“Do I need to speed up, slow down, or stop?” K.C. said. “Or all three at once?”
“Not sure,” Franklin said, peering to his right. “Something moved in the woods.”
Rachel crawled to the side of the storage area and peered through a slit in the armored side panels. The Humvee was only doing about thirty miles per hour, so her visibility wasn’t blurred. She scanned the brown-and-gray trees for signs of movement. A strange tingling crawled over her skin and her eardrums tightened as if the atmospheric pressure had changed.
“Something weird’s going on,” DeVontay said, touching his forehead. He plucked the metal orb from his damaged eye socket. “This thing’s getting warm.”
“I feel it, too,” Rachel said.
“We’re only twenty clicks from the target,” Cone said. “As long as there are no hostiles in the area, we should keep going.”
“That’s up to Rachel,” DeVontay said. “The captain built this mission around her abilities and perceptions. She’s our only hope for success, so we have to trust her.”
“Sorry,” Cone said. “This is all new to me. I’ve been trained to kill Zaps, not obey them.”
“Slow down,” Rachel shouted to K.C., who let off the accelerator and let the vehicle idle forward at about ten miles per hour.
They approached a hill where a massive collision had caused a pile-up that completely blocked the pavement. They would have to go off road to circumvent the wreckage. The narrow passage on the right veered dangerously close to the forest, and although they had yet to encounter any beasts of either natural or manufactured creation, Rachel sensed the presence of something.
“Right or left?” K.C. asked.
“Maybe I should get out and take a look over the hill,” Franklin said.
“We’re safer inside,” Rachel said. Her grandfather was just stubborn enough to ignore her warning, but he stayed put, scoffing with a snort.
DeVontay slid his mutant prosthetic back into his skull. “Maybe this metal works like some kind of radio receiver or radiation detector,” he said. “Because it’s tingling a little bit.”
Ziminski’s theory was correct. The metal will activate when it nears the influence of the Zaps.
While Rachel shared telepathic abilities with the mutants, she could also be blocked by a particularly strong Zap baby. Kokona had tricked Rachel into a mothering role while at the same time the devious infant had plotted the betrayal of them all. If Franklin hadn’t killed Kokona, Rachel would’ve remained her slave forever.
But Rachel had no connection to the organic metal monstrosities constructed by the Zaps. She’d watched in helpless horror as Kokona had crafted a duplicate of Rachel. The living robot might’ve replaced Rachel as Kokona’s carrier if the cruel and arrogant infant hadn’t so enjoyed Rachel’s psychological torment. In the end, Kokona’s incredible intellect hadn’t protected her from her most corrupt human weaknesses.
“Must be robots,” Rachel said. “Maybe an advance guard to defend the city, or a few scouts.”
“What about the birds?” Cone said. “Maybe they fly in big orbits around the city, conducting aerial surveillance.”
Rachel imagined the birds would be fully articulated if they were near the Zap city. But she had no idea how powerful a sentient city would be, or what motivations it operated under. She’d have to assume that Zaps still controlled the organic material until she discovered more evidence.
And that meant reaching the city and making contact.
“Sky’s clear,” DeVontay said.
“I need a decision,” K.C. said. “I’ll be in the pile-up soon. Right or left?”
The four-lane highway had a grass median that sloped downward to collect rainwater. A number of cars and trucks had slid off the highway when their drivers died in the solar storms. An overturned tractor-trailer rig lay atop a couple of sedans, and soggy cardboard boxes had spilled from the trailer. Rachel worried that if they tried to cross the median, they might get stuck in the mud despite the Humvee’s all-wheel drive.
“Go right,” Rachel said. “Try to keep as far from the woods as possible.”
“Maybe I can keep two wheels on the shoulder,” K.C. said. “Looks a little swampy over there.”
She gunned the engine and swerved to the right, with DeVontay and Franklin both turned fully to monitor the forest. Rachel knelt and cuddled Squeak, waiting for the Humvee to pass the wreckage and crest the hill. K.C. hugged the pavement as much as possible, and Rachel shielded Squeak’s view when they passed a rusty pick-up truck that featured two skeletons sitting in the cab. It had sideswiped a motorcycle and pinned it against the rear bumper of a Volvo wagon. Luckily, the rider must’ve been carried off by predators—or had turned into a Zap and ran wild during the chaos, killing anyone unlucky enough to not die instantly.
At least three dozen vehicles were tangled in the massive pileup at the top of the hill. It was impossible to tell what had tipped the dominoes, but Rachel suspected it was triggered by the overturned Volkswagen in the median. Traffic from both directions had rammed into it, creating an avant-garde sculpture of silver metal, plastic, and shattered glass. Rachel suspected the driver had tried to dart between vehicles while coming over the hill, not realizing that the wall of traffic had spilled out wider than the lanes could contain.
Rachel looked away and then glanced back. Had the Volkswagen moved?
Shadows shifted in the twisted carnage. It wasn’t the car. It was…something else.
The metal men came pouring out of the pile-up like rats. They must’ve seen the Humvee approaching and made a calculated act of concealment—suggesting a cunning intelligence that was different from the robots Kokona and her fellow mutants had willed into life.
“Bots at nine o’clock!” Cone shouted before Rachel could sound the alarm. She levered the window down a few inches and poked the barrel of her M4 through the opening.
Like the birds, the metal men weren’t fully articulated. They wore featureless faces and their bodies were smooth, which somehow made them creepier than if they were human duplicates.
“Go! Go! Go!” Franklin ordered needlessly, since K.C. had already revved the engine and accelerated, the tires tossing up huge chunks of mud as they fought for traction.
Cone unleashed a burst of gunfire, deafening everyone in the cab, and the brass casings clinked off the floor around Rachel and Squeak. Rachel covered the girl’s body with her own, trying to telepathically connect with the robots. All she detected was a faint humming that she couldn’t even be sure was real. The noise might’ve been the ringing of her ears due to the gun’s percussion.
But when DeVontay looked at her, she realized they had a connection after all.
The metal orb in his eye socket was glowing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Bullets chew them up but they keep coming,” Cone shouted.
DeVontay counted five of the metal figures sprinting toward them, their legs pumping with long, fluid strides. The Humvee slid sideways in the mud, bouncing toward the forest as K.C. fought to maintain control of the wheel. DeVontay perched beside Cone and brought his M16 to bear. His marksmanship was lousy in the best of circumstances, and these were nowhere close to maximal.
He grew irritated when Rachel called his name, since he was concentrating on sighting down the barrel. But she was insistent. He squeezed off three rounds, watching one of the bullets plow a furrow in the chest of one of the creatures forty yards away.
“Can’t believe how fast those metal bastards are,” Franklin said.
DeVontay squeezed the trigger again, sending a burst that caught the nearest bot in the face. Shrapnel sprayed everywhere, glinting green under the aurora, and the thing faltered. DeVontay was pleased with himself despite the danger, adrenaline kicking in and giving him a buzz. Although K.C. had the Humvee under control again and gunned the engine, the four remaining bots gained ground.
“Put it down,” Cone said. “Eliminate the threat.”
; “DeVontay!” Rachel screamed, and DeVontay’s arm twitched as he fired, wasting a volley as his shots raked across the wrecked vehicles.
“What?” he snarled, glancing at her as Cone fired again.
She put a finger against her temple and then pointed to his face.
What in hell? An inexplicable rage surged through him. He’d tolerated Rachel’s mutant mood swings and had risked his life to follow her, but now she grated on his nerves.
“Your eye,” she yelled.
DeVontay touched the prosthetic and rolled it around in his eye socket. It was warm and slick, a little softer than it had been when he’d inserted it. Has his body heat transformed it?
K.C. accelerated and the Humvee banged against a guard rail and fishtailed, then the other rear flank slammed into a dead van. Cone was flung from her position and she slammed into DeVontay, whose finger nearly hooked on the M16’s trigger. By the time they’d regained their balance, K.C. had navigated the Hummer past the wreckage and back onto the pavement. She shifted the automatic transmission from second to high gear and the diesel engine rattled as the RPMs rose. Soon they were traveling at more than fifty miles per hour now that there were fewer obstacles.
The five robots continued to give chase, but they rapidly fell behind. The one DeVontay had shot staggered behind the others, one flexible arm reaching toward the damage as if feeling pain from the wound. It wasn’t “dead,” but the bullets had harmed it.
“Everybody okay?” Franklin asked.
“We hurt ‘em,” Cone said. “I thought you said the metal creatures in the domed city were impermeable.”
“These acted a little different,” Rachel said. “They didn’t just move in a mindless pack, but as if they had some awareness of their individuality.”
Franklin groaned. “Don’t tell me these metal fuckers are evolving, too.”
“What’s all this about my eye?” DeVontay said. The Humvee had no interior rearview mirror, so he tried to catch his reflection in his side window. The metal eye seemed brighter than usual, but he couldn’t trust the quality of the light. The sun and the aurora were suffused by the lingering storm clouds.
“It’s getting dimmer now,” Rachel said. “But when we were near the Zap robots, it was shiny and oily-looking.”
“Weird,” DeVontay said. “It was gooier, too, almost like a real eyeball.”
He pressed the outside corner of his eye socket with his pinkie and popped out the metal orb.
“Dude, that’s gross,” Cone said, but Squeak giggled. DeVontay was glad the kid saw this ordeal as an adventure.
Life’s always too hard to keep going. You just have to do it anyway.
“I think Capt. Ziminski suspected the metal still retained some of its properties,” Rachel said. “Like it would activate if we got near the Zaps or any of their metal creations.”
“And he just kept that little theory to himself?” DeVontay said. “Just send me out as a guinea pig? Or a canary in a coal mine?”
“We’re expendable resources, son,” Franklin said. “You have to put yourself in the military mind. Rachel is the only one here that matters.”
“Hey, I matter, too!” Squeak interrupted, already playing with her doll again.
“Yes, that’s true, honey,” Franklin said. “What I mean is we can’t really do what Rachel can do. When it comes down to it, our job is to just put her in a position to succeed.”
DeVontay hefted the small ball of organic metal, forged by Zaps from their plasma harvesting. Now that he’d removed it from his skull, it seemed like a polished rock. But while he was wearing it—while it was inside him—it had radiated some sort of heat and energy. He wondered if its influence had been the cause of his sudden anger at Rachel.
“Maybe the detection works both ways,” Rachel said. “You can sense them, and they can sense you. Or more accurately, metal attracts metal in some kind of mutant magnetism.”
DeVontay tossed it up in the air and caught it like a ping pong ball. “So they knew we were coming and they hid in the wreck and waited for us.”
“If we believe the bots are motivated and intelligent, then why not?”
“Did they want to kill us, or did they want their little baby cousin here back?”
“Maybe both,” Franklin said. “We saw how that stuff reacted in the domed city. It killed on command, like it knew its survival was at stake.”
“Kokona and the others controlled the material through psychokinesis,” Rachel said. “The metal didn’t fabricate itself and didn’t initiate any action. The metal was sentient but submissive.”
“We don’t know what would’ve happened if President Murray hadn’t blown up the city,” Franklin said. “Once we killed all the Zap babies, the city might’ve been forced to keep the dome operational in order to survive. It might’ve had to think for itself.”
“In other words, we don’t know what surprises might be waiting,” K.C. said.
“Whatever it is, I’ll be ready,” Cone said. “I was born for this. Zap or robot or Russian Commie storm trooper, I’m ready to end it.”
DeVontay held up the metal orb and studied it as if it were a rare jewel. “I guess I should toss this out the window. Otherwise, it’s like a GPS for Zap radar.”
“Keep it,” Rachel said. “It’s an asset. Sure, it helps them detect us, but I’ll bet it will help us when we finally make contact.”
“We just made contact, and it wasn’t all that friendly,” Franklin said. “Who knows? Maybe that stuff has memory, and it feels the pain of us blowing up the city. Maybe it’s afraid we’ll do it to the next city, too.”
The terrain sprawled outward in a series of rolling hills, resulting in the Humvee climbing noisily up a slope for a few hundred yards and then coasting downhill. The houses and exit ramps were sparser and stranded vehicles were few and far between. In the distance stood blue mountain ridges wreathed with smoke where their bunker and Franklin’s compound was located.
DeVontay wasn’t sure he wanted the metal stuck in his head. What if that bizarre ore came to life and drilled into his brain, or sent little wires through his nervous system and started controlling him?
“I get it now,” DeVontay said to Rachel. “You want me to be a half-breed, too.”
“What do you mean?” she responded, wary.
“You’re a Zap, so if Zaps are running the city, you can communicate with them. But you can’t communicate with the organic metal. You need a go-between. And you think if I stick this in my head, maybe I’ll have some kind of fucked-up ESP, too. That I can do some kind of mind meld with the metal people.”
“It’s a theory,” Rachel said.
“Well, you’re not turning me into your damned robot,” he said, suddenly angry again. One hand curled around the barrel of his rifle and squeezed so hard his fingers ached. The other gently palmed the metal orb, rolling it around and finding pleasure in the smooth, slick surface. This was his eye. What right did Ziminski have to take it away from him in the first place?
“Cool it, DeVontay,” Franklin said. “Nobody’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to. It’s not like the human race is depending on you for its survival or anything.”
“Thanks for reminding me about Operation Free Bird,” K.C. said. “I was starting to enjoy the drive.”
“Three days, DeVontay,” Rachel said. “After that, it doesn’t matter what you want or don’t want.”
He set the metal on the armrest and removed the magazine from his M16. “Pass me that ammo can,” he said, calmer now.
When their fingers touched, he felt that old electricity and it made him melancholy. What if their attraction wasn’t borne on the noble wings of love, but instead was a trick of chemicals and misfiring electrical signals? What if they’d been fooled by the deranged forces inside them, hypnotized by sick science, manipulated like robots by some unseen power?
Did robots understand free will, or did they just react while mistakenly believing they were independ
ent and autonomous?
Would an intelligent robot even know it was a robot?
As DeVontay pulled the can away, Rachel grabbed his wrist and leaned forward. She kissed him on the mouth and whispered, “Don’t worry, honey. I would never let you get lost.”
“Even if I became some kind of cyborg Zap thing?” he said, looking deep into her surreal, glittering eyes.
“Especially then,” she whispered. “It might even be sexy.”
“Just don’t make me wear no eye patch. That’s such a damned post-apocalyptic cliché.”
Rachel touched the metal orb. “Hot.”
DeVontay laughed, and a wave of relief washed over him. “I guess we’re already the weirdest couple in this shitstorm of a universe. May as well go all the way over the edge.”
He collected the orb and placed it against his empty eye socket, and then nudged and wriggled it into place. It yielded and entered as if it belonged there. Rachel kissed him again but it irritated him and he turned away, reloading his weapon.
CHAPTER NINE
“This is Mike Uniform November, over.”
“Come in, Munger,” Gen. Arnold Alexander said. “This is Hotel Quebec.”
He’d been summoned from the front fifteen minutes ago. After issuing the Red Alert, he’d personally traveled the main line of defense, boosting morale and ensuring the troop strength was evenly distributed. He was coordinating the counterattack strategy for the main entrance when he received news of the call. So far, the enemy hadn’t engaged, or else Alexander would’ve let Munger wait.
“We reached our objective, over...POTUS is MIA and presumed to be KIA. I say again, POTUS is Mike India Alpha, presumed Kilo India Alpha.”
Murray was dead? Alexander had been Murray’s friend for decades as part of the government’s administrative staff, but he felt no sorrow. She’d betrayed their country. He was only angry that she’d escaped his punishment. “Is that confirmed, over?”
“We have the secondary target, over. We interrogated him as well as some of the staff. Ziminski didn’t break but the others corroborated the report of her death.”
Half Life: A Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (Next Book 6) Page 5