Downfall: The Deadlander Series (Book 1)

by Colin Sims

  Shell-shocked, I followed her as we ran for Oldstown’s front gate. We made our way through the screaming crowd of settlers, who were still being kept at bay by the remaining soldiers.

  We were only fifty feet from the gate when one of the massive armored vehicles came to a grinding halt in front of us. I saw Samireh reach for a throwing star, but when the door swung open it was the Russian.

  “Get in!” he shouted to us. “The Droids will reactivate in four minutes!”

  I glanced at Samireh who didn’t look like she had any intention of doing what he said. I could tell she was only a millisecond away from telling the guy to get lost, but instead, something unexpected happened.

  The world went into slow motion again, and I looked down. There had been guns firing ever since Samireh broke free, so this particular shot didn’t stand out. Only the fact that the bullet from this one had gone straight through my back and out my chest made it any different.

  I couldn’t quite believe what I was looking at. I put my hand to the wound and took it away, covered in blood.

  I looked at Samireh and dropped to my knees.

  She caught me and started shouting something. I was too distracted to hear.

  Then I was in the cargo bay of the truck. The vehicle was going in reverse, then there was an abrupt stop, and then it shot forward, crashing through Oldstown’s front gate.

  Samireh was hovering over me, her face pure panic. She ripped up some cloth to wipe away the growing pool of blood on my chest. The truck was bouncing all over the place as it gunned forward at full speed.

  My vision was getting blurry and there was a constant ringing in my ears.

  “There’s something in there!” I heard Samireh yell toward the driver.

  “The bullet went straight through!” a Russian voice shouted back.

  “No, I can’t get—!” she dug her finger into the wound, shocking me back to reality. I gasped and convulsed, yet she pushed me back down, keeping me flat.

  “Fuck!” she cried. “It’s killing him! What the hell is it?!”

  I didn’t know. Was she talking about the bullet? I couldn’t think straight anymore …

  Then I heard her yell, “SCREW IT!” and her hand went flat against my chest and I felt a sickening lurch as something ripped away from my ribcage.

  The last thing I saw was Samireh, wide-eyed, holding up some sort of tiny electrical device covered in my blood. With a dazed “Huh,” I looked from the device to her eyes and blacked out.

  Chapter 10

  When I woke up it was dusk. I tried to sit up, but a lightning flash of pain dissuaded me from trying any further. I fell flat on my back and looked around. I was still inside the cargo bay of the armored vehicle. Its large rear hatch was open, letting in what was left of the sun’s rays. To my right, there was an IV bag, dripping plasma down a tube running into my arm.

  Smacking my lips, I spotted some water. The second I reached for it, I froze. A Droid. Its shadow cast over my legs as it looked directly at me. A second later, Samireh appeared beside it, grinning like a ten-year-old as she hopped into the cargo bay beside me.

  “You’re totally up, that’s crazy,” she told me, checking my forehead. “And no fever or anything. Man, I’m good. Sorry about Janice, by the way,”—she nodded toward the Droid—“that’s what I named her. It works, right?”

  As I stared at her, a million questions shot through my head, including Why is there a Droid here? and How am I not dead? but instead, I asked, “It’s a she?”

  Samireh frowned defensively. “Of course she’s a she. Why wouldn’t she be?” She then turned to the Droid and added, “Don’t listen to him, Janice. You’re very pretty.”

  She looked back at me and smiled. “So that was nuts, right? I mean, I cut a Droid in half—I’ve never done that before—and you got shot in the chest, we made friends with a Russian, and oh yeah, you met Billy Lee. I’m going to kill him one day, but only when it’s a fair fight. So anyway, how are you feeling?”

  I glanced at the Droid for a second then collapsed on my back. “How’d you come up with ‘Janice’?” I asked with a smile.

  Samireh grinned back. “You’re still on that? I would’ve figured you’d be like ‘whoa, I got shot in the chest last night! And how, Samireh, did you manage to become so brilliant and figure out how to stop the bleeding and everything?’ I figured you’d be saying something like that …”

  “How did you stop the bleeding?”

  “I just used some bandages,” she replied. “But that’s not the point. The point is I handled that shit like a badass.”

  I chuckled for a second, which really hurt, then looked at Samireh seriously. “Let me try to ask one question at a time. Why is there a Droid here?”

  “Janice,” she replied.

  “Okay, Janice. How’d she get here?”

  Samireh shook her head at Janice for a moment then looked at me. “She was in the truck when we left. I guess she was like a spare or something. Yuri—who, before you ask, is out keeping watch—is like some kind of Russian whiz with computers, and he was able to hijack Janice’s software. Now she’ll only respond to our commands, or at least, to mine and Yuri’s. You have to be nice to her first, then she’ll learn your voice.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. “Number two: What the hell happened back in Oldstown? And who was that psycho Billy Lee? How do you know him?”

  Samireh smiled again. “That was three questions. And how come you always think I know everything? I mean, I do, but still …”

  “Well, who was he?” I asked.

  “He’s an agent for New America,” she answered, stepping back to sit on the cargo bay’s side bench. “A very bad guy, as you probably noticed. Watkins apparently ratted us out to the nearest NAM outpost, and Billy Lee Fuckface was the guy they sent. And I can’t believe that Watkins! How could he be so stupid? I actually liked that old guy.”

  “I don’t know,” I said to her, reaching back for the water. “When we saw him, he looked pretty scared. Like he didn’t have a choice.”

  Samireh waved her hand. “Yeah well, scared or not, he should’ve known better.” She then stepped forward to examine the bandages and took the water once I was done. “Now I have a question for you,” she told me, taking a knee at my side. “What in the world is this?” She held up a small, silvery piece of metal that looked like a microchip with a pair of wires sticking out.

  I starred at it for a second as I had a quick flashback to the previous night. Seeing it made my stomach turn, especially when I remembered the sight of it—covered in my blood—in Samireh’s hands. And her question was even scarier: What the hell was it?

  “Where did it come from?” I asked her.

  She glanced between the microchip and my chest. “Well … it sort of came from you,” she said to me. “When you got shot, the bullet went straight through—somehow missing any organs—and then when we were driving off, I noticed this little thing sparking inside your chest like it was damaged, so I managed to dig it out.”

  Samireh digging it out wasn’t quite what I remembered, but I figured I’d keep silent on that for the moment. I was a lot more worried about why there had been a microchip in my chest. Every who-what-when-where-why question in the universe seemed to be zipping through my head all at once. Yet still, all I managed to say was, “There’s no way that thing came out of my chest.”

  Samireh shrugged. “Well, it did. You think it’s Clicker tech, maybe? Seriously, how crazy would that be? And yes—I know that the flash drive thingy is still back in Oldstown.”

  I shot upright like I’d been lying on a spring. I’d completely forgotten about it. “Shit, we have to—”

  “Easy.” Samireh stopped me from getting up, and then added gently, “You gotta take it easy. I know it sucks that we left it there, but we’ll figure something out. Besides, are sure you even want it back? As long as you have it, guys like Billy Lee are going to come looking for it.”

  I lay back down with h
er help, wincing as I coughed from the sudden movement. The pain in my chest was bad, but truth be told, it wasn’t nearly as bad as it should have been. I’d been shot only a matter of hours ago, and yet I was still able to talk and move without too much trouble. It was strange.

  “I need to get it,” I told Samireh, looking up at her as seriously as I could. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m starting to think it might have had something to do with Boise getting attacked.”

  Samireh looked at me quizzically. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling,” I said. “But it seems weird that that guy Billy Lee is with New America, and the morning of the attack, there was a New American delegation meeting with my parents.”

  “How come your parents?” Samireh asked.

  I paused for a second. It suddenly occurred to me that I’d never really told her anything about myself. Not my parents, Alec, nothing. Likewise, I didn’t really know much about her either.

  “My mom was actually the President,” I told her. “And my dad was like the head tech guy.”

  Samireh leaned back with an arched eyebrow. “Wow,” she said, letting the word hang for a moment. “So you’re like royalty or something?”

  I painfully looked down at the mess of bandages on my chest. “Not anymore,” I replied darkly. “Now I’m just a guy with a hole in his chest in the middle of nowhere, and oh yeah, not a single friend or family left in the world.”

  Samireh stayed silent for a minute, looking down at her hands. I instantly felt bad for being so dark with her. She’d saved my life more times than I could count in the past day alone, and somehow, my tone came off as blatantly ungrateful. I looked up at her, wanting to say something, but she looked like she was deep in thought. Her eyes were more serious than they had been a moment ago, too. Sad, even. She looked up and quietly asked, “You saw it all, didn’t you? Your parents getting killed?”

  I nodded.

  And for the first time since I’d met Samireh, I actually let my eyes well up a little in front of her. Maybe it had something to do with getting shot or maybe it was something else. Either way, I couldn’t stop it. Just thinking of my parents brought me back to that white hallway, and that door swinging open and that flood of black rushing toward me. I closed my eyes and focused on pushing it back. When I reopened them, Samireh was still staring at me, as if she knew exactly what I’d just been doing. She put her hand on my shoulder. “We have something in common, you know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You asked me how I knew Billy Lee.” She looked away a moment. “I’ve known him since I was seven. And even now, he’s the biggest memory I have.”

  I looked at her, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “He killed my mom and dad,” she replied. “I saw the whole thing.”

  ***

  An hour later it was dark. I’d learned that the armored vehicle, which Samireh called a “Cougar,” was actually parked inside the mouth of another Clicker tunnel, keeping it hidden from view. Yuri had come back, and I was shocked at how young he looked. With his short stature and pudgy baby face, he looked severely out of place in a military uniform. And yet when I asked him how old he was, he merely shrugged and said, “I am sixteen. But in Russian years, this is like thirty-five.”

  I also learned that he was indeed some kind of tech genius, and that he’d only shipped out to what he called the New American Territories two weeks ago. Apparently, he’d been sent from the Rostek Corporation to perform upkeep on the Droids. “But also,” he told me with a grin, “I am spy.”

  “Spying on who?” I asked him, spooning out the mushy contents of an MRE Samireh had found in the truck. There was a whole stash of them, enough for several days. Plus water.

  Yuri didn’t hesitate a second to boast, “The N.A. government. They are doing something suspect with Rostek Droids. It is Yuri’s job to find out what.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, taking another huge bite. It felt good to be getting my appetite back, yet also a little weird that it was coming back so quickly.

  “Rostek Droids,” he explained, “are designed with many fail-safes. This way, no one uses them against Russian Empire. They will obey commands of owners, but not all commands. I believe N.A. is trying to hack these fail-safes. Why, I do not know. Even with Droids, Russian Empire would crush them.”

  From what I knew about the R.E., he was right. It operated the world’s sole remaining navy, not to mention a large battery of nuclear weapons. Plus, however many Droids New America had, the Russian Empire would have twenty times as many.

  “So is that what you did with this Droid?” I asked Yuri, nodding toward Janice. “You hacked its software?”

  He smiled. “Something like this,” he told me wryly. “Yuri is the greatest hacker in the world, but to explain what I do, this requires the Russian language.”

  I chuckled. “I’d say your English is pretty good,” I told him. “You barely have an accent.”

  Yuri leaned back with his hands behind his head. “Funny you say this,” he said, grinning. “You see, my teachers were from New America, but my student advisors were Russian. This is what makes the difference.”

  I looked at him for a second, confused. “I don’t get it. Your student advisors?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Any mistakes, including accent, were met with a strong fist to the stomach. However,”—and he leaned forward with a sly grin—“now that I am here, I will let the accent come out. I believe it is like caged animal, waiting to pounce on unsuspecting girls.”

  “I wish I had an accent,” I said.

  “In Russia, you would. But the girls wouldn’t like you for it.”

  “I hear your accent just fine,” Samireh interrupted, jumping into the bay with us. “And it sounds stupid.”

  Yuri waved his hand at her, brushing her off. “This is because you are wild girl in Deadlands,” he told her, then turned to me and added, “I do not know why, but only women with large bosom are in love with Yuri. It is like curse, but good.”

  “Aww, that’s beautiful,” Samireh cooed, then frowned sharply. “So did you give him the bracelet thing yet or what? I thought that’s why you came in here.”

  Yuri nodded and leaned over to rifle through a bag at his feet. “This is true,” he said and looked up at me. “Michael, you know what AMTACC is?”

  I shook my head.

  “It is large acronym,” he explained, pulling out an expensive-looking piece of military tech. It was camouflage green and looked like some type of smart watch. “It stands for Arm Mounted Tactical Assault Command and Control,” Yuri said to me, reaching for my left arm and fitting it on my wrist. “You should wear it until you are healed. It can run a full body diagnostic—”

  “Which would have been nice this morning,” Samireh added.

  Yuri glanced at her, and then back at me. “This is true. I forget about it. But let us try now.” He flipped it on and I felt a rubbery fabric inflate on the inside of the metal band as it conformed to my wrist. Next, after a few seconds, a holoscreen lit up, projecting a two-foot wide screen directly in front of me.

  “No matter where your arm is,” Yuri explained. “The screen will appear directly in front of you. The AMTACC’s projector goes all the way around wrist, see?” He pointed at the device for me to look.

  “What does it do?” I asked.

  Yuri smiled. “When you have good quality smart munitions, it does very, very much. But for now,”—he leaned in to tap some of the buttons on the home screen—“let us see how chest wound is doing.”

  A few seconds later, I was looking at sets of graphs, numbers, and wavy lines that I assumed meant something medical, but what exactly, I had no idea. Yuri did, though.

  He kept scrolling through different charts, until he said under his breath, “This is crazy. You are either one tough son of bitch,”—he paused, reading something else—“or you are a space alien.”

  Samireh crawled forward to look at the sc
reen herself. “What are you talking about?”

  He glanced at her and answered, “He is healing very fast. I never see something like this. At this rate, he will be good in day or two.”

  I looked between the two of them and then back at the screen. The news that I was healing quickly was good, but it was also unsettling. “So …” I asked Yuri cautiously. “That’s good, right? Or am I like a genetic freak?”

  Samireh shook her head like she thought Yuri and I were being overly dramatic. “It’s no big deal,” she said to both of us. “I got shot in the shoulder once, and I was moving it around just fine within a day.” She turned to Yuri and added, “Maybe Michael and I are just tougher than you.”

  Yuri ignored her and kept looking at the diagnostics. “No,” he said after a minute, “I believe you are genetic freak, Michael. But as far as that goes, you are lucky genetic freak. How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine,” I told him. And it was true. In the past hour alone, I felt like I’d gotten a lot of my strength back and the pain in my chest had gone down considerably. It was a strange, if not ironic, thing to be so worried about getting better. But genetic freak or not, Yuri was right … I was lucky. Getting shot in the chest wasn’t usually something you expected to live through.

  Yuri broke his attention from the holoscreen and reached down to take the plasma needle from my arm. “You should try to get up,” he suggested. “AMTACC says you are ready.”

  With a shrug, I swung my legs off the “bed”—which was actually just a row of seats inside the Cougar—and managed to stand up. I still had to crouch due to the low ceiling, but I was a lot steadier and stronger than I thought I would be.

  “What a wuss,” Samireh teased. “I would’ve been up hours ago.”

  For a second, I was unavoidably distracted by how pretty she looked when she smiled. I chuckled and said to her, “Even now, I could beat you at ping pong.”

  She scrunched her face. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Help me get down,” I said to Yuri, stepping toward the Cougar’s rear hatch. It was still open, facing the dark landscape behind us. The air was getting cooler, but not nearly as cold as the previous night. Yuri took a little weight from my arm and jumped down before I followed him.