The Apocalypse Watch

by J Foster Ward

  His first instinct was to be careful of broken bones as he got up. But then he remembered he’d been upgraded with a reinforced skeleton. Might as well not even have bothered worrying. There was a slight bump on his head, and otherwise he was fine.

  And alone. The entire tribe had fled, leaving him to himself ankle-deep in lobster bisque.

  A quick look in the confined crawlspace told him there was nothing left but scorched shell. Jacob dug the goggles and revolver out from the spreading pool of mutant gank and gingerly leaned on the oven-hot lip of the service crawlway.

  “Synthetica? Tesla? Are you ok in there?”

  There was a longer pause than he would have liked before someone shouted back.

  “You have singlehandedly vanquished the unkillable beast that stalks the darkness!” Tesla’s voice echoed up the tunnel.

  Good, the teenage cavegirl was still alive. It surprised him how glad he was about it.

  “Glad you’re okay too,” Jake shouted back. “Synthetica?”

  “She lives!” Tesla replied. “But she is hurt badly! She put herself between us and the beast!”

  “Can you get her out?”

  “Yes!“

  Jake suddenly realised he’d have to tell the chieftain’s daughter that her cousin had been eaten.

  ***

  There were three fewer obeyers by the time he did a head count. Tesla’s cousin who’d been eaten, another one missing in the tunnel and presumed dead, and a third who had been trampled to death in the panic.

  Tesla was the last to crawl out of the tunnel, dragging Synthetica by the armor. The two emerged, scorched, covered in gunk, and one arm of the android was missing. Jake picked her up in his arms, carried her to a clean patch of the main corridor to lay her down. He could barely look at her mutilated form, remembering the intense sexual encounter they’d just had, and laying in a post-coital bliss, talking about his future wives.

  “I’m sorry,” he told the android girl.

  “It’s fine,” she said. Her voice sounded slightly hollow, maybe due to the other slash in her neck, from the monster’s claw. “I can be repaired. This is nothing.”

  “It’s not nothing,” he said, “I shouldn’t have left you. I’ll get you down to the repair shop, get you good as new.”

  “No, there’s no time. I can perform field repairs. Thank you, Jake,” and she even leaned up to kiss him. “Go check on the Tesla. We saw her cousin get torn apart.”

  He left her there and made his way through the cluster of primitive obeyers and stepped through the naked blue tribesmen to find the tall chieftain’s daughter.

  “I beg your forgiveness,” the barbarian princess said, kneeling. “I did not mean to abandon you. Nor did I mean for your celestial man-machine to be so badly hurt. She was sorely wounded saving me.”

  “I’m not upset. I know you’re brave and you would have fought that creature single-handed with nothing but your swords. I’m glad Synthetica kept you safe; it would be… a shame if anything happened to you.”

  She looked up at him with her amber eyes and quickly down again, cheeks turning violet as she blushed. Jake found himself wanting to put his arms around her so he did. For a moment she went stiff and then hugged him fiercely. God it felt good. For a moment he wanted to forget about his mission and just find a shower for the two of them so he could see what was under all that dirt.

  “My kinsman, Bool, fell to the beast,” Tesla said, face set in stone.

  “I know, I’m sorry, there was nothing I could do.”

  “We were never close, until we arrived here. He was brave. We had resigned ourselves to our fate, to die as cattle. But then you came, and instead of being butchered, he died as a real man, living free, fighting for the tribe’s freedom. I will miss him dearly, but I thank you for the gift of giving him a better death, Lord Jacob.”

  Despite all his efforts to ignore the girl as a filthy primitive, Jake found himself starting to care for the strange, blue barbarian. Jacob gently disengaged from her hug. She looked younger, somehow, with two tears trickling a path through the dirt of her cheeks, wearing armor three sizes too big for her, with the sleeves rolled up; like a kid dressing up in her dad’s clothes.

  But this wasn’t the time for that.

  “Oh, uh, hey, I’m getting you all covered in baked shrimp goo,” he said, gently prying her away. “My map says the main entrance blast doors are this way.”

  “Um, yes, it’s this way,” Tesla nodded, blushing even harder, so the purple moved down her neck and the pale curve of her exposed breasts in the open front of the jacket. She spoke to her people in their native language and the crowd nodded, helping the wounded, and started walking.

  On the way to the elevator, Jacob hoped his little army would be safe on the surface. He had no real idea what waited for them out there

  The weird mood-stabilizing happy-drugs that his new body pumped through his veins wouldn’t let him feel panic, or even anything except a general sense of positive need for action, but the old-fashioned human part of him doubted he would be able to do this all alone. He needed someone he could rely on, someone who could share his trials as well as his joys, and who wouldn’t run at the first signs of trouble. Someone able to take care of themselves and maybe him too.

  His gaze wandered over the one-armed android, and the sword-wielding barbarian. As strange as it was, he might have found that in the unlikeliest of partners.

  ***

  Chapter 12

  : No Escape

  For the third time Jake arrived at the underground warehouse that led to the main entrance of Nevermore’s Tomorrow Project, N12 facility. More than ever the open cavern of darkness felt oppressive. Like it was hiding danger just beyond the pool of light from his little lantern.

  “Have you been here before?” Jake asked Tesla.

  “Only the once,” she looked nervous, staring into the black of the warehouse.

  Jake kept his light focussed on the ground near his feet, trying to keep it from being obvious, and they crossed the dusty, empty expanse. It felt like one of those underground flood reservoirs: nothing but concrete and a forest of support pillars. Jake kept one eye on the ceiling but none of the spidery skull-fruit things tried to drop feelers for them. Probably they knew better than to attack a large group.

  With any luck, Yanco would have no idea Jake had blocked the truck-sized tunnel with the emergency blast doors. This would be the best place to try to catch him. And when they did, he’d squeeze the little orange priest until he told them where to find Milan.

  And he grinned a bit at the thought of Yanco getting to the doors. For one, it would be impossible to open them, and for another he’d find another bloody corpse of Jake. Hopefully it would reinforce his status as an immortal being and scare the crap out of the tangerine mutant.

  Almost across the open space and Jake heard a click and shuffle from ahead.

  “No more!” a voice rang out on the darkness. “More and we kill the annoying weelix!”

  Jake knew the voice. It was Yanco.

  He clicked off his light, plunging them into darkness and immediately ducked and moved to the left. If they were going to shoot him they already would have, but he didn’t want to make himself an easy target.

  “You trying to make a deal, Yanco?” he called back. “Fuck you. You’re a liar and a dealbreaker.”

  “No need to hide,” Yanco replied back and one of the glowing red grub lanterns was unhooded out in the dark, revealing at least a half-dozen voxers with weapons drawn, and in their midst was Milan. She was bound and tied to the back of a particularly big specimen of the gorilla-men.

  Jake hesitated a long moment. He could end this all right here.

  “I’m going to count to three,” Jake yelled. “You give her back before I’m done and you and your people can walk away. If you don’t, you all die!”

  “The time for idle threats is past!” Yanco replied.

  “One,” Jake said loudly.


  He aimed and fired the plasma rifle in one fluid gesture, the bolt of lightning illuminating the entire, gigantic warehouse like high noon.

  In that single flare of white light Jake saw maybe thirty voxers arranged in a line, Yanco at their back. He saw the emergency secondary doors he’d closed had somehow, impossibly, been wedged apart with some solid piece of metal machinery. He saw the ceiling overhead was a white drapery of spider silk that undulated with dozens of the strange headfruit creatures. He saw a single bot standing still in the far corner of the chamber. And he saw what had never been revealed before, that the back half of the cavern was filled with the orderly rows of rusted and decaying vehicles of all kinds.

  He didn’t know how but Yanco had seen him raise the gun. At the moment Jake squeezed the trigger, and unleashed a white-hot oven, Yanco glowed green and the big gorilla with Milan strapped to his back was yanked to the side on invisible strings. Not much, but just enough that the blast scorched the voxer with its passing instead of exploding him into ashes. The smoking corpse slammed to the ground on top of Milan and she screamed, gag knocked loose.

  “You moppeting test-pattern!” Milan screamed. “You almost killed me!”

  Jake fired again, but Yanco was already using his psychic powers to flip Milan out of the way – tied corpse and all – so the white-hot bolt of lightning exploded the duracrete surface of the warehouse floor. Flash like a phosphorous bomb. A shower of molten fragments erupted like a roman candle.

  “Play with friends!” Yanco yelled.

  From above there came a hissing chorus. Jake felt a chill, remembering it: screaming headfruit creatures. The screaming got closer, fast. Jake clicked on his light as the first wave of them showered down, like candy skulls, cracking open and skittering. The obeyers screamed and began backing up. But more and more spiders came down, the next wave cushioned their fall on the squishy bodies of the first, and whipping spinnerets of silk lashed out from the mouth-shaped carapaces. Wherever it touched the bare skin of an obeyer it made an angry welt.

  Jake had one more shot to take. By the dim light of the voxer’s grub lantern he saw Yanco and his followers were making a break for the open door. He fired lightning, incinerating a pair of gorilla-men and blasting the wedge that was keeping the doors open. It went white hot, and exploded into chunks, letting the massive doors grind shut with a clang that echoed back and forth in the warehouse.

  Then he was too busy with the raging chaos around him. He boot-stomped the skull spiders as the obeyers fought hysterically, screaming like children. Drawing the shotgun revolver Jake blasted around him, erupting a half-dozen skullfruit creatures with each shot.

  Some instinct, maybe the enhanced combat reflexes that had more situational awareness than he could possible know consciously, alerted him. Just before the whisper of the air Jake threw himself to the side. Landing where he’d been was the mother of all skull spiders.

  She was a bloated, bone-white thing, covered in stiff hairs. The bulbous carapace was the size of a golf cart, the maniacal screaming skull like the deformed face of a giant. The spider-queen lashed out, white legs tripping a fleeing obeyer and yanking him back to sink dripping ivory fangs into his back. The man spluttered and screamed before foaming at the mouth in convulsions.

  Jake couldn’t fire the plasma gun. Too close. He’d kill himself and half his allies.

  “Get back, Lord Jacob, get back!” Tesla was screaming, and four obeyers were dragging him from the fight, while the rest attacked with whatever primitive weapons they had. Spears, axes, prybars and knives.

  They surrounded the spider mother on all sides, hacking and gouging, so that the skull spider raced back and forth, turning in circles, but unable to escape. Jake reloaded the revolver, slamming in new shells. He elbowed his way through the obeyers and blasted two shots that ate an expanding pothole through one side of the carapace and out the other. The spider heaved one last time and rolled over, dead, with liquified guts steaming in a river onto the floor.

  In the silence that followed Jake expected the voxers to come screaming out of the dark and finish them.

  There was no attack. They were alone.

  “Where did they go?” Tesla asked, realizing the same thing.

  Venti tapped her hard on the coin-armored jacket and pointed with her remaining hand. Towards the far corner of the warehouse, where Jake had momentarily spotted the immobile bot.

  Synthetica, knelt beside the poisoned obeyers with her K-kit one-handed. She tried three different drugs injected into him and looked up at Jake. She shook her head.

  “Fuck,” Jake muttered. He pulled up the wrist-buddy map. “The map says there’s an auxiliary entrance and ‘Synthetic Processing Station’ that way. Got to be where Yanco’s going.”

  Jake showed the android girl the map. “Must be an industrial annex of some kind.”

  “Not exactly,” Synthetica replied. “There was a small visitor’s center for orientation of synthetic assets. Myself and my fellow synthetics were delivered there from the Nevermore storage facility.”

  “By the people who ran Nevermore corporation?”

  “No people. I never saw any humans, only other synthetics and Cool Breeze. I never met a human until I met you and the other agents.”

  For a moment he tried to imagine this bunker when it was brand new, in the 23rd century. Of a self-driving truck delivering crates of androids and robots, of Cool Breeze issuing orders and the synthetics going into a long sleep, waiting to be woken by human masters. And instead the bunker was invaded by monsters and mutants that destroyed them all and stacked their bodies like firewood. Jake had always assumed nothing could be more horrific than the way he’d been awakened only to be killed over and over again by a mutated praying mantis, but there had been a worse holocaust; the androids and synthetics had died horribly, in a mass extinction.

  “That’s Yanco’s way out,” he said soberly and led the way.

  As they closed the distance Jake began to make out a humanoid shape on the edge of the light ahead and drew the shotgun revolver. But Synthetica placed a hand on his arm and looking more closely Jake saw it was the hulking metal shape of Flux, the security bot. The closer they got, the stranger it was to see him standing there, staring straight ahead. Only when they approached within a few feet did the head swivel towards them.

  There were no voxers in sight, only the open space of a doorway in the wall nearby.

  “Some security,” Jake said. “Why didn’t he stop Yanco?”

  “It hasn’t been given orders or print commands yet,” Synthetica replied.

  “Reporting for duty,” Flux announced. The voice was a bit gravelly. A pleasing baritone that sounded like it was echoing out of a metal drum.

  “Bring him along,” Jake sighed, raised an eyebrow.

  Behind Flux was the door to the synthetic processing center. It would barely have been visible if Jake hadn’t known where to look. It was flat and featureless, like another part of the wall. Even so, Yanco – or something – had discovered it and it showed the aged but obvious signs of attempts to break it open or pry it apart with dents and scrapes in the metal. Maybe his Tox-powered abilities had opened it without a passcard.

  Synthetica used Jake’s wrist-buddy to tap a quick command to the door and there was a series of clanks and motors whining before the door opened fully on a puff of dusty air and slid into the wall with a grinding noise. A moment later the area beyond the door lit up with a dim, greenish light.

  “Hurry,” Jake said.

  But the android took him by the arm with her remaining hand. “Jake, we don’t know what’s in there. Yanco is intelligent. He could be planning an ambush.”

  “The longer we take, the further away he gets with Milan.”

  Jake risked a quick glance into the chamber beyond. It was like something between a hospital ward and an assembly line. Wheeled gurneys were lined up along either wall under a series of spidery mechanical arms and instruments attached to the ceiling. Som
e sort of greenish mold or fungus had spread inside the room and long, searching arms of the growth had spread across the floors, walls and ceiling. Where the growth had covered the light panels it was producing the green-tinted glow.

  Dozens of fresh footprints in the moldy surface of the floor led out the far side.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Jake told Tesla and the obeyers before slowly walking into the room.

  He went in, checking corners for threats, careful to avoid the fungal growth, but the room was still and apparently undisturbed since it had last been used two hundred years earlier. At the far end of the room he found a wheeled bin that was full of empty plastic packaging, like travel bags for clothes except big enough for an entire person. Stamped on the outside of each one was the marking “YR7E28”.

  “Jake,” Synthetica said. “I can use this facility to make some repairs.”

  “We have to keep moving!” Jake said. But when he looked at the one-armed android girl he immediately felt guilty.

  “Right. Half of you with me. The other half stay here.”

  The android girl motioned to Flux and the big bot clumped after her to one of the tables. Removing a spare arm from the limbs on the bot’s back she powered up one of the workstations and the tool-tipped machine arms whirred to life.

  A collective gasp went up from the obeyers who all dropped to their knees and began whispering chants.

  “Lord Jacob!” Tesla could barely keep her eyes off the repair bench as she spoke to Jake. “Are my people permitted to remain and witness the miracle of the living metal?”

  “Uh, sure, why wouldn’t you?”

  The android girl only just noticed the kneeling crowd. “I’m not used to working with an audience.”

  “None but the high priests have ever seen such a thing,” tesla cautioned. “It wouldn’t be right.”

  Synthetica gave a weird half shrug and went back to her task.