by Matt Handle
Ben didn’t say a word as Erika told her tale. He just went about the business of stabilizing his patient and did his best to avoid Sawyer’s gaze. When Erika finished her story, Ben invited the big man to limp over to another room down the hall where he said he could see to his wounds as well. Erika attempted to follow, but Ben shook his head and nodded toward Angel where she still slept on the table.
“I need you to stay here and keep a watch on her,” Ben explained to Erika. “We’ll be right down the hall.”
Erika gave Ben a worried look and he smiled at her in return. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re right, they need our help.”
Once Sawyer was lying on the operating table in the next room, Ben confirmed that he’d indeed broken a pair of ribs, but that his organs seemed to be more or less intact. Then he went about wrapping Sawyer’s mid-section up in bandages tight enough to restrict lateral movement but not so tight that he had trouble breathing. He also gave him a couple painkillers before putting a half dozen stitches in the ragged flesh above his right knee. As he worked, he spoke to Sawyer in a low enough voice that he hoped Erika couldn’t overhear from next door.
“You may be a dangerous man, but you have no idea what Mechler and his new cybernetic army are capable of,” he began. “I’ve seen one in action.”
Sawyer offered the gray-haired man a bitter smile before the doctor’s fingers found a particularly sensitive spot on his ribcage, causing him to wince.
“So have I, Doc,” he said. “At a military base in Florida. I blew it up into about a thousand pieces, one of which led me here.”
“You what?” Ben asked in surprise.
“Your boss is franchising,” Sawyer explained. “One of those things Erika described attacked us in a military base down in Miami that it had turned into a slaughterhouse. I blew it up with a trip mine. It had a manufacturing plate stamped with Biomech’s name on it.”
“Why in the world would Mechler, or Doctor Steele for that matter, put the company’s name on them?”
Sawyer shrugged. “Because they’re arrogant pricks? Who knows? All that matters is that I’m here to put a stop to them.”
“Look, I don’t mean to offend,” Ben said. “You’re clearly more than competent with a gun, but there are dozens of them and you’re hurt. I think maybe we ought to just be considering an escape plan. I fear staying here is no longer an option for me or Erika.”
Sawyer tested his newly stitched up knee by bending it a few times and then slid back off the table and to his feet.
“I’ve been outside,” he said. “We made it across two states and fought more of the Afflicted you people created than you want to know. Two of my friends died tonight trying to get here so we could destroy this company and stop it from setting loose any more evil on the world. I’m not leaving until that’s done, with you or without you.”
When Sawyer and Ben got back to Erika, Angel was still on the table, but she was leaning on one side, taking a sip of water from a plastic cup. The bandage wrapped around her head partially covered one eye, but she smiled at Sawyer as he stepped into the room.
“Hey stranger,” she greeted him. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”
Sawyer returned her smile briefly but after moving to the side of the table and taking her hand in his, the smile fell away and was immediately replaced with sorrow.
“Jenny and Tyler…” he began, but before he could continue, Angel squeezed his hand firmly.
“I know,” she said. “Erika told me what happened.”
A tear slid down Angel’s cheek and she sniffled as she looked into Sawyer’s eyes.
“I loved that little girl,” she stated as more tears began to fall. “I loved her like she was my own.”
Sawyer bent down to hug Angel and she clung to him, sobs wracking her slender frame. “It wasn’t your fault,” she assured him. “I know you did everything you could to protect us.”
Erika and Ben both turned away, facing the hallway in an effort to give them a small measure of privacy. Erika knew their grief only too well, her own still raw and ugly.
Angel’s sobbing stopped after another minute or two and then she called to Erika and Ben’s backs as she wiped away her tears and released Sawyer from her clench.
“Jenny was only 12 years old and Tyler couldn’t have been out of high school,” she said with a sniffle. “They deserved better. I’m going to help Sawyer kill the people that did this. And so are you.”
Chapter 18
If there had ever been a time that Erwin Steele was more pleased that his boss preferred video conferencing over face-to-face communication, he couldn’t remember it. It was the middle of the night and Mechler’s furious visage filled the flat-screen monitor atop his desk. A vein stood out in the lunatic’s forehead so prominently, Steele wondered if the man might actually have a stroke in the middle of his spitting, red-faced tirade.
It seemed someone had escaped his drone, killed his soldiers, and was very likely inside the building already. The security alarms had stirred Erwin from sleep soon after he’d returned from his check of the zyborgs downstairs and now he nodded blearily at the screen as Mechler barked orders at him. He wanted the zyborgs operational and patrolling the floors immediately with instructions to kill the intruders on sight. Steele did his best to portray full confidence in this mission despite the fact he was so tired that he could barely think. As soon as Mechler closed the video call, Erwin lurched toward the bathroom so he could step into a shower icy enough to jolt himself awake before heading back downstairs to deploy the troops.
Ten minutes later, Steele was hustling down the stairs, his wet hair still dripping on the collar of his lab coat. He was confident the zyborgs would perform well given the most recent set of upgrades he’d installed, but he was also secretly glad he had added the backdoor override via what looked like a fancy wristwatch. There was no telling what Mechler might do in his current state of mind and the last thing Erwin wanted was to wind up on the wrong side of one of his zyborg’s termination orders.
When he reached the lab, Erwin methodically removed the steel clamps that held down each zyborg and then went straight to the main console to start up the remote software. Now Mechler was capable of taking control of the zyborgs from anywhere as long as he held the device Steele had provided him weeks earlier. The satellite that transmitted the instructions from the device to the zyborg’s internal chip set was capable of capturing and sending these signals almost anywhere on Earth.
With these tasks out of the way, Erwin made the call to his boss via the same main console and delivered the news. The zyborgs were now operational and at Mechler’s command. From Erwin’s perspective, the call was blissfully short. Mechler was all business and displayed none of the fury he’d shown minutes earlier now that he had another move to make. Sixty seconds later, Erwin watched as all 24 zyborgs sat up in unison, swiveled to the edge of their beds, and stood up razor-straight. They marched in a line out the door and down the hall, their heavy feet thudding all the way to the staircase. Once they’d exited, Erwin exhaled a relieved sigh and leaned back against the wall. For better or worse, his creations were now out of his hands. God help the intruders Mechler was sending them to destroy.
***
Some might consider Calvin Mechler a madman, but as he maneuvered the zyborgs into the staircase, his mind was as clear and as coldly calculating as it had ever been. With the killing of the four soldiers outside, his human shield was gone. The man responsible was somewhere in the facility and if allowed to live, Mechler had no doubt that he’d destroy everything Calvin had worked for years to build. He split the zyborgs up into a dozen teams of two and instructed them to search each floor until they found the man and his injured bitch and exterminated them with prejudice. Calvin then monitored each team via their integrated GPS trackers and data feeds. He’d have preferred to watch them via the building’s security cameras as well, but it appeared the intruders had somehow disabled those.
This first batch of 24 was just the beginning. As Mechler watched the green dots that represented each zyborg unit systematically explore the maze-like display of every hall, room, and office on a half dozen different monitors, he allowed himself to contemplate the next phase of his plans. More than 99% of the population had succumbed to the plague or been killed since, but he estimated there were at least 250,000 uninfected people left scattered around the country. Only one hundred or so of those were employed by Biomech or one of its affiliates. Thirty of them, including him, were here in Atlanta. Most of the remaining population was holed up in their houses or rural camps, struggling to survive as the Afflicted slowly died of starvation or exposure. Those survivors posed little threat to his growing power. A few however, like the ones that were currently inside this facility, were an eminent danger. They had to be rooted out and eliminated at all costs. He needed to grow his army before supplies of the infected dwindled and as soon as the current crisis was resolved, he’d set that phase in motion. The time to seize power was now.
***
Sawyer heard them coming before he or any of his companions actually saw the flesh and metal monsters. Like the one at SOUTHCOM, they didn’t bother to try hiding their approach. Their steel-booted feet thudded down the hall, in perfect unison as they reached the laboratory and breached its doors. There were two of them, one armed with a pair of machine guns and the other with what looked like a flame thrower and a grenade launcher.
While Angel, Erika, and Ben were tucked away in the same room Ben had sewn Angel up in, Sawyer waited for the zyborgs just inside the front doors, standing to one side and remaining hidden from view. When the pair of monsters strode through the entry, Sawyer leapt atop the back of the one sporting the heavier artillery, immediately wrapping his thick arms around the thing’s neck and twisting as hard as he could. As the other turned toward him, its guns already firing a steady stream of bullets, Sawyer felt a satisfying crack and the zyborg he had hold of dropped dead, its neck broken. He allowed the monster to fall on top of him, forcing him toward the ground but also shielding his body from the barrage of the other attacker’s machine guns. A split-second before both he and the dead zyborg crashed to the floor, Sawyer wrenched the thing’s grenade launcher arm upward and then pulled the trigger just before they both landed hard enough to knock the breath out of him and send a new shockwave of pain through his ribcage.
The launcher fired its grenade directly into the other zyborg’s chest, the resulting explosion tearing the remaining zyborg to pieces. As Sawyer lay beneath the bulk of the first monster’s corpse, shreds of the second clattered all around him as they hit the floor, some chunks still afire or smoking. Sawyer managed to partially wriggle free moments later and he called out to his friends with as much volume as he could muster. His ears were ringing from the blast. Everything sounded like it was coming through a bad cell phone connection.
“We’ve got to go,” he grunted as he twisted a finger first in one ear and then the other, trying in vain to unclog them. “Now that they’ve got a fix on us, they’ll send them all.”
Angel, Erika, and Ben came out from hiding at the sound of Sawyer’s voice. Erika had an arm around Angel to help her keep her balance, but Ben offered Sawyer a hand in shoving the heavy corpse the rest of the way off him so Sawyer could get to his feet.
Sawyer left the grenade launcher where he’d dropped it after seeing it was a single-shot weapon, but he retrieved the two machine guns from the wreckage of the second zyborg and handed one to Angel. He laid the other off to the side. Rummaging around in a nearby cabinet, he found enough medical wrap to construct a makeshift sling and shouldered the second gun before yanking the flame thrower and its fuel pack off the zyborg that had fallen on him. He played with the big gun for a minute to make sure he was comfortable with it and then strapped the pack onto his back before smiling at his companions.
“Might come in handy,” he explained.
All four of them stood at the now scorched doorway amidst the continued blare of the alarm. Sawyer wiped a mixture of blood, soot and sweat away from his eyes and then looked at Erika after glancing down the hall to make sure more of the zyborgs weren’t already in sight.
“We need to kill whoever controls those things before we wind up having to fight our way through all of them,” he said. “Which way?”
Erika thought for a minute before she responded. “Mechler’s office and suite are near the top floor but off in a separate section from the rest of the facility. The elevator is the fastest way but he might have taken back control of it by now. I can’t try to hack into it again without my laptop.”
“Then I guess we take the stairs,” Sawyer replied.
Sawyer started to step outside into the hall but before he did, he glanced again at the laboratory around him and stopped cold. He turned to stare at Ben, his face hardening into a mask of fury as realization dawned on him.
“This is where you created it, isn’t it?” he asked. “All of these tubes, beakers and microscopes. The plague was born right here in this room, wasn’t it?”
Ben tried to take a step backward and stumbled over a piece of the debris from the blasted zyborg. Sawyer darted forward with a quickness that surprised the old doctor and grabbed him by the collar, pulling him so close that Ben could feel Sawyer’s breath as he shouted into his face.
“You were in charge down here, right?” Sawyer yelled. Spit flew from his lips and onto Ben’s frightened face. “It was you that killed the goddamned entire human race!”
Erika reached out and gently put a hand on Sawyer’s arm. “My husband was part of the bio team as well,” she said. “They didn’t know. Albert would never have worked on it if he’d known what Mechler would do with it. It was supposed to calm people, bring peace to the country. Albert died because of Mechler. Just like your friends did tonight. Ben and I want the same thing you want. Revenge.”
Sawyer’s eyes never left Ben’s as Erika spoke. Anger burned along his nerve endings, every one of them urging him to rip Ben’s head from his shoulders. He took a deep breath and glanced over at Angel. Angel didn’t say a word, but he could read her thoughts just looking at her steady gaze. She wanted to make those that were responsible pay as much as he did, but not like this.
Sawyer tossed Ben to the ground with a grunt of disgust and then pulled his pistol from his waistband, holding it at his hip as if deciding whether to use it. Ben didn’t move. He remained on the floor, one hand in front of his face as if that would somehow protect him if Sawyer decided to shoot. Instead, Sawyer flipped the pistol around and handed it to Erika.
“You’re on your own,” he told her and then he walked away into the hall. The two scientists could follow or stay. He didn’t care. All he wanted was Mechler and the zyborg device. Angel was right at his heels, her head bloody and bandaged, but her eyes as fierce as he’d ever seen them.
“You told me not that long ago that all you came home with after the war were scars and regret,” she said. “Maybe Erika and Ben feel the same way.”
Sawyer opened his mouth to respond and then decided better of it. Arguing wouldn’t do any good. Arguing would only waste time and energy. The zyborgs were coming to kill them and if he and Angel didn’t move fast, the damn things just might do it. They needed to reach Mechler before it was too late. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Erika and Ben had decided to stay put. Good, Sawyer thought. With any luck, maybe they’ll keep some of the zyborgs busy.
Between Sawyer’s broken ribs and Angel’s fractured skull, neither of them was able to move very fast. They’d almost made it to the staircase when the door burst open and another pair of zyborgs stomped through it, each armed with machine guns. There was no place to hide so Sawyer pulled the trigger on his flamethrower and torched everything in front of him. The zyborgs disappeared in the flames before they’d gotten off a single shot. Their flesh melted into globs that sloughed to the floor in seconds while their metal components grew red hot
and distorted from the fire’s intensity.
The flamethrower burned through its fuel inside of a minute, but that was more than enough. Once emptied, Sawyer dropped the gun and canister at his feet and led Angel through the charred remains of the hallway and onto the stairs.
“Twenty more to go,” Angel said wearily as they began their climb.
Sawyer fingered the stock of his machine gun and shook his head. “If you’re counting on us bringing them down with these things, I think you’re going to be disappointed. We need something bigger.”
“So what’s your plan?” she asked as they continued making their way toward the next floor.
“We get lucky,” Sawyer replied.
Angel looked at him for a moment to make sure he was serious. His face told her that he was. Every muscle in her body begged her to turn back, to find some place to run and hide. She kept putting one foot in front of the other anyway, every stair one step closer to their enemy. She called up a picture of Jenny in her mind, that sweet scared little girl now lying dead because of the madman somewhere up ahead. It was all she needed to push the fright and tiredness aside. They were in this to the end, no matter what.
***
While Sawyer and Angel headed for Mechler’s offices, Erika and Ben went the other direction. Erika hadn’t mentioned Steele’s secondary device to Sawyer, but she hadn’t forgotten it either. If what she thought she saw in the zyborg lab was accurate, Steele not only had a controller just like Mechler’s, he had one that could override Mechler. She didn’t blame Sawyer for his anger, but she didn’t trust him either. The man was on a vendetta and he had every reason to hold Erika and Ben responsible based on their role in the plague and zyborgs’ creation. They were better off going after Steele by themselves. Armed with Sawyer’s gun, she just hoped they could find and corner the doctor while he was alone.