Gruber thought about meth paranoia and burned-down houses, abruptly certain that Johanna and Eddie Watkins were never going to see the inside of the Trinity County Courthouse. He shivered.
Then he heard the Heap’s engine suddenly rev to a roar, and had his mouth open to yell to Connie not to try and pick him up, that they’d both be exposed the moment she opened the door for him. But in a moment he realized that wasn’t her plan.
The nerve-rending wail of screechers came on as she gunned the Heap straight for the house, picking up speed fast. The tweakers fired at it, of course, but the Heap had been built to stand off flames, claws, fangs and pretty much anything short of an RPG. When the guys with the walrus mustaches realized the howling metal monster wasn’t slowing down, not even a little bit, they threw away their guns and bailed, running for the trees. The Latino followed a moment later. Only Larry Watkins kept firing, his eyes wide and insane.
With nobody paying attention to him anymore, it was safe for Gruber to stick his head out: even at this distance the screechers were so loud he had to put his hands over his ears. He watched the whole scene in disbelief, tensing at the inevitable collision. Then—not twenty feet from the house—Connie must have braked hard and spun the steering wheel all the way to the left, or nearly so, because the Heap suddenly went into a great skidding turn that almost tipped it over, trading back for front as the rear end came round and three tons of reinforced metal hammered what was left of the veranda into kindling. Watkins vanished somewhere in the debris.
The Heap came to a stop. So did the screechers.
Gruber jumped to his feet and ran full-tilt toward the house. He couldn’t see Connie through the fissured, pockmarked glass of the Heap’s front window, and for a moment he was certain that one of the bullets had gotten through, that she was lying dead on the floor of the cab and it was all his goddamn fault. But before he got there the Heap lurched once, then again, and finally detached itself from whatever piece of the house it had gotten caught on, moving forward smoothly. In a dim, distant way he realized he was shouting.
Connie slowed the Heap to a crawl when she spotted him. As Gruber pulled open the driver-side door and jumped in she moved over, making room for him to take the wheel. He stomped on the gas without bothering to belt himself in.
“You better be okay to drive, and not in shock or anything,” she said. “I’ve got something to take care of here.”
He turned to look at her and ask what, but a shadow at the corner of his eye made him pull his head back just in time to see the San Ysidro standing smack in the middle of the flattened dirt road they’d driven up, a century or so earlier. It looked profoundly pissed-off, and if it didn’t know that Gruber was the human being responsible for its pain and confusion, then he was in the wrong line of work.
Two seconds, three choices. He could jam on the brakes and pulp both of them against the windshield—Connie wasn’t belted in, either—or he could ram the D and make it even angrier, or he could veer round it one way or the other and pray not to front-end a tree before he managed to pull the Heap back onto the road. Connie had the McNaughton on her lap, messing with it, doing something he couldn’t figure, but Gruber knew she hadn’t seen the San Ysidro yet and there was no time to shout an explanation. He picked Door Number Three, threw all his weight on cranking the wheel to the right, crashed into a blackberry bramble and came out the other side just as a blast from the San Ysidro sent it up in flames. Gruber had the wheel to hold onto. Connie didn’t. She screamed as inertia threw her against his aching right shoulder, and he yelled as she hit him, the pain causing him to white out for a moment. His foot slipped off the accelerator and the Heap slowed down, half on the road and half off.
When he could focus again the Heap had stopped, and the San Ysidro had climbed on top of it. The D was hammering on the cab with everything it had—wings, spikes, tails, and claws—trying to get in. It brought its head down even with the side window, and Gruber found himself staring straight into one of its glaring yellow eyes from ten inches away.
It knew, all right. It knew who he was, why he was there, what he had done to it, how he had felt about doing it; and it knew he wasn’t going to get away. Not this time.
It reared its head back, opened its jaws, and let loose hell.
The Heap was completely fireproof, of course, like every D-retrieval vehicle—flames couldn’t even get under the door, normally—but the designers hadn’t done any tests after shooting one all the hell up, slamming it into a house, and driving it through a bunch of scrub and fallen tree limbs. Gruber saw tiny fingers of flame squeezing through cracks in the windshield, and smelled insulation and wiring burning inside the dash. The air in the cab was so hot it hurt to breathe: Gruber couldn’t guess what was going to kill them first, roasting to death or smoke inhalation. He turned the key in the ignition, but couldn’t even hear the starter motor turning over. If the San Ysidro’ fire had gotten through the engine compartment seals, it was all over.
For a single moment, he rested his head on the wheel and—only for a moment—closed his eyes.
A sudden raw blast of heat on his face made him aware that Connie had opened the window on her side. He looked and saw her leaning out through it, hurling wyvern eggs at the San Ysidro as fast as she could pull them out of the keeper. No, not eggs—blazing orange hatchlings, literally biting at her fingers as she scooped them up and threw them. Gruber screamed at her to get down, but she paid him no heed, not until the McNaughton was completely empty. Then she slumped back onto her seat and tried to roll the window up, but couldn’t get a grip on the handle. Despite the D-schmear, her crabbed-up fingers were a mass of red and blistered burns, and both hands bled from a dozen bad nips and slices. He reached past and rolled the window up for her, certain that any second they were both going to be incinerated by the San Ysidro’s fire.
Only that wasn’t happening. Something else was.
The San Ysidro was howling. The cab shook hard as it lurched away, letting go. Gruber saw it rolling and thrashing on the ground, speckled with bright moving sparks, as if its own fire was leaking out from the inside.
Connie was laughing hysterically, her wounded hands curled in her lap. “How do you like being on the receiving end for once, hey? You like that?”
Gruber finally understood what she had done. D’s—all the D’s—were as fiercely territorial as different species of ants . . . and newborn wyverns had teeth that could puncture Kevlar, a mean body temperature hotter than boiling water, and a drive to eat that wouldn’t stop until they’d consumed five or six times their own body weight. One of them, the San Ysidro could have handled. Seven or eight, even, with some permanent damage. But more than sixty, and every single tiny mouth eating its way straight in from wherever it started?
Gruber and Connie sat in the Heap’s cab, saying nothing, and watched the San Ysidro die by inches. It took nearly an hour before it stopped moving. Somewhere in there Gruber got out the first aid kit and did what he could for Connie’s hands.
It was full night out by the time it was over. Connie was slumped beside him, almost bent double, her arms crossed palm-up in front of her chest. They both felt hollow, still half in shock and no longer amped on adrenaline.
She mumbled, “Nobody should be allowed to have them.”
“Nobody is,” Gruber said. “But they have them anyway.” Connie did not seem to have heard him.
“You’re a walking mess,” he said with weary affection. Her dark-brown hair was scorched short on the right side, just as her right cheek and ear were singed, and all of her right arm had a first degree burn inside her coverall sleeve. He didn’t want to think about what was under the bandages on both her hands, but for now the kit’s painkiller was keeping the nerves properly numb. That was good. “Thanks for saving my dumbass life. Twice, even.”
Connie gave him a wary sideways glance. Most of her right eyebrow was gone too. “Trick compliment?”
“No trick. That was smart, cranking
up the McNaughton so the wyverns would hatch out faster. I wouldn’t have thought of that one.” He rubbed his right shoulder, which was out-and-out killing him, now that it had regained his attention.
“I had to do something when the San Ysidro showed up. It was the only thing that occurred to me.”
“You could have peeled out of there, like I told you to.”
She shook her head. “I’m not actually so good about following orders. I was going to tell you that tomorrow.”
He thought for a silent while. Then he said, “Consider the message conveyed.”
A minute later he pushed the door open and stepped out. “Come on. The Heap’s not going anywhere, and we’ve got a job to finish.”
“What, we’re going back?” She stiffened in the seat, leaning away from his extended hand.
“Not a chance. I think you must have creamed Junior pretty good, or else we’d have had company by now. But it’s anybody’s guess whether those other idiots came back or not.” He made a brusque hurry up gesture, and turned away once he saw she was finally starting to move. “So no, we’re not going back. What we’re going to do is hike down to 299. Somewhere around the turnoff we’re going to find Trager or one of his guys. They were expecting us hours ago, they’ll be looking. After we tell them what went down we can get you to Mountain Community Medical.”
“You too,” Connie said.
“Yeah, me too.”
He stood where the San Ysidro had finally ceased thrashing, and looked down at the bloody, riddled corpse. Somehow it looked even bigger, splayed out dead in the darkness. Connie stopped a few feet behind him.
“Hey, trainee. How long before the baby wyverns wake up and start eating their way back out?”
“I have no idea,” she said, looking a little worried.
“Good to learn there’s something about D’s you don’t know.” Despite the pounding snarl in his shoulder, he realized he felt happier than he had in months. Maybe years. “The answer, for your information, is twelve to fifteen hours. Plenty of time for somebody else to come here and handle this mess, and good luck to them.”
He started off the way they’d first come, hunching forward slightly as he walked to keep his torso from swinging too much. Connie caught up with him, matching his pace. The stars were out, and it wasn’t hard to find their way.
Neither of them said anything for more than twenty minutes. Then Connie spoke up. “They had a San Ysidro black. Can you believe it?”
“There’s a lot of people who’ll be asking that one,” Gruber nodded. “From the Feds on down. Get ready to star in one hell of an investigation.”
Connie stopped walking. “Oh my god” she whispered. “Oh no. What are my parents going to say? I can’t tell them about this! I mean—”
“Nice try,” Gruber grinned at her. “Parents or no, hands or no, you’re still writing up the report. If you can’t type, you can dictate.”
She tried to kick him in the shin, but he managed to get out of range. The first time, anyway.
Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain
* * *
by Von Carr
Canticle 1: De Profundis
Sister Jasmine was three miles outside the safe zone when she saw her first zombie. There was only one in sight: a tattered shambler that the disposal patrol must have somehow missed. She revved the Silver Stallion’s motor to draw the zombie’s attention, and waited for the corpse to stumble in range.
“Hey, hey,” yelped Einstein, her K9 Antizombie Unit, as it bounced excitedly in the passenger seat. The robotic dog loved nothing better than a chance to fulfill its original function. “We’re going to get you, deadite!”
The shambler cocked its head. If Sister Jasmine hadn’t known better, she would have sworn it was parsing through the robotic dog’s yaps, trying to identify the words. The thought gave her chills.
“It’s looking at us!” the K9 unit said, tail wagging. “Signs of intelligence! Oh boy oh boy!”
“Pray for us now and at the hour of our death,” Jasmine muttered as she hit the gas. Einstein wailed with disappointment as the shambler bounced off the reinforced windshield.
“You killed it!” Einstein said. He hopped into the rear seat and leaned up against the rear window, titanium claws clicking against the glass. “No fair! It could have been a smart one, too!” Like most of the later models of K9 units, Einstein dreamed of the day when the Restored UN’s fear of zombie tacticians would come true, and give him more challenging enemies to tear and rend. But Einstein was also a creature of the moment. “We killed you!” he yelped back at the corpse twitching on the road. “We killed you good!”
“Eyes on the road, Einstein,” the Sister said. “The Lord rewards the vigilant.” The Lord also rewards those who keep their weapons close at hand, she thought. Zombies were like pre-apocalypse cockroaches. If you saw one, there were probably a thousand more somewhere nearby.
Where there were zombies, there were also probably wild K9 units, their programming scrambled during the onslaught of the first robot uprising. And then there were the natural predators of the wasteland: radioactive ants; intelligent rat armies; triffids. Even a well-trained nun like Sister Jasmine, armed to the teeth against the byproducts of natural and supernatural apocalypses, knew better than to hang around outside the safe zone.
So she kept driving, making a mental note to set the radio to call in a zombie report. The zombie’s look of intelligence might have been illusion, but she didn’t want to take any chances.
“Read me the list again,” she ordered, and the dog halted its yapping long enough to recite the list of reported supplies. “Wal-Mart, three clicks northeast,” it said, in the dry tones of the Mother Superior. “Investigate and collect: crossbows; canned food; medical supplies; diagram of light bulb.”
Sister Jasmine sighed. She didn’t know what Our Lady of the Serpent’s obsession was with the collection and illumination of electrical diagrams, but hers was not to question why.
In the old days, back before the zombie plague and the attack of the mitochondrial nanobots, back when Sister Jasmine had been merely Jasmine Brown, yoga instructor, she’d hated going to Wal-Mart. It was the kind of place her parents shopped at because it was cheap, and which Jasmine refused to enter because of its politics. She recalled telling her father that mega-corporations like Wal-Mart were going to ruin the world. Ironic, she thought, that nowadays the Wal-Marts of the earth might be its salvation.
But who could have anticipated any of this? In the old days people had—maybe—worried about one apocalypse. At most, two. Global Warming and an ice age. Vampires and zombies. Nobody had expected all of the apocalypses to happen at once. They got them all anyway.
So when Sister Jasmine pulled into the starkly empty lot of the Wal-Mart, she was on the lookout for a multitude of apocalyptic troubles. The road had been ominously clear on the way here, a sure sign of robot scavenging. And the dim interior of the former bastion of low prices could be a perfect haven for everything from vampires to sadomasochistic Australian biker gangs.
“Anything on the scanner?” she asked.
Einstein obliged by shifting the dish antenna. “No signs of life,” said the dog. “I hope there are zombies.”
Jasmine pulled out her case of supernatural weaponry. As a post-Vatican V nun, she had some distinct advantages in this area. She opted for a heavier weapon, the modified M4A1 carbine with holy water and napalm capacity, and holstered her Glock. She tugged her silver crucifix to the outside of her robes, and made sure her Star of David was also in place, in case any Jewish vampires got too friendly.
Most religiously-minded supernatural beasts tended to falter at the sight of a well-armed nun. The Glock would do for the atheists.
She sent Einstein in to scout. When the dog sounded an all-clear she followed him inside, trying to brush off her growing sense of unease. A Wal-Mart run outside the safe zone was never a cakewalk. For a brief moment she wondered if lack of overt dangers was a good
sign, if maybe it meant that the world beyond the safe zone was getting safer. But she dismissed the thought. It was dangerous to speculate; better to assume that this Wal-Mart, like every other one in the Wasteland, sheltered hidden dangers. Zombies in the freezers. Vampires in the basement. Cockroach hive-minds plotting beneath the compost in the produce aisle.
For the first few minutes, everything went smoothly. The dusty linoleum was strewn with cans, and while Einstein trained his shoulder missiles on the occasional corpse, nothing moved. They were alone.
It was the light-bulb diagram, of course, that caused the problem. Wal-Mart didn’t exactly sell light-bulb diagrams. The Mother Superior’s report had come from a bearded peddler who claimed he’d seen one in the corner office while sheltering from a radioactive sandstorm. But as Sister Jasmine edged along the wall, she realized that the man’s tip was probably too good to be true. Who nowadays would recognize a lightbulb diagram? Something was wrong.
She halted, feet away from the door, and took it all in: the empty mega-mart with canned food strewn invitingly across the floor; the closed office door.
“Einstein,” she said quietly into her comlink. “Retreat.”
As she turned and sprinted for the entrance, the trap sprung. Shadowy figures dropped from the ceiling. Jasmine ducked under an overhanging shelf and reached for a flash-grenade.
“Ninjas!” howled Einstein from a corner. “Awesome!”
A black object struck Sister Jasmine on the face and she collided with the wall. Her flash-grenade fell uselessly from her fingers. Spitting blood, she scrambled to her feet in time to see the silver K9 unit go down under a barrage of black forms.
“Hey!” yelped the dog as its red bandana was torn away by unseen hands. “No fair! Give it back!”
Somewhere in the space between Sister Jasmine’s anger and her utter despair, a thought formed. Blood. Use it. Glancing downward she saw the drain beneath her feet.
“Mary, Mother of God,” she whispered, and before she could even complete the prayer she was pressing her hand into the broken glass that clung to her radiation habit, watching the dark droplets fall toward the earth.
InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I Page 4