Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  I bet it’s been a very long time since he’s been afraid.

  “He’s doing something to the whole block, Heme.”

  Klaxons sounded in the apartment building, and the walls around her turned red. The room peeled away, and a storm cloud of drones of all kinds coalesced around them from every direction, like angry bees.

  She turned her gaze back to the reticle, just as the micronuke impacted. A look of shock crossed the man’s face as a hole blossomed in his chest.

  The micronuke exploded, and the man vaporized.

  The chrysalis convulsed again as Gun fired the Heavy straight into the oncoming drone cloud. In slow motion, Heme watched as it left Gun’s barrel, spiraling out and spraying propellant. A flash, and the propellant ignited. The round exploded, the radius of the blast ejecting forward, as Heme had programmed it to do. Still, some of the blast came backward, blowing a hole through the wall and slamming into the chrysalis. Heme was ready.

  She engaged the chrysalis, and it leaped forward out of the hole even as the wall was still disintegrating, driving the chrysalis into free-fall. She engaged its thrusters and pulled a hard one-eighty, firing straight back up through the Heavy’s expanding debris cloud.

  Heedless of the gravitational strain on the chrysalis, she pushed the throttle wide open, rocketing through the debris cloud and out beyond, arcing straight up into the gray sky. Drones of various sizes and shapes attempted to give chase, firing at her as she blasted past. They punched through the heavy cloud cover, smashing through a rain-seeding array, and then they were free, climbing upward beyond the reach of the drones.

  Stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere, exosphere, vacuum.

  And just like that, it’s over.

  Heme cut back on the throttle as the chrysalis settled into stable orbit. She issued a few commands, and the chrysalis reconfigured, blending into the endless sea of space debris that circled Earth.

  “Gun, send a tightbeam to command. Tell them know we’re Butcher Block Red; target is down.”

  Pickup wouldn’t be for another week, after everything settled down. Plenty of time to finally relax after months of tension. Systems powered down as her own mind began to cycle into hibernation mode. Remaining at full power meant a chance of discovery, and discovery wasn’t worth it—no matter how minute the chance.

  Gun nudged her mind, purring. Heme chuckled to herself.

  Gotta learn to control that cat brain, Gun.

  Heme stroked her weapon, running mental fingers across her back. Her consciousness faded as hibernation triggered.

  “Good job, Gun. That’s my girl.”

  Act 2

  LOSS

  O nce, all I had to do for food was order it to my house.

  Sam sighted down his scope, aiming his airgun at a post-human thrashing around four stories below. Occasional flashes of the massive creature appeared under a swarm of ants, blood flowing from a hundred bites. The ground and ants were slick with it. He clicked forward once on the scope’s focus knob and the picture sharpened just in time to see one of the thing’s five heads—a middle-aged woman with graying hair—ripped off by one of the bull ants clinging to it.

  Lifting his eyes from the scope, Sam craned his neck left and right down Leopold Street. An endless stream of ants crawled everywhere on the road, heading north.

  A chorus of warbling, almost-human cries drew him back. The post-human, despite a presumed intelligence given its five—now four—heads, was trying to eat the offending ant, its cavernous chest sucking wetly as it pulled in the ant.

  That’s not a good idea, dude.

  A fresh wave of ants smothered the melee. The post-human surged up, ripping ants apart at random with its twenty arms. The hole in its chest had resealed, having managed to consume the meal. More ants swarmed, the bulls forming a protective circle while harvesters streamed around them.

  The post-human did its weird warble-chorus again, and its shoulder exploded in a haze of blood and tissue. Inside the bleeding crater, the consumed bull ant whipped around, tearing at her captor. Sam almost whistled in admiration, before catching himself. No unnecessary noise. Not now, when he was this close.

  The fight moved up the street, carried by the flow of the river of ants, still providing him with an opportunity to make a shot. Sam reshouldered his air rifle, looking for a target.

  There would be plenty of bull ants on the street, which would be fine for the hemolymph, but this was a rare opportunity, a distraction that might net him a special kill. Sam panned a little way down from the fight, where countless broken bull ants marked the post-human’s destructive path. The stream of ants was a little more chaotic here, disorganized by the intense reek of the dead and dying’s pheromones.

  There. A nursing ant, its pincers holding foamy green sponge in a tight grip. Sam glanced through his rangefinder, trying to keep the ant in view. Sixty-eight yards. Doable. The air rifle, a high-pressure .45 bullpup, was designed for people with a fetish for nostalgic, retro big game hunting.

  Countless years ago, when he’d bought the gun, he’d reasoned he’d be too much of a chicken to kill himself with it. His friends had thought it was some statement on individuality. Sam had let them think that, since talking about killing oneself in the pre-apocalypse time meant forced hospitalization and neural remapping.

  None of that mattered now. His friends were long dead, part of some post-human, and yet here he was, sighting through the rifle he’d thought was too weak to kill him.

  Sam took in a breath, letting the old bitterness fade. He held it, counted to three, and pulled the trigger. The gun’s bolt clanked as the bolt cycled. There was no big boom; it was always the anticlimax of the hunt. A heartbeat passed before the nursing ant staggered. A hit. Sam exhaled, watching the ant weave against its hive-mates. Four yards later, it went down. Sam panned around, seeing if the shot had attracted attention. Bull ants were one thing, but a nursing ant’s death tended to whip the colony into a frenzy.

  Sure enough, a boil of agitation started around the stricken insect. Sam brought his gun down and pulled himself closer to the shooter’s slit in the hunter’s blind, watching with a concerned eye.

  More warbling. The post-human was in three pieces now, each one fighting with a ferocity only seen in those facing death. A few yards away, by the nursing ant, the agitation swept through the sea of ants like a living thing. Sam’s heart beat faster despite himself as the post-human edged towards him, the pheromone-induced maelstrom sucking in all the insects in its path.

  Come on … go for the obvious threat.

  For a moment it looked like the ants were onto him, then the post-human warbled again, drawing the attention of the seething ball of ants.

  There you go.

  Seconds later, a pink mist was all that remained of the monster. A minute later, even that was gone, leaving only the unending stream of ants.

  Satisfied he had not attracted unwanted attention, Sam stood, staying low under the wall of the hunter’s blind. He slung his rifle over his shoulder and moved inside, easing the heavy door closed behind him.

  A cascade of refracted light greeted him as he entered his sanctuary. Thousands of prisms hung in windows that offered a circumferential view of the crumbling city. The prisms, painstakingly collected over the years, captured the molding light of the mutating atmosphere and filtered it into a fractaled rainbow. Light spread everywhere across the enormous room he’d dubbed “The Alamo.” Deep down, Sam knew those prisms kept the world out, filtering clean the rot trying to get in and break him.

  The Alamo was the fourth floor of a downtown New Philadelphia office building, converted with laborious care and years of labor. He’d cleared out all the extra walls, creating a few thousand feet of open space he’d sectioned off into different areas: armory and workshop, kitchen, bedroom, and—his pride and joy—the library, which took up almost a quarter of the space. Books had been considered obsolete in pre-apocalypse civilization, but he’d found a cache of them and, de
spite the risks, had hauled them all back.

  “Hello, Samuel. How was it?”

  “Hi, Tes. Got a nurse while a post-human was doing its wrecking ball thing. A ton of bull ants died too … we should plan on at least ten hours to harvest everything.”

  “I observed the end of it on the northeast monitor; quite a fight.”

  “Sure was. I’m going to recharge the rifle and get some things done. Everything calm?”

  “Yes. No sensors tripped.”

  Years ago, Sam had found an undisturbed Tesla-manufactured mercenary’s chrysalis during a week-long expedition into an area of New Philadelphia about sixty miles away. It had been an incredible find. He’d spent days trying to get it flying again but, like most other singularity-era machines, it was too complex for a human to fix.

  However, during his fumbling attempt, he’d discovered that the chrysalis’s main weapon AI, housed in a cat’s brain, was still alive and clinging to the edges of sanity after years of sensory isolation. He’d rescued it, named it Tes, and nursed her back to health. It had been common practice for biotech companies to assign pre-apocalypse AIs a gender. It had taken a few weeks after recovery before Tes had remembered hers. In return for his help, she’d saved him from the oceans of loneliness and depression he’d been fighting for years.

  Now Tes inhabited an eight-legged bomb disposal droid with a fusion battery—another unlikely find. She skittered behind Sam as he walked over to a workbench piled high with neat stacks of scrap lead.

  “Running low on rifle rounds, Tes. Used four today … missed three times. I know, I know, I don’t need to hear it. There’s still plenty of lead in the armory. We’re going to have to smelt some more rounds, though, before the week’s out.”

  He handed Tes the weapon, and she extended a plug, locking into the weapon’s air tank. A slight hiss suffused the air as she filled it.

  “I will perform weapons maintenance as well, Samuel.”

  “Okay, thanks. I’m gonna check the bag, then.”

  Sam opened a closet and grabbed an old, green external-frame backpack. One by one, he pulled everything out, inspecting each item. It was a soothing ritual, as close as he could get to meditation. Each item was hard won from years of scavenging: a compressed air tank for refills, extra lead pellets, a pitted and rusted grenade he’d bartered for years ago, a knife, and a Nalgene bottle filled with filtered hemolymph. Survival gear. Equipment for food harvesting. A compact consciousness module he’d modified to carry Tes’s consciousness.

  “Hey, girl. When you’re done there, fill up the high-pressure tank. It’s at four thousand right now. Might be a slow leak … can you check on that, too?”

  “I will if you stop calling me ‘girl.’ I’m an adult AI … not to mention older than you, as you’ve obviously forgotten. Also, I control the ethylene oxide, remember?”

  Sam chuckled as he repacked the backpack. He couldn’t help pushing her buttons sometimes. Tes gave as good as she got, though. She was a bit of a practical joker, something that always took him by surprise.

  “Okay, okay. Yes, ma’am. I’m taking a nap before tonight. What’s the activity been like the last week? The ogres staying quiet? Pretty weird to see one of them during the day today.”

  “Normal patterns across sensory areas three through four. Slight traffic in area nine. Seismograph estimates a creature with a mass in the six-hundred-kilogram range. Peak activity at twenty-three hundred hours to zero three hundred.”

  “That’s good. What about the immediate four-block grid? Areas one, two, and five?”

  “Negative detection for eight days between twenty-two hundred hours and dawn.”

  “Perfect. Nine o’clock, then. Wake me. We’ll be on the roof by ten.”

  Sam always got the jitters before leaving the safety of the Alamo. There was no good time to do it—even more so now that the world had been degrading for two decades. The post-humans seemed to prefer the night, but, according to sensors he’d placed in a five-mile radius around his holdout, they were few and far between. It was better odds than the ants.

  About five years ago, he’d come to an intersection and found a woman pulling the inner tube off a bicycle tire. Sam had seen her from a block away—he’d been trying to haul a solar array back to the Alamo. She’d been the first human he’d seen in at least a year. The excitement of seeing another living human being had overwhelmed him, and he’d run to her, waving a white scarf over his head like a maniac to tell her he wasn’t a threat. She saw him, looked up, and had smiled before turning her head towards something out of his view, a frown on her face. A second later, a swarm of ants had engulfed her, flooding the road and walls before disappearing down the street.

  The entire thing had only taken seconds, but Sam had stayed in the middle of the road, paralyzed by fear, for another half hour. Eventually, he’d regained control of himself and fled, leaving his wheelbarrow and solar array. It was still there, sitting where it had been abandoned, a decaying memorial to the woman’s last moments.

  After that, Sam had stopped going out during the day. Despite the risks. Despite the absolute horror that walked around in the dark. He couldn’t do it anymore.

  “Go sleep, Samuel. I will wake you.” Tes always seemed to sense his moods.

  “Fine,” Sam said grudgingly.

  He kicked off his shoes and walked over to his bedroom: a permasteel shipping container he’d cut apart, dragged up to the fourth floor, and then re-welded together. Ducking low, he went through the narrow door, sliding it closed behind him and locking it.

  “Lock the door, Samuel.”

  “You realize you say that every single night, right? I’ve been doing this for years … you don’t need to remind me. Variety is the spice of life, Tes!”

  “Lock the door, Samuel.”

  “Holy cow, you’re impossible. Done.”

  His bedroom doubled as a panic room: a last-ditch holdout if the ants, post-humans, or whatever other hellish abomination broke through. It was a useless gesture—Sam had seen post-humans punch through walls like tissue paper, but it made him feel better. Every other avenue and door in the building was also welded shut, and Sam had spent months filling in the other floors with debris and seeding them with directional hydrogen mines he’d found.

  You’re a paranoid coward.

  Yeah, but cowards survive.

  Sleep came quickly.

  The New Philadelphia national anthem startled him awake during its ugly, discordant crescendo, as it always did. One of Tes’s weird personality quirks was her steadfast patriotism to the former super-city, no doubt because she’d been a member of its armed forces. Or, at least, he thought it was a personality quirk. Deep down, he suspected she got a kick out of waking him up like that. Sam groaned, pulling his pillow over his head.

  “I’m up, Tes. You know what would be awesome? Never hearing that grotesque noise again.”

  “It is twenty-one-hundred hours, Samuel. Sensors are clear, save for the expected activity in section nine.”

  “Did you hear what I said? You should really play someth—Ah, never mind.”

  Fumbling around and reminding himself for the millionth time to bring a flashlight into the pitch black room, he changed shirts for a synthskin tactical vest with heavy lumps sewn into the spine. After adjusting the straps, Sam undid the lock and emerged from the panic room, stretching. “You ready?”

  “I rechecked your gear. Also repaired a microfracture in the high-pressure tank around the inlet valve.”

  “Great, thanks. Go ahead and move into the flight computer. I’ve had it charging since last week, so no worries about running out of juice if we have to book it.”

  Rule number one when scavenging: always be prepared to never return home.

  “Hey, did the vest charge after that battery replacement?” Sam asked.

  “Yes. Transferring.”

  Sam grabbed the external-frame backpack, securing the straps. He jumped up and down, testing the straps, and
then walked over to the main door. The former elevator door to the building was now also a massive chunk of permasteel. He took a helmet with six bulbous lenses mounted on it off a hook next to the door and seated it on his head, dropping the lenses over his eyes. The well-worn webbing scratched his head and stank of sour sweat. Feeling on the side of the helmet, he twisted a cracked dial until it clicked. Sam fished around behind the helmet until he found two wires, twisted them together, and tucked the filaments into the goggles’ webbing. A small reticle lit up on a screen in front of his eyes, flickering and stabilizing into an image of the room, overlaid with data from his sensor network. He turned to a mirror on the wall, inspecting himself to make sure everything was there. The reflectionless black optics of the night vision goggles stared back at him.

  Bony guy in a much patched gray-orange jumpsuit, check. Patchy beard with a chunk missing where he’d burned himself, check. Gun, check. Gear, check. Boots…

  Oh yeah. Shoes. How the heck have I survived so long?

  He grabbed a pair of well-worn boots covered in tape and put them on.

  “Tes, can you hear me? Night goggles are up. I’m ready if you are.”

  “I am in the computer. We will see if your new transmitter will keep us linked to the Alamo while we are away. I have a pretty good connection right now.”

  “That’s right! I can’t believe I forgot about it! Okay, let’s go.”

  Sam paused, cleared his throat, and bowed his head. He always felt awkward doing this. “Hey, God. Guide us while we’re out there. Protect us. Bring us back. Also … please let us meet another living human. Please.”

  “Amen. Opening the door, Samuel.”

  “Thanks, girl.”

  “Samuel. That is insulting. Also, I have no skin for you to get under. I don’t know why you try.”

  “Haha, I’ll stop calling you ‘girl’ if you call me ‘Sam.’ Samuel makes me feel like one of those anti-technology people. Remember those guys and the sandwich signs they’d wear?”

  “I cannot help it, Samuel. You remind me of one of those anti-technology people. Remember how obsessed they were with prisms and crystals?”