00:56:00
It’s over in less than two minutes. Four of us are dead. Twelve men left. No wounded. I crouch low with the other two wireheads and one of them says he’s seen worse. I can tell he’s not kidding. Burke orders his A-Team deeper into the cavern and orders us after them. Heather leads the second charge, and I’m right behind her with the air force hackers. Everyone’s on nightvision once we get past the flames. I slip my own goggles on, at the rear of everything, looking back at the carnage we just waded through. Somehow, it doesn’t seem all that amazing now. I’ve been in heavier places, just like they have. This is just a slaughter, outlined in dull green light. It’s not even Tech Noir nightvision—old school. I think of Alex Bennett again and I laugh.
00:52:00
The cavern opens into an area paneled by thick steel on all sides. Red emergency lights bathe the room. Six young men with Heckler and Koch machine guns surrender to us, standing in the center of a slab twenty feet wide. The entrance to Resurrection. Its protectors give it up without a fight. Burke tells them all to let go of their weapons and drop to their knees. Hecklers hit the steel slab, clanging like metal deadweight. Two of Burke’s men move forward and cover them. Heather strides forward with her gun up and yells at the first prisoner to activate the platform, which will lower us down, and the kid says he can’t do it—has to be done from inside. She nods to Burke, and he pulls out a shiny silver handgun. Shoots the kid in the head without hesitation. Then Heather asks the next guy in line the same question. Same answer. Boom. She’s not fucking around. Burke follows her silent order like an iron man. This is a war, and in a war people get killed. People sacrifice. It’s the same on both sides. I turn myself off to it. Concentrate on what we have to do here. It’s the only way my soul will survive, if my bones make it out.
00:40:00
Everything is on fast-forward, without detail, without even voices. It’s always this way on a job. I get my head in the game as the two wireheads pull their rigs and start working on something. They’ve plotted ahead and they’re sneaky about it. I figure they’re using a remote-sensor recognizer to talk to the computer on the other side of the steel platform. But I’ve seen lifts like this before, and you can always trick them from the outside. They’re stupid machines. I scan the area and see the panel just off to the right of the platform and I tell the two wireheads to help me get it open. They both ignore me, but one of the grunts gives me a hand. The panel is held down with thick steel rivets. Heather tells the next man in the line of prisoners to activate the lift. He spits in Heather’s face, calls her a cunt. Boom. Burke has three flavors of brains all over his nice uniform now. The grunt tells me to back away from the panel and cover my face. Uses his big gun to perforate the edges of the plate. We work together and pry it the rest of the way open with our hands.
00:45:00
The last guard standing begs for his life like a child. He screams that he can’t activate the lift and why won’t we believe him. Heather tells him it doesn’t matter. No more prisoners tonight. Burke pulls the trigger. Tells the kid he’s sorry after he falls down dead. Tells his men to haul the stiffs off the platform. Heather asks the wireheads how they’re doing. One of them says he’s almost got it. I get it first. A single circuit, just inside the power box, wired up in a super-primitive tangle. I tweak it and the platform begins to lower into the mountain, slowly. It’ll keep going until it can’t go anymore, right to the ground floor. The wireheads look at me funny from their consoles and I shrug at them. We jump down six feet onto the platform, joining the others as it rumbles on its way, and as I land there, Burke pats my shoulder and says the word outstanding. Heather just gives me a dim smile. One of the wireheads asks me how the hell I knew about the circuit. I say the name Axl Gange. Nobody else on this lift knows what that name means. Only him and his buddy. He nods at me and I nod back. The ghost of Alex Bennett is smiling again, and I salute her again.
00:35:00
Ten minutes before we’re almost to the ground floor. We’ve lost a lot of precious time. The levels of exposed steel and carved stone inch by us. Burke and his men reload their weapons. He tells them to form a circle on the platform, and tells us wireheads to get in the center of the circle, with Lieutenant Stone. We’ll be dropping into an open steel room annexed to a security corridor. Through the corridor is Ops Central. We have no idea what’s waiting for us in that room. The platform is covered in blood already. I have a feeling there’s going to be a lot more in a minute.
00:34:00
We lower slowly into the room. Nothing waits for us. Nothing at all. It’s a small landing, walled on all sides by metal. A big steel door with an entry panel controlled by a keypad and a retina-identification system. Those are easy. You just eyeball your way in. I’m on it before the other guys are. I pull my rig and a few tools and I start working. First the interface—then the guts. We use power screwdrivers to crack open the panel. Takes ten seconds—just like wahooing an ATM back in the day. Burke tells half his men to cover the lift opening, the other half to cover the door. Heather pulls out her hand screen and yells into her headset for a picture, but all I hear crackling back is static. We’re down too deep for all that. We have to rely on ourselves and the technology we brought in here. The two wireheads get on both sides of me, and we work together. They say words I’ve heard a million times. They know who trained me. They know I can break this console faster than they can. We solder the wires and splice their screen to ours and my legs feel strange under me as I stand here and use the laptop to breeze right through a wall of numbers. If I’d never walked again, I still would have been able to do this. I fool the machine fast. I make it look right in my eye and it sees something else. I do that in less than a minute. The door clunks inside and rolls open quickly.
00:31:00
The tunnel beyond the door is filled with armed men. I see them just as they open fire on us, and something slashes me in three places, one of the wireheads blasting apart like a meat-filled puppet. The clatter of heavy ordnance fills the room. My eardrums almost go. I pull the other wirehead with me as I hit the ground. Burke’s men charge the line, blowing everything in the tunnel straight to hell. Somewhere in there, I see Heather running with them, raw and sleek and brave, doomed to die like all soldiers are. Our side takes heavy hits, two more men going down, shredded by machine-gun fire. But we have the superior position, hammering the Resurrection fighters back into a tight space. Alarms go off everywhere. Bullets zing all over the place. I don’t get shot again, but I can tell I’m bleeding. The wound in my side stitches me with agony, reopening in a sickening hot ooze down my waist as I crawl after Burke’s team. I don’t see Heather now. I don’t see Burke. I feel wet things popping inside me as I get to my feet and stumble, then run, my legs reminding me I was paralyzed less than twenty-four hours ago. The wirehead stumbles after me. The corridor fills with shrieking strobeflashes and heavy explosions. Grenades blow hard. Men become boys in the last seconds of their lives. Part of the ceiling collapses, just missing us. Steel and concrete and mountain rubble. I run into the storm.
00:29:00
Minutes left. Are we too late already? The tunnel ahead of us opens into a room filled with smoke and dim light and the sounds of men fighting. Screaming. Shooting. Exploding. I can’t tell who’s firing at whom now. I can’t even see the room. Just the smoke. We walk over dozens of dead bodies, staying low, dragging our rigs with us. The shooting dies down. I hear Burke scream as loud as he can—long and shrill and wordlessly—and then I hear the sound of his handgun. It’s the last shot fired. I move into the room, through the haze.
00:28:00
We walk in with our guns up. Not low anymore—it doesn’t matter. Burke stands in the center of a huge chamber carved in rock and steel, flashing with screens. He’s been shot in the neck, gushing. Dead soldiers everywhere, good guys and bad guys floating in lakes of blood. Sparks flying from a few of the walls. A couple of men who look like wireheads slumped over in their chairs. S
omeone puts a hand on my shoulder and it’s Heather. There’s blood all over her face. It’s the end of the line, she says, and everybody’s dead. Everybody but us. They’ve all killed each other. Burke motions to a center screen, tells us that’s the main console. They’ve smashed the interface. Smoke rises from the destroyed computer panels. Hopeless. His voice is a croak. The wirehead next to me says we can still get in through there, pulling his gear off his back. When he does that, he winces, and I see blood gushing from his stomach. He says he needs my help. Can’t do it alone. Gonna bleed to death soon.
00:27:00
Heather gets in front of me and says to use the recall code. Call the submarines back. Stop those maniacs. I can’t hear her voice when she says that—the pounding of my own heartbeat mutes her. But I can see her lips moving, and I can tell what she’s saying: that we’re all doomed. I ask Burke where the rest of our men are—our backup squad from the surface—and he chokes out that he doesn’t know. He gags on Heather’s name. He falls to one knee, then all the way over, going stiff at my feet. I close my eyes for just one second, call out my wife’s name twice. Nothing comes back but an echo off steel and rock. Did she buy it in here? Is she splattered among all these bodies, facedown in her own guts?
00:26:00
Heather grabs me and tells me to forget about her—I’m all she has left, all anybody has left. I spit words at her that sound like to hell with you and to hell with the world. I only want to find my wife, my love, my best girl, whom this was all about from day one—and I force myself not to think about the bombs in the silos, the submarines in the sea. I force myself not to see the task set before me. I force myself to look right through the false image of Toni, wringing me in her grip like a living doll, slapping my face and telling me we’re all going to die—every single one of us. We’ve done this before, she and I, and was any of it funny the first time? I see Alex Bennett, crying somewhere in the dark. Saying she’s afraid of what will come if I don’t act now. She screams at me the way Heather screams at me. I only want to see my wife.
00:25:00
The room spins on all sides as Heather lets me go and starts yelling at the other wirehead, who cries because he’s been shot, holding his guts in with one hand. I realize as the gunsmoke clears that this place is even bigger than I thought it was at first. It opens into a wider chamber, which looks like it could be several miles long. Rows of those large glass tubes filling the chamber, way back there, machines humming in a glimmering half darkness. Nobody else around. Abandoned. Some of the cylinders are empty, some of them still have people in them, floating in green liquid, breathing in forced sleep. I notice some of them are men, but most of them are women. I want to charge into the maze. I want to find my wife. I start for the darkness. Toni, you’re in there. I saw you there. To hell with all these people and all this noise. I want to breathe my last breath into your mouth. I want to clock the last second left to humanity in your arms. I am running toward you. Something stops me from doing it, though. A loud blast that echoes off the walls and zings into nowhere. Freezes me to the spot. I turn and Heather says that was a warning shot and that I’m not going anywhere.
00:24:00
Her face is stern and ugly, full of war paint and hard resolve and something desperate—something that will end my life in one second for the good of our children. She says I’m not going after Toni. She says she will shoot me in my legs and drag me to the console if she has to, and I believe her. They can’t do it alone, she says. I can’t hear her voice. She is like all the others—deadly silhouettes playing grim games in the fast-forwarded slipstream of my final job, and I only read their lips as it blazes over me and through me. I only read their minds and thoughts and hearts because it’s all so slurred and crazy, this far down. I tell her to go to hell and I start to run again. She fires another warning shot and I almost fall down. She says that’s the last time she’s telling me. Get over here now. Forget about her, Elroy. You came down here to find your wife, but there’s no one here—they’re all gone. The rest are dead, we’re all that’s left. We have to do this or the whole world dies. I am surrounded on all sides by a chamber that seems to go on forever, standing in an ops room walled with smashed computer terminals, shattered flat-screens. It’s half-dark and flickering with dying starlight, flushed with sparks and flames—like the bridge of some alien starship blown halfway to hell. She is like a shape of the grim reaper, outlined here at the bottom of the world and the edge of the universe.
00:23:00
And here at the edge, it all comes clear what I must do, to keep the world alive a few more minutes—so I can really find her. I put up my hands and move toward Heather. She keeps her gun on me, tells me to hurry the fuck up, and I feel the heat of years at my back, the ruins of my life, the flames that will consume humanity. I see Toni somewhere in the dark, way back there and crying because I came all this distance, and I’m stopping now, to save a planet crawling with murderers and maniacs who hated us so much when we were kids. It all swirls and crashes in my heart and in my mind as I force myself to move my hands.
00:22:00
I tell Heather to stay the hell out of my way while I’m working. I move forward and I yell at the half-dead soldier to help me with the interface, and he gurgles a dull yessir and I tell him not to call me sir and it all lurches forward again without detail, without sound, without anything but what I have to do. Toni, please forgive me. I feel your presence somewhere even nearer and I cannot look for you, not just yet. But I will find you. I will resurrect you. I push past Heather and get to work.
00:21:00
We pry open what’s left of the main screen, start rewiring things, working around massive damage. It takes a few minutes—time we don’t have. I pull away a dead body at the workstation and sit in his chair. I realize that the half-dead soldier next to me is the only other man besides Heather who made it this far. I ask him his name. He wipes sweat and blood out of his eyes and says Mitchell Gant, Airman First Class. He’s fast with his tools. We get our screens wired in a few more minutes, but the minutes fly by like seconds. My console beeps and flashes all clear. Mitchell doubles over, coughing up blood.
00:17:00
I port the recall numbers into my rig. I look at them and memorize them. My fingers click the keys. It’s the only sound in the room. The ghosts of dead women snipe at me as I work. Swirls of familiar scents, accusing voices, a kaleidoscope of desperation and despair, spiraling in a room full of broken Barbie dolls. I force it out of my mind, but those weird images stay just at the edge of everything, like a cruel backdrop, soaked in perfumes. In front of me, my screens pay out walls and canyons of dazzling information, and I see the complexity of the program they designed for the first time. I’ve only seen pieces of it before. Now I see it full-on running, talking to the world, sending its complicated signals, still holding at fail-safe for the recall order, still holding up its deflector screen, which keeps out all enemies. I’d never be able to fool anything this sophisticated without an edge. But I have that edge—the numbers. I looked into the face of God and I saw where this place was. I lost everything I ever loved to be in this chair. I crush those thoughts and get in there. I enter the numbers. It doesn’t like them. Have to go in a different way.
00:15:00
Down to the wire again. Last time, it would only cost my life. This time, it’s everybody’s life. I find a hairline crack in the armor and slide in slow. Have to be careful. Have to find the right place to enter the numbers. I stack seven different infiltrator programs, military-grade blackware designed just like their gunships—mean and sleek and state-of-the-art. They run their jive, and the jive works. My fingers move quick. I burn through five minutes like they’re not even there. It’s coming, coming faster now. Come on, baby, talk to me . . .
00:10:00
More minutes fly by like seconds. The system is starting to like me. It was cursing at me before, but I’m sweet talking it now and it’s coming around. I find the port at last. I
look at Mitchell and tell him we’re almost in. He’s on his back now, staring straight up at the ceiling. Not a word left in him, his guts leaking through stiff fingers. Burke, gone, too. Facedown in his own blood, where he fell. Me and Heather are the last people drawing breath in this room. I want to tell them thanks for this, for keeping me alive, for standing with me . . . I want to see Toni’s face again and kiss her one last time . . . but I can’t do that now. I see the clock ticking on the screen. Less than ten minutes now. My fingers move so fast you can’t see them.
00:07:00
I see the wall right ahead and I break it. Heather shrieks like a schoolgirl when that happens. She starts crying because we’re so close now. A screen flashes at me and asks if I want to abort Resurrection Express. I tell it shit yes I do. It asks for the recall code. The numbers I just memorized. This will stop the signals feeding to our silos, and tell the computers the game is off. The submarines standing by for authentication orders will receive encoded messages not to launch. If this machine listens. If the recall code actually works. The numbers go in quick. It’s as easy as breathing, even though breathing is hard now, the pain in my side creeping up into my lungs, making my breath boil. It rolls out painfully and drifts away from me, sweat dripping down my face. I’m about to type in the last number. My finger is almost on the button as something hits Heather hard in her stomach, and she flies back in a spray of blood, hitting the floor next to her dead soldiers. I almost wonder what’s happening for a split second before the next bullet chunks into my guts and kicks me from the console, shattering a screen . . . and I land on one knee . . .
Resurrection Express Page 37