Extensis Vitae: The Shattered Land

by Gregory Mattix

  “No, Marcus. You’re coming back with me.”

  “Why? So I can hide behind my safe laboratory walls again? You said yourself: it’s an ugly world out there. Sometimes you need to deal with the outside world rather than always hiding behind walls. I owe a favor to my new friends, and I am in a position to be able to actually help them this time, so I intend to do that.”

  Bethany surged to her feet and was standing eye to eye with him before he could even blink. He held his ground and felt a flicker of pride that he didn’t flinch. In the past, on those few occasions when he was of a mind to go against her wishes, those occasions always ended with her intimidating him until he backed down. Not this time. She has no official supervisory role over me, despite what she likes to think. She stared him in the eyes for a long moment, obviously angered at his defiance.

  “Your people failed in their security duties on my scientific mission,” Marcus said coldly. Bethany had told him earlier that the mutated canine had escaped during the crash of the ship. “I know you technically outrank me, Bethany, but I was put in charge of this research mission, and I’m not ready to declare it a total failure yet. Are you in a rush to return empty-handed? I don’t intend to tell Barbosa that we failed. I think you owe this to me, just like I owe it to them. Besides, the drone is only part of the plan.”

  Her full lips squeezed together in a thin line, and her eyes narrowed as she stared daggers at him. Marcus glared right back.

  After a tense moment, she finally spoke. “Hmm… not the same old Marcus anymore, are you? Your little adventure in the wasteland put some steel in your spine. I kinda like this assertive side.” Her expression turned cheerful again, and she patted his cheek. She ran her hand along the side of his head, careful not to touch the healing scar that had been neatly cleaned and glued shut. “What did I tell you about shaving your head? Don’t try to hide the scar—just embrace it.” She turned away and sat on the edge of the conference table. “Now, what was this about a plan with a drone?”

  Marcus smiled to himself as equal parts joy and relief ran through him. He knew he had her hooked now.

  Chapter 16

  “So you’re sure this thing will work?” Mason looked dubiously at the fingernail-sized chip the techie handed him. The hacker sat reclined behind the grungy shop counter, feet propped up and a shit-eating grin on his face. It looked as if a cyclone had passed through and strewn computer equipment around the small shop. A luminescent tattoo pulsed a faint shade of orange on the man’s neck and through his t-shirt.

  “Well, nothing is one hundred percent for sure when you are dealing with bio-tech, but I’m pretty damn confident this will do the trick. Once the malware breaks through the skin’s encryption, it will upload itself through the same means they use for their remote back-ups. This will render the skin sandboxed, and after that, it’s lights out for whoever the unlucky SOB is.”

  “If you’ve sold me garbage, I’ll be paying you another visit.” Mason narrowed his blank chrome eyes as he gave the hacker a hard look. “What did we agree on, 180,000 chips?” The amount was extraordinarily expensive, but if it worked, it would be worth every red cent. Mason could pay for the cost with the take from the last job with Haze’s gang and still have plenty left over.

  The techie seemed relatively unfazed by the possibility of having an unsatisfied customer. “Oh, you’ll be satisfied for sure. This is some of my best work. Yeah, a cool 180 k.”

  Mason swiped his hand over the sensor, which beeped, and a green LED lit up. The money was deducted from his account.

  “Good to go, chief.” The techie nodded as he glanced at a holoscreen. “Enjoy your new malware. Come back to see me next time you need to fuck over some skins.”

  “Will do,” Mason replied as he pocketed the chip and exited the store to join the throng of people congesting the sidewalk.

  ***

  The room wasn’t much more than a soundproofed shipping container lodged in amongst the hodgepodge of what passed for dwellings in the Skin City Sprawl. Mason casually leaned against the wall, his arms crossed, surveying activity in the slum around him. A woman dumped some trash out her window onto the street. Some thugs lounged in a doorway and made catcalls at a pretty girl walking by. The girl looked down at the ground and picked up her pace. Further down the street, a vendor cursed at a drunk who knocked over a display of hand-stitched garments. Nobody paid any mind to Mason, which is how he liked it.

  A swipe of his hand over a sensor released a locking mechanism as the encoded chip in his hand was scanned. Bolts clanked as they retracted, and the door swung open. The combined stench of urine, feces, and sweat hit him immediately. Mason pulled a bandana over his nose and mouth to block the odor.

  “I need to get a ventilation system in here,” he grunted as his eyes adjusted to the darkness of the shipping container. A wall of stifling heat was almost a physical force when he stepped into the enclosed space. “Damn, you stink, man.” He switched on the dim LED lighting and closed the door behind him. It boomed shut, and the lock clanked as it reengaged. He walked slowly toward his prisoner, cautiously making sure the man wasn’t going to try to jump him. Even in his degraded condition, the man could still be dangerous.

  The prisoner’s head rose fractionally. He was still bound securely to the steel chair by graphene filaments. The chair was bent and misshapen from when the man had still had his strength and struggled to get free. He had soiled himself, but that was days ago—his body no longer had any waste left to process. The man had once been hale and healthy, but not even an advanced skin could withstand two weeks without food or water in the sauna of the shipping container. The man’s body had begun to consume its own muscle and fat deposits to keep him alive. His once-powerful limbs were just cords of gristle covering bone now.

  “Sergeant Watters, it’s been a while,” Mason said. He yanked off the blindfold and freed the gag from the prisoner’s mouth.

  Watters blinked and looked away as the light temporarily blinded him. His face looked like a skeleton’s, with its skin stretched taut over the skull.

  “You look like shit. Did you miss me?”

  Watters tried to speak, but his vocal cords wouldn’t work without moisture, and he made only a dry rasping sound. Mason unscrewed the cap of a canteen filled with hot, rancid water. He tilted Watters’s head back and poured a thin stream over his mouth. Watters began drinking greedily, but he coughed most of it back up.

  “That should wet your whistle a bit. Now, you were saying…?”

  “I said I hope you rot in hell, Mason. You’re a terrorist and murdering piece of shit.” A spark of hatred shone in Watters’s dull eyes.

  “Ah, so that’s what they say about me, huh? At least you’re talking again. That silent treatment had me a little concerned.”

  “Ask your questions and just kill me, you bastard. Once I come back reskinned, you are a dead man. Whatever pain you inflict on me I will return tenfold.”

  Mason punched the man in the face. Blood flew from his lip, and his head rocked back. The skin’s nanobots had expended all of their energy trying to keep him alive, and without any sustenance to draw on, they were merely inert particles floating inside his body like dead cells.

  “Your body is tearing itself apart,” Mason said. “You must be in hell right now. Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll put you out of your misery. And then, like you said, you come back. It’s a refresh for you, like it never happened.”

  “That’s right.” Watters’s smile was a grim rictus. “A refresh except for the memories. Memories of these last two weeks suffering in this hellhole. You better be looking over your shoulder for the rest of your days.”

  “The rest of them said the same thing, yet here I stand,” Mason replied, unimpressed by the threat. “I wouldn’t hold your breath on coming back though. I’ve got a little surprise that should mean ‘game over’ for you and your friends.” It was Mason’s turn to smile. He walked around behind the man and shoved his head f
orward. He snapped the malware chip into the port in the back of Watters’s head. A tiny LED lit up yellow, indicating it was processing. When it turned green, it would mean it had completed its task.

  “What the hell is that?” Watters asked nervously. “Why are you trying to hack my onboard system? Why don’t you just kill me?”

  “I’ll get around to that later. You know, it took quite a lot of questioning of some of your pals to find somebody who was actually there that night. So now I want you to tell me everything I want to know about what happened to my family, and I make your death painless.”

  Watters burped and grimaced. “That water is fucking tainted or something.”

  “It must have plenty of bacteria in it by now.”

  Watters looked as though he was going to make an angry retort, but he sighed and lowered his chin to his sunken chest. When he raised his head again, he looked resigned. “The woman you know, St. Pierre, Thorne’s personal assistant or angel of death or whatever the hell she is… she put together the team. We were all sworn to silence. She said the drone had recorded activity at the house in the middle of the night, so we had to strike as soon as we could.”

  “When was this?”

  “Hell, I don’t know the exact date and time—it was over twenty years ago.”

  “Give me an idea. I was out of commission for about a week, and it had already happened by the time I was back on my feet.”

  “I think it was about five days after your disappearance. St. Pierre was all barely contained fury. Everyone was scared shitless of her. The rumor was that you killed her in a pretty painful manner. When she came back, she was pissed as fuck and was searching for you with every resource at her disposal, which was a hell of a lot.”

  I bet she was, Mason thought. A lot like how I’m searching for you murdering assholes now. “Continue,” was all he said.

  “So she gathered a few of us grunts together, and we flew out to that location, but we landed a half mile away and approached on foot. She thought you might be there and might have laid some traps, so we were cautious about it. That wasn’t the case, though. It was just a woman and a couple kids in that house.” Watters took a deep breath. “I didn’t kill any of them, I swear it! I was outside the house the whole time keeping watch. She took a couple of the other men in with her.” He exhaled, a haunted look on his face. “That was a shitty deal, killing women and children. One of the other guys told her so right before we moved in, and I thought she was going to rip his head off right there. She didn’t, but she put the fear of the devil in all of us…” He trailed off.

  “And she and the rest of you murdered all three of them. In their beds at night, is that right?” Mason clamped down the simmering fury.

  “No, not all three. The woman carried a kid out of there—she said he wasn’t to be touched. I have no idea why that one was special. For the others, they staged the bodies and called in the District cops to mop up. I don’t know, it was to frame you, I guess. That’s all I know, man. Please, just finish me off.” Watters looked as though a weight had been taken off his shoulders at the confession. He dared to have a hopeful look on his face.

  Mason didn’t even hear the last part or notice Watters’s expression. When he replayed the scene later, he would note the details. He was currently reeling in shock from what the man had said. “Did you say one of the children was taken alive?” He leaned in and studied his prisoner’s face. His look must have been so intense that Watters blanched and leaned away.

  “Yeah, that’s right. The woman took away one of the kids. ‘The older child is not to be harmed,’ she said. I remember that clearly. I have no clue what she did after that, though, honestly.”

  Mason believed the man. He was trying to get over the fact that his elder son had been spared. My son—he’s got to still be out there. He thought back over twenty years ago to the night that Bethany St. Pierre had tried to kill him. She had made him an offer: to try to get his son a billet in Thorne’s bunker as an intern due to his extraordinary math and science aptitude. He had turned her down, and they had fought until only one of them walked away. What have they done with him? He probably thinks that I’m dead—that I’m some kind of monster. He’s probably grown up being fed all the lies about his father being a terrorist who murdered his own family.

  “I’ve got to go,” Mason said brusquely. He glanced at the back of the man’s head and saw the LED on the malware chip had turned green.

  “Wait, we had a deal—” Watters was cut off as Mason shoved the gag back in his mouth.

  “You’re right, we did.” Mason’s forearm blade sprang out of his artificial arm. With a quick slash, he opened Watters’s throat. The man’s eyes went wide, and he convulsed in the chair for a couple minutes as blood poured down his chest.

  Mason removed the malware chip and stuck it in a pocket. He flicked the lights off and quickly left the fetid room behind. He would return later to dispose of the body, but now he had to make preparations to leave Skin City and seek out the wasteland rebels.

  Thorne’s people wanted to pin those crimes on me and make me out to be a monster. Well, they got their wish—they created a monster. I’ll give them their terrorist. As they say, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

  Chapter 17

  A stream of fire flared and lit up the darkness. “Get back, you burnt bastard,” a burly man yelled as he stepped out of the circle of light surrounding the workers. He triggered the flamethrower again, and another burst of fire bloomed in the darkness.

  The creature flinched away from the flame. It reminded Reznik of the charred corpses of a family he had seen in a hut in Afghanistan following a botched operation. The flashbang his team had tossed through the window had landed next to a leaky can of lantern oil in the hut. The resulting fireball had blown them all a dozen feet back, but luckily, nobody on his team had been harmed. The family living in the hut hadn’t been so fortunate. The operation hadn’t turned out well for anyone involved, least of all that innocent family, who had all been killed. His team was going off what they had been briefed pre-mission, but the intel turned out to have been bad. The media had a field day with the resulting scandal.

  “It’s one of the Burned Ones,” Rin said quietly. The two of them had approached the boundary of the exclusion zone on foot and crouched behind a boulder to observe the scene before them. The sun had just sunk below the horizon a short time ago.

  The Burned One staggered aimlessly in a circle like a drunk bounced from a bar and trying to get his bearings. The creature looked like a person burned to a crisp yet very much alive and walking around. It had the size and build of a human yet was hunched over and wearing rags. Its spindly arms and legs and bloated torso made Reznik think of a great spider for some reason.

  After a few meandering, retreating steps, it suddenly changed direction and advanced right toward the nervous workers huddled around the pylon they had been driving into the ground. The Burned One gathered speed as it lurched ahead as if it was descending a steep hill out of control.

  The flamethrower spat another stream of flame, and this time the Burned One burst into flame as if made of straw. It gave a human-sounding screech and waved its arms around wildly but still lurched toward the workers. They bolted away from the pylon, cursing at the man with the flamethrower.

  “Farley, you asshole! You’re supposed to keep those damn things away from us,” one of the workers shouted. The Burned One finally collapsed to its knees about fifteen feet from the pylon.

  Farley bellowed laughter. “That’s the fastest I’ve seen you pricks move since we’ve been on this job. Paid by the hour, obviously.” He shook his head and blasted the Burned One with another jet of fire. The creature’s fat deposits popped and crackled as it cooked and collapsed into a charred heap. Reznik could smell the stench of burning flesh from where he and Rin hid a hundred yards away.

  “What are you waiting for? Get your asses back to work! Shift is almost over.” Farley
walked away and squinted into the darkness again. As he turned and was illuminated by the floodlight for a moment, the Thorne Industries emblem was visible on the shoulder of his uniform.

  The worker who had cursed at Farley kicked a stone at the burning heap of the creature. “Damn it, now we have to smell that shit while we work.” He muttered something under his breath and knelt back down by the pylon. The other two workers rejoined him.

  “Should be a good incentive to hurry up, then. I’m ready to get back to base and get a drink,” Farley complained.

  “Are they building a barrier around the exclusion zone?” Reznik asked in a whisper.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Rin replied. “I’m surprised Thorne Industries cares about what happens out here in the wasteland.”

  “They must not want these creatures wandering into their New USA frontier communities,” Reznik replied.

  In the darkness, the two of them stealthily made their way back toward the truck. They had been delayed back at Planter’s Ridge, much to Reznik’s chagrin. The plan had been to have Ichiro accompany them, but he had found that Ichiro wouldn’t be able to operate the Ares 13 since they would be well out of range of the Datalink network. After going over several different plans, they decided that the Ares 13 would accompany them and revert to automated protocols once Ichiro lost his connection. Reznik wasn’t sure what the bot was programmed to do, but Ichiro had assured him it would follow basic offensive and defensive commands.

  The robot waited by the truck. It had been able to keep up with the slow pace Reznik drove. He had kept the lights off and driven slowly not only to keep the noise down, but also to avoid tumbling off into one of the bottomless chasms.

  Reznik got back behind the wheel of the truck, and Rin climbed into the back to keep a lookout once again. She would alert him if she saw anything ahead as she had when she spotted the floodlights from the work site. He turned and picked a route that would safely circumvent the work site, leaving the lights off once again as the truck pulled away. The stillness of the night was broken by the crunching of the rocky terrain beneath the truck’s oversized tires and the occasional clang of the robot’s metal feet striking rocks as it followed.