City Of The Living Dead

Chapter 10

After the next day, Blade knew that he was absolutely right about the Watchers. As long as he moved no faster than a slow walk and made no other quick movements, they would ignore him as if he were no more than a buzzing insect. It would be slow and tedious exploring the whole land here behind the Wall at a snail's pace. It would have been much worse to be trapped in his room by the Watchers until Lord Leighton's computer drew him back to Home Dimension. As long as he moved slowly enough not to alert the Watchers, Blade could go anywhere he pleased. The other robots ignored him completely, no matter how he moved or what he did.

There were several kinds of unarmed work robots. There were the box-like ones that served the meals and did the cleaning. Blade called them Housemaids. There were the Mechanics-the cone-shaped ones he'd seen in the bathroom, who seemed to make all the major repairs. Finally, there were the Gardeners-Mechanics equipped with three extra-long telescoping arms that worked in the gardens spreading all around the building where Blade and Twana were staying.

The building itself was a perfect cube of the same blue-gray material as the Wall, two hundred feet on a side. From the roof Blade could get a tantalizing view of the land beyond the Wall.

The land rose gently upward for three miles toward the east, to the Wall itself. Most of the distance between the building and the Wall was heavily forested. The trees seemed to form a belt along the Wall, reaching as far as Blade could see. Around the building itself was a stretch of formal gardens, an intricate patchwork of hedges, flowerbeds, gravel paths, streams, and ornamental bridges. Miles away in either direction, Blade could see other cubical buildings, apparently identical to the one he was in.

Toward the west lay more gardens, less carefully tended. In places the grass of the lawns rose knee-high. In other places fallen trees drifted about in the ponds. Blade found only a handful of robots at work here, and those Gardeners were more battered and much slower in their movements than the work robots elsewhere.

So far away to the west that it was visible only from the top of the building lay what looked like a city. By straining his eyes at sunset, Blade could make out the dim silhouettes of high towers. Occasionally he would catch a flash of color, fleeting and mysterious like the flashes of the Watchers on the Wall.

This Dimension seemed to be piling one mystery on top of another, and being beyond the Wall only seemed to be making things worse. There were a hundred and one questions to answer, starting with: Where were the people? Blade could spend half an hour listing them.

One thing seemed reasonably certain. This was a land fast declining. There was an air of shabbiness, neglect, and decay about everything Blade could see. The work robots might be fighting a valiant rearguard action against the ravages of time and weather and plant life, but they were losing.

The best place to start looking for answers seemed to be that city to the west-if it were a city. If it weren't, he could look elsewhere. The only alternative seemed to be wandering aimlessly about in endless miles of forest and garden and perhaps running into defenses that weren't so easily fooled as the Watchers.

Now all that remained was to pick a time and a route for their escape. The Watchers seemed to ignore him no matter how much he was carrying, as long as he moved slowly. If they went on doing this, the escape should be easy.

The escape was even easier than Blade would have dared hope, thanks to the weather.

Whatever forces strengthened the Wall and raised the blindness field did nothing to fend off the weather. Blade awoke one night with a chill breeze blowing through the room from the small window that pierced the outer wall. Blade unwound himself from the sleeping Twana and went to the window. As he reached it, the darkness outside exploded in a raw, white glaze of lightning. Thunder cracked, making the whole building jump; then as the rumbling died away, Blade heard the swelling hiss of wind-driven rain. He sprang back into the room as the first cold drops whipped in through the window.

Twana sat up in the bed, drawing the blankets around her shoulders against the breeze. «Put your clothes on,» said Blade. «We're getting out of here. The storm will hide us and cover our tracks once we're out of the building.» Twana nodded without a word and leaped out of bed.

They pulled on their clothes and picked up their gear and weapons. Meanwhile, the storm outside was mounting steadily. Rain blew in through the window almost continuously, soaking the rug.

The Watcher that guarded the corridor was in its usual place, but getting past it was now routine, even for Twana. They filled their water bottles in the bathroom and continued downward. A last flight of stairs, and then a long ramp led them down to the high-vaulted entrance hall on the ground floor.

There were more robots in the hall than Blade had ever seen in one place, including a dozen Gardeners and five Watchers. He couldn't be sure whether they were on the alert for emergency work on the building or just getting in out of the storm. All he could do was move very slowly, one cautious step at a time, and keep his hands at his sides.

As stiffly as if they'd been robots themselves, Blade and Twana made their way through the crowd toward the entrance. Once Blade had to quickly sidestep a Housemaid that was about to run into him. The nearest Watcher turned its head to look at him and raised one tentacle, but didn't turn on its fan or sound the alarm. Blade stood still for a moment, the Watcher turned away, and he went on.

At last they reached the entrance. By now the wind was blowing a full gale, and the rain was hitting like blasts from a shotgun. It was as black as the inside of a coal mine, and the wind and the thunder together made a roar that would have drowned out a full-scale battle. There'd never be a better chance to get beyond reach of the robots.

Blade found his feet itching a break into a run. He held back, as a Watcher came wobbling in out of the storm, making slow headway against the wind. With one pair of arms, it was towing a Gardener that had apparently been struck by some heavy falling object. Blade waited until the two robots joined the crowd. Then he took Twana's hand and led her out into the storm.

Instantly the wind gripped them, and the rain lashed at them, driving them along like stampeding cattle. Even when they bent almost double, the pressure of the wind forced them to trot. They didn't even try moving against the wind.

Several times savage gusts almost tore Twana's hand out of Blade's grip. After the fourth gust, Blade led her into the lee of some solid trees and pulled the rope out of his pack. He tied one end of it around Twana's waist and the other around his own. Getting separated, disoriented, and totally lost in this howling darkness were real dangers.

As Blade finished tying the last knot, something fell almost at his feet with a crash like an artillery shell. It was a branch-or rather, the whole top of a tree, with half a dozen branches, each as long as a man and as thick as a man's leg.

With this sort of debris blowing about, it didn't matter how fast he and Twana moved. As long as the storm lasted, the Watchers would be seeing a hundred and one things moving fast enough to alert them. They'd hardly be able to track and examine each one of them. There simply weren't enough Watchers.

A weakness? Yes, but not against the primitive opponents the Watchers were designed to meet. Assuming any primitive opponents got this far beyond the Wall, they wouldn't be out and about tonight. They'd be cowering under cover where they could do no harm.

Richard Blade was not a primitive opponent, even for the most advanced technology.

He led Twana back out into the storm, and after that he let it blow them more or less where it would. It would be easier to make up lost ground when the storm died than try to fight it while it was blowing, and they had to get as far as they could before the robots realized they were gone.

So the storm blew them onward. It blew them across a bridge and nearly blew them into the stream under the bridge. They entered the trees again on the other side of the stream and passed down a long, narrow path. The trees on either side looked like pines and stood eighty or a hundred feet tall, but they were bending like blades of grass in the storm. The path was already littered with fallen branches, and more were crashing down every minute.

They came out of the trees onto the shore of a small lake. It was only a few acres, but the storm was whipping up respectable waves. The water was churning ankle-deep over the stepping stones they used to cross the lake. Once Twana slipped and went to her knees in the water, but Blade pulled her to her feet and half-carried her the rest of the way across.

They moved on listening to the roar of the wind and the thunder, the crackle and crash of falling trees, the hammering beat of the rain, until they were half-deaf. They were thoroughly drenched, and Blade was beginning to wonder if he were losing his sense of direction. He kept on though-it would be safer to get completely lost than to arouse the suspicion of the robots.

How long he and Twana kept going it was impossible to guess. Blade only knew that it was still pitch dark and blowing a gale when Twana began to stumble and stagger. She shook her head and mouthed the words, «I can't go on.» Blade lifted her onto his back, with her arms clamped about his neck.

His own legs were beginning to ache and stiffen when they finally reached something that could serve as shelter. It was a small stone house, open on one side. Fortunately, the open side faced away from the storm, so the interior was reasonably dry. Blade carried Twana inside and set her down in a corner. He would have liked to make a fire, but there was nothing to burn, nothing to light it with, and too much risk of being spotted by the robots.

Inside, Blade and Twana stripped, wrapped themselves in their soggy blankets, and lay down to get as much sleep as they could. Exhaustion quickly sent them off to sleep, with the storm still howling in their ears.

In the morning the storm was still blowing as hard as ever, and Twana flatly refused to face it again. Blade began to wonder if he'd have done better to leave her in the building by the Wall and do his exploring on his own. Twana could cope with the robots, and they would probably protect her from any other danger until he returned.

However, he and Twana were both committed now, and something good might come of her joining him. The more she saw with her own eyes about what lay beyond the Wall, the more she could tell her own people, and the more likely they were to believe her. Blade was sure that knowing more about what lay beyond the Wall would help the villagers. If it did nothing else, it would ease their superstitious fear of the Watchers.

By late afternoon the wind was no more than a stiff breeze, and the clouds were breaking up. Blade saw several Gardener robots pass the house, most of them carrying fallen branches in their claws. He and Twana headed straight west until darkness overtook them, seeing a good many more Gardeners, but only one Watcher. They passed it slowly, and it ignored them as if they were only leaves blown on the wind. There didn't seem to be any hunt on for them yet.

They slept that night on the driest patch of ground they could find, deep inside a pine grove. When morning came, Blade scrambled up to the top of the tallest tree he could find and took his bearings. They'd come far enough so that in the pale morning light he could make out hints of the distant city from this lower perch. It looked as if they still had a long walk ahead of them, so the sooner they got started, the better.

They had to walk all that day and most of the next. Every hour or so Blade climbed a tree to check direction. The city was always there, though for a long time it seemed to be getting no closer. At times during the first day, Blade almost suspected the city was a phantom, receding into the distance, as he and Twana advanced toward where they thought it was.

Toward evening he could see the sunset light flashing from dozens of ranked metal towers. The city was there. What surprised him was realizing its size. It must be a good ten of fifteen miles wide, and many of those towers had to be at least a mile high. Blade was tempted to push on through the darkness but decided against it. What lay around him was no longer any sort of garden, but rank wilderness that might hold all sorts of surprises.

This area might have been a garden once. Twice Blade saw heavily overgrown patches of tumbled stone, once the remains of a bridge. But here the neglect that was overtaking the land closer to the Wall had gone totally unchecked for many years. Even the robots seemed to shun this land. Blade hadn't seen one all afternoon.

They pushed on at dawn the next day. For the first few hours they faced a tangle of vegetation that would have done justice to a tropical jungle. Blade would gladly have traded one of their swords for a machete.

Then abruptly they came out into open country, rolling away toward the city that was now clearly visible from the ground for the first time. Somehow, in spite of its size and the hundred or more shimmering towers, the city looked sterile and asleep, even dead. It seemed to radiate a vast, overpowering silence that spread across the country and swallowed up even the sigh of the wind and the crunch of Blade's and Twana's footsteps through the brittle grass.

Blade wondered for a moment if he'd taken off on a wild-goose chase after a dead city. Still, there was no point in calling the city a corpse until he'd at least tried to take its pulse! He lengthened his stride.

They covered the last miles to the city in a couple of hours. As they drew closer, Blade saw the city had its own wall. It was the same height as the Wall outside, but this one was studded with featureless cylindrical towers about every hundred yards. Towers and wall both seemed to be made of something that looked like frosted, white glass. There was no shimmering in the air over his wall and no glint of metal from prowling Watchers. This wall looked as dead as the city behind it.

The wall stood unbroken as far as Blade could see, but once more the storm had been his friend. A good many trees grew along the wall, and one of them had fallen against it. Branches large enough to support a man jutted almost up to the top of the wall. Blade and Twana headed toward the tree.

Blade dropped his pack and other gear and scrambled up the tree. Some of the branches sagged under his weight, but all of them held. In a few minutes he crawled out onto the top of the city wall. On hands and knees he crept toward the inner side of the wall, half-expecting to stick his head into yet another weird energy field.

Instead, he found himself staring down at the ground. The city wall was barely ten feet thick. At the foot of the wall was a belt of what looked like faded green concrete. Beyond it was another stretch of ragged garden. Two miles away the buildings of the city began, mounting up like a mountain range, from five-story foothills to the crowning peaks of the mile-high towers. Nothing moved except the grass, where it was long enough to ripple in the wind.

Blade sighed. It looked as if he had come all this way to reach a dead city.

He crawled back across the wall, threw one end of the rope down, and saw Twana tie his gear and weapons to it. He pulled them up, put on his sword belt, then threw the rope down again. A moment later Twana was standing beside him.

In the moment after that, the city came horribly alive. The nearest tower, fifty yards away, sprouted lean, red-clad figures with gleaming blue rifles in their hands. «Get down!» Blade shouted, grabbing Twana's belt as he dropped flat.

He was seconds too slow. One of the figures raised his rifle, sighted, and fired. Air crackled and blurred, and a halo of white danced around Twana's head. She gave a choked cry and threw her arms out wildly to keep her balance. She took a drunken, reeling step; then one flailing foot came down on the empty air inside the wall. She vanished with a scream that ended in a crunch as she struck the ground fifty feet below.

Then there was silence-except for the sharp hiss of Blade's indrawn breath as he stood up and the softer hiss of steel as he drew his sword.