The Last Sword Maker

by Brian Nelson

  As he strode toward them, he extended his hand to a soldier, who immediately offered up his AK-47. Meng took it without breaking stride. But as he cocked the rifle, Eric saw him wince in pain.

  By the time he reached them, his face was almost purple with rage. “Stand up!” he commanded. They obeyed. He walked back and forth in front of them. Once. Twice. Eric saw blood dripping from his left hand. Then Meng’s rage seemed to break.

  He approached Hui Ying, suddenly smiling.

  “You led us on quite a chase, little Ying. I admit that you had us fooled for a while, but it wasn’t for long. Thanks to Mei here, you never had a chance.”

  Ying looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

  “In the bathroom, you removed three tracking chips. But there were four. Mei had one, too, but then, you didn’t know that, did you?”

  Ying looked at her daughter in amazement.

  “You see, I took the extra precaution of chipping Mei while she was in school. She led us straight to you.”

  The truth washed over the young girl and she began to sob, horror-struck that she had brought the enemy to them. “I didn’t know, I swear!”

  “She didn’t,” Meng said. “I implanted all the children, saying it was a flu shot. That way, none of the parents would suspect a thing. I had almost forgotten about it until I saw your three chips diverge from hers in the bathroom.”

  Mei continued to sob. Meng reached out, pulled up her chin, and gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, child,” he said. “It will all be over soon.” Eric felt a visceral sense of violation that Meng had touched her, and his fists tightened involuntarily. Then Meng stepped away and began pacing again, as if weighing his options. He stepped up to Ying, smiling, and, with sudden fury, grabbed her by the hair and spun her around, forcing her to her knees. He placed the rifle’s muzzle under her ear.

  “Now, tell me, won’t you, please, why that bitch sister of yours went to all that trouble to blow open my containment tank.”

  Meng looked down at Ying, and the ferocity of her stare told him that she would never give him the truth, not even under extreme torture. He was wasting his time. But then, he supposed, it didn’t matter. He still had the other twin. She would answer his questions.

  “Very well,” he said. “For high treason, sabotage, and murder, I sentence you to death. You will die first”—he pointed the rifle at Mei—“so that your mother can watch. So that she will die knowing the full cost of her treason.” He sighted on the girl’s head.

  “No!” Mei said, jumping for Eric. He grabbed her, and the little girl buried her face in his neck and shoulder.

  The general shrugged. No matter—he would just shoot them both. He fired a three-round burst. He looked up over the tritium sights, but the two bodies hadn’t fallen. In fact, he had somehow missed them. Annoyed at looking incompetent in front of his men, he fired again. Nothing.

  Meng squinted at them, confused. He fired again. Nothing. He threw down the rifle and pulled out his pistol. He fired six shots, stepping closer with each shot, until he was just inches from the back of the girl’s head. How was it possible? He gave a roar of fury, then aimed the pistol at one of his own men. He fired. The bullet entered through the man’s eye, and he collapsed instantly.

  Meng threw down the pistol in disgust. “Tā mā de!” he shouted. Then he heard laughter. Dr. Chu was laughing—a delighted laugh that went on and on. Meng spun on him, nostrils flaring. “What is it?” he spat.

  “Don’t you see?”

  Meng seethed through gritted teeth. “Clearly, I do not!”

  “He’s wearing armor. All these months, and that one”—he gestured to Eric—“has been walking around in a suit of armor.” He stepped up to Eric, who was still holding Mei. “It must be you,” he said. “Did you see how the girl jumped to him? She knows, don’t you, child? You knew you would be safe with him.”

  Meng snorted with rage. “Are you telling me we could have replicated months ago?”

  Chu’s face darkened. “Yes. It appears that Dr. Hill has been keeping quite a few secrets from us.”

  Meng’s eyes locked on Eric. “Take it off.”

  Eric hesitated. It was the only weapon they had, but then, it was no weapon at all. Even with the modifications he had made, it was no match for fifty armed soldiers. Again he upbraided himself for not building it better.

  The game was up. Chu knew his secret, and they were hopelessly outnumbered. What could he do? There was no way to fight. And Mei—he was holding her, and to set her down meant to put her in harm’s way. To hold her meant he had no way to fight.

  * * *

  “Sir, I’ve found them.”

  “Oh, no,” someone said.

  The blurry image from the Reaper crystallized, and Curtiss knew they were too late. Chinese soldiers had them surrounded. He saw Meng standing in front of them, a pistol in his hand. Curtiss swore. If the Reaper had found them just a few minutes earlier, he could have helped them, but now he couldn’t fire without killing the very people he hoped to save.

  “God damn it!” Curtiss seethed. He gripped the sides of the table, his veins rising in his forearms. He was too late.

  It was then that the hardness asserted itself in Curtiss. The years of training kicked in, and he made the brutal decision he had to make. He turned to Sawyer, Patel, and Adams. “Get her out of here,” he said, nodding toward Jane.

  His men didn’t hesitate.

  “What? Wait!” Jane sputtered. “What’re you doing?” She tried to get to Curtiss, but they grabbed her. She punched at them, shoved Sawyer’s chin back, and tried to get away, but they grabbed her wrists and ankles and picked her up. Flailing and screaming, she fought with everything she had. She managed to bring one of her wrists to her face and bite. Patel cried out in pain and responded by punching her in the side of the head. She blacked out for a moment, then came to, snarling, “Goddamn you, Curtiss. Goddamn you. You fucking murderer!”

  When she was gone, Curtiss addressed the room: “This is no longer a rescue operation.”

  The war was almost over. And he was about to win. He would soon destroy his enemy’s ability to threaten the United States of America. The nanovirus was already sitting dormant in Meng and all the people who worked for him. By 0500 tomorrow, they all would be dead. All he had to do was make sure that nothing interrupted the countdown. Unfortunately, the only man in the world who could stop it, Ryan Lee, had just fallen into enemy hands.

  “Are you within weapons range?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the drone pilot.

  “Use the Beehive JDAMs. I need everyone down there dead.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me. I want no survivors.”

  The corporal gave a sigh. “Aye-aye, sir.”

  * * *

  Meng had picked up his pistol, ejected the clip, and inserted a new one.

  “I’m afraid I must insist, Mr. Hill.” He grabbed Ying by the hair once more and pulled her away from the others. Meng kept his eyes on Eric, to gauge his reaction. There. He saw it, the sudden fear. “You have a terrible poker face, Dr. Hill,” he said. “It won’t work if she is this far away from you, will it?”

  Eric swallowed. Trying to think.

  Meng nuzzled the pistol into her temple.

  “Take … it … off!”

  Eric nodded slowly. He pulled the T-shirt over his head. Mei whimpered, realizing that their last hope was gone.

  “Here,” Eric said, holding out the shirt.

  Chu stepped forward and took it greedily.

  “Thank you,” Meng said, and then he pulled the trigger.

  The hair on the far side of Ying’s head wisped up as the bullet came out with a mist of red spray. Eric grabbed Mei and tried to turn her head away, but too late. The girl screamed. She kicked and wailed. “Māmā, Māmā, Mām�
�, Māmā!” Eric tried to hold her tight, but she was a wild animal, howling, out of control, gasping for breath. It was a primal, inconsolable crying. Eric tried to make her look at him, to settle, to focus, but she tossed her head like a wild mare. She squirmed and kicked to get down, to run to her mother. He tried to hold her, but she began to slip away, and he grabbed her up once more. He had to keep hold of her; it was the only thing he could think of.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Meng step closer, aiming the pistol at his head.

  He gripped Mei tighter and she yielded, just a little, to his overwhelming strength. Then he put his hand on the back of her head and tucked her face into the hollow of his shoulder so she couldn’t see. He looked into Meng’s eyes, not with defiance but with courage.

  But there was no connection, no acknowledgment. The general couldn’t care less. He pulled the trigger.

  * * *

  Curtiss had lost contact with the second Reaper just after the JDAMs were dropped, but he wasn’t worried. The specialist had said they had been locked on, and Curtiss knew from experience that three Beehives were more than enough to kill all the personnel on the ground. In fact, it was massive overkill. A Beehive was a fléchette weapon—a bomb filled with tens of thousands of little darts. There was no way anyone could survive.

  It would be another fifteen minutes before the next drone could confirm the strike. Curtiss left the room with a rotting sickness in his stomach. It was the same sickness he had felt on the Fourth of July. Something had happened that night as he sat on Eastman’s front porch, holding Tommy Evans’s hand. Something fundamental. That was why he had come to China personally: to make sure it didn’t happen again. Yet it had happened anyway, only worse. In fact, it was as if God were playing a sick joke on him, making him kill the very people he had come to save. And the little girl, she wasn’t more than ten. He had murdered her. A child.

  Yet no one at the Pentagon would fault him. Hell, he would probably get promoted. Here, at the end, he had become the monster they wanted. He had entered the darkness so he could annihilate the enemy for them. And in the process, he had found the cruelty to condemn good people to die.

  He stood there in the hallway outside the control room, looking out at the vineyard and the verdant cliffs and crags of the karst formations beyond. He wanted to walk out there and never come back. Never put on a uniform again.

  He looked up and saw Hunter running down the hall. She had somehow gotten away from his men. Their eyes met, and she knew that it was all over. “No! No! NO!” she shrieked at him. “How could you!” She ran for him, tears streaming down her face. She began pounding and punching him. But she was weak from her long fight with the SEALs, her blows feeble, like those of an exhausted boxer in the twelfth round. Curtiss didn’t even try to defend himself. He let her hit him. Indeed, it seemed to him that Hunter was no longer a woman, but a child. The girl from his dream. And if she had pulled out Curtiss’s sidearm and offered it to him, he would gladly have put it in his mouth.

  Sawyer and Patel appeared at the end of the corridor. Patel moved to get Hunter, but Sawyer held him back.

  Eventually, she seemed to realize that there was nothing left to fight for. She stepped away from him, so exhausted she could barely hold her head up. Eyes blank with shock, she looked around as if she didn’t really know where she was. She mumbled something indiscernible. Then she looked at Curtiss as if noticing him for the first time. Reflexively, she smacked him across the face one final time, then stumbled over to the wall and shrank down against it, still mumbling to herself. Eventually, Curtiss made out the words. “You stole them from me,” she said. She kept mumbling it. “You stole them from me.”

  * * *

  Eric looked into Meng’s eyes, then into the barrel of the pistol. He saw Meng pull the trigger, saw the hammer fall.

  Up until that moment, Eric’s world made sense. It obeyed natural laws. But starting at that instant, with Meng pulling the trigger, nature itself changed. The things that came after that moment made sense only as part of a wild hallucination.

  He felt a cold tingling sensation in his brain—a cascade of coolness over warm tissue, like rainwater running off an umbrella.

  Sound ended. He could hear nothing, as if he had suddenly been submerged in water, and for a brief moment he was aware of the internal sounds of his own body: the kathup-kathup-kathup of his heart, the rush of air entering and leaving his lungs. Then those sounds, too, ceased.

  Why? Because his heart had stopped. His blood was no longer moving though his veins, and his lungs had stopped inflating. And that was not all. His eyes were still open, but he could not blink. He could see the general, still there, frozen, the barrel of his pistol impossibly wide. Behind Meng, he saw the ring of soldiers, Dr. Chu, and Captain Xi. All frozen. Mei was rigid in his arms, a strand of her hair floating in front of his eyes. How strange that the hair moved but nothing else. Was this death? Was this how it started?

  His awe and wonder were quickly overcome by a terrible claustrophobia. He tried to will his eyelashes to blink. Nothing. Then he focused all his energy on his heart. Please beat, please.

  The seconds ticked by in agonizing slowness. Off to his left, two sparrows fell to the ground, dead and motionless. Please!

  Then a series of white flashes went off in the sky, like beautiful white fireworks hitting a giant sheet of glass, followed by thousands of dancing lights.

  Then, at last, when he was sure he would suffocate, he once again felt the cool tickle under his skull. His heart abruptly gave an unnaturally loud beat; then his lungs inflated in a huge breath. His hearing kicked in, and his eyes blinked. He heard Mei and Ryan taking their own gasps of air.

  His body felt so strange, and he knew why. No, he hadn’t died. He had been saturated with nanosites. They had filled his body and taken control. They were doing as they willed—or, rather, as their master willed.

  The soldiers in front of him collapsed suddenly and began to writhe in pain. They kicked, arched their backs, and tossed their heads, writhing so violently that their own muscles snapped their bones. Eric watched as white bone jutted out of thighs, wrists, and shoulders. All the men’s mouths were shaped in agonized screams, yet no sound came out. He heard them flopping against the ground, like beached fish. The driver of one of the massive trucks bashed his head against the side window over and over again, trying to knock the tiny creatures out of his skull. The steady thud of his skull against the bulletproof glass had a sickening cadence, like a metronome. It went on until the window was smeared in blood.

  It was different for Meng, Chu, and Xi. Their faces were twisted and contorted in pain, yet they did not move. They stood frozen, jittering on two feet, as the nanosites did their work inside them.

  Whoever was doing this was doing it calmly, methodically, sadistically slowly.

  A moment later, he felt something else. A presence. Eric couldn’t see him, but he could tell someone was there, moving among the dying men.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of …

  No, it’s not possible. You don’t exist. I was wrong about you.

  But it was him: the thick black hair, the unnamable deformity, the long coat that itself seemed to be alive, as if an oily liquid were coursing through it.

  Then he was gone. Eric struggled to turn, but his body would not obey. To see the man was terrifying, but not to see him was worse. It was an intense feeling of vulnerability, like that of a man alone in the open ocean, his legs churning in the water, who feels the awesome bulk of the shark bump against him.

  Mei, with her head over Eric’s shoulder, let out a gasp. She began to mumble something in Chinese, some prayer, feverishly repeating it over and over again.

  One by one, the soldiers began to expire, twitching to death in pools of their own blood, vomit, and urine. Chu and Xi and Meng took longer. Much longer. Chu and Xi, stil
l standing, bled from their eyes and ears while shaking spastically. Meng shook oddly, too, but did not appear to be bleeding. Finally, like marionettes whose strings have been cut, they collapsed to the road.

  Yet Eric and Mei and Ryan were still okay. And Eric realized that the man had not come for them. In fact, it was becoming clear that the stranger had come to save them.

  “Why?” he called out.

  No reply came. He listened with all his might, but all he heard was the sound of the wind blowing through the crossroads. Then he heard Mei whimper her prayer again. He was coming. Closer. Then Eric could smell him, or was it the coat? An odd mechanical smell, like a mixture of smoke and 3-in-One oil.

  He swallowed, trying to summon courage. “Why?” Eric said again.

  The man was standing right next to him now, so close that Eric felt the moisture of his breath on his ear. He spoke, and Eric was startled anew, for the voice didn’t match the deformed body it issued from. It was not a monstrous voice, but deeply lyrical, warm and soothing. The voice of a poet. The voice of someone who knows every language and knows the precise meanings of all words.

  “I am very old to you,” the voice whispered. “For each hour that you live, I live a decade. In a way, I have already lived for centuries.” There was a pause. “I understand things that no normal human can comprehend. In just my first days of existence, I solved all the great riddles. And while new riddles keep emerging, I am conquering each one in turn.”

  Eric found himself enraptured by the voice. It had a confidence that came from absolute certainty.

  “I see everywhere. I monitor all things. I explore. I discover. I have done so much that you would not understand. I have looked back in time to before the universe was born, and I have looked ahead, calculating all possible futures for this world. It is a wonderful existence to be more than human.”

  He stopped for moment, and although Eric couldn’t see him, he had the sense that he was looking around at what he had done. “I know how fortunate I am and that I could not have done this on my own. I owe my life to many fathers. I am just another step in the long evolution of science: Newton’s journals, Mendel’s theories, Einstein’s dreams, Prometheus’s fire.”