“Mira, cover your mouth and nose. Poison in the air,” I shouted, giving up any hint of stealth for the sake of warning her. Whatever the virus had done to lizards, this was a new and terrible version. Sleek, dark, and streaked with yellow scales, the creature turned nearly double to snap at my legs with its coffin jaws, the teeth a forest of ivory decorated with shreds of earlier meals. In my augmented sight, the creature seemed to pulse with malignant life, its midsection heaving as it drove itself forward on thick legs.
In my night vision, the monster’s eyes were glittering ovals, both fixed and moving with me as the head stayed low, tongue flicking out to catch the steady stream of blood from where my blades landed. I did some dirty math in my head, deciding that the creature massed a ton or more. I might tire in this fight, but the lizard would gas faster because nothing escapes gravity.
Not even a futuristic dragon.
We circled each other for a quarter turn, both deciding what the next move would be in our fatal discussion. I dodged left as the jaws closed, a sure indication that it was about to charge. Swinging hard as I passed, the creature surprised me, ducking its head almost flat in a move that was nimble well beyond my expectations. My blade caught in the bony ridges above its neck, shearing through the knobs with an orange spark and jerking my arm back from the hard resistance.
Again, the jaws opened and closed in a snap, missing me by inches as I followed the counter turn to land between the left legs, snugged up against the monster’s heaving side. It was oddly warm, cooking with effort in the cooling night air as we fought, but before I could reverse my blades and drive them home, the jaws came whirling around again with snake-like elegance. I opted for a hard punch in the softest part of the side, just below the bellowing ribs.
My reward was a crunching blow to the shoulder from the creature’s thick skull, slamming me into the air like a ragdoll.
Fast. Getting faster, too, I thought. The bastard had been sandbagging me, easing into the fight after its first rush didn’t take me down. The plan meant this wasn’t some mindless lizard with a growling gut. It was an alpha predator used to hunting things nearly as dangerous as me, and I adjusted my tactics on the fly. If it was smart, I would fight smarter.
I would also be more brutal.
I had to end the stomping, crashing fight because the noise levels were growing beyond anything that could remotely be called stealthy. Taking to my feet, I turned to meet the lizard, its body held low as it charged again, head coursing back and forth slightly as the tongue and chin gathered data on where I was and what I was doing. It was more than a sight hunter, and less than a shark, falling somewhere the two styles of killer.
With a ton of angry lizard surging forward, I dodged again, this time to the right, but turning my shoulder inward as one blade went high and the other forward like a question tongue of metal. The direct blade hit first, piercing the thick hide and opening a wound longer than my forearm that ran from the creature’s ear covering to the bulging shoulder muscle. In my ‘bots starlight sight, the blood looked like green lava, spattering wild as the lizard shied away, bringing its tail around to club me in a defensive move that was too fast for the normal eye to see. The tail whistled past my head as I rolled, slashing backward at the massive foot with my right hand. I was rewarded with a pair of talons—toes attached—flying into the night sky, blood spitting from the wounded leg as the lizard rounded again, clearly not done with the fight.
The jaws stayed closed as it barreled into me, knocking me straight back in a classic bull rush. I skidded, raised my blades, and drove them up like steel pistons into the lizard’s cavernous mouth as it began to lower toward my head for the killing blow. There was a wheezing squeal as the monster closed its jaws on my forearms just hard enough to punch teeth into my skin, my hands slimy with wretched saliva and buried in the throat well past my elbows.
The jaws twitched once as my blade tips found the brain, driving the teeth deeper into my arms, and it died, the light in its eyes fading as it went from alpha predator to world’s largest collection of shoe leather in a dying moment.
“Mira,” I gasped, my arms held tight in the thing’s mouth. “Little help here.”
She was already prying at the jaws, having jumped down to sink her own knife into the crown of the skull, making sure of the kill. “Fucking stinks. What is that?”
“Saliva. Rot in the teeth. It’s—ah, thanks,” I said as she levered the jaws open enough for me to extract the teeth from my arms. I hissed in pain, not only at the sensation of animal teeth in my body, but at the stinging wounds left behind. “I wondered how good my ‘bots are at fighting infection. I’m about to find out.”
Mira began swabbing my wounds with bandages from her pack. “If these run hot, we might have to score them.”
“We’ll see. There’s a medical suite in the facility, but in the meantime we’ve gotta move. Help me up,” I said.
“What about this thing?” Mira asked, thumping a boot into the corpse. “Be a shame to waste all that hide.”
“Maybe later. We’re on the clock and no time for trophies. Help me sling the guns,” I said. She looked at me with concern, but shrugged and complied, lifting the heavy weapons across my back where they dangled, clanking together softly as I adjusted them. “Not bad.”
“Can you even walk, Jack?”
“I can. Let my ‘bots go to work, and let’s see what happens. What’s the next site?” I asked.
“Long walk, but smooth. Up and around, where the sand slides down onto another small ravine. The last two sites are only fifty meters apart, guarding a ridge and a depression. That way,” Mira pointed into the night, waiting for me to lead.
I took a step, and then another, establishing my legs and finding that the bites were painful but not bad enough to make me stop. In seconds, the blood flow vanished, replaced by a deep ache and tightening of my skin around the wounds. My ‘bots were busy.
It was an easy ten-minute walk turned into a hard twenty by the darkness and my slow pace, but soon enough, the platform loomed over us in a patch of disturbed earth. “They really put these in the right places,” I said, lowering the guns with a sigh of relief. My body was heating up as things happened around the rows of puncture wounds, now closing but weeping clear fluid that dripped to the ground in a steady patter. I felt a burning thirst and pulled hard at my waterskin, nearly emptying the entire bag in four long swallows.
“Easy, Jack.” Mira put a hesitant hand to my forehead, wavering as it searched for the right place to land. Unlike me, she was operating by starlight, and despite her excellent vision, the night stole her confidence.
“I’m okay. Seriously. You’re going to have to hand the gun up to me, though,” I said, looking up at the darkened platform.
“Okay. Climb, don’t jump,” she said.
“Wasn’t dreaming of it.” I pulled myself up onto the platform, arms shrieking in pain as the bite wounds opened back up, spattering my face with blood. “Fuck, but that stings,” I hissed through gritted teeth. A shaky minute later, I was on the platform, gassed but whole, if lighter by an ounce or two of blood.
“Coming up,” Mira said, lifting the gun case toward me. I took it in my leaden arms, leaning back as a counterbalance, then slid the unit over the platform lip with a muffled curse.
“Got it.” I fumbled at the fittings, my fingers betraying me as every nerve in my arms howled in protest. Whatever my ‘bots were doing, they were taking their sweet fucking time about it. Despite the lizard’s teeth being sharp, the wounds hurt like hell. Not just because of the cuts, but the pressure wounds, too. I took a long breath to clear my vision, clicking the cable port together as the gun’s blue light snapped to life with a welcome glow.
“Can you get down?” Mira asked, her face a pale oval in my vision.
“Slowly, but yeah. I can,” I replied, sliding over the side like a sack of meat. When my boots touched earth, I faltered, caught only by Mira’s strong grip as she steadied me
, then urged me to sit. I sat.
“Venom?” she asked in to the night.
“I don’t think so. The teeth and mouth were a shitshow of bacteria, like a Komodo dragon. Same kind of creature, might be the same effects. We’ll see if the ‘bots work or not in the next few minutes,” I said.
“Komodo dragon? From your time?” she asked.
“They were meaner than hell but lived around the world. Island creature that hunted deer and used their cesspool mouths as a weapon. Not really common, but the virus must have created their analog here in The Empty. That thing fills a need, even if I can’t see what the purpose is right now,” I said. Thinking of the scorps and rats, I grinned. “Scratch that. This thing was doing a job no one else wanted. Pest control. I’m sure the ecology is still working out the kinks when it comes to what variant of animals are going to thrive.”
“And which ones will be dinner,” Mira concluded.
“Right. Any chance you’ll sit still, or are you going to insist on moving forward despite leaking out of a few dozen holes?” she asked.
“Believe it or not, I think they’re closing. Not fast, but the sting in my arms is different. Feels like I’m being stitched by a slow, patient needle that doesn’t give a fuck about my pain tolerance,” I told her.
“You know, that kind of thing makes me want to avoid ever having ‘bots in my body, no matter how tough they make me,” Mira said with a casual wave.
I twitched, then sat up. Turning to stare at her in the darkness, I could feel my breath catch and it wasn’t from the pain. Slowly, I asked her the first question that would set our world on a different path. “Have you thought about being injected with nanobots?”
“Sure, ever since you lopped Hardhead’s top off. You don’t know it, but you move like—well, it’s not entirely human. I’ve watched you in these fights, and thought about what would have happened if I’d had ‘bots in my blood. You know, before—” She hesitated, then a silence fell between us.
“Before Bel died?” I asked.
It was a long moment before she spoke, and her eyes were bright, even in the darkness. “I could have saved her. She could have saved herself.”
I reached up and pulled her down to sit next to me, shoulder to shoulder as we looked out over the dark, windswept Empty. “I didn’t even know how my ‘bots worked then. Hell, I still don’t know, but that’s where Andi fits in the picture. Do you see?”
“I think? I mean, I know all of this place is—is what she was meant to do, but how can she help us survive, when all we do is find more things like that lizard? More teeth, more claws. Every day. Something else that wants to drag us under the sand. Like Bel,” she said. Her voice was flat; hopeless.
“Nanobots won’t bring Bel out of the beyond, Mira. I’d give anything for that, you have to believe me. If Andi thinks you can survive with ‘bots, then you’ll have them. Everyone in the Free Oasis will have them if there’s a source. I won’t let the people I care about go down in this shithole. I failed your sister because I was too new to this. I won’t fail you. I won’t fail Silk, or Derin, or Scoot, or even Andi. I won’t because I can’t, not if I want to fulfill my purpose. I was Jack Bowman before I went in that tube, but I came out of it with the tools to do something about this world. I’ll do exactly that. Do you believe me?”
Her answer was a soft lean into my shoulder. Her hair smelled like the desert, and I could feel her smile, even if there were tears spangled on her cheeks. “I believe you,” she said.
“We get through the next days, and then we build a plan that includes finding and using every scrap of technology that’s still working. And then, with Andi’s help, we do the one thing that will secure our future,” I told her.
“Which is?” she asked, looking directly at me, even though the night was deep and my face a mere blur.
“We don’t scavenge. We rebuild. All of it. The means, the places, and then we push on with science and work and sweat, and when the Free Oasis is stable, we build another city,” I said.
“And another after that?” she asked.
“Damned right. We push out from The Empty until our shoulders brush the ocean. I swear it, Mira. I won’t live in a husk of my world, not when I can do something about it,” I said.
“Good enough for me.” She kissed me lightly, the desert wind lifting an errant lock of hair to spiral in the breeze. In my vision, it looked like a halo, shifting as she moved. “But first, you have to get off your ass.” Her smile was bright, even with only the stars to light it.
14
We took the steps slowly, unsure of what waited at the second level, but silence greeted us—at first.
Standing there recovering my balance, I heard voices down the corridor; soft, female, calm. “They’re here, and they’re okay. Don’t call out.” My strength faded in and out, but water seemed to help. The wounds were closed, if far from completely healed. I tried to ignore whatever was happening in my body, if only to let myself rest.
Silk leaned out into the hallway, her eyes rounding at our staggering approach. “What happened?” She waved into the room, Andi popping out a second later, her hands filled with a gooseneck tool I didn’t recognize.
“The king of the jungle, that’s what happened,” Mira said. “Lizard. Big one.”
“Very big,” I added. “Think Komodo dragon on steroids. Maybe a ton or more, like nothing I’ve ever seen. Got to be a product of the virus. Bit me once, but the wounds are closing. I lost a lot of blood and—whatever happened after my ‘bots kicked in.”
The Komodo reference clicked with Andi, who knew of the animal. She turned my arms over, peering at the lines of cuts with a frown. “How long ago?” she asked.
“Twenty minutes?” I guessed.
Andi’s frown deepened. “Those cuts should be fully closed. You’ve lost too much blood, and along the way, ‘bots. They’re self-replicating, but only to a point. You need to have your tank topped off.”
“Later. We need to get ready to greet Rowan,” I said.
“We might be able to do both. While you were out, we got one of the drones ready to fly. It’s on platform, and I have a tablet slaved to the main displays downstairs. There’s a control center, but we don’t need it for a single drone that’s flying lazy eights. If we do anything more complex, we’ll need access to it,” Andi said.
“What floor?” I asked.
“Level 4. Only thing beneath it is the subbasement where we ran the special ordinance. We need every floor in here, but we can survive for now with control of this level and some of floor two. Three and four are command, more supply, and storage. The floors are mixed in case of compromise, and there’s a second small armory on four, at the close end right near the stairwell. As to the basement, it’s an absolute wonderland of destruction. I should know, I put it together,” Andi said, her voice ringing with pride.
“What kind of surprises down there?” I asked. My curiosity was well past casual.
“Refractive body armor. Ground based radar units. More small arms, but the stars of the show are the Vampires,” Andi said.
“Rocket system?” I asked, unfamiliar with the term.
“Sort of. If you consider a single person flexible wing with modular guns to be a rocket. They launch from any height over ten meters and have a six hour flight time. The guns are dart-based, modular, and the wing is ‘bot enhanced. It can repair itself in flight, as long as the damage isn’t catastrophic, and the entire system is run from a headsup helmet linked by wireless. It weighs less than 300 pounds, and it can hit speeds of 100 knots. You can flare and land on a square meter of ground, and the wing acts as a parachute in the event of system failure,” Andi said.
“Holy shit. We have air capability?” I said, stunned. The Vampires changed everything. “Why Vampires? What’s the name mean?”
“Special dart packages that can not only kill, but link into enemy data cables and siphon off realtime intel. They don’t just kill. They sabotage, they corrupt data
, and they drain off any and all secrets you could ever want. As to the use of that now, I don’t know, but the guns still work, and shooting from a height would be nothing short of magic,” Andi said.
“Rowan and his people have long guns. What’s the operational ceiling for the Vampires?” I asked.
“And how low can they fly?” Silk asked. When I raised my brows at her question, she was quick to answer.
“Flying is great for war. Flying low would be invaluable for peace,” Silk said. She was right. The applications of the Vampire for mapping, trail breaking, and general security were limitless.
Andi thought for a second, then waggled her hand in a gesture of uncertainty. “Without much wind? Twenty meters. I wouldn’t go lower because of the weight.”
“Downdrafts?” I asked.
“Among other things. A column of cool air could put you in the ground. Better to stay above fifty meters, if only to buy some time for the ‘chute function to deploy,” Andi said.
I felt my jaw tighten as the value of the facility became even clearer. “We have to protect this place. Between the reactors and the Vampires, there’s enough material here to modernize the Free Oasis overnight.”
“We will,” Mira said, squeezing my shoulder lightly.
“I know. I hate the idea of thinning humans in such a starved time. It isn’t like there are people to spare,” I said.
“We don’t need bad people,” Silk said flatly. She was right.
“You said I needed my tank to be refilled. I have questions about that,” I told Andi, sliding up to the wall to my feet. I was steadier, if sore and a touch dizzy.
“We can discuss it once the Condor is up. I’m going to launch and get it circling before we waste any more time,” Andi said.
“Do we need to—” I began, but Andi’s fingers moved over the tablet in a series of rote motions.
“It’s up. We go live camera in three . . . two—live. Here’s our view,” Andi said, turning the tablet to face me. The view was a blend of greens and black, tinged with the occasional blue. “It’s enhanced, but fairly true. Condor is at 200 meters and climbing.”
Future Rebuilt: A Post-Apocalyptic Harem (Future Reborn Book 2) Page 13