“We need to get moving.”
Working his jaw as he stood, Mitchell tried to clear his ear canals, push the lingering pain out of his skull.
He blinked and shook his head. He noticed Cypher nearby, frozen stiff. As close to a human expression as a bot could get locked on its face. It looked almost like fear.
A few sparks sizzled from the sides of its mechanical jaw. He let his gaze drift beyond the sci-bot to see the others, stiff, rigid; sparks flying intermittently. The Warbot stood like an immobile sentry.
“What the hell did you just do?
“I told you not to bring them. You wouldn’t listen. Now, we have to move.”
“Hold on just a damn minute.”
Eden leaped off the tank onto the asphalt, retrieved the satchel from behind the rear track. “There’s no time.”
Mitchell stepped forward to challenge her on that, but cut the words off in his throat. There was movement in the distance. Lots of it. Hordes of bodies, staggering, stumbling, hobbling. He watched their outlines expand and gain definition. There must have been hundreds of them, moving at various paces, closing in from all directions. Except for the one they’d been heading in.
Younger uttered some profanity under his breath. Tyler was more vocal. “Holy shit! We got Zs, Lieutenant! One shitload of Zs heading our way!” The unnatural sounds of the walking rot reached Mitchell’s numbed ears as they rolled in like a distant tide. Wet, throaty noises, moans without breath. Like gas escaping a mass of waterlogged corpses.
Mitchell glanced at Eden, who was glaring at him with quiet, impatient eyes. He tried to figure out what it was about those eyes that was striking him now, realized it wasn’t what he saw, but what he didn’t see. Fear. She had none. He figured that must mean she knew what to do. He sure hoped so.
“Everyone follow Eden.” He glanced at Tyler and Younger, let the point sink in. “Do whatever she says. For now.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t forget for one second that I’m still in command here.”
She slung the satchel over her shoulder and said nothing. Mitchell watched her break into a run. Not a sprint, more like a jog, but he realized right off it would be hard to keep up with her. She was like a cat, lithe and fluid, springing forward off each stride with an effortless efficiency. He signaled to the others to get moving and surged after her.
The bots weren’t frozen dead in their tracks the way Mitchell had thought. As he drew close he saw them making slight movements, the micro-turn of a head here, a subtle flex of an arm piston there.
Tiny sparks and arcs of light flashed in their joints.
“What did you do to them?” Mitchell said, his voice raised and his breath labored.
“What I had to. Now stop asking questions. We must hurry.”
“I’m hurrying. Jeez.” He eyed the bots as he maneuvered through their ranks. He could sense them watching him back. The tension was tangible, and bothersome. They weren’t just watching, they were glaring.
Eden kept a pace just faster than the others could maintain, slowing periodically to allow them to close within a dozen yards or so. The road began to incline and they spent several hours entering the foothills, legs straining against gravity. Then the sun became a bright orange ball sinking into the rear horizon, and Eden abruptly stopped.
“We’ll camp here.”
Mitchell slowed as he approached and bent forward, hands on his knees. “Here? Now?”
“It’s not safe after dark. There are too many of them around, and without the ability to spot them from a distance, they’ll have the advantage.” She pointed past the side of the road. “That’s the only shelter around for miles.”
About a football field away Mitchell could make out a structure nestled between some trees, obscured by tall grass and vines.
Eden started in that direction. “You stay here. I’ll make sure it’s safe.”
“No.” Mitchell hooked a hand around her arm, stopping her. “I told you, I give the orders around here. Younger and Tyler can check it out.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“That’s not the point.” Mitchell gestured to Younger, who nodded back at him, then at Tyler. “You’re not armed. And I’m guessing you’re not indestructible, either. Besides, it’s not up for debate.”
“I suppose I’m expected to believe you are kind and noble now,” she said, smiling and shaking her head slightly. “Even after I’ve demonstrated my abilities. Men are such fools.”
She walked over to Tyler, touched his face, then made a casual gesture that Mitchell couldn’t quite understand. Like she were pointing with one arm at him and drawing the other across her chest.
Tyler looked to Mitchell and shrugged. The lieutenant held up a finger and then pointed toward the small building. Tyler nodded and then he and Younger made their way through the tall grass, Younger leading the way. Mitchell raised his rifle and watched as Younger approached the front. The structure looked to be a utility shack of some sort.
Tyler glanced back midway there. Mitchell held out a flat hand, pressed it down. He raised his chin and mouthed the words Be Careful with exaggerated lips.
A sudden breeze flowed through the grass, rustling the growth around the shack. Younger and Tyler stopped, watching. Then Younger tread through the rest of the undergrowth and reached the door. He made eye contact with Tyler, who raised his weapon to a ready-fire position. One nod, and he grabbed the door knob and yanked.
The bodies spilled out like worms, countless tiny arms clutching at air. Children, boys and girls, others so ratty and decayed they could be either, an impossible number of them, black faces and tattered clothing, squirming in a cascade through the doorway, angry and hungry and scrabbling. The first few fell flat to the ground as the ranks behind them burst through, climbing and trampling. To Mitchell, it was like watching a car full of midget circus clowns unload; far too many emerging than could possibly have been inside. Only in this case the clowns were five to ten years old, deathly and rotting, hissing and snapping their jaws in hunger.
“Holy shit!”
Shots slapped Mitchell’s ears as Tyler started firing. Younger jerked away from the grasping hands that reached for him, backpedaling, and stumbled in the grass. He landed on his ass and righted himself enough to raise his weapon and begin firing.
At least six descended upon him, all of them disappearing from view below the line of tall grass. Tyler bounded heavily toward him but was forced to stop and lay down some suppression fire as a swarm of Zs scurried toward him.
Mitchell ran forward until the grass slowed him down. He dropped to a knee and began to pick off heads one at a time, as fast as he could.
“Lieutenant!”
“Get out of there!”
“What about—?”
“He’s dead. Joining him won’t change that.”
Tyler held his ground for another moment, then started to reverse his field, firing in retreat. Once he reached the street, Mitchell sprang up and started to run, gesturing for Tyler to follow. Eden was waiting for them about a hundred yards up the road, arms crossed. One foot was pointed away, tapping the asphalt.
Before they were within a hundred feet, Mitchell had his rifle up, aimed squarely at the woman’s head.
“You have five seconds to give me an explanation. And it better be a good one.”
“I told you I’d check it out myself. If you were more concerned about being smart than looking masculine and being in control, that wouldn’t have happened.”
“You knew. You knew, and you let them walk into it.”
“It was a test. You failed.”
“Lieutenant!”
Before Mitchell could tighten the rifle butt against his shoulder, something hissed through the air and yanked it from his hands, almost jerking his arms from their sockets. He caught his balance and looked to see a woman atop a large rock catch it by the stock, the end of a long cord with two small weighted balls hanging from it.
Then more of them came into view, springing onto boulders, dropping in graceful somersaults from trees. Blonds, brunettes, a couple more redheads. At least eight of them. All young, all athletic.
Two of the women carried longbows. They were topless, except for an x of leather crossing their sternums. They each had a jagged scar where their right breast would normally be. Each had an arrow nocked and resting across the crest of the bow.
“What is this?”
“This,” Eden said, stepping forward, “is a new beginning. Or, for you, an after. Your kind corrupted this planet to the point of self-extermination. Then you tried to draw us into it, use our genes, our isolation, to save yourselves.”
Mitchell cast glances at the various women. “I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t. Ignorance is your race’s most invoked tool.”
He took a step forward. “Now wait just a God da—”
A searing heat scorched his back, cutting off his words. He dropped to his knees, arms contorting to reach the source of the pain. As the sting grew less hot and more acute, he realized the air had cracked with the snap of a whip.
“You see, this is how you failed. You are unable to accept the leadership, the authority, of a woman. You simply are not capable of obedience, just as you are incapable of many other things.”
She tilted her head toward Tyler. “Your compatriot, on the other hand, appears domesticable, as we had hoped. He will make an acceptable breeder. For now.”
Her shoe came into view beneath his head and he raised his face to look at her. One of the others tossed her a long curved blade that she snagged out of the air and positioned directly beneath his chin in one smooth motion.
Seconds passed. She regarded him with curious eyes.
Mitchell cleared his throat with a hard swallow. He felt the point of the knife dig into the flesh beneath his jaw.
“I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing, but I’m pretty sure if you were going to kill me, you’d have done it already.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Yes. You let the Zs take care of Younger. I’m guessing you didn’t actually touch Riley, either.” He allowed himself a smirk, though it didn’t come easy. “You don’t have the balls, do you, sister?”
“Arrogant till the end.” She wagged her chin slightly, smiling. “If you must know, we do not murder, as you would say, in cold blood. We only kill in battle. Or self-defense. It is part of our creed. A creed that the men like you, the ones who used their time vessel to try to snatch us from our paradise and use our pure blood to try to perfect a vaccine, did not comprehend. A dozen of us, barely pubescent girls, allowed ourselves to be taken, to see what was happening in your society, to better prepare ourselves if the upheaval should spill over. They tested their drugs, excited about how untainted our cells were, how receptive our immune systems. They thought they’d found a miracle, planned to drain us until they had enough serum. But they were arrogant, too. They did not realize we are the descendants of gods, that our blood was not like yours. What resulted in a temporary immunity for us merely slowed down the rate of infection in your kind, changing the conversion from mere seconds to an agonizing string of days. Fortunately, once we learned what we needed, our ‘captors’ were easily lured with overtures of sex, and even more easily overcome. We overtook the compound within hours of our first attempt. We kept one – a docile man with scientific and technical expertise.”
“And the rest?”
“We... let them go.”
“Let them go. You mean, left them for the Zs.”
Something like sadness seemed to tug at her lips as she cocked her head and appraised him. “You actually dare to judge me. Amazing. The capacity of men to delude is so vast, I often forget. Do you know what Riley included on those recordings? A confession. A confession to sitting back while he suspected what you were intending, to allowing you to murder the original occupants of that underwater facility, simply because they would not follow your demands to stop seeking out survivors. Even after they took you in. He wanted people to hear it, to come and be prepared to deal with you, arrest you, even. How did you do it? How did you keep the truth from the others? The truth Riley saw? Did you stage something to make it look like they killed themselves? Killed each other? Did you make it look like they just left?”
Mitchell started to respond, but decided against it. Instead of feeling defensive, he felt strangely vindicated. If they had merely listened to him, not only would he not have had to do it, but this situation would have never occurred. The irony almost made him smile. Riley was an idiot. He should have taken care of him, too.
“What do you want from me?”
She nodded in Tyler’s direction. “Not you.”
“Tyler? Why?”
“The recording on your bot was very informative. Your Riley was kind enough to have included personnel data that allowed us to access a variety of information from military records. The one you call Tyler would appear to have been gifted with a rare condition, based upon his family history. One passed along in males, necessarily. He is nine times more likely to father a female child than a male one. That makes him an ideal breeder for our purposes. His medical and family data are consistent with this. Dr Dayton confirmed this before we allowed him to go on his way, too.”
“Are you saying you sought us out, for Tyler?”
Eden didn’t respond. She looked him over with a mix of contempt and curiosity. No, he realized, not contempt. More like pity.
“There was no bot virus, was there? At least, not anything that you weren’t controlling. It was all an excuse to disable any bots we encountered, and to disable ours in the process. Because some of them were onto you.”
“Really, this is pointless. The answers you seek won’t change anything. It is time for us to part.”
Before Mitchell could respond, Eden shot a look at the archer, giving a nod and gesturing vaguely toward the ground. The woman cocked her bow, her breastless chest allowing her arm to slide close, and released an arrow in a ballistic arc. Mitchell could see it clearly, hear it sizzling through the air, but couldn’t react in time. The head punched into the bone beneath his ankle, the tip barely protruding through the other side.
He collapsed and swallowed a scream, grunting.
The women were already dispersing, moving efficiently into the spreading gloom of evening. Grimacing, Mitchell shot glances in every direction, searching for Tyler. Gone, not a trace left behind.
Eden tossed a look over her shoulder before disappearing into the shadow of a large fir. “Goodbye, Lieutenant. It is time for you to go your own way.”
And then he was by himself. But he could tell by the crunching and scraping from the road behind him that he was not alone.
* * *
The foamy water washed over his boots as he stood at the ocean’s edge, swaying. He felt it tug against the broken shaft of the arrow as it sucked back, but just barely. More of a sense than a sensation. He felt no pain, because pain was all there was.
The tide knocked him back repeatedly, the undertow letting him make slight progress, until he was buffeted into a rip current. His arms flailed uncertainly and he bobbed near the surface, indifferent to the loss of control. The flow dragged him away from shore.
Three days had passed. He’d fought hard, surprised himself at how many he’d dispatched, how long he’d held them off. But the arrow was too much of a handicap. The live-wire jolt every time he’d try to stand made it impossible. But still, he’d managed to crawl to a rock, use a branch to ward them off. Climb to a perch they couldn’t quit
e reach. Not with him kicking at their heads and stabbing their faces with the branch every time they’d get a foothold.
He’d finally jumped into the remaining group and killed them all, a stab to the eye, a stomp to the skull.
He felt something nibble at the gristly tissue on his calf. Again, just a sense, not a sensation. But something in his mind flashed. The feel of teeth clamping down as he climbed. The punch of the arrow penetrating his ankle.
The arrow. There was something about it he tried to remember. In an instant it came back to him. Dipped in the vaccine, he’d guessed. That’s why he’d survived the bites this long. It only slowed the onset of the virus in his kind, she’d said. This was what she’d intended. Why she hadn’t killed him. He thought about her wanting him to suffer. Why? What motivated someone to be that way? Cruelty? Hatred? Revenge?
American Nocturne Page 33