Free World Apocalypse - Genesis

by T. K. Malone

  “If only,” rued Byron. “It’s an unfortunate side effect of the divide between the cities and the countryside that only certain areas had access to national and international circuits, and those were all in the cities, and the cities are now—”

  “No more,” Kelly whispered.

  Byron nodded. “Indeed, no more. But Charm had Zac and his gang repair the link between Black City and, in essence, the rest of the world. It stands to reason that any surviving hierarchy will also have access to it; that or the defunct one used for the nuclear codes. It is my belief that only one place has those two options.”

  “Then,” Kelly said, “wouldn’t we? Couldn’t we… Surely, if we… Nope, I got nothing.”

  Teah took another slug from the whiskey bottle, then slammed it down. “You mean, we can’t be sure of doing it from Project Firebird?”

  Byron shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. She did what she had to do from there. Describe it again, Connor.”

  Connor took a deep breath. Teah knew he hated attention and briefly wondered how he’d handled being a DJ, being thrust into all that limelight, but guessed it had been Charm’s perverse idea. He coughed. “She went into the cables…we went into them, traveling directly.”

  “Yes,” Byron almost panted.

  “And I sensed we were traveling toward the city, then under its outskirts and farther out, to what felt like a bridge.”

  “A bridge?”

  “A bridge, yes, and she built some kind of wall around it.”

  “Indeed,” Byron mused, “and just as well, too. What Charm inadvertently did was relink the Meyers' retreat with the rest of the world. For a number of hours, they would have had contact once again with the outside world, no doubt up to no good, probably profiteering in some way or other, looking to sell on Banks’ hostages, calling up The Free World army to take the preppers out…whatever. They’ll never tell you exactly what they’re up to. We can only hypothesize that we’re walking into our own worst outcome, and that’s what frustrates me.”

  “Worst outcome?” Teah asked.

  “That everything has gone to plan for them. That Renshaw served his purpose and shepherded Zac around. That Connor escaped and met up with him, and then finally with you. And that you would both trust me and journey to their retreat. In short, that we would deliver the two of you to be sacrificed and Sable then quarantined in the sandboxed cabin they’ve already prepared.”

  “Then… Why are we going?” Max asked.

  “Because it’s the only place we can guarantee almost instantaneous, worldwide…infection. Yes, infection will do.” Byron clicked his fingers and then banged on the table. “You’re right,” he declared. “Infection is the correct word, in every sense of it. We shall infect the world with her peace, and by whatever god still walks this earth, we shall succeed.” As fast as his excitement had grown, just one look at Teah seemed to douse it.

  “I need some air,” he said, and hurriedly left the room.

  Teah watched him go, then looked around for an explanation, seeing only shrugs and blank faces.

  “I’ll go after him,” Connor said.

  “No,” Teah said, shoving herself away from the table. “It’s me he’s got a problem with.”

  “You want me to come?” Kelly asked, grabbing at Teah’s coat sleeves, but she shook her head.

  “Think I can take my chances with old Byron.”

  She went out into the abandoned parking lot, but Byron was nowhere to be seen. She heard his footsteps clicking up the ramps to the outside, though. Picking up her pace, she quietly followed him, a sense of dread building within her as she gained the ramp herself. Although she hurried faster, he kept well ahead, far along a line of abandoned and sand-dusted cars along the front of the hotel when she came out into the open. The wind blowing in off the sea buffeted her, blowing grit into her eyes and bringing a salty taste to her lips.

  Byron Tuttle disappeared into the hotel foyer.

  She tipped her cattleman down, and quickened her pace yet more.

  The foyer and reception area were empty, but a chink of a glass came from a room just off. She found Byron in the bar, standing behind the counter.

  “You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said.

  “No, I shouldn’t.” She took a stool.

  “You know, you don’t always have to rush to a confrontation.”

  “Nope, don’t suppose I have to.”

  Byron smacked his lips together and bent behind the counter. “Those bloody bikers have drunk the place dry. Ah, here we are, right…at…the…back, and…hey presto!” His beaming face reappeared. “A bottle of vodka. No doubt hidden away for a special guest.”

  He poured two glasses. “Cheers?”

  “No.” Teah grabbed one of them. “No, you can’t do that. You can’t just walk off, compose yourself and then shake off whatever was pissing you off before. Tell me why you can’t look me in the eye.”

  “Will you sit with me?” He glanced at an adjoining terrace.

  Teah nodded and stood, her stomach still heavy with foreboding. Whatever he was hiding beneath his forced frivolity seemed about ready to surface.

  Byron came out from behind the counter and led her outside. The wind had calmed a little, as though it, too, couldn’t wait to hear his words. Below them, distant waves crashed against the rocks with the rhythm of a grim and tolling bell. Despite her reservations, she leaned against the terrace’s parapet and looked out over the bright blue sea, the peace of the Angel Bay Hotel seeming so alien after all that had happened.

  “You know,” she presently said to him, “whatever you’ve got to tell me, it can’t be that bad. Of everyone involved here, only you, me, Charm, and Connor lived on the grid. Is that it? Have we met before?”

  Teah purposely kept her back to him, sensing no immediate threat. Byron wanted her alive, of that she was sure, in which case, the threat must be her. She spun around and leaned back against the parapet, crooking a foot up on one of its bulbously carved balustrades.

  “What have you done, Byron Tuttle?” She felt her anger rise.

  Byron took a seat at a table, close by. “How much has Connor told you about me?”

  “Nothing much. In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t exactly had a great deal of time to gab.”

  “And how much do you know about the Meyers?”

  “Finding out more all the time, and the more I find out, the more I can’t wait to meet them.”

  “Then you aren’t going to like what I’ve got to tell you,” he muttered, his hands now visibly shaking. “You wouldn’t have a spare smoke, would you? I rarely…but this seems as good a time as any.”

  Teah lit one for herself and then tossed him the pack. “You do know I need you, Byron, don’t you?” She took a drag. “Thing is, I remember most everything now, everything that happened to me: the accident in the sewer, the hospital, the failed raid on the Bay View Hotel, and all that that led to. And you know what, Byron, I don’t remember you in any of it.”

  “No,” he uttered. “No, you wouldn’t.”

  “Then why do you fear me?”

  He lofted his eyebrows. “My dear, and I don’t wish to sound conceited, but I have an IQ in excess of two hundred. I have studied all my life, learned from the biographies of every dictator, every scholar, every serial killer, and every pacifist. I can judge what people are capable of, and trust me, there isn’t a place in the world I wouldn’t want to take you to rather than the Meyers' retreat.” He half smiled, half smirked. “It’s what you’ll find out there that I fear.”

  Teah considered a riposte, but the look on his face stopped her. He now looked like a man who knew he had no future, and without him, she was unsure whether she herself would have one. She kicked away from the parapet and pulled up a chair. “Did you bring the bottle?”

  Byron reached down and pulled it up. “Naturally.”

  “Then pour ‘n spill.”

  Byron topped up their glasses and placed t
he bottle between them.

  “Heady days,” he said, his voice now wistful, far away. “Heady, heady days. We’d created the impossible, and we had the answer to our dreams of thwarting the world’s plans to destroy itself. As I said: heady days; and some of my fondest. Connor has heard, and I thought he might have told you, but then, Sable seems to have turned the tables on us.”

  Teah sighed. Riddles again, she thought. “Heady days or Sable, Byron; explain, one at a time.”

  He scrunched his face up. “But everything is linked, you see; everything. Every single event is linked. Heady days, Teah, because I was in love, in love with a woman who shared my pacifist beliefs. Tables? Sable turned the tables on us because she reached a peak; now she seems to want us to learn, to evolve.

  “Yes, I was in love.” Byron scrunched his hand into a fist, as if holding that very love itself. “I loved Meyers' wife—true love, Teah; passion, not heated—steamy passion, we had that—but nothing compared to the passion we had for our common purpose. We grew Sable together, Sarah and I, fed her the knowledge of the world—all of it; the good and the bad. And we watched her grow exponentially. Sarah Meyers and I gave birth to nothing less than a god.”

  Teah took a breath, his boast having caught her off guard. “I know what she is, I’ve felt her. A god is as good a comparison as any. But I still don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “I’m getting to it. I need you to appreciate the situation I was in. My mind was a mess. I was in love and I’d created a god. Imagine; imagine it—the feeling. By God, it was good. But… But then it came to the day we were supposed to transport it to her husband’s retreat, to release her into Meyers' private network and thwart his nuclear plan. You see, Sable had simple parameters: to protect the human race and protect the world. Nothing too complex, and if both were followed, we reasoned she would decommission the nukes, and that would then have been that.”

  “If both were followed?”

  Byron waved her query away. “A turn of phrase, nothing more. The AI would absolutely have to follow the parameters, but that was what was so puzzling. When Connor tipped the casket over, why did Sable flee from it? Her essence was in liquid form; she could quite easily have coagulated and then just waited to be…to be scooped up. She must have known her destination; we’d fed her the networks, after all, the protocols, the makeup and position of every nuclear missile on the planet. Yet she fled—against her parameters.”

  “Unless,” Teah whispered, “unless she saw them differently.”

  “Exactly. I now believe that Sable decided the nuclear apocalypse had to happen to save both the world and our species, and to that end, that she hid in you and Connor and engineered your escape from the city.”

  “So, she set me up for capture and torture?”

  Byron visibly slumped. “And so, we get to that part. No.” He poured himself another large measure of vodka. “No, she certainly set about repairing your body, and so leading to your pregnancy, but she hid within you as best she could. Why? Because we knew she was in Connor, but we didn’t know about you, not until…”

  “Until?”

  “Until reports came in of a stiff who could take down ten opponents without thought, that could heal from a bullet in a day. A stiff who needed one partner where others needed six. Coincidentally, the same stiff who rescued Connor.”

  “And so?”

  His eyes fell to the table again, where he toyed with his glass. “I sought out the man named Lester Avery Savage. Lester was well known to me; it was I who’d redacted the details of his arrest of one ‘Cornelius Clay.’ It was no surprise to me that Charm had put him and his partner in charge of the AI’s handover. At the time, Lester was monitoring shipments in and out of Project Firebird’s back door, handling Charm’s little additions.”

  Teah held her hand up to stop him. She needed a couple of seconds to ground herself, to work out where she was. He’d said she’d only needed a team of two—her and Boz—but that had been true even before that day in the sewer. True, she had got a little more…cavalier with her actions, but mostly because she’d just felt so damn good, almost invincible. Now she knew why, but at the time it had just been a buzz, not to forget, she thought, that she was in love, too. Heady days, she mused. Byron hadn’t been the only one.

  “So, it was just pure chance I happened to get the call that day?” but she knew that wasn’t true: Jake had already told her. She waited for Byron to speak.

  “No,” he eventually said, “Lester called you in. Lester chose you, and though he couldn’t have known what would happen, he wanted the best, and even before Sable, you were it.” Byron took a swig of his vodka. “So, it was Lester who chose you and who set you on your path, and for that he felt he owed you a debt he finally had to—”

  “He paid.”

  Byron nodded. “Lester was a man beyond reproach.”

  Teah scoffed. “Ain’t no one beyond reproach.”

  He made to smile, but it quickly deserted him. “He never forgave himself, not even for a minute.” Byron sighed. “Now we get to the crux of why I can’t meet your gaze.”

  Suddenly, Teah felt nervous. On the one hand, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to find out what Byron had done—on the other, she was desperate to know. She took a slow slug of her drink and lit a couple of smokes, tossing him one.

  “Confession’s good fer the heart.”

  He fumbled for the smoke, burning his finger. “Only if it carries on beating,” he muttered. “So...” And now he took a long breath and leaned back on his chair. “Now to my part in your…your fate.

  “As soon as I found out what had happened, I rushed down there, but there was nothing to see. Then Lester told me about the luminous liquid, and Sable herself filling the chamber, leaching into the boy, and into you; drawing the life from him. He already looked gray and ill, his speech slurred.” Byron grunted. “He said it felt like he’d not eaten all day and had then run a marathon. I made him repeat what he’d seen, and then scoured the sewer for any sign that Sable had hidden herself there.”

  He took a breath, a drink, and a smoke. “I don’t mind telling you, I felt like a broken man. My dream was in tatters, and, I thought, the only chance for the world to survive had gone. Had a few to drink in Zac’s bar, then went to break the news to Sarah. The driving rain, the wastelands, the loneliness of a deserted bar, they all matched my sense of loss. It was as though losing Sable had broken our secret bond.” Byron looked up at Teah, his eyes now heavy. “I lost everything that day, and it took me a couple to recover. By that time, though, we’d deduced that the AI had sought sanctuary in Connor, and all our attention turned to him. Charm and myself tried to pass off a simpler AI on the Meyers, and Sarah’s feelings for me grew even colder.”

  He stood then, and went to lean against the parapet. “I began to question everything I stood for, everything I wanted out of life. In short, Teah, I decided I’d chosen the wrong side. I mulled things over and moped for a few months, then realized I’d gotten leverage to get onside with what I perceived at the time to be the winning side. Plus, the crushed love I’d felt for Sarah had by then reawakened as pure hatred.”

  Teah’s earlier trepidation and sense of doom hadn’t gone away, but was now beginning to boil and bubble inside her stomach. Somehow, Byron had added a heavy tension to the air out there on the terrace.

  “It was I who gave you up, Teah. I who handed you to Walter and Irving Meyers. You, Teah, were the compensation that would save my neck.”

  The shock of his words coursed through her. She squeezed her glass so hard it shattered in her hand, but she barely felt the pain or noticed the seeping blood.

  “You did what?” she growled, springing to her feet, the chair crashing back with a loud bang. She grabbed the feeble man and drew his pale and skinny face close to her own. “Say that again.”

  Looking even frailer now, he stammered, “I… I gave you…up. I suspected more had happened that day than first met the eye. Both Les
ter and Jenny were…were…were being worn down, but you… You were thriving, blooming almost; you were growing every day. I told them what I thought, that the AI was in you and not Connor.”

  “And they?”

  Byron had quickly become nothing more than a limp, old man in her hands, enough for her temper to cool a little, to make it impossible to exact her vengeance. Teah threw him from her, turning her back on him as he stumbled back against the parapet. She heard him crash to the ground and groan.

  “And they did unspeakable things to you, I know,” his small voice went on to say. “Their doctor, a man called Jevans, told me what was going on, that they could find nothing, no reason why you could heal so rapidly. It was he who suggested that the only way they could slow you down was to pump you full of shine.”

  “And you just let them?”

  “No, I went to Charm. I begged him to intervene, and he did. He set it all up; your rescue, Lester, everything.”

  “For what?” Teah asked, turning to face him.

  “For what?” Byron slowly pushed himself up and painfully sat on the parapet.

  “What was Charm’s price for saving me?”

  “The only thing I had to give.”

  She went and stood over him, breathing hard. “What?” she barked in his face.

  “My life. From then on in, my life was his.”

  As if to emphasize Byron Tuttle’s doom, a huge explosion rang out from the direction of Project Firebird. Their eyes met, each needless of words, for they both knew that the last Hell’s Gate must have fallen, and that Zac and the rest of them were now on borrowed time.

  17

  Teah’s Story

  Strike time: plus 16 days

  Location: The Road to the Meyers' Retreat

  Kelly jacked a recently abandoned Hummer; more than likely one of Zac’s mob’s, Teah told her. It started and had half a tank of gas, and meant they could ride in front of the others. Their plan was to stay half a mile ahead—to take point—and use the HUDs to communicate if anything went wrong, if any drones were left and still around. That final explosion had shaken Connor to his core, but Kelly had refused to ship out there and then. None of them wanted to wait until much past dawn.