Leon let the silence on the line convey all he had to say on the matter before signing off. The hope was that the quiet would throw a respectful shroud over the dead as much as over their bottled feelings. In truth, the quietude would likely metastasize throughout the night, forging more and more pockets of soundlessness to swallow up the exudate of dark feelings that had only begun to flow. By the time those psychic wounds had healed, the bloody ooze they gave off welled up in the stagnant pools of silence, all of time would seem little more than a graveyard of these cesspools of trampled emotions brooking no trespass.
THIRTY-ONE
“There you go, mate. First beer’s on me,” Cronos said to the kangaroo dragging him out of the collapsed Goliath-Bot, which he had no choice but to land face down. That way he could be that much closer to the ground come time to crawl out of it. The force of the impact had conveniently cracked the otherwise bulletproof glass, making the poor animal’s job that much easier. In place of “the jaws of life” he used his legs to hammer out the splintered shards. Did a damn fine job with the power kicks too, Cronos didn’t mind saying. “Hey, mate, ever consider kickboxing? We could clean up.”
Cronos looked up at his partner and copilot, Ajax, once they were both clear of the robot. “I’ll walk again, right? Someday?”
Ajax shook his head. “Damn drama queen. Did I tell you or did I not tell you to knock it off with the fancy roundhouse kicks?”
“I might have been showing off for Cassandra.”
“The most deadly assassin on the planet? I’d rather date a pineapple. Just bore a hole out at the bottom for me.”
Ajax lost his train of thought when one of the kangaroos dragging Crumley away from a Goliath-Bot carted him past. His arm was lying on his chest, unattached to his body. “What the hell happened to you? You were inside a protective womb that my own mother refused to give me.”
“Look, don’t start in with me, okay?” Crumley was about to give Ajax a piece of his mind when he noticed the kangaroo had stopped dragging him to attend to his arm. Reaching into Crumley’s own triage kit to stitch him back up, after clamping off the hemorrhaging arteries and brushing the nanopaint over his exposed areas.
“Who trained these things?” Ajax blurted, just to get his mouth from permanently freezing up in the shape of an O-ring.
“I did,” Mandrake said stepping into the circle. “And you better show some appreciation.”
“Show some appreciation?” Ajax said. “How is that thing with handing out sexual favors? Because I can show some serious appreciation.”
Mandrake made a move for him. Crumley intervened. “Allow me,” Crumley said, reaching up, grabbing Ajax by the waist and pulling him down. Whereupon he set about pummeling him to death using his unattached arm as a club.
“All right! All right! Christ, anyone ever heard of gallows humor?” Ajax said, fending off the clubbing as best he could. “I hear it’s all the rage among jarheads.”
Crumley eased up on the clubbing. “Sorry for getting in your way there, Sister Theresa,” he said, handing his arm back to the kangaroo so it could continue with its triage surgery.
***
Back at camp, Leon moseyed on over to Natty who was sitting on a tree stump with his face buried in his hands. The rest of the group looked only slightly less out of it, but he decided he’d leave them alone for now. He pretended to be sending out a distress call on his mike. “Houston, we have a problem.”
“Look, everything’s not a joke, okay?!” Natty blared, rising to his feet. “In case you haven’t noticed, they have my wife. No small thanks to you, by the way.”
Leon saw the ripple effect throughout the camp of Natty’s outburst. He whispered and threw his voice at the same time, “Sit your ass down before I pull you into that tree stump so hard I crack your pelvis.” The stern tone made Natty growl and take his seat at the same time. “Defeatism is like a bad flu spreading through the ranks,” Leon continued in his hushed tone, “and I won’t have it.
“Now, use your mind for something besides a weapon against yourself. Think it through. Truman had to have some reason to go after her. And it’s got nothing to do with getting your goat. He knows that working together you’re far more likely to best your last round of tech creations than working apart, so he had to have one damn compelling reason to sabotage his own efforts. Now think. Which of your inventions could she actually be of more help with than you?”
Natty pulled his head out of his hands, his eyes popped wide. Seeing his expression, Leon said, “I guess it’s a good thing I’m already sitting down for this.”
“It’s nothing.”
Leon’s face hardened. “Where have I heard that before?”
“He wouldn’t. He couldn’t. It’s too crazy even for him to contemplate.”
Cassandra looked up from her incessant knife filing against a piece of flint she carried on her like a lucky rabbit’s foot. Of the entire group, she was the closest to them. Strategically positioned to reach Natty fast, faster she knew than Leon himself could move. “There’s nothing too crazy for that man to contemplate,” she said like she was pouring acid out of her mouth and not words. “I’m living proof of that.”
Natty looked up at her guiltily.
“Tell you what, Natty,” Leon said, “I’m going to leave you to your secrets this night. Because I can only fight one war at a time. And I’ve got my hands full with this one. And you’re going to keep your mouth shut too about whatever it is you suspect. My boys have more than enough to keep them busy chasing after real demons far less the ones still rattling around inside your head.”
Leon went and sat at the opposite end of camp, rejoining his circle of men. He didn’t even want to be tempted to try and read Natty’s fleeting expressions, which he couldn’t well do from this distance.
Crumley tested his newly reattached arm, flexing and extending it from the elbow resting on his knee.
“How’s the new arm, Crumley?” Ajax said, making a jackoff gesture with his left hand. Ajax turned to address the rest of the group. “He’s a southpaw, in case that joke went over anybody’s head.”
“I think we got it, Ajax, thank you very much,” Leon said to subdued chuckles.
Crumley, flexing and extending his newly reattached arm, flipped Ajax off.
“Being as that’s the only sign language you ever mastered,” Ajax jibed, “I’d say it’s a hundred percent.”
Leon noticed Cronos had his back against the tree, the rest of him stretched out on the ground on a raised bed of logs. He stabbed a millipede creature as long as his arm crawling up his leg, shoved it in his mouth and chewed it like it was a fine delicacy. Leon grunted. Yeah, he’s fitting in just fine.
Crumley walked on his hands a while, then braved using his legs, uneasily and insecurely at first. The lactic acid buildup in them still too great, he kept falling. The other guys came and “prayed” over him. Laying on of hands, bead rolling, eyes rolling to the back of their heads, chanting, the full Monty. After getting the complete treatment, Crumley tested his legs again and he could walk. “I can walk! I can walk! Praise God! It’s a miracle.”
Leon cracked up.
He heard a “Shit!” from Cronos and reached for his gun. Turned to spy the wincing, pained, wracked expression on his face as he stripped off his pants and went to dangle his dong off the side of a tree stump.
“Really?” Ajax protested. “As if earlier today didn’t give me more insecurities than I know what to do with.”
“He has a point, Cronos. It’s mixed company,” Leon said. “If it was just the girls I could understand.”
“I’m raw, God damn it!” Cronos blurted. “Sweat so much the salt between my legs rubbed everything raw.” He winced as he cut one of the creeper vines, the kind that held water, and hosed himself down in that area. Then took to rubbing cream on himself.
“Jesus,” Ajax said. “It’s getting bigger. I think I’m going to faint.”
“It’s a dick, guys,�
� Leon said. “It’s not the Holy Grail.”
“Speak for yourself,” Cassandra said.
Leon made sure his laugh didn’t produce any sound, using all his military training, and shook his head slowly with the dumb smile still hanging on his face.
He glanced over at Crumley and knew that something was up. “All right, Crumley, I know that look. Miracle healing, my ass. You slipped yourself something.”
“You questioning our faith healing?” Ajax said. “The nerve.” He kicked at Crumley’s feet as he sprawled on the bed of logs he’d thrown down against a tree by way of a recliner. “Well, Crumley, tell him. Tell him there’s no healing like faith healing.” The others had surrounded him as well, giving him a challenging look.”
“I might have doctored myself with some curare,” he said with glazed eyes and a suspiciously blissful look.
Everyone took a step back and voiced a collective, “Shiiiiit!” Then, from the chorus: “You’re mad.” “What the hell?” “What were you thinking?!”
“Relax, gents. At the proper dosage, curare is just an analgesic and muscle relaxant.” He chuckled. “Though I wouldn’t try this at home.”
“All right, guys, leave him to his miracle cure. I don’t have to tell the rest of you to not try anything that crazy.”
From the chorus: “Noooooooo.” “No!” “No, you don’t.” The rest of the team meandered back to their sleep stations.
Leon surveyed the group. They still looked pretty ragged. The humor and Crumley’s little sideshow was helping. But they were going to need a steeper course of medicine this time. If they were going to get up and do it all over again in the morning, in any event.
He decided a little kindling to get the fire going on their spirits mightn’t be a bad idea. “So, Cassandra, what’s your story? You pop out of nowhere, literally. You mind filling in some of the blanks?”
She gave him a dirty look. He gave her a nod directed at the rest of the group, so she could read between the lines for herself. It looked like she read him just fine and was going to play along.
“Natty tells the story better than me,” she said.
Leon saw what she was doing immediately even if Natty didn’t. Natty stopped drowning in whatever well he’d sunken into, per Leon’s forcing him to think about what Truman could be using Laney for. Surfaced. Suddenly it was easier to vent at Cassandra than worry about Laney.
“Truman came to me with a pressing need,” Natty said. “It’s kind of how all our conversations get started. It took too damn long to make a first-class spy, he said. Assassins, not so much, that, given someone with the right stuff and sufficient training, a few years, tops. But a spy, someone who could blend in almost anywhere, much, much harder. They not only had to speak the language, they had to know the culture inside and out. Because all it would take was the smallest of slips to give them away. Just to get someone who could blend into one culture like a native was a tall enough order. But a go-anywhere, land-on-her-feet spy... Well, there was no one in the world who could pull it off. The best of them might be able to lose themselves convincingly in a half dozen countries, tops. The problem, you see, is exacerbated by the fact that one country alone could have more than a hundred dialects, just as many sub-cultures. It was an impossible problem.”
Leon noticed no one in camp was moving. They weren’t even shifting their weight. They were barely breathing. And, more to the point, they’d forgotten their aches and pains. They’d forgotten their self-pity, their self-deprecating, their sense of defeat. Nothing like a good war story, Leon thought, for his war dogs. Natty was performing better than a trained monkey with Cassandra as the organ grinder.
“We discussed making an android to do the job, considering the language requirements alone were beyond the capabilities of even a human with photographic recall. But the state of the art at the time just wasn’t there yet. Of course, he pushed me to get it there. But then I asked him if he really wanted a robot out there that could pass without detection? All it would take is to add a morphing ability and some good 3D printers and they could replace the entire human race without anyone noticing. Enough anyway so that by the time they made their move the rest of us could do nothing about it. That rationale seemed to get him to back off that idea quickly enough.”
There were a lot of Adam’s apples bobbing up and down, Leon noticed. Evidently there was an alternate future out there even scarier than the one they were facing here. Good, Leon thought. The more tomorrow seemed like a walk in the park, by comparison, the better it was going to be for everybody.
Natty sighed. “So, we came up with Cassandra. I cloned my wife because I thought her aptitudes for bioengineering could serve us elsewhere, down the road. There might come a time, for instance, when Cassandra’s morphing ability would have to go beyond simply blending with different cultures.”
“Oh, shit!” Leon thought. “Pull back, buddy. Don’t need you opening that can of worms right now.”
Cassandra must have read Leon’s mind because she flashed that reptilian paint job of hers, turning her skin to camouflage tattoos. The nods around the group suggested they were tracking Natty now. Their eyes and their attention returned to Natty. Leon breathed easier.
“Cassandra’s nano-infused mind and body solved the language problem just like it solved the cultural problem, allowing her to even replicate subtle gestures and tics associated with one or another peoples and individuals. The insertion of a mindchip solved even more problems, like the backstory problem. She could scour the internet for whatever they had on her, her mind maintaining constant connection with it, even rewrite her backstory on the fly by updating all sources on the internet at once. Those abilities, courtesy of the mindchip, which stores the self-evolving algorithms that can do this kind of grunt work for her without her having to do anything beyond setting the intent.”
There were some gasps. And people were starting to shift in their seats again. It wasn’t from the physical discomfort in their bodies. It was from thinking about what this Cassandra chick had been put through. Again, good, Leon thought, anything to make their problems seem small by comparison.
“But that still wasn’t enough,” Natty said. “Anyone can be suspicious, even jealous of you, for all the wrong reasons, even when you don’t give them any. So I had to give her the ability to not just blend, but disappear. Show them, Cassandra.”
Cassandra morphed into Leon. That her cells could divide that quickly to bulk her up in the blink of an eye added to the creep factor. Everybody in the group was up on their feet, taking a collective step back. “She can also make herself invisible,” Natty said. “Some other things, I’d rather not share right now, as I can see you’re spooked enough.”
“Cassandra, that’s enough,” the real Leon said.
She morphed back into her more beguiling self. The men resumed their seats but closing the circle about Natty, aiming their weapons at him. “Don’t think we can do anything to her,” Ajax said, “but I’m thinking why cut off the head of the hydra when you can just go to the hydra maker?”
“Yeah, whatever,” Natty said. “She decides to go rogue, I’ll take the mercy killing over whatever she’s got in mind for you.”
Another ripple effect of Adam’s apples bobbing. One of them said, “Good point,” and all the bodies and the weapons turned to face Cassandra.
“But to make the whole thing work,” Natty said, “I needed a kind of secret sauce. Otherwise her remarkable abilities would never be used to their full potential. I needed a backstory she’d treasure more than the others. She might use the other stories to con her marks, but she’d use this one to con herself. And so I gave her a past that justified her shape changing. Made her hungry for it. A past so ugly and so painful no human could contemplate it without going mad. And so she had no choice but to run from it in the form of one character or another, and keep running, never quite able to get far enough away.”
The men were slowly pivoting in their seats, returning their
gun turrets to Natty. It was Leon’s guess they didn’t much appreciate what he’d done to her.
Natty ignored them, kept talking. “But for the medicine to go down, for her to sell herself on the value of her own coping methods, she needed to be a complete sociopath. Otherwise, she’d know she was just fooling herself. So that’s what she became. Someone who could charm the pants off any man, make them fall in love with her by day, while she slit their throats in bed lying next to them at night.”
All the bodies and all the weapons turned back towards Cassandra. Leon heard the hammers being pulled back on the guns.
“I leave anything out, Cassandra?” Natty said. “I can’t remember every in and out of each one of my creations.”
“You did just fine,” she said. “Nothing else worth telling, really.”
“Everyone’s skin crawling?” Leon said. “Good! Never know my guys to get a decent night’s sleep without a good horror story to send them to bed with.”
The comment drew a few belayed snorts as the guys slowly started relaxing back into the moment. “Good one!” Ajax said, lowering his gun. “Should have known they were just screwing with us.”
Cassandra morphed into Ajax. “Good one! Should have known they were just screwing with us.”
Ajax raised his gun at his mirror reflection. “Okay, I’m going to bed now. Just so you know, I sleep with one eye open.”
“Me too!” “Me three.” “I think tonight I’ll sleep with both eyes open.” “And my gun aimed at her.”
Leon smiled as the group retreated to their hammocks and tucked themselves in for the night. They really would sleep soundly knowing that the world they were in was a lot safer now. For all their mock protests, they would be delighted to have her on the team. Who better to watch their backs?
“Until we can find a witch doctor worth recruiting on to the team, I suppose a nextgen psycho-killer sociopath is the next best thing,” Ajax mumbled, beating his spray-foam pillow into submission with his fists before settling into it and the hammock.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 29