia with your tongue, you will shut up. And if you want to get to Elia with your hands, you will never, ever, until the day you die, touch me or this steering wheel again.”
The boy licked at his cut lip, turned and spit out the side of the jeep.
Tyler looked at his watch. His countdown showed a half hour had passed, but it had only been fifteen minutes since he’d last checked. Somehow he’d lost an extra fifteen minutes. That had only ever happened after a gunfight or a mission, whenever his JACKK had fired full-tilt in his blood stream. Was this how it was going to go from here on? Was his survival time going to lose sync with chronological time? Was his lifespan shorter than he’d thought? It was unnerving. For six years he had lived with a certainty of death, but to the minute, the second. A tradeoff in knowledge, ambiguous to certain.
The boy looked at Tyler, then out the side of the jeep at the infinite and lifeless lake and said, “I am nothing like you.”
Resignation and exhaustion eventually won and the boy slept. He rested his head on the roll bar and his mouth sagged in a pout. It gave the little shit a look of innocence, as if he were truly a boy and nothing more. But isn’t that how they worked? Cover their violence in candy? Narcotics by the bagful to make you feel. Stories fired into your brain, electrocuting you with emotion. Stories that helped you escape what is with what isn’t.
The boy was no more innocent than Tyler. He told himself this. Maybe he believed it.
They drove all through that day watching the hills rise up and drop away, the decades-old asphalt and concrete destroyed by things like poplar trees and switchgrass. Every now and then they passed farms long abandoned and growing nothing but memories of a time when people lived outside of the cities, brick silos crumbled and hollow, their roofs pockmarked with shadowed holes. Stone skeletons standing like broken teeth.
How was he going to get through Cerebus Gate North with this tumor in tow? He had the uniforms and the ID chip, but what if they weren’t enough? Would the kid run when Tyler said to? Would he try and get Tyler killed?
He looked back at the road and there were two of them, doubled and dancing. Tyler squeezed his eye closed and opened it again, somewhat useless because the Sakanaya never turned off, but it didn’t help anyway. He shook his head, but that was a mistake. Tingling sparked down his arms and legs and then he knew. A seizure.
“What,” the boy said, the sway of the jeep waking him.
Tyler tried to get his foot off of the accelerator, over to the brake, but it was too late.
His neck hurt. The jeep was on its side ten meters away, its undercarriage and chassis exposed to him like looking up a woman’s skirt. He could see a black lump that he thought might be his backpack another thirty meters behind the vehicle. Tyler swore to himself. The boy.
Circling the jeep, he tried to prepare for what he would find. Prepare for a mission failed. Instead he found it empty. Tyler looked around, scanning with his Sakanaya at seven power for any movement, thermal for heat signatures. Nothing. He did see his .30-06 a couple meters away. He went to it and picked it up and then he noticed his sidearm was missing from his holster, the flap unbuckled. That wouldn’t happen. Not by itself.
If it began to rain, as the sky was threatening, he’d have a harder time finding the boy, any tracks being washed away. He moved out from the jeep in widening concentric circles, looking for footprints or blood and found both on the third loop, moving into a field. Six hundred meters in he saw the boy crouching in the grasses, his orange jumpsuit blazing like a beacon. What an idiot. His enhanced hearing could hear the boy whispering to himself, a kind of prayer over and over. Don’t find me. Don’t find me.
When it was obvious he’d been found, the boy sat up and pointed the handgun at Tyler. He had a cut on his forehead and blood had painted half of his face.
“I don’t want to—”
“Give me the gun,” Tyler said.
“But I will,” the boy said.
“Kid, I’m hurt and we’re wasting time.”
“Just let me go. Leave me here.”
“A pistol and a jumpsuit? That’s what you think you’ll need? And who the hell hides in a grass field wearing an orange jumpsuit?”
“You can kill Mr. Staern by yourself. You don’t need me.”
Tyler craned his neck, trying to loosen whatever he’d done to it in the accident, when he saw the doe. She was big, standing at the edge of the field a hundred meters out and she was watching them, her ears swiveled forwards, tail swishing once or twice.
Tyler raised the rifle slowly, slowly, pointing it over the boy’s head. “Don’t move,” he whispered.
The doe blew at him, a weird trumpeting sound, like a man with a sinus infection, and Tyler fired. She crouched, then bound forward two or three leaps before her front legs crumpled and she drove into the dirt, her hind quarters somersaulting over her head.
The boy had turned to see what Tyler was aiming at and when he turned back, Tyler was standing in front of him, taking the MK-9 from his hands.
“You said you were hungry,” Tyler said.
She was a good whitetail, plenty of meat for the next couple of days as long as Tyler could keep her cool. The autumn air would help with that. He rolled her on her back, kneeled on her hind legs and flipped out his knife.
Thick, but scattered, raindrops began to fall. A precursor to a pouring.
“You shot it,” the boy said.
Tyler cut away the teats to clear the belly, then sawed around the anus to release the muscles and tendons. He could tell the boy was both fascinated and frightened.
“That’s the problem,” Tyler said as he worked. He was using a combination of the knife and his fingers to separate the organs from the stomach muscles now, careful not to puncture the guts and poison the meat. “People don’t have a sense of the world. They spend their days under a synmap, getting their nutrients by a drip, or if they’re awake and eating solids, they don’t ask or think about where the food comes from.” Tyler crunched the knife up the sternum, breaking the ribs. “Everything is bullshit. They tell Skimmers stories of the great sacrifice they make during Cullings. You go under, experience the syncast, you get an extra dose of Seven Ten in your IV and you cry a
t how heroic and beautiful it all is.” By now Tyler’s arms were buried elbow deep up the deer’s neck. The sharp bones of the ribs, clawed at his forearms. He grabbed the ridged esophagus, slippery, and with the knife in his other hand severed it.
“Okay, grab the front legs,” he said.
The boy didn’t move.
“The front legs. Grab them.”
Startling forward, the boy tripped on the deer’s snout as he tried to straddle the head and fell into Tyler.
“Dammit, kid, just grab the legs and lift.”
The boy scrambled back to his feet, the deer’s blood streaked across his jumpsuit, and he grabbed the front hooves.
Tyler stood and walked backwards, pulling the esophagus. All of the organs and entrails poured out of the deer onto the grass and the copper smell of blood and shit stewed in the rain. All of the things that once made a life now a pile of stink and slop.
“That is where your food comes from,” Tyler said. “And that,” he nudged the gut pile with his boot, “is the cost of living. Something else must die.”
It turned out that getting the tactical vehicle back on its wheels was an easier task than getting it out of the ditch. Tyler had the boy sit in the driver’s seat and told him to press the accelerator when he said go, then stop once on the road. Don’t overshoot it and end up in the ditch on the other side, he’d warned. After pushing and grunting, his feet skidding out in the mud, the engine impotently roaring, he realized the kid was pressing both the brake and the accelerator.
“I’ve never driven,” the boy said. “I’ve never done anything.”
Nine hours later they laid under a decomposing barn roof, slanted and wrong, listening to the rain ping against the sheet metal. Two walls were now piles of gravel, catching the skidding rain in pools. Tyler could still smell the smoke from their smoldering fire, the roasted venison. He had taken off his belt rig with his ammo so he could stretch out. Tyler figured they were at most twelve hours out from Cerebus and he wanted to go into that situation rested.
Looking at his watch, -04:20:16:31, he knew healing after the accident had eaten ten extra hours off of his life. He’d need to watch that. He’d always lost time when his JACKK worked, but it had never been that drastic. All signs of the end, he knew.
After a long while of listening to the paper sounds of leaves under rain, the boy asked, “Why’d they go?”
“Who?”
“The people who made this barn?”
“They didn’t. They died. Go to sleep.”
He could tell the boy wanted to ask how, but didn’t want to get yelled at, so he kept silent. Then the boy rammed up straight when a coyote let out its yip yooowwww cry eighty or a hundred meters out. It’s siblings caught on quick, singing the chorus.
“What is that?” The kid whispered it.
“You didn’t hear coyotes all that way out here?”
The boy shook his head.
“Go to sleep. They’re hunting. They’ll leave us alone. We’re moving in three hours, so sleep. Now.”
The kid was shivering and Tyler didn’t think it was from the October cold. Ten minutes later, maybe when the kid thought Tyler was asleep already, he first heard, then felt the boy slide across the gravel and press up against him. The kid clasped his hands under his chin and pressed his face into Tyler’s back.
He stopped shivering.
By mid-morning the next day, the rain had stopped and they could see Cerebus Gate North and the wall. It spanned northeast to southwest as far as the Earth’s curve would reveal. A river of concrete and steel. A desperate hand keeping out the Midwestern crazies in what used to be the plain states and central Canada, keeping in the urban crazies in the Lower Skims. But a wall is only as strong as the gates through it and the Cerebus Gates were powerful. Seven levels of traffic entered under constant threat of destruction. Gunships hovered and scanned vehicles—almost all of which were piloted by automated systems—escorting them, blessing them.
Tyler watched the traffic, the security, and he felt a flittering under his stomach he hadn’t felt in years. He was one man. This was the entire Liberty Conglomerate Province and the combined strength of the Big Seven. All of their money. All of their authority. Was he really going to do this alone?
“I didn’t get to see it last time,” the boy said. “It’s big.”
Tyler pulled the SLS uniform out of his bag and began to strip. “We’re going through on the bottom level.” He talked while he dressed. “They’re going to scan my jeep. If we’re lucky, the SLS chip gets us through and nobody gets hurt, but if we’re not, the AI will route us to security. If that happens, you do what I say, when I say. Move when I move. I want you to be the tumor you are and stick to me. Understand?”
The boy didn’t look at him, but only stared at the wall.
Tyler turned the boy towards him. “If I get even a whiff that you are trying something or if it looks like we aren’t going to make it through, I will put a bullet right here.” He jabbed the boy above his left eye. “Understand? Tell me you understand.”
“We don’t have to go. Once we go in there, we can’t go back. We can still go back.”
Tyler buckled his tactical vest over the melmoth shirt. A click. Crisp. Final.
He held a deep breath, then let it out and said, “Retreat forward, kid.”
Sitting there, waiting, surrounded by automated semis, logging trucks and tankers, smelling the wet asphalt, Tyler felt like a zit on a whore’s ass. Two living humans in a river of mechatronics. That wasn’t how he’d been trained to blend in.
As they neared the gate, an angular skull with three syringes sticking out of its cranium and an “x” over its mouth was painted on the wall. It was huge, probably three meters tall. Graffiti. On the wall and outside of it, no less. He’d never heard of something like that.
Two maintenance bots hovered near a display screen. Normally, the screen displayed instructions for human pilots coming into the gate, but now it was playing a video of LCP officers inside a residence tower. The video was from the perspective of one of the officers. It was distorted with noise, like old recordings—not a true syncast pattern—and it showed the officers chasing a group of kids up a stairwell, the camera bouncy and giddy. Tyler’s mouth went dry, tasted like rot, when he realized what the video was from. The officers were shooting at the kids, high-fiving each other with every kill. The point of view pivoted to congratulate an officer behind him and Tyler could see further down the stairwell the men with the personal incinerators, saw the lightning flash of that contained inferno, saw the vacuum bots trundling behind.
“What is that,” the boy whispered.
This was the sacrifice, a Culling, but not how it was supposed to be portrayed. Not awake. Solemn and sleeping under a syncast, not running. No high-fives. Certainly not reminding us there were children involved. The “In Memoriams” never mentioned the children. But they were there. Tyler knew they were there.
The video ended with a flicker and that same stylized skull with an “x” over its mouth on the screen, then looped and began again.
A security bot rolled towards them between the lanes of vehicles. It had a flat monitor for a head, two M243 miniguns mounted on either side of its body and it balanced on a pair of side-by-side wheels. It was scanning codes embedded in the doors of the vehicles, communicating with the pilot AIs, then moving along. When it reached Tyler’s jeep it scanned the door, then blinked a series of colors at Tyler.
“No,” Tyler said. “I have this.” He held up the SLS ID badge and a red laser line scanned across it. The security bot blinked colors at Tyler again.
“No.”
More colors.
“That’s not—I have Cam-Tom clearance for this kid.”
One final blink and the bot turned to leave.
“Dammit, no. I need—“
The jeep started moving on its own, the piloting system commandeered by Cerebus security.
“Shit,” Tyler said. He checked th
at his Mark 37 was loaded with a round chambered.
“Remember,” he said. “Move when I move.”
They were guided into a service lane and stopped next to the main security office for the ground level. Inside, he could see several security officers. To his left, the stop-and-go traffic leaching through the gate. Tyler knew there would be gun turrets nestled in the ceiling. If it came to running, it would be hell, but maybe it wouldn’t come to that. Maybe the SLS men hadn’t been reported missing yet.
One of the officers approached. Tyler knew how they must look, the jeep crumpled and muddy, the kid in the orange jumpsuit, also muddy, covered in blood with a swollen cut over his eye. Why had he thought he could do this by himself?
Tyler held up the security badge. “I have Cam-Tom clearance. It’s important I get through now.” Calm. Authoritative.
The security guard noticed the JACKK arteries. “Oh,” he said. “Ok. Um, hover tight a minute.” He took Tyler’s badge and returned to the station.
Movement in the rearview mirror grabbed Tyler’s attention. An unmarked black van that practically screamed SLS creeped along the service lane and stopped at the end of the tunnel behind him, blocking their way back.
How in the hell? Of all the gates, of all the levels through the gate, how? Tyler opened his door and got out. He pulled on his backpack, buckled it across his chest, then slung on his Mark 37.
Six men in black uniforms with assault rifles climbed out of the van and started walking towards them. They moved tactically; slow and steady, spread out.
“Come here,” Tyler said to the boy. The kid didn’t move. Tyler leaned into the jeep and dragged him over.
At the other end of the tunnel ahead of him, another black van weaved against traffic until it was blocking the service lane. Again, six soldiers. None of them had raised their weapons. Yet.
