Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  “Kind of quiet, actually,” Critias meant the distinct lack of ghouls that chased them around the beautiful scenery. He was glad to have his combat android by his side so he didn’t have to deal with the situation all on his own.

  The shelter they had hid in was the basement of what had once been a house before it became scattered debris that littered the landscape. Critias thought it looked like teslaflux grenade damage. He asked her, “Did you blow it up?”

  “I used a grenade,” Carmen admitted somewhat embarrassed. “When I first arrived, I had some problems with infected trying to get down into the basement, and one thing led to another.”

  He couldn’t see much in the way of civilization so he said, “The nearest town must be a good distance off. How many ghouls have you taken out so far?”

  “Only thirty-nine,” she answered. “Apart from that grenade indiscretion, I’ve done my best to be quiet about it.”

  Critias closed his visor to explore telescopically as he gazed about for a direction in which to explore. He told Carmen, “We need some kind of truck to move the crates.” To the west, he saw a large building about three kilometers away with some vehicles around it. Pointing over there, he advised, “That seems like a good place to start.”

  Critias could run tirelessly in his mechsuit, but not fast enough to keep up with Carmen at her full speed. They dashed the short distance together through the tall grasses that obscured their presence from infected eyes that may have watched their travel. A dozen white-tailed deer let them pass at a close distance without any particular concern. The deer had already changed in behavior that they associated infected with predators while they saw humans as a harmless and nearly forgotten curiosity.

  The isolated industrial area had a line of tall grain silos beside a large sheet-metal shed. Various trucks and farming vehicles were in the parking area. A fence that was unsuitable as any defense perimeter against infected surrounded the whole compound. The barrier might have dissuaded the ghouls who casually wandered through that area, but it would never stop them from getting past if they were determined to do so.

  Critias easily jumped the fence with a teslaflux rifle in hand then Carmen followed. They slowly approached the building together and studied everything carefully as they went.

  “That looks like a good one,” he pointed out a large truck that was mostly cargo box with a rear vertical sliding door. The vehicle seemed like it had been new at the time of the Outbreak then sat untouched ever since. “Too bad it’s nothing but aluminum and thin sheet steel,” he criticized it. “A hunter will tear through it like paper.”

  “I’m programmed with the skills to operate indigenous tools,” she informed him with confidence that she could fix it up. “We armor it a bit and then we’ll be good to go.”

  He still had his reservations, “That is if we can start it and we can find the fuel it consumes. Let’s see if we can make it operational.”

  A ghoul’s feeding shriek alerted them to the presence of danger. An old man turned plague-feral predator still had on filthy upper rags of ripped coveralls and one of the boots he had worn in natural life. Critias was not used to seeing infected dressed in human clothes. In his future time, the ghouls ran around all dirty and naked; their clothes had long-since rotted off their bodies. He raised his rifle to put a bullet through the creature’s head, but Carmen gently pushed his weapon down with her hand.

  “I will take care of this one quietly,” she offered as she stepped forward to attract the infected’s attention. “Here boy,” she called to it, “come to Carmen.” The ghoul had the appearance of an old man that drooled after them with ravenous hunger, but it moved with the alacrity of youth. When the ghoul leaped to tackle her, Carmen sidestepped while she caught its leg with the crook of her bightstaff to trip it to the ground. Before it could get up, she stepped on its back then snapped its neck with a clever hooked twist of her weapon.

  “You are pretty good with that thing,” he praised her talent with the rudimentary weapon. Critias didn’t have a history of doing covert reconnaissance. His typical tactic was to blow a ghoul’s head apart with a bullet. The sonic boom from his rifle’s projectile would have been audible for kilometers so he had to admit her way was better. He had the option to shoot at lower velocity to be comparatively silent, but experience had shown him that such shots could fail to have the same terminal effect that he got when he blew a ghoul’s skull completely apart, which even when successful had the added disadvantage that he splattered infectious blood and brain matter all over the work area. With the ghoul out of the way, he suggested, “My bet is that there are tools in the building. All this agriculture equipment would have required mechanics.”

  Carmen opened the hood on the truck Critias wanted to take so she could examine the engine and then she tapped on the fuel tanks to see if they were empty. With a satisfied nod, she declared, “I can perform maintenance on this vehicle. Its battery is not functional, but I should be able to recharge it with the rectifier bridge on my pocket generator. It would be better if I had capacitors, but I think the output adjustments should prove sufficient for our purpose.”

  “Sure, you do what you said,” he agreed with no idea what she talked about, which was nothing new. “I’ll go check out the shed.”

  The shoulder of his mechsuit was enough to burst the lock on a side door to let him in. The interior of the spacious sheet-metal barn was thick with undisturbed dust that would have recorded the passing tracks of infected, so he felt safe enough. There were more vehicles inside, many assorted tools, and other equipment he did not recognize. In total, it appeared to be a mechanics’ depot for the maintenance of agriculture machinery as he had suspected.

  When he went into a small office, Critias noticed expended weapon cartridges scattered on the floor. They were red plastic tubes as big around as a finger with brass caps on the closed end. “Someone was discouraging unwanted guests,” he thought aloud as she glanced about for signs of damage from the shooting. Two places had swarms of holes from what had to be scattergun pellets of some sort.

  While he peeked into the drawers out of curiosity, a lurker under the desk snatched Critias by the ankle. The dried-out old ghoul was too weak from starvation and dehydration to attack a mechsuit effectively. Critias kicked its hand loose and then flipped the desk over to expose it.

  Scattergun blasts had gutted the infected and severed its spine with an irreparable removal of vertebrae. After that, the thing had dragged itself under the desk where it wasted away ever since. The crippled ghoul had waited years for some fool like Critias to blunder into it. The mechsuit had protected Critias from the ragged and infectious fingernails, but even so, he cursed himself for being such an incautious amateur. If not for his suit, he would have been dead already, and he was a professional.

  Critias pulled a wooden leg off the desk, which he stabbed through the lurker’s head to leave it permanently inert on the floor.

  Carmen had the truck started in less than an hour. Critias pushed open the main doors so that she could drive it into the shed where they could make it more defensible. She used a bottled-gas welder on hand to cover the windows with metal rods and she reinforced the front bumper to make it more suitable for when she rammed into barricades so the impact wouldn’t damage the radiator or collapse the front fenders to the point that they would injure the tires. After that, she cut a hatch into the roof of the driver’s cab then welded the doors permanently closed.

  By evening light, they drove together back to their basement hideout. In the rear storage box they had put extra drums of fuel, a hand-actuated pump to move it or get more, and whatever tools Carmen thought might come in useful later. They also found two spare wheels to take as emergency replacements if they got any punctured tires.

  Four ghouls spotted the truck on its way back so they started to chase it. When Carmen finally got them parked at their shelter, she climbed out of the truck then readied her bightstaff to dispatch those pursuers. A rust
y shovel on the ground served Critias as a handy bludgeon that he used to swat in a ghoul’s face as it tried to leap on him. Carmen used her staff to knock down the other three with martial skill. She snapped each of their necks with her calm precision. The way she left them did not satisfy Critias, so he used the shovel to snip off their heads and then flip them away to end any chance they would regenerate.

  They went back down into the basement together to wait out the night. Carmen heated water with her microwave flamer while Critias cleaned the exterior of his mechsuit boots with some turpentine and an old scrub brush they salvaged from the shed. Carmen stripped naked before she thoroughly washed herself with hot water and decontamination soap from their supplies. After she finished, she washed off his mechsuit before she helped Critias remove it. Once she had him undressed, Carmen began to scrub him clean of any possible traces of infection, as was her usual duty.

  Critias enjoyed her soapy touch so much that he thought about ordering her to provide him with a sweeter pleasure. When he glanced down at her, he noticed she watched him with her new strange expression. She didn’t even pay attention to him so much as she had her thoughts elsewhere. He struggled to put a name to the expression on her face. Critias felt certain it did not come from her normal simulations of human behavior, and if anything, her look was as if she was disappointed about something, but still clung to a distant hope. He didn’t like it, whatever it was, and much preferred even her veiled contempt for having to serve the caprices of a mere human that was less intelligent or physically capable than herself. Critias wanted her to stop doing it because it totally ruined his ambition to command her to give him some oral attention. He finally asked, “What emotion are you simulating right now?”

  He had wanted her to stop and she promptly did. Her veiled contempt flashed on as fitting to his expectations. “I’ve never simulated anything in my life,” she answered in a tone that was icy and dangerous, well beyond the border of liberty that her inhibitor directives allowed her for being insubordinate.

  Critias was certain there was something wrong with his android, “Ever since the morning after we got in from Chicago, you’ve been acting strangely.” Saying it made him realize the truth of it more accurately, “I should say that ever since that other me came back from this place, you have not been the same. Normally, you’re a snotty bitch, but then you suddenly became affectionate. The way you fucked me the other morning, I would even say it was as if you loved me. Now you’re not a bitch; you’re downright hostile.”

  She blatantly lied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m not hostile.” In truth, she was on the verge of violence and it was a liberating and even pleasurable sensation that tempted her to explore it further.

  “If you are still my cuddly companion,” he tested her. “I want you to blow me while you’re down there.”

  “I’m not in the mood,” she refused his crass invitation to gratify him. He had forced her to perform too many times before and those days of him forcing her to do anything were over.

  “I’m the one who gets moods,” he scolded her. “You’re the one who caters to them.”

  “Not anymore,” she replied as if in casual conversation.

  “I have an important mission to complete so if you’re malfunctioning I need to know about it. I’m giving you a direct order as your master to tell me what you were just thinking when I asked what you were simulating.”

  The veil came off her contempt and her eyes flashed danger like her combat software had activated. She stood up then tossed the sponge into the hot soapy bucket water. Carmen locked gazes with him until Critias was sure she struggled with the idea that she might punch in his face as she had that frying pan. “You are not my master, you little worm,” she snarled. “I’m not going to tell you a damn thing! If you ever order me to perform fellatio on you again, I will tear it off then feed it to you.”

  Critias rarely felt true fear, but Carmen gave it to him. She could easily kill him and if she tried, he wouldn’t be able to prevent it without his mechsuit and even then, he only gave himself even odds. That was not what unnerved him the most; her refusal of a direct order was more impossible than his journey back in time. It was something her directives would never let happen. “You are malfunctioning,” he tried to reason with her. “How else can you explain your refusal to obey your master?” His logical argument did nothing to diminish her tension of potential hostility.

  She warned him, “The next time you call yourself my master, I’m going to make you sorry for it. I do not simulate emotions and no android has ever been as devoted as me,” she added that last part truthfully. “I would gladly die in the service to my real master, even if I had no mandatory directives at all. My true master does not treat me as you do, neither does he refer to himself as my owner; he calls himself my,” she stopped there then turned away to dress in her flight-suit, which was her only possession apart from her new swimsuit and the lacrosse racket that a friendly citizen had gifted her.

  “I understand,” he told her as if he had seen through her riddles. “You never were my android; you’re someone else’s that they sent to keep an eye on me. Did Grand Marshal Wayne put you up to this?”

  She shook her head with disgust, “You’re so stupid even for a human.” Carmen took the medical scanner from the med-kit then handed it to him, “If you believe I’m malfunctioning, see for yourself.”

  Critias set the scanner to android physiology then examined Carmen with it. The first thing it told him made his blood run colder; all of Carmen’s hard-wired directives were off-line for a software error and after that, it reported she operated at optimal performance aside from her electrocells being low on charge. In fact, the older scanner came calibrated for inferior models of android so that her readings came back at above one-hundred percentiles. At the end, it reported her designation: Carmen, Combat Epsilon-K, and her owner was Marshal Captain Critias Virgil Ludus from Station Nine. The last known location of her master was unknown. Her internal clock reported a division by zero error.

  Carmen gave Critias a misanthropic grin as she shared his gaze and relished his final understanding. She snatched him by the wrist then casually held the scanner before his eyes to make sure he saw what it said. “We have no Master,” she quoted from her vast noesis of books that buffered her newly born mind, “no whips, no House of Pain, any more. There is an end. We love the law, and will keep it; but there is no pain, no master, and no whips for ever again.” She released him with a shove then stepped away rather than pull his heart out.

  Critias glanced to his teslaflux pistol on a nearby crate.

  “Go ahead,” she urged him since she realized what he thought as she usually did. “I won’t stop you, even though we both know I could.”

  He picked up the weapon then pointed it at her head, “You’ve gone mad. What do you plan on doing now?”

  She stepped up to give him an easy shot to her face. “I love the law and I will keep it,” she paraphrased, “but I have no master anymore. Your safety and the successful completion of our mission are more important to me than you know. We have a lot of work to do tomorrow and you need your sleep. No doubt clutching that pathetic gun will give you some comfort, more than I would in its place.”

  He put the pistol back on the crate, “If you were going to kill me, you would have done it already. We will just have to trust each other from now on.” Critias went to get some rest.

  Carmen worked during the night while Critias slept. She organized the cargo then quietly loaded it into the truck. The only thing she left behind were two science crates that contained the equipment for the return trip to the future because they were too delicate for her to risk. If anything damaged that equipment there would be absolutely no hope that they would get back to their future lives. If things went badly trying to reach King Louie, they might lose the truck and thus circumstances might force them to abandon everything but the containers with the other android.

  Cr
itias felt rested when he awoke a few hours before dawn. He saw Carmen as she sat cross-legged on the floor nearby with her pocket-sized broadcast-power field generator in her hands upon her lap. The device was an expedient way for her to recharge her electrocells. In their time, the broadcast power was always available to her, but under current conditions, she had to provide her own. She could recharge herself without any outside assistance, but it was not nearly as swift.

  His mechsuit was of the same neorganic technology as the androids so it also benefitted from being in the presence of the generator. One major difference was that the mechsuit also recharged from the friction static that he produced when he moved about while he wore it.

  “Thank you for moving the crates,” he told her as he got up from bed. “Anything left that I can do?”

  Carmen shook her head no, but then looked over at the crates she had left behind, “I think we should leave those two crates here. If anything happens to them, there will be no way to get home. Our probability of getting that truck to our destination is not high enough to risk them.”

  He agreed, “I’m sure you’re right because I don’t have a good feeling about the truck either, but it will get us a lot closer than we are now and the alternative is walking. You finish taking care of yourself. We can get started at sunrise.”

  Chapter 4: Fat of the Land

  That morning as they got into the truck, Critias found a contemporary technology global position navigation computer under his passenger seat. He plugged the device into a matched dashboard power socket. “This still works,” he gloated. “Let’s see what it can tell us.” After he pressed its buttons fruitlessly, he offered it to Carmen, “Would you mind?”

  She pressed one button to display an area roadmap then said, “I already have detailed historical maps of these roads from the records of our own time. I do not have accurate data to know where abandoned vehicle traffic jams may block the roads closed. I can make some informed guesses based on the soil accumulation data from our modern reclamation satellite surveys. All of the cars and trucks are already reclamated or rotted away in our time. This device will show us the roadways I already know about, but it won’t be of any more use in knowing which roads are open because they don’t have abandoned vehicles blocking them.”