“Afraid not. Look, I’m not looking forward to it either. You’re going to be heavy as hell.”
“Are you telling me you can fly?”
Wordlessly, she turned to me and levitated a meter in the air before quickly coming back to earth. She sighed impatiently. “Enough demonstration? Now get onboard, big fella.”
I hesitantly lifted my leg up, allowing her to scoop first it, and then the other, under her arms.
“Oh damn!” she exhaled. “You’re heavy! Why the hell did John do this to me? I could have done this alone!”
She lifted off and I wrapped my arms tight around her torso.
“Because he doesn’t trust me,” I replied. “He thinks I’ll run through the gates.”
17
Haywire and I had entered the gray abyss nearly twenty minutes earlier, and I held tight to her torso like a child as I waited for the abyss to crack and the city to reemerge. John Doe’s foreboding prediction that it would be worse than the worst imaginings of Dante and Blake had me casting horrific images of flesh burning in flames and people clawing one another to death. I was expecting to witness a holocaust. What we saw emerging from the gray, through the slivers that opened in the cloud and rain, allowing us see the city, disturbed us for altogether different reasons. Indeed, the city was not burning, nor was it tearing itself apart; rather, it was at a perfect standstill.
“What the hell is going on?” Haywire asked as we flew over the bridge and witnessed it devoid of traffic. She skimmed over the treetops in the park, and the downtown core materialized from out of the clouds. The glow of the city lights was peaceful, yet somehow cold and unwelcoming, as though they were lights in a painting on the wall in a frozen room. “Where is everybody?”
Almost the instant she asked, I noticed a woman standing on the sidewalk, her body so rigid and her spine so straight that I could easily have mistaken her for a street lamp or mailbox, as she was just as fixed in place. She stared straight ahead at the wall of the building across the street from her. In the building, I noticed something even more disturbing. “Haywire, look at the windows,” I said, pointing to the building.
“Oh my God,” Haywire reacted, astonished.
The windows of the building, along with the windows of the other high-rises in the downtown core, were dotted with the faces of people standing and staring straight forward, out into the night. “What are they waiting for? Why aren’t they purging the sim?”
“You said Kali had outsmarted you with her undetectable lynchpin program. Perhaps delaying or avoiding a purge is another example of her outthinking your post-human organization.”
“But why?” Haywire replied as we banked to the left and headed north, across the water and toward my penthouse. “The point of lynchpin programs is to serve as protection against hacktivists. They initiate purges so the hackers can be weeded out and eliminated. If she doesn’t purge the sim, she has nothing. No defense whatsoever.”
“That’s only assuming that Kali is as limited as the other targets of your hacking activities were. The complex encryption in her lynchpin program has already established that this is not the case. We should be on our guard. Kali must be thinking outside the box.”
“Well, well. Look at you,” Haywire replied condescendingly over her shoulder as we neared my penthouse. “Figuring stuff out. You’re a quick study, aren’t ya?”
“I only hope that I represent my primitive, un-enhanced primate brethren well,” I replied, tiring of the post-human tendency to underestimate me.
“Oh, and he’s getting funny too! You’re full of surprises tonight.”
We set down on my balcony, and Haywire immediately shrugged me off her back, seemingly relieved to dispatch her burden. She stretched as though her back had stiffened.
“Isn’t your body only an avatar?” I noted.
She glared at me as she rubbed her shoulder. “The avatars simulate reality—maybe a little too well sometimes. And for the record, your muscle mass is meant to be devoured by women’s eyes, not carried on their backs.”
I nodded. “My apologies.”
“Mr. Big?” Haywire called out into the penthouse. The wet, cold wind blew the curtains ominously as Haywire entered the darkened living space in search of her companions. When no answer was returned, I immediately became alarmed, fear causing me to grasp my gun with both hands, holding it in front of me as I stepped slowly through the doorway. “Haywire, something’s wrong.”
“Yeah, I’m thinking that too,” she whispered as she stood outside my bedroom door, waiting for me to join her. She looked at my gun. “Raise your weapon. Get ready to fight.”
18
Haywire placed the side of her hand against the bedroom door and began to push it open. For the second time that night, I found myself on the verge of praying that Kali would be there, asleep in the bed—and for the second time, that prayer would go unanswered.
“Oh no,” Haywire whispered.
“Maybe they moved her to a more secure location,” I suggested.
“No. They didn’t,” Haywire replied, her shoulders slumping as she stepped forward, moving toward something I couldn’t see on the ground in front of my bed.
I craned my neck to peer past the door for a better view. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.
Body parts. Blood. Agony.
“What the hell happened?” Haywire asked as she took Mr. Big’s armless, legless, eyeless body into her arms, cradling him against her.
“She was never asleep,” Mr. Big gasped painfully, his mouth filling with blood that he had to spit away every few seconds. “She...took us by surprise. We couldn’t even fight back...ripped everyone apart...only left me alive to give you a message.”
“What?” Haywire asked, her face twisted in torment as she rocked her comrade in a wasted attempt to be soothing; nothing could soothe pain like that.
I scanned the room. There were arms, legs, torsos, and enough blood to coat the entire floor crimson. I shifted slightly and kicked something accidentally. I looked down, realizing it was someone’s face. It skidded to a halt near Haywire, but she didn’t notice the grotesque interruption, her attention riveted to Mr. Big.
“She said, ‘where the mind’s acutest reasoning is joined to evil will and evil power...there human beings can’t defend themselves.’”
Haywire’s face was aghast. “What the hell is that—”
“She’s quoting Dante’s Inferno,” I said.
Haywire’s expression remained the same. “Why? What the hell for?”
I shook my head.
“You’ve got to kill me!” Mr. Big suddenly shouted, snapping Haywire’s attention back to him.
“I won’t do that and you know it,” Haywire immediately replied, dismissing the request.
“You have to!” Mr. Big’s voice was corrupted by the pain to the point that the high, desperate pitch he reached was inhuman. “I’m in agony!”
“Listen to me! You’ve still got your appendages in the real world. She cauterized the wounds. You can hold out and we can get you out of this!”
“There’s no getting out of this!” Mr. Big screamed. “We’re in her head, damn it! She’s awake, and we’re in her head! There’s no escaping this! We’re all going to die—every single one of us!” The big man writhed in pain; it sounded as though he wanted to shed tears, but a cursory glance of the size of the holes where his eyes had been ripped from his skull was enough to confirm that he had no tear ducts. Dried tears of blood, however, streaked his cheeks.
“So what? You’re just going to die?” Haywire retorted. “Unacceptable!”
“You can put my back-up mind file into my body,” Mr. Big replied, pleadingly, negotiating for his own death.
Haywire shook her head.
He couldn’t have seen her refusal, but somehow he seemed to sense it. “Yes you can. You can! I backed it up right before we hacked Kali’s sim!”
“You can back up your brains?” I asked, astonished.
&
nbsp; Haywire ignored me and continued to address the fallen. “It’s too risky. We have to unlock the gates first.”
Mr. Big’s only response was a long, forlorn moan. I couldn’t fathom the torment he was enduring. He was willing to risk ending his real life to end the pain in the sim.
Suddenly, I felt a low vibration in the soles of my boots. I raised my weapon and stepped back quickly to the door of the room and peered out into the hallway. The vibration—whatever it was—was growing.
“What is it?” Haywire called to me, sensing it as well.
“I don’t know,” I replied as the vibrations grew, sounding more and more like a coming stampede of wild horses as it neared. “But I think we should get out of here immed—”
Before I could finish my suggestion, my right arm yanked me around and forced me to take aim at an incensed man in a blue dress shirt and khaki pants as he sprinted from the elevator toward me. The pattern disruptor gun fired without me pulling the trigger, a golden jet of particles hitting him in the chest and ripping him apart into nothing but waves of distortion, like the air above a hot asphalt road on a sunny July day. Before I could even react, the gun fired twice more at two more NPCs, the two barely able to make it out of the elevator before the gun cut them down.
“Nice shooting, Tex,” Haywire commented as she joined me outside the bedroom door.
“I didn’t—”
“Autopilot, I know,” Haywire replied, cutting me off. The sound of the menacing stampede was swelling. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”
We turned back to the bedroom to retrieve what was left of Mr. Big, only to stop in our tracks as a wave of NPCs reached the railing of my balcony. They vaulted over it preternaturally in leaps that would put Olympic gymnasts to shame, and rushed toward us like river rapids about to sweep us away.
19
The computer in my suit identified targets in rapid succession, aiming and firing several times a second, nearly ripping my shoulder out of its socket as it locked on, dispatched, and then quickly found the next most threatening NPC. Even with the speed of the futuristic targeting software guiding the hardware in the suit and gun, I still couldn’t shoot fast enough to stop the tide of enemies from overwhelming us.
Luckily, Haywire had it covered. She used her left leg to kick me in the ribs with enough force to knock me out of her way, somehow managing to avoid injuring me. She then thrust her arms forward, palms out, as though she were trying to move an invisible truck out of her way. Just as Kali had done to me in the same hallway, Haywire was able to force the NPCs backward, ramming what must have been fifty of them out to the balcony and beyond, sending each one tumbling violently over the railing.
“Impressive,” I commented.
She watched as, immediately, the next wave of NPCs, apparently oblivious to the fate of their predecessors, launched themselves over the railing and into the apartment. Again, she sent her invisible force-field toward them, slamming them all backwards, sending their bodies twirling out into the rain-drenched night, spiraling to their deaths, only to collide with the pavement far below. Then she turned to me and grabbed me by my arm, thrusting me back into my bedroom before shutting the door with one hand and then gesturing with the other, seemingly summoning every inanimate object in the room to her and then piling them up as a barricade. “That’ll only hold ‘em for seconds at most. We have to get out of here.”
She strode to Mr. Big, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt and dragging him to the window. Then she turned back to me, looking at me impatiently as I stood, dumbfounded, next to the bedroom door. “Why are you just standing there? My Jedi mind tricks can’t hold them back forever. We’ve got to fly out of here before—”
Before she could finish her sentence, the bedroom window smashed, and the first NPC’s bloodied fingers grasped desperately toward her. She turned and used her force-field power once again, sending the NPC tumbling out into the night, but another three instantly took its place. She sent them off the edge as well, but they were quickly replaced by five more. “This is bad!” she shouted. “I can’t get on top of them, and we need to get the hell out of here—like yesterday!”
On my right side, the door Haywire had barricaded with the heavy oak dresser, my bed, the twin nightstands, the entire contents of my walk-in closet, and the body parts of the deceased post-humans was undulating from the force of the NPCs as they piled their bodies against it. Not only were they mere seconds from breaking down the door, but it appeared they were mere seconds from bringing down the entire wall of the bedroom. I stepped away from the door, my head swiveling from the door to the window, where Haywire continued to send NPCs to their ultimate demises. There appeared to be no escape.
Then I remembered something John Doe had said. I raised my weapon again, this time pointing straight up at the ceiling, and I fired. Just as John had related, the section of the ceiling I’d shot disappeared, leaving a hole that was more than a meter deep in the concrete. I surmised that the rooftop couldn’t be much further. I shot twice more, the golden pattern dematerializing the concrete, erasing it form the sim. When the rain began pouring into the room, I knew my efforts were not wasted.
“Haywire! C’mon! I made us an exit!”
She looked over her shoulder at me briefly, then up at the hole I’d shot into the ceiling. “Can we fit through there? It looks narrow!”
I shot twice more. “I widened it. We’ll be okay!”
“What about Mr. Big? We can’t leave without him, but the second I leave this window, NPCs are going to pour into the room!”
I ran to Mr. Big and grabbed him as securely as I could, hooking my hand into the waist of his pants. “I got him!”
“Leave me...” Mr. Big whimpered.
Haywire ignored his protest. “Brace yourself!” she shouted as she sent another force blast out toward the intruding NPCs. Then she turned, hooked her arm under mine, and flew toward the hole in the ceiling. I fired one last pattern disruptor shot at the first NPC who made it into the room, but before I could fire another, we’d already entered the narrow hole, Haywire dragging me as I dragged Mr. Big. We were making our way through three and a half meters of concrete, but before we could escape, an NPC had already, uncannily, reached Mr. Big. The remnant of the gigantic man was wrenched out of my arm in a fraction of a second, so unceremoniously that I was still in shock as we cleared the rooftop. A second after that, the NPCs began erupting like a geyser from the hole I’d created, spouting up, using each other’s bodies like ladders to climb as they preternaturally leapt and clawed at us, more than one of them coming quite close before falling back to the rooftop.
“Where’d he go?” Haywire screamed to me.
“I lost him,” I replied, fixing my eyes on the atrocious spectacle that shrank away behind us, the entire building swarmed by NPCs like bees on a honeycomb, covering every inch of the building exterior until the walls themselves seemed to move.
As I watched the spectacle, Mr. Big’s words echoed in my head: “We’re all going to die—every single one of us.”
20
“What do you mean, you lost him?” Haywire shouted, shrugging me off of her back a little too early, forcing me to roll painfully across the wet gravel of the rooftop of the high-rise she’d chosen as a landing pad in the downtown core. She set down and thundered toward me, then grabbed me by the front of my armor and shook me angrily as she followed up icily, “How do you just lose a human being?”
“I held on as tight as a I could,” I replied in protest. “The NPC...ripped him from my grasp. I didn’t even feel a tug...I just had him one moment and then the next...”
Her lip curled up in disgust before she thrust me back down to the gravel. “We have to go back for him.”
“That’s completely irrational,” I replied as I sprang back to my feet. “You’re letting your emotions get the best of you.”
Haywire’s eyes grew wild. “Yeah. I am,” she said, nodding as she stepped toward me again, her posture
threatening. “Where’s your emotion?”
“I’m feeling very emotional,” I retorted, “but I am not letting it stop me from being analytical. Mr. Big was dead by the time we left the building. There’s no one back there to save.”
Haywire shook her head, the resentment in her eyes burning holes through me. “He was dead the moment I trusted his fate to you.”
“I-I’m sorry. I really tried.”
Haywire kept her resentful glare locked on me for several moments more before finally turning away with a disgusted snarl. She marched to the ledge of the building. “If you didn’t have the lynchpin, I’d return the favor and leave you here to die.”
“Where are you planning to go?”
She snapped her head around as though it was the stupidest question she’d ever heard. “Where do you think?”
“If you’re planning to head back to the gates, I’m afraid that’s no longer an option.”
“What?”
“Kali’s awake,” I replied. “The gates north of the city are the first place she’ll go in search of me. For all we know, she’s already there.”
“That’s precisely why we need to get there immediately. John and the others need our help.”
“It’s exceedingly unlikely that the gates are even still there.”
Haywire’s mouth opened, aghast. “You cold son-of-a-bitch.”
“I’m speaking the truth, am I not?” I replied. “Kali can manipulate the physical world in her sim on a scale that goes far beyond what even you and the other post-humans can achieve, correct? What makes you think the post-humans could possibly have resisted her? She would have caught them by surprise, just as she did Mr. Big and the others at my condo. I’m sorry, Haywire, but it is almost a certainty that John is already dead.”
“Almost! That’s the point!” Haywire shouted in reply. “We don’t know for sure! That’s why we have to go!”
“And almost certainly die?”
Post-Human Series Books 1-4 Page 67