Ghost Book One: The Earth Transformed

by Mike Stackpole, Nathan Long

  We saw nothing.

  Angie whistled as we hurried past the stove tops and dish sink. “Back at Ranger Center, even the infirmary isn’t this clean.”

  “It’s not the clean that unnerves me,” I said. “There’s no dust. That means the cleaning has been recent, but the staff has been gone for a while. Who did this cleaning?”

  “Elves?” suggested Ace. “Pixies?”

  We pushed into another hall and heard the chatter of an SMG coming from a stairwell in the far wall. The sound was raw and unmuffled. There were no more doors between us and the action. Whatever was happening was right at the bottom of those stairs.

  “Come on,” I said, and pushed ahead, ready to charge down with guns blazing.

  Angie caught me by my backpack and hauled me back.

  “Not this time, ghost boy.” She stepped ahead of me and started down at a more measured pace. “You’ve already gone off half–cocked once today. This time you’re gonna follow my lead.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  I followed her down with Ace at my heels and Kate a flight back, and I gotta say, I was actually relieved. Now that I had a second to think about it, charging down into a firefight without taking a look–see first seemed like the stupidest idea in the world, but I’d been ready to jump in with both feet — just like back at the Black Market, just like at White Mesa. What the hell? What was going on with my brain?

  At the bottom of the stairs a haze of gun smoke drifted through an open door and we could hear strange grinding noises and stranger voices coming from the room beyond. They were tinny, mechanical voices, like the kind of thing you’d occasionally hear on salvaged pre–war answering machines.

  “Employees are not to interfere with custodial staff in the performance of their duties. Any employee who interferes with custodial staff in the performance of their duties will be removed from the premises.”

  We crept down to the bottom and peeked through, Kate hovering behind us, half way down the last flight of steps. Right inside the door was a small room that looked like some kind of security checkpoint, barred doors on either end and a window on one side made out of inch–thick bulletproof glass. Both the security doors were jammed open, however, and we could see through them to a larger room that seemed to be filled with old–fashioned barred jail cells. There was also something moving in there, but the smoke was so thick we couldn’t tell what it was.

  At least there was no gunfire anymore, just the strange grinding noise, the weird voice, and underneath both of those the soft sobbing of terrified people.

  Angie ran back up to the first landing and grabbed her walkie. “Vargas. You still alive in there? Whatta we got?”

  “Angie!” Vargas’s voice sounded rough and tired. “Good to hear you. We’re still alive. Holed up in an old guard room with robots out in the cell block, pinning us down. We can’t get out and they can’t get in. If you’re in the stairwell you’ll get the jump on ‘em easy, but be careful. Got friendlies in the cells. We were breakin’ ‘em out when the cleaning crew showed up.”

  “Armed?”

  “Oh yeah.” Vargas laughed through the radio. “Mops, brooms and machine guns. They’re ready to blast those dust bunnies back to the stone age.”

  “Alright,” said Angie. “Hang tight.”

  She came back down the stairs and pointed straight at me. “Okay, Kami–Crazy. You wanna go hog wild again, then listen up. Somebody’s gotta go in there and tell those friendlies to lay flat on the ground, if they aren’t already. Of course as soon as you start shouting, those pepper–pots on wheels are gonna come for you like a tin–can stampede.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I’m not feeling this plan.”

  “It’ll be fine — I hope. When they swing around toward you, we’ve got ‘em flanked. We’ll gun ‘em down before they can get a bead on you, see?”

  I gave her a cold look. “I see you’ve decided who you want to spend the rest of your life with. And it ain’t gonna be the guy with all the bullets in him.”

  She hung her head, embarrassed. “Sorry, but you been playin’ it so balls–out lately, I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  I was hurt, I’ll admit that. When your former lover all but comes out and tells you you’re expendable, it kinda stings a little. But she was right too. When I went looking for the cold dread that should have been turning my insides into knotted ice snakes at the prospect of being robot fodder, it wasn’t there. I wasn’t happy about going into that room and shouting “Olly olly oxen free,” but I wasn’t scared either. I didn’t really feel anything at all.

  I took off my pack and checked my pistol. Full clip and one in the chamber. Ready as I’d ever be.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I better get one hell of a retirement party.”

  She squeezed my hand. It almost made me have second thoughts, but then I took a deep breath and edged through the door into the checkpoint cage. The bulletproof window looked through into a closet with a chair and a door–buzzer. The far door opened into the smoke–choked cell block and I started to understand the layout a little better. It was laid out more like a kennel than a jail, a grid with two clusters of free–standing cells on either side of a central corridor, and more cells surrounding the clusters.

  I dropped into a squat and found I could see further into the smoke closer to the ground. Straight ahead of me, at the far end of the cell block, were the bottom halves of three robots. They were outside an open door, tooling around on tank treads, and Vargas had not been lying. The mechanical arms sprouting from their torsos were rigged with mops, brooms and cleaning brushes, but higher up, where the smoke partially hid them, I saw more ominous silhouettes swinging about. And between me and them, huddling in the cages, I saw the friendlies.

  They were all dressed in service overalls and hospital scrubs that had the word DARWIN printed in large black letters on the back, and they looked tired, terrified, hungry, and most of all sick as irradiated dogs. They were also all sitting on the floor to keep their heads below the smoke, but that wasn’t quite low enough for what was coming.

  I slipped through the second security door and then ducked into the left–hand corridor, which ran around all four sides of the cages on the left. I held my breath but heard nothing from the robots. They were still milling around the guardroom door, trying to get an angle on the rangers inside. I hadn’t gone completely unnoticed, however. I could see the folks inside the cells looking up and staring at me.

  I shushed them with a finger to my lips and kept crawling around the cages on my hands and knees until I was at the left–forward corner of the corridor.

  Showtime.

  I took out my pistol, sucked in a deep breath of the smoke–free air near the floor, then stood up and raised my voice.

  “Prisoners in the cages! Listen up! We are here to rescue you! Lie flat on the floor and don’t get up until we give the all clear! I repeat! Lie flat on—!”

  I didn’t have time to repeat. With a whirring of servos and a rumble of treads, the cleaning crew came to investigate my noise. And they didn’t wait to see the whites of my eyes. They were already firing as they came around the cages — a barrage of bullets and sizzling beams of light all blasting my way.

  “Unauthorized personnel will be removed from the premises. Cleanliness must be maintained.”

  I dove right, not even bothering to fire back, and landed on the floor with a hot pain searing my left forearm. There was blood and the smell of burning hair. That was no gun! It was some kind of laser!

  As I rolled to my feet I saw that the people in the cells had followed my orders. They were hugging the ground like it was a lover.

  Now I fired, through the bars and high over the heads of the prisoners. “Come on, you metal maids! Come get me.”

  They came, and I had to hit the floor again as lasers and bullets ricocheted off the bars all around me. Then the firing wasn’t just coming from the robots. From behind them and beside
them came the howls of the rangers and the clatter of their guns. Angie and Ace were flanking them from the stairwell while Vargas and his crew unloaded on them from the safety of the guardroom door.

  The robots squawked and ground their gears as they tried to turn toward these threats, but there was too much lead coming their way.

  “All employees are… unauthorized personnel… From the premises. Cleanliness will… be removed. Interfere… with custodial staff in the… must be maintained. Any employee who… must be maintained… must be maintained… must be maintained… must be—”

  When the last shot echoed away I heard Angie calling from somewhere in the smoke. “Are they all dead?”

  Vargas answered her. “All dead.”

  “Any casualties from the prisoners? Ghost, you okay?”

  “I’m gonna have a new scar,” I called back.

  “I… I think Cindy is hurt,” said a voice I didn’t know.

  “Damnit,” Vargas raised his voice. “Thrasher, where are those keys? Come on, move it.”

  By the time Thrasher had found the keys and we’d opened all the cells, the smoke had cleared enough that we could see our friends, the folks we had saved — and what we had killed.

  Vargas, Thrasher and Hell Razor were bruised and bloodied from head to toe, and Hell Razor had a laser burn to match mine across his left thigh. Athalia on the other hand was as clean and untouched as she always seemed to be. She gave me a little nod of greeting as she entered a cell to help the occupants. I gave her a smirk and a salute.

  Survivors again. Woo.

  The three robots were as big and clunky as their treads had indicated — vaguely humanoid torsos with gun and mop and broom arms sticking out all over the place and cyclopic pinheads, each with a laser gun for an eye. Their metal skins were covered in an acne of bullet holes, and they were leaking fluids all over the floors they had worked so tirelessly to keep clean.

  The people in the cages looked worse up close than they had from a distance. About half of them were too sick to stand. We had to carry them out. One guy my height felt like he weighed about eighty pounds, and looked it too. His cheekbones were poking through his skin like knife blades. Some of them had died before we got there, rolled into corners and covered with blankets by their friends.

  Two of them had taken wounds — not bullets, but concrete shrapnel from where the robots had shot up the walls over their heads — and as Kate was patching them up, Metal and Mad Dog poked their heads in and stared around wide–eyed.

  “Whoa,” said Metal.

  Mad Dog agreed with him. “Seriously.”

  One of the former prisoners sat up, a woman who might have been a looker once, before she’d lost half her hair and wasted away to seventy pounds. “Maniac. Mad Dog.” Her voice was a ragged whisper. “You’re… safe. I thought he… might’ve got you too.”

  I put two and two together as the two men crossed to her, and guessed the guy she called Maniac must be the guy I’d been calling Metal. So… Metal Maniac. Sure. Seemed to fit him.

  “Liz!” Metal knelt beside her as Mad Dog stared. “What the hell happened to you? We thought you’d died in the leak.”

  “There was no leak,” breathed Liz. “At least not an… accidental one. Finster did it… deliberately.”

  “What?” asked Mad Dog. “But he told us to stay away. Every day on the PA. “Don’t come near the facility!”“

  “I know.” Liz nodded. “We heard him too. But he’s been… experimenting on us in the next room. Exposing us to rads, then… cutting us open.”

  “But why?” Metal was in tears. “Why?”

  Liz shook her head. “He’s crazy, Maniac. Who knows why?”

  I joined them. “Are there any other prisoners anywhere? Is there anybody else we need to rescue?”

  Liz looked around, then stared at me. “You again.”

  I frowned. I’d never seen her before in my life. “Uh, what about me?”

  “You were here before. A few days ago. You and your… twin brother promised us you were going to get us out of here. I… I thought you’d died, or given up or something, but you… did it. Thank you.”

  I blinked. “My… twin brother?”

  “Yes. Is he okay? Did he come back with you? He looked pretty hurt last time.”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out and before I could try again Vargas came and stood by Metal and Mad Dog. “Hey listen, can we leave it to you two to get these people out of here and dose them with the Prussian Blue? We’re gonna keep looking for Finster and the sec pass.”

  “We got it,” said Mad Dog.

  Metal pulled Liz gently up into his big arms. “You find him, you bring him out to us. We wanna give him what he deserves.”

  Vargas shrugged. “If we can, we will. But if it gets messy? Well, no guarantees.”

  The two men nodded, then got to work.

  ***

  The room beyond the cell block was a lab as spotless and bright as the rest of the facility. Everything shined, the dissection tables with their channels for blood drainage shined, the trays full of knives and saws and retractors and other implements I had no idea about shined, and the wall at the end of the room that had a four–by–three grid of square steel doors set into it shined.

  Me, Kate, Athalia, Ace, and the rangers moved through the room like hungry coyotes, looting the scalpels and other things that could be used as weapons and ransacking closets and drawers full of bandages, splints, trauma packs, and antiseptic creams. Kate was practically giddy at the sight of it all. I stuffed my pack.

  “Hey.”

  We all turned. Thrasher was looking at a cluster of photos on the wall by the far door. Had he spoken? I’d never heard him speak before. He must have, because he tapped on a photo and waved us over.

  Athalia was busy looking into the ranks of the square steel doors on the end wall, but the rest of us gathered around the big man. He pointed to one of the photos. It was a framed pre–war pic of a bunch of people in white lab coats standing outside the facility, smiling and squinting in the bright sunshine another guy in a lab coat shook hands with a fat man in a military uniform in front of them.

  Hell Razor scowled. “Scientists. So?”

  Thrasher tapped the glass again. Beneath it was a strip of paper with typed words on it, fixed to the photo with yellowing tape. “Read that.”

  Who knew he could read? Hidden depths.

  Angie leaned in. “General Wade Huntsinger congratulates Dr. Irwin John Finster on his appointment as project director of the DOD’s newest research facility, Project Darwin, which will study biological solutions to various hypothetical national security scenarios.”

  Ace grunted. Vargas frowned.

  “Can’t be the same guy, can it?”

  I laughed. “From back before the bombs fell? Not a chance. He’d be what? A hundred and fifty years old? He’d be the oldest man in the world.”

  “Maybe our guy is his son,” said Kate. “He could be Irwin John Finster Junior. Or the third, even.”

  “Could be,” said Vargas. “Though none of the townies mentioned anything like that.”

  “Might be a clone,” I said.

  Angie shot me a look, then cleared her throat. “Well, we’ll ask him when we find him. I’ve got a list of questions for that son–of–a–bitch, as a matter of—”

  “Ghost.” Athalia was looking up from one of the open steel doors in the back wall. “You better look at this. I found something else.”

  She stepped back as I approached. Apparently the steel doors were connected to some kind of refrigeration unit, because a cold mist drifted out from the open one. Inside the door was a long metal tray on rollers, and on the tray lay a big rubberized bag with a zipper down the front. Athalia had unzipped the bag half–way and pulled it open.

  There was a body inside, pretty cut up — like there had been an autopsy or maybe more experiments — and at first I didn’t recogniz
e it. Then I noticed the missing finger and the scar on the forehead. The body had other scars — beyond the incisions made during its recent dissection — that kindled a few ancient memories in my head.

  “Hello, ‘twin brother,’“ I said.

  – Chapter Seven –

  Angie sobbed, and I looked around to see that the others had followed me.

  Ace put a hand on Angie’s shoulder to comfort her, but she squirmed out from under, still sobbing, still looking at the old, dead me. “I… I’m sorry. I guess I was still hoping that you were… That he was still….”

  I nodded. I knew just how she felt. “I guess I was too.”

  Yeah, I should have known. I did know, basically, but there’s still a difference between being pretty damn sure somebody’s dead and seeing their corpse with your own eyes. I was dead. The original “I” — the guy I was trying so desperately to remember how to be.

  I zipped the zipper all the way down and peeled back the bag to take a better look at my corpse. It turned my stomach. The only fatal wounds on my body had been made with a scalpel, and the bruising at my ankles and wrists suggested that those wounds had been made while I was alive and conscious.

  “Looks like you fought like hell,” said Vargas.

  “Yeah.”

  Kate, who’d never been brought up to speed on my history, looked confused. “So, this isn’t your twin brother?”

  I shook my head. “I cloned myself at Sleeper One. Twice, I think.”

  Athalia crossed her arms. “The part I don’t understand is how you — I mean he — are — uh, is — here. How did one of your bodies end up here, and the other in Sleeper One?”

  “I think I’ve got that figured out.” I turned to face them. “I think I’m doing this all over again, like the world’s worst case of déjà–vu.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Angie.