Apex Cypher (Prequel to The Techxorcist series)

by Barnes, Colin F.

  Ten minutes into their run, Gabe spotted the vertical stabilizer fins of an old passenger plane behind a fence stretching for at least a kilometre across the horizon.

  “This must be it,” Gabe said, just as a strike of lightning from the dark, ominous clouds above lit up the scorched earth and shined briefly off a metallic fuselage. Three seconds later, a clap of thunder crashed across the sky, rumbled against the ground, making Gabe jump with surprise.

  Petal screamed with excitement, not realising that they, being the only two things apart from the rusting aircraft in the desert, were prime targets for a lightning strike.

  They dashed closer to the scrapyard. A light glowed from behind an ancient bomber, bathing its disintegrating shell in a kind of holy light that stood up to the indomitable darkness of the storm clouds. How brave, Gabe thought, of that little light to shine when all around the world looked to swallow it whole and snuff it out for good. How brave.

  Gabe fixed his attentions on it as if it was a safety beacon.

  The counter had thankfully grown quieter. They had passed through the worst of the lingering radiation. How much damage was done during their exposure, he couldn’t know. Hopefully it would be minor, if not negligible. It had been over fifty years since the The Family dropped the nukes and EMPs. Time does heal, even from the worst atrocities of humankind.

  It was ironic that the one thing that still worked properly in this desolate, post-Cataclysmic place was the wind turbine, considering it was designed and manufactured by The Family when they were a renewable energy company. That was before the economic collapse. Before they changed tack and applied their technology and immeasurable resources to arms and weapons manufacture. Before they became the superpower.

  “Can you imagine what we could salvage from here?” Petal said.

  “They’re dead, girl. Doubt any of the gear inside these planes survived the EMPs. Half of ‘em never left the ground. Besides, the Tinker would’ve grabbed anything of use by now, I’m sure. It’s a crying shame though. Look at those beauties just sitting there.”

  He pointed to the far left of the yard. Ten pristine Anglo-American drone-controlled F300 stealth fighters sat lined up like they just came out of the Skunkworks. Trillions of dollars worth of dead, pretty metal rusting on the desert planes of north China.

  They were nothing more than rusted garden ornaments now.

  Back before the war, this place would have been covered in lush agricultural land, growing cotton and rice. The nukes and subsequent fallout had killed most of that off. The main foods available consisted of leftover powdered foods, sugarweed, and surprisingly, soya.

  After the fallout dropped to a certain level, soya started to regrow. According to the gangs that Gabe ran with in Hong Kong, before he met Petal, there was something about the soya plant that trapped and made safe the dangerous isotopes. Since then, soya beans, milk, oil, and its proteins have been the main source of food—for those who could find the fields. They were few and far between. Gabe and Petal’s own rations, stored in her backpack, were running dangerously low.

  Petal shrugged her shoulders, “Yeah, real shame. All that money, and now they ain’t worth crap.” She moved closer to the chain link fence and reached out a hand.

  With a sharp cracking sound, she flew away, her body hitting the hard ground like a doll. A shower of blue sparks arced from the electrified fence as her body jerked briefly before tensing up and then becoming still. The sparks, like blue shards, fell around Gabe’s body as he dropped the Geiger counter to the floor and rushed to Petal’s prone body.

  “Jesus, girl!”

  He shook her gently, tried to wake her, but she didn’t move.

  Taking off her goggles, her eyes were still that solid black, only now they weren’t doing their weird swirling thing. He checked her pulse: nothing.

  Screaming for help, he placed her flat on her back, and one hand over the other pumped her chest. Time had no purpose then. He had no idea how long he’d been pumping her heart when a voice called out to him from beyond the fence.

  “What are you doing out there? Who are you?” the voice said, in a gravely singsong kind of way.

  It had to be the Tinker. She fitted the description given to him by Xian, and the voice sounded similar to the one on the video recording.

  “I think she’s dead!” Gabe said. “Help me!”

  Part 2 - The Tinker

  Gabe had never seen Petal like this before. She’d blacked out once or twice, lost consciousness on many occasions, but she always came round. It sometimes took a shot of NanoStem—a solution made from nanobots that healed wounds and cured illnesses, but he had no ‘Stems, and this time, there was no pulse at all.

  A figure in a makeshift leather cloak, stained black from dirt and grease, entered a code into a keypad attached to a fencepost. Gabe knew the power to the fence was now off due to the lack of hum, more apparent because of its absence. With the rain and the wind, he hadn’t noticed it before, but the silence now was like someone had switched off a white-noise generator.

  The figure opened a door within the fence, and stopped about twenty metres away as if regarding them as threat, or perhaps expecting this was just a setup to lure her from her graveyard. Gabe couldn’t make out their face, hidden deep within the shadow of the hood. Rain lashed against the stiff leather fabric, making a drumming sound.

  It lifted its head no more than an inch, but it was enough for Gabe to see two pinpricks of blue light, like two miniature Earths floating in a void. It was she: the Tinker.

  “Please,” Gabe begged, hunched over Petal’s still form, “Help me.”

  No reaction.

  “Are you listening? Ya damned fence has probably killed my friend! Hell, my only friend! Don’t just stand there. Help me. There must be something ya can do?”

  A hot prickly sensation crawled up and down his arms and back as his muscles tensed. Her inactivity and passiveness enraged him; made him want to destroy her, punish her for not helping him save the only person he held dear. His one precious thing in a world of ruin and struggle. Petal was as close to family as anyone could be. And the only family he had left.

  The Tinker ambled forwards a few steps, her feet scraping against the hard earth. Her right hip rose higher than her left like two out-of-sync pistons, giving her an awkward, waddling gait. When she was just a metre away, she pulled back the hood.

  The two lights were some kind of optical replacement. Attached to her head by a leather strap, the two orbs set in a steel surround. The orbs themselves were no more than a centimetre in diameter. Behind the strap, rough, amateur stitches lined the circumference of scar tissue around the profile of the eye socket. The wounds looked old, matched the soft-edged scars that ran diagonally from the socket where it met the bridge of her nose and down across her sunken cheeks to finish at her jawline.

  She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out for a few seconds. She had just three teeth on the bottom row, pointing at counterpoint angles, and two canines on the upper row, which as he noticed looked especially sharp.

  Her foul breath carried to him even through the wind and rain. It stunk of rotten meat or some kind of rancid fungus. Her blackened tongue probed tentatively at her teeth.

  He was reminded of how a snake would taste the air with its forked tongue.

  “Well?” The tension was killing him.

  Finally she spoke, uttered with the cadence and timbre of words that had sat eager in a throat with no audience to hear them for far too long. They came tumbling out, tripping over each other. “What who do you are... I mean... who are you? What do you want?”

  “Want? What does it look like?” He stood, pointed to Petal. “She took a shook off ya fence, I want you to help me get her out of the rain, try and help her. We ain’t got time to screw about here, yeah? Can ya
help?”

  “Who are you people?” She raised her face to him, trained those weird orbs on his face. She swayed her head, held it at a crooked angle as if she wasn’t sure where she should be looking. Her upturned lips transferred her confusion.

  It dawned on him then: she clearly hadn’t received the message he and Petal had sent responding to her request for help for her job. That, or Xian hadn’t sent it. Given how his brain was full of a varied concoction of toxins, that wasn’t so surprising.

  He quickly explained that they were there for the job.

  “Right!” she said. “Yeah, about the job. You’re here for that? Good. Come. Bring the girl. I’ve got just the thing—for a price.”

  Gabe didn’t care about the price; he just wanted her back. He’d negotiate afterwards. He gently lifted Petal from the ground, placed her arms around his neck, and carried her towards the open door of the Tinker’s graveyard compound.

  As he passed through the door, held open by the Tinker, she had pulled her cloak slightly to one side, exposing a beige-coloured leather jerkin that had—

  What the hell? He looked closer to confirm his suspicions. The markings on the jerkin were tattoos. That wasn’t leather! It was skin.

  She gave him a wicked grin, exposing her rotten black gums.

  Skin jackets, foul breath that stunk of rotting meat... He tried not to think about what that all pointed to.

  “Over there.” The Tinker pointed to the broken fuselage of a passenger jet. The nose cone and tail-fin had come away as did one of the wings. It had the colours of a Russian airline: white and red. The windows were covered with hastily welded scrap pieces salvaged from other planes. The steps to the cabin door were a combination of robes, wooden steps, and yet more salvaged metal.

  Gabe waited her for to lead the way, but she stood there, her cloak open, her hand resting on the butt of a rifle that was hanging from a belt: a not-so-subtle threat. But that was fine. She wasn’t the only one concealing arms.

  Not wanting to hang around, he accepted the situation and headed for the plane, all the while the hairs on the back of his neck tickled as if being brushed constantly by a ghost. He just hoped that by the time he got inside, the clearly mental woman would have shot him and decided which bits of his body she would barbecue first.

  It was that unfortunate thought that drew his gaze to his side as he made his way across the muddy ground and through the piles of scrap metal. Through a narrow gap between two ten metre high piles of wings and fins, a series of sharpened sections of metal reached out of the ground. Upon them, hung like nothing more than laundry, were the skins of three separate individuals. Their bodies were casually tossed to the site in a pile of garbage.

  Holding Petal over his shoulder with one hand, he reached the other inside of his duster, placed his palm around the grip of a revolver.

  “Up there, go in and turn right. Place her on the bench.”

  He just nodded, followed the orders, and waited. As crazy as she seemed, and potentially murderous, she could have just killed him from a distance. He couldn’t give up on Petal now. He’d have to see this through for her sake, one way, or another.

  ***

  Inside the plane was a veritable warehouse of junk-treasure, objet d’art, and pieces of salvaged tech in myriad states of repair. Racks and shelves lined the left side in place of the passenger seats that had been taken out to leave a wide long space within the tube. Various tools littered the shelves: some taken from various plane assemblies, maintenance kits—as per the markings on the various boxes—and others clearly homemade.

  In the dark light of the fuselage he found the bench. Carefully clearing a place on its busy surface, he placed Petal down as gentle as if she were made of eggshell waiting to crack into a hundred pieces. Above the bench was a port window looking out into the graveyard. Dark storm clouds continued to gather, blocking out the light. Inside the plane, a small hydrogen fuel-cell generator—a common item found in military aircraft—whined as it feed the string of overhead lights, giving the craft a strange out of time and place feel.

  When the Tinker closed the cabin door behind her, they could have been absolutely anywhere. The sound of the rain pattering against the metal shell made him remember the days of living in the fallout shelters with his family in Hong Kong. For ten long years they had lived underground, surviving on the stockpiled supplies. Some days he wished he was back there. He missed his family, the camaraderie of the other survivors, the spirit and society of mutual help. Looking around the Tinker’s makeshift home, all he saw were tools, machinery, and circuitry.

  The place had the whiff of the mad in the air, the stench of loneliness and desperation. And worse: he hadn’t seen any other way out. He was in the bargain for good now, and had to see it through, whatever happened.

  “What’s your name?” Gabe said, more to break the atmosphere than anything. She pottered about, in no rush with Petal. He wanted to wail and scream to get her to move faster, but she just fussed about her racks and shelves, looking through boxes and containers. All the while mumbling indecipherable words.

  “Hey. I asked—”

  “I know what you asked. All in good time. Here, take this and place it in her mouth.”

  She reached out a filthy fingerless gloved hand towards him and passed to him a flat metal disc, the size of a Yen coin. Upon its surface, a golden light shimmered, and around its edges indentations looked exactly like teeth marks. “What is it?”

  “Just do it. Does she have a pacemaker or any mechanised organs?”

  Crap, did she? He’d known her for about four years when he found her walking in a daze with no memory out of the desert. In that time she’d only needed a few basic stitches for a flesh wound. She could have anything inside for all he knew. She certainly hadn’t said anything. There were her concealed forearm spikes, and her dermal implant chip, that, via her neck port and wirelessly, allowed her to connect to computers. That wasn’t entirely different to Gabe’s own internal systems, but they couldn’t be classed as mechanised.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “You ever heard the story of Dr Frankenstein?” She stepped closer, carrying a box of wires and other devices he didn’t recognise. She dropped the box casually on the bench next to Petal. Reaching over the bench to a rack made from yet more salvaged metal, she pulled out a half-metre long blade. She turned to Gabe, gesticulating wildly with the blade, making him have to step back away from the cruel looking cutting edge. “Well, have you?”

  “I... no, not that I can remember, why?”

  With an ugly grin followed by a laugh that seemed to come from her guts, all wet and phlegmy, she passed him the blade. He noticed that a wire poked out of the base of the handle. He traced it to a black box under the bench.

  “When I say so, you touch the end of that to the disc in her mouth. Just stand back to avoid the limbs.”

  “Wait, you’re gonna electrocute her again?”

  “Do you trust me or not?” She scrutinised him with those weird blue surrogate eyes of hers.

  “I barely know ya. So no, I don’t.”

  “Now,” she said, and kicked out at the box. A loud hum phased through the cabin, his fingers gripped around the handle, and before he knew it, the Tinker gripped his wrist and with strength that belied her stature, forced him to move the blade to the disc. Before it even touched, a blue electrical charge jumped across the gap to strike the disc. The current seemed to swim on the surface of the disc for a few seconds before flowing down into Petal’s mouth.

  Nothing happened.

  Gabe turned to face the Tinker. He was about to remonstrate when she kicked at the box again. Another bolt of electricity jumped from the tip of the tool in his hand to the disc.

  Petal’s body lurched upwards in a tight arc before slamming back down onto the be
nch. Her right foot jolted up and down, striking her heel against the bench.

  The Tinker pushed Gabe out of the way as he stood open-mouthed. She grabbed the disc with a pair of rubber handed pliers and threw it down into the dark recesses of the fuselage. From inside her cloak, she pulled out a syringe. She ripped of the wrapper and leaned over Petal’s chest.

  Gabe moved to intercept her, fearful of what might be in the needle, but she casually turned, held her hand up to stop him. “It’s ‘Stem,” she said. “It’ll help repair the damage from the fence. He reached for the wrapper. She was right. Somehow, she had managed to find a legit supply of NanoStems. It didn’t matter, however. Petal snapped her head to the side, stared at the woman, screamed, and thrust up an arm, knocking the syringe to the floor.

  “God damn it!” The Tinker turned, and scrabbled on the floor for the NanoStem shot.

  “Petal!” Gabe rushed to the bench, reached for Petal’s hand. “Y’okay, girl? Can you hear me?”

  Petal heaved in a deep breath, expanding her chest and let it out in a barely controlled roar. She clasped her hands to the side of her head, before ripping off the goggles and throwing them to the floor. Her eyes were still black, but now shimmered with an ethereal blue as tiny lines of electricity danced on the surface.

  “Argh! What the holy fuck is happening?” Sweat poured from Petal’s face as she sat up on the bench, her legs hanging off the edge. She leaned forward, crunched up into a ball, and let out a high-pitched keening noise.

  Gabe could do nothing but put his arms around her and call to the Tinker. “What’s happening? Have you ever done this before?” The old woman rose up from her crouched position beneath the bench, the syringe now in her hand.