Kill Machine (The Hroza Connection Book 6)

by William Vitka

  Gordineer looks to his feet. Crosses his arms. This sorta Aww, shucks thing going on. “It’s the easiest way for me to remember em.”

  I chuckle. “Dude, it’s fine. Cute, even. Just don’t tell me these fuckers are led by Yosemite Sam or Foghorn Leghorn or something.”

  Gordineer gawks at me like I just kicked his cat. Or maybe failed to outwit his cat in chess. “No, no. Don’t be stupid... Their supreme leader’s name back on their planet is Chuck Jones.”

  * * *

  Me, Bugs Two, and Gordineer stand in a side room. A hologram in front of us. Most of it’s the same shit Plissken showed off in the camp’s command center.

  Yadda yadda. Biomass east of Boston.

  Yadda yadda. Craptons of biomasses humping in a deep sea trench.

  I bite my bottom lip. Look up to Gordineer. Bugs Two. Wish I could smoke. Say, “I know all this shit already.” I point at the hologram. “I know all this shit already, guys.”

  Bugs Two holds up a slender finger. “Pro-jek-shun.”

  I watch. Fleshy slugs from across the globe congeal on the trench. Hundreds. Thousands. The projection becomes exactly what Jack said it’d be: a planet-eater.

  Shit.

  I say, “What if we bomb em?” I twirl my hands. “Uh, uh, put my blood in a bomb and bloodnuke em.”

  The pilot shakes his head. “Must be fresh. Planet is lost.”

  I shake my finger at Bugs Two. “I refuse to believe that. We doused the camp in my blood. It killed the infected there.”

  Gordineer says, “Don’t forget that you’re talking to a species that eradicated the infection by literally destroying planets. Sacrificing its own people. They’re not the most creative.” He jerks his head toward Bugs Two. “No offense.”

  The pilot doesn’t acknowledge Gordineer.

  I say, “You gotta find something better than that. I’m not gonna destroy my planet.” I eye Gordineer. “Our planet. There has to be another way. Even if it means raining my blood all over the world. There has to be a way.”

  Bugs Two stares at me. “Why are we supposed to care?”

  Shit times two.

  * * *

  I sit on the edge of the bed in me and DeVille’s apartment.

  She hands me a short glass of whiskey. “How’d it go?” Plops herself down next to me.

  “Apparently, I gotta get creative. Since the pilots ain’t. Their endgame is just to blow up the planet and move on. We need to get the Beast up and running.”

  “What about taking New York?”

  “It’s on my to-do list.” I grunt. “Wish Three was here to talk to.”

  I’m not a particularly good leader.

  5. Know What Makes Me Feel Better?

  I wake up the next day thinking: I gotta kill something.

  Cuz I’m kinda depressed.

  Given how I’ve talked before, you might wonder, Doesn’t killing things get boring after a while? Hell, this guy’s already said that zombies are boring.

  And you’d be wrong. So slap yourself.

  Killing monsters never gets boring. Certainly not when you’re driving a giant robot. Testing new weaponry. Toys and technology the pilots let Plissken examine. Duplicate.

  I mean...

  Really, now.

  Let’s fuckin kill something.

  I slide my arm over DeVille. The woman I love still naked. Scarred. Slumbering in the bed beside me. My fingers move to her stomach. Where cells are working their figurative asses off to become a life. Lives, actually. Twins. A boy and a girl.

  Our babies.

  Course, there’s no way for me to know what the kids could end up with in their brain. A Durandal. Or something else.

  Wouldn’t be me. I’m tethered strictly to your headmeat. Old buddy. Old pal. Old target of my sadomasochistic urges... Uh, in the psychological sense. Cuz. Man, if you and me could get it on, that’d add whole new level of weirdness to the science fiction cheese we live in.

  I kiss DeVille’s neck. Whisper in her ear. “Hey cowgirl. Wanna climb into a giant murder machine with me and destroy big monsters with our new antimatter missiles? They have no harmful nuclear falllouuut.”

  She’s showing. Hasn’t changed her combat effectiveness, though. Or her desire to kill things.

  I’d tell her to stop working, but you can imagine how well that’d go.

  DeVille grumbles. “You sure know how to make a lady swoon.” She blinks. Yawns.

  We both try not to smell each other’s morning breath.

  I grab my pack of American Spirits. Pop a cigarette between my lips. “So is that a ‘yes’ or a ‘no?’”

  “You smoke that shit in the other room. With the windows wide open and the joining door closed.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You might. I’m stunned you’ve managed even this modicum of self-control.” DeVille rubs her face. “Obviously I wanna shoot monsters.”

  “Good. Otherwise, I was totally gonna break up with you.”

  DeVille squints at me. “We’re literally among the last people on Earth. You think you’re gonna find someone else who can tolerate you?”

  * * *

  We slip into our carbon mesh armor. Ones with holes along our arms, legs and spines for the neural bioports. We toss grey sweaters and blue jeans over that. Combat boots. Tight gloves.

  DeVille straps an FN Herstal FNX-45 Tactical clone to her thigh. The pistol hits hard with a nice fifteen-round magazine to go with it.

  Me, I’ll always prefer Colts and Colt clones. When it comes to 1911s, John Moses Browning can’t be defeated in terms of genius. Even now.

  But Plissken’s a good stand-in.

  Aww.

  We march through the courtyard. The “first couple” of the apocalypse. Light snow salts the air. Me and DeVille push into the armory. Where the robotics factory is. Where all the camp’s goodies are created and stored for our parasite-murdering pleasure.

  Booker King and Sarah Yuan—the youngest emergent soldiers in camp at seventeen—nod to me and DeVille. The both of em field-stripping pulse rifles on a table near the racks of assault rifles, submachine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, and pistols.

  Dead ahead is a big empty space and twin massive doors.

  They slide open.

  Reveal two identical, forty-foot-tall Talos warframes with dark grey digital camouflage coloring. They’re bipedal behemoths with fully articulated hands and fingers for the real big guns.

  These suckers have a new addition, though: missile pods mounted on the shoulders.

  I hear Plissken before I see him. “Meet the Talos Mark IIs.” His pudgy saucer shape zips around the threatening forms of me and DeVille’s warframes. Bonnie and Clyde. “The vast majority of the upgrades were done to subsystems. Which is to say, under the hood. Which is also to say, huge advances you don’t give much of a shit about.”

  I fake a wretched mimicry of English. “It make more kill better?”

  “That is literally how you sound to me all the time.” Plissken puffs his thrusters. “But yes. What always prevented antimatter weapons from being feasible was threefold: cost, production, and containment.”

  DeVille says, “‘Containment’ as in?”

  “Nuclear weapons don’t detonate unless the chemical triggers fire correctly and in sequence. They’re ‘fail-safe.’ While I wouldn’t recommend it, you could whack a nuke with a hammer and it wouldn’t level an entire city. This all has to do with the fact that you still need those triggers to set off the detonation—to start the fission or fusion reaction that leads to the release of all that energy.” Plissken puffs his thrusters. Sorta like a teacher taking a breath to see who’d paying attention in class.

  I twirl my finger. “Yeah, and?”

  “Do you understand the principles of an antimat
ter weapon?”

  “It...make more kill better?”

  DeVille whacks the back of my head.

  I wince. Point around the mostly-empty armory. “That’s domestic abuse. You all saw it.”

  Plissken sighs. “In an antimatter weapon, matter and antimatter slam together and annihilate each other. That’s what produces the ‘make kill more better’ boom. The ‘containment’ issue is that no trigger is needed. If antimatter touches even the sides of the container then you get your reaction. The pilots’ solution was to isolate the antimatter in a vacuum, which itself is maintained by magnetic fields inside the missile housing—a Penning Trap.”

  DeVille cocks an eye. “This sounds comically unsafe.”

  “We needed a weapons solution for late-stage parasite forms that didn’t involve turning the planet into a radioactive ashtray.” Plissken bobs in the air. “That said, don’t hit the antimatter ordinance with a hammer.”

  I cross my arms. “I still want a blood bomb.”

  “I’m working on it. The issue of keeping the parasite in the blood alive remains an issue.”

  “Which’s kinda hilarious when you think about it.”

  * * *

  DeVille climbs inside Bonnie.

  I climb inside Clyde.

  My warframe’s Thriller-era Vincent Price voice says, “Welcome back.”

  I stretch in front of the neural harness before plugging in. Shed my sweater and jeans. “Hey, Clyde.” Light a cigarette. “How do the upgrades feel?”

  “Very good, sir. Certainly better than exploding.”

  “I bet.” I step into the pilot harness. Let Clyde’s neural spikes punch into my bioports. Which sounds a lot more sexual than I thought. “This’s never gonna feel good.”

  There’s a flash in my brain. A brief sensation of weightlessness. Then the Talos is an extension of me. No delay. I ball my fists. Turn my huge metal head toward DeVille. See her doing the same with Bonnie.

  I gesture to her. Palm up. “Ladies first.”

  DeVille struts to the tunnel door of the armory. I follow. She pauses near the Talos weapons racks. Says to me, “What should we go fishing with?”

  “None of our usual stuff.”

  “Yeah, bullets go sideways in water.”

  “Kinda cuts our options.”

  “Rip and tear?”

  “Rip and tear.”

  * * *

  The silo doors above the Talos elevator open. I step onto Farragut Road next to the remains of the old western wall. Most of it deconstructed for the raw materials.

  DeVille jogs passed me. Toward Boston Harbor. She stops just shy of the water. Turns to me. Shrugs. Jumps in. Her Talos splits the waves.

  I follow. My vision dims before Clyde corrects for the lack of light. My feet slam down in the sediment. Kick up fat clouds of dirt and detritus.

  Being submerged in water above your head is naturally spooky. You can’t see as well. There’s no fuckin visibility. Feels like you’ve got only a couple dozen yards before it’s all murky hell.

  Any damn thing could be waiting.

  Which’s why the ocean scared Internet goons shitless for ages.

  Clyde’s running lights and flood lights punch through the green-grey muck. The heads up display in my eyes is overlaid with radar. A topographical map. Armor and weapons status—the missile pod reads: AM/20, and while I’ve got no idea how explodey an antimatter missile is, it’s hard to think we’ll need forty of the things.

  All in all, the tech cuts the creepiness factor down in a big way.

  But the bones I step on. The skulls pushed around in the currents. The forever smiles etched in calcium. That shit ramps it right the fuck back up.

  Plissken’s voice pipes over the radio. “Make your way through the bay. Head east. Come aground at Deer Island to avoid the sunken fence that isolates the harbor. When you get to Massachusetts Bay, proceed with caution and I would prefer you not venture farther than ten miles out.”

  I say, “Aww, you worried about us?”

  “I’m worried about mounting a salvage operation out there.” There’s a pause. “Though I also enjoy you both alive. Along those lines, while the biomass is still two hundred and seventy-five miles out, I have no idea what its senses are like.”

  “We’re sealed up in the warframes. It can’t smell us.”

  “In as much as the emergent gifts are reactions to the parasite, the parasite also clearly reacts to the presence of the emergent. I have some theories.”

  “You always have theories, all of which can suck—”

  DeVille cuts me off. “We’ll stay inside a ten-mile zone, test the missiles, then be home for dinner.” Her warframe turns to mine. She points at me. Throws her hands out. Like, Wouldja shut the hell up for a minute?

  All right, all right.

  I tell Plissken, “We’ll stick close. Especially since we ain’t armed otherwise.”

  “Not too close. Each of those missiles contains enough destructive force to level lower Manhattan.”

  DeVille says, “How goddamn much antimatter is in these things?”

  “Just a pinch. Two hundredths of an ounce.”

  Me and DeVille don’t say anything.

  Plissken hums. “Science is wonderful, isn’t it?”

  * * *

  The trek through Boston Harbor is a slow motion journey through a ship graveyard. Everything from cargo vessels torn in half to the lonely, decaying masts of historic frigates that stretch up toward the rippling surface.

  The boney, drowned fingers of industry and commerce and tourism.

  Animal life down here is weird.

  Of course.

  Used to be striped bass. Flounder. Shellfish. Families’d meander along on a harbor walk. Cast off. Catch something they probably couldn’t eat but might make em smile.

  Holy shit, you were almost...almost cheerfully nostalgic there.

  Now it’s just variations on a similar parasite theme. Crabs with claws and poison tails. Fish whose faces split and unleash tongues that dart forward to pierce smaller prey.

  Welp. Three cheers for plant life and their lack of a centralized nervous system! Way to go plant life!

  Anything on your hook would eat little Johnny and Barbra.

  Or try to.

  But they’re small. Not like the leviathans at sea. Biggest I’ve seen is six feet. And that was a lobster lined with tentacles fighting over the carcass of a split-face fish with another crustacean.

  Looks a bit like Three, huh?

  Still gotta talk to that cocksucker.

  Sorry. Find said cocksucker, then talk to him.

  Anyway, the fauna in Boston Harbor ain’t huge. Gotta be cuz they don’t have the space to get enormous. An animal can only grow as large as the environment allows.

  That’s right, bitches. I kinda pay attention when scientists talk.

  Guess one question is: Now that the camp’s been inoculated, can they eat the parasitized animals we harvest? It’d always been considered contaminated. Dangerous even if the meat was purified in fire. And survivors didn’t wanna eat it anyway.

  Sure would be beneficial.

  Look, ma! I done killt one’a them two-headed heifers with the spider legs. That’s good eats! Mootant steaks!

  Yeah, they probably wouldn’t be too happy about eating that. And the customer is always right... Or some shit like that.

  We storm onto Deer Island. Water cascading from our armor. Stomp around the little bit of a green park that surrounds the remains of an industrial area. The snow’s starting to accumulate.

  Snow day!

  I say to DeVille, “Got a target in mind? Next seven or so miles are our boom-boom playground.”

  I like this.

  I love this.

  A partner on my level. Who
doesn’t give a shit about all the people I’ve murdered.

  DeVille says, “You seeing what I’m seeing?”

  My heads up display is a neon green lightshow. Clyde identifies worthwhile leviathans as fast as they swim in range. There are hundreds. Massive. Some moving in packs. Families. Others attacking in packs. Chasing down the smaller ones.

  Nothing’s really changed as far as nature is concerned.

  It just looks stranger.

  DeVille digs her warframe’s feet into the ground. Left foot forward. Shoulders hunched. “Let’s see what happens.”

  There’s a great gout of gas and fire from her left shoulder pod. The missile streaks into the air. Screams along a path designated by Bonnie’s software.

  It’s gone in a blink. A shape I can’t see outlined by a green rectangle on my heads up display. A square that tightens and tightens. Then it’s gone.

  Then there’s a flash.

  The sea disappears. All that’s there is a bowl of nothingness about a thousand feet out. It’s as though the water’s been cut out of the area. I can see things against the waves. Wriggling shapes. Cuz the ocean doesn’t know what to do.

  Then the blue realizes what’s happened. That it’s been parted. And it slams back together with a tremendous splash that sends fountains up and waves out.

  Murderboner engaged.

  DeVille turns to me. “I killed four.”

  I smile. “Leviathans? Successful test, I’d say.”

  “You wanna try? It’s even easier than pulling a trigger.”

  “No, I...uh...Yeah, fuck it. I’d love to.” I tell Clyde: “Find me a target. I wanna use all twenty rockets. I wanna be fuckin antimatter Moses.”

  I will ruin everything.

  I am destruction. I am death. I am salvation.

  I am punishment.

  None of the goddamn animals out here did anything.