The door slammed shut. A tingle skittered across my body.
My fingers twitched.
I could move again.
What was happening?
I sat up, dizzied; I’d been motionless for so long, my muscles cramped from the sudden exertion. Sensations flooded back in: my bloody nose throbbed from Gumdrool’s rifle butt, my chest ached from where the spirocopter’s backwash had smashed me into a door, my stitches stung.
…stitches? The medtechs had sewn up my coral gashes. They’d also dressed me in a flimsy medical gown.
I clambered to my feet, clutching a rail for support, looking for something I could use to assault Gumdrool when he came back. I stood in a windowless hospital room roughly the size of a subway car. Equipment hung off every square inch of wallspace – medicine cabinets, EKG machines, spray-on disinfectants. The bed-slash-operating-table had been placed in the room’s center, presumably so soldiers could walk around it as they made their way up and down the monorail.
The IceBreaker rested in a tray nearby. I grabbed it, grateful to have my old tools back.
“Ah- ah- Amichai?”
Wickliffe looked down at me from a monitor. He wore a monocle now, squinching Wickliffe’s solemn expression into a mischievous half-wink.
“Guh-get to the back door,” Wickliffe told me. “I think-think-think you want to whuh- watch this.”
I staggered over to the oval door at the monorail’s rear. I’d never been on a monorail, but I knew how they worked from TV shows – you levered open one door, almost like an airlock, then stepped out onto a platform between cars.
Except the trailing car’s door was locked, trapping the guards inside. Gumdrool banged a rifle butt against the window, mad to escape. The rest of the LifeGuard looked on, puzzled, waiting for Gumdrool’s orders.
When Gumdrool saw me, he screamed red-faced threats – threats I couldn’t hear. I gave him a shy little wave.
He grabbed a bigger gun, blasted the door off its hinges. But by then, there had been a quite satisfying clack as Gumdrool’s segment of the monorail decoupled, then rolled to a stop.
The last I saw of Gumdrool was his guards holding him back as he tried to leap out after me.
“That dude is a total ass!- assmunch,” said Wickliffe.
“Now that’s a fine sight to see,” I muttered – and then stood, astonished, as the monorail pulled away further, revealing an endless canopy of vibrant green forests rolling underneath us at a hundred-miles-per-hour blur.
I’d never travelled this fast before. I’d never seen the wilderness up close. Void, I’d never even set foot outside of New York – and here I was up on an unsettlingly high rail, zooming towards an unknown location, on a monorail piloted by a glitchy Wickliffe.
“Who are you?” I asked. “What’s going on?”
“Nuh- nuh- no time for explanations, Amichai!” Wickliffe was as merry as a game show host. “We must es- es- escape before Wickliffe cuh- catches up with us. After all, we’re on a mmmonorail, it’s nnnnot like we can lose them. Gggget Dr Hsiang. We’re technozombies, Amichai; we neeeeeeed her brains!”
“Where are we going?”
“Boston.”
“There is no Boston. You killed Boston.”
“Nnnnot me,” he said sternly. “You huh- huh- have ffffriends there, Amichai, huh- hiding in the ruins. They have fuh- firepower aplenty, but lack knnnnowledge! If there’s a weakness in Wickliffe’s factories, it lies- lies!- lies within Duh- Doctor Hsiang’s brains. Shuh- she headed up the project. Shuh- she’s the k- key to our victory. If she dies, then Wwwwwickliffe wins.”
“You’re not Wickliffe?”
“Not these days.” He winked out – literally winked out, squinting one eye before the screen flickered into blackness.
The monorail shook, picking up speed. I grabbed at the walls for support; I’d never moved faster than a pony ride before. I couldn’t even see New York; we must have left the city behind.
I thumbed the “door open” button and clambered out onto the narrow platform between cars, watching the ground shoot by beneath my feet. One slip, and I’d die forever.
I hauled myself into the next car with gratitude; it was another medical car, the floor clotted with blood.
Dr Hsiang lay on a cot. Dare had done a number on her after she’d shot Peaches; her nose had been mashed into her eyes, her features stitched together with black thread. Worse, her chest bulged in ugly ways; she must have been hurled through the window when the plane crashed.
She breathed thanks to mechanical help, but her wax-white skin told me she hadn’t long to live.
I heard a clack, and looked down:
Dare was unplugging Dr Hsiang’s life support machines.
“Dare!” I yanked him back. He wriggled in my grasp.
“Dare, you can’t kill her. We need Dr Hsiang alive!”
“I know that.” He looked wounded. “I’m moving her to the front of the monorail. That crazy Wickliffe-thing told me to move Peaches first, but I… I couldn’t bear to look at her…”
The relief was so sudden, it stole my breath. “So Peaches is…?”
“Alive. But she’s in bad shape.” He knelt again, meticulously disconnecting Dr Hsiang’s rebreathers before plugging them into a battery – something I’d have noticed if I’d taken the time to look.
“…Dare, I am so sorry.”
“Peaches keeps making choices to bail you out,” Dare whispered. “I think you should take a good look at what those choices do, Amichai.”
I fled to the next car. I should have stayed with Dare and talked it through, explaining how I didn’t mean to hurt anyone…
Yet when I saw Dare, helping save the woman who’d shot his sister, I realized Dare knew a lot more about sacrifice than I did.
I made my way into the next car, and saw Peaches.
26: SOARING TOWARDS STURDIER HEAVENS
* * *
Watching Peaches’ cut-up body breathe was somehow worse than a corpse’s stillness. I held my own breath each time her chest rose, her lungs assisted by the ventilator. She was barely taking in oxygen; the last of her life could slip out at any moment.
Peaches had always worn short shirts tied tight under her breasts to show off her flat belly. That kissable stomach was now carved full of flaps, tubes, and wires. They’d strapped her to a metal backbrace; I could see the incisions curving back to where they’d operated on her spine.
I didn’t cry. Grief felt like the worst of indulgences. Instead, I knelt by her bed and started figuring out how to unhook the machines.
The far door hissed open.
Evangeline walked in, dressed in the same skimpy medical gown we all wore.
She jerked to a stop at the sight of Peaches, rattled. Which struck me as weird: she believed in an all-powerful skybeard who Shrived everyone up to Heaven. Blood sure as void hadn’t bothered her when she’d seen her dead friends back at the branch server. Why would this surgical recovery room get to her?
Evangeline unhooked a briefcase-sized battery from the wall. “I’m told this is the spare power. I’m unfamiliar with the rest of the technology.”
“It’s got diagrams. We can figure this out.” Of course, if I got it wrong then Peaches would die on the spot, but hey…
“Good.” Evangeline rose, squeezed her hands together, then headed for the doorway.
“Hey! A little help here?”
Her hand hesitated at the door switch, then she clutched her fists and nodded. “Of course.” She untangled the wires, crouching hip-by-hip with me as we leaned in to examine the connecting cables, keeping her eyes averted from Peaches.
“I’ll help get… Peaches… ready for transport,” she said. “Then I must go.”
“Like, go go?”
“One should walk not in the counsel of the wicked, and you’re… a sinful people. Though I’m… I had hoped to help you repent.” She shook her head; a lock of red hair dropped across a blushing cheek.
�
��Where will you go? I mean, your parents, they’re…”
“Dead,” Evangeline finished. “As is my clan. I must admit, Amichai, I don’t have good options. I’ve heard rumors of NeoChristian enclaves in the Appalachians. I could try to make my way back to them, I suppose, but they’re hard to track down – and even if I found them, they might not welcome me.” She drew in a breath through her nose, steeling herself. “I’ve made do with worse.”
“So stay.” I grabbed her. “We need all the help we can get.”
“No, Amichai!” She slapped me away – then sighed. “It’s not… I’m honored, Amichai. You have a great heart for an unbeliever. But…” She glanced at Peaches, tormented. “You love her.”
“What?”
Her green eyes went wide. “I never would have kissed you if I’d known you had a lover, Amichai. Intent was sin enough. I shouldn’t have–”
“…Amichai?”
Peaches gurgled around the plastic tube in her throat. I leapt to my feet to comfort Peaches, trying to ignore Evangeline’s stricken look.
“It’s OK, Peaches.” I tried to sound confident. “We’re getting you to safety.”
She clutched my hand, her grip even weaker than Izzy’s. “Did we… did we get the word out?”
“…now’s not the time to talk about that…”
“No.” Peaches struggled to get up, arms flailing; her legs remained motionless. “The living are depending on us…”
“We have to get you somewhere safe.”
“No.” Even in an anesthetic daze, Peaches’ will was strong as titanium. “We have to stop Wickliffe.”
The monorail jerked to a stop.
“What’s happening?” Peaches tugged the intubator out. The monitors on the wall flickered on, showing the monocled Wickliffe, dressed in a conductor’s uniform.
“Luh-luh-last stop!” he cried. “Yyyyyour ride has arrived. Tuh-tuh-to the front of the monorail, children!”
Dare pushed Dr Hsiang’s bed in, and the three of us pushed the beds up into a cargo railcar.
A high wind poured through the wide door on the railcar’s side, where the ponies would normally be led up to unload whatever cargo the monorails had delivered. Except we hadn’t stopped at a platform; the monorail had halted between stations, motionless yards above the forest floor.
A spirocopter, festooned with crudely painted crosses, hovered outside the cargo door. Its jets kicked up a miniature hurricane as automated computer controls kept it locked into position next to the entryway.
A group of sour-looking women wearing long woolen shirts loaded crates into the copter’s holding bay. Their shirts flapped madly in the copter’s breeze. They had machine guns slung over their backs, glaring balefully at us with the hard look of women ready to kill – which made sense when I saw the blue marks of inked crosses tattooed across their necks and foreheads.
“NeoChristians?” Dare spluttered.
“Yyyyyou’re luh-lucky you kids led a rescue effort to suh-save them at the buh-branch server,” the Wickliffe-conductor said. “Uh-uh-otherwise they’d have let you rot.”
“NeoChristians have spirocopters?” Peaches asked.
“You think we ride horses?” Evangeline stood straighter in her brethren’s presence. “We use computers, weapons, programs – same as you. The difference is, we don’t pretend programs are people.” She thumped her cross tattoo. “And we don’t worship them.”
“No one worships Wickliffe,” Dare shot back.
“No. You just elect a piece of code to serve as your leader.”
Dare spat out an argument – but the NeoChristians ignored him, wheeled Peaches and Dr Hsiang up a ramp into the spirocopter’s belly, then shoved the rest of us in at gunpoint. The copter was covered in a shifting camouflage green, the sides blurring with color as its illusion-engines mirrored the treetops below.
The copter eased back a bit once we were all on board, putting some distance between itself and the railway as its pilot waited for orders.
“Burn it,” a leathery, white-haired woman said.
“Huh-huh-hey!” Wickliffe spoke from a computer tablet, urging Dare to lift the screen into view. “There’s no nuh-need to duh-destroy the monorail… tuh-technology is guh-getting harder to replace…”
“Need? No.” The old woman grinned; each of her yellowed teeth had tiny crosses engraved into the surface, like scrimshaw. “Still. Explosions bring us closer to God.”
The NeoChristians whooped as the spirocopter lurched away, arcing up over the vast forest. Someone offered the old woman a red button; she stabbed it gleefully. The monorail detonated in a thunderclap, the long curve of the rail collapsing, the burning cars tumbling down.
“Explosions also remove evidence,” the old woman said. “They discourage pursuit. All sorts of benefits in explosions, really.”
“Thuh-that was gratuitous!” Wickliffe said. Dare looked miserable, blindly pushing Wickliffe’s tablet towards the NeoChristians. “Thuh-they wouldn’t have fuh-found you! Ah-ah-I’m shielding you! Thuh-that’s why I got you the spirocopter!”
“The program expects gratitude?” The old woman snatched the tablet away.
“I eh-eh-expect you to act ruh-rationally! Thuh-thuh-that explosion almost damaged the copter! Huh-how will you bring our mutual friends to Boston in-in!-in a downed ship?”
The old woman tapped her etched teeth contemplatively with the tablet. “Ah. Then you will really not like what I have to tell you next.”
“Wwwhat’s that?”
“We don’t obey machines who pretend to be people.”
She Frisbeed the tablet out the door. It tumbled forwards the fir trees hundreds of feet below.
“No!” I yelled. “That – Wickliffe – thing – is right! We need to get Dr Hsiang to Boston! We need–”
My words dried in my throat as the NeoChristians leaned in to listen to me. I wore nothing but a flapping gown over my scrawny ass. They could fling me out the door after the tablet, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
The old woman pulled my gown aside to press her fingertips to my throat, touching the bare flesh where every NeoChristian got their first cross tattoo.
“We must discover what your soul is made of,” she whispered. “Everything else can wait.”
27: BOUND BY RELIGION AND LUST
* * *
As prisons go, the NeoChristian enclave was top notch. They didn’t lock us in a room; they let us wander in the woods around their compound.
Hey, if the city kids wanted to run into the forest and die of exposure, they’d let us.
I wanted to kidnap Dr Hsiang to Boston. Boston was a slim lead – a rumor, given to me by a possibly insane program that wore Wickliffe’s face – but if there was someone who could stop this “brainwash the living” plan, we needed to get Dr Hsiang there soon before she breathed her last.
The NeoChristians seemed to understand our urgency, meeting it with kindness. The compound was more like a caravan than a permanent outpost. Each of the fifteen NeoChristian families had their own transport methods – mostly stolen spirocopters and hovercrafts, but a few had offroad dirtbikes. They’d built a temporary city in the forest, convening so their pastors could determine how best to judge Peaches, Dare, and me.
The compound bustled with activity, everyone pitching in to help. They’d strung camo net over the trees so the satellites wouldn’t spot them. Nobody rested from sunup to nightfall; people tended the fires, tuned spirocopters, taught krav maga classes, cleaned carcasses, gave lessons in stitching wounds.
And guns, guns galore – people fieldstripping them, testfiring them into targets, picking off squirrels, debating the merits of various models.
But more importantly, there were rehabilitation lessons. Lots of the NeoChristians were missing limbs, had been half-blinded by shrapnel; a few pushed themselves around in wheelchairs. The sight was baffling. You didn’t see injured people in New York, mainly because any wound that affected your productiv
ity gave you a free ticket to the Upterlife. But here, the injured sought out the injured – trading coping techniques, building elaborate mechanisms to help them get around better, consoling and strengthening.
All the while, drones buzzed by overhead, sweeping the woods – but we had a million trees to hide under.
A small group held vigil outside the medical tent they’d built for Dr Hsiang and Peaches, where NeoChristian physicians tried to repair the damage to Peaches’ spine.
The NeoChristians cried to the Lord to save these sinners, taking shifts to pray.
I remembered the New York doctor treating Izzy with all the compassion a mechanic showed a stuck valve. Why bother treating her pain? She’d be OK when she died, so who cared?
Whereas for the NeoChristians, crazy as they were, there was something at stake here. If Peaches died, she’d go to Hell.
These were the same NeoChristians who wanted to kill everyone in the Upterlife.
I pondered that, and my head spun; the NeoChristians could kill a man one moment and weep for him the next, and void knew how to judge someone like that.
Maybe they were evil when they hurt you and good when they helped you. Yet that felt too relative. Because Wickliffe, with all his angst, seemed to feel he was doing the right thing, too. And here I was, standing among people who’d had no problems planting bombs to kill people like me, and if there was a clear morality to any of this then I was lost as surely as if I’d walked out into those deep woods.
I needed to get away.
Dare dozed on the other side of the surgical tent. The portable operating room was just wide enough for two doctors to work on a single patient. The tent’s whoosh of filtered air sounded like lungs. If you tuned out the prayer susurrations, you could make out surgeons muttering their strategies to fix Peaches’ spine.
If anyone could, it was the NeoChristians. Always on the run, they had no time for leisurely recuperations. It was rumored the NeoChristians had miracle techniques to get people up and walking in days.
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