The Tin Man

by Dale Brown

  Chris Wohl got on his feet like an enraged grizzly bear. He picked up the steel pipe and swung it with all his might, hitting Patrick squarely in the left shoulder. They all heard the dull thud and Patrick reeled, stumbled slightly over to the right, but did not go down. Wohl swung again. The pipe landed on Patrick’s left rib cage. Again, no effect. He blocked two even harder blows with his forearms. The next blow, weaker now that Wohl was winded, landed right on his head, across his right temple. His head jerked to the left from the impact, but he remained standing. Then, as if from the depths of a wild-boar pit, Patrick cried out, a loud, almost animal-like cry, and clutched his head in pain.

  “Patrick!” Masters shouted. “Are you all right? Doc, help him!”

  Carlson Heinrich ran over to Patrick, ready to get him out of the suit and administer first aid, but Patrick swung his left arm and swatted Heinrich away. One of Heinrich’s ribs cracked loud enough for everyone in the hangar to hear it.

  As Wohl looked at him in amazement, Patrick stepped over to him and rammed his left hand into his chest. The blow felt like a sledgehammer. The wind gushed out of Wohl’s lungs, and he fell to his knees, grasping his midriff in pain. Then Patrick reached down, picked up the steel pipe-and hit him square on the side of the head with a tremendous swinging blow. Wohl’s head snapped over to the right in a cloud of blood. He landed flat on his face and lay still, blood oozing from his ears, his mouth, his eyes. Then, with another growl, Patrick raised the pipe over the fallen man, aiming one end of it at his skull…

  “What the fuck!” Hal Briggs shouted in shock. Patrick McLanahan, their friend and colleague, was going to kill Chris Wohl! He ran over and body-tackled Patrick. They both fell over onto the concrete floor, Briggs on top. “Patrick, what the hell are you doing, man?” He intended just to hold Patrick, to calm him down-but both of Patrick’s arms swung up and hit him in the jaw. Briggs felt as if a steel girder had hit him-the force was no different from being hit by a man, but it didn’t feel like arms striking him; they felt like huge steel rods, completely unyielding. Briggs’s head snapped upward, blood spattering from a chomped tongue and broken nose, teeth flying.

  Shouting like a madman, Patrick struggled to his feet, again clutching his helmeted head. He picked up the steel pipe and turned on the first person he saw: the prone Chris Wohl. He raised the pipe like a woodsman getting ready to split a log and…

  “No!” Briggs shouted. He pulled his.45 Colt from his holster, aimed, and fired three rounds, hitting Patrick twice in the back and once in the helmet. Patrick screamed, the electronically distorted voice sounding like the squealing brakes of a locomotive against the rails, metal on metal. He dropped the steel pipe and again clutched his head, writhing in pain-but still on his feet. He turned toward Briggs, screamed again, and charged.

  “Patrick, stop!” Briggs fired five more rounds, emptying his Colt. Patrick fell to his knees after the last slug hit him. The air was filled with blue smoke and the walls echoed from the gunshots. The scene was surreal: a costumed figure howling like an animal, writhing in pain, crouched on the concrete floor.

  But he still wasn’t down. Patrick crawled to his feet, his chest heaving, his electronically amplified breathing heavy and labored. Briggs couldn’t believe his eyes. Patrick had just taken eight slugs from a.45-caliber automatic from no more than twenty feet away and he was still alive. Or was he really alive? Was this some kind of sick, homicidal automaton? Briggs dropped the empty magazine, pounded a full one home, and took aim…

  “Wait!” Masters shouted. He ran over to Patrick with Heinrich, plowing into him from the right side and tackling him back to the floor. Patrick swung an arm, clubbing Heinrich painfully on the right arm. Heinrich cried out in pain and rolled free, clutching a broken arm, but it gave Masters enough time to touch a tiny hidden switch under the left edge of Patrick’s helmet. An invisible seam appeared, and the helmet popped open and clattered to the concrete hangar floor.

  What they saw made their blood turn cold. Patrick’s face was contorted in agony. His eyes were bulging, his mouth wide open. The veins on his head and neck protruded so much that they looked ready to burst through his skin, and his neck muscles were horribly swollen. His maddened eyes rested on Briggs. He scrambled drunkenly to his feet, ready to pounce again, ready to rip Briggs’s heart out, ready to spill his blood. Briggs aimed for the contorted head and closed his eyes…

  “Don’t, Hal,” Jon Masters said in a remarkably calm voice, holding up both hands. “He’ll be all right now. The power in the suit is deactivated. Just stay away from him.” He stooped to help Heinrich, who was clutching his fractured arm against his body. Patrick got to his feet and charged, but Briggs sidestepped him easily, pushing him away to keep clear of those pile-driver arms.

  He watched the way Patrick’s eyes darted from side to side; he’d clutch his head and then they’d flash sideways again. He stumbled about, trying to regain his footing, before finally collapsing to his knees on the floor. “What’s he doing?” Briggs asked. “Why are his eyes doing that?”

  “He’s trying to activate the eyeball sensors,” Masters explained. “Trying to activate the systems in the suit. He still thinks he has his helmet on. Don’t touch him, Hal. The effect will wear off, but you might set him off again. Look after Chris.”

  Keeping a wary eye on Patrick, Briggs went over to Chris Wohl. The big Marine commando was moaning in pain, trying feebly to raise a hand to his head. He looked in very bad shape. “I think Patrick fractured his skull,” said Briggs, “but he’s conscious-though barely. He needs an ambulance.”

  “I… I already called for an ambulance,” they heard Patrick say. His breathing had returned almost to normal. He was still on his knees, his head listing to one side as if he couldn’t hold it upright. “As soon as I hit him, I got on the VHF radio and called the security office for an ambulance. It’ll be here any second now.”

  “What the hell were you trying to do, Patrick?” Briggs spat. “What got into you, man?”

  “I… I don’t know, Hal,” Patrick said weakly. “It was as if I were… I don’t know, on speed or something. When Chris pushed me, I felt-I just felt like I had to kill him. He was the enemy. I could see everything so clearly, as if I were watching myself. When those bullets hit me, I wanted to rip something apart-anything. I wanted to kill you, kill Chris, kill anyone who came near me. I knew what was happening. I knew who you were, I knew where I was-and I also knew I had to kill all of you.”

  “Jesus. I think that suit messed up your head,” Briggs said. “Jon, help Patrick out of here before the ambulance comes. I’ll stay with the doc and Chris.” Masters helped Patrick to his feet and supported him to an adjacent office. When the ambulance arrived, he went back to see Wohl safely loaded in, issued instructions to the security crews, and returned to look after Patrick.

  He found him where he had left him, sitting on a bench with his elbows resting on his knees, looking down at the floor. He had opened the top of the suit so he wouldn’t pass out from the heat. Jon disconnected the backpack power unit, then helped him strip off the suit. Soon Patrick was sitting in a chair, wearing only a sweat-soaked light cotton undergarment. He was staring straight ahead, his lips parted, the expression on his face suggesting he was replaying the past twenty terrible minutes in his mind’s eye.

  Jon sat down in front of him. Blood vessels had popped around Patrick’s eyes, and the muscles on his neck, shoulder, chest, and arms looked thick and chiseled, as if he had just finished a weight-lifting workout. He began to weep.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jon said. “I think they’re all going to be all right.”

  “I was afraid I killed Chris. Are they on their way to the hospital? How are they?”

  “Chris is hurt pretty bad,” Jon said, “but he was conscious when they took him away. Carl has a broken arm and rib. Hal has some broken teeth and a cut tongue, but he’ll be okay. He’s staying with Chris.” The two men sat quietly for a long moment, overwhelmed
by what had happened. Then Jon cleared his throat and asked, “Patrick… Patrick, what did it feel like?”

  “What?”

  “Come on, Patrick, you’ve got to tell me. You got hit over the head with a steel pipe. My God, you were shot in the head and in the back by a big-ass forty-five automatic from point-blank range! The gun blasts almost knocked me over!”

  “I… I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’ve got to, Patrick!” Masters retorted. “You know as well as I do that this program is dead. It failed with the airlines and the FAA, and after this neither ISA nor any other government agency will come anywhere near BERP. It’s over.

  “But you experienced it, Patrick. You know what it’s like to survive something like that. I’d never have the guts to put that thing on and have a Hal Briggs fire live forty-five-caliber rounds at me! You’re the only one who will ever know what it felt like to be…” He paused, then went ahead and said it, “… be invulnerable, like Superman. What was it like? How did it feel?”

  Patrick whispered something too low to be audible, then began to weep again.

  “Never mind,” Jon said reassuringly, putting a hand on his shoulder. “It’s over. We’ll destroy the suit. I promise it’ll never hurt anyone else again.”

  “Jon… dammit, Jon, it felt great, it felt wonderful!” Patrick exclaimed, his tears now more shame than pain. “When I felt that energy rush through the suit, I felt more alive than I’ve felt in months. The power is incredible, Jon, enormous. It’s like a drug, like a shot of adrenaline jammed right into the heart. But the energy surge did something else too-it made me a little crazy, like a berserker. Everything was running in slow motion. The gunshots felt like ocean waves hitting you-you get pushed around, and you can feel the force behind them, but then the impact is gone and you’re still left standing.”

  “Did it hurt? Did the energy surges hurt you?”

  Patrick laughed. “Oh God, yes,” he said. Jon looked at him as if he had gone off his rocker. “The pain was… exquisite. That’s the only way I can describe it. Exquisite. It was what I always imagined slow death would be like, once you accepted the fact that you were going to die. I felt liberated, powerful, free. My whole body felt as if it were on fire. Every nerve was alive, jangling my brain. The incredible pain made me feel…” He shook his head, shrugged, and said, “… immortal. I was dying, but I felt immortal. It felt… good.”

  “I’m destroying that damned suit, Patrick,” Jon said firmly. “Apart from what it made you feel like doing, even if it protected you from Hal’s bullets the suit itself could have killed you. It’s not worth it. No government contract or big breakthrough is worth it.”

  But Patrick didn’t seem to be listening anymore. He looked totally wiped out. “I’ll call Wendy too…”

  “No,” Patrick said. “I’ll tell her.”

  The first thing Patrick did, after visiting Chris Wohl and Carl Heinrich in the hospital, was go home and hug his wife and child. But he said nothing. He simply held them close and let their warmth wash away the memories of that terrible morning.

  University of California-Davis Medical Center,

  Stockton Boulevard and Forty-Second Street,

  Sacramento, California

  the next morning

  When Patrick arrived at the UC-Davis Medical Center the next morning, he was startled to find a crowd of reporters and TV cameras at the entrance. “Mr McLanahan!” they shouted. “Over here, Mr McLanahan! What do you think of the court’s decision?”

  Patrick always tried to avoid the media, but they were everywhere this time, and he could not hide the confusion on his face. “Mr McLanahan, you heard about the appeals court’s decision, didn’t you?”

  “No, I haven’t,” Patrick responded, curious now.

  “A judge in the state appeals court has overturned the superior court’s no-bail ruling for the two defendants charged with murder in the Sacramento Live! shootout,” the reporter said. “He said there’s insufficient evidence to hold them on an attempted-murder charge.”

  Patrick gasped. “What?” he exclaimed. “No-that can’t be!” The reporters circled him like sharks around a wounded marlin. He knew he shouldn’t react, should conceal the horror he felt, but he couldn’t contain his disbelief. This can’t be, he said to himself. The best, the only opportunity to discover more about who had attacked Paul and killed the two Sacramento police officers seemed to be slipping out of their fingers.

  In a daze, Patrick pushed his way through the knot of reporters and into the entrance. There were more of them at the nurses’ station on Paul’s floor but the policeman on duty cleared a path for him as he made his way to the room.

  Jon Masters was already there, together with a technician who worked with Carlson Heinrich. Paul was sitting up in bed looking apprehensive, on his lap the ever-present notepad he used for communicating. A lot of the bandages and dressings had been removed from his neck and throat. The most horrible parts were his shoulder and left arm. Despite three separate surgeries, the shoulder, unprotected by his bullet-proof vest, could not be repaired, and the damage to the left bicep and elbow was too extensive. A month ago, the decision had finally been made to amputate the arm. Paul had taken the news stoically, but the nurses told Patrick in private that they had seen him silently weeping when he was alone at night, and more than once he had buzzed them for something to alleviate the pain in the arm that was no longer there.

  “You hear about the court decision?” Jon asked.

  “Just did, from the reporters outside,” Patrick said, sitting down beside the bed and clasping his brother’s right hand, “but no details. What in hell happened?”

  “The appeals court said there wasn’t enough evidence that the suspects had anything to do with the shooting.”

  “Then they must know who they are,” Patrick said. “Did they say?”

  “They’re former German soldiers,” Jon said.

  Patrick nodded-he had figured that professional soldiers were involved in the attack. “Let me guess: They work for some mercenary group or drug gang, and they sneaked into the country and planned the robbery…”

  “Nope. What Chandler said that night on the tape is true; they have valid Canadian entry and work visas, and a valid Canadian residence and employer. All verified. They said they were visiting friends in Sacramento and didn’t know they needed a visa to visit here from Canada.”

  “That’s bullshit! It’s gotta be bullshit!” Patrick exclaimed. “Didn’t the police check out their stories? Where were they staying? What were they doing? Where were they going?”

  “They claim they were walking down some road, the Garden Highway I think they said, heading from the riverfront to the apartment complex where they’re staying, and got hit by a truck,” Jon responded. Patrick’s mind flashed to what he remembered of the Garden Highway. It paralleled the Sacramento River and was very desolate in spots. The Northgate section of town, just off Northgate Boulevard and the Garden Highway, had a large German-immigrant population, so large that it was known as Little Berlin. There were numerous immigrants from Eastern Europe in some of the other apartment complexes in the area too; and with several families often occupying a single apartment unit, it was almost impossible to keep track of the residents.

  “They said someone picked them up after the accident and brought them back to the apartment,” Jon went on. “No one reported it because they were afraid they or their friends might be deported. But when their injuries turned out to be so serious, they were dropped off at the hospital by an anonymous Good Samaritan who didn’t want to be identified because he’s an illegal immigrant too.”

  “But all the media reports of their arrest said their injuries were consistent with their being struck by the police car,” Patrick protested. “The broken bones in their legs and rib cages matched perfectly with the dimensions of the squad car Paul was driving…”

  “Yeah-well, apparently the press folks were talking through their asse
s,” Jon said disgustedly. “It turns out the police can’t prove anything. The injuries are consistent with their getting hit by some vehicle, but they can’t say for sure it was a police car.

  “So the appeals court’s decided the murder and attempted-murder charges are unsupported and they’ve thrown the case out of court. The only charge that’s sticking is violation of immigration laws. The worst that will happen to them is they’ll be put on a plane and flown back to Canada, or back to Germany if Canada won’t take them back-that is, if the city or county can afford to deport them. In the meantime, the county of Sacramento will pick up all their hospital bills.”

  Patrick shook his head. “It’s a nightmare,” he said, his voice reflecting his anger and frustration. “A goddamn nightmare. I thought for sure they were involved in the shootout.” Apparently Masters heard something in Patrick’s tone that made him flash back to the previous day, because he looked worried, even scared. Patrick noticed. He gave Jon a nod, a silent “I’m okay. Don’t worry.”

  Paul noticed too. “Everything okay, bro?” came a voice. “You sound pissed off enough to kill someone.”

  Stunned, Patrick stared at his brother. “Paul? Was that you?”

  “Damn straight!” Paul smiled proudly.

  Patrick’s face glowed with wonder. “The electronic larynx works! You did it, Jon! How does it work?”

  “Sensors in the trachea attached to the muscles that normally control the vocal cords activate lasers that duplicate the actions of the vocal cords,” Masters explained. “The laser pickups activate an electronic voice-box that translates the vibrations of laser light into speech-pattern sounds, then broadcasts the sounds through the throat, mouth, and nasal passages. We can very nearly duplicate Paul’s natural voice because the sound still emanates from his mouth, just like normal speech. Fitting the hardware was the easy part-it’s tuning the system to closely match his natural voice that’s been hard.”