“Think we should go the other way?” Valor asked, her eyes wide as saucers. She was brave, but there was a lot to be said for not entering the hunting ground of an unseen killer.
A hiss came from overhead, and I flicked my eyes—and the light—upward at the shape uncoiling from a bent column of Memrock.
“I think it’s a bit late for that now,” I said, firing my shotgun twice without hesitation. Ichor rained down as a long shape streaked toward us. My blades were out and moving before the creature could touch the floor, and my enhanced sight began to process what I was seeing.
There were monsters in the Empty, and then there was whatever descended toward us with murderous speed. It was ten meters of lithe serpent, but there were dozens—hell, there might have been hundreds of legs, each ending in a pad that glistened with some kind of gelatinous ooze. It was clinging to the column with an array of its sucker feet, the rest waving at me as a mouth like a chainsaw came directly for my head. There were circular rows of teeth that looked like a garbage disposal, and in a flash I knew how the bones had come to be ground up into pieces.
I also knew the sonofabitch was going to die.
I leaped up to meet the falling mouth, both blades darting forward with lethal speed. Before my steel could touch the creature, it showed me a new trick as six of the front legs telescoped forward with repulsive clicking sounds, the joints cracking as droplets of fluid rained down on my head. The legs shot past my shoulders, grabbed me, and began drawing me up toward the mouth as even more legs began to join the party. I hacked and slashed like a madman, severing leg after leg, but there was always a replacement ready to lock onto my body and pull me inevitably forward.
Valor had a pistol in her hand, firing in a calm, cool wham wham wham until she clocked on ammo, then she reloaded in seconds and began firing again. Her work had little effect on the monster, which was down about twenty legs and bleeding freely, but without any hint that it was going to break free of its hanging place and drop to the floor.
If the bastard wouldn’t put me down, then I would go up.
I wriggled and punched and fought like a wild animal to get free and ascend the creature’s longer legs, finally plunging my blades into the massive shoulder muscles above its head. The eyes were flat discs of moist gray, so I stabbed at both for good measure as I scrambled past the whirling mouth to climb, spider-like, on the dangling beast and begin jabbing at it like a sewing machine gone wild. I cut and slashed and ripped gobbets of flesh from the thing’s long body, feeling it begin to weaken as the tail—also covered in suckers of some kind—finally began to slip.
With a hiss, it let go of the Memrock and we spilled to the floor in a gooey tumble. Valor didn’t hesitate—she struck forward with a wicked short sword, her blade cleaving open a section of its softer underside, revealing mysterious organs that pulsed and twisted when my light passed over them. There were shapes inside the body—victims, no doubt, being digested slowly in the meters-long horror of its gut. Valor plunged her blade in again and again, and I did the same, finally getting a blade inside the mouth and wedging the steel back like a can opener.
I pulled.
The head split apart slowly at first, gaining steam as I added my second hand and began levering my feet against one of the muscle clumps behind the shoulder. Inch by inch, I butchered the monster until I hit a nerve nexus and the entire body twitched once and fell stone dead, but not before it vomited a torrent of undigested animal parts all over the ground before me.
“Jesus,” I said into the sudden stillness.
“Is that like ‘fuck me, that’s gross?’” Valor asked.
“Sort of. And yes. It is.” I stared at the steaming carcass and stepped away from it with a look of revulsion. “Even for this place, that’s quite a beast.”
“Never seen anything like it,” Valor said. “Not sure I want to again.”
“Same here. Do you think it had anything to do with this place coming down, or was it a later addition?” I asked.
She looked away then shrugged. “It looks like the kind of thing the virus would create.”
“Yeah. Agreed.” I flicked ichor off my blades and slid them in their scabbards. “That reminds me. Looks like we’re going up the building, right?”
“The floor numbers get higher, yes,” she offered in a neutral tone.
“So let’s go the other way. I don’t think we should be looking high in the air for a cause of collapse. If there’s anything to be found, it would be at the base, or even a basement, for that matter,” I said.
“I don’t know, but—what if there are more of these things?” Valor asked.
I flexed my arms then cracked my neck. “I’m not tired yet.”
We started in the other direction, which I now thought of as down. There was evidence of other predators, but nothing like what we’d just killed, and after fifteen minutes, we entered an area where water had seeped in from the outside, accelerating the decay of the building interior. There were mosses and lichens among the opportunistic vines muscling in from outside, and it was apparent that the ruin had never been looted. In fact, it looked like the building had fallen over, been covered, and then forgotten in the span of a single day. An eerie completeness to the scene— lunch trays, computer cases, even a few oddly designed bicycles—all were elements of a place that had been permanently sealed from human influence for who knew how long.
“Like it collapsed and everyone stayed away,” I said. “Was it biological? Radiation?”
Valor said nothing as we progressed through a landscape of forgotten history, one floor at a time. One thing was missing on the next few floors: skeletons There were none, which told me that animals had a way in regardless of what humans thought about the place.
“No people,” I remarked.
“No bones outside, either. I’ve never seen skeletons in the land around this place, and believe me, I would know,” Valor said. “My wolves would know, too.”
“So where is everyone? And aren’t there more of these buildings? And more victims?”
“Everything is so . . . complete,” Valor said, picking up a cup. It rested in the dust next to a tray—a cafeteria. Like a corporate dining hall, I thought. She dropped the cup and it rolled away, undamaged.
“Nice to know that even the apocalypse can’t stop corporate America,” I said, moving a stack of faded papers with my foot. As we went down the building, there was less chaos and a more complete sense to each floor. After two solid hours of picking our way, I was nearly out of patience and adrenaline.
“This is different,” I said. We were in a floor that had no furnishings or debris to speak of, and then I saw massive cylinders, split and open to the air. Water reservoirs. “Follow me,” I said, slipping past the first water tank and moving across the space.
“What do you see?” Valor asked.
“What I expected,” I said, touching another large cylinder, but different in design. It wasn’t damaged beyond being torn from its mounts by the fall of the buildings, and thick cables ran to a relay station nearby. “Power. They generated power for the building here, and had a water source, too. I’m thinking this was more than a simple office space. This was the next version of living for people who were seeing the virus take their world apart, and that means we’re missing the two most important things.”
“The people?” Valor asked. “I don’t think they made it. Or they left.”
I shook my head. “Not them, but it would be nice to know where they went, if only to see how much of humanity survived this second calamity. No, I think people who were prepared enough to have water and power would also have weapons.”
“Ahh,” Valor said, her eyes bright as she took in the massive space. “Good point. And if the size of their armory follows this, then it would be a considerable number of guns. Or something. Can’t imagine these people using bows or spears, but you never know. Things were weird after the main world fell apart. Lots of mixed tech. What’s the second
thing?”
I tapped the power station, earning a dull ringing noise, then continued to search. “How the building fell. Why the building fell. And, if I’m being careful, who did it, because just like the virus, bad things don’t ever really go away. They just wait.”
We found a set of stairs, and a cloud of bats exploded upward in a shrieking, chittering mass. After their deafening noise faded, I waved Valor to follow me, walking along the side of the steps like we were in a strange two-dimensional drawing. The perspective was off, but gravity still pulled in the same way it always had, so following the passage sideways—down—was easy, if unsettling to my senses. For the first time since entering the building, I smelled moisture, and there were patches of damp on the walls, with huge cave crickets crawling about, their legs cocked like weapons, ready to jumpy away when my light flashed over them. I saw a hint of green—some kind of moss—and then we were on a floor that was quite different from everything above.
“This is where it happened,” I said without thinking.
“What makes you—oh. Okay, did not expect that,” Valor said, staring into the darkness.
There was a hole in the wall. Actually, there were two, then I saw a second pair that made four, a hole in each sub-basement wall, nearly five meters across, smooth, and cut cleanly as if in a surgical procedure. Spidering out from each hole were massive cracks, and then the structure of the building began to come apart. No amount of healing by the Memrock could have fixed the holes I saw, each opening with smooth edges and a sense of purpose.
“This was intentional,” I said.
“Four walls, four holes. Intentional or thorough,” Valor said.
“And enough to bring the building down without a problem. Something went to a lot of trouble to make that happen.” I stepped carefully to the edge of a hole, touching the smooth rim. No texture, no grit, nothing. Just a cut, with no hint about what did it or why.
I sniffed, I prodded, and I kicked at a jumble of tiny rocks dislodged from the tunnel, but there was nothing unusual about it at all—other than the fact it existed. Absently drinking water, I pointed my light deeper into the tunnel, then shrugged. “Feel like going into the mysterious tunnel of doom with me?” I asked Valor with a grin.
“Weirdest proposition ever, but I accept. You know, there are perfectly romantic places up top that aren’t surrounded by screaming snake monsters and their victims. I feel like I should mention that to you just in case you’ve forgotten,” Valor said, She let her fingers trail down my forearm, and it was a gesture charged with the memory of things that I very much wanted to happen again.
Above us, there were great stains on the wall in a pattern I knew well. Blood, but there was no logical reason for it to be here after so long a time. I expected insects, water, and the environment to remove something like a loop of blood, so the scene triggered a suspicion in me that needed answers. I slipped the ‘bot detector out of my pocket and held it up, watching the lights pulse softly as the device warmed to its task.
“Somebody died badly here,” Valor said. “Look.” There were scratch marks on the wall from impacts of something metallic, the bright scars undimmed by the years. “Must not be Memrock. Just stone or concrete down here.”
“I’m no structural engineer, but I’m betting someone made a last stand here. And lost, obviously, but—” I said as the device chimed softly and the blue light pulsed.
“What’s that thing?” Valor asked.
I turned to answer, and when the detector pointed at her it chimed again. Interesting. “Blood. Human blood, that is—the machine detects it. It’s old tech, but useful in its own way. Let’s me know where people have been fighting, since the entire desert is basically a war zone. It doesn’t do me any good to waste time on brawls between predators. At least no fights that don’t involved humans,” I said, carefully avoiding Valor’s eyes. She was far too perceptive to be lied to with any ease, and if we had more physical contact, I suspected she would be able to know everything about me, whether I chose to reveal it or not.
I formed some question for when we got into the light again, and dropped a pin on my communicator so that we would know to circle back someday. There was a lot to see underneath the ground, and I hoped we would have enough time. Everything always came back to time and work, and I shook my head grimly as we ascended into the light and air above. We’d found another crack, wide enough for humans and emerging into the desert some hundred meters from our original entry. Standing there in the sun, I blinked hard as my eyes adjusted to the glare.
“Never thought I’d be glad to breath hot, dusty air, but I am,” I said.
“Air without a thousand legs and a mouth, too. That was—I thought I was the ultimate badass. Turns out that a millipede from hell isn’t to my liking,” Valor said with a laugh. The wolves came loping up, leaning forward for scratches, then sniffing Valor to make sure she was alright. Satisfied that she was unharmed, they faced out and began staring at the horizon with an inscrutable expression. “I guess they think I’m okay.”
“Glad to hear it. It’s time for a chat with my people. I need to update them on what we’ve found,” I said tapping my communicator. “I need Aristine.”
“One moment, transferring,” came a male voice. A Daymare from the Chain.
“Thanks.” I waited in companionable silence with Valor, who was examining a wolf ear with intensity. She plucked something, glared at it, and threw it away, wiping her hands with disgust. It gave me some comfort to know that there were mundane things like ticks still in the world, even though they were repulsive. At least they couldn’t swallow me whole, but then, there was a lot of world left to explore.
“Jack? Where are you? Don’t answer that—I know where you are, but we got a weird signal on you for the past three hours or so,” Aristine said. She didn’t sound worried, just interested. The two moods were similar for someone with her skills and responsibility.
“I was in a collapsed building, at least fifty stories tall or more when standing, and there’s a material called Memrock as one of the main components. Ever heard of it?” I asked.
“Sure. We toyed with it, but it’s too malleable for our purposes. Gives when it should hold, even though the self-correcting nature is a nice effect. Think it was impacting our ability to contact and track you?” Aristine asked.
“I’ve been underground before without any issues of being reached, and that was the only new element that I could see. Well, that and a centipede with a food processor for a mouth, but that’s nothing new. It’s dead—took some killing, but I had help. Valor’s good with a knife, and I haven’t even seen what her wolves can do but I suspect it’s a thing of beauty.”
Valor grinned, and the wolves perked up, aware I was speaking of them.
“There are massive unexplored spaces and resources here,” I continued, “and the interior is stable enough to go in for long-term exploration. The problem is what brought the building down, and something else. I found blood and bone inside.”
“Blood? Fresh, I assume?” Aristine asked.
“No, old, and not just blood. Nanobots, and no sign of where they came from. At least not an obvious one,” I said.
“Why are you worried about what brought the building down?” Aristine asked. “Should I get Andi on this call?”
“Not a bad idea, but better for a meeting. I took plenty of pics, and I’d rather we all have input on this. Something isn’t right, and it’s not just war or decay. I’ll head back in a half day and we’ll meet at the firepit. I want all hands on deck for this one, because I have my suspicions that the Procurators are involved in whatever ended this place, but I don’t know how,” I said,
“Four days at most,” Valor said.
“Four days? I don’t have time for—” I began, but she pointed north.
“You’ve followed me this far. Let’s go get the thing that killed my king. Remember, Jack?” Valor asked, her face open and trusting.
“Change of plan
. I’m going north to find a dead Proc. Give me drones twice daily, radio checks at sunup and sunset if you don’t hear from me first,” I said into my comm.
Aristine was quiet for a moment, then I heard a pen tapping on the desk where she was working. “Jack, if you can get this Proc—I mean secure it—bring it home.”
“Sure. Whole or in parts?” I asked with what I hoped was a casual air.
“Either way. Fit the fucker into a basket if you want, it’s up to you. But bring it home, where we can find out what makes them tick. After all you’ve told me, I’m not convinced they’re human, and that means we can’t fight them as such,” Aristine said.
“I agree. Whole or in parts, this Proc is coming to you. I’ll see you soon.”
“You do that, or I’ll never forgive you. Chain out.”
15
We struck north again with two drones above us instead of one. Aristine argued that our location was growing increasingly uncertain, and that meant I needed a redundant system in place in case things went to shit. Since both Condors were armed, I wasn’t as concerned about a herd of animals trampling us to death, though that was still a possibility given the variety of animals and tracks all around us.
I shot a wounded deer, butchered it, and shared the kill with both Valor and her wolves, who looked on in amused silence as I set up a small fire to cook.
“I take it they don’t approve of cooking their dinner?” I asked, assembling kindling inside a small depression of rocks. It wasn’t nearly as dry as the Empty, but we were in country where a fire could go a long way if left untended. It was better to be safe than caught by a firestorm of my own making.
Future Reborn Box Set Page 84