Gravewalkers: Dying Time

by Richard T. Schrader

  Carmen limped over to the stairs then pushed her strength to rip the hand railing right off, support-spokes and all. While ghouls frantically beat on their door in an effort to get in at them, Carmen stuffed some of the steel spokes through the rectangular hoop-handle of the door then rapidly twisted them off into a knot so that once she had them tight, the length of rail wedged against the wall effectively barred the door from ever opening. “It will take them some time to find the way around,” Carmen gasped as she started up the stairs hobbled by her crippled right leg. She knew his expression behind her without ever seeing it. “I can make it,” she growled with tenacity.

  As Critias lifted her in his arms to carry her up, he demanded, “Tell me where to find a window I can jump from.” He started up the stairwell by taking five or six steps at a leap. Ghouls that were already above them in the building came down the stairwell only to have Carmen shoot them in the face as Critias sprang past. He tried to figure out how she would ever be able to get back across to the Customs House. Critias finally asked, “How bad is your leg?”

  “It tore out my tendons I think,” she told him truthfully. “I’ll need surgery to correct it or I’ll regenerate lame for certain.” She chuckled darkly, “Unless you would prefer to have a limper for a,” she paused perhaps from pain, “partner.” When he had gone up enough floors, Carmen told him, “Take this door,” which he opened with a kick. She directed him down the hallway then picked an office, “This one should be good.”

  Critias sat her on her good leg then they opened the door; once inside, he closed and locked it, then put a desk against it.

  Carmen limped into a window office that had missing glass. They were two floors higher than their destination across the street. “I still have one good leg,” she tried to sound positive. “You’ll have to throw me.”

  “Fucking hell,” he exclaimed with no time to delay over his fear that he would toss Carmen to a splattered end on the street below. Ghouls were coming up and they needed to be gone when the infected arrived. Critias went to the window then laced his fingers for her to step in when he launched her.

  Carmen wiped his sword clean of infected blood on a soggy old chair then put it in his scabbard. She stepped her good foot into his laced grip, balanced herself with her hands on his shoulders and then counted, “One, two, throw.”

  They counted off then Critias heaved her with all his might. Carmen kicked away on her healthy leg with flawless timing to sail over the street to the building across the way. From the extra height, she came down rough in a plot of chicken-wire-covered tomatoes. Critias backed up to have room to run then went after her to land clean on an open area of roof edge.

  “Help me get inside,” she urged him so that they could escape the light of sunrise. For the moment, they were in the shadow of the tower and that concealed them a little. “We don’t want the ghouls to see us here and get any ideas about trying to jump across.”

  Critias took her arm then they went to the door to enter the stairwell. Once they were inside, he stopped at the first landing to say, “We’re too dirty from rolling with the dogs to track it all through the hallways without decontamination.” He sat her down then used his helmet radio on the guard-patrol frequency to summon help.

  The first guard arrived within a minute. He was a young man, short of breath from his run up the stairwells as he asked, “Are there ghouls on the roof?”

  Critias was about to explain to the guard that they had been in the office building to the east, but then he realized that would mean that he would also need to explain how they could accomplish such a seemingly impossible leap. Instead, he said, “It’s possible for a hunter to jump from that office building to the east to land on this roof. There are no ghouls up there right now, but it could happen. Your guard commander needs to station a watch at this door and we need a crew of cleaners to decontaminate us so we can get to the medics. We tussled with a bull of a hunter and are somewhat worse for wear.”

  The guard sounded excited at their news of such an encounter, “Did you kill it?”

  “No,” Carmen confessed, “but it damn sure knows that it was in a fight.”

  Critias chuckled painfully to the taste of blood, “Lady Beowulf here blew his arm off then her Grendel ran away to learn how to wipe his ass with the other hand.”

  The guard couldn’t believe it, “A hunter ran away? A hunter would never run from anything except maybe a flamethrower or Godzilla.”

  “We lit his ass on fire alright,” Critias assured the guard. “It chose the better part of valor.”

  Two more guards soon arrived followed by four decontamination technicians in splatter-suits. They carried suction vacuums and wash buckets. The crew removed all their possessions then put them aside while they scrubbed Critias and Carmen clean.

  The decontamination scrubbers searched them diligently for any signs of infectious abrasions. Critias’ armor had protected him from any wounds aside from crushing injuries. Carmen’s formfitting diving suit had done much the same for her. Her titanium bones were all but unbreakable and nothing sharp had penetrated her splash-protection.

  “Their pistols are filthy,” the lead technician told the guards as he put them in a plastic tub. “You must escort them to King’s Tower then deliver them to Tinker Bob’s new doctor friend, Kevin. If anyone complains about them not having weapons, you tell them they’re still undergoing decontamination according to my instructions. We will take all their stuff to the cleaners.”

  By the time the guards had escorted Critias and Carmen to Bob’s floor, Critias hurt so badly from his beating that it was hard for him to walk without his mechsuit to support him. Carmen had radioed ahead with her burst interlink so that Kevin awaited them at the elevator.

  Kevin helped get Carmen into the laboratory then put her on a table to operate. He asked, “What happened?”

  “Grendel,” Critias answered. “That’s what she called the supersized hunter that nearly killed us both. After she blew off an arm and I dumped a box of bullets into him, the giant freak ran off to save its own ass.”

  Kevin used the med-scanner to focus in on Carmen’s leg as he said, “Though a bromide personification for the invincible enemy, it is still high praise for a ghoul coming from a prototype Epsilon killer-stalker combat unit like Carmen. Jim will be interested in this Grendel. With your permission, I’d like to download sensory recording data of the encounter from your helmet and from Carmen to prepare a displayable video of the material for general study.”

  Critias agreed, “If Carmen is willing, go ahead and make your movie.”

  “I will be fine for the moment,” Carmen told Kevin, “Help Critias first.”

  Kevin got Critias on an examining table where the android diagnosed him, “You have some deep subcutaneous contusions but no fractures.” He went over to a small refrigerator where he filled a syringe from a little bottle then returned to inject it into Critias’ arm.

  Critias was cautious about the injection, “What was that?”

  As Kevin went to see about Carmen's leg, he told Critias, “Something to keep you calm while I operate on Carmen and it will also ease your pain.”

  Critias rested comfortably on painkillers while Kevin performed surgery on Carmen so that he could reattach a broken tendon, which would allow her leg to regenerate properly without any lingering handicap.

  Jim came in about the time Kevin bandaged his successfully completed procedure. He was none too pleased when he asked, “Would you two care to explain to me how you got outside in order to get into a fight?”

  “We jumped off the roof of the Customs House,” Carmen revealed.

  Jim considered that and quickly deduced what she meant, “Could a hunter make the jump back here from that building?”

  “Absolutely,” Carmen confirmed, “if they ever think of it.”

  Jim saw something positive in that, “Then it seems your ignorant stunt did us a favor. If the ghouls had figured out our vulnerability befo
re you did, things could have gone a whole lot differently. From Critias’ bruises it seems that something lurks in that building capable of putting up a fight.”

  Kevin went to a soldering station then came back with an electronic device he had recently manufactured. “I fabricated this,” he told Jim, “to allow your primitive video technology to display our more advanced compression stream.” He plugged a wire from his device into a high-definition video monitor that he would use to display the downloaded images from Carmen’s sensory recording of their adventure. The male android already had all the relevant material stored in his own memory.

  Jim walked over to the display to watch as Kevin played a recording that was a view from Carmen’s eyes with sound from her ears. Kevin needed a few moments to adjust the manual settings on his device and the monitor to get the picture in focus.

  The show began where Carmen straddled Critias in their bed earlier that night. From her eyes, their dark room was clear as daylight. Their hands together in interlaced fingers dominated the scene as she slowly moiled over him.

  When Kevin came around to see the perfected display, he apologized, “Sorry about that; allow me to fast forward to the relevant material.”

  The image advanced to when they arrived on the roof of the Customs House. After Carmen landed in the office building, the girlish ghoul had crept in to investigate the noise where Carmen snatched it by the neck from surprise.

  Jim watched with interest and Carmen’s ingenuity impressed him, “You can walk up to them if they think you’re a ghoul.” Later he observed, “That hunter doesn’t make feeding calls, not even when it must be sure you’re not infected. What was that sound just before it fled?”

  Kevin adjusted his device then replayed the moment multiple times from just before the hunter running away. Among all the howling of ghouls and sounds of battle there was a distant tinkling, then the hunter turned away and fled.

  “That was falling glass perhaps,” Kevin guessed as to the source of the sound.

  Jim doubted it was falling glass, “Not a bell?”

  They listened again repeatedly, but Kevin remained unsure, “It could be a bell. Perhaps there were such things in that stationery store that fell from a shelf. I hear the sound, but I don’t have anything in memory to compare it against so that I could positively identify it with any certainty.”

  “Yeah,” Jim replied, “but I don’t think so. I’m not that lucky.”

  Carmen guessed at Jim’s thoughts, “It was a dog-whistle?”

  Jim said, “For a bodyguard,” before he made a loud whistle.

  Hatchet came in to answer the call, “What is it, boss?”

  Jim quizzed him, “What is this sound?”

  Hatchet guessed, “A bell, or maybe some falling broken glass.”

  “The bastards are knocking right on my doorstep,” Jim realized in dismay.

  Carmen quoted one of her books, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open locks, whoever knocks.”

  Kevin answered her, “How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags. What is it you do?”

  “A deed without a name,” Carmen finished it.

  “I know his name,” Jim told them with a less-illustrious quote from an immortal of his own. “Hatchet, call Derek and tell him we need to secure the roof of the Customs House from bridge-jumpers coming in from the east.”

  “I’m sorry I did something so reckless,” Carmen apologized.

  “Are you sorry?” Jim knew she was not, “If that hunter had broken Critias’ back and then hung him from the ceiling by his own guts, then you would be genuinely sorry right now for being reckless. When you’re a negligent mother running around begging someone to shoot you after having spent the last twenty-four hours watching your son turn ghoul in an isolation cage to end up wanting to eat you then you would know what sorry is. You don’t know what sorry is yet and I hope you never find out. If the two of you want to come back alive from Houston, you’ll need to train for all the insanity you can. We all got lucky today and you learned plenty. The next time you want to go play in the backyard, you tell us what is going on so we can be ready. What we have here in this community is a team effort. All these people are not just an entourage for you divas.”

  Critias was so stoned on morphine that he couldn’t do much more than groggily nod his head in agreement while Carmen sheepishly remained in a guilty silence.

  When Jim felt satisfied that he had made his point, he asked Kevin, “Are these two going to live?”

  “Nothing permanent,” Kevin had confidence in his appraisal. “Carmen will be back to combat readiness in a matter of hours. Marshal Critias requires bed rest for a few days.”

  Before leaving, Jim asked Critias, “You really jumped all the way to that other building?”

  “Like a hawk,” Critias used his hand to demonstrate a drunken flying motion.

  Jim looked to Kevin, “Does everyone from where you come from have more balls than brains?”

  “A king has use for both, I think,” Kevin answered.

  After a moment to consider how good an answer that was, Jim nodded, “Yes. That is true.” He eyed the copper-haired android circumspectly, “Bob told me something I found interesting and I’d like your opinion, Kevin. He told me that artificial intelligence had an inherent danger.”

  Kevin guessed the rest, “He told you that the most efficient solution to every problem does not necessarily fall into the realm of what people would generally call goodness.”

  “Yes,” Jim confirmed. “He told me that viciousness was often the shortest distance between two points. Since you’re the genius of your kind, I was wondering what you think about that.”

  “It is better to be loved than feared,” Kevin explained cryptically while rightly guessing that Jim would understand that answer to the Machiavellian contravention. “Human life is always a short and uncertain thing, King Louie, but history has such a long and romantic memory. Kleos is the remedy to ruthlessness. Have the pride to be the inspiration for those who come after you for thousands of years to come.”

  Jim asked, “Are you proud, android?”

  Kevin’s eyes did not reveal their Luciferian super-abundance of superbia that coursed behind them in his genetically enhanced brain. “In all humble honesty,” Kevin stated, “I am the smartest being who has ever lived. Mankind will honor me with love as one of their selfless benefactors. I am a Prometheus for a new age.”

  Before walking out, Jim commented, “Bob’s son was named Kevin.” It was an explanation as to why the tinkerer had chosen that new name for the android upon his assembly.

  “He is more worthy than my former master,” Kevin revealed. “I will endeavor to live up to Bob’s fatherly expectations.”

  Jim didn’t look back, but he still asked, “What did your former master call you?”

  Kevin answered, “He called me Mister Brink.”

  Carmen's injuries fully regenerated by suppertime that same day while Critias remained stiff and had a dappled covering of dark bruises. After the evening meal, Jim invited the Denver pilot Bertram to join them for their planning session on Critias’ trip to Houston.

  “I flew a C-2A Greyhound,” Bertram told them about the plane they came in from the Denver airport. “It’s a navy dual-turboprop with a powered rear ramp for cargo. She has her own onboard power-unit that will start the engines. That plane is a real tough bird that can take carrier landings and catapult launches. She was fresh from a rewiring and is like brand new.”

  Critias asked the pilot, “What about fuel?”

  “I filled it up before we left so it’s sitting at about half. I figure she would reach Houston from here in about two and a half hours, but she would be sucking fumes with little left for taking a tour of the town and nothing left for the return home. She will fly on diesel fuel so you should have no trouble getting that most anywhere.”

  Critias wondered, “Could I drive a car up the cargo ramp and take it with us?�
�

  “Sure,” the pilot answered. “You would still be way underweight for what she could handle. It can’t be anything too big though and you won’t be able to open the car doors. The cargo bay is wide open, but it won’t fit in a truck. We left the ramp down when we hauled-ass out of there and I cut the power so the batteries should still be good. The amount of fuel you will need is way beyond a couple jerrycans if you’re thinking of taking it with you in a car. You’ll need a fuel truck or a set of pumps.”

  Critias looked to Carmen, “Could you fly it to that agriculture depot where we got the truck? That had plenty of diesel fuel and it’s in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Definitely,” she was sure. “I can land on a country road a lot softer than slamming it down on an aircraft carrier.”

  “If you can fly it,” Bertram doubted because of her youth, “can you fly it alone?”

  “Critias can follow my instructions and he is also a gunship pilot,” she answered. “That will be the least of our problems.”

  “Yes.” That reminded Critias of something else he needed from Bertram, “Do you think you could draw on a map the route you drove from the plane to where Hatchet picked you up?”

  “Probably, I’ll need to talk to the others so we could work on it together. In more than a few places, we had to race through suburbia that was absolutely crawling with nasty vampires. The positive thing about driving through all those neighborhoods was that the infected wiped it all out long before traffic jams became a problem. You will have to keep moving fast if you want to have a chance to make it. We were lucky in more ways than I care to count. I wouldn’t ever want to try it again unless I was just as desperate. What could possibly be in Houston worth risking your lives for?”

  “We have a lead on a possible antigen,” Critias revealed. “I know it sounds stupid, but any chance is too big to throw away.”

  Bertram thought it would not be easy to find a landing strip, “Have you put any thought into where you might land in Houston?”

  Kevin knew where they could land, “There are several suitable runways. Unfortunately, none of them are especially close to their destination.”