After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1) (12 page)

When morning came I returned to my search, using a length of jagged steel I’d found like a crowbar to shove debris aside, but the task was quickly eroding my patience. Maybe there was nothing here after all. I clambered across a piece of corrugated iron, headed to the next mound of rubble, when I heard something that caught my attention. I stopped and took a step back. There it was again. I stood and tapped my foot on the sheet of iron. It sounded hollow. Shifting bits of rubble aside, I was able to get my fingers underneath and lever it upwards. There was definitely a dark space underneath it.

It took me another half hour of clearing rubble and scooping away dirt with my bare hands, but I eventually got the corrugated iron lifted up and hoisted aside. Underneath was a hole filled with more rubble. But there too, down below, was the unmistakable outline of a door.

Inspired by this one meagre discovery, I pushed on with renewed vigour, clearing away the rubble from what turned out to be a stairwell. In time I’d cleared a path, and I shined the flashlight down into the dusty confines. Carefully picking my way down, I found that the door, grey in colour and with a stainless steel handle, was crumpled slightly inward. I heaved into it with the steel bar and it gave way after half a dozen bashes. I moved inside.

Squirming for a few metres through a low crawl space, I came out into a narrow corridor. The dust I’d stirred was like a fog, a drifting precipitation of motes in the yellow of the torchlight. I swung it about, but there was really only one way to go.

I inched forward slowly, listening for any sound that might indicate an imminent cave-in. I was confident that, since it had stood here for decades, it wasn’t going to fall down unless I started to push or pull things aside. To that end, I made sure to keep my hands to myself.

The flashlight illuminated the dull red of a fire alarm mounted on the wall, and an electrical outlet further along. Past that the corridor turned to the right. I followed it along, finding empty storerooms and what looked like a small office space. Further still I found another doorway. I could see the bulk of a metal object jutting out from the wall nearby, and upon moving closer found that it was a filing cabinet that had fallen through a doorway.

I shoved it into the room and crouched as I surveyed the area. There was a desk on its side in front of me, and I directed the beam across a garbage bin, an empty tool rack and a jacket slung across an office chair.

Then, right next to me, the beam fell on a human face staring up at me.

I cried out and lurched backward, tripping
over the filing cabinet and landing on the flat of my back.  I scrambled desperately to a sitting position and thrust the flashlight in front of me, jerking it this way and that until it found the face again.  I held it there, shaking.  Pale skinned, his eyes wide open, the man didn’t react.  It was then that I realized it was not the face of a man, but of a synthetic.

Or rather, part of a synthetic. There was really only a head and a few parts of the torso laying there. No arms, legs, or innards to speak of. No power core. It was either a fallen soldier who’d been gutted and brought back for repairs, or just a jumble of spare parts. I couldn’t decide which. His face was relatively unmarked, so I decided he’d probably never been taken into battle.

Unfortunately, without the legs, I wouldn’t find the parts I needed for Max. A cursory sweep of the room revealed that there wasn’t much else in here. An old security droid, hunched over and inactive, sat in one corner, and nearby there was a cupboard that contained only stationery. I took some paper and a pencil as a consolation and placed them in the satchel, then rested on the filing cabinet while I decided what to do.

I grabbed the clank and slid him toward me, turning him over to see what I could scavenge. The only bones present were the spine and the ribs, like a big grey cage sitting under his head. I tapped my lip thoughtfully. If I could at least take back a few ribs, it might give me something to work with. The spine itself, while possibly of some use, would be too hard to separate.

From the satchel I produced a hacksaw blade I’d found a few days back and, placing the flashlight on the filing cabinet, began sawing away at the first rib.  It was slow going, and the
scree-scraw
of the saw grew monotonous very quickly.  I couldn’t find a decent angle from which to operate and had to make tiny little motions that also slowed my progress.  With determination and patience, I eventually separated three ribs and placed them in the satchel by the time the flashlight began flickering.  The batteries were dying, and I’d have to make do with the few parts I’d acquired if I wanted to explore anything else.

I placed the hacksaw inside the satchel and gave the room one last sweep. Then I returned to the corridor.

The next door was more solid, and took quite a deal of prying and bashing to open. I was lucky that power was no longer supplied to the door. Had the mag-lock been engaged, I would never have gotten through.

With a final heave the door crashed open, revealing a ramp that led down into blackness. Cautiously I trained the flashlight inside and descended the short distance to the room below. It was a large, rounded space with a low ceiling, benches in the centre cluttered with instruments and backpacks and clothes, as if a bunch of people had decided to disrobe and take a shower and never returned for their belongings.

Over by one wall, a large touch panel display sat covered in so much grime that it was almost unrecognisable, like an ancient relic. Embedded into the curving exterior of the room were a row of twelve half cylinders stretching from floor to ceiling, their opaque glassy surfaces also thick with dust.

The cryotanks.

This was it. This was the place.

At the end of the row was another security droid. I let the flashlight linger on it for a moment. An early precursor to human-like synthetics, these things had still been popular as a cheap alternative for basic tasks and routines. It was about waist height, a blocky and primitive build comprised of a ballistic weapon on one arm, a rectangular body, stout round head and little flat discs for eyes. Propelled by a row of wheels on either side, its rubber treads had deteriorated to the point where they were falling apart.

Sweeping the flashlight away, I brushed my hand against the glass of the first tank, carving a broad slash through the grime, but couldn’t see what was inside - there was only nebulous darkness within. Returning to the touch panel, I started to scrub away at the surface to see if there was any way to activate it, when, as if in response, a red icon began flashing in the bottom corner.

Auxiliary Power 1.2%

There must have been a minute amount of residual charge still left in the cells, but at such a low level these cryotanks weren’t going to be sustained for long. If there were survivors inside their time was running out.

Tapping at the panel, I brought up the controls. Icons and parameters flared across the screen in drab shades of yellow and blue, the drained cells churning out barely enough power to illuminate the pixels. Data from the cryotanks began populating the screen but it was garbled, nonsensical. The system was practically useless.

Inside the cryotanks, dim lights had been activated, shining from the upper extremities and creating shadowy outlines of what lay inside. I could make out the silhouettes of people in there: heads and shoulders, the hint of arms, but not any specific details.

They were going to die in there if I didn’t get them out.

Desperately swiping at the touch panel, I tried to initiate the ejection procedure, but the screen was jumping and twitching constantly, a moving target. Using both hands I jammed my fingers at the screen, hoping I would land on the correct button. It worked. A moment later a short, sharp buzzing sound echoed from each of the cryotanks in turn, cascading from one to the next like falling dominoes. The seals were broken, and the doors edged open a crack before stopping abruptly to the chorus of more buzzing alerts.

Grabbing the steel rod from the bench, I hurried to the first tank and jammed it inside the crack, working desperately back and forth as I tried to pry it open. Leaning to get the required leverage, I forced my full weight upon it, and suddenly it creaked fully open.

A sodden, decomposing and foul smelling corpse towered above me, its skin eaten away to reveal mushy brown flesh that dripped and pooled on the floor of the cryotank. I reeled back, raking my arm across my nose and mouth to cover the stench, as the organic goo began to spill out onto the floor like viscous, lumpy soup.

“Ugh,” I said in disgust, stepping away. As I watched, the rest of the cylinders made a clacking sound and resumed their unfolding, revealing eleven more of the ghoulish remains, their flesh sloughing off their bodies as the sudden vibrations coursed through them. The stench was like a solid wall that hit me and almost knocked me over.

The grisly corpses splayed out before me like a pantheon of necrotic monsters.

There was no one here to save. They’d been dead a long while, their flesh partially preserved within the confines of the tanks. This was not the place where I would find live humans after all.

I fumbled for my gear and prepared to leave when I heard yet another noise. At the end of the row, the security droid’s eyes were glowing dully yellow, and from inside came a clicking noise that sounded like someone slowly cranking a socket wrench.

“What the hell?” I muttered.

The droid began to draw itself up and the light from its eyes intensified.

The damn thing’s reactivated.

I had time to duck under the bench before the droid loosed a warning bugle as its boot sequence completed, loud enough to shake dust from the ceiling.  It was
deafening
.  A red light swept across the room and I heard its treads begin to rumble along the floor as it headed my way.  Poking my head up, I saw it jerk the weapon on its arm at me, and suddenly the backpacks and instruments on the bench were exploding in a blizzard of noise and bullets and shredded fabric, raining down all around me. 

I crouched low, spying the ramp just a few paces away. I could reach it in only a couple of seconds, but even that was too much time. The droid would rip me in two.

I heard the wheels of the droid turning, closing in, the sound of the rubber tracks scattering about the place as they came apart. The wheels themselves ground against the floor as they struggled to find purchase, and I thought I could sense it labouring through the gunk that was spilling on the floor from the cryotanks.

This was my chance.

Clasping a shredded backpack, I sized up the throw and then tossed it over the bench, saw it land on the head of the droid and snag there for a second, blocking its view. I bolted. In two strides the ramp was under my feet, another volley of bullets snapping into the floor and walls as the droid regained its sight. Then I was up and out of the hellish tomb.

In the hallway, things got worse.

The droid from the first room was there, also reactivated and facing me at the end of the corridor, amber eyes blazing. There must have been a localised transmission sent when I was fiddling with the touch panel. I had time to lurch to the side, crashing through a glass window as it too opened fire, bullets thudding into the walls and ceiling all around me. I was cut somewhere on my torso, but I had no time to dwell on it. I kept low and crawled as fast as I could, heading toward the doorway that fed out into the corridor behind the droid. If I was fast enough, quiet enough, I might slip past it unnoticed.

I wasn’t.

We reached the doorway together, almost bumping into each other, and I instinctively grabbed at its weapon arm, dropping the steel bar and lifting and pushing the droid away as it tried to lever the gun back toward me. It began firing, and we twirled awkwardly back into the corridor like uncoordinated dance partners, thumping into the far wall and then cannoning off again. As I rounded I saw the droid from the cryotank room reach the top of the ramp, busting through the remains of the doorway and levelling its gun at us.

“
Fuck!
”

I swivelled my body and came down behind the grappling droid, keeping a desperate hand on its weapon.  Bullets thudded into it like hail, rattling its frame and causing my teeth to clack together painfully.  Hidden behind its bulky torso, I somehow avoided taking a round, and in a few seconds the droid began to hiss and whirr and bleep, going limp, destroyed by the assault
from its counterpart. With all my might I held it upright, now nothing more than a shield, the only thing that was preventing me from suffering the same demise.

The other droid rolled closer, the bullets never ceasing, thudding and jarring as I gritted my teeth. It was only a few metres away now. There was nowhere to run.

The bullets suddenly stopped and a whirring noise caused me to peek around the ruined body of the droid. I could see smoke rising from the barrel of its gun, and a magazine separating from its arm, with another sliding in to take its place.

It was reloading.

I took my chance, the only one I was likely to get. I bounded up, snatched the steel rod from the floor and launched myself at the droid as the magazine clicked home. I screamed in fury, ramming the bar between its eyes, crunching through metal plating and silicon and tipping it over backward as it began firing again. The rounds clattered into the roof with a deafening sound, and the droid’s bugle went off again, compounding the noise. I turned on my heel and ran, pushing beyond the husk of the other droid and down the corridor and past the other rooms, hearing the droid scraping and grinding as it tried to right itself, expecting to feel the agony of bullets ripping through my body any second. I pumped my arms and bolted.