by Vikki Romano
Cooper shook his head.
“Not possibly--he will turn into a killing machine if he hasn’t already. And without training and testing, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen when he does.”
“Have you tried to call him at all?” Steven asked.
Sierra rubbed her temples and paced to the far side of the room.
“Yeah. I get nothing, just a dead line.”
“Probably all part of the issue with his grid being reset. Honestly, that’s a good sign. If his grid wasn’t booted, then it’s a good possibility that this killer code hasn’t completely booted either.”
“No, it booted, or at least started to,” she said, taking a seat at the desk. She leaned forward and cradled her forehead in her fingertips. “That’s why I shot him with the dart, remember? He was acting strange, like a zombie, counting weapons, and then he came after me.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t kill you. He didn’t kill any of us. If he had been full drone, we’d all be dead, guaranteed.” Steven grabbed a bottle of water out of a small fridge under the lab desk and went to Sierra, setting the bottle on the table next to her. Cooper hopped off his stool and went to them as well, putting a hand to Sierra’s shoulder.
“We’ll find him and we’ll fix him if we can,” Cooper offered with a grimace as he looked to Steven, who nodded solemnly. Sierra lifted her head and brushed the hair from her face.
“Can you fix him? Is that possible?”
“We won’t know until we try,” Steven said, giving her a forced smile.
Sierra bit her lip and looked away. She knew they were grasping at straws.
How did you find someone who didn’t want to be found?
Where did you even start?
CHAPTER SIX
Jimmy let out a long, low whistle and sat back from the table, pushing his plate away. Calder didn’t know what else to say at that point. He had spent the last hour telling him everything that had happened, starting with the atrocities in special ops, to the most recent issue with his augmentation.
Mentioning the augment silenced Jimmy. Though he had a prosthetic leg, it was there to replace the one he’d lost. Calder’s augmentation was an add-on, something the army deemed necessary for doing his job. He was realizing how much bullshit that was and how detrimental it was to his life now.
“So, you see, I need to figure out what it is that I uploaded, and either delete it or get the augment out before I kill someone, including myself.”
“And how do you suppose we do that?” Jimmy asked, leaning on the table with his elbows.
Visions of bloody kitchen knives and a bowl of mucked-up parts flashed through Calder’s mind. He sat back as well, pushed a plate of half-eaten baked chicken aside, and took a sip of his beer to wash the nausea away. It didn’t help.
“If I knew the answer, I wouldn’t be here, you know that,” he said.
Jimmy shook his head slowly and stood from the table, dumping the remnants of his plate into a bucket on the floor.
“You done?” he asked, gesturing to Calder’s plate. Calder nodding and handed it to him.
“It was great, really, I’m just not… very hungry.”
“But you are thirsty?” Jimmy asked, setting the plate down on the counter and pulling a fresh beer from the fridge. He handed it to Calder with a smirk, and he took it happily.
He held it up to look at it, a dark glass bottle with some kind of foil label.
“Where did you get these?” he asked, and tipped the bottle to his lips, sipping slowly. It was old, and a bit skunked, but wasn’t too bad. Nothing like the stuff at the market these days in collapsible nylon bags.
Jimmy continued with his clean-up, piled the dirty dishes in the sink, then jerked his head toward the back door with a suspicious wink.
Intrigued, Calder followed him outside, half expecting to find an old Styrofoam cooler duct taped to a tree, but instead, he watched as Jimmy wandered off across the expanse of the yard toward the tree line.
The inky black night quickly cloaked them both, but Calder’s vision sharpened, and this time it caught him off guard because the shift was immediate. He held his hand out in front of him and looked at it. It was grainy and strangely digital, as if someone had turned up the brightness on a vid screen. Like a child mesmerized by a new toy, Calder was awed in the way his vision adapted as he slowly moved forward.
Jimmy had gone about thirty feet into the wooded area behind the cabin, and then stopped and turned to Calder with a smile. When Calder finally caught up, Jimmy motioned to the large tree in front of them and placed his hand on a large knot there. There was a hum, and suddenly the ground beneath their feet began giving way. Calder was about to jump out of the way when Jimmy grabbed his arm and gave him a coy smile, waggling his brows comically.
They were standing on a disguised platform, and it dropped below ground level to be suddenly closed in from above. A few moments later, sodium lights flickered on to expose a large, open cinder-block area lined with metal shelving. It had to be at least thirty feet square, and the amount of goods stocking the shelves had Calder’s mouth gaping. It was a veritable warehouse of grocery goods and various other “supplies.”
“What is all this?” Calder moved slowly down the first aisle. Stacks of canned foods still wrapped in their cases lined one shelf. The cans were generic and just said “soup” on the front in large black letters. It was kind of creepy in an apocalyptic sort of way.
“It was something Dad and Uncle Chet started back in the thirties, back when they were younger than we are now. They had been out here hunting one season and were basically stranded during a lockdown of the city. Dad said convoys pushed up and down the highway, lots of weapons and soldiers, and they thought they’d die out here cut off from everything. When they finally got out a few weeks later, they planned this. They wanted to stock up in case something catastrophic happened and they needed someplace to hunker down until it blew over.”
“Stock up?” Calder asked as he grabbed a twenty-pound block of C4.
“Well…” Jimmy shrugged and shook his head. “They both saw the need for protection, too. Things were getting out of hand, and the city was pretty lawless then.”
“Then?” Calder asked with a smirk. “Never thought your dad was a survivalist. He never came off that crazy to me.”
Jimmy smirked. “You think this is crazy?”
“Yeah, it’s a little out there.”
“I think it’s smart to be prepared.”
“Prepared, yes, but this is”--he spun in the aisle, holding out his arms--“this is nuts. You have enough here to last ten years.”
“Yeah, and what happens when some meathead decides to launch an attack, drop some bombs?”
“Jesus, Jim, no one even has bombs anymore. If anything does happen, it will be something you can’t see or control, like a bio attack.”
Jimmy dug through a box at the end of one aisle, pulled out a silver-wrapped package, and threw it to Calder.
“Hazmat suits, with filters and breathing apparatuses.”
Calder looked at the package in his hands only briefly before tossing it onto a shelf.
“Um… yeah.” Jimmy was crazy.
Calder made his way to the far side of the room and stood, hands on hips, wide-eyed at what was there. The first aisle was all non-perishable foods: dry goods, jerky, MREs, freeze-dried meals, and canned goods. The second aisle was a mishmash of living items: batteries, lanterns, thermal blankets, light sticks, and various other pieces of camping gear, including compact tools.
“Where did you get all this stuff?” he asked as he turned back to Jimmy.
“Dad got most of it at bulk stores and warehouse sales. It just piled up over time.”
Calder picked up a flashlight and turned it on. It worked, even though it looked a hundred years old to him. He continued down the aisle, turned, and went down another. There were medicines, bandages, even old splint and casting materials. Not lik
e you could drag a cast printer or bone knitter down here, so this stuff made some amount of sense.
At the end of the aisle, toward the far side of the room where the light from above faded, he spotted an odd indentation on the floor. When he stooped to look closer, he realized it was a hatch. He looked over his shoulder to find Jimmy.
“What’s down here?”
“Go ahead and find out.” Jimmy reached into his pocket and pulled out a key ring, shuffled through the myriad of old metal keys, and handed the bunch to Calder with a strange round key sticking up. Calder found the indent of a circle just beneath the handle that the key fit into, and he turned it until he felt the mechanism click and the door loosen. Handing the keys back to Jimmy with a cautious glance, he twisted the handle and pulled the hatch up, laying it flat against the floor beside him.
It was dark, but he could see a floor below about twelve feet down.
“There’s a light switch to the left of the ladder when you get down there,” Jimmy said as he gestured to the opening. Calder nodded in acknowledgement, dropped his legs into the hole, and jumped.
He didn’t need to find the light switch to know what they were hiding there. He could smell them. Feel them. Rows and rows that glistened faintly in the shadows, and when he reached back and flipped the switch, he couldn’t help the smile that grew on his face.
No matter where he looked, there were weapons. All kinds of weapons, from antique pistols to plasma rifles still in their celluloid wrappers. One shelf housed box after box of ammo, from nine-millimeter bullets to compact charge cartridges and TiC grenade shells.
“Holy fuck,” he said, wiping his mouth with a hand as if he had been salivating. Not only was this insane, it was magnificent. In an eerie way, it was comforting. If there was something he knew intimately, it was weapons.
His eye was drawn to a large box against the wall. The markings on the box made it more than evident that it was military, and Calder knew what was inside without opening the lid, but he needed to see it, feel it in his hands.
It was the most current version of the practical M249. A harnessed automatic weapon that once held a heavy reel of bullets, this one had been upgraded with a large cylinder that had three wires and three LED lights… a fusion charge conversion unit. A gun that was endearingly called The Annihilator.
He grasped it by the large vented stock and hefted it out of the box, balancing it against his hip. This was the shit.
“Find something you like?” Jimmy asked as he dropped into the room behind him.
Calder turned with a large, evil grin.
“I don’t even want to know where the fuck you got this,” he said, tilting the gun up to admire its fittings. “I really don’t care.”
“I assume you remember how to use one of those?”
“Remember? I love this gun. I tended to use smaller, lighter weapons due to my position in the unit, but every chance I got, I took this one.”
“Really? It’s a heavy one to be lugging around.”
“Yeah, it is at first, but after a while it just becomes a part of you, another appendage,” he said, then noted Jimmy’s smirk as he looked down at his leg. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’m over it.”
Calder shook his head and set the weapon back in its box. He knew this topic would surface sooner or later. It was something that had bothered him for so many years.
“It should have happened to me, not you.”
“Stop,” Jimmy said, leaning against a shelf, toying with the small handguns that sat in rows there. “We don’t need to get into it.”
“Yeah, we do,” Calder said, stuffing his hands into his pockets, wondering where he should even begin, aside from his millionth apology.
The day Jimmy lost his leg, several units had been sent out on a sprint, a short skirmish to stir up the enemy so the snipers and infantry could cull the herd. They called it “kicking the nest,” and Calder was out in front. He was always out in front. He was agile and had a knack for finding the sweet spots where he could sit and knock off targets without getting so much as a scratch. Aside from the ability to upload data into his augment, he didn’t have the boosts that the others in his unit had gotten, so he always had to rely on instinct and skill.
The bio-enhanced guys were infantry all the way, able to outrun, outjump, and strong-arm their way behind enemy lines. They were great moles, busting through barricades with ease and depositing enough explosives to move the enemy back a proper distance, like the next county.
The cyber-augmented soldiers worked on the inside, infiltrating networks and capturing critical data. They were able to hack systems with a mere thought, walk through encrypted information like so much water, and sift it through their fingers to find gold.
Calder wasn’t able to do any of that, even though he had a similar augmentation. Though the hardware was the same, the ability to use it varied from person to person. He was no exception.
For some, the initial installation was a death sentence. Three in his unit were pronounced DOA within moments of the operation, their brain tissue rejecting the hardware even with all the anti-rejection drugs pumping through them.
It happened. It was a risk the ops guys were willing to take.
Preparing yourself for that kind of risk was easy for some, but for Calder it wasn’t. The decision wasn’t one he’d made lightly or quickly. His parents had stopped talking to him when he enlisted, and on the day he told them what he had let the army do to his skull, his father disowned him. Erased him from the family.
As a corporate drone, his father saw Calder’s decision as a slap in the face. Having raised Calder to be educated, set up to move right into that corporate stream of consciousness as a CFO or some stodgy stockbroker, his choosing to be a soldier was a dismissal of that life. Of everything his father was about. He was turning his back on a heritage that had long been sown in his blood.
But being some corporate lemming wasn’t Calder’s idea of a life, even if it was one his parents prospered at handily. Granted, being a soldier in an army that was, for all intents and purposes, run by the very corporations he despised was a bit hypocritical. Still, he knew that learning what he could while he was in and making the connections necessary before he got out would get him where he needed and wanted to go in life. Sitting behind a desk all day wasn’t going to get him anything but a fat ass and an ulcer.
What he didn’t bank on in this whole process was that day in the NE2 zone.
Enemy factions had taken over the south side of Old Chicago, down by the warehouses, and their hackers had shut down half the power grid and scrambled police and emergency transmissions. No one was getting in, and civilians who hadn’t gotten out were locked in and under threat of attack.
Calder’s unit, along with two others, was sent to infiltrate and capture the head of the enemy forces. He was holed up in an air traffic control tower on the O’Hare landing port, but the man had enough defensive weaponry set up to deflect a starship. And Calder knew it.
He was never one to just run in without thought. He wasn’t a livewire, a risk taker. Quite the contrary, he was one of the more levelheaded soldiers in his unit, logical and calculating, with deadly focus, but for some reason on that day, he got a bug up his ass to throw caution to the wind and initiated a surprise attack that would be detrimental to a lot of people, including himself and his unit.
They were aware of the depth and range of the defense that had been put in place by the enemy forces at O’Hare. Aside from the detonation units that were speckling the base of the tower like Christmas lights, the enemy had also dropped enough proton mines and ion hover bombs to erase an entire city block. An attack from above wasn’t even considered, since the tower had its own missile defense that the enemy faction had already overridden.
Snipers couldn’t shoot through the impenetrable rhino glass that encased the control room. The place was a veritable fortress unto itself. That was whe
n Calder had the brilliant idea to just bomb the shit out of it.
The powers that be wanted the leader alive, and that’s what Calder was going to give them, by bombing the tower with enough infrawaves to roast their nuts to a golden brown. Make them come out on their own, with a little push. And the plan would have worked like a charm if he hadn’t cranked the pulse rate up to insane levels. The vibration from the infrawaves set off a chain reaction of explosions that sent bodies flying, some in pieces, on both sides.
In the fog of the aftermath, Calder could see the ruins of the tower tilted sideways in a smoking heap, screams and groans echoing in his ears so loudly that he didn’t notice his own pain. That hit him soon enough, and as he crawled toward the med units that were landing nearby, he spotted Jimmy thrown over a pile of rubble like a discarded doll, with nothing more than ligaments and sinew hanging out of his hip on the right side. That’s not something you see every day, or want to.
Calder didn’t remember much after that. Cloudy snippets of being moved onto a gurney and being airlifted to wherever they took him flashed in his mind. That was all he remembered. His next memory was waking up in that stark, sterile room at the clinic, being told he had undergone surgery to repair his skull, which had taken percussion damage during the blast. He had also broken quite a few bones that had been reset while he had been out. In all, he was there for nearly six months. And that was six months too long for him.
“Why didn’t I see you at the clinic after the skirmish?” he asked once the flurry of visions faded.
Jimmy took him by the shoulder, shook him a bit.
“We don’t need to talk about this, Calder, I’m good now.”
“But I’m not.” He pulled away from Jimmy’s grasp and put some distance between them.
“Do you really think it’s wise to be digging up old demons?”
“I don’t have to dig. They never left me,” he said, bowing his head. And it was true. Not a day went by that he didn’t grieve for the things he’d done that day. For the people he’d maimed and killed.