Ghost Book Two: The Death Machines

– Chapter Six –

I stared at her.

“Athalia. What the fuck?”

“I tried to get you not to come here. I guess you’re just too stupid to take a hint!”

“I don’t… wait. Does this mean you’re not a Servant of the Mushroom Cloud?”

Athalia rolled her eyes. “Tsk, I was wrong. He’s a genius!”

I didn’t feel very smart, and I bet I didn’t look very smart either, standing there with my mouth hanging open as my brain replayed all our time together, looking for clues to this crazy betrayal. I still couldn’t see it.

“But… but you helped me — you helped us — the whole way.”

“Of course I did,” said Athalia. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend, is he not? The Base Cochise AI determined that the greatest threat to its existence was Finster and his mutant monsters. You and the rangers were going there, so I joined you and helped destroy him.”

A memory jumped out at me, stark and brutal. Athalia putting her pistol to Finster’s heart and pulling the trigger three times. “You killed Finster. You were the assassin he was talking about.”

“I had to make sure it was done,” she said. “Rangers can sometimes be confusingly merciful.”

I fast forwarded to another memory. “But… but what about the armor from Sleeper One. Why would you help us get that?”

“What better way to bring it to Cochise than have you wear it there? But you wouldn’t go to Cochise! You just had to come here! I… I held on ‘til the last second, praying you’d give up when you saw what you were up against, but you’re all so damn stubborn!”

“So you were urging us to go directly to Base Cochise so the robots would kill us and take the armor? Is that it?”

“Not you!” Athalia cried. “You would have been spared. You would have come with me!”

She stepped between me and the door, then reached out a hand. “Listen, Ghost, it can still happen. You can still come away with me. We can still be together. I’ll show you a place to hide until this is over, then we’ll forget it ever happened, alright? We’ll make a life for ourselves in the new future.”

I frowned. “And what would that life be like, exactly? I thought the Base Cochise AI wanted to wipe out all human life.”

“In the new future, man and machine will be one, a perfected being with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither. We of the Guardians of the Old Order will be perfected beings, exalted, as will all the chosen — and you and I will be chosen, I promise you. Only those who do not join us will be left behind.”

“And, uh, by “left behind” you mean they’ll be killed.”

“Why should you care what happens to them?” Athalia asked. “You’re not like them. You’ve moved beyond them.”

I stared at her, not sure what to say.

She sobbed. “I don’t understand you, Ghost. Why should you give them any loyalty? You see how they treat you. You’re not human to them. You’re not even real. As far as they’re concerned, you’re just a cheap copy of some other guy. They’re ready to sacrifice you for the least little thing. I love you for you, Ghost. You’re like me, unnatural and uncanny, but still capable of love. And I want to be with you — forever.”

It was a pretty convincing speech, I had to admit. She was right about the others. They’d made it pretty clear I wasn’t one of them and never would be, and I’d always be in the shadow of the guy who’d come before me. I was pretty sure she wasn’t lying about loving me either. And that tugged at me. It hurt not to be loved, and her affection and open arms had been giving me hope for my future. I’d had some pretty good dreams about being together with her once all this was over.

But the Athalia I’d loved wasn’t the one who wanted to wipe out most of the human race. She wasn’t the one that wanted me to turn my back on my past. She wasn’t the one who had lied to me about who she was and what she believed since the moment I’d met her.

I shook my head. “Sorry, Athalia. If I wasn’t me and you weren’t you, it might have worked out, but since we’re both who we are, I’m afraid you’re gonna have to shoot me, ‘cause I’m not going anywhere.”

“But why, Ghost? Why?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that humans are still the only people I know, and I’d hate to see ‘em go.”

Her face got cold and she aimed the gun straight at my heart. “Don’t worry. You won’t.”

I raised my gun, hoping against hope to beat her to the draw, but the shot came way before my finger squeezed the trigger, and I staggered back, clutching my chest.

Then I frowned. There was no wound, and no pain. I looked up at Athalia. Had she missed on purpose?

She was sinking to her knees, a surprised look on her face and a red stain spreading across her gray robes. Her gun clattered to the floor. Behind her, Angie stepped into the room, her rifle smoking. Ace came in too. Athalia was still squirming and bleeding between us.

I let out a long held breath. “Nothing like waiting ‘til the last minute, Angie. Damn.”

“I had to see if I needed to shoot one person or two.” She stepped over Athalia and put two more shots in her back.

I turned away. Athalia might have been a psycho who wanted to wipe out the human waste. It was still hard to see her die.

“You need a minute?” asked Angie.

“Nah,” I said, then had to swallow hard. “I–I’m fine.”

Angie returned to the door. “Then come have a look. We got that vault open. Vargas, Thrasher and Hell Razor are on their way.”

I nodded and followed her and Ace back into the corridor, then stopped and took a last look back at Athalia’s body. Her head was turned the other way. I couldn’t see her face. I wanted to shout at her to turn around.

Actually, I just wanted to shout.

Or maybe cry.

Yeah, that.

Angie stood inside the titanium door, pointing to a pried up floor tile under which was a dismantled pressure plate, TNT, batteries, and wiring. “I think that’s the only one, but be careful.”

I stepped past the booby trap, then stared. What she and Ace had opened up was an armory the likes of which I’d never seen before. There were racks of standard issue AK–97s, but beyond them I saw rows of lightweight laser rifles, all sleek plastic and glass, and bins full of power packs shaped to fit neatly into a slot in the rifles’ stocks just behind their triggers.

As I was checking out the goodies, I saw a trickle of silver metal running from a black circle burned in the far wall. It looked like Angie and Ace had been seeing what the guns could do.

I looked back at them. “How many shots did that take?”

Ace smirked and patted the plastic rifle he was slinging over his shoulder. “Just the one.”

“Damn.”

I moved deeper into the armory and pulled out a heavier weapon with a fatter barrel, but the same basic design. The serial number scratched on the trigger guard had a very low number, prefaced by XMC–98.

I hefted it. It felt good. “What is this?”

“I didn’t try it,” said Angie. “But with that designation, I’d guess it’s an experimental meson cannon.”

As I was giving the big beast a once over, Vargas, Hell Razor, and Thrasher squeezed into the narrow room.

Angie gave them a wave. “Heya, boys. Come on in and pick your new favorite weapons.”

Thrasher’s eyes lit up. Hell Razor cackled like a mad man.

“Ho–Lee–Shit!”

Vargas picked up one of the rifles and shook his head. “Well, I’m glad they didn’t use these on us, but I don’t get it. Why shoot at us with second hand zip–guns when they had stuff like this in storage?”

“Too holy to use?” said Angie.

Vargas nodded. “That’s the whole and entire problem with these assholes. They got stuff in here that could save the world I bet, but instead of usin’ all that goodness to help their fellow humans, they’re siding with a supercomputer that’s decided humans are roaches who need exterminating.”

“I guess that doesn’t include them?” said Ace.

“They get to become some kind of human–robot angels in a golden future,” I said. ““Perfected beings with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of neither.”“

Everybody looked at me funny. I shrugged. “That’s what Athalia told me.”

“Is that what’s really going to happen?” asked Vargas. “Or is that just what the computer told ‘em what was gonna happen?”

Hell Razor curled his lip. “Neither is gonna happen. If anybody gets a golden future, it ain’t gonna be these homicidal hypocrite hoarders. Fuck that. Let’s burn ‘em down.”

And with that, everybody armed up and headed deeper into the citadel to finish what we started.

I suppose the others killed the Guardians out of righteous fury for their crimes, and I suppose in other circumstances I probably would have too. They were, after all, undeniably a bunch of heinous jerks who were out to destroy life as we knew it, but at that moment I really wouldn’t have cared if they had been saintly grandmothers who healed puppies and wanted to share the cure for cancer with the whole world. I probably still would have gunned them down.

I know I’d told Angie I was fine with Athalia’s death, and I know I hadn’t shed any tears about it. But I was not fine. I was about as far from fine as a man could get.

Athalia deserved what she’d got. She’d lied to me. She was crazy. She was the enemy, for fuck’s sake. That didn’t stop me from realizing she was also probably the only person in the world who would ever want anything to do with me. It didn’t stop me from realizing that once again, there was no golden future for me, and that once again I had nothing and no–one to live for. It made me mad. It made me want everyone else in the world to feel the same way I did.

It made me want to kill.

I cannot remember everything I did in there, how many I slaughtered; how I slaughtered them. It all passed me by like a surreal red dream. All I know is that the others didn’t look at me the same afterwards — not even Hell Razor — and they did their fair share of killing that day, too.

The laser rifles worked beautifully. Horribly. Their bolts glowed in the darkness and the angry light revealed the Guardians’ hiding places, then burned their lungs out from the inside. A shot through the eye would boil a brain in the skull — and the venting of the molten ejecta made the Guardians dance like decapitated chickens. Robes burned, makeshift armor melted, and the greasy stink of roasted flesh and the sharp sourness of singed hair filled the place. There wasn’t much blood, since the lasers’ heat cauterized wounds, but that didn’t make the holes any easier to look at. Luckily for us, the corpses usually stopped burning by the time we reached them.

Every now and then the Guardians would mass for a charge. I couldn’t tell if they couldn’t understand what kind of death we were dishing out, or just didn’t care, but they’d swarm out of some dark corridor chanting pre–apocalyptic slogans like, “Leggo my Eggo!” and “I’d walk a mile for a Camel!” Right into our lasers.

I fired the meson cannon from my hip, sweeping right to left and back again like I was turning a hose on them. The cannon’s bolts came thick, long and slow, and glowed with an unearthly purple light that burned fist–sized holes through anyone it touched. Ace and the rangers fired searing bursts into whoever I missed. The place smelled like a cookout wherever we went.

We found a third key in a small chapel, hidden inside a bronze triptych that seemed to show some kind of allegory. In the first panel, a happy young man was holding hands with a beautiful girl. In the second panel, the young man had broken out in pimples, while the beautiful girl walked off with a muscle man. In the third panel, the young man’s face was clear again and he was ascending toward heaven with the girl on his left arm and a bottle labeled Acme Acne Cream held aloft in his right.

“What a touching story,” drawled Vargas.

“It’s the Guardians’ philosophy in three easy steps,” said Angie. “The rise, fall, and redemption of man through the wisdom of the ancients.”

“Pffft!” I said. “Like killer robots are gonna make my zits go away.”

“Sure they will,” said Hell Razor, stuffing the key into his pocket. “Decapitation is a sure–fire cure.”

Finding the fourth key almost cost me my life, and I have no one to blame but myself. We were clearing a bunk room, pulling back the blankets and overturning the mattresses when a piece of paper fluttered from under a pillow. Thrasher bent to look at it.

“Rosebud?” he said, and reached for it. “What does that—”

With a squeal of fright, a Guardian rolled out from under the bunk next to him and started blasting at us with an assault rifle. Fortunately, he was too crazed to hit anything other than the ceiling, and Thrasher burned a hole through his intestines . The Guardian curled up, hissing.

But he wasn’t quiet dead, and as I kicked the gun from his hands and raised the meson cannon to finish him, he looked up at me with wild eyes and beckoned me closer.

“You…” he whispered. “You are… different from the others. Come closer. I must tell you…”

Yes, I know I’m a sucker, but I knelt down and turned my ear toward him… and the son of a bitch grabbed me around the neck and started choking the shit out of me!

“Die infidel!”

The old man had a grip like iron and I was way too close and bent over to bring the meson cannon around for a shot. I punched at him as best I could with blood pounding in my ears and throbbing in my neck.

Suddenly there was a bang and his hands went limp. A hole had appeared in the middle of his forehead and Angie was holstering her side arm and walking away from me with a disgusted look on her face.

“What the hell, Ghost,” she said. “Were you born yesterday?”

I coughed and cleared my throat. “Last week. Sorry.”

I was so embarrassed I almost walked away without searching him, but then I saw something peeking out of one of his pockets. I pulled it out. The fourth key. I handed it over to Vargas, who had the other three.

“Nice,” he said. “We’re set.”

“Does that mean we can get out of here?” asked Ace.

Angie shook her head. “These guys are too dangerous to let live.”

“Besides,” said Vargas. “You don’t hurt a gang as bad as we’ve hurt these chumps and not finish the job. The survivors will come back and kick our ass one day. We’ve gotta erase these bastards. Every one of ‘em.”

Ace made a face like he didn’t like the taste of that, but he fell in with the rest of us as we stepped back into the main hall and started toward the gigantic iron portcullis set into its north wall. There were no buttons to push or levers to pull, but through a door to the left we found a crank wheel.

Thrasher didn’t have to be asked. He stepped up to it and started pulling on the arms with smooth strength We heard the rattle of chains and the groaning of iron above us. A minute later the chain thrummed tight and Thrasher locked the wheel with a cotter pin, then stopped to mop his brow.

We went back into the hall, then passed under the portcullis and started up the broad marble steps into the inner sanctum. Gave me a funny feeling in my shoulders, passing under several tons of iron held up by a pin thinner than my finger. If anyone was to pull it…

At the top of the stairs we found a pair of massive gold doors rivaling the big bronze ones out front in all details save for their height, and this time the walls on either side weren’t falling apart. There wasn’t going to be any blowing our way in this time. There was, however, a keypad off to one side.

“Hmmm,” said Angie. “Looks like we need another password.”

“Try 1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9,” said Vargas.

“Try 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1 — 1,” said Ace.

She did. They didn’t work.

“Try ‘password’,” I said.

That didn’t work either.

“Try ‘rosebud’,” said Thrasher.

We all looked around at him.

“Huh?”

“Just try it.”

Angie typed it in. There was a click, and then the doors started slowly retracting into the ceiling.

“Well, whaddaya know,” said Vargas. “Beto, you never cease to amaze—”

He was cut off by the chattering roar of machine gun fire. The Guardians were firing under the rising door.