World of Hurt

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  We rode the monorail back to the city. I chatted with a backpack-carrying Dexter along the way, flashing him my new security card when the others weren’t looking. Something unspoken passed between us and I could tell that Dexter was still expecting me to use my security card to gain him access to the underground city.

  We disembarked from the monorail and Dexter claimed that he needed me to accompany him on a trip up to see some of the admin personnel running the mech program. Jezzy cast a wary eye at me, but didn’t say anything. We separated from the other operators, and headed past a series of anterooms, moving briskly over one of those moving walkways they used to have at airports. Exiting the walkway, Dexter and I shuttled down a semi-darkened hallway.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Dexter said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then you just decided to wear that long face for the hell of it?”

  I looked over and he smiled. “Talk to me, Deus.”

  “Okay, alright, so maybe, hypothetically, I’ve got girl problems.”

  “Baila and Jezzy factor into this hypothetical at all?” Dexter asked.

  I nodded. “I just don’t understand them.”

  “See, that’s your problem.”

  “What is?”

  “You can’t understand someone else if you don’t understand yourself. If you don’t mind me saying so, I’ve been around you long enough to realize that you still haven’t come down from the occupation. You’re still living your life under fire. Yesterday is history and tomorrow is a mystery, but we’ve got today, this moment, Danny. That’s all. Use it to try and figure out where you’re coming from and where you want to go, and then you shall understand those two lovely ladies.”

  I took this in. “You know what, Dexter?”

  “What’s that?”

  I grinned. “That is the biggest crock of bullshit I have ever heard.”

  “But it made you smile, didn’t it?

  I nodded and Dexter laughed. “Then mission accomplished.”

  * * *

  We continued down the hallway, guided by Dexter’s instinct and a handful of signs for rooms or spaces he claimed to recognize. I marveled at the variety of things taking place under the city’s streets. There were rooms filled with gear and supplies, and others overflowing with hydroponic gardens (“vertical farms” Dexter called them), and still more where men and women were engaged in aquafarming, raising fish in giant plastic pools for food.

  “You better be right about all this,” I said as we moved down into a deserted corridor. “If somebody catches us sneaking around, they’re gonna be pissed.”

  “Relax, nothing bad can happen to you as long as you’re with Dexter J.”

  “Is that right?”

  He nodded. “I got a guardian angel watching over me. How do you think I survived the invasion and occupation?”

  “Dumb luck.”

  Dexter pointed up and I snickered. “You still believe in that? In God?” I asked.

  “Got no reason to disbelieve. I mean, I know for a fact that Heaven is real.”

  “How can you know that?”

  * * *

  “Because of time travel and the multiverse.” Dexter could tell that I didn’t understand so he stopped and whispered, “It’s like this, Danny. There are a million other timelines, loops, whatever you want to call them. All the people that you knew, that died in this world, in this loop, they’re still alive out there somewhere in some other loop.”

  “You’re saying my family—”

  “I’m saying everybody, brother,” Dexter replied. “Right this very minute, your mother, your little bro, everybody you ever knew is alive out there in another version of this reality, living a good life, and it will probably continue that way until the end of time. You know what they call that?”

  “No.”

  “Life everlasting,” Dexter replied with a warm smile. “If that ain’t Heaven, then I don’t know what is.”

  The idea that somehow what Dexter was saying, that my mom and Frank and even Spence were very much alive in another loop, in another timeline or universe, was simply too overwhelming for me to fully process at that moment. I looked up and spotted a green door just up ahead.

  “That’s it,” Dexter said.

  I took a step and Dexter grabbed my hand and pulled me into an alcove directly across from the green door. He had a finger to his lips and was pointing down to the other end of the hallway. I could barely make out two guards who were sauntering forward, moving toward us. We were hidden for the moment, but they’d surely see us in seconds.

  Dexter opened his backpack which I could see was crammed with all sorts of little gizmos and gadgets and small devices studded with wires.

  “Where the hell did you get all that?” I asked.

  “You weren’t the only one who helped himself to the goodies at The Candy Store,” he replied with a wink.

  Dexter carefully removed a small crystal orb and zipped the backpack back up. The orb was the size of a gold ball and nearly invisible. “We don’t have any time for games,” I whispered, frantically eying the orb.

  “Games my ass. This is a ‘Holosphere,’” Dexter replied. “Uses points of light called voxels and femtosecond lasers to create a little magic.”

  “What kind of magic?”

  Dexter whipped the ball in the direction of the guards. The ball ricocheted off the wall and past the guards who failed to notice the translucent sphere until—

  WONK!

  A cone of light shot out from the sphere.

  I blinked as the light coalesced into a figure.

  Dexter.

  A friggin’ holographic Dexter was visible, standing at the other end of the hallway.

  The real Dexter, the dude standing next to me, raised his hand and the holographic Dexter did the same.

  The guards reacted to the light and turned. The real Dexter flipped a middle finger and so did his holographic twin!

  Then Dexter pumped his arms and his holographic double spun and started running down the hallway.

  In the opposite direction, away from us.

  The guards chased after the hologram, giving us some breathing room. We tiptoed across the hallway to the green door.

  “How the hell did you do that?” I asked.

  “Your boy’s got skills.”

  “And here I was thinking you were just some kind of programmer.”

  Dexter grinned. “I am, but I’ve also undertaken a wide assortment of side gigs. Hacking, the creation of metasurface holograms. I like to diversify.”

  I slapped my security card against a pad on the door and it clicked and hissed open. We slipped through the door and closed it gently behind us, waiting for the guards to knock or shout. When they didn’t, we spun around and navigated down a staircase. Dexter mouthed the words “it’s right up here,” and waved for me to follow.

  We shimmied under sections of exposed conduit and beyond an assemblage of heating and cooling equipment. Voices echoed and we pressed ourselves against a cement wall and waited. The voices faded and we moved down a ramp that ended at a set of titanic black double-doors.

  “This is it,” Dexter whispered.

  I placed my card against the security scanner and something clicked. Dexter grabbed one of the handles and heaved the door open.

  Darkness greeted us.

  We paused, allowing our eyes to acclimate to the murkiness. Dexter headed in first and a few pulse lights snapped on overhead. The space on the other side of the double doors was circular and seemed almost as large as the hangar back at The Hermitage.

  The ceilings in the circular room were twenty-feet tall and roll-up doors were visible at the back. The rest of the room was littered with the twisted metal remains of the glider that had attacked The Hermitage. There were sections of a wing here, and whole portions of the glider’s deformed belly and fuselage. Some of the items had stickers and numbers on them, as if somebody was trying to number and piece the glider back
together again. I closed the double-doors behind us and followed Dexter as he tiptoed through the forest of destruction.

  Dexter whipped out a penlight and began flashing it around, crouching, searching for something that only he could see. He nosed through the wreckage and I noticed that tiny scraps of blackened material, the residue from the glider’s remains, were filling the sky like snow flurries. A door closed somewhere off in the distance and several men shouted and laughed. I dropped to my haunches and tensed, waiting for us to be exposed.

  “Hurry up!” I whisper-shouted.

  Dexter held up a hand. “Cool your jets. I’m going as fast as I can.”

  “Go faster!”

  I watched Dexter stop in front of a long, warped section of the fallen glider’s side panel. Several feet away from him, propped on a portion of the glider’s undercarriage were a half-dozen items enclosed in what looked like plastic ziplock bags. Dexter picked through these and pulled out one of the bags that appeared to contain a partially melted black cube. Dexter’s mouth pulled back in a grin. He opened the bag and removed the black cube.

  “Is that it?” I asked.

  Dexter nodded.

  “What happens if you’re right?”

  Dexter hesitated and shot me a sideways look. “What?”

  “What happens if you look at the black box and it shows that somebody’s been lying about what’s going on? What then?”

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Dexter replied. “But we’ll have plenty of time to decide once we get out of here.” He put the cube back in the bag and stuffed it in his back and that’s when a pulse of amber light caught my eye.

  It was coming from the far side of the room.

  Dexter saw it too.

  Silently, we crept across the room and observed a sliding door that we hadn’t seen before. The light was beaming through a crack in the door. Dexter pressed a finger to his lips and then grabbed the edge of the sliding door and pulled it back to reveal a sunken room.

  The sunken room lay at the bottom of a staircase and was illuminated by several ceiling lights. We inched down the stairs to see that the space was cluttered with industrial tools and black exosuits that dangled from the ceiling on hooks.

  We moved under the exosuits, which looked like bigger, badder versions of the exoskeleton contraption Richter had worn when we’d done battle with him back at the training range. Dexter reached a hand up and touched one of the suits. “Always wanted to try one of these suckers on.”

  “Seriously?”

  He nodded. “Just once. Wanna see what all the hype’s about.”

  I pointed to the back of the room. There was something there in the shadows. Something colossal surrounded by scaffolding that was hidden under the biggest tarp I’d ever seen. Dexter and I moved over. We paused, then grabbed the edges of the tarp and with much effort, pulled it down to reveal…

  The largest friggin’ mech I’d ever seen before.

  A gasp escaped from my mouth as I took in the metal monstrosity, which was olive in color, and stood nearly thirty-feet tall.

  The legs on the fighting machine looked like Redwoods, seemingly as large as the whole Spence mech, and the arms were laden with cannons and rocket-pods and various other weapons I didn’t even recognize.

  The turret and cockpit were tiny, barely big enough to fit a single operator and that’s when it hit me. This mech probably hadn’t been designed to be operated by people, at least I didn’t think so.

  “What the hell is that?” I asked.

  “You know how Vidmark was talking about scalpels and hammers back in his little presentation?”

  I nodded. “Well this is the hammer,” Dexter said. “Question is, is it ours or something the scuds left behind?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered tiptoeing up to the mech, noticing something stenciled on the machine’s massive right leg, what looked like a red and black phoenix rising over a series of carrot-colored flames. The very same thing I’d seen tattooed on Fincher’s neck. I reached out and touched the phoenix when—

  WONK! WONK! WONK!

  Klaxons started shrieking.

  I nearly jumped out of my shoes.

  Dexter and I shared a terrified moment. For an instant, the situation reminded me of that scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” where Indy grabs the golden idol from inside the temple and all hell breaks loose. I glanced around, half-expecting to see that big ass boulder start rolling down toward us.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Dexter shouted.

  Dexter and I quickly retraced our steps back up into the other room and took off toward the double doors. I cursed myself for ever agreeing to come along. It was obvious that we’d trespassed, stolen the black box from the glider room, and seen things we weren’t supposed to see. Now they were onto us. I was already beginning to conjure up excuses to tell Vidmark and the others when Dexter grabbed my arm and pulled me forward.

  The klaxons continued to wail as we peeked out through the double doors. Thankfully, there wasn’t anybody in sight, so we rushed back down the corridor, keeping to the shadows as much as we could. Along the way, Dexter slid his neural glasses on.

  “What the hell’s going on?!” I asked.

  “It’s not us,” he said, studying something on his glasses. “The alarms are just a signal.”

  “From who?

  “Vidmark and President Landis.”

  “About what!”

  Dexter stopped and removed his glasses, his face full of worry. “They want you and the other operators to report at once.”

  “Why?”

  “Looks like they’ve got a new mission for you.”

  23

  I ran headlong down through the underground corridors and over the walkways. The klaxons ended just as I reached the hangar-like room where Jezzy and the other operators were standing in a circle, peering up at our mechs, which had refurbished and covered with a bluish-white paint.

  “Where the hell you been, Deus?” Billy asked.

  “I got lost on the way back.”

  “I’m gonna put out a trail of breadcrumbs for you next time,” Billy said.

  The others snickered and I pointed at the mechs. “What’s up with the new paint job?”

  “It’s called liquid blue!” a voice boomed.

  Doors opened and Fincher appeared, accompanied by two men and another, slump-shouldered form whose head was covered by a black hood.

  “How come our mechs gotta look like ice cubes?” Dru asked, pointing to his mech.

  “Because they’re the color of the ice in the middle of glaciers,” Fincher replied. “It’s active camouflage for your next mission.”

  All of us exchanged nervous looks. Fincher drew near and I could see that the hooded form had a single, elephant trunk-like arm that was dragging on the ground.

  Fincher grabbed the form roughly around the back and stopped him eight or ten feet from us. Then he yanked off the hood to reveal Carpe Kenyatta whose three eyes were red and swollen and leaking fluids. There were bruises and welts all over his body and dozens of tiny circular scorch marks, as if a group of people had put their cigarettes out on his blue skin.

  “You were asked to come here, because our friend has decided to cooperate,” Fincher said with a dark smile. “Go on, tell ‘em.”

  Kenyatta didn’t say anything for several heartbeats. He just glanced up at us and I stared into his middle eye. I have to admit that I felt a slight twinge of sorrow for the little bastard. Billy had been right after all. It was obvious that Fincher and his people had forced Kenyatta to undergo enhanced interrogation and that they’d broken the alien. When Kenyatta still didn’t speak, Fincher jabbed him in the back with a small silver object the size of an ice pick. There was a flash of light at the end of the metal pick and Kenyatta yelped.

  “They are h-headed n-north,” Kenyatta sputtered.

  “Who is?!” Fincher shouted, prodding Kenyatta again with the silver object.

  “The master and th
e others,” Kenyatta said, gasping for air. “They are going to the land beyond the water.”

  “How far north?” Simeon asked.

  “About as far north as you can get,” Fincher replied. “Have you ever heard of the Petermann Glacier?”

  I looked to the other operators who were shaking their heads.

  “It’s in the place your people called Greenland,” Kenyatta croaked, keeping his eyes on the ground. “The glacier is the mass that connects Greenland’s ice sheet to the body of water you call the Arctic Ocean.”

  “Why the hell are they going there?” Billy asked.

  Kenyatta looked up. “There is something buried in the ice.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That I do not know, Master Deus.”

  “They took something from the vault before they escaped,” I replied.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Kenyatta said.

  “I saw them pull it up from under the deck. It was long and black—”

  “That’s what she said,” Billy quipped. Nobody laughed and Kenyatta was silent. Fincher prodded the alien again, but he still didn’t talk.

  “Looks like our extraterrestrial friend here has reached the end of his usefulness,” Fincher said, tugging the hood back down over Kenyatta’s head. Fincher spun the alien around and kicked him in the ass, chuckling when he pitched to the ground. The two men accompanying Fincher grabbed Kenyatta by the arms and dragged him off.

  “What’s going to happen to him?” I asked.

  Fincher squinted at me. “Please don’t tell me you actually give a damn.”

  Before I could respond, Jezzy raised a hand. “How do we know any of what he just said is true?”

  Fincher grinned. “Two reasons. One, we know from prior intel the location of an alien leave-behind on the glacier and two, because of the taggants that were implanted in our friend and the other scuds when they were imprisoned. Unfortunately, they’re not functioning as well as we’d hoped, but we just got echoes off the bugs that escaped the attack in the desert. By all indications, they are indeed making their way north and will be at or around that glacier in roughly ten hours.”