The gunshots had alerted those within earshot. He could already hear shouts echoing down the tunnel. Around the first bend, he found his dog barking at a solid wall of chopped-up subway cars. Synths swarmed in at his back. Bruce admired the construction. It would take several minutes to bring it down. In that time, Gotham’s best would be up and ready.
This is going to be a mess.
The wall came crashing down. Improvised explosives showered the bots, blasting several into the walls. The tunnel lit up white and Bruce shut his eyes, staggering as an impact wave hit him. He knelt to shield his dog, knowing that unprotected canines would be the only casualties of these lightweight bombs.
Shrapnel and sparks came down in a hell-rain and then the humans rose up, a block of men with automatic rifles and well-constructed body armor. They screamed and opened fire.
Dogs at the back. Return fire.
Targets 7 through 22 went down in the first hail of Gyro fire. Bruce saw a man’s gun go off as he turned to run, saw the bullet take off another’s scalp along with a stringy bit of brain matter and recorded it as target 23. Friendly fire.
Awkward term, he always thought.
Keeping his dog heeled, he advanced carefully, cutting into the retreating ranks of the humans. They would be falling back to another checkpoint, with more explosives, most likely. In the meantime, the women and children were being shuttled out somewhere in the back. Delmar and Cinnamon’s teams would catch them.
The synths kept a tight formation and washed the tunnel from wall to wall with Gyro fire. Chemical flame leapt at the running targets. Bruce heard 23 through 47 going down in quick succession. Why did they have so many men at the front anyway? Had they really thought they’d stand a chance holding their ground?
He’d often observed a “fighting spirit”, a passion, in the dreamer communities he swept. Not so much with these undreamers. No, this was almost a sacrifice. Maybe they threw themselves at the synths because they knew they really had nothing to live for. Or maybe it was to give the women and children more time. Just another part of the human mystique.
Bruce saw an alcove with a door and nudged his dog toward it. Kicking it in, he immediately spied several targets huddled down and trained his weapon on them.
Empty.
He was peppered with bullets. “I need backup at the front end of North Metro!” Shoving the dog outside, Bruce slammed the door and absorbed the gunfire coming at him. Then it stopped. It was silent, and he appraised the room in the light of an electric bulb.
Two families. Husbands, wives, children. Five children. All the adults were armed, and they still had rounds in their guns, he was sure of that; but they were just staring at him.
“Backup!” He snapped. His internal radio crackled. “Situation just down the line. We can’t spare anyone.”
Bruce holstered his gun. “All right.” He looked at their faces once more. The children, all prepubescent, dirty and shaking and clinging to their weathered parents who still held their guns up with trembling hands.
88 targets had been taken out so far. There seemed to be a stall in the procedure; the “situation” Bruce had heard about on the radio, but he had to deal with this first.
“Use your remaining ammunition on yourself and your children or I will have to use my hands.”
The mothers wailed. The children responded in kind. It filled the tiny room, and the fathers could only clutch at their loved ones and glare up at him, their tear-streaked faces asking that eternal question, why?
Bruce wasn’t here to answer. “I’ll allow one minute for prayers and goodbyes. Starting now.”
The mothers cried harder, pulled their younglings in as if they could shelter them from the inevitable. The fathers looked at one another, realizing, accepting, and they placed their hands on their wives’ shoulders and someone started a choked prayer, a formality, for the children who hadn’t yet been operated on and still believed in a soul.
Bruce stood quiet in respect as the cluster of people wrapped their arms around one another, and he ticked off the seconds in his head.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
“I’m so sorry-”
“Don’t be sorry.”
“Time,” Bruce said.
The parents drew silent. The children stared up at them, cherub cheeks glistening with tears of not being able to understand, of simply sharing in the grief and fear of their mothers and fathers. They waited for a cue.
“PLEASE!” A mother cried.
“Do it now,” Bruce commanded.
The mother’s husband said, “You first, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” and he cradled her in his arms and put the gun to her head and screamed as loud as he could. It didn’t drown out the sound at all.
The children began crying. The other father and mother nodded to one another, they lay down with their two young. Each used two shots, quick.
The father and his three, the three pressed against their still mother. He held the shaking gun and sobbed, “Please...I can’t...”
Bruce took the gun from his hand.
“Close your eyes.”
***
The “situation” was an armored subway train full of gunmen with bullets and bombs, and it had been taken care of and was a blackened husk when Bruce came out of the room in the alcove.
One hundred forty-nine targets down.
There was an underground water treatment plant that had been converted to a greenhouse of sorts, with a little farm using sod and soil taken from the surface world. It was all very clever, remarkable for those who had excised their own imagination. The will to survive still endured, Bruce supposed. Will was stubborn and illogical, perhaps more so than emotion.
Bruce walked out onto the swatch of grass they’d cultivated and stomped his foot. “There’s a door under here.”
So, they hadn’t tried to get the women and children out. They truly wanted to hold their own.
Macendale pried the trapdoor open and peered down. “Not a sight or sound. Probably goes into the sewers.”
“Then we go into the sewers.”
Bruce suspected that the targets were out of weapons now. This wasn’t to have been discovered. Clean sweep from here on out.
“Give me my dog.”
Standing at the bottom of the trapdoor ladder, Bruce reached up to receive his mutt in a harness from Macendale. “Find ‘em boy. Go!”
The dog took off at breakneck speed, already scenting its prey, and the screams came soon after. Bruce broke into a run. He called for his dog, not wanting it to be compromised by the targets. “Boy! Boy!”
He’d reloaded and taken on another Gyro. Pointing both guns down the tunnel, he splashed along and yelled “Boy!”
The dog tore around the corner and jumped at his legs. “Good!” Bruce said. “Now stay!” And he went on.
Target 150, male, head shot.
Target 151, male, head shot.
Target 152, female, head shot.
Target 153, male, broken neck.
Target 154, male, two shots to abdomen, one to throat.
Target 155, female, head shot.
Target 156, female, head shot.
Target 157, male, head shot. Sustained temporal damage from blunt object.
Target 158, male, one shot to torso.
Target 159, male, head shot.
He cleared a path for the others, and they swept in, and took every corridor, every room; the screams and the gunfire reached a cacophony and then began to descend rapidly. Targets 160 through 190 down.
There were two hundred and twelve in all, close enough to the estimate Bruce had gotten from his infiltrator the previous month.
Did anyone kill a Jack DaVinci? Do you recall that file? Jack DaVinci.
All negative.
The storied hero had escaped again. Bruce had tracked him down through Canada (the armored subway car was his work, definitely) and watched him build up communi
ty after community. They would all be exterminated in the end, but this DaVinci...interesting character.
He’d moved on. “As do we,” Bruce whispered into his dog’s ear.
Macendale came over the radio. “I think I’ve found a mine entrance. This might be the dreamer community we heard about from our infiltrator.”
“Let’s go, boy!” Bruce called, slapping the dog’s haunches and pulling out his guns.
***
It was a clean sweep.
The only one that really put up a fight was a large male who looked as if he was mentally disabled; slamming bots into the tunnel walls and shouting “LUCY!” until he was brought down by a pair of synths.
“WALTER” was stitched into his shirt. Bruce recorded all this and noted that there didn’t appear to be a Lucy among the dead targets.
6.
The Road
They were three hours in, cruising on a grassy freeway, when one of the crates whimpered.
Hitch looked at Ira, who looked at Cutter.
“Did we all hear that?”
“The bottom right crate.”
“West, there anything living among our rations?”
“Of course not!” West replied. Cutter got down in front of the crate and studied it. “If somebody’s in there, by God, say so right now or I’ll-”
“All right!” Came the sharp cry, followed by barking as Lucy and her puppy came through the crumbling crate wall and fell into a fetal roll on the floor of the van.
“What? What?” West was yelling. Amanda, looking back, had a half-smile as she cried “Jesus Christ Lucy, and the dog too?”
“Holy shit,” Hitch breathed. Cutter just laughed.
“Why’d you do it?” Ira shouted. Lucy put on a pout and cradled the puppy to her chest. “Why, Lucy? What were you thinking? Oh, your father’s going to be beside himself!”
“He’ll just be sleeping like always,” Lucy said. “I wanted to come.”
Amanda slipped out of her seat and came back, hugging Lucy. “Baby, this is a dangerous trip. It’s not for fun.”
“What’re we gonna do, West?” Ira yelled.
“I’m just fucking driving!” West yelled back.
“Well, stop!”
They stopped, in the middle of the freeway somewhere in Illinois or maybe Wisconsin, West couldn’t be sure with most of the signs being eaten by rust. They stopped and got out in the pleasant May weather.
“We absolutely cannot turn back,” West fumed. “There’s no way of notifying them that - dammit - why would she-”
Amanda held Lucy’s hand and walked across the freeway, looking at the sun and the sky and the plains. “It’s beautiful,” Lucy said.
“Yes it is.”
“I want to live up here.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to do,” Amanda said, kneeling to touch Lucy’s face and pet the dog.
“We don’t have supplies for an extra person. We certainly can’t accommodate the fucking dog.”
“Wait, West,” Hitch said, circling Ira who was doing his best to do nothing while Cutter stretched his limbs on the shoulder.
“Hell, we may find some supplies along the way. We could even stop to hunt, did you think of that? Was that in your plan?”
“She wasn’t in my plan!”
“Well, she is now, so we have to roll with it. C’mon Mike, I know you can improvise in a crunch.”
“Oh, it’s Mike again,” West spat. “Back to best friends?”
“I’m just trying to hold our shit together!”
“This is all my shit!” West slapped the front of the van and kicked a tumbleweed down the lane. “My plan! I made this! For us, all of us! And I don’t want it coming apart!”
“All right!” Hitch shouted. “Lucy isn’t going to be a wrench in the gears, Mike. We’ll make do. We’ll be fine. The Plan goes on.”
“I think he’s right,” Ira offered.
“Might as well just get a move on,” Cutter muttered, climbing back into the van. “Worse comes to worse we’ll eat the dog.”
“Thank God Lucy didn’t hear that,” Ira said, always a bastion of the obvious.
Hitch and West stared at each other, on that overgrown stretch of asphalt and concrete with a light western wind moving the grass.
“So are we set?” Hitch asked.
“Why do I feel like God is working against me?” West grumbled.
“You think about God?”
“All the time. If Nightmare’s out there you know our God is.”
“Then where in the hell is He?”
“I don’t know.” West was crestfallen. He leaned on the van and shook his head. “Maybe He gave up, some time ago. Or maybe it’s just up to us to work things out, but - against the gods, Hitch! Other gods! Where’s that in the old Book?”
“Guess He thought it wasn’t relevant.”
“It’s become pretty goddamn relevant. They’re muscling in on His shit and He’s not here to help us.”
“He gave us free will,” Hitch shrugged. “We do with it what we want.”
“This is being done to us!”
“Maybe we brought it on ourselves.”
“Oh. No. Have you ever heard even the suggestion that we summoned Nightmare and the Harvesters? That we wanted this to happen to us?”
“I’m not saying willingly! Jesus Christ, you’re the doctor, stop and think! I don’t know, what if our dreams became so mad and dark and chaotic that it was just the right time - we were ripe?”
“We’ll never know,” West said, throwing his arms in the air.
“People like Mandy might know.”
“You mean people who can connect with Nightmare? Would you trust anything that came from that...thing?”
Hitch could only brush back his oily hair and hold out a wet palm. “Seems to me that we’ve got the better minds. It envies us, Mike. Maybe it would tell us the truth, if it thinks it can get what it wants.”
“Well, I’m not putting Mandy’s sanity on the line to bargain for information,” West said. “I just want her to keep us appraised on Nightmare’s mood...I don’t expect this year’s Harvest just yet but it’s not a science. Can’t be predicted.”
“Chaos.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll drive for a while.”
“Really?”
“We’re staying on this freeway, why not take a load off? You and Amanda can sit in the back. Be nice to Lucy.”
“All right, all right.” West trudged over to Hitch and said, “They say the Lord works in mysterious ways. Maybe this’ll turn out to be a benefit.”
“We’re gonna be okay.”
“Let’s roll.”
***
About a half-mile back, Jack DaVinci put down a beaten-up set of binoculars and leaned back in his seat. He tried raising Gotham on the radio again. Static.
His jar of cortices was secure in the glove box. No one knew about his little friends, those seeds of inspiration that time and again had made him the best detective in North America. He swallowed a couple of pickled nodules, waited for the rush, and tried the radio again.
“Anybody read me? This is DaVinci.”
“DaVinci?”
“Yes! Who’s this?”
Static.
Son of a bitch. Jack rolled his head over his shoulders and relaxed. At least he knew they were still alive.
***
“Let’s make it a small strike team,” Bruce said to Delmar. “You, me, Cinnamon and Macendale. We’ll pick up DaVinci and come back. He knows where the other hives are. He moves from city to city. We’ll catch him on the road and then we’ll have them all.”
Bruce nuzzled his dog and looked to the sky, gray with black towers of smoke.
Nightmare, see this. Another crop you won’t reap. We are more efficient and we are always on task. You will lose. Stop now.
And...
Then...
7.
The Run
“Do you know what Moun
t Rushmore is?” West asked Lucy.
She shook her head. Still had the dog in her lap as a guard, still wary of the men around her. Hitch and Cutter were in the front, Ira and West in the back.
“It’s a mountain,” Amanda said, “Where they carved out the faces of four great Presidents of the United States. Long before the First Harvest, Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln were honored for their leadership in America.”
“America was when everyone lived outside,” Lucy said.
Amanda nodded. “We’re about ten hours away from Mount Rushmore. I think we’re going to stop there and camp for the night. But you look like you need a little nap right now.”
“We’re tired,” Lucy yawned, pulling the puppy to her chin. He’d lapped up a bit of water earlier, from Amanda’s canteen, and she supposed that was all he needed for the moment.
Up front, Cutter elbowed Hitch at the wheel. “Why’d you let her go?”
“I don’t want to get into it.”
“C’mon. Your best friend? What’re you, some kind of pussy?”
“What? Piss off Cutter.”
“I’m just askin’.” Cutter had a round, scarred chin that made his shit-eating grin all the worse. He tousled his greasy curled hair and shifted in the passenger seat. “Did you three have some sort of thing going on?”
“No.”
“Fuck, I’d share a piece as long as I could have ‘er. Haven’t gotten off in something like three years, not counting the self-help.”
“That’s great.”
“You still think about her when you jack off?”
The Harvest Cycle Page 4