His pulse accelerated as he gained on her, her sobbing egging him on. He tasted her imminent death on his tongue, bittersweet as he reached out for her.
She stumbled and fell face first into the leaves. He stood over her imperiously, savoring the brief moment before he ceased her existence in the world, his bloodlust climaxing.
She turned around to face him, and he gazed down at none other than Captain Fiona London. He was filled with a chaotic ambivalence, torn between what must have been something like pity and a yearning for satiety.
She looked at his face knowingly, as if an acceptance of her reality washed over her. He wanted to help her achieve that reality in tune with her new acceptance. He wanted her to fulfill her destiny to fall under his strength.
Frenzy rattled his body and he reached for her…
Carl awoke with a start on his cot in the abandoned church. He was sweating and panting, as if he really had been sprinting through the woods, and he absentmindedly fingered the scar on his head.
He stood and walked over to a small flat screen that blared, unwatched by the others in the room. The news was just finishing a story on rampant premature balding in young men and cut to a commercial.
Uncle Sam wants YOU to join the fight against terrorism (a particularly muscular version of the iconic figure with torn off sleeves was pointing out at Carl). More than ever, the military has OIL on the run, and YOU can be a part of history as they rid the world of enemies of freedom. (It cuts to a dark silhouette framed in heroic fashion against a backdrop of what are unmistakably undead drones) Join the Automaton as he hunts down OIL operatives and vicious drug cartels to make the greatest nation on the planet safer for our families (cut to children of various ages posing with senior citizens).
Carl huffed at the advertisement. Now they were using his likeness for recruitment videos. Even he was starting to think that this whole thing was getting out of hand.
The whole country was in turmoil, and everyone was so desperate for something positive that he had become something the whole country could get behind, a symbol of American exceptionalism.
Carl wondered how his legions of fans would feel if they knew he dreamed about stalking and killing people every night. He couldn’t even call them nightmares because, in the dreams, he enjoyed it. The thrill of the hunt, the rapture of the kill.
He wondered what Peter would think. In Afghanistan, Carl was looked up to as a leader, admired for his strength and ability. Now the men in the unit kept their distance from him, as if what was happening to him was contagious. For all he knew, it was, but no one else appeared to show signs of any of his symptoms.
He thought about what Peter said and thought that maybe he was right. He had to take ego out of the equation. It wasn’t about being loved. It was about duty. It was about the good he could do to make America safer.
He thought about his mother. She didn’t want him to enlist because she feared for his safety. She had no idea of the kind of monster he was to become, so feared by his own government that they placed a kill chip in his brain and gave his brother the button.
He knew how Peter felt about him. He did his best to try and hide it, but he was also afraid of Carl. Not so much Carl’s abilities, but his change in demeanor. His arrogance, his recklessness. Peter knew the price that was paid for recklessness, and he was tired of losing good men.
However, that was what Carl and the infantry drones had to offer. Good men, Americans with families, no longer were fodder for the battlefield. Carl was sure that he was doing something good, but something on a visceral level didn’t feel right.
The dreams, which were becoming more frequent, were leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth, and the exhilaration they gave him was beginning to creep into his waking experience. He savored the thought of tracking those Mexican smugglers in the underground tunnel…hunting them, wiping them and their evil off the face of the earth.
The more he thought about it, the more he searched his feelings; he was startled by the dawning realization that it had nothing whatsoever to do with good or evil, freedom or democracy…
It was the thrill of the hunt and the rapture of the kill.
***
Fiona knocked at the door of her grandmother’s house. It was a rundown Victorian with a dilapidated wrap around porch, the kind old Southerners in the movies sat on in rocking chairs, sipping sweet tea.
Twilight was falling, but she figured she’d pay her Nana a visit. It had been a while, and her work keeping tabs on the Infantry Drone Program from a distance and developing the Retinal Gateway Technology had occupied most of her time.
Her Nana opened the door and smiled when she saw her. She gave her a hug and gestured for her to enter. Fiona was used to the silent treatment since the stroke. Nanna didn’t speak after that, but she understood everything.
They traversed a long hallway past a staircase leading upstairs, their footsteps echoing off the walls. The house had three floors. Her Nana lived, at this point, exclusively on the first floor, using the dining room as a bedroom. The second was no longer used. The third floor, once rented to tenants and those passing through Abernathy, had been abandoned for years.
Fiona grew up spending many a hot summer day at that house. Her little brother had once dared her to go up to the third floor when Nana was napping. She was around eight years old. He was seven. She had gone, but he chickened out as usual.
She remembered spending what was probably only a few minutes, but felt like an eternity, up there. It was a dark, creaky, dusty place. The stale scent of mothballs wafted in the air and the shadows played tricks on the eyes.
As they now passed the staircase leading up, Fiona smiled to herself nostalgically. They passed through a door, passed by the dining room, and entered the kitchen.
Nana hugged Fiona again and took a good look at her in the light, appraising her from head to toe. Then, apparently liking what she saw, she gestured for Fiona to sit at the kitchen table.
As Fiona sat, Nana went to the fridge and opened the door. She grabbed and held up various beverages: milk, diet soda, iced tea. Fiona nodded at the iced tea. Her Nana had always made the best iced tea.
After she had fixed Fiona a glass, she held up one finger telling Fiona to wait. Then she disappeared into the bathroom across from the dining room.
Fiona sat there holding her cold glass of iced tea. She took a sip and it brought back memories of long summers from an almost forgotten period in Fiona’s life. She was glad that it was still there, buried in her subconscious.
Her life since that time had been filled with tragedy. Her brother’s death when she was in college from an acute asthma attack. Her father’s heart attack and death shortly thereafter. That was right about the time she had enlisted.
Her father was a major in the army. He was a proud man, but he had never wanted the same for his daughter. Not his princess. After the loss of her brother and father, Fiona’s life had lost its direction. She had taken all kinds of tests. She scored in the superior range of intelligence, and she was a high 4-9 on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the 4 being the Psychopathic Deviate Scale and the 9 being the Hypomania Scale. The 4 referred to what the shrinks called “moral flexibility.” The military saw her scores and immediately recruited her into Army Intelligence.
A high 4-9 was the profile of a psychologist, so she attended a graduate program in clinical psychology and the army paid for her Ph.D. Her “moral flexibility” made her ripe for shadow ops, and she was trained in gathering intelligence on terrorists. She showed a particular talent for interrogation, and she collaborated with human factor engineers in developing the Retinal Gateway Technology, which made waterboarding and such obsolete.
She grew distant from her mother over the years, as if the distance would bury the pain of losing her brother and father. In Army Intelligence, fostering relationships was not a priority and frankly discouraged, particularly for the type of work Fiona was involved in. Connections to oth
ers were a liability that could be exploited by the enemy.
Fiona had left her entire young life behind. She imagined her classmates from high school settling down, getting married and having children. In the meantime, she was figuring ways to penetrate the minds of terrorists to keep American families safe.
Nana came out of the bathroom and made her way back into the kitchen. She poured herself some iced tea and joined her granddaughter at the table. She held Fiona’s hands in hers.
“I’ve been fine, Nana. I’ve been very busy with the army. Nothing I can talk about,” and she winked at Nana. Nana smiled in delight and shivered in excitement.
“I’ve been meaning to visit.”
Nana waved her hand dismissively and made a gesture that Fiona understood to be happiness that she was there now.
“So how have you been?”
Her Nana made a so-so gesture, turning her hand over and back.
“Are you taking all of your meds?”
Nana put her hands up in the air in exaggerated exasperation, indicating that she was taking too much medication in her estimation.
Then she put her finger up in the air again.
“Okay. What is it?”
Nana rose from her chair and gestured for Fiona to follow her. She had something to show her. Fiona stood and followed her. Nana walked to the dining room, opened the door, and pointed inside.
Fiona caught up and looked through the doorway into the dark dining room. She saw a dark outline of her Nana’s bed and the outline of the dining room table pushed to one side with irregular piles of what were likely papers on top. Then there was a dark shape, tall and thin, like a coatrack.
“What is it, Nana?”
Her Nana pointed insistently into the dark room, her face glowing with excitement.
“I can’t see in here. Let’s turn the light on,” Fiona reached for the light switch.
As the dim light went on, she was confused by what she initially saw. The coatrack wasn’t a coatrack at all. It was an adolescent boy just standing there still as can be. His face looked pale and the skin around his eyes dark.
Then her eyes widened in horror as she recognized the boy.
Her Nana put her hand on Fiona’s arm and, for the first time in years, spoke clear as day.
“Fiona, your brother’s here.”
Fiona backed out of the room, nearly tripping over her own feet, her back hitting the wall behind her. Her brother reached out for her, baring broken yellow teeth.
She opened the door to her right and ran back through the hallway towards the front door. She slid the deadbolt and pulled on the handle, but the door wouldn’t budge. She heard her brother clawing on the door behind her as her Nana laughed in maniacal delight.
The door creaked open slowly, and the doorway was dark. Her brother was no longer there. But she heard scratching on the kitchen floor, a scurrying, and she saw a small shadow creeping along the floor.
It stopped when it reached the doorway and just paused there on all fours, waiting. Her heart pounding in her chest, Fiona strained her eyes to make out the small figure. It was oddly shaped, its head disproportionately larger than its body, its rear end up higher than the rest of its body.
“Nana…” she called out tentatively.
The thing in the doorway cooed back at her. Horrified, she yanked on the doorknob, but the front door wouldn’t open.
“Stay away from me,” she called out to it. It hissed at her in response and began to scurry towards her.
She ran up the staircase, rounded the second floor landing, and continued up to the abandoned third floor. She heard scurrying on the steps below. It was coming after her.
She opened the old wooden door to the third floor apartment and ran into the dark room closing the door behind her. She engaged the lock and backed away from the door, listening.
She heard more scratching and scurrying as it climbed the second flight of stairs. It stopped right outside the locked door and cooed at her. It knew she was in there.
“Leave me alone,” she called out, and it began to scratch at the door.
“I said GO AWAY.”
It hissed at her through the door and continued to scratch.
She thought of the fire escape. She groped in the darkness and stumbled uncertainly into the next room. The moonlight shone through the window and she lurched towards it, feeling for the latch at the top of the windowpane.
It was painted over and, as her fingers struggled to unlock it, she realized that it was painted shut. She searched the room for some large piece of furniture as the thing on the other side of the apartment door clucked and gurgled horribly.
She found an old wooden chair and picked it up. She brought it to the window and pulled it back to take a swing when she saw it in the darkness of the other room. The eyes she saw when she used the RGT on Carl Birdsall, the face she had seen in her nightmares ever since, glared at her in the black void.
Her body became frozen in terror and she dropped the chair. Behind her, she heard keys jingling and her Nana talking to the thing scratching at the door. “It’ll only be a moment, dear. Don’t worry, I have the key.”
“Nana, DON’T,” she called out desperately, sounding like a frightened child.
However, it was too late.
The lock disengaged and the door swung open. She heard scurrying in the other room behind her as the eyes in the room in front of her glared menacingly. She screamed as the scampering horror brushed up against her leg and sunk its teeth into her ankle.
Fiona awoke with a start, dripping in sweat, tears streaming down her hot face. Another damned nightmare. She looked around her room and it dawned on her with some relief that she was still on base.
She wiped her face with the back of her right hand and got out of bed. She turned on the light and walked over to the window. She saw herself in the reflection from the light. She looked terrible. Ever since that day the RGT revealed a glimpse of that face, she had been stricken with these nightmares.
They were very personal. In one, Carl was hunting her down viciously, and this one…she hadn’t seen her Nana in years. This was something she had felt guilty about, but she was busy with her work. She no longer felt any connection to her family.
Her brother…that really got to her. She missed her brother terribly. Why did he appear in the nightmare? What was the purpose of these nightmares?
The brass didn’t take what she saw that day seriously, and they chalked her nightmares up to stress. They ordered her to see one of the other shrinks, but it was all pro forma. The psychologist made obtuse interpretations about guilt in giving up a normal life connected to family and a fear of settling down and having children.
Fiona knew her life didn’t follow a traditional path, and there was some guilt about that. However, she had never been plagued by nightmares like this before. In every dream, there was that face…
She mused about what her life would’ve been like if she’d settled down, but she couldn’t imagine the man she would essentially settle down with. The Birdsall brothers popped into her head. There was Carl, the younger brother. She understood what it was like to have lost purpose and why he enlisted. Then there was Peter. He was strong and heroic. She didn’t deny that there was an attraction there. She had to tune it out during her sessions with him. However, she was no longer his therapist, and any record of her therapy had been erased.
She shook her head, dismissing the fantasies as foolish. She went over to her computer and powered it on. She called up the files on the RGT data collected on Carl and reviewed the files on the crash site in the Congo. There had to be a connection. Nothing in the files explained that face she saw in the nightmares.
She couldn’t help but think that, while the government was using the Retinal Gateway Technology to spy on others, something else—the technology’s creator—was watching them.
She knew there had to be a connection between the RGT and the THV virus. The virus was found in villagers n
ear the crash site. They died, reanimated, and tried to eat the other villagers.
Then there was Carl’s unique situation. His body was going through changes. Was it because of his proximity to the undead drones? If that was the case, why didn’t any of the other soldiers develop tumors or any of Carl’s abilities?
He was becoming the perfect soldier—fast, strong, more acute in his senses. He had the ability to communicate with the undead drones. It was as if he was their commander. They obeyed him without question.
She had wondered if he had the same nightmares…if he saw the same face. None of the data she had indicated so, but she wondered if he was being influenced somehow.
An epiphany hit her like a freight train. He was the perfect soldier, the commander of an army of undead. All they appeared to do was kill, eat, and make more zombies. In a war scenario, it was the perfect battle of attrition. Whoever wasn’t killed was converted. Sun Tzu would’ve been proud.
With such an army, one could conquer a nation. Moreover, she thought about what happened in Xcaret, Mexico, and how they had lost control of the drones which turned on Peter, Carl, and their platoon.
She played out the scenario in her head to its ultimate conclusion. If the drones couldn’t be controlled, the virus would spread, killing and converting anyone in its path. From an epidemiological perspective, it would become an epidemic, and eventually a pandemic.
A pandemic was an infectious disease that spread across large regions or worldwide. So then, the THV pandemic would, in effect, wipe out the world population through attrition.
Carl could control it, somehow, for some reason, but what if he wasn’t meant to control it…
What if he was meant to direct it…?
***
Nogales, Arizona
05:04 HRS
Carl lay on a mound of dirt with a receded, sparse hairline of grass a hundred feet away from the border fence, the deep purple sky yielding to burnt orange on the horizon. There was a drone lying motionless next to him. Cronos was literally hanging on the fence covered in corrugated tin for camouflage.
I Am Automaton 2: Kafka Rising Page 10