Chapter 10
Robots
'Okay, so we head down the length of the park from here, cut across the reservoir... maybe even by boat if we can, over the great lawn past the boathouse and through the Kitchen to my place.' Jace rattled off the plan one last time as they slowly trudged through the thickening snow. They really hadn't dressed for the occasion. The cold weather was penetrating through to their skin. Maybe if they just moved a little faster, Lizzie thought, then they could just warm up a fraction.
So far there hadn't been any Robots in the park. It felt strange calling them that, even in the safe confines of her own head, but there really wasn't any other way to think of them. Jace was right to de-humanize the whole thing. It would have paralyzed them both with fear if they hadn't.
The Italian Gardens had been covered in snow, to the point where none of the beautifully fashioned trees were even visible beyond the blanket of white. At first they had been able to just about feel the pointy gravel paths under their feet, but no more. The snow was falling faster than anyone had predicted. New York had been caught in an extreme weather front, which just added to the shrillness of the situation they found themselves in. Part winter wonderland and part icy terror.
They trudged over the snow covered ground in total silence, barely pausing to look at each other. Lizzie respected Jace so much, and the feeling was always returned. They had walked some of the roughest parts of this city in full uniform and never felt a single breath missing. They had been in armed shoot outs with criminal gangs and never missed a single heartbeat. But this was something else, something out of this world.
The wind whistled around the trees as they entered the dark wooded area of the park. The severity of it died down a little but the chill remained. The snow billowed around the old oaks, caught in up draughts and swirls. It whisked around in a dance that might have been pretty had it not been for the mood carried on the air. But on the wind there carried a faint whisper. Or was it a whimper? A child, crying perhaps?
'Jace.' She pulled on the sleeve of his jacket until he stopped.
'We should keep moving, Liz, we aren't going to last a very long time out in this blistering cold.' He tried to move off but she pulled again and told him to wait.
'Don't you hear that?' She pleaded with him.
'No, I think it's just the wind.' He gave only a cursory listen and tried to move off again. He snapped out of it pretty fast. It was obvious to her that he was scared. He was just trying to ignore it. He must have heard it. His head had been tucked as far into his jacket as his slender neck would allow, to the point he almost looked like a frightened turtle, but he raised his head and listened intently to the wind and the sounds it carried for just long enough. 'Yeah...' he finally conceded defeat and heard the whimpering noise.
He didn't say anything, just took her firmly by the hand and pulled her gently to a crouching stance. He put his arm tight around her shoulder and pulled her 180 degrees to face the other way. He held a single finger over his frozen and closed lips so she said nothing.
It was a creature. A Robot. Whatever. Male, tall but thin. It stood at the farthest edge of the covering mist. Still. Without even a sound. She couldn't tell if it was facing toward them or away from them. But it had its neck cocked to one side at an odd angle.
'I don't think its one of them.' Jace finally broke the silence and pointed to its feet. There was a football there, still barely visible under whips of newly fallen white snow.
'Who would be playing football in the Park right now?' She pleaded in a panic stricken surge of adrenaline as Jace stood up to approach the character.
'That flu though, don't you remember, one of the symptoms was delirium. Maybe they need our help, maybe they're just sick.' Jace was half grabbing at straws to justify what was just his raging curiosity. Even if they were still sick, they both knew what the final stage of this obscure virus was, death and re-birth for want of a better explanation at hand. Even if they were still stricken with flu, it wouldn't be long until they were gnashing at Jace's throat!
'Hello sir.' Jace shouted a little louder than he thought was brave enough. 'Is that your football?' He rolled his eyes back in his head when he heard in his mind's ear what he had just said out load. But what was he supposed to say? Are you dead? Are you going to try to bite me? It had been enough to stir the man come beast though.
He started howling, in a way that pierced their eardrums and drilled into their very brains. Such a high pitched yet bass filled yelp. Most screams had purpose. A scream for help, one made in desperation or sadness. A scream is what happens when words fail us and emotion just comes out. This scream meant both nothing and everything at the same time. It was pain. It was fear, exhaustion. Hunger. Powerlessness and need all in one vocalization of monstrous evil. Jace did the right thing and reached for his gun.
'No further!' He gave it one last order but the Robot was pacing slowly around on the spot. It cast a milky glance at the football he had left at his own bare feet. It looked as though he just wanted to pick it up, throw it to Jace and start playing a ball game. By the length of time he stared at it, that's just what it looked like he wanted to do. Another screech followed as he locked eyes with the two barely armed police officers. It started to run, or at least stumble as his ice cold feet became trapped in the snow.
'Jace!' Lizzie shouted in desperation as the Robot came ever closer. Jace had frozen. Some part of him was terrified at the very sight, some part of him just didn't want to fire on someone who after all just might be sick. But he had no choice. The bullet blast echoed around the vacant park, bouncing from one tree to another and back again.
The bullet hit the Robot right in the chest but it just kept coming. Lizzie started firing too. Every one of her shots hit on target. It was easy to forget she was an award winning police marksman but everyone had to hand it to her that she was very good. But still the Robot stumbled further. Jace fired one last shot out of desperate fear. It hit it in the head and the Robot fell on top of him.
'Are you okay?' She holstered her weapon after a very fast reload. Tossed the empty clip over her shoulder in a fit of frustration.
'Get him off me!' He shouted and spat blood from his mouth. Lizzie grabbed the fragile Robot by the shoulder and dragged it away. She grimaced and almost vomited when she heard the bones about his back snap from the strain on her muscles.
Its bones must have become so brittle as a side effect of this mysterious plague that had swept across the world. Jace kept spluttering and heaving to be sick.
'Make yourself sick, get all of that blood out of your system!' She barked at him and left the lifeless Robot to fall into the ditches of snow. He didn't have to try. He threw up violently for a good while. He had swallowed a lot of the creature's blood in his panicked gasps for breath once he had shot through its head. Lizzie put a gentle hand on his shoulder while his chest violently shook from the outburst of sick from his stomach. He had blood all over his eyes too.
'Here' Lizzie balled up some snow and started dabbing his eyes with it. They had to get as much of him as clean as they could, or else he was in danger of getting the infection himself.
'That hurts.' He jerked his neck aside with the shock of the brittle and cold snow on his soft skin.
'Shut up.' She told him quite matter of fact and continued. He inhaled sharply each time a sharper piece of icy snow hit the iris of his eye but stopped complaining soon enough.
'Do you feel like you could walk?' Lizzie asked and pulled him to his feet.
'It's just some blood.' He was instantly not himself. No joking around, no silliness. He was worried and with very good reason too. Any contact with a flu ridden person, never mind a Robot, could cause infection. So far both of them had been very lucky. They even dared to joke that they might be a part of a very minor percentage of the population of the human stock of the planet that might be immune.
Jace had even joked they might have to help repopulate but stopped when they had
both blushed to the point their faces ached.
'Let's keep moving.' He urged her and strode off in their original direction. They hadn't traveled for long at all when both radios started to rattle and crackle with an attempted transmission.
'Say again?' Jace shook of his banging head and spat some more blood from his mouth. He would dive back into his job as he always did when threatened. That would refocus his mind and distract him from dealing with the more or less immediate possibility that he had been infected with the flu by the creature's blood. 'This is DC Jason Seven, respond?' Still nothing of any clarity came through.
'Maybe someone is trying to reach us... we haven't checked in for a while?' Lizzie posed a possible solution. She was grasping at straws and she knew it.
'Chances are the station has been hit by... by Robots, too.' He struggled but bravely continued with his own de-humanizing efforts. That attack had shaken him to his core. Lizzie felt for him but simply didn't know what to do. At the majority of times, he was her rock, and not the other way around. She would try at least.
'Listen, Jace, everything's going to be okay... we didn't get infected yet for a reason.' She swallowed a big lump in her throat at the minute thought of loosing him. 'You and I have built up an immunity to it.'
'I swallowed a lot of that blood...' His face turned grey and he wretched even at the memory of it. 'But yeah... you're right.' He nodded and in a show of bravery smiled at her. 'We didn't get it so far, and that has to mean something.' Their radios had been crackling the whole time and he was growing concerned that the noise was going to attract something to their whereabouts.
'This is the free voice of New York City.' The clarity of the transmission suddenly changed to a point where every rasp of the squeaky voice was crystal in its Clearness. 'No doubt you have seen the dead rise from their graves?' It continued. Jace tried to reply but he was locked out of the transmission. This guy clearly just wanted people to listen.
'Do you know that voice?' Lizzie asked a bit pointlessly. He didn't. It wasn't someone at the station, they could be sure of it. Jace just shook his head and rolled his tongue inside of his mouth, he seemed to bring himself out of the worried trance he had been in.
'Who is this?' Jace demanded but took a tight hold of Lizzie's hand so they could keep walking through the dark, cold and deeply wooded area. No reply. Even with his finger depressed completely on the transmit button, he could only receive. The voice droned on.
'The net is slowly failing but I'm seeing a lot of denial on there. People don't want to believe what is in front of their eyes. People don't want to be told the truth because they want to sleep at night. What I've been talking about all of these years has finally happened!' The scratchy voice grew disturbingly excited as it went on. Sounded like a young male. No idea where he was transmitting from.
'Some nut...' Jace tried to dismiss it. He wanted to toss his radio away in frustration but decided it best to keep it just in case the police force, if there was one left, tried to get back in touch.
'We are not the first culture to experience a zombie outbreak!' Lizzie visibly shivered at the sound of that word: "zombie". She had been thinking it, and she would have bet he was too, but neither had said anything at all. Calling them "Robots" did take the power out of the situation.
Jace had just begun shaking his head. He wasn't one for a conspiracy theory, no matter how well thought out they might seem to be. He, in fact, enjoyed poking them full of holes. They often found themselves talking about such things on the odd stakeout.
'The ancient Greeks believed wholeheartedly in the un-dead and their power. Burials unearthed in the necropolis of a Greek colony in Sicily called Paso Marinaro show tell tale signs of a zombie outbreak, somehow contained by the authorities of the day!' The voice simply didn't cease to rant. But it was hypnotic. Hard to stop listening but sickening to continue. They almost found themselves walking to the notes of his voice.
'Archaeologists digging around the cemetery near the coastal town of Kamarina found around three thousand bodies.' They kept on trudging through the woods for longer than they thought they could stand for. Some kind of adrenaline, or a survivors instinct kept them going. 'That suggests the graveyard was in use full time, servicing the full community. But two of the tombs were unique. In one, the head and feet of the individual are completely covered by large, two handled ceramic vessels, presumably intended to pin the individual to the grave and prevent it from rising.'
Didn't mean anything in Jace's mind. People were often buried with the things they liked, or the things they felt best defined them in life. It can't have been uncommon in the ancient world. That was part of what made him such a great cop. The ability to ask the questions where others wouldn't. He found the holes in people's theories. Other cops back in the precinct would just run their theories, or their evidence bases, past him just to see where he would punch a hole. It made their cases watertight when they found something more concrete to fill them with. He didn't say anything at first.
'The other grave contained the remains of an unknown child. The child was buried with five large stones placed on top of its body, to trap it into its grave.' The broadcaster took on a surreal horror narrative tone. 'Katadesmoi, tablets inscribed with magical spells, were also found at the cemetery. These were used for necromancy, the raising of the dead. On those tablets people would write spells and incantations addressed to the Gods of the underworld. The Gods of the underworld would then raise the dead to carry out the will of the person who had taken the time to write the spell.'
'That's barbaric.' Lizzie whispered, even though she had been listening intently, almost like a frightened child who wanted to hear every word to the end, but at the same time hated the fearful state that it left her in.
'Just myth and legend, nothing to worry about. Just because their loved one's buried them with large implements to stop them from coming back to life, doesn't mean that it ever happened, it just meant they bought into the theory and were afraid. I guess who would want to see their kid die and then come back as an evil spirit from Hell?' He pitched his response in a dismissive and near to sarcastic tone. But it was almost as if the broadcaster had pre-empted his every word.
'Need harder evidence? Think in Sicily it was prevention before cure? Hierakonpolis, Egypt, in 1892, a British archaeological dig unearthed a nondescript tomb where thousands of scratch marks lined every surface of the tomb, as if the corpse had tried to claw its way out!' Buried alive then. Jace thought to himself.
It wasn't that uncommon. In a technologically advanced world, it can be determined whether or not someone had passed away by monitoring brain activity. Before that it was whether or not the heart had stopped. Before that, whether or not the breathing had stopped. He smiled triumphantly with his potential explanation.
An interesting fact he had come by some time ago. When someone dies, you hold a wake. Now it's just a send off and farewell. Some time ago, it was an intermediate time before burying the deceased, simply in case they woke up. He would listen some more to test the theory.
'The British dig was conducted by archaeologists by the names of "Clarke and J.J. Tylor", during which they cleared the decorated tombs of Ny-ankh-pepy and Horemkhawef. They reported that the unpainted walls were covered with hundreds of scratch marks, made by fingernails by anyone's eyes.' Maybe they had been buried alive as a punishment for something. He had heard of stranger things.
'The scene is captured on a piece of archaeological evidence called the Narmer palette. Traditional scholars think it depicts the victorious King Narmer assessing his victory, whereby he is paraded in front of a line of decapitated bodies, where the overview shows Narmer armed with chisels.'
The traditional response sounded the most likely. They kept walking, still hand in hand, but in silence. With only the scratching voice emitting from both his and her radios for accompaniment. The wind had died off but only slightly. The exertion of the walk had dulled the painful sensation of the
deepening cold, but they still had to try and find somewhere to get warm if they were to be within any chance of surviving the deeply encroaching night.
'Could it be that King Narmer was in fact celebrating the successful squashing of a zombie uprising?' Again he reached a sickening fever pitch. How was he even hacking the police radio channels? Jace snapped out of his inner argument with the voice coming from the radio, and paused to ask the more obvious question. But the answer was itself as equally obvious as the question. There was no one left to stop him.
'From the very beginning of Pre-dynastic research...' the voice continued on, echoing around the thinning woods and more solitary trees as they walked out into a snow covered grassy plane. 'Several intact but headless bodies had been found in Naqada, Egypt, in 1895. More were found in Gerzeh and even more since back at Hierakonpolis! Twenty-one bodies were found with clear indications of hacking at the cervical vertebrae, which could only mean complete decapitation before burial. Everyone knows how to kill the living dead. Sever the head, destroy the brain, or consume in fire! Coincidence? I doubt it!' He was almost screaming.
'Do you think it might be time we shut these things off?' Lizzie asked delicately. She hadn't wanted to distract Jace before now. At least he was concentrating more on this nut job's theories than on the state of his own health. Yes, she had been right to say neither of them had been infected so far. But at the same time, and in the same breath, it was obvious neither of them had thus far been so intensely exposed.
He shook his head. 'Let's hear it out.' He sounded almost defeated. Almost like he had begun to accept what the voice had been saying. Like his own argument was running thin. He would have dismissed it in a heartbeat before all of this. But in the face of mounting evidence, it was hard to disagree.
'All of the cuts are in the same position on each of the bodies, which suggests that they are uniform, and not injuries sustained during fighting!' He paused, and an audible gulp suggested it was so he could take a drink. 'Want more?' He hit another decibel in volume as he grew either more and more excited or further agitated, it was hard to tell which.
'Archaeologists have dug up detached skulls at other Stone Age sites in Europe and the Near East. In Syria, several skulls have been found completely detached from their bodies, and what's more is, they all had their faces caved in too!'
Jace pulled Lizzie to an abrupt halt when he spotted something in the near distance. The trees had shielded them from the bulk of the wind and snow, but now that the woods were receding, the mist had grown distressingly dense yet again, and to top that, the snow had begun falling in even greater densities too. Though the snow covered it rather quickly, the pool of freezing blood was impossible to miss. No one in sight though. So they listened on.
'These skulls are over ten thousand years old! That predates the pyramids! But they were probably separated from their bodies after decomposition had already begun! That means they were exhumed and decapitated for some unknown reason... Or they rose from the dead and were killed. The heads were then caved in by blunt instruments and reburied far away from their respective bodies!'
They kept scanning the near distance, but it was hard when the mist seemed to move and flow in greater volumes with each passing second. One moment it would be rather thin, then patchy at best. Soon enough the snow would tumble down with the mist in its wake and black out anything beyond the distance of a breath.
'The writing is on the wall people. We have been lied to our whole lives. But, New York, I ask you this. Our ancient forefathers and most distant ancestors could stop the zombie outbreaks in small communities, with populations of not more than thousands. There are eight point four million people in this city. At least there were.' The radio fell dead silent. But his words left a lasting tremor. One that was hard to ignore as they tried diligently and tirelessly to refocus on the pool of blood Jace had seen not too far ahead of them.
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