by Mat Nastos
Mal marveled the Japanese-made mini MPV was still mostly in one piece as he disentangled himself from its ruined rear end. Watching as a two-story robot with a gooey human center broke through the front wall of the building in front of him, intent on his destruction, Mal desperately hoped his own parts came from the same manufacturing plant.
Splinters of wood and glass and aluminum showered the area in a deadly rain, coating every inch in deadly debris. Looking around for an escape route, Mal cursed Zuz’s choice to make his home in a dump filled with ammunition for Talos. Why couldn’t he have lived in a nice, empty open field or on a boat?
Gutted cars and refrigerators and old industrial air conditioning units flew by Mal’s technologically-enhanced form and were tossed carelessly out of the way, crushed flat by, or absorbed into the ever-growing form of Talos.
Mal hazarded a glimpse behind him to see the government killer topping twenty-five or thirty feet in height with no signs of slowing down. He had to figure out how to stop the monster fast or there’d be no way out.
Ducking into an ancient school bus to catch his breath and avoid being stepped on, Mal found his relief to be fleeting as he came nose to barrel with the MP5/40 submachine gun of GMR Rho-Five.
Even more disturbing for Mal was a voice from the past emerging from the robot-like solider.
“Steve? Steve Douros?”
“Halt or be terminated, Designate Cestus,” echoed the voice of US Army Sergeant Steven Gus Douros coldly. Almost no trace of his Pennsylvanian accent remained in his words and Mal found no hint of recognition in his former friend’s face. A face almost entirely replaced with the same gleaming metal shared by all GMR-units.
Gleaming nano-tech arms snapped up in a sign of non-aggression. Mal was dumbfounded at the sight before him, positive that Douros had died in the same helicopter crash that started him down his current road.
“What happened to you, Sarge?” said Mal, backing slowly out of the bus, arms still raised in faux-surrender.
The sound of six more military weapons chambering rounds and preparing to fire halted Mal’s retreat, but no more so than staring into the glassy, uncomprehending eyes of a dead man. Mal allowed his internal computer system to inform him of the presence of seven GMR-units surrounding him, not able to rip his gaze from the sergeant.
“What did they do to him?” Mal demanded of his computer.
“Rho-Team, Unit Five, formerly known as Steven Gus Douros, retired first sergeant serving in Third Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment. Classified unfit for service and discharged on an RFM approved by Lieutenant Colonel Michael Denman,” rambled Mal’s personal version of Wikipedia.
The man once known as Sergeant Douros signaled the rest of his team to close in and Mal sprung into action even as his computer continued its litany of facts.
“Diagnosed in a persistent vegetative state, Rho-Five was removed to the Project: Hardwired facility in Houston, Texas on the authorization of Director Gordon Kiesling.”
Mal burst into action even as a pair of the GMRs opened fire on him, launching himself to his left into a third Rho Unit and shoved his clawed metal fist through the protective Kevlar of its bulletproof vest, into its stomach and out its back. Pieces of spine dropped to the ground in a soup of human entrails and bits of tattered uniform.
In less than the time it took to sneeze, Rho-Four was dead and Mal was moving again, a trail of bullets from his would-be captors kicking up divots of asphalt all around him.
“Douros was an early test subject in the GMR Upgrade process led by Doctor Jean Ryan. Eighty-percent of his brain was replaced by cybernetic implants which allowed him to be controlled by the main Abraxas command protocol.”
“Is his like me? Is Steve still in there,” Mal leapt over Rho-One, dragging his six-inch claws through its neck and face in a geyser of gore, splitting its helmet in half. Four of the remaining five Gomers dropped their guns, allowing the weapons to hang freely from harnesses attached to their torsos, and unsheathed electrified truncheons that glowed blue and sparked evilly in the shadows of the junkyard. An elbow strike from above drove the eleven-inch forearm spike through the head of Rho-Nine, slicing its skull neatly in half and ending its pitiful existence.
“Negative,” came the computer’s response, punctuated by Mal blocking an overhand strike by Rho-Seven. Mal knew from previous experience the electricity would do little harm to him as long as it only made contact with his cybernetic arms. The nanotech of Mal’s left arm reformed itself into a shining, mirror-polished, three-foot long blade, a blade he used to slice Rho-Seven in half, from right shoulder to left hip. “Rho-Five’s originally personality construct was terminated with the surgical removal of his higher organic brain functions. Only involuntary systems remain.”
“Those bastards,” spit Mal, gutting two more of his robotic attackers with ease. He was glad the Gomers weren’t as tough as Gauss or Talos. “Where is Talos, anyway?” he quizzed as he faced off against the final GMR, Rho-Five, his former friend.
“Designate Talos inbound. Fifty meters and closing at a speed of twenty-two miles per hour,” Mal wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected just a hint of humor in the electronic voice. He was starting to hate the thing.
“Bloody great,” said Mal, charging into battle against Rho-Five, desperately trying to drown out the sound of a pissed-off four-thousand pound junkyard titan bearing down on him with death in its eyes.
*****
The decaying skeletons of long-dead luxury automobiles, the cracked and corroded frames of defunct exercise equipment, and the fast deteriorating shells of once-cutting edge televisions formed alleys of rotting plastic hope and high walls of decomposing oxidized dreams. It was deep in the midst of those alleys and walls that David Zuzelo had squirreled himself away.
Casting an eye around the tottering stack of balding steel-radial tires he’d selected as his lookout station, Zuz strained to hear the discussion coming out of the open side door of the Project: Hardwired operated communications rig less than ten feet away.
Zuz’s approach to the vehicle, while less than the ninja-like affair he’d hoped it would be, had been completely overlooked by the occupants of the twenty-foot long, nine-foot high, box-shaped transport due to the sounds of the pitched battle going on somewhere in the middle of the scrap-yard. Of course, the giant “trash mech” Zuz saw smashing its way through his formerly organized yard helped add to the sound pollution. It took every ounce of self-control he possessed to keep from yelling “Geroni-do-run-run-roni-moooo” when Designate Talos’s “Junkion” form came jogging past.
Talos had better be careful or he’d get sued by Hasbro for his new look.
Zuz just about shat himself when one of the communications officers appeared in the open doorway of the RV from hell, an unlit cigarette half-dangling from his lips and a pair of high tech binoculars clutched chest-level in his gloved hands.
From his position on the vehicle’s exit, the soldier, whose enormous chin caused Zuz to dub ‘Leno,’ pressed the field glasses up to his face and began talking back to an unseen partner hidden from view, “Ho-lee shit, Connors! You should this. I’ve never seen Talos so beefed up. He’s got to be thirty, thirty-five feet now. It’s nuts to see two Primes going at it for real.”
The cigarette slid lower and lower on the man’s lip, dropping down a bit with every sentence. Each exclamation threatened to cause the cancer stick to fall away completely, but it stayed attached as if by force of the man’s will.
“Designate Cestus is a badass for sure; it’s probably why they sent two of the big guns out after him,” a second solider, this one with flaming-red hair, cropped short to his scalp, poked his head out from behind the first. There was no choice for Zuz but to name him ‘Conan.’
That got the attention of both Zuz and Leno.
“Two?” the first soldier’s head snapped back around to face his friend, causing his seemingly-forgotten cigarette to flap like crazy as it held on for dear life.<
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Seizing the binoculars away from his teammate nonchalantly, Conan squinted out to watch the battle, “Designate Gauss is inbound. E.T.A. less than eight minutes with three squads of Gomers. We’re streaming a live feed of the op to him now. Even if Cestus takes Talos down before Gauss arrives, we’ll have enough data to hack his on-board systems and shut him down cold.”
Leno snatched the matte-black glasses back.
“You think?” he asked, not quite as confident as his comrade-in-arms. “So far, the new biotech the lab installed in him has ignored everything we’ve thrown at it. If I didn’t know better I’d say it was learning from every attack.”
Conan headed back inside, mocking Leno, “You’re an idiot, private. We’ll get him, it’s just a matter of time.”
“Shitshitshit!” Zuz scrambled away from the men in a panic. He’d heard enough about Gauss from Mal to know the man would tear them both a new hole if they were still in the yard when he arrived. The computer-engineer turned professional conspiracy buff was positive he didn’t want to see what happened when a batshit crazy cyborg with magnetic powers landed in a scrapyard filled with ferrous metals.
If they were going to survive, the pair needed to escape before reinforcements arrived. Even more immediate, Zuz knew the tech truck, and whatever it was trying to do to Mal, needed to be taken offline. They could not be allowed to shut him down.
Leaping to his feet after a fifteen foot crawl through detritus, Zuz hauled ass towards a section of the compound a short distance away that held some of his most-prized pieces: a half-destroyed 727 airliner, a pair of Korean-era army jeeps, and, the thing he was sure would be their salvation, a four-hundred and ten horsepower 1969 Caterpillar D9 bulldozer he’d purchased from a Hollywood auction house. The monster had been sitting in a production studio’s warehouse for over 40 years after having ‘starred’ in the 1974 film, ‘Killdozer!,’ and had been his pet restoration project for the past nine months.
At a forty-nine ton operating weight, Zuz was confident it’d make short work of the Comm-vehicle and the men inside. Zuz climbed up onto the machine’s tread and tossed open the door to the driver’s compartment before climbing in, feeling like the cavalry about to ride in and save the day.
That is, until the D9 decided not to cooperate with him.
Zuz tried and failed to hot-wire the beast’s ignition five times before giving up and retrieving the keys from his utility shed. Luckily, all of the Gomers he’d seen running around the yard like ants earlier had found something more important to do than shoot a middle-aged, balding former computer technician.
If the sound of gunfire and explosions on the other side of the compound was any indication, then they had just run into Mal and, in the parlance of the iPad generation, ‘shit just got real.’
The sound of an engine as big as a car roaring to life caused an insane grin to spill across Zuz’s face. He was pretty sure sitting in the driver’s seat of the ‘Killdozer’ was what it felt like to ride a thunder cloud.
Obliterating a line of tattered Chevys that were relics from the Great Depression, Zuz pushed the construction vehicle to ‘warp 9.’ The only thing more satisfying to Zuz than the feel of power rumbling beneath him was the look of Leno’s face as he emerged from his vehicle a quarter second before impact.
The unlit cigarette finally dropped from the soldier’s quivering lower lip as the ‘Killdozer’ launched itself over the dilapidated husk of a once bright blue Pacer and plowed into the mobile comm-station, pulverizing it beyond recognition.
Zuz’s scream of exaltation rang out over the clamor of the D9’s mammoth diesel engine, but he knew his work wasn’t done yet. He had nullified the computerized threat from the men in the mangled heap before him, but the pair had no more than five minutes to make good their escape or it was all over. Gauss was coming and with him guaranteed capture.
Pulling as close to a 180 degree ‘bootleg’ turn as a one hundred thousand pound bulldozer can do while going twenty miles per hour, he lowered the six massive hydraulic arms attached to the U-blade, and charged straight for the mechanical giant beating the snot out of his friend.
“OK , sweetheart! Destroy!” was his battle cry.
God, Zuz loved that movie.
*****
A steel and aluminum fist the size of a phone booth slammed into Mal’s back, even as he eviscerated Rho-Five. The sheer force of the blow, and subsequent full-body pain Mal experienced from it, kept the cyborg from dwelling overly long on the death of his former compatriot.
Rolling out of the way of a follow-up strike from the gargantuan hand of Talos, Mal resolved the best way to mourn for the soldier—the friend—who had been Steven Douros, would be to take down the bastards that turned him into a mindless automaton. To take down the men responsible for what happened to both of them.
Of course, Mal’s line of thinking continued, the only way to do that was to not get killed by the colossal walking pile of rust currently doing its damnedest to squash him like a grape.
A gout of flame spewing forth from the oxyacetylene torch merged with Talos’s right forearm punctuated just how unlikely survival was going to be. Heat from the fire lance blistered Mal’s back and caused his shirt to light up. The nanotech in his bloodstream set his healing into over drive, making Mal realize just how much he hated the itchy feeling the things gave him when they were active.
Not that the half-machine man was going to complain, though. Having an uncontrollable urge to scratch himself all over was better than dealing with the discomfort of third degree burns over forty-percent of his body.
Mal tore off his flame-licked shirt and hurled it in the human face of Talos staring out from the upper chest of his patchwork iron shell. The giant reflexively protected its face with a large hand, allowing the smaller cyborg to rush between its legs.
Thirteen inch long talons sprung from once human hands and tore through the cables, girders and rods supporting the titan’s legs. With the groan and screech of metal shredding like tissue paper, forty tons of man and machine folded in on itself, crashing hard enough into the ground to send a spider web of cracks radiating out from it. A fifteen foot high stack of flattened sedans was upended by the earthquake caused by the falling cyborg, dropping unceremoniously onto its head.
“That went better than I had hoped,” smirked Mal, a bit too sure of himself.
Recent events being what they were, he should have known things wouldn’t be quite that easy. Ignoring his better judgment, and the little alarm of warning going off from the computer in his head, Mal formed one arm into a meter-and-a-half blade of gleaming metal and vaulted onto the back of the prone Talos, planning to finish off the Project: Hardwired assassin with one stroke of the sword.
Well, “sword arm” or “arm sword” or whatever it was.
Before the forty-eight inches of indestructible top-secret titanium alloy could puncture the armored enclosure Talos’s flesh and blood form was hiding in, the entire structure lurched and jerked, reforming under his feet and tossing Mal back to the cracked and crevassed pavement.
“Oooh,” the air was knocked from Mal’s lungs and he felt pebbles and small rocks forced into areas he really didn’t want them in.
By the time Mal kicked up to his feet again, Talos was ready for him. Somehow, the over-sized cyborg had beaten him to a standing position. Mal was stunned that something so big could move so fast.
“Gotcha!” echoed Talos’s rich voice from deep within the junk titan he’d become as his left hand shot out and gripped Mal’s body, pinning his arms to his sides.
Mal was trapped in a hand as big as an industrial freezer. Even worse than the fact he was probably about to be crushed to pulp was that a little shit like Talos was going to do the crushing.
Grunting as the titanic appendage tightened its vise-like hold, Mal struggled to no avail.
“You were always Kiesling’s number one draft pick. Now, you ain’t shit, are you?” Talos leaned his body over so he cou
ld watch as he squeezed the life out of the renegade cyborg.
“Fuck you.” The words were less than a whisper. Mal tried to spit in his enemy’s face as a final gesture of defiance, but the pressure on his chest and lungs was too great and the wad of phlegm just slid down his chin and onto his neck.
“I’m going to enjoy breaking you in half, Cestus.”
The sound of something huge crashing through the piles of scrap metal startled both men, snapping their heads to attention. The crunching and banging was joined by the pulsating bleat of a behemoth diesel engine and the horrific off-key voice of David Zuzelo singing ‘Ice, Ice, Baby’ at the top of his lungs.
Hurling out from between a pair of wasted Volkswagen buses, the D9 bulldozer slammed into the side of Designate Talos with the force of a locomotive, and caused Malcolm Weir’s world to go sideways.
Mal wasn’t sure how long he lost consciousness, but it was at least a handful of seconds. One second, Zuz is driving a huge-ass bulldozer into Talos, and the next, at least according to Mal’s rattled brain, there was a mushroom cloud of dust in the air and the entire north-facing wall of the garage was gone, collapsed in on itself.
A scream of terror and pain from within the decimated building snapped Mal out of his near-concussive funk, sending him running towards the sound. He reached down to pull a grenade belt off the corpse of Rho-Five, blanking out the fact that it was body of his fallen friend.
Making his way head-first through the powdery-gray fog at a speed that would make an Olympic sprinter green with envy, dodging the shattered pieces of destroyed cars as he went, Mal demanded a status update from his internal computer.
“Systems operating at ninety-three percent. Minor cosmetic damage in twelve locations. Three fractures in the following bones: right tibia, right ulna, and right ulna. Repairs will be complete in four minutes three seconds. Recommend intake of one thousand eight hundred calories of protein and calcium to compensate for projected loss in bone mineral density.”