“It came from the steakhouse.”
The men didn’t know what to do. Their guns were useless. Peter watched as two men came running in, each carrying something.
“Hold it, they’re not ID.”
They were obviously human; maybe some stranded tourists or even a couple of locals. Then Peter saw the AK-47’s.
He raised his weapon and trained it on them. They were arguing in some other language, but when they saw Peter, they raised their rifles. Peter’s men aimed their defunct weaponry at the two visitors.
The two men were yelling at Peter. Peter took his left hand off his rifle and held his hand out, palm facing them, a gesture for them to calm down.
“Is-is that…” Barnes started.
“Yes,” Peter said in horror. These were terrorists, Order for International Liberation that were still lingering.
They continued to yell at him and point their weapons. Peter and his men kept bluffing with theirs. Peter kept telling them to calm down.
Thankfully, no one had fired a shot, as it would only have been from the terrorists. Apparently Peter’s bluff was working.
“Don’t lower your weapons,” he instructed to his men.
This was quite the delicate stalemate, and undoubtedly a diversion that they didn’t need at the moment. Soon the ID would be upon them, and they needed to find something to fight with and a place to make their stand.
Carl stepped forward, holding his MR.UD down at his side and his other hand out, showing that it was empty. One of the men pointed his AK at him and yelled. The other kept his gun on Peter.
“Carl, what the hell are you doing?”
However, before Peter could say or do anything else, Carl held his arms out stiffly in front of him and began to walk funny, groaning and snapping his jaws.
The two men apparently forgot about Peter and the others for a moment and just gawked at this funny man walking like a mummy.
Carl stopped and said loudly, “Zom-bies. Zom-bies. Yes?”
One of the men said something in his language, and both began to nod emphatically. It seemed that they understood his pantomiming.
Carl then gestured with his free hand in a sweeping motion ending in his pointing at the ground. “They’re coming…HERE. They will be here.”
Then he pointed his MR.UD at the windows as if it was a rifle and mimicked shooting at the windows.
“Jesus Christ, Carl,” Peter said, but he watched the two men closely. Maybe they understood.
“We have to fight to-ge-ther,” Carl said. “To-ge-ther.” He made a wide gesture encompassing everyone ending with his one hand shaking the other in pantomimed agreement.
The two men looked at each other and nodded, but they continued to train their AK’s on Peter.
“I don’t think it’s working,” Peter murmured to Carl out of the corner of his mouth.
Then the best thing that could’ve happened did. There were more sounds of broken glass, and several ID came stomping through the steakhouse and in their direction.
“Shit, they’re already here,” said Longo.
Chapter 14
“Fall back!” Peter ordered.
Their two guests had other ideas. They began to open fire at the approaching ID. The ID stumbled and staggered through the gunfire, but only one that had been hit in the head (probably accidentally) was stopped permanently.
Carl ran up to one of the men and tapped him on the shoulder. The man looked over at Carl angrily as he continued to fire into the closing ID.
Carl made a gun with his thumb and index finger and pantomimed shooting himself in the head. The man shot him a look that could only be construed as pure bile, and then he aimed his rifle higher.
He took out two of the closest ID with headshots, but both men’s bursts were too erratic and uncontrolled. They’d be out of bullets before disposing of the ID.
“Carl!” Peter yelled. Carl turned back to look at Peter. Peter made a swirling motion with his finger and then gestured with all five fingers on a straightened hand to move into the gym.
Peter retreated into the hallway, and his men followed. During the brief pauses between gunfire, Peter heard the tourists on the other side of the convention doors yelling out.
Jorge, don’t open those doors, whatever you do. He tried to open the glass doors to the gym, but they were locked. He smashed the glass with the butt of his rifle and breached the entrance.
All of the men filed into the gym. They began to look around for anything they could use.
Behind them, they heard one of the terrorists screaming and banging on the convention doors. It appeared the ID were doing their thing, and quite effectively from the sounds of it.
“Quick, grab some free weights,” Peter ordered. He went and grabbed a straight bar lying on the floor without weights on it. He wielded it to get a feel for it, like a kid taking a practice swing on deck at a little league game. It was longer and heavier than the baton he carried.
Carl put down his MR.UD and was looking around. “Where’re we making our stand, Lieutenant?”
Peter looked around the gym. There were two sets of stairs separated by a landing leading to the machines upstairs.
“We go up. We can barricade the top with the machines. As they make it up and over one or a couple at a time, we smash their skulls in.”
“Wait,” Carl pointed over to the benches. “Let’s load up the bars with the weights on them and take them up. We can drop them from the top and take a bunch of them down at once.”
“Good idea, Carl. Barnes, Longo, and Munger, help Carl. Mirabella, Hasbro, and Smithe, bring as many free weights as you can up the stairs.”
The hallway was eerily quiet. The ID were feeding.
“Let’s move it, men. We only have until when the ID have finished their snack.”
Carl and Barnes loaded up one bar with heavy weights and each took a side. They walked quickly but carefully towards the stairs, grunting under the weight of their load. Longo and Munger loaded up their bar and were right behind them.
They started up the stairs and were nearly startled into dropping their loads as the back glass door cracked from the impact of a rather large ID. Outside they were being blown all over the place. But the large, glass windows of the modern gym might as well have been a supermarket window, and the ID were getting a good glimpse of the food running around inside.
They all saw Peter and his men, and they were all converging on the gym in their relentless way, persevering in the 175 mile per hour wind.
“Hurry up! We gotta move!” Pete yelled in encouragement. Carl, Barnes, Longo, and Munger just reached the top when the ID started barging into the gym on the other side from the hallway.
“The machines, move ‘em!”
They took treadmills, elliptical machines, anything they could find, and they piled them in a heap at the top of the stairs, wedging them into the rails at the sides.
A few ID burst through the glass doors at the bottom of the stairs and began to make their clumsy ascent. But they were only functioning as they were supposed to. Peter knew this. And having been trained in using them, he had some idea about how to deal with them on the receiving end.
His men moved with a purpose, and so far, no one lost their cool. But the true test of their fortitude was about to begin. It wasn’t just the ID’s appearance that unnerved their prey. It was their slow, steady pursuit. They took just about whatever was thrown at them, and then they kept coming.
But Peter and his men knew how to slow them down, separate them, and dispatch them.
“Bring the first barbell.”
Carl and Barnes lifted it slowly and put it down on the inside of their barricade. The ID made their way up slowly, wheezing and growling, their glassy eyes fixed on their imminent meal and jaws snapping in anticipation.
“Steady. Steady.”
The group from outside rounded the landing and were beginning their ascent of the second staircase, and the group from the hall
way crossed the floor with the blood and intestinal juices of the two terrorists smeared across their faces.
The group climbing the stairs was almost all the way up and was reaching for the barricade.
“Okay, NOW.”
Carl and Barnes picked up each end of the barbell and hoisted it up above their heads. They leaned up against their side of the barricade.
“On three,” Carl grunted. Barnes nodded. “One, two, THREE.”
They tossed the barbell down on top of the approaching hoard, catching several of them and pulling them down to the landing.
There was the crunching of bones. A couple were silenced permanently, their heads crushed under the weight. The others kept coming, grabbing onto the overturned equipment.
Those maimed on the landing below were beginning to recover and pulled broken carcasses up the stairs with whatever limbs and appendages they had left.
At least they thinned the herd, and that was the exact effect Peter was looking for. A couple of ID were climbing over the barricade.
Peter brought down his straight bar on the head of the first. He finished the job with a second blow. The one behind it almost made it all the way over, but Longo brought a free weight down on the back of its head, caving in its skull. As it reached out for him he struck again, and then one last time. Blood and grey matter splattered everywhere.
“Don’t get any on you,” Peter warned.
Peter saw they had mere moments before the next wave began climbing the stairs. He handed Barnes his straight bar, and climbed over the barricade. Barnes reached over and handed the bar back to him.
He flew down the stairs, taking two at a time, and began whacking the heads of those ID dragging themselves up.
Carl saw that the next wave was making their way up and closing in on his brother. He climbed the barricade. “I’ll be just a moment.”
He extended his baton and descended the stairs, bringing it down on the skulls of crawling ID alongside his brother.
“Carl, what are you doing?”
“Helping my brother. Look.”
Peter looked up in time to see more ID reaching the landing.
“Let’s go,” he said as he smashed one lying on its back in the face.
Carl brought his baton down on one that grabbed his ankle, and then struck two more times. Peter grabbed him and they both turned around as undead fingertips clawed at their black suits. All of their suits were torn from their fall into the cenote, and the ID tracked their cuts and sweat.
They climbed the stairs as fast as they could, the ID right on their heels, and began to climb the barricade. They were half-way over when the second wave reached the top.
Barnes and Munger reached out and, grabbing their hands, pulled Peter and Carl back over. Longo and Hasbro had the second barbell hoisted in the air.
“NOW,” Peter yelled as he hit the ground on the safe side.
Longo and Hasbro tossed the next barbell over, sending several ID crashing down to the landing below. But this time there was more of them, and they were climbing over the barricade.
They fought some of them off, scoring deadly blows to heads with batons and free weights, but some made it over. Now the men were retreating.
A female ID had climbed on top of Mirabella, opening her mouth wide, flipping the top of her head like a candy dispenser. As she lunged for his face, he pulled out his rather large knife and placed it over his face pointing out.
She fell on the knife, pushing into it as if she was trying to swallow it whole, and the tip came out the back of her head. Viscous black liquid dribbled down the blade and onto his gloved hand and wrist.
He rolled her then motionless carcass over and pulled his knife out of her mouth. Carl pulled him away from the other ID stumbling off the barricade and dragged him back with the other soldiers.
Another young woman in her twenties was crawling over the top of the heap of exercise machines. She got her footing rather quickly and looked at Mirabella with imploring glassy eyes whitewashed with death, an uncanny smile on her face.
He found himself swimming in her lifeless pools gazing into him, unaware of Carl shouting for him to get up. He was tired, so tired, and she at that moment did not look so abhorrent.
He was jarred from his exhausted reverie as she sunk teeth into his upper thigh.
“NO!” Carl yelled as the company drew back. More ID began to climb the barricade and reach the other side. Some piled on Mirabella, ending him.
“Don’t look at their eyes!” Peter shouted.
They had never been on the receiving end of the ID, other than the orientation in the Labyrinth, so this was their first uncontrolled experience with the psychological component of being hunted.
There was the visceral revulsion of encountering an undead drone; the phobias of disease, germs, and being eaten alive, but these drones were once human and still retained many human traits and expressions. It induced a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, where you were so tired of being pursued that you just as well joined them.
However, the ID did no recruiting, and they took no prisoners. When they finished with you, there was nothing left to reanimate. Reanimation only occurred when they were interrupted from completing their ghastly purpose.
Peter looked around frantically. There was a workout room behind them, glass walled and mirrored on the inside, likely a room for classes.
“Into that room,” Peter ordered.
The men fell back, striking blows with whatever they had. Hasbro had misjudged a strike with a hefty free weight, placing his fist directly into a middle-aged Asian man’s mouth. The ID chomped down on his hand as two others reached around and pulled him in, seizing his forearms in their jaws.
Longo lost it and ran to the railing. Before Peter could shout any protest, he flung himself off the second floor in a final act of desperation.
He hit the ground, legs first, shattering his knee joints. As he laid there wailing in pain, two teenage boys began to shuffle their way over to him. He pulled out his baton, but he couldn’t see straight from the pain. The boys closed in on him, their faces wild with cannibalism.
Peter heard Longo’s shrieks as he entered the mirrored room. Barnes, Carl, Munger, and Smithe filed in and Peter closed the glass door, locking it from the inside.
There were now only five of them left, and Peter could not believe how his platoon was being victimized rather effectively by their own training.
The psychological effects were gradually setting in, the effect amplified by the mirrored walls. As the ID pressed themselves up against the glass, the reflections in the mirrors made it appear as if they were surrounded on all four sides.
Their banging on the glass, the hisses, and the moans prevented Peter from thinking straight. His men looked to him for guidance, for the glass would not hold the ID back much longer.
Carl saw his brother’s vexation, so he snatched Peter’s metal bar from his hands and smashed the mirror behind them. Then he did the same with the mirror on the wall to the left, and then on the wall to the right.
The act of Carl shattering the glass and the relief from the hideous reflections allowed Peter to come to his senses again.
“We gotta get out of here, Lieutenant,” Barnes pleaded, his face pale with terror.
If Peter didn’t come up with something quick, his men would descend into madness and let the ID take them.
Carl scanned the room. Suddenly, he was reminded of his experience with the Labyrinth.
“Pete, look up there,” he pointed to a rather large air conditioning vent.
Peter traced the likely path of the duct with his eyes, and saw that it stretched over the gym and out. “Barnes, give Carl a lift up to that vent.”
Barnes nodded and gave Carl a boost up. Carl pulled off the screen and tossed it aside. He stuck his head inside the vent, looked around, and then he pulled it back out.
“We can fit,” he shouted down, “but we should only go one at a time and space ourselves apa
rt. The ventilation shaft won’t hold the weight of too many of us.”
“Carl, you first.”
Carl nodded, and he climbed in. The shaft was wide enough for him to squeeze in with some room to spare. With the power off, it was hot and stuffy. But Carl’s special suit helped, as it was designed to, and he began to commando crawl through.
“Smithe, you’re next,” Peter directed.
Barnes gave Smithe a boost, and Smithe peered into the shaft. He saw Carl crawling away. “He’s outside, Lieutenant.”
Peter looked outside into the gymnasium and above the heads of more than a dozen frenzying ID. He noticed a bulge in the ventilation moving slowly over the gym.
“Good boy, Carl,” he said to himself. Then he nodded to Smithe. Smithe hoisted himself up and into the vent and began his commando crawl across.
The ID were pounding on the glass. Silent spider webs were beginning to form, the cracking of the glass drowned out by the growling of hungry undead and the dull roar of the hurricane outside.
“Munger, now you.”
Carl barely heard the noises of the ID over his own echoed clamoring through the airshaft. The dust was tickling his nose, and he did his best to stifle a sneeze. But he heard several sneezes from someone a ways behind him. He wondered if the ID detected men climbing through the airshafts overhead.
Eventually he took a sharp right turn and a bit of a dip as he figured he likely cleared the gym and was somewhere in the hallway in front of the convention center.
He came to a fork, where a shaft went ninety degrees to the left. He figured that was the direction of those hundreds of terrified tourists, so he pushed on forward. He hoped he guessed correctly, as the space was too small to allow him to consult his Mini-com Multi-tasker, which was at the moment strapped to his leg.
Peter and Barnes were the only ones left. The ID had breached the glass, jutting arms and heads through the jagged holes, snapping their jaws while shredding themselves on the shards. However, they didn’t register pain and apparently hadn’t noticed the damage they were inflicting on themselves.
I Am Automaton Page 19